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The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories

by Edith Wharton · English · Gutenberg #4533 · 371,478 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories

Author: Edith Wharton


        
Release date: October 1, 2003 [eBook #4533]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Charles Aldarondo.  HTML version by Al Haines.


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Produced by Charles Aldarondo.  HTML version by Al Haines.









THE HERMIT AND THE WILD WOMAN AND OTHER STORIES


BY

EDITH WHARTON


NEW YORK


MCMVIII






TABLE OF CONTENTS

I _The Hermit and the Wild Woman_

II _The Last Asset_

III _In Trust_

IV _The Pretext_

V _The Verdict_

VI _The Pot-Boiler_

VII _The Best Man_




THE HERMIT AND THE WILD WOMAN


I

THE Hermit lived in a cave in the hollow of a hill. Below him was a
glen, with a stream in a coppice of oaks and alders, and on the farther
side of the valley, half a day's journey distant, another hill, steep
and bristling, which raised aloft a little walled town with Ghibelline
swallow-tails notched against the sky.

When the Hermit was a lad, and lived in the town, the crenellations of
the walls had been square-topped, and a Guelf lord had flown his
standard from the keep. Then one day a steel-coloured line of
men-at-arms rode across the valley, wound up the hill and battered in
the gates. Stones and Greek fire rained from the ramparts, shields
clashed in the streets, blade sprang at blade in passages and
stairways, pikes and lances dripped above huddled flesh, and all the
still familiar place was a stew of dying bodies. The boy fled from it
in horror. He had seen his father go forth and not come back, his
mother drop dead from an arquebuse shot as she leaned from the platform
of the tower, his little sister fall with a slit throat across the
altar steps of the chapel--and he ran, ran for his life, through the
slippery streets, over warm twitching bodies, between legs of soldiers
carousing, out of the gates, past burning farmsteads, trampled
wheat-fields, orchards stripped and broken, till the still woods
received him and he fell face down on the unmutilated earth.

He had no wish to go back. His longing was to live hidden from life. Up
the hillside he found a hollow in the rock, and built before it a porch
of boughs bound together with withies. He fed on nuts and roots, and on
trout which he caught with his hands under the stones in the stream. He
had always been a quiet boy, liking to sit at his mother's feet and
watch the flowers grow on her embroidery frame, while the chaplain read
aloud the histories of the Desert Fathers from a great silver-clasped
volume. He would rather have been bred a clerk and scholar than a
knight's son, and his happiest moments were when he served mass for the
chaplain in the early morning, and felt his heart flutter up and up
like a lark, up and up till it was lost in infinite space and
brightness. Almost as happy were the hours when he sat beside the
foreign painter who came over the mountains to paint the chapel, and
under whose brush celestial faces grew out of the rough wall as if he
had sown some magic seed which flowered while you watched it. With the
appearing of every gold-rimmed face the boy felt he had won another
friend, a friend who would come and bend above him at night, keeping
off the ugly visions which haunted his pillow--visions of the gnawing
monsters about the church-porch, evil-faced bats and dragons, giant
worms and winged bristling hogs, a devil's flock who crept down from
the stone-work at night and hunted the souls of sinful children through
the town. With the growth of the picture the bright mailed angels
thronged so close about the boy's bed that between their interwoven
wings not a snout or a claw could force itself; and he would turn over
sighing on his pillow, which felt as soft and warm as if it had been
lined with down from those sheltering pinions.

All these thoughts came back to him now in his cave on the cliff-side.
The stillness seemed to enclose him with wings, to fold him away from
life and evil. He was never restless or discontented. He loved the long
silent empty days, each one as like the other as pearls in a
well-matched string. Above all he liked to have time to save his soul.
He had been greatly troubled about his soul since a band of Flagellants
had passed through the town, exhibiting their gaunt scourged bodies and
exhorting the people to turn from soft raiment and delicate fare, from
marriage and money-getting and dancing and games, and think only how
they might escape the devil's talons and the great red blaze of hell.
For days that red blaze hung on the edge of the boy's thoughts like the
light of a burning city across a plain. There seemed to be so many
pitfalls to avoid--so many things were wicked which one might have
supposed to be harmless. How could a child of his age tell? He dared
not for a moment think of anything else. And the scene of sack and
slaughter from which he had fled gave shape and distinctness to that
blood-red vision. Hell was like that, only a million million times
worse. Now he knew how flesh looked when devils' pincers tore it, how
the shrieks of the damned sounded, and how roasting bodies smelled. How
could a Christian spare one moment of his days and nights from the long
long struggle to keep safe from the wrath to come?

Gradually the horror faded, leaving only a tranquil pleasure in the
minute performance of his religious duties. His mind was not naturally
given to the contemplation of evil, and in the blessed solitude of his
new life his thoughts dwelt more and more on the beauty of holiness.
His desire was to be perfectly good, and to live in love and charity
with his fellow-men; and how could one do this without fleeing from
them?

At first his life was difficult, for in the winter season he was put to
great straits to feed himself; and there were nights when the sky was
like an iron vault, and a hoarse wind rattled the oakwood in the
valley, and a great fear came on him that was worse than any cold. But
in time it became known to his townsfolk and to the peasants in the
neighbouring valleys that he had withdrawn to the wilderness to lead a
godly life; and after that his worst hardships were over, for pious
persons brought him gifts of oil and dried fruit, one good woman gave
him seeds from her garden, another spun for him a hodden gown, and
others would have brought him all manner of food and clothing, had he
not refused to accept anything but for his bare needs. The good woman
who had given him the seeds showed him also how to build a little
garden on the southern ledge of his cliff, and all one summer the
Hermit carried up soil from the streamside, and the next he carried up
water to keep his garden green. After that the fear of solitude quite
passed from him, for he was so busy all day long that at night he had
much ado to fight off the demon of sleep, which Saint Arsenius the
Abbot has denounced as the chief foe of the solitary. His memory kept
good store of prayers and litanies, besides long passages from the Mass
and other offices, and he marked the hours of his day by different acts
of devotion. On Sundays and feast days, when the wind was set his way,
he could hear the church bells from his native town, and these helped
him to follow the worship of the faithful, and to bear in mind the
seasons of the liturgical year; and what with carrying up water from
the river, digging in the garden, gathering fagots for his fire,
observing his religious duties, and keeping his thoughts continually
upon the salvation of his soul, the Hermit knew not a moment's idleness.

At first, during his night vigils, he had felt a great fear of the
stars, which seemed to set a cruel watch upon him, as though they spied
out the frailty of his heart and took the measure of his littleness.
But one day a wandering clerk, to whom he chanced to give a night's
shelter, explained to him that, in the opinion of the most learned
doctors of theology, the stars were inhabited by the spirits of the
blessed, and this thought brought great consolation to the Hermit. Even
on winter nights, when the eagle's wings clanged among the peaks, and
he heard the long howl of wolves about the sheep-cotes in the valley,
he no longer felt any fear, but thought of those sounds as representing
the evil voices of the world, and hugged himself in the solitude of his
cave. Sometimes, to keep himself awake, he composed lauds in honour of
Christ and the saints, and they seemed to him so pleasant that he
feared to forget them, so after much debate with himself he decided to
ask a friendly priest from the valley, who sometimes visited him, to
write down the lauds; and the priest wrote them down on comely
sheepskin, which the Hermit dried and prepared with his own hands. When
the Hermit saw them written down they appeared to him so beautiful that
he feared to commit the sin of vanity if he looked at them too often,
so he hid them between two smooth stones in his cave, and vowed that he
would take them out only once in the year, at Easter, when our Lord has
risen and it is meet that Christians should rejoice. And this vow he
faithfully kept; but, alas, when Easter drew near, he found he was
looking forward to the blessed festival less because of our Lord's
rising than because he should then be able to read his pleasant lauds
written on fair sheepskin; and thereupon he took a vow that he would
not look upon the lauds till he lay dying.

So the Hermit, for many years, lived to the glory of God and in great
peace of mind.


II

ONE day he resolved to set forth on a visit to the Saint of the Rock,
who lived on the other side of the mountains. Travellers had brought
the Hermit report of this solitary, how he lived in great holiness and
austerity in a desert place among the hills, where snow lay all winter,
and in summer the sun beat down cruelly. The Saint, it appeared, had
vowed that he would withdraw from the world to a spot where there was
neither shade nor water, lest he should be tempted to take his ease and
think less continually upon his Maker; but wherever he went he found a
spreading tree or a gushing spring, till at last he climbed up to the
bare heights where nothing grows, and where the only water comes from
the melting of the snow in spring. Here he found a tall rock rising
from the ground, and in it he scooped a hollow with his own hands,
labouring for five years and wearing his fingers to the bone. Then he
seated himself in the hollow, which faced the west, so that in winter
he should have small warmth of the sun and in summer be consumed by it;
and there he had sat without moving for years beyond number.

The Hermit was greatly drawn by the tale of such austerities, which in
his humility he did not dream of emulating, but desired, for his soul's
good, to contemplate and praise; so one day he bound sandals to his
feet, cut an alder staff from the stream, and set out to visit the
Saint of the Rock.

It was the pleasant spring season, when seeds are shooting and the bud
is on the tree. The Hermit was troubled at the thought of leaving his
plants without water, but he could not travel in winter by reason of
the snows, and in summer he feared the garden would suffer even more
from his absence. So he set out, praying that rain might fall while he
was away, and hoping to return again in five days. The peasants
labouring in the fields left their work to ask his blessing; and they
would even have followed him in great numbers had he not told them that
he was bound on a pilgrimage to the Saint of the Rock, and that it
behoved him to go alone, as one solitary seeking another. So they
respected his wish, and he went on and entered the forest. In the
forest he walked for two days and slept for two nights. He heard the
wolves crying, and foxes rustling in the covert, and once, at twilight,
a shaggy brown man peered at him through the leaves and galloped away
with a soft padding of hoofs; but the Hermit feared neither wild beasts
nor evil-doers, nor even the fauns and satyrs who linger in unhallowed
forest depths where the Cross has not been raised; for he said: "If I
die, I die to the glory of God, and if I live it must be to the same
end." Only he felt a secret pang at the thought that he might die
without seeing his lauds again. But the third day, without
misadventure, he came out on another valley.

Then he began to climb the mountain, first through brown woods of beech
and oak, then through pine and broom, and then across red stony ledges
where only a pinched growth of lentisk and briar spread in patches over
the rock. By this time he thought to have reached his goal, but for two
more days he fared on through the same scene, with the sky close over
him and the green valleys of earth receding far below. Sometimes for
hours he saw only the red glistering slopes tufted with thin bushes,
and the hard blue heaven so close that it seemed his hand could touch
it; then at a turn of the path the rocks rolled apart, the eye plunged
down a long pine-clad defile, and beyond it the forest flowed in mighty
undulations to a plain shining with cities and another mountain-range
many days' journey away. To some eyes this would have been a terrible
spectacle, reminding the wayfarer of his remoteness from his kind, and
of the perils which lurk in waste places and the weakness of man
against them; but the Hermit was so mated to solitude, and felt such
love for all things created, that to him the bare rocks sang of their
Maker and the vast distance bore witness to His greatness. So His
servant journeyed on unafraid.

But one morning, after a long climb over steep and difficult slopes,
the wayfarer halted suddenly at a bend of the way; for beyond the
defile at his feet there was no plain shining with cities, but a bare
expanse of shaken silver that reached away to the rim of the world; and
the Hermit knew it was the sea. Fear seized him then, for it was
terrible to see that great plain move like a heaving bosom, and, as he
looked on it, the earth seemed also to heave beneath him. But presently
he remembered how Christ had walked the waves, and how even Saint Mary
of Egypt, who was a great sinner, had crossed the waters of Jordan
dry-shod to receive the Sacrament from the Abbot Zosimus; and then the
Hermit's heart grew still, and he sang as he went down the mountain:
"The sea shall praise Thee, O Lord."

All day he kept seeing it and then losing it; but toward night he came
to a cleft of the hills, and lay down in a pine-wood to sleep. He had
now been six days gone, and once and again he thought anxiously of his
herbs; but he said to himself: "What though my garden perish, if I see
a holy man face to face and praise God in his company?" So he was never
long cast down.

Before daylight he was afoot under the stars; and leaving the wood
where he had slept, began climbing the face of a tall cliff, where he
had to clutch the jutting ledges with his hands, and with every step he
gained, a rock seemed thrust forth to hurl him back. So, footsore and
bleeding, he reached a little stony plain as the sun dropped to the
sea; and in the red light he saw a hollow rock, and the Saint sitting
in the hollow.

The Hermit fell on his knees, praising God; then he rose and ran across
the plain to the rock. As he drew near he saw that the Saint was a very
old man, clad in goatskin, with a long white beard. He sat motionless,
his hands on his knees, and two red eye-sockets turned to the sunset.
Near him was a young boy in skins who brushed the flies from his face;
but they always came back, and settled on the rheum which ran from his
eyes.

He did not appear to hear or see the approach of the Hermit, but sat
quite still till the boy said: "Father, here is a pilgrim."

Then he lifted up his voice and asked angrily who was there and what
the stranger sought.

The Hermit answered: "Father, the report of your holy practices came to
me a long way off, and being myself a solitary, though not worthy to be
named with you for godliness, it seemed fitting that I should cross the
mountains to visit you, that we might sit together and speak in praise
of solitude."

The Saint replied: "You fool, how can two sit together and praise
solitude, since by so doing they put an end to the thing they pretend
to honour?"

The Hermit, at that, was sorely abashed, for he had thought his speech
out on the way, reciting it many times over; and now it appeared to him
vainer than the crackling of thorns under a pot.

Nevertheless he took heart and said: "True, Father; but may not two
sinners sit together and praise Christ, who has taught them the
blessings of solitude?"

But the other only answered: "If you had really learned the blessings
of solitude you would not squander them in idle wandering." And, the
Hermit not knowing how to reply, he said again: "If two sinners meet
they can best praise Christ by going each his own way in silence."

After that he shut his lips and continued motionless while the boy
brushed the flies from his eye-sockets; but the Hermit's heart sank,
and for the first time he felt all the weariness of the way he had
fared, and the great distance dividing him from home.

He had meant to take counsel with the Saint concerning his lauds, and
whether he ought to destroy them; but now he had no heart to say
another word, and turning away he began to descend the mountain.
Presently he heard steps running behind him, and the boy came up and
pressed a honey-comb in his hand.

"You have come a long way and must be hungry," he said; but before the
Hermit could thank him he had hastened back to his task. So the Hermit
crept down the mountain till he reached the wood where he had slept
before; and there he made his bed again, but he had no mind to eat
before sleeping, for his heart hungered more than his body; and his
salt tears made the honey-comb bitter.


III

ON the fourteenth day he came to the valley below his cliff, and saw
the walls of his native town against the sky. He was footsore and heavy
of heart, for his long pilgrimage had brought him only weariness and
humiliation, and as no drop of rain had fallen he knew that his garden
must have perished. So he climbed the cliff heavily and reached his
cave at the angelus.

But there a great wonder awaited him. For though the scant earth of the
hillside was parched and crumbling, his garden-soil reeked with
moisture, and his plants had shot up, fresh and glistening, to a height
they had never before attained. More wonderful still, the tendrils of
the gourd had been trained about his door, and kneeling down he saw
that the earth had been loosened between the rows of sprouting
vegetables, and that every leaf sparkled with drops as though the rain
had but newly ceased. Then it appeared to the Hermit that he beheld a
miracle, but doubting his own deserts he refused to believe himself
worthy of such grace, and went within doors to ponder on what had
befallen him. And on his bed of rushes he saw a young woman sleeping,
clad in an outlandish garment, with strange amulets about her neck.

The sight was very terrifying to the Hermit, for he recalled how often
the demon, in tempting the Desert Fathers, had taken the form of a
woman for their undoing; but he reflected that, since there was nothing
pleasing to him in the sight of this female, who was brown as a nut and
lean with wayfaring, he ran no great danger in looking at her. At first
he took her for a wandering Egyptian, but as he looked he perceived,
among the heathen charms, an Agnus Dei in her bosom; and this so
surprised him that he bent over and called on her to wake.

She sprang up with a start, but seeing the Hermit's gown and staff, and
his face above her, lay quiet and said to him: "I have watered your
garden daily in return for the beans and oil that I took from your
store."

"Who are you, and how do you come here?" asked the Hermit.

She said: "I am a wild woman and live in the woods."

And when he pressed her again to tell him why she had sought shelter in
his cave, she said that the land to the south, whence she came, was
full of armed companies and bands of marauders, and that great license
and bloodshed prevailed there; and this the Hermit knew to be true, for
he had heard of it on his homeward journey. The Wild Woman went on to
tell him that she had been hunted through the woods like an animal by a
band of drunken men-at-arms, Lansknechts from the north by their
barbarous dress and speech, and at length, starving and spent, had come
on his cave and hidden herself from her pursuers. "For," she said, "I
fear neither wild beasts nor the woodland people, charcoal burners,
Egyptians, wandering minstrels or chapmen; even the highway robbers do
not touch me, because I am poor and brown; but these armed men flown
with blood and wine are more terrible than wolves and tigers."

And the Hermit's heart melted, for he thought of his little sister
lying with her throat slit across the altar steps, and of the scenes of
blood and rapine from which he had fled away into the wilderness. So he
said to the stranger that it was not meet he should house her in his
cave, but that he would send a messenger to the town across the valley,
and beg a pious woman there to give her lodging and work in her
household. "For," said he, "I perceive by the blessed image about your
neck that you are not a heathen wilding, but a child of Christ, though
so far astray from Him in the desert."

"Yes," she said, "I am a Christian, and know as many prayers as you;
but I will never set foot in city walls again, lest I be caught and put
back into the convent."

"What," cried the Hermit with a start, "you are a runagate nun?" And he
crossed himself, and again thought of the demon.

She smiled and said: "It is true I was once a cloistered woman, but I
will never willingly be one again. Now drive me forth if you like; but
I cannot go far, for I have a wounded foot, which I got in climbing the
cliff with water for your garden." And she pointed to a deep cut in her
foot.

At that, for all his fear, the Hermit was moved to pity, and washed the
cut and bound it up; and as he did so he bethought him that perhaps his
strange visitor had been sent to him not for his soul's undoing but for
her own salvation. And from that hour he earnestly yearned to save her.

But it was not fitting that she should remain in his cave; so, having
given her water to drink and a handful of lentils, he raised her up and
putting his staff in her hand guided her to a hollow not far off in the
face of the cliff. And while he was doing this he heard the sunset
bells ring across the valley, and set about reciting the _Angelus
Domini nuntiavit Mariae_; and she joined in very piously, with her
hands folded, not missing a word.

Nevertheless the thought of her wickedness weighed on him, and the next
day when he went to carry her food he asked her to tell him how it came
about that she had fallen into such abominable sin. And this is the
story she told.


IV

I WAS born (said she) in the north country, where the winters are long
and cold, where snow sometimes falls in the valleys, and the high
mountains for months are white with it. My father's castle is in a tall
green wood, where the winds always rustle, and a cold river runs down
from the ice-gorges. South of us was the wide plain, glowing with heat,
but above us were stony passes where the eagle nests and the storms
howl; in winter great fires roared in our chimneys, and even in summer
there was always a cool air off the gorges. But when I was a child my
mother went southward in the great Empress's train and I went with her.
We travelled many days, across plains and mountains, and saw Rome,
where the Pope lives in a golden palace, and many other cities, till we
came to the great Emperor's court. There for two years or more we lived
in pomp and merriment, for it was a wonderful court, full of mimes,
magicians, philosophers and poets; and the Empress's ladies spent their
days in mirth and music, dressed in light silken garments, walking in
gardens of roses, and bathing in a great cool marble tank, while the
Emperor's eunuchs guarded the approach to the gardens. Oh, those baths
in the marble tank, my Father! I used to lie awake through the whole
hot southern night, and think of that plunge at sunrise under the last
stars. For we were in a burning country, and I pined for the tall green
woods and the cold stream of my father's valley; and when I had cooled
my limbs in the tank I lay all day in the scant cypress shade and
dreamed of my next bath.

My mother pined for the coolness till she died; then the Empress put me
in a convent and I was forgotten. The convent was on the side of a bare
yellow hill, where bees made a hot buzzing in the thyme. Below was the
sea, blazing with a million shafts of light; and overhead a blinding
sky, which reflected the sun's glitter like a huge baldric of steel.
Now the convent was built on the site of an old pleasure-house which a
holy Princess had given to our Order; and a part of the house was left
standing with its court and garden. The nuns had built all about the
garden; but they left the cypresses in the middle, and the long marble
tank where the Princess and her ladies had bathed. The tank, however,
as you may conceive, was no longer used as a bath; for the washing of
the body is an indulgence forbidden to cloistered virgins; and our
Abbess, who was famed for her austerities, boasted that, like holy
Sylvia the nun, she never touched water save to bathe her finger-tips
before receiving the Sacrament. With such an example before them, the
nuns were obliged to conform to the same pious rule, and many, having
been bred in the convent from infancy, regarded all ablutions with
horror, and felt no temptation to cleanse the filth from their flesh;
but I, who had bathed daily, had the freshness of clear water in my
veins, and perished slowly for want of it, like your garden herbs in a
drought.

