CD-ROM Aktief 1995 #6/CDA_6.iso/shell/book/whrt210.arj/WHRT210.TXT

Text File | 1995-08-27 | 270KB | 6,110 lines

Project Gutenberg Etext of Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton

Part Two

Please take a look at the important information in this header.
We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*

Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
further information is included below.  We need your donations.


The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part Two

August, 1995  [Etext #306]


Project Gutenberg Etext of Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
*****This file should be named whrt210.txt or whrt210.zip******

Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, whrt211.txt.
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, whrt210a.txt.


The Project Gutenberg Anthology Series


The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
A Ten-Part Collection
Part Two


The etexts in this volume were created by Judith Boss, Omaha, NE
This series is edited by John Hamm <[e-mail]>


We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
of the official release dates, for time for better editing.

Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
new copy has at least one byte more or less.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $4
million dollars per hour this year as we release some eight text
files per month:  thus upping our productivity from $2 million.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is 10% of the expected number of computer users by the end
of the year 2001.

We need your donations more than ever!

All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/IBC", and are
tax deductible to the extent allowable by law ("IBC" is Illinois
Benedictine College).  (Subscriptions to our paper newsletter go
to IBC, too)

For these and other matters, please mail to:

Project Gutenberg
P. O. Box  2782
Champaign, IL 61825

When all other email fails try our Michael S. Hart, Executive
Director:
[e-mail] (internet)   hart@uiucvmd   (bitnet)

We would prefer to send you this information by email
(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).

******
If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]

ftp mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu
login:  anonymous
password:  your@login
cd etext/etext90 through /etext95
or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
dir [to see files]
get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
GET INDEX?00.GUT
for a list of books
and
GET NEW GUT for general information
and
MGET GUT* for newsletters.

**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
(Three Pages)


***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
Illinois Benedictine College (the "Project").  Among other
things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association / Illinois
     Benedictine College" within the 60 days following each
     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
Association / Illinois Benedictine College".

This "Small Print!" by Charles B. Kramer, Attorney
Internet ([e-mail]); TEL: [phone])
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*



                The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
                        A Ten-Part Collection
                               Part Two



                        Contents of Part Two

                               Stories
           AFTERWARD............................January   1910
           THE FULNESS OF LIFE..................December  1893
           A VENETIAN NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT.....December  1903
           XINGU................................December  1911
           THE VERDICT..........................June      1908
           THE RECKONING........................August    1902


                                Verse

           BOTTICELLI'S MADONNA IN THE LOUVRE...January   1891
           THE TOMB OF ILARIA GIUNIGI...........February  1891
           THE SONNET...........................November  1891
           TWO BACKGROUNDS......................November  1892
           EXPERIENCE...........................January   1893
           CHARTRES.............................September 1893
           LIFE.................................June      1894
           AN AUTUMN SUNSET.....................October   1894




AFTERWARD
January 1910


I


"Oh, there IS one, of course, but you'll never know it."

The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a
bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp
perception of its latent significance as she stood, in the
December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the
library.

The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they
sat at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very
house of which the library in question was the central, the
pivotal "feature."  Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a
country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties,
had, on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight
to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own case;
but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously,
several practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it
out: "Well, there's Lyng, in Dorsetshire.  It belongs to Hugo's
cousins, and you can get it for a song."

The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms--its
remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water
pipes, and other vulgar necessities--were exactly those pleading
in its favor with two romantic Americans perversely in search of
the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition,
with unusual architectural felicities.

"I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was
thoroughly uncomfortable," Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the
two, had jocosely insisted; "the least hint of 'convenience'
would make me think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with
the pieces numbered, and set up again."  And they had proceeded
to enumerate, with humorous precision, their various suspicions
and exactions, refusing to believe that the house their cousin
recommended was REALLY Tudor till they learned it had no heating
system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds
till she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the water-
supply.

"It's too uncomfortable to be true!" Edward Boyne had continued
to exult as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively
wrung from her; but he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a
sudden relapse to distrust: "And the ghost?  You've been
concealing from us the fact that there is no ghost!"

Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her
laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent
perceptions, had noted a sudden flatness of tone in Alida's
answering hilarity.

"Oh, Dorsetshire's full of ghosts, you know."

"Yes, yes; but that won't do.  I don't want to have to drive ten
miles to see somebody else's ghost.  I want one of my own on the
premises.  IS there a ghost at Lyng?"

His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that
she had flung back tantalizingly: "Oh, there IS one, of course,
but you'll never know it."

"Never know it?"  Boyne pulled her up.  "But what in the world
constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?"

"I can't say.  But that's the story."

"That there's a ghost, but that nobody knows it's a ghost?"

"Well--not till afterward, at any rate."

"Till afterward?"

"Not till long, long afterward."

"But if it's once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why
hasn't its signalement been handed down in the family?  How has
it managed to preserve its incognito?"

Alida could only shake her head.  "Don't ask me.  But it has."

"And then suddenly--"  Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous
depth of divination--"suddenly, long afterward, one says to one's
self, 'THAT WAS it?'"

She was oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her
question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the
shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida's clear pupils.
"I suppose so.  One just has to wait."

"Oh, hang waiting!" Ned broke in.  "Life's too short for a ghost
who can only be enjoyed in retrospect.  Can't we do better than
that, Mary?"

But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to,
for within three months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair
they were established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for
to the point of planning it out in all its daily details had
actually begun for them.

It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a wide-
hooded fireplace, under just such black oak rafters, with the
sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkening to
a deeper solitude: it was for the ultimate indulgence in such
sensations that Mary Boyne had endured for nearly fourteen years
the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West, and that Boyne
had ground on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness
that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue
Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the
leisure to taste it.  They had never for a moment meant their new
state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves
only to harmonious activities.  She had her vision of painting
and gardening (against a background of gray walls), he dreamed of
the production of his long-planned book on the "Economic Basis of
Culture"; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could
be too sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world,
or plunge deep enough into the past.

Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of
remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position.
But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the
whole incredibly compressed island--a nest of counties, as they
put it--that for the production of its effects so little of a
given quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and
so short a distance a difference.

"It's that," Ned had once enthusiastically explained, "that gives
such depth to their effects, such relief to their least
contrasts.  They've been able to lay the butter so thick on every
exquisite mouthful."

The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray
house, hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the
finer marks of commerce with a protracted past.  The mere fact
that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes,
abound the more richly in its special sense--the sense of having
been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life.  The life had
probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no
doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet
drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond
between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes
breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and
Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an
intenser memory.

The feeling had never been stronger than on the December
afternoon when, waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she
rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth.
Her husband had gone off, after luncheon, for one of his long
tramps on the downs.  She had noticed of late that he preferred
to be unaccompanied on these occasions; and, in the tried
security of their personal relations, had been driven to conclude
that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the
afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the
morning's work.  Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as
she had imagined it would, and the lines of perplexity between
his eyes had never been there in his engineering days.  Then he
had often looked fagged to the verge of illness, but the native
demon of "worry" had never branded his brow.  Yet the few pages
he had so far read to her--the introduction, and a synopsis of
the opening chapter--gave evidences of a firm possession of his
subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.

The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had
done with "business" and its disturbing contingencies, the one
other possible element of anxiety was eliminated.  Unless it were
his health, then?  But physically he had gained since they had
come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed.
It was only within a week that she had felt in him the
undefinable change that made her restless in his absence, and as
tongue-tied in his presence as though it were SHE who had a
secret to keep from him!

The thought that there WAS a secret somewhere between them struck
her with a sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her
down the dim, long room.

"Can it be the house?" she mused.

The room itself might have been full of secrets.  They seemed to
be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and
layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky
walls of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth.

"Why, of course--the house is haunted!" she reflected.

The ghost--Alida's imperceptible ghost--after figuring largely in
the banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been
gradually discarded as too ineffectual for imaginative use.  Mary
had, indeed, as became the tenant of a haunted house, made the
customary inquiries among her few rural neighbors, but, beyond a
vague, "They du say so, Ma'am," the villagers had nothing to
impart.  The elusive specter had apparently never had sufficient
identity for a legend to crystallize about it, and after a time
the Boynes had laughingly set the matter down to their profit-
and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses
good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.

"And I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that's why it beats its
beautiful wings in vain in the void," Mary had laughingly
concluded.

"Or, rather," Ned answered, in the same strain, "why, amid so
much that's ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence
as THE ghost."  And thereupon their invisible housemate had
finally dropped out of their references, which were numerous
enough to make them promptly unaware of the loss.

Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier
curiosity revived in her with a new sense of its meaning--a sense
gradually acquired through close daily contact with the scene of
the lurking mystery.  It was the house itself, of course, that
possessed the ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but
secretly with its own past; and if one could only get into close
enough communion with the house, one might surprise its secret,
and acquire the ghost-sight on one's own account.  Perhaps, in
his long solitary hours in this very room, where she never
trespassed till the afternoon, her husband HAD acquired it
already, and was silently carrying the dread weight of whatever
it had revealed to him.  Mary was too well-versed in the code of
the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the
ghosts one saw: to do so was almost as great a breach of good-
breeding as to name a lady in a club.  But this explanation did
not really satisfy her.  "What, after all, except for the fun of
the frisson," she reflected, "would he really care for any of
their old ghosts?"  And thence she was thrown back once more on
the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's greater or less
susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing
on the case, since, when one DID see a ghost at Lyng, one did not
know it.

"Not till long afterward," Alida Stair had said.  Well, supposing
Ned HAD seen one when they first came, and had known only within
the last week what had happened to him?  More and more under the
spell of the hour, she threw back her searching thoughts to the
early days of their tenancy, but at first only to recall a gay
confusion of unpacking, settling, arranging of books, and calling
to each other from remote corners of the house as treasure after
treasure of their habitation revealed itself to them.  It was in
this particular connection that she presently recalled a certain
soft afternoon of the previous October, when, passing from the
first rapturous flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of
the old house, she had pressed (like a novel heroine) a panel
that opened at her touch, on a narrow flight of stairs leading to
an unsuspected flat ledge of the roof--the roof which, from
below, seemed to slope away on all sides too abruptly for any but
practised feet to scale.

The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown
down to snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of
her discovery.  She remembered still how, standing on the narrow
ledge, he had passed his arm about her while their gaze flew to
the long, tossed horizon-line of the downs, and then dropped
contentedly back to trace the arabesque of yew hedges about the
fish-pond, and the shadow of the cedar on the lawn.

"And now the other way," he had said, gently turning her about
within his arm; and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed,
like some long, satisfying draft, the picture of the gray-walled
court, the squat lions on the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching
up to the highroad under the downs.

It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she
had felt his arm relax, and heard a sharp "Hullo!" that made her
turn to glance at him.

Distinctly, yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a
shadow of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face;
and, following his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man--a man in
loose, grayish clothes, as it appeared to her--who was sauntering
down the lime-avenue to the court with the tentative gait of a
stranger seeking his way.  Her short-sighted eyes had given her
but a blurred impression of slightness and grayness, with
something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of the figure
or its garb; but her husband had apparently seen more--seen
enough to make him push past her with a sharp "Wait!" and dash
down the twisting stairs without pausing to give her a hand for
the descent.

A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional
clutch at the chimney against which they had been leaning, to
follow him down more cautiously; and when she had reached the
attic landing she paused again for a less definite reason,
leaning over the oak banister to strain her eyes through the
silence of the brown, sun-flecked depths below.  She lingered
there till, somewhere in those depths, she heard the closing of a
door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the shallow
flights of steps till she reached the lower hall.

The front door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and
hall and court were empty.  The library door was open, too, and
after listening in vain for any sound of voices within, she
quickly crossed the threshold, and found her husband alone,
vaguely fingering the papers on his desk.

He looked up, as if surprised at her precipitate entrance, but
the shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even,
as she fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.

"What was it?  Who was it?" she asked.

"Who?" he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.

"The man we saw coming toward the house."

He seemed honestly to reflect.  "The man?  Why, I thought I saw
Peters; I dashed after him to say a word about the stable-drains,
but he had disappeared before I could get down."

"Disappeared?  Why, he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw
him."

Boyne shrugged his shoulders.  "So I thought; but he must have
got up steam in the interval.  What do you say to our trying a
scramble up Meldon Steep before sunset?"

That was all.  At the time the occurrence had been less than
nothing, had, indeed, been immediately obliterated by the magic
of their first vision from Meldon Steep, a height which they had
dreamed of climbing ever since they had first seen its bare spine
heaving itself above the low roof of Lyng.  Doubtless it was the
mere fact of the other incident's having occurred on the very day
of their ascent to Meldon that had kept it stored away in the
unconscious fold of association from which it now emerged; for in
itself it had no mark of the portentous.  At the moment there
could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash
himself from the roof in the pursuit of dilatory tradesmen.  It
was the period when they were always on the watch for one or the
other of the specialists employed about the place; always lying
in wait for them, and dashing out at them with questions,
reproaches, or reminders.  And certainly in the distance the gray
figure had looked like Peters.

Yet now, as she reviewed the rapid scene, she felt her husband's
explanation of it to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety
on his face.  Why had the familiar appearance of Peters made him
anxious?  Why, above all, if it was of such prime necessity to
confer with that authority on the subject of the stable-drains,
had the failure to find him produced such a look of relief?  Mary
could not say that any one of these considerations had occurred
to her at the time, yet, from the promptness with which they now
marshaled themselves at her summons, she had a sudden sense that
they must all along have been there, waiting their hour.



II


Weary with her thoughts, she moved toward the window.  The
library was now completely dark, and she was surprised to see how
much faint light the outer world still held.

As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped
itself in the tapering perspective of bare lines: it looked a
mere blot of deeper gray in the grayness, and for an instant, as
it moved toward her, her heart thumped to the thought, "It's the
ghost!"

She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man
of whom, two months earlier, she had a brief distant vision from
the roof was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal
himself as NOT having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the
impending fear of the disclosure.  But almost with the next tick
of the clock the ambiguous figure, gaining substance and
character, showed itself even to her weak sight as her husband's;
and she turned away to meet him, as he entered, with the
confession of her folly.

"It's really too absurd," she laughed out from the threshold,
"but I never CAN remember!"

"Remember what?" Boyne questioned as they drew together.

"That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it."

Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no
response in his gesture or in the lines of his fagged,
preoccupied face.

"Did you think you'd seen it?" he asked, after an appreciable
interval.

"Why, I actually took YOU for it, my dear, in my mad
determination to spot it!"

"Me--just now?"  His arm dropped away, and he turned from her
with a faint echo of her laugh.  "Really, dearest, you'd better
give it up, if that's the best you can do."

"Yes, I give it up--I give it up.  Have YOU?" she asked, turning
round on him abruptly.

The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the
light struck up into Boyne's face as he bent above the tray she
presented.

"Have YOU?" Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had
disappeared on her errand of illumination.

"Have I what?" he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the
sharp stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the
letters.

"Given up trying to see the ghost."  Her heart beat a little at
the experiment she was making.

Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow
of the hearth.

"I never tried," he said, tearing open the wrapper of a
newspaper.

"Well, of course," Mary persisted, "the exasperating thing is
that there's no use trying, since one can't be sure till so long
afterward."

He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but
after a pause, during which the sheets rustled spasmodically
between his hands, he lifted his head to say abruptly, "Have you
any idea HOW LONG?"

Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace.  From her
seat she looked up, startled, at her husband's profile, which was
darkly projected against the circle of lamplight.

"No; none.  Have YOU?" she retorted, repeating her former phrase
with an added keenness of intention.

Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then inconsequently
turned back with it toward the lamp.

"Lord, no!  I only meant," he explained, with a faint tinge of
impatience, "is there any legend, any tradition, as to that?"

"Not that I know of," she answered; but the impulse to add, "What
makes you ask?" was checked by the reappearance of the parlor-
maid with tea and a second lamp.

With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the daily
domestic office, Mary Boyne felt herself less oppressed by that
sense of something mutely imminent which had darkened her
solitary afternoon.  For a few moments she gave herself silently
to the details of her task, and when she looked up from it she
was struck to the point of bewilderment by the change in her
husband's face.  He had seated himself near the farther lamp, and
was absorbed in the perusal of his letters; but was it something
he had found in them, or merely the shifting of her own point of
view, that had restored his features to their normal aspect?  The
longer she looked, the more definitely the change affirmed
itself.  The lines of painful tension had vanished, and such
traces of fatigue as lingered were of the kind easily
attributable to steady mental effort.  He glanced up, as if drawn
by her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile.

"I'm dying for my tea, you know; and here's a letter for you," he
said.

She took the letter he held out in exchange for the cup she
proffered him, and, returning to her seat, broke the seal with
the languid gesture of the reader whose interests are all
inclosed in the circle of one cherished presence.

Her next conscious motion was that of starting to her feet, the
letter falling to them as she rose, while she held out to her
husband a long newspaper clipping.

"Ned!  What's this?  What does it mean?"

He had risen at the same instant, almost as if hearing her cry
before she uttered it; and for a perceptible space of time he and
she studied each other, like adversaries watching for an
advantage, across the space between her chair and his desk.

"What's what?  You fairly made me jump!" Boyne said at length,
moving toward her with a sudden, half-exasperated laugh.  The
shadow of apprehension was on his face again, not now a look of
fixed foreboding, but a shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that
gave her the sense of his feeling himself invisibly surrounded.

Her hand shook so that she could hardly give him the clipping.

"This article--from the 'Waukesha Sentinel'--that a man named
Elwell has brought suit against you--that there was something
wrong about the Blue Star Mine.  I can't understand more than
half."

They continued to face each other as she spoke, and to her
astonishment, she saw that her words had the almost immediate
effect of dissipating the strained watchfulness of his look.

"Oh, THAT!"  He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it
with the gesture of one who handles something harmless and
familiar.  "What's the matter with you this afternoon, Mary?  I
thought you'd got bad news."

She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly
under the reassuring touch of his composure.

"You knew about this, then--it's all right?"

"Certainly I knew about it; and it's all right."

"But what IS it?  I don't understand.  What does this man accuse
you of?"

"Oh, pretty nearly every crime in the calendar."  Boyne had
tossed the clipping down, and thrown himself comfortably into an
arm-chair near the fire.  "Do you want to hear the story?  It's
not particularly interesting--just a squabble over interests in
the Blue Star."

"But who is this Elwell?  I don't know the name."

"Oh, he's a fellow I put into it--gave him a hand up.  I told you
all about him at the time."

"I daresay.  I must have forgotten."  Vainly she strained back
among her memories.  "But if you helped him, why does he make
this return?"

"Oh, probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him
over.  It's all rather technical and complicated.  I thought that
kind of thing bored you."

His wife felt a sting of compunction.  Theoretically, she
deprecated the American wife's detachment from her husband's
professional interests, but in practice she had always found it
difficult to fix her attention on Boyne's report of the
transactions in which his varied interests involved him.
Besides, she had felt from the first that, in a community where
the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of
efforts as arduous as her husband's professional labors, such
brief leisure as they could command should be used as an escape
from immediate preoccupations, a flight to the life they always
dreamed of living.  Once or twice, now that this new life had
actually drawn its magic circle about them, she had asked herself
if she had done right; but hitherto such conjectures had been no
more than the retrospective excursions of an active fancy.  Now,
for the first time, it startled her a little to find how little
she knew of the material foundation on which her happiness was
built.

She glanced again at her husband, and was reassured by the
composure of his face; yet she felt the need of more definite
grounds for her reassurance.

"But doesn't this suit worry you?  Why have you never spoken to
me about it?"

He answered both questions at once: "I didn't speak of it at
first because it DID worry me--annoyed me, rather.  But it's all
ancient history now.  Your correspondent must have got hold of a
back number of the 'Sentinel.'"

She felt a quick thrill of relief.  "You mean it's over?  He's
lost his case?"

There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne's reply.  "The suit's
been withdrawn--that's all."

But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward
charge of being too easily put off.  "Withdrawn because he saw he
had no chance?"

"Oh, he had no chance," Boyne answered.

She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back
of her thoughts.

"How long ago was it withdrawn?"

He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty.
"I've just had the news now; but I've been expecting it."

"Just now--in one of your letters?"

"Yes; in one of my letters."

She made no answer, and was aware only, after a short interval of
waiting, that he had risen, and strolling across the room, had
placed himself on the sofa at her side.  She felt him, as he did
so, pass an arm about her, she felt his hand seek hers and clasp
it, and turning slowly, drawn by the warmth of his cheek, she met
the smiling clearness of his eyes.

"It's all right--it's all right?" she questioned, through the
flood of her dissolving doubts; and "I give you my word it never
was righter!" he laughed back at her, holding her close.



III


One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of
all the next day's incredible strangeness was the sudden and
complete recovery of her sense of security.

It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room;
it accompanied her down-stairs to the breakfast-table, flashed
out at her from the fire, and re-duplicated itself brightly from
the flanks of the urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian
teapot.  It was as if, in some roundabout way, all her diffused
apprehensions of the previous day, with their moment of sharp
concentration about the newspaper article,--as if this dim
questioning of the future, and startled return upon the past,--
had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting moral
obligation.  If she had indeed been careless of her husband's
affairs, it was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith
in him instinctively justified such carelessness; and his right
to her faith had overwhelmingly affirmed itself in the very face
of menace and suspicion.  She had never seen him more untroubled,
more naturally and unconsciously in possession of himself, than
after the cross-examination to which she had subjected him: it
was almost as if he had been aware of her lurking doubts, and had
wanted the air cleared as much as she did.

It was as clear, thank Heaven! as the bright outer light that
surprised her almost with a touch of summer when she issued from
the house for her daily round of the gardens.  She had left Boyne
at his desk, indulging herself, as she passed the library door,
by a last peep at his quiet face, where he bent, pipe in his
mouth, above his papers, and now she had her own morning's task
to perform.  The task involved on such charmed winter days almost
as much delighted loitering about the different quarters of her
demesne as if spring were already at work on shrubs and borders.
There were such inexhaustible possibilities still before her,
such opportunities to bring out the latent graces of the old
place, without a single irreverent touch of alteration, that the
winter months were all too short to plan what spring and autumn
executed.  And her recovered sense of safety gave, on this
particular morning, a peculiar zest to her progress through the
sweet, still place.  She went first to the kitchen-garden, where
the espaliered pear-trees drew complicated patterns on the walls,
and pigeons were fluttering and preening about the silvery-slated
roof of their cot.  There was something wrong about the piping of
the hothouse, and she was expecting an authority from Dorchester,
who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis of the
boiler.  But when she dipped into the damp heat of the
greenhouses, among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of
old-fashioned exotics,--even the flora of Lyng was in the note!--
she learned that the great man had not arrived, and the day being
too rare to waste in an artificial atmosphere, she came out again
and paced slowly along the springy turf of the bowling-green to
the gardens behind the house.  At their farther end rose a grass
terrace, commanding, over the fish-pond and the yew hedges, a
view of the long house-front, with its twisted chimney-stacks and
the blue shadows of its roof angles, all drenched in the pale
gold moisture of the air.

Seen thus, across the level tracery of the yews, under the
suffused, mild light, it sent her, from its open windows and
hospitably smoking chimneys, the look of some warm human
presence, of a mind slowly ripened on a sunny wall of experience.
She had never before had so deep a sense of her intimacy with it,
such a conviction that its secrets were all beneficent, kept, as
they said to children, "for one's good," so complete a trust in
its power to gather up her life and Ned's into the harmonious
pattern of the long, long story it sat there weaving in the sun.

She heard steps behind her, and turned, expecting to see the
gardener, accompanied by the engineer from Dorchester.  But only
one figure was in sight, that of a youngish, slightly built man,
who, for reasons she could not on the spot have specified, did
not remotely resemble her preconceived notion of an authority on
hot-house boilers.  The new-comer, on seeing her, lifted his hat,
and paused with the air of a gentleman--perhaps a traveler--
desirous of having it immediately known that his intrusion is
involuntary.  The local fame of Lyng occasionally attracted the
more intelligent sight-seer, and Mary half-expected to see the
stranger dissemble a camera, or justify his presence by producing
it.  But he made no gesture of any sort, and after a moment she
asked, in a tone responding to the courteous deprecation of his
attitude: "Is there any one you wish to see?"

"I came to see Mr. Boyne," he replied.  His intonation, rather
than his accent, was faintly American, and Mary, at the familiar
note, looked at him more closely.  The brim of his soft felt hat
cast a shade on his face, which, thus obscured, wore to her
short-sighted gaze a look of seriousness, as of a person arriving
"on business," and civilly but firmly aware of his rights.

Past experience had made Mary equally sensible to such claims;
but she was jealous of her husband's morning hours, and doubtful
of his having given any one the right to intrude on them.

"Have you an appointment with Mr. Boyne?" she asked.

He hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.

"Not exactly an appointment," he replied.

"Then I'm afraid, this being his working-time, that he can't
receive you now.  Will you give me a message, or come back
later?"

The visitor, again lifting his hat, briefly replied that he would
come back later, and walked away, as if to regain the front of
the house.  As his figure receded down the walk between the yew
hedges, Mary saw him pause and look up an instant at the peaceful
house-front bathed in faint winter sunshine; and it struck her,
with a tardy touch of compunction, that it would have been more
humane to ask if he had come from a distance, and to offer, in
that case, to inquire if her husband could receive him.  But as
the thought occurred to her he passed out of sight behind a
pyramidal yew, and at the same moment her attention was
distracted by the approach of the gardener, attended by the
bearded pepper-and-salt figure of the boiler-maker from
Dorchester.

The encounter with this authority led to such far-reaching issues
that they resulted in his finding it expedient to ignore his
train, and beguiled Mary into spending the remainder of the
morning in absorbed confabulation among the greenhouses.  She was
startled to find, when the colloquy ended, that it was nearly
luncheon-time, and she half expected, as she hurried back to the
house, to see her husband coming out to meet her.  But she found
no one in the court but an under-gardener raking the gravel, and
the hall, when she entered it, was so silent that she guessed
Boyne to be still at work behind the closed door of the library.

Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and
there, at her writing-table, lost herself in renewed calculations
of the outlay to which the morning's conference had committed
her.  The knowledge that she could permit herself such follies
had not yet lost its novelty; and somehow, in contrast to the
vague apprehensions of the previous days, it now seemed an
element of her recovered security, of the sense that, as Ned had
said, things in general had never been "righter."

She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the
parlor-maid, from the threshold, roused her with a dubiously
worded inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon.  It was
one of their jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were
divulging a state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers,
merely murmured an absent-minded assent.

She felt Trimmle wavering expressively on the threshold as if in
rebuke of such offhand acquiescence; then her retreating steps
sounded down the passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers,
crossed the hall, and went to the library door.  It was still
closed, and she wavered in her turn, disliking to disturb her
husband, yet anxious that he should not exceed his normal measure
of work.  As she stood there, balancing her impulses, the
esoteric Trimmle returned with the announcement of luncheon, and
Mary, thus impelled, opened the door and went into the library.

Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to
discover him at the book-shelves, somewhere down the length of
the room; but her call brought no response, and gradually it
became clear to her that he was not in the library.

She turned back to the parlor-maid.

"Mr. Boyne must be up-stairs.  Please tell him that luncheon is
ready."

The parlor-maid appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of
obeying orders and an equally obvious conviction of the
foolishness of the injunction laid upon her.  The struggle
resulted in her saying doubtfully, "If you please, Madam, Mr.
Boyne's not up-stairs."

"Not in his room?  Are you sure?"

"I'm sure, Madam."

Mary consulted the clock.  "Where is he, then?"

"He's gone out," Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one
who has respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered
mind would have first propounded.

Mary's previous conjecture had been right, then.  Boyne must have
gone to the gardens to meet her, and since she had missed him, it
was clear that he had taken the shorter way by the south door,
instead of going round to the court.  She crossed the hall to the
glass portal opening directly on the yew garden, but the parlor-
maid, after another moment of inner conflict, decided to bring
out recklessly, "Please, Madam, Mr. Boyne didn't go that way."

Mary turned back.  "Where DID he go?  And when?"

"He went out of the front door, up the drive, Madam."  It was a
matter of principle with Trimmle never to answer more than one
question at a time.

"Up the drive?  At this hour?"  Mary went to the door herself,
and glanced across the court through the long tunnel of bare
limes.  But its perspective was as empty as when she had scanned
it on entering the house.

"Did Mr. Boyne leave no message?" she asked.

Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the
forces of chaos.

"No, Madam.  He just went out with the gentleman."

"The gentleman?  What gentleman?"  Mary wheeled about, as if to
front this new factor.

"The gentleman who called, Madam," said Trimmle, resignedly.

"When did a gentleman call?  Do explain yourself, Trimmle!"

Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to
consult her husband about the greenhouses, would have caused her
to lay so unusual an injunction on her attendant; and even now
she was detached enough to note in Trimmle's eye the dawning
defiance of the respectful subordinate who has been pressed too
hard.

"I couldn't exactly say the hour, Madam, because I didn't let the
gentleman in," she replied, with the air of magnanimously
ignoring the irregularity of her mistress's course.

"You didn't let him in?"

"No, Madam.  When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes--"

"Go and ask Agnes, then," Mary interjected.  Trimmle still wore
her look of patient magnanimity.  "Agnes would not know, Madam,
for she had unfortunately burnt her hand in trying the wick of
the new lamp from town--"  Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always
been opposed to the new lamp--"and so Mrs. Dockett sent the
kitchen-maid instead."

Mary looked again at the clock.  "It's after two!  Go and ask the
kitchen-maid if Mr. Boyne left any word."

She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently
brought her there the kitchen-maid's statement that the gentleman
had called about one o'clock, that Mr. Boyne had gone out with
him without leaving any message.  The kitchen-maid did not even
know the caller's name, for he had written it on a slip of paper,
which he had folded and handed to her, with the injunction to
deliver it at once to Mr. Boyne.

Mary finished her luncheon, still wondering, and when it was
over, and Trimmle had brought the coffee to the drawing-room, her
wonder had deepened to a first faint tinge of disquietude.  It
was unlike Boyne to absent himself without explanation at so
unwonted an hour, and the difficulty of identifying the visitor
whose summons he had apparently obeyed made his disappearance the
more unaccountable.  Mary Boyne's experience as the wife of a
busy engineer, subject to sudden calls and compelled to keep
irregular hours, had trained her to the philosophic acceptance of
surprises; but since Boyne's withdrawal from business he had
adopted a Benedictine regularity of life.  As if to make up for
the dispersed and agitated years, with their "stand-up" lunches
and dinners rattled down to the joltings of the dining-car, he
cultivated the last refinements of punctuality and monotony,
discouraging his wife's fancy for the unexpected; and declaring
that to a delicate taste there were infinite gradations of
pleasure in the fixed recurrences of habit.

Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the
unforeseen, it was evident that all Boyne's precautions would
sooner or later prove unavailable, and Mary concluded that he had
cut short a tiresome visit by walking with his caller to the
station, or at least accompanying him for part of the way.

This conclusion relieved her from farther preoccupation, and she
went out herself to take up her conference with the gardener.
Thence she walked to the village post-office, a mile or so away;
and when she turned toward home, the early twilight was setting
in.

She had taken a foot-path across the downs, and as Boyne,
meanwhile, had probably returned from the station by the
highroad, there was little likelihood of their meeting on the
way.  She felt sure, however, of his having reached the house
before her; so sure that, when she entered it herself, without
even pausing to inquire of Trimmle, she made directly for the
library.  But the library was still empty, and with an unwonted
precision of visual memory she immediately observed that the
papers on her husband's desk lay precisely as they had lain when
she had gone in to call him to luncheon.

Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown.
She had closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood
alone in the long, silent, shadowy room, her dread seemed to take
shape and sound, to be there audibly breathing and lurking among
the shadows.  Her short-sighted eyes strained through them, half-
discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and
knew; and in the recoil from that intangible propinquity she
threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope and gave it a desperate
pull.

The long, quavering summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with
a lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of
the usual.

"You may bring tea if Mr. Boyne is in," she said, to justify her
ring.

"Very well, Madam.  But Mr. Boyne is not in," said Trimmle,
putting down the lamp.

"Not in?  You mean he's come back and gone out again?"

"No, Madam.  He's never been back."

The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.

"Not since he went out with--the gentleman?"

"Not since he went out with the gentleman."

"But who WAS the gentleman?" Mary gasped out, with the sharp note
of some one trying to be heard through a confusion of meaningless
noises.

"That I couldn't say, Madam."  Trimmle, standing there by the
lamp, seemed suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though
eclipsed by the same creeping shade of apprehension.

"But the kitchen-maid knows--wasn't it the kitchen-maid who let
him in?"

"She doesn't know either, Madam, for he wrote his name on a
folded paper."

Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both
designating the unknown visitor by a vague pronoun, instead of
the conventional formula which, till then, had kept their
allusions within the bounds of custom.  And at the same moment
her mind caught at the suggestion of the folded paper.

"But he must have a name!  Where is the paper?"

She moved to the desk, and began to turn over the scattered
documents that littered it.  The first that caught her eye was an
unfinished letter in her husband's hand, with his pen lying
across it, as though dropped there at a sudden summons.

"My dear Parvis,"--who was Parvis?--"I have just received your
letter announcing Elwell's death, and while I suppose there is
now no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--"

She tossed the sheet aside, and continued her search; but no
folded paper was discoverable among the letters and pages of
manuscript which had been swept together in a promiscuous heap,
as if by a hurried or a startled gesture.

"But the kitchen-maid SAW him.  Send her here," she commanded,
wondering at her dullness in not thinking sooner of so simple a
solution.

Trimmle, at the behest, vanished in a flash, as if thankful to be
out of the room, and when she reappeared, conducting the agitated
underling, Mary had regained her self-possession, and had her
questions pat.

The gentleman was a stranger, yes--that she understood.  But what
had he said?  And, above all, what had he looked like?  The first
question was easily enough answered, for the disconcerting reason
that he had said so little--had merely asked for Mr. Boyne, and,
scribbling something on a bit of paper, had requested that it
should at once be carried in to him.

"Then you don't know what he wrote?  You're not sure it WAS his
name?"

The kitchen-maid was not sure, but supposed it was, since he had
written it in answer to her inquiry as to whom she should
announce.

"And when you carried the paper in to Mr. Boyne, what did he
say?"

The kitchen-maid did not think that Mr. Boyne had said anything,
but she could not be sure, for just as she had handed him the
paper and he was opening it, she had become aware that the
visitor had followed her into the library, and she had slipped
out, leaving the two gentlemen together.

"But then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that
they went out of the house?"

This question plunged the witness into momentary
inarticulateness, from which she was rescued by Trimmle, who, by
means of ingenious circumlocutions, elicited the statement that
before she could cross the hall to the back passage she had heard
the gentlemen behind her, and had seen them go out of the front
door together.

"Then, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell
me what he looked like."

But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it
became clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid's endurance had
been reached.  The obligation of going to the front door to "show
in" a visitor was in itself so subversive of the fundamental
order of things that it had thrown her faculties into hopeless
disarray, and she could only stammer out, after various panting
efforts at evocation, "His hat, mum, was different-like, as you
might say--"

"Different?  How different?" Mary flashed out at her, her own
mind, in the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it
that morning, but temporarily lost under layers of subsequent
impressions.

"His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale--a
youngish face?" Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity
of interrogation.  But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate
answer to this challenge, it was swept away for her listener down
the rushing current of her own convictions.  The stranger--the
stranger in the garden!  Why had Mary not thought of him before?
She needed no one now to tell her that it was he who had called
for her husband and gone away with him.  But who was he, and why
had Boyne obeyed his call?



IV


It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that
they had often called England so little--"such a confoundedly
hard place to get lost in."

A CONFOUNDEDLY HARD PLACE TO GET LOST IN!  That had been her
husband's phrase.  And now, with the whole machinery of official
investigation sweeping its flash-lights from shore to shore, and
across the dividing straits; now, with Boyne's name blazing from
the walls of every town and village, his portrait (how that wrung
her!) hawked up and down the country like the image of a hunted
criminal; now the little compact, populous island, so policed,
surveyed, and administered, revealed itself as a Sphinx-like
guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his wife's
anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing something
they would never know!

In the fortnight since Boyne's disappearance there had been no
word of him, no trace of his movements.  Even the usual
misleading reports that raise expectancy in tortured bosoms had
been few and fleeting.  No one but the bewildered kitchen-maid
had seen him leave the house, and no one else had seen "the
gentleman" who accompanied him.  All inquiries in the
neighborhood failed to elicit the memory of a stranger's presence
that day in the neighborhood of Lyng.  And no one had met Edward
Boyne, either alone or in company, in any of the neighboring
villages, or on the road across the downs, or at either of the
local railway-stations.  The sunny English noon had swallowed him
as completely as if he had gone out into Cimmerian night.

Mary, while every external means of investigation was working at
its highest pressure, had ransacked her husband's papers for any
trace of antecedent complications, of entanglements or
obligations unknown to her, that might throw a faint ray into the
darkness.  But if any such had existed in the background of
Boyne's life, they had disappeared as completely as the slip of
paper on which the visitor had written his name.  There remained
no possible thread of guidance except--if it were indeed an
exception--the letter which Boyne had apparently been in the act
of writing when he received his mysterious summons.  That letter,
read and reread by his wife, and submitted by her to the police,
yielded little enough for conjecture to feed on.

"I have just heard of Elwell's death, and while I suppose there
is now no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--"  That was
all.  The "risk of trouble" was easily explained by the newspaper
clipping which had apprised Mary of the suit brought against her
husband by one of his associates in the Blue Star enterprise.
The only new information conveyed in the letter was the fact of
its showing Boyne, when he wrote it, to be still apprehensive of
the results of the suit, though he had assured his wife that it
had been withdrawn, and though the letter itself declared that
the plaintiff was dead.  It took several weeks of exhaustive
cabling to fix the identity of the "Parvis" to whom the
fragmentary communication was addressed, but even after these
inquiries had shown him to be a Waukesha lawyer, no new facts
concerning the Elwell suit were elicited.  He appeared to have
had no direct concern in it, but to have been conversant with the
facts merely as an acquaintance, and possible intermediary; and
he declared himself unable to divine with what object Boyne
intended to seek his assistance.

This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight's
feverish search, was not increased by a jot during the slow weeks
that followed.  Mary knew that the investigations were still
being carried on, but she had a vague sense of their gradually
slackening, as the actual march of time seemed to slacken.  It
was as though the days, flying horror-struck from the shrouded
image of the one inscrutable day, gained assurance as the
distance lengthened, till at last they fell back into their
normal gait.  And so with the human imaginations at work on the
dark event.  No doubt it occupied them still, but week by week
and hour by hour it grew less absorbing, took up less space, was
slowly but inevitably crowded out of the foreground of
consciousness by the new problems perpetually bubbling up from
the vaporous caldron of human experience.

Even Mary Boyne's consciousness gradually felt the same lowering
of velocity.  It still swayed with the incessant oscillations of
conjecture; but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat.
There were moments of overwhelming lassitude when, like the
victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the
body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror,
accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions
of life.

These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed
into a phase of stolid acquiescence.  She watched the familiar
routine of life with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the
meaningless processes of civilization make but the faintest
impression.  She had come to regard herself as part of the
routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its motion; she
felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat, an
insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs
and tables.  And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in
spite of the urgent entreaties of friends and the usual medical
recommendation of "change."  Her friends supposed that her
refusal to move was inspired by the belief that her husband would
one day return to the spot from which he had vanished, and a
beautiful legend grew up about this imaginary state of waiting.
But in reality she had no such belief: the depths of anguish
inclosing her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope.  She was
sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of
her sight as completely as if Death itself had waited that day on
the threshold.  She had even renounced, one by one, the various
theories as to his disappearance which had been advanced by the
press, the police, and her own agonized imagination.  In sheer
lassitude her mind turned from these alternatives of horror, and
sank back into the blank fact that he was gone.

No, she would never know what had become of him--no one would
ever know.  But the house KNEW; the library in which she spent
her long, lonely evenings knew.  For it was here that the last
scene had been enacted, here that the stranger had come, and
spoken the word which had caused Boyne to rise and follow him.
The floor she trod had felt his tread; the books on the shelves
had seen his face; and there were moments when the intense
consciousness of the old, dusky walls seemed about to break out
into some audible revelation of their secret.  But the revelation
never came, and she knew it would never come.  Lyng was not one
of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets intrusted to
them.  Its very legend proved that it had always been the mute
accomplice, the incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had
surprised.  And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face with its
portentous silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by
any human means.



V


"I don't say it WASN'T straight, yet don't say it WAS straight.
It was business."

Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked
intently at the speaker.

When, half an hour before, a card with "Mr. Parvis" on it had
been brought up to her, she had been immediately aware that the
name had been a part of her consciousness ever since she had read
it at the head of Boyne's unfinished letter.  In the library she
had found awaiting her a small neutral-tinted man with a bald
head and gold eye-glasses, and it sent a strange tremor through
her to know that this was the person to whom her husband's last
known thought had been directed.

Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble,--in the manner of a
man who has his watch in his hand,--had set forth the object of
his visit.  He had "run over" to England on business, and finding
himself in the neighborhood of Dorchester, had not wished to
leave it without paying his respects to Mrs. Boyne; without
asking her, if the occasion offered, what she meant to do about
Bob Elwell's family.

The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary's
bosom.  Did her visitor, after all, know what Boyne had meant by
his unfinished phrase?  She asked for an elucidation of his
question, and noticed at once that he seemed surprised at her
continued ignorance of the subject.  Was it possible that she
really knew as little as she said?

"I know nothing--you must tell me," she faltered out; and her
visitor thereupon proceeded to unfold his story.  It threw, even
to her confused perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a
lurid glare on the whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine.  Her
husband had made his money in that brilliant speculation at the
cost of "getting ahead" of some one less alert to seize the
chance; the victim of his ingenuity was young Robert Elwell, who
had "put him on" to the Blue Star scheme.

Parvis, at Mary's first startled cry, had thrown her a sobering
glance through his impartial glasses.

"Bob Elwell wasn't smart enough, that's all; if he had been, he
might have turned round and served Boyne the same way.  It's the
kind of thing that happens every day in business.  I guess it's
what the scientists call the survival of the fittest," said Mr.
Parvis, evidently pleased with the aptness of his analogy.

Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried
to frame; it was as though the words on her lips had a taste that
nauseated her.

"But then--you accuse my husband of doing something
dishonorable?"

Mr. Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately.  "Oh, no, I
don't.  I don't even say it wasn't straight."  He glanced up and
down the long lines of books, as if one of them might have
supplied him with the definition he sought.  "I don't say it
WASN'T straight, and yet I don't say it WAS straight.  It was
business."  After all, no definition in his category could be
more comprehensive than that.

Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror.  He seemed to her
like the indifferent, implacable emissary of some dark, formless
power.

"But Mr. Elwell's lawyers apparently did not take your view,
since I suppose the suit was withdrawn by their advice."

"Oh, yes, they knew he hadn't a leg to stand on, technically.  It
was when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got
desperate.  You see, he'd borrowed most of the money he lost in
the Blue Star, and he was up a tree.  That's why he shot himself
when they told him he had no show."

The horror was sweeping over Mary in great, deafening waves.

"He shot himself?  He killed himself because of THAT? "

"Well, he didn't kill himself, exactly.  He dragged on two months
before he died."  Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally
as a gramophone grinding out its "record."

"You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed?  And tried
again?"

"Oh, he didn't have to try again," said Parvis, grimly.

They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eye-
glass thoughtfully about his finger, she, motionless, her arms
stretched along her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.

"But if you knew all this," she began at length, hardly able to
force her voice above a whisper, "how is it that when I wrote you
at the time of my husband's disappearance you said you didn't
understand his letter?"

Parvis received this without perceptible discomfiture.  "Why, I
didn't understand it--strictly speaking.  And it wasn't the time
to talk about it, if I had.  The Elwell business was settled when
the suit was withdrawn.  Nothing I could have told you would have
helped you to find your husband."

Mary continued to scrutinize him.  "Then why are you telling me
now?"

Still Parvis did not hesitate.  "Well, to begin with, I supposed
you knew more than you appear to--I mean about the circumstances
of Elwell's death.  And then people are talking of it now; the
whole matter's been raked up again.  And I thought, if you didn't
know, you ought to."

She remained silent, and he continued: "You see, it's only come
out lately what a bad state Elwell's affairs were in.  His wife's
a proud woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out
to work, and taking sewing at home, when she got too sick--
something with the heart, I believe.  But she had his bedridden
mother to look after, and the children, and she broke down under
it, and finally had to ask for help.  That attracted attention to
the case, and the papers took it up, and a subscription was
started.  Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most of the
prominent names in the place are down on the list, and people
began to wonder why--"

Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket.  "Here," he
continued, "here's an account of the whole thing from the
'Sentinel'--a little sensational, of course.  But I guess you'd
better look it over."

He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly,
remembering, as she did so, the evening when, in that same room,
the perusal of a clipping from the "Sentinel" had first shaken
the depths of her security.

As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring
head-lines, "Widow of Boyne's Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid,"
ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it.  The
first was her husband's, taken from a photograph made the year
they had come to England.  It was the picture of him that she
liked best, the one that stood on the writing-table up-stairs in
her bedroom.  As the eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it
would be impossible to read what was said of him, and closed her
lids with the sharpness of the pain.

"I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down--" she
heard Parvis continue.

She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other
portrait.  It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, in
rough clothes, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a
projecting hat-brim.  Where had she seen that outline before?
She stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her throat
and ears.  Then she gave a cry.

"This is the man--the man who came for my husband!"

She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she
had slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was
bending above her in alarm.  With an intense effort she
straightened herself, and reached out for the paper, which she
had dropped.

"It's the man!  I should know him anywhere!" she cried in a voice
that sounded in her own ears like a scream.

Parvis's voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless,
fog-muffled windings.

"Mrs. Boyne, you're not very well.  Shall I call somebody?  Shall
I get a glass of water?"

"No, no, no!"  She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically
clenching the newspaper.  "I tell you, it's the man!  I KNOW him!
He spoke to me in the garden!"

Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the
portrait.  "It can't be, Mrs. Boyne.  It's Robert Elwell."

"Robert Elwell?"  Her white stare seemed to travel into space.
"Then it was Robert Elwell who came for him."

"Came for Boyne?  The day he went away?"  Parvis's voice dropped
as hers rose.  He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as
if to coax her gently back into her seat.  "Why, Elwell was dead!
Don't you remember?"

Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what
he was saying.

"Don't you remember Boyne's unfinished letter to me--the one you
found on his desk that day?  It was written just after he'd heard
of Elwell's death."  She noticed an odd shake in Parvis's
unemotional voice.  "Surely you remember that!" he urged her.

Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it.
Elwell had died the day before her husband's disappearance; and
this was Elwell's portrait; and it was the portrait of the man
who had spoken to her in the garden.  She lifted her head and
looked slowly about the library.  The library could have borne
witness that it was also the portrait of the man who had come in
that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter.  Through the
misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom of half-
forgotten words--words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at
Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at
Lyng, or had imagined that they might one day live there.

"This was the man who spoke to me," she repeated.

She looked again at Parvis.  He was trying to conceal his
disturbance under what he imagined to be an expression of
indulgent commiseration; but the edges of his lips were blue.
"He thinks me mad; but I'm not mad," she reflected; and suddenly
there flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange
affirmation.

She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting
till she could trust her voice to keep its habitual level; then
she said, looking straight at Parvis: "Will you answer me one
question, please?  When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill
himself?"

"When--when?" Parvis stammered.

"Yes; the date.  Please try to remember."

She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her.  "I have a
reason," she insisted gently.

"Yes, yes.  Only I can't remember.  About two months before, I
should say."

"I want the date," she repeated.

Parvis picked up the newspaper.  "We might see here," he said,
still humoring her.  He ran his eyes down the page.  "Here it is.
Last October--the--"

She caught the words from him.  "The 20th, wasn't it?"  With a
sharp look at her, he verified.  "Yes, the 20th.  Then you DID
know?"

"I know now."  Her white stare continued to travel past him.
"Sunday, the 20th--that was the day he came first."

Parvis's voice was almost inaudible.  "Came HERE first?"

"Yes."

"You saw him twice, then?"

"Yes, twice."  She breathed it at him with dilated eyes.  "He
came first on the 20th of October.  I remember the date because
it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time."  She
felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for
that she might have forgotten.

Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her
gaze.

"We saw him from the roof," she went on.  "He came down the lime-
avenue toward the house.  He was dressed just as he is in that
picture.  My husband saw him first.  He was frightened, and ran
down ahead of me; but there was no one there.  He had vanished."

"Elwell had vanished?" Parvis faltered.

"Yes."  Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other.  "I
couldn't think what had happened.  I see now.  He TRIED to come
then; but he wasn't dead enough--he couldn't reach us.  He had to
wait for two months; and then he came back again--and Ned went
with him."

She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has
successfully worked out a difficult puzzle.  But suddenly she
lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her
bursting temples.

"Oh, my God!  I sent him to Ned--I told him where to go!  I sent
him to this room!" she screamed out.

She felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward
falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if
through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her.
But she was numb to his touch, she did not know what he was
saying.  Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the
voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.

"You won't know till afterward," it said.  "You won't know till
long, long afterward."



The End of Afterward




THE FULNESS OF LIFE
December 1893


I.


For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike
that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer
noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and
insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow-grasses, one
looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast
shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.  Now and then, at ever-
lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her, like
the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it
was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious,
bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and
more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an
effort of reattachment to the vanishing edges of consciousness.

The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but
now they were at an end.  Through her mind, long harried by
grotesque visions, fragmentary images of the life that she was
leaving, tormenting lines of verse, obstinate presentments of
pictures once beheld, indistinct impressions of rivers, towers,
and cupolas, gathered in the length of journeys half forgotten--
through her mind there now only moved a few primal sensations of
colorless well-being; a vague satisfaction in the thought that
she had swallowed her noxious last draught of medicine . . . and
that she should never again hear the creaking of her husband's
boots--those horrible boots--and that no one would come to bother
her about the next day's dinner . . . or the butcher's book. . . .

At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in the
thickening obscurity which enveloped her; a dusk now filled with
pale geometric roses, circling softly, interminably before her,
now darkened to a uniform blue-blackness, the hue of a summer
night without stars.  And into this darkness she felt herself
sinking, sinking, with the gentle sense of security of one upheld
from beneath.  Like a tepid tide it rose around her, gliding ever
higher and higher, folding in its velvety embrace her relaxed and
tired body, now submerging her breast and shoulders, now creeping
gradually, with soft inexorableness, over her throat to her chin,
to her ears, to her mouth. . . .  Ah, now it was rising too high;
the impulse to struggle was renewed;. . . her mouth was full;. . .
she was choking. . . .  Help!

"It is all over," said the nurse, drawing down the eyelids with
official composure.

The clock struck three.  They remembered it afterward.  Someone
opened the window and let in a blast of that strange, neutral air
which walks the earth between darkness and dawn; someone else led
the husband into another room.  He walked vaguely, like a blind
man, on his creaking boots.



II.


She stood, as it seemed, on a threshold, yet no tangible gateway
was in front of her.  Only a wide vista of light, mild yet
penetrating as the gathered glimmer of innumerable stars,
expanded gradually before her eyes, in blissful contrast to the
cavernous darkness from which she had of late emerged.

She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as her
eyes began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light
about her, she distinguished the outlines of a landscape, at
first swimming in the opaline uncertainty of Shelley's vaporous
creations, then gradually resolved into distincter shape--the
vast unrolling of a sunlit plain, aerial forms of mountains, and
presently the silver crescent of a river in the valley, and a
blue stencilling of trees along its curve--something suggestive
in its ineffable hue of an azure background of Leonardo's,
strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye and the
imagination into regions of fabulous delight.  As she gazed, her
heart beat with a soft and rapturous surprise; so exquisite a
promise she read in the summons of that hyaline distance.

