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Title: Blindfold

Author: Orrick Johns

Release date: September 18, 2022 [eBook #69006]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Lieber & Lewis

Credits: Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLINDFOLD ***





BLINDFOLD




  BLINDFOLD

  _By_
  ORRICK JOHNS

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  LIEBER & LEWIS
  1923




  Copyright, 1923

  By LIEBER & LEWIS


  Printed in the U.S.A.




  TO MY
  FATHER

  GEORGE S. JOHNS,

  IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT
  OF UNFAILING SYMPATHY




BLINDFOLD




BLINDFOLD




I


Ellen Sydney’s first garden in the Meadowburn’s new American home had
made a fair beginning. She was at work one afternoon bending over the
bed of sweet peas, hooking the baby tendrils to the wire mesh of the
frame, with an occasional pat of the soft dark earth beneath--the earth
which Bennet, the youngest of the family, had brought by the basketful
from a distance, to enrich the yellow clay that filled in the property.

School was just out and as she worked Bennet banged into the hall,
threw down his books and rushed forth again with a shout to join his
comrades up the street. They were building a “switch-back railway”
from the second story rear window of a neighbour’s house. She could
just glimpse the murderous rickety scaffolding of it through the small
leaves of the alley poplars.

Fastening up the last of the tendrils to the wire, Ellen heard Mrs.
Osprey’s shrill voice calling from quite half a block away to one
of the Osprey boys. She could not restrain a smile at the familiar
summons.

“Poor woman,” thought she, “they do worry her.” But she would no more
have thought of pitying Mrs. Osprey actually, than of feeling sorry for
Her Majesty Queen Alexandra, whom many years in Canada had taught her
to believe next to the angels themselves.

As she turned from the garden she heard a still more familiar voice and
Potter Osprey came through the gate.

“Hello, Ellen, mind my coming over?”

“Oh, no! I’ve got to go in, though. Come in the kitchen, I’m not
very busy.” She had in fact three easy hours before her, with dinner
practically prepared and a little ironing to do before she put the
dishes in the stove. Ironing was quite pleasant if you had some one to
talk to while you did it.

“Vacation’s only six weeks off now,” Potter said as they walked up to
the house. “Ain’t that great! I hate school anyway.”

“Ah, Potter, when you are doing so well at it! Milly told me about the
debates. She said you were fine in them.”

The monthly school debates were a point of pride with him, and he
betrayed a momentary embarrassment. He had quite lost himself in the
vainglory of winning two of them in succession, or of being on the
winning side both times. He had regretted that while they were in
progress, especially while he was on his feet, everybody he knew had
not been in the audience. So many people were not. The thing that he
feared in talking about them to Ellen was that he would reveal his
satisfaction. So Milly had been gossiping about them outside? That
pleased him. Milly was in the class below him, which sat in the same
room.

He recovered his composure and spoke as though of an ordinary matter.

“Pshaw, the debates ain’t really school. They’re different.... But
look, Ellen, all the lots around here are almost forests of weeds in
the summer. It’s great! You can hide in them, and everything. They get
over six feet high. And there’s woods only a mile out west there, to
swim and camp in. If you have time we can walk there some day.”

Ellen’s face brightened at the prospect.

“But it gets hot here in the summer,” he went on, “awful hot--not like
Winnipeg. You won’t like that.”

“Oh, I’ve lived in N’Orleans. It’s lots hotter there.”

“Yes, that’s so. That’s way down south, ain’t it? I always think of
you coming from Winnipeg. Bennet talks about it all the time. He’s a
Britisher all right.”

Ellen replied warmly.

“Well, he shouldn’t be, even if they were born in Canada. His father
says he’s going to stand by this country now, because it gives them a
good living and always has. He’s going to make them all citizens.”

Potter laughed. He was sitting perched up on the kitchen table, his
small feet dangling beneath it and his cap in his hand.

“I told Bennet we licked England twice and he got hot under the collar.
He’s funny. Did you like it better up north?”

“Yes, I guess I did. We used to have good times in Winnipeg. The
fellows always in the house, my! It’ll be the same here after a while.
Those two girls get a crowd coming pretty quick. Only we’ll never have
snow like in Winnipeg. I did love the snow, such sledding and skating!”

“That’s the ticket!” agreed Potter, and added with some disgust, “We
hardly had one good skate last winter--soon as it’d freeze it’d thaw!
But you should have seen the first winter we were here. Almost two
months of ice! This house wasn’t here then--hardly any in this row
were, and gee, the way the wind used to blow! It changes around here
fast. Kirk broke his arm falling through these joistses.”

Potter swung down from the table and stood in front of the ironing
board, smiling up at the tall woman, his hands in his pockets.

“Say, Ellen, got something to eat? Just anything, you know--I’ll tell
you why I want it.”

Ellen put down her iron on the metal guard and went into the pantry.
She returned with three powdered doughnuts on a plate.

“Here,” she said laughing. “You’re always eating, Potter Osprey. Your
mother told me I was spoiling your appetite for meals.”

“Thanks,” he said and went on between mouthfuls. “I’ve been smoking. I
thought something to eat would take my breath away.”

“Well, if that’s what you came here for you can go right back home. You
oughtn’t smoke--so there!”

Potter, however, did not stir; and for a time there was no sound
except the thumping of Ellen’s iron on the thickly padded board. She
was thumping harder than need be, because she was angry. She was often
angry with him. Yet his prolonged visits with her in the kitchen or
on the back stoop of a fine afternoon meant much to her. The family
already teased her, calling young Osprey “Ellen’s pet.” Then Tom
Meadowburn reminded them that “Ellen always had a pet. Remember
Wolly Judson.” This sally caused an uproar. Wolly Judson had been a
Winnipegian of sixty-eight, a town character, a tottering flirt, who
had brought the current gossip regularly to Ellen’s door.

Potter heard none of this chaffing, yet in his talks with her he
betrayed a small opinion of the Meadowburns, all except his friend
Bennet, with whom he sang in the choir. Once he told her indignantly
that she worked too hard, she was spoiling the whole family. Why didn’t
the others do more? Ellen laughed heartily. She did not believe any
such thing. It was her lot to work, and keep at it until things were
done.

Ellen was neither by birth nor legal adoption a member of the
Meadowburn household. She lived there, a fixture; and the principal
advantages did accrue to the family. They obtained a willing, strong
and tireless servant, modest and well-appearing enough to be treated
as a distant relative (and consequently not paid except when chance
generosity dictated). She had been with the Meadowburns since she was
twelve, learning by heart their various needs so that she could have
administered to them in her sleep. She was now twenty-seven, a gaunt
figure, black-eyed and above the middle height. The face would have
been attractive but for the toughened swarthiness it had acquired, and
the cheeks perceptibly sunken by the absence of jaw teeth.

The Meadowburn children had grown up under her care, the two eldest
girls being little more than babies at the time the orphan asylum
in New Orleans yielded her young and frightened body into the hands
of Mrs. Meadowburn. Ellen had found time for those fretful and
ill-tempered midgets, in addition to keeping the house spotless,
laundering for six and cooking the meals. Mrs. Meadowburn had been left
free to nurse a collection of modern ills, and to dream of her youth
as the dark beauty of a northwestern town. Since those days a morose
gloom had settled upon her handsome, Indian-like face. Ellen had rarely
known her to laugh at all. Even the smile with which she greeted her
husband’s jokes was wan and half-hearted.

It was to Ellen that Tom Meadowburn looked for the fullest appreciation
of his comic genius and his masculine importance. Few men were more
conscious of both than he, and even in those moments when the comic
mask fell away completely, there was something in the solemn air of
pompous judgment and disciplinary wisdom which to any one but his
adoring brood would have seemed most funny.

For Tom Meadowburn the world, whether of New Orleans or Winnipeg, or
the new city that had lately taken them in, was a place where he and
the wife and children were “getting on.” The Meadowburn household was,
in his mind, something very much like heaven, himself presiding. For
Ellen, as he often said, it was a refuge under his protecting arm,
wherein she need never come to harm nor suffer want. And to her credit
she believed him and worked all the harder to please him.