My cell did not look on the garden, but on the steep mule-path leading
up the cliff, where all day long the sun beat as if with flails of
fire, and I saw the sweating peasants toil up and down behind their
thirsty asses, and the beggars whining and scraping their sores in the
heat. Oh, how I hated to look out through the bars on that burning
world! I used to turn away from it, sick with disgust, and lying on my
hard bed, stare up by the hour at the ceiling of my cell. But flies
crawled in hundreds on the ceiling, and the hot noise they made was
worse than the glare. Sometimes, at an hour when I knew myself
unobserved, I tore off my stifling gown, and hung it over the grated
window, that I might no longer see the shaft of hot sunlight lying
across my cell, and the dust dancing in it like fat in the fire. But
the darkness choked me, and I struggled for breath as though I lay at
the bottom of a pit; so that at last I would spring up, and dragging
down the dress, fling myself on my knees before the Cross, and entreat
our Lord to give me the gift of holiness, that I might escape the
everlasting fires of hell, of which this heat was like an awful
foretaste. For if I could not endure the scorching of a summer's day,
with what constancy could I meet the thought of the flame that dieth
not?

This longing to escape the heat of hell made me apply myself to a
devouter way of living, and I reflected that if my bodily distress were
somewhat eased I should be able to throw myself with greater zeal into
the practice of vigils and austerities. And at length, having set forth
to the Abbess that the sultry air of my cell induced in me a grievous
heaviness of sleep, I prevailed on her to lodge me in that part of the
building which overlooked the garden.

For a few days I was quite happy, for instead of the dusty
mountainside, and the sight of the sweating peasants and their asses, I
looked out on dark cypresses and rows of budding vegetables. But
presently I found I had not bettered myself. For with the approach of
midsummer the garden, being all enclosed with buildings, grew as
stifling as my cell. All the green things in it withered and dried off,
leaving trenches of bare red earth, across which the cypresses cast
strips of shade too narrow to cool the aching heads of the nuns who
sought shelter there; and I began to think sorrowfully of my former
cell, where now and then there came a sea-breeze, hot and languid, yet
alive, and where at least I could look out upon the sea. But this was
not the worst; for when the dog-days came I found that the sun, at a
certain hour, cast on the ceiling of my cell the reflection of the
ripples on the garden-tank; and to say how I suffered from this sight
is not within the power of speech. It was indeed agony to watch the
clear water rippling and washing above my head, yet feel no solace of
it on my limbs: as though I had been a senseless brazen image lying at
the bottom of a well. But the image, if it felt no refreshment, would
have suffered no torture; whereas every inch of my skin throbbed with
thirst, and every vein was a mouth of Dives praying for a drop of
water. Oh, Father, how shall I tell you the grievous pains that I
endured? Sometimes I so feared the sight of the mocking ripples
overhead that I hid my eyes from their approach, lying face down on my
burning bed till I knew that they were gone; yet on cloudy days, when
they did not come, the heat was even worse to bear.

By day I hardly dared trust myself in the garden, for the nuns walked
there, and one fiery noon they found me hanging so close above the tank
that they snatched me away, crying out that I had tried to destroy
myself. The scandal of this reaching the Abbess, she sent for me to
know what demon had beset me; and when I wept and said, the longing to
bathe my burning body, she broke into great anger and cried out: "Do
you not know that this is a sin well-nigh as great as the other, and
condemned by all the greatest saints? For a nun may be tempted to take
her life through excess of self-scrutiny and despair of her own
worthiness; but this desire to indulge the despicable body is one of
the lusts of the flesh, to be classed with concupiscence and adultery."
And she ordered me to sleep every night for a month in my heavy gown,
with a veil upon my face.

Now, Father, I believe it was this penance that drove me to sin. For we
were in the dog-days, and it was more than flesh could bear. And on the
third night, after the portress had passed, and the lights were out, I
rose and flung off my veil and gown, and knelt in my window fainting.
There was no moon, but the sky was full of stars. At first the garden
was all blackness; but as I looked I saw a faint twinkle between the
cypress-trunks, and I knew it was the starlight on the tank. The water!
The water! It was there close to me--only a few bolts and bars were
between us.

The portress was a heavy sleeper, and I knew where her keys hung, on a
nail just within the door of her cell. I stole thither, unlatched the
door, seized the keys and crept barefoot down the corridor. The bolts
of the cloister-door were stiff and heavy, and I dragged at them till
the veins in my wrists were bursting. Then I turned the key and it
cried out in the ward. I stood still, my whole body beating with fear
lest the hinges too should have a voice--but no one stirred, and I
pushed open the door and slipped out. The garden was as airless as a
pit, but at least I could stretch my arms in it; and, oh, my Father,
the sweetness of the stars! The stones in the path cut my feet as I
ran, but I thought of the joy of bathing them in the tank, and that
made the wounds sweet to me.... My Father, I have heard of the
temptations which in times past assailed the holy Solitaries of the
desert, flattering the reluctant flesh beyond resistance; but none, I
think, could have surpassed in ecstasy that first touch of the water on
my limbs. To prolong the joy I let myself slip in slowly, resting my
hands on the edge of the tank, and smiling to see my body, as I lowered
it, break up the shining black surface and shatter the starbeams into
splinters. And the water, my Father, seemed to crave me as I craved it.
Its ripples rose about me, first in furtive touches, then in a long
embrace that clung and drew me down; till at length they lay like
kisses on my lips. It was no frank comrade like the mountain pools of
my childhood, but a secret playmate compassionating my pains and
soothing them with noiseless hands. From the first I thought of it as
an accomplice--its whisper seemed to promise me secrecy if I would
promise it love. And I went back and back to it, my Father; all day I
lived in the thought of it; each night I stole to it with fresh
thirst....

But at length the old portress died, and a young lay-sister took her
place. She was a light sleeper, and keen-eared; and I knew the danger
of venturing to her cell. I knew the danger, but when darkness came I
felt the water drawing me. The first night I fought on my bed and held
out; but the second I crept to her door. She made no motion when I
entered, but rose up secretly and stole after me; and the second night
she warned the Abbess, and the two came on me as I stood by the tank.

I was punished with terrible penances: fasting, scourging,
imprisonment, and the privation of drinking water; for the Abbess stood
amazed at the obduracy of my sin, and was resolved to make me an
example to my fellows. For a month I endured the pains of hell; then
one night the Saracen pirates fell on our convent. On a sudden the
darkness was full of flames and blood; but while the other nuns ran
hither and thither, clinging to the Abbess's feet or shrieking on the
steps of the altar, I slipped through an unwatched postern and made my
way to the hills. The next day the Emperor's soldiery descended on the
carousing heathen, slew them and burned their vessels on the beach; the
Abbess and nuns were rescued, the convent walls rebuilt, and peace
restored to the holy precincts. All this I heard from a shepherdess of
the hills, who found me in my hiding, and brought me honeycomb and
water. In her simplicity she offered to lead me home to the convent;
but while she slept I laid off my wimple and scapular, and stealing her
cloak fled away lest she should betray me. And since then I have
wandered alone over the face of the world, living in woods and desert
places, often hungry, often cold and sometimes fearful; yet resigned to
any hardship, and with a front for any peril, if only I may sleep under
the free heaven and wash the dust from my body in cool water.


V

THE Hermit, as may be supposed, was much perturbed by this story, and
dismayed that such sinfulness should cross his path. His first motion
was to drive the woman forth, for he knew the heinousness of the
craving for water, and how Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine and other holy
doctors have taught that they who would purify the soul must not be
distraught by the vain cares of bodily cleanliness; yet, remembering
the lust that drew him to his lauds, he dared not judge his sister's
fault too harshly.

Moreover he was moved by the Wild Woman's story of the hardships she
had suffered, and the godless company she had been driven to
keep--Egyptians, jugglers, outlaws and even sorcerers, who are masters
of the pagan lore of the East, and still practice their dark rites
among the simple folk of the hills. Yet she would not have him think
wholly ill of this vagrant people, from whom she had often received
food and comfort; and her worst danger, as he learned with shame, had
come from the _girovaghi_ or wandering monks, who are the scourge and
dishonour of Christendom; carrying their ribald idleness from one
monastery to another, and leaving on their way a trail of thieving,
revelry and worse. Once or twice the Wild Woman had nearly fallen into
their hands; but had been saved by her own quick wit and skill in
woodcraft. Once, so she assured the Hermit, she had found refuge with a
faun and his female, who fed and sheltered her in their cave, where she
slept on a bed of leaves with their shaggy nurslings; and in this cave
she had seen a stock or idol of wood, extremely seamed and ancient,
before which the wood-creatures, when they thought she slept, laid
garlands and the wild bees' honey-comb.

She told him also of a hill-village of weavers, where she lived many
weeks, and learned to ply their trade in return for her lodging; and
where wayfaring men in the guise of cobblers, charcoal-burners or
goatherds came and taught strange doctrines at midnight in the poor
hovels. What they taught she could not clearly tell, save that they
believed each soul could commune directly with its Maker, without need
of priest or intercessor; also she had heard from some of their
disciples that there are two Gods, one of good and one of evil, and
that the God of evil has his throne in the Pope's palace in Rome. But
in spite of these dark teachings they were a mild and merciful folk,
full of loving-kindness toward poor persons and wayfarers; so that her
heart grieved for them when one day a Dominican monk appeared in the
village with a company of soldiers, and some of the weavers were seized
and dragged to prison, while others, with their wives and babes, fled
to the winter woods. She fled with them, fearing to be charged with
their heresy, and for months they lay hid in desert places, the older
and weaker, who fell sick from want and exposure, being devoutly
ministered to by their brethren, and dying in the sure faith of heaven.

All this she related modestly and simply, not as one who joys in a
godless life, but as having been drawn into it through misadventure;
and she told the Hermit that when she heard the sound of church bells
she never failed to say an Ave or a Pater; and that often, as she lay
in the midnight darkness of the forest, she had hushed her fears by
reciting the versicles from the Evening Hour:

  Keep us, O Lord, as the apple of the eye,
  Protect us under the shadow of Thy wings.

The wound in her foot healed slowly; and the Hermit, while it was
mending, repaired daily to her cave, reasoning with her in love and
charity, and exhorting her to return to the cloister. But this she
persistently refused to do; and fearing lest she attempt to fly before
her foot was healed, and so expose herself to hunger and ill-usage, he
promised not to betray her presence, or to take any measures toward
restoring her to her Order.

He began indeed to doubt whether she had any calling to the life
enclosed; yet her gentleness and innocency of mind made him feel that
she might be won back to holy living, if only her freedom were assured.
So after many inward struggles (since his promise forbade his taking
counsel with any concerning her) he resolved to let her remain in the
cave till some light should come to him. And one day, visiting her
about the hour of Nones (for it became his pious habit to say the
evening office with her), he found her engaged with a little goatherd,
who in a sudden seizure had fallen from a rock above her cave, and lay
senseless and full of blood at her feet. And the Hermit saw with wonder
how skilfully she bound up his cuts and restored his senses, giving him
to drink of a liquor she had distilled from the wild simples of the
mountain; whereat the boy opened his eyes and praised God, as one
restored by heaven. Now it was known that this lad was subject to
possessions, and had more than once dropped lifeless while he heeded
his flock; and the Hermit, knowing that only great saints or unclean
necromancers can loosen devils, feared that the Wild Woman had
exorcised the spirits by means of unholy spells. But she told him that
the goatherd's sickness was caused only by the heat of the sun, and
that, such seizures being common in the hot countries whence she came,
she had learned from a wise woman how to stay them by a decoction of
the _carduus benedictus_, made in the third night of the waxing moon,
but without the aid of magic.

"But," she continued, "you need not fear my bringing scandal on your
holy retreat, for by the arts of the same wise woman my own wound is
well-nigh healed, and tonight at sunset I set forth on my travels."

The Hermit's heart grew heavy as she spoke, and it seemed to him that
her own look was sorrowful. And suddenly his perplexities were lifted
from him, and he saw what was God's purpose with the Wild Woman.

"Why," said he, "do you fly from this place, where you are safe from
molestation, and can look to the saving of your soul? Is it that your
feet weary for the road, and your spirits are heavy for lack of worldly
discourse?"

She replied that she had no wish to travel, and felt no repugnance to
solitude. "But," said she, "I must go forth to beg my bread, since in
this wilderness there is none but yourself to feed me; and moreover,
when it is known that I have healed the goatherd, curious folk and
scandal-mongers may seek me out, and, learning whence I come, drag me
back to the cloister."

Then the Hermit answered her and said: "In the early days, when the
faith of Christ was first preached, there were holy women who fled to
the desert and lived there in solitude, to the glory of God and the
edification of their sex. If you are minded to embrace so austere a
life, contenting you with such sustenance as the wilderness yields, and
wearing out your days in prayer and vigil, it may be that you shall
make amends for the great sin you have committed, and live and die in
the peace of the Lord Jesus."

He spoke thus, knowing that if she left him and returned to her
roaming, hunger and fear might drive her to fresh sin; whereas in a
life of penance and reclusion her eyes might be opened to her iniquity,
and her soul snatched back from ruin.

He saw that his words moved her, and she seemed about to consent, and
embrace a life of holiness; but suddenly she fell silent, and looked
down on the valley at their feet.

"A stream flows in the glen below us," she said. "Do you forbid me to
bathe in it in the heat of summer?"

"It is not I that forbid you, my daughter, but the laws of God," said
the Hermit; "yet see how miraculously heaven protects you--for in the
hot season, when your lust is upon you, our stream runs dry, and
temptation will be removed from you. Moreover on these heights there is
no excess of heat to madden the body, but always, before dawn and at
the angelus, a cool breeze which refreshes it like water."

And after thinking long on this, and again receiving his promise not to
betray her, the Wild Woman agreed to embrace a life of reclusion; and
the Hermit fell on his knees, worshipping God and rejoicing to think
that, if he saved his sister from sin, his own term of probation would
be shortened.


VI

THEREAFTER for two years the Hermit and the Wild Woman lived side by
side, meeting together to pray on the great feast-days of the year, but
on all other days dwelling apart, engaged in pious practices.

At first the Hermit, knowing the weakness of woman, and her little
aptitude for the life apart, had feared that he might be disturbed by
the nearness of his penitent; but she faithfully held to his commands,
abstaining from all sight of him save on the Days of Obligation; and
when they met, so modest and devout was her demeanour that she raised
his soul to fresh fervency. And gradually it grew sweet to him to think
that, near by though unseen, was one who performed the same tasks at
the same hours; so that, whether he tended his garden, or recited his
chaplet, or rose under the stars to repeat the midnight office, he had
a companion in all his labours and devotions.

Meanwhile the report had spread abroad that a holy woman who cast out
devils had made her dwelling in the Hermit's cliff; and many sick
persons from the valley sought her out, and went away restored by her.
These poor pilgrims brought her oil and flour, and with her own hands
she made a garden like the Hermit's, and planted it with corn and
lentils; but she would never take a trout from the brook, or receive
the gift of a snared wild-fowl, for she said that in her vagrant life
the wild creatures of the wood had befriended her, and as she had slept
in peace among them, so now she would never suffer them to be molested.

In the third year came a plague, and death walked the cities, and many
poor peasants fled to the hills to escape it. These the Hermit and his
penitent faithfully tended, and so skilful were the Wild Woman's
ministrations that the report of them reached the town across the
valley, and a deputation of burgesses came with rich offerings, and
besought her to descend and comfort their sick. The Hermit, seeing her
depart on so dangerous a mission, would have accompanied her, but she
bade him remain and tend those who fled to the hills; and for many days
his heart was consumed in prayer for her, and he feared lest every
fugitive should bring him word of her death.

But at length she returned, wearied-out but whole, and covered with the
blessings of the townsfolk; and thereafter her name for holiness spread
as wide as the Hermit's.

Seeing how constant she remained in her chosen life, and what advance
she had made in the way of perfection, the Hermit now felt that it
behoved him to exhort her again to return to the convent; and more than
once he resolved to speak with her, but his heart hung back. At length
he bethought him that by failing in this duty he imperilled his own
soul, and thereupon, on the next feast-day, when they met, he reminded
her that in spite of her good works she still lived in sin and
excommunicate, and that, now she had once more tasted the sweets of
godliness, it was her duty to confess her fault and give herself up to
her superiors.

She heard him meekly, but when he had spoken she was silent and her
tears ran over; and looking at her he wept also, and said no more. And
they prayed together, and returned each to his cave.

It was not till late winter that the plague abated; and the spring and
early summer following were heavy with rains and great heat. When the
Hermit visited his penitent at the feast of Pentecost, she appeared to
him so weak and wasted that, when they had recited the _Veni, sancte
spiritus_, and the proper psalms, he taxed her with too great rigour of
penitential practices; but she replied that her weakness was not due to
an excess of discipline, but that she had brought back from her labours
among the sick a heaviness of body which the intemperance of the season
no doubt increased. The evil rains continued, falling chiefly at night,
while by day the land reeked with heat and vapours; so that lassitude
fell on the Hermit also, and he could hardly drag himself down to the
spring whence he drew his drinking-water. Thus he fell into the habit
of going down to the glen before cockcrow, after he had recited Matins;
for at that hour the rain commonly ceased, and a faint air was
stirring. Now because of the wet season the stream had not gone dry,
and instead of replenishing his flagon slowly at the trickling spring,
the Hermit went down to the waterside to fill it; and once, as he
descended the steep slope of the glen, he heard the covert rustle, and
saw the leaves stir as though something moved behind them. As he looked
silence fell, and the leaves grew still; but his heart was shaken, for
it seemed to him that what he had seen in the dusk had a human
semblance, such as the wood-people wear. And he was loth to think that
such unhallowed beings haunted the glen.

A few days passed, and again, descending to the stream, he saw a figure
flit by him through the covert; and this time a deeper fear entered
into him; but he put away the thought, and prayed fervently for all
souls in temptation. And when he spoke with the Wild Woman again, on
the feast of the Seven Maccabees, which falls on the first day of
August, he was smitten with fear to see her wasted looks, and besought
her to cease from labouring and let him minister to her in her
weakness. But she denied him gently, and replied that all she asked of
him was to keep her steadfastly in his prayers.

Before the feast of the Assumption the rains ceased, and the plague,
which had begun to show itself, was stayed; but the ardency of the sun
grew greater, and the Hermit's cliff was a fiery furnace. Never had
such heat been known in those regions; but the people did not murmur,
for with the cessation of the rain their crops were saved and the
pestilence banished; and these mercies they ascribed in great part to
the prayers and macerations of the two holy anchorets. Therefore on the
eve of the Assumption they sent a messenger to the Hermit, saying that
at daylight on the morrow the townspeople and all the dwellers in the
valley would come forth, led by their Bishop, who bore the Pope's
blessing to the two solitaries, and who was mindful to celebrate the
Mass of the Assumption in the Hermit's cave in the cliffside. At the
blessed word the Hermit was well-nigh distraught with joy, for he felt
this to be a sign from heaven that his prayers were heard, and that he
had won the Wild Woman's grace as well as his own. And all night he
prayed that on the morrow she might confess her fault and receive the
Sacrament with him.

Before dawn he recited the psalms of the proper nocturn; then he girded
on his gown and sandals, and went forth to meet the Bishop in the
valley.

As he went downward daylight stood on the mountains, and he thought he
had never seen so fair a dawn. It filled the farthest heaven with
brightness, and penetrated even to the woody crevices of the glen, as
the grace of God had entered into the obscurest folds of his heart. The
morning airs were hushed, and he heard only the sound of his own
footfall, and the murmur of the stream which, though diminished, still
poured a swift current between the rocks; but as he reached the bottom
of the glen a sound of chanting came to him, and he knew that the
pilgrims were at hand. His heart leapt up and his feet hastened
forward; but at the streamside they were suddenly stayed, for in a pool
where the water was still deep he saw the shining of a woman's
body--and on a stone hard by lay the Wild Woman's gown and sandals.

Fear and rage possessed the Hermit's heart, and he stood as one smitten
speechless, covering his eyes from the shame. But the song of the
approaching pilgrims swelled ever louder and nearer, and finding voice
he cried to the Wild Woman to come forth and hide herself from the
people.