"And so death is not the end after all," in sheer gladness she
heard herself exclaiming aloud.  "I always knew that it couldn't
be.  I believed in Darwin, of course.  I do still; but then
Darwin himself said that he wasn't sure about the soul--at least,
I think he did--and Wallace was a spiritualist; and then there
was St. George Mivart--"

Her gaze lost itself in the ethereal remoteness of the mountains.

"How beautiful!  How satisfying!" she murmured.  "Perhaps now I
shall really know what it is to live."

As she spoke she felt a sudden thickening of her heart-beats, and
looking up she was aware that before her stood the Spirit of
Life.

"Have you never really known what it is to live?" the Spirit of
Life asked her.

"I have never known," she replied, "that fulness of life which we
all feel ourselves capable of knowing; though my life has not
been without scattered hints of it, like the scent of earth which
comes to one sometimes far out at sea."

"And what do you call the fulness of life?" the Spirit asked
again.

"Oh, I can't tell you, if you don't know," she said, almost
reproachfully.  "Many words are supposed to define it--love and
sympathy are those in commonest use, but I am not even sure that
they are the right ones, and so few people really know what they
mean."

"You were married," said the Spirit, "yet you did not find the
fulness of life in your marriage?"

"Oh, dear, no," she replied, with an indulgent scorn, "my
marriage was a very incomplete affair."

"And yet you were fond of your husband?"

"You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just
as I was fond of my grandmother, and the house that I was born
in, and my old nurse.  Oh, I was fond of him, and we were counted
a very happy couple.  But I have sometimes thought that a woman's
nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall,
through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-
room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where
the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond
that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors
perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one
knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of
holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never
comes."

"And your husband," asked the Spirit, after a pause, "never got
beyond the family sitting-room?"

"Never," she returned, impatiently; "and the worst of it was that
he was quite content to remain there.  He thought it perfectly
beautiful, and sometimes, when he was admiring its commonplace
furniture, insignificant as the chairs and tables of a hotel
parlor, I felt like crying out to him: 'Fool, will you never
guess that close at hand are rooms full of treasures and wonders,
such as the eye of man hath not seen, rooms that no step has
crossed, but that might be yours to live in, could you but find
the handle of the door?'"

"Then," the Spirit continued, "those moments of which you lately
spoke, which seemed to come to you like scattered hints of the
fulness of life, were not shared with your husband?"

"Oh, no--never.  He was different.  His boots creaked, and he
always slammed the door when he went out, and he never read
anything but railway novels and the sporting advertisements in
the papers--and--and, in short, we never understood each other in
the least."

"To what influence, then, did you owe those exquisite
sensations?"

"I can hardly tell.  Sometimes to the perfume of a flower;
sometimes to a verse of Dante or of Shakespeare; sometimes to a
picture or a sunset, or to one of those calm days at sea, when
one seems to be lying in the hollow of a blue pearl; sometimes,
but rarely, to a word spoken by someone who chanced to give
utterance, at the right moment, to what I felt but could not
express."

"Someone whom you loved?" asked the Spirit.

"I never loved anyone, in that way," she said, rather sadly, "nor
was I thinking of any one person when I spoke, but of two or
three who, by touching for an instant upon a certain chord of my
being, had called forth a single note of that strange melody
which seemed sleeping in my soul.  It has seldom happened,
however, that I have owed such feelings to people; and no one
ever gave me a moment of such happiness as it was my lot to feel
one evening in the Church of Or San Michele, in Florence."

"Tell me about it," said the Spirit.

"It was near sunset on a rainy spring afternoon in Easter week.
The clouds had vanished, dispersed by a sudden wind, and as we
entered the church the fiery panes of the high windows shone out
like lamps through the dusk.  A priest was at the high altar, his
white cope a livid spot in the incense-laden obscurity, the light
of the candles flickering up and down like fireflies about his
head; a few people knelt near by.  We stole behind them and sat
down on a bench close to the tabernacle of Orcagna.

"Strange to say, though Florence was not new to me, I had never
been in the church before; and in that magical light I saw for
the first time the inlaid steps, the fluted columns, the
sculptured bas-reliefs and canopy of the marvellous shrine.  The
marble, worn and mellowed by the subtle hand of time, took on an
unspeakable rosy hue, suggestive in some remote way of the honey-
colored columns of the Parthenon, but more mystic, more complex,
a color not born of the sun's inveterate kiss, but made up of
cryptal twilight, and the flame of candles upon martyrs' tombs,
and gleams of sunset through symbolic panes of chrysoprase and
ruby; such a light as illumines the missals in the library of
Siena, or burns like a hidden fire through the Madonna of Gian
Bellini in the Church of the Redeemer, at Venice; the light of
the Middle Ages, richer, more solemn, more significant than the
limpid sunshine of Greece.

"The church was silent, but for the wail of the priest and the
occasional scraping of a chair against the floor, and as I sat
there, bathed in that light, absorbed in rapt contemplation of
the marble miracle which rose before me, cunningly wrought as a
casket of ivory and enriched with jewel-like incrustations and
tarnished gleams of gold, I felt myself borne onward along a
mighty current, whose source seemed to be in the very beginning
of things, and whose tremendous waters gathered as they went all
the mingled streams of human passion and endeavor.  Life in all
its varied manifestations of beauty and strangeness seemed
weaving a rhythmical dance around me as I moved, and wherever the
spirit of man had passed I knew that my foot had once been
familiar.

"As I gazed the mediaeval bosses of the tabernacle of Orcagna
seemed to melt and flow into their primal forms so that the
folded lotus of the Nile and the Greek acanthus were braided with
the runic knots and fish-tailed monsters of the North, and all
the plastic terror and beauty born of man's hand from the Ganges
to the Baltic quivered and mingled in Orcagna's apotheosis of
Mary.  And so the river bore me on, past the alien face of
antique civilizations and the familiar wonders of Greece, till I
swam upon the fiercely rushing tide of the Middle Ages, with its
swirling eddies of passion, its heaven-reflecting pools of poetry
and art; I heard the rhythmic blow of the craftsmen's hammers in
the goldsmiths' workshops and on the walls of churches, the
party-cries of armed factions in the narrow streets, the organ-
roll of Dante's verse, the crackle of the fagots around Arnold of
Brescia, the twitter of the swallows to which St. Francis
preached, the laughter of the ladies listening on the hillside to
the quips of the Decameron, while plague-struck Florence howled
beneath them--all this and much more I heard, joined in strange
unison with voices earlier and more remote, fierce, passionate,
or tender, yet subdued to such awful harmony that I thought of
the song that the morning stars sang together and felt as though
it were sounding in my ears.  My heart beat to suffocation, the
tears burned my lids, the joy, the mystery of it seemed too
intolerable to be borne.  I could not understand even then the
words of the song; but I knew that if there had been someone at
my side who could have heard it with me, we might have found the
key to it together.

"I turned to my husband, who was sitting beside me in an attitude
of patient dejection, gazing into the bottom of his hat; but at
that moment he rose, and stretching his stiffened legs, said,
mildly: 'Hadn't we better be going?  There doesn't seem to be
much to see here, and you know the table d'hote dinner is at
half-past six o'clock."



Her recital ended, there was an interval of silence; then the
Spirit of Life said: "There is a compensation in store for such
needs as you have expressed."

"Oh, then you DO understand?" she exclaimed.  "Tell me what
compensation, I entreat you!"

"It is ordained," the Spirit answered, "that every soul which
seeks in vain on earth for a kindred soul to whom it can lay bare
its inmost being shall find that soul here and be united to it
for eternity."

A glad cry broke from her lips.  "Ah, shall I find him at last?"
she cried, exultant.

"He is here," said the Spirit of Life.

She looked up and saw that a man stood near whose soul (for in
that unwonted light she seemed to see his soul more clearly than
his face) drew her toward him with an invincible force.

"Are you really he?" she murmured.

"I am he," he answered.

She laid her hand in his and drew him toward the parapet which
overhung the valley.

"Shall we go down together," she asked him, "into that marvellous
country; shall we see it together, as if with the self-same eyes,
and tell each other in the same words all that we think and feel?"

"So," he replied, "have I hoped and dreamed."

"What?" she asked, with rising joy.  "Then you, too, have looked
for me?"

"All my life."

"How wonderful!  And did you never, never find anyone in the
other world who understood you?"

"Not wholly--not as you and I understand each other."

"Then you feel it, too?  Oh, I am happy," she sighed.

They stood, hand in hand, looking down over the parapet upon the
shimmering landscape which stretched forth beneath them into
sapphirine space, and the Spirit of Life, who kept watch near the
threshold, heard now and then a floating fragment of their talk
blown backward like the stray swallows which the wind sometimes
separates from their migratory tribe.

"Did you never feel at sunset--"

"Ah, yes; but I never heard anyone else say so.  Did you?"

"Do you remember that line in the third canto of the 'Inferno?'"

"Ah, that line--my favorite always.  Is it possible--"

"You know the stooping Victory in the frieze of the Nike
Apteros?"

"You mean the one who is tying her sandal?  Then you have
noticed, too, that all Botticelli and Mantegna are dormant in
those flying folds of her drapery?"

"After a storm in autumn have you never seen--"

"Yes, it is curious how certain flowers suggest certain painters--
the perfume of the incarnation, Leonardo; that of the rose,
Titian; the tuberose, Crivelli--"

"I never supposed that anyone else had noticed it."

"Have you never thought--"

"Oh, yes, often and often; but I never dreamed that anyone else had."

"But surely you must have felt--"

"Oh, yes, yes; and you, too--"

"How beautiful!  How strange--"

Their voices rose and fell, like the murmur of two fountains
answering each other across a garden full of flowers.  At length,
with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said:
"Love, why should we linger here?  All eternity lies before us.
Let us go down into that beautiful country together and make a
home for ourselves on some blue hill above the shining river."

As he spoke, the hand she had forgotten in his was suddenly
withdrawn, and he felt that a cloud was passing over the radiance
of her soul.

"A home," she repeated, slowly, "a home for you and me to live in
for all eternity?"

"Why not, love?  Am I not the soul that yours has sought?"

"Y-yes--yes, I know--but, don't you see, home would not be like
home to me, unless--"

"Unless?" he wonderingly repeated.

She did not answer, but she thought to herself, with an impulse
of whimsical inconsistency, "Unless you slammed the door and wore
creaking boots."

But he had recovered his hold upon her hand, and by imperceptible
degrees was leading her toward the shining steps which descended
to the valley.

"Come, O my soul's soul," he passionately implored; "why delay a
moment?  Surely you feel, as I do, that eternity itself is too
short to hold such bliss as ours.  It seems to me that I can see
our home already.  Have I not always seem it in my dreams?  It is
white, love, is it not, with polished columns, and a sculptured
cornice against the blue?  Groves of laurel and oleander and
thickets of roses surround it; but from the terrace where we walk
at sunset, the eye looks out over woodlands and cool meadows
where, deep-bowered under ancient boughs, a stream goes
delicately toward the river.  Indoors our favorite pictures hang
upon the walls and the rooms are lined with books.  Think, dear,
at last we shall have time to read them all.  With which shall we
begin?  Come, help me to choose.  Shall it be 'Faust' or the
'Vita Nuova,' the 'Tempest' or 'Les Caprices de Marianne,' or the
thirty-first canto of the 'Paradise,' or 'Epipsychidion' or
"Lycidas'?  Tell me, dear, which one?"

As he spoke he saw the answer trembling joyously upon her lips;
but it died in the ensuing silence, and she stood motionless,
resisting the persuasion of his hand.

"What is it?" he entreated.

"Wait a moment," she said, with a strange hesitation in her
voice.  "Tell me first, are you quite sure of yourself?  Is there
no one on earth whom you sometimes remember?"

"Not since I have seen you," he replied; for, being a man, he had
indeed forgotten.

Still she stood motionless, and he saw that the shadow deepened
on her soul.

"Surely, love," he rebuked her, "it was not that which troubled
you?  For my part I have walked through Lethe.  The past has
melted like a cloud before the moon.  I never lived until I saw
you."

She made no answer to his pleadings, but at length, rousing
herself with a visible effort, she turned away from him and moved
toward the Spirit of Life, who still stood near the threshold.

"I want to ask you a question," she said, in a troubled voice.

"Ask," said the Spirit.

"A little while ago," she began, slowly, "you told me that every
soul which has not found a kindred soul on earth is destined to
find one here."

"And have you not found one?" asked the Spirit.

"Yes; but will it be so with my husband's soul also?"

"No," answered the Spirit of Life, "for your husband imagined
that he had found his soul's mate on earth in you; and for such
delusions eternity itself contains no cure."

She gave a little cry.  Was it of disappointment or triumph?

"Then--then what will happen to him when he comes here?"

"That I cannot tell you.  Some field of activity and happiness he
will doubtless find, in due measure to his capacity for being
active and happy."

She interrupted, almost angrily: "He will never be happy without me."

"Do not be too sure of that," said the Spirit.

She took no notice of this, and the Spirit continued: "He will
not understand you here any better than he did on earth."

"No matter," she said; "I shall be the only sufferer, for he
always thought that he understood me."

"His boots will creak just as much as ever--"

"No matter."

"And he will slam the door--"

"Very likely."

"And continue to read railway novels--"

She interposed, impatiently: "Many men do worse than that."

"But you said just now," said the Spirit, "that you did not love
him."

"True," she answered, simply; "but don't you understand that I
shouldn't feel at home without him?  It is all very well for a
week or two--but for eternity!  After all, I never minded the
creaking of his boots, except when my head ached, and I don't
suppose it will ache HERE; and he was always so sorry when he had
slammed the door, only he never COULD remember not to.  Besides,
no one else would know how to look after him, he is so helpless.
His inkstand would never be filled, and he would always be out of
stamps and visiting-cards.  He would never remember to have his
umbrella re-covered, or to ask the price of anything before he
bought it.  Why, he wouldn't even know what novels to read.  I
always had to choose the kind he liked, with a murder or a
forgery and a successful detective."

She turned abruptly to her kindred soul, who stood listening with
a mien of wonder and dismay.

"Don't you see," she said, "that I can't possibly go with you?"

"But what do you intend to do?" asked the Spirit of Life.

"What do I intend to do?" she returned, indignantly.  "Why, I
mean to wait for my husband, of course.  If he had come here
first HE would have waited for me for years and years; and it
would break his heart not to find me here when he comes."  She
pointed with a contemptuous gesture to the magic vision of hill
and vale sloping away to the translucent mountains.  "He wouldn't
give a fig for all that," she said, "if he didn't find me here."

"But consider," warned the Spirit, "that you are now choosing for
eternity.  It is a solemn moment."

"Choosing!" she said, with a half-sad smile.  "Do you still keep
up here that old fiction about choosing?  I should have thought
that YOU knew better than that.  How can I help myself?  He will
expect to find me here when he comes, and he would never believe
you if you told him that I had gone away with someone else--
never, never."

"So be it," said the Spirit.  "Here, as on earth, each one must
decide for himself."

She turned to her kindred soul and looked at him gently, almost
wistfully.  "I am sorry," she said.  "I should have liked to talk
with you again; but you will understand, I know, and I dare say
you will find someone else a great deal cleverer--"

And without pausing to hear his answer she waved him a swift
farewell and turned back toward the threshold.

"Will my husband come soon?" she asked the Spirit of Life.

"That you are not destined to know," the Spirit replied.

"No matter," she said, cheerfully; "I have all eternity to wait
in."

And still seated alone on the threshold, she listens for the
creaking of his boots.



The End of The Fulness of Life




A VENETIAN NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT
December 1903



This is the story that, in the dining-room of the old Beacon
Street house (now the Aldebaran Club), Judge Anthony Bracknell,
of the famous East India firm of Bracknell & Saulsbee, when the
ladies had withdrawn to the oval parlour (and Maria's harp was
throwing its gauzy web of sound across the Common), used to
relate to his grandsons, about the year that Buonaparte marched
upon Moscow.



I


"Him Venice!" said the Lascar with the big earrings; and Tony
Bracknell, leaning on the high gunwale of his father's East
Indiaman, the Hepzibah B., saw far off, across the morning sea, a
faint vision of towers and domes dissolved in golden air.

It was a rare February day of the year 1760, and a young Tony,
newly of age, and bound on the grand tour aboard the crack
merchantman of old Bracknell's fleet, felt his heart leap up as
the distant city trembled into shape.  VENICE!  The name, since
childhood, had been a magician's wand to him.  In the hall of the
old Bracknell house at Salem there hung a series of yellowing
prints which Uncle Richard Saulsbee had brought home from one of
his long voyages: views of heathen mosques and palaces, of the
Grand Turk's Seraglio, of St. Peter's Church in Rome; and, in a
corner--the corner nearest the rack where the old flintlocks
hung--a busy merry populous scene, entitled: ST. MARK'S SQUARE IN
VENICE.  This picture, from the first, had singularly taken
little Tony's fancy.  His unformulated criticism on the others
was that they lacked action.  True, in the view of St. Peter's an
experienced-looking gentleman in a full-bottomed wig was pointing
out the fairly obvious monument to a bashful companion, who had
presumably not ventured to raise his eyes to it; while, at the
doors of the Seraglio, a group of turbaned infidels observed with
less hesitancy the approach of a veiled lady on a camel.  But in
Venice so many things were happening at once--more, Tony was
sure, than had ever happened in Boston in a twelve-month or in
Salem in a long lifetime.  For here, by their garb, were people
of every nation on earth, Chinamen, Turks, Spaniards, and many
more, mixed with a parti-coloured throng of gentry, lacqueys,
chapmen, hucksters, and tall personages in parsons' gowns who
stalked through the crowd with an air of mastery, a string of
parasites at their heels.  And all these people seemed to be
diverting themselves hugely, chaffering with the hucksters,
watching the antics of trained dogs and monkeys, distributing
doles to maimed beggars or having their pockets picked by
slippery-looking fellows in black--the whole with such an air of
ease and good-humour that one felt the cut-purses to be as much a
part of the show as the tumbling acrobats and animals.

As Tony advanced in years and experience this childish mumming
lost its magic; but not so the early imaginings it had excited.
For the old picture had been but the spring-board of fancy, the
first step of a cloud-ladder leading to a land of dreams.  With
these dreams the name of Venice remained associated; and all that
observation or report subsequently brought him concerning the
place seemed, on a sober warranty of fact, to confirm its claim
to stand midway between reality and illusion.  There was, for
instance, a slender Venice glass, gold-powdered as with lily-
pollen or the dust of sunbeams, that, standing in the corner
cabinet betwixt two Lowestoft caddies, seemed, among its lifeless
neighbours, to palpitate like an impaled butterfly.  There was,
farther, a gold chain of his mother's, spun of that same sun-
pollen, so thread-like, impalpable, that it slipped through the
fingers like light, yet so strong that it carried a heavy pendant
which seemed held in air as if by magic.  MAGIC!  That was the
word which the thought of Venice evoked.  It was the kind of
place, Tony felt, in which things elsewhere impossible might
naturally happen, in which two and two might make five, a paradox
elope with a syllogism, and a conclusion give the lie to its own
premiss.  Was there ever a young heart that did not, once and
again, long to get away into such a world as that?  Tony, at
least, had felt the longing from the first hour when the axioms
in his horn-book had brought home to him his heavy
responsibilities as a Christian and a sinner.  And now here was
his wish taking shape before him, as the distant haze of gold
shaped itself into towers and domes across the morning sea!

The Reverend Ozias Mounce, Tony's governor and bear-leader, was
just putting a hand to the third clause of the fourth part of a
sermon on Free-Will and Predestination as the Hepzibah B.'s
anchor rattled overboard.  Tony, in his haste to be ashore, would
have made one plunge with the anchor; but the Reverend Ozias, on
being roused from his lucubrations, earnestly protested against
leaving his argument in suspense.  What was the trifle of an
arrival at some Papistical foreign city, where the very churches
wore turbans like so many Moslem idolators, to the important fact
of Mr. Mounce's summing up his conclusions before the Muse of
Theology took flight?  He should be happy, he said, if the tide
served, to visit Venice with Mr. Bracknell the next morning.

The next morning, ha!--Tony murmured a submissive "Yes, sir,"
winked at the subjugated captain, buckled on his sword, pressed
his hat down with a flourish, and before the Reverend Ozias had
arrived at his next deduction, was skimming merrily shoreward in
the Hepzibah's gig.

A moment more and he was in the thick of it!  Here was the very
world of the old print, only suffused with sunlight and colour,
and bubbling with merry noises.  What a scene it was!  A square
enclosed in fantastic painted buildings, and peopled with a
throng as fantastic: a bawling, laughing, jostling, sweating mob,
parti-coloured, parti-speeched, crackling and sputtering under
the hot sun like a dish of fritters over a kitchen fire.  Tony,
agape, shouldered his way through the press, aware at once that,
spite of the tumult, the shrillness, the gesticulation, there was
no undercurrent of clownishness, no tendency to horse-play, as in
such crowds on market-day at home, but a kind of facetious
suavity which seemed to include everybody in the circumference of
one huge joke.  In such an air the sense of strangeness soon wore
off, and Tony was beginning to feel himself vastly at home, when
a lift of the tide bore him against a droll-looking bell-ringing
fellow who carried above his head a tall metal tree hung with
sherbet-glasses.

The encounter set the glasses spinning and three or four spun off
and clattered to the stones.  The sherbet-seller called on all
the saints, and Tony, clapping a lordly hand to his pocket,
tossed him a ducat by mistake for a sequin.  The fellow's eyes
shot out of their orbits, and just then a personable-looking
young man who had observed the transaction stepped up to Tony and
said pleasantly, in English:

"I perceive, sir, that you are not familiar with our currency."

"Does he want more?" says Tony, very lordly; whereat the other
laughed and replied: "You have given him enough to retire from
his business and open a gaming-house over the arcade."

Tony joined in the laugh, and this incident bridging the
preliminaries, the two young men were presently hobnobbing over a
glass of Canary in front of one of the coffee-houses about the
square.  Tony counted himself lucky to have run across an
English-speaking companion who was good-natured enough to give
him a clue to the labyrinth; and when he had paid for the Canary
(in the coin his friend selected) they set out again to view the
town.  The Italian gentleman, who called himself Count Rialto,
appeared to have a very numerous acquaintance, and was able to
point out to Tony all the chief dignitaries of the state, the men
of ton and ladies of fashion, as well as a number of other
characters of a kind not openly mentioned in taking a census of
Salem.

Tony, who was not averse from reading when nothing better
offered, had perused the "Merchant of Venice" and Mr. Otway's
fine tragedy; but though these pieces had given him a notion that
the social usages of Venice differed from those at home, he was
unprepared for the surprising appearance and manners of the great
people his friend named to him.  The gravest Senators of the
Republic went in prodigious striped trousers, short cloaks and
feathered hats.  One nobleman wore a ruff and doctor's gown,
another a black velvet tunic slashed with rose-colour; while the
President of the dreaded Council of Ten was a terrible strutting
fellow with a rapier-like nose, a buff leather jerkin and a
trailing scarlet cloak that the crowd was careful not to step on.

It was all vastly diverting, and Tony would gladly have gone on
forever; but he had given his word to the captain to be at the
landing-place at sunset, and here was dusk already creeping over
the skies!  Tony was a man of honour; and having pressed on the
Count a handsome damascened dagger selected from one of the
goldsmiths' shops in a narrow street lined with such wares, he
insisted on turning his face toward the Hepzibah's gig.  The
Count yielded reluctantly; but as they came out again on the
square they were caught in a great throng pouring toward the
doors of the cathedral.

"They go to Benediction," said the Count.  "A beautiful sight,
with many lights and flowers.  It is a pity you cannot take a
peep at it."

Tony thought so too, and in another minute a legless beggar had
pulled back the leathern flap of the cathedral door, and they
stood in a haze of gold and perfume that seemed to rise and fall
on the mighty undulations of the organ.  Here the press was as
thick as without; and as Tony flattened himself against a pillar,
he heard a pretty voice at his elbow:--"Oh, sir, oh, sir, your
sword!"

He turned at sound of the broken English, and saw a girl who
matched the voice trying to disengage her dress from the tip of
his scabbard.  She wore one of the voluminous black hoods which
the Venetian ladies affected, and under its projecting eaves her
face spied out at him as sweet as a nesting bird.

In the dusk their hands met over the scabbard, and as she freed
herself a shred of her lace flounce clung to Tony's enchanted
fingers.  Looking after her, he saw she was on the arm of a
pompous-looking graybeard in a long black gown and scarlet
stockings, who, on perceiving the exchange of glances between the
young people, drew the lady away with a threatening look.

The Count met Tony's eye with a smile.  "One of our Venetian
beauties," said he; "the lovely Polixena Cador.  She is thought
to have the finest eyes in Venice."

"She spoke English," stammered Tony.

"Oh--ah--precisely: she learned the language at the Court of
Saint James's, where her father, the Senator, was formerly
accredited as Ambassador.  She played as an infant with the royal
princes of England."

"And that was her father?"

"Assuredly: young ladies of Donna Polixena's rank do not go
abroad save with their parents or a duenna."

Just then a soft hand slid into Tony's.  His heart gave a foolish
bound, and he turned about half-expecting to meet again the merry
eyes under the hood; but saw instead a slender brown boy, in some
kind of fanciful page's dress, who thrust a folded paper between
his fingers and vanished in the throng.  Tony, in a tingle,
glanced surreptitiously at the Count, who appeared absorbed in
his prayers.  The crowd, at the ringing of a bell, had in fact
been overswept by a sudden wave of devotion; and Tony seized the
moment to step beneath a lighted shrine with his letter.

"I am in dreadful trouble and implore your help.  Polixena"--he
read; but hardly had he seized the sense of the words when a hand
fell on his shoulder, and a stern-looking man in a cocked hat,
and bearing a kind of rod or mace, pronounced a few words in
Venetian.

Tony, with a start, thrust the letter in his breast, and tried to
jerk himself free; but the harder he jerked the tighter grew the
other's grip, and the Count, presently perceiving what had
happened, pushed his way through the crowd, and whispered hastily
to his companion: "For God's sake, make no struggle.  This is
serious.  Keep quiet and do as I tell you."

Tony was no chicken-heart.  He had something of a name for
pugnacity among the lads of his own age at home, and was not the
man to stand in Venice what he would have resented in Salem; but
the devil of it was that this black fellow seemed to be pointing
to the letter in his breast; and this suspicion was confirmed by
the Count's agitated whisper.

