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The Happy End

by Joseph Hergesheimer · English · Gutenberg #7843 · 451,817 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Happy End

Author: Joseph Hergesheimer


        
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7843]
                Most recently updated: March 12, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY END ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Joshua
Hutchinson, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team








THE HAPPY END

By Joseph Hergesheimer



Books By Joseph Hergesheimer

  The Happy End
  Java Head
  Gold And Iron
  The Three Black Pennys
  Mountain Blood
  The Lay Anthony




THE HAPPY END



DEDICATION


These stories have but one purpose--to give pleasure; and they have been
made into a book at the requests of those I have fortunately pleased. It
is, therefore, to such friends of my writing that they are addressed and
dedicated. However, this is not an effort to avoid my responsibility:
but to whom? Not to critics, not middlemen, nor the Academies of which
I am so reprehensibly ignorant; not, certainly, to my neighbor. They
brought me, in times of varying difficulty, food; and for that excellent
reason I am forced to conclude that, then as now, I am responsible to my
grocer.




CONTENTS

  Lonely Valleys
  The Egyptian Chariot
  The Flower of Spain
  Tol'able David
  Bread
  Rosemary Roselle
  The Thrush in the Hedge




LONELY VALLEYS


The maid, smartly capped in starched ruffled muslin and black, who
admitted them to the somber luxury of the rectory, hesitated in
unconcealed sulky disfavor.

“Doctor Goodlowe has hardly started dinner,” she asserted.

“Just ask him to come out for a little,” the man repeated.

He was past middle age, awkward in harsh ill-fitting and formal clothes
and with a gaunt high-boned countenance and clear blue eyes.

His companion, a wistfully pale girl under an absurd and expensive hat,
laid her hand in an embroidered white silk glove on his arm and said in
a low tone: “We won't bother him, Calvin. There are plenty of ministers
in Washington; or we could come back later.”

“There are, and we could,” he agreed; “but we won't. I'm not going to
wait a minute more for you, Lucy. Not now that you are willing. Why, I
have been waiting half my life already.”

I

A gaunt young man with clear blue eyes sat on the bank of a mountain
road and gazed at the newly-built house opposite. It was the only
dwelling visible. Behind, the range rose in a dark wall against the
evening sky; on either hand the small green valley was lost in a blue
haze of serried peaks. The house was not imposing; in reality small,
but a story and a half, it had a length of three rooms with a kitchen
forming an angle, invisible from where Calvin Stammark sat; an outside
chimney at each end, and a narrow covered portico over the front door.

An expiring clatter of hoofs marked the departure of the neighbor who
had helped Calvin set the last flanged course. It seemed incredible that
it was finished, ready--when the furniture and bright rag carpet had
been placed--for Hannah. “The truck patch will go in there on the
right,” he told himself; “and gradually I'll get the slope cleared out,
corn and buckwheat planted.”

He twisted about, facing the valley. It was deep in grass, watered with
streams like twisting shining ribbons, and held a sleek slow-grazing
herd of cattle.

The care of the latter, a part of Senator Alderwith's wide possessions,
was to form Calvin's main occupation--for the present anyhow. Calvin
Stammark had larger plans for his future with Hannah. Some day he would
own the Alderwith pastures at his back and be grazing his own steers.

His thoughts returned to Hannah, and he rose and proceeded to where
a saddled horse was tied beside the road. He ought to go back to
Greenstream and fix up before seeing her; but with their home all built,
his impatience to be with her was greater than his sense of propriety,
and he put his horse at a sharp canter to the left.

Calvin continued down the valley until the road turned toward the
range and an opening which he followed into a steeper and narrower rift
beyond. Here there were no clearings in the rocky underbrush until he
reached Richmond Braley's land. A long upturning sweep ended at the
house, directly against the base of the mountain; and without decreasing
his gait he passed over the faintly traced way, by the triangular sheep
washing and shearing pen, to the stabling shed.

Hannah's mother was bending fretfully over the kitchen stove, and
Richmond, her father, was drawing off sodden leather boots. He was a
man tall and bowed, stiff but still powerful, with a face masked in an
unkempt tangle of beard.

“H'y, Calvin,” he cried; “you're just here for spoon licking! Lucy was
looking for company.” Mrs. Braley's comment was below her breath, but
it was plainly no corroboration of her husband's assurance. “You'll find
Hannah in the front of the house,” Richmond added. Hannah was sitting on
the stone steps at the side entrance to the parlor. As usual she had
a bright bow in the hair streaming over her back, and her feet were
graceful in slippers with thin black stockings. She kissed him willingly
and studied him with wide-opened hazel-brown eyes. There wasn't another
girl in Greenstream, in Virginia, with Hannah's fetching appearance, he
decided with a glow of adoration. She had a--a sort of beauty entirely
her own; it was not exactly prettiness, but a quality far more
disturbing, something a man could never forget.

“She's done,” he told her abruptly.

“What?” Hannah gazed up at him with a dim sweetness in the gathering
dusk.

“What!” he mocked her. “You ought to be ashamed to ask. Why, the
house--our home. We could move in by a week if we were called to. We can
get married any time.”

She now looked away from him, her face still and dreaming.

“You don't seem overly anxious,” Calvin declared.

“It's just the idea,” she replied. “I never thought of it like this
before--right on a person.” She sighed. “Of course it will be nice,
Calvin.”

He sat below her with an arm across her slim knees. “I'm going to dig
right into the truck patch; there's a parcel of poles cut for the beans.
It won't be much the first year; but wait and we'll show people how to
live.” He repeated his vision in connection with the present Alderwith
holdings.

“I wonder will we ever be rich like the senator?”

“Certainly,” he answered with calm conviction. “A man couldn't be
shiftless with you to do for, Hannah. He'd be obliged to have everything
the best.”

“It'll take a long while though,” she continued.

“We will have to put in some hard licks,” he admitted. “But we are
young; we've got a life to do it in.”

“A man has, but I don't know about girls. It seems like they get old
faster; and then things--silk dresses don't do them any good. How would
ma look in fashionable clothes!”

“You won't have to wait that long,” he assured her. “Your father has
never hurt himself about the place, there's no money in sheep; and as
for Hosmer--you know well as me that he is nothing outside of the bank
and his own comfort. Store clothes is Hosmer all through.”

“I wish you were a little like him there,” Hannah returned.

He admitted that this evening he was more untidy than need be. “I just
couldn't wait to see you,” he declared; “with our place and--and all so
safe and happy.”

II

The Braley table, spread after the Greenstream custom in the kitchen,
was surrounded by Richmond and Calvin--Hosmer had stayed late at the
bank--Hannah and Susan, the eldest of the children, prematurely aged and
wasted by a perpetual cough, while Lucy Braley moved carelessly between
the stove and the table. At rare intervals she was assisted by Hannah,
who bore the heavy dishes in a silent but perceptible air of protest.

Calvin Stammark liked this; it was a part of her superiority to the
other girls of the locality. He made up his mind that she should never
lose her present gentility. Whenever he could afford it Hannah must
have help in the house. No greater elegance was imaginable. Senator
Alderwith, at his dwelling with its broad porch, had two servants--two
servants and a bathtub with hot water running right out of a tap. And he
Calvin Stammark, would have the same, before Hannah and he were too old
to enjoy it.

He had eleven hundred dollars now, after buying the land about
his house. When the right time came he would invest it in more
property--grazing, a few herd of cattle and maybe in timber. Calvin had
innumerable schemes for their betterment and success. To all this the
sheer fact of Hannah was like the haunting refrain of a song. She was
never really out of his planning. He might be sitting on his rooftree
squaring the shingling; bargaining with Eli Goss, the stone-cutter;
renewing the rock salt for Alderwith's steers; but running through every
occupation was the memory of Hannah's pale distracting face, the scarlet
thread of the lips she was continually biting, her slender solid body.

He had heard that her mother was like that when she was young; but
looking at Mrs. Braley's spent being, hearing her thin complaining
voice, it seemed impossible. People who had known her in her youth
asserted that it was so. Phebe too, they said, was the same--Phebe who
had left Greenstream nine years ago, when she was seventeen, to become
an actress in the great cities beyond the mountains. This might or
might not be a fact. Calvin always doubted that any one else could have
Hannah's charm.

However, he had never seen Phebe; he had moved from a distant part of
the county to the principal Greenstream settlement after she had gone.
But the legend of Phebe's beauty and talent was a part of the Braley
household. Mrs. Braley told it as a distinguished trait that Phebe would
never set her hand in hot dishwater. Calvin noted that Hannah was often
blamed for domestic negligence, but this and far more advanced conduct
in Phebe was surrounded by a halo of superiority.

After supper, in view of the fact of their courtship, Calvin and Hannah
were permitted to sit undisturbed in the formality of the parlor. The
rest of the family congregated with complete normality in the kitchen.
The parlor was an uncomfortable chamber with uncomfortable elaborate
chairs in orange plush upholstery, a narrow sofa, an organ of highly
varnished lightwood ornamented with scrolled fretwork, and a cannon
stove with polished brass spires.

Calvin sat on the sofa with an arm about Hannah's waist, while she
twisted round her finger the ring he had given her, a ring of warranted
gold clasping a large red stone. Her throat was circled by a silver
chain supporting a mounted polished Scotch pebble, his gift as well.
Their position was conventional; Calvin's arm was cramped from its
unusual position, he had to brace his feet to keep firm on the slippery
plush, but he was dazed with delight. His heart throbs were evident in
his wrists and throat, while a tenderness of pity actually wet his eyes.
At times he spoke in a hushed voice, phrases meaningless in word but
charged with inarticulate emotion; Hannah replied more coherently; but
for the most they were silent. She accepted the situation with evident
calm as an inevitable part of life. Drawn against him she rested her
head lightly on his shoulder, her gaze speculative and undisturbed.

Once he exclaimed: “I don't believe you love me! I don't believe you're
interested in the things for the kitchen or the bedroom suite I saw in a
catalogue at Priest's store!”

“Don't be silly!” she murmured. “Why shouldn't I be when it's my own,
when it's all I'm going to have.”

He cried bravely. “It's only the beginning! Wait till you see our cattle
herded over the mountain to the railroad; wait till you see a spur come
up the Sugarloaf and haul away our hardwood. Just you wait----”

There was the clip-clip of a horse outside, and the creaking of wheels.

“I believe that's Hosmer.” Hannah rose. “It's funny, too, because he
said he'd have to stay at the hotel to-night, there was so much settling
up at the bank.”

It was, however, Hosmer Braley. He paused at the parlor door, a man in
the vicinity of thirty, fat in body and carefully clad, with a white
starched collar and figured satin tie.

“I didn't want to drive out,” he said, at once bland and aggrieved; “but
it couldn't be helped. Here's a piece of news for all of you--Phebe is
coming home to visit She wrote me to say so, and I only got the letter
this evening. Whatever do you suppose took her?”

Hannah at once flushed with excitement--like, Calvin Stammark thought,
the parlor lamp with the pink shade, turned up suddenly. An instant
vague depression settled over him; Hannah, only the minute before in his
arms, seemed to draw away from him, remote and unconcerned by anything
but Phebe's extraordinary return. Hosmer made it clear that the event
promised nothing but annoyance for him.

“She's coming by to-morrow's stage,” he went on, untouched by the
sensation his information had wrought in the kitchen; “and it's certain
I can't meet her. The bank's sending me into West Virginia about some
securities.”

Richmond Braley, it developed further, was bound to a day's work on the
public roads. They turned to Calvin.

“Take my buggy,” Hosmer offered; “I'll have to go from Durban by rail.”

There was no reason why he shouldn't meet Phebe Braley, Calvin realized.
He lingered, gazing with silent longing at Hannah, but it was evident
that she had no intention of returning to the parlor.

III

Waiting in Hosmer's buggy for the arrival of the Greenstream stage and
Phebe Braley, Calvin was conscious of the persistence of the depression
that had invaded him at the announcement of her visit. He resented,
too, the new element thrust into the Braley household, disrupting the
familiar course of his love. Hannah had been unreasonably distracted by
the actuality of Phebe's return--the Phebe who had gone away from the
mountains and become an actress.

The buggy was drawn to one side of the principal Greenstream road,
at the post-office. Before him the way crossed the valley and lifted
abruptly to the slope of the eastern range. At his back the village--the
brick Methodist church and the white painted Presbyterian church, the
courthouse with its dignified columns, the stores at the corners of the
single crossroads, and varied dwellings--was settling into the elusive
May twilight. The highest peaks in the east were capped with dissolving
rose by the lowering sun, and the sky was a dusty blue.

Calvin Stammark heard the approaching stage before he saw it; then the
long rigid surrey with its spare horses rapidly rolled up over the open
road to the post-office. He got down and moved diffidently forward,
seeing and recognizing Phebe immediately. This was made possible by her
resemblance to Hannah; and yet, Calvin added, no two women could be more
utterly different.

Phebe Braley had a full figure--she was almost stout--a body of the
frankest emphasized curves in a long purple coat with a collar of soiled
white fur. A straw hat with the brim caught by a short purple-dyed
ostrich feather was pinned to a dead-looking crinkled mass of
greenish-gold hair, and her face--the memorable features of Hannah--was
loaded with pink powder.

Calvin said: “You must be Phebe Braley. Well, I'm Calvin Stammark. Your
father or Hosmer couldn't meet the stage and so they had to let me get
you. Where's your bag?”

She adopted at once an air of comfortable familiarity. “I don't remember
your name,” she said, settling beside him in the buggy.

He told her that he had come to this vicinity after she had gone and
that he was about to marry her sister.

“The hell you say!” she replied with cheerful surprise. “Who'd thought
Hannah was old enough to have a fellow!”

They were out of the village now and she produced a paper pack of
cigarettes from a leather hand bag with a florid gilt top. Flooding her
being with smoke she gazed with a shudder at the mountain wall on either
hand, the unbroken greenery sweeping to the sky.

“It's worse than I remembered,” she confided, resting against him. “A
person with any life to them would go dippy here. Say, it's fierce! And
yet, inside of me, I'm kind of glad to see it. I used to dream about the
mountains, and this is like riding in the dream. I'm glad you came for
me and let me down easy into things. I suppose they live in the kitchen
home and pa'd lose a currycomb in his beard. Does Hosmer still beller if
he gets the chicken neck?

“Do you sit in the holy parlor for your courting, and ain't that plush
sofa a God-forsaken perch for two little love birds? It's funny how I
remember this and that. I reckon ma's temper don't improve with age.
They kid me something dreadful about saying 'reckon,' in the talent. But
it's all good and a dam' sight better than 'I guess.' That's all they
get off me.”

Calvin Stammark's vague uneasiness changed to an acute dislike, even a
fear of Phebe. Her freedom of discourse and person, the powdered hard
fare close to his, the reek of scent--all rasped the delicacy of his
love for Hannah. The sisters were utterly different, and yet he
would have realized instantly their relationship. Phebe, too, had the
disturbing quality that made Hannah so appealing. In the former it was
coarsened, almost lost; almost but not quite.

“I'll bet,” she continued, “that I'm the only female prodigal on the
bills. Not that I've been feeding on husks. Not me. Milwaukee lager and
raw beef sandwiches. I have a passion for them after the show. We do
two a day and I want solid refreshment. I wonder if you ever saw me. Of
course you didn't, but you might have. Ned Higmann's Parisian Dainties.
Rose Rayner's what I go by. That's French, but spelled different, and
means brightness. And I'm bright, Casper.

“My, what are you so glum about--the dump you live in or matrimony?
There was a gentleman in an orchestra in Harrisburg wanted to marry
me--he played the oboe--but I declined. Too Bohemian.... This is where
we turn,” she cried instinctively, and they swung into the valley where
the Braleys had their clearing.

Phebe crushed the cigarette in her fingers. Suddenly she was nervous.

“It's natural I have changed a lot,” she said. “If you hear me saying
anything rough pinch me.”

Richmond Braley was standing beside his house in the muddy clothes
in which he had labored on the roads, and Mrs. Braley and Hannah came
eagerly forward. Behind them sounded Susan's racking cough. Sentimental
tears rolled dustily over Phebe's cheeks as she kissed and embraced her
mother and sisters.

“H'y,” Richmond Braley awkwardly saluted her; and “H'y,” she answered in
the local manner.

“Well,” he commented, “you hain't forgotten that anyway.”

Calvin was asked to stay for the supper that had been delayed for
Phebe's return, but when he declined uncertainly he wasn't pressed.
Putting up Hosmer's rig and saddling his own horse he rode slowly and
dejectedly on.

Instead of going directly back to Greenstream he followed the way that
led to his new house. The evening was silvery with a full brilliant
moon, and the fresh paint and bright woodwork were striking against the
dark elevated background of trees. The truck patch would be dug on the
right, the clearing widen rod by rod. From Alderwith's meadows came the
soft blowing of a steer's nostrils, while the persistent piping of the
frogs in the hollows fluctuated in his depressed consciousness.

Calvin had drawn rein and sat on his horse in the road. He was trying to
picture Hannah standing in the door waiting for him, to hear her calling
him from work; but always Phebe intervened with her travesty of Hannah's
clear loveliness.

IV

Again at the Braleys' he found the family--in the kitchen--listening
with absorbed interest to Phebe's stories of life and the stage.
Richmond Braley sat with an undisguised wonderment and frequent
exclamations; there was a faint flush in Mrs. Braley's dun cheeks; Susan
tried without success to strangle her coughing. Only Hosmer was
unmoved; at times he nodded in recognition of the realities of Phebe's
narratives; his attitude was one of complacent understanding.

Calvin, at last succeeding in catching Hannah's attention, made a
suggestive gesture toward the front of the house, but she ignored his
desire. She, more than any of the others, was intent upon Phebe. And he
realized that Phebe paid her a special attention.

“My,” she exclaimed, “the healthy life has put you in the front row. Ned
Higmann would rave about your shape and airs. It's too bad to bury
them here in the mountains. I reckon you love me for that”--she turned
cheerfully to Calvin--“but it's the truth. If you could do anything at
all, Hannah, you'd lead a chorus and go in the olio. And you would draw
at the stage door better than you would on the front. Young and fresh as
a daisy spells champagne and diamond garters. I don't believe they'd let
you stay in burlesque but sign you for comic opera.”

The blood beat angrily in Calvin Stammark's head. Whatever did Phebe
mean by talking like that to Hannah just when she was to marry him!
He cursed silently at Richmond Braley's fatuous face, at Mrs. Braley's
endorsement of all that her eldest daughter related, at Hosmer's
assumption of worldly experience. But Hannah's manner filled him with
apprehension.

“It's according to how you feel,” Phebe continued; “some like to get
up of a black winter morning and fight the kitchen fire. I don't. Some
women are happy handing plates to their husband while he puts down a
square feed. Not in mine.”

“The loneliness is what I hate,” Hannah added.

“It's hell,” the other agreed. “Excuse me, ma.”

Hannah went on: “And you get old without ever seeing things. There
is all that you tell about going on--those crowds and the jewels and
dresses, the parties and elegant times; but there is never a whisper
of it in Greenstream; nothing but the frogs that I could fairly scream
at--and maybe a church social.” As she talked Hannah avoided Celvin
Stammark's gaze.

“Me and you'll have a conversation,” Phebe promised her recklessly.

Choking with rage Calvin rose. “I might as well move along,” he
asserted.

“Don't get heated,” Phebe advised him. “I wouldn't break up your happy
home, only I want Hannah to have an idea of what's what. I don't doubt
you'll get her for a wife.”

“There's nothing but slaving for a woman round here,” Mrs. Braley put
in. “I'm right glad Phebe had so much spirit.”

Richmond Braley evidently thought it was time for certain reservations.
“You mustn't come down so hard on Calvin and me,” he said practically.
“We're both likely young fellows.”

“I'll be here evening after to-morrow,” Calvin told Hannah in a low
voice.

She nodded without interest. They must be married at once, he decided,
his wise horse following unerringly the rocky road, stepping through
splashing dark fords. If there was a repetition of the past visit he
would have something to say. Hannah was his, she was promised to him. He
felt the coolness of her cheeks, her bright mouth against his. A tyranny
of misery and desire flooded him at the sudden danger--it was as much as
that--threatening his happiness and life.

It was a danger founded on his entire ignorance of what he must combat.
He couldn't visualize it, but it never occurred to him that Hannah would
actually go away--leave him and Greenstream. No, it was a quality in
Hannah herself, a thing that had always lurked below the surface, beyond
his knowledge until now. Yet he realized that it formed a part of her
appeal, a part of her distinction over the other girls of the county.

Maybe it was because he was never in his heart absolutely certain of
her--even when she was closest to him she seemed to slip away beyond his
power to follow. His love, he acknowledged for the first time, had never
been easy or contented or happy. It had been obscure, like the night
about him now; it resembled a fire that he held in his bare hands.
Hannah's particularity, too, was allied to this strange newly-awakened
peril. In a manner it was that which had carried Phebe out of the
mountains. Now the resemblance between them was far stronger than their
difference.

There was more than a touch of all this in the girls' mother, in her
bitterness and discontent. He felt that he hated the elder as much as he
did Phebe. If the latter were a man----

He dressed with the greatest care for his next evening with Hannah.
Hosmer wore no stiffer nor whiter collar, and Calvin's necktie was a
pure gay silk. He arrived just as the moon detached itself from the
fringe of mountain peaks and the frogs started insistently. His heart
was heavy but his manner calm, determined, as he entered the Braley
kitchen. No one was there but Susan; soon however, Phebe entered in an
amazing slovenly wrapper with a lace edge turned back from her ample
throat; and Hannah followed.

Phebe made a mocking reference to the sofa in the parlor, and Hannah's
expression was distasteful; but she slowly followed Calvin into the
conventional chamber.