She made no answer, but in the dusk he saw her limbs sway with the
swaying of the water, and her eyes were turned to him as if in mockery.
At the sight blind fury filled him, and clambering over the rocks to
the pool's edge he bent down and caught her by the shoulder. At that
moment he could have strangled her with his hands, so abhorrent to him
was the touch of her flesh; but as he cried out on her, heaping her
with cruel names, he saw that her eyes returned his look without
wavering; and suddenly it came to him that she was dead. Then through
all his anger and fear a great pang smote him; for here was his work
undone, and one he had loved in Christ laid low in her sin, in spite of
all his labours.

One moment pity possessed him; the next he bethought him how the people
would find him bending above the body of a naked woman, whom he had
held up to them as holy, but whom they might now well take for the
secret instrument of his undoing; and beholding how at her touch all
the slow edifice of his holiness was demolished, and his soul in mortal
jeopardy, he felt the earth reel round him and his sight grew red.

Already the head of the procession had entered the glen, and the
stillness shook with the great sound of the _Salve Regina_. When the
Hermit opened his eyes once more the air was quivering with thronged
candle-flames, which glittered on the gold thread of priestly
vestments, and on the blazing monstrance beneath its canopy; and close
above him was bent the Bishop's face.

The Hermit struggled to his knees.

"My Father in God," he cried, "behold, for my sins I have been visited
by a demon--" But as he spoke he perceived that those about him no
longer heeded him, and that the Bishop and all his clergy had fallen on
their knees about the pool. Then the Hermit, following their gaze, saw
that the brown waters of the pool covered the Wild Woman's limbs as
with a garment, and that about her floating head a great light floated;
and to the utmost edges of the throng a cry of praise went up, for many
were there whom the Wild Woman had healed and comforted, and who read
God's mercy in this wonder. But fresh fear fell on the Hermit, for he
had cursed a dying saint, and denounced her aloud to all the people;
and this new anguish, coming so close upon the other, smote down his
weakened frame, so that his limbs failed him and he sank once more to
the ground.

Again the earth reeled about him, and the bending faces grew remote;
but as he forced his weak voice once more to proclaim his sins he felt
the blessed touch of absolution, and the holy oils of the last voyage
laid on his lips and eyes. Peace returned to him then, and with it a
great longing to look once more upon his lauds, as he had dreamed of
doing at his last hour; but he was too far gone to make this longing
known, and so tried to banish it from his mind. Yet in his weakness the
wish held him, and the tears ran down his face.

Then, as he lay there, feeling the earth slip from under him, and the
Everlasting Arms replace it, he heard a great peal of voices that
seemed to come down from the sky and mingle with the singing of the
throng; and the words of the chant were the words of his own lauds, so
long hidden in the secret of his breast, and now rejoicing above him
through the spheres. And his soul rose on the chant, and soared with it
to the seat of mercy.




THE LAST ASSET


I

"THE devil!" Paul Garnett exclaimed as he re-read his note; and the dry
old gentleman who was at the moment his only neighbour in the quiet
restaurant they both frequented, remarked with a smile: "You don't seem
particularly annoyed at meeting him."

Garnett returned the smile. "I don't know why I apostrophized him, for
he's not in the least present--except inasmuch as he may prove to be at
the bottom of anything unexpected."

The old gentleman who, like Garnett, was an American, and spoke in the
thin rarefied voice which seems best fitted to emit sententious truths,
twisted his lean neck toward the younger man and cackled out shrewdly:
"Ah, it's generally a woman who is at the bottom of the unexpected.
Not," he added, leaning forward with deliberation to select a
tooth-pick, "that that precludes the devil's being there too."

Garnett uttered the requisite laugh, and his neighbour, pushing back
his plate, called out with a perfectly unbending American intonation:
"Gassong! L'addition, silver play."

His repast, as usual, had been a simple one, and he left only thirty
centimes in the plate on which his account was presented; but the
waiter, to whom he was evidently a familiar presence, received the
tribute with Latin affability, and hovered helpfully about the table
while the old gentleman cut and lighted his cigar.

"Yes," the latter proceeded, revolving the cigar meditatively between
his thin lips, "they're generally both in the same hole, like the owl
and the prairie-dog in the natural history books of my youth. I believe
it was all a mistake about the owl and the prairie-dog, but it isn't
about the unexpected. The fact is, the unexpected _is_ the devil--the
sooner you find that out, the happier you'll be." He leaned back,
tilting his smooth bald head against the blotched mirror behind him,
and rambling on with gentle garrulity while Garnett attacked his omelet.

"Get your life down to routine--eliminate surprises. Arrange things so
that, when you get up in the morning, you'll know exactly what is going
to happen to you during the day--and the next day and the next. I don't
say it's funny--it ain't. But it's better than being hit on the head by
a brick-bat. That's why I always take my meals at this restaurant. I
know just how much onion they put in things--if I went to the next
place I shouldn't. And I always take the same streets to come
here--I've been doing it for ten years now. I know at which crossings
to look out--I know what I'm going to see in the shop-windows. It saves
a lot of wear and tear to know what's coming. For a good many years I
never did know, from one minute to another, and now I like to think
that everything's cut-and-dried, and nothing unexpected can jump out at
me like a tramp from a ditch."

He paused calmly to knock the ashes from his cigar, and Garnett said
with a smile: "Doesn't such a plan of life cut off nearly all the
possibilities?"

The old gentleman made a contemptuous motion. "Possibilities of what?
Of being multifariously miserable? There are lots of ways of being
miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is
to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to
be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time."

"That was Schopenhauer's idea, I believe," the young man said, pouring
his wine with the smile of youthful incredulity.

"I guess he hadn't the monopoly," responded his friend. "Lots of people
have found out the secret--the trouble is that so few live up to it."

He rose from his seat, pushing the table forward, and standing passive
while the waiter advanced with his shabby overcoat and umbrella. Then
he nodded to Garnett, lifted his hat politely to the broad-bosomed lady
behind the desk, and passed out into the street.

Garnett looked after him with a musing smile. The two had exchanged
views on life for two years without so much as knowing each other's
names. Garnett was a newspaper correspondent whose work kept him mainly
in London, but on his periodic visits to Paris he lodged in a dingy
hotel of the Latin Quarter, the chief merit of which was its nearness
to the cheap and excellent restaurant where the two Americans had made
acquaintance. But Garnett's assiduity in frequenting the place arose,
in the end, less from the excellence of the food than from the
enjoyment of his old friend's conversation. Amid the flashy
sophistications of the Parisian life to which Garnett's trade
introduced him, the American sage's conversation had the crisp and
homely flavor of a native dish--one of the domestic compounds for which
the exiled palate is supposed to yearn. It was a mark of the old man's
impersonality that, in spite of the interest he inspired, Garnett had
never got beyond idly wondering who he might be, where he lived, and
what his occupations were. He was presumably a bachelor--a man of
family ties, however relaxed, though he might have been as often absent
from home would not have been as regularly present in the same
place--and there was about him a boundless desultoriness which renewed
Garnett's conviction that there is no one on earth as idle as an
American who is not busy. From certain allusions it was plain that he
had lived many years in Paris, yet he had not taken the trouble to
adapt his tongue to the local inflections, but spoke French with the
accent of one who has formed his conception of the language from a
phrase-book.

The city itself seemed to have made as little impression on him as its
speech. He appeared to have no artistic or intellectual curiosities, to
remain untouched by the complex appeal of Paris, while preserving,
perhaps the more strikingly from his very detachment, that odd American
astuteness which seems the fruit of innocence rather than of
experience. His nationality revealed itself again in a mild interest in
the political problems of his adopted country, though they appeared to
preoccupy him only as illustrating the boundless perversity of mankind.
The exhibition of human folly never ceased to divert him, and though
his examples of it seemed mainly drawn from the columns of one exiguous
daily paper, he found there matter for endless variations on his
favorite theme. If this monotony of topic did not weary the younger
man, it was because he fancied he could detect under it the tragic
implication of the fixed idea--of some great moral upheaval which had
flung his friend stripped and starving on the desert island of the
little cafe where they met. He hardly knew wherein he read this
revelation--whether in the resigned shabbiness of the sage's dress, the
impartial courtesy of his manner, or the shade of apprehension which
lurked, indescribably, in his guileless yet suspicious eye. There were
moments when Garnett could only define him by saying that he looked
like a man who had seen a ghost.


II

AN apparition almost as startling had come to Garnett himself in the
shape of the mauve note received from his _concierge_ as he was leaving
the hotel for luncheon.

Not that, on the face of it, a missive announcing Mrs. Sam Newell's
arrival at Ritz's, and her need of his presence there that afternoon at
five, carried any special mark of the portentous. It was not her being
at Ritz's that surprised him. The fact that she was chronically hard
up, and had once or twice lately been so brutally confronted with the
consequences as to accept--indeed solicit--a loan of five pounds from
him: this circumstance, as Garnett knew, would never be allowed to
affect the general tenor of her existence. If one came to Paris, where
could one go but to Ritz's? Did he see her in some grubby hole across
the river? Or in a family _pension_ near the Place de l'Etoile? There
was no affectation in her tendency to gravitate toward what was
costliest and most conspicuous. In doing so she obeyed one of the
profoundest instincts of her nature, and it was another instinct which
taught her to gratify the first at any cost, even to that of dipping
into the pocket of an impecunious newspaper correspondent. It was a
part of her strength--and of her charm too--that she did such things
naturally, openly, without any of the ugly grimaces of dissimulation or
compunction.

Her recourse to Garnett had of course marked a specially low ebb in her
fortunes. Save in moments of exceptional dearth she had richer sources
of supply; and he was nearly sure that, by running over the "society
column" of the Paris _Herald_, he should find an explanation, not
perhaps of her presence at Ritz's, but of her means of subsistence
there. What really perplexed him was not the financial but the social
aspect of the case. When Mrs. Newell had left London in July she had
told him that, between Cowes and Scotland, she and Hermy were provided
for till the middle of October: after that, as she put it, they would
have to look about. Why, then, when she had in her hand the opportunity
of living for three months at the expense of the British aristocracy,
did she rush off to Paris at heaven knew whose expense in the beginning
of September? She was not a woman to act incoherently; if she made
mistakes they were not of that kind. Garnett felt sure she would never
willingly relax her hold on her distinguished friends--was it possible
that it was they who had somewhat violently let go of her?

As Garnett reviewed the situation he began to see that this possibility
had for some time been latent in it. He had felt that something might
happen at any moment--and was not this the something he had obscurely
foreseen? Mrs. Newell really moved too fast: her position was as
perilous as that of an invading army without a base of supplies. She
used up everything too quickly--friends, credit, influence,
forbearance. It was so easy for her to acquire all these--what a pity
she had never learned to keep them! He himself, for instance--the most
insignificant of her acquisitions--was beginning to feel like a
squeezed sponge at the mere thought of her; and it was this sense of
exhaustion, of the inability to provide more, either materially or
morally, which had provoked his exclamation on opening her note. From
the first days of their acquaintance her prodigality had amazed him,
but he had believed it to be surpassed by the infinity of her
resources. If she exhausted old supplies she always found new ones to
replace them. When one set of people began to find her impossible,
another was always beginning to find her indispensable. Yes--but there
were limits--there were only so many sets of people, at least in her
social classification, and when she came to an end of them, what then?
Was this flight to Paris a sign that she had come to an end--was she
going to try Paris because London had failed her? The time of year
precluded such a conjecture. Mrs. Newell's Paris was non-existent in
September. The town was a desert of gaping trippers--he could as soon
think of her seeking social restoration at Margate.

For a moment it occurred to him that she might have to come over to
replenish her wardrobe; but he knew her dates too well to dwell long on
this hope. It was in April and December that she visited the
dress-makers: before December, he had heard her explain, one got
nothing but "the American fashions." Mrs. Newell's scorn of all things
American was somewhat illogically coupled with the determination to use
her own Americanism to the utmost as a means of social advance. She had
found out long ago that, on certain lines, it paid in London to be
American, and she had manufactured for herself a personality
independent of geographical or social demarcations, and presenting that
remarkable blend of plantation dialect, Bowery slang and hyperbolic
statement, which is the British nobility's favorite idea of an
unadulterated Americanism. Mrs. Newell, for all her talents, was not
naturally either humorous or hyperbolic, and there were times when it
would doubtless have been a relief to her to be as monumentally stolid
as some of the persons whose dulness it was her fate to enliven. It was
perhaps the need of relaxing which had drawn her into her odd intimacy
with Garnett, with whom she did not have to be either scrupulously
English or artificially American, since the impression she made on him
was of no more consequence than that which she produced on her footman.
Garnett was perfectly aware that he owed his success to his
insignificance, but the fact affected him only as adding one more
element to his knowledge of Mrs. Newell's character. He was as ready to
sacrifice his personal vanity in such a cause as he had been, at the
outset of their acquaintance, to sacrifice his professional pride to
the opportunity of knowing her.

When he had accepted the position of "London correspondent" (with an
occasional side-glance at Paris) to the New York _Searchlight_, he had
not understood that his work was to include the obligation of
"interviewing"; indeed, had the possibility presented itself in
advance, he would have met it by unpacking his valise and returning to
the drudgery of his assistant-editorship in New York. But when, after
three months in Europe, he received a letter from his chief, suggesting
that he should enliven the Sunday _Searchlight_ by a series of "Talks
with Smart Americans in London" (beginning, say, with Mrs. Sam Newell),
the change of focus already enabled him to view the proposal without
passion. For his life on the edge of the great world-caldron of art,
politics and pleasure--of that high-spiced brew which is nowhere else
so subtly and variously compounded--had bred in him an eager appetite
to taste of the heady mixture. He knew he should never have the full
spoon at his lips, but he recalled the peasant-girl in one of
Browning's plays, who has once eaten polenta cut with a knife which has
carved an ortolan. Might not Mrs. Newell, who had so successfully cut a
way into the dense and succulent mass of English society, serve as the
knife to season his polenta?

He had expected, as the result of the interview, to which she promptly,
almost eagerly, assented, no more than the glimpse of brightly lit
vistas which a waiting messenger may catch through open doors; but
instead he had found himself drawn at once into the inner sanctuary,
not of London society, but of Mrs. Newell's relation to it. She had
been candidly charmed by the idea of the interview: it struck him that
she was conscious of the need of being freshened up. Her appearance was
brilliantly fresh, with the inveterate freshness of the toilet-table;
her paint was as impenetrable as armor. But her personality was a
little tarnished: she was in want of social renovation. She had been
doing and saying the same things for too long a time. London, Cowes,
Homburg, Scotland, Monte Carlo--that had been the round since Hermy was
a baby. Hermy was her daughter, Miss Hermione Newell, who was called in
presently to be shown off to the interviewer and add a paragraph to the
celebration of her mother's charms.

Miss Newell's appearance was so full of an unassisted freshness that
for a moment Garnett made the mistake of fancying that she could fill a
paragraph of her own. But he soon found that her vague personality was
merely tributary to her parent's; that her youth and grace were, in
some mysterious way, her mother's rather than her own. She smiled
obediently on Garnett, but could contribute little beyond her smile and
the general sweetness of her presence, to the picture of Mrs. Newell's
existence which it was the young man's business to draw. And presently
he found that she had left the room without his noticing it.

He learned in time that this unnoticeableness was the most conspicuous
thing about her. Burning at best with a mild light, she became
invisible in the glare of her mother's personality. It was in fact only
as a product of her environment that poor Hermione struck the
imagination. With the smartest woman in London as her guide and example
she had never developed a taste for dress, and with opportunities for
enlightenment from which Garnett's fancy recoiled she remained simple,
unsuspicious and tender, with an inclination to good works and
afternoon church, a taste for the society of dull girls, and a clinging
fidelity to old governesses and retired nurse-maids. Mrs. Newell, whose
boast it was that she looked facts in the face, frankly owned that she
had not been able to make anything of Hermione. "If she has a role I
haven't discovered it," she confessed to Garnett. "I've tried
everything, but she doesn't fit in anywhere."

Mrs. Newell spoke as if her daughter were a piece of furniture acquired
without due reflection, and for which no suitable place could be found.
She got, of course, what she could out of Hermione, who wrote her
notes, ran her errands, saw tiresome people for her, and occupied an
intermediate office between that of lady's maid and secretary; but such
small returns on her investment were not what Mrs. Newell had counted
on. What was the use of producing and educating a handsome daughter if
she did not, in some more positive way, contribute to her parent's
advancement?


III

"IT'S about Hermy," Mrs. Newell said, rising from the heap of
embroidered cushions which formed the background of her afternoon
repose.

Her sitting-room at Ritz's was full of penetrating warmth and
fragrance. Long-stemmed roses filled the vases on the chimney-piece, in
which a fire sparkled with that effect of luxury which fires produce
when the weather is not cold enough to justify them. On the
writing-table, among notes and cards, and signed photographs of
celebrities, Mrs. Newell's gold inkstand, her jewelled penholder, her
heavily-monogrammed despatch-box, gave back from their expensive
surfaces the glint of the flame, which sought out and magnified the
orient of the pearls among the lady's laces and found a mirror in the
pinky polish of her finger-tips. It was just such a scene as a little
September fire, lit for show and not for warmth, would delight to dwell
on and pick out in all its opulent details; and even Garnett, inured to
Mrs. Newell's capacity for extracting manna from the desert, reflected
that she must have found new fields to glean.

"It's about Hermy," she repeated, making room for him among the
cushions. "I had to see you at once. We came over yesterday from
London."

Garnett, seating himself, continued his leisurely survey of the room.
In the glitter of Mrs. Newell's magnificence Hermione, as usual, faded
out of sight, and he hardly noticed her mother's allusion.

"I have never seen you more resplendent," he remarked.

She received the tribute with complacency. "The rooms are not bad, are
they? We came over with the Woolsey Hubbards (you've heard of them, of
course?--they're from Detroit), and really they do things very
decently. Their motor-car met us at Boulogne, and the courier always
wires ahead to have the rooms filled with flowers. This _salon,_ is
really a part of their suite. I simply couldn't have afforded it
myself."

She delivered these facts in a high decisive voice, which had a note
akin to the clink of her many bracelets and the rattle of her ringed
hands against the enamelled cigarette-case which she extended to
Garnett after helping herself from its contents.

"You are always meeting such charming people," said Garnett with mild
irony; and, reverting to her first remark, he bethought himself to add:
"I hope Miss Hermione is not ill?"

"Ill? She was never ill in her life," exclaimed Mrs. Newell, as though
her daughter had been accused of an indelicacy.

"It was only that you said you had come over on her account."

"So I have. Hermione is to be married."

Mrs. Newell brought out the words impressively, drawing back to observe
their effect on her visitor. It was such that he received them with a
long silent stare, which finally passed into a cry of wonder. "Married?
For heaven's sake, to whom?"

Mrs. Newell continued to regard him with a smile so serene and
victorious that he saw she took his somewhat unseemly astonishment as a
merited tribute to her genius. Presently she extended a glittering hand
and took a sheet of note paper from the blotter.

"You can have that put in to-morrow's _Herald_," she said.

Garnett, receiving the paper, read in Hermione's own finished hand: "A
marriage has been arranged, and will shortly take place, between the
Comte Louis du Trayas, son of the Marquis du Trayas de la Baume, and
Miss Hermione Newell, daughter of Samuel C. Newell Esqre. of Elmira, N.
Y. Comte Louis du Trayas belongs to one of the oldest and most
distinguished families in France, and is equally well connected in
England, being the nephew of Lord Saint Priscoe and a cousin of the
Countess of Morningfield, whom he frequently visits at Adham and
Portlow."

The perusal of this document filled Garnett with such deepening wonder
that he could not, for the moment, even do justice to the strangeness
of its being written out for publication in the bride's own hand.
Hermione a bride! Hermione a future countess! Hermione on the brink of
a marriage which would give her not only a great "situation" in the
Parisian world but a footing in some of the best houses in England!
Regardless of its unflattering implications, Garnett prolonged his
stare of mute amazement till Mrs. Newell somewhat sharply
exclaimed--"Well, didn't I always tell you that she would marry a
Frenchman?"

Garnett, in spite of himself, smiled at this revised version of his
hostess's frequent assertion that Hermione was too goody-goody to take
in England, but that with her little dowdy air she might very well "go
off" in the Faubourg if only a _dot_ could be raked up for her--and the
recollection flashed a new light on the versatility of Mrs. Newell's
genius.

"But how did you do it--?" was on the tip of his tongue; and he had
barely time to give the query the more conventional turn of: "How did
it happen?"

