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Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 2, September, 1905

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Title: Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 2, September, 1905

Author: Various


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AINSLEE'S MAGAZINE, VOLUME 16, NO. 2, SEPTEMBER, 1905 ***

Transcriber’s note: The Table of Contents was created by the Transcriber
and placed in the Public Domain.




CONTENTS


  The Maintenance of Jane                       1
  To A Roadside Cedar                          26
  The Deluge: A Story of Modern Finance        27
  Conversations With Egeria                    43
  Mis-Mated Americans                          46
  Aftermath                                    48
  The Golden Apple                             49
  The Master of the Dido                       62
  Mrs. Evremond                                71
  The Dog Star                                 81
  As It Ended                                  88
  The Tears of Undine                          89
  Now’s The Time O’ Year                      102
  Pride of Race                               103
  The Princess’ Kingdom                       116
  The Most Exclusive City in America          125
  The Gate                                    131
  The Way of a Man                            132
  The Incompatibility of the Catherwoods      144
  Dramatic Flashes From London & Paris        150
  For Book Lovers                             156




AINSLEE’S

  VOL. XVI.      SEPTEMBER, 1905.      No. 2.




THE MAINTENANCE OF JANE

By

MARGARET G. FAWCETT

[Illustration]


CHAPTER I.

The total,” began Jacob Willoughby, adjusting his _pince-nez_ and
regarding with near-sighted attention the scrap of paper he had
selected from a little white heap on the table in front of him--“the
total is just four thousand five hundred and seventy-six dollars and
ninety-seven cents.”

The figures froze the features of the Willoughby connection into
immobility for a second, but only for a second.

“I agreed to buy her wraps,” spoke up crisply Miss Willoughby, a maiden
lady of vinegary aspect, who sat on the extreme edge of the horsehair
and mahogany chair and glowered at the white heap on the table. “Read
the bill, Jacob.”

Obediently Jacob searched through the heap and extracted another
scrap. “Total, one thousand five hundred and forty-three dollars and
eighty-three cents,” he announced, ponderously.

If she hadn’t been a Willoughby, one would have said that the lady
of vinegary aspect snorted. All the Willoughbys, however, prided
themselves on never doing anything low. “_That_ for wraps,” muttered
this one, acidulously. “And she wheedled a set of sables out of Jacob
at Christmas time.”

Mr. Willoughby coughed deprecatingly and avoided the eye of his wife,
a woman with an appallingly firm chin who sat opposite him. She now
spoke sharply. “It’s Jacob’s ridiculous lack of backbone that’s to
blame for all this foolish extravagance,” she declared. “Why did he
consent in the first place to Jane’s furnishing that expensive flat?
Why did he get us to agree to divide the expense of her clothes among
us, and make us the victim of her spendthrift habits? For what she
calls _lingerie_”--Mrs. Jacob Willoughby pronounced the French word
with ineffable scorn, as though it suggested a multitude of moral
lapses--“she has run up a bill of---- What’s the amount, Jacob?”

Her husband, who was beginning to look crushed, searched with pathetic
haste through the white drift of papers, selected another slip and
readjusted his _pince-nez_. Suddenly a wave of red swept over his
distressed features.

“Well?” queried his wife, sharply.

“She’s--she’s itemized it!” murmured the unresourceful Jacob, faintly.

Thomas Willoughby, bachelor, who was a trifle hard of hearing, but
whose other faculties were very sharp, leaned forward and put his hand
behind his ear. “What say?” he demanded, querulously. “Speak up louder,
man, can’t you?” Thomas, who was sixty, regretted his affliction
chiefly because it so frequently prevented his hearing the recital of
some fresh deviltry of Jane’s.

Mrs. Jacob now interposed. “The total’s on the other side,” she said,
eying her husband suspiciously, and, with a guilty air, he hastily
reversed the paper. “The amount is eight hundred and seventeen dollars
and sixteen cents,” he informed his auditors, lifelessly.

“And just for one season,” supplemented Mrs. Willoughby. “It’s more
than I spend--it’s more, I’m sure, than any of us spend”--she surveyed
the Willoughby connection virtuously--“in five years.”

“Oh, well,” gurgled the youngest and most attractive of the Willoughbys
that were present, a placid, fair-haired woman, to whom any account
of Jane and her doings always read like a page out of a thrilling
novel, “she’s only twenty-four, you know, and it costs more to live in
New York than in the country.” The lady sighed. Her country home was
luxurious, but in her soul she longed for the flesh pots represented
by a New York season. Her husband, however, devoted to his Alderney
cows, his Berkshire hogs and his fancy fowls, put his foot down firmly
whenever the subject of a town house, or even a brief month at one of
the quieter hotels, was mentioned.

“Of course it costs more to live in New York,” snapped Miss Willoughby,
“and I’ve contended all along that Jane has no business keeping up that
flat in town. In the first place, ’tisn’t proper. A young woman with
her flighty ideas and without a chaperon or any female relation to give
her countenance! Mark my words”--with acrid emphasis--“Jane will yet
trail the Willoughby name in the dust.”

“Why doesn’t she marry again?” queried the Willoughby bachelor,
impatiently. “Deuce take it, De Mille’s been dead a year and six
months. Is the girl determined to wear widow’s weeds forever. Gad!”
he chuckled, shrilly, “I’d marry her myself to-morrow if I wasn’t
sixty and her uncle. Not,” he added, hastily, for he, like most of the
Willoughbys, was notoriously close-fisted, “that I countenance her
extravagance. But she needs a husband’s discipline.”

The depressed Jacob Willoughby here saw an opportunity to put in a word
in vindication of himself.

“You all know perfectly well,” he began, with dignity, “that when De
Mille up and died, just when his affairs were in the most critical
condition, and when a little firmness on his part would have kept him
alive long enough to save something out of the wreck for his widow,
Jane declared that she wouldn’t be bored with another husband, and
that if the connection couldn’t support her in the style to which she
was accustomed, she would go on the stage. When I said she might spend
her time with us, visiting each of us in turn, you know she flatly
refused, and insisted upon an apartment. She said that, though He
was a Willoughby Himself”--Jacob repeated this Janeism with peculiar
relish--“God never intended relations to be lived with, that they were
generally people you’d have nothing to do with if the accident of birth
hadn’t made them cousins, uncles and aunts.” As a matter of fact, when
Jane had uttered this impertinence, she had excepted Jacob, but the
senior Willoughby was too wise to hint at the exception in the presence
of his wife, who was also a Willoughby.

“You should have been firm,” she observed, witheringly. “That threat
about her going on the stage was all nonsense.”

“It was not nonsense,” retorted her husband, with unexpected spirit,
“and I had to think of the bishop.”

Jacob’s retort told as he meant that it should, and a painful pause
ensued. It was the bachelor Willoughby who broke it. “Well,” he
exclaimed, pettishly, drawing out his watch, “Jane will be here in five
minutes, and dinner in half an hour. The question is, what are we going
to do?”

“We are going to tell her,” snapped Miss Willoughby, “that the
apartment must be given up, and that she must live with each of us
in turn. Since she’s here--or will soon be here--she can remain a
while with you, Susan, and then she can come to me. In the meantime,
Jacob can see about subletting her apartment. Hark! There’s wheels!
Now”--turning to her brother--“be firm, Jacob. Let us”--encouragingly,
and glancing in turn at each of the Willoughbys, who, strange to
relate, looked ill at ease, if not frightened--“let us all be firm.”

The door opened and everybody started. But it was only the butler.

“A telegram for you, sir,” he said to Mr. Jacob Willoughby, extending
a yellow slip. The latter took it and hastily opened it. “It’s from
Jane,” he announced, glancing up. Did the other Willoughbys imagine it
or did his voice express relief?

“Read it,” commanded his wife, crisply.

    You dear, good people, I’m the biggest wretch on earth. Did so want
    to get to you before the house party broke up, but there’s the
    Reffolds’ dinner for to-night which I had entirely forgotten. Hope
    to get down for a week end later. Love to all.

            JANE.

For fully half a minute not a sound was heard in the stuffily furnished
Willoughby library. Then Miss Willoughby, in a voice ominously calm,
asked: “Will you kindly tell us the number of words in that telegram,
Jacob?”

“Total, fifty,” murmured Jacob, reluctantly, dropping the yellow slip
on the white heap and surveying it ruefully.

“Fifty!” echoed the Willoughby connection, feebly.

Susan Willoughby, Jacob’s wife, was the first to regain her mental
equilibrium. “You will write this evening, Jacob?” she questioned, with
stony composure.

“I will write this evening,” responded her husband, firmly.

The bachelor Willoughby suddenly chuckled. The outraged connection
stared at him in astonishment. “I--I was just thinking,” he giggled,
“that economy doesn’t seem to be Jane’s strong point.”

At its best, the Willoughby connection’s sense of humor was the reverse
of keen, and the situation was not one, in their opinion, that invited
levity. But whatever crushing blow threatened the frivolous member--and
Mrs. Susan Willoughby and Miss Willoughby both looked primed--was
happily averted by the opportune reappearance of the butler.

“Dinner is served,” he announced, solemnly, and Jacob Willoughby sprang
with alacrity to offer his arm to the most attractive of the female
Willoughbys.

“I will summon the bishop to wrestle with Jane,” announced Susan,
magisterially, as she led the way to the dining room. And the
connection realized that Jane had, indeed, become a problem.


CHAPTER II.

Jane balanced her spoon on the brim of the shell-like cup and smiled at
Mr. Scott.

“Yesterday, Billie, I received another of those Willoughby
epistles--about my extravagance, you know.”

“The idea of anybody thinking you extravagant,” murmured Mr. Scott,
with an adoring glance.

“Oh, as to that,” observed Jane, airily, “I admit I’m extravagant, but
I’m purposely so. Listen, my child, and I’ll tell you the story of my
life. But first let me put a drop more rum in your tea.” Mr. Scott held
out his cup.

“It does taste of tea,” he admitted. “And you know I’ve always cracked
up the flavor of your--er--tea, Jane.” She dropped the rum out of a
silver filigree bottle with an amethyst in the stopper.

“You see,” she continued, thoughtfully, “before my eyes were opened or
my teeth cut, those Willoughby relations of mine married me to De Mille
because he had money. He was--oh, well, Billie, he was the biggest
bore I ever met. However, I saw as little of him as possible, but
you can imagine that I did my best to make life miserable for those
Willoughbys who blighted my youth. What _are_ you laughing at, Billie?
Well, De Mille got into financial difficulties, and selfishly took
to his bed. I got the best nurse in town, and went to see him every
day. Yes, I did. It was good for me, of course!”--Jane’s conversation
usually took the form of a monologue. “Finally, he had the good taste
to die. When one of the Willoughbys, who came up to town to help me
bear my grief, came in and told me that he had passed to a better land,
I said: ‘Well, God knows best.’” Mr. Scott tittered. “Aunt Susan--that
was the Willoughby--assured the family that I was showing a beautiful
spirit. As a matter of fact, I really could have danced up and down,
I was so relieved. You see, Billie, if the man had ever pretended to
love me, I should not have been such a wretch. But he just wanted a
good-looking woman to preside over his house, and he wanted to marry
into the Willoughby family, and the Willoughby family wanted to get
me married to money and off their hands, so it was just a disgraceful
bargain, about which your humble servant had no more to say than the
dress goods on a bargain counter. When it was discovered that De Mille
had left me nothing but debts, I refused to worry, and informed my
beloved relations that my support was their business. Otherwise, the
stage for Jane, and the Willoughbys’ view of the stage is very similar
to the devil’s view of holy water.”

“Well, they’ve got plenty of this world’s goods,” commented Mr.
Scott, who was quite content to have Jane do most of the talking, an
arrangement that suited her to perfection.

“They’re rolling in wealth!” she exclaimed, filling her own cup. “But
they’re as close as bark on a tree, and how to bring them to time after
De Mille’s death kept me awake nights. I made up my mind to get even
with them for marrying me off like a slave, and the first thing I did
was to order the most expensive mourning New York affords. I still
cling to it, for black is _so_ becoming to me.”

“I should think it was,” said Mr. Scott, fervently. “You are simply
ravishing in that cap.”

“The cap was my own idea,” observed Jane, sweetly. “The real lace ones
are so stunning and so--er--expensive. But where was I? Oh, yes. The
Willoughbys held a mass meeting, or convocation, or something, to talk
me over. Finally it was decided that they would pay my bills among
them--if I was not too extravagant--and that I should spend my time
with each of them in turn, handed around from house to house like a
poor relation. But it was at that point in their proceedings that Jane
rose and gave them an ultimatum.”

“I put my money on Jane,” spoke up Mr. Scott, promptly.

“You won’t lose,” answered that young woman. “I rose, wiped my
eyes with a handkerchief--black border, two inches; price, three
dollars--and spoke my mind. I said that I had married to suit them,
and that henceforth I would live to suit myself; that I was perfectly
willing they should pay my bills, but that I intended to take an
apartment in town and go on living as before. I said it was not my
fault that my poor, dear husband--I shed a tear or two--had met with
financial reverses and was not able to leave me anything. I said,
further, that I would not be dictated to about the size of my bills,
that everyone knew I was not extravagant--yes, Billie, I said that with
a straight face--and that I was in deep grief, and could not bear any
more discussion of my affairs, and so I would just take my leave and
send in the bills.”

“Bet they were paralyzed,” observed Billie.

“That’s not the word for it. I left them gasping for breath. But they
hate gossip, and that’s where I had them. They hate to be called mean,
though being mean doesn’t worry them. That’s the way with some people,
you know. So I rented this apartment, moved my things in, drew a few
checks on uncle Jacob--the best of the lot, by the way--and here I have
lived in my deep grief.”

Jane smiled at Mr. Scott and leaned back in her chair.

“That’s the first chapter,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered, “and yesterday’s letter, which I’m coming to, is
the beginning of the second. This letter informed me that my bills were
becoming outrageously large, that I needed a chaperon--fancy a widow in
her first grief needing a chaperon, Billie--and the long and short of
it is that I must give up this apartment and go and live among them as
originally proposed.

“Well?” queried Mr. Scott.

“Well, what?” demanded Jane. “You certainly didn’t for a moment think I
would do it?”

“No,” he responded. “There’s a very simple way out, you know. Marry me
and let the Willoughbys go to----”

“Thunder,” finished Jane. “Oh, Billie, I do appreciate the fact that
you love me and want me. And if I loved you, I’d live in a cottage
with you--though I hate cottages--and work like a slave. But the awful
fact must be faced that I do not love you. I am horribly fond of you,
though, Billie, and I wish I could marry you, but I never could make
you understand how I hate being married. I was knocked down to the
highest bidder, and the experience was too disagreeable to permit me to
marry again or to fall in love with anyone.”

“But you’re flirting awfully with Kingston and Maitland--and there’s
Dick Thomas--oh, Jane, it’s pretty tough on me!” The boy--for Mr. Scott
wasn’t much more--looked as though he were going to cry.

“Fiddlesticks!” exclaimed Jane, contemptuously. “Nothing in the world
would induce me to marry one of those men--or any other. Freedom
is the breath of life to me, Billie, but I must have my little
recreations. You can’t understand--no man can--how flirting to a woman
is a justifiable evening up of the sufferings that some women have to
endure. Why, I’m leading Jack Maitland an awful existence because he
flirted desperately with Betty Lockwood, who loves him to distraction.
I’m doing it for Betty’s sake, and it’s good for him. Betty married
Maurice just out of pique.” Jane put down her cup. “I’m really trying
to do good, in my own way, Billie.”

“You should join the Humane Society,” observed Mr. Scott, sarcastically.

“The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children will rescue
you from my clutches if you persist in coming here all the time,” she
retorted, severely. “I’ll tell you what I am going to do”--changing the
subject, swiftly. “I’ll answer the Willoughby epistle in person. I’ll
go down to Rosemount to-morrow and tell them things that I hope will
do them good. I do not intend to reduce my bills, or live with them.
Whenever I get a letter from them like this last one, I go out and buy
something.”

“What did you buy yesterday?” queried Mr. Scott, with lively interest.

“A pair of high-boys--genuine colonials! I’ve no place for them here,
of course, but the Willoughbys needed them for a lesson.”

“Let me drive you down to Rosemount in my car,” said Mr. Scott, with
sudden inspiration.

“Um--I’d like the car and the chauffeur, but you, Billie, cannot come.
It might cause gossip.”

“Let ’em talk, who cares?” exclaimed Mr. Scott, defiantly.

“I do,” said Jane, decidedly. “No, you can’t come, Billie, but if
you’ll have the car here to-morrow, at ten, I’ll drive down in it, stay
all night, and come back the next day.”

“I’m afraid they’ll persuade you to live with them,” murmured Mr.
Scott, miserably.

“To think that you would say that to me,” said Jane, reproachfully. “I
intend to live alone from this time on. I hate living with anybody.”

“Wait until you’re in love!” warned Billie.

“Yes, I’ll wait,” responded his hostess, briskly. “A woman who has
had my luck would be an ungrateful wretch if she permitted herself to
become entangled again. Why, it isn’t one woman in ten who marries for
money whose husband dies in two years. No wonder I’ve clung to deep
mourning. It’s an expression of thankfulness--of the warmest gratitude
on my part. No one can say of me, Billie, that I do not realize my
blessings!”

Mr. Scott rose and tried to kiss Jane’s hand, but she put it
determinedly behind her.

“Respect my mourning, my child,” she said, rebukingly.

After Mr. Scott had taken his departure, she ordered two suit cases
packed, gave orders to her two servants about the care of the
apartment during her absence, and telegraphed a lengthy message to the
Willoughbys.


CHAPTER III.

It was a glorious May day. Jane, whose sound digestion and general
superlatively good health enabled her always to front life genially,
even when she was most convinced that it was nothing but a heartless
farce, was in rollicking spirits. She let Johnson, Billie’s chauffeur,
take full charge of the car, while she lay back luxuriously, humming
snatches of gay song or planning fresh audacities that would humble the
proud spirit of the Willoughbys. But silence for any length of time
when there was somebody to talk to was always irksome to Jane.

“You have heard of Elijah, of course?” she observed, presently, to the
smug-faced driver.

“Mrs. Carruth’s man, mum?” he asked, stolidly.

“Goodness, no, Johnson!” exclaimed Jane, in a horrified voice.
“Though, really”--judiciously--“if Polly insists on his keeping up
that awful pace with her car, I think he, too, will go to heaven in
a chariot of fire. But”--this to the chauffeur--“I was not referring
to Mrs. Carruth’s man, Elihu, but to Elijah, a Bible character. Don’t
you”--severely--“read your Bible, Johnson?”

“Well, mum,” began Johnson, cautiously, “seeing as how I didn’t take
much to books when I was a kid, and seeing as how big words always
kind of floor me now, I don’t go in much for readin’, ’cept about the
sports in the papers.”

“They should publish the Bible in words of one syllable,” reflected
Jane. “I must speak to the bishop about it. Elijah, Johnson, was a
prophet who went to heaven in a chariot of fire. I’ve always liked to
think that it was a kind of superior motor car, and that it took Elijah
several days to reach his destination, and that he had a perfectly
delicious time whizzing up through the air, past the stars and the
moon, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised, Johnson, if he leaned out
and jabbed at the moon as he passed, just to see what it was really
made of. Personally, I take no stock in what the scientists tell us,
and I’ve often thought that if Elijah had come back and told about
his ride, they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Now, it’s my private
opinion, Johnson, that the world is flat, as flat as a--goodness
gracious, what’s that!”

“It’s somethin’ gone wrong, mum,” said Johnson, resignedly. “There
was a bolt I was suspectin’ of this morning, but Mr. Scott said
that on no account was you to be kept waitin’, and that, bolt or no
bolt, I was to be at your door at ten sharp. An’ you’ll remember,
mum”--reproachfully--“that I waited in front of those steps one hour by
th’ watch Mr. Scott gave me Christmas, and if it wasn’t for the fact
that every minute I was expectin’ to see you come runnin’ down them, I
could have put in a new bolt----”

“Of course it’s all my fault, Johnson,” interrupted Jane, “but I never
was on time in my life, and I’m too old to begin now. Here’s a nice
secluded bit of road where you can overhaul the car, and I’ll just walk
about a bit for exercise. But don’t let it take long, Johnson, for I’m
simply famished, and we have to go ten miles yet before we get any
luncheon.”

By this time the driver was under the car, and only a pair of
tremendous boots was visible. After giving them an amused look, Jane
divested herself of her motor rig, shook out her skirts, and, with
a parting warning to Johnson to blow the horn when he was ready,
sauntered slowly down the country road, which reminded her of one of
the picturesque lanes in English Surrey.

“It’s a queer thing,” she communed with herself, as she walked along,
“that the first day I’m in the country I adore it, and resolve firmly
never, never to leave it again; and the second day I begin to pick
flaws in it, and take notice of all the hideous little creeping things,
and the third I loathe it, and feel that I will die instantly if I
can’t get back to where there are lots of people and a great deal of
noise and plenty of dirt. I suppose I----”

Jane’s saunter and reflections both came to an abrupt end, for a
turn in the lane had disclosed to her a man sitting on a log by the
roadside, munching hungrily at an appetizing-looking sandwich, the most
appetizing one, the hungry Mrs. De Mille instantly decided, that she
had ever seen. Beside the man was a small hamper of straw, and leaning
against the log was a bottle. He was reading out of a small book, and
utterly oblivious, apparently, to his surroundings. He finished in a
few bites the sandwich, and, without lifting his eyes, thrust his hand
in the hamper, drew forth another, and proceeded deliberately to devour
that, too. More and more envious grew Jane’s eyes as she watched the
rapid shrinking of the thing she most coveted just then. The second
sandwich disappeared like its predecessor, and once more the long,
brown hand sought the hamper. Another sandwich was drawn forth, it was
raised to the man’s mouth, but before he had a chance to take a bite
Jane cried out, impulsively: “Oh, please don’t eat them _all_!”