He made no attempt to embrace her, but said instead: “I came to fix the
day for our wedding.”

“Phebe wants me to go with her for a little first,” she replied
indirectly. “She says I can come back whenever I like.”

“Your Phebe has no say in it.” He spoke harshly. “We're honestly
promised to each other and don't need outside advice or interference.”

“Don't you go to call Phebe 'outside,'” she retorted. “She's my sister.
Perhaps it's a good thing she came when she did, and saved me from being
buried. Perhaps I'm not aiming to be married right off.”

V

Hannah was standing, a hand on the table that held the pink-shaded lamp,
and the light showed her petulant and antagonistic. A flare of anger
threatened to shut all else from Calvin's thoughts; but suddenly he was
conscious of the necessity for care--care and patience. He forced back
his justified sense of wrong.

“I wasn't referring direct to Phebe,” he told her. “I meant that between
us nobody else matters, no one in the world is of any importance to
me but you. It's all I think about. When I was building the house, our
house, I hammered you into it with every nail. It is sort of made out of
you,” he foundered; “like--like I am.”

He could see her relenting in the loss of the rigidity of her pose.
Hannah's head drooped and her fingers tapped faintly on the table. He
moved closer, urging his advantage.

“We're all but married, Hannah; our carpet is being wove and that suite
of furniture ordered through Priest. You've been upset by this talk of
theaters and such. You'd get tired of them and that fly-by-night life in
a month.”

“Phebe hasn't.”

“What suits one doesn't suit all,” he said concisely.

“It would suit more girls than you know for,” she informed him. “Take it
round here, there's nothing to do but get married, and all the change
is from one kitchen to another. You don't even have a way to match up
fellows. Soon as you're out of short skirts one of them visits with you
and the rest stay away like you had the smallpox. Our courting lasted a
week and you were here four times.”

“We haven't much time, Hannah,” he reminded her. “It was right hard for
me to see you that often. There was a smart of things you were doing,
too.”

“The more fool!” she exclaimed.

Again his resentment promised to leap beyond control. He clenched his
hands and stared with contracted eyes at the floor.

“Well,” he articulated finally, “we're promised anyhow; that can't be
denied. I have your word.”

“Yes,” she admitted, “but chance that I went with Phebe doesn't mean I'd
never come back.”

“It would mean that you'd never come back,” he paraphrased her.

“Maybe I would know better,” she answered quickly. “I'm sorry, Calvin.
I didn't go to be so sharp. Only I don't know what's right,” she went on
unhappily.

“It isn't what's right,” he corrected her, “but what you want. I wish
Phebe had stayed away a little longer.”

“There you go again at Phebe!” she protested.

He replied grimly; “Not half what I feel.”

In a dangerously calm voice she inquired, “What's the rest then?”

“She's a trouble-maker,” he asserted in a shaking tone over which he
seemed to have no command; “she came back to Greenstream and for no
reason but her own slinked into our happiness. Your whole family--even
Hosmer, pretending to be so wise--are blind as bats. You can't even
see that Phebe's hair is as dyed as her stories. She says she is on the
stage, but it's a pretty stage! I've been to Stanwick and seen those
Parisian Dainties and burlesque shows. They're nothing but a lot of
half-naked women cavorting and singing fast songs. And the show only
begins--with most of them--when the curtain drops. If I even try to
think of you in that I get sick.”

“Go on,” Hannah stammered, scarcely above her breath.

“It's bad,” Calvin Stammark went on. “The women are bad; and a bad woman
is something awful. I know about that too. I've been to the city as
well as Phebe. Oh, Hannah,” he cried, “can't you see, can't you!” With
a violent effort he regained the greater part of his composure. “But it
won't touch you,” he added; “we're going to be married right away.”

“We are?” Hannah echoed him thinly, in bitter mockery. “I wouldn't have
you now if you were the last man on earth with the way you talked about
Phebe! I don't see how you can stand there and look at me. If I told pa
or Hosmer they would shoot you. You might as well know this as well--I'm
going back with her; it'll be some gayer than these lonely old valleys
or your house stuck away all by itself with nothing to see but Senator
Alderwith's steers.”

There flashed into Calvin Stammark's mind the memory of how he had
planned to possess just such cattle for Hannah and himself; he saw in
the elusive lamplight the house he had built for Hannah. His feeling,
that a second before had been so acute, was numb. This, he thought, was
strange; a voice within echoed that he was going to lose her, to lose
Hannah; but he had no faculty capable of understanding such a calamity.

“Why, Hannah,” he said impotently--“Hannah--” His vision blurred so that
he couldn't see her clearly; it was as if, indistinct before him,
she were already fading from his life. “I never went to hurt you,”
 he continued in a curious detachment from his suffering. “You were
everything I had.”

Calvin grew awkward, confused in his mind and gestures. At the same time
Hannah's desirability increased immeasurably. Never in Greenstream or
any place else had he seen another like her; and he was about to lose
her, lose Hannah.

Automatically he repeated, “If Phebe were a man----”

He was powerless not only against exterior circumstance but to combat
what lay with Hannah. Phebe would never set her hands in hot dishwater.
He recalled their mother, fretful and impatient. He shook his head as
if to free his mind from so many vain thoughts. She stood, hard and
unrelenting.

He tried to mutter a phrase about being here if she should return, but
it perished in the conviction of its uselessness. Calvin saw her with
green-yellow hair, a cigarette in painted lips; he heard the blurred
applause of men at the spectacle of Hannah on the stage, dressed like
the women he had seen there. Then pride stiffened him into a semblance
of her own remoteness.

“It's in you,” he said; “and it will have to come out. I'm what I am
too, and that doesn't make it any easier. Kind of a fool about you.
Another girl won't do. I'll say good night.”

He turned and abruptly quitted the room and all his hope.

VI

When the furniture Calvin had ordered through the catalogue at Priest's
store arrived by mountain wagon he placed it in the room beside the
kitchen that was to have been Hannah's and his. Hannah had gone three
weeks before with Phebe. This done he sat for a long while on the
portico of his house, facing the rich bottom pasturage and high verdant
range beyond. It was late afternoon and the rift was filling with a
golden haze from a sun veiled in watery late-spring vapors. An old apple
tree by the road was flushed with pink blossoms and a mocking bird was
whistling with piercing sweetness.

Soon it would be evening and the frogs would begin again, the frogs
and whippoorwills. The valley, just as Hannah had said, was lonely.
He stirred and later found himself some supper--in the kitchen where
everything was new.

On the following morning he left the Greenstream settlement; it
was Friday, and Monday he returned with Ettie, his sister. She was
remarkably like him--tall and angular, with a gaunt face and steady blue
eyes. Older than Calvin, she had settled into a complete acquiescence
with whatever life brought; no more for her than the keeping of her
brother's house. Calvin, noting the efficient manner in which she
ordered their material affairs, wondered at the fact that she had not
been married. Men were unaccountable, but none more than himself, with
his unquenchable longing for Hannah.

This retreated to the back of his being. He never spoke of her. Indeed
he tried to put her from his thoughts, and with a measure of success.
But it never occurred to him to consider any other girl; that
possibility was closed. Those he saw--and they were uniformly kind, even
inviting--were dull after Hannah.

Instead he devoted himself to the equivalent, in his undertakings,
of Ettie's quiet capability. The following year a small number of the
steers grazing beyond the road were his; in two years more Senator
Alderwith died, and there was a division of his estate, in which Calvin
assumed large liabilities, paying them as he had contracted. The timber
in Sugarloaf Valley drew speculators--he sold options and bought a place
in the logging development.

It seemed to him that he grew older, in appearance anyhow, with
exceptional rapidity; his face grew leaner and his beard, which he
continued to shave, was soiled with gray hair.

He avoided the Braleys and their clearing; and when circumstance drew
him into conversation with Richmond or Hosmer he studiously spoke of
indifferent things. He heard nothing of Hannah. Yet he learned in the
various channels of communication common to remote localities that
Richmond Braley was doing badly. Hosmer went to bank in one of the
newly prosperous towns of West Virginia and apparently left all
family obligations behind; Susan died of lung fever; and then, at the
post-office, Calvin was told that Richmond himself was dangerously sick.

He left the mail with Ettie at his door and rode on, turning for the
first time in nine years into the narrow valley of the Braleys' home.
The place had been neglected until it was hardly distinguishable from
the surrounding tangled wild. Such sheep as he saw were in wretched
condition, wild and massed with filth and burrs.

Mrs. Braley was filling a large glass flask with hot water for her
husband; and to Calvin's surprise a child with a quantity of straight
pale-brown hair and wide-opened hazel-brown eyes was seated in the
kitchen watching her.

“How is Richmond?” he asked, his gaze straying involuntarily to the
girl.

“Kingdom Come's how he is,” Lucy Braley replied. “Yes, and the poorhouse
will end us unless Hosmer has a spark of good feeling. I sent him
a postal card to come a long while back, but he hasn't so much as
answered. Here, Lucy”--she turned to the child--“run up with this.”

“Lucy?” Calvin Stammark asked when they were alone.

“Been here two weeks,” Mrs. Braley told him. “What will become of her's
beyond me. She is Hannah's daughter, and Hannah is dead.”

There was a sharp constriction of Calvin's heart. Hannah's daughter, and
Hannah was dead!

“As far as I know,” the other continued in a strained metallic voice,
“the child's got no father you could fix. Her mother wrote the name was
Lucy Vibard, and she'd called her after me. But when I asked her she
didn't seem to know anything about it.

“Hannah was alone and dog poor when she died, that's certain. Like
everything else I can lay mind on she came to a bad end--Lord reckons
where Phebe is. I always thought you were weak fingered to let Hannah
go--with that house built and all. I suppose maybe you weren't, though;
well out of a slack bargain.”

Calvin Stammark scarcely heard her; his being was possessed by the
pitiable image of Hannah dying alone and dog poor. He had always
pictured her--except in the fleet vision of debasement--as young and
graceful and disturbing. Without further speech he left the kitchen and
crossed the house to the shut parlor. It was screened against the day,
dim and musty and damp. The orange plush of the chairs and the narrow
uncomfortable sofa, carefully dusted, was as bright as it had been when
he had last seen it--was it ten years ago?

Here she had stood, her fingers tapping on the table, when he had made
the unfortunate remark about Phebe; the lamplight had illuminated her
right cheek. Here she had proclaimed her impatience with Greenstream,
with its loneliness, her hunger for life. Here he had lost her. A
sudden need to see Hannah's daughter invaded him and he returned to the
kitchen.

The child was present, silent; she had Hannah's eyes, Hannah's hair.
Seated by Richmond Braley's bed he realized instantly that the old man
was dying; and mentally he composed the urgent message to be sent to
Hosmer. But that failed to settle the problem of Lucy's safety--Hannah's
Lucy, who might have been his too. The solution of that difficulty
slowly took form in his thoughts. There was no need to discuss it with
Ettie--his duty, yes, and his desire was clear.

He took her home directly after Richmond's funeral, an erratic wind
blowing her soft loose hair against his face as he drove.

VII

There had been additions to Calvin Stammark's house--the half story
raised, and the length increased by a room. This was now furnished as
the parlor and had an entrance from the porch extended across the face
of the dwelling; the middle lower room was his; the chamber designed
for his married life was a seldom used dining room; while Ettie and Lucy
were above. A number of sheds for stabling and implements, chicken coops
and pig pen had accumulated at the back; the corn and buckwheat climbed
the mountain; and the truck patch was wide and luxuriant.

A narrow strip, bright, in season, with the petunias and cinnamon pinks
which Ettie tended, separated the dwelling from the public road; and
the flowers more than anything else attracted Hannah's daughter. Calvin
talked with her infrequently, but a great deal of his silent attention
was directed at the child.

Already Lucy had a quality of appeal to which he watched Ettie respond.
The latter took a special pride in making Lucy as pretty as possible;
in the afternoon she would dress her in sheer white with a ribbon in
her hair. She spared Lucy many of the details of housework in which the
latter could have easily assisted her; and when Calvin protested she
replied that she was so accustomed to doing that it was easier for her
to go ahead.

Calvin's feelings were mixed. At first he had told himself that Lucy
would be, in a way, his daughter; he would bring her up as his own;
and in the end what he had would be hers, just as it should have been
Hannah's. However, his attitude was never any that might be recognized
as that of parenthood. He never grew completely accustomed to her
presence, she was always a subject of interest and speculation. He
continued to get pleasure from her slender graceful being and the little
airs of delicacy she assumed.

He was conscious, certainly, that Lucy was growing older--yet not so
fast as he--but he had a shock of surprise when she informed him that
she was fifteen. Calvin pinched her cheek, and, sitting on the porch,
heard her within issuing a peremptory direction to Ettie. The elder made
no reply and, he knew, did as Lucy wished. This disturbed him. There
wasn't a finer woman living than Ettie Stammark, and he didn't purpose
to have Lucy impudent to her. Lucy, he decided, was getting a little
beyond them. She was quick at her lessons, the Greenstream teacher said.
Lucy would have considerable property when he died; he'd like her to
have all the advantages possible; and--very suddenly--Calvin decided to
send her away to school, to Stanwick, the small city to and from which
the Greenstream stage drove.

She returned from her first term at Christmas, full of her experiences
with teachers and friends, to which Ettie and he listened with absorbed
attention. Now she seemed farther from him than before; and he saw that
a likeness to Hannah was increasing; not in appearance--though that
was not dissimilar--but in the quality that had established Hannah's
difference from other girls, the quality for which he had never found
a name. The assumptions of Lucy's childhood had become strongly marked
preferences for the flowers of existence, the ease of the portico rather
than the homely labor of the back of the house.

Neither his sister nor he resented this or felt that Lucy was evading
her just duties; rather they enjoyed its difference from their own
practical beings and affairs. They could afford to have her in fresh
laundered frills and they secretly enjoyed the manner in which she
instructed them in social conventions.

At her home-coming for the summer she brought to an end the meals in the
kitchen; but when she left once more for Stanwick and school Ettie and
Calvin without remark drifted back to the comfortable convenience of the
table near the cooking stove.

This period of Lucy's experience at an end she arrived in Greenstream on
a hot still June evening. Neither Calvin nor his sister had been able to
go to Stanwick for the school commencement, and Calvin had been too late
to meet the stage. After the refreshing cold water in the bright tin
basin by the kitchen door he went to his room for a presentable necktie
and handkerchief--Lucy was very severe about the latter--and then walked
into the dining room.

The lamp was not yet lit, the light was elusive, tender, and his heart
contracted violently at the youthful yet mature back toward him. She
turned slowly, a hand resting on the table, and Calvin Stammark's senses
swam. An inner confusion invaded him, pierced by a sharp unutterable
longing.

“Hannah,” he whispered.

She smiled and advanced; but, his heart pounding, Calvin retreated. He
must say something reasonable, tell her that they were glad to have her
back--mustn't leave them again. She kissed him, and, his eyes shut, the
touch of her lips re-created about him the parlor of the Braleys,--the
stiffly arranged furniture with its gay plush, the varnished fretwork of
the organ, the pink glow of the lamp.

She was Hannah! The resemblance was so perfect--her cheek's turn,
her voice, sweet with a trace of petulance, her fingers--that it was
sustained in a flooding illumination through the commonplace revealing
act of supper. It was as if the eighteen years since Hannah, his Hannah,
was a reality were but momentary, the passage of the valley. His love
for her was unchanged--no, here at least, was a difference; it was
greater, keener; exactly as if during the progress of their intimacy he
had been obliged to go away from her for a while.

She accompanied Ettie to the kitchen and Calvin sat on the porch in
a gathering darkness throbbing with frogs and perfumed with drifting
locust blooms. Constellation by constellation the stars glimmered into
being. Hannah, Lucy! They mingled and in his fiber were forever one. He
gave himself up to the beauty of his passion, purified and intense from
long patience and wanting, amazed at the miracle that had brought back
everything infinitely desirable.

He forgot his age, and, preparing for the night, saw with a sense of
personal outrage his seamed countenance reflected in the mirror of the
bureau. Yet in reality he wasn't old--forty-something--still, not fifty.
He was as hard and nearly as springy as a hickory sapling. There was
a saying in which he found vast comfort--the prime, the very prime of
life.

VIII

His enormous difficulty would be to bring Lucy to the understanding
of his new--but it was the old--attitude toward her. If she had never
become completely familiar to him association had made him a solid
recognized part of her existence; if not exactly a father, an uncle at
the very least. Calvin realized that she would be profoundly shocked
by any abrupt revelation of his feeling. Yet he was for the time in no
hurry to bring about the desired change in their relationship. His
life had been so long empty that it was enough to dwell on the great
happiness of his repossession.

This, he knew, could not continue, but at present, today, it was almost
enough. Before he was aware, the summer had gone, the mountains were
sheeted in gold; and he was still dreaming, putting off the actuality
before them.

The logging in Sugarloaf Valley had grown to an operation of importance,
and a great deal of his time was spent watching the spur of railroad
creep forward and the clearing of new sections; sawmills and camps were
in course of erection; and what had been a still green cleft in the
mountains was filled with human activity. He had secured an advantageous
position for a young man from the part of the county inhabited by the
Stammark family, Wilmer Deakon, and consulted with him frequently in
connection with his interests.

Wilmer was to the last degree dependable; a large grave individual who
took a serious interest in the welfare of his fellows and supported
established customs and institutions. He sang in a resounding barytone
with the Methodist Church choir; his dignified bearing gave weight to
the school board; and he accumulated a steadily growing capital at the
Greenstream bank. An admirable individual, Calvin thought, and extended
to him the wide hospitality of his house.

Lucy apparently had little to say to Wilmer Deakon; indeed, when he
was not present, to their great amusement she imitated his deliberate
balanced speech. She said that he was too solemn--an opinion with which
Calvin privately agreed--and made an irreverent play on his name and the
place he should occupy in the church. It seemed that she found a special
pleasure in annoying him; and on an occasion when Calvin had determined
to reprove her for this he was surprised by Winner's request to speak to
him outside.

Wilmer Deakon said abruptly: “Lucy and I are promised to each other.”

Calvin stood gazing at him in a lowering complete surprise, at a loss
for words, when the other continued with an intimation of his peculiar
qualifications for matrimony, the incontrovertible fact that he could
and would take care of Lucy. He stopped at the appropriate moment and
waited confidently for Calvin Stammark's approval.

The latter, out of a gathering immeasurable rage, almost shouted: “You
get to hell off my place!”

Wilmer Deakon was astounded but otherwise unshaken. “That's no way to
answer a decent man and a proper question,” he replied. “Lucy and I want
to be married. There's nothing wrong with that. But you look as if I had
offered to disgrace her. Why, Mr. Stammark, you can't keep her forever.
I reckon it'll be hard on you to have her go, but you must make up your
mind to it some day. She's willing, and you know all about me. Then Lucy
won't be far away from you all. I've cleared the brush up and right now
the bottom of our house is laid in Sugarloaf.”

Calvin's anger sank before a sense of helplessness at this latter fact.
Wilmer was building a house for her just as he had built one for Hannah.
He remembered his delight and pride as it had approached completion; he
remembered the evening, nearly twenty years ago, when he had sat on the
bank across the road and seen it finished. Then he had ridden, without
waiting to fix up, to the Braleys'; Hannah had scolded him as they sat
in the parlor.

“I must talk to Lucy,” he said in a different weary tone. Bareheaded he
walked over into the pasture, now his. The cattle moved vaguely in the
gloom, with softly blowing nostrils, and the streams were like smooth
dark ribbons. When he returned to his house the lights were out, Wilmer
Deakon was gone and Lucy was in bed.

He again examined his countenance in the mirror, but now he was
surprised that it was not haggard with age. It seemed that twenty more
years had been added to him since supper. He wondered whether there had
ever been another man who had lost his love twice and saw that he had
been a blind fool for not speaking in the June dusk when Lucy had come
back from school.

Lucy, it developed, had spoken to Ettie, and there was a general
discussion of her affair at breakfast.

Calvin carried away from it a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction,
but for this he could find no tangible reason. Of course, he silently
argued, the girl could not be expected to show her love for Wilmer
publicly; it was enough that he had been assured of its strength; the
fact of her agreement to marry him was final.

He went about his daily activities with a heavy absent-mindedness, with
a dragging spirit. A man was coming from Washington to see him in the
interest of a new practically permanent fencing, and he met him at
the post-office, listened to a loud cheerful greeting with marked
inattention.

The salesman was named Martin Eckles, and he was fashionably dressed in
a suit of shepherd's check bound with braid, and had a flashing ring--a
broad gold band set with a mystic symbol in rubies and diamonds. After
his supper at the hotel he walked, following Calvin's direction, the
short distance to the latter's house, where Calvin and Ettie Stammark
and Lucy were seated on the porch.

Martin Eckles, it developed, was a fluent and persuasive talker, a man
of the broadest worldly experiences and wit. He was younger than Calvin,
but older than Wilmer Deakon, and a little fat. He had a small mustache
cut above his lip, and closely shaved ruddy cheeks with a tinge of
purple about his ears. Drawing out his monologue entertainingly he gazed
repeatedly at Lucy. Calvin lost the sense of most that the other said;
he was immersed in the past that had been made the present and then
denied to him--it was all before him in the presence of Lucy, of Hannah
come back with the unforgetable and magic danger of her appeal.

IX

In the extension of his commercial activity Martin Eckles kept his
room at the Greenstream hotel and employed a horse and buggy for his
excursions throughout the county. It had become his habit to sit through
the evenings with the Stammarks where his flood of conversation never
lessened. Lucy scarcely added a phrase to the sum of talk. She rocked in
her chair with a slight endless motion, her dreaming gaze fixed on the
dim valley.