"This is one of the agents of the Ten.--For God's sake, no
outcry."  He exchanged a word or two with the mace-bearer and
again turned to Tony.  "You have been seen concealing a letter
about your person--"

"And what of that?" says Tony furiously.

"Gently, gently, my master.  A letter handed to you by the page
of Donna Polixena Cador.--A black business!  Oh, a very black
business!  This Cador is one of the most powerful nobles in
Venice--I beseech you, not a word, sir!  Let me think--
deliberate--"

His hand on Tony's shoulder, he carried on a rapid dialogue with
the potentate in the cocked hat.

"I am sorry, sir--but our young ladies of rank are as jealously
guarded as the Grand Turk's wives, and you must be answerable for
this scandal.  The best I can do is to have you taken privately
to the Palazzo Cador, instead of being brought before the
Council.  I have pleaded your youth and inexperience"--Tony
winced at this--"and I think the business may still be arranged."

Meanwhile the agent of the Ten had yielded his place to a sharp-
featured shabby-looking fellow in black, dressed somewhat like a
lawyer's clerk, who laid a grimy hand on Tony's arm, and with
many apologetic gestures steered him through the crowd to the
doors of the church.  The Count held him by the other arm, and in
this fashion they emerged on the square, which now lay in
darkness save for the many lights twinkling under the arcade and
in the windows of the gaming-rooms above it.

Tony by this time had regained voice enough to declare that he
would go where they pleased, but that he must first say a word to
the mate of the Hepzibah, who had now been awaiting him some two
hours or more at the landing-place.

The Count repeated this to Tony's custodian, but the latter shook
his head and rattled off a sharp denial.

"Impossible, sir," said the Count.  "I entreat you not to insist.
Any resistance will tell against you in the end."

Tony fell silent.  With a rapid eye he was measuring his chances
of escape.  In wind and limb he was more than a mate for his
captors, and boyhood's ruses were not so far behind him but he
felt himself equal to outwitting a dozen grown men; but he had
the sense to see that at a cry the crowd would close in on him.
Space was what he wanted: a clear ten yards, and he would have
laughed at Doge and Council.  But the throng was thick as glue,
and he walked on submissively, keeping his eye alert for an
opening.  Suddenly the mob swerved aside after some new show.
Tony's fist shot out at the black fellow's chest, and before the
latter could right himself the young New Englander was showing a
clean pair of heels to his escort.  On he sped, cleaving the
crowd like a flood-tide in Gloucester bay, diving under the first
arch that caught his eye, dashing down a lane to an unlit water-
way, and plunging across a narrow hump-back bridge which landed
him in a black pocket between walls.  But now his pursuers were
at his back, reinforced by the yelping mob.  The walls were too
high to scale, and for all his courage Tony's breath came short
as he paced the masonry cage in which ill-luck had landed him.
Suddenly a gate opened in one of the walls, and a slip of a
servant wench looked out and beckoned him.  There was no time to
weigh chances.  Tony dashed through the gate, his rescuer slammed
and bolted it, and the two stood in a narrow paved well between
high houses.



II


The servant picked up a lantern and signed to Tony to follow her.
They climbed a squalid stairway of stone, felt their way along a
corridor, and entered a tall vaulted room feebly lit by an oil-
lamp hung from the painted ceiling.  Tony discerned traces of
former splendour in his surroundings, but he had no time to
examine them, for a figure started up at his approach and in the
dim light he recognized the girl who was the cause of all his
troubles.

She sprang toward him with outstretched hands, but as he advanced
her face changed and she shrank back abashed.

"This is a misunderstanding--a dreadful misunderstanding," she
cried out in her pretty broken English.  "Oh, how does it happen
that you are here?"

"Through no choice of my own, madam, I assure you!" retorted
Tony, not over-pleased by his reception.

"But why--how--how did you make this unfortunate mistake?"

"Why, madam, if you'll excuse my candour, I think the mistake was
yours--"

"Mine?"

--"in sending me a letter--"

"YOU--a letter?"

--"by a simpleton of a lad, who must needs hand it to me under
your father's very nose--"

The girl broke in on him with a cry.  "What!  It was YOU who
received my letter?"  She swept round on the little maid-servant
and submerged her under a flood of Venetian.  The latter volleyed
back in the same jargon, and as she did so, Tony's astonished eye
detected in her the doubleted page who had handed him the letter
in Saint Mark's.

"What!" he cried, "the lad was this girl in disguise?"

Polixena broke off with an irrepressible smile; but her face
clouded instantly and she returned to the charge.

"This wicked, careless girl--she has ruined me, she will be my
undoing!  Oh, sir, how can I make you understand?  The letter was
not intended for you--it was meant for the English Ambassador, an
old friend of my mother's, from whom I hoped to obtain
assistance--oh, how can I ever excuse myself to you?"

"No excuses are needed, madam," said Tony, bowing; "though I am
surprised, I own, that any one should mistake me for an
ambassador."

Here a wave of mirth again overran Polixena's face.  "Oh, sir,
you must pardon my poor girl's mistake.  She heard you speaking
English, and--and--I had told her to hand the letter to the
handsomest foreigner in the church."  Tony bowed again, more
profoundly.  "The English Ambassador," Polixena added simply, "is
a very handsome man."

"I wish, madam, I were a better proxy!"

She echoed his laugh, and then clapped her hands together with a
look of anguish.  "Fool that I am!  How can I jest at such a
moment?  I am in dreadful trouble, and now perhaps I have brought
trouble on you also--  Oh, my father!  I hear my father coming!"
She turned pale and leaned tremblingly upon the little servant.

Footsteps and loud voices were in fact heard outside, and a
moment later the red-stockinged Senator stalked into the room
attended by half-a-dozen of the magnificoes whom Tony had seen
abroad in the square.  At sight of him, all clapped hands to
their swords and burst into furious outcries; and though their
jargon was unintelligible to the young man, their tones and
gestures made their meaning unpleasantly plain.  The Senator,
with a start of anger, first flung himself on the intruder; then,
snatched back by his companions, turned wrathfully on his
daughter, who, at his feet, with outstretched arms and streaming
face, pleaded her cause with all the eloquence of young distress.
Meanwhile the other nobles gesticulated vehemently among
themselves, and one, a truculent-looking personage in ruff and
Spanish cape, stalked apart, keeping a jealous eye on Tony.  The
latter was at his wit's end how to comport himself, for the
lovely Polixena's tears had quite drowned her few words of
English, and beyond guessing that the magnificoes meant him a
mischief he had no notion what they would be at.

At this point, luckily, his friend Count Rialto suddenly broke in
on the scene, and was at once assailed by all the tongues in the
room.  He pulled a long face at sight of Tony, but signed to the
young man to be silent, and addressed himself earnestly to the
Senator.  The latter, at first, would not draw breath to hear
him; but presently, sobering, he walked apart with the Count, and
the two conversed together out of earshot.

"My dear sir," said the Count, at length turning to Tony with a
perturbed countenance, "it is as I feared, and you are fallen
into a great misfortune."

"A great misfortune!  A great trap, I call it!" shouted Tony,
whose blood, by this time, was boiling; but as he uttered the
word the beautiful Polixena cast such a stricken look on him that
he blushed up to the forehead.

"Be careful," said the Count, in a low tone.  "Though his
Illustriousness does not speak your language, he understands a
few words of it, and--"

"So much the better!" broke in Tony; "I hope he will understand
me if I ask him in plain English what is his grievance against
me."

The Senator, at this, would have burst forth again; but the
Count, stepping between, answered quickly: "His grievance against
you is that you have been detected in secret correspondence with
his daughter, the most noble Polixena Cador, the betrothed bride
of this gentleman, the most illustrious Marquess Zanipolo--" and
he waved a deferential hand at the frowning hidalgo of the cape
and ruff.

"Sir," said Tony, "if that is the extent of my offence, it lies
with the young lady to set me free, since by her own avowal--"
but here he stopped short, for, to his surprise, Polixena shot a
terrified glance at him.

"Sir," interposed the Count, "we are not accustomed in Venice to
take shelter behind a lady's reputation."

"No more are we in Salem," retorted Tony in a white heat.  "I was
merely about to remark that, by the young lady's avowal, she has
never seen me before."

Polixena's eyes signalled her gratitude, and he felt he would
have died to defend her.

The Count translated his statement, and presently pursued: "His
Illustriousness observes that, in that case, his daughter's
misconduct has been all the more reprehensible."

"Her misconduct?  Of what does he accuse her?"

"Of sending you, just now, in the church of Saint Mark's, a
letter which you were seen to read openly and thrust in your
bosom.  The incident was witnessed by his Illustriousness the
Marquess Zanipolo, who, in consequence, has already repudiated
his unhappy bride."

Tony stared contemptuously at the black Marquess.  "If his
Illustriousness is so lacking in gallantry as to repudiate a lady
on so trivial a pretext, it is he and not I who should be the
object of her father's resentment."

"That, my dear young gentleman, is hardly for you to decide.
Your only excuse being your ignorance of our customs, it is
scarcely for you to advise us how to behave in matters of
punctilio."

It seemed to Tony as though the Count were going over to his
enemies, and the thought sharpened his retort.

"I had supposed," said he, "that men of sense had much the same
behaviour in all countries, and that, here as elsewhere, a
gentleman would be taken at his word.  I solemnly affirm that the
letter I was seen to read reflects in no way on the honour of
this young lady, and has in fact nothing to do with what you
suppose."

As he had himself no notion what the letter was about, this was
as far as he dared commit himself.

There was another brief consultation in the opposing camp, and
the Count then said:--"We all know, sir, that a gentleman is
obliged to meet certain enquiries by a denial; but you have at
your command the means of immediately clearing the lady.  Will
you show the letter to her father?"

There was a perceptible pause, during which Tony, while appearing
to look straight before him, managed to deflect an interrogatory
glance toward Polixena.  Her reply was a faint negative motion,
accompanied by unmistakable signs of apprehension.

"Poor girl!" he thought, "she is in a worse case than I imagined,
and whatever happens I must keep her secret."

He turned to the Senator with a deep bow.  "I am not," said he,
"in the habit of showing my private correspondence to strangers."

The Count interpreted these words, and Donna Polixena's father,
dashing his hand on his hilt, broke into furious invective, while
the Marquess continued to nurse his outraged feelings aloof.

The Count shook his head funereally.  "Alas, sir, it is as I
feared.  This is not the first time that youth and propinquity
have led to fatal imprudence.  But I need hardly, I suppose,
point out the obligation incumbent upon you as a man of honour."

Tony stared at him haughtily, with a look which was meant for the
Marquess.  "And what obligation is that?"

"To repair the wrong you have done--in other words, to marry the
lady."

Polixena at this burst into tears, and Tony said to himself: "Why
in heaven does she not bid me show the letter?"  Then he
remembered that it had no superscription, and that the words it
contained, supposing them to have been addressed to himself, were
hardly of a nature to disarm suspicion.  The sense of the girl's
grave plight effaced all thought of his own risk, but the Count's
last words struck him as so preposterous that he could not
repress a smile.

"I cannot flatter myself," said he, "that the lady would welcome
this solution."

The Count's manner became increasingly ceremonious.  "Such
modesty," he said, "becomes your youth and inexperience; but even
if it were justified it would scarcely alter the case, as it is
always assumed in this country that a young lady wishes to marry
the man whom her father has selected."

"But I understood just now," Tony interposed, "that the gentleman
yonder was in that enviable position."

"So he was, till circumstances obliged him to waive the privilege
in your favour."

"He does me too much honour; but if a deep sense of my
unworthiness obliges me to decline--"

"You are still," interrupted the Count, "labouring under a
misapprehension.  Your choice in the matter is no more to be
consulted than the lady's.  Not to put too fine a point on it, it
is necessary that you should marry her within the hour."

Tony, at this, for all his spirit, felt the blood run thin in his
veins.  He looked in silence at the threatening visages between
himself and the door, stole a side-glance at the high barred
windows of the apartment, and then turned to Polixena, who had
fallen sobbing at her father's feet.

"And if I refuse?" said he.

The Count made a significant gesture.  "I am not so foolish as to
threaten a man of your mettle.  But perhaps you are unaware what
the consequences would be to the lady."

Polixena, at this, struggling to her feet, addressed a few
impassioned words to the Count and her father; but the latter put
her aside with an obdurate gesture.

The Count turned to Tony.  "The lady herself pleads for you--at
what cost you do not guess--but as you see it is vain.  In an
hour his Illustriousness's chaplain will be here.  Meanwhile his
Illustriousness consents to leave you in the custody of your
betrothed."

He stepped back, and the other gentlemen, bowing with deep
ceremony to Tony, stalked out one by one from the room.  Tony
heard the key turn in the lock, and found himself alone with
Polixena.



III


The girl had sunk into a chair, her face hidden, a picture of
shame and agony.  So moving was the sight that Tony once again
forgot his own extremity in the view of her distress.  He went
and kneeled beside her, drawing her hands from her face.

"Oh, don't make me look at you!" she sobbed; but it was on his
bosom that she hid from his gaze.  He held her there a breathing-
space, as he might have clasped a weeping child; then she drew
back and put him gently from her.

"What humiliation!" she lamented.

"Do you think I blame you for what has happened?"

"Alas, was it not my foolish letter that brought you to this
plight?  And how nobly you defended me!  How generous it was of
you not to show the letter!  If my father knew I had written to
the Ambassador to save me from this dreadful marriage his anger
against me would be even greater."

"Ah--it was that you wrote for?" cried Tony with unaccountable
relief.

"Of course--what else did you think?"

"But is it too late for the Ambassador to save you?"

"From YOU?"  A smile flashed through her tears.  "Alas, yes."
She drew back and hid her face again, as though overcome by a
fresh wave of shame.

Tony glanced about him.  "If I could wrench a bar out of that
window--" he muttered.

"Impossible!  The court is guarded.  You are a prisoner, alas.--
Oh, I must speak!"  She sprang up and paced the room.  "But
indeed you can scarce think worse of me than you do already--"

"I think ill of you?"

"Alas, you must!  To be unwilling to marry the man my father has
chosen for me--"

"Such a beetle-browed lout!  It would be a burning shame if you
married him."

"Ah, you come from a free country.  Here a girl is allowed no
choice."

"It is infamous, I say--infamous!"

"No, no--I ought to have resigned myself, like so many others."

"Resigned yourself to that brute!  Impossible!"

"He has a dreadful name for violence--his gondolier has told my
little maid such tales of him!  But why do I talk of myself, when
it is of you I should be thinking?"

"Of me, poor child?" cried Tony, losing his head.

"Yes, and how to save you--for I CAN save you!  But every moment
counts--and yet what I have to say is so dreadful."

"Nothing from your lips could seem dreadful."

"Ah, if he had had your way of speaking!"

"Well, now at least you are free of him," said Tony, a little
wildly; but at this she stood up and bent a grave look on him.

"No, I am not free," she said; "but you are, if you will do as I
tell you."

Tony, at this, felt a sudden dizziness; as though, from a mad
flight through clouds and darkness, he had dropped to safety
again, and the fall had stunned him.

"What am I to do?" he said.

"Look away from me, or I can never tell you."

He thought at first that this was a jest, but her eyes commanded
him, and reluctantly he walked away and leaned in the embrasure
of the window.  She stood in the middle of the room, and as soon
as his back was turned she began to speak in a quick monotonous
voice, as though she were reciting a lesson.

"You must know that the Marquess Zanipolo, though a great noble,
is not a rich man.  True, he has large estates, but he is a
desperate spendthrift and gambler, and would sell his soul for a
round sum of ready money.--If you turn round I shall not go on!--
He wrangled horribly with my father over my dowry--he wanted me
to have more than either of my sisters, though one married a
Procurator and the other a grandee of Spain.  But my father is a
gambler too--oh, such fortunes as are squandered over the arcade
yonder!  And so--and so--don't turn, I implore you--oh, do you
begin to see my meaning?"

She broke off sobbing, and it took all his strength to keep his
eyes from her.

"Go on," he said.

"Will you not understand?  Oh, I would say anything to save you!
You don't know us Venetians--we're all to be bought for a price.
It is not only the brides who are marketable--sometimes the
husbands sell themselves too.  And they think you rich--my father
does, and the others--I don't know why, unless you have shown
your money too freely--and the English are all rich, are they
not?  And--oh, oh--do you understand?  Oh, I can't bear your
eyes!"

She dropped into a chair, her head on her arms, and Tony in a
flash was at her side.

"My poor child, my poor Polixena!" he cried, and wept and clasped
her.

"You ARE rich, are you not?  You would promise them a ransom?"
she persisted.

"To enable you to marry the Marquess?"

"To enable you to escape from this place.  Oh, I hope I may never
see your face again."  She fell to weeping once more, and he drew
away and paced the floor in a fever.

Presently she sprang up with a fresh air of resolution, and
pointed to a clock against the wall.  "The hour is nearly over.
It is quite true that my father is gone to fetch his chaplain.
Oh, I implore you, be warned by me!  There is no other way of
escape."

"And if I do as you say--?"

"You are safe!  You are free!  I stake my life on it."

"And you--you are married to that villain?"

"But I shall have saved you.  Tell me your name, that I may say
it to myself when I am alone."

"My name is Anthony.  But you must not marry that fellow."

"You forgive me, Anthony?  You don't think too badly of me?"

"I say you must not marry that fellow."

She laid a trembling hand on his arm.  "Time presses," she
adjured him, "and I warn you there is no other way."

For a moment he had a vision of his mother, sitting very upright,
on a Sunday evening, reading Dr. Tillotson's sermons in the best
parlour at Salem; then he swung round on the girl and caught both
her hands in his.  "Yes, there is," he cried, "if you are
willing.  Polixena, let the priest come!"

She shrank back from him, white and radiant.  "Oh, hush, be
silent!" she said.

"I am no noble Marquess, and have no great estates," he cried.
"My father is a plain India merchant in the colony of
Massachusetts--but if you--"

"Oh, hush, I say!  I don't know what your long words mean.  But I
bless you, bless you, bless you on my knees!"  And she knelt
before him, and fell to kissing his hands.

He drew her up to his breast and held her there.

"You are willing, Polixena?" he said.

"No, no!"  She broke from him with outstretched hands.  "I am not
willing.  You mistake me.  I must marry the Marquess, I tell
you!"

"On my money?" he taunted her; and her burning blush rebuked him.

"Yes, on your money," she said sadly.

"Why?  Because, much as you hate him, you hate me still more?"

She was silent.

"If you hate me, why do you sacrifice yourself for me?" he
persisted.

"You torture me!  And I tell you the hour is past."

"Let it pass.  I'll not accept your sacrifice.  I will not lift a
finger to help another man to marry you."

"Oh, madman, madman!" she murmured.

Tony, with crossed arms, faced her squarely, and she leaned
against the wall a few feet off from him.  Her breast throbbed
under its lace and falbalas, and her eyes swam with terror and
entreaty.

"Polixena, I love you!" he cried.

A blush swept over her throat and bosom, bathing her in light to
the verge of her troubled brows.

"I love you!  I love you!" he repeated.

And now she was on his breast again, and all their youth was in
their lips.  But her embrace was as fleeting as a bird's poise
and before he knew it he clasped empty air, and half the room was
between them.

She was holding up a little coral charm and laughing.  "I took it
from your fob," she said.  "It is of no value, is it?  And I
shall not get any of the money, you know."

She continued to laugh strangely, and the rouge burned like fire
in her ashen face.

"What are you talking of?" he said.

"They never give me anything but the clothes I wear.  And I shall
never see you again, Anthony!"  She gave him a dreadful look.
"Oh, my poor boy, my poor love--'I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU,
POLIXENA!'"

He thought she had turned light-headed, and advanced to her with
soothing words; but she held him quietly at arm's length, and as
he gazed he read the truth in her face.

He fell back from her, and a sob broke from him as he bowed his
head on his hands.

"Only, for God's sake, have the money ready, or there may be foul
play here," she said.

As she spoke there was a great tramping of steps outside and a
burst of voices on the threshold.

"It is all a lie," she gasped out, "about my marriage, and the
Marquess, and the Ambassador, and the Senator--but not, oh, not
about your danger in this place--or about my love," she breathed
to him.  And as the key rattled in the door she laid her lips on
his brow.

The key rattled, and the door swung open--but the black-cassocked
gentleman who stepped in, though a priest indeed, was no votary
of idolatrous rites, but that sound orthodox divine, the Reverend
Ozias Mounce, looking very much perturbed at his surroundings,
and very much on the alert for the Scarlet Woman.  He was
supported, to his evident relief, by the captain of the Hepzibah
B., and the procession was closed by an escort of stern-looking
fellows in cocked hats and small-swords, who led between them
Tony's late friends the magnificoes, now as sorry a looking
company as the law ever landed in her net.

The captain strode briskly into the room, uttering a grunt of
satisfaction as he clapped eyes on Tony.

"So, Mr. Bracknell," said he, "you have been seeing the Carnival
with this pack of mummers, have you?  And this is where your
pleasuring has landed you?  H'm--a pretty establishment, and a
pretty lady at the head of it."  He glanced about the apartment
and doffed his hat with mock ceremony to Polixena, who faced him
like a princess.

"Why, my girl," said he, amicably, "I think I saw you this
morning in the square, on the arm of the Pantaloon yonder; and as
for that Captain Spavent--" and he pointed a derisive finger at
the Marquess--"I've watched him drive his bully's trade under the
arcade ever since I first dropped anchor in these waters.  Well,
well," he continued, his indignation subsiding, "all's fair in
Carnival, I suppose, but this gentleman here is under sailing
orders, and I fear we must break up your little party."

At this Tony saw Count Rialto step forward, looking very small
and explanatory, and uncovering obsequiously to the captain.

"I can assure you, sir," said the Count in his best English,
"that this incident is the result of an unfortunate
misunderstanding, and if you will oblige us by dismissing these
myrmidons, any of my friends here will be happy to offer
satisfaction to Mr. Bracknell and his companions."

Mr. Mounce shrank visibly at this, and the captain burst into a
loud guffaw.

"Satisfaction?" says he.  "Why, my cock, that's very handsome of
you, considering the rope's at your throats.  But we'll not take
advantage of your generosity, for I fear Mr. Bracknell has
already trespassed on it too long.  You pack of galley-slaves,
you!" he spluttered suddenly, "decoying young innocents with that
devil's bait of yours--"  His eye fell on Polixena, and his voice
softened unaccountably.  "Ah, well, we must all see the Carnival
once, I suppose," he said.  "All's well that ends well, as the
fellow says in the play; and now, if you please, Mr. Bracknell,
if you'll take the reverend gentleman's arm there, we'll bid
adieu to our hospitable entertainers, and right about face for
the Hepzibah."



The End of A Venetian Night's Entertainment




XINGU
December, 1911


Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands,
as though it were dangerous to meet alone.  To this end she had
founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and
several other indomitable huntresses of erudition.  The Lunch
Club, after three or four winters of lunching and debate, had
acquired such local distinction that the entertainment of
distinguished strangers became one of its accepted functions; in
recognition of which it duly extended to the celebrated "Osric
Dane," on the day of her arrival in Hillbridge, an invitation to
be present at the next meeting.

The Club was to meet at Mrs. Ballinger's.  The other members,
behind her back, were of one voice in deploring her unwillingness
to cede her rights in favor of Mrs. Plinth, whose house made a
more impressive setting for the entertainment of celebrities;
while, as Mrs. Leveret observed, there was always the picture-
gallery to fall back on.

Mrs. Plinth made no secret of sharing this view.  She had always
regarded it as one of her obligations to entertain the Lunch
Club's distinguished guests.  Mrs. Plinth was almost as proud of
her obligations as she was of her picture-gallery; she was in
fact fond of implying that the one possession implied the other,
and that only a woman of her wealth could afford to live up to a
standard as high as that which she had set herself.  An all-round
sense of duty, roughly adaptable to various ends, was, in her
opinion, all that Providence exacted of the more humbly
stationed; but the power which had predestined Mrs. Plinth to
keep footmen clearly intended her to maintain an equally
specialized staff of responsibilities.  It was the more to be
regretted that Mrs. Ballinger, whose obligations to society were
bounded by the narrow scope of two parlour-maids, should have
been so tenacious of the right to entertain Osric Dane.

The question of that lady's reception had for a month past
profoundly moved the members of the Lunch Club.  It was not that
they felt themselves unequal to the task, but that their sense of
the opportunity plunged them into the agreeable uncertainty of
the lady who weighs the alternatives of a well-stocked wardrobe.
If such subsidiary members as Mrs. Leveret were fluttered by the
thought of exchanging ideas with the author of "The Wings of
Death," no forebodings of the kind disturbed the conscious
adequacy of Mrs. Plinth, Mrs. Ballinger and Miss Van Vluyck.
"The Wings of Death" had, in fact, at Miss Van Vluyck's
suggestion, been chosen as the subject of discussion at the last
club meeting, and each member had thus been enabled to express
her own opinion or to appropriate whatever seemed most likely to
be of use in the comments of the others.  Mrs. Roby alone had
abstained from profiting by the opportunity thus offered; but it
was now openly recognised that, as a member of the Lunch Club,
Mrs. Roby was a failure.  "It all comes," as Miss Van Vluyck put
it, "of accepting a woman on a man's estimation."  Mrs. Roby,
returning to Hillbridge from a prolonged sojourn in exotic
regions--the other ladies no longer took the trouble to remember
where--had been emphatically commended by the distinguished
biologist, Professor Foreland, as the most agreeable woman he had
ever met; and the members of the Lunch Club, awed by an encomium
that carried the weight of a diploma, and rashly assuming that
the Professor's social sympathies would follow the line of his
scientific bent, had seized the chance of annexing a biological
member.  Their disillusionment was complete.  At Miss Van
Vluyck's first off-hand mention of the pterodactyl Mrs. Roby had
confusedly murmured: "I know so little about metres--" and after
that painful betrayal of incompetence she had prudently withdrawn
from farther participation in the mental gymnastics of the club.

"I suppose she flattered him," Miss Van Vluyck summed up--"or
else it's the way she does her hair."