The man looked up, bewildered, and then, catching sight of Jane, sprang
to his feet and pulled off his cap. “I--beg your pardon,” he began,
uncertainly; “did you speak?”

“Yes,” calmly answered Mrs. De Mille, who was always prepared to back
her own imprudent impulses. “I asked you to please not eat that other
sandwich. I’m terribly hungry!”

A smile lighted up the man’s serious face. “Oh, there are more in the
hamper,” he answered. “My appetite is big enough, but it is not as big
as Mrs. Moore thinks it is. Please help yourself.” He held out the
hamper.

“Thanks,” said Jane, taking a sandwich and beginning to devour it
hungrily. “If Mrs. Moore made these,” she observed, presently, “I think
she has very good taste--in sandwiches.”

“It’s her specialty,” he responded. “Everybody, you know, has a
specialty. But won’t you be seated?” With a gesture he indicated the
log, and Jane, frankly delighted with her adventure, seated herself.

“Have they?” she queried, helping herself to another sandwich. “Now, I
wonder what mine is?”

The man regarded her with interest. “If you have just fallen from the
sky----” he began.

“No, it was a motor car,” interrupted Jane. “That is, I didn’t fall
from it, but something happened to a bolt. The chauffeur is working at
it down the road a bit. I didn’t stay to examine it, for I always get
a smudge on my nose when I look at the works of a motor car. Perhaps
that’s my specialty--getting smudges on my nose.” She looked at the man
and smiled. “It isn’t a very useful one, is it?”

“There are practical specialties and ornamental specialties,” he
observed, “and it’s----”

“Oh, well, you know getting a smudge on one’s nose is neither
ornamental nor practical,” broke in Jane, with a laugh. Then, changing
the subject quickly: “It’s awfully good of you to feed the hungry.”

“Pray let me give drink to the thirsty, too,” he said. Picking up a
small silver cup, he walked over to a brook that purled behind them,
rinsed it out and, coming back, filled it from the bottle of wine that
rested against the log.

Jane drank it gratefully. “I never in my life had a more delicious
meal,” she said, quite truthfully. Then she looked at him
inquisitively. “Do you live some place around here, or did your car
break down, too?” she asked.

“I’m not so lucky as to own a car. I’m stopping for a time at
Rosemount--the village, you know.”

“Oh, then, perhaps you know the Willoughbys,” said Jane. “The
Willoughbys, of Willoughby Hall.”

“Do they live in an ugly mass of architecture on a hill, and does the
lady look like a grenadier and the man like a drummer boy in his first
engagement?”

Jane threw back her head and laughed. “That’s Aunt Susan and Uncle
Jacob to a T,” she exclaimed. The man flushed with embarrassment.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Of course I had no idea they were
relatives of yours.”

“You haven’t offended me,” Jane hastened to assure him. “I know they’re
impossible, though Uncle Jacob really means well. I’m on my way down
there now.”

“For a visit?” queried the man, who was staring at her in an impersonal
sort of way that rather piqued her.

“Not if I know myself, and I flatter myself I do,” she responded,
decidedly. “No, I’m going down to give them--Aunt Susan particularly--a
piece of my mind.”

“Lucky Aunt Susan!” commented the man, still regarding her with that
air of detached interest.

“You say that because you’ve never had a piece of my mind,” observed
Jane, darkly. “Because I’m desperately poor----”

“Poor!” exclaimed the man, disbelievingly, as his eye took in the
details of her exceedingly smart get-up.

“As poor as a church mouse,” said Jane, impressively. “I’m supported
by contributions made by the Willoughby connection, and because my
bills for the past season have been a--a trifle large, they wrote me an
abusive letter. Fancy!”

“Fancy!” echoed the man, absent-mindedly. “Why don’t you----”

But an explosive blast on a horn interrupted him. Jane rose hastily.
“That’s Johnson,” she said. “I must go. But how are you going to get
back to Rosemount?” she demanded.

“Oh, I’ll pick up one of the market gardeners along the road,” he
answered, indifferently. “Besides, I came out on a quest, and I can’t
return until it is successfully consummated.”

“A quest!” echoed Jane, and promptly sat down again. “It sounds
interesting,” she said; “tell me about it.”

“I’m looking for a heroine,” he explained.

“A heroine!” repeated Mrs. De Mille, blankly, wondering for the first
time if he was as sane as he looked.

“Yes, for a book, you know,” he said, in a matter-of-fact way. “I
scribble for a living, and lately my publishers have complained that I
never draw a real flesh-and-blood woman. I’ve determined to put one in
the new book I’m writing.”

“So you’re strolling around the country in search of one,” mused Jane.
“I should think you’d stand a better chance of finding one in town.”
There was another blast on the horn, short and angry this time, but
Mrs. De Mille waved it airily aside.

“I can’t work in town,” he answered. “I’ve just come back from Alaska,
and it seems so shut-in there.” He nodded in the direction of the
skyscrapers of New York.

“What would a heroine have to do?” queried Jane. “I mean a model
heroine?”

“Oh, just give me a chance to study her, and let me pay her for it,”
he answered, coolly. “I work in a small bungalow, and if she’d give
me some sittings----” But once more the voice of the horn broke in--a
long, reproachful, plaintive note this time. Mrs. De Mille rose,
reluctantly. “I really must go, or Johnson will ruin his voice,” she
said. Then she had a sudden inspiration. “You’re going to Rosemount,”
she said to the man. “Why can’t we take you there? I’d like to do
something to pay for that delicious meal.”

“You’ve paid me a thousandfold by accepting it,” he answered, quickly.
“I couldn’t think of putting you to any trouble.”

“It isn’t any trouble,” she answered, positively. “There’s plenty of
room in the car.” The man’s face showed signs of yielding.

“Come,” she commanded, imperiously; and he stooped and gathered up the
hamper and his book and followed her down the road.

“Johnson,” Mrs. De Mille called to the chauffeur, who was sitting in
the car like patience on a monument, but without the smile, “this
gentleman has saved me from starvation, and he’s now going to save you;
for in this hamper, Johnson, are three of the most delicious sandwiches
you ever ate. Hustle them down as quickly as you can, and then we’ll
repay his generosity by giving him a lift to Rosemount.”

When the car was well under way, Jane turned impressively to her new
acquaintance. “And now I want to ask you,” she said, “if you think I’d
do for the heroine?”

“It’s been my wish ever since I first set eyes on you,” he answered,
calmly. “I’m in great luck.”

“And the Willoughbys,” said Jane, cheerfully, “will be in a rage, so
it’s a delightful arrangement all around.”


CHAPTER IV.

Mrs. Willoughby and Miss Willoughby--the latter had driven over from
her country home to discuss Jane--sat in the library listening to the
shrieks of laughter that floated across the hall from the music room,
laughter interspersed with the sharp yelping of a dog and bars of music.

“They’ve kept that up,” said Mrs. Willoughby, crisply, “since luncheon.”

“What did you say his name was?” asked Miss Willoughby, whose patent
disgust made her look more vinegary than ever.

“She calls him Dick,” said aunt Susan, disdainfully. “His last name is
Thomas. A flighty idiot, who talks with a lisp.”

“Where’s the bishop?” demanded the guest, suddenly.

“He’s packing,” answered her sister-in-law, with an air of repressed
anger. “Jane took him out in a motor car, some man’s motor car that
she came down in, and he came back looking much upset, and said he had
to pack and return to town immediately. And he had promised to stay two
days!”

“Must have been her doings,” commented Miss Willoughby.

“I don’t know,” said Aunt Susan, drearily. “He did say something about
fleeing temptation.”

“The hussy!” Miss Willoughby’s voice expressed virtuous scorn. “Wait
until she comes to me.” She closed her lips, grimly.

“I was going to tell you about that,” said her hostess. “Jane has what
she calls _a job_.”

“A--a job!” echoed Miss Willoughby, faintly.

Susan Willoughby nodded her head, vigorously. “That’s what she calls
it,” she said, indignation revealed in every monosyllable. “She’s hired
out as a model!”

Miss Willoughby shrieked and fumbled feebly for her smelling salts.

“Oh, I don’t mean the--er--_Trilby_ kind, you know,” said Mrs.
Willoughby, hastily. “Some wretched creature whom she picked up with
on her way down here is writing a book, and he’s offered to pay her if
she’ll let him study her in order to get material for his heroine.”

“I never heard of such a thing!” gasped Miss Willoughby. “It isn’t
respectable, and you don’t need to try to convince me that it is. What
does Jacob say?”

“Jacob!” There was indescribable contempt expressed in Mrs.
Willoughby’s voice as she uttered the name. “Jane simply twists him
around her little finger.”

Miss Willoughby rose suddenly, with the air of one having made up her
mind to perform an unpleasant task.

“Where are you going?” demanded her hostess.

“To tell Jane what I think of her conduct and to warn----”

But before the spinster had a chance to finish her sentence, the door
across the hall was flung open suddenly, and Jane, laughter in her
eyes and on her lips, her hair disheveled, emerged. Under her arm
was tucked a yelping skye terrier, and close behind her followed an
immaculately attired and rather good-looking young man, who appeared to
be thoroughly enjoying himself. As usual, Jane was talking.

“You’re not musical, Bijou, and it’s a waste of time trying to make
you musical! Here Mr. Thomas and I have spent the greater part of an
hour trying to impress upon you the difference between Wagner and
ragtime, but it’s been a miserable failure. I want to think you have a
soul, Bijou, though the bishop doesn’t believe you have, but after the
painful lack of discrimination you have just shown--Aunt Mary! When in
the world did you come, and _what_ a delightful surprise!”

Jane, who had suddenly espied her two aunts, unceremoniously dropped
the skye terrier and darted into the library, leaving the young man
hovering uncertainly in the doorway. She seized the spinster’s two
mitt-clad hands and kissed her heartily on each withered cheek. Then
she stood back a pace or two and surveyed her with rapt admiration.

“I’m terribly jealous of you, Aunt Mary,” she exclaimed. “Look at
your complexion! Peaches and cream!”--as a matter of fact, it more
closely resembled sole leather, but Miss Willoughby brightened up,
nevertheless. “And your figure! What in the world have you been doing
to your figure? Such curves!”

The spinster, conscious of the strange young man in the doorway,
blushed painfully.

“My dear----” she began, in a stage whisper, motioning stealthily in
the direction of Mr. Thomas.

“Oh, pardon me,” said Jane, willfully misunderstanding her aunt’s
meaning. “Aunt Mary, this is Mr. Thomas. I shall have to ask you to
entertain him for a while, for I have a business engagement.” She
pulled out a tiny, jeweled watch and gave an exclamation. “Half an hour
late! Dick, what is it they do to working people when they are half
an hour late? Though why, indeed, I should ask you I don’t know, for
I’m sure you never did half an hour’s real work in your life! Oh, yes,
dock them--that’s it, isn’t it? I thought of yacht, for I knew the term
was nautical, and then I instantly thought of ‘docked’”--triumphantly;
Jane was always intensely interested in her mental processes. “Did you
know I had become a working person, Aunt Mary? Earning my living by
the sweat of my brow, and that sort of thing?” Miss Willoughby smiled,
weakly. “Well, ta, ta,” continued Jane. “Remember”--shaking a warning
finger at the spinster--“Mr. Thomas is young and unsophisticated, and
I’ll not have his young affections trifled with.”

“Oh, I thay----” began Mr. Thomas, protestingly, and making a motion as
though he were bent on accompanying Mrs. De Mille.

“No, Dickie,” she said, firmly, “bosses don’t like to have young men
a-followin’ of their gells.” This was said with an inimitable cockney
accent that caused Mr. Thomas to grin appreciatively. Jane made a
wicked _moue_ at him, nodded to her aunts and hurried away, leaving the
two ladies speechless, and the guest she had thrust upon them looking
decidedly uncomfortable.

As she sauntered down the road that led past the bungalow which had
been erected in the rear of the Moore cottage, and which her new
acquaintance had pointed out as his workshop, Jane looked as though she
hadn’t a care in the world. As a matter of fact, however, she was not
without her misgivings in regard to the outcome of the engagement she
had entered into. She had done it chiefly to torment the Willoughbys,
but she was honest enough to admit to herself, as she walked leisurely
on, that the man himself had aroused her curiosity, and that this had
something to do with her obeying that reckless impulse to offer herself
as a model.

“He’s doubtless a counterfeiter or a gentleman burglar who’s planning
to steal the Willoughby spoons,” she communed with herself, cheerfully,
“and it’s very likely that he’ll insist on my becoming his accomplice,
and then Aunt Mary will have a chance to say: ‘Didn’t I tell you Jane
would come to a bad end.’ I really believe they’d----”

But the quaint-looking bungalow had suddenly loomed up in Mrs. De
Mille’s path, and put an end to her reflections. Half hesitatingly she
knocked on the door, and it was instantly thrown open by the man whom
she chose to call her employer.

“Please don’t tell me I’m late,” she said, as she gave him her hand and
stepped across the threshold. “Being late, you know, is a weakness one
is born with, I think, like not being able to spell, or having a thirst
for strong drink. In town they call me ‘the late Mrs. De Mille.’ The
only occasion I was ever known to be on time was at poor De Mille’s
funeral. Billie Scott said---- But how delightfully cozy it is here!”

Jane paused and surveyed the room with interest. It was simply
furnished with some good rugs, several well-filled bookcases, two or
three comfortable-looking chairs, and a long table that apparently
served for a desk, for it was covered with papers; but there was a
cheerful fire in the great fireplace--a comfort that Mrs. De Mille
appreciated, for the day, though bright, was chilly--and in front of
this was a tea table, on which a copper kettle was singing merrily over
a blue, alcohol flame.

“I’m glad you like it,” said the man, gravely. “Can I take your hat and
jacket?”

“Oh, I’ll just toss them over this chair,” said Jane, carelessly,
suiting the action to her words. “I hope you’re not one of those people
who must have everything just so. De Mille was like that. He found me
a terrible trial. His idea of a well-ordered existence was a place for
everything and everything in its place. I don’t mind having a place
for everything, you know, but I think having everything in its place
robs life of a great deal of uncertainty, and it’s the uncertainty that
makes it fascinating, don’t you think?”

“When I was a little chap,” said the man, pulling forward a chair for
Jane and taking one himself near the table, “I had to look out not
only for myself, but also for my mother, who sewed when she could, to
support herself and me, but who was crippled with rheumatism most of
the time. Our next meal was always a matter of uncertainty. My idea
of heaven then was a place where the future was absolutely certain.
No”--reflectively, as he leaned over to poke the fire--“I don’t believe
I want any more uncertainties in mine.”

Mrs. De Mille stared at him with lively curiosity in her eyes, and
noted approvingly the strong, clean contour of his jaw, and his long,
lean, brown hands. “He may have been born poor, but he was also born a
gentleman,” she reflected, shrewdly. Aloud she said:

“Do you know that I haven’t the remotest idea what your name is?”

“How very remiss of me!” he exclaimed, looking up from the fire. “It’s
John Ormsby.”

“Oh,” said Jane, “you’re the man who writes men’s books. Why,” she
continued, severely, “have you ignored my sex?”

He smiled. “I have already told you,” he said, “that I don’t know
enough about you to put you in a book.”

“You’ve chosen a bad specimen to study,” she retorted. “I give you fair
warning.”

“As to that,” he answered, with an indifference that nettled Jane,
“I’m not at all particular about the type. My publishers demand a real
flesh-and-blood creation, but they didn’t specify the type.”

“He’s downright brutal,” said Jane, to herself, but rather enjoying the
novelty of seeing an opportunity for a pretty speech to her ignored.
“You’ll have to instruct me in my duties,” she said, smilingly. “Now,
if there was only such a thing as a Handy Manual for authors’ models
that I could get and read up in, my course would be plain sailing. As
it is, I’m all at sea.”

“Oh, all you have to do is to talk,” said the man, encouragingly. “I’m
going to make you a cup of tea.” He began to handle the tea things
deftly.

“Talk and tea,” commented Jane, thoughtfully. “It sounds easy. I
believe I’ve got what Billie Scott would call a ‘snap.’”


CHAPTER V.

MY DEAR DENEEN: The Labrador trip sounds good to me, and as soon as
the book is off my hands, which will be about the time you fellows
are ready to start, I reckon I’ll be wid ye. The old spring fever has
again seized hold of me, and I’m fairly sweating for a whiff of the
open. I wrote you a squib shortly after I arrived, and the ragged kid
to whom I gave it to post swears by all that’s unholy--he knows nothing
holy--that he posted it, but I suppose it represented too promising
spitball material to be wasted on a village post office. This is the
worst place to get anything done. Every villager regards himself as
an American from “wayback,” and scorns to turn an honest penny by
running or walking an errand. But it’s a jolly place to write in. I’m
boarding with a queer old couple by the name of Moore, who take summer
boarders during July and August, and who, for the convenience of the
town folk, have built a bungalow a short distance from the house.
It’s quite decently furnished with books and rugs and a fireplace,
and my credentials were so good that the Moores have turned it over
to me for a workroom. The book I’m at work on is a deliberate attempt
to pander to the depraved taste of _hoi polloi_. Yet, I confess it
without shame, I’m tremendously interested in it. I find myself reading
over and over again parts I’ve written--not with a view to improving
them, but because I think they’re so good. Sounds maudlin, doesn’t
it? But it’s the gospel truth. And the book is all about a woman!
Smoke that in your pipe, old man! I, who have heretofore scorned all
feminine frumperies, find myself dissecting frills and analyzing
chiffons. Whence cometh this superior knowledge? do I hear you ask with
a suspicious leer? Whisper! I have a model, and I’m learning about
women from her. Kipling’s idea, you see, but put into respectable and
strictly business-like practice. For an hour or so every afternoon she
gives me “sittings” in the bungalow. She’s no ordinary paid hireling,
mind you, but a fine New York lady, who seems to have accepted the job
partly because she desired a new experience, and partly to displease
some rich but close-fisted relatives upon whom she’s dependent, but
whom she appears to be leading a life. I was tramping about the country
one day shortly after I came down here, and while I was having a bite
by the roadside, a tailor-made vision with hungry eyes and a wistful
air suddenly appeared out of the nowhere and demanded a sandwich. She
accepted my invitation to sit down and share what I had, and then she
insisted on giving me a lift, and on the way to Rosemount artlessly
discussed her deceased husband and her relatives--in short, told me
several chapters out of the story of her life. I suppose she’s about
the most frivolous specimen of the frivolous sex. Her male admirers
are numerous, and some of them trail down from town every day. The
morning after she arrived--she came down in a motor car, and it is to a
lost bolt that I owe my introduction--I met her out in the car gazing
soulfully into the eyes of an elderly party with a clerical collar and
an Episcopal air. She told me afterward it was Bishop ----, and informed
me quite calmly that he had fled to town to save his immortal soul,
his wife being in Europe. Said her relatives were scandalized, a fact
that seemed to please her very much. Last night I walked down to the
village to get some medicine for my landlord, who had eaten something
that disagreed with him and was in a rather bad way. It was as dark as
pitch, and I had a lantern. I flashed it as I came around a turn in
the road, and found myself face to face with my model and two young
men. Each had hold of one of her hands, and each looked idiotically
blissful. She seemed the least confused of the bunch, and said
“good-evening” quite calmly. I don’t suppose there’s another bundle of
such contradictions in the universe. She has all the aplomb of a woman
of the world, and all of the _naïveté_ of an unspoiled child. No sort
of companion for a man, you understand, but vastly amusing. She speaks
of her deceased husband with the most brutal frankness, and makes no
pretense of regarding his passing as anything but a happy release for
her. For all her apparent spontaneity, I’ve an idea that at heart this
model of mine is as hard as rocks. But as I’ve already told you, she’s
teaching me a lot, and the book is progressing, and if it’s a success,
half the royalties go to her. That is only fair.

Keep me posted about arrangements for your trip. I’m writing now at
white heat, and should have the book ready for my publishers within a
fortnight. And then, old pal, for Labrador and the open and real, real
life.

  Yours,
            JOHN ORMSBY.


CHAPTER VI.

DEAR BETTY: I’m inclosing that cold-cream recipe you asked for. It’s
warranted to give you a perfect complexion, keep your hair in curls,
your hat on straight and your temper amiable. I’m glad to hear that
you and Maurice have had an understanding, and that everything is all
serene. If you have to be in love with somebody, I honestly think it’s
much better to be in love with your husband. De Mille, of course, was
out of the question, but fortunately I’ve never felt the necessity
of being in love with anyone, and, now that I’ve reached the age of
twenty-four, it’s not probable that I ever will. Confidentially, Betty,
I never could see what you saw in Maitland. His eyes are good, I grant
you, but he’s so terribly sentimental. I’ve flirted with him, so I know
him. Next to living with a man, there’s nothing like a good flirtation
to put you on to all his good and bad qualities. Your husband is worth
a hundred of him. I _know_.