Wilmer Deakon, on the occasion of his first encounter with Eckles at the
Stammarks', acknowledged the other's phrase and stood waiting for Lucy
to proceed with him to the parlor. But Lucy was apparently unaware of
this; she sat calm and remote in her crisp white skirts, while Wilmer
fidgeted at the door.

Soon, however, she said: “For goodness' sake, Wilmer, whatever's the
matter with you? Can't you find a chair that suits you? You make a
person nervous.”

At the same time she rose ungraciously and followed him into the house.

Wilmer came out, Calvin thought, in an astonishingly short time.
Courting was nothing like it had been in his day. The young man
muttered an unintelligible sentence that, from its connection, might be
interpreted as a good night, and strode back to the barn and his horse.

Martin Eckles smiled: “The love birds must have been a little ruffled.”

And Calvin, with a strong impression of having heard such a thing
before, was vaguely uneasy. Eckles sat for a long space; Lucy didn't
appear, and at last the visitor rose reluctantly. But Lucy had not gone
to bed; she came out on the porch and dropped with a flounce into a
chair beside Calvin.

“Wilmer's pestering me to get married right away,” she told him; “before
ever the house is built. He seems to think I ought to be just crazy to
take him and go to that lonely Sugarloaf place.”

“It's what you promised for,” Calvin reminded her; “nothing's turned up
you didn't know about.”

“If I did!” she exclaimed irritably. “What else is a girl to do, I'd
like to ask? It's just going from one stove to another, here. Only it'll
be worse in my case--you and Aunt Ettie have been lovely to me. I hate
to cook!” she cried. “And it makes me sick to put my hands in greasy
dishwater! I suppose that's wicked but I can't help it. When I told
Wilmer that to-night he acted like I'd denied communion. I can't help it
if the whippoorwills make me shiver, can I? Or if I want to see a person
go by once in a while. I--I don't want to be bad--or to hurt you or
Wilmer. Oh, I'll settle down, there's nothing else to do; I'll marry him
and get old before my time, like the others.”

Calvin Stammark leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and stared at
her in shocked amazement--Hannah in every accent and feeling. The old
sense of danger and helplessness flooded him. He thought of Phebe with
her dyed hair and cigarette-stained lips, her stories of the stage and
life; he thought of Hannah dying alone and dog poor. Now Lucy----

“Do you remember anything about your mother,” he asked, “and before you
came here?”

“Only that we were dreadfully unhappy,” she replied. “There was a
boarding house with actresses washing their stockings in the rooms and
a landlady they were all afraid of. There was beer in the wash-stand
pitcher. But that wouldn't happen to me,” she asserted; “I'd be
different. I might be an actress, but in dramas where my hair would be
down and everybody love me.”

“You're going to marry Wilmer Deakon and be a proper happy wife!”
 he declared, bringing his fist down on a hard palm. “Get this other
nonsense out of your head!”

Suddenly he was trembling at the old catastrophe reopened by Lucy. His
love for her, and his dread, choked him. She added nothing more, but
sat rigid and pale and rebellious. Before long she went in, but Calvin
stayed facing the darkness, the menace of the lonely valley. Except for
the lumbermen it would be worse in the Sugarloaf cutting.

Damn the frogs!

Martin Eckles appeared in the buggy the following evening and offered
to carry Lucy for a short drive to a near-by farm; with an air of
indifference she accepted. Wilmer didn't call, and Calvin sat in silent
perplexity with Ettie. The buggy returned later than they had allowed,
and Lucy went up to bed without stopping on the porch.

The next morning Ettie, with something in her hand, came out to Calvin
at the stable shed.

“I found this in Lucy's room,” she said simply.

It was Martin Eckles' gold ring, set with the insignia in rubies,
suspended in a loop of ribbon.

A cold angry certitude formed in his being. What a criminal fool he had
been! What a blind booby! His only remark, however, brought a puzzled
expression to Ettie's troubled countenance. Calvin Stammark exclaimed,
“Phebe Braley.” He was silent for a little, his frowning gaze fixed
beyond any visible object, then he added: “Put that back where you found
it and forget everything.”

Ettie laid a hand on his sleeve. “Now, Calvin,” she begged, her voice
low and strained, “promise me----”

“Forget everything!” he repeated harshly.

His face was dark, forbidding, the lines deeply bitten about a somber
mouth, his eyes were like blue ice. He walked into Greenstream, where he
saw the proprietor of the small single hotel; then, back in his room, he
unwrapped from oiled leather a heavy blued revolver; and soon after he
saddled his horse and was clattering in a sharp trot in the opposite
direction from the village.

It was dark when, having returned, he dismounted and swung the saddle
from the horse to its tree. Familiar details kept him a long while, his
hands were steady but slow, automatic in movement. He went in through
the kitchen past Ettie to his room, and after a little he re-wrapped the
revolver and laid it back in its accustomed place. Supper, in spite of
Lucy's sharp comment, was set by the stove, and Ettie was solicitous
of his every possible need. He ate methodically what was offered, and
afterward filled and lit his pipe. It soon went out. Once, on the porch,
he leaned toward Lucy and awkwardly touched her shoulder.

X

Wilmer came. He was late, and Lucy said wearily, “I've got a headache
to-night. Do you mind if we stay out here in the cool?”

He didn't, and his confident familiar planning took the place of Martin
Eckles' more exciting narratives.

The next day, past noon, the proprietor of the Greenstream hotel left
an excited group of men to stop Calvin as he drove in from Sugarloaf
Valley.

He cried: “Eckles has been shot and killed. First they found the horse
and buggy by the road, and then Martin Eckles. He had fallen out. One
bullet did it.”

“That's too bad,” Calvin replied evenly. “Lawlessness ought to be put
down.” He had known Solon Entreken all his life. The level gaze of two
men encountered and held.

Then: “I'll never say anything against that,” the other pronounced.
“It's mighty strange who could have shot Eckles and got clear away.
That's what he did, in spite of hell and the sheriff.”

Turning, after inevitable exclamations, toward home, Calvin found Lucy
sitting moodily on the porch.

“I've got a right ugly piece of news,” he told her, masking the painful
interest with which he followed her expression. “Martin Eckles was
killed yesterday; shot out of the buggy.”

She grew pale, her breast rose in a sudden gasp and her hands were
clenched.

“Oh!” she whispered, horrified.

But there was nothing in her manner beyond the natural detestation of
such brutality; nothing, he saw, hidden.

“He wanted me to go away with him,” she swept on; “and get married in
Stanwick. Martin wanted me to see the world. He said I ought to, and not
stay here all my life.”

The misery that settled over her, the hopelessness dulling her youth
filled him with a passionate resentment at the fate that made her what
she was and seemingly condemned her to eternal denial. His love for
her--Lucy, Hannah, Hannah, Lucy--was intolerably keen. He went to her,
bending with a riven hand on the arm of her chair.

“Do you want Wilmer?” he demanded. “Do you love him truly? Is he
enough?”

“I don't know.” Slow tears wet her cheeks. “I can't say. I ought to;
he's good and faithful, and with some of me that's enough. But there's
another part; I can't explain it except to say it's a kind of excitement
for the life Mr. Eckles told us about, all those lights and restaurants
and theaters. Sometimes I think I'll die, I want it so much; then it
comes over me how ungrateful I am to you and Aunt Ettie, and I hate
myself for the way I treat Wilmer.”

“Do you love him?” he insisted.

“Perhaps not like you mean.”

All that had been so long obscured in his mind and heart slowly cleared
to understanding--Lucy Braley, Richmond's wife; Phebe; Hannah; and again
Lucy, Lucy Vibard had this common hunger for life, for brightness; they
were as helpless in its grasp as he had been to hold Hannah. Phebe's
return, Martin Eckles--were only incidents in a great inner need. In
itself it wasn't wicked; circumstance had made it seem wrong; Phebe's
greenish hair, the mark of so much spoiled, Hannah's unhappy death--were
the result of aspirations; they fretted and bruised, even killed
themselves, like gay young animals, innocent animals, in a dark lonely
enclosure.

They were really finer than the satisfied women who faded to ugliness
in the solitary homes of the Greenstream mountains; not better, for
example, than Ettie--it might be that they weren't so good, not so high
in heaven; but they were finer in the manner of blooded horses rebelling
against the plow traces. They were more elegant, slimmer, with a greater
fire. That too was the secret of their memorable power over him; he
wanted a companion different from a kitchen drudge; when he returned
home at evening, he wanted a wife cool and sweet in crisp white with
a yellow ribbon about her waist, and store slippers. He loved Lucy's
superiority--it was above ordinary things. “Like a star,” Calvin
Stammark told himself.

He, with everything else that had combated their desire, depriving them
of the very necessities for his adoration, had been to blame.

“Lucy,” he said, bending over her and speaking rapidly, “let's you and
me go and learn all this life together. Let's run away from Greenstream
and Wilmer Deakon and even Ettie, what we ought to hold by, and see
every theater in the country. I've got enough money----”

The radiance of the gesture by which she interrupted his speech filled
him with pounding joy.

“Oh, shall we!” she cried; and then hugged him wildly, her warm young
arms about his neck.

“Of course we will,” he reassured her; “and right away, to-morrow. You
and me.”

He felt her lips against his, and then more cautiously she took up the
immediate planning of their purpose. It would be ridiculously easy; they
would drive to Stanwick in the buggy.

“The hotels and all,” she continued with shining eyes; “and nobody will
think it's queer. I'll be your daughter, like always.”

Calvin turned abruptly from her and faced the valley saturated with
slumberous sunlight. Lucy hesitated for a moment and then fled lightly
into the house. After a little he heard her singing on the upper floor.
People wouldn't think it was queer because she would be his daughter,
“like always.”

Yet he wasn't old beyond hope, past love--as strong and nearly as
springy as a hickory sapling. He had waited half his life for this.
Calvin slowly smiled in bitterness and self-contempt; a pretty figure
for a young girl to admire, he thought, losing the sense of mere
physical fitness. Anyhow Lucy was supremely happy and safe, and he
had accomplished it. He was glad that he had been so industrious and
successful. Lucy could have almost anything she wanted--pretty clothes
and rings with real jewels, necklaces hung with better than Scotch
pebbles.

Perhaps when she had seen the world--its bigness and noise and
confusion--after her longing was answered, she would turn back to him.
Already he was oppressed by a feeling of strangeness, of loss at leaving
the high valleys of home.




THE EGYPTIAN CHARIOT


Lemuel Doret walked slowly home from the prayer meeting with his being
vibrating to the triumphant beat of the last hymn. It was a good hymn,
filled with promised joy for every one who conquered sin. The long
twilight of early summer showed the surrounding fields still bright
green, but the more distant hills were vague, the sky was remote and
faintly blue, and shadows thickened under the heavy maples that covered
the single street of Nantbrook. The small frame dwellings of the village
were higher than the precarious sidewalk; flights of steps mounted to
the narrow porches; and though Lemuel Doret realized that his neighbors
were sitting outside he did not look up, and no voices called down
arresting his deliberate progress.

An instant bitterness, tightening his thin metallic lips and narrowing a
cold fixed gaze, destroyed the harmony of the assured salvation. Lemuel
Doret silently cursed the pinched stupidity of the country clods. The
slow helpless fools! If instead of muttering in groups one of the men
would face him with the local hypocrisy he'd sink a heel in his jaw. The
bitterness expanded into a hatred like the gleam on a knife blade;
his hands, spare and hard, grew rigid with the desire to choke a thick
throat.

Then the rage sank before a swift self-horror, an overwhelming
conviction of his relapse into unutterable sin. He stopped and in a
spiritual agony, forgetful of his surroundings, half lifted quivering
arms to the dim sky: “O Christ, lean down from the throne and hold me
steady.”

He stood for a moment while a monotonous chatter on a porch above
dropped to a curious stillness. It seemed to him that his whisper was
heard and immediately answered; anyhow peace slowly enveloped him
once more, the melody of hope was again uppermost in his mind. He went
forward, procuring a cigarette from a mended ragged pocket.

His house, reached by a short steep path and sagging steps, was dark;
at first he saw no one, then the creak of a rocking-chair in the open
doorway indicated Bella, his wife.

“Give me a cigarette,” she demanded, her penetrating voice dissatisfied.

“You know I don't want you to smoke anywhere you can be seen,” he
answered. “Since we've come here to live we have to mind the customs.
The women'll never take to you smoking cigarettes.”

“Ah, hell, what do I care! We came here, but it ain't living. It makes
me sick, and you make me sick I Can't you sing and pray in the city as
well as among these hicks?”

“I'm afraid of it,” he said, brief and somber. “And I don't want
Flavilla brought up with any of the gang we knew. Where is she?”

“I sent her to bed. She fussed round till she got me nervous.”

“Did she feel good?”

“If she didn't a smack would have cured her.”

He passed Bella, rocking sharply, into the dank interior.

On the right was the bare room where he had his dilapidated barber's
chair and shelf with a few mugs, brushes and other scant necessities.
There had been no customers to-day nor yesterday; still, it was the
middle of the week and what trade there was generally concentrated on
Saturday. Beyond he went upstairs to Flavilla's bed. She was awake,
twisting about in a fragmentary nightgown, dark against the disordered
sheet.

“It's dreadful hot,” she complained shortly; “my head's hot too. The
window won't go up.”

Lemuel Doret crossed the narrow bare floor and dragged the sash open;
then he moved his daughter while he smoothed the bed and freshened a
harsh pillow. She whimpered.

“You're too big to cry without any reason,” he informed her, leaving to
fetch a glass of water from the tap in the kitchen.

Usually she responded to his intimations of her increasing age and
wisdom, but to-night she was listless. She turned away from him, her
arms flung above her head and wispy hair veiling her damp cheek.

“Keep still, can't you?” and he gathered her hair into a clumsy plait.

The darkness about him seeped within, into his hope and courage and
resolution; all that he had determined to do seemed impossibly removed.
The whole world resembled Nantbrook--a place of universal condemnation,
forgiving nothing. He felt a certainty that even the few dollars he had
honestly earned would now be stopped.

The air grew clearer and deeper in color, and stars brightened. Lemuel
Doret wondered about God. There was no doubt of His power and glory or
of the final triumph of heaven established and earth, sin, destroyed.
 wickedness was equally plain; it was the ways of the righteous that
bewildered him--the conduct of the righteous and, in the face of his
supreme recognition, the extreme difficulty of providing life for
Flavilla--and Bella.

He consciously added his wife's name. Somehow his daughter was the sole
objective measure of his determination to build up, however late, a home
here and in eternity.

It was not unreasonable, in view of the past, to suppose that he had no
chance of succeeding. Yet religion was explicit upon that particular; it
was founded on the very hopes of sinners, on redemption. But he could do
nothing without an opportunity to make the small living they required;
if the men of Nantbrook, of the world, wouldn't come to him to be
barbered, and if he had no money to go anywhere else to begin again,
he was helpless. Everything was conspiring to thrust him back into the
city, of which he had confessed his fear, back----

He rose and stood above the child's thin exposed body--suddenly frozen
into a deathlike sleep--chilled with a vision, a premonition, the
insidious possibility of surrender. He saw, too, that it was a solitary
struggle; even his devotion to Flavilla, shut in the single space of
his own heart, helped to isolate him in what resembled a surrounding
blackness rent with blinding flashes of lightning.

The morning sun showed him spare, with a curious appearance of being
both wasted and grimly strong; he moved with an alert, a watchful ease,
catlike and silent; and his face was pallid with gray shadows. He stood
in trousers and undershirt, suspenders hanging down, before the small
dim mirror in the room where he had the barber chair, pasting his hair
down with an odorous brilliantine. This was his intention, but he saw
with sharp discomfort that bristling strands defied his every effort.
The hot edge of anger cut at him, but, singing, he dissipated it:

  “_Why should I feel discouraged?
    Why should the shadows fall?
  Why should my heart be lonely,
    And long for heaven_----”

He broke off at the thought of Flavilla, still in bed, her head, if
anything, hotter than last night. Lemuel Doret wished again that he had
not allowed Bella to call their child by that unsanctified name.
Before the birth they had seen a vaudeville, and Bella, fascinated by a
golden-and-white creature playing a white accordion that bore her
name in ornamental letters, had insisted on calling her daughter,
too, Flavilla. In spite of the hymn, dejection fastened on him as he
remembered this and a great deal more about his wife.

If she could only be brought to see the light their marriage and
life might still be crowned with triumph. But Bella, pointing out the
resulting poverty of his own conviction and struggle, said freely that
she had no confidence in promises; she demanded fulfillment now. She
regarded him as more than a little affected in the brain. Yet there had
been no deep change in him--from the very first he had felt a growing
uneasiness at the spectacle of the world and the flesh. The throb of
the Salvation Army drum at the end of an alley, the echo of the fervent
exhortations and holy songs, had always filled him with a surging
emotion like homesickness.

Two impulses, he recognized, held a relentless warfare within him; he
pictured them as Christ and Satan; but the first would overthrow all
else. “Glory!” he cried mechanically aloud. He put down the hairbrush
and inspected the razors on their shelf. The bright morning light
flashed along the rubbed fine blades; they were beautiful, flawless,
without a trace of defilement. He felt the satin smoothness of the steel
with an actual thrill of pleasure; his eyes narrowed until they were
like the glittering points of knives; he held the razor firmly and
easily, with a sinewy poised wrist.

Finally, his suspenders in position over a collarless striped shirt, he
moved out to the bare sharp descent before his house and poured water
onto the roots of a struggling lilac bush. Its leaves were now coated
with dust; but the week before it had borne an actual cluster of scented
blossom; and he was still in the wonder of the lavender fragrance on the
meager starved stem.

The beat of hoofs approached, and he turned, seeing Doctor Frazee in his
yellow cart.

“Oh, doctor!” he called instinctively.

The other stopped, a man with a lean face, heavy curved nose and
penetrating gaze behind large spectacles. He was in reality a
veterinary, but Lemuel Doret, out of a profound caution, had discovered
him to be above the narrow scope of local prejudice.

“I wish you'd look at Flavilla,” Doret continued.

The doctor hesitated, and then turned shortly in at the sidewalk.
“It will hurt no one if I do that.” Above Flavilla's flushed face, a
tentative finger on her wrist, Frazee's expression grew serious. “I'll
tell you this,” he asserted; “she's sick. You had better call Markley
to-day. And until he comes don't give her any solids. You can see she's
in a fever.”

“Can't you tend her? I'd put more on you than any fresh young hospital
stiff.”

“Certainly not,” he responded.

When the latter had gone Lemuel Doret found his wife in the kitchen. She
wore a pale-blue wrapper with a soiled scrap of coarse lace at her full
throat, her hair was gathered into a disorderly knot, and already there
was a dab of paint on either cheek. She had been pretty when he married
her, pretty and full of an engaging sparkle, a ready wit; but the charm
had gone, the wit had hardened into a habit of sarcasm. They had been
married twelve years, and in itself, everything considered, that was
remarkable and held a great deal in her favor. She had been faithful. It
was only lately, in Nantbrook, that her dissatisfaction had materialized
in vague restless hints.

“Frazee says Flavilla is sick,” he told her. “He thinks we ought to get
Markley.”

She made a gesture of skepticism. “All those doctors send you to each
other,” she proclaimed. “Like as not he'll get half for doing it.”

“She don't look right.”

Bella's voice and attitude grew exasperated. “Of course you know all
about children; you've been where you could study on them. And of course
I have no sense; a woman's not the person to say when her child is sick
or well. Have a doctor if you can pay one, and buy a lot of medicine
too. There's some calomel upstairs, but that's no good. I'd like to know
where you have all the money! God knows I need a little, to put inside
me and out.”

“It's right scarce,” he admitted, resolutely ignoring her tone. “Perhaps
Flavilla will be better later in the day; I'll wait.”

He spoke without conviction, denying the impulse to have her cared for
at once, in an effort to content and still Bella. However, he failed in
both of these aims. Her voice swept into a shrill complaint and abuse
of Nantbrook--a place, she asserted, of one dead street, without even a
passing trolley car to watch. She had no intention of being buried here
for the rest of her life. Turning to a cigarette and yesterday's paper
she drooped into a sulky shape of fat and slovenly blue wrapper beside
the neglected dishes of their insufficient breakfast.

He went through the empty house to the front again, where at least the
sun was warm and bright. The air held a faint dry fragrance that came
from the haymaking of the deep country in which Nantbrook lay. Lemuel
Doret could see the hotel at a crossing on the left, a small gray block
of stone with a flat portico, a heavy gilt beer sign and whitewashed
sheds beyond. The barkeeper stood at a door, a huge girth circled by
a soiled apron; nearer a bundle of brooms and glittering stacked paint
cans marked the local store. It was, he was forced to admit, far
from gay; but he found a great contentment in the sunny peace, in the
limitless space of the unenclosed sky; the air, the fields, the birds in
the trees were free.

As he stood frowning in thought he saw the figure of a strange man
walking over the road; Lemuel knew that he was strange by the formality
of the clothes. He wore a hard straw hat, collar and diamond-pinned tie,
and a suit with a waistcoat. At first Doret's interest was perfunctory,
but as the other drew nearer his inspection changed to a painful
absorption. Suddenly his attitude grew tense; he had the appearance of
a man gazing at an enthralling but dangerous spectacle, such--for
example--as a wall that might topple over, crushing anything human
within its sweep.

The object of this scrutiny had a pale countenance with a carefully
clipped mustache, baggy eyes and a blue-shaved heavy jaw. An indefinable
suggestion of haste sat on a progress not unduly hurried. But as he
caught sight of Lemuel Doret he walked more and more slowly, returning
his fixed attention. When the two men were opposite each other, only a
few feet apart, he almost stopped. For a moment their sharpened visions
met, parried, and then the stranger moved on. He made a few steps,
hesitated, then directly returned.