The dimensions of Miss Van Vluyck's dining-room having restricted
the membership of the club to six, the non-conductiveness of one
member was a serious obstacle to the exchange of ideas, and some
wonder had already been expressed that Mrs. Roby should care to
live, as it were, on the intellectual bounty of the others.  This
feeling was augmented by the discovery that she had not yet read
"The Wings of Death."  She owned to having heard the name of
Osric Dane; but that--incredible as it appeared--was the extent
of her acquaintance with the celebrated novelist.  The ladies
could not conceal their surprise, but Mrs. Ballinger, whose pride
in the club made her wish to put even Mrs. Roby in the best
possible light, gently insinuated that, though she had not had
time to acquaint herself with "The Wings of Death," she must at
least be familiar with its equally remarkable predecessor, "The
Supreme Instant."

Mrs. Roby wrinkled her sunny brows in a conscientious effort of
memory, as a result of which she recalled that, oh, yes, she HAD
seen the book at her brother's, when she was staying with him in
Brazil, and had even carried it off to read one day on a boating
party; but they had all got to shying things at each other in the
boat, and the book had gone overboard, so she had never had the
chance--

The picture evoked by this anecdote did not advance Mrs. Roby's
credit with the club, and there was a painful pause, which was
broken by Mrs. Plinth's remarking: "I can understand that, with
all your other pursuits, you should not find much time for
reading; but I should have thought you might at least have GOT UP
'The Wings of Death' before Osric Dane's arrival."

Mrs. Roby took this rebuke good-humouredly.  She had meant, she
owned to glance through the book; but she had been so absorbed in
a novel of Trollope's that--

"No one reads Trollope now," Mrs. Ballinger interrupted
impatiently.

Mrs. Roby looked pained.  "I'm only just beginning," she
confessed.

"And does he interest you?" Mrs. Plinth inquired.

"He amuses me."

"Amusement," said Mrs. Plinth sententiously, "is hardly what I
look for in my choice of books."

"Oh, certainly, 'The Wings of Death' is not amusing," ventured
Mrs. Leveret, whose manner of putting forth an opinion was like
that of an obliging salesman with a variety of other styles to
submit if his first selection does not suit.

"Was it MEANT to be?" enquired Mrs. Plinth, who was fond of
asking questions that she permitted no one but herself to answer.
"Assuredly not."

"Assuredly not--that is what I was going to say," assented Mrs.
Leveret, hastily rolling up her opinion and reaching for another.
"It was meant to--to elevate."

Miss Van Vluyck adjusted her spectacles as though they were the
black cap of condemnation.  "I hardly see," she interposed, "how
a book steeped in the bitterest pessimism can be said to elevate,
however much it may instruct."

"I meant, of course, to instruct," said Mrs. Leveret, flurried by
the unexpected distinction between two terms which she had
supposed to be synonymous.  Mrs. Leveret's enjoyment of the Lunch
Club was frequently marred by such surprises; and not knowing her
own value to the other ladies as a mirror for their mental
complacency she was sometimes troubled by a doubt of her
worthiness to join in their debates.  It was only the fact of
having a dull sister who thought her clever that saved her from a
sense of hopeless inferiority.

"Do they get married in the end?" Mrs. Roby interposed.

"They--who?" the Lunch Club collectively exclaimed.

"Why, the girl and man.  It's a novel, isn't it?  I always think
that's the one thing that matters.  If they're parted it spoils
my dinner."

Mrs. Plinth and Mrs. Ballinger exchanged scandalised glances, and
the latter said: "I should hardly advise you to read 'The Wings
of Death,' in that spirit.  For my part, when there are so many
books that one HAS to read, I wonder how any one can find time
for those that are merely amusing."

"The beautiful part of it," Laura Glyde murmured, "is surely just
this--that no one can tell HOW 'The Wings of Death' ends.  Osric
Dane, overcome by the dread significance of her own meaning, has
mercifully veiled it--perhaps even from herself--as Apelles, in
representing the sacrifice of Iphigenia, veiled the face of
Agamemnon."

"What's that?  Is it poetry?" whispered Mrs. Leveret nervously to
Mrs. Plinth, who, disdaining a definite reply, said coldly: "You
should look it up.  I always make it a point to look things up."
Her tone added--"though I might easily have it done for me by the
footman."

"I was about to say," Miss Van Vluyck resumed, "that it must
always be a question whether a book CAN instruct unless it
elevates."

"Oh--" murmured Mrs. Leveret, now feeling herself hopelessly
astray.

"I don't know," said Mrs. Ballinger, scenting in Miss Van
Vluyck's tone a tendency to depreciate the coveted distinction of
entertaining Osric Dane; "I don't know that such a question can
seriously be raised as to a book which has attracted more
attention among thoughtful people than any novel since 'Robert
Elsmere.'"

"Oh, but don't you see," exclaimed Laura Glyde, "that it's just
the dark hopelessness of it all--the wonderful tone-scheme of
black on black--that makes it such an artistic achievement?  It
reminded me so when I read it of Prince Rupert's maniere noire . . .
the book is etched, not painted, yet one feels the colour
values so intensely . . ."

"Who is HE?" Mrs. Leveret whispered to her neighbour.  "Some one
she's met abroad?"

"The wonderful part of the book," Mrs. Ballinger conceded, "is
that it may be looked at from so many points of view.  I hear
that as a study of determinism Professor Lupton ranks it with
'The Data of Ethics.'"

"I'm told that Osric Dane spent ten years in preparatory studies
before beginning to write it," said Mrs. Plinth.  "She looks up
everything--verifies everything.  It has always been my
principle, as you know.  Nothing would induce me, now, to put
aside a book before I'd finished it, just because I can buy as
many more as I want."

"And what do YOU think of 'The Wings of Death'?" Mrs. Roby
abruptly asked her.

It was the kind of question that might be termed out of order,
and the ladies glanced at each other as though disclaiming any
share in such a breach of discipline.  They all knew that there
was nothing Mrs. Plinth so much disliked as being asked her
opinion of a book.  Books were written to read; if one read them
what more could be expected?  To be questioned in detail
regarding the contents of a volume seemed to her as great an
outrage as being searched for smuggled laces at the Custom House.
The club had always respected this idiosyncrasy of Mrs. Plinth's.
Such opinions as she had were imposing and substantial: her mind,
like her house, was furnished with monumental "pieces" that were
not meant to be suddenly disarranged; and it was one of the
unwritten rules of the Lunch Club that, within her own province,
each member's habits of thought should be respected.  The meeting
therefore closed with an increased sense, on the part of the
other ladies, of Mrs. Roby's hopeless unfitness to be one of
them.



II


Mrs. Leveret, on the eventful day, had arrived early at Mrs.
Ballinger's, her volume of Appropriate Allusions in her pocket.

It always flustered Mrs. Leveret to be late at the Lunch Club:
she liked to collect her thoughts and gather a hint, as the
others assembled, of the turn the conversation was likely to
take.  To-day, however, she felt herself completely at a loss;
and even the familiar contact of Appropriate Allusions, which
stuck into her as she sat down, failed to give her any
reassurance.  It was an admirable little volume, compiled to meet
all the social emergencies; so that, whether on the occasion of
Anniversaries, joyful or melancholy (as the classification ran),
of Banquets, social or municipal, or of Baptisms, Church of
England or sectarian, its student need never be at a loss for a
pertinent reference.  Mrs. Leveret, though she had for years
devoutly conned its pages, valued it, however, rather for its
moral support than for its practical services; for though in the
privacy of her own room she commanded an army of quotations,
these invariably deserted her at the critical moment, and the
only line she retained--CANST THOU DRAW OUT LEVIATHAN WITH A
HOOK?--was one she had never yet found the occasion to apply.

To-day she felt that even the complete mastery of the volume
would hardly have insured her self-possession; for she thought it
probable, even if she DID, in some miraculous way, remember an
Allusion, it would be only to find that Osric Dane used a
different volume (Mrs. Leveret was convinced that literary people
always carried them), and would consequently not recognise her
quotations.

Mrs. Leveret's sense of being adrift was intensified by the
appearance of Mrs. Ballinger's drawing-room.  To a careless eye
its aspect was unchanged; but those acquainted with Mrs.
Ballinger's way of arranging her books would instantly have
detected the marks of recent perturbation.  Mrs. Ballinger's
province, as a member of the Lunch Club, was the Book of the Day.
On that, whatever it was, from a novel to a treatise on
experimental psychology, she was confidently, authoritatively
"up."  What became of last year's books, or last week's even;
what she did with the "subjects" she had previously professed
with equal authority; no one had ever yet discovered.  Her mind
was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers,
without leaving their address behind, and frequently without
paying for their board.  It was Mrs. Ballinger's boast that she
was "abreast with the Thought of the Day," and her pride that
this advanced position should be expressed by the books on her
drawing-room table.  These volumes, frequently renewed, and
almost always damp from the press, bore names generally
unfamiliar to Mrs. Leveret, and giving her, as she furtively
scanned them, a disheartening glimpse of new fields of knowledge
to be breathlessly traversed in Mrs. Ballinger's wake.  But to-
day a number of maturer-looking volumes were adroitly mingled
with the primeurs of the press--Karl Marx jostled Professor
Bergson, and the "Confessions of St. Augustine" lay beside the
last work on "Mendelism"; so that even to Mrs. Leveret's
fluttered perceptions it was clear that Mrs. Ballinger didn't in
the least know what Osric Dane was likely to talk about, and had
taken measures to be prepared for anything.  Mrs. Leveret felt
like a passenger on an ocean steamer who is told that there is no
immediate danger, but that she had better put on her life-belt.

It was a relief to be roused from these forebodings by Miss Van
Vluyck's arrival.

"Well, my dear," the new-comer briskly asked her hostess, "what
subjects are we to discuss to-day?"

Mrs. Ballinger was furtively replacing a volume of Wordsworth by
a copy of Verlaine.  "I hardly know," she said somewhat
nervously.  "Perhaps we had better leave that to circumstances."

"Circumstances?" said Miss Van Vluyck drily.  "That means, I
suppose, that Laura Glyde will take the floor as usual, and we
shall be deluged with literature."

Philanthropy and statistics were Miss Van Vluyck's province, and
she naturally resented any tendency to divert their guest's
attention from these topics.

Mrs. Plinth at this moment appeared.

"Literature?" she protested in a tone of remonstrance.  "But this
is perfectly unexpected.  I understood we were to talk of Osric
Dane's novel."

Mrs. Ballinger winced at the discrimination, but let it pass.
"We can hardly make that our chief subject--at least not TOO
intentionally," she suggested.  "Of course we can let our talk
DRIFT in that direction; but we ought to have some other topic as
an introduction, and that is what I wanted to consult you about.
The fact is, we know so little of Osric Dane's tastes and
interests that it is difficult to make any special preparation."

"It may be difficult," said Mrs. Plinth with decision, "but it is
absolutely necessary.  I know what that happy-go-lucky principle
leads to.  As I told one of my nieces the other day, there are
certain emergencies for which a lady should always be prepared.
It's in shocking taste to wear colours when one pays a visit of
condolence, or a last year's dress when there are reports that
one's husband is on the wrong side of the market; and so it is
with conversation.  All I ask is that I should know beforehand
what is to be talked about; then I feel sure of being able to say
the proper thing."

"I quite agree with you," Mrs. Ballinger anxiously assented;
"but--"

And at that instant, heralded by the fluttered parlour-maid,
Osric Dane appeared upon the threshold.

Mrs. Leveret told her sister afterward that she had known at a
glance what was coming.  She saw that Osric Dane was not going to
meet them half way.  That distinguished personage had indeed
entered with an air of compulsion not calculated to promote the
easy exercise of hospitality.  She looked as though she were
about to be photographed for a new edition of her books.

The desire to propitiate a divinity is generally in inverse ratio
to its responsiveness, and the sense of discouragement produced
by Osric Dane's entrance visibly increased the Lunch Club's
eagerness to please her.  Any lingering idea that she might
consider herself under an obligation to her entertainers was at
once dispelled by her manner: as Mrs. Leveret said afterward to
her sister, she had a way of looking at you that made you feel as
if there was something wrong with your hat.  This evidence of
greatness produced such an immediate impression on the ladies
that a shudder of awe ran through them when Mrs. Roby, as their
hostess led the great personage into the dining-room, turned back
to whisper to the others: "What a brute she is!"

The hour about the table did not tend to correct this verdict.
It was passed by Osric Dane in the silent deglutition of Mrs.
Ballinger's menu, and by the members of the Club in the emission
of tentative platitudes which their guest seemed to swallow as
perfunctorily as the successive courses of the luncheon.

Mrs. Ballinger's deplorable delay in fixing a topic had thrown
the Club into a mental disarray which increased with the return
to the drawing-room, where the actual business of discussion was
to open.  Each lady waited for the other to speak; and there was
a general shock of disappointment when their hostess opened the
conversation by the painfully commonplace inquiry: "Is this your
first visit to Hillbridge?"

Even Mrs. Leveret was conscious that this was a bad beginning;
and a vague impulse of deprecation made Miss Glyde interject: "It
is a very small place indeed."

Mrs. Plinth bristled.  "We have a great many representative
people," she said, in the tone of one who speaks for her order.

Osric Dane turned to her thoughtfully.  "What do they represent?"
she asked.

Mrs. Plinth's constitutional dislike to being questioned was
intensified by her sense of unpreparedness; and her reproachful
glance passed the question on to Mrs. Ballinger.

"Why," said that lady, glancing in turn at the other members, "as
a community I hope it is not too much to say that we stand for
culture."

"For art--" Miss Glyde eagerly interjected.

"For art and literature," Mrs. Ballinger emended.

"And for sociology, I trust," snapped Miss Van Vluyck.

"We have a standard," said Mrs. Plinth, feeling herself suddenly
secure on the vast expanse of a generalisation: and Mrs. Leveret,
thinking there must be room for more than one on so broad a
statement, took courage to murmur: "Oh, certainly; we have a
standard."

"The object of our little club," Mrs. Ballinger continued, "is to
concentrate the highest tendencies of Hillbridge--to centralise
and focus its complex intellectual effort."

This was felt to be so happy that the ladies drew an almost
audible breath of relief.

"We aspire," the President went on, "to stand for what is highest
in art, literature and ethics."

Osric Dane again turned to her.  "What ethics?" she asked.

A tremor of apprehension encircled the room.  None of the ladies
required any preparation to pronounce on a question of morals;
but when they were called ethics it was different.  The club,
when fresh from the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," the "Reader's
Handbook" or Smith's "Classical Dictionary," could deal
confidently with any subject; but when taken unawares it had been
known to define agnosticism as a heresy of the Early Church and
Professor Froude as a distinguished histologist; and such minor
members as Mrs. Leveret still secretly regarded ethics as
something vaguely pagan.

Even to Mrs. Ballinger, Osric Dane's question was unsettling, and
there was a general sense of gratitude when Laura Glyde leaned
forward to say, with her most sympathetic accent: "You must
excuse us, Mrs. Dane, for not being able, just at present, to
talk of anything but 'The Wings of Death.'"

"Yes," said Miss Van Vluyck, with a sudden resolve to carry the
war into the enemy's camp.  "We are so anxious to know the exact
purpose you had in mind in writing your wonderful book."

"You will find," Mrs. Plinth interposed, "that we are not
superficial readers."

"We are eager to hear from you," Miss Van Vluyck continued, "if
the pessimistic tendency of the book is an expression of your own
convictions or--"

"Or merely," Miss Glyde hastily thrust in, "a sombre background
brushed in to throw your figures into more vivid relief.  ARE you
not primarily plastic?"

"I have always maintained," Mrs. Ballinger interposed, "that you
represent the purely objective method--"

Osric Dane helped herself critically to coffee.  "How do you
define objective?" she then inquired.

There was a flurried pause before Laura Glyde intensely murmured:
"In reading YOU we don't define, we feel."

Osric Dane smiled.  "The cerebellum," she remarked, "is not
infrequently the seat of the literary emotions."  And she took a
second lump of sugar.

The sting that this remark was vaguely felt to conceal was almost
neutralised by the satisfaction of being addressed in such
technical language.

"Ah, the cerebellum," said Miss Van Vluyck complacently.  "The
Club took a course in psychology last winter."

"Which psychology?" asked Osric Dane.

There was an agonising pause, during which each member of the
Club secretly deplored the distressing inefficiency of the
others.  Only Mrs. Roby went on placidly sipping her chartreuse.
At last Mrs. Ballinger said, with an attempt at a high tone:
"Well, really, you know, it was last year that we took
psychology, and this winter we have been so absorbed in--"

She broke off, nervously trying to recall some of the Club's
discussions; but her faculties seemed to be paralysed by the
petrifying stare of Osric Dane.  What HAD the club been absorbed
in lately?  Mrs. Ballinger, with a vague purpose of gaining time,
repeated slowly: "We've been so intensely absorbed in--"

Mrs. Roby put down her liqueur glass and drew near the group with
a smile.

"In Xingu?" she gently prompted.

A thrill ran through the other members.  They exchanged confused
glances, and then, with one accord, turned a gaze of mingled
relief and interrogation on their unexpected rescuer.  The
expression of each denoted a different phase of the same emotion.
Mrs. Plinth was the first to compose her features to an air of
reassurance: after a moment's hasty adjustment her look almost
implied that it was she who had given the word to Mrs. Ballinger.

"Xingu, of course!" exclaimed the latter with her accustomed
promptness, while Miss Van Vluyck and Laura Glyde seemed to be
plumbing the depths of memory, and Mrs. Leveret, feeling
apprehensively for Appropriate Allusions, was somehow reassured
by the uncomfortable pressure of its bulk against her person.

Osric Dane's change of countenance was no less striking than that
of her entertainers.  She too put down her coffee-cup, but with a
look of distinct annoyance: she too wore, for a brief moment,
what Mrs. Roby afterward described as the look of feeling for
something in the back of her head; and before she could dissemble
these momentary signs of weakness, Mrs. Roby, turning to her with
a deferential smile, had said: "And we've been so hoping that
to-day you would tell us just what you think of it."

Osric Dane received the homage of the smile as a matter of
course; but the accompanying question obviously embarrassed her,
and it became clear to her observers that she was not quick at
shifting her facial scenery.  It was as though her countenance
had so long been set in an expression of unchallenged superiority
that the muscles had stiffened, and refused to obey her orders.

"Xingu--" she murmured, as if seeking in her turn to gain time.

Mrs. Roby continued to press her.  "Knowing how engrossing the
subject is, you will understand how it happens that the Club has
let everything else go to the wall for the moment.  Since we took
up Xingu I might almost say--were it not for your books--that
nothing else seems to us worth remembering."

Osric Dane's stern features were darkened rather than lit up by
an uneasy smile.  "I am glad to hear there is one exception," she
gave out between narrowed lips.

"Oh, of course," Mrs. Roby said prettily; "but as you have shown
us that--so very naturally!--you don't care to talk about your
own things, we really can't let you off from telling us exactly
what you think about Xingu; especially," she added, with a
persuasive smile, "as some people say that one of your last books
was simply saturated with it."

It was an IT, then--the assurance sped like fire through the
parched minds of the other members.  In their eagerness to gain
the least little clue to Xingu they almost forgot the joy of
assisting at the discomfiture of Mrs. Dane.

The latter reddened nervously under her antagonist's direct
assault.  "May I ask," she faltered out in an embarrassed tone,
"to which of my books you refer?"

Mrs. Roby did not falter.  "That's just what I want you to tell
us; because, though I was present, I didn't actually take part."

"Present at what?" Mrs. Dane took her up; and for an instant the
trembling members of the Lunch Club thought that the champion
Providence had raised up for them had lost a point.  But Mrs.
Roby explained herself gaily: "At the discussion, of course.  And
so we're dreadfully anxious to know just how it was that you went
into the Xingu."

There was a portentous pause, a silence so big with incalculable
dangers that the members with one accord checked the words on
their lips, like soldiers dropping their arms to watch a single
combat between their leaders.  Then Mrs. Dane gave expression to
their inmost dread by saying sharply: "Ah--you say THE Xingu, do
you?"

Mrs. Roby smiled undauntedly.  "It IS a shade pedantic, isn't it?
Personally, I always drop the article; but I don't know how the
other members feel about it."

The other members looked as though they would willingly have
dispensed with this deferential appeal to their opinion, and Mrs.
Roby, after a bright glance about the group, went on: "They
probably think, as I do, that nothing really matters except the
thing itself--except Xingu."

No immediate reply seemed to occur to Mrs. Dane, and Mrs.
Ballinger gathered courage to say: "Surely every one must feel
that about Xingu."

Mrs. Plinth came to her support with a heavy murmur of assent,
and Laura Glyde breathed emotionally: "I have known cases where
it has changed a whole life."

"It has done me worlds of good," Mrs. Leveret interjected,
seeming to herself to remember that she had either taken it or
read it in the winter before.

"Of course," Mrs. Roby admitted, "the difficulty is that one must
give up so much time to it.  It's very long."

"I can't imagine," said Miss Van Vluyck tartly, "grudging the
time given to such a subject."

"And deep in places," Mrs. Roby pursued; (so then it was a book!)
"And it isn't easy to skip."

"I never skip," said Mrs. Plinth dogmatically.

"Ah, it's dangerous to, in Xingu.  Even at the start there are
places where one can't.  One must just wade through."

"I should hardly call it WADING," said Mrs. Ballinger
sarcastically.

Mrs. Roby sent her a look of interest.  "Ah--you always found it
went swimmingly?"

Mrs. Ballinger hesitated.  "Of course there are difficult
passages," she conceded modestly.

"Yes; some are not at all clear--even," Mrs. Roby added, "if one
is familiar with the original."

"As I suppose you are?" Osric Dane interposed, suddenly fixing
her with a look of challenge.

Mrs. Roby met it by a deprecating smile.  "Oh, it's really not
difficult up to a certain point; though some of the branches are
very little known, and it's almost impossible to get at the
source."

"Have you ever tried?" Mrs. Plinth enquired, still distrustful of
Mrs. Roby's thoroughness.

Mrs. Roby was silent for a moment; then she replied with lowered
lids: "No--but a friend of mine did; a very brilliant man; and he
told me it was best for women--not to . . ."

A shudder ran around the room.  Mrs. Leveret coughed so that the
parlour-maid, who was handing the cigarettes, should not hear;
Miss Van Vluyck's face took on a nauseated expression, and Mrs.
Plinth looked as if she were passing some one she did not care to
bow to.  But the most remarkable result of Mrs. Roby's words was
the effect they produced on the Lunch Club's distinguished guest.
Osric Dane's impassive features suddenly melted to an expression
of the warmest human sympathy, and edging her chair toward Mrs.
Roby's she asked: "Did he really?  And--did you find he was
right?"

Mrs. Ballinger, in whom annoyance at Mrs. Roby's unwonted
assumption of prominence was beginning to displace gratitude for
the aid she had rendered, could not consent to her being allowed,
by such dubious means, to monopolise the attention of their
guest.  If Osric Dane had not enough self-respect to resent Mrs.
Roby's flippancy, at least the Lunch Club would do so in the
person of its President.

Mrs. Ballinger laid her hand on Mrs. Roby's arm.  "We must not
forget," she said with a frigid amiability, "that absorbing as
Xingu is to US, it may be less interesting to--"

"Oh, no, on the contrary, I assure you," Osric Dane energetically
intervened.

"--to others," Mrs. Ballinger finished firmly; "and we must not
allow our little meeting to end without persuading Mrs. Dane to
say a few words to us on a subject which, to-day, is much more
present in all our thoughts.  I refer, of course, to 'The Wings
of Death.'"

The other members, animated by various degrees of the same
sentiment, and encouraged by the humanised mien of their
redoubtable guest, repeated after Mrs. Ballinger: "Oh, yes, you
really MUST talk to us a little about your book."

Osric Dane's expression became as bored, though not as haughty,
as when her work had been previously mentioned.  But before she
could respond to Mrs. Ballinger's request, Mrs. Roby had risen
from her seat, and was pulling her veil down over her frivolous
nose.

"I'm so sorry," she said, advancing toward her hostess with
outstretched hand, "but before Mrs. Dane begins I think I'd
better run away.  Unluckily, as you know, I haven't read her
books, so I should be at a terrible disadvantage among you all;
and besides, I've an engagement to play bridge."

If Mrs. Roby had simply pleaded her ignorance of Osric Dane's
works as a reason for withdrawing, the Lunch Club, in view of her
recent prowess, might have approved such evidence of discretion;
but to couple this excuse with the brazen announcement that she
was foregoing the privilege for the purpose of joining a bridge-
party, was only one more instance of her deplorable lack of
discrimination.

The ladies were disposed, however, to feel that her departure--
now that she had performed the sole service she was ever likely
to render them--would probably make for greater order and dignity
in the impending discussion, besides relieving them of the sense
of self-distrust which her presence always mysteriously produced.
Mrs. Ballinger therefore restricted herself to a formal murmur of
regret, and the other members were just grouping themselves
comfortably about Osric Dane when the latter, to their dismay,
started up from the sofa on which she had been deferentially
enthroned.

"Oh wait--do wait, and I'll go with you!" she called out to Mrs.
Roby; and, seizing the hands of the disconcerted members, she
administered a series of farewell pressures with the mechanical
haste of a railway-conductor punching tickets.

"I'm so sorry--I'd quite forgotten--" she flung back at them from
the threshold; and as she joined Mrs. Roby, who had turned in
surprise at her appeal, the other ladies had the mortification of
hearing her say, in a voice which she did not take the pains to
lower: "If you'll let me walk a little way with you, I should so
like to ask you a few more questions about Xingu . . ."



III


The incident had been so rapid that the door closed on the
departing pair before the other members had had time to
understand what was happening.  Then a sense of the indignity put
upon them by Osric Dane's unceremonious desertion began to
contend with the confused feeling that they had been cheated out
of their due without exactly knowing how or why.

There was an awkward silence, during which Mrs. Ballinger, with a
perfunctory hand, rearranged the skilfully grouped literature at
which her distinguished guest had not so much as glanced; then
Miss Van Vluyck tartly pronounced: "Well, I can't say that I
consider Osric Dane's departure a great loss."