"Oh, we were up at Glaish with the Edmund Fitzarthurs. Lady Edmund is a
sort of cousin of the Morningfields', who have a shooting-lodge near
Glaish--a place called Portlow--and young Trayas was there with them.
Lady Edmund, who is a dear, drove Hermy over to Portlow, and the thing
was done in no time. He simply fell over head and ears in love with
her. You know Hermy is really very handsome in her peculiar way. I
don't think you have ever appreciated her," Mrs. Newell summed up with
a note of exquisite reproach.

"I've appreciated her, I assure you; but one somehow didn't think of
her marrying--so soon."

"Soon? She's three-and-twenty; but you've no imagination," said Mrs.
Newell; and Garnett inwardly admitted that he had not enough to soar to
the heights of her invention. For the marriage, of course, was an
invention of her own, a superlative stroke of business, in which he was
sure the principal parties had all been passive agents, in which
everyone, from the bankrupt and disreputable Fitzarthurs to the rich
and immaculate Morningfields, had by some mysterious sleight of hand
been made to fit into Mrs. Newell's designs. But it was not enough for
Garnett to marvel at her work--he wanted to understand it, to take it
apart, to find out how the trick had been done. It was true that Mrs.
Newell had always said Hermy might go off in the Faubourg if she had a
_dot_--but even Mrs. Newell's juggling could hardly conjure up a _dot:_
such feats as she was able to perform in this line were usually made to
serve her own urgent necessities. And besides, who was likely to take
sufficient interest in Hermione to supply her with the means of
marrying a French nobleman? The flowers ordered in advance by the
Woolsey Hubbards' courier made Garnett wonder if that accomplished
functionary had also wired over to have Miss Newell's settlements drawn
up. But of all the comments hovering on his lips the only one he could
decently formulate was the remark that he supposed Mrs. Newell and her
daughter had come over to see the young man's family and make the final
arrangements.

"Oh, they're made--everything is settled," said Mrs. Newell, looking
him squarely in the eye. "You're wondering, of course, about the
_dot_--Frenchmen never go off their heads to the extent of forgetting
_that;_ or at least their parents don't allow them to."

Garnett murmured a vague assent, and she went on without the least
appearance of resenting his curiosity: "It all came about so
fortunately. Only fancy, just the week they met I got a little legacy
from an aunt in Elmira--a good soul I hadn't seen or heard of for
years. I suppose I ought to have put on mourning for her, by the way,
but it would have eaten up a good bit of the legacy, and I really
needed it all for poor Hermy. Oh, it's not a fortune, you
understand--but the young man is madly in love, and has always had his
own way, so after a lot of correspondence it's been arranged. They saw
Hermy this morning, and they're enchanted."

"And the marriage takes place very soon?"

"Yes, in a few weeks, here. His mother is an invalid and couldn't have
gone to England. Besides, the French don't travel. And as Hermy has
become a Catholic--"

"Already?"

Mrs. Newell stared. "It doesn't take long. And it suits Hermy
exactly--she can go to church so much oftener. So I thought," Mrs.
Newell concluded with dignity, "that a wedding at Saint Philippe du
Roule would be the most suitable thing at this season."

"Dear me," said Garnett, "I am left breathless--I can't catch up with
you. I suppose even the day is fixed, though Miss Hermione doesn't
mention it," and he indicated the official announcement in his hand.

Mrs. Newell laughed. "Hermy had to write that herself, poor dear,
because my scrawl's too hideous--but I dictated it. No, the day isn't
fixed--that's why I sent for you." There was a splendid directness
about Mrs. Newell. It would never have occurred to her to pretend to
Garnett that she had summoned him for the pleasure of his company.

"You've sent for me--to fix the day?" he enquired humourously.

"To remove the last obstacle to its being fixed."

"I? What kind of an obstacle could I have the least effect on?"

Mrs. Newell met his banter with a look which quelled it. "I want you to
find her father."

"Her father? Miss Hermione's--?"

"My husband, of course. I suppose you know he's living."

Garnett blushed at his own clumsiness. "I--yes--that is, I really knew
nothing--" he stammered, feeling that each word added to it. If
Hermione was unnoticeable, Mr. Newell had always been invisible. The
young man had never so much as given him a thought, and it was awkward
to come on him so suddenly at a turn of the talk.

"Well, he is--living here in Paris," said Mrs. Newell, with a note of
asperity which seemed to imply that her friend might have taken the
trouble to post himself on this point.

"In Paris? But in that case isn't it quite simple--?"

"To find him? I daresay it won't be difficult, though he is rather
mysterious. But the point is that I can't go to him--and that if I
write to him he won't answer."

"Ah," said Garnett thoughtfully.

"And so you've got to find him for me, and tell him."

"Tell him what?"

"That he must come to the wedding--that we must show ourselves together
at church and at the breakfast."

She delivered the behest in her sharp imperative key, the tone of the
born commander. But for once Garnett ventured to question her orders.

"And supposing he won't come?"

"He must if he cares for his daughter's happiness. She can't be married
without him."

"Can't be married?"

"The French are like that--especially the old families. I was given to
understand at once that my husband must appear--if only to establish
the fact that we're not divorced."

"Ah--you're _not_, then?" escaped from Garnett.

"Mercy, no! Divorce is stupid. They don't like it in Europe. And in
this case it would have been the end of Hermy's marriage. They wouldn't
think of letting their son marry the child of divorced parents."

"How fortunate, then--"

"Yes; but I always think of such things beforehand. And of course I've
told them that my husband will be present."

"You think he will consent?"

"No; not at first; but you must make him. You must tell him how sweet
Hermione is--and you must see Louis, and be able to describe their
happiness. You must dine here to-night--he is coming. We're all dining
with the Hubbards, and they expect you. They have given Hermy some very
good diamonds--though I should have preferred a cheque, as she'll be
horribly poor. But I think Kate Hubbard means to do something about the
trousseau--Hermy is at Paquin's with her now. You've no idea how
delightful all our friends have been.--Ah, here is one of them now,"
she broke off smiling, as the door opened to admit, without preliminary
announcement, a gentleman so glossy and ancient, with such a fixed
unnatural freshness of smile and eye, that he gave Garnett the effect
of having been embalmed and then enamelled. It needed not the
exotic-looking ribbon in the visitor's button-hole, nor Mrs. Newell's
introduction of him as her friend Baron Schenkelderff, to assure
Garnett of his connection with a race as ancient as his appearance.

Baron Schenkelderff greeted his hostess with paternal playfulness, and
the young man with an ease which might have been acquired on the Stock
Exchange and in the dressing-rooms of "leading ladies." He spoke a
faultless, colourless English, from which one felt he might pass with
equal mastery to half a dozen other languages. He enquired
patronizingly for the excellent Hubbards, asked his hostess if she did
not mean to give him a drop of tea and a cigarette, remarked that he
need not ask if Hermione was still closeted with the dress-maker, and,
on the waiter's coming in answer to his ring, ordered the tea himself,
and added a request for _fine champagne_. It was not the first time
that Garnett had seen such minor liberties taken in Mrs. Newell's
drawing-room, but they had hitherto been taken by persons who had at
least the superiority of knowing what they were permitting themselves,
whereas the young man felt almost sure that Baron Schenkelderff's
manner was the most distinguished he could achieve; and this deepened
the disgust with which, as the minutes passed, he yielded to the
conviction that the Baron was Mrs. Newell's aunt.


IV

GARNETT had always foreseen that Mrs. Newell might some day ask him to
do something he should greatly dislike. He had never gone so far as to
conjecture what it might be, but had simply felt that if he allowed his
acquaintance with her to pass from spectatorship to participation he
must be prepared to find himself, at any moment, in a queer situation.

The moment had come; and he was relieved to find that he could meet it
by refusing her request. He had not always been sure that she would
leave him this alternative. She had a way of involving people in her
complications without their being aware of it, and Garnett had pictured
himself in holes so tight that there might not be room for a wriggle.
Happily in this case he could still move freely. Nothing compelled him
to act as an intermediary between Mrs. Newell and her husband, and it
was preposterous to suppose that, even in a life of such perpetual
upheaval as hers, there were no roots which struck deeper than her
casual intimacy with himself. She had simply laid hands on him because
he happened to be within reach, and he would put himself out of reach
by leaving for London on the morrow.

Having thus inwardly asserted his independence, he felt free to let his
fancy dwell on the strangeness of the situation. He had always supposed
that Mrs. Newell, in her flight through life, must have thrown a good
many victims to the wolves, and had assumed that Mr. Newell had been
among the number. That he had been dropped overboard at an early stage
in the lady's career seemed probable from the fact that neither his
wife nor his daughter ever mentioned him. Mrs. Newell was incapable of
reticence, and if her husband had still been an active element in her
life he would certainly have figured in her conversation. Garnett, if
he thought of the matter at all, had concluded that divorce must long
since have eliminated Mr. Newell; but he now saw how he had underrated
his friend's faculty for using up the waste material of life. She had
always struck him as the most extravagant of women, yet it turned out
that by a miracle of thrift she had for years kept a superfluous
husband on the chance that he might some day be useful to her. The day
had come, and Mr. Newell was to be called from his obscurity. Garnett
wondered what had become of him in the interval, and in what shape he
would respond to the evocation. The fact that his wife feared he might
not respond to it at all, seemed to show that his exile was voluntary,
or had at least come to appear preferable to other alternatives; but if
that were the case it was curious that he should not have taken legal
means to free himself. He could hardly have had his wife's motives for
wishing to maintain the vague tie between them; but conjecture lost
itself in trying to picture what his point of view was likely to be,
and Garnett, on his way to the Hubbards' dinner that evening, could not
help regretting that circumstances denied him the opportunity of
meeting so enigmatic a person. The young man's knowledge of Mrs.
Newell's methods made him feel that her husband might be an interesting
study. This, however, did not affect his resolve to keep clear of the
business. He entered the Hubbards' dining-room with the firm intention
of refusing to execute Mrs. Newell's commission, and if he changed his
mind in the course of the evening it was not owing to that lady's
persuasions.

Garnett's curiosity as to the Hubbards' share in Hermione's marriage
was appeased before he had been seated five minutes at their table.

Mrs. Woolsey Hubbard was an expansive blonde, whose ample but
disciplined outline seemed the result of a well-matched struggle
between her cook and her corset-maker. She talked a great deal of what
was appropriate in dress and conduct, and seemed to regard Mrs. Newell
as a final arbiter on both points. To do or to wear anything
inappropriate would have been extremely mortifying to Mrs. Hubbard, and
she was evidently resolved, at the price of eternal vigilance, to prove
her familiarity with what she frequently referred to as "the right
thing." Mr. Hubbard appeared to have no such preoccupations. Garnett,
if called upon to describe him, would have done so by saying that he
was the American who always pays. The young man, in the course of his
foreign wanderings, had come across many fellow-citizens of Mr.
Hubbard's type, in the most diverse company and surroundings; and
wherever they were to be found, they always had their hands in their
pockets. Mr. Hubbard's standard of gentility was the extent of a man's
capacity to "foot the bill"; and as no one but an occasional compatriot
cared to dispute the privilege with him, he seldom had reason to doubt
his social superiority.

Garnett, nevertheless, did not believe that this lavish pair were, as
Mrs. Newell would have phrased it, "putting up" Hermione's _dot_. They
would go very far in diamonds, but they would hang back from
securities. Their readiness to pay was indefinably mingled with a dread
of being expected to, and their prodigalities would take flight at the
first hint of coercion. Mrs. Newell, who had had a good deal of
experience in managing this type of millionaire, could be trusted not
to arouse their susceptibilities, and Garnett was therefore certain
that the chimerical legacy had been extracted from other pockets. There
were none in view but those of Baron Schenkelderff, who, seated at Mrs.
Hubbard's right, with a new order in his button-hole, and a fresh glaze
upon his features, enchanted that lady by his careless references to
crowned heads and his condescending approval of the champagne. Garnett
was more than ever certain that it was the Baron who was paying; and it
was this conviction which made him suddenly feel that, at any cost,
Hermione's marriage must take place. He had felt no special interest in
the marriage except as one more proof of Mrs. Newell's extraordinary
capacity; but now it appealed to him from the girl's own stand-point.
For he saw, with a touch of compunction, that in the mephitic air of
her surroundings a love-story of surprising freshness had miraculously
flowered. He had only to intercept the glances which the young couple
exchanged to find himself transported to the candid region of romance.
It was evident that Hermione adored and was adored; that the lovers
believed in each other and in every one about them, and that even the
legacy of the defunct aunt had not been too great a strain on their
faith in human nature.

His first glance at the Comte Louis du Trayas showed Garnett that, by
some marvel of fitness, Hermione had happened upon a kindred nature. If
the young man's long mild features and short-sighted glance revealed no
special force of character, they showed a benevolence and simplicity as
incorruptible as her own, and declared that their possessor, whatever
his failings, would never imperil the illusions she had so miraculously
preserved. The fact that the girl took her good fortune naturally, and
did not regard herself as suddenly snatched from the jaws of death,
added poignancy to the situation; for if she missed this way of escape,
and was thrown back on her former life, the day of discovery could not
be long deferred. It made Garnett shiver to think of her growing old
between her mother and Schenkelderff, or such successors of the Baron's
as might probably attend on Mrs. Newell's waning fortunes; for it was
clear to him that the Baron marked the first stage in his friend's
decline. When Garnett took leave that evening he had promised Mrs.
Newell that he would try to find her husband.


V

IF Mr. Newell read in the papers the announcement of his daughter's
marriage it did not cause him to lift the veil of seclusion in which
his wife represented him as shrouded.

A round of the American banks in Paris failed to give Garnett his
address, and it was only in chance talk with one of the young
secretaries of the Embassy that he was put on Mr. Newell's track. The
secretary's father, it appeared, had known the Newells some twenty
years earlier. He had had business relations with Mr. Newell, who was
then a man of property, with factories or something of the kind, the
narrator thought, somewhere in Western New York. There had been at this
period, for Mrs. Newell, a phase of large hospitality and showy
carriages in Washington and at Narragansett. Then her husband had had
reverses, had lost heavily in Wall Street, and had finally drifted
abroad and been lost to sight. The young man did not know at what point
in his financial decline Mr. Newell had parted company with his wife
and daughter; "though you may bet your hat," he philosophically
concluded, "that the old girl hung on as long as there were any
pickings." He did not himself know Mr. Newell's address, but opined
that it might be extracted from a certain official at the Consulate, if
Garnett could give a sufficiently good reason for the request; and here
in fact Mrs. Newell's emissary learned that her husband was to be found
in an obscure street of the Luxembourg quarter.

In order to be near the scene of action, Garnett went to breakfast at
his usual haunt, determined to despatch his business as early in the
day as politeness allowed. The head waiter welcomed him to a table near
that of the transatlantic sage, who sat in his customary corner, his
head tilted back against the blistered mirror at an angle suggesting
that in a freer civilization his feet would have sought the same level.
He greeted Garnett affably and the two exchanged their usual
generalizations on life till the sage rose to go; whereupon it occurred
to Garnett to accompany him. His friend took the offer in good part,
merely remarking that he was going to the Luxembourg gardens, where it
was his invariable habit, on good days, to feed the sparrows with the
remains of his breakfast roll; and Garnett replied that, as it
happened, his own business lay in the same direction.

"Perhaps, by the way," he added, "you can tell me how to find the rue
Panonceaux where I must go presently. I thought I knew this quarter
fairly well, but I have never heard of it."

His companion came to a sudden halt on the narrow sidewalk, to the
confusion of the dense and desultory traffic which marks the old
streets of the Latin quarter. He fixed his mild eye on Garnett and gave
a twist to the cigar which lingered in the corner of his mouth.

"The rue Panonceaux? It _is_ an out of the way hole, but I can tell you
how to find it," he answered.

He made no motion to do so, however, but continued to bend on the young
man the full force of his interrogative gaze; then he added abruptly:
"Would you mind telling me your object in going there?"

Garnett looked at him with surprise: a question so unblushingly
personal was strangely out of keeping with his friend's usual attitude
of detachment. Before he could reply, however, the other had quietly
continued: "Do you happen to be in search of Samuel C. Newell?"

"Why, yes, I am," said Garnett with a start of conjecture.

His companion uttered a sigh. "I supposed so," he said resignedly; "and
in that case," he added, "we may as well have the matter out in the
Luxembourg."

Garnett had halted before him with deepening astonishment. "But you
don't mean to tell me--?" he stammered.

The little man made a motion of assent. "I am Samuel C. Newell," he
said drily; "and if you have no objection, I prefer not to break
through my habit of feeding the sparrows. We are five minutes late as
it is."

He quickened his pace without awaiting any reply from Garnett, who
walked beside him in unsubdued wonder till they reached the Luxembourg
gardens, where Mr. Newell, making for one of the less frequented
alleys, seated himself on a bench and drew the fragment of a roll from
his pocket. His coming was evidently expected, for a shower of little
dusky bodies at once descended on him, and the gravel fluttered with
battling wings and beaks as he distributed his dole with impartial
gestures.

It was not till the ground was white with crumbs, and the first frenzy
of his pensioners appeased, that he turned to Garnett and said: "I
presume, sir, that you come from my wife."

Garnett coloured with embarrassment: the more simply the old man took
his mission the more complicated it appeared to himself.

"From your wife--and from Miss Newell," he said at length. "You have
perhaps heard that she is to be married."

"Oh, yes--I read the _Herald_ pretty faithfully," said Miss Newell's
parent, shaking out another handful of crumbs.

Garnett cleared his throat. "Then you have no doubt thought it natural
that, under the circumstances, they should wish to communicate with
you."

The sage continued to fix his attention on the sparrows. "My wife," he
remarked, "might have written to me."

"Mrs. Newell was afraid she might not hear from you in reply."

"In reply? Why should she? I suppose she merely wishes to announce the
marriage. She knows I have no money left to buy wedding-presents," said
Mr. Newell astonishingly.

Garnett felt his colour deepen: he had a vague sense of standing as the
representative of something guilty and enormous, with which he had
rashly identified himself.

"I don't think you understand," he said. "Mrs. Newell and your daughter
have asked me to see you because they are anxious that you should
consent to appear at the wedding."

Mr. Newell, at this, ceased to give his attention to the birds, and
turned a compassionate gaze upon Garnett.

"My dear sir--I don't know your name--" he remarked, "would you mind
telling me how long you have been acquainted with Mrs. Newell?" And
without waiting for an answer he added judicially: "If you wait long
enough she will ask you to do some very disagreeable things for her."

This echo of his own thoughts gave Garnett a sharp twinge of
discomfort, but he made shift to answer good-humouredly: "If you refer
to my present errand, I must tell you that I don't find it disagreeable
to do anything which may be of service to Miss Hermione."

Mr. Newell fumbled in his pocket, as though searching unavailingly for
another morsel of bread; then he said: "From her point of view I shall
not be the most important person at the ceremony."

Garnett smiled. "That is hardly a reason--" he began; but he was
checked by the brevity of tone with which his companion replied: "I am
not aware that I am called upon to give you my reasons."

"You are certainly not," the young man rejoined, "except in so far as
you are willing to consider me as the messenger of your wife and
daughter."

"Oh, I accept your credentials," said the other with his dry smile;
"what I don't recognize is their right to send a message."

This reduced Garnett to silence, and after a moment's pause Mr. Newell
drew his watch from his pocket.

"I am sorry to cut the conversation short, but my days are mapped out
with a certain regularity, and this is the hour for my nap." He rose as
he spoke and held out his hand with a glint of melancholy humour in his
small clear eyes.

"You dismiss me, then? I am to take back a refusal?" the young man
exclaimed.

"My dear sir, those ladies have got on very well without me for a
number of years: I imagine they can put through this wedding without my
help."

"You are mistaken, then; if it were not for that I shouldn't have
undertaken this errand."

Mr. Newell paused as he was turning away. "Not for what?" he enquired.

"The fact that, as it happens, the wedding can't be put through without
your help."

Mr. Newell's thin lips formed a noiseless whistle. "They've got to have
my consent, have they? Well, is he a good young man?"

"The bridegroom?" Garnett echoed in surprise. "I hear the best accounts
of him--and Miss Newell is very much in love."

Her parent met this with an odd smile. "Well, then, I give my
consent--it's all I've got left to give," he added philosophically.

Garnett hesitated. "But if you consent--if you approve--why do you
refuse your daughter's request?"

Mr. Newell looked at him a moment. "Ask Mrs. Newell!" he said. And as
Garnett was again silent, he turned away with a slight gesture of
leave-taking.

But in an instant the young man was at his side. "I will not ask your
reasons, sir," he said, "but I will give you mine for being here. Miss
Newell cannot be married unless you are present at the ceremony. The
young man's parents know that she has a father living, and they give
their consent only on condition that he appears at her marriage. I
believe it is customary in old French families--."