Physically Meadowburn was a tall stout man with a heavy, pink,
unwhiskered face, the pale eyelashes and tow hair being lighter than
his skin, and the small, quick eyes a transparent, hardly perceptible
blue. As a humourist he was not one of your torrential and generous
laughers. He was sly and dry, a wrinkle, the flicker of a smile, a
knowing arch of the eyebrows being his favourite manner of accentuating
his point. He was in the habit of twitting Ellen on the subject of
marriage.

“Now then, my girl,” he would say, “what are you keeping from us? What
have you got up your sleeve? Didn’t I hear you come in a little late
last night? Walking, eh--of course, not _alone_? We wouldn’t permit you
to walk alone.”

“Ellen went to the drugstore for some medicine for me, last night,
Tom,” interposed his wife.

“Well, well, Ellen,” he went on, “you must remember you’re perfectly
free. We wouldn’t keep you from marrying when the right man comes
along.”

“Yes, and maybe I will marry, sooner than you think! You watch out, Mr.
Meadowburn!”

The pleasure of this stock joke lay in the fact that none of the
Meadowburns believed there was danger of Ellen marrying, of any one
caring to marry her, at least, whose social position would suit her.
For she did not have kitchen-maid standards, as they knew. And she
believed there was no danger either. She felt very old....

It was into this somewhat harsh and lonely existence that Potter had
thrust his genial, boyish appearance, and by some strange affinity of
comradeship, they had taken to each other at once. He too, as she was
soon to learn, was lonely and cherished his dreams; and it comforted
her to have a champion--even so young and small a champion as he. Was
he so young and small? There were times when he frightened her with
flashes of grown-up speech. It did not always seem quite nice, quite
appropriate. For example, one evening when they were talking about
perfectly ordinary matters, he burst out:

“You’re like Christ, Ellen. If He could be on earth He wouldn’t love
Dr. Minor or any of those people in the church. He’d pick you.”

Her first thought about this was that it was deliberately bad, as bad
as his smoking and his score of other boy tricks. It was blasphemous
and wildly untrue. She sent him away in disgrace, much discomfited and
hurt. Probably this rudeness of her own was what brought her so swiftly
around to forgiveness, or it may be that she came to look kindly on
his tribute. In any event, she gave Bennet a note for him, a queer,
misspelled, dignified note....

When Potter returned she told him that he “must not think of Jesus as a
person but as God, and that was the end of it.”




II


The next Spring, which followed on the heels of his fourteenth
birthday, held a wonder for Potter Osprey such as he had not
experienced before. Until now the green buds and soft winds had meant
a time for the surreptitious stripping off of shoes and stockings
after school (and out of sight of home), the agonizing anticipation of
three long months of holidaying, and the making of limitless plans for
outdoor fun. This year he welcomed the bright weeks not as a rowdy boy,
but with a conscious relish that came from a deeper source within him.

The Spring itself, as if it also were filled with a sense of unusual
importance, was precocious. When Potter, late every afternoon, ambled
along the several blocks of blatantly new sidewalks that led to the
church, the grass hid the softened brown earth with an abundance of
delicate colour wherever feet had not trod, the robins and squirrels
skipped perilously about the pavements and lawns oblivious of savage
man, and exultant banks of snowballs escaping over the picturesque
shingle- and iron-railed barriers of the old Clemons place, were just
on the point of changing from their pale shade of willow bark into
round fluffs of dazzling white as big as a boy’s head.

These Lenten afternoons were moments of solitary poetry in his days.
The still church, the long slanting rays which came through the
coloured glass windows to the west; the faint perfumes that rose
into the ogival shadows above the nave, emanating from the hair and
handkerchiefs and bodices of lady worshippers, who made up the majority
(and the subtle pleasure with which he felt the eyes of these fine
women on his broadening back as he walked down to the chancel carrying
the offertory); the pervasive, vibrant drone of the organ, which had
always been like a physical caress to him; and the saintly beaked
profile of the rector, Dr. Minor, with its high, peeled brows, and
black, unruly hair, dominating an almost chinless jaw; and, finally,
between the breathing of the organ pipes, and the shrill singing of the
feminine congregation, Dr. Minor’s broad Virginia accents and consoling
overtones and melancholy quavers--all these sensations produced a
mingling of peace and the awareness of sacrifice, which was like a bath
of goodness.

The church itself was charming to look at, built in the late ’eighties
of shingles now coloured a warm brown by many rains, and properly
vine-hung. The little building with its limited open meadow and
well-grown trees drew him at times when he had no particular business
there. It was a favourite place to read. Often he would arrive an hour
or more before the service and sit huddled up in one of the corners
of the deep verandah, intent upon his pastime, until the brisk step
of the rector sounded on the boards below; and if Dr. Minor happened
to espy him he would be conducted cheerily into the study, while the
lanky priest put on his vestments and asked him questions about his
work at school and the health of his “dear mother,” who, much to the
clergyman’s disappointment, came almost never to the services.

These innocent confidences sometimes went so far as a mild spiritual
examination which had more significance than its casualness indicated.
Minor regarded young Osprey as promising material for the ministry.

“The type for scholarship and consecration,” he told his wife. “A
sensitive boy, thoughtful and retiring--Oh, manly, manly enough! A
little conviction would turn that into spiritual leadership. His family
could do nothing better than give him a seminary training. And a part
of our duty, my dear, is to be fishers of men, to look out for new
recruits to bring under His banner.”

Minor loved to roll forth militant symbols in his reflections upon the
mission of the Church. His early gods had been the deeply pious heroes
of the South. Stonewall Jackson and General Lee took rank with him very
little below the Apostles.

There was one other who shared this secret ambition for Potter--Ellen
Sydney--until a recent incident in which he had figured shook her faith.

This affair produced something of a scandal in the Osprey family.
Searching one day through the shelves of an old closet for one of
his brother Kirk’s discarded school books which it was now his turn
to use, the boy had come across a half dozen large, handsomely bound
portfolios. He had drawn one out and leaved it over, fascinated on the
instant. The sheets were of lovely texture, beautifully printed, and
the covers of a flexible, warm-toned, heavy parchment. He felt a sense
of incomparable luxury in the very touch of the books.

The contents were no less absorbing. Between the pages of French
text were reproductions of paintings hung in the Paris salons of the
mid-’nineties, the majority of them nudes of that languishing and
silken type beloved by the French school of that day, the studio
renderings of a flock of anonymous Bouguereaus. Forgetting his search
for the school books, Potter took the volumes to an attic room where he
consulted them many times in the following weeks, and a collection of
nude sketches came from his pencil, copied sometimes from the originals
and sometimes attempted from memory.

The upshot of it was that his mother swooped upon him one day just as
he was finishing a particularly elaborate drawing. It was taken from
him and shown in excited secrecy to John Osprey.

Osprey was cut of a different cloth from Meadowburn. In a ruminant,
half-serious talk (a ray of amusement flickered in his eye on actually
facing the boy alone) he quoted the Scripture according to St. Paul,
and enjoined him to resist putting away childish things until he was
on the way to become a man. Then he dropped a sly hint that if the
youthful artist really had to draw improper subjects it would be a good
thing to keep them from his mother. There was other good advice to
the effect that it was both harder and more practical to draw people
the way they were usually seen in life, but this passed largely over
Potter’s head.

He promptly diagnosed the interview as a vindication and he saw no harm
in telling the adventure to Ellen, but to his utter surprise she was
inexpressibly shocked; so much so that she left him on the Meadowburn
steps without even a good-night.

As he had related the story, coolly, indeed boastfully to her, the
feeling came over her that the next time she raised her eyes to observe
him she would see a coarse, swarthy young man with stubble whiskers
whom she ought to be afraid of. The contrast between this fancy and
his actual appearance was a little laughable--yet the notion of his
interest in a woman’s body, a thing he could not, as she reasoned,
naturally have seen or even been strongly moved to see, was more than
she could grasp.

For many days she watched him passing the house with other boys, his
eyes casting furtive and unhappy glances at its windows, and hardened
her heart. Then she could bear it no longer, and once more Potter
received a scarcely legible, lady-like note of prim forgiveness.