“Come inside,” he said in a slightly hoarse voice.

“It suits me here,” Doret replied.

The other regarded him steadily. “I've made no mistake,” he asserted. “I
could almost say how long you were up for, and a few other little things
too. I don't know what you're doing in this dump, but here we both are.”

He waited for nothing more, ascending quickly to the hall. The two made
their way into the improvised barber shop.

“You've got me wrong,” Doret still insisted.

“Who is it, Lem?” Bella demanded at the door.

As she spoke an expression of geniality overspread her face, daubed with
paint and discontent.

“Why, I'll tell you--I'm June Bowman.”

“That don't mean anything to us,” Lemuel continued. “The best thing you
can do is keep right on going.”

“Not that Fourth Ward stew?” Bella asked eagerly.

He nodded.

“Lem's kind of died on his feet,” she explained in a palpable excuse of
her husband's ignorance; “he don't read the papers nor nothing. But of
course I've heard of you, Mr. Bowman. We're glad to see you.”

“Keep right along,” Lemuel Doret repeated. His face was dark and his
mouth hardly more than a pinched line.

“Now, who are you?” Bowman inquired.

“I'll tell you,” Bella put in, “since his manners have gone with
everything else. This is Snow Doret. If you know the live men that name
will be familiar to you.”

“I seem to remember it,” he admitted.

“If Snow went in the city it's Lemuel here,” Doret told him. His anger
seethed like a kettle beginning to boil.

“Well, if Snow ever went I guess I'm in right. The truth is I got to
lay off for a little, and this seems first-rate. I can explain it in a
couple of words: Things went bad----”

“Wasn't it the election?” Bella asked politely.

“In a way,” he answered with a bow. “You're all right. A certain party,
you see, was making some funny cracks--a reform dope; and he got in
other certain parties' light, see? Word was sent round, and when a
friend and me come on him some talk was passed and this public nuisance
got something. It was all regular and paid for----”

“I read about it,” Bella interrupted. “He died in the ambulance.”

“Then I was slipped the news that they were going to elect me the pretty
boy, and I had to make a break. Only temporary, till things are fixed.
Thus you see me scattered with hayseed. I was walking through for a lift
to Lancaster, where there are some good fellows; but when I saw Snow
here taking the air I knew there was one nearer.”

“Lemuel; and I'm no good fellow.”

“That's the truth,” his wife added thinly. “Here is the only one in this
house.” She touched her abundant self.

“Then I can put up?”

“No,” Lemuel Doret told him. “This is a house of God's.”

Bella laughed in a rising hysterical key.

“Listen to him,” she gasped; “listen to Snow Doret. It's no wonder you
might have forgotten him,” she proclaimed; “he's been in the pen for ten
and a half years with a bunch off for good conduct. But fifteen years
ago--say! He went in for knifing a drug store keeper who held out on a
'coke' deal. If this here's a house of God's I'd like to know what he
called the one he had then. I couldn't tell you half of what went on,
not half, with fixing drinks and frame-ups and skirts. Why, he run a hop
joint with the Chinese and took a noseful of snow at every other breath.
That was after his gambling room broke up--it got too raw even for the
police. It was brandy with him, too, and there ain't a gutter in his
district he didn't lay in. The drug store man wasn't the first he cut
neither.”

She stopped from sheer lack of breath.

Curiously all that filled Lemuel Doret's mind was the thought of the
glory of God. Everything Bella said was true; but in the might of the
Savior it was less than nothing. He had descended into the pit and
brought him, Snow, up, filling his ears with the sweet hymns of
redemption, the promise of Paradise for the thieves and murderers who
acknowledged His splendor and fought His fight. This marvelous charity,
the cleansing hope for his blackened soul, swept over him in a warm rush
of humble praise and unutterable gratitude. Nothing of the Lord's was
lost: “His eye is on the sparrow.”

“Certainly, lay off your coat,” Bella was urging; “it's fierce hot. Lem
can rush a can of beer from the hotel. Even he wouldn't go to turn out
one of the crowd in a hard fix. I'm awful glad you saw him.”

With June Bowman in his house, engaged in verbal agreements with Bella
and spreading comfortably on a chair, Lemuel was powerless. AH his
instinct pressed him to send the other on, to refuse--in the commonest
self-preservation--shelter. But both the laws of his old life and the
commands of the new were against this act of simple precaution. Bowman
eyed him with a shrewd appraisement.

“A clever fellow,” he said, nodding; “admire you for coming out here for
a while. Well, how about the suds?”

He produced a thick roll of yellow-backed currency and detached a small
bill. “I'll finance this campaign.”

Lemuel Doret was confused by the rapidity with which the discredited
past was re-created by Bowman's mere presence. He was at the point of
refusing to fetch the beer when he saw that there was no explanation
possible; they would regard him as merely crabbed, and Bella would
indulge her habit of shrill abuse. It wasn't the drink itself that
disturbed him but the old position of “rushing the can”--a symbol of
so much that he had left forever. Forever; he repeated the word with a
silent bitter force. The feel of the kettle in his hand, the thin
odor of the beer and slopping foam, seemed to him evidences of acute
degeneration; he was oppressed by a mounting dejection. God seemed very
far away.

His wife was talking while Bowman listened with an air of sympathetic
wisdom.

“It wasn't so bad then,” she said; “I was kind of glad to get away, and
Lem was certain everything would open right out. But he's awful hard to
do with; he wouldn't take a dollar from parties who had every right to
stake him good, and borrowed five from no more than a stranger to buy
that secondhand barber chair. What he needed was chloroform to separate
these farmers from their dimes and whiskers.” Bowman laughed loudly, and
a corresponding color invaded Bella. “Of course no one knew Lem had done
time, then. They wouldn't have either, but for the Law and Order. Oh,
dear me, no, your child ain't none of your own; they lend it to you like
and then sneak up whenever the idea takes them, to see if it's getting
a Turkish bath. I guess the people on the street wondered who was our
swell automobile friend till they found out.”

“I suppose,” Bowman put in, “they all came round and offered you the
helping hand, wanted to see you happy and successful.”

She laughed. “Them?” she demanded. “Them? The man that owns this
house said that if he'd known, Lem would never had it; they don't want
convicts in this town. This is a moral burg. That's more than the women
said to me though--the starved buzzards; if they've spoke a word to me
since I never heard it.” Her voice rose in sharp mimicry: “You, Katie,
come right up on the porch, child! Don't you know--! See, I'm going by.”

“I could have warned you of all that,” June Bowman asserted; “for the
reason they're narrow, don't know anything about living or affairs;
hypocritical too; long on churchgoing----”

Doret regarded him solemnly. How blind he was, a mound of corruptible
flesh! He put the beer down and turned abruptly away, going up to
Flavilla. She seemed better; her face was white but most of the fever
had gone. He listened to her harsh breathing with the conviction that
she had caught a cold; and immediately after he was back from the store
with a bottle of cherry pectoral. She liked the sweet taste of the thick
bright-pink sirup and was soon quiet. Lemuel sniffed the mouth of the
bottle suspiciously. It was doped, he finally decided, but not enough
to hurt her; tasting it, a momentary desire for stinging liquor ran like
fire through his nerves. He laughed at it, crushing and throwing aside
the longing with a sense of contempt and triumph.

He could hear occasionally Bowman's smooth periods and his wife's eager
enjoyment of the discourse. His sense of worldly loneliness deepened;
Flavilla seemed far away. All life was inexplicable--yes, and
profitless, ending in weariness and death. The hunger for perfection,
for God, that had been a constant part of his existence, the longing for
peace and security, were almost unbearable. He had had a long struggle;
the devil was deeply rooted in him. He could laugh at the broken tyranny
of drugs and drink, but the passion for fine steel cutting edges
was different, and twisted into every fiber. The rage that even yet
threatened to flood him, sweeping away his painfully erected integrity,
was different too. These things had made him a murderer.

“... not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

He had a sudden muddled vision of another world, a world where sturdy
men gave him their hands and in reality fulfilled June Bowman's mocking
words. There the houses, the streets of his youth would have been
impossible. Ah, he was thinking of another kind of heaven; it was a hop
dream.

There was a stir below and he heard the clatter of plates. Dinner was in
preparation. “Lem!” his wife called. “Mr. Bowman wants you to go to the
butcher's.”

“Call me June,” he put in; adding: “Sure, Lem; the butcher's; we want
a tenderloin, cut thick. You can't get any pep on greens; we ain't
cattle.”

Doret felt that he would have been infinitely happier with his own thin
fare. In a manner he got comfort from a pinch of hunger; somehow the
physical deprivation gave him a sense of purification. The other man,
purple with the meat and beer, shook out a cigarette from a paper pack.

“Always smoke caporal halves,” he proclaimed.

The blue vapor from the three burning cigarettes rose and mingled.
Bella was quiet, reflective; Bowman sat with half-shut speculative eyes;
Lemuel Doret was again lost in visions.

“How long are you taking the milk cure?” Bowman asked.

Lemuel made no reply, but his wife smiled bitterly.

“I had an idea,” the other continued; “but it's a little soon to spring
anything. And I don't know but you might prefer it here.”

“Try me,” Bella proclaimed; “that's all I want!”

Doret still said nothing of his determination to conquer life in
Nantbrook. A swift impulse seized him to take June Bowman by the collar
and fling him into the street.

“Just try me!” Bella repeated.

He would be helpless in his, Doret's, hands. It was hard enough to be
upright without an insinuating crook in the place. There was a heavy
movement of feet in the front of the house, and he went out to meet a
customer.

Sliding the sensitive razor blade over a young tanned cheek he pondered
moodily on the undesirable fact of June Bowman.

Returning from this exercise of his trade he saw Bella descending the
stair with a plate.

“With all your going on over Flavilla,” she told him, “it never came to
you that she'd like a piece of steak.”

“But Doctor Frazee told us nothing solid. I took her up two eggs in the
morning.”

“Yes, and you'd had two dollars to pay as well if I hadn't showed you
different. Flavilla's probably as well as any of us. I wish you would
fix yourself a little, Lem. I'm tired of having you about the house in
your suspenders.”

He viewed her silently. Bella had on a dress he had never seen before,
thin red-spotted yellow silk drawn tightly over a pronounced figure, a
red girdle, and high-heeled patent-leather slippers.

“If you're going to look like this,” he admitted, “I'll have to get a
move on.”

When they were first in Nantbrook she had worn a denim apron, and that,
too, with all the other differences had seemed to express their new
life; but now in yellow silk she was back in the old. Lemuel Doret
studied his wife with secret doubt; more than the dress had changed.
She seemed younger; rather she was adopting a younger manner. In the
presence of June Bowman it intensified.

“That idea I spoke about,” the latter advanced: “I've been sizing
you up, the both of you, and you look good. Well, I've got hold of
a concession on the Atlantic Boardwalk and the necessary cash is in
sight.” He turned to Lemuel. “How would you like to run a bowling game?
It's on the square and would give you a lead into something bigger.
You're wise; why, you might turn into a shore magnate, with Bella here
dressed up in stones.”

Doret shook his head. “Treasure on earth,” he thought; “moth and rust.”
 But it would be hopeless to attempt any explanation. “No,” he said;
“we'll play it out here.”

“We will?” Bella echoed him. “Indeed! We will?” Now the emphasis was
sharply on the first word. “What's going to keep me?”

“You're my wife,” he replied simply; “we have a child.”

“Times have changed, Snow,” Bowman interrupted. “You ought to read the
papers. This is ladies' day. The old harem stuff don't go no longer.
They are emancipated.”

“Lemuel,” Doret insisted, a narrowed hard gaze on the other man; “Lemuel
Doret.”

“He thinks nobody'll remember,” his wife explained. “Lem's redeemed.”

“Your name's what you say,” Bowman agreed, “but remember this--you can't
throw any scare into me. I'm no Fauntleroy, neither. Behave.”

The anger seethed again beneath Lemuel's restraint. It began to be
particular, personal, focused on Bowman; and joined to it was a petty
dislike for the details of the man's appearance, the jaunty bearing and
conspicuous necktie, the gloss of youth over the unmistakable signs of
degeneration, the fatty pouches of his eyes and loose throat.

“I wouldn't bother with scaring you,” he told him. “Why should I? You've
got no kick. I took you in, didn't I? And all I said was my name. Snow
Doret's dead; he died in prison; and this Lemuel's all different----”

“I've heard about that too,” Bowman returned; “but somehow I don't take
stock in these miracles.”

“If you ever see me looking like I might be Snow, go quiet,” Lemuel
advised. “That's all.”

With clenched hands he abruptly departed. The cords of his neck were
swollen and rigid; there was a haze before his eyes. He went up to the
refuge of his daughter's room. She was lying still, breathing thickly,
with a finger print of scarlet on each cheek.

She was so thin, so wasted, the bed and room so stripped of every
comfort, that he dropped forward on his knees, his arms outflung across
her body in an inarticulate prayer for faith, for strength and patience.

It was not much he wanted--only food for one child and help for a woman,
and a grip on the devil tearing at him in the form of hatred.

He got only a temporary relief, for when he went down Bella and June
Bowman were whispering together; he passed the door with his silent
tread and saw their heads close. Bella was actually pretty.

An astonishing possibility occurred to him--perhaps Bella would go away
with Bowman. An unbidden deep relief at such a prospect invaded him; how
happy he could be with Flavilla. They would get a smaller house, which
Flavilla would soon learn to keep for him; they would go to church and
prayer meeting together, her soprano voice and his bass joined in the
praise of the Lord, of the Almighty who raised the dead and his Son, who
took the thief to glory.

This speculation was overcome by a troubled mind; both his innate pride
in his wife as an institution of his honor, the feeling that he would
uphold it at any cost, and his Christianity interrupted the vision of
release. He must not let her stumble, and he would see that June Bowman
didn't interfere in his home. More beer made its appearance, and the
other man grew louder, boastful. He exhibited the roll of money--that
was nothing, four times that much could be had from the same source. He
was a spender, too, and treated all his friends liberally. Lemuel was
to see if there was any wine in the damned jumping-off place; and when
would they all go to Atlantic?

“Never,” Doret repeated.

Bowman laughed skeptically.

The rage stirred and increased, blinding Lemuel Doret's heart, stinging
his eyes. Bella, watching him, became quieter, and she gave June--she
called him June--a warning pressure of her fingers. Her husband saw it
with indifference; everything small was lost in the hot tide enveloping
him. His hands twitched, but there was no other outward sign of his
tumult. He smoked his cigarettes with extreme deliberation.

It was evening again, and they were sitting on the narrow porch. The
west was a serene lake of fading light against which the trees made dark
blots of foliage. Nantbrook seemed unreal, a place of thin shadow, the
future unsubstantial as well; only the past was actual in Lemuel Doret's
mind--the gray cold prison, the city at night, locked rooms filled with
smoke and lurid lights, avaricious voices in the mechanical sentences of
gambling, agonized tones begging for a shot, just a shot, of an addicted
drug, a girl crying.

He tried to sing a measure of praise beneath his breath but the tune and
words evaded him. He glanced furtively at Bowman's complacent bulk, the
flushed face turned fatuously to Bella. Under the other's left arm his
coat was drawn smoothly on a cushion of fat.

Later Lemuel stopped at Flavilla's bed, and though she was composed he
was vaguely alarmed at what seemed to him an unreal rigidity. She was
not asleep, but sunk in a stupor with a glimmer of vision and an elusive
pulse. He should not have listened to Bella but had a doctor as Frazee
had advised. It appeared now that--with all Flavilla held for him--he
had been strangely neglectful. At the same time he was conscious of
the steady increase of his hatred for Bowman. This was natural, he told
himself; Bowman in a way was the past--all that he, Doret, had put out
of his life. At least he had believed that accomplished, yet here it
was back again, alive and threatening; drinking beer in his rooms,
whispering to his wife, putting the thought of Flavilla from his head.

In the morning even Bella admitted that Flavilla might be sick and a
doctor necessary. He took one look at his daughter's burning face, heard
the shrill labor of her breathing, and hurried downstairs with a set
face. He was standing with Bella in the hall when June Bowman descended.

“Flavilla ain't right,” she told him.

The latter promptly exhibited the wad of money. “Whatever you need,” he
said.

“Put it away,” Lemuel replied shortly. “I don't want any of that for
Flavilla.”

Bowman studied him. Doret made no effort to mask his bitterness, and the
other whistled faintly. Bella laughed, turning from her husband.

“He's cracked,” she declared; “you'll get no decency off him. A body
would think I had been in jail and him looking out for her all those ten
years and more. I can say thank you, though; we'll need your help, and
glad.”

“Put it away,” Lemuel Doret repeated. He was more than ever catlike,
alert, bent slightly forward with tense fingers.

Bowman was unperturbed. “I told you about this flash stuff,” he
observed. “Nobody's forcing money on you. Get the bend out of you and
give me a shave. That'll start you on the pills.”

Lemuel Doret mechanically followed him into the rude barber shop; he was
fascinated by the idea of laying the razor across Bowman's throat.
The latter extended himself in the chair and Doret slowly, thoroughly,
covered his lower face with lather, through which the blade drew with a
clean smooth rip. A fever burned in the standing man's brain, he fought
constantly against a stiffening of his employed fingers--a swift turn,
a cutting twist. Subconsciously he called noiselessly upon the God that
had sustained him and, divided between apprehension and the increasing
lust to kill, his lips held the form in which they had pronounced that
impressive name. He had the sensation of battling against a terrific
wind, a remorseless force beating him to submission. His body ached from
the violence of the struggle to keep his hand steadily, evenly, busied,
following in a delicate sweep the cords of June Bowman's neck, the
jugulars.

The other looked up at him and grinned confidently. “Little children,”
 he said, “love one another.”

Lemuel stopped, the razor suspended in air; there was a din in his
ears, his vision blurred, his grip tightened on the bone handle. A sweat
started out on his brow and he found himself dabbing June Bowman's face
with a wet cold towel.

“Witch hazel?” he asked mechanically.

Suddenly he was so tired that his legs seemed incapable of support.
He wiped the razor blade and put it away with a lax nerveless hand.
He realized that he had been again at the point of murder. He had been
saved by the narrowest margin in the world. For a moment the fact that
he had been saved absorbed him, and then the imminent danger of his
position, his weakness, filled him with the sense of failure, a
heavy feeling of hopelessness. His prayers and singing, his plans for
redemption, for a godly life, had threatened to end at the first assault
of evil.

He temporarily overcame his dejection at the memory of Flavilla. Doctor
Markley lived in a larger town than Nantbrook, a dozen miles beyond the
fields and green hills, and he must get him by telephone. Then there was
the problem of payment. The doctor, he knew, would expect his fee, two
dollars, immediately from such an applicant as himself; and he had less
than a dollar. He explained something of this over the wire, adding that
if Markley would see Flavilla at the end of the day the money would be
forthcoming. That, the crisp, disembodied tone replied, was impossible;
he must call in the middle of the morning, but no difficulty would be
made about his bill; Doret could send the amount to him promptly.

He hurried back to the house with this information, and found Bella
seated in the kitchen, the inevitable cigarette throwing up its ribbon
of smoke from her fingers, and June Bowman at her shoulder. Lemuel
ignored the latter.

“The doctor'll be here at about eleven,” he announced. “Mind you listen
to all he says and get Flavilla into a clean nightgown and sheets.”

“What's the matter with your tending to her?” Bella demanded.

“I won't be here; not till night. I'm going to put up hay with one of
the farmers. I hear they're in a hurry and offering good money.”

Bella's expression was strange. She laughed in a forced way.

“We got to hand it to you,” Bowman admitted genially; “you're there. I
guess I'd starve before ever it would come to me to fork hay.”

Lemuel's wife added nothing; her lips twisted into a fixed smile at once
defiant and almost tremulous. Well, he was late now; he couldn't linger
to inquire into Bella's moods. Yet at the door he hesitated again to
impress on her the importance of attending the doctor's every word.

It seemed to him an hour later that he was burning up in a dry
intolerable haze of sun and hay. He awkwardly balanced heavy ragged
forkfuls, heaving them onto the mounting stack of the wagon in a paste
of sweat and dust. His eyes were filmed and his throat dry. He struggled
on in the soft unaccustomed tyranny of the grass, the glare of sun, with
his mind set on the close of day. He thought of cool shadows, of city
streets wet at night, and a swift plunge into a river where it swept
about the thrust of a wharf. He wondered what Doctor Markley would say
about Flavilla; probably the child wasn't seriously sick.

The day drew apparently into a tormenting eternity; the physical effort
he welcomed; it seemed to exhaust that devil in him which had so
nearly betrayed and ruined him forever in the morning; but the shifting
slippery hay, the fiery dust, the incandescent blaze created an inferno
in the midst of which his mind whirled with monotonous giddy images and
half-meaningless phrases spoken and re-spoken. Yet the sun was not, as
he had begun to suppose, still in the sky; it sank toward the horizon,
the violet shadows slipped out from the western hills, and Lemuel
finished his toil in a swimming gold mist. It was two miles to
Nantbrook, and disregarding his aching muscles he hurried over the
gray undulating road. The people of the village were gathered on their
commanding porches, the barkeeper at the hotel bulked in his doorway.
The lower part of Lemuel's own house was closed; no one appeared as he
mounted the insecure steps.

“Bella!” he cried in an overwhelming anxiety before he reached the hall.

There was no reply. He paused inside and called again. His voice echoed
about the bare walls; he heard a dripping from the kitchen sink; nothing
more.

“I'd better go up,” he said aloud with a curious tightening of his
throat. He progressed evenly up the stairs; suddenly a great weight
seemed to bow his shoulders; the illusion was so vivid that he actually
staggered; he was incapable of breaking from his measured progress. He
turned directly into Flavilla's room. She was there--he saw her at
once. But Bella hadn't put a fresh nightgown on her, and the sheets were
disordered and unchanged.