"Old French families be damned!" said Mr. Newell with sudden vigour.
"She had better marry an American." And he made a more decided motion
to free himself from Garnett's importunities.

But his resistance only strengthened the young man's. The more
unpleasant the latter's task became, the more unwilling he grew to see
his efforts end in failure. During the three days which had been
consumed in his quest it had become clear to him that the bridegroom's
parents, having been surprised into a reluctant consent, were but too
ready to withdraw it on the plea of Mr. Newell's non-appearance. Mrs.
Newell, on the last edge of tension, had confided to Garnett that the
Morningfields were "being nasty"; and he could picture the whole
powerful clan, on both sides of the Channel, arrayed in a common
resolve to exclude poor Hermione from their ranks. The very inequality
of the contest stirred his blood, and made him vow that in this case at
least the sins of the parents should not be visited on the children. In
his talk with the young secretary he had obtained some glimpses of
Baron Schenkelderff's past which fortified this resolve. The Baron, at
one time a familiar figure in a much-observed London set, had been
mixed up in an ugly money-lending business ending in suicide, which had
excluded him from the society most accessible to his race. His alliance
with Mrs. Newell was doubtless a desperate attempt at rehabilitation, a
forlorn hope on both sides, but likely to be an enduring tie because it
represented, to both partners, their last chance of escape from social
extinction. That Hermione's marriage was a mere stake in their game did
not in the least affect Garnett's view of its urgency. If on their part
it was a sordid speculation, to her it had the freshness of the first
wooing. If it made of her a mere pawn in their hands, it would put her,
so Garnett hoped, beyond farther risk of such base uses; and to achieve
this had become a necessity to him.

The sense that, if he lost sight of Mr. Newell, the latter might not
easily be found again, nerved Garnett to hold his ground in spite of
the resistance he encountered; and he tried to put the full force of
his plea into the tone with which he cried: "Ah, you don't know your
daughter!"


VI

MRS. NEWELL, that afternoon, met him on the threshold of her
sitting-room with a "Well?" of pent-up anxiety.

In the room itself, Baron Schenkelderff sat with crossed legs and head
thrown back, in an attitude which he did not see fit to alter at the
young man's approach.

Garnett hesitated; but it was not the summariness of the Baron's
greeting which he resented.

"You've found him?" Mrs. Newell exclaimed.

"Yes; but--"

She followed his glance and answered it with a slight shrug. "I can't
take you into my room, because there's a dress-maker there, and she
won't go because she is waiting to be paid. Schenkelderff," she
exclaimed, "you're not wanted; please go and look out of the window."

The Baron rose and, lighting a cigarette, laughingly retired to the
embrasure. Mrs. Newell flung herself down and signed to Garnett to take
a seat at her side.

"Well--you've found him? You've talked with him?"

"Yes; I have talked with him--for an hour."

She made an impatient movement. "That's too long! Does he refuse?"

"He doesn't consent."

"Then you mean--?"

"He wants time to think it over."

"Time? There _is_ no time--did you tell him so?"

"I told him so; but you must remember that he has plenty. He has taken
twenty-four hours."

Mrs. Newell groaned. "Oh, that's too much. When he thinks things over
he always refuses."

"Well, he would have refused at once if I had not agreed to the delay."

She rose nervously from her seat and pressed her hands to her forehead.
"It's too hard, after all I've done! The trousseau is ordered--think
how disgraceful! You must have managed him badly; I'll go and see him
myself."

The Baron, at this, turned abruptly from his study of the Place Vendome.

"My dear creature, for heaven's sake don't spoil everything!" he
exclaimed.

Mrs. Newell coloured furiously. "What's the meaning of that brilliant
speech?"

"I was merely putting myself in the place of a man on whom you have
ceased to smile."

He picked up his hat and stick, nodded knowingly to Garnett, and walked
toward the door with an air of creaking jauntiness.

But on the threshold Mrs. Newell waylaid him.

"Don't go--I must speak to you," she said, following him into the
antechamber; and Garnett remembered the dress-maker who was not to be
dislodged from her bedroom.

In a moment Mrs. Newell returned, with a small flat packet which she
vainly sought to dissemble in an inaccessible pocket.

"He makes everything too odious!" she exclaimed; but whether she
referred to her husband or the Baron it was left to Garnett to decide.

She sat silent, nervously twisting her cigarette-case between her
fingers, while her visitor rehearsed the details of his conversation
with Mr. Newell. He did not indeed tell her the arguments he had used
to shake her husband's resolve, since in his eloquent sketch of
Hermione's situation there had perforce entered hints unflattering to
her mother; but he gave the impression that his hearer had in the end
been moved, and for that reason had consented to defer his refusal.

"Ah, it's not that--it's to prolong our misery!" Mrs. Newell exclaimed;
and after a moment she added drearily: "He has been waiting for such an
opportunity for years."

It seemed needless for Garnett to protract his visit, and he took leave
with the promise to report at once the result of his final talk with
Mr. Newell. But as he was passing through the ante-chamber a side-door
opened and Hermione stood before him. Her face was flushed and shaken
out of its usual repose of line, and he saw at once that she had been
waiting for him.

"Mr. Garnett!" she said in a whisper.

He paused, considering her with surprise: he had never supposed her
capable of such emotion as her voice and eyes revealed.

"I want to speak to you; we are quite safe here. Mamma is with the
dress-maker," she explained, closing the door behind her, while Garnett
laid aside his hat and stick.

"I am at your service," he said.

"You have seen my father? Mamma told me that you were to see him
to-day," the girl went on, standing close to him in order that she
might not have to raise her voice.

"Yes; I have seen him," Garnett replied with increasing wonder.
Hermione had never before mentioned her father to him, and it was by a
slight stretch of veracity that he had included her name in her
mother's plea to Mr. Newell. He had supposed her to be either
unconscious of the transaction, or else too much engrossed in her own
happiness to give it a thought; and he had forgiven her the last
alternative in consideration of the abnormal character of her filial
relations. But now he saw that he must readjust his view of her.

"You went to ask him to come to my wedding; I know about it," Hermione
continued. "Of course it is the custom--people will think it odd if he
does not come." She paused, and then asked: "Does he consent?"

"No; he has not yet consented."

"Ah, I thought so when I saw Mamma just now!"

"But he hasn't quite refused--he has promised to think it over."

"But he hated it--he hated the idea?"

Garnett hesitated. "It seemed to arouse painful associations."

"Ah, it would--it would!" she exclaimed.

He was astonished at the passion of her accent; astonished still more
at the tone with which she went on, laying her hand on his arm: "Mr.
Garnett, he must not be asked--he has been asked too often to do things
that he hated!"

Garnett looked at the girl with a shock of awe. What abysses of
knowledge did her purity hide?

"But, my dear Miss Hermione--" he began.

"I know what you are going to say," she interrupted him. "It is
necessary that he should be present at the marriage or the du Trayas
will break it off. They don't want it very much, at any rate," she
added with a strange candour, "and they will not be sorry, perhaps--for
of course Louis would have to obey them."

"So I explained to your father," Garnett assured her.

"Yes--yes; I knew you would put it to him. But that makes no
difference, Mr. Garnett. He must not be forced to come unwillingly."

"But if he sees the point--after all, no one can force him!"

"No; but if it is painful to him--if it reminds him too much ... Oh,
Mr. Garnett, I was not a child when he left us.... I was old enough to
see ... to see how it must hurt him even now to be reminded. Peace was
all he asked for, and I want him to be left in peace!"

Garnett paused in deep embarrassment. "My dear child, there is no need
to remind you that your own future--"

She had a gesture that recalled her mother. "My future must take care
of itself; he must not be made to see us!" she said imperatively. And
as Garnett remained silent she went on: "I have always hoped he did not
hate me, but he would hate me now if he were forced to see me."

"Not if he could see you at this moment!" he exclaimed.

She lifted her face with swimming eyes.

"Well, go to him, then; tell him what I have said to you!"

Garnett continued to stand before her, deeply struck. "It might be the
best thing," he reflected inwardly; but he did not give utterance to
the thought. He merely put out his hand, holding Hermione's in a long
pressure.

"I will do whatever you wish," he replied.

"You understand that I am in earnest?" she urged tenaciously.

"I am quite sure of it."

"Then I want you to repeat to him what I have said--I want him to be
left undisturbed. I don't want him ever to hear of us again!"

The next day, at the appointed hour, Garnett resorted to the Luxembourg
gardens, which Mr. Newell had named as a meeting-place in preference to
his own lodgings. It was clear that he did not wish to admit the young
man any further into his privacy than the occasion required, and the
extreme shabbiness of his dress hinted that pride might be the cause of
his reluctance.

Garnett found him feeding the sparrows, but he desisted at the young
man's approach, and said at once: "You will not thank me for bringing
you all this distance."

"If that means that you are going to send me away with a refusal, I
have come to spare you the necessity," Garnett answered.

Mr. Newell turned on him a glance of undisguised wonder, in which an
undertone of disappointment might almost have been detected.


"Ah--they've got no use for me, after all?" he said ironically.

Garnett, in reply, related without comment his conversation with
Hermione, and the message with which she had charged him. He remembered
her words exactly and repeated them without modification, heedless of
what they implied or revealed.

Mr. Newell listened with an immovable face, occasionally casting a
crumb to his flock. When Garnett ended he asked: "Does her mother know
of this?"

"Assuredly not!" cried Garnett with a movement of disgust.

"You must pardon me; but Mrs. Newell is a very ingenious woman." Mr.
Newell shook out his remaining crumbs and turned thoughtfully toward
Garnett.

"You believe it's quite clear to Hermione that these people will use my
refusal as a pretext for backing out of the marriage?"

"Perfectly clear--she told me so herself."

"Doesn't she consider the young man rather chicken-hearted?"

"No; he has already put up a big fight for her, and you know the French
look at these things differently. He's only twenty-three and his
marrying against his parents' approval is in itself an act of heroism."

"Yes; I believe they look at it that way," Mr. Newell assented. He rose
and picked up the half-smoked cigar which he had laid on the bench
beside him.

"What do they wear at these French weddings, anyhow? A dress-suit,
isn't it?" he asked.

The question was such a surprise to Garnett that for the moment he
could only stammer out--"You consent then? I may go and tell her?"

"You may tell my girl--yes." He gave a vague laugh and added: "One way
or another, my wife always gets what she wants."


VII

MR. NEWELL'S consent brought with it no accompanying concessions. In
the first flush of his success Garnett had pictured himself as bringing
together the father and daughter, and hovering in an attitude of
benediction over a family group in which Mrs. Newell did not very
distinctly figure.

But Mr. Newell's conditions were inflexible. He would "see the thing
through" for his daughter's sake; but he stipulated that in the
meantime there should be no meetings or farther communications of any
kind. He agreed to be ready when Garnett called for him, at the
appointed hour on the wedding-day; but until then he begged to be left
alone. To this decision he adhered immovably, and when Garnett conveyed
it to Hermione she accepted it with a deep look of understanding. As
for Mrs. Newell she was too much engrossed in the nuptial preparations
to give her husband another thought. She had gained her point, she had
disarmed her foes, and in the first flush of success she had no time to
remember by what means her victory had been won. Even Garnett's
services received little recognition, unless he found them sufficiently
compensated by the new look in Hermione's eyes.

The principal figures in Mrs. Newell's foreground were the Woolsey
Hubbards and Baron Schenkelderff. With these she was in hourly
consultation, and Mrs. Hubbard went about aureoled with the importance
of her close connection with an "aristocratic marriage," and dazzled by
the Baron's familiarity with the intricacies of the Almanach de Gotha.
In his society and Mrs. Newell's, Mrs. Hubbard evidently felt that she
had penetrated to the sacred precincts where "the right thing"
flourished in its native soil. As for Hermione, her look of happiness
had returned, but with an undertint of melancholy, visible perhaps only
to Garnett, but to him always hauntingly present. Outwardly she sank
back into her passive self, resigned to serve as the brilliant
lay-figure on which Mrs. Newell hung the trophies of conquest.
Preparations for the wedding were zealously pressed. Mrs. Newell knew
the danger of giving people time to think things over, and her fears
about her husband being allayed, she began to dread a new attempt
at evasion on the part of the bridegroom's family.

"The sooner it's over the sounder I shall sleep!" she declared to
Garnett; and all the mitigations of art could not conceal the fact that
she was desperately in need of that restorative. There were moments,
indeed, when he was sorrier for her than for her husband or her
daughter; so black and unfathomable appeared the abyss into which she
must slip back if she lost her hold on this last spar of safety.

But she did not lose her hold; his own experience, as well as her
husband's declaration, might have told him that she always got what she
wanted. How much she had wanted this particular thing was shown by the
way in which, on the last day, when all peril was over, she bloomed out
in renovated splendour. It gave Garnett a shivering sense of the
ugliness of the alternative which had confronted her.

The day came; the showy coupe provided by Mrs. Newell presented itself
punctually at Garnett's door, and the young man entered it and drove to
the rue Panonceaus. It was a little melancholy back street, with lean
old houses sweating rust and damp, and glimpses of pit-life gardens,
black and sunless, between walls bristling with iron spikes. On the
narrow pavement a blind man pottered along led by a red-eyed poodle: a
little farther on a dishevelled woman sat grinding coffee on the
threshold of a _buvette_. The bridal carriage stopped before one of the
doorways, with a clatter of hoofs and harness which drew the
neighbourhood to its windows, and Garnett started to mount the
ill-smelling stairs to the fourth floor, on which he learned from the
_concierge_ that Mr. Newell lodged. But half-way up he met the latter
descending, and they turned and went down together.

Hermione's parent wore his usual imperturbable look, and his eye seemed
as full as ever of generalisations on human folly; but there was
something oddly shrunken and submerged in his appearance, as though he
had grown smaller or his clothes larger. And on the last hypothesis
Garnett paused--for it became evident to him that Mr. Newell had hired
his dress-suit.

Seated at the young man's side on the satin cushions, he remained
silent while the carriage rolled smoothly and rapidly through the
net-work of streets leading to the Boulevard Saint-Germain; only once
he remarked, glancing at the elaborate fittings of the coupe: "Is this
Mrs. Newell's carriage?"

"I believe so--yes," Garnett assented, with the guilty sense that in
defining that lady's possessions it was impossible not to trespass on
those of her friends.

Mr. Newell made no farther comment, but presently requested his
companion to rehearse to him once more the exact duties which were to
devolve on him during the coming ceremony. Having mastered these he
remained silent, fixing a dry speculative eye on the panorama of the
brilliant streets, till the carriage drew up at the entrance of Saint
Philippe du Roule.

With the same air of composure he followed his guide through the mob of
spectators, and up the crimson velvet steps, at the head of which, but
for a word from Garnett, a formidable Suisse, glittering with cocked
hat and mace, would have checked the advance of the small crumpled
figure so oddly out of keeping with the magnificence of the bridal
party. The French fashion prescribing that the family _cortege_ shall
follow the bride to the altar, the vestibule of the church was thronged
with the participatore in the coming procession; but if Mr. Newell felt
any nervousness at his sudden projection into this unfamiliar group,
nothing in his look or manner betrayed it. He stood beside Garnett till
a white-favoured carriage, dashing up to the church with a superlative
glitter of highly groomed horseflesh and silver-plated harness,
deposited the snowy apparition of the bride, supported by her mother;
then, as Hermione entered the vestibule, he went forward quietly to
meet her.

The girl, wrapped in the haze of her bridal veil, and a little
confused, perhaps, by the anticipation of the meeting, paused a moment,
as if in doubt, before the small oddly-clad figure which blocked her
path--a horrible moment to Garnett, who felt a pang of misery at this
satire on the infallibility of the filial instinct. He longed to make
some sign, to break in some way the pause of uncertainty; but before he
could move he saw Mrs. Newell give her daughter a sharp push, he saw a
blush of compunction flood Hermione's face, and the girl, throwing back
her veil, bent her tall head and flung her arms about her father.

Mr. Newell emerged unshaken from the embrace: it seemed to have no
effect beyond giving an odder twist to his tie. He stood beside his
daughter till the church doors were thrown open; then, at a sign from
the verger, he gave her his arm, and the strange couple, with the long
train of fashion and finery behind them, started on their march to the
altar.

Garnett had already slipped into the church and secured a post of
vantage which gave him a side-view over the assemblage. The building
was thronged--Mrs. Newell had attained her ambition and given Hermione
a smart wedding. Garnett's eye travelled curiously from one group to
another--from the numerous representatives of the bridegroom's family,
all stamped with the same air of somewhat dowdy distinction, the air of
having had their thinking done for them for so long that they could no
longer perform the act individually, and the heterogeneous company of
Mrs. Newell's friends, who presented, on the opposite side of the nave,
every variety of individual conviction in dress and conduct. Of the two
groups the latter was decidedly the more interesting to Garnett, who
observed that it comprised not only such recent acquisitions as the
Woolsey Hubbards and the Baron, but also sundry more important figures
which of late had faded to the verse of Mrs. Newell's horizon.
Hermione's marriage had drawn them back, had once more made her mother
a social entity, had in short already accomplished the object for which
it had been planned and executed.

And as he looked about him Garnett saw that all the other actors in the
show faded into insignificance beside the dominant figure of Mrs.
Newell, became mere marionettes pulled hither and thither by the hidden
wires of her intention. One and all they were there to serve her ends
and accomplish her purpose: Schenkelderff and the Hubbards to pay for
the show, the bride and bridegroom to seal and symbolize her social
rehabilitation, Garnett himself as the humble instrument adjusting the
different parts of the complicated machinery, and her husband, finally,
as the last stake in her game, the last asset on which she could draw
to rebuild her fallen fortunes. At the thought Garnett was filled with
a deep disgust for what the scene signified, and for his own share in
it. He had been her tool and dupe like the others; if he imagined that
he was serving Hermione, it was for her mother's ends that he had
worked. What right had he to sentimentalise a marriage founded on such
base connivances, and how could he have imagined that in so doing he
was acting a disinterested part?

While these thoughts were passing through his mind the ceremony had
already begun, and the principal personages in the drama were ranged
before him in the row of crimson velvet chairs which fills the
foreground of a Catholic marriage. Through the glow of lights and the
perfumed haze about the altar, Garnett's eyes rested on the central
figures of the group, and gradually the others disappeared from his
view and his mind. After all, neither Mrs. Newell's schemes nor his own
share in them could ever unsanctify Hermione's marriage. It was one
more testimony to life's indefatigable renewals, to nature's secret of
drawing fragrance from corruption; and as his eyes turned from the
girl's illuminated presence to the resigned and stoical figure sunk in
the adjoining chair, it occured to him that he had perhaps worked
better than he knew in placing them, if only for a moment, side by side.




IN TRUST


IN the good days, just after we all left college, Ned Halidon and I
used to listen, laughing and smoking, while Paul Ambrose set forth his
plans.

They were immense, these plans, involving, as it sometimes seemed, the
ultimate aesthetic redemption of the whole human race; and
provisionally restoring the sense of beauty to those unhappy millions
of our fellow country-men who, as Ambrose movingly pointed out, now
live and die in surroundings of unperceived and unmitigated ugliness.

"I want to bring the poor starved wretches back to their lost
inheritance, to the divine past they've thrown away--I want to make 'em
hate ugliness so that they'll smash nearly everything in sight," he
would passionately exclaim, stretching his arms across the shabby
black-walnut writing-table and shaking his thin consumptive fist in the
fact of all the accumulated ugliness in the world.

"You might set the example by smashing that table," I once suggested
with youthful brutality; and Paul, pulling himself up, cast a surprised
glance at me, and then looked slowly about the parental library, in
which we sat.

His parents were dead, and he had inherited the house in Seventeenth
Street, where his grandfather Ambrose had lived in a setting of black
walnut and pier glasses, giving Madeira dinners, and saying to his
guests, as they rejoined the ladies across a florid waste of Aubusson
carpet: "This, sir, is Dabney's first study for the Niagara--the
Grecian Slave in the bay window was executed for me in Rome twenty
years ago by my old friend Ezra Stimpson--" by token of which he passed
for a Maecenas in the New York of the 'forties,' and a poem had once
been published in the Keepsake or the Book of Beauty "On a picture in
the possession of Jonathan Ambrose, Esqre."

Since then the house had remained unchanged. Paul's father, a frugal
liver and hard-headed manipulator of investments, did not inherit old
Jonathan's artistic sensibilities, and was content to live and die in
the unmodified black walnut and red rep of his predecessor. It was only
in Paul that the grandfather's aesthetic faculty revived, and Mrs.
Ambrose used often to say to her husband, as they watched the little
pale-browed boy poring over an old number of the _Art Journal:_ "Paul
will know how to appreciate your father's treasures."