To-night he was to see her for the first time since that event....

In Creve Cœur suburb a clear division existed between the old and the
new, marked by a certain trolly line. Northward lay the flat, banal
commons in which the Ospreys and the Meadowburns lived, but to the
south were houses mellowed by long custom, set deep in cool lawns, and
facing arched avenues of maples and elms under which one trod decaying
and rickety pine-board walks or crossed the tremulous bridges spanning
a serpentine creek that drained the valley.

The quaint modesty of Florissant lane, its uselessness and hidden
charm--the thick maples and high shrubbery cutting off even the sight
of neighbouring windows--made it a fairy road, a retreat in which
Potter had already learned to spend fine mornings of October and May
when his mother thought him safely at school. As for Ellen, her first
autumn glimpse of it, nearly a year ago, had taken her back to greener
memories in the north. She could never walk there too often; it was as
near to complete demoralization and unbounded luxury as anything her
starved imagination could picture.

Ordinarily they sat upon the steep terraced slope at the end of the
lane, whence one could look down its leaf-fretted vista, or peer over
one’s shoulder into the sombre depths of the rarely-visited Florissant
place, but to-night he was more venturesome. He led her through the
path behind the wall of Annunciation’s big enclosure, until they came
to the end of the terrace. Beyond was an open field, once the pasture
of the Florissants, and still a part of the property, empty and unused.
In its centre through the dusk loomed a dark little hillock clustered
with poplars and fir-trees.

It was not hard to believe oneself continents away from the noise
of any familiar street or the lights of Creve Cœur houses. Directly
fronting them lay the dim mass of Annunciation, its half dozen French
turrets and many spires floating out of the treetops into crystalline
starlight. Potter had often sat in that very spot and pondered on
the mystery of this religious stillness, on the utter distance which
separated its life from any he had known, its community of young
and vital beauty sternly and perhaps rebelliously subordinated to
withered holiness. By a paradox of the law of boyhood, the girls
in the convent--boarders from comfortable families everywhere in
the states--were the subject of vulgar joking among the youngsters
thereabouts.

To Ellen the convent was not benign; it was a little terrifying and
monstrous. All her life she had been awestruck by anything that
suggested the gigantic and august power of Rome, and her head was full
of legends concerning that religion and its devotees. Superstition had
required of her that she regard them--not as individuals but in the
mass--as a sinister species apart from ordinary people.

Potter remarked that when there was bright moonlight the steep slate
pitches of the convent roof looked as though they were sheeted in snow.

“There’s lots more of those places in Canada than here,” said she.
“They’re not all that they should be, either. Think of sending young
girls there!”

“Why not?” he asked.

She now regretted her outburst and was annoyed at his question. She
answered primly:

“Why, I wouldn’t tell you, of course.”

He laughed, unconcerned and superior.

“Pshaw, I know what you mean. I’ve heard those stories too--about nuns
being in love with priests. But I don’t believe them.”

“Oh, you don’t?” inquired Ellen sarcastically. It was not that she did
not think it admirable of him to dislike believing evil of people, but
one need not go so far as to defend Catholics....

“No,” he said. “You know why?”

“Well, why, smarty?”

“Because even people outside of such places, convents and the like,
even people who are grown up and free to do as they please--well, they
never do anything they want to do. I mean things that just pop into
their heads to do.”

“Ah, don’t they?” asked Ellen, by this time amused, “And how are you so
sure they don’t?”

“I just know. They’re too dog-goned cowardly.”

“Well!” she exclaimed, “that’s a fine thing to be calling people who
behave themselves!”

“Then they don’t think of anything bad that they want to do,” he
persisted. “You wouldn’t call that being good, would you, Ellen? Pshaw,
what’s the credit in that?”

“It’s well for them they don’t think of such things,” she declared. “To
hear you, a person would believe you wanted to be tempted.”

“No, I hate it, honestly,” he replied, and she felt that he was trying
to speak truly of himself. “I used to say that part of the Lord’s
prayer, about ‘lead us not into temptation,’ over twice. I did, for a
long time. Because, you see, I’m really tempted--always, every minute.”

He paused after this announcement, which, in spite of his sincerity,
had a note of pride, and Ellen broke in, thinking that the moment had
come to speak of what was most in her mind.

“Potter, you haven’t been making any more of those pictures, have you?”

She felt him shift quickly to the defensive.

“Yes, I have,” he said. “I’ve finished two more.”

“Well, I’m ashamed of you.”

“Why do you mind them so much, Ellen?”

“You don’t have to ask me why.”

“But I do, because my father didn’t think they were bad. He only
lectured me for show!” He chuckled at the recollection.

“Ah, Potter, your father is a grown man! Men do lots of things that you
shouldn’t think about. You’re just a child. Those pictures! What’s the
good of them anyway? Nice people wouldn’t have them around.”

“Some people would!” he declared stoutly. “They’re beautiful, or my
father wouldn’t have kept them ... and the one I’ve just finished is
the best, oh, lots the best I’ve done!”

She sensed a strain of profound unhappiness in his voice, and all her
instincts flew to soothe the hurt.

“I don’t mean to be hard on you, Potter,” she said. “You worry me,
that’s all. I can’t see why you bother about these things that other
people never think of.”

“Aw,” he said, “never mind, Ellen. I guess I don’t know what I want.
It’s no fun being a boy when you’d like to be a man.”

They both fell silent, listening to the trees chattering overhead
like live things. The breeze that stirred them was growing chill, and
Potter, responding to the kindlier tone of his companion, moved closer
to her. His last words and this unconscious movement of affection
touched her. She put a rough, friendly hand on his arm, and they sat
there in silence for a time. It was he who broke it....

Suddenly a strange plea came pouring from his lips in a torrent of
eager words, a plea that she all at once realized she had many times
before dreaded--and laughed at herself for dreading.... She sat,
scarcely breathing, with averted face. He ended abruptly, frightened
at the sound of his own voice. She said nothing. Surely she understood
him. What was she thinking?

She turned toward him at last, and he found himself looking into her
black eyes that glowed like coals despite the mantle of dusk. Her
parted lips closed in a tight line.

“Well,” she said, with slow emphasis, “if that’s what you mean, I’ll
tell you this. I will never do such a thing.”

She was on her feet in an instant, her tall body like a statue of
rebuke crushing him in its shadow.

“Come,” she said coldly.

“Yes,” he replied. “I’m sorry, I’m awfully sorry, Ellen.”

At that moment, as they started homeward from Florissant’s field with
the darkness between them, her swishing, angry stride filling him with
a new knowledge of mystery and awe, there was no doubt that they both
meant what they said. But in Ellen a certain helplessness and fear were
born. Struggle as she might from now on his very presence would be a
menace, and his presence was more than ever a necessity. For the cry
that he was uttering was one that her own heart understood.

       *       *       *       *       *

So it happened that a few months later when the Osprey family were at
a country hotel for the summer, he and Ellen met in the empty house
and walked hand in hand through the rooms--her sworn promise whirling
in his brain. She was stiff and awkward, but he was in high spirits,
perhaps a little hysterical, fondly imagining he was entering upon a
new paradise of experience....




III


Emmet Roget, twenty, and Potter Osprey, nineteen, both juniors at the
University, were sitting naked one afternoon on the long parapet which
formed one of the banks of Milton’s abandoned quarry. Behind them the
stone wall fell away a sheer twenty feet to the gulch below. In front,
licking the tops of the three-foot barrier, lay the broad sheet of
deep, clear water. Their white bodies dripped opaline flakes in the
sunset. From time to time they shivered in the chilly late September
wind.

A pale, luminous dory of a moon floated low in the delicately blue
and pink expanse of sky that lay over the town. The surrounding flat
country was infinitely still, infinitely peaceful.

Potter suddenly droned forth in the melancholy baritone the two
affected when reading Swinburne and other modern poets:

  “The wandering moon, an optimistic sprite
  Etched a pale border ’round the face of night....”