My dear, I’m earning my own living, and, according to the Willoughbys,
it’s the most extravagant thing I’ve done in the whole course of my
extravagant career. You see, every time I remember I’m a working woman,
I feel independent, and order a lot of new things, and the bills have
been rather stiff, I’ll admit. But you know how miserly the Willoughbys
are! Aunt Susan suggested that I figure up how much I’m going to get
and try to live on it, but I declined most emphatically. I never was
good at doing sums, and I don’t propose to begin to subtract and add
at this late day. Besides, I haven’t the remotest idea how much I’m
going to receive, for I refuse to let Mr. Ormsby mention the matter.
Money matters are _so tiresome_. But I’m forgetting that you know
nothing about my _job_. I’m a model--a literary man’s model. You’re
in with that literary set, so I suppose you’ve read his books. I
read one--Billie Scott raved so about it that I simply had to--but
there wasn’t a woman in it, just a lot of horrid men, that smoked and
swore when they weren’t fighting, and that fought when they weren’t
swearing and smoking. It seems that Mr. Ormsby’s publishers have
insisted upon his turning over a new leaf and writing something about
women, and, knowing nothing about our sex, Betty, he conceived the
strictly original idea of employing a model. I came down to Rosemount
in Billie’s motor car, and picked him--Mr. Ormsby--up and took him
along with me. We had quite a romantic meeting. I found him eating his
luncheon by the roadside, and insisted on his sharing it with me. I
give him “sittings” every afternoon in an adorable bungalow that he’s
fitted up as a workshop. He explained to me, in the beginning, that he
might have picked out some woman of his acquaintance and studied her,
but that he considered it wouldn’t be honorable--that with a hired
model he felt absolutely independent. I really can’t endure him, but
I’ve resolved to stick this out to the bitter end. I feel like a little
wiggly bug pinned to a piece of cardboard, with a pair of sharp, cold,
gray eyes analyzing every wiggle. This Ormsby is shockingly lacking in
_savoir faire_, and so far as flirting is concerned, he doesn’t know
the a, b, c’s of the game.

I began this letter yesterday afternoon, before dinner, with the hope
of getting it out in the evening mail, but Billie and Ernie Francis
came down from town and stopped to dinner. I’m sure the Willoughbys
have never been so gay in their lives--we’ve had company every day
since I’ve been down here--but I can’t see that it has improved Aunt
Susan’s disposition much. Something occurred last night that I suppose
has shoved me a peg further down in Mr. Ormsby’s estimation. Not that
I care! After dinner, Billie and Ernie and I went for a walk down to
the village. It was very dark coming back, and, walking between them,
naturally I didn’t resent it when each took one of my hands. There’s
something so _comforting_ about the grasp of a strong man’s hand.
Haven’t you often thought so, Betty? If I ever marry again, I intend to
pick out a man who will be able to hold my hand in a nice way when I’m
dying.

Unfortunately, as we came around a bend in the road, a lantern was
flashed at us. It was Ormsby, and you can’t imagine the look of disgust
on his face when he took in the situation. As though it were any
business of his! I had a wretched evening, for Billie and Ernie were
furious because I permitted each to hold my hand. They have _such queer
ideas_ of propriety! How little real pleasure one gets out of life,
Betty! Louise has sent me down one of those _bébé_ hats--a perfect
dream. I intend to wear it to church to-morrow morning and give the
villagers a treat.

By the way, dear, if you’ve any old clothes to dispose of, send them
down here. I’ve discovered a poor family--father out of work, mother
sick, baby three days old. They are absolutely destitute. I’ve ordered
a beautiful christening robe for the baby, and have had the bill sent
to Uncle Jacob. I intend to be its godmother. But why will those people
insist on having so many children, Betty? Six in this family! _Fancy!_
I’ve a good mind to write to the President, and insist on his providing
for them. This man, even when he works, doesn’t make enough to support
two--to say nothing of six. The baby is quite pretty, except that
its nose is inclined to spread. I’ve explained to the mother how, by
pinching it every day, she can get it into quite a respectable shape.
You see, the baby’s a girl, and much will depend upon its nose. If
mine were Roman instead of _retroussé_, I would probably have been a
bluestocking and respected by Mr. Ormsby. Not that I care, though!

  Lovingly,
            JANE.

P. S.--I wish you’d leave an order at a bookstand to have all his books
sent down. Have them sent c. o. d. to Uncle Jacob.


CHAPTER VII.

There were three things in the culinary line that the sum of Jane’s
accomplishments included--nut salad, rarebit and tea. After her first
visit to the bungalow she had taken upon herself the task of brewing
the cup that cheers, an arrangement that suited Ormsby perfectly,
for she looked very pretty fussing with the tea things, and he
was not above taking what he called an “academic interest” in her
attractiveness.

“If one can only do a few things, naturally, all one’s vanity is
centered in them,” she was observing to him now, by way of explaining
her fondness for tea making. “I fancy I regard my talent as a mother
regards her only child. If she has a number of children, she’s
uncertain, of course, whether Ann’s blue eyes are the most beautiful
in the world or Jimmie’s brown ones, and she can’t decide whether to
thrust Susie upon the attention of visitors, that they may admire her
golden curls, or whether to give raven-locked Lucy the center of the
stage. With one child or one accomplishment it’s different; you simply
_have_ to concentrate your admiration on that. You won’t take two
lumps?”

Ormsby shook his head firmly, and Jane handed him his tea. “It’s just
tea with one lump; it’s nectar with two,” she observed, regretfully.
“Speaking of children,” she continued, as she poured herself out a cup,
“have you seen the new Larson baby?”

“I’m sorry to say I have not,” said Ormsby, gravely.

“It’s a dear,” observed Jane, enthusiastically. “I think it will be the
beauty of the Larson family.”

“If the Larson family occupy that cottage near the grove, and if all
the children who play about there are Larson children, I fancy the
baby wouldn’t require much in the way of looks to be the beauty of the
Larson family,” he commented, dryly.

“What a nasty remark!” exclaimed Jane, indignantly. “They all have
their good points when you come to study them. And you can’t imagine
how amusing they are. I’ve been helping them along a bit lately, and
between their extravagant gratitude and the Willoughbys’ indignation at
the size of the bills, I’ve been having no end of a good time.” Jane
leaned back and smiled. Ormsby frowned. A good time! That apparently
was the aim and end of her existence. Aloud he said:

“Are you never serious, Mrs. De Mille?”

“Not very often; what’s the use?” responded Jane, promptly.

“I should imagine that a woman who has had the”--he hesitated for an
instant--“the sad experience you have had would show the effect of
it.” Ormsby was really ashamed of this remark, but Jane’s flippancy
frequently goaded him on to say things he regretted. But she did not
look offended.

“Sad experience?” she repeated, puzzled. “Oh, you mean the Willoughbys?”

Her employer smiled in spite of himself. He quickly regained his air of
grave composure, however. “No, I don’t mean the Willoughbys; I mean the
death of your husband,” he said, rebukingly.

“Oh, that!” exclaimed Jane, smiling sweetly. “Why, you see, that’s
really the reason why I’m so gay now. When De Mille was alive, I was
always so solemn. He had no sense of humor--it really takes two to see
a joke, you know--and consequently I was depressed most of the time.
Since his passing away”--Jane thought this sounded well--“I laugh most
of the time--the reaction, I suppose.”

Ormsby handed his cup for some more tea. “No sugar this time,” he said,
coldly. Jane looked at him wistfully.

“I suppose I’m a disappointment to you--as a heroine, I mean,” she
remarked, almost humbly. “Perhaps”--regarding him tentatively--“if you
had known I was not serious you would not have engaged me.”

Ormsby shrugged his shoulders. “You answer my purpose very well,”
he answered, indifferently, blissfully unaware that Jane’s fingers
were itching just then to box his ears. “But you know,” he went on,
determinedly, “woman should take some things seriously.”

“I do,” responded Jane. “I take you seriously.”

Ormsby ignored her and continued: “Life is not a huge joke, you know.
It----”

“You remind me of my first husband,” interrupted Jane, frowning. “He
talked like that.”

“First?” he queried. Jane blushed. Then she said, defiantly: “Is it so
improbable that I shall marry again?”

“Oh, that reminds me,” he said, with that air of impersonal interest
which, in the beginning, had secretly infuriated Mrs. De Mille, and
which now unaccountably depressed her. “Will you allow me to ask you a
question?”

“Certainly,” she answered; “ask me anything you like.”

“I want to know,” he said, with great deliberation, “whether you have
ever been in love?”

Jane stared at him with wide-open eyes. “Don’t think,” he continued,
hastily, “that I have any desire to pry into your personal affairs, but
for the sake of my book----”

“Oh, the book, by all means,” she answered, rather hardly. “No, I’ve
never been in love. However”--flippantly--“I trust I will fall in love
some day. It will be a new experience, at least. You see, ever since I
was a very little girl I have been jobbed out----”

“Jobbed out!” exclaimed the puzzled Ormsby.

“Passed around from one Willoughby to the other,” explained Jane,
impatiently. “My father was the improvident one of the Willoughby
connection, and he married an equally improvident but awfully pretty
girl, my mother. They died within a short time of each other”--Jane
caught her breath, but continued without a trace of feeling in her
voice--“when I was just two years old. The Willoughbys married me to De
Mille when I was nineteen. There you have the story of my career in a
nutshell.” She rose abruptly. “I must be going,” she said, picking up
her hat.

“Just a minute,” interposed Ormsby, almost pleadingly, motioning her to
resume her seat. Jane sat down again and looked at him expectantly. His
manner seemed to have changed suddenly. His cold gray eyes had taken
on a softer, a more human, expression, and they fastened themselves on
hers with such an intent gaze that, though she tried to meet it boldly,
she found her own glance wavering, and the hot color surged up in her
face.

“Supposing, Mrs. De Mille,” he began, apparently unmindful of her
confusion, “that a chap different from the sort you’d been accustomed
to, one with less polish and with his own way--perhaps a most
uncertain one--to make, should come to you and tell you that he loved
you--no, wait!” Jane’s lips had parted, as though she were about to
speak. “And supposing you felt,” he continued, “that in spite of the
man’s uncouthness he was capable of making you love him, if only
you consented to give him a chance, do you think----” He paused and
studied her for a second with even a more intent gaze, but her eyes
were downcast, and her trembling fingers were rapidly tying and untying
knots in her lace handkerchief.

“Look at me, please,” he said, authoritatively. Reluctantly, Mrs. De
Mille raised her eyes. Her soul shone in them.

“Do you think that if that man told you that your life with him might
be a hard one, that the _wanderlust_ was in his bones, and that when it
took possession of him he had to fare forth, come what might, you would
have the courage to put your hand in his--_don’t stir_.”

She had turned down, but had not extinguished, the alcohol flame, and
an impulsive gesture had brought the lace which hung from the sleeve
of her gown in contact with it. Before she had the remotest inkling of
what had happened, Ormsby was at her side, smothering the flame with
his hands. It was all over in an instant. His quickness had saved her
from even the slightest burn, and also from a realization of her danger
until that danger was past. She leaned back in her chair feeling rather
faint, while Ormsby walked over to a small cabinet, took from it a
bottle and rubbed some of its contents on his hands, afterward knotting
his handkerchief carelessly around the right one.

“You are burnt!” exclaimed Jane, jumping up as though to go to his
assistance.

“A mere trifle,” he answered, indifferently. “It doesn’t even sting.”

She looked at him tremulously. “Your presence of mind saved my life,”
she said, in a voice that was not quite steady.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” he replied, rather awkwardly.

“Perhaps not,” said Jane, smiling at him with a suggestion of her old
flippancy, “but it’s a great deal to me, you know. It’s the only one I
have. Cats can afford to be indifferent in the face of peril until they
have exhausted eight of their lives, at any rate, but the rest of us,
having only one poor little life, naturally treasure it.”

Ormsby frowned. Wouldn’t she be serious in the face of death, even?
Then he remembered the interrupted conversation.

“The alcohol spoiled the pretty little situation I had arranged for my
book,” he said, smiling.

“Your book!” echoed Jane, staring at him.

“Yes, you know the question I was about to ask you. Your answer was
rather important to me, but you can give it some other time. I advise
you now to go straight home and lie down. There must have been some
nervous shock.”

“You’re mistaken,” said Jane, who was in truth looking very pale. “I
never felt less nervous in my life, and we mustn’t let the book suffer.
Now, if you’ll repeat the question--I’m afraid”--penitently--“I wasn’t
paying much attention to what you were saying.”

“Oh, well, I fancy you caught the idea of the sort of man I sketched.
Would you give up everything for his sake, if you loved him?”

Jane rose and deliberately pinned on her hat, leisurely consulting a
tiny chatelaine mirror after she had done so. Then she looked at Ormsby
maliciously.

“Give up! Thank you, no! You see, all my life I’ve been giving up
things I couldn’t wrest from the Willoughbys or De Mille.

“Not any more in mine, if you please. I should say to that misguided
and frightfully sentimental young man: ‘Mend your ways, become rich and
famous, and then come back and Jane will consider you.’” She picked up
her gloves and walked toward the door of the bungalow.

“_Au revoir_,” she said; “so good of you to have saved my life.”

“At least,” observed Ormsby, sarcastically, as he hastened to open it
for her, “nobody can accuse you of being inconsistent.”

“Billie Scott would shriek if he heard you say so,” observed Jane, as
she calmly nodded good-by.


CHAPTER VIII.

Billie Scott had come down for the week end, and he and Jane were
motoring.

“What’s up, Jane?” he remarked, suddenly, breaking a lengthy pause in
the conversation. “You don’t seem like your usual self.”

“Whom do I seem like?” she inquired, flippantly. Then she went on,
indignantly: “Whenever I keep still for a minute or two, or in some
other way act like a rational being, everyone is sure there is
something up.”

“I merely thought,” observed Mr. Scott, pacifically, “that there might
be something worrying you.”

“Nothing worries me except the careless manner in which you drive this
car,” answered Jane, sharply for her. “Please put me down at Mrs.
Larson’s, Billie.”

“Shall I wait for you?” he asked, as he steered the machine in the
direction of the cottage.

“No, indeed”--determinedly--“and, by the way, I think you had better go
back to town----”

“But I came down to stay over Sunday,” he cried, in an injured voice.

“I know,” said Jane, “but the Willoughbys like a quiet Sunday, and so
do I.”

Mr. Scott whistled.

“Terribly considerate of the Willoughbys’ feelings,” he commented,
sarcastically. “I suppose I may stop at the house for my bag?”

The car had pulled up in front of the Larson cottage, and Jane jumped
lightly out. She was instantly surrounded by a troop of dirty, noisy
children, but she turned from them and smiled sweetly up at the sulky
Mr. Scott. “Dear old Billie,” she said, sweetly; “don’t mind me. It’s
true I’m not quite myself these days. I think the Willoughbys must be
getting on my nerves. Go home and I’ll write you.”

“Oh, Jane, if you would only let me----”

But Mrs. De Mille ruthlessly interrupted him.

“Don’t be sentimental, Billie,” she said, quickly; “and please remember
that I’ll not be proposed to every time we meet. Ta! ta!” She gave him
her hand, withdrew it quickly and hastened into the Larson cottage.

“Damn!” said Mr. Scott, under his breath. Then he got out, bribed with
a shower of coin the Larson brood to keep out of his path, and drove
drearily away.

Mrs. Larson was an angular, sallow-faced, stoop-shouldered woman, who
had seen so much of the dark side of life that she had reached the
stage where she couldn’t be persuaded there was any other.

“He’s laid off again, miss,” she announced, darkly, to Jane, who
found her scrubbing in the disordered kitchen. Mrs. Larson never used
anything but the personal pronoun to designate her spouse, so Jane knew
instantly whom she meant.

“Why, what’s the matter now?” she asked, in dismay. “I thought he was
going to like his new work. Was he discharged?”

“No, miss, he was not!” In spite of her dejection, Mrs. Larson’s voice
revealed a note of pride. “But it was inside work, and he ain’t used
to inside work, and he says as how he don’t suppose at his age he ever
will get used to it.”

“But surely he could endure it for a little while, until something
else turned up!” exclaimed Jane, who was finding the Larsons a heavy
responsibility. “What in the world will you do now?” A discussion of
the problem of existence, however, was beyond the ability of Mrs.
Larson, so she scrubbed for a while in apathetic silence, while Jane
thought hard and anxiously.

“He’d like to be a shover,” finally volunteered her hostess.

“A shover!” exclaimed Mrs. De Mille, who was absolutely sure that
the leisurely Larson’s view of life was incompatible with any form
of employment that called for shoving. His wife nodded her head. “He
always was a master hand for going swift, and he thought if he could
get a place like Mr. Johnson’s----”

“Oh!” said Jane, suddenly comprehending, “I see. Does he know anything
about machinery or about driving a car?”

Mrs. Larson shook her head despondently. “Nothin’, miss. It’s just his
fondness for goin’ swift that made him think of it.”

“It’s just like him to wish to ‘go swift’ at somebody else’s expense,”
thought Jane, scornfully, but she felt a delicacy about expressing her
opinion of Larson to his wife, so another sorrowful pause ensued. It
was broken by a lusty yell from the new Larson baby in the next room.

“Let me go to her,” said Jane, rising quickly, and Mrs. Larson
indifferently acquiesced. Babies were no novelty to her and she could
not understand her guest’s enthusiasm. Mrs. De Mille returned to the
kitchen with the baby in her arms and seated herself near the open
window. The youngest scion of the house of Larson was dressed in an
expensive but dirty robe, and Jane looked at its mother reproachfully.

“You should not let her wear her christening robe every day, Mrs.
Larson,” she protested.

“I know, miss,” answered Mrs. Larson, apologetically, “but she don’t
appear to sleep comfortable in nothin’ else.” Jane sighed, but,
she reasoned humbly, it was not for her to preach economy to the
improvident Larsons. The fact of the matter is that Mrs. De Mille was
feeling in an exceedingly chastened mood these days, and even Aunt
Susan found little cause for complaint. To-day as she sat “clucking”
softly to the Larson baby, which crowed happily in response, she felt
that even her bedraggled and weary-looking hostess had obtained from
life something more worth while than it had vouchsafed her, and a wave
of self-pity swept over her.

“Goo-goo!” shrieked the baby, in an ecstasy of delight, and, flinging
up a dimpled fist, it clutched determinedly at the lace at Jane’s
throat. The magnetic touch of the tiny fingers proved Mrs. De Mille’s
undoing, and, to the astonishment and disgust of the youngest Larson,
she burst into tears.

“Land sakes!” exclaimed Mrs. Larson, dropping her scrubbing brush
and hastening to the side of her guest. “Did it jab you in the eye?”
She made an effort to take her offspring from Jane, but the latter
resisted.

“It--it isn’t the baby’s fault,” she sobbed, feeling that she was
acting in a very ridiculous way, but unable to control herself. “I was
just wishing I had a baby of my own.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Larson, understandingly, and then her red and ugly
arms, which her sleeveless waist revealed, were slipped about Jane,
and the two women mingled their tears exactly as though no gulf of
opportunity and education yawned between them.

Larson had been pointed out to John Ormsby as the only man in Rosemount
who was not above doing an errand, provided he was well paid for it,
and Ormsby had started out in search of him. He took a short cut to the
Larson cabin, approaching that humble domicile by way of the rear, and
while he was still within half a block of the premises he recognized
the graceful curve of Mrs. De Mille’s back through the open window.
With no consciousness of eavesdropping, he strained his ears to catch
her words as he came nearer, for invariably he found her gay stream of
nonsense stimulating. But the look of anticipation changed to one of
profound surprise as the dwindling distance between him and the cottage
made him spectator of the little scene enacted in the Larsons’ untidy
kitchen.

“By Jove!” he murmured, in his bewilderment. The disgusted and
temporarily neglected Larson infant, who was hanging over Jane’s
shoulder while that lady and its mother wept, caught a glimpse of the
man outside, and, perhaps, recognized in his look of astonishment a
reflex of its own feelings.

“Ah, goo,” it called out, tearfully, waving one hand feebly but
sympathetically.

“By Jove!” muttered Mr. Ormsby again, and then turned suddenly, and
made his way with surprising but quiet dispatch down the path up which
he had come. The Larson baby, choosing to regard his retreat in the
light of a desertion, raised a lusty howl, which instantly brought Jane
and his mother to their senses.

Ormsby meanwhile had repaired to the bungalow. From the drawer of the
table which he used for a desk he took a bundle of closely written
sheets and began to thumb them over, pausing here and there to read a
passage. The more he read, the more dissatisfied he looked, and finally
he rolled the papers up again and thrust them contemptuously on the
table. Then he took out his pipe, filled it and lighted it, and puffed
away in silence for a while. Presently he removed it and looked once
more at the manuscript lying on the table.

“By Jove!” he ejaculated once more, and then replaced his pipe and went
on smoking.

Half an hour later Mrs. Moore, the venerable dame with whom he boarded,
found him still sitting before the table, staring thoughtfully at
the manuscript, his pipe out. She gave him a telegram and watched
him inquisitively while he read it. “I have to run up to New York
to-morrow,” he said, without looking up. “Have an early breakfast,
please.”

His landlady, who never spoke unless it was absolutely necessary,
nodded solemnly and withdrew, and Ormsby took out some paper and
began to write a note. When he had finished he read it over and then
deliberately tore it up. Five other notes which he wrote shared the
same fate. Finally he indited a brief one and addressed it to Mrs. De
Mille. It informed her tersely that he had been called to town and
would not return for three days. Sealing it, he went to the door of the
bungalow, and, after whistling vigorously for five minutes, succeeded
in attracting the attention of a tow-headed youngster, who was walking
leisurely up the dust road.

“Take this up to Willoughby Hall at once,” ordered Ormsby, sternly,
slipping a coin into the grimy paw.

“Yep,” answered the boy, cheerfully, and obediently trotted off in
the direction of the architectural monstrosity on the hill, Ormsby
relentlessly following him with his eyes until he was out of sight.
Alas! A grove of firs intervened between the bungalow and the house on
the hill, and it was in this grove that the tow-headed urchin dropped
responsibility, thrust the note and coin in his pocket and “skinned”
a tree for a nest. The coin was spent that very night, but it was not
until a week later that, looking for a grasshopper he had carefully
stowed away in his pocket, the recreant one came across Ormsby’s note.
The discovery was timely, for he was in need just then of a bit of
paper to polish his agate bottle, a new treasure.