In recognition of these transmitted gifts Paul, on leaving Harvard, was
sent to Paris with a tutor, and established in a studio in which
nothing was ever done. He could not paint, and recognized the fact
early enough to save himself much wasted labor and his friends many
painful efforts in dissimulation. But he brought back a touching
enthusiasm for the forms of beauty which an old civilization had
revealed to him and an apostolic ardour in the cause of their
dissemination.

He had paused in his harangue to take in my ill-timed parenthesis, and
the color mounted slowly to his thin cheek-bones.

"It _is_ an ugly room," he owned, as though he had noticed the library
for the first time.

The desk was carved at the angles with the heads of helmeted knights
with long black-walnut moustaches. The red cloth top was worn
thread-bare, and patterned like a map with islands and peninsulas of
ink; and in its centre throned a massive bronze inkstand representing a
Syrian maiden slumbering by a well beneath a palm-tree.

"The fact is," I said, walking home that evening with Ned Halidon, "old
Paul will never do anything, for the simple reason that he's too
stingy."

Ned, who was an idealist, shook his handsome head. "It's not that, my
dear fellow. He simply doesn't see things when they're too close to
him. I'm glad you woke him up to that desk."

The next time I dined with Paul he said, when we entered the library,
and I had gently rejected one of his cheap cigars in favour of a
superior article of my own: "Look here, I've been looking round for a
decent writing-table. I don't care, as a rule, to turn out old things,
especially when they've done good service, but I see now that this is
too monstrous--"

"For an apostle of beauty to write his evangel on," I agreed, "it _is_
a little inappropriate, except as an awful warning."

Paul colored. "Well, but, my dear fellow, I'd no idea how much a table
of this kind costs. I find I can't get anything decent--the plainest
mahogany--under a hundred and fifty." He hung his head, and pretended
not to notice that I was taking out my own cigar.

"Well, what's a hundred and fifty to you?" I rejoined. "You talk as if
you had to live on a book-keeper's salary, with a large family to
support."

He smiled nervously and twirled the ring on his thin finger. "I know--I
know--that's all very well. But for twenty tables that I _don't_ buy I
can send some fellow abroad and unseal his eyes."

"Oh, hang it, do both!" I exclaimed impatiently; but the writing-table
was never bought. The library remained as it was, and so did the
contention between Halidon and myself, as to whether this inconsistent
acceptance of his surroundings was due, on our friend's part, to a
congenital inability to put his hand in his pocket, or to a real
unconsciousness of the ugliness that happened to fall inside his point
of vision.

"But he owned that the table was ugly," I agreed.

"Yes, but not till you'd called his attention to the fact; and I'll
wager he became unconscious of it again as soon as your back was
turned."

"Not before he'd had time to look at a lot of others, and make up his
mind that he couldn't afford to buy one."

"That was just his excuse. He'd rather be thought mean than insensible
to ugliness. But the truth is that he doesn't mind the table and is
used to it. He knows his way about the drawers."

"But he could get another with the same number of drawers."

"Too much trouble," argued Halidon.

"Too much money," I persisted.

"Oh, hang it, now, if he were mean would he have founded three
travelling scholarships and be planning this big Academy of Arts?"

"Well, he's mean to himself, at any rate."

"Yes; and magnificently, royally generous to all the world besides!"
Halidon exclaimed with one of his great flushes of enthusiasm.

But if, on the whole, the last word remained with Halidon, and
Ambrose's personal chariness seemed a trifling foible compared to his
altruistic breadth of intention, yet neither of us could help
observing, as time went on, that the habit of thrift was beginning to
impede the execution of his schemes of art-philanthropy. The three
travelling scholarships had been founded in the first blaze of his
ardour, and before the personal management of his property had awakened
in him the sleeping instincts of parsimony. But as his capital
accumulated, and problems of investment and considerations of interest
began to encroach upon his visionary hours, we saw a gradual arrest in
the practical development of his plan.

"For every thousand dollars he talks of spending on his work, I believe
he knocks off a cigar, or buys one less newspaper," Halidon grumbled
affectionately; "but after all," he went on, with one of the quick
revivals of optimism that gave a perpetual freshness to his spirit,
"after all, it makes one admire him all the more when one sees such a
nature condemned to be at war with the petty inherited instinct of
greed."

Still, I could see it was a disappointment to Halidon that the great
project of the Academy of Arts should languish on paper long after all
its details had been discussed and settled to the satisfaction of the
projector, and of the expert advisers he had called in council.

"He's quite right to do nothing in a hurry--to take advice and compare
ideas and points of view--to collect and classify his material in
advance," Halidon argued, in answer to a taunt of mine about Paul's
perpetually reiterated plea that he was still waiting for So-and-so's
report; "but now that the plan's mature--and _such_ a plan! You'll
grant it's magnificent?--I should think he'd burn to see it carried
out, instead of pottering over it till his enthusiasm cools and the
whole business turns stale on his hands."

That summer Ambrose went to Europe, and spent his holiday in a frugal
walking-tour through Brittany. When he came back he seemed refreshed by
his respite from business cares and from the interminable revision of
his cherished scheme; while contact with the concrete manifestations of
beauty had, as usual, renewed his flagging ardour.

"By Jove," he cried, "whenever I indulged my unworthy eyes in a long
gaze at one of those big things--picture or church or statue--I kept
saying to myself: 'You lucky devil, you, to be able to provide such a
sight as that for eyes that can make some good use of it! Isn't it
better to give fifty fellows a chance to paint or carve or build, than
to be able to daub canvas or punch clay in a corner all by yourself?'"

"Well," I said, when he had worked off his first ebullition, "when is
the foundation stone to be laid?"

His excitement dropped. "The foundation stone--?"

"When are you going to touch the electric button that sets the thing
going?"

Paul, with his hands in his sagging pockets, began to pace the library
hearth-rug--I can see him now, setting his shabby red slippers between
its ramified cabbages.

"My dear fellow, there are one or two points to be considered
still--one or two new suggestions I picked up over there--"

I sat silent, and he paused before me, flushing to the roots of his
thin hair. "You think I've had time enough--that I ought to have put
the thing through before this? I suppose you're right; I can see that
even Ned Halidon thinks so; and he has always understood my
difficulties better than you have."

This insinuation exasperated me. "Ned would have put it through years
ago!" I broke out.

Paul pulled at his straggling moustache. "You mean he has more
executive capacity? More--no, it's not that; he's not afraid to spend
money, and I am!" he suddenly exclaimed.

He had never before alluded to this weakness to either of us, and I sat
abashed, suffering from his evident distress. But he remained planted
before me, his little legs wide apart, his eyes fixed on mine in an
agony of voluntary self-exposure.

"That's my trouble, and I know it. Big sums frighten me--I can't look
them in the face. By George, I wish Ned had the carrying out of this
scheme--I wish he could spend my money for me!" His face was lit by the
reflection of a passing thought. "Do you know, I shouldn't wonder if I
dropped out of the running before either of you chaps, and in case I do
I've half a mind to leave everything in trust to Halidon, and let him
put the job through for me."

"Much better have your own fun with it," I retorted; but he shook his
head, saying with a sigh as he turned away: "It's _not_ fun to
me--that's the worst of it."

Halidon, to whom I could not help repeating our talk, was amused and
touched by his friend's thought.

"Heaven knows what will become of the scheme, if Paul doesn't live to
carry it out. There are a lot of hungry Ambrose cousins who will make
one gulp of his money, and never give a dollar to the work. Jove, it
_would_ be a fine thing to have the carrying out of such a plan--but
he'll do it yet, you'll see he'll do it yet!" cried Ned, his old faith
in his friend flaming up again through the wet blanket of fact.


II

PAUL AMBROSE did not die and leave his fortune to Halidon, but the
following summer he did something far more unexpected. He went abroad
again, and came back married. Now our busy fancy had never seen Paul
married. Even Ned recognized the vague unlikelihood of such a
metamorphosis.

"He'd stick at the parson's fee--not to mention the best man's
scarf-pin. And I should hate," Ned added sentimentally, "to see 'the
touch of a woman's hand' desecrate the sublime ugliness of the
ancestral home. Think of such a house made 'cozy'!"

But when the news came he would own neither to surprise nor to
disappointment.

"Goodbye, poor Academy!" I exclaimed, tossing over the bridegroom's
eight-page rhapsody to Halidon, who had received its duplicate by the
same post.

"Now, why the deuce do you say that?" he growled. "I never saw such a
beast as you are for imputing mean motives."

To defend myself from this accusation I put out my hand and recovered
Paul's letter.

"Here: listen to this. 'Studying art in Paris when I met her--"the
vision and the faculty divine, but lacking the accomplishment," etc....
A little ethereal profile, like one of Piero della Francesca's angels
... not rich, thank heaven, _but not afraid of money_, and already
enamored of my project for fertilizing my sterile millions...'"

"Well, why the deuce--?" Ned began again, as though I had convicted
myself out of my friend's mouth; and I could only grumble obscurely:
"It's all too pat."

He brushed aside my misgivings. "Thank heaven, she can't paint, anyhow.
And now that I think of it, Paul's just the kind of chap who ought
to have a dozen children."

"Ah, then indeed: goodbye, poor Academy!" I croaked.

The lady was lovely, of that there could be no doubt; and if Paul now
for a time forgot the Academy, his doing so was but a vindication of
his sex. Halidon had only a glimpse of the returning couple before he
was himself snatched up in one of the chariots of adventure that seemed
perpetually waiting at his door. This time he was going to the far East
in the train of a "special mission," and his head was humming with new
hopes and ardors; but he had time for a last word with me about Ambrose.

"You'll see--you'll see!" he summed up hopefully as we parted; and what
I was to see was, of course, the crowning pinnacle of the Academy
lifting itself against the horizon of the immediate future.

It was in the nature of things that I should, meanwhile, see less than
formerly of the projector of that unrealized structure. Paul had a
personal dread of society, but he wished to show his wife to the world,
and I was not often a spectator on these occasions. Paul indeed, good
fellow, tried to maintain the pretense of an unbroken intercourse, and
to this end I was asked to dine now and then; but when I went I found
guests of a new type, who, after dinner, talked of sport and stocks,
while their host blinked at them silently through the smoke of his
cheap cigars.

The first innovation that struck me was a sudden improvement in the
quality of the cigars. Was this Daisy's doing? (Mrs. Ambrose was
Daisy.) It was hard to tell--she produced her results so noiselessly.
With her fair bent head and vague smile, she seemed to watch life flow
by without, as yet, trusting anything of her own to its current. But
she was watching, at any rate, and anything might come of that. Such
modifications as she produced were as yet almost imperceptible to any
but the trained observer. I saw that Paul wished her to be well
dressed, but also that he suffered her to drive in a hired brougham,
and to have her door opened by the raw-boned Celt who had bumped down
the dishes on his bachelor table. The drawing-room curtains were
renewed, but this change served only to accentuate the enormities of
the carpet, and perhaps discouraged Mrs. Ambrose from farther
experiments. At any rate, the desecrating touch that Halidon had
affected to dread made no other inroads on the serried ugliness of the
Ambrose interior.

In the early summer, when Ned returned, the Ambroses had flown to
Europe again--and the Academy was still on paper.

"Well, what do you make of her?" the traveller asked, as we sat over
our first dinner together.

"Too many things--and they don't hang together. Perhaps she's still in
the chrysalis stage."

"Has Paul chucked the scheme altogether?"

"No. He sent for me and we had a talk about it just before he sailed."

"And what impression did you get?"

"That he had waited to send for me _till_ just before he sailed."

"Oh, there you go again!" I offered no denial, and after a pause he
asked: "Did _she_ ever talk to you about it?"

"Yes. Once or twice--in snatches."

"Well--?"

"She thinks it all _too_ beautiful. She would like to see beauty put
within the reach of everyone."

"And the practical side--?"

"She says she doesn't understand business."

Halidon rose with a shrug. "Very likely you frightened her with your
ugly sardonic grin."

"It's not my fault if my smile doesn't add to the sum-total of beauty."

"Well," he said, ignoring me, "next winter we shall see."

But the next winter did not bring Ambrose back. A brief line, written
in November from the Italian lakes, told me that he had "a rotten
cough," and that the doctors were packing him off to Egypt. Would I see
the architects for him, and explain to the trustees? (The Academy
already had trustees, and all the rest of its official hierarchy.) And
would they all excuse his not writing more than a word? He was really
too groggy--but a little warm weather would set him up again, and he
would certainly come home in the spring.

He came home in the spring--in the hold of the ship, with his widow
several decks above. The funeral services were attended by all the
officers of the Academy, and by two of the young fellows who had won
the travelling scholarships, and who shed tears of genuine grief when
their benefactor was committed to the grave.

After that there was a pause of suspense--and then the newspapers
announced that the late Paul Ambrose had left his entire estate to his
widow. The board of the Academy dissolved like a summer cloud, and the
secretary lighted his pipe for a year with the official paper of the
still-born institution.

After a decent lapse of time I called at the house in Seventeenth
Street, and found a man attaching a real-estate agent's sign to the
window and a van-load of luggage backing away from the door. The
care-taker told me that Mrs. Ambrose was sailing the next morning. Not
long afterward I saw the library table with the helmeted knights
standing before an auctioneer's door in University Place; and I looked
with a pang at the familiar ink-stains, in which I had so often traced
the geography of Paul's visionary world.

Halidon, who had picked up another job in the Orient, wrote me an
elegiac letter on Paul's death, ending with--"And what about the
Academy?" and for all answer I sent him a newspaper clipping recording
the terms of the will, and another announcing the sale of the house and
Mrs. Ambrose's departure for Europe.

Though Ned and I corresponded with tolerable regularity I received no
direct answer to this communication till about eighteen months later,
when he surprised me by a letter dated from Florence. It began: "Though
she tells me you have never understood her--" and when I had reached
that point I laid it down and stared out of my office window at the
chimney-pots and the dirty snow on the roof.

"Ned Halidon and Paul's wife!" I murmured; and, incongruously enough,
my next thought was: "I wish I'd bought the library table that day."

The letter went on with waxing eloquence: "I could not stand the money
if it were not that, to her as well as to me, it represents the sacred
opportunity of at last giving speech to his inarticulateness ..."

"Oh, damn it, they're too glib!" I muttered, dashing the letter down;
then, controlling my unreasoning resentment, I read on. "You remember,
old man, those words of his that you repeated to me three or four years
ago: 'I've half a mind to leave my money in trust to Ned'? Well, it
_has_ come to me in trust--as if in mysterious fulfillment of his
thought; and, oh, dear chap--" I dashed the letter down again, and
plunged into my work.


III

"WON'T you own yourself a beast, dear boy?" Halidon asked me gently,
one afternoon of the following spring.

I had escaped for a six weeks' holiday, and was lying outstretched
beside him in a willow chair on the terrace of their villa above
Florence.

My eyes turned from the happy vale at our feet to the illuminated face
beside me. A little way off, at the other end of the terrace, Mrs.
Halidon was bending over a pot of carnations on the balustrade.

"Oh, cheerfully," I assented.

"You see," he continued, glowing, "living here costs us next to
nothing, and it was quite _her_ idea, our founding that fourth
scholarship in memory of Paul."

I had already heard of the fourth scholarship, but I may have betrayed
my surprise at the plural pronoun, for the blood rose under Ned's
sensitive skin, and he said with an embarrassed laugh: "Ah, she so
completely makes me forget that it's not mine too."

"Well, the great thing is that you both think of it chiefly as his."

"Oh, chiefly--altogether. I should be no more than a wretched parasite
if I didn't live first of all for that!"

Mrs. Halidon had turned and was advancing toward us with the slow step
of leisurely enjoyment. The bud of her beauty had at last unfolded: her
vague enigmatical gaze had given way to the clear look of the woman
whose hand is on the clue of life.

"_She's_ not living for anything but her own happiness," I mused, "and
why in heaven's name should she? But Ned--"

"My wife," Halidon continued, his eyes following mine, "my wife feels
it too, even more strongly. You know a woman's sensitiveness.
She's--there's nothing she wouldn't do for his memory--because--in
other ways.... You understand," he added, lowering his tone as she drew
nearer, "that as soon as the child is born we mean to go home for good,
and take up his work--Paul's work."

Mrs. Halidon recovered slowly after the birth of her child: the return
to America was deferred for six months, and then again for a whole
year. I heard of the Halidons as established first at Biarritz, then in
Rome. The second summer Ned wrote me a line from St. Moritz. He said
the place agreed so well with his wife--who was still delicate--that
they were "thinking of building a house there: a mere cleft in the
rocks, to hide our happiness in when it becomes too exuberant"--and the
rest of the letter, very properly, was filled with a rhapsody upon his
little daughter. He spoke of her as Paula.

The following year the Halidons reappeared in New York, and I heard
with surprise that they had taken the Brereton house for the winter.

"Well, why not?" I argued with myself. "After all, the money is hers:
as far as I know the will didn't even hint at a restriction. Why should
I expect a pretty woman with two children" (for now there was an heir)
"to spend her fortune on a visionary scheme that its originator hadn't
the heart to carry out?"

"Yes," cried the devil's advocate--"but Ned?"

My first impression of Halidon was that he had thickened--thickened all
through. He was heavier, physically, with the ruddiness of good living
rather than of hard training; he spoke more deliberately, and had less
frequent bursts of subversive enthusiasm. Well, he was a father, a
householder--yes, and a capitalist now. It was fitting that his manner
should show a sense of these responsibilities. As for Mrs. Halidon, it
was evident that the only responsibilities she was conscious of were
those of the handsome woman and the accomplished hostess. She was
handsomer than ever, with her two babies at her knee--perfect mother as
she was perfect wife. Poor Paul! I wonder if he ever dreamed what a
flower was hidden in the folded bud?

Not long after their arrival, I dined alone with the Halidons, and
lingered on to smoke with Ned while his wife went alone to the opera.
He seemed dull and out of sorts, and complained of a twinge of gout.

"Fact is, I don't get enough exercise--I must look about for a horse."

He had gone afoot for a good many years, and kept his clear skin and
quick eye on that homely regimen--but I had to remind myself that,
after all, we were both older; and also that the Halidons had champagne
every evening.

"How do you like these cigars? They're some I've just got out from
London, but I'm not quite satisfied with them myself," he grumbled,
pushing toward me the silver box and its attendant taper.

I leaned to the flame, and our eyes met as I lit my cigar. Ned flushed
and laughed uneasily. "Poor Paul! Were you thinking of those execrable
weeds of his?--I wonder how I knew you were? Probably because I have
been wanting to talk to you of our plan--I sent Daisy off alone so that
we might have a quiet evening. Not that she isn't interested, only the
technical details bore her."

I hesitated. "Are there many technical details left to settle?"

Halidon pushed his armchair back from the fire-light, and twirled his
cigar between his fingers. "I didn't suppose there were till I began to
look into things a little more closely. You know I never had much of a
head for business, and it was chiefly with you that Paul used to go
over the figures."

"The figures--?"

"There it is, you see." He paused. "Have you any idea how much this
thing is going to cost?"

"Approximately, yes."

"And have you any idea how much we--how much Daisy's fortune amounts
to?"

"None whatever," I hastened to assert.

He looked relieved. "Well, we simply can't do it--and live."

"Live?"

"Paul didn't _live_," he said impatiently. "I can't ask a woman with
two children to think of--hang it, she's under no actual obligation--"
He rose and began to walk the floor. Presently he paused and halted in
front of me, defensively, as Paul had once done years before. "It's not
that I've lost the sense of _my_ obligation--it grows keener with the
growth of my happiness; but my position's a delicate one--"

"Ah, my dear fellow--"

"You _do_ see it? I knew you would." (Yes, he was duller!) "That's the
point. I can't strip my wife and children to carry out a plan--a plan
so nebulous that even its inventor.... The long and short of it is that
the whole scheme must be re-studied, reorganized. Paul lived in a world
of dreams."

I rose and tossed my cigar into the fire. "There were some things he
never dreamed of," I said.

Halidon rose too, facing me uneasily. "You mean--?"

"That _you_ would taunt him with not having spent that money."

He pulled himself up with darkening brows; then the muscles of his
forehead relaxed, a flush suffused it, and he held out his hand in
boyish penitence.

"I stand a good deal from you," he said.

He kept up his idea of going over the Academy question--threshing it
out once for all, as he expressed it; but my suggestion that we should
provisionally resuscitate the extinct board did not meet with his
approval.

"Not till the whole business is settled. I shouldn't have the
face-- Wait till I can go to them and say: 'We're laying the
foundation-stone on such a day.'"