Emmet was silent for a moment, and then as though the sound of the
quotation had travelled to him from a distance, burst out:

“Gosh, man, where did you get that?”

The other reached over boisterously and clapped his friend’s shoulder.

“A trial of my own! All you need to be a poet is to suffer from
insomnia, the way I did the other night.”

“Well, you can write.”

“Eh? But I’d so much rather paint.”

“Better look out. You may have more talent for writing than for
painting.” Potter sensed a criticism in the remark, which he privately
resented.

“No, the thing I’ll never be able to do is the thing I’m going to do.”

Emmet did not reply at once, and his sleepy blue eyes, long and narrow
between the lids, rested upon an indefinable point of distance. The
wind ruffled his dark curly hair that grew low on the brow and temples.
He was the handsomer of the two.

“Damn specialists and specialism,” he said. “I keep thinking about
a synthesis of the arts. Take the theatre, for example. Why not do
something like Wagner did--in a lighter, more lyric vein? Bring all the
arts together and create a new art? I hate this little business of one
man with a pen, one man with a brush and another with a piano, none of
them understanding each other.”

“A synthesis of the arts is contradictory,” said Osprey. “Only Nature
can accomplish it, at any rate, and Nature and art are sworn enemies.
Nature takes a tree and gives it form and colour; its leaves rustle and
its branches are wood-winds. Then in certain lights the tree will have
the elusive, the startling quality of poetry. There you have sculpture,
painting, music and literature--but it isn’t art, and, thank God, art
never will be such a pudding.”

“Nevertheless,” replied Roget, without controversy and as if to
himself, “Nevertheless something can be done that way. What about the
church in Renaissance Italy and elsewhere? That was a synthesis--a man
didn’t paint just to be painting something of his own. He painted for
God’s sake.”

It was really cold by now, and a moment later they were hastily
dressing. Roget murmured:

“‘The wandering moon, an optimistic sprite, etched a pale border
’round the face of night.’ _Ce n’est pas mal._ It’s pictorial and yet
it’s literary too. Perhaps you will use words to fix your notions
for painting. What’s that, in a sense, but synthesis, old-timer?” he
finished jubilantly.

They went home in the dusk. These were the perfect hours college gave
them....

The rural University town of the central states, in the period when
electric lighting and telephones were young, when the automobile was
as yet a rarity, and the popular senior took his best girl out riding
Sundays behind a smart livery tandem, may have been hideous to modern
eyes with its muddy streets, its wooden dwellings and its old-time
murky brick and brownstone halls, but it had a mellow and quiet charm
that comported well with the spirit of scholarship.

This charm we may assume has been swept away forever. Gasoline and
commercial growth, endowments, tudorized architecture, prohibition,
short-skirted and long-headed women, energetic chancellors, a wealthier
class of students, up-to-date burgher emporiums, moving picture
palazzos, Grecian banks, and other vanities of the wicked age have
hidden that erstwhile scene, with its air of leisure and moderation,
beneath a slick financial veneer that nothing but the fall of federal
empire and the end of progress will ever wipe off.

When Potter Osprey arrived at the Athens of his native state it was
still a function of one’s education to sit with the more or less elect
twice a week in one of the three saloons and beer up, to the point
where one navigated with difficulty the crossings of perilously high
stepping stones and sometimes fell off into honest Athenian mud, which
accumulated in viscid pools a foot deep.

If one was only a freshman one might have to be contented with the
private room of the “Bucket of Blood”--in a small rear section of
which negroes were allowed to drink. Later on, you aimed for the
private room at Steve Ball’s. The Y.M.C.A. and the Cadet Corps, the
latter also a moral training camp under the guise of military orders,
throve, but only among the groundlings. Two obscure fraternities out
of twelve admitted members who would stoop to either, unless they
were recommended by extraordinary prowess in other and more popular
directions.

In those days the dirt-stained farmers in jack-boots came to town
Saturday morning with heavy carts of solid produce and departed at
nightfall with almost equally heavy burdens of liquid joy. Afternoon
strollers got their legs inextricably mixed with frantic, squealing
hogs, and the smell of fresh manure rose to the fifth story of the
Attic House, the tallest building on the local Broadway. Nowadays the
farmers come snorting in in Cadillacs as often as they please and
go home sober to tot up the double entry ledger with “mommer.” It
is a changed world and undoubtedly a more leisurely one for college
disciplinary committees.

Potter’s progress for a year had consisted in desperate efforts to
escape his classes toward the end of the week, and to regain some
hold on them at the beginning. As often happens, in spite of such
practices, or perhaps because of the extra spurts of effort which they
made necessary, he regularly stood well in his studies. His second
year, however, from the standpoint of conduct, was an improvement over
the first. Roget put in an appearance, and Osprey wearied somewhat of
smutty anecdotes, at the telling of which he was never skilful, and
found a genuine interest growing in him for his language classes, and
even for mathematics.

In the entire town, beside the poet, there had been two people in whom
he took an interest. One was a thin, rather angular but not uncomely
instructress in the art classes, who had come from New York and the Art
Students’ League. Potter never probed her jolly, untroubled character
very deeply, but she had a firm pencil stroke that he admired, and
after a few talks with her he discovered that she breathed a freer air
than the folk at Athens. To his fraternity brothers she was a frump,
socially impossible. The feminine ideal of the day was the type of Miss
Carroll of Carrollton, or Miss Brown from Brownhaven, rich father,
proud virtue, sentimental possibilities and skill in the small town
graces.

His second admiration was a grey-haired, lean descendant of one of the
oldest families in town, a certain Oliver Pruyd, whose hawk-beaked
face habitually wore an ironic grin. He was supposed to correspond
with the metropolitan newspapers, and his unofficial scholarship had
achieved a certain subrosa reputation. But his gains in his vocation
were obviously slender and it was not his scholarship that brought him
distinction. Pruyd was the only known addict to the use of morphine of
whom the community could boast.

Osprey’s acquaintance with him had been casual. There was something
sinister in Pruyd’s mocking expression and wrinkled, flavescent
skin. Once, however, the younger man had achieved the brilliance of
seeking him out in his small den over the pool and billiard hall, an
indescribably neat and carefully arranged place, walled with books and
piles of periodicals. Pruyd proved stimulating through three drinks,
introducing many hints of literary sources and art lore hitherto
strange to his companion. In the days of his family’s wealth he had
ruined his usefulness by overlong haunting of the byways of Europe.

Beginning with the fourth bourbon, however, the conversation descended
to common levels, and the affair ended with their staggering down
Broadway like any two other louts expelled from Steve Ball’s at the
closing hour.

The only other consolation was the college library. In its actual
precincts he was often uncomfortable because he was critically
inspected by elderly persons at the desk for his curious taste in
books. This alternately intimidated and enraged him--and almost
barred him from the use of the library. But from it he obtained
Pater’s “Marius” and “Renaissance,” prints of Hogarth and Daumier
and Michelangelo, “Tom Jones” and Balzac, Rousseau and Voltaire,
stray bits of Wilde and Beardsley, and sprinklings of the French
symbolists--shuddersome bombs in those days.

The art class, one of the main objectives of his course (and the sop
which his father had thrown him in urging him to take a well-rounded
education before he settled down to his choice) was a puerile and
primary bore after the first day, a repetition of the drawing of casts
in charcoal, to which he had devoted two years at high school--with a
prim sketch hour thrown in twice a week in the evening, the members of
the class serving as models for fifteen minute studies.

A few weeks after the conversation with Emmet Roget at Milton’s Pond,
Potter was sitting with a full assemblage of his fraternity brothers
at a breakfast of oatmeal swimming in blue milk, biscuits and rancid
butter--which was all the country town could furnish for some curious
reason--and pork chops well immersed in grease. The house manager that
season was an economist, loudly cursed at every meal, but immensely
appreciated at the end of the month when the pro-rated statements came
around.