CHAPTER IX.

It was raining; not spasmodically, with a suggestion of lifting skies
between frenzied outbursts, but steadily, drearily, insistently. Jane,
sitting up in bed, drew the down coverlet cozily about her bare neck
and half-clad arms, while she despondently looked out through the
window at the dripping landscape.

“Rain is bad enough in the city,” she mused, “but it’s simply
impossible in the country. There, at least, you can get away from it,
but here it seems to be all over.” There was a tap on the door.

“Come,” she called, and a maid entered with an appetizing breakfast on
a tray. “Good-morning, Blanche,” said Jane. “Tell me what you do on a
rainy day. You and Johnson won’t be able to walk out this evening.”

“We sits in the kitchen, miss,” said the little maid, primly, blushing
to the roots of her mouse-colored hair. “Cook goes to bed early.”

“Very obliging of cook,” commented Jane, as she sipped her coffee. “And
that reminds me, Blanche, I want to ask you a question, and I want you
to answer me truthfully. Are you trifling with Johnson?”

“Me, miss?” The maid’s face grew redder than ever, but she tossed her
head. “I’m not triflin’. Mr. Johnson keeps a-sayin’ as how he’s very
fond o’ me, but I tells ’im he’s a city chap and says the same to all
th’ gurls.”

“You’re right, Blanche, all the Johnsons are a bad lot,” said Jane,
pessimistically. “However”--for the little maid’s face looked suddenly
downcast--“I believe Johnson is one of the best of them, and that his
intentions are serious.” The maid beamed. “And I would feel sorry to
have you trifle with him, because I feel responsible for him while he’s
down here. Avoid the reputation of being a flirt, Blanche.” Jane looked
pensive. “It’s the hardest in the world to live down.”

“Yes’m,” said the maid, politely. “Is there anythink I can do for you?”
She adored Jane, and spent hours trying to do her hair the way Mrs. De
Mille did hers.

“No, I think not. Have the Willoughbys had breakfast?”

“Hours ago, miss,” answered Blanche. Jane smiled. This breakfast in bed
represented one of her most memorable victories over Aunt Susan, and
imparted a particularly delicious flavor to her coffee and rolls.

“Well, take the tray; I’ll get up in an hour or so,” said Jane,
deliberately composing herself for another nap.

She dreamed of the bungalow and of Ormsby, and, when she finally
dressed, it was with the defeated feeling of one who has striven hard
to put certain thoughts out of her head, but who finds that they have
taken possession even of her dreams.

She saw Uncle Jacob and Aunt Susan for the first time at the luncheon
table. The rain was still falling with what Jane called disgusting
pertinacity.

“Of course you’re not going out a day like this,” said Mrs. Willoughby,
in the disapproving voice she seemed to reserve for Jane and her
husband. By “out” she meant the bungalow. Until Aunt Susan had spoken,
Mrs. De Mille had made up her mind that a visit to the bungalow on such
a day was out of the question, and that Ormsby would not expect her.
Now, however, she found herself saying, perversely: “Out! Of course
I’m going out. A woman who works for a living cannot afford to mind a
little rain. I have an appointment at the bungalow with Mr. Ormsby, and
I have to keep it.”

Aunt Susan sniffed. “The neighbors are commenting----”

Jane held up a reproachful finger. “No gossip, aunt!” she said,
rebukingly. “Don’t you think that living in the country has a
tendency--_just a slight tendency_--to make people too deeply
interested in their neighbors’ affairs?” Jane looked excessively
virtuous. “I’d hate, Aunt Susan, to have you degenerate. But one has to
be _so_ careful!”

Mrs. Willoughby deigned no response, and finished the meal in stony
silence. Uncle Jacob, who found himself unable to carry on a peaceful
conversation with Jane and his wife both present, stealthily perused
the columns of a belated city paper he held on his knee.

Immediately after her luncheon, Jane went to her room and got together
her rainy-day things. When she sallied forth presently, she wore a
coquettish-looking cap, a short, mannish coat and a skirt that was
short enough to reveal not only a pair of the thinnest and most
absurdly small Louis Quinze shoes, but a good bit of thin silk stocking
as well. Jane, as she tripped along, surveyed her feet ruefully. “I
know he’ll say something sarcastic about my shoes,” she mused, “and
they are ridiculous for a day like this, and I’ve no doubt they do
show I haven’t a scrap of common sense--though I know women who never
wear anything but common-sense shoes who haven’t any common sense to
boast of. It’s simply a question of whether you’re athletic or not.
Besides, I can explain to him that I really did try to wear a pair of
Blanche’s, but they slipped off when they were buttoned up, and he’ll
have to admit that it’s much better for me to arrive at the bungalow
in my own shoes, even though they’re more ridiculous, than in my
stocking feet--which would have been the case had I worn Blanche’s.
I’ll tell----” Jane pulled herself up sharp with a sudden, angry flush.
“I don’t know,” she said out loud, sharply, “why you’re always trying
to placate him, Jane De Mille! Where’s your independence gone to?” Then
she fixed her eyes firmly on the distant horizon and her thoughts on a
new summer gown and marched independently on.

To find the bungalow locked was like a blow to her, and when she
faced about to return home she felt suddenly very cold, very wet, very
miserable and very forlorn. Then she recollected that he had told her
once that there was always a key under the mat in case she should come
to the bungalow when he wasn’t there, and, reluctant to return to the
dreariness of the Willoughby house, she searched for this, and, finding
it, thrust it in the keyhole and opened the door. There was no fire in
the fireplace, but there was material for one beside it, and, kneeling
down in front of the cavernous opening, Jane laboriously constructed
one and held out her hands gratefully to the warmth when the flames
darted forth. She surveyed the room over her shoulder and was chilled
afresh by its deserted air. “Can he have gone away without a word?” she
wondered, and paled at the thought.

“It’s no use denying you’re in a very bad way about this Ormsby, Jane
De Mille,” she reflected, pensively surveying the dancing flames.
“You’re rapidly losing all your independence, and, what’s worse, your
self-respect. And you haven’t the remotest reason for believing that he
cares a scrap for you.”

She rose presently, and, moving his chair over to the fireplace, sat
down in it and held out first one and then the other little high-heeled
boot to dry. “If he loved me,” she observed to herself, “I really
wouldn’t mind wearing thick soles and low heels.”

Her shoes dry, she began to move restlessly about the room. Now, it
is a curious fact that Jane had never expressed and never felt any
curiosity about the book Ormsby was writing, though she knew that she
was furnishing the material for the heroine. In spite of herself,
almost unconsciously, indeed, at first, she had become so absorbed
in the writer that the book became of secondary importance. Today,
however, his absence made everything that was intimately associated
with him of interest to her, since they served, in a way, as a
substitute for him. She picked up his pipe and held it caressingly
against her cheek, and then, with a guilty start, set it down again.
She dropped her head on an open book he had evidently been reading,
and her eyes were dewy when she raised it. She came upon, finally, the
bundle of papers he had tossed contemptuously on the table the night
before, and recognized it as the manuscript upon which he had been
working. She regarded it thoughtfully for a while and then her face
brightened.

“Why, how stupid of me!” she exclaimed, aloud, and, going back to his
chair, she seated herself in it once more and smoothed out the sheets.

“He can’t possibly object to my reading it,” she reasoned, “since I’m
in it, and it’s soon to be public property.” She stared at the title.
“‘A Woman,’” she read aloud--“that’s me, I suppose. Why”--with an odd,
breathless little laugh--“it will be exactly like seeing for the first
time a portrait done of yourself by some great painter--one of those
artists who pay more attention to the soul than to the hair or the
mouth or the eyes. I’ll see myself as somebody else sees me. It’s--it’s
going to be terribly exciting.”

Yet, in spite of the curiosity she professed, Jane did not begin at
once to read. Instead, she dropped the manuscript in her lap and
stared for a while into the fire, her chin propped on her hand. Her
thoughts ran on something like this: “You’ve never had such an awfully
good time, Jane De Mille, though you’ve put up what Billie would call
a pretty stiff bluff. You’ve never had anybody to really and truly
care for you, unless it be Uncle Jacob, though plenty of people have
admired you for what good looks you have or because you didn’t bore
them. But if you should _discover_ that somebody loved you for yourself
alone, thought you a little better, perhaps, than you really are, you
know--why, it’s just possible----” A catch in her breath put a stop to
her reflections, and she unrolled the manuscript and began to read.

The fire was dying down, but, tenacious of life as some very old man
who has prolonged his years through will power alone, it shot forth
unexpected flames at infrequent intervals. These lighted up Jane’s
face, and such changes did they reveal with each succeeding appearance
that they might have been the withering years. The patter of the rain
on the roof, the rustle of the sheets as they fell from her hand and
fluttered to the floor, the occasional sputter of the fire--these for
the next two hours were the only sounds heard in the bungalow. When
the last page joined the others that lay scattered about in disorder
on the floor, Mrs. De Mille stared for a few seconds straight ahead of
her, and then, with a quivering sigh, buried her head on the arm of the
chair and began to cry.

       *       *       *       *       *

It lacked half an hour of dinner time, and Jacob Willoughby sat alone
in the stuffy library. The owner of Willoughby Hall was not what could
be called sentimental, but in the twilight hour, and especially when
the weather necessitated an open fire, he was apt, if Susan Willoughby
was in a remote part of the house, to let his thoughts stray back to a
time when she was not, so far as Jacob Willoughby was concerned, and
when a slim young creature, addicted to pink and blue muslins, but with
neither family nor prospects, was the sun of his days, the moon and
stars of his nights. He had been sensible and never regretted it--that
is, hardly ever. To-night, however, the dancing flames that glorified
the dull room reminded him of the grace of his boyhood’s love, and the
dreary splash, splash, of the rain outside, of the gray monotony of the
years that lay behind him and of those other dull and purposeless years
that stretched out before him.

And when presently a pale Jane broke in upon this reverie, Jacob was
forced to brush his hands across his eyes twice to make sure it was
Jane and not the slim young creature to whom he had brought the early
crocuses in the springtime of his youth. Neither knew exactly how it
happened, but Jane found herself sobbing out her story on Uncle Jacob’s
broad bosom, and feeling strangely comforted by the tender pressure of
his pudgy hand upon her shoulder. When she cried out that she could
not stand it to have that hateful book come out, and to listen to the
comments upon it, it was Uncle Jacob who suggested that a trip abroad
might accomplish wonders in the way of making her forget both the man
and the book. Not that he believed it--he lied gallantly there--but he
had his reward in seeing the face he loved brighten somewhat.

And when Jane stole away with a check in her hand, leaving him to
explain to Aunt Susan her absence from dinner and her early departure
in the morning, in spite of the ordeal that lay before him, there was a
warm glow underneath the white vest, a glow which even the approaching
grenadier-like tread of Aunt Susan could not dispel.


CHAPTER X.

It was the last Tuesday in November, and Mrs. Hardenburgh was giving
the first of her usual series of at-homes. An inveterate lion hunter
was this clever woman of sixty-odd summers, whose hair was as thick
and golden as a débutante’s, and whose complexion as pink and white.
This afternoon she was in a particularly complacent mood, for she had
arranged a piquant double attraction for her guests. When, however, by
six o’clock, both attractions had failed to materialize, the faintest
suggestion of a frown appeared on her remarkably smooth brow. Five
minutes later the appearance of a newcomer had dispelled it, and the
hostess was her humorous, smiling self.

The newcomer was Jane--Jane in a gown every line of which spoke Paris,
in a dream of a hat that sat on her proud little head like a coronet;
Jane, in short, in a perfect get-up and in radiant health and spirits.
Personally, we’d prefer to set it down that she looked pale, distrait;
that “concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,” etc.; but it would not
be true. Whatever the suffering within--and there was a rather deep,
intent look about the eyes--Mrs. De Mille presented an unconquered,
nay, a self-satisfied, front to this little New York world, and was
looking her very best.

As she made her way slowly down the long room to where her hostess
stood, it occurred to her that she was causing something of a
sensation. At first she modestly ascribed it to the fact that she had
been away for six months, and that this was her first public appearance
since her return. It dawned upon her presently, however, that the
rooms were filled with strangers, principally, and as the interest
deepened rather than lessened with her slow advance, she was forced to
acknowledge to herself that something beside her lengthened absence
was responsible for the attention she was receiving. The more puzzled
she grew, the more confidently she carried herself, and when a very
young bud in a very high treble agitatedly remarked to a _blasé_ youth:
“She’s not a bit disappointing, is she?” it expressed in words the
verdict of the rooms.

After greeting Mrs. Hardenburgh, the first familiar face Jane
encountered was Mr. Scott’s.

“So you’ve gone and gotten yourself engaged, faithless one?” she
observed, reproachfully, after they had shaken hands.

“Oh, I say, Jane----” he began, in exactly the same tone with which he
was wont, in the past, to preface one of his numerous proposals.

Jane regarded him with mock horror. “Billie, Billie, don’t tell me
you are going to propose!” she exclaimed, disapprovingly. “One rather
expects proposals from the married men nowadays, but from newly engaged
ones, fie! fie!”

Mr. Scott colored high. “You can’t think how the sight of you makes my
heart beat,” he said, agitatedly.

“Nonsense!” retorted Jane, snubbingly. “Point out your girl instantly.”

Pulling himself together with a palpable effort, Mr. Scott indicated a
sparkling brunette, one of a group of débutantes who were watching Jane
with intense interest.

“Why, she’s adorable!” exclaimed Mrs. De Mille. “Present me.” And Mr.
Scott, looking suddenly very proud, offered his arm.

“I’ve read the book,” murmured the little brunette, ecstatically, after
Jane had offered her felicitations. “It must be beautiful to be written
about like that.”

Mrs. De Mille stared and then grew pale. “The book!” she echoed. “I--I
don’t know what you mean!”

“Why, I thought----” began Mr. Scott’s pretty fiancée, looking as
though she regretted her own impulsiveness. But before she had a chance
to explain, a tall and extremely well-dressed young matron bore down
upon Jane and triumphantly carried her off.

“How well you’re looking, Betty,” observed Jane, surveying her friend
rather wistfully, when they were seated in a quiet corner.

“That’s because I’m so happy,” answered that lady, promptly. “Maurice
is such a dear! And now, Jane, tell me, when is the engagement to be
announced?”

Mrs. De Mille opened her eyes very wide. “Engagement!” she cried. “I
don’t know what you’re talking about. Whose engagement?”

“Why, yours and Mr. Ormsby’s,” retorted her friend. “Every line of the
book shows he’s desperately in love with you. Did you refuse him?”

Jane clutched Mrs. McClurg’s hand. “Is that awful book out, and does
everybody think it’s me?” she demanded, in a voice that trembled in
spite of her effort to control it.

Mrs. McClurg looked at her in astonishment. “Awful book!” she
exclaimed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Mr. Ormsby’s
novel is the success of the year, and the heroine is an _extremely
flattering_ picture of you. All your friends have recognized it, and
they all agree with me.”

Jane rose. “If my friends think I’m the heartless and idiotic creature
that book pictures, then I have no friends,” she said, coldly.
“Good-by, Betty.” She turned to go, but Mrs. McClurg caught her hand.

“I don’t believe you’ve read the book, Jane de Mille,” she said. “The
heroine is not heartless. She’s a perfectly adorable creature, and
everybody--all the women envy you.”

“I haven’t seen the book,” admitted Jane, “but I read the manuscript,
and my recollection is that the author placed me a good deal lower than
the angels, to state it mildly. I never want to see it.”

“I can’t understand; there must be some mistake!” exclaimed Mrs.
McClurg. “Just wait here a minute.” She glided out from behind the
screen of palms, and, after a brief absence, came back to the nook
with a small, quietly bound little book in her hand. “Read that!” she
commanded, triumphantly, opening it and pointing to the title-page.

Reluctantly Jane raised her eyes and took in the brief contents. “The
Woman, by John Ormsby,” she read, and then, underneath, a single line,
“To her who inspired it,” and underneath that again this fragment of
verse:

  Lean penury within that pen doth dwell
    That to his subject lends not some small glory;
  But he that writes of you, if he can tell
    That you are you, so dignifies his story;
  Let him but copy what in you is writ,
    Not making worse what nature made so clear,
  And such a counterpart shall fame his wit,
    Making his style admired everywhere.

“Betty.” Jane lifted her head and looked at her friend with sudden
inspiration.

“Well,” retorted Mrs. McClurg, not too enthusiastically, for it had
just occurred to her that Mrs. De Mille had concealed a great deal.

“I want to sneak, and I want to take this book with me,” explained the
latter, shamelessly. “I don’t believe I have read it. Can you--will you
cover my retreat?”

Mrs. McClurg looked only half appeased and dubious. “Mr. Ormsby is
coming here this afternoon,” she said, severely. “I happen to know that
Mrs. Hardenburgh has been rejoicing at the thought that you were to
meet here in her drawing room.”

“Neat little arrangement,” observed Jane, ironically. Then she became
suddenly frightened. “I must go at once,” she said. “Oh, Betty, don’t
you see that I can’t see him here? Help me, there’s a good girl, and
come to me to-morrow--I have the same apartment, you know--and I’ll
tell you _everything_.”

And Mrs. McClurg, who was by no means hard-hearted, relented. When the
big doors finally closed upon Jane, she gave a sigh of relief, but it
ended with a gasp, for she found herself face to face with John Ormsby,
who, immaculately attired, was ascending the brownstone steps.

“How d’ye do?” said Mrs. De Mille, airily, extending her hand and
hoping fervently at the same time that the book which she had tucked
away underneath her arm was invisible.

He took her hand, but did not respond to her salutation, only gazed
hungrily into her face.

“Where in the world have you been hiding yourself?” he demanded,
finally, when Jane, with an effort, had removed her hand.

“Sounds as though I were a criminal,” commented Jane. “Did you miss any
spoons at the bungalow?”

He did not answer, only continued to stare at her, and so she went on,
nervously: “I’ve been in Paris chiefly. Some people don’t like Paris in
the summer time, but I adore it. But you’re Mrs. Hardenburgh’s lion. I
mustn’t detain you. _Au revoir!_” She started down the steps, but he
followed her determinedly. “If you think I’m going to lose sight of you
after my long search, you’re mistaken,” he said, quietly.

“Mrs. Hardenburgh will be furious, and you will be very impolite, if
you don’t go in at once,” said Jane, tucking the little book further
out of sight.

“I loathe those things,” he answered, disrespectfully. “I only
consented to come because I was told you might be there. But if
Paradise was just inside, and----”

“Hades,” interrupted Jane, demurely.

“And you were outside, nothing would induce me to go in.”

“The inference is so odious I refuse to be flattered,” she said, “but
you never were good at making pretty speeches. If you’re coming with
me”--briskly--“you’ll have to walk. I’m economizing. Uncle Jacob is
giving me an allowance, and I’m living on it.”

“But you’re rich, or almost rich, in your own right,” said Mr.
Ormsby, as they walked along. “The book promises to be preposterously
successful, and half the royalties are yours, you know.”

Jane grew suddenly frigid. “I beg that you will not refer to that
wretched affair,” she said, haughtily. “I have not read your book, and
I am not interested in it.”

Mr. Ormsby’s face became very downcast. “I was in hopes that you had
read it, and that it would explain----”

“There is really nothing to explain,” interrupted Jane. “I acted on a
reckless impulse, and was bored for my pains. I have no wish to read
your book, though”--civilly--“I’m glad for your sake it promises to be
a success.”

Mrs. De Mille’s fall followed fast on the heels of her little
exhibition of pride. A boy hurrying by with a bundle jostled her arm,
and the book she had been endeavoring to conceal fell to the pavement.
In stooping to recover it, Mr. Ormsby recognized it, but he returned it
to her without comment, and Jane perversely chose to feel affronted at
his silence.

“I met a friend at Mrs. Hardenburgh’s who was quite enthusiastic about
the book, and to please her I consented to take it home to read,” she
exclaimed, coldly.

“I would not bother myself about it, if I were you; it’s a poor thing,”
he returned, just as coldly. They walked for a square in silence, a
silence that, strange to relate, was not broken first by Jane but by
her companion.

“I have an explanation to make, and, in spite of the risk I run of
further offending you, I must make it,” he said, distantly. “When I
wrote that first absurd sketch I did not understand you. I thought that
you were as frivolous and as heartless as you appeared on the surface.”

“Indeed!” commented Jane, tilting her chin scornfully.

“And then something happened----” he paused.

“What was it?” she asked, eagerly, and bit her lip in vexation at
herself for displaying curiosity.

“I’m not going to tell you that,” he responded, coolly, “but it helped
me to an understanding of you. And then I was called to New York, and I
found when I got back that you had been at the bungalow--you left your
handkerchief there, you know--and that you had read the sketch, for
the papers were scattered about the floor, and I realized that----” he
hesitated.

“You realized what?” said Jane, defiantly.

“That I loved you,” he concluded, quietly.

The acknowledgment was so unexpected that it disconcerted Mrs. De
Mille, and she had nothing to say.

“I suppose _that_ bores you, too?” he said, half ironically.

“This is where I live,” was her only response. They had reached the
entrance to a smart uptown apartment house, and Jane paused. Her tone
was not exactly a dismissal one, and, as she faced him, Ormsby stared
at her anxiously.

“Is there--can there be any hope for me----” he began.

“While there’s life there’s hope, you know,” retorted Jane,
frivolously. “But I was just about to suggest that if you’re quite
certain you don’t want to go back to Mrs. Hardenburgh’s, I’ll give you
a cup of tea.”

Her tone was noncommittal, but as she led the way to the elevator, she
looked back at him over her shoulder and laughed softly, and a great
joy transfigured John Ormsby’s face.