Lemuel took a step forward; then he stopped. “The fever's gone,” he
vainly told the dread freezing about his heart at a stilled white face.

“Yes,” he repeated with numb lips; “it's gone.”

He approached the bed and standing over it and the meager body he cursed
softly and wonderingly. The light was failing and it veiled the sharp
lines of the dead child's countenance. For a moment his gaze strayed
about the room and he felt a swift sorrow at its ugliness. He had wanted
pretty things, pictures and a bright carpet and ribbons, for Flavilla.
Then he was conscious of a tearing rage, but now he was unmindful of it,
impervious to its assault in the fixed necessity of the present.

Later----

He was sitting again on his porch, after the momentary morbid stir of
curiosity and small funeral, when the unrestrained sweep of his own
emotion overcame him. His appearance had not changed; it was impossible
for his expression to become bleaker; but there was a tremendous change
within. Yet it was not strange; rather he had the sensation of returning
to an old familiar condition. There he was at ease; he moved swiftly,
surely forward in the realization of what lay ahead.

Bella and June Bowman had left the house almost directly after him, and
Markley, finding it empty, with no response to his repeated knocking,
had turned away, being as usual both impatient and hurried. Yes, Bella
had gone and left Flavilla without even a glass of water. But Bella
didn't matter. He couldn't understand this--except where he saw at last
that she never had mattered; yet it was so. June Bowman was different.

There was no rush about the latter--to-morrow, next week would do
equally. There was no doubt either. Lemuel Doret gave a passing thought,
like a half-contemptuous gesture of final dismissal, to so much that had
lately occupied him. The shadow of a smile disfigured his metallic lips.

The following noon he shut the door of his house with a sharp impact and
made his way over the single street of Nantbrook toward the city. His
fear of it had vanished; and when he reached the steel-bound towering
masonry, the pouring crowds, he moved directly to a theater from which
an audience composed entirely of men was passing out by the posters of a
hectic burlesque.

“Clegett?” he asked at the grille of the box office.

A small man with a tilted black derby came from the darkened auditorium.

“Where have you been?” he demanded as he caught sight of Lemuel Doret.
“I asked two or three but you might have been dead for all of them.”

“That's just about what I have,” Doret answered. “Mr. Clegett, I'd like
a little money.”

“How little?”

“A hundred would be plenty.”

The other without hesitation produced a fold of currency, from which he
transferred an amount to Lemuel Doret. It went into his pocket without a
glance. He hesitated a moment, then added: “This will be all.”

Clegett nodded. “It might, and it might not,” he asserted; “but you
can't jam me. You're welcome to that, anyhow. It was coming to you. I
wondered when you'd be round.”

It was not far from the theater to a glittering hardware store, a place
that specialized in sporting goods. There were cases of fishing reels,
brilliant tied flies and varnished, gayly wrapped cane rods, gaffs and
coiled wire leaders, and an impressive assortment of modern pistols,
rifles and shotguns.

“Something small and neat,” Doret told the man in charge of the weapons.

He examined a compact automatic pistol, a blunted shape no larger than
his palm. It was a beautiful mechanism, and as with his silken razors,
merely to hold it, to test the smooth action, gave him a sense of
pleasure.

Later, seated in a quiet cafe, an adjunct of the saloon below, he could
not resist the temptation of taking the pistol in its rubber holster
from his pocket, merely to finger the delicate trigger. There was no
hurry. He knew his world thoroughly: it was a small land in which the
inhabitants had constant knowledge of each other. A question in the
right place would bring all the information he needed. Lemuel was
absolutely composed, actually he was a little sleepy; longing and inner
strife, dreams, were at an end; only an old familiar state, a thoroughly
comprehensible purpose remained.

A girl--she could have been no more than fourteen--was hurriedly
slipping a paper of white crystalline powder into a glass of
sarsaparilla. She smiled at him as she saw his indifferent
interrogation.

“It's better rolled with a pencil first,” he said, and then returned to
the contemplation of his own affair.

The result of this was that, soon after, he was seated in the smoking
car of an electric train that, hurtling across a sedgy green expanse of
salt meadow, deposited him in a colorful thronging city built on sand
and the rim of the sea. It was best to avoid if possible even a casual
inquiry, and Bowman had spoken of Atlantic City. The afternoon was
hot and bright, the beach was still dotted with groups of bathers;
and Lemuel Doret found an inconspicuous place in a row of swing chairs
protected by an awning ... where he waited for evening. Below him a
young woman lay contentedly with her head in a youth's lap; a child in a
red scrap of bathing suit dug sturdily with an ineffectual tin spade.

The day declined, the water darkened and the groups vanished from the
beach. An attendant was stacking the swing chairs, and Lemuel Doret
left his place. The boardwalk, elevated above him, was filled with a
gay multitude, subdued by the early twilight and the brightening
lemon-yellow radiance of the strung globes. Drifting, with only his gaze
alert, in the scented mob, he stopped at an unremarkable lunch room
for coffee, and afterward turned down a side avenue to where some
automobiles waited at the curb. A driver moved from his seat as Lemuel
approached, but after a closer inspection the former's interest died.

Doret lighted a cigarette. “How are they hitting you?” he asked
negligently.

“Bad; but the season ain't opened up right yet. It'll have to soon,
though, if they want me; gas has gone to where it's like shoving
champagne into your car.”

“The cafés doing anything?”

“None except the Torquay; but the cabaret they got takes all the
profits. That's on the front. Then there's the World, back of the town.
It's colored, but white go. Quite a place--I saw a sailor come out last
night hashed with a knife.”

He found the Torquay, a place of brilliant illumination and color,
packed with tables about a dancing floor, and small insistent orchestra.
He sat against the wall by the entrance, apparently sunk in apathy, but
his vision searched the crowd like the cutting bar of light thrown on
the intermittent singers. He renewed his order. Toward midnight a fresh
influx of people swept in; his search was unsatisfied.

The cigarette girl, pinkly pretty with an exaggerated figure, carrying a
wooden tray with her wares, stopped at his gesture.

“Why don't you hang that about your neck with something?” he inquired.

“And get round shouldered!” she demanded. Her manner became
confidential. “I do get fierce tired,” she admitted; “nine till
two-thirty.”

He asked for a particular brand of cigarette.

“We haven't got them.” She studied him with a memorizing frown. “They
are hardly ever asked for; and now--yes, there was a man, last night, I
think----”

“He must have made an impression.”

“Another move and I'd slapped him if I lost my job. They got to be some
fresh when they disturb me, too.”

“Alone, then?”

“That's right. Wanted me to meet him, and showed me a roll of money.
Me!” her contempt sharpened.

“He was young?”

“Young nothing, with gray in his shoebrush mustache.”

By such small things, Lemuel Doret reflected, the freshness that had
fixed June Bowman in the girl's memory, men were marked and followed.

“I told him,” she volunteered further, “he didn't belong on the
boardwalk but in the rough joints past the avenue.”

Paying for his drink Doret left the Torquay; and following the slight
pressure of two suggestions and a faint possibility he found himself in
a sodden dark district where a red-glass electric sign proclaimed the
entrance to the World. An automobile stopped and a chattering group of
young colored girls in sheer white with vivid ribbons, accompanied
by sultry silent negroes, preceded him into the café. He was met by a
brassy racket and a curiously musty heavy air.

The room was long and narrow, and on one wall a narrow long platform was
built above the floor for the cabaret. There was a ledge about the other
walls the width of one table, and below that the space was crowded by
a singular assembly. There were women faintly bisque in shade, with
beautiful regular features, and absolute blacks with flattened noses and
glistening eyes in burning red and green muslins. Among them were white
girls with untidy bright-gold hair, veiled gaze and sullen painted
lips; white men sat scattered through the darker throng, men like Lemuel
Doret, quiet and watchful, others laughing carelessly, belligerent, and
still more sunk in a stupor of drink.

Perhaps ten performers occupied the stage, and at one end was the
hysterical scraping on strings, the muffled hammered drums, that
furnished the rhythm for a slow intense waltz.

Yet in no detail was the place so marked as by an indefinable oppressive
atmosphere. The strong musk and edged perfumes, the races, distinct and
subtly antagonistic or mingled and spoiled, the rasping instruments,
combined in an unnatural irritating pressure; they produced an actual
sensation of cold and staleness like that from the air of a vault.

Doret ordered beer in a bottle, and watched the negro waitress snap
off the cap. He had never seen a café such as this before, and he was
engaged, slightly; its character he expressed comprehensively in the
word “bad.”

A wonderfully agile dancer caught the attention of the room.
The musicians added their voices to the jangle, and the minor
half-inarticulate wail, the dull regular thudding of the bass drum were
savage. The song fluctuated and died; the dancer dropped exhausted into
her chair.

Then Lemuel saw June Bowman. He was only a short distance away,
and--without Bella--seated alone but talking to the occupants of the
next table. Lemuel Doret was composed. In his pocket he removed the
automatic pistol from its rubber case. Still there was no hurry--Bowman
was half turned from him, absolutely at his command. The other twisted
about, his glance swept the room, and he recognized Doret. He half
rose from his chair, made a gesture of acknowledgment that died before
Lemuel's stony face, and sank back into his place. Lemuel saw Bowman's
hand slip under his coat, but it came out immediately; the fingers
drummed on the table.

The careless fool--he was unarmed.

There was no hurry; he could make one, two steps at Bowman's slightest
movement.... Lemuel thought of Flavilla deserted, dying alone with
a parched mouth, of all that had gone to wreck in the evil that had
overtaken him--the past that could not, it appeared, be killed. Yet
where Bowman was the past, it was nearly over. He'd finish the beer
before him, that would leave some in the bottle, and then end it.
With the glass poised in his hand he heard an absurd unexpected sound.
Looking up he saw that it came from the platform, from a black woman in
pale-blue silk, a short ruffled skirt and silver-paper ornaments in her
tightly crinkled hair. She was singing, barely audibly:

  _“Oh, children ... lost in Egypt
  See that chariot....
  ... good tidings!”_

Even from his table across the room he realized that she was sunk in
an abstraction; her eyes were shut and her body rocking in beat to the
line.

“Good tidings,” she sang.

A negro close beside Doret looked up suddenly, and his voice joined in a
humming undertone, “See that chariot, oh, good tidings ... that Egyptian
chariot.”

A vague emotion stirred within Lemuel Doret, the singing annoyed him,
troubled him with memories of perishing things. Another joined, and the
spiritual swelled slightly, haltingly above the clatter of glasses and
laughter. The woman who had begun it was swept to her feet; she
stood with her tinsel gayety of apparel making her tragic ebony face
infinitely grotesque and tormented while her tone rose in a clear
emotional soprano:

  _“Children of Israel, unhappy slaves,
  Good tidings, good tidings,
  For that chariot's coming,
  God's chariot's coming, ... coming,
  ........... chariot out of Egypt.”_

The magic of her feeling swept like a flame over the room; shrill mirth,
mocking calls, curses were bound in a louder and louder volume of hope
and praise. The negroes were on their feet, swaying in the hysterical
contagion of melody, the unutterable longing of their alien isolation.

“God's chariot's coming.” The song filled the roof, hung with bright
strips of paper, it boomed through the windows and doors. Sobbing cries
cut through it, profound invocations, beautiful shadowy voices chimed
above the weight of sound.

It beat like a hammer on Lemuel Doret's brain and heart. Suddenly he
couldn't breathe, and he rose with a gasp, facing the miracle that had
overtaken the place he called bad. God's chariot--was there! He heard
God's very tone directed at him. Borne upward on the flood of exaltation
he seemed to leave the earth far, far away. Something hard, frozen, in
him burst, and tears ran over his face; he was torn by fear and terrible
joy. His Lord....

He fell forward on his knees, an arm overturning the bottle of beer;
and, his sleeve dabbled in it, he pressed his head against the cold edge
of the table, praying wordlessly for faith, incoherently ravished by the
marvel of salvation, the knowledge of God here, everywhere.

The harmony wavered and sank, and out of the shuddering silence that
followed Lemuel Doret turned again from the city.




THE FLOWER OF SPAIN

I

From the window of the drawing-room Lavinia Sanviano could see, on the
left, the Statue of Garibaldi, where the Corso Regina Maria cut into the
Lungarno; on the right, and farther along, the gray-green foliage of the
Cascine. Before her the Arno flowed away, sluggish and without a wrinkle
or reflection on its turbid surface, into Tuscany. It was past the
middle of afternoon, and a steady procession of carriages and mounted
officers in pale blue tunics moved below toward the shade of the
Cascine.

Lavinia could not see this gay progress very well, for the window--it
had only a narrow ledge guarded by an iron grille--was practically
filled by her sister, Gheta, and Anna Mantegazza. Occasionally
she leaned forward, pressed upon Gheta's shoulder, for a hasty
unsatisfactory glimpse.

“You are crushing my sleeves!” Gheta finally and sharply complained.
“Do go somewhere else. Anna and I want to talk without your young ears
eternally about. When do you return to the convent?”

Lavinia drew back. However, she didn't leave. She was accustomed to her
sister's complaining, and--unless the other went to their father--she
ignored her hints. Lavinia's curiosity in worldly scenes and topics was
almost as full as her imagination thereof. She was sixteen, and would
have to endure another year of obscurity before her marriage could be
thought of, or she take any part in the social life where Gheta moved
with such marked success.

But, Lavinia realized with a sigh, she couldn't expect to be pursued
like Gheta, who was very beautiful. Gheta was so exceptional that she
had been introduced to the Florentine polite world without the customary
preliminary of marriage. She could, almost every one agreed, marry very
nearly whomever and whenever she willed. Even now, after the number of
years she had been going about with practically all her friends wedded,
no one seriously criticized the Sanvianos for not insisting on a match
with one of the several eligibles who had unquestionably presented
themselves.

Gheta was slender and round; her complexion had the flawless pallid
bloom of a gardenia; her eyes and hair were dark, and her lips an
enticing scarlet thread. Perhaps her chin was a trifle lacking in
definition, her voice a little devoid of warmth; but those were
minor defects in a person so precisely radiant. Her dress was always
noticeably lovely; at present she wore pink tulle over lustrous gray,
with a high silver girdle, a narrow black velvet band and diamond clasp
about her delicate full throat.

Anna Mantegazza was more elaborately gowned, in white embroidery, with
a little French hat; but Anna Mantegazza was an American with millions,
and elaboration was a commonplace with her. Lavinia wore only a simple
white slip, confined about her flexible waist with a yellow ribbon; and
she was painfully conscious of the contrast she presented to the two
women seated in the front of the window.

The fact was that a whole fifth of the Sanvianos' income was spent
on Gheta's clothes; and this left only the most meager provision for
Lavinia. But this, the latter felt, was just--still in the convent,
she required comparatively little personal adornment; while the other's
beauty demanded a worthy emphasis. Later Lavinia would have tulle and
silver lace. She wished, however, that Gheta would get married; for
Lavinia knew that even if she came home she would be held back until the
older sister was settled. It was her opinion that Gheta was very silly
to show such indifference to Cesare Orsi.... Suddenly she longed to have
men--not fat and good-natured like the Neapolitan banker, but austere
and romantic--in love with her. She clasped her hands to her fine young
breast and a delicate color stained her cheeks. She stood very straight
and her breathing quickened through parted lips.

She was disturbed by the echo of a voice from the cool depths of the
house, and turned at approaching footfalls. The room was so high and
large that its stiff gilt and brocade furnishing appeared insignificant.
Three long windows faced the Lungarno, but two were screened with green
slatted blinds and heavily draped, and the light within was silvery and
illusive. A small man in correct English clothes, with a pointed bald
head and a heavy nose, entered impulsively.

“It's Bembo,” Lavinia announced flatly.

“Of course it's Bembo,” he echoed vivaciously. “Who's more faithful to
the Casa Sanviano----”

“At tea time,” Lavinia interrupted.

“Lavinia,” her sister said sharply, “don't be impertinent. There are so
many strangers driving,” she continued, to the man; “do stand and tell
us who they are. You know every second person in Europe.”

He pressed eagerly forward, and Anna Mantegazza turned and patted his
hand.

“I wish you were so attentive to Pier and myself,” she remarked,
both light and serious. “I'd like to buy you--you're indispensable in
Florence.”

“Contessa!” he protested. “Delighted! At once.”

“Bembo,” Gheta demanded, “duty--who's that in the little carriage with
the bells bowed over the horses?”

He leaned out over the grille, his beady alert gaze sweeping the way
below.

“Litolff,” he pronounced without a moment's hesitation--“a Russian
swell. The girl with him is----” He stopped with a side glance at
Lavinia, a slight shrug.

“Positively, Lavinia,” Gheta insisted again, more crossly, “you're a
nuisance! When do you go back to school?”

“In a week,” Lavinia answered serenely.

With Bembo added to the others, she could see almost nothing of the
scene below. Across the river the declining sun cast a rosy light on the
great glossy hedges and clipped foliage of the Boboli Gardens; far to
the left the paved height of the Piazzale Michelangelo rose above the
somber sweep of roofs and bridges; an aged bell rang harshly and mingled
with the inconsequential clatter on the Lungarno. An overwhelming sense
of the mystery of being stabbed, sharp as a knife, at her heart; a
choking longing possessed her to experience all--all the wonders of
life, but principally love.

“Look, Bembo!” Anna Mantegazza suddenly exclaimed. “No;
there--approaching! Who's that singular person in the hired carriage?”

Her interest was so roused that Lavinia, once more forgetful of
Gheta's sleeves, leaned over her sister's shoulder, and immediately
distinguished the object of their curiosity.

An open cab was moving slowly, almost directly under the window, with a
single patron--a slender man, sitting rigidly erect, in a short, black
shell jacket, open upon white linen, a long black tie, and a soft narrow
scarlet sash. He wore a wide-brimmed stiff felt hat slanted over a thin
countenance burned by the sun as dark as green bronze; his face was as
immobile as metal, too; it bore, as if permanently molded, an expression
of excessive contemptuous pride.

Bembo's voice rose in a babble of excited information.

“'Singular?' Why, that's one of the most interesting men alive. It's
Abrego y Mochales, the greatest bullfighter in existence, the Flower of
Spain. I've seen him in the ring and at San Sebastian with the King; and
I can assure you that one was hardly more important than the other. He's
idolized by every one in Spain and South America; women of all classes
fall over each other with declarations and gifts.”

As if he had heard the pronouncement of his name the man in the cab
turned sharply and looked up. Gheta was leaning out, and his gaze
fastened upon her with a sudden and extraordinary intensity. Lavinia
saw that her sister, without dissembling her interest, sat forward,
statuesque and lovely. It seemed to the former that the cab was an
intolerable time passing; she wished to draw Gheta back, to cover
her indiscretion from Anna Mantegazza's prying sight. She sighed with
inexplicable relief when she saw that the man had driven beyond them and
that he did not turn.

A bull-fighter! A blurred picture formed in Lavinia's mind from the
various details she had read and heard of the cruelty of the Spanish
national sport--torn horses, stiff on blood-soaked sand; a frenzied
and savage populace; and charging bulls, drenched with red froth. She
shuddered.

“What a brute!” she spoke aloud unintentionally.

Gheta glanced at her out of a cool superiority, but Anna Mantegazza
nodded vigorously.

“He would be a horrid person!” she affirmed.

“How silly!” Gheta responded. “It's an art, like the opera; he's an
artist in courage. Personally I find it rather fascinating. Most men are
so--so mild.”

Lavinia knew that the other was thinking of Cesare Orsi, and she agreed
with her sister that Orsi was far too mild. Without the Orsi fortune--he
had much more even than Anna Mantegazza--Cesare would simply get
nowhere. The Spaniard--Lavinia could not recall his name, although it
hung elusively among her thoughts--was different; women of all classes,
Bembo had said, pursued him with favors. He could be cruel, she
decided, and shivered a little vicariously. She half heard Bembo's rapid
high-pitched excitement over trifles.

“You are going to the Guarinis' sale to-morrow afternoon? But, of
course, every one is. Well, if I come across Abrego y Mochales before
then, and I'm almost certain to, and he'll come, I'll bring him. He's as
proud as the devil--duchesses, you see--so no airs with him. The
Flower of Spain. A king of sport sits high at the table--” He went on,
apparently interminable; but Lavinia turned away to where tea was being
laid in a far angle.

Others approached over the tiled hall and the Marchese Sanviano entered
with Cesare Orsi. The window was deserted, and the women trailed
gracefully toward the bubbling minor note of the alcohol lamp. Both
Sanviano and Orsi were big men--the former, like Bembo, wore English
clothes; but Orsi's ungainly body had been tightly garbed by a Southern
military tailor, making him--Lavinia thought--appear absolutely
ridiculous. His collar was both too tight and too high, although
perspiration promised relief from the latter.

A general and unremarkable conversation mingled with the faint rattle of
passing cups and low directions to a servant. Lavinia was seated next to
Cesare Orsi, but she was entirely oblivious of his heavy kindly face and
almost anxiously benevolent gaze. He spoke to her, and because she had
comprehended nothing of his speech she smiled at him with an absent and
illuminating charm. He smiled back, happy in her apparent pleasure; and
his good-nature was so insistent that she was impelled to reward it with
a remark.

She thought, she said, that Gheta was particularly lovely this
afternoon. He agreed eagerly; and Lavinia wondered whether she had been
clumsy. She simply couldn't imagine marrying Cesare Orsi, but she knew
that such a match for Gheta was freely discussed, and she hoped that her
sister would not make difficulties. She wouldn't have dresses so
fussy as Gheta's--in figure, anyhow, she was perhaps her sister's
superior--fine materials, simply cut, with a ruffle at the throat and
hem, a satin wrap pointed at the back, with a soft tassel....