They were not a well-to-do nor a polished crowd. Raw-boned, plebeian,
familiar--tobacco-chewers from the agricultural towns getting their
first taste of a dress suit--they nevertheless had their pride
and social standards. Potter, for example, though he liked them
well enough--indeed had been dazzled by several of their more
suave and persuasive members during the first few weeks after his
matriculation--was now, on account of those standards, nursing a
private feud against the whole organization. The cause of this feud was
their refusal to invite Emmet Roget to join, a man, thought he, better
bred than any of them. They had taken in two gawky, mannerless Freshmen
that year, sons of zinc barons from the mining counties, but they would
not have Roget.

Potter understood the reason well enough, but his resentment was
all the more keen on that account. Roget was rejected for personal
characteristics which he himself would like to have exhibited oftener.
He, also, did not quite belong in the group, and his influence, which
for some reason was not inconsiderable, would have waned quickly had
he been more frank about his own tastes. Roget did not lack that
frankness. He was poor, but poverty was no bar in that fraternity. The
trouble was that he was not ashamed of having won the Whittier prize
for verse in his freshman year. He had needed the money. He pronounced
his name in the French manner and sat in a corner quietly cynical at
dances. He was pretty generally admired by girls, but that could be
a fault in a person you instinctively disliked; and he turned up one
evening at a smoker wearing a wrist watch. In the first administration
of Roosevelt, a man was either a “good scout” or a “crumb,” and the
best looking and brainiest chap on earth, if he did these things, was a
crumb.

The crowd was beginning to leave the breakfast table, some of them
rushing off to eight o’clock classes and others moiling onto the porch
for the first Bull Durham “drag” of the day, and bawling a good-natured
“hello, men” to students hurrying past from other houses.

Potter had an eight o’clock class and was late. As he started off,
however, he took up a letter addressed to him, from the table in the
hall, and stopped in his tracks. He stared again at the superscription
and the eight o’clock class dropped completely from his mind. The
letter was in a hand that he knew well, and the sight of it instantly
smote him with fear. He looked about to see if any one was watching and
turned to flee to the bathroom upstairs, the only place in the house
where privacy was possible. On second thought he walked quietly by the
group on the porch and went up the street. A ten minute lope brought
him to the deserted little nine-hole golf course outside of town. He
could not help thinking how benign, how untroubled the fields were in
the brisk, delicious morning. They calmed his pounding blood and sent a
wave of optimism through him.

“What a fool I was to miss my class,” he muttered aloud. “It may not
be anything at all.” He sat down on a sandbox and hurriedly opened the
letter.

  “Dear Potter,” it ran, “It’s happened as I was afraid. I’m nearly
  three months gone. Dr. Schottman won’t help me. He says he never does
  that. I haven’t got much money, and don’t know what I’m to do.

                                            “Yours truly,
                                                                “ELLEN.”





IV


The blow, which he had many times dreaded, but which for two long years
he had thought of as blissfully escaped, had fallen. Until the summer
just passed, that length of time had elapsed--the first two years of
his University life--during which the affair with Ellen had reverted
to its original innocence. Before that they had drifted on, taking
what opportunities they could find. Potter, sometimes conscious that
the thing was an ordinary slavery, had struggled against it from time
to time, but half-heartedly. Habit and gratification were too strong.
Then, in a blinding flash of awakened responsibility, he realized that
physical consequences followed such relations, and under the guise of
moral repentance, he went to her and told her he wished to end it.

Ellen acquiesced simply enough in this, as she acquiesced, perforce, in
everything that concerned her. She dumbly worshipped him, but she knew
how much that mattered.

Then had come the summer of this year. It was accident that threw them
together one night, one very magical night, as Potter recalled. Both
were lonely; the Meadowburn family were all away on an August journey.
Their old intimacy, which in reality had been sordid and furtive, took
on a certain beauty--the sentiment of past things. Under that momentary
glamour forgetfulness took possession of them.

“She said,” recalled Potter, “that was the first time she had been
thoroughly happy and secure.”

He ruminated on, connecting this sudden, vivid pleasure of hers,
this mood of safety and surrender, with the deadening outcome they
now faced. His own fear had never left him since that night--that
one night, for it had had no sequel. Now he interpreted the event
fatalistically. Nature had waited for that happy mood of Ellen’s before
making her a mother. Nature was a subtle monster, a thing of scheming
purposes. She let you go on and on with impunity and then tripped you
when you weren’t thinking, when you felt particularly strong because
you had put up a long fight against her. She could even, in this awful
moment, make him thrill with the knowledge of having created life....

Potter had never had a confidant in the affair with Ellen. So far as he
knew the secret was her own and his, and had been from the beginning.
And it was something of a miracle, considering their narrow escapes
from detection.

But now that he needed support there was no one to turn to. Roget was
the last person in the world to whom he could take such a tale. He had
an idea that Roget would laugh him to scorn or question his taste in
becoming the victim of such an intimacy. Roget had been raised among
women and had acquired a knowledge of them that made his relations
toward them seem little short of uncanny to Potter. He gave the
impression of being successful with many and quite uninvolved with all.
To Potter women were the paralyzing mystery. It was one of the subjects
on which he and Roget did not meet.

Had there been an older man in town with whom he had developed any
sympathy, a faculty member or a person in authority of any kind, he
would have gone to him. There were many questions; there was money to
be got; there was common-sense guidance needed as to doctors and other
such matters, instinctively repugnant and dreadful to him.

Marriage! Sometimes in the dead of night, lying awake with his fears,
anticipating just this predicament, he had experienced exaltations,
mystic desires for sacrifice and immolation and simple, laborious
living; it was a surviving remnant of his intense religious life as
a very young boy. In such moments his mind had admitted the idea of
marriage. In broad day, the thought became abhorrent. And in all the
broad days that had preceded this one, his fears also had melted with
the sun; but now they would not melt.... He knew perfectly well that he
would urge marriage upon Ellen, sincerely in a fashion. He knew also
that she would flatly refuse, and that he would accept her refusal with
relief.

Yet what was she to do? He counted on no sympathy from the prudish
Meadowburns. They would loudly invoke the names of their young
daughters and fly from the scene. The family physician, Schottman,
a tolerant German-born physician of real ability, had taken an odd
sort of liking to Ellen and never visited the house without having a
talk with her wherever he happened to find her at work. He had been
their hope in earlier discussions. With him, there would be no danger,
while with others--Potter writhed before the spectres of horrible
little operating rooms, of death in agony, of murder and police and
squint-eyed judges with nose-glasses. But Ellen’s letter had settled
Schottman.

It was past noon before he realized it, and the golf links were
becoming populated by a few straggling faculty men with clubs. He
aimed for an outlying street which led into town and the act of motion
toward a definite objective revived his spirits, which had been sinking
hopelessly into the quicksand of despair. He went to the bank and drew
out all of his small balance but a dollar. The previous day his check
had come and he had paid his scot for October at the fraternity house.
It was rare that his remittances from home exceeded forty dollars a
month. He converted the larger part of the sum he withdrew into a
money order at the Post Office and mailed it to Ellen, with a short
note in which he told her he would see her somehow before long, and if
possible to do nothing until then.

“Money,” he thought, as he stepped out of the Post Office, “if one
just had enough money one could fix up anything!”--an idea that had
come to him before in many a tight place and morning after. He fell to
day-dreaming about what he would do for Ellen if he had money, money in
his hand, money in plenty.

The mailing of the letter had brought a sudden release to his feelings.
It would cheer her up to hear from him.

In this state he responded more willingly to passing acquaintances,
did not avoid the livery stable man and the candy man, and the dozen
other town bodies who were always about. Catastrophes, he reflected,
had their good points. They furnished a reason for cutting classes and
loafing on a beautiful Fall day. He was tempted for a moment to call on
Roget, who lived, as no one but he would have lived, on the native side
of Broadway, a short distance off. But he decided against it. He would
be pressed to talk about his trouble and that he had resolved not to do
except in the worst extremity, and certainly not to Roget.

The decision to avoid Emmet left him no alternative, and he drifted
into Steve Ball’s bar. Those dark, quiet, wet-smelling precincts were
deserted at that hour, so far as his familiars were concerned. He was
glad they were. It would not have been easy to conceal the turmoil
within him, if forced into an extended conversation. He would take a
drink or two, slowly, he concluded, go home and try to forget the whole
thing, and to-morrow with a hard head, he would work out a plan of
action.