[Illustration]

TO A ROADSIDE CEDAR


  ’Tis not for thee in ancient walks to throw
    Thy pointed shadows o’er the sculptured stone,
    Where marble fixes some immortal moan
  Of art; nor, gathering gloom where waters flow
  Past groves Lethean, crypts of human woe,
    To lift thy cheering spires. Thy lot is strown
    In newer, happier climes and lands unknown
  To classic realms of storied pomps and show.

  For thou, dear gnomon of the passing hour,
    Green sentinel of sunny lanes and fields,
      Whose sturdy watch defies harsh winter’s knell,
      Art guardian of the humblest homes, where dwell
    The simple folk, the yeomanry that wields
  In peopled might all that men crave of power!

            HARVEY MAITLAND WATTS.




_The_ DELUGE

A STORY _OF_ MODERN FINANCE

_By_

DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

[Illustration]


XXIII.

Next day Langdon’s stocks wavered, going up a little, going down a
little, closing at practically the same figures at which they had
opened. Then I sprang my sensation--that Langdon and his particular
clique, though they controlled the Textile Trust, did not own so much
as one-fiftieth of its voting stock. True “captains of industry”
that they were, they made their profits not out of dividends, but
out of side schemes which absorbed about two-thirds of the earnings
of the Trust, and out of gambling in its bonds and stocks. I said in
conclusion:

    The largest owner of the stock is Walter G. Edmunds, of Chicago--an
    honest man. Send your voting proxies to him, and he can take the
    Textile Company away from those now plundering it.

As the annual election of the Trust was only six weeks away, Langdon
and his clique were in a panic. They rushed into the market and bought
frantically, the public bidding against them. Langdon himself went to
Chicago to reason with Edmunds--that is, to try to find out at what
figure he could be bought. And so on, day after day, I faithfully
reporting to the public the main occurrences behind the scenes. The
Langdon attempt to regain control by purchases of stock failed. He and
his allies made what must have been to them appalling sacrifices. But
even at the high prices they offered, comparatively little of the stock
appeared.

“I’ve caught them,” said I to Joe--the first time, and the last,
during that campaign that I indulged in a boast.

“If Edmunds sticks to you,” replied Joe.

But Edmunds did not. I do not know at what price he sold himself.
Probably it was pitifully small; cupidity usually snatches the instant
the bait tickles its nose. But I do know that my faith in human nature
got its severest shock. “You are down this morning,” said Thornley,
when I looked in on him at his bank. “I don’t think I ever before saw
you show that you were in low spirits.”

“I’ve found out a man with whom I’d have trusted my life,” said I.
“Sometimes I think all men are dishonest. I’ve tried to be an optimist
like you, and have told myself that most men must be honest or
ninety-five per cent. of the business couldn’t be done on credit as it
is.”

Thornley smiled, like an old man at the enthusiasm of a youngster.
“That proves nothing as to honesty,” said he. “It simply shows that men
can be counted on to do what it is to their plain interest to do. The
truth is--and a fine truth, too--most men wish and try to be honest.
Give ’em a chance to resist their own weaknesses. Don’t trust them.
Trust--that’s the making of false friends and the filling of jails.”

“And palaces,” I added.

“And palaces,” assented he. “Every vast fortune is a monument to the
credulity of men. Instead of getting after these heavy-laden rascals,
Matthew, you’d better have turned your attention to the public that has
made rascals of them by leaving its property unguarded.”

Fortunately, Edmunds had held out, or, rather, Langdon had delayed
approaching him, long enough for me to gain my main point. The uproar
over the Textile Trust had become so great that the national Department
of Commerce dared not refuse an investigation; and I straightway began
to spread out in my daily letters the facts of the Trust’s enormous
earnings and of the shameful sources of those earnings. Thanks to
Langdon’s political pull, the President appointed as investigator one
of those rascals who carefully build themselves good reputations to
enable them to charge higher prices for dirty work. But with my facts
before the people, whitewash was impossible.

I was expecting emissaries from Langdon, for I knew he must now be
actually in straits. Even the Universal Life didn’t dare lend him
money, and was trying to call in the millions it had loaned him. But
I was astounded when my private door opened and Mrs. Langdon ushered
herself in.

“Don’t blame your boy, Mr. Blacklock,” cried she, gayly, exasperatingly
confident that I was as delighted with her as she was with herself. “I
told him you were expecting me and didn’t give him a chance to stop me.”

I assumed she had come to give me wholly undeserved thanks for
revenging her upon her recreant husband. I tried to look civil and
courteous, but I felt that my face was darkening--her very presence
forced forward things I had been keeping in the far background of my
mind. “How can I be of service to you, madam?” said I.

“I bring you good news,” she replied--and I noted that she no longer
looked haggard and wretched, that her beauty was once more smiling
with a certain girlishness, like a young widow’s when she finds her
consolation. “Mowbray and I have made it up,” she explained.

I simply listened, probably looking as grim as I felt.

“I knew you would be interested,” she went on. “Indeed, it means almost
as much to you as to me. It brings peace to _two_ families.”

Still I did not relax.

“And so,” she continued, a little uneasy, “I came to you immediately.”

I continued to listen as if I were waiting for her to finish and depart.

“If you want, I’ll go to Anita.” Natural feminine tact would have saved
her from this rawness; but, convinced that she was a “great lady” by
the flattery of servants and shopkeepers and sensational newspapers and
social climbers, she had long since discarded tact as worthy only of
the lowly and of the aspiring before they “arrive.”

“You are too kind,” said I. “Mrs. Blacklock and I feel competent to
take care of our own affairs.”

“Please, Mr. Blacklock,” she said, realizing that she had blundered,
“don’t take my directness the wrong way. Life is too short for pose and
pretense about the few things that really matter. Why shouldn’t we be
frank with each other?”

“I trust you will excuse me,” said I, moving toward the door--I had not
seated myself when she did. “I think I have made it clear that we have
nothing to discuss.”

“You have the reputation of being generous and too big for hatred.
That is why I have come to you,” said she, her expression confirming
my suspicion of the real and only reason for her visit. “Mowbray and
I are completely reconciled--_completely_, you understand. And I want
you to be generous, and not keep on with this attack. I am involved
even more than he. He has used up his fortune in defending mine. Now
you are simply trying to ruin me--not him, but _me_. The President is a
friend of Mowbray’s, and he’ll call off this horrid investigation, and
everything’ll be all right, if you’ll only stop.”

“Who sent you here?” I asked.

“I came of my own accord,” she protested. Then, realizing from the
sound of her voice that she could not have convinced me with a tone so
unconvincing, she hedged with: “It was my own suggestion, really it
was.”

“And your husband permitted _you_ to come to _me_?”

She flushed.

“And you have accepted his overtures when you knew he made them only
because he needed your money?”

She hung her head. “I love him,” she said, simply. Then she looked
straight at me, and I somehow liked her expression. “A woman has no
false pride when love is at stake,” she said. “We leave that to you
men.”

“Love!” I retorted, rather satirically, I imagine. “How much had your
own imperiled fortune to do with your being so forgiving?”

“Something,” she admitted. “You must remember I have children. I must
think of their future. I don’t want them to be poor. I want them to
have the station they were born to.” She went to one of the windows
overlooking the street. “Look here!” she said.

I stood beside her. The window was not far above the street level. Just
below us was a handsome victoria, coachman, harness, horses, all most
proper, a footman rigid at the step. A crowd had gathered round--in
those stirring days when I was the chief subject of conversation
wherever men were interested in money--and where are they not?--there
was almost always a crowd before my offices. In the carriage sat
two children, a boy and a girl, hardly more than babies. They were
gorgeously overdressed, after the vulgar fashion of aristocrats and
apers of aristocracy. They sat stiffly, like little scions of royalty,
with that expression of complacent superiority which one so often sees
on the faces of the little children of the very rich--and some not so
little, too. The thronging loungers were gaping in true New York “lower
class” awe; the children were literally swelling with delighted vanity.
If they had been pampered pet dogs, one would have laughed. As they
were human beings, it filled me with sadness and pity.

“For their sake, Mr. Blacklock,” she pleaded, her mother love wholly
hiding from her the features of the spectacle that most impressed me.

“Your husband has deceived you about your fortune, Mrs. Langdon,” I
said, gently. “You can tell him what I am about to say, or not, as
you please. But my advice is that you keep it to yourself. Even if
the present situation develops, as seems probable, develops as Mr.
Langdon fears, you will not be left without a fortune--a very large
fortune, most people would think. But Mr. Langdon will have little or
nothing--indeed, I think he is practically dependent on you now.”

“What I have is his,” she said.

“That is generous,” replied I, “but is it prudent? You wish to keep
him--securely. Don’t tempt him by a generosity he would only abuse.”

She thought it over. “The idea of holding a man in that way is
repellent to me,” said she, obviously posing for my benefit.

“If the man happens to be one that can be held in no other way,” said
I, moving significantly toward the door, “one must overcome one’s
repugnance--or be despoiled and abandoned.”

“Thank you,” she said, giving me her hand. “Thank you--more than I
can say.” She had forgotten entirely that she came to plead for her
husband. “And I hope that you will soon be as happy as I am.”

I bowed, and when there was the closed door between us, I laughed, not
at all pleasantly. “This New York!” I said aloud. “This New York that
dabbles its slime of sordidness and snobbishness on every flower in the
garden of human nature.” I took from my inside pocket the picture of
Anita I always carried. “Are _you_ like that?” I demanded of it. And it
seemed to answer: “Yes, I am.” Did I tear the picture up? No. I kissed
it as if it were the magnetic reality. “I don’t care what you are,” I
cried. “I want you! I want you!”

“Fool!” you are saying. Precisely what I called myself. And you? Is it
the one you _ought_ to love that you give your heart to? Is it the one
that understands you and sympathizes with you? Or is it the one whose
presence gives you visions of paradise and whose absence blots out the
light?

I loved her. Yet I would have torn out my life before I would have
taken her on any terms that did not make her wholly mine.


XXIV.

Now that Updegraff is dead, I am free to tell of our relations.

My acquaintance with him was more casual than with any other of “The
Seven.” From the outset of my career I made it a rule never to deal
with understrappers, always to get in touch with the man who had the
final say. Thus, as the years went by, I grew into intimacy with
the great men of finance where many with better natural facilities
for knowing them remained in an outer circle. But with Updegraff,
interested only in enterprises west of the Mississippi and keeping
Denver as his legal residence and exploiting himself as a Western man
who hated Wall Street, I had a mere bowing acquaintance. This was not
important, however, as each knew the other well by reputation. Our
common intimacies made us intimates for all practical purposes.

Our connection was established soon after the development of my
campaign against the Textile Trust had shown that I was after a big
bag of the biggest game. We happened to have the same secret broker;
and I suppose it was in his crafty brain that the idea of bringing us
together was born. Be that as it may, he by gradual stages intimated to
me that Updegraff would convey me secrets of “The Seven” in exchange
for a guarantee that I would not attack his interests. I do not know
what his motive in this treachery was--probably a desire to curb the
power of his associates in industrial despotism. Each of “The Seven”
hated and feared and suspected the other six with far more than the
ordinary and proverbial rich man’s jealous dislike of other rich men.
There was not one of them that did not bear the ever-smarting scars of
vicious wounds, front and back, received from his fellows; there was
not one that did not cherish the hope of overthrowing the rule of Seven
and establishing the rule of One. At any rate, I accepted Updegraff’s
proposition; thenceforth, though he stopped speaking to me when we
happened to meet, as did all the other big bandits and most of their
parasites and procurers, he kept me informed of every act “The Seven”
resolved upon.

Thus I knew all about their “gentlemen’s agreement” to support the
stock market, and that they had made Tavistock their agent for
resisting any and all attempts to lower prices, and had given him
practically unlimited funds to draw upon as he needed. I had Tavistock
sounded on every side, but found no weak spot. There was no rascality
he would not perpetrate for whoever employed him; but to his employer
he was as loyal as a woman to a bad man. And for a time it looked as
if “The Seven” had checkmated me. Those outsiders who had invested
heavily in the great enterprises through which “The Seven” ruled were
disposing of their holdings--cautiously, through fear of breaking the
market. Money would pile up in the banks--money paid out by “The Seven”
for their bonds and stocks, of which the people had become deeply
suspicious. Then these deposits would be withdrawn--and I knew they
were going into real estate investments, because news of a boom in real
estate and in building was coming in from everywhere. But prices on the
Stock Exchange continued to advance.

“They are too strong for you,” said Joe. “They will hold the market up
until the public loses faith in you. Then they will sell out at boom
prices, as the people rush in to buy.”

I might have wavered had I not been seeing Tavistock every day. He
continued to wear his devil-may-care air; but I observed that he was
aging swiftly--and I knew what that meant. Fighting all day to prevent
breaks in the crucial stocks; planning most of the night how to prevent
breaks the next day; watching the reserve resources of “The Seven” melt
away. Those reserves were vast; also, “The Seven” controlled the United
States Treasury, and were using its resources as their own; they were
buying securities that would be almost worthless if they lost, but if
they won, would be rebought by the public at the old swindling prices,
when “confidence” was restored. But there was I, cannonading away from
an impregnable position; as fast as they repaired breaches in their
walls, my big guns of publicity tore new breaches. No wonder Tavistock
had thinner hair and wrinkles and the drawn look about the eyes, nose
and mouth.

With the battle thus raging doubtfully all along the line, on the
one side “The Seven” and their armies of money and mercenaries and
impressed slaves, on the other side the public, I in command, you
will say that my yearning for distraction must have been gratified.
If the road from his cell were long enough, the condemned man would
be fretting less about the gallows than about the tight shoe that was
making him limp and wince at every step. Besides, in human affairs it
is the personal, always the personal. I soon got used to the crowds, to
the big headlines in the newspapers, to the routine of cannonade and
reply. But the old thorn, pressing persistently--I could not get used
to that. In the midst of the adulation, of the blares upon the trumpets
of fame that saluted my waking and were wafted to me as I fell asleep
at night--in the midst of all the turmoil, I was often in a great and
brooding silence, longing for her, now with the imperious energy of
passion, and now with the sad ache of love. What was she doing? What
was she thinking? Now that Langdon had again played her false for the
old price, with what eyes was she looking into the future?

Alva, settled in a West Side apartment not far from the ancestral white
elephant, telephoned, asking me to come. I went, because she could and
would give me news of Anita. But as I entered her little drawing room,
I said: “It was curiosity that brought me. I wished to see how you were
installed.”

“Isn’t it nice and small?” cried she. “Billy and I haven’t the
slightest difficulty in finding each other--as people so often have
in the big houses.” And it was Billy this and Billy that, and what
Billy said and thought and felt--and before they were married, she had
called him William, and had declared “Billy” to be the most offensive
combination of letters that ever fell from human lips.

“I needn’t ask if _you_ are happy,” said I, presently, with a dismal
failure at looking cheerful. “I can’t stay but a moment,” I added, and
if I had obeyed my feelings, I’d have risen up and taken myself and my
pain away from surroundings as hateful to me as a summer sunrise in a
death chamber.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, in some confusion. “Then excuse me.” And she
hastened from the room.

I thought she had gone to order, or perhaps to bring, the tea. The long
minutes dragged away until ten had passed. Hearing a rustling in the
hall, I rose, intending to take leave the instant she appeared. The
rustling stopped just outside. I waited a few seconds, cried, “Well,
I’m off. Next time I want to be alone, I’ll know where to come,” and
advanced to the door. It was not Alva hesitating there; it was Anita.

“I beg your pardon,” said I, coldly.

If there had been room to pass I should have gone. What devil
possessed me? Certainly in all our relations I had found her direct
and frank; if anything, too frank. Doubtless it was the influence of
my associations downtown, where for so many months I had been dealing
with the “short-card” crowd of high finance, who would not play the
game straight even where that was the easy way to win. My long, steady
stretch in that stealthy and sinuous company had put me in the state of
mind in which it is impossible to credit any human being with a motive
that is decent or an action that is not a dead-fall. Thus the obvious
change in her made no impression on me. Her haughtiness, her coldness,
were gone, and with them had gone all that had been least like her
natural self, most like the repellent conventional pattern to which her
mother and her associates had molded her. But I was saying to myself:
“A trap! Langdon has gone back to his wife. She turns to me.” And I
loved her and hated her. “Never,” thought I, “has she shown so poor an
opinion of me as now.”

“My uncle told me day before yesterday that it was not he, but you,”
she said, lifting her eyes to mine. It is inconceivable to me now that
I could have misread their honest story; yet I did.

“I had no idea your uncle’s notion of honor was also eccentric,” said
I, with a satirical smile that made the blood rush to her face.

“That is unjust to him,” she replied, earnestly. “He says he made you
no promise of secrecy. And he confessed to me only because he wished to
convince me that he had good reason for his high opinion of you.”

“Really!” said I, ironically. “And no doubt he found you open wide to
conviction--_now_.” This a subtlety to let her know that I understood
why she was seeking me.

“No,” she answered, lowering her eyes. “I knew--better than he.”

For an instant this, spoken in a voice I had long given up hope of
ever hearing from her, staggered my cynical conviction. Then I said,
mockingly: “Doubtless your opinion of me has been improving steadily
ever since you heard that Mrs. Langdon has recovered her husband.”

She winced as if I had struck her. “Oh!” she murmured. If she had been
the ordinary woman, who in every crisis with man instinctively resorts
to weakness’ strongest weakness, tears, I might have a very different
story to tell. But she fought back the tears in which her eyes were
swimming and gathered herself together. “That is brutal,” she said,
with not a touch of haughtiness, but not humbly, either. “But I deserve
it.”

“There was a time,” I went on, swept in a swift current of cold
rage--“there was a time when I would have taken you on almost any
terms. A man never makes a complete fool of himself about a woman but
once in his life, they say. I have done my time--and it is over.”

She sighed wearily. “Langdon came to see me soon after I left your
house and went to my uncle,” she said. “I will tell you what happened.”

“I do not wish to hear,” replied I. “I have been waiting impatiently
ever since you left for news of your plans.”

She grew white, and my heart smote me. She came into the room and
seated herself. “Won’t you stop, please, for a moment longer?” she
said. “I hope that, at least, we can part without bitterness. I
understand now that everything is over between us. A woman’s vanity
makes her belief that a man cares for her die hard. I am convinced
now--I assure you I am. I shall trouble you no more about the past. But
I have the right to ask you to hear me when I say that Langdon came,
and that I myself sent him away; sent him back to his wife.”

“Touching self-sacrifice,” said I, ironically.

“No,” she replied. “I cannot claim any credit. I sent him away only
because you and Alva had taught me how to judge him better. I do not
despise him as do you; I know too well what has made him what he is.
But I had to send him away.”

My comment was an incredulous look and shrug. “I must be going,” I said.

“You do not believe me?” she asked.

“In my place, would you believe?” replied I. “You say I have taught
you. Well, you have taught me, too--for instance, that your years and
years on your knees in the musty temple of conventionality before false
gods have made you--fit only for the Langdon sort of thing. You have
forgotten how to stand erect, and your eyes cannot bear the light.”

“I am sorry,” she said, slowly, hesitatingly, “that your faith in me
has died just when I might, perhaps, have justified it. Ours has been a
pitiful series of misunderstandings.”

“A trap! A trap!” I was warning myself. “You’ve been a fool long
enough, Blacklock.” And aloud I said: “Well, Anita, the series is ended
now. There’s no longer any occasion for our lying or posing to each
other. Any arrangements your uncle’s lawyers suggest will be made.”

I was bowing, to leave without shaking hands with her. But she would
not have it so. “Let us be friends, at least,” she said, stretching
out her long, slender arm and offering me her hand.

What a devil possessed me that day! With every atom of me longing for
her, I yet was able to take her hand and say, with a smile that was, I
doubt not, as mocking as my tone: “By all means, let us be friends. And
I trust you will not think me discourteous if I say that I shall feel
safer in our friendship when we are both on neutral ground.”

As I was turning away, her look, my own heart, made me turn again. I
caught her by the shoulders. I gazed into her eyes. “If I could only
trust you, could only believe you!” I cried.

“You cared for me when I wasn’t worth it,” she said. “Now that I am
more like what you once imagined me, you do not care.”

Up between us rose Langdon’s face--cynical, mocking, contemptuous.
“Your heart is _his_! You told me so! Don’t _lie_ to me!” I exclaimed.
And before she could reply I was gone.

Out from under the spell of her presence, back among the tricksters
and assassins, the traps and ambushes of Wall Street, I believed
again; believed firmly the promptings of the devil that possessed me.
“She would have given you a brief fool’s paradise,” said that devil.
“Then what a hideous awakening!” And I cursed the day when New York’s
insidious snobbishness had tempted my vanity into starting me on that
degrading chase after “respectability.”

“If she does not move to free herself soon,” said I, to myself, “I will
put my own lawyer to work. My right eye offends me. I will pluck it
out.”


XXV.

“The Seven” made their fatal move on treacherous Updegraff’s
treacherous advice, I suspect. But they would not have adopted his
suggestion had it not been so exactly congenial to their own temper
of arrogance and tyranny and contempt for the people who meekly, year
after year, presented themselves for the shearing with fatuous bleats
of enthusiasm.

“The Seven,” of course, controlled, directly or indirectly, all but a
few of the newspapers with which I had advertising contracts. They also
controlled the main sources through which the press was supplied with
news--and often and well they had used this control, and surprisingly
cautious had they been not so to abuse it that the editors and the
public would become suspicious. When my war was at its height, when
I was beginning to congratulate myself that the huge magazines of
“The Seven” were empty almost to the point at which they must sue for
peace on my own terms, all in four days forty-three of my sixty-seven
newspapers--and they the most important--notified me that they would no
longer carry out their contracts to publish my daily letter. They gave
as their reason, not the real one, fear of “The Seven,” but fear that I
would involve them in ruinous libel suits. I who had _legal_ proof for
every statement I made; I who was always careful to understate! Next,
one press association after another ceased to send out my letter as
news, though they had been doing so regularly for months. The public
had grown tired of the “sensation,” they said.