This confession crystallised the fluid resentment of the other
members, and Mrs. Leveret exclaimed: "I do believe she came on
purpose to be nasty!"

It was Mrs. Plinth's private opinion that Osric Dane's attitude
toward the Lunch Club might have been very different had it
welcomed her in the majestic setting of the Plinth drawing-rooms;
but not liking to reflect on the inadequacy of Mrs. Ballinger's
establishment she sought a round-about satisfaction in
depreciating her savoir faire.

"I said from the first that we ought to have had a subject ready.
It's what always happens when you're unprepared.  Now if we'd
only got up Xingu--"

The slowness of Mrs. Plinth's mental processes was always allowed
for by the Club; but this instance of it was too much for Mrs.
Ballinger's equanimity.

"Xingu!" she scoffed.  "Why, it was the fact of our knowing so
much more about it than she did--unprepared though we were--that
made Osric Dane so furious.  I should have thought that was plain
enough to everybody!"

This retort impressed even Mrs. Plinth, and Laura Glyde, moved by
an impulse of generosity, said: "Yes, we really ought to be
grateful to Mrs. Roby for introducing the topic.  It may have
made Osric Dane furious, but at least it made her civil."

"I am glad we were able to show her," added Miss Van Vluyck,
"that a broad and up-to-date culture is not confined to the great
intellectual centres."

This increased the satisfaction of the other members, and they
began to forget their wrath against Osric Dane in the pleasure of
having contributed to her defeat.

Miss Van Vluyck thoughtfully rubbed her spectacles.  "What
surprised me most," she continued, "was that Fanny Roby should be
so up on Xingu."

This frank admission threw a slight chill on the company, but
Mrs. Ballinger said with an air of indulgent irony: "Mrs. Roby
always has the knack of making a little go a long way; still, we
certainly owe her a debt for happening to remember that she'd
heard of Xingu."  And this was felt by the other members to be a
graceful way of cancelling once for all the Club's obligation to
Mrs. Roby.

Even Mrs. Leveret took courage to speed a timid shaft of irony:
"I fancy Osric Dane hardly expected to take a lesson in Xingu at
Hillbridge!"

Mrs. Ballinger smiled.  "When she asked me what we represented--
do you remember?--I wish I'd simply said we represented Xingu!"

All the ladies laughed appreciatively at this sally, except Mrs.
Plinth, who said, after a moment's deliberation: "I'm not sure it
would have been wise to do so."

Mrs. Ballinger, who was already beginning to feel as if she had
launched at Osric Dane the retort which had just occurred to her,
looked ironically at Mrs. Plinth.  "May I ask why?" she enquired.

Mrs. Plinth looked grave.  "Surely," she said, "I understood from
Mrs. Roby herself that the subject was one it was as well not to
go into too deeply?"

Miss Van Vluyck rejoined with precision: "I think that applied
only to an investigation of the origin of the--of the--"; and
suddenly she found that her usually accurate memory had failed
her.  "It's a part of the subject I never studied myself," she
concluded lamely.

"Nor I," said Mrs. Ballinger.

Laura Glyde bent toward them with widened eyes.  "And yet it
seems--doesn't it?--the part that is fullest of an esoteric
fascination?"

"I don't know on what you base that," said Miss Van Vluyck
argumentatively.

"Well, didn't you notice how intensely interested Osric Dane
became as soon as she heard what the brilliant foreigner--he WAS
a foreigner, wasn't he?--had told Mrs. Roby about the origin--the
origin of the rite--or whatever you call it?"

Mrs. Plinth looked disapproving, and Mrs. Ballinger visibly
wavered.  Then she said in a decisive tone: "It may not be
desirable to touch on the--on that part of the subject in general
conversation; but, from the importance it evidently has to a
woman of Osric Dane's distinction, I feel as if we ought not to
be afraid to discuss it among ourselves--without gloves--though
with closed doors, if necessary."

"I'm quite of your opinion," Miss Van Vluyck came briskly to her
support; "on condition, that is, that all grossness of language
is avoided."

"Oh, I'm sure we shall understand without that," Mrs. Leveret
tittered; and Laura Glyde added significantly: "I fancy we can
read between the lines," while Mrs. Ballinger rose to assure
herself that the doors were really closed.

Mrs. Plinth had not yet given her adhesion.  "I hardly see," she
began, "what benefit is to be derived from investigating such
peculiar customs--"

But Mrs. Ballinger's patience had reached the extreme limit of
tension.  "This at least," she returned; "that we shall not be
placed again in the humiliating position of finding ourselves
less up on our own subjects than Fanny Roby!"

Even to Mrs. Plinth this argument was conclusive.  She peered
furtively about the room and lowered her commanding tones to ask:
"Have you got a copy?"

"A--a copy?" stammered Mrs. Ballinger.  She was aware that the
other members were looking at her expectantly, and that this
answer was inadequate, so she supported it by asking another
question.  "A copy of what?"

Her companions bent their expectant gaze on Mrs. Plinth, who, in
turn, appeared less sure of herself than usual.  "Why, of--of--
the book," she explained.

"What book?" snapped Miss Van Vluyck, almost as sharply as Osric
Dane.

Mrs. Ballinger looked at Laura Glyde, whose eyes were
interrogatively fixed on Mrs. Leveret.  The fact of being
deferred to was so new to the latter that it filled her with an
insane temerity.  "Why, Xingu, of course!" she exclaimed.

A profound silence followed this direct challenge to the
resources of Mrs. Ballinger's library, and the latter, after
glancing nervously toward the Books of the Day, returned in a
deprecating voice: "It's not a thing one cares to leave about."

"I should think NOT!" exclaimed Mrs. Plinth.

"It IS a book, then?" said Miss Van Vluyck.

This again threw the company into disarray, and Mrs. Ballinger,
with an impatient sigh, rejoined: "Why--there IS a book--
naturally . . ."

"Then why did Miss Glyde call it a religion?"

Laura Glyde started up.  "A religion?  I never--"

"Yes, you did," Miss Van Vluyck insisted; "you spoke of rites;
and Mrs. Plinth said it was a custom."

Miss Glyde was evidently making a desperate effort to reinforce
her statement; but accuracy of detail was not her strongest
point.  At length she began in a deep murmur: "Surely they used
to do something of the kind at the Eleusinian mysteries--"

"Oh--" said Miss Van Vluyck, on the verge of disapproval; and
Mrs. Plinth protested: "I understood there was to be no
indelicacy!"

Mrs. Ballinger could not control her irritation.  "Really, it is
too bad that we should not be able to talk the matter over
quietly among ourselves.  Personally, I think that if one goes
into Xingu at all--"

"Oh, so do I!" cried Miss Glyde.

"And I don't see how one can avoid doing so, if one wishes to
keep up with the Thought of the Day--"

Mrs. Leveret uttered an exclamation of relief.  "There--that's
it!" she interposed.

"What's it?" the President curtly took her up.

"Why--it's a--a Thought: I mean a philosophy."

This seemed to bring a certain relief to Mrs. Ballinger and Laura
Glyde, but Miss Van Vluyck said dogmatically: "Excuse me if I
tell you that you're all mistaken.  Xingu happens to be a
language."

"A language!" the Lunch Club cried.

"Certainly.  Don't you remember Fanny Roby's saying that there
were several branches, and that some were hard to trace?  What
could that apply to but dialects?"

Mrs. Ballinger could no longer restrain a contemptuous laugh.
"Really, if the Lunch Club has reached such a pass that it has to
go to Fanny Roby for instruction on a subject like Xingu, it had
almost better cease to exist!"

"It's really her fault for not being clearer," Laura Glyde put
in.

"Oh, clearness and Fanny Roby!" Mrs. Ballinger shrugged.  "I
daresay we shall find she was mistaken on almost every point."

"Why not look it up?" said Mrs. Plinth.

As a rule this recurrent suggestion of Mrs. Plinth's was ignored
in the heat of discussion, and only resorted to afterward in the
privacy of each member's home.  But on the present occasion the
desire to ascribe their own confusion of thought to the vague and
contradictory nature of Mrs. Roby's statements caused the members
of the Lunch Club to utter a collective demand for a book of
reference.

At this point the production of her treasured volume gave Mrs.
Leveret, for a moment, the unusual experience of occupying the
centre front; but she was not able to hold it long, for
Appropriate Allusions contained no mention of Xingu.

"Oh, that's not the kind of thing we want!" exclaimed Miss Van
Vluyck.  She cast a disparaging glance over Mrs. Ballinger's
assortment of literature, and added impatiently: "Haven't you any
useful books?"

"Of course I have," replied Mrs. Ballinger indignantly; "but I
keep them in my husband's dressing-room."

From this region, after some difficulty and delay, the parlour-
maid produced the W-Z volume of an Encyclopaedia and, in
deference to the fact that the demand for it had come from Miss
Van Vluyck, laid the ponderous tome before her.

There was a moment of painful suspense while Miss Van Vluyck
rubbed her spectacles, adjusted them, and turned to Z; and a
murmur of surprise when she said: "It isn't here."

"I suppose," said Mrs. Plinth, "it's not fit to be put in a book
of reference."

"Oh, nonsense!" exclaimed Mrs. Ballinger.  "Try X."

Miss Van Vluyck turned back through the volume, peering short-
sightedly up and down the pages, till she came to a stop and
remained motionless, like a dog on a point.

"Well, have you found it?" Mrs. Ballinger enquired, after a
considerable delay.

"Yes.  I've found it," said Miss Van Vluyck in a queer voice.

Mrs. Plinth hastily interposed: "I beg you won't read it aloud if
there's anything offensive."

Miss Van Vluyck, without answering, continued her silent
scrutiny.

"Well, what IS it?" exclaimed Laura Glyde excitedly.

"DO tell us!" urged Mrs. Leveret, feeling that she would have
something awful to tell her sister.

Miss Van Vluyck pushed the volume aside and turned slowly toward
the expectant group.

"It's a river."

"A RIVER?"

"Yes: in Brazil.  Isn't that where she's been living?"

"Who?  Fanny Roby?  Oh, but you must be mistaken.  You've been
reading the wrong thing," Mrs. Ballinger exclaimed, leaning over
her to seize the volume.

"It's the only XINGU in the Encyclopaedia; and she HAS been
living in Brazil," Miss Van Vluyck persisted.

"Yes: her brother has a consulship there," Mrs. Leveret eagerly
interposed.

"But it's too ridiculous!  I--we--why we ALL remember studying
Xingu last year--or the year before last," Mrs. Ballinger
stammered.

"I thought I did when YOU said so," Laura Glyde avowed.

"I said so?" cried Mrs. Ballinger.

"Yes.  You said it had crowded everything else out of your mind."

"Well, YOU said it had changed your whole life!"

"For that matter, Miss Van Vluyck said she had never grudged the
time she'd given it."

Mrs. Plinth interposed: "I made it clear that I knew nothing
whatever of the original."

Mrs. Ballinger broke off the dispute with a groan.  "Oh, what
does it all matter if she's been making fools of us?  I believe
Miss Van Vluyck's right--she was talking of the river all the
while!"

"How could she?  It's too preposterous," Miss Glyde exclaimed.

"Listen."  Miss Van Vluyck had repossessed herself of the
Encyclopaedia, and restored her spectacles to a nose reddened by
excitement.  "'The Xingu, one of the principal rivers of Brazil,
rises on the plateau of Mato Grosso, and flows in a northerly
direction for a length of no less than one thousand one hundred
and eighteen miles, entering the Amazon near the mouth of the
latter river.  The upper course of the Xingu is auriferous and
fed by numerous branches.  Its source was first discovered in
1884 by the German explorer von den Steinen, after a difficult
and dangerous expedition through a region inhabited by tribes
still in the Stone Age of culture.'"

The ladies received this communication in a state of stupefied
silence from which Mrs. Leveret was the first to rally.  "She
certainly DID speak of its having branches."

The word seemed to snap the last thread of their incredulity.
"And of its great length," gasped Mrs. Ballinger.

"She said it was awfully deep, and you couldn't skip--you just
had to wade through," Miss Glyde subjoined.

The idea worked its way more slowly through Mrs. Plinth's compact
resistances.  "How could there be anything improper about a
river?" she inquired.

"Improper?"

"Why, what she said about the source--that it was corrupt?"

"Not corrupt, but hard to get at," Laura Glyde corrected.  "Some
one who'd been there had told her so.  I daresay it was the
explorer himself--doesn't it say the expedition was dangerous?"

"'Difficult and dangerous,'" read Miss Van Vluyck.

Mrs. Ballinger pressed her hands to her throbbing temples.
"There's nothing she said that wouldn't apply to a river--to this
river!"  She swung about excitedly to the other members.  "Why,
do you remember her telling us that she hadn't read 'The Supreme
Instant' because she'd taken it on a boating party while she was
staying with her brother, and some one had 'shied' it overboard--
'shied' of course was her own expression?"

The ladies breathlessly signified that the expression had not
escaped them.

"Well--and then didn't she tell Osric Dane that one of her books
was simply saturated with Xingu?  Of course it was, if some of
Mrs. Roby's rowdy friends had thrown it into the river!"

This surprising reconstruction of the scene in which they had
just participated left the members of the Lunch Club
inarticulate.  At length Mrs. Plinth, after visibly labouring
with the problem, said in a heavy tone: "Osric Dane was taken in
too."

Mrs. Leveret took courage at this.  "Perhaps that's what Mrs.
Roby did it for.  She said Osric Dane was a brute, and she may
have wanted to give her a lesson."

Miss Van Vluyck frowned.  "It was hardly worth while to do it at
our expense."

"At least," said Miss Glyde with a touch of bitterness, "she
succeeded in interesting her, which was more than we did."

"What chance had we?" rejoined Mrs. Ballinger.  "Mrs. Roby
monopolised her from the first.  And THAT, I've no doubt, was her
purpose--to give Osric Dane a false impression of her own
standing in the Club.  She would hesitate at nothing to attract
attention: we all know how she took in poor Professor Foreland."

"She actually makes him give bridge-teas every Thursday," Mrs.
Leveret piped up.

Laura Glyde struck her hands together.  "Why, this is Thursday,
and it's THERE she's gone, of course; and taken Osric with her!"

"And they're shrieking over us at this moment," said Mrs.
Ballinger between her teeth.

This possibility seemed too preposterous to be admitted.  "She
would hardly dare," said Miss Van Vluyck, "confess the imposture
to Osric Dane."

"I'm not so sure: I thought I saw her make a sign as she left.
If she hadn't made a sign, why should Osric Dane have rushed out
after her?"

"Well, you know, we'd all been telling her how wonderful Xingu
was, and she said she wanted to find out more about it," Mrs.
Leveret said, with a tardy impulse of justice to the absent.

This reminder, far from mitigating the wrath of the other
members, gave it a stronger impetus.

"Yes--and that's exactly what they're both laughing over now,"
said Laura Glyde ironically.

Mrs. Plinth stood up and gathered her expensive furs about her
monumental form.  "I have no wish to criticise," she said; "but
unless the Lunch Club can protect its members against the
recurrence of such--such unbecoming scenes, I for one--"

"Oh, so do I!" agreed Miss Glyde, rising also.

Miss Van Vluyck closed the Encyclopaedia and proceeded to button
herself into her jacket.  "My time is really too valuable--" she
began.

"I fancy we are all of one mind," said Mrs. Ballinger, looking
searchingly at Mrs. Leveret, who looked at the others.

"I always deprecate anything like a scandal--" Mrs. Plinth
continued.

"She has been the cause of one to-day!" exclaimed Miss Glyde.

Mrs. Leveret moaned: "I don't see how she COULD!" and Miss Van
Vluyck said, picking up her note-book: "Some women stop at
nothing."

"--but if," Mrs. Plinth took up her argument impressively,
"anything of the kind had happened in MY house" (it never would
have, her tone implied), "I should have felt that I owed it to
myself either to ask for Mrs. Roby's resignation--or to offer
mine."

"Oh, Mrs. Plinth--" gasped the Lunch Club.

"Fortunately for me," Mrs. Plinth continued with an awful
magnanimity, "the matter was taken out of my hands by our
President's decision that the right to entertain distinguished
guests was a privilege vested in her office; and I think the
other members will agree that, as she was alone in this opinion,
she ought to be alone in deciding on the best way of effacing
its--its really deplorable consequences."

A deep silence followed this unexpected outbreak of Mrs. Plinth's
long-stored resentment.

"I don't see why I should be expected to ask her to resign--"
Mrs. Ballinger at length began; but Laura Glyde turned back to
remind her: "You know she made you say that you'd got on
swimmingly in Xingu."

An ill-timed giggle escaped from Mrs. Leveret, and Mrs. Ballinger
energetically continued "--but you needn't think for a moment
that I'm afraid to!"

The door of the drawing-room closed on the retreating backs of
the Lunch Club, and the President of that distinguished
association, seating herself at her writing-table, and pushing
away a copy of "The Wings of Death" to make room for her elbow,
drew forth a sheet of the club's note-paper, on which she began
to write: "My dear Mrs. Roby--"



The End of Xingu




THE VERDICT
June 1908


I had always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius--though a
good fellow enough--so it was no great surprise to me to hear
that, in the height of his glory, he had dropped his painting,
married a rich widow, and established himself in a villa on the
Riviera.  (Though I rather thought it would have been Rome or
Florence.)

"The height of his glory"--that was what the women called it.  I
can hear Mrs. Gideon Thwing--his last Chicago sitter--deploring
his unaccountable abdication.  "Of course it's going to send the
value of my picture 'way up; but I don't think of that, Mr.
Rickham--the loss to Arrt is all I think of."  The word, on Mrs.
Thwing's lips, multiplied its RS as though they were reflected in
an endless vista of mirrors.  And it was not only the Mrs. Thwings
who mourned.  Had not the exquisite Hermia Croft, at the last
Grafton Gallery show, stopped me before Gisburn's "Moon-dancers"
to say, with tears in her eyes: "We shall not look upon
its like again"?

Well!--even through the prism of Hermia's tears I felt able to
face the fact with equanimity.  Poor Jack Gisburn!  The women had
made him--it was fitting that they should mourn him.  Among his
own sex fewer regrets were heard, and in his own trade hardly a
murmur.  Professional jealousy?  Perhaps.  If it were, the honour
of the craft was vindicated by little Claude Nutley, who, in all
good faith, brought out in the Burlington a very handsome
"obituary" on Jack--one of those showy articles stocked with
random technicalities that I have heard (I won't say by whom)
compared to Gisburn's painting.  And so--his resolve being
apparently irrevocable--the discussion gradually died out, and,
as Mrs. Thwing had predicted, the price of "Gisburns" went up.

It was not till three years later that, in the course of a few
weeks' idling on the Riviera, it suddenly occurred to me to
wonder why Gisburn had given up his painting.  On reflection, it
really was a tempting problem.  To accuse his wife would have
been too easy--his fair sitters had been denied the solace of
saying that Mrs. Gisburn had "dragged him down."  For Mrs.
Gisburn--as such--had not existed till nearly a year after Jack's
resolve had been taken.  It might be that he had married her--
since he liked his ease--because he didn't want to go on
painting; but it would have been hard to prove that he had given
up his painting because he had married her.

Of course, if she had not dragged him down, she had equally, as
Miss Croft contended, failed to "lift him up"--she had not led
him back to the easel.  To put the brush into his hand again--
what a vocation for a wife!  But Mrs. Gisburn appeared to have
disdained it--and I felt it might be interesting to find out why.

The desultory life of the Riviera lends itself to such purely
academic speculations; and having, on my way to Monte Carlo,
caught a glimpse of Jack's balustraded terraces between the
pines, I had myself borne thither the next day.

I found the couple at tea beneath their palm-trees; and Mrs.
Gisburn's welcome was so genial that, in the ensuing weeks, I
claimed it frequently.  It was not that my hostess was
"interesting": on that point I could have given Miss Croft the
fullest reassurance.  It was just because she was NOT
interesting--if I may be pardoned the bull--that I found her so.
For Jack, all his life, had been surrounded by interesting women:
they had fostered his art, it had been reared in the hot-house of
their adulation.  And it was therefore instructive to note what
effect the "deadening atmosphere of mediocrity" (I quote Miss
Croft) was having on him.

I have mentioned that Mrs. Gisburn was rich; and it was
immediately perceptible that her husband was extracting from this
circumstance a delicate but substantial satisfaction.  It is, as
a rule, the people who scorn money who get most out of it; and
Jack's elegant disdain of his wife's big balance enabled him,
with an appearance of perfect good-breeding, to transmute it into
objects of art and luxury.  To the latter, I must add, he
remained relatively indifferent; but he was buying Renaissance
bronzes and eighteenth-century pictures with a discrimination
that bespoke the amplest resources.

"Money's only excuse is to put beauty into circulation," was one
of the axioms he laid down across the Sevres and silver of an
exquisitely appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had
again run over from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on
him, added for my enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive
to every form of beauty."

Poor Jack!  It had always been his fate to have women say such
things of him: the fact should be set down in extenuation.  What
struck me now was that, for the first time, he resented the tone.
I had seen him, so often, basking under similar tributes--was it
the conjugal note that robbed them of their savour?  No--for,
oddly enough, it became apparent that he was fond of Mrs.
Gisburn--fond enough not to see her absurdity.  It was his own
absurdity he seemed to be wincing under--his own attitude as an
object for garlands and incense.

"My dear, since I've chucked painting people don't say that stuff
about me--they say it about Victor Grindle," was his only
protest, as he rose from the table and strolled out onto the
sunlit terrace.

I glanced after him, struck by his last word.  Victor Grindle
was, in fact, becoming the man of the moment--as Jack himself,
one might put it, had been the man of the hour.  The younger
artist was said to have formed himself at my friend's feet, and I
wondered if a tinge of jealousy underlay the latter's mysterious
abdication.  But no--for it was not till after that event that
the rose Dubarry drawing-rooms had begun to display their
"Grindles."

I turned to Mrs. Gisburn, who had lingered to give a lump of
sugar to her spaniel in the dining-room.

"Why HAS he chucked painting?" I asked abruptly.

She raised her eyebrows with a hint of good-humoured surprise.

"Oh, he doesn't HAVE to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy
himself," she said quite simply.

I looked about the spacious white-panelled room, with its
famille-verte vases repeating the tones of the pale damask
curtains, and its eighteenth-century pastels in delicate faded
frames.

"Has he chucked his pictures too?  I haven't seen a single one in
the house."

A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn's open
countenance.  "It's his ridiculous modesty, you know.  He says
they're not fit to have about; he's sent them all away except
one--my portrait--and that I have to keep upstairs."

His ridiculous modesty--Jack's modesty about his pictures?  My
curiosity was growing like the bean-stalk.  I said persuasively
to my hostess: "I must really see your portrait, you know."

She glanced out almost timorously at the terrace where her
husband, lounging in a hooded chair, had lit a cigar and drawn
the Russian deerhound's head between his knees.

"Well, come while he's not looking," she said, with a laugh that
tried to hide her nervousness; and I followed her between the
marble Emperors of the hall, and up the wide stairs with terra-
cotta nymphs poised among flowers at each landing.

In the dimmest corner of her boudoir, amid a profusion of
delicate and distinguished objects, hung one of the familiar oval
canvases, in the inevitable garlanded frame.  The mere outline of
the frame called up all Gisburn's past!

Mrs. Gisburn drew back the window-curtains, moved aside a
jardiniere full of pink azaleas, pushed an arm-chair away, and
said: "If you stand here you can just manage to see it.  I had it
over the mantel-piece, but he wouldn't let it stay."

Yes--I could just manage to see it--the first portrait of Jack's
I had ever had to strain my eyes over!  Usually they had the
place of honour--say the central panel in a pale yellow or rose
Dubarry drawing-room, or a monumental easel placed so that it
took the light through curtains of old Venetian point.  The more
modest place became the picture better; yet, as my eyes grew
accustomed to the half-light, all the characteristic qualities
came out--all the hesitations disguised as audacities, the tricks
of prestidigitation by which, with such consummate skill, he
managed to divert attention from the real business of the picture
to some pretty irrelevance of detail.  Mrs. Gisburn, presenting a
neutral surface to work on--forming, as it were, so inevitably
the background of her own picture--had lent herself in an unusual
degree to the display of this false virtuosity.  The picture was
one of Jack's "strongest," as his admirers would have put it--it
represented, on his part, a swelling of muscles, a congesting of
veins, a balancing, straddling and straining, that reminded one
of the circus-clown's ironic efforts to lift a feather.  It met,
in short, at every point the demand of lovely woman to be painted
"strongly" because she was tired of being painted "sweetly"--and
yet not to lose an atom of the sweetness.

"It's the last he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with
pardonable pride.  "The last but one," she corrected herself--
"but the other doesn't count, because he destroyed it."

"Destroyed it?"  I was about to follow up this clue when I heard
a footstep and saw Jack himself on the threshold.

As he stood there, his hands in the pockets of his velveteen
coat, the thin brown waves of hair pushed back from his white
forehead, his lean sunburnt cheeks furrowed by a smile that
lifted the tips of a self-confident moustache, I felt to what a
degree he had the same quality as his pictures--the quality of
looking cleverer than he was.

His wife glanced at him deprecatingly, but his eyes travelled
past her to the portrait.

"Mr. Rickham wanted to see it," she began, as if excusing
herself.  He shrugged his shoulders, still smiling.

"Oh, Rickham found me out long ago," he said lightly; then,
passing his arm through mine: "Come and see the rest of the
house."

He showed it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the
bath-rooms, the speaking-tubes, the dress-closets, the trouser-
presses--all the complex simplifications of the millionaire's
domestic economy.  And whenever my wonder paid the expected
tribute he said, throwing out his chest a little: "Yes, I really
don't see how people manage to live without that."

Well--it was just the end one might have foreseen for him.  Only
he was, through it all and in spite of it all--as he had been
through, and in spite of, his pictures--so handsome, so charming,
so disarming, that one longed to cry out: "Be dissatisfied with
your leisure!" as once one had longed to say: "Be dissatisfied
with your work!"

But, with the cry on my lips, my diagnosis suffered an unexpected
check.