We had one or two conferences, and Ned speedily lost himself in a maze
of figures. His nimble fancy was recalcitrant to mental discipline, and
he excused his inattention with the plea that he had no head for
business.

"All I know is that it's a colossal undertaking, and that short of
living on bread and water--" and then we turned anew to the hard
problem of retrenchment.

At the close of the second conference we fixed a date for a third, when
Ned's business adviser was to be called in; but before the day came, I
learned casually that the Halidons had gone south. Some weeks later Ned
wrote me from Florida, apologizing for his remissness. They had rushed
off suddenly--his wife had a cough, he explained.

When they returned in the spring, I heard that they had bought the
Brereton house, for what seemed to my inexperienced ears a very large
sum. But Ned, whom I met one day at the club, explained to me
convincingly that it was really the most economical thing they could
do. "You don't understand about such things, dear boy, living in your
Diogenes tub; but wait till there's a Mrs. Diogenes. I can assure you
it's a lot cheaper than building, which is what Daisy would have
preferred, and of course," he added, his color rising as our eyes met,
"of course, once the Academy's going, I shall have to make my
head-quarters here; and I suppose even you won't grudge me a roof over
my head."

The Brereton roof was a vast one, with a marble balustrade about it;
and I could quite understand, without Ned's halting explanation, that
"under the circumstances" it would be necessary to defer what he called
"our work--" "Of course, after we've rallied from this amputation, we
shall grow fresh supplies--I mean my wife's investments will," he
laughingly corrected, "and then we'll have no big outlays ahead and
shall know exactly where we stand. After all, my dear fellow, charity
begins at home!"


IV

THE Halidons floated off to Europe for the summer. In due course their
return was announced in the social chronicle, and walking up Fifth
Avenue one afternoon I saw the back of the Brereton house sheathed in
scaffolding, and realized that they were adding a wing.

I did not look up Halidon, nor did I hear from him till the middle of
the winter. Once or twice, meanwhile, I had seen him in the back of his
wife's opera box; but Mrs. Halidon had grown so resplendent that she
reduced her handsome husband to a supernumerary. In January the papers
began to talk of the Halidon ball; and in due course I received a card
for it. I was not a frequenter of balls, and had no intention of going
to this one; but when the day came some obscure impulse moved me to set
aside my rule, and toward midnight I presented myself at Ned's
illuminated portals.

I shall never forget his look when I accosted him on the threshold of
the big new ballroom. With celibate egoism I had rather fancied he
would be gratified by my departure from custom; but one glance showed
me my mistake. He smiled warmly, indeed, and threw into his hand-clasp
an artificial energy of welcome--"You of all people--my dear fellow!
Have you seen Daisy?"--but the look behind the smile made me feel cold
in the crowded room.

Nor was Mrs. Halidon's greeting calculated to restore my circulation.
"Have you come to spy on us?" her frosty smile seemed to say; and I
crept home early, wondering if she had not found me out.

It was the following week that Halidon turned up one day in my office.
He looked pale and thinner, and for the first time I noticed a dash of
gray in his hair. I was startled at the change in him, but I reflected
that it was nearly a year since we had looked at each other by
daylight, and that my shaving-glass had doubtless a similar tale to
tell.

He fidgeted about the office, told me a funny story about his little
boy, and then dropped into a chair.

"Look here," he said, "I want to go into business."

"Business?" I stared.

"Well, why not? I suppose men have gone to work, even at my age, and
not made a complete failure of it. The fact is, I want to make some
money." He paused, and added: "I've heard of an opportunity to pick up
for next to nothing a site for the Academy, and if I could lay my hands
on a little cash--"

"Do you want to speculate?" I interposed.

"Heaven forbid! But don't you see that, if I had a fixed job--so much a
quarter--I could borrow the money and pay it off gradually?"

I meditated upon this astounding proposition. "Do you really think it's
wise to buy a site before--"

"Before what?"

"Well--seeing ahead a little?"

His face fell for a moment, but he rejoined cheerfully: "It's an
exceptional chance, and after all, I _shall_ see ahead if I can get
regular work. I can put by a little every month, and by and bye, when
our living expenses diminish, my wife means to come forward--her idea
would be to give the building--"

He broke off and drummed on the table, waiting nervously for me to
speak. He did not say on what grounds he still counted on a diminution
of his household expenses, and I had not the cruelty to press this
point; but I murmured, after a moment: "I think you're right--I should
try to buy the land."

We discussed his potentialities for work, which were obviously still an
unknown quantity, and the conference ended in my sending him to a firm
of real-estate brokers who were looking out for a partner with a little
money to invest. Halidon had a few thousands of his own, which he
decided to embark in the venture; and thereafter, for the remaining
months of the winter, he appeared punctually at a desk in the brokers'
office, and sketched plans of the Academy on the back of their business
paper. The site for the future building had meanwhile been bought, and
I rather deplored the publicity which Ned gave to the fact; but, after
all, since this publicity served to commit him more deeply, to pledge
him conspicuously to the completion of his task, it was perhaps a wise
instinct of self-coercion that had prompted him.

It was a dull winter in realty, and toward spring, when the market
began to revive, one of the Halidon children showed symptoms of a
delicate throat, and the fashionable doctor who humoured the family
ailments counselled--nay, commanded--a prompt flight to the
Mediterranean.

"He says a New York spring would be simply criminal--and as for those
ghastly southern places, my wife won't hear of them; so we're off. But
I shall be back in July, and I mean to stick to the office all summer."

He was true to his word, and reappeared just as all his friends were
deserting town. For two torrid months he sat at his desk, drawing fresh
plans of the Academy, and waiting for the wind-fall of a "big deal";
but in September he broke down from the effect of the unwonted
confinement, and his indignant wife swept him off to the mountains.

"Why Ned should work when we have the money--I wish he would sell that
wretched piece of land!" And sell it he did one day: I chanced on a
record of the transaction in the realty column of the morning paper. He
afterward explained the sale to me at length. Owing to some spasmodic
effort at municipal improvement, there had been an unforeseen rise in
the adjoining property, and it would have been foolish--yes, I agreed
that it would have been foolish. He had made $10,000 on the sale, and
that would go toward paying off what he had borrowed for the original
purchase. Meanwhile he could be looking about for another site.

Later in the winter he told me it was a bad time to look. His position
in the real-estate business enabled him to follow the trend of the
market, and that trend was obstinately upward. But of course there
would be a reaction--and he was keeping his eyes open.

As the resuscitated Academy scheme once more fell into abeyance, I saw
Halidon less and less frequently; and we had not met for several
months, when one day of June, my morning paper startled me with the
announcement that the President had appointed Edward Halidon of New
York to be Civil Commissioner of our newly acquired Eastern possession,
the Manana Islands. "The unhealthy climate of the islands, and the
defective sanitation of the towns, make it necessary that vigorous
measures should be taken to protect the health of the American citizens
established there, and it is believed that Mr. Halidon's large
experience of Eastern life and well-known energy of character--" I read
the paragraph twice; then I dropped the paper, and projected myself
through the subway to Halidon's office. But he was not there; he had
not been there for a month. One of the clerks believed he was in
Washington.

"It's true, then!" I said to myself. "But Mrs. Halidon in the
Mananas--?"

A day or two later Ned appeared in my office. He looked better than
when we had last met, and there was a determined line about his lips.

"My wife? Heaven forbid! You don't suppose I should think of taking
her? But the job is a tremendously interesting one, and it's the kind
of work I believe I can do--the only kind," he added, smiling rather
ruefully.

"But my dear Ned--"

He faced me with a look of quiet resolution. "I think I've been through
all the _buts_. It's an infernal climate, of course, but then I am used
to the East--I know what precautions to take. And it would be a big
thing to clean up that Augean stable."

"But consider your wife and children--"

He met this with deliberation. "I _have_ considered my children--that's
the point. I don't want them to be able to say, when they look back:
'He was content to go on living on that money--'"

"My dear Ned--"

"That's the one thing they _shan't_ say of me," he pressed on
vehemently. "I've tried other ways--but I'm no good at business. I see
now that I shall never make money enough to carry out the scheme
myself; but at least I can clear out, and not go on being _his_
pensioner--seeing his dreams turned into horses and carpets and
clothes--"

He broke off, and leaning on my desk hid his face in his hands. When he
looked up again his flush of wrath had subsided.

"Just understand me--it's not _her_ fault. Don't fancy I'm trying for
an instant to shift the blame. A woman with children simply obeys the
instinct of her sex; she puts them first--and I wouldn't have it
otherwise. As far as she's concerned there were no conditions
attached--there's no reason why she should make any sacrifice." He
paused, and added painfully: "The trouble is, I can't make her see that
I am differently situated."

"But, Ned, the climate--what are you going to gain by chucking yourself
away?"

He lifted his brows. "That's a queer argument from _you_. And, besides,
I'm up to the tricks of all those ague-holes. And I've _got_ to live,
you see: I've got something to put through." He saw my look of enquiry,
and added with a shy, poignant laugh--how I hear it still!--: "I don't
mean only the job in hand, though that's enough in itself; but Paul's
work--you understand.--It won't come in _my_ day, of course--I've got
to accept that--but my boy's a splendid chap" (the boy was three), "and
I tell you what it is, old man, I believe when he grows up _he'll put
it through_."

Halidon went to the Mananas, and for two years the journals brought me
incidental reports of the work he was accomplishing. He certainly had
found a job to his hand: official words of commendation rang through
the country, and there were lengthy newspaper leaders on the efficiency
with which our representative was prosecuting his task in that lost
corner of our colonies. Then one day a brief paragraph announced his
death--"one of the last victims of the pestilence he had so
successfully combated."

That evening, at my club, I heard men talking of him. One said: "What's
the use of a fellow wasting himself on a lot of savages?" and another
wiseacre opined: "Oh, he went off because there was friction at home. A
fellow like that, who knew the East, would have got through all right
if he'd taken the proper precautions. I saw him before he left, and I
never saw a man look less as if he wanted to live."

I turned on the last speaker, and my voice made him drop his lighted
cigar on his complacent knuckles.

"I never knew a man," I exclaimed, "who had better reasons for wanting
to live!"

A handsome youth mused: "Yes, his wife is very beautiful--but it
doesn't follow--"

And then some one nudged him, for they knew I was Halidon's friend.




THE PRETEXT


I

MRS. RANSOM, when the front door had closed on her visitor, passed with
a spring from the drawing-room to the narrow hall, and thence up the
narrow stairs to her bedroom.

Though slender, and still light of foot, she did not always move so
quickly: hitherto, in her life, there had not been much to hurry for,
save the recurring domestic tasks that compel haste without fostering
elasticity; but some impetus of youth revived, communicated to her by
her talk with Guy Dawnish, now found expression in her girlish flight
upstairs, her girlish impatience to bolt herself into her room with her
throbs and her blushes.

Her blushes? Was she really blushing?

She approached the cramped eagle-topped mirror above her plain prim
dressing-table: just such a meagre concession to the weakness of the
flesh as every old-fashioned house in Wentworth counted among its
relics. The face reflected in this unflattering surface--for even the
mirrors of Wentworth erred on the side of depreciation--did not seem,
at first sight, a suitable theatre for the display of the tenderer
emotions, and its owner blushed more deeply as the fact was forced upon
her.

Her fair hair had grown too thin--it no longer quite hid the blue veins
in her candid forehead--a forehead that one seemed to see turned toward
professorial desks, in large bare halls where a snowy winter light fell
uncompromisingly on rows of "thoughtful women." Her mouth was thin,
too, and a little strained; her lips were too pale; and there were
lines in the corners of her eyes. It was a face which had grown
middle-aged while it waited for the joys of youth.

Well--but if she could still blush? Instinctively she drew back a
little, so that her scrutiny became less microscopic, and the pretty
lingering pink threw a veil over her pallor, the hollows in her
temples, the faint wrinkles of inexperience about her lips and eyes.
How a little colour helped! It made her eyes so deep and shining. She
saw now why bad women rouged.... Her redness deepened at the thought.

But suddenly she noticed for the first time that the collar of her
dress was cut too low. It showed the shrunken lines of the throat. She
rummaged feverishly in a tidy scentless drawer, and snatching out a bit
of black velvet, bound it about her neck. Yes--that was better. It gave
her the relief she needed. Relief--contrast--that was it! She had never
had any, either in her appearance or in her setting. She was as flat as
the pattern of the wall-paper--and so was her life. And all the people
about her had the same look. Wentworth was the kind of place where
husbands and wives gradually grew to resemble each other--one or two of
her friends, she remembered, had told her lately that she and Ransom
were beginning to look alike....

But why had she always, so tamely, allowed her aspect to conform to her
situation? Perhaps a gayer exterior would have provoked a brighter
fate. Even now--she turned back to the glass, loosened the tight
strands of hair above her brow, ran the fine end of the comb under them
with a rapid frizzing motion, and then disposed them, more lightly and
amply, above her eager face. Yes--it was really better; it made a
difference. She smiled at herself with a timid coquetry, and her lips
seemed rosier as she smiled. Then she laid down the comb and the smile
faded. It made a difference, certainly--but was it right to try to make
one's hair look thicker and wavier than it really was? Between that and
rouging the ethical line seemed almost impalpable, and the spectre of
her rigid New England ancestry rose reprovingly before her. She was
sure that none of her grandmothers had ever simulated a curl or
encouraged a blush. A blush, indeed! What had any of them ever had to
blush for in all their frozen lives? And what, in Heaven's name, had
she? She sat down in the stiff mahogany rocking-chair beside her
work-table and tried to collect herself. From childhood she had been
taught to "collect herself"--but never before had her small sensations
and aspirations been so widely scattered, diffused over so vague and
uncharted an expanse. Hitherto they had lain in neatly sorted and
easily accessible bundles on the high shelves of a perfectly ordered
moral consciousness. And now--now that for the first time they _needed_
collecting--now that the little winged and scattered bits of self were
dancing madly down the vagrant winds of fancy, she knew no spell to
call them to the fold again. The best way, no doubt--if only her
bewilderment permitted--was to go back to the beginning--the beginning,
at least, of to-day's visit--to recapitulate, word for word and look
for look....

She clasped her hands on the arms of the chair, checked its swaying
with a firm thrust of her foot, and fixed her eyes upon the inward
vision....

To begin with, what had made to-day's visit so different from the
others? It became suddenly vivid to her that there had been many,
almost daily, others, since Guy Dawnish's coming to Wentworth. Even the
previous winter--the winter of his arrival from England--his visits had
been numerous enough to make Wentworth aware that--very naturally--Mrs.
Ransom was "looking after" the stray young Englishman committed to her
husband's care by an eminent Q. C. whom the Ransoms had known on one of
their brief London visits, and with whom Ransom had since maintained
professional relations. All this was in the natural order of things, as
sanctioned by the social code of Wentworth. Every one was kind to Guy
Dawnish--some rather importunately so, as Margaret Ransom had smiled to
observe--but it was recognized as fitting that she should be kindest,
since he was in a sense her property, since his people in England, by
profusely acknowledging her kindness, had given it the domestic
sanction without which, to Wentworth, any social relation between the
sexes remained unhallowed and to be viewed askance. Yes! And even this
second winter, when the visits had become so much more frequent, so
admitted a part of the day's routine, there had not been, from any one,
a hint of surprise or of conjecture....

Mrs. Ransom smiled with a faint bitterness. She was protected by her
age, no doubt--her age and her past, and the image her mirror gave back
to her....

Her door-handle turned suddenly, and the bolt's resistance was met by
an impatient knock.

"Margaret!"

She started up, her brightness fading, and unbolted the door to admit
her husband.

"Why are you locked in? Why, you're not dressed yet!" he exclaimed.

It was possible for Ransom to reach his dressing-room by a slight
circuit through the passage; but it was characteristic of the
relentless domesticity of their relation that he chose, as a matter of
course, the directer way through his wife's bedroom. She had never
before been disturbed by this practice, which she accepted as
inevitable, but had merely adapted her own habits to it, delaying her
hasty toilet till he was safely in his room, or completing it before
she heard his step on the stair; since a scrupulous traditional prudery
had miraculously survived this massacre of all the privacies.

"Oh, I shan't dress this evening--I shall just have some tea in the
library after you've gone," she answered absently. "Your things are
laid out," she added, rousing herself.

He looked surprised. "The dinner's at seven. I suppose the speeches
will begin at nine. I thought you were coming to hear them."

She wavered. "I don't know. I think not. Mrs. Sperry's ill, and I've no
one else to go with."

He glanced at his watch. "Why not get hold of Dawnish? Wasn't he here
just now? Why didn't you ask him?"

She turned toward her dressing-table, and straightened the comb and
brush with a nervous hand. Her husband had given her, that morning, two
tickets for the ladies' gallery in Hamblin Hall, where the great public
dinner of the evening was to take place--a banquet offered by the
faculty of Wentworth to visitors of academic eminence--and she had
meant to ask Dawnish to go with her: it had seemed the most natural
thing to do, till the end of his visit came, and then, after all, she
had not spoken....

"It's too late now," she murmured, bending over her pin cushion.

"Too late? Not if you telephone him."

Her husband came toward her, and she turned quickly to face him, lest
he should suspect her of trying to avoid his eye. To what duplicity was
she already committed!

Ransom laid a friendly hand on her arm: "Come along, Margaret. You know
I speak for the bar." She was aware, in his voice, of a little note of
surprise at his having to remind her of this.

"Oh, yes. I meant to go, of course--"

"Well, then--" He opened his dressing-room door, and caught a glimpse
of the retreating house-maid's skirt. "Here's Maria now. Maria! Call up
Mr. Dawnish--at Mrs. Creswell's, you know. Tell him Mrs. Ransom wants
him to go with her to hear the speeches this evening--the _speeches_,
you understand?--and he's to call for her at a quarter before nine."

Margaret heard the Irish "Yessir" on the stairs, and stood motionless,
while her husband added loudly: "And bring me some towels when you come
up." Then he turned back into his wife's room.

"Why, it would be a thousand pities for Guy to miss this. He's so
interested in the way we do things over here--and I don't know that
he's ever heard me speak in public." Again the slight note of fatuity!
Was it possible that Ransom was a fatuous man?

He paused in front of her, his short-sighted unobservant glance
concentrating itself unexpectedly on her face.

"You're not going like that, are you?" he asked, with glaring
eye-glasses.

"Like what?" she faltered, lifting a conscious hand to the velvet at
her throat.

"With your hair in such a fearful mess. Have you been shampooing it?
You look like the Brant girl at the end of a tennis-match."

The Brant girl was their horror--the horror of all right-thinking
Wentworth; a laced, whale-boned, frizzle-headed, high-heeled daughter
of iniquity, who came--from New York, of course--on long, disturbing,
tumultuous visits to a Wentworth aunt, working havoc among the
freshmen, and leaving, when she departed, an angry wake of criticism
that ruffled the social waters for weeks. _She_, too, had tried her
hand at Guy--with ludicrous unsuccess. And now, to be compared to
her--to be accused of looking "New Yorky!" Ah, there are times when
husbands are obtuse; and Ransom, as he stood there, thick and yet
juiceless, in his dry legal middle age, with his wiry dust-coloured
beard, and his perpetual _pince-nez_, seemed to his wife a sudden
embodiment of this traditional attribute. Not that she had ever fancied
herself, poor soul, a "_femme incomprise_." She had, on the contrary,
prided herself on being understood by her husband, almost as much as on
her own complete comprehension of him. Wentworth laid a good deal of
stress on "motives"; and Margaret Ransom and her husband had dwelt in a
complete community of motive. It had been the proudest day of her life
when, without consulting her, he had refused an offer of partnership in
an eminent New York firm because he preferred the distinction of
practising in Wentworth, of being known as the legal representative of
the University. Wentworth, in fact, had always been the bond between
the two; they were united in their veneration for that estimable seat
of learning, and in their modest yet vivid consciousness of possessing
its tone. The Wentworth "tone" is unmistakable: it permeates every part
of the social economy, from the _coiffure_ of the ladies to the
preparation of the food. It has its sumptuary laws as well as its
curriculum of learning. It sits in judgment not only on its own
townsmen but on the rest of the world--enlightening, criticising,
ostracizing a heedless universe--and non-conformity to Wentworth
standards involves obliteration from Wentworth's consciousness.

In a world without traditions, without reverence, without stability,
such little expiring centres of prejudice and precedent make an
irresistible appeal to those instincts for which a democracy has
neglected to provide. Wentworth, with its "tone," its backward
references, its inflexible aversions and condemnations, its hard moral
outline preserved intact against a whirling background of experiment,
had been all the poetry and history of Margaret Ransom's life. Yes,
what she had really esteemed in her husband was the fact of his being
so intense an embodiment of Wentworth; so long and closely identified,
for instance, with its legal affairs, that he was almost a part of its
university existence, that of course, at a college banquet, he would
inevitably speak for the bar!