I countered with a telegram to one or more newspapers in every city and
large town in the United States:

    “The Seven” are trying to cut the wires between the truth and the
    public. If you wish my daily letter, telegraph me direct and I will
    send it at my expense.

The response should have warned “The Seven.” But it did not. Under
their orders the telegraph companies refused to transmit the
letter. I got an injunction. It was obeyed in typical, corrupt
corporation fashion--they sent my matter, but so garbled that it was
unintelligible. I appealed to the courts. In vain.

To me it was clear as sun in cloudless noonday sky that there could be
but one result of this insolent and despotic denial of my rights and
the rights of the people, this public confession of the truth of my
charges. I waited for the cataclysm.

Thursday--Friday--Saturday. Apparently all was tranquil; apparently
the people accepted the Wall Street theory that I was an “exploded
sensation.” “The Seven” began to preen themselves; the strain upon
them to maintain prices, if no less than for three months past, was
not notably greater; the crisis would pass, I and my exposures would
be forgotten, the routine of reaping the harvests and leaving only the
gleanings for the sowers would soon be placidly resumed.

Sunday. Roebuck, taken ill as he was passing the basket in the church
of which he was the shining light, died at midnight--a beautiful,
peaceful death, they say, with his daughter reading the Bible aloud,
and his lips moving in prayer. Some hold that, had he lived, the
tranquillity would have continued; but this is the view of those who
can not realize that the tide of affairs is no more controlled by
the “great men” than is the river led down to the sea by its surface
flotsam, by which we measure the speed and direction of its current.
Under that terrific tension, which to the shallow seemed a calm,
something had to give way. If the dam had not yielded where Roebuck
stood guard, it must have yielded somewhere else, or might have gone
all in one grand crash.

Monday. You know the story of the artist and his statue of Grief--how
he molded the features a hundred times, always failing, always getting
an anti-climax, until at last, in despair, he gave up the impossible
and finished the statue with a veil over the face. I have tried again
and again to assemble words that would give some not too inadequate
impression of that tremendous week in which, with a succession of
explosions, each like the crack of doom, the financial structure that
housed eighty millions of people burst, collapsed, was engulfed. I
cannot. I must leave it to your memory or your imagination.

For years the financial leaders, crazed by the excess of power
which the people had in ignorance and over-confidence and slovenly
good-nature permitted them to acquire, had been tearing out the honest
foundations on which alone so vast a structure can hope to rest solid
and secure. They had been substituting rotten beams painted to look
like stone and iron. The crash had to come; the sooner the better--when
a thing is wrong, each day’s delay compounds the cost of righting it.
So, with all the horrors of Wild Week in mind, all its physical and
mental suffering, all the ruin and rioting and bloodshed, I still can
insist that I am justly proud of my share in bringing it about. The
blame and the shame are wholly upon those who made Wild Week necessary
and inevitable.

In catastrophes the cry is, “Each for himself!” But in a cataclysm
the obvious wise selfishness is generosity, and the cry is, “Stand
together, for, singly, we perish.” This was a cataclysm. No one could
save himself, except the few who, taking my often urged advice and
following my example, had entered the ark of ready money. Farmer and
artisan and professional man and laborer owed merchant; merchant owed
banker; banker owed depositor. No one could pay because no one could
get what was due him or could realize upon his property. The endless
chain of credit that binds together the whole of modern society had
snapped in a thousand places. It must be repaired, instantly and
securely. But how--and by whom?

I issued a clear statement of the situation; I showed in minute detail
how the people, standing together under the leadership of the honest
men of property, could easily force the big bandits to consent to an
honest, just, rock-founded, iron-built reconstruction. My statement
appeared in all the morning papers throughout the land. Turn back to
it; read it. You will say that I was right. Well----

Toward two o’clock Inspector Crawford came into my private office,
escorted by Joe. I saw in Joe’s seamed, green-gray face that some new
danger had arisen. “You’ve got to get out of this,” said he. “The mob
in front of our place fills the three streets. It’s made up of crowds
turned away from the suspended banks.”

I remembered the sullen faces and the hisses as I entered the office
that morning earlier than usual. My windows were closed to keep out the
street noises; but now that my mind was up from the work in which I had
been absorbed, I could hear the sounds of many voices, even through the
thick plate glass.

“We’ve got two hundred policemen here,” said the inspector. “Five
hundred more are on the way. But--really, Mr. Blacklock, unless we can
get you away, there’ll be serious trouble. Those damn’ newspapers.
Every one of them denounced you this morning, and the people are in a
fury against you.”

I went toward the door.

“Hold on, Matt,” cried Joe, springing at me and seizing me. “Where are
you going?”

“To tell them what I think of them,” replied I, sweeping him aside. For
my blood was up, and I was enraged against the poor cowardly fools.

“For God’s sake, don’t show yourself,” he begged. “If you don’t care
for your own life, think of the rest of us. We’ve fixed a route through
buildings and under streets up to Broadway. Your electric is waiting
for you there.”

“It won’t do,” I said. “I’ll face ’em--it’s the only way.”

I went to the window, and was about to throw up one of the sunblinds
for a look at them; Crawford stopped me. “They’ll stone the building
and then storm it,” said he. “You must go at once, by the route we’ve
arranged.”

“Even if you tell them I’m gone, they won’t believe it,” replied I.

“We can look out for that,” said Joe, eager to save me and caring
nothing about consequences to himself. But I had unsettled the
inspector.

“Send for my electric to come down here,” said I. “I’ll go out alone
and get in it and drive away.”

“That’ll never do!” cried Joe.

But the inspector said: “You’re right, Mr. Blacklock. It’s a bare
chance. You may take ’em by surprise. Again, some fellow may yell and
throw a stone, and----” He did not need to finish.

Joe looked wildly at me. “You mustn’t do it, Matt!” he exclaimed.
“You’ll precipitate a riot, Crawford, if you permit this.”

But the inspector was telephoning for my electric. Then he went into
the adjoining room, where he commanded a view of the entrance. Silence
between Joe and me until he returned. “The electric is coming down the
street,” said he.

I rose. “Good,” said I. “I’m ready.”

“Wait until the other police get here,” advised Crawford.

“If the mob is in the temper you describe,” said I, “the less that’s
done to irritate it, the better. I must go out as if I hadn’t a
suspicion of danger.”

The inspector eyed me with an expression that was highly flattering to
my vanity.

“I’ll go with you,” said Joe, starting up from his stupor.

“No,” I replied. “You and the other fellows can take the underground
route, if it’s necessary.”

“It won’t be necessary,” put in the inspector. “As soon as I’m rid of
you and have my additional force, I’ll clear the streets.” He went to
the door. “Wait, Mr. Blacklock, until I’ve had time to get out to my
men.”

Perhaps ten seconds after he disappeared, I, without further words, put
on my hat, lit a cigar, shook Joe’s wet, trembling hand, left in it my
private keys and the memorandum of the combination of my private vault.
Then I sallied forth.

I had always had a ravenous appetite for excitement, and I had been in
many a tight place; but for the first time in my life I had a sense of
equilibrium between my internal energy and the outside situation. As I
stepped from my street door and glanced about me, I had no feeling of
danger. The whole situation seemed so simple. There stood the electric,
just across the narrow stretch of sidewalk; there were the two hundred
police, under Crawford’s orders, scattered everywhere through the
crowd, and good-naturedly jostling and pushing to create distraction.
Without haste, I got into my machine. I calmly met the gaze of those
thousands, quiet as so many barrels of gunpowder before the explosion.
The chauffeur turned the machine.

“Go slow,” I called to him. “You might hurt somebody.”

But he had his orders from the inspector. He suddenly darted ahead
at full speed. The mob scattered in every direction, and we were in
Broadway, bound up town full-tilt, before I or the mob realized what he
was about.

I called to him to slow down. He paid not the slightest attention. I
leaned from the window and looked up at him. It was not my chauffeur;
it was a man who had the unmistakable but indescribable marks of the
plainclothes policeman. “Where are you going?” I shouted.

“You’ll find out when we arrive,” he shouted back, grinning.

I settled myself and waited--what else was there to do? Soon I guessed
we were headed for the pier off which my yacht was anchored. As we
dashed on to it, I saw that it was filled with police, both in uniform
and in plain clothes. I descended. A detective sergeant stepped up
to me. “We are here to help you to your yacht,” he explained. “You
wouldn’t be safe anywhere in New York--no more would the place that
harbored you.”

He had both common sense and force on his side. I got into the launch.
Four detective sergeants accompanied me, and went aboard with me. “Go
ahead,” said one of them to my captain. He looked at me for orders. “We
are in the hands of our guests,” said I. “Let them have their way.”

We steamed down the bay and out to sea.

       *       *       *       *       *

From Maine to Texas the cry rose and swelled: “Blacklock is
responsible! What does it matter whether he lied or told the truth? See
the results of his crusade! He ought to be pilloried! He ought to be
killed! He is the enemy of the human race. He has almost plunged the
whole civilized world into bankruptcy and civil war.” And they turned
eagerly to the very autocrats who had been oppressing and robbing
them. “You have the genius for finance and industry. Save us!”

If you did not know, you could guess how those patriots with the
“genius for finance and industry” responded. When they had done, when
their program was in effect, Langdon, Melville and Updegraff were the
three richest men in the country, and as powerful as Octavius, Anthony
and Lepidus after Philippi. They had saddled upon the reorganized
finance and industry of the nation heavier taxes than ever, and a
vaster and more expensive and more luxurious army of their parasites.
The people had risen for financial and industrial freedom; they had
paid its fearful price; then, in senseless panic and terror, they flung
it away. I have read that one of the inscriptions on Apollo’s temple
at Delphi was, “Man, the fool of the farce.” Truly, the gods must have
created us for their amusement; and when Olympus palls, they ring up
the curtain on some such screaming comedy as was that. It

  “Makes the fancy chuckle, while the heart doth ache.”


XXVI.

My enemies caused it to be widely believed that Wild Week was my
deliberate contrivance for the sole purpose of enriching myself. Thus
they got me a reputation for almost superhuman daring, for Satanic
astuteness at cold-blooded calculation. I do not deserve the admiration
and respect which my success-worshiping fellow-countrymen lay at my
feet. True, I did greatly enrich myself; but _not until the Monday
after Wild Week_.

Not until I had pondered on men and events with the assistance of
the newspapers my detective protectors and jailers permitted to be
brought aboard--not until the last hope of turning Wild Week to the
immediate public advantage had sputtered out like a lost man’s last
match, did I think of benefiting myself, of seizing the opportunity to
strengthen myself for the future. On Monday morning I said to Sergeant
Mulholland: “I want to go ashore and send some telegrams.”

The sergeant is one of the detective bureau’s “dress-suit men.” He is
by nature phlegmatic and cynical. His experience has put over that a
veneer of weary politeness. We had become great friends during our
enforced inseparable companionship. For Joe, who looked on me somewhat
as a mother looks on a brilliant but erratic son, had, as I soon
discovered, elaborated a wonderful program for me. It included a watch
on me day and night, lest, through rage or despondency, I should try
to do violence to myself. A fine character, that Joe! But, to return,
Mulholland answered my request for shore leave with a soothing smile.
“Can’t do it, Mr. Blacklock,” he said. “Our orders are positive. But
when we put in at New London and send ashore for further instructions,
and for the papers, you can send your telegrams.”

“As you please,” said I. And I gave him a cipher telegram to Joe--an
order to invest my store of cash, which meant practically my whole
fortune, in the gilt-edged securities that were to be had for cash at a
small fraction of their actual value.

This on the Monday after Wild Week, please note. I would have helped
the people to deliver themselves from the bondage of the bandits.
They would not have it. I would even have sacrificed my all in
trying to save them in spite of themselves. But what is one sane man
against a stampeded multitude of maniacs? For confirmation of my
disinterestedness, I point to all those weeks and months during which
I waged costly warfare on “The Seven,” who would gladly have given me
more than I now have, could I have been bribed to desist. But when I
was compelled to admit that I had overestimated my fellow-men, that the
people wear the yoke because they have not yet become intelligent and
competent enough to be free, then and not till then did I abandon the
hopeless struggle.

And I did not go over to the bandits; I simply resumed my own
neglected personal affairs and made Wild Week at least a personal
triumph.

There is nothing of the spectacular in my make-up. I have no belief
in the value of martyrs and martyrdom. Causes are not won--and in my
humble opinion never have been won--in the graveyards. Alive and afoot
and armed, and true to my cause, I am the dreaded menace to systematic
and respectable robbery. What possible good could have come of mobs
killing me and the bandits dividing my estate?

But why should I seek to justify myself? I care not a rap for the
opinion of my fellow-men. They sought my life when they should have
been hailing me as a deliverer; now they look up to me because they
falsely believe me guilty of what I regard as an infamy.

My guards expected to be recalled on Tuesday. But Melville heard what
Crawford had done about me, and straightway used his influence to have
me detained until the new grip of the old gang was secure. Saturday
afternoon we put in at Newport for the daily communication with the
shore. When the launch returned, Mulholland brought the papers to me,
lounging aft in a mass of cushions under the awning. “We are going
ashore,” said he. “The order has come.”

I had a sudden sense of loneliness. “I’ll take you down to New York,”
said I. “I must put my guests off where I took them up.”

As we steamed slowly westward I read the papers. The country was
rapidly readjusting itself, was returning to the conditions before the
upheaval. The “financiers”--the same old gang, except for a few of the
weaker brethren ruined and a few strong outsiders who had slipped in
during the confusion--were employing all the old, familiar devices for
deceiving and robbing the people. The upset milking-stool was righted,
and the milker was seated again and busy, the good old cow standing
without so much as shake of horn or switch of tail. “Mulholland,” said
I, “what do you think of this business of living?”

“I’ll tell you, Mr. Blacklock,” said he. “I used to fuss and fret a
good deal about it. But I don’t any more. I’ve got a house up in the
Bronx, and a bit of land round it. And there’s Mrs. Mulholland and
four little Mulhollands and me--that’s my country and my party and my
religion. The rest is off my beat, and I don’t give a damn for it. I
don’t care which fakir gets to be President, or which swindler gets to
be rich. Everything works out somehow, and the best any man can do is
to mind his own business.”

“Mulholland--Mrs. Mulholland--four little Mulhollands,” said I
reflectively. “That’s about as much as one man could attend to
properly. And--you are ‘on the level,’ aren’t you?”

“Some say honesty’s the best policy,” replied he. “Some say it isn’t.
I don’t know, and I don’t care, whether it is or it isn’t. It’s _my_
policy. And we six seem to have got along on it so far.”

I sent my “guests” ashore the next morning. “No, I’ll stay aboard,”
said I to Mulholland, as he stood aside for me to precede him down the
gangway to the launch. I went into the watch pocket of my trousers and
drew out the folded two one-thousand-dollar bills I always carried--it
was a habit formed in my youthful, gambling days. I handed him one of
the bills. He hesitated.

“For the four little Mulhollands,” I urged.

He put it in his pocket. I watched him and his men depart with a heavy
heart. I felt alone, horribly alone, without a tie or an interest. Some
of the morning papers spoke respectfully of me as one of the strong
men who had ridden the flood and had been landed by it on the heights
of wealth and power. Admiration and envy lurked even in sneers at my
“unscrupulous plotting.” Since I had wealth, plenty of wealth, I did
not need character. Of what use was character in such a world except as
a commodity to exchange for wealth?

“Any orders, sir?” interrupted my captain.

I looked round that vast and vivid scene of sea and land activities. I
looked along the city’s titanic sky-line--the mighty fortresses of
trade and commerce piercing the heavens and flinging to the wind their
black banners of defiance. I felt that I was under the walls of hell
itself.

“To get away from this,” replied I to the waiting captain. “Go back
down the Sound--to Dawn Hill.”

Yes, I would go to the peaceful, soothing country, to my dogs and
houses and those faithful servants bound to me by our common love for
the same animals. “Men to cross swords with, to amuse oneself with,”
I mused. “But dogs and horses to live with.” I pictured myself at the
kennels--the joyful uproar the instant instinct warned the dogs of my
coming; how they would leap and bark and tremble in a very ecstasy of
delight as I stood among them; how jealous all the others would be as I
selected one to caress.

“Send her ahead as fast as she’ll go,” I called to the captain.

As the _Albatross_ steamed into the little harbor, I saw Mowbray
Langdon’s _Indolence_ at anchor. I glanced toward Steuben Point--where
his cousins, the Vivians, live--and thought I recognized his launch
at their pier. We saluted the _Indolence_; the _Indolence_ saluted
us. My launch was piped away and took me ashore. I strolled along the
path that wound round the base of the hill toward the kennels. At the
crossing of the path down from the house, I paused and lingered on the
glimpse of one of the corner towers of the great showy palace. I was
muttering something--I listened to myself. It was: “Mulholland, Mrs.
Mulholland and the four little Mulhollands.” And I felt like laughing
aloud, such a joke was it that I should be envying a policeman his
potato patch and his fat wife and his four brats, and that he should be
in a position to pity me.

You may be imagining that, through all, Anita had been dominating my
mind. That is the way it is in the romances; but not in life. No doubt
there are men who brood upon the impossible, and moon and maunder away
their lives over the grave of a dead love; no doubt there are people
who will say that, because I did not shoot Langdon or her or myself,
or fly to a desert, or pose in the crowded places of the world as the
last scene of a tragedy, I therefore cared little about her. I offer
them this suggestion: A man strong enough to give a love worth a
woman’s while is strong enough to live on without her when he finds he
may not live with her.

As I stood there that summer day, looking toward the crest of the
hill, at the mocking mausoleum of my dead dream, I realized what the
incessant battle of the Street had meant to me. “There is peace for
me only in the storm,” said I. “But, thank God, there is peace for me
somewhere.”

Through the foliage I had glimpses of some one coming slowly down the
zigzag path. Presently, at one of the turnings half-way up the hill,
appeared Mowbray Langdon. “What is he doing here?” thought I, scarcely
able to believe my eyes. “Here of all places!” And then I forgot
the strangeness of his being at Dawn Hill in the strangeness of his
expression. For it was apparent, even at the distance which separated
us, that he was suffering from some great and recent blow. He looked
old and haggard; he walked like a man who neither knows nor cares where
he is going.

He had not seen me, and my impulse was to avoid him by continuing on
toward the kennels. I had no especial feeling against him; I had not
lost Anita because she cared for him or he for her, but because she did
not care for me. Simply that to meet would be awkward, disagreeable
for us both. At the slight noise of my movement to go on, he halted,
glanced round eagerly, as if he hoped the sound had been made by some
one he wished to see. His glance fell on me. He stopped short, was for
an instant disconcerted; then his face lighted up with devilish joy.
“You!” he cried. “Just the man!” And he descended more rapidly.

At first I could make nothing of this remark. But as he drew nearer and
nearer, and his ugly mood became more and more apparent, I felt that
he was looking forward to provoking me into giving him a distraction
from whatever was tormenting him. I waited. A few minutes and we were
face to face, I outwardly calm, but my anger slowly lighting up as
he deliberately applied to it the torch of his insolent eyes. He was
wearing his old familiar air of cynical assurance. Evidently, with
his recovered fortune, he had recovered his conviction of his great
superiority to the rest of the human race--the child had climbed back
on the chair that made it tall and had forgotten its tumble. And I was
wondering again that I, so short a time before, had been crude enough
to be fascinated and fooled by those tawdry posings and pretenses. For
the man, as I now saw him, was obviously shallow and vain, a slave to
those poor “man-of-the-world” passions--ostentation, and cynicism,
and skill at vices old as mankind and tedious as a treadmill, the
commonplace routine of the idle and foolish and purposeless. A clever,
handsome fellow, but the more pitiful that he was by nature above the
uses to which he prostituted himself.

He fought hard to keep his eyes steadily on mine; but they would waver
and shift. Not, however, before I had found deep down in them the
beginnings of fear. “You see, you were mistaken,” said I. “You have
nothing to say to me--or I to you.”

He knew I had looked straight to the bottom of his real self, had seen
the coward that is in every man who has been bred to appearances only.
Up rose his vanity, the coward’s substitute for courage. “You think I
am afraid of you?” he sneered, bluffing and blustering like the school
bully.

“I don’t in the least care whether you are or not,” replied I. “What
are you doing here, anyhow?”

It was as if I had thrown off the cover of a furnace. “I came to get
the woman I love,” he cried. “You stole her from me. You tricked me.
But, by God, Blacklock, I’ll never pause until I get her back and
punish you.” He was brave enough now, drunk with the fumes from his
brave words. “All my life,” he raged arrogantly on, “I’ve had whatever
I wanted. I’ve let nothing interfere--nothing and nobody. I’ve been too
forbearing with you--first because I knew she could never care for you,
and then because I rather admired your pluck and impudence. I like to
see fellows kick their way up among us from the common people.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. No doubt the fiend that rose within me,
as from the dead, looked at him from my eyes. He has great physical
strength, but he winced under that weight and grip, and across his face
flitted the terror which must come to any man at first sense of being
in the angry clutch of one stronger than he. I slowly released him--I
had tested and realized my physical superiority; to use it would be
cheap and cowardly. “You can’t provoke me to descend to your level,”
said I, with the easy philosophy of him who clearly has the better of
the argument.