"This is my own lair," he said, leading me into a dark plain room
at the end of the florid vista.  It was square and brown and
leathery: no "effects"; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing
for reproduction in a picture weekly--above all, no least sign of
ever having been used as a studio.

The fact brought home to me the absolute finality of Jack's break
with his old life.

"Don't you ever dabble with paint any more?" I asked, still
looking about for a trace of such activity.

"Never," he said briefly.

"Or water-colour--or etching?"

His confident eyes grew dim, and his cheeks paled a little under
their handsome sunburn.

"Never think of it, my dear fellow--any more than if I'd never
touched a brush."

And his tone told me in a flash that he never thought of anything
else.

I moved away, instinctively embarrassed by my unexpected
discovery; and as I turned, my eye fell on a small picture above
the mantel-piece--the only object breaking the plain oak
panelling of the room.

"Oh, by Jove!" I said.

It was a sketch of a donkey--an old tired donkey, standing in the
rain under a wall.

"By Jove--a Stroud!" I cried.

He was silent; but I felt him close behind me, breathing a little
quickly.

"What a wonder!  Made with a dozen lines--but on everlasting
foundations.  You lucky chap, where did you get it?"

He answered slowly: "Mrs. Stroud gave it to me."

"Ah--I didn't know you even knew the Strouds.  He was such an
inflexible hermit."

"I didn't--till after. . . .  She sent for me to paint him when
he was dead."

"When he was dead?  You?"

I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my
surprise, for he answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes--she's
an awful simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud.  Her only idea was to
have him done by a fashionable painter--ah, poor Stroud!  She
thought it the surest way of proclaiming his greatness--of
forcing it on a purblind public.  And at the moment I was THE
fashionable painter."

"Ah, poor Stroud--as you say.  Was THAT his history?"

"That was his history.  She believed in him, gloried in him--or
thought she did.  But she couldn't bear not to have all the
drawing-rooms with her.  She couldn't bear the fact that, on
varnishing days, one could always get near enough to see his
pictures.  Poor woman!  She's just a fragment groping for other
fragments.  Stroud is the only whole I ever knew."

"You ever knew?  But you just said--"

Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.

"Oh, I knew him, and he knew me--only it happened after he was
dead."

I dropped my voice instinctively.  "When she sent for you?"

"Yes--quite insensible to the irony.  She wanted him vindicated--
and by me!"

He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the
sketch of the donkey.  "There were days when I couldn't look at
that thing--couldn't face it.  But I forced myself to put it
here; and now it's cured me--cured me.  That's the reason why I
don't dabble any more, my dear Rickham; or rather Stroud himself
is the reason."

For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned
into a serious desire to understand him better.

"I wish you'd tell me how it happened," I said.

He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his
fingers a cigarette he had forgotten to light.  Suddenly he
turned toward me.

"I'd rather like to tell you--because I've always suspected you
of loathing my work."

I made a deprecating gesture, which he negatived with a good-
humoured shrug.

"Oh, I didn't care a straw when I believed in myself--and now
it's an added tie between us!"

He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the
deep arm-chairs forward.  "There: make yourself comfortable--and
here are the cigars you like."

He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down
the room, stopping now and then beneath the picture.

"How it happened?  I can tell you in five minutes--and it didn't
take much longer to happen. . . .  I can remember now how
surprised and pleased I was when I got Mrs. Stroud's note.  Of
course, deep down, I had always FELT there was no one like him--
only I had gone with the stream, echoed the usual platitudes
about him, till I half got to think he was a failure, one of the
kind that are left behind.  By Jove, and he WAS left behind--
because he had come to stay!  The rest of us had to let ourselves
be swept along or go under, but he was high above the current--on
everlasting foundations, as you say.

"Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood--rather
moved, Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud's career of
failure being crowned by the glory of my painting him!  Of course
I meant to do the picture for nothing--I told Mrs. Stroud so when
she began to stammer something about her poverty.  I remember
getting off a prodigious phrase about the honour being MINE--oh,
I was princely, my dear Rickham!  I was posing to myself like one
of my own sitters.

"Then I was taken up and left alone with him.  I had sent all my
traps in advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to
work.  He had been dead only twenty-four hours, and he died
suddenly, of heart disease, so that there had been no preliminary
work of destruction--his face was clear and untouched.  I had met
him once or twice, years before, and thought him insignificant
and dingy.  Now I saw that he was superb.

"I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad
to have my hand on such a 'subject.'  Then his strange life-
likeness began to affect me queerly--as I blocked the head in I
felt as if he were watching me do it.  The sensation was followed
by the thought: if he WERE watching me, what would he say to my
way of working?  My strokes began to go a little wild--I felt
nervous and uncertain.

"Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close
grayish beard--as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself
by holding it back from me.  That exasperated me still more.  The
secret?  Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his!  I dashed at
the canvas furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks.  But
they failed me, they crumbled.  I saw that he wasn't watching the
showy bits--I couldn't distract his attention; he just kept his
eyes on the hard passages between.  Those were the ones I had
always shirked, or covered up with some lying paint.  And how he
saw through my lies!

"I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey
hanging on the wall near his bed.  His wife told me afterward it
was the last thing he had done--just a note taken with a shaking
hand, when he was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous
heart attack.  Just a note!  But it tells his whole history.
There are years of patient scornful persistence in every line.  A
man who had swum with the current could never have learned that
mighty up-stream stroke. . . .

"I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then
I looked at the donkey again.  I saw that, when Stroud laid in
the first stroke, he knew just what the end would be.  He had
possessed his subject, absorbed it, recreated it.  When had I
done that with any of my things?  They hadn't been born of me--I
had just adopted them. . . .

"Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn't do
another stroke.  The plain truth was, I didn't know where to put
it--I HAD NEVER KNOWN.  Only, with my sitters and my public, a
showy splash of colour covered up the fact--I just threw paint
into their faces. . . .  Well, paint was the one medium those
dead eyes could see through--see straight to the tottering
foundations underneath.  Don't you know how, in talking a foreign
language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one
wants to but what one can?  Well--that was the way I painted; and
as he lay there and watched me, the thing they called my
'technique' collapsed like a house of cards.  He didn't sneer,
you understand, poor Stroud--he just lay there quietly watching,
and on his lips, through the gray beard, I seemed to hear the
question: 'Are you sure you know where you're coming out?'

"If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I
should have done a great thing.  The next greatest thing was to
see that I couldn't--and that grace was given me.  But, oh, at
that minute, Rickham, was there anything on earth I wouldn't have
given to have Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say: 'It's
not too late--I'll show you how'?

"It WAS too late--it would have been, even if he'd been alive.  I
packed up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud.  Of
course I didn't tell her THAT--it would have been Greek to her.
I simply said I couldn't paint him, that I was too moved.  She
rather liked the idea--she's so romantic!  It was that that made
her give me the donkey.  But she was terribly upset at not
getting the portrait--she did so want him 'done' by some one
showy!  At first I was afraid she wouldn't let me off--and at my
wits' end I suggested Grindle.  Yes, it was I who started
Grindle: I told Mrs. Stroud he was the 'coming' man, and she told
somebody else, and so it got to be true. . . .  And he painted
Stroud without wincing; and she hung the picture among her
husband's things. . . ."

He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his
head, and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture
above the chimney-piece.

"I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me,
if he'd been able to say what he thought that day."

And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically--"Begin
again?" he flashed out.  "When the one thing that brings me
anywhere near him is that I knew enough to leave off?"

He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh.  "Only
the irony of it is that I AM still painting--since Grindle's
doing it for me!  The Strouds stand alone, and happen once--but
there's no exterminating our kind of art."



The End of The Verdict




THE RECKONING
August, 1902


I


"The marriage law of the new dispensation will be: THOU SHALT NOT
BE UNFAITHFUL--TO THYSELF."

A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the
haze of cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband
descended from his improvised platform, saw him merged in a
congratulatory group of ladies.  Westall's informal talks on "The
New Ethics" had drawn about him an eager following of the
mentally unemployed--those who, as he had once phrased it, liked
to have their brain-food cut up for them.  The talks had begun by
accident.  Westall's ideas were known to be "advanced," but
hitherto their advance had not been in the direction of
publicity.  He had been, in his wife's opinion, almost
pusillanimously careful not to let his personal views endanger
his professional standing.  Of late, however, he had shown a
puzzling tendency to dogmatize, to throw down the gauntlet, to
flaunt his private code in the face of society; and the relation
of the sexes being a topic always sure of an audience, a few
admiring friends had persuaded him to give his after-dinner
opinions a larger circulation by summing them up in a series of
talks at the Van Sideren studio.

The Herbert Van Siderens were a couple who subsisted, socially,
on the fact that they had a studio.  Van Sideren's pictures were
chiefly valuable as accessories to the mise en scene which
differentiated his wife's "afternoons" from the blighting
functions held in long New York drawing-rooms, and permitted her
to offer their friends whiskey-and-soda instead of tea.  Mrs. Van
Sideren, for her part, was skilled in making the most of the kind
of atmosphere which a lay-figure and an easel create; and if at
times she found the illusion hard to maintain, and lost courage
to the extent of almost wishing that Herbert could paint, she
promptly overcame such moments of weakness by calling in some
fresh talent, some extraneous re-enforcement of the "artistic"
impression.  It was in quest of such aid that she had seized on
Westall, coaxing him, somewhat to his wife's surprise, into a
flattered participation in her fraud.  It was vaguely felt, in
the Van Sideren circle, that all the audacities were artistic,
and that a teacher who pronounced marriage immoral was somehow as
distinguished as a painter who depicted purple grass and a green
sky.  The Van Sideren set were tired of the conventional color-
scheme in art and conduct.

Julia Westall had long had her own views on the immorality of
marriage; she might indeed have claimed her husband as a
disciple.  In the early days of their union she had secretly
resented his disinclination to proclaim himself a follower of the
new creed; had been inclined to tax him with moral cowardice,
with a failure to live up to the convictions for which their
marriage was supposed to stand.  That was in the first burst of
propagandism, when, womanlike, she wanted to turn her
disobedience into a law.  Now she felt differently.  She could
hardly account for the change, yet being a woman who never
allowed her impulses to remain unaccounted for, she tried to do
so by saying that she did not care to have the articles of her
faith misinterpreted by the vulgar.  In this connection, she was
beginning to think that almost every one was vulgar; certainly
there were few to whom she would have cared to intrust the
defence of so esoteric a doctrine.  And it was precisely at this
point that Westall, discarding his unspoken principles, had
chosen to descend from the heights of privacy, and stand hawking
his convictions at the street-corner!

It was Una Van Sideren who, on this occasion, unconsciously
focussed upon herself Mrs. Westall's wandering resentment.  In
the first place, the girl had no business to be there.  It was
"horrid"--Mrs. Westall found herself slipping back into the old
feminine vocabulary--simply "horrid" to think of a young girl's
being allowed to listen to such talk.  The fact that Una smoked
cigarettes and sipped an occasional cocktail did not in the least
tarnish a certain radiant innocency which made her appear the
victim, rather than the accomplice, of her parents' vulgarities.
Julia Westall felt in a hot helpless way that something ought to
be done--that some one ought to speak to the girl's mother.  And
just then Una glided up.

"Oh, Mrs. Westall, how beautiful it was!"  Una fixed her with
large limpid eyes.  "You believe it all, I suppose?" she asked
with seraphic gravity.

"All--what, my dear child?"

The girl shone on her.  "About the higher life--the freer
expansion of the individual--the law of fidelity to one's self,"
she glibly recited.

Mrs. Westall, to her own wonder, blushed a deep and burning
blush.

"My dear Una," she said, "you don't in the least understand what
it's all about!"

Miss Van Sideren stared, with a slowly answering blush.  "Don't
YOU, then?" she murmured.

Mrs. Westall laughed.  "Not always--or altogether!  But I should
like some tea, please."

Una led her to the corner where innocent beverages were
dispensed.  As Julia received her cup she scrutinized the girl
more carefully.  It was not such a girlish face, after all--
definite lines were forming under the rosy haze of youth.  She
reflected that Una must be six-and-twenty, and wondered why she
had not married.  A nice stock of ideas she would have as her
dower!  If THEY were to be a part of the modern girl's trousseau--

Mrs. Westall caught herself up with a start.  It was as though
some one else had been speaking--a stranger who had borrowed her
own voice: she felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental
ventriloquism.  Concluding suddenly that the room was stifling
and Una's tea too sweet, she set down her cup, and looked about
for Westall: to meet his eyes had long been her refuge from every
uncertainty.  She met them now, but only, as she felt, in
transit; they included her parenthetically in a larger flight.
She followed the flight, and it carried her to a corner to which
Una had withdrawn--one of the palmy nooks to which Mrs. Van
Sideren attributed the success of her Saturdays.  Westall, a
moment later, had overtaken his look, and found a place at the
girl's side.  She bent forward, speaking eagerly; he leaned back,
listening, with the depreciatory smile which acted as a filter to
flattery, enabling him to swallow the strongest doses without
apparent grossness of appetite.  Julia winced at her own
definition of the smile.


On the way home, in the deserted winter dusk, Westall surprised
his wife by a sudden boyish pressure of her arm.  "Did I open
their eyes a bit?  Did I tell them what you wanted me to?" he
asked gaily.

Almost unconsciously, she let her arm slip from his.  "What I
wanted--?"

"Why, haven't you--all this time?"  She caught the honest wonder
of his tone.  "I somehow fancied you'd rather blamed me for not
talking more openly--before--  You've made me feel, at times, that
I was sacrificing principles to expediency."

She paused a moment over her reply; then she asked quietly: "What
made you decide not to--any longer?"

She felt again the vibration of a faint surprise.  "Why--the wish
to please you!" he answered, almost too simply.

"I wish you would not go on, then," she said abruptly.

He stopped in his quick walk, and she felt his stare through the
darkness.

"Not go on--?"

"Call a hansom, please.  I'm tired," broke from her with a sudden
rush of physical weariness.

Instantly his solicitude enveloped her.  The room had been
infernally hot--and then that confounded cigarette smoke--he had
noticed once or twice that she looked pale--she mustn't come to
another Saturday.  She felt herself yielding, as she always did,
to the warm influence of his concern for her, the feminine in her
leaning on the man in him with a conscious intensity of
abandonment.  He put her in the hansom, and her hand stole into
his in the darkness.  A tear or two rose, and she let them fall.
It was so delicious to cry over imaginary troubles!

That evening, after dinner, he surprised her by reverting to the
subject of his talk.  He combined a man's dislike of
uncomfortable questions with an almost feminine skill in eluding
them; and she knew that if he returned to the subject he must
have some special reason for doing so.

"You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon.  Did
I put the case badly?"

"No--you put it very well."

"Then what did you mean by saying that you would rather not have
me go on with it?"

She glanced at him nervously, her ignorance of his intention
deepening her sense of helplessness.

"I don't think I care to hear such things discussed in public."

"I don't understand you," he exclaimed.  Again the feeling that
his surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own
attitude.  She was not sure that she understood herself.

"Won't you explain?" he said with a tinge of impatience.
Her eyes wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been
the scene of so many of their evening confidences.  The shaded
lamps, the quiet-colored walls hung with mezzotints, the pale
spring flowers scattered here and there in Venice glasses and
bowls of old Sevres, recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment
in which the evenings of her first marriage had been passed--a
wilderness of rosewood and upholstery, with a picture of a Roman
peasant above the mantel-piece, and a Greek slave in "statuary
marble" between the folding-doors of the back drawing-room.  It
was a room with which she had never been able to establish any
closer relation than that between a traveller and a railway
station; and now, as she looked about at the surroundings which
stood for her deepest affinities--the room for which she had left
that other room--she was startled by the same sense of
strangeness and unfamiliarity.  The prints, the flowers, the
subdued tones of the old porcelains, seemed to typify a
superficial refinement that had no relation to the deeper
significances of life.

Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.

"I don't know that I can explain," she faltered.

He drew his arm-chair forward so that he faced her across the
hearth.  The light of a reading-lamp fell on his finely drawn
face, which had a kind of surface-sensitiveness akin to the
surface-refinement of its setting.

"Is it that you no longer believe in our ideas?" he asked.

"In our ideas--?"

"The ideas I am trying to teach.  The ideas you and I are
supposed to stand for."  He paused a moment.  "The ideas on which
our marriage was founded."

The blood rushed to her face.  He had his reasons, then--she was
sure now that he had his reasons!  In the ten years of their
marriage, how often had either of them stopped to consider the
ideas on which it was founded?  How often does a man dig about
the basement of his house to examine its foundation?  The
foundation is there, of course--the house rests on it--but one
lives abovestairs and not in the cellar.  It was she, indeed, who
in the beginning had insisted on reviewing the situation now and
then, on recapitulating the reasons which justified her course,
on proclaiming, from time to time, her adherence to the religion
of personal independence; but she had long ceased to feel the
need of any such ideal standards, and had accepted her marriage
as frankly and naturally as though it had been based on the
primitive needs of the heart, and needed no special sanction to
explain or justify it.

"Of course I still believe in our ideas!" she exclaimed.

"Then I repeat that I don't understand.  It was a part of your
theory that the greatest possible publicity should be given to
our view of marriage.  Have you changed your mind in that
respect?"

She hesitated.  "It depends on circumstances--on the public one
is addressing.  The set of people that the Van Siderens get about
them don't care for the truth or falseness of a doctrine.  They
are attracted simply by its novelty."

"And yet it was in just such a set of people that you and I met,
and learned the truth from each other."

"That was different."

"In what way?"

"I was not a young girl, to begin with.  It is perfectly
unfitting that young girls should be present at--at such times--
should hear such things discussed--"

"I thought you considered it one of the deepest social wrongs
that such things never ARE discussed before young girls; but that
is beside the point, for I don't remember seeing any young girl
in my audience to-day--"

"Except Una Van Sideren!"

He turned slightly and pushed back the lamp at his elbow.

"Oh, Miss Van Sideren--naturally--"

"Why naturally?"

"The daughter of the house--would you have had her sent out with
her governess?"

"If I had a daughter I should not allow such things to go on in
my house!"

Westall, stroking his mustache, leaned back with a faint smile.
"I fancy Miss Van Sideren is quite capable of taking care of
herself."

"No girl knows how to take care of herself--till it's too late."

"And yet you would deliberately deny her the surest means of
self-defence?"

"What do you call the surest means of self-defence?"

"Some preliminary knowledge of human nature in its relation to
the marriage tie."

She made an impatient gesture.  "How should you like to marry
that kind of a girl?"

"Immensely--if she were my kind of girl in other respects."

She took up the argument at another point.

"You are quite mistaken if you think such talk does not affect
young girls.  Una was in a state of the most absurd exaltation--"
She broke off, wondering why she had spoken.

Westall reopened a magazine which he had laid aside at the
beginning of their discussion.  "What you tell me is immensely
flattering to my oratorical talent--but I fear you overrate its
effect.  I can assure you that Miss Van Sideren doesn't have to
have her thinking done for her.  She's quite capable of doing it
herself."

"You seem very familiar with her mental processes!" flashed
unguardedly from his wife.

He looked up quietly from the pages he was cutting.

"I should like to be," he answered.  "She interests me."



II


If there be a distinction in being misunderstood, it was one
denied to Julia Westall when she left her first husband.  Every
one was ready to excuse and even to defend her.  The world she
adorned agreed that John Arment was "impossible," and hostesses
gave a sigh of relief at the thought that it would no longer be
necessary to ask him to dine.

There had been no scandal connected with the divorce: neither
side had accused the other of the offence euphemistically
described as "statutory."  The Arments had indeed been obliged to
transfer their allegiance to a State which recognized desertion
as a cause for divorce, and construed the term so liberally that
the seeds of desertion were shown to exist in every union.  Even
Mrs. Arment's second marriage did not make traditional morality
stir in its sleep.  It was known that she had not met her second
husband till after she had parted from the first, and she had,
moreover, replaced a rich man by a poor one.  Though Clement
Westall was acknowledged to be a rising lawyer, it was generally
felt that his fortunes would not rise as rapidly as his
reputation.  The Westalls would probably always have to live
quietly and go out to dinner in cabs.  Could there be better
evidence of Mrs. Arment's complete disinterestedness?

If the reasoning by which her friends justified her course was
somewhat cruder and less complex than her own elucidation of the
matter, both explanations led to the same conclusion: John Arment
was impossible.  The only difference was that, to his wife, his
impossibility was something deeper than a social
disqualification.  She had once said, in ironical defence of her
marriage, that it had at least preserved her from the necessity
of sitting next to him at dinner; but she had not then realized
at what cost the immunity was purchased.  John Arment was
impossible; but the sting of his impossibility lay in the fact
that he made it impossible for those about him to be other than
himself.  By an unconscious process of elimination he had
excluded from the world everything of which he did not feel a
personal need: had become, as it were, a climate in which only
his own requirements survived.  This might seem to imply a
deliberate selfishness; but there was nothing deliberate about
Arment.  He was as instinctive as an animal or a child.  It was
this childish element in his nature which sometimes for a moment
unsettled his wife's estimate of him.  Was it possible that he
was simply undeveloped, that he had delayed, somewhat longer than
is usual, the laborious process of growing up?  He had the kind
of sporadic shrewdness which causes it to be said of a dull man
that he is "no fool"; and it was this quality that his wife found
most trying.  Even to the naturalist it is annoying to have his
deductions disturbed by some unforeseen aberrancy of form or
function; and how much more so to the wife whose estimate of
herself is inevitably bound up with her judgment of her husband!

Arment's shrewdness did not, indeed, imply any latent
intellectual power; it suggested, rather, potentialities of
feeling, of suffering, perhaps, in a blind rudimentary way, on
which Julia's sensibilities naturally declined to linger.  She so
fully understood her own reasons for leaving him that she
disliked to think they were not as comprehensible to her husband.
She was haunted, in her analytic moments, by the look of
perplexity, too inarticulate for words, with which he had
acquiesced to her explanations.

These moments were rare with her, however.  Her marriage had been
too concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically.  If she had
been unhappy for complex reasons, the unhappiness was as real as
though it had been uncomplicated.  Soul is more bruisable than
flesh, and Julia was wounded in every fibre of her spirit.  Her
husband's personality seemed to be closing gradually in on her,
obscuring the sky and cutting off the air, till she felt herself
shut up among the decaying bodies of her starved hopes.  A sense
of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this
bondage of body and soul filled her with despair.  If marriage
was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in
ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.  She,
for one, would have no share in maintaining the pretence of which
she had been a victim: the pretence that a man and a woman,
forced into the narrowest of personal relations, must remain
there till the end, though they may have outgrown the span of
each other's natures as the mature tree outgrows the iron brace
about the sapling.

It was in the first heat of her moral indignation that she had
met Clement Westall.  She had seen at once that he was
"interested," and had fought off the discovery, dreading any
influence that should draw her back into the bondage of
conventional relations.  To ward off the peril she had, with an
almost crude precipitancy, revealed her opinions to him.  To her
surprise, she found that he shared them.  She was attracted by
the frankness of a suitor who, while pressing his suit, admitted
that he did not believe in marriage.  Her worst audacities did
not seem to surprise him: he had thought out all that she had
felt, and they had reached the same conclusion.  People grew at
varying rates, and the yoke that was an easy fit for the one
might soon become galling to the other.  That was what divorce
was for: the readjustment of personal relations.  As soon as
their necessarily transitive nature was recognized they would
gain in dignity as well as in harmony.  There would be no farther
need of the ignoble concessions and connivances, the perpetual
sacrifice of personal delicacy and moral pride, by means of which
imperfect marriages were now held together.  Each partner to the
contract would be on his mettle, forced to live up to the highest
standard of self-development, on pain of losing the other's
respect and affection.  The low nature could no longer drag the
higher down, but must struggle to rise, or remain alone on its
inferior level.  The only necessary condition to a harmonious
marriage was a frank recognition of this truth, and a solemn
agreement between the contracting parties to keep faith with
themselves, and not to live together for a moment after complete
accord had ceased to exist between them.  The new adultery was
unfaithfulness to self.

It was, as Westall had just reminded her, on this understanding
that they had married.  The ceremony was an unimportant
concession to social prejudice: now that the door of divorce
stood open, no marriage need be an imprisonment, and the contract
therefore no longer involved any diminution of self-respect.  The
nature of their attachment placed them so far beyond the reach of
such contingencies that it was easy to discuss them with an open
mind; and Julia's sense of security made her dwell with a tender
insistence on Westall's promise to claim his release when he
should cease to love her.  The exchange of these vows seemed to
make them, in a sense, champions of the new law, pioneers in the
forbidden realm of individual freedom: they felt that they had
somehow achieved beatitude without martyrdom.

This, as Julia now reviewed the past, she perceived to have been
her theoretical attitude toward marriage.  It was unconsciously,
insidiously, that her ten years of happiness with Westall had
developed another conception of the tie; a reversion, rather, to
the old instinct of passionate dependency and possessorship that
now made her blood revolt at the mere hint of change.  Change?
Renewal?  Was that what they had called it, in their foolish
jargon?  Destruction, extermination rather--this rending of a
myriad fibres interwoven with another's being!  Another?  But he
was not other!  He and she were one, one in the mystic sense
which alone gave marriage its significance.  The new law was not
for them, but for the disunited creatures forced into a mockery
of union.  The gospel she had felt called on to proclaim had no
bearing on her own case. . . .  She sent for the doctor and told
him she was sure she needed a nerve tonic.

She took the nerve tonic diligently, but it failed to act as a
sedative to her fears.  She did not know what she feared; but
that made her anxiety the more pervasive.  Her husband had not
reverted to the subject of his Saturday talks.  He was unusually
kind and considerate, with a softening of his quick manner, a
touch of shyness in his consideration, that sickened her with new
fears.  She told herself that it was because she looked badly--
because he knew about the doctor and the nerve tonic--that he
showed this deference to her wishes, this eagerness to screen her
from moral draughts; but the explanation simply cleared the way
for fresh inferences.

The week passed slowly, vacantly, like a prolonged Sunday.  On
Saturday the morning post brought a note from Mrs. Van Sideren.
Would dear Julia ask Mr. Westall to come half an hour earlier
than usual, as there was to be some music after his "talk"?
Westall was just leaving for his office when his wife read the
note.  She opened the drawing-room door and called him back to
deliver the message.