Orsi was talking to Gheta, and she was answering him with a brevity
that had cast a shade of annoyance over the Marchese Sanviano's large
features. Lavinia agreed with her father that Gheta was a fool. She must
be thirty, the younger suddenly realized. Bembo was growing hysterical
from the tea and his own shrill anecdotes. He resembled a grotesque
performing bird with a large beak. Lavinia's mind returned to the silent
dark man who had passed in a cab. She wished, now, that she had been
sitting at the front of the window--the object of his unsparing intense
gaze. She realized that he was extremely handsome, and contrasted his
erect slim carriage with Orsi's thick slouched shoulders. The latter
interrupted her look, misinterpreted it, and said something about candy
from Giacosa's.

Lavinia thanked him and rose; the discussion about the tea table became
unbearably stupid, no better than the flat chatter of the nuns at
school.

Her room was small and barely furnished, with a thin rug over the stone
floor, and opened upon the court about which the house was built. The
Sanvianos occupied the second floor. Below, the _piano nobile_ was
rented by the proprietor of a great wine industry. It was evident that
he was going out to dinner, for his dark blue brougham was waiting
at the inner entrance. The horse, a fine sleek animal, was stamping
impatiently, with ringing shoes, on the paved court. A flowering
magnolia tree against one corner filled the thickening dusk with a heavy
palpitating sweetness.

Lavinia stayed for a long while at the ledge of her window. Her hair,
which she wore braided in a smooth heavy rope, slid out and hung free.
The brougham left, with a clatter of hoofs and a final clang of the
great iron-bound door on the street; above, white stars grew visible in
a blue dust. She dressed slowly, changing from one plain gown to another
hardly less simple. Before the mirror, in an unsatisfactory lamplight,
she studied her appearance in comparison with Gheta's.

She lacked the latter's lustrous pallor, the petal-like richness of
Gheta's skin. Lavinia's cheeks bore a perceptible flush, which she
detested and tried vainly to mask with powder. Her eyes, a clear bluish
gray, inherited from the Lombard strain in her mother, were not so much
fancied as her sister's brown; but at least they were more uncommon and
contrasted nicely with her straight dark bang. Her shoulders and arms
she surveyed with frank healthy approbation. Now her hair annoyed
her, swinging childishly about her waist, and she secured it in an
instinctively effective coil on the top of her head. She decided to
leave it there for dinner. Her mother was away for the night; and she
knew that Gheta's sarcasm would only stir their father to a teasing
mirth.

Later, Gheta departed for a ball, together with the Marchese
Sanviano--to be dropped at his club--and Lavinia was left alone. The
scene in the court was repeated, but with less flourish than earlier in
the evening. Gheta would be nominally in the charge of Anna Mantegazza;
but Lavinia knew how laxly the American would hold her responsibility.
She wished, moving disconsolately under high painted ceilings through
the semi-gloom of still formal chambers, that she was a recognized
beauty--free, like Gheta.

The drawing-room, from which they had watched the afternoon procession,
was in complete darkness, save for the luminous rectangle of the window
they had occupied. Its drapery was still disarranged. Lavinia crossed
the room and stood at the grille. The lights strung along the river,
curving away like uniform pale bubbles, cast a thin illumination over
the Lungarno, through which a solitary vehicle moved. Lavinia idly
watched it approach, but her interest increased as it halted directly
opposite where she stood. A man got quickly out--a lithe figure with a
broad-brimmed hat slanted across his eyes. It was, she realized with
an involuntary quickening of her blood, Abrego y Mochales. A second
man followed, tendered him a curiously shaped object, and stood by
the waiting cab while the bull-fighter walked deliberately forward. He
stopped under the window and shifted the thing in his hands.

A rich chord of strings vibrated through the night, another followed,
and then a brief pattern of sound was woven from the serious notes of
a guitar. Lavinia shrank back within the room--it was, incredibly, a
serenade on the stolid Lungarno. It was for Gheta! The romance of the
south of Spain had come to life under their window. A voice joined
the instrument, melodious and melancholy, singing an air with little
variation, but with an insistent burden of desire. The voice and the
guitar mingled and fluctuated, drifting up from the pavement exotic and
moving. Lavinia could comprehend but little of the Spanish:

  _“I followed through the acacias,
  But it was only the wind.
  .... looked for you beyond the limes----“_

The thrill at her heart deepened until tears wet her cheeks. It was for
Gheta, but it overwhelmed Lavinia with a formless and aching emotion;
it was for Gheta, but her response was instant and uncontrollable. It
seemed to Lavinia that the sheer beauty of life, which had moved her
so sharply, had been magnified unbearably; she had never dreamed of the
possibilities of such ecstasy or such delectable grief.

The song ended abruptly, with a sharp jarring note. The man by the
carriage moved deferentially forward and took the guitar. She could
see the minute pulsating sparks of cigarettes; heard a direction to the
driver. Abrego y Mochales and the other got into the cab and it turned
and shambled away. Lavinia Sanviano moved forward mechanically, gazing
after the dark vanishing shape on the road. She was shaken, almost
appalled, by the feeling that stirred her. A momentary terror of living
swept over her; the thrills persisted; her hands were icy cold. She had
been safely a child until now, when she had lost that small security,
and gained--what?

She studied herself, clad in her coarse nightgown with narrow lace, in
her inadequate mirror. The color had left her cheeks and her eyes shone
darkly from shadows. “Lavinia Sanviano!” she spoke aloud, with the
extraordinary sensation of addressing, in her reflection, a stranger.
She could never, never wear her hair down again, she thought with an odd
pang.

II

Gheta invariably took breakfast in her room. It was a larger chamber by
far than Lavinia's, toward the Via Garibaldi. A thick white bearskin was
spread by the canopied bed, an elaborate dressing table stood between
long windows drawn with ruffled pink silk, while the ceiling bore a
scaling ottocento frescoing of garlanded cupids. She was sitting in bed,
the chocolate pot on a painted table at her side, when Lavinia entered.

A maid was putting soft paper in the sleeves of Gheta's ball dress, and
Lavinia, finding an unexpected reluctance to proceed with what she had
come to say, watched the servant's deft care.

“Mochales was here last night,” Lavinia finally remarked abruptly--“that
is he stood on the street and serenaded you.”

Gheta put her cup down with a clatter.

“How charming!” she exclaimed. “And I missed it for an insufferable
affair. He stood under the window--”

“With a guitar,” Lavinia proceeded evenly. “It was very beautiful.”

“Heavens! Bembo's going to fetch him to the Guarinis' sale, and I forgot
and promised Anna Mantegazza to drive out to Arcetri! But Anna won't
miss this. It was really a very pretty compliment.”

She spoke with a trivial satisfaction that jarred painfully on Lavinia's
memory of the past night. Gheta calmly accepted the serenade as another
tribute to her beauty; Lavinia could imagine what Anna Mantegazza and
her sister would say, and they both seemed commonplace--even a little
vulgar--to her acutely sensitive being. She suddenly lost her desire
to resemble Gheta; her sister diminished in her estimation. The elder,
Lavinia realized with an unsparing detachment, was enveloped in a petty
vanity acquired in an atmosphere of continuous flattery; it had chilled
her heart.

The Guarinis, who had been overtaken by misfortune, and whose household
goods were, being disposed of at public sale, occupied a large gloomy
floor on the Via Cavour. The rooms were crowded by their friends and the
merely curious; the carpets were protected by a temporary covering; and
all the furnishings, the chairs and piano, pictures, glass and bijoux,
bore gummed and numbered labels.

The sale was progressing in one of the larger salons, but the crowd
circulated in a slow solid undulation through every room. Gheta and Anna
Mantegazza had sought the familiar comfortable corner of an entresol,
and were seated. Lavinia was standing tensely, with a laboring breast,
when Bembo suddenly appeared with the man whom he had called the Flower
of Spain.

“The Contessa Mantegazza,” Bembo said suavely, “Signorina Sanviano, this
is Abrego y Mochales.”

The bull-fighter bowed with magnificent flexibility. A hot resentment
possessed Lavinia at Bembo's apparent ignoring of her; but he had not
seen her at first and hastened to repair his omission. Lavinia inclined
her head stiffly. An increasing confusion enveloped her, but she forced
herself to gaze directly into Mochales' still black eyes. His face, she
saw, was gaunt, the ridges of his skull apparent under the bronzed skin.
His hair, worn in a queue, was pinned in a flat disk on his head, and
small gold loops had been riveted in his ears; but these peculiarities
of garb were lost in the man's intense virility, his patent brute
force. His fine perfumed linen, the touch of scarlet at his waist,
his extremely high-heeled patent-leather boots under soft uncreased
trousers, served only to emphasize his resolute metal--they resembled an
embroidered and tasseled scabbard that held a keen, thin and dangerous
blade.

Anna Mantegazza extended her hand in the American fashion, and Gheta
smiled from--Lavinia saw--her best facial angle. The Spaniard regarded
Gheta Sanviano so fixedly that after a moment she turned, in a species
of constraint, to Anna. The latter spoke with her customary facility and
the man responded gravely.

They stood a little aside from Lavinia; she only partly heard their
remarks, but she saw that Abrego y Mochales' attention never strayed
from her sister. Vicariously it made her giddy. The man absolutely
summed up all that Lavinia had dreamed of a romantic and masterful
personage. She felt convinced that he had destroyed her life's
happiness--no other man could ever appeal to her now; none other could
satisfy the tumult he had aroused in her. This, she told herself,
desperately miserable, was love.

Gheta spoke of her, for the three turned to regard her. She met their
scrutiny with a doubtful half smile, which vanished as Anna Mantegazza
made a light comment upon her hair being so newly up. Lavinia detested
the latter with a sudden and absurd intensity. She saw Anna, with a
veiled glance at Gheta, make an apology and leave to join an eddy of
familiars that had formed in the human stream sweeping by. Mochales
stood very close to her sister, speaking seriously, while Gheta
nervously fingered the short veil hanging from her gay straw hat.

A familiar kindly voice sounded suddenly in Lavinia's ears, and Cesare
Orsi joined her. He was about to move forward toward Gheta; but, before
he could attract her attention, she disappeared in the crowd with the
Spaniard.

“Who was it?” he inquired. “He resembles a juggler.”

Lavinia elaborately masked her hot resentment at this fresh stupidity.
She must not, she felt, allow Orsi to discover her feeling for Abrego
y Mochales; that was a secret she must keep forever from the profane
world. She would die, perhaps at a terribly advanced age, with it locked
in her heart. But if Gheta married him she would go into a convent.

“A bull-fighter, I believe,” she said carelessly.

“In other words, a brute,” Orsi continued. “Such men are not fit for the
society of--of your sister. One would think his mere presence would make
her ill.... Yet she seemed quite pleased.”

“Strange!” Lavinia spoke with innocent eyes.

It was like turning a knife in her wound to agree apparently with Cesare
Orsi--rather, she wanted to laugh at him coldly and leave him standing
alone; but she must cultivate her defenses. There was, too, a sort of
negative pleasure in misleading the banker, a sort of torment not unlike
that enjoyed by the early martyrs.

Cesare Orsi regarded her with new interest and approbation.

“You're a sensible girl,” he proclaimed; “and extremely pretty in the
bargain.” He added this in an accent of profound surprise, as if she had
suddenly grown presentable under his eyes. “In some ways,” he went on,
gathering conviction, “you are as handsome as Gheta.”

“Thank you, Signor Orsi,” Lavinia responded with every indication of a
modesty, which, in fact, was the indifference of a supreme contempt.

“I have been blind,” he asseverated, vivaciously gesticulating with his
thick hands.

Lavinia studied him with a remote young brutality, from his fluffy
disarranged hair, adhering to his wet brow, to his extravagantly pointed
shoes. The ridiculous coral charm hanging from his heavy watch chain, a
violent green handkerchief, an insufferable cameo pin--all contributed
pleasurably to the lowering of her opinion of him.

“I must find Gheta,” she pronounced, suddenly aware of her isolation
with Cesare Orsi in the crowd, and of curious glances. Orsi immediately
took her arm, but she eluded him. “Go first, please; we can get through
sooner that way.”

They progressed from room to room, thoroughly exploring the dense throng
about the auctioneer, but without finding either Gheta, Anna Mantegazza
or the bull-fighter.

“I can't think how she could have forgotten me!” Lavinia declared with
increasing annoyance. “It's clear that they have all gone.”

“Don't agitate yourself,” Cesare Orsi begged. “Sanviano will be
absolutely contented to have you in my care. I am delighted. You shall
go home directly in my carriage.” He conducted her, with a show of form
that in any one else or at another time she would have enjoyed hugely,
to the street, where he handed her into an immaculately glossy and
corded victoria, drawn by a big stamping bay, and stood with his hat off
until she had rolled away.

It was comfortable in the luxuriously upholstered seat and, in spite of
herself, Lavinia sank back with a contented sigh. There was in its case
a gilt hand mirror, into which she peered, and a ledge that pulled out,
with a crystal box for cigarettes and a spirit lighter. The Sanvianos
had only a landaulet, no longer in its first condition; and Lavinia
wondered why Gheta, who adored ease, had been so long in securing for
herself such comforts as Orsi's victoria.

They swept smoothly on rubber tires into the Lungarno and rapidly
approached her home. The carriage stopped before the familiar white
façade, built of marble in the pseudo-severity of the early nineteenth
century, and the porter swung open the great iron gate to the courtyard.
Lavinia mounted the square white shaft of the stairs to the Sanvianos'
floor with a deepening sense of injury. She would make it plain to Gheta
that she was no longer a child to be casually overlooked.

A small room, used in connection with the dining room for coffee and
smoking, gave directly on the hall; there she saw her father sitting,
with his hat still on, his face stamped with an almost comical dismay,
and holding an unlighted cigar.

“Gheta left me at the Guarinis',” Lavinia halted impetuously. “If it
hadn't been for Signor Orsi I shouldn't be here yet; I was completely
ignored.”

“Heavens!” her father exclaimed, waving her away. “Another feminine
catastrophe! Go to your sister and mother. My head is in a whirl.”

Her mother, then, had returned. She went forward and was suddenly
startled by hearing Gheta's voice rise in a wail of despairing misery.
She hurried forward to her sister's room. Gheta, fully dressed, was
prostrate, face down, upon her bed, shaken by a strangled sobbing that
at intervals rose to a thin hysterical scream. The Marchesa Sanviano,
still in her traveling suit and close-fitting black hat, sat by
her elder daughter's side, trying vainly to calm the tumult. In the
background the maid, her face streaming with sympathetic tears, was
hovering distractedly with a jar of volatile salts.

“Mamma,” Lavinia demanded, torn by extravagant fears, “what has
happened?”

The marchesa momentarily turned a concerned countenance.

“Your sister,” she said seriously, “has found some wrinkles on her
forehead.”

Lavinia with difficulty restrained a sharp giggle. Gheta's grief and
their mother's anxiety at first seemed so foolishly disproportionate
to their cause. Then a realization of what such an occurrence meant to
Gheta dawned upon her. To an acknowledged beauty like Gheta Sanviano
the marks of Time were an absolute tragedy; they threatened her on every
plane of her being.

“But when--” Lavinia began.

“They--Anna Mantegazza and she--went to the dressing room at the
Guarinis', where, it seems, Anna discovered them--sympathetically, of
course.”

Gheta's sobbing slowly subsided under the marchesa's urgent plea that
unrestrained emotion would only deepen her trouble. She did not appear
at dinner; and afterward the marchese, his wife and Lavinia sat wrapped
in a gloomy silence. The marchesa was still handsome, in spite of
increasing weight. The gray gaze inherited by Lavinia had escaped the
parent; her eyes were soft and dense, like brown velvet. She was a woman
of decision and now she brought her hands smartly together.

“We have waited too long with Gheta; we should not have counted so
confidently on her beauty; time flies so treacherously. She must marry
as soon as possible.”

“Thank God, there's Cesare Orsi!” her husband responded.

Lavinia was gazing inward at the secretly enshrined image of the Flower
of Spain.

III

Gheta Sanviano often passed a night at the Mantegazzas' villa on the
Height of Castena, a long mile from the city.

Lavinia, too, knew the dwelling well, for Sanviano and Pier Mantegazza
had been intimate from their similar beginnings, and she had played
there as a child. However, she had never been regularly asked with
Gheta; and when that occurred--Gheta indifferently delivered Anna
Mantegazza's message--and her mother acquiesced, Lavinia had a renewed
sense of her growing importance.

She went out early, in the heat of midday, a time that fitted best with
the involved schedule of the Sanvianos' single equipage--Anna would take
her sister directly from a luncheon at the Ginoris'. Lavinia looked with
mingled anticipation and relief at the approaching graceful façade added
scarcely a hundred and fifty years before to the otherwise somber abode
of the Mantegazzas, first established in the twelfth century.

The villa stood on an eminence, circled by austere pines, and terraced
with innumerable vegetable gardens and frugally planted olives. The road
mounted abruptly, turned under a frowning wall incongruously topped with
delicately painted urns, and doubled across the massive iron-bound door
that closed the arched entrance. Within, an immensely high timbered hall
was pleasantly cool and dark after the white blaze without. It was bare
of furnishing except for a number of rude oak settles against the naked
stone walls. It had been a place of fear to Lavinia when a child; and
even now she left it with a sense of relief for the modernized interior
beyond.

Pier Mantegazza was standing before a high inclined table, which bore
a number of blackened and shapeless medallions. He was a famous
numismatic--a tall stooping man, slightly lame, and enveloped in a
premature gray ill health that resembled clinging cobwebs. He bent and
brushed Lavinia's forehead with his crisp mustache, and then returned to
the delicate manipulation of a magnifying glass and a small blue bottle
of acid. She left him for a deep chair and a surprising French romance
by Remy de Gourmont. At a long philosophical dialogue the book drooped,
and she thought of Anna Mantegazza and her husband.

She wondered whether they were happy. But she decided, measuring
that condition solely by her own requirement, that such a state was
impossible for them. It had certainly been a marriage for money and
position; prior to the ceremony the Casa Mantegazza had been closed
for years, and Pier Mantegazza occupied a small establishment near the
Military Hospital, on the Via San Gallo. Anna Cane had arrived in Rome,
without family or credentials, and unknown to the American Embassy
other than by amazing deposits at the best banks. But she did have, in
addition to this, a pungent charm and undeniable force and good taste.
It was said that the moment she had seen Mantegazza's villa she had
decided to possess it, even at the price of its sere withdrawn holder.

She had gone at once into the best Florentine and Roman society.
That was ten years before, but Lavinia realized that she had never
successfully assimilated the Italian social formula. She mixed the
most diverse elements of their world willfully and found enjoyment in
bringing about amusing situations. She seemed devoid of the foundations
of proper caution; in fact, she mocked at them openly. And if she
had not been a model Catholic, and herself above the slightest moral
question, even Mantegazza could not have carried her among his own
circles. As it was, people flocked to her elaborate parties, torn
between the hope of being amazed and the fear that they should furnish
the hub of the occasion.

Gheta and her hostess arrived later. The former, it appeared to Lavinia,
looked disconcerted; and it was evident that she had been remonstrating
with Anna Mantegazza. The other laughed provokingly.

“Nonsense!” she declared. “It was too good to miss; besides, you're an
old campaigner.”

A stair of flagging, turning sharply round a stone pillar, led
incongruously from the light French furnishings to the chamber where
Lavinia was to sleep. A Renaissance bed, made of thick quilting directly
upon the floor, was covered with gilt ecclesiastical embroidery; and a
movable tub stood in a stone corner. The narrow deep windows overlooked
Florence, a somber expanse of roofing; and, coming rapidly toward
the villa, Lavinia could see a tall dogcart, with a groom and two
passengers. They were men; and, as they drew nearer, Lavinia--with a
sudden pounding of her heart--realized the cause of the slight friction
between the two women. The cart bore Cesare Orsi, and Mochales the
bull-fighter, the Flower of Spain. It was a part of Anna Mantegazza's
humor that the men, so essentially antagonistic, should arrive together
clinging precariously on the high insecure trap.

Tea was served at five on the terrace, and Lavinia dressed with minute
care. Gheta, she knew, had brought a new lavender lawn with little gold
velvet buttons and lace; while she had nothing but the familiar coarse
white mull. But she had fresh ribbons and she gazed with satisfaction at
her firm, faintly rosy countenance. She would have no wrinkles for years
to come. However, she thought, with a return to her sense of tragic
gloom, such considerations were of little moment, as Abrego y Mochales
would scarcely be aware of her existence; he would never know....
Perhaps, years after--

She purposely delayed her appearance on the terrace until the others
had assembled, and then quietly took possession of a chair. Cesare Orsi
greeted her with effusive warmth, the Spaniard bowed ceremoniously.
A wide prospect of countryside flowed away in innumerable hills and
valleys, clothed in the silvery smoke of olives and in green-black
pines; below, a bank of cherry trees were in bloom. The air was sweet
and still and full of a warm radiance.

Lavinia luxuriated in her unhappiness. Mochales, she decided, must
be the handsomest man in existence. His unchanging gravity fascinated
her--the man's face, his voice, his dignified gestures, were all steeped
in a splendid melancholy.

“I am a peasant,” he said, apparently addressing them all, but with his
eyes upon Gheta, “from Estremadura, in the mountains. The life there was
very hard, and that was fortunate for me; the food was scarce, and that
was good too. If I ate like the grandees a bull would end me in the hot
sun of the first _fiesta_; I'd double up like a pancake. I must work all
the time--run for miles and play _pelota_.”