Frank, the experienced bar man, wiped up the much scarred and
initialled table of the private room, and hovered in the doorway with a
friendly smile.

“This is the sort of companionship a fellow needs in my fix,” thought
Potter. “Nothing like it. A good barkeep.”

Frank, however, soon proved too busy to talk, and Potter was left to
his own thoughts. The effect which liquor usually had on him was to
produce three distinct stages. It plunged him first into a dreamy and
altogether pleasant condition, in which his lot appeared the rosiest
in the world, and he radiated good will on all sides. This led to
melancholy and a gradual feeling of boredom with everything, aggravated
by a tendency to analyze his wrongs and conduct long, unspoken
conversations about them with the persons presumed to be responsible
for wronging him. Then followed a feverish desire for physical motion,
and the making of quick decisions, obeyed on the instant, however
ill-advised.

The first state of high spirits brought him agreeably to six o’clock
when he left Steve Ball’s for fear of encountering early drinkers
from the Campus. He was hungry and bolted sandwiches and coffee in a
nameless lunch-wagon around the corner. He found himself after that
in the “Bucket of Blood.” Night had fallen; the place was unspeakably
sordid with its dim lamps and shuffling bums, and his problem once more
assumed proportions that harried him. He began to assail Ellen for ever
having permitted the intimacy to start. Then he quickly reacted from
that attack. A profound, overwhelming wave of self-abasement engulfed
him. If there was suffering to be done poor Ellen would endure all of
it. She had been his victim and had given him what she had to give, in
all things. Had their ages been precisely reversed, he could not have
been more responsible.

As he ordered another bottle of beer, he became acutely conscious that
his money was disappearing. There was no more to be had, certainly for
several days. Mails had to take their time, even if there was anything
to hope for from them. This sense of impecuniousness made his mind veer
to another complicated grievance. In one of the banks at home, held for
his use at majority, lay what now seemed an incredible sum of money,
from his grandmother’s estate. He had twice entreated his father to
allow him to draw modestly on it. His father had not refused in either
case, but had probed good-naturedly into his reasons for desiring it.
But why, thought the boy, should his father have to know his private
business? How could his father understand his peculiar needs? These
questions had rankled time and again.

And now, he reflected bitterly, now that the trust fund might be the
means of lightening a burden that would follow him all his life, it
would be the same old story with his father. He would have to make a
full confession of the case. But he could not do this. How could he
tell his father such a yarn? Weren’t his whole family concerned as much
as he? Was there not a question of blood relationship involving them?
Common delicacy and loyal feeling toward them demanded that he conceal
the truth, unless he took the burden upon himself and parted with them
completely. He had thought all this out before and settled it. There
was nothing he could say to his father.

These reflections, repeated over and over again, embroidered upon,
attacked at every angle, adorned with many duplications of the same
phrases, led nowhere. The bill at the “Bucket of Blood” had to be paid,
and nothing was left to do but to get up and go. Well, well, he felt
like moving anyhow. If only there were anything he could do now, right
now, it would be a relief. He started walking rapidly uptown toward the
fraternity house. Then at the corner where Broadway turned into his
own street he stopped abruptly.

“What a fool!” he muttered aloud. “What a triple-plated iron-head! Why
did I send that money to Ellen? Why didn’t I go myself?” He stopped and
began to curse his idiocy with all the eloquence and thoroughness of
which he was capable.

Then he reflected, again aloud: “But is it too late? The jerk-water
goes over to Jamestown in half an hour. I could make it to Jamestown.
But I haven’t enough money to go all the way. Well, I’ve got enough to
go to Jamestown.”

The thought of bluffing his way on the through train with a promise to
pay at the other end rushed into his mind. His name, his identification
by letters in his pocket, his father’s acquaintance with railroad
officials, these might carry him through. He turned and started toward
the station.

“If I can get home I can raise that money. I can raise it on a note. I
can get some Jew like Stern to shave the note. Or maybe I can get it
from Colonel Cobb. I’ll bet Colonel Cobb would let me have it.”

This line of reasoning had to be exhausted with the usual number of
variations and redundancies as he sat in the little branch train of
two cars, with its dusty, worn plush seats, its threadbare blue
trainmen ambling back and forth, and its scattering of anonymous,
unimportant-looking passengers. Fortunately nobody was leaving town
that he knew. That was to be expected six weeks after the opening of
term. For the first time, the thought struck him that he himself was
bolting, perhaps for several days, without the formality of an excuse
from the Dean, without even notifying the men at the house. Ordinarily
this would have been a serious infraction of the rules, punishable by
suspension.

“I can’t help it,” he thought, “I’ve _got_ to go. If they knew why I
guess they’d think so.”

This, however, upon reflection, sounded illogical and inadequate.
The danger of trouble with the authorities would not down so easily.
There’d be mystery in his disappearance, a search would be made for him
in the morning, and a wire probably sent to his folks. A moment later
he had the solution. How easy! He could fix that up by telephoning the
fraternity from Jamestown. It would cost him a quarter and he’d still
have more than a dollar left. He would get old Ed Taylor to see the
Dean to-morrow. Some lie would do. Ed could turn the Dean around his
finger. Maybe he could keep the whole thing from his father. He could,
if he slipped back to town on the next night’s train. If his father got
hold of it, he’d be puzzled, want to know things, and this was no time
to be submitted to questioning of any kind.

“At the same time,” he pursued, “I’d better not try the through train.
Fellows have been pinched for it. They might take me off the train at
Fayette, and then, oh, my God....”

A picture rose before him of a night in the county jail, of wiring home
for money to pay his fine, of his father coming to Fayette, of scandal
untold and unending, and no help to Ellen whatever. Rather the reverse,
because he would be in disgrace and his hands, therefore, completely
tied for some time to come.

“No, I can’t try the through train. Too big a chance. I wonder how
about the freight. Hell, plenty of other fellows have done that, with
no worse results than a swipe on the ear or a bawling out. Besides I’ve
got a little money. Brakies are all right.”

The wind at that moment coming through the leaky train was devilishly
sharp, and he had no overcoat, nothing but his fall-weight suit. It
would be still colder later, especially on an unprotected freight car
roof, which was the only place he could think of to ride.

“Can’t help it,” he concluded. “It’s got to be the freight. I can get
a half pint of rot gut at Jamestown. Keep me warm enough. It’s just a
nice little ride in the open air.”

An hour later, with his hat pulled down over his eyes, and his
bottle in his breast pocket, Potter stepped from the smoke-draped,
kerosene-smelling barroom of the little junction town. By buying
a round of beer for two loafers he had obtained the advice and
information he wanted. The freight train now resting on tracks just
back of those on which the through train was soon expected would pull
out for his destination about ten-thirty. He crept down perhaps a half
a dozen cars from the station and found himself practically in open
country. An overgrown fence lay twenty feet to the side of one of the
big, dirty-looking red cars. He sat down in the shadow of the fence to
wait, listening to the frogs in the dim, unwelcoming marshes behind him.

Once as he sat there a man ran along the top of the train from the
caboose far off at the end of the line of cars and came back. Once just
a little before the scheduled hour, he heard cinders being crunched
under foot in the direction of the engine. The flashing rays of a
lantern, swung from an invisible shoulder, played under the cars and
the figure carrying it passed by hurriedly on the other side. At every
coupling the lantern was swung up between the cars. Osprey knew now why
the roustabouts had told him to lie low and keep away from the train
while it was still.

“Wait ’til she gives her first jerk, then grab her and climb like yer
momma was after you.”

Whistles shrieked and soon a long, noisy shiver travelled down the
length of the cars. Potter jumped for the iron treads closest to him.
The train was moving off and he with it. Once on top of the car, he
laid full length, making himself as small as possible on the side of
the roof farthest from the station, until it should be passed. Beyond
the little town he breathed freely, took a comfortable seat on the flat
boardway in the centre with his legs dangling over the car’s end, and
gripped the rusty steel shaft of the brake.