He was shaking from head to foot, not with terror, but with impotent
rage. How much we owe to accident! The mere accident of my physical
superiority had put him at hopeless disadvantage; had made him feel
inferior to me as no victory of mental or moral superiority could
possibly have done. And I myself felt a greater contempt for him
than the discovery of his treachery and his shallowness had together
inspired.

“I shan’t indulge in flapdoodle,” I went on. “I’ll be frank. A year
ago, if any man had faced me with a claim upon a woman who was married
to me, I’d probably have dealt with him as your vanity and what you
call ‘honor’ would force you to try to deal with a similar situation.
But I live to learn, and I’m, fortunately, not afraid to follow a new
light. There is the vanity of so-called honor; there is also the demand
of justice--of fair play. As I have told her, so I now tell you--she
is free to go. But I shall say one thing to you that I did not say to
her. If you do not deal fairly with her, I shall see to it that there
are ten thorns to every rose in that bed of roses on which you lie. You
are contemptible in many ways--perhaps that’s why women like you. But
there must be some good in you, or possibilities of good, or you could
not have won and kept _her_ love.”

He was staring at me with a dazed expression. I rather expected him
to show some of that amused contempt with which men of his sort
always receive a new idea that is beyond the range of their narrow,
conventional minds. For I did not expect him to understand why I was
not only willing, but even eager, to relinquish a woman whom I could
hold only by asserting a property right in her. And I do not think he
did understand me, though his manner changed to a sort of grudging
respect. He was, I believe, about to make some impulsive, generous
speech, when we heard the quick strokes of iron-shod hoofs on the path
from the kennels and the stables--is there any sound more arresting?
Past us at a gallop swept a horse, on his back--Anita. She was not in
riding-habit; the wind fluttered the sleeves of her blouse, blew her
uncovered hair this way and that about her beautiful face. She sped on
toward the landing, though I fancied she had seen us.

Anita at Dawn Hill; Langdon, in a furious temper, descending from the
house toward the landing; Anita presently riding like mad--“to overtake
him,” thought I. And I read confirmation in his triumphant eyes. In
another mood, I suppose my fury would have been beyond my power to
restrain it. Just then--the day grew dark for me, and I wanted to hide
away somewhere. Heartsick, I was ashamed for her, hated myself for
having blundered into surprising her.

She reappeared at the turn round which she had vanished. I now noted
that she was riding without saddle or bridle, with only a halter round
the horse’s neck--then she did see us, had stopped and come back as
soon as she could. She dropped from the horse, looked swiftly at me, at
him, at me again, with intense anxiety. “I saw your yacht in the harbor
only a moment ago,” she said to me. She was almost panting. “I feared
you might meet him. So I came.”

“As you see, he is quite--intact,” said I. “I must ask that you and he
leave the place at once.” And I went rapidly along the path toward the
kennels.

An exclamation from Langdon forced me to turn in spite of myself. He
was half kneeling, was holding her in his arms. At that sight, the
savage in me shook himself free. I dashed toward them with I knew not
what curses bursting from me. Langdon, intent upon her, did not realize
until I sent him reeling backward to the earth and snatched her up.
Her white face, her closed eyes, her limp form made my fury instantly
collapse. In my confusion I thought she was dead. I laid her gently
on the grass and supported her head, so small, so gloriously crowned,
the face so still and sweet and white, like the stainless entrance to
a stainless shrine. How that horrible fear changed my whole way of
looking at her, at him, at her and him, at everything!

Her eyelids were quivering--her eyes were opening--her bosom was rising
and falling slowly as she drew long, uncertain breaths. She shuddered,
sat up, started up. “Go! go!” she cried. “Bring him back! Bring him
back! Bring him----”

There she recognized me. “Oh!” she said, and gave a great sigh of
relief. She leaned against a tree and looked at Langdon. “You are still
here? Then tell him.”

Langdon gazed sullenly at the ground. “I can’t,” he answered. “I don’t
believe it. Besides--he has given you to me. Let us go. Let me take you
to the Vivians’.” He threw out his arms in a wild, passionate gesture;
he was utterly unlike himself. His emotion burst through and shattered
pose and cynicism and hard crust of selfishness like the exploding
powder bursting the shell. “I can’t give you up, Anita!” he exclaimed
desperately. “I can’t! I can’t!”

But her gaze was all this time steadily on me, as if she feared I
would go, should she look away. “I will tell you myself,” she said
rapidly, to me. “We--uncle Howard and I--read in the papers how they
had all turned against you, and he brought me over here. He has been
telegraphing for you. This morning he went to town to search for you.
About an hour ago Langdon came. I refused to see him, as I have ever
since the time I told you about at Alva’s. He persisted, until at last
I had the servant request him to leave the house.”

“But _now_ there’s no longer any reason for your staying, Anita,” he
pleaded. “He has said you are free. Why stay when _you_ would really no
more be here than if you were to go, leaving one of your empty dresses?”

She had not for an instant taken her gaze from me; and so strange were
her eyes, so compelling, that I seemed unable to move or speak. But
now she released me to blaze upon him--and never shall I forget any
detail of her face or voice as she said to him: “That is false, Mowbray
Langdon. I told you the truth when I told you I loved him!”

So violent was her emotion that she had to pause for self-control.
And I? I was overwhelmed, dazed, stunned. When she went on, she was
looking at neither of us. “Yes, I loved him almost from the first--from
the day he came to the box at the races. I was ashamed, poor creature
that my parents had made me! I was ashamed of it. And I tried to hate
him, and thought I did. And when he showed me that he no longer cared,
my pride goaded me into the folly of trying to listen to you. But I
loved him more than ever. And as you and he stand here, I am ashamed
again--ashamed that I was ever so blind and ignorant and prejudiced as
to compare him with”--she looked at Langdon--“with you. Do you believe
me now--now that I humble myself before him in your presence?”

I should have had no heart at all if I had not felt pity for him. His
face was gray, and on it were those signs of age that strong emotion
brings to the surface after forty. “You could have convinced me in no
other way,” he replied, after a silence, and in a voice I should not
have recognized.

Silence again. Presently he raised his head, and with something of his
old cynicism bowed to her. “You have avenged much and many,” said he.
“I have often had a presentiment that my day of wrath would come.” He
lifted his hat, bowed to me without looking at me, and, drawing the
tatters of his pose still further over his wounds, moved away toward
the landing.

I, still in a stupor, watched him until he had disappeared. When I
turned to her, she dropped her eyes. “Uncle Howard will be back this
afternoon,” said she. “If I may, I’ll stay at the house until he comes
to take me.”

A weary, half-suppressed sigh escaped from her. I knew how she must
be reading my silence, but I was still unable to speak. She went to
the horse, browsing near by; she stroked his muzzle. Lingeringly she
twined her fingers in his mane, as if about to spring to his back!
That reminded me of a thousand and one changes in her--little changes,
each a trifle in itself, yet, taken all together, making a complete
transformation.

“Let me help you,” I managed to say. And I bent, and made a step of my
hand.

She touched her fingers to my shoulder, set her narrow, graceful foot
upon my palm. But she did not rise. I glanced up; she was gazing
wistfully down at me. “Women have to learn by experience just as do
men,” said she forlornly. “Yet men will not tolerate it.”

I suppose I must suddenly have looked what I was unable to put into
words--for her eyes grew very wide, and with a cry that was a sigh and
a sob and a laugh and a caress all in one, she slid into my arms and
her face was burning against mine.

“Do you remember the night at the theater,” she murmured, “when your
lips almost touched my neck?--I loved you then--Black Matt!--_Black
Matt!_”

And I found voice; and the horse wandered away.

       *       *       *       *       *

What more?

How Langdon eased his pain and soothed his vanity? Whenever an old
Babylonian nobleman had a misfortune, he used to order all his slaves
to be lashed, that their shrieks and moans might join his in appeasing
the god who was punishing him. Langdon went back to Wall Street, and
for months he made all within his power suffer; in his fury he smashed
fortunes, lowered wages, raised prices, reveled in the blasts of a
storm of impotent curses. But you do not care to hear about that.

As for myself, what could I tell that you do not know or guess? Now
that all men, even the rich, even the parasites of the bandits, groan
under their tyranny and their taxes, is it strange that the resentment
against me has disappeared, that my warnings are remembered, that I am
popular? I might forecast what I purpose to do when the time is ripe.
But I am not given to prophecy. I will only say that I think I shall,
in due season, go into action again--profiting by my experience in the
futility of trying to hasten evolution by revolution. Meanwhile----

As I write, I can look up from the paper, and out upon the lawn, at
a woman--what a woman!--teaching a baby to walk. And, assisting her,
there is a boy, himself not yet an expert at walking. I doubt if you’d
have to glance twice at that boy to know he is my son. Well--I have
borrowed a leaf from Mulholland’s philosophy. I commend it to you.


THE END.

[Illustration]




CONVERSATIONS WITH EGERIA

_Woman’s Trump Card?_

By MRS. WILSON WOODROW

[Illustration]


The senator and Egeria sat in the rich man’s tent--a marble palace by
the sea--and the little nook in the supper room upon which they had
fastened their desire was at last untenanted. Now they slipped into the
recently vacated chairs with a smile of content into each other’s eyes
across the board.

“A moment ago,” said the senator, unfolding his napkin, “we gazed
at those who slowly sipped their coffee and wished that our belief
still held its lost Paradise--Hell--that we might mentally consign
them thither. A moment since we were the people, hungry, clamorous,
watching them ‘spill the bread and spoil the wine.’ In the twinkling
of an eye our attitude changed. We now look with indifferent scorn
upon the waiting mob, and advise them if they have no bread to eat
cake. What a range of experience it gives us! We are one with the labor
agitator elevated to the presidency of a trust. We are the men in the
saddle--after us, the deluge!”

“We are the conquerors, at any rate,” observed Egeria. “Ours is this
delicate _pâté_, this soft, smooth wine. _Vive le_ rich man! May he
entertain oftener! It is unsurpassed.”

“Save by Nature,” returned the senator. “You have failed to notice that
she too entertains to-night. What a fête! The sea dashing the froth of
its ‘night and its might’ against the wall, that arch of honeysuckle,
sweeter than a bank of violets, and yonder pale siren, the moon! Fair
to-night, I drink to you!”

“After all,” mused Egeria, “the high gods bestowed on Nature a woman’s
privilege--the last word. Art may declaim, Science explain, Religion
dogmatize; but Nature has the last word.”

“And the last word, the one word, the eternal word, is ‘beauty,’” he
amended.

Egeria shrugged her shoulders. “A matter of surfaces. The mask nature
wears to hide her hideous processes of decay. As the lovely heroine of
a recent novel says, ‘the beauty that rules the world is lodged in the
epidermis.’”

“A superficial and essentially feminine point of view,” commented the
senator. “Beauty”--with a wave of the hand--“is a matter of the soul.
The skin-deep variety is not worth considering.”

“But most women would pay the price of a pound of radium for that
infinitesimal depth,” she returned, flippantly.

“Your sex is hardly a judge of what constitutes feminine beauty.” There
was condescension in the senator’s tone. “Here, I can prove the point
for you. Grant me your indulgence and I will tell you a little story.”
The senator rather fancied himself as a _raconteur_.

“There was once a woman who was regarded by all the men of her
acquaintance as ugly, stupid and tiresome, and by all the women
who knew her as beautiful, brilliant, fascinating and altogether
delightful. Their different points of view led to so much discussion
and bickering that they finally decided to submit the matter to a
referee, a wise old fellow, who, after a very thorough acquaintance
with the world and its works, had elected to spend the remainder of his
days in seclusion.

“The philosopher kindly consented to decide the matter, and
consequently gave the lady in question due study. Ultimately he
announced his decision.

“‘Both sides are right,’ he said. ‘She is the ugliest, stupidest, most
aggressive creature on earth; but masculine indifference and dislike
have thrown such a halo about her that all women see her as beautiful
and charming.’”

During the recital of this tale, a flush had risen on Egeria’s cheek,
and she tapped her foot with growing impatience upon the floor. Barely
had he finished when she cried, explosively:

“I hate men! Your fable proves nothing but the ineffable conceit of
your sex!”

The senator pursued his advantage. “I saw a similar remark in a book I
was reading the other day”--pleasantly. “‘I hate men,’ said one woman
to another; ‘I wish they were all at the bottom of the sea.’

“‘Then,’ replied the woman to whom she spoke, ‘we would all be
purchasing diving bells.’

“But”--hastily, as Egeria half rose--“you really don’t consider women
judges of what constitutes feminine beauty?”

“The only judges. We are not dazzled, hypnotized, by a mere matter of
exquisite coloring, the fugitive glance of too expressive eyes. We
are able to bring a calm, unbiased scrutiny to bear upon it, to fully
analyze it. _We_ do not confuse beauty with charm.”

“Are the two, then, distinct?” he pondered.

“Are they distinct?” repeated Egeria, scornfully. “Are they distinct?
Some one--a man, of course--has said that if Cleopatra had been without
a front tooth the whole history of the world would have been changed;
and Heine, you remember, when asked about Madame de Staël, remarked
that, had Helen looked so, Troy would not have known a siege. Absurd!
The sirens of this world who have swayed men’s hearts and imaginations
have never been dependent on their front teeth or their back hair. If
Cleopatra had lost a whole row, Antony and every other man who knew her
would have insisted that women in the full possession of their molars
were repulsive.”

“Ah!” cried the senator, triumphantly, “your words justify me. Beauty
is some subtle essence of the soul, as I said.”

A faint, malicious sparkle brightened Egeria’s eyes. “Really, now,
would you call the sirens of this world soulful creatures? They were
and are psychologists, intuitive diviners of a man’s moods, capable of
meeting him on every side of his nature; but----”

“Do you mean,” interrupted the senator, his eyes reflecting the sparkle
of hers, “that their dominion over us is through an intellectual
comprehension of our moods?”

“Good heavens, no!” disclaimed Egeria, in shocked tones. “Who said
anything about the intellectual faculties of woman? I hear enough of
them at my club. What I am trying to get at is that beauty without
charm has always received a very frigid appreciation. Men prate of it,
adore it, yawn, and--leave it. Of the two, they infinitely prefer charm
without beauty. Now, senator, what is it you really admire in women?”

“I will tell you if you tell me first what women really admire in men?”

“Ah!” cried Egeria, with complacency, “there we have the advantage of
you. We show twice the solid, substantial reasons for the faith that
is in us that you do. Woman admires in man masculinity, virility; then
brains, ability, distinction. She may loudly profess her devotion to
‘the carpet knight so trim.’ ‘Such a dear, thoughtful fellow, so sweet
and sympathetic!’ But her secret preference is profoundly for the one
who is ‘in stern fight a warrior grim, in camp a leader sage.’ She has
not altered since the Stone Age, not in the least degree. When she was
dragged by the hair from her accustomed cave to make a happy home in
a new one, do you fancy she gave a thought to the recent companion of
her joys and sorrows who was lying somewhere with his head stove in?
Not she. Her pity was swallowed up in admiration for the victor, who,
lightly ignoring the marks of her teeth and nails, haled her along to
his den. It is to the strong men of this earth that the heart of woman
goes out.

“Printed articles on the home,” she went on, with light derision,
“are always urging husbands to show the same tender attention and
loving courtesies to their wives after marriage as before. In reality,
nothing would so bore a woman. Man is an idealist; woman is intensely
practical. She would infinitely prefer to have him out winning the
bread and butter and jam than sitting at her feet, penning sonnets
to her eyebrow. After an experience of the before-wedded, tender
courtesies, she would exclaim: ‘John, please don’t be such a fool. I am
so sick of this lovey-dovey business, that I would really enjoy a good
beating.’

“You see, she knows instinctively that ‘man’s love is of his life, a
thing apart,’ and that, if he prefers showing her lover-like attentions
to ranging the court, camp, church, the vessel and the mart, she has a
freak on her hands. But how I run on; and you haven’t told me yet what
it is that men admire in women?”

“Beauty,” still insisted the senator, enthusiastically. “Goodness,
truth, constancy, amiability!”

Egeria looked at him with reproach. “Do you really mean it?”--earnestly.

“Of course I do”--surprised at her tone.

“I dare say any man to whom I put the question would answer in the
same way.” Her eyebrows expressed resignation. “Stay, I will phrase it
differently; why do you think you love a particular woman?”

The senator could not resist the opportunity. “Because she is
you!”--gallantly.

“Stop trifling.” Egeria was becoming petulant. “This is a serious
matter. Now, answer properly; why do you think you love a particular
woman?”

“Because”--emphatically--“I imagine her, rightly or wrongly, to be the
possessor of those qualities I have enumerated.”

Egeria sighed. “And you still stick to it?”

“Of course I do,” he responded, with assurance.

She shook her head. “Nonsense! Men are less exacting than you
think--and more. They ask neither beauty nor grace nor unselfishness of
woman; they demand but one thing--you must charm me. For me you must
possess that indefinable quality we call magnetism. Emerson puts it all
in a nutshell, voices the essentially masculine point of view:”

  I hold it of little matter
  Whether your jewel be of pure water--
  A rose diamond, or a white--
  But whether it dazzle me with light.

“But,” combated the senator, “you must admit that Solomon had ample
opportunity to make a study of your sex, and he reserved all his praise
for the good woman, averring that her price was above rubies.”

Egeria’s smile was faintly cynical. “That was in his capacity as
philosopher. As mere man, he gave the rubies and an immortal song to a
Shulamite girl who looked at him with youth in her smile and laughter
in her eyes.”

“A tribute to beauty,” contested the senator.

“Not at all. Because she fascinated him.”

“And the secret of fascination is beauty,” he triumphed.

She refused to admit it. “The secret of fascination lies with the woman
who can convince a man that under no circumstances could she possibly
bore him.”

The senator was still argumentative. “I continue to maintain that
beauty is some subtle essence of the soul.”

“But the last word, the one word, the eternal word,” quoted Egeria,
rising, “is that beauty is----”

“What?” he questioned, eagerly.

“In the eye of the beholder.”




MIS-MATED AMERICANS

_By_ Julien Gordon

(Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger)

[Illustration]


Mr. Henry James is inclined to pity American women, because their
men--husbands and lovers--are not up to their level of fastidious
refinement.

We are inclined to ask Mr. James to what American women he alludes.

Living in a center which makes history, among men of monumental
achievement, of vast intellectual resource, and of comprehensive
judgment, I confess that when I first encountered some of these men
they seemed to me so lacking in the charms of the drawing room that I
asked myself: “How can their women stand them?” When, however, I had
made the acquaintance of some of these women, or ladies, the query in
my soul became: “How can they stand their women?”

Mating and reproduction are largely animal processes, requiring
little play of the imagination. If they did, race suicide would never
have been heard of. The heroine of “The Garden of Allah” pins a pale
Christ over her bed on her wedding night. It has been a late fashion
for English and French writers--Verlaine, Mallock, Oscar Wilde, and
even that rare genius Robert Hichens--to intermingle religion and
spirituality with the sexual instinct. The fact remains that nothing
can be more sane or simple, and it only touches fanatical frenzy in
minds which border hysteria and decadence.

We believe that the average American, being absolutely sane, finds his
mate. He is even persuaded, when she has invested in a diamond brooch
and a brocaded front, that she has become a woman of rare elegance,
belonging to that type which energetic newspaper reporters depict as a
“leader.” The illusion is no doubt calming. Social ambition is salient
among politicians and ambassadors, and a good American who expects
Paradise desires his wife and daughters to be “all right.” He is
quickly and conveniently persuaded that they are. The enormous egotism
of the man of success is large enough to cover, with its gilded wing,
family ramifications in its spasms of self-laudation.

It has become a habit to speak of American women as superior to all
others, and in Europe the legend is beginning to hold. But in what
does this superiority consist? Push, aplomb, finery, what? We cannot
concede that it lies in exceptional accomplishments, or in any rare
degree of scholarship. American women are not often accomplished, are
not frequently even linguists; being usually satisfied with one foreign
tongue, and that a very wretched French. We have few amateur musicians;
and women artists of the force of Janet Scudder or Mrs. Leslie Cotton
can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Our literary women are
not ornamental, and are skillfully excluded from drawing rooms. Our
feminine poets are usually dishevelled. If we throw out a dozen women
in each of our large Eastern cities who have had the advantage of
birth, breeding, position and wealth, the rank and file are like the
rank and file of any other nation--a little brighter, perhaps; keener,
more alert, better groomed, but harder--and often less fascinating. Our
women lack the high vitality and repose of the English--weak nerves
make for fidgetiness--the subtle seduction of the Austrian, the soft
sweetness of the Italian. French women are deteriorating, their present
social upheavals being responsible for this change.

Nevertheless, American girls have married well in Europe; principally
for their ducats, sometimes for their beauty, only very occasionally
for love.

The Latins love readily, particularly when they scent income. The
English, more sincere, play their game openly. They demand “dots” at
the altar, and--get them. However, as I have said, social ambition is
a trait of our new life. It is a wholesome trait and has its use. Only
by contact with a high civilization can a new people become civilized.
Intermarriage is the easiest method.

We are told that American women who have married foreigners adore their
exotic existence and could not be persuaded to return. Is it their
husbands whom they adore? Are all their _ménages_ exceptionally happy?
What they do like is the graceful ease of an existence which appeals to
fancy and a career which women over here do not attain. For, in fact,
American women are overshadowed by their men. _La femme politique_ is
almost, if not quite, unknown in America, as is _la femme artiste_ or
_la femme littéraire_. There are no literary women in the United States
who wield any social power whatsoever. In America talent is rather a
social handicap to a girl or woman, and an escape into a wider field is
tolerated only by our extremely conservative society when balanced by
some peculiar prestige of early environment or personal allurement. We
have no drawing rooms here like that of Madeleine Lemaire, in Paris,
or like that of a certain cosmopolitan, Corinne of Venice, now, alas!
closed forever. In the salons of the artist French woman one encounters
English women of rank, the “little duchesses,” the big ambassadresses,
men of note in every calling, diplomats, statesmen, scientists and
writers.