Lavinia was possessed by a new contempt for her kind, which she centered
upon Orsi, clumsy and stupidly smiling. It was clear that he couldn't
run a mile; in fact, he admitted that he detested all exercise. How
absurd he looked in his tight plaited jacket! It appeared that he was
always perspiring; a crime, she felt sure--with entire disregard of its
fatal consequences--that Mochales never committed.

“A friend of ours--it was Bembo--said that he saw you at San Sebastian
with your King,” Anna Mantegazza put in.

“Why not? But Alphonso is a fine boy; he understands the business of
royalty. Every year I dedicate a magnificent bull to the King on his
name day.”

“Will you dedicate one to me?” Gheta asked carelessly.

“The best in Andalusia,” he responded with fire.

Cesare Orsi made a slight sharp exclamation, and Lavinia's heart beat
painfully. The former turned to her with sudden determination.

“Were you comfortable in my carriage,” he demanded, “and fetched home at
a smart pace?” Lavinia thanked him.

“You are always so quiet,” he complained. “I'm certain there's a great
deal in that wise young head worth hearing.”

“Lavinia is still in the schoolroom,” Gheta explained brutally.
“Yesterday she put up her hair, to-day Anna Mantegazza invites her, and
we have an effect.”

Anna Mantegazza turned to the younger with a new veiled scrutiny. Her
gaze rested for an instant on Orsi and then moved contemplatively to
Gheta and Abrego y Mochales. It was evident that her thoughts were very
busy; a faint sparkle appeared in her eyes, a fresh vivacity animated
her manner. Suddenly she included Lavinia in her remarks; she put
queries to the girl patently intended to draw her out. Gheta grew uneasy
and then cross.

“I'm sick of sitting here,” she declared; “let's walk about. It's
cooler, and Pier Mantegazza's place is always worth investigation.”
 She rose and waited for Cesare Orsi, then led the small procession from
under the striped tea kiosk down the terrace. The way grew steep and
she rested a hand on Orsi's arm. Anna, Lavinia and the Flower of Spain
followed together, until the first moved forward to join the leaders.
Lavinia's gaze was obscured by a sort of warm mist; she clasped her
hands to keep them from trembling. In a narrow flagged turn Mochales
brushed her shoulder. He scarcely moved his eyes from Gheta's back. Once
he gazed somberly at the girl beside him and she responded with a pale
questioning smile. “I have had a great misfortune,” he told her.

“Oh, I'm terribly, terribly sorry!”

“I've lost a blessed coin that interceded for me since the first day I
went in the bull ring. I'd give a thousand wax candles for its return.
Now--when I need everything,” he continued as if to himself. “Your
sister is beautiful,” he added abruptly. “Everybody thinks so,” Lavinia
replied in a voice she endeavored to make enthusiastic. “She has had
tens of admirers here and at Rome and Lucca.” There she knew she
should stop; but she continued: “Cesare Orsi is very persistent and
tremendously rich.”

Mochales made a short unintelligible remark in Spanish. He twisted a
cigarette with lightning-like rapidity and only one hand. Together
they looked at Orsi's broad ungainly back, and the bull-fighter's lips
tightened, exposing a glimmer of his immaculate teeth. They passed a
neat whitewashed cottage, where an old couple stood bowing abjectly, and
came on a series of long pale-brown buildings and walls.

“The stables and barn,” Lavinia explained.

Anna Mantegazza turned. “You may see something of interest here,” she
called to Mochales.

A series of steps, made by projecting stones, rose to the top of an
eight-foot wall, up which Anna unexpectedly led the way. The wall was
broad, afforded a comfortable footing, and enclosed a straw-littered
yard. A number of doors led into a barn, and into one some men were
urging refractory cattle. In a corner a small compact bull, with the
rapierlike horns of the mountain breeds, was secured by a nose ring and
a short chain; and to the latter the men turned when the other animals
had been confined. Two threatened the animal with long poles, while a
third unfastened the chain from the wall; and then all endeavored to
drive him within. Abrego y Mochales stood easily above, watching these
clumsy efforts.

Suddenly the bull stopped, plunged his front hoofs into the soft mold
of the stable yard and swept his head from side to side with a broken
hoarse bellow. The men prodded him with urgent cries; but the bull
suddenly whirled, snapping the poles, and there was an immediate
scattering.

The sight of the retreating forms apparently enraged the animal, for he
charged with astonishing speed and barely missed horning the last man
to fall over the barricade of a half door. Mochales smiled; he called
familiarly to the bull. Then he stooped and vaulted lightly down into
the yard. Lavinia gave a short exclamation; she was cold with fear. Orsi
looked on without any emotion visible on his heavy face. Anna Mantegazza
leaned forward, tense with interest. “_Bravo!_” she called.

Gheta Sanviano smiled.

The bull did not see Mochales at first, then the man cried tauntingly.
The bull turned and stood with a lowered slowly-moving head, an uneasy
tail. The Spaniard found a small milking stool and, carrying it to the
middle of the yard, sat and comfortably rolled another cigarette. He was
searching for a match when the bull moved forward a pace; he had found
and was striking it when the bull increased his pace; he was guarding
the flame about the cigarette's end when the animal broke into a
charging run.

The Flower of Spain inhaled a deep breath of smoke, which he expelled in
deliberate globes.

“Oh, don't! Oh----” Lavinia exclaimed, an arm before her eyes.

Mochales shifted easily from his seat and apparently in the same instant
the bull crushed the stool to splinters.

“_Bravo! Bravo!_” Anna Mantegazza called again, and the man bowed until
his extended hat rested on the ground.

He straightened slowly; the bull whirled about and flung himself
forward. Abrego y Mochales now had one of the discarded poles; and,
waiting until the horns had almost encircled him, he vaulted lightly
and beautifully over the running animal's shoulder. He waited again,
avoiding the infuriated charge by a scant step; and, when the bull
stopped he had Mochales' hat placed squarely upon his horns. Lavinia
watched now in fascinated terror; she could not remove her gaze from the
slim figure in the short black jacket and narrow crimson sash. At the
moment when her tension relaxed, Mochales, with a short running step,
vaulted cleanly to the top of the wall. His cigarette was still
burning. She wanted desperately to add her praise to Anna Mantegazza's
enthusiastic plaudits, Gheta's subtle smile; but only the utmost
banalities occurred to her.

They descended the stone steps and slowly mounted toward the house.
Cesare Orsi resolutely dropped back beside Lavinia.

“You are really superb!” he told her in his highly colored Neapolitan
manner. “Most women--Anna Mantegazza for example--are like children
before such a show as that back there. Your sister, too, was pleased; it
appealed to her vanity, as the fellow intended it should. But you
only disliked it.... I could see that in your attitude. It was the
circus--that's all.”

Lavinia gazed at him out of an unfathomable contempt. She thought: What
a fool he is! It wasn't Abrego y Mochales' courage that appealed to
her most, although that had afforded her an exquisite thrill, but his
powerful grace, his absolute physical perfection. Orsi was heated again
and his tie had slipped up over the back of his collar.

She recalled the first talk she had had with him about Mochales and the
manner in which she had masked her true feeling for the latter.

How easy Orsi had been to mislead! Now she was seized by the desire to
show him the actual state of her mind; she wanted, in bitter sentences,
to tell him how infinitely superior the Spaniard was to such fat easy
grubs as himself. She longed to make clear to him exactly what it was
that women admired in men--romance and daring and splendid strength.
It might suit Gheta, who had wrinkles, to encourage such men as Cesare
Orsi; their wealth might appeal to cold and material minds, but they
could never hope to inspire passion; no one would ever cherish for them
a hopeless lifelong love.

“Do you know,” Orsi declared with firm conviction, “you are even
handsomer than your sister!”

“Fool! fool! fool!” But she could not, of course, say a word of what was
in her thoughts. She met his admiring gaze with a blank face, conscious
of how utterly her exterior belied and hid the actual Lavinia Sanviano.
She felt wearily old, sophisticated. In her room, dressing for the
evening, she made up her mind that she must have a black dinner
gown--later she would wear no other shade.

IV

Anna Mantegazza knocked and entered just as Lavinia had finished with
her hair and was slipping into the familiar white dress. There had been,
within the last few hours, a perceptible change in the former's attitude
toward her. Lavinia realized that Anna Mantegazza regarded her with a
new interest, a greater and more personal friendliness.

“My dear Lavinia!” she exclaimed, critically overlooking the other's
preparations. “You look very appealing--like a snowdrop; exactly.
I should say the toilet for Sunday at the convent; but no longer
appropriate outside. Really, I must speak to the marchesa--parents are
so slow to see the differences in their own family. Gheta has been a
little overemphasized.

“I wonder,” she continued with glowing vivacity, “if you would allow
me--I assure you it would give me the greatest pleasure in the world....
Your figure is a thousand times better than mine; but, thank heaven, I'm
still slender.... A little evening dress from Vienna! It should really
do you very well. Will you accept it from me? I'd like to give you
something, Lavinia; and it has never been out of its box.”

She turned and was out of the room before Lavinia could reply. There was
no reason why she shouldn't take a present from Anna--Pier Mantegazza
and her father had been lifelong friends, and his wife was an intimate
of the Sanvianos. It would not, probably, be black. It wasn't. Anna
returned, followed by her maid, who bore carefully over her arm a
shimmering mass of glowing pink.

“Now!” Anna Mantegazza cried. “Your hair is very pretty, very
original--but hardly for a dress by Verlat. Sara!”

The maid moved quietly forward and directed an appraising gaze at
Lavinia. She was a flat-hipped Englishwoman, with a cleft chin and
enigmatic greenish eyes. “I see exactly, madame,” she assured Anna; and
with her deft dry hands she took down Lavinia's laboriously arranged
hair.

She drew it back from the brow apparently as simply as before, twisted
it into a low knot slightly eccentric in shape, and recut a bang.
Lavinia's eyes seemed bluer, her delicate flush more elusive; the shape
of her face appeared changed, it was more pointed and had a new willful
charm.

“The stockings,” Anna commanded.

Dressed, Lavinia Sanviano stood curiously before the long mirror; she
saw a fresh Lavinia that was yet the old; and she was absorbing her
first great lesson in the magic of clothes. Verlat, a celebrated
dressmaker, was typical of the Viennese spirit--the gown Lavinia wore
resembled, in all its implications, an orchid. There was a whisper here
of satin, a pale note of green, a promise of chiffon. Her crisp round
shoulders were bare; her finely molded arms were clouded, as it were,
with a pink mist; the skirt was full, incredibly airy; yet every
movement was draped by a suave flowing and swaying.

Lavinia recognized that she had been immensely enriched in effect; it
was not a question of mere beauty--beauty here gave way to a more subtle
and potent consideration. It was a potency which she instinctively
shrank from probing. For a moment she experienced, curiously enough, a
gust of passionate resentment, followed by a quickly passing melancholy,
a faint regret.

Anna Mantegazza and the maid radiated with satisfaction at the result of
their efforts. The former murmured a phrase that bore Gheta's name, but
Lavinia caught nothing else. The maid said:

“Without a doubt, madame.”

Lavinia lingered in her room, strangely reluctant to go down and see her
sister. She was embarrassed by her unusual appearance and dreaded the
prominence of the inevitable exclamations. At last she was obliged
to proceed. The rest stood by the entrance of the dining room. Anna
Mantegazza was laughing at a puzzled expression on the good-natured
countenance of Cesare Orsi; Gheta was slowly waving a fan of gilded
feathers; Abrego y Mochales was standing rigid and somberly handsome;
and, as usual, Pier Mantegazza was late.

Gheta Sanviano turned and saw Lavinia approaching, and the elder's
face, always pale, grew suddenly chalky; it was drawn, and the wrinkles,
carefully treated with paste, became visible about her eyes. Her hands
shook a little as she took a step forward.

“What does this mean, Lavinia?” she demanded. “Why did I know nothing
about that dress?”

“I knew nothing myself until a little bit ago,” Lavinia explained
apologetically, filled with a formless pity for Gheta. “Isn't it pretty?
Anna Mantegazza gave it to me.”

She could see, over Gheta's shoulder, Cesare Orsi staring at her in
idiotic surprise.

“Don't you like it, Gheta?” Anna asked.

Gheta Sanviano didn't answer, but closed her eyes for a moment in an
effort to control the anger that shone in them. The silence deepened to
constraint, and then she laughed lightly.

“Quite a woman of fashion!” she observed of Lavinia. “Fancy! It's a pity
that she must go back to the convent so soon.”

Her eyes while she was speaking were directed toward Anna Mantegazza
and the resentment changed to hatred. The other shrugged her shoulders
indifferently and moved toward the dining room, catching Lavinia's arm
in her own.

Mantegazza entered at the soup and was seated on Gheta's right; Cesare
Orsi was on Anna's left; and Lavinia sat between the two men, with
Mochales opposite. Whatever change had taken place in her looks made
absolutely no impression upon the latter; it was clear that he saw no
one besides Gheta Sanviano.

In the candlelight his face more than ever resembled bronze; his hair
was dead-black; above the white linen his head was like a superb effigy
of an earlier and different race from the others. It was almost savage
in its still austerity. Cesare Orsi, too, said little, which was
extraordinary for him. If Lavinia had made small mark on Mochales, at
least she had overpowered the other to a ludicrous degree. It seemed
that he had never before half observed her; he even muttered to himself
and smiled uncertainly when she chanced to gaze at him.

But what the others lacked conversationally Anna Mantegazza more than
supplied; she was at her best, and that was very sparkling, touched with
malice and understanding, and absolute independence. She insisted on
including Lavinia in every issue. At first Lavinia was only confused by
the attention pressed on her; she retreated, growing more inarticulate
at every sally. Then she became easier; spurred partly by Gheta's
direct unpleasantness and partly by the consciousness of her becoming
appearance, she retorted with spirit; engaged Pier Mantegazza in a duet
of verbal confetti. She gazed challengingly at Abrego y Mochales, but
got no other answer than a grave perfunctory inclination.

She thought of an alternative to the black gowns and unrelieved
melancholy--she might become the gayest member of the gay Roman world,
be known throughout Italy for her reckless exploits, her affairs and
Vienna gowns, all the while hiding her passion for the Flower of Spain.
It would be a vain search for forgetfulness, with an early death in an
atmosphere of roses and champagne. Gheta was gazing at her so crossly
that she took a sip of Mantegazza's brandy; it burned her throat
cruelly, but she concealed the choking with a smile of high bravado.

After dinner they progressed to a drawing-room that filled an entire end
of the villa; it lay three steps below the hall, the imposing walls and
floor covered with tapestries and richly dark rugs. Lavinia more than
ever resembled an orchid, here in a gloom of towering trees curiously
suggested by the draperies and space. She went forward with Anna
Mantegazza to an amber blur of lamplight, the others following
irregularly.

Cesare Orsi sat at Lavinia's side, quickly finishing one long black
cigar and lighting another; Pier Mantegazza and Mochales smoked
cigarettes. Anna was smoking, but Gheta had refused. Lavinia's feeling
for her sister had changed from pity to total indifference. The elder
had been an overbearing and thoughtless superior; and now, when Lavinia
felt in some subtle inexplicable manner that Gheta was losing rank, her
store of sympathy was small. Lavinia hoped that she would marry Orsi
immediately and leave the field free for herself. She wondered whether
her father would buy her a dress by Verlat.

“Honestly,” Orsi murmured, “more beautiful than your--”

She stopped him with an impatient gesture, wondering what Mochales was
saying to Gheta. A possibility suddenly filled her with dread--it was
evident that the Spaniard was growing hourly more absorbed in Gheta, and
the latter might----Lavinia could not support the possibility of Abrego
y Mochales married to her sister. But, she reassured herself, there was
little danger of that--Gheta would never make a sacrifice for emotion;
she would be sure of the comfortable material thing, and now more than
ever.

Anna Mantegazza moved to a piano, which, in the obscurity, she began to
play. The notes rose deliberate and melodious. Gheta Sanviano told Orsi:

“That's Iris. Do you remember, we heard it at the Pergola in the
winter?”

“Do go over to her,” Lavinia whispered.

He rose heavily and went to Gheta's side, and Lavinia waited expectantly
for Mochales to change too. The Spaniard shifted, but it was toward the
piano, where he stood with the rosy reflection of his cigarette on a
moody countenance. It was Pier Mantegazza who sat beside her, with a
quizzical expression on his long gray visage. He said something to her
in Latin, which she only partly understood, but which alluded to the
changing of water into wine.

“I am a subject of jest,” he continued in Italian, “because I prefer
water.”

She smiled with polite vacuity, wondering what he meant.

“You always satisfied me, Lavinia, with your dark smooth plait and white
simplicity; you were cool and refreshing. Now they have made you only
disturbing. I suppose it was inevitable, and with you the change will be
temporary.”

“I'll never let my hair down again,” she retorted. “I've settled that
with Gheta. Mother didn't care, really.”

She was annoyed by the implied criticism, his entire lack of response to
her new being. He had grown blind staring at his stupid old coins.

A step sounded behind her; she turned hopefully, but it was only Cesare
Orsi.

“The others have gone outside,” he told her, and she noticed that the
piano had stopped.

Mantegazza rose and bowed in mock serious formality, at which Lavinia
shrugged an impatient shoulder and walked with Orsi across the room and
out upon the terrace.

Florence had sunk into a dark chasm of night, except for the curving
double row of lights that marked the Lungarno and the indifferent
illumination of a few principal squares. The stars seemed big and near
in deep blue space. Orsi was standing very close to her, and she moved
away; but he followed.

“Lavinia,” he muttered, and suddenly his arm was about her waist.

She leaned back, pushing with both hands against his chest; but he
swept her irresistibly up to him and kissed her clumsily. A cold
rage possessed her. She stopped struggling; yet there was no need to
continue--he released her immediately and opened a stammering apology.

“I am a madman,” he admitted abjectly--“a little animal that ought to
be shot. I don't know what came over me; my head was in a carnival. You
must forgive or I shall be a maniac, I----”

She turned and walked swiftly into the house and mounted to her
room. All the pleasure she had had in the evening, the Viennese gown,
evaporated, left her possessed by an utter loathing of self. Now, in the
mirror, she seemed hateful, the clouded chiffon and airy clinging satin
unspeakable. Looking back out of the dim glass was a stranger who had
betrayed and cheapened her. Her pure serenity revolted against the
currents of life sweeping down upon her, threatening to inundate her.

She unhooked the Verlat gown with trembling fingers and--once more in
simple white--dropped into a deep chair, where she cried with short
painful inspirations, her face pressed against her arm. Her emotion
subsided, changed to a formless dread, and again to a black sense
of helplessness. Suddenly she rose and mechanically shook loose
her hair--footsteps were approaching. Her sister entered, pale and
vindictive.

“You are to be congratulated,” she proceeded thinly; “you made a success
with everybody--that is, with all but Mochales. It was for him, wasn't
it? You were very clever, but you failed ridiculously.”

Lavinia made no reply.

“I hope Mochales excuses you because of your greenness.”

“Youth isn't any longer your crime,” Lavinia retorted at last.

“That dress--it would suit Anna Mantegazza; but you looked only
indecent.”

“Perhaps you're right, Gheta,” Lavinia said unexpectedly. “I'm going to
bed now, please.”

Her balance, restored by sleep, was once more normal when she returned
to the Lungarno. It was again late afternoon, the daily procession was
returning from the Cascine, and Gheta was at the window, looking coldly
down. The Marchesa Sanviano was knitting at prodigious speed a shapeless
gray garment. They all turned when a servant entered:

Signer Orsi wished to see the marchese.

This unusual formality on the part of Cesare Orsi could have but one
purpose, and Lavinia and their mother gazed significantly at the elder
sister.

“The marchese is dressing,” his wife directed.

She drew a long breath of relief and nodded over her needles. Gheta
raised her chin; her lips bore the half-contemptuous expression that
lately had become habitual; her eyes were half closed.

Lavinia sat with her hands loose in her lap. She was wondering whether
or not, should she make a vigorous protest, they would send her back
to the convent. The Verlat gown was carefully hung in her closet. Last
night she had been idiotic.

The Marchese Sanviano appeared hurriedly and alone; his tie was crooked
and his expression very much disturbed. His wife looked up, startled.

“What!” she demanded directly. “Didn't he----”

“Yes,” Sanviano replied, “he did! He wants to marry Lavinia.”

Lavinia half rose, with a horrified protest; Gheta seemed suddenly
turned to stone; the knitting fell unheeded from the marchesa's lap.
Sanviano spread out his hands helplessly.

“Well,” he demanded, “what could I do?... A man with Orsi's blameless
character and the Orsi banks!”

V

The house to which Cesare Orsi took Lavinia was built over the rim of a
small steep island in the Bay of Naples, opposite Castellamare. It
faced the city, rising in an amphitheater of bright stucco and almond
blossoms, across an expanse of glassy and incredibly blue water. It
was evening, the color of sky and bay was darkening, intensified by a
vaporous rosy column where the ascending smoke of Vesuvius held the last
upflung glow of the vanished sun. Lavinia could see from her window the
pale distant quiver of the electric lights springing up along the Villa
Nazionale.

The dwelling itself drew a long irregular façade of white marble on
its abrupt verdant screen--a series of connected pavilions, galleries,
pergolas, belvedere, flowering walls and airy chambers. There were
tesselated remains from the time of the great pleasure-saturated Roman
emperors, a later distinctly Moorish influence, quattrocento-painted
eaves, an eighteenth-century sodded court, and a smoking room with the
startling colored glass of the nineteenth.

The windows of Lavinia's room had no sashes; they were composed of a
double marble arch, supported in the center by a slender twisted marble
column, with Venetian blinds. She stood in the opening, gazing fixedly
over the water turning into night. She could hear, from the room beyond,
her husband's heavy deliberate footfalls; and the sound filled her with
a formless resentment. She wished to be justifiably annoyed by them,
or him; but there was absolutely no cause. Cesare Orsi's character
and disposition were alike beyond reproach--transparent and heroically
optimistic. Since their marriage she had been insolent, she had been
both captious and continuously indifferent, without unsettling the
determined eager good-nature with which he met her moods.