V


At first he did not mind the bumping, nor the penetrating wind, nor
the coldness of the metal on his palms. The occasional showers of
cinders were annoying, and this grew worse as the train increased its
speed. Nevertheless, he was exhilarated; the motionless friendly stars
overhead, the sense of succeeding in a wild and unreasonable adventure
gave him courage and high spirits. He only had to stand it for a few
hours and a few hours of discomfort never had killed anybody.

Misgivings crept over him gradually. His seat was being severely
lambasted by the bumping. It seemed incredible, in a way, how it
kept up and the violence of it. The steel bar to which he held grew
increasingly cold, yet he realized that come what may he would have
to cling to it or stand a chance of falling. The wind became more
biting and between it and the bar his fingers were stiffening fast. The
cinders, stinging his face with only brief cessations, might soon be
unendurable.

However, he argued, he could bear all these for some time, and when
he couldn’t bear them any longer, he could do something else, shift
his position. He deliberately decided to stand his present one as long
as he could, then change and stand the next one as long as he could.
In that way each new position would be so much the greater relief. He
would see the night through. A long pull at the flask revived him.

“I’ll get my second wind pretty soon,” he thought, “and it won’t be so
bad. That flask was an inspiration.”

The night wore on and Potter resorted to first one expedient and
then another. He put his right side to the wind and then his left,
thus partly protecting his face from the cinders. He wrapped
handkerchiefs--fortunately he had two--around his hands. It was no
good trying to get a decent hold of his board seat. He didn’t feel
secure that way. These makeshifts did not help his sore buttocks, which
were being hammered to insensibility, nor keep off the cold which was
creeping over his whole body, but they lessened the number of his pains.

Finally he could endure sitting no longer. He laid down first on one
side, then on the other, on his belly, and even for a while on his
back. He threw his arms around the brake shaft and doubled his body
into a bouncing, shaken ball, in order to keep the cold out of his
vitals. At the moment when he thought he was beginning to see the end
of his endurance the train ambled benevolently to a stop. He breathed a
sigh of thanks and drank.

They were on a siding. As the train continued still, for five minutes,
for ten minutes, a fresh fear assailed him. He had forgotten about the
train crew. The fellow at Jamestown had told him to get off and hide
whenever the train stopped.

“You got to do that if yer ridin’ in sight,” he said. Indeed, had the
man been a professional tramp instead of a village lounger, he would
have scouted the whole idea of riding on top.

But by this time Potter was so stiff and sore in every muscle that he
feared being unable to climb back while the train was in motion. The
relief from the rushing wind and bumping and cinders was too much. It
was too sweet to sit there and recover some use of his limbs, to feel
the warm blood in him once more for a brief spell. If he could only
smoke or get up and walk about--but that would be dangerously courting
attention. He had gone this far, and he would finish it; there was no
sense in taking more chances than were necessary.

It was unearthly still. Not a living thing seemed to stir for miles
about, over the uninterrupted fields of stubble just visible in the
starlight. Even the frogs were silent. Against the sky far off he saw
the silhouette of a group of buildings and trees, but they seemed
like apparitions in a dream. On the train he was in a separate world,
cut off from the other, a lonely world consisting of himself and his
thoughts. The long, tapering string of dark cars ahead struck him like
a procession of elephants asleep. They were impersonal and cruel, but
alive; and presently would begin to sway and lumber frightfully through
the murk. With their stopping his life, it seemed, had stopped.

Time went on. They had been there on the siding for fifteen, perhaps
twenty minutes. Suddenly he was conscious of a low, blurred humming
which rose from the main tracks alongside, and a succession of whistle
blasts at a great distance broke the monotony. The buzz of the rails
grew louder and the whistles shrieked again. His tussle with discomfort
was about to begin once more, but he felt infinitely rested and
refreshed. He sat up straight and peered down the tracks for the sight
of a headlight.

“Hullo!”

The head and shoulders of a man appeared over the top of the car,
followed by a short, wiry body.

“What the hell’s this? How’d you get here?”

“I’ve got to get to Mississippi City, to-night. I’m from the University
up at Athens.”

“Don’t care where yer from. This here ain’t no place fer you.”

“Say, old man, you’re not goin’ to put me off now, are you?”

“H’m.” The man leaned over and inspected him familiarly.

“Yeh, you don’t look much like a bum. University up at Athens, eh?
I’ve heard some about you God damn loafers, raisin’ hell on trains. Why
the Christ can’t you ride in the cars where you belong?”

“Didn’t have the price.”

“No. An’ you think this railroad’s a charity institootion?”

“Say,” pleaded Potter, “honest, this is a life and death matter. It’d
be a dirty trick to put a fellow off. Le’ me go the rest of the way, go
on.”

The brakeman was obviously relenting. He gazed at Potter’s huddled,
unhappy looking figure while the passenger train, like a streak of
exploding lights on a whirling black band, shot deafeningly by.

“How far are we, anyway?” asked Potter. “Must be more than half way.”

The brakeman chuckled.

“We ain’t even a third of the way yet. Guess you’ve been plenty cold up
here.”

The first sentence fell heavily upon Potter’s spirits.

“Gee, seems longer’n that,” he said, as casually as he could manage.

“Got on at Jamestown, did you?”

“Yes.”

“You got any money?”

“A little,” said Potter eagerly. “I’ll give you all I’ve got.”

He thrust his hand into his pocket and drew it forth with a collection
of small change.

“There,” he said, counting it over. “It’s seventy-five cents.”

The brakeman took it.

“That all you got, honest to God?”

“Every cent. I can get more at Mississippi City, though. You going to
be there a few hours?”

“Huh,” replied the other, “guess you’ll need breakfast by the time you
get in. Ain’t much used to this kind o’ business, eh? Well, here’s
coffee money.” He handed back a dime.

“Have a drink, old man?” asked Potter, almost jovially, pulling out his
bottle with a distinct feeling of pride.

“Sure.”

The man took a long pull at the depleted flask and returned it almost
empty.

“Ach,” he grunted appreciatively. “That’s red eye! Bet you were drunk,
boy, an’ thought ridin’ free was a picnic. Well, better come out o’
this and hustle up the track. They’s an empty box car about halfway up.
You’ll see it ’cause one door’s open. An’ you’re God damn lucky, son.
You’d just naturally a froze a lung off up here an’ maybe fell off an’
got winged. Shake a leg. Just time to make it. An’ hop off well outside
the yards when we get to town in the mornin’. Understand? If you don’t
you may see the judge.”

Before he had finished speaking Potter was stumbling frantically
along the cinder track-side. In one end of the empty car was a little
dirty straw and excelsior. Two minutes later he was asleep, jolting
happily along the streets of paradise in a royal coach. An old man in
a brakeman’s cap whom he took to be the king of the country sat beside
him....

A sudden, wrenching jolt and the screaming of brakes woke him. Daylight
filled the car, and in a moment he was out on his feet, recognizing
the familiar outskirts of his native city. He plunged into the park,
striding vigorously along over new-fallen crisp leaves, warming his
body, which had been chilled through during his sleep, even in that
protected corner. The woods were gay with the last of the autumn
colour; the morning was dewy and mysterious under long corridors of
trees. His day’s job seemed easy before him, such as it was, and beyond
that he was too happy and thankful to speculate. Quite a trip, he
thought, thoroughly surprised that he had attempted it and come through
all right.

“If I hadn’t got potty, I wouldn’t be here,” he told himself,
justifying thereby volumes of alcoholic adventures past and to come.

He looked down at his hands, his trousers, his shirt. He was filthy.
It would never do to appear before Colonel Cobb with the grime of a
hundred and forty miles of rough travel clinging to him. But this was
the home town, good old home town! and he could get breakfast, new
linen and a good wash without the outlay of a cent. He took the car
downtown and went first to a store, then to a hotel. By ten o’clock he
was breakfasting sumptuously and appeared fairly respectable.

Heretofore, Colonel Cobb had seemed in Potter’s mind a sort of complete
symbol of good fellowship. The all-weather friend of his father for
thirty years, Potter had heard everything there was to know about him
that could with discretion be told. He was the old-fashioned type of
publicity man, doing business largely through the medium of champagne
and dinners. Open-handedness and good nature were traits which a half
century of tradition had associated with his name.