It was wonderful of how much consequence all this had seemed till
now....


II

WHEN, punctually at ten minutes to seven, her husband had emerged from
the house, Margaret Ransom remained seated in her bedroom, addressing
herself anew to the difficult process of self-collection. As an aid to
this endeavour, she bent forward and looked out of the window,
following Ransom's figure as it receded down the elm-shaded street. He
moved almost alone between the prim flowerless grass-plots, the white
porches, the protrusion of irrelevant shingled gables, which stamped
the empty street as part of an American college town. She had always
been proud of living in Hill Street, where the university people
congregated, proud to associate her husband's retreating back, as he
walked daily to his office, with backs literary and pedagogic, backs of
which it was whispered, for the edification of duly-impressed visitors:
"Wait till that old boy turns--that's so-and-so."

This had been her world, a world destitute of personal experience, but
filled with a rich sense of privilege and distinction, of being not as
those millions were who, denied the inestimable advantage of living at
Wentworth, pursued elsewhere careers foredoomed to futility by that
very fact.

And now--!

She rose and turned to her work-table where she had dropped, on
entering, the handful of photographs that Guy Dawnish had left with
her. While he sat so close, pointing out and explaining, she had hardly
taken in the details; but now, on the full tones of his low young
voice, they came back with redoubled distinctness. This was Guise
Abbey, his uncle's place in Wiltshire, where, under his grandfather's
rule, Guy's own boyhood had been spent: a long gabled Jacobean facade,
many-chimneyed, ivy-draped, overhung (she felt sure) by the boughs of a
venerable rookery. And in this other picture--the walled garden at
Guise--that was his uncle, Lord Askern, a hale gouty-looking figure,
planted robustly on the terrace, a gun on his shoulder and a couple of
setters at his feet. And here was the river below the park, with Guy
"punting" a girl in a flapping hat--how Margaret hated the flap that
hid the girl's face! And here was the tennis-court, with Guy among a
jolly cross-legged group of youths in flannels, and pretty girls about
the tea-table under the big lime: in the centre the curate handing
bread and butter, and in the middle distance a footman approaching with
more cups.

Margaret raised this picture closer to her eyes, puzzling, in the
diminished light, over the face of the girl nearest to Guy
Dawnish--bent above him in profile, while he laughingly lifted his
head. No hat hid this profile, which stood out clearly against the
foliage behind it.

"And who is that handsome girl?" Margaret had said, detaining the
photograph as he pushed it aside, and struck by the fact that, of the
whole group, he had left only this member unnamed.

"Oh, only Gwendolen Matcher--I've always known her--. Look at this: the
almshouses at Guise. Aren't they jolly?"

And then--without her having had the courage to ask if the girl in the
punt were also Gwendolen Matcher--they passed on to photographs of his
rooms at Oxford, of a cousin's studio in London--one of Lord Askern's
grandsons was "artistic"--of the rose-hung cottage in Wales to which,
on the old Earl's death, his daughter-in-law, Guy's mother, had retired.

Every one of the photographs opened a window on the life Margaret had
been trying to picture since she had known him--a life so rich, so
romantic, so packed--in the mere casual vocabulary of daily life--with
historic reference and poetic allusion, that she felt almost oppressed
by this distant whiff of its air. The very words he used fascinated and
bewildered her. He seemed to have been born into all sorts of
connections, political, historical, official, that made the Ransom
situation at Wentworth as featureless as the top shelf of a dark
closet. Some one in the family had "asked for the Chiltern
Hundreds"--one uncle was an Elder Brother of the Trinity House--some
one else was the Master of a College--some one was in command at
Devonport--the Army, the Navy, the House of Commons, the House of
Lords, the most venerable seats of learning, were all woven into the
dense background of this young man's light unconscious talk. For the
unconsciousness was unmistakable. Margaret was not without experience
of the transatlantic visitor who sounds loud names and evokes
reverberating connections. The poetry of Guy Dawnish's situation lay in
the fact that it was so completely a part of early associations and
accepted facts. Life was like that in England--in Wentworth of course
(where he had been sent, through his uncle's influence, for two years'
training in the neighbouring electrical works at Smedden)--in
Wentworth, though "immensely jolly," it was different. The fact that he
was qualifying to be an electrical engineer--with the hope of a
secretaryship at the London end of the great Smedden Company--that, at
best, he was returning home to a life of industrial "grind," this fact,
though avowedly a bore, did not disconnect him from that brilliant
pinnacled past, that many-faceted life in which the brightest episodes
of the whole body of English fiction seemed collectively reflected. Of
course he would have to work--younger sons' sons almost always had
to--but his uncle Askern (like Wentworth) was "immensely jolly," and
Guise always open to him, and his other uncle, the Master, a capital
old boy too--and in town he could always put up with his clever aunt,
Lady Caroline Duckett, who had made a "beastly marriage" and was
horribly poor, but who knew everybody jolly and amusing, and had always
been particularly kind to him.

It was not--and Margaret had not, even in her own thoughts, to defend
herself from the imputation--it was not what Wentworth would have
called the "material side" of her friend's situation that captivated
her. She was austerely proof against such appeals: her enthusiasms were
all of the imaginative order. What subjugated her was the unexampled
prodigality with which he poured for her the same draught of tradition
of which Wentworth held out its little teacupful. He besieged her with
a million Wentworths in one--saying, as it were: "All these are mine
for the asking--and I choose you instead!"

For this, she told herself somewhat dizzily, was what it came to--the
summing-up toward which her conscientious efforts at self-collection
had been gradually pushing her: with all this in reach, Guy Dawnish was
leaving Wentworth reluctantly.

"I _was_ a bit lonely here at first--but _now!_" And again: "It will be
jolly, of course, to see them all again--but there are some things one
doesn't easily give up...."

If he had known only Wentworth, it would have been wonderful enough
that he should have chosen her out of all Wentworth--but to have known
that other life, and to set her in the balance against it--poor
Margaret Ransom, in whom, at the moment, nothing seemed of weight but
her years! Ah, it might well produce, in nerves and brain, and poor
unpractised pulses, a flushed tumult of sensation, the rush of a great
wave of life, under which memory struggled in vain to reassert itself,
to particularize again just what his last words--the very last--had
been....

When consciousness emerged, quivering, from this retrospective assault,
it pushed Margaret Ransom--feeling herself a mere leaf in the
blast--toward the writing-table from which her innocent and voluminous
correspondence habitually flowed. She had a letter to write now--much
shorter but more difficult than any she had ever been called on to
indite.

"Dear Mr. Dawnish," she began, "since telephoning you just now I have
decided not--"

Maria's voice, at the door, announced that tea was in the library: "And
I s'pose it's the brown silk you'll wear to the speaking?"

In the usual order of the Ransom existence, its mistress's toilet was
performed unassisted; and the mere enquiry--at once friendly and
deferential--projected, for Margaret, a strong light on the importance
of the occasion. That she should answer: "But I am not going," when the
going was so manifestly part of a household solemnity about which the
thoughts below stairs fluttered in proud participation; that in face of
such participation she should utter a word implying indifference or
hesitation--nay, revealing herself the transposed, uprooted thing she
had been on the verge of becoming; to do this was--well! infinitely
harder than to perform the alternative act of tearing up the sheet of
note-paper under her reluctant pen.

Yes, she said, she would wear the brown silk....


III

ALL the heat and glare from the long illuminated table, about which the
fumes of many courses still hung in a savoury fog, seemed to surge up
to the ladies' gallery, and concentrate themselves in the burning
cheeks of a slender figure withdrawn behind the projection of a pillar.

It never occurred to Margaret Ransom that she was sitting in the shade.
She supposed that the full light of the chandeliers was beating on her
face--and there were moments when it seemed as though all the heads
about the great horse-shoe below, bald, shaggy, sleek, close-thatched,
or thinly latticed, were equipped with an additional pair of eyes, set
at an angle which enabled them to rake her face as relentlessly as the
electric burners.

In the lull after a speech, the gallery was fluttering with the rustle
of programmes consulted, and Mrs. Sheff (the Brant girl's aunt) leaned
forward to say enthusiastically: "And now we're to hear Mr. Ransom!"

A louder buzz rose from the table, and the heads (without relaxing
their upward vigilance) seemed to merge, and flow together, like an
attentive flood, toward the upper end of the horse-shoe, where all the
threads of Margaret Ransom's consciousness were suddenly drawn into
what seemed a small speck, no more--a black speck that rose, hung in
air, dissolved into gyrating gestures, became distended, enormous,
preponderant--became her husband "speaking."

"It's the heat--" Margaret gasped, pressing her handkerchief to her
whitening lips, and finding just strength enough left to push back
farther into the shadow.

She felt a touch on her arm. "It _is_ horrible--shall we go?" a voice
suggested; and, "Yes, yes, let us go," she whispered, feeling, with a
great throb of relief, _that_ to be the only possible, the only
conceivable, solution. To sit and listen to her husband _now_--how
could she ever have thought she could survive it? Luckily, under the
lingering hubbub from below, his opening words were inaudible, and she
had only to run the gauntlet of sympathetic feminine glances, shot
after her between waving fans and programmes, as, guided by Guy
Dawnish, she managed to reach the door. It was really so hot that even
Mrs. Sheff was not much surprised--till long afterward....

The winding staircase was empty, half dark and blessedly silent. In a
committee room below Dawnish found the inevitable water jug, and filled
a glass for her, while she leaned back, confronted only by a frowning
college President in an emblazoned frame. The academic frown descended
on her like an anathema when she rose and followed her companion out of
the building.

Hamblin Hall stands at the end of the long green "Campus" with its
sextuple line of elms--the boast and the singularity of Wentworth. A
pale spring moon, rising above the dome of the University library at
the opposite end of the elm-walk, diffused a pearly mildness in the
sky, melted to thin haze the shadows of the trees, and turned to golden
yellow the lights of the college windows. Against this soft suffusion
of light the Library cupola assumed a Bramantesque grace, the white
steeple of the congregational church became a campanile topped by a
winged spirit, and the scant porticoes of the older halls the
colonnades of classic temples.

"This is better--" Dawnish said, as they passed down the steps and
under the shadow of the elms.

They moved on a little way in silence before he began again: "You're
too tired to walk. Let us sit down a few minutes."

Her feet, in truth, were leaden, and not far off a group of park
benches, encircling the pedestal of a patriot in bronze, invited them
to rest. But Dawnish was guiding her toward a lateral path which bent,
through shrubberies, toward a strip of turf between two of the
buildings.

"It will be cooler by the river," he said, moving on without waiting
for a possible protest. None came: it seemed easier, for the moment, to
let herself be led without any conventional feint of resistance. And
besides, there was nothing wrong about _this_--the wrong would have
been in sitting up there in the glare, pretending to listen to her
husband, a dutiful wife among her kind....

The path descended, as both knew, to the chosen, the inimitable spot of
Wentworth: that fugitive curve of the river, where, before hurrying on
to glut the brutal industries of South Wentworth and Smedden, it
simulated for a few hundred yards the leisurely pace of an ancient
university stream, with willows on its banks and a stretch of turf
extending from the grounds of Hamblin Hall to the boat houses at the
farther bend. Here too were benches, beneath the willows, and so close
to the river that the voice of its gliding softened and filled out the
reverberating silence between Margaret and her companion, and made her
feel that she knew why he had brought her there.

"Do you feel better?" he asked gently as he sat down beside her.

"Oh, yes. I only needed a little air."

"I'm so glad you did. Of course the speeches were tremendously
interesting--but I prefer this. What a good night!"

"Yes."

There was a pause, which now, after all, the soothing accompaniment of
the river seemed hardly sufficient to fill.

"I wonder what time it is. I ought to be going home," Margaret began at
length.

"Oh, it's not late. They'll be at it for hours in there--yet."

She made a faint inarticulate sound. She wanted to say: "No--Robert's
speech was to be the last--" but she could not bring herself to
pronounce Ransom's name, and at the moment no other way of refuting her
companion's statement occurred to her.

The young man leaned back luxuriously, reassured by her silence.

"You see it's my last chance--and I want to make the most of it."

"Your last chance?" How stupid of her to repeat his words on that
cooing note of interrogation! It was just such a lead as the Brant girl
might have given him.

"To be with you--like this. I haven't had so many. And there's less
than a week left."

She attempted to laugh. "Perhaps it will sound longer if you call it
five days."

The flatness of that, again! And she knew there were people who called
her intelligent. Fortunately he did not seem to notice it; but her
laugh continued to sound in her own ears--the coquettish chirp of
middle age! She decided that if he spoke again--if he _said
anything_--she would make no farther effort at evasion: she would take
it directly, seriously, frankly--she would not be doubly disloyal.

"Besides," he continued, throwing his arm along the back of the bench,
and turning toward her so that his face was like a dusky bas-relief
with a silver rim--"besides, there's something I've been wanting to
tell you."

The sound of the river seemed to cease altogether: the whole world
became silent.

Margaret had trusted her inspiration farther than it appeared likely to
carry her. Again she could think of nothing happier than to repeat, on
the same witless note of interrogation: "To tell me?"

"You only."

The constraint, the difficulty, seemed to be on his side now: she
divined it by the renewed shifting of his attitude--he was capable,
usually, of such fine intervals of immobility--and by a confusion in
his utterance that set her own voice throbbing in her throat.

"You've been so perfect to me," he began again. "It's not my fault if
you've made me feel that you would understand everything--make
allowances for everything--see just how a man may have held out, and
fought against a thing--as long as he had the strength.... This may be
my only chance; and I can't go away without telling you."

He had turned from her now, and was staring at the river, so that his
profile was projected against the moonlight in all its beautiful young
dejection.

There was a slight pause, as though he waited for her to speak; then
she leaned forward and laid her hand on his.

"If I have really been--if I have done for you even the least part of
what you say ... what you imagine ... will you do for me, now, just one
thing in return?"

He sat motionless, as if fearing to frighten away the shy touch on his
hand, and she left it there, conscious of her gesture only as part of
the high ritual of their farewell.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked in a low tone.

"_Not_ to tell me!" she breathed on a deep note of entreaty.

"_Not_ to tell you--?"

"Anything--_anything_--just to leave our ... our friendship ... as it
has been--as--as a painter, if a friend asked him, might leave a
picture--not quite finished, perhaps ... but all the more exquisite...."

She felt the hand under hers slip away, recover itself, and seek her
own, which had flashed out of reach in the same instant--felt the start
that swept him round on her as if he had been caught and turned about
by the shoulders.

"You--_you_--?" he stammered, in a strange voice full of fear and
tenderness; but she held fast, so centred in her inexorable resolve
that she was hardly conscious of the effect her words might be
producing.

"Don't you see," she hurried on, "don't you _feel_ how much safer it
is--yes, I'm willing to put it so!--how much safer to leave everything
undisturbed ... just as ... as it has grown of itself ... without
trying to say: 'It's this or that'...? It's what we each choose to call
it to ourselves, after all, isn't it? Don't let us try to find a name
that ... that we should both agree upon ... we probably shouldn't
succeed." She laughed abruptly. "And ghosts vanish when one names
them!" she ended with a break in her voice.

When she ceased her heart was beating so violently that there was a
rush in her ears like the noise of the river after rain, and she did
not immediately make out what he was answering. But as she recovered
her lucidity she said to herself that, whatever he was saying, she must
not hear it; and she began to speak again, half playfully, half
appealingly, with an eloquence of entreaty, an ingenuity in argument,
of which she had never dreamed herself capable. And then, suddenly,
strangling hands seemed to reach up from her heart to her throat, and
she had to stop.

Her companion remained motionless. He had not tried to regain her hand,
and his eyes were away from her, on the river. But his nearness had
become something formidable and exquisite--something she had never
before imagined. A flush of guilt swept over her--vague reminiscences
of French novels and of opera plots. This was what such women felt,
then ... this was "shame." ... Phrases of the newspaper and the pulpit
danced before her.... She dared not speak, and his silence began to
frighten her. Had ever a heart beat so wildly before in Wentworth?

He turned at last, and taking her two hands, quite simply, kissed them
one after the other.

"I shall never forget--" he said in a confused voice, unlike his own.

A return of strength enabled her to rise, and even to let her eyes meet
his for a moment.

"Thank you," she said, simply also.

She turned away from the bench, regaining the path that led back to the
college buildings, and he walked beside her in silence. When they
reached the elm walk it was dotted with dispersing groups. The
"speaking" was over, and Hamblin Hall had poured its audience out into
the moonlight. Margaret felt a rush of relief, followed by a receding
wave of regret. She had the distinct sensation that her hour--her one
hour--was over.

One of the groups just ahead broke up as they approached, and projected
Ransom's solid bulk against the moonlight.

"My husband," she said, hastening forward; and she never afterward
forgot the look of his back--heavy, round-shouldered, yet a little
pompous--in a badly fitting overcoat that stood out at the neck and hid
his collar. She had never before noticed how he dressed.


IV

THEY met again, inevitably, before Dawnish left; but the thing she
feared did not happen--he did not try to see her alone.

It even became clear to her, in looking back, that he had deliberately
avoided doing so; and this seemed merely an added proof of his
"understanding," of that deep undefinable communion that set them alone
in an empty world, as if on a peak above the clouds.

The five days passed in a flash; and when the last one came, it brought
to Margaret Ransom an hour of weakness, of profound disorganization,
when old barriers fell, old convictions faded--when to be alone with
him for a moment became, after all, the one craving of her heart. She
knew he was coming that afternoon to say "good-by"--and she knew also
that Ransom was to be away at South Wentworth. She waited alone in her
pale little drawing-room, with its scant kakemonos, its one or two
chilly reproductions from the antique, its slippery Chippendale chairs.
At length the bell rang, and her world became a rosy blur--through
which she presently discerned the austere form of Mrs. Sperry, wife of
the Professor of palaeontology, who had come to talk over with her the
next winter's programme for the Higher Thought Club. They debated the
question for an hour, and when Mrs. Sperry departed Margaret had a
confused impression that the course was to deal with the influence of
the First Crusade on the development of European architecture--but the
sentient part of her knew only that Dawnish had not come.

He "bobbed in," as he would have put it, after dinner--having, it
appeared, run across Ransom early in the day, and learned that the
latter would be absent till evening. Margaret was in the study with her
husband when the door opened and Dawnish stood there. Ransom--who had
not had time to dress--was seated at his desk, a pile of shabby law
books at his elbow, the light from a hanging lamp falling on his
grayish stubble of hair, his sallow forehead and spectacled eyes.
Dawnish, towering higher than usual against the shadows of the room,
and refined by his unusual pallor, hung a moment on the threshold, then
came in, explaining himself profusely--laughing, accepting a cigar,
letting Ransom push an arm-chair forward--a Dawnish she had never seen,
ill at ease, ejaculatory, yet somehow more mature, more obscurely in
command of himself.

Margaret drew back, seating herself in the shade, in such a way that
she saw her husband's head first, and beyond it their visitor's,
relieved against the dusk of the book shelves. Her heart was still--she
felt no throbbing in her throat or temples: all her life seemed
concentrated in the hand that lay on her knee, the hand he would touch
when they said good-by.

Afterward her heart rang all the changes, and there was a mood in which
she reproached herself for cowardice--for having deliberately missed
her one moment with him, the moment in which she might have sounded the
depths of life, for joy or anguish. But that mood was fleeting and
infrequent. In quieter hours she blushed for it--she even trembled to
think that he might have guessed such a regret in her. It seemed to
convict her of a lack of fineness that he should have had, in his youth
and his power, a tenderer, surer sense of the peril of a rash
touch--should have handled the case so much more delicately.

At first her days were fire and the nights long solemn vigils. Her
thoughts were no longer vulgarized and defaced by any notion of
"guilt," of mental disloyalty. She was ashamed now of her shame. What
had happened was as much outside the sphere of her marriage as some
transaction in a star. It had simply given her a secret life of
incommunicable joys, as if all the wasted springs of her youth had been
stored in some hidden pool, and she could return there now to bathe in
them.

After that there came a phase of loneliness, through which the life
about her loomed phantasmal and remote. She thought the dead must feel
thus, repeating the vain gestures of the living beside some Stygian
shore. She wondered if any other woman had lived to whom _nothing had
ever happened?_ And then his first letter came....

It was a charming letter--a perfect letter. The little touch of
awkwardness and constraint under its boyish spontaneity told her more
than whole pages of eloquence. He spoke of their friendship--of their
good days together.... Ransom, chancing to come in while she read,
noticed the foreign stamps; and she was able to hand him the letter,
saying gaily: "There's a message for you," and knowing all the while
that _her_ message was safe in her heart.

On the days when 

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