During the week he went by launch into Naples in the interests of his
banking, and did not return for luncheon; and she had long uninterrupted
hours for the enjoyment of her pleasant domain. Altogether, his demands
upon her were reasonable to the point of self-effacement. He laughed
a great deal; this annoyed her youthful gravity and she remonstrated
sharply more than once, but he only leaned back and laughed harder. Then
she would either grow coldly disdainful or leave the room, followed by
the echo of his merriment. There was something impervious, like armor,
in his excellent humor. Apparently she could not get through it to wound
him as she would have liked; and she secretly wondered.

He was prodigal in his generosity--the stores of the Via Roma were
prepared to empty themselves at her desire. Cesare Orsi's wife was
a figure of importance in Naples. She had been made welcome by the
Neapolitan society--lawn fêtes had been given in villas under the
burnished leaves of magnolias on the height of Vomero. The Cavaliere
Nelli, Orsi's cousin and a retired colonel of Bersaglieri, entertained
lavishly at dinner on the terrace of Bertolini's; she went out to old
houses looking through aged and riven pines at the sea.

She would have enjoyed all this hugely if she had not been married to
Orsi; but the continual reiteration of the fact that she was Orsi's wife
filled her with an accumulating resentment. The implication that she
had been exceedingly fortunate became more than she could bear. The
consequence was that, as soon as it could be managed, she ceased going
about.

She was now at the window, immersed in a melancholy sense of total
isolation; the water stirring along the masonry below, a call from a
shadowy fishing boat dropping down the bay, filled her with longing for
the cheerful existence of the Lungarno. She had had a letter from Gheta
that morning, the first from her sister since she had left Florence,
brief but without any actual expression of ill will. After all was said,
she had brought Gheta a great disappointment; if she had been in the
elder's place probably she would have behaved no better.... It occurred
to her to ask Gheta to Naples. At least then she would have some one
with whom to recall the pleasant trifles of past years. She would
have liked to ask Anna Mantegazza, too; but this she knew was
impossible--Gheta had not forgiven Anna for her part on the night that
had resulted in Orsi's proposal for Lavinia.

She wondered, more obscurely, whether Abrego y Mochales was still in
Florence. He loomed at the back of her thoughts, inscrutably dark and
romantic. It piqued her that he had not made the slightest response to
her palpable admiration. But he had been tremendously stirred by Gheta,
who was never touched by such emotions.

A desire to see Mochales grew insidiously out of her speculations; a
desire to talk about him, hear his name. Lavinia deliberately shut her
eyes to the fact that this last became her principal reason for wishing
to see Gheta.

She told Cesare, with a diffidence which she was unable to overcome,
that she had written asking her sister for a visit. Seemingly he didn't
hear her. They were at breakfast, on the wine-red tiling of a pergola
by the water, and he had shaken his fist, with a rueful curse, in the
direction of Naples. Before him lay an open letter with an engraved page
heading.

“I said,” Lavinia repeated impatiently, “that Gheta will probably be
here the last of the week.”

“The sacred camels!” Orsi exclaimed; then: “Oh, Gheta--good!” But he
fell immediately into an angry reverie. “If I dared--” he muttered.

“What has stirred you up so?”

“It's difficult to explain to any one not born in Naples. Here, you see,
all is not in order, like Florence; we have had a stormy time between
brigands and secret factions and foreign rulers; and certain societies
sprang up, necessary once, but now--when one still exists--a source of
bribery and nuisance. This letter, for example, congratulates me on the
possession of a charming bride; it expresses the devotion of a hidden
organization, but points out that in order to guarantee your safety in
a city where the guards are admittedly insufficient it will be necessary
for me to forward two thousand lire at once.”

“You will, of course, ignore it.”

“I will certainly send the money at once.”

“What a cowardly attitude!” Lavinia declared contemptuously. “You allow
yourself to be blackmailed like a common criminal.”

Orsi laughed, his equilibrium quickly restored.

“I warned you that a stranger could not understand,” he reminded her.
“If the money weren't sent, in ten days or two weeks perhaps, there
would be a little accident on the Chiaja--your carriage would be run
into; you would be upset, confused, angry. There would be profuse
apologies, investigation, perhaps arrests; but nothing would come of it.
If the money was still held back something a little more serious would
occur. Nothing really dangerous, you understand; but finally the
two thousand lire would be gladly paid over and the accidents would
mysteriously cease.”

“An outrage!” Lavinia asserted, and Orsi nodded.

“If you had an enemy,” he continued, “you could have her gown ruined in
the foyer of the San Carlos; if it were a man he would be caught at his
club with an uncomfortable ace in his cuff. At least so I'm assured.
I haven't had any reason to look the society up yet.” He laughed
prodigiously. “Even murders are ascribed to it. Careful, Cesare, or a
new valet will cut your throat some fine morning and your widow walk
away with a more graceful man!”

“Your jokes are so stupid.” Lavinia shrugged her shoulders.

He laid the letter on the table's edge and a wandering air bore it
slanting to the floor, but he promptly recovered it.

“That must go in the safe,” he ended; “it is well to have a slight grasp
on those gentlemen.”

He rose; and a few minutes later Lavinia saw his trim brown launch,
with its awning and steersman in gleaming white, rushing through the bay
toward Naples.

VI

The basin from which the launch plied lay inside a seawall inclosing a
small placid rectangle with a walk all about and iron benches. Steps at
the back, guarded by two great Pompeian sandstone urns, and pressed by
a luxuriant growth, led up to the villa. Gheta looked curiously about
as she stepped from the launch and went forward with her brother-in-law.
Lavinia followed, with Gheta's maid and a porter in the rear.

Lavinia realized that her sister looked badly; in the unsparing blaze
of midday the wrinkles about her eyes were apparent, and they had
multiplied. Although it was past the first of June, Gheta was wearing
a linen suit of last year; and--as her maid unpacked--Lavinia saw the
familiar pink tulle and the lavender gown with the gold velvet buttons.

“Your dressmaker is very late,” she observed thoughtlessly.

A slow flush spread over the other's countenance; she did not reply
immediately and Lavinia would have given a great deal to unsay her
period.

“It isn't that,” Gheta finally explained; “the family find that I am too
expensive. You see, I haven't justified their hopes and they have been
cutting down.”

Her voice was thin, metallic; her features had sharpened like folded
paper creased between the fingers.

“It's very good form here,” she went on, dancing about her room. It was
hardly more than a marble gallery, the peristyle choked with flowering
bushes, camellias and althea and hibiscus, barely furnished, and filled
with drifting perfumes and the savor of the sea. “What a shame that
these things must be got at a price!”

Lavinia glanced at her sharply; until the present moment that would have
expressed her own attitude, but said by Gheta it seemed a little crude.
It was, anyhow, painfully obvious, and she had no intention of showing
Gheta the true state of her being.

“Isn't that so of everything--worth having?” she asked, adding the
latter purely as a counter.

The elder drew up her fine shoulders.

“That's very courageous of you,” she admitted--“especially since
everybody knew your opinion of Orsi. Heaven knows you made no effort to
disguise your feeling to others.”

Lavinia smiled calmly; Cesare was really very thoughtful, and she said
so. Gheta replied at a sudden tangent:

“Mochales has been a great nuisance.”

Lavinia was gazing through an opening in the leaves at the sparkling
blue plane of the bay. She made no movement, aware of her sister's
unsparing curiosity turned upon her, and only said:

“Really?”

“Spaniards are so tempestuous,” Gheta continued; “he's been whispering
a hundred mad schemes in my ear. He gave up an important engagement in
Madrid rather than leave Florence. I have been almost stirred by him, he
is so slender and handsome.

“Simply every woman--except perhaps me--is in love with him.”

“There's no danger of your loving any one besides yourself.”

“I saw him the day before I left; told him where I was going. Then I had
to beg him not to take the same train. He said he was going to Naples,
anyhow, to sail from there for Spain. He will be at the Grand Hotel and
I gave him permission to see me here once.”

Lavinia revolved slowly.

“Why not? He turned my head round at least twice.” She moved toward
the door. “Ring whenever you like,” she said; “there are servants for
everything.”

In her room she wondered, with burning cheeks, when Abrego y Mochales
would come. Her sentimental interest in him had waned a trifle during
the past busy weeks; but, in spite of that, he was the great romantic
attachment of her life. If he had returned her love no whispered scheme
would have been too mad. What would he think of her now? But she knew
instinctively that there would be no change in Mochales' attitude. He
was in love with Gheta; blind to the rest of the world.

She sat lost in a day-dream--how different her life would have been,
married to the bull-fighter! She would have become a part of the fierce
Spanish crowds at the ring, traveled to South America, seen the people
heap roses, jewels, upon her idol....

Cesare Orsi stood in the doorway, smiling with oppressive good-nature.

“Lavinia,” he told her, “I've done something, and now I'm in the devil
of a doubt.” He advanced, holding a small package, and sat on the edge
of a chair, mopping his brow. “You see,” he began diffidently, “that is,
as you must know, at first--you were at the convent--I thought something
of proposing for your sister. Thank God,” he added vigorously, “I
waited! Well, I didn't; although, to be completely honest, I knew that
it came to be expected. I could see the surprise in your father's
face. It occurred to me afterward that if I had brought Gheta any
embarrassment I'd like to do something in a small way, a sort of
acknowledgment. And to-day I saw this,” he held out the package; “it
was pretty and I bought it for her at once. But now, when the moment
arrives, I hesitate to give it to her. Gheta has grown so--so formal
that I'm afraid of her,” he laughed.

Lavinia unwrapped the paper covering from a green morocco box and,
releasing the catch, saw a shimmering string of delicately pink pearls.

“Cesare!” she exclaimed. “How gorgeous!” She lifted the necklace,
letting it slide cool and fine through her fingers. “It's too good of
you. This has cost hundreds and hundreds. I'll keep it myself.”

He laughed, shaking all over; then fell serious.

“Everything I have--all, all--is yours,” he assured her. Lavinia
turned away with an uncomfortable feeling of falseness. “What do you
predict--will Gheta take it, understand, or will she play the frozen
princess?”

“If I know Gheta, she'll take it,” Lavinia promptly replied.

Orsi presented Gheta Sanviano with the necklace at dinner. She took it
slowly from its box and glanced at the diamond clasp.

“Thank you, Cesare, immensely! What a shame that pink pearls so closely
resemble coral! No one gives you credit for them.”

A feeling of shame for her sister's ungraciousness possessed Lavinia and
mounted to angry resentment. She had no particular desire to champion
Cesare, but the simplicity and kindness of his thought demanded more
than a superficial admission. At the same time she had no intention of
permitting Gheta any display of superiority here.

“You need only say they were from Cesare,” she observed coldly; “with
him, it is always pearls.”

Such a tide of pleasure swept over her husband's countenance that
Lavinia bit her lip in annoyance. She had intended only to rebuke Gheta
and had not calculated the effect of her speech upon Cesare. She was
scrupulously careful not to mislead the latter with regard to her
feeling for him. She went to a rather needless extreme to demonstrate
that she conducted herself from a sense of duty and propriety alone.

Her married life, she assured herself, already resembled the
Mantegazzas', whose indifferent courtesy she had marked and wondered at.
Perhaps in time, like them, she would grow accustomed to it; but now it
took all her determination to maintain the smallest daily amenities. It
was not that her actual condition was unbearable, but only that it was
so tragically removed from what she had imagined; she had dreamed of
romance, it had been embodied for her eager gaze--and she had married
Cesare Orsi!

Gheta returned the necklace to its box and the dinner progressed in
silence. The coffee was on when the elder sister said:

“I had a card from the Grand Hotel a while ago; Abrego y Mochales is
there.”

“And there,” Orsi put in promptly, “I hope he'll stay, or sail for
Spain. I don't want the clown about here.”

Gheta turned.

“But you will regret that,” she addressed Lavinia; “you always found him
so fascinating.”

Lavinia's husband cleared his throat sharply; he was clearly impatiently
annoyed.

“What foolishness!” he cried. “From the first, Lavinia has been scarcely
conscious of his existence.”

Lavinia avoided her sister's mocking gaze, disturbed and angry.

“Certainly Signore Mochales must be asked here,” she declared.

“I suppose it can't be avoided,” Orsi muttered.

It was arranged that the Spaniard should dine with them on the following
evening and Lavinia spent the intervening time in exploring her
emotions. She recognized now that Gheta hated both Cesare and herself,
and that she would miss no opportunity to force an awkward or even
dangerously unpleasant situation upon them. Gheta had sharpened in
being as well as in countenance to such a degree that Lavinia lost what
natural affection for her sister she had retained.

This, in a way, allied her with Cesare. She was now able at least to
survey him in a detached manner, with an impersonal comprehension of his
good qualities and aesthetic shortcomings; and in pointing out to Gheta
the lavish beauty of her--Lavinia's--surroundings, she engendered in
herself a slight proprietary pride. She met Abrego y Mochales at the
basin with a direct bright smile, standing firmly upon her wall.

Against the blue water shadowed by the promise of dusk he was a somber
and splendid figure. Her heart undeniably beat faster and she was vexed
when he turned immediately to Gheta. His greeting was intensely serious,
his gaze so hungry that Lavinia looked away. It was vulgar, she told
herself. Cesare met them above and greeted Mochales with a superficial
heartiness. It was difficult for Cesare Orsi to conceal his opinions and
feelings. The other man's gravity was superb.

At dinner conversation languished. Gheta, in a very low dress, had
a bright red scarf about her shoulders, and was painted. This was so
unusual that it had almost the effect of a disguise; her eyes were
staring and brilliant, her fingers constantly fidgeting and creasing
her napkin. Afterward she walked with Mochales to the corner of the
belvedere, where they had all been sitting, and from there drifted
the low continuous murmur of her voice, briefly punctuated by a deep
masculine note of interrogation. Below, the water was invisible in the
wrap of night. Naples shone like a pale gold net drawn about the sweep
of its hills. A glow like a thumb print hung over Vesuvius; the hidden
column of smoke smudged the stars.

Lavinia grew restless and descended to her room, where she procured a
fan. Returning, she was partly startled by a pale still figure in the
gloom of a passage. She saw that it was Gheta, and spoke; but the other
moved away without reply and quickly vanished. Above, Lavinia halted
at the strange spectacle--clearly drawn against the luminous depths of
space--of Mochales and her husband rigidly facing each other.

“I must admit,” Orsi said in an exasperated voice, “that I don't
understand.”

Lavinia saw that he was holding something in a half-extended hand.
Moving closer, she identified the object as the necklace he had given
Gheta.

“What is it that you don't understand, Cesare?” she asked.

“Some infernal joke or foolishness!”

“It is no joke, signore,” Mochales responded; “and it is
better,--perhaps, for your wife to leave us.”

Orsi turned to Lavinia.

“He gives me back this necklace of Gheta's,” he explained; “he says that
he has every right. It appears that Gheta is going to marry him, and he
already objects to presents from her brother-in-law.”

“But what stuff!” Lavinia pronounced.

A swift surprise overtook her at Cesare's announcement--Gheta and
Mochales to marry! She was certain that the arrangement had not existed
that morning. A fleet inchoate sorrow numbed her heart and fled.

“Orsi has been only truthful enough to suit his own purpose,” Mochales
stated, “Signora, please----” He indicated the descent from the
belvedere.

She moved closer to him, smiling appealingly.

“What is it all about?” she queried.

“Forgive me; it is impossible to answer.”

“Cesare?” She addressed her husband.

“Why, this--this donkey hints that there was something improper in my
present. It seems that I have been annoying Gheta by my attentions,
flattering her with pearls.”

“Did Gheta tell you that?” Lavinia demanded. A growing resentment took
possession of her. “Because if she did, she lied!”

“Ah!” Mochales whispered sharply.

“They're both mad,” Orsi told her, “and should be dipped in the bay.”

Never had Abrego y Mochales appeared handsomer; never more like fine
bronze. That latter fact struck her forcibly. His face was no more
mutable than a mask of metal. Its stark rigidity sent a cold tremor to
her heart.

“And,” she went on impetuously, “since Gheta said that, I'll tell you
really about this necklace: Cesare gave it to her because he was sorry
for her; because he thought that perhaps he had misled her. He spoke of
it to me first.”

“No, signora,” the Spaniard responded deliberately; “it is not your
sister who lies.”

Cesare Orsi exclaimed angrily. He took a hasty step; but Lavinia,
quicker, moved between the two men.

“This is impossible,” she declared, “and must stop immediately! It is
childish!”

There was now a metallic ring in Mochales' voice that disturbed her even
more than his words. The bull-fighter, completely immobile, seemed
a little inhuman; he was without a visible stir of emotion, but Orsi
looked more puzzled and angry every moment.

“This,” he ejaculated, “in my own house--infamous!”

“Signor Mochales,” Lavinia reiterated, “what I have told you is
absolutely so.”

“Your sister, signora, has said something different.... She did not want
to tell me, but I persisted--I saw that something was wrong--and forced
it from her.”

“Enough!” Orsi commanded. “One can see plainly that you have been duped;
some things may be overlooked.... You have talked enough.”

Mochales moved easily forward.

“You pudding!” he said in a low even voice. “Do you talk to me--Abrego y
Mochales?”

A dark tide of passion, visible even in the night, flooded Orsi's
countenance.

“Leave!” he insisted, “Or I'll have you flung into the bay.”

A deep silence followed, in which Lavinia could hear the stir of the
water against the walls below. A sharp fear entered her heart, a new
dread of the Spaniard. He was completely outside the circle of impulses
which she understood and to which she reacted. He was not a part of her
world; he coldly menaced the foundations of all right and security.
Her worship of romance died miserably. In a way, she thought, she was
responsible for the present horrible situation; it was the result of the
feeling she had had for Mochales. Lavinia was certain that if Gheta
had not known of it the Spaniard would have been quickly dropped by the
elder. She was suddenly conscious of the perfume he always bore; that,
curiously, lent him a strange additional oppression.

“Mochales,” he said in a species of strained wonderment, “threatened ...
thrown into the bay! Mochales--the Flower of Spain! And by a helpless
mound of fat, a tub of entrails----”

“Cesare!” Lavinia cried in an energy of desperation. “Come! Don't listen
to him.”

Orsi released her grasp.

“I believe you are at the Grand Hotel?” he addressed the other man.

“Until I hear from you.”

“To-morrow----”

All the heat had apparently evaporated from their words; they spoke with
a perfunctory politeness. Cesare Orsi said:

“I will order the launch.”

In a few minutes the palpitations of the steam died in the direction of
Naples.

VII

Lavinia followed her husband to their rooms, where he sat smoking one
of his long black cigars. He was pale; his brow was wet and his collar
wilted. She stood beside him and he patted her arm.

“Everything is in order,” he assured her.

A species of blundering tenderness for him possessed her; an unexpected
throb of her being startled and robbed her of words. He mistook her
continued silence.

“All I have is yours,” he explained; “it is your right. I can see now
that--that my money was all I had to offer you. The only thing of value
I possess. I should have realized that a girl, charming like yourself,
couldn't care for a mound of fat.” Her tenderness rose till it choked in
her throat, blurred what she had to say.

“Cesare,” she told him, “Gheta was right; at one time I was in love with
Mochales.” He turned with a startled exclamation; but she silenced him.
“He was, it seemed, all that a girl might admire--dark and mysterious
and handsome. He was romantic. I demanded nothing else then; now
something has happened that I don't altogether understand, but it has
changed everything for me. Cesare, your money never made any difference
in my feeling for you--it didn't before and it doesn't to-night--” She
hesitated and blushed painfully, awkwardly.

The cigar fell from his hand and he rose, eagerly facing her.

“Lavinia,” he asked, “is it possible--do you mean that you care the
least about me?”

“It must be that, Cesare, because I am so terribly afraid.”

Later he admitted ruefully:

“But no man should resemble, as I do, a great oyster. I shall pay very
dearly for my laziness.”

“You are not going to fight Mochales!” she protested. “It would be
insanity.”

“Insanity,” he agreed promptly. “Yet I can't permit myself to be the
target for vile tongues.”

Lavinia abruptly left him and hurried to her sister's room. The door was
locked; she knocked, but got no response.

“Gheta,” she called, low and urgently, “open at once! Your plans have
gone dreadfully wrong. Gheta!” she said more sharply into the answering
silence. “Cesare has had a terrific argument with Mochales, and worse
may follow. Open!” There was still no answer, and suddenly she beat
upon the door with her fists. “Liar!” she cried thinly through the wood.
“Liar! You bitter old stick! I'll make you eat that necklace, pearl for
pearl, sorrow for sorrow!”

A feeling of impotence overwhelmed her at the implacable stillness that
succeeded her hysterical outburst. She stood with a pounding heart, and
clasped straining fingers.

Abrego y Mochales could kill Cesare without the slightest shadow of a
question. There was, she recognized, something essentially feminine in
the saturnine bullfighter; his pride had been severely assaulted; and
therefore he would be--in his own, less subtle manner--as dangerous
as Gheta. Cesare's self-esteem, too, had been wounded in its most
vulnerable place--he had been insulted before her. But, even if the
latter refused to proceed, Mochales, she knew, would force an acute
conclusion. There was nothing to be got from her sister and she
slowly returned to her chamber, from which she could hear Orsi's heavy
footfalls.

She mechanically removed the square emerald that hung from a platinum
thread about her neck, took off her rings, and proceeded to the small
iron safe where valuables were kept. As she swung open the door a sheet
of paper slipped forward from an upper compartment. It bore a

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