He glanced at the note and tossed it aside.  "What a bore!  I
shall have to cut my game of racquets.  Well, I suppose it can't
be helped.  Will you write and say it's all right?"

Julia hesitated a moment, her hand stiffening on the chair-back
against which she leaned.

"You mean to go on with these talks?" she asked.

"I--why not?" he returned; and this time it struck her that his
surprise was not quite unfeigned.  The discovery helped her to
find words.

"You said you had started them with the idea of pleasing me--"

"Well?"

"I told you last week that they didn't please me."

"Last week?  Oh--"  He seemed to make an effort of memory.  "I
thought you were nervous then; you sent for the doctor the next
day."

"It was not the doctor I needed; it was your assurance--"

"My assurance?"

Suddenly she felt the floor fail under her.  She sank into the
chair with a choking throat, her words, her reasons slipping away
from her like straws down a whirling flood.

"Clement," she cried, "isn't it enough for you to know that I
hate it?"

He turned to close the door behind them; then he walked toward
her and sat down.  "What is it that you hate?" he asked gently.

She had made a desperate effort to rally her routed argument.

"I can't bear to have you speak as if--as if--our marriage--were
like the other kind--the wrong kind.  When I heard you there, the
other afternoon, before all those inquisitive gossiping people,
proclaiming that husbands and wives had a right to leave each
other whenever they were tired--or had seen some one else--"

Westall sat motionless, his eyes fixed on a pattern of the
carpet.

"You HAVE ceased to take this view, then?" he said as she broke
off.  "You no longer believe that husbands and wives ARE
justified in separating--under such conditions?"

"Under such conditions?" she stammered.  "Yes--I still believe
that--but how can we judge for others?  What can we know of the
circumstances--?"

He interrupted her.  "I thought it was a fundamental article of
our creed that the special circumstances produced by marriage
were not to interfere with the full assertion of individual
liberty."  He paused a moment.  "I thought that was your reason
for leaving Arment."

She flushed to the forehead.  It was not like him to give a
personal turn to the argument.

"It was my reason," she said simply.

"Well, then--why do you refuse to recognize its validity now?"

"I don't--I don't--I only say that one can't judge for others."

He made an impatient movement.  "This is mere hair-splitting.
What you mean is that, the doctrine having served your purpose
when you needed it, you now repudiate it."

"Well," she exclaimed, flushing again, "what if I do?  What does
it matter to us?"

Westall rose from his chair.  He was excessively pale, and stood
before his wife with something of the formality of a stranger.

"It matters to me," he said in a low voice, "because I do NOT
repudiate it."

"Well--?"

"And because I had intended to invoke it as"--

He paused and drew his breath deeply.  She sat silent, almost
deafened by her heart-beats.

--"as a complete justification of the course I am about to take."

Julia remained motionless.  "What course is that?" she asked.

He cleared his throat.  "I mean to claim the fulfilment of your
promise."

For an instant the room wavered and darkened; then she recovered
a torturing acuteness of vision.  Every detail of her
surroundings pressed upon her: the tick of the clock, the slant
of sunlight on the wall, the hardness of the chair-arms that she
grasped, were a separate wound to each sense.

"My promise--" she faltered.

"Your part of our mutual agreement to set each other free if one
or the other should wish to be released."

She was silent again.  He waited a moment, shifting his position
nervously; then he said, with a touch of irritability: "You
acknowledge the agreement?"

The question went through her like a shock.  She lifted her head
to it proudly.  "I acknowledge the agreement," she said.

"And--you don't mean to repudiate it?"

A log on the hearth fell forward, and mechanically he advanced
and pushed it back.

"No," she answered slowly, "I don't mean to repudiate it."

There was a pause.  He remained near the hearth, his elbow
resting on the mantel-shelf.  Close to his hand stood a little
cup of jade that he had given her on one of their wedding
anniversaries.  She wondered vaguely if he noticed it.

"You intend to leave me, then?" she said at length.

His gesture seemed to deprecate the crudeness of the allusion.

"To marry some one else?"

Again his eye and hand protested.  She rose and stood before him.

"Why should you be afraid to tell me?  Is it Una Van Sideren?"

He was silent.

"I wish you good luck," she said.



III


She looked up, finding herself alone.  She did not remember when
or how he had left the room, or how long afterward she had sat
there.  The fire still smouldered on the hearth, but the slant of
sunlight had left the wall.

Her first conscious thought was that she had not broken her word,
that she had fulfilled the very letter of their bargain.  There
had been no crying out, no vain appeal to the past, no attempt at
temporizing or evasion.  She had marched straight up to the guns.

Now that it was over, she sickened to find herself alive.  She
looked about her, trying to recover her hold on reality.  Her
identity seemed to be slipping from her, as it disappears in a
physical swoon.  "This is my room--this is my house," she heard
herself saying.  Her room?  Her house?  She could almost hear the
walls laugh back at her.

She stood up, a dull ache in every bone.  The silence of the room
frightened her.  She remembered, now, having heard the front door
close a long time ago: the sound suddenly re-echoed through her
brain.  Her husband must have left the house, then--her HUSBAND?
She no longer knew in what terms to think: the simplest phrases
had a poisoned edge.  She sank back into her chair, overcome by a
strange weakness.  The clock struck ten--it was only ten o'clock!
Suddenly she remembered that she had not ordered dinner . . . or
were they dining out that evening?  DINNER--DINING OUT--the old
meaningless phraseology pursued her!  She must try to think of
herself as she would think of some one else, a some one
dissociated from all the familiar routine of the past, whose
wants and habits must gradually be learned, as one might spy out
the ways of a strange animal. . .

The clock struck another hour--eleven.  She stood up again and
walked to the door: she thought she would go up stairs to her
room.  HER room?  Again the word derided her.  She opened the
door, crossed the narrow hall, and walked up the stairs.  As she
passed, she noticed Westall's sticks and umbrellas: a pair of his
gloves lay on the hall table.  The same stair-carpet mounted
between the same walls; the same old French print, in its narrow
black frame, faced her on the landing.  This visual continuity
was intolerable.  Within, a gaping chasm; without, the same
untroubled and familiar surface.  She must get away from it
before she could attempt to think.  But, once in her room, she
sat down on the lounge, a stupor creeping over her. . .

Gradually her vision cleared.  A great deal had happened in the
interval--a wild marching and countermarching of emotions,
arguments, ideas--a fury of insurgent impulses that fell back
spent upon themselves.  She had tried, at first, to rally, to
organize these chaotic forces.  There must be help somewhere, if
only she could master the inner tumult.  Life could not be broken
off short like this, for a whim, a fancy; the law itself would
side with her, would defend her.  The law?  What claim had she
upon it?  She was the prisoner of her own choice: she had been
her own legislator, and she was the predestined victim of the
code she had devised.  But this was grotesque, intolerable--a mad
mistake, for which she could not be held accountable!  The law
she had despised was still there, might still be invoked . . .
invoked, but to what end?  Could she ask it to chain Westall to
her side?  SHE had been allowed to go free when she claimed her
freedom--should she show less magnanimity than she had exacted?
Magnanimity?  The word lashed her with its irony--one does not
strike an attitude when one is fighting for life!  She would
threaten, grovel, cajole . . . she would yield anything to keep
her hold on happiness.  Ah, but the difficulty lay deeper!  The
law could not help her--her own apostasy could not help her.  She
was the victim of the theories she renounced.  It was as though
some giant machine of her own making had caught her up in its
wheels and was grinding her to atoms. . .

It was afternoon when she found herself out-of-doors.  She walked
with an aimless haste, fearing to meet familiar faces.  The day
was radiant, metallic: one of those searching American days so
calculated to reveal the shortcomings of our street-cleaning and
the excesses of our architecture.  The streets looked bare and
hideous; everything stared and glittered.  She called a passing
hansom, and gave Mrs. Van Sideren's address.  She did not know
what had led up to the act; but she found herself suddenly
resolved to speak, to cry out a warning.  it was too late to save
herself--but the girl might still be told.  The hansom rattled up
Fifth Avenue; she sat with her eyes fixed, avoiding recognition.
At the Van Siderens' door she sprang out and rang the bell.
Action had cleared her brain, and she felt calm and self-
possessed.  She knew now exactly what she meant to say.

The ladies were both out . . . the parlor-maid stood waiting for
a card.  Julia, with a vague murmur, turned away from the door
and lingered a moment on the sidewalk.  Then she remembered that
she had not paid the cab-driver.  She drew a dollar from her
purse and handed it to him.  He touched his hat and drove off,
leaving her alone in the long empty street.  She wandered away
westward, toward strange thoroughfares, where she was not likely
to meet acquaintances.  The feeling of aimlessness had returned.
Once she found herself in the afternoon torrent of Broadway,
swept past tawdry shops and flaming theatrical posters, with a
succession of meaningless faces gliding by in the opposite
direction. . .

A feeling of faintness reminded her that she had not eaten since
morning.  She turned into a side street of shabby houses, with
rows of ash-barrels behind bent area railings.  In a basement
window she saw the sign LADIES' RESTAURANT: a pie and a dish of
doughnuts lay against the dusty pane like petrified food in an
ethnological museum.  She entered, and a young woman with a weak
mouth and a brazen eye cleared a table for her near the window.
The table was covered with a red and white cotton cloth and
adorned with a bunch of celery in a thick tumbler and a salt-
cellar full of grayish lumpy salt.  Julia ordered tea, and sat a
long time waiting for it.  She was glad to be away from the noise
and confusion of the streets.  The low-ceilinged room was empty,
and two or three waitresses with thin pert faces lounged in the
background staring at her and whispering together.  At last the
tea was brought in a discolored metal teapot.  Julia poured a cup
and drank it hastily.  It was black and bitter, but it flowed
through her veins like an elixir.  She was almost dizzy with
exhilaration.  Oh, how tired, how unutterably tired she had been!

She drank a second cup, blacker and bitterer, and now her mind
was once more working clearly.  She felt as vigorous, as
decisive, as when she had stood on the Van Siderens' door-step--
but the wish to return there had subsided.  She saw now the
futility of such an attempt--the humiliation to which it might
have exposed her. . .  The pity of it was that she did not know
what to do next.  The short winter day was fading, and she
realized that she could not remain much longer in the restaurant
without attracting notice.  She paid for her tea and went out
into the street.  The lamps were alight, and here and there a
basement shop cast an oblong of gas-light across the fissured
pavement.  In the dusk there was something sinister about the
aspect of the street, and she hastened back toward Fifth Avenue.
She was not used to being out alone at that hour.

At the corner of Fifth Avenue she paused and stood watching the
stream of carriages.  At last a policeman caught sight of her and
signed to her that he would take her across.  She had not meant
to cross the street, but she obeyed automatically, and presently
found herself on the farther corner.  There she paused again for
a moment; but she fancied the policeman was watching her, and
this sent her hastening down the nearest side street. . .  After
that she walked a long time, vaguely. . .  Night had fallen, and
now and then, through the windows of a passing carriage, she
caught the expanse of an evening waistcoat or the shimmer of an
opera cloak. . .

Suddenly she found herself in a familiar street.  She stood still
a moment, breathing quickly.  She had turned the corner without
noticing whither it led; but now, a few yards ahead of her, she
saw the house in which she had once lived--her first husband's
house.  The blinds were drawn, and only a faint translucence
marked the windows and the transom above the door.  As she stood
there she heard a step behind her, and a man walked by in the
direction of the house.  He walked slowly, with a heavy middle-
aged gait, his head sunk a little between the shoulders, the red
crease of his neck visible above the fur collar of his overcoat.
He crossed the street, went up the steps of the house, drew forth
a latch-key, and let himself in. . .

There was no one else in sight.  Julia leaned for a long time
against the area-rail at the corner, her eyes fixed on the front
of the house.  The feeling of physical weariness had returned,
but the strong tea still throbbed in her veins and lit her brain
with an unnatural clearness.  Presently she heard another step
draw near, and moving quickly away, she too crossed the street
and mounted the steps of the house.  The impulse which had
carried her there prolonged itself in a quick pressure of the
electric bell--then she felt suddenly weak and tremulous, and
grasped the balustrade for support.  The door opened and a young
footman with a fresh inexperienced face stood on the threshold.
Julia knew in an instant that he would admit her.

"I saw Mr. Arment going in just now," she said.  "Will you ask
him to see me for a moment?"

The footman hesitated.  "I think Mr. Arment has gone up to dress
for dinner, madam."

Julia advanced into the hall.  "I am sure he will see me--I will
not detain him long," she said.  She spoke quietly,
authoritatively, in the tone which a good servant does not
mistake.  The footman had his hand on the drawing-room door.

"I will tell him, madam.  What name, please?"

Julia trembled: she had not thought of that.  "Merely say a
lady," she returned carelessly.

The footman wavered and she fancied herself lost; but at that
instant the door opened from within and John Arment stepped into
the hall.  He drew back sharply as he saw her, his florid face
turning sallow with the shock; then the blood poured back to it,
swelling the veins on his temples and reddening the lobes of his
thick ears.

It was long since Julia had seen him, and she was startled at the
change in his appearance.  He had thickened, coarsened, settled
down into the enclosing flesh.  But she noted this insensibly:
her one conscious thought was that, now she was face to face with
him, she must not let him escape till he had heard her.  Every
pulse in her body throbbed with the urgency of her message.

She went up to him as he drew back.  "I must speak to you," she
said.

Arment hesitated, red and stammering.  Julia glanced at the
footman, and her look acted as a warning.  The instinctive
shrinking from a "scene" predominated over every other impulse,
and Arment said slowly: "Will you come this way?"

He followed her into the drawing-room and closed the door.
Julia, as she advanced, was vaguely aware that the room at least
was unchanged: time had not mitigated its horrors.  The contadina
still lurched from the chimney-breast, and the Greek slave
obstructed the threshold of the inner room.  The place was alive
with memories: they started out from every fold of the yellow
satin curtains and glided between the angles of the rosewood
furniture.  But while some subordinate agency was carrying these
impressions to her brain, her whole conscious effort was centred
in the act of dominating Arment's will.  The fear that he would
refuse to hear her mounted like fever to her brain.  She felt her
purpose melt before it, words and arguments running into each
other in the heat of her longing.  For a moment her voice failed
her, and she imagined herself thrust out before she could speak;
but as she was struggling for a word, Arment pushed a chair
forward, and said quietly: "You are not well."

The sound of his voice steadied her.  It was neither kind nor
unkind--a voice that suspended judgment, rather, awaiting
unforeseen developments.  She supported herself against the back
of the chair and drew a deep breath.  "Shall I send for
something?" he continued, with a cold embarrassed politeness.

Julia raised an entreating hand.  "No--no--thank you.  I am quite
well."

He paused midway toward the bell and turned on her.  "Then may I
ask--?"

"Yes," she interrupted him.  "I came here because I wanted to see
you.  There is something I must tell you."

Arment continued to scrutinize her.  "I am surprised at that," he
said.  "I should have supposed that any communication you may
wish to make could have been made through our lawyers."

"Our lawyers!"  She burst into a little laugh.  "I don't think
they could help me--this time."

Arment's face took on a barricaded look.  "If there is any
question of help--of course--"

It struck her, whimsically, that she had seen that look when some
shabby devil called with a subscription-book.  Perhaps he thought
she wanted him to put his name down for so much in sympathy--or
even in money. . .  The thought made her laugh again.  She saw
his look change slowly to perplexity.  All his facial changes
were slow, and she remembered, suddenly, how it had once diverted
her to shift that lumbering scenery with a word.  For the first
time it struck her that she had been cruel.  "There IS a question
of help," she said in a softer key: "you can help me; but only by
listening. . .  I want to tell you something. . ."

Arment's resistance was not yielding.  "Would it not be easier
to--write?" he suggested.

She shook her head.  "There is no time to write . . . and it
won't take long."  She raised her head and their eyes met.  "My
husband has left me," she said.

"Westall--?" he stammered, reddening again.

"Yes.  This morning.  Just as I left you.  Because he was tired
of me."

The words, uttered scarcely above a whisper, seemed to dilate to
the limit of the room.  Arment looked toward the door; then his
embarrassed glance returned to Julia.

"I am very sorry," he said awkwardly.

"Thank you," she murmured.

"But I don't see--"

"No--but you will--in a moment.  Won't you listen to me?
Please!"  Instinctively she had shifted her position putting
herself between him and the door.  "It happened this morning,"
she went on in short breathless phrases.  "I never suspected
anything--I thought we were--perfectly happy. . .  Suddenly he
told me he was tired of me . . . there is a girl he likes better. . .
He has gone to her. . ."  As she spoke, the lurking anguish
rose upon her, possessing her once more to the exclusion of every
other emotion.  Her eyes ached, her throat swelled with it, and
two painful tears burnt a way down her face.

Arment's constraint was increasing visibly.  "This--this is very
unfortunate," he began.  "But I should say the law--"

"The law?" she echoed ironically.  "When he asks for his
freedom?"

"You are not obliged to give it."

"You were not obliged to give me mine--but you did."

He made a protesting gesture.

"You saw that the law couldn't help you--didn't you?" she went
on.  "That is what I see now.  The law represents material
rights--it can't go beyond.  If we don't recognize an inner law . . .
the obligation that love creates . . . being loved as well as
loving . . . there is nothing to prevent our spreading ruin
unhindered . . . is there?"  She raised her head plaintively,
with the look of a bewildered child.  "That is what I see now . . .
what I wanted to tell you.  He leaves me because he's tired . . .
but I was not tired; and I don't understand why he is.  That's
the dreadful part of it--the not understanding: I hadn't realized
what it meant.  But I've been thinking of it all day, and things
have come back to me--things I hadn't noticed . . . when you and
I. . ."  She moved closer to him, and fixed her eyes on his with
the gaze that tries to reach beyond words.  "I see now that YOU
didn't understand--did you?"

Their eyes met in a sudden shock of comprehension: a veil seemed
to be lifted between them.  Arment's lip trembled.

"No," he said, "I didn't understand."

She gave a little cry, almost of triumph.  "I knew it!  I knew
it!  You wondered--you tried to tell me--but no words came. . .
You saw your life falling in ruins . . . the world slipping from
you . . . and you couldn't speak or move!"

She sank down on the chair against which she had been leaning.
"Now I know--now I know," she repeated.

"I am very sorry for you," she heard Arment stammer.

She looked up quickly.  "That's not what I came for.  I don't
want you to be sorry.  I came to ask you to forgive me . . . for
not understanding that YOU didn't understand. . .  That's all I
wanted to say."  She rose with a vague sense that the end had
come, and put out a groping hand toward the door.

Arment stood motionless.  She turned to him with a faint smile.

"You forgive me?"

"There is nothing to forgive--"

"Then will you shake hands for good-by?"  She felt his hand in
hers: it was nerveless, reluctant.

"Good-by," she repeated.  "I understand now."

She opened the door and passed out into the hall.  As she did so,
Arment took an impulsive step forward; but just then the footman,
who was evidently alive to his obligations, advanced from the
background to let her out.  She heard Arment fall back.  The
footman threw open the door, and she found herself outside in the
darkness.



The End of The Reckoning




Verse



BOTTICELLI'S MADONNA IN THE LOUVRE.


WHAT strange presentiment, O Mother, lies
On thy waste brow and sadly-folded lips,
Forefeeling the Light's terrible eclipse
On Calvary, as if love made thee wise,
And thou couldst read in those dear infant eyes
The sorrow that beneath their smiling sleeps,
And guess what bitter tears a mother weeps
When the cross darkens her unclouded skies?

Sad Lady, if some mother, passing thee,
Should feel a throb of thy foreboding pain,
And think--"My child at home clings so to me,
With the same smile . . . and yet in vain, in vain,
Since even this Jesus died on Calvary"--
Say to her then: "He also rose again."




THE TOMB OF ILARIA GIUNIGI.


ILARIA, thou that wert so fair and dear
That death would fain disown thee, grief made wise
With prophecy thy husband's widowed eyes
And bade him call the master's art to rear
Thy perfect image on the sculptured bier,
With dreaming lids, hands laid in peaceful guise
Beneath the breast that seems to fall and rise,
And lips that at love's call should answer, "Here!"

First-born of the Renascence, when thy soul
Cast the sweet robing of the flesh aside,
Into these lovelier marble limbs it stole,
Regenerate in art's sunrise clear and wide
As saints who, having kept faith's raiment whole,
Change it above for garments glorified.




THE SONNET.

PURE form, that like some chalice of old time
   Contain'st the liquid of the poet's thought
   Within thy curving hollow, gem-enwrought
   With interwoven traceries of rhyme,
While o'er thy brim the bubbling fancies climb,
   What thing am I, that undismayed have sought
   To pour my verse with trembling hand untaught
   Into a shape so small yet so sublime?
Because perfection haunts the hearts of men,
   Because thy sacred chalice gathered up
   The wine of Petrarch, Shakspere, Shelley--then
Receive these tears of failure as they drop
   (Sole vintage of my life), since I am fain
   To pour them in a consecrated cup.




TWO BACKGROUNDS.

I.

LA VIERGE AU DONATEUR.


HERE  by the ample river's argent sweep,
Bosomed in tilth and vintage to her walls,
A tower-crowned Cybele in armored sleep
The city lies, fat plenty in her halls,
With calm, parochial spires that hold in fee
The friendly gables clustered at their base,
And, equipoised o'er tower and market-place,
The Gothic minster's winged immensity;
And in that narrow burgh, with equal mood,
Two placid hearts, to all life's good resigned,
Might, from the altar to the lych-gate, find
Long years of peace and dreamless plenitude.



II.

MONA LISA.


Yon strange blue city crowns a scarped steep
No mortal foot hath bloodlessly essayed;
Dreams and illusions beacon from its keep,
But at the gate an Angel bares his blade;
And tales are told of those who thought to gain
At dawn its ramparts; but when evening fell
Far off they saw each fading pinnacle
Lit with wild lightnings from the heaven of pain;
Yet there two souls, whom life's perversities
Had mocked with want in plenty, tears in mirth,
Might meet in dreams, ungarmented of earth,
And drain Joy's awful chalice to the lees.




EXPERIENCE.


I.

LIKE Crusoe with the bootless gold we stand
Upon the desert verge of death, and say:
"What shall avail the woes of yesterday
To buy to-morrow's wisdom, in the land
Whose currency is strange unto our hand?
In life's small market they have served to pay
Some late-found rapture, could we but delay
Till Time hath matched our means to our demand."

But otherwise Fate wills it, for, behold,
Our gathered strength of individual pain,
When Time's long alchemy hath made it gold,
Dies with us--hoarded all these years in vain,
Since those that might be heir to it the mould
Renew, and coin themselves new griefs again.


II.

O, Death, we come full-handed to thy gate,
Rich with strange burden of the mingled years,
Gains and renunciations, mirth and tears,
And love's oblivion, and remembering hate,
Nor know we what compulsion laid such freight
Upon our souls--and shall our hopes and fears
Buy nothing of thee, Death?  Behold our wares,
And sell us the one joy for which we wait.
Had we lived longer, life had such for sale,
With the last coin of sorrow purchased cheap,
But now we stand before thy shadowy pale,
And all our longings lie within thy keep--
Death, can it be the years shall naught avail?

"Not so," Death answered, "they shall purchase sleep."




CHARTRES.


I.

IMMENSE, august, like some Titanic bloom,
   The mighty choir unfolds its lithic core,
Petalled with panes of azure, gules and or,
   Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom,
And stamened with keen flamelets that illume
   The pale high-altar.  On the prayer-worn floor,
By surging worshippers thick-thronged of yore,
   A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb,
The stranded driftwood of Faith's ebbing sea--
   For these alone the finials fret the skies,
The topmost bosses shake their blossoms free,
   While from the triple portals, with grave eyes,
Tranquil, and fixed upon eternity,
   The cloud of witnesses still testifies.


II.

The crimson panes like blood-drops stigmatize
   The western floor.  The aisles are mute and cold.
A rigid fetich in her robe of gold
   The Virgin of the Pillar, with blank eyes,
Enthroned beneath her votive canopies,
   Gathers a meagre remnant to her fold.
The rest is solitude; the church, grown old,
   Stands stark and gray beneath the burning skies.
Wellnigh again its mighty frame-work grows
   To be a part of nature's self, withdrawn
From hot humanity's impatient woes;
   The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn,
And in the east one giant window shows
   The roseate coldness of an Alp at dawn.




LIFE.


LIFE, like a marble block, is given to all,
A blank, inchoate mass of years and days,
Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays
Some shape of strength or symmetry to call;
One shatters it in bits to mend a wall;
One in a craftier hand the chisel lays,
And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia's gaze,
Carves it apace in toys fantastical.

But least is he who, with enchanted eyes
Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be,
Muses which god he shall immortalize
In the proud Parian's perpetuity,
Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies
That the night cometh wherein none shall see.




AN AUTUMN SUNSET


I

LEAGUERED in fire
The wild black promontories of the coast extend
Their savage silhouettes;
The sun in universal carnage sets,
And, halting higher,
The motionless storm-clouds mass their sullen threats,
Like an advancing mob in sword-points penned,
That, balked, yet stands at bay.
Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated day
In wind-lustrated hollows crystalline,
A wan valkyrie whose wide pinions shine
Across the ensanguined ruins of the fray,
And in her lifted hand swings high o'erhead,
Above the waste of war,
The silver torch-light of the evening star
Wherewith to search the faces of the dead.


II

Lagooned in gold,
Seem not those jetty promontories rather
The outposts of some ancient land forlorn,
Uncomforted of morn,
Where old oblivions gather,
The melancholy, unconsoling fold
Of all things that go utterly to death
And mix no more, no more
With life's perpetually awakening breath?
Shall Time not ferry me to such a shore,
Over such sailless seas,
To walk with hope's slain importunities
In miserable marriage?  Nay, shall not
All things be there forgot,
Save the sea's golden barrier and the black
Closecrouching promontories?
Dead to all shames, forgotten of all glories,
Shall I not wander there, a shadow's shade,
A spectre self-destroyed,
So purged of all remembrance and sucked back
Into the primal void,
That should we on that shore phantasmal meet
I should not know the coming of your feet?





End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
Part Two