Our great men have usually married, in their youth, their first love,
and, be it said to their credit, have remained, if not always true to
this village ideal, at least outwardly loyal. They are not ashamed of
past virtue. Their wives, thrown suddenly into a world of which they
know nothing, should surely be excused some solecisms. Occupied in the
cares of rearing children, of providing for large families on small
rations, they have hardly had the leisure to cultivate their minds and
manners. We will not allude to grammar and intonation. It would be too
much to ask!

These women do not demand that a man appeal to the imagination. They
have none. The lover is at once sunk into the father. In fact, they
address their husbands as “father” or “papa”--sometimes, indeed, as
“pa” pronounced paw in moments of caressing emphasis. What would these
women do with a handsome, dashing troubadour, who warbled ditties in
feathered cap and doublet? They do not want a tenor about the house,
they want their bills paid. “Pa” sees to that. She is eminently
practical. Her husband talks little to her of his ambitions, schemes
or success, but he signs the check. That check is the epitome of his
brain’s travail. If in his arid life he sometimes longs for a higher
companionship, and is drawn into the net of some cleverer siren,
his wife remains ignorant of the fact. She is entirely trusting--a
convenient quality and one which men superlatively admire.

No, Mr. James, Americans on the whole are well matched. Look beyond
the few dainty women of fashion who have personally petted you--women
accustomed to the homage of men of the world, and who have danced
at the courts of kings. To these we are willing to add a handful of
brilliant young students who obtain degrees from Vassar, Wellesley,
Smith and Bryn Mawr, are an ornament to the Normal and Barnard College,
and distance male competitors at Cornell University.

May one of these be President some day! We quote the wish of a gallant
member of the Cabinet. We hope that they have low voices, speak
admirable English, and feel sure they never smoke cigarettes and never
say “Damn!”

The camp, however, is very wide. The tents are spread, innumerable,
over the hills and valleys of our fair country. Lift their flapping
curtains, Mr. James. Peep in and you will find content--enough.




[Illustration]

AFTERMATH


  If I should go to you in that old place.
    (God knows, dear heart, we trod it smooth and straight!)
  And lifting up to yours a tear-worn face,
    Should whisper, “Darling, it is not too late,
    For life and love can soon unbar the gate,”
  You would say “No,” e’en though your lips were dumb--
  Fear not: I shall not come.

  If you should gather up the poor, pale shreds
    Of what is left and bring them here to me,
  Saying, “Fate tangled. Let us mend the threads
    And weave a web more beautiful to see,”
    All weeping, I would cry, “It may not be.”
  And I would cast it by with hands all numb--
  Nay, Sweet; you will not come.

  We each have learned the lesson rapt apart,
    The better task Fate set us ere the noon.
  The storms of Life have beat across my heart
    And scourged its madden’d throbbing into tune.
    Who would have looked for moth and rust so soon?
  Nay, Patience, Sweet! God will bend down some day
  And lift your hand to wipe my tears away.

            MARGARET HOUSTON.




THE GOLDEN APPLE

BY AGNES and EGERTON CASTLE

[Illustration]


The orchard was on a hill, the farmhouse lay at the foot. There was a
long field, in spring a palace of cowslips, between the orchard and the
house.

This September dawn Pomona came through it and left a dark track of
green along the dew-bepearled grass. Little swaths of mist hung over
the cowslip field, but up in the orchard the air was already clear. It
was sweet with the scent of the ripe fruit, and the tart, clean autumn
pungency left by the light frost.

Pomona shifted the empty basket that she had borne on her head to the
ground, and began to fill it with rosy-cheeked apples. Some she shook
from the laden boughs, some she picked up from the sward where they had
fallen from the tree; but she chose only the best and ripest.

A shaft of sunlight broke over the purple hills. It shone on her
ruddy hair and on her smooth cheek. She straightened herself to look
out across the valley at the eastern sky; all sights of nature were
beautiful to her and gave her a joy that, yet, she had never learned to
put into words, hardly into thoughts. Now, as she stood gazing, some
one came along the road that skirted the orchard, and, catching sight
of her, halted and became lost in contemplation of her, even as she of
the sunrise pageant.

As evidently as Pomona, in her homespun skirt and bodice, belonged to
the farmhouse, so did he to the great castle near by. The gentleman
had made as careful a toilet for his early walk as if he had been
bound for St. James. His riding coat was of delicate hue, and laces
fluttered at his wrists and throat. His black lovelocks hung carefully
combed on either shoulder from under his beplumed hat. A rapier swung
at his side, and, as he stood, he flicked at it with the glove in
his bare hand. He had a long, pale face and long eyes with drooping
lids and haughty eyebrows; a small upturned mustache gave a tilt of
mockery to the grave lips. He looked very young, and yet so sedate and
self-possessed and scornful that he might have known the emptiness of
the world a hundred years.

Pomona turned with a start, feeling herself watched. She gazed for a
moment in surprise, and a deep blush rose in her cheeks; then, still
staring, she made a slow country courtesy. Off went the befeathered
hat; the gentleman returned her salutation by a profound bow. Then he
leaped the little ditch into the orchard and threaded his way through
the trees toward her. She watched him come; her great eyes were like
the eyes of a deer, as shy, as innocent.

“Good-morrow, sir,” said she with another courtesy, and then corrected
herself quickly--“good-morrow, my lord.” For, if he came from the
castle, he was surely a lord.

“Good-morrow, madam,” returned he, pleasantly. His glance appraised her
with open admiration.

What a glorious creature! What proportions; what amber and red on those
smooth cheeks, what ruddy radiance in that sun-illumined hair! What a
column of a throat, and how white the skin where the coarse kerchief
parted above the laced bodice! What lines of bust and hip, of arm and
wrist; generous but perfect! A goddess! He glanced at the strong,
sunburned hands; they were ringless. Unowned, then, as yet, this superb
nymph.

His long eyes moved at their pleasure; and she stood waiting in repose,
though the color came and went richly on her cheek. Then he bowed
again, the hat clasped to his bosom.

“Thank you,” said he, and replaced his beaver with a turn of the wrist
that set all the gray and white plumes rippling round the crown.

“Sir?” she queried, startled, and on her second thought--“my lord?”

At this he broke into a smile. When he smiled, his haughty face gained
a rare sweetness.

“Thank you for rising thus early, and coming into the orchard, and
standing in the sun rays, and being, my maid, so beautiful. I little
thought to find so fair a vision. ’Twill be a sweet one to carry forth
with me--if it be the last on earth.”

Her wits were never quick to work. She went her country way, as a rule,
as straight and sweetly and unthinkingly as the lilies grow.

To question why a noble visitor at the castle--and a visitor it must
be, since his countenance was unfamiliar--should walk forth at the dawn
and speak as if this morning saunter were to death, never entered her
head.

She stammered: “Oh, sir!” to his compliment, and paused, her lip
quivering over the inarticulate sense of her own awkwardness.

“Have you been gathering apples?” quoth he, still smiling on her.

“Ay, sir,” she said; “to make preserve withal;” and faltered yet again,
“my lord.”

“Ay,” approved he. “It has a fair sound in your mouth. Would I were
your lord! What is your name?”

She told him “Pomona.” Whereat he laughed, and repeated it as if he
liked the sound. Then he looked at the east, and behold, the sun had
risen, a full ball of crimson in a swimming sea of rose. The light
glimmered upon his pale cheek, and on the fine laces of his shirt,
redly, as if with stains of new blood.

“I must hence,” he said, and his voice had a stern, far-away sound.
“Farewell, Pomona; wilt thou not wish me well?”

“My lord?”

“Wilt thou not?”

“Oh, indeed, my lord, I do.” And she was moved, on a sudden, she knew
not why, and the tears gathered like a mist in her eyes. “With all my
heart,” she said.

He made her a final bow, bending till his curls fell over his face.

“I thank you.”

She watched him walk away from her in and out the apple trees with his
careless stride, and leap the little ditch again; and so on down the
road.

And when he was lost to her sight, she still stood looking at the point
where the way dipped and vanished and she had seen the last flutter of
the gray feathers.

After a while she drew a long sigh and passed her hands over her eyes,
as if she were awakening from a dream. Then she began mechanically to
fill her basket once more. All the ruddiness faded from the sky. The
sun swam up into the blue, and a white brilliance laid hold of the dewy
valley. Delicate gossamer threads floated high above the apple trees,
against the vault of ever-deeper blue. Somewhere from the hidden folds
of the land a church bell began to chime. Then all at once Pomona
dropped her basket, and while the apples rolled, yellow, green and red,
in all directions, she set off running in the direction the gentleman
had taken.

Why she ran, she knew not, but something drove her with a mighty
urgency. Her heart beat thickly, and her breath came short, though, as
a rule, there was no maid in the countryside that could run as she did.
When she came to the foot of the hill she paused, and there, by the
bramble brake, where the firwood began, she saw, lying on the lip of
the baby stream, a gauntleted gray glove. She turned into the wood.

The pine needles were soft under her feet. The pine stems grew like the
pillars of a church aisle, and the air was sweeter with their fragrance
than any incense that was ever burned.

And after, but a little way, where the forest aisle widened into a
glade, she came on the grand riding coat tossed in a heap; across it
was flung an empty scabbard. And beyond, outstretched at the foot of a
tree---- Pomona stopped short. Now she knew why she had had to run so
fast!

He lay as if asleep, his head pillowed upon a branching root; but
it was no slumber that held him. His features, whiter than ivory,
were strangely sharpened and aged, blue shadows were about nostrils
and mouth, the parted lips under the mocking mustache were set in a
terrible gravity; they were purple, like dead red roses. Between the
long, half-open lids the eyeballs shone silver. It was not now God’s
lovely sunrise that stained the white cambric of his shirt. From where
it had escaped from his relaxed hand a long, keen-bladed sword gleamed
among the pine needles.

Pomona knelt down. She parted the ruffled shirt with a steady hand; his
heart still beat, but below it was a wound that might well cause death.
She sat back on her heels and thought. She could not leave him to call
for help, for he might die alone; neither could she sit useless beside
him and watch him go. She took her resolution quickly. She rose, then
bending, she braced herself and gathered him into her arms as if he had
been a child. He was no taller than she, and slight and lean of build.
She was used to burdens. But she had not thought to find him so heavy.
She staggered and shifted him for an easier grip; and then, as his
pallid head lay loose and languid against her shoulder, the half-open
eyelids fluttered, the upturned eyes rolled and fixed themselves. He
looked at her; dark, dark as eternity was his gaze. She bent her head,
his lips were moving.

“Pomona!”

It was the merest breath, but she knew it was her name. Nearer she bent
to him; a flicker as of a smile came upon those purple-tinted lips.

“Kiss me, Pomona!”

She kissed him, and thought she drew from his cold mouth the last sigh.
But now she was strong. She could have gone to the end of the earth
with this burden in her arms.

His black hair, dank and all uncurled, fell over her bare arm. With the
movement his wound opened afresh, and as she pressed him against her
she felt his blood soak through her bodice to the skin. Then her soul
yearned over him with an indescribable, inarticulate passion of desire;
to help him, to heal him! If she could have given her blood to him she
would have given it with the joy with which a mother gives life to the
babe at her breast.

Pomona was mistress of herself and of her farm, and lived alone with
her servants. Though she was a firm ruler, these latter considered her
soft on certain points. They had known her, before this, carry home a
calf that had staked itself, a mongrel cur half-drowned. But a murdered
gentleman, that was beyond everything!

“Heavens ha’ mercy, mistress,” cried Sue, rising to the occasion, while
the others gaped, and clapped their hands, and whispered together.
“Shall I fetch old Mall to help you lay him out?”

“Fool,” panted Pomona, “bring me the Nantes brandy!”

       *       *       *       *       *

Earl Blantyre woke from a succession of dreams, in which he had had
most varied and curious experiences; known strange horrors and strange
sweetnesses, flown to more aërial heights than any bird, and sunk to
deeper depths than the sea could hold; fought unending combats and lain
in peace in tender arms.

He woke. His eyelids were heavy. His hand had grown so weighty that
it was as much as he could do to lift it. And yet, as he held it up,
he hardly knew it for his own; ’twas a skeleton thing. There was a
sound in his ears which, dimly he recognized, had woven into most of
his dreams these days, a whirring, soothing sound, like the ceaseless
beating of moth’s wings. As he breathed deeply and with delicious ease,
there was fragrance of herbs in his nostrils. A tag of poetry floated
into his mind--

  I know a bank where the wild thyme blows.

He turned his head and went to sleep again and dreamed not at all.

Pomona lighted the lamp, and, shading it with her hand, came, with soft
tread, into the guest chamber. He was still asleep. She set down the
light, mended the fire with another log, peeped into the pan of broth
simmering on the hob, and then sat to her spinning wheel once more.
Suddenly the wool snapped; she started, to find that he was holding
back the curtain with a finger and thumb, and had turned his head on
the pillow to watch her; his eyes gleamed in the firelight. She rose
and came to him quickly.

“So you were spinning,” he said. His voice was very weak, but how
different from those tones of dreadful clearness, of hoarse muttering,
with which she had been so sadly familiar.

Pomona knelt beside him and put her hand on his forehead, on his wrist.

“Thank God!” she said.

“By all means,” he answered, peering at her amusedly. “Natheless, why?”

“Nay, you must not speak,” she bade him, and rose to pour the soup into
a bowl.

He watched her while she stirred and tasted and added salt. He was
smiling. When she lifted him, pillows and all, propped against her
strong arm, and held the bowl to his lips at a compelling angle, he
laughed outright. It was rather a feeble thing in the way of laughs,
but to Pomona it was as wonderful and beautiful an achievement as a
child’s first word in the mother’s ear.

“Drink,” she said, firmly, while her heart throbbed in joy.

“Now you must sleep,” she added, as she settled him with extraordinary
art. But sleep was far away from those curious wandering eyes.

“Bring the light closer and come to the bed again.”

His voice had gained strength from Pomona’s fine broth, and it rang in
command. Without another word she obeyed him. As she sat down on the
little oaken stool, where he could see her, the light fell on her face,
and from behind her the fire shot ruddily in her crown of hair.

“I remember you now,” said he, lifting himself on his elbow. “You
stood in the sunrise gathering apples for preserve; you are the nymph
of the orchard.”

He fell back, with a sigh of satisfaction. “And your name is Pomona,”
said he.

The girl, her capable, work-marked hands lying folded on her knee, sat
in absolute stillness; but her heart was beating stormily under the
folds of her kerchief.

The sick man’s beard had grown close and fine round chin and cheeks
during these long dreams of his. His hair lay in a mass on one
shoulder; it had been carefully tied back with a riband, and in all
that black setting the pallor of his countenance seemed deathlike. Yet
she knew that he was saved. He lay a while, gazing at the beflowered
ceiling of the great four-post bed, and by and by his voice came
sighing.

“And after that, what hap befell me? Help me to remember.”

“I found you in the wood,” said she, slowly. “You were lying wounded.”

He interrupted her with a sharp cry.

“Enough! I mind me now. Was I alone?”

“Quite alone, my lord.”

“And my sword?”

There was a current of evil eagerness running through the feeble voice.

“Your sword, my lord?”

“Pshaw! was it clean, child? Bore it no sign upon the blade?”

“There was blood on it,” said Pomona, gravely, “to a third of the
length.”

The duelist gave a sigh.

“That is well,” said he, and fell once more into silence, striving to
knit present and past in his mind.

After a while he shifted himself on his pillows so that he again looked
on her.

Then his eyes wandered round the dark paneling, on the polished surface
of which the firelight gleamed like rosy flowers. He touched the coarse
sheet, the patchwork quilt, then lifted the sleeve of the homespun
shirt that covered his thin arm, and gazed inquiringly from it to the
quiet woman.

“How do I come here? Where am I?” queried he, imperiously.

“I brought you; you are in my house,” she answered him.

“You brought me?”

“Ay, my lord.”

“You found me wounded,” he puzzled, drawing his haughty brows together,
“and you brought me here to your house? How?”

“I carried you,” said Pomona.

“You carried me!”

The statement was so amazing and Lord Blantyre’s wits were still so
weakened that he turned giddy and was fain to close his eyes and allow
the old vagueness to cradle him again for a few minutes.

Pomona prayed that he might be sleeping, but as she was stealthily
rising from his bedside he opened his eyes and held her with them.

“You carried me, you brought me to your own house? Why?”

“I wanted to nurse you,” said poor Pomona.

She knew no artifice whereby she could answer, yet conceal the truth.
But it was as if her heart were being torn from her bit by bit.

His eyes, hard and curious, softened; so did the imperious voice.

“How did you keep them out?”

“Keep them out?”

She was beautiful, but she was dull.

“My kinsfolk, from the castle.”

Pomona stood like a child caught in grave fault.

“They do not know,” she answered, at last.

It was his turn to ejaculate in amazement. “Not know!”

“I did not want them,” said she, then, doggedly. “I did not want any
fine ladies about, nor physicians with their lancets. When my father
was cut with the scythe, they sent a leech from the castle, who blooded
him, and he died. I did not want you to die.”

She spoke the last words almost in a whisper, then she waited
breathlessly. There came a low sound from the pillows. His laugh that
had been music to her a minute ago now stabbed her to the heart. She
turned, the blood flashing into her cheeks; yet his face grew quickly
grave; he spoke, his voice was kind.

“Stay. I want to understand. You carried me, all by yourself, from the
wood; is it so?”

“Ay.”

“And no one knows where I am, or that you found me?”

“No. I went down to the wood again and brought back your coat and your
sword and scabbard and your gloves. I forbade my people to speak. None
of the great folk know you are here.”

“And you nursed me?”

“Ay.”

“Was I long ill?”

“Fourteen days.”

“I have been near death, have I not?”

“You have, indeed.”

“And you nursed me!” he repeated again. “How did you learn such
science?”

“My lord, I have loved and cared for the dumb things all my life. There
was the calf that was staked----” She stopped; that laugh was torture.

“Go on, Pomona!”

“I bathed your wound in cold water over and over till the bleeding
stopped, and then, when the fever came, I knew what brew of herbs would
help you. One night I thought that you would die----”

“Go on, Pomona!”

“You could not breathe, no matter how high I laid you on the
pillows----”

“Ay! Why dost thou halt again? What didst thou then?”

“I held you in my arms,” she said. “You seemed to get your breath
better that way, and then you slept at last.”

“While you held me?” he proceeded. “How long did you hold me in your
arms, Pomona?”

“My lord,” she said, “the whole night.”

Upon this he kept silence quite a long time, and she sat down on her
stool again and waited. She had nursed him and saved him, and now he
would soon be well; she ought surely to rejoice, but, she knew not why,
her heart was like lead. Presently he called her; he would be lifted,
shifted, his pillows were hot, his bedclothes pressed on him. As she
bent over him, the fretful expression suddenly was smoothed from his
features.

“I remember now,” he said, with a singular gleam in his eyes. “I
remember, Pomona; you kissed me.”

       *       *       *       *       *

My Lord Blantyre began now to have more consecutive recollections of
that time of dreams; and when the night came he felt mightily injured,
mightily affronted, to find that the shadow of the watcher in the
rushlight against the wall belonged to a bent and aged figure, was a
grotesque profile, instead of the mild gray angel that had soothed him
hitherto. So deep seemed the injury, so cruel the neglect, that the
ill-used patient could not find it in him to consent to sleep, but
tossed till his bed grew unbearable, pettishly refused to drink from
Mall’s withered hand, was quite positive that the pain in his side was
very bad again, and that his angry heart beats were due to fever.

It drew toward midnight. Again Mall brought the cooling drink and
offered it patiently. Like an old owl she stood and blinked. Her
toothless jaws worked.

He made an angry gesture of refusal; the cup was dashed from her hand
and fell clattering on the boards. She cried out in dismay, and he in
fury.

“Out of my sight, you Hecate!”

Then suddenly Pomona stood beside them. So soft her tread that neither
had heard her come.

“Lord, be good to us! The poor gentleman’s mad again,” whimpered Mall,
as she went down on her knees to mop.

Pomona was in a white wrapper, well starched; the wide sleeves spread
out like wings. Her hair hung in one loose plait to her knees.

“You look like a monstrous, beautiful great angel,” cried he. Her hand
was on his pulse. He was as pleased and soothed as a naughty infant
when it is lifted from its cradle and nursed.

She stood, and seemed encircled by the fragrance of the sacrificed cup,
lavender and thyme and other sweet and wholesome herbs.

She thought he wandered, yet his pulse was steadying down under her
finger into a very reasonable pace for a convalescent. She looked down
at him with puzzled eyes.

“What is it, my lord?”

“Prithee,” said he, “though you live so quiet here, my maid, and keep
your secrets so well, you would have known, would you not, had there
been a death at the castle?”

“Surely, my lord,” she said, and bent closer to comfort him. “Nay, it
must be that you have the fever again, I fear. Nay, all is well with
your kinsfolk. Mall, haste thee with another cup of the drink. Is the
wound painful, my good lord, and how goes it with the breathing?”

As he bent he caught her great plait in both his hands and held it so
that she could not straighten herself.

“It would go vastly better,” cried he, “I should breathe with infinite
more ease, my sweet nurse, and forget that I had ever had a gaping
hole to burn the side of me, could you but tell me that there had been
even a trifle of sickness at the house beyond. Come, my sword was red,
you know! It was not red for nothing! Was not Master Leech sent for in
haste to draw more blood? The excellent physician, thou mindest, who
helped thy worthy father so pleasantly from t

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