A much older man than Potter’s father, Cobb wore a beard which was
nearly white, but he was one of those veterans to whom a beard imparted
an air of boldness and adventure rather than of piety or age. His
costume was youngish, smart-looking, but deeply wrinkled by lounging
ease. He greeted the young man cordially in his somewhat unpretentious
and disorderly office and indicated an upholstered arm chair to him.
Potter sank into it and the old man leaned back in his own to survey
him.

“Well,” he said, “Johnny’s boys are growing up. Let’s see, are you the
second or the third?”

“Third, Colonel.”

“I know your brother Kirk better’n I do the rest of you. I see a good
deal of him up at the Mercantile Club. Kirk’s a good boy and looks to
me like he’s goin’ to make his Dad proud. You ain’t old enough to drink
whiskey, are you? I guess not this time of the morning, anyway. Well,
have a cigar.”

He thrust out a spacious box.

“Colonel,” said Potter, “you may be surprised at what I’m here for. I’m
in a kind of a fix, a bad fix, to tell the truth, and I need money.
I’ve got twenty-eight hundred in the National Trust but I can’t draw
on it for two years, without my father’s consent. I want to get two
hundred and fifty dollars on a note for that length of time.”

As he mentioned the amount it seemed so enormous to Potter that he felt
a little absurd. He had never handled more than fifty dollars at a time
in his life.

“I see. H’m.”

The older man was smoking a well-used meerschaum and took a few puffs
on it in silence, looking at Potter quickly once or twice with a more
penetrating and appraising glance than at first. The latter noticed, in
spite of the Colonel’s genial expression, that his eyes, in reflection,
became a very cold and impersonal grey.

“H’m, that’s bad,” said the Colonel. “You see, your pa and me are
old pals. Now, why don’t you go over and tell him what the trouble
is? There’s nothin’ in the world you could tell John Osprey that he
wouldn’t understand. There ain’t a thing, son.”

“I think there is, Colonel,” said Potter gravely.

“Some girl trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Now, I’d say you’re wrong. I’d say he’d be just the kind of man to
take that kind of a story to. Your old man has got nothing to learn
about human nature, son.”

Potter felt the moment had come for fuller confidence if he hoped to
succeed. He had anticipated this objection and intended to combat it by
laying stress on his own reasons for not wishing to tell his father.
These he felt would make a good impression upon any man. He launched
into the broad outlines of his story. Colonel Cobb listened with
seriousness and attention until he had finished. When Potter mentioned
the manner in which he had come to town that morning his eye lighted up
with a spark of the warmth that had marked his first reception.

“H’m,” he chuckled. “I like that. Yep, I used to hop those blamed
things myself. Then they got me to workin’ for ’em, and since then I’ve
had to ride in style--but I don’t enjoy it as much.”

He ruminated on in silence, puffing at the pipe held in one hand
and combing his beard downward with the other, at every stroke or so
stopping to scratch the tip of his thrust out chin, and drawing down
his lower lip somewhat in the manner of a bitted horse. Potter noticed
the long, blackened roots of his teeth, his puffy, reddish skin, and
the tiny network of blood vessels and wrinkles that crisscrossed his
cheeks around the eyes and nose. He felt a sudden disgust for life,
for the rotten universe and for his own silly predicament. He grew
restless, wishing for a decision one way or the other, scarcely caring
which it should be.

“You’re at college, you said?” asked the Colonel.

“Yes, State University. Two years.”

“How are you doin’ up there in your studies?”

“Well, a little better than the average, Colonel, right along,” said
Potter, smiling. It was somewhat less than the truth, yet he regretted
the words immediately, as a boast. But the Colonel did not mind.

“That’s good,” he said, heartily.

He lurched forward in his big leather swivel chair and laid down his
pipe.

“The way I figure it out is this,” he said. “If you know that there’s
two of us to get into trouble over this money, instead of one, you
maybe will be more careful not to do the wrong thing with it, so it
will get out. As for what’s the wrong thing I leave that to you. I’m
goin’ to take a chance on John Osprey’s skinnin’ me alive if he hears
about this transaction, and I guess there ain’t much likelihood of his
hearin’ about it from you or me, is there?”

He ponderously drew out a long black check-book, inked the pen and
looked at it, inked it again and wrote. Potter received the slip of
paper with its figures written in a big, round buccaneer’s Spencerian.
His fingers trembled in spite of himself.

“But, Colonel,” he began, suddenly feeling a sense of guilt.

“I don’t want a note,” interrupted Cobb, lifting his rotund body by the
arms of his chair. “The check’s enough. If you don’t pay me, I’ll send
it around to you some day, when you’re rich, and you can light your
cigar with it or pay, just the way you please. It’s made out to cash,
so’s you won’t have any trouble gettin’ the money, but you just write
your name along the back when you get to the bank. Good luck, son.”

With the money actually in his pocket, Potter’s despondency abruptly
returned. After all, what had he accomplished? The money was useless so
far as restoring Ellen to her normal self was concerned. Much more--a
simply unrealizable sum--would be needed to enable her to go away in
peace and have her child with dignity and comfort. At best, this would
only pay the price of a crime....

He found her in much the same mood as his own, tired and resigned.
She did not complain or accuse any one at all. But she seemed aching
with dull resentment at the inevitable, friendless future, hating
it and fearing it. She told him directly that she was not to have
an operation. Dr. Schottman had warned that in her case it meant an
exceptional risk. Her health was not good and having the baby would put
her in fine shape.... Potter felt the sting of a lash in every word she
uttered. He burst out at last.

“Ellen, you must marry me. You must. There’s no other way out.”

She did not laugh at him, but she simply refused to heed him. If she
had consented he would have felt in that moment infinitely happier;
and for even a ray of light in his present darkness, he would have
abandoned a great many of the future’s promises.

“But what will you do?”

“Dr. Schottman has arranged everything for me. He’s to take me to a
hospital in a few weeks. I could wait a month or two longer, I suppose,
without their knowing it, but I might as well go. At the hospital I’ll
have to work, until my time. Then he’s fixed it with some people for me
to stay. They won’t mind anything. He’s told them all about me. They’re
patients of his, nice people and well off. The Meadowburns will never
know anything, they’ll never see me again. Not even the doctor knows
about you and nobody will if you keep still. I’m just to walk out and
disappear.”

Potter stumbled down the stairway of the pretentious new Meadowburn
house in a daze of misery and meanness. Nightfall found him lying face
downward in the dried leaves of the park where the woods were thickest.
He might have built his house there and never have been discovered for
a generation. He might have become like “Clothes-pole Tom,” a hermit
hero of his childhood, and sold gopher skins for a living. Some such
method of losing himself would have been sweet....

But youth walks forward even though it harbours corroding secrets.
He could not escape the vision of Ellen in a hospital uniform, worn
and broken-spirited, carrying heavy buckets of dirty water and
swabbing down floors with a mop. He went back to college, lifeless
and desperate, whipping himself into work with torturing thoughts. By
January even his family saw something was wrong, and his father, who
saw farthest, told him to make his own plans, to leave school and go
where he liked. After a week of dismal idleness at home there followed
a telegraphic correspondence with Roget. The two started off together
to New York. Three years later, crossing the Atlantic to Paris, Osprey
still had not returned to his native city, and he repeated his oath
never to go back there again if it could be avoided.




VI


What Ellen Sydney had expected to be her trial by fire proved quite
the opposite. It was the beginning of a new and kinder life. For
if she had been unhappy at the Meadowburns’ it was because of a
deep-seated difference between her own native impulses and those of her
keepers. Long habit in a narrow rut, listening daily to a cautious and
inglorious philosophy, had fostered in her the belief that the great
world outside was monstrous and cruel; but she did not find it so. On
the contrary, there were many to appreciate her cheerful courage and
ready laugh, and return it with affection. Life at the hospital was
novel and filled with congenial activity. Behind its unmoral walls
was an anonymous and practical community in which her shame quickly
melted from her daily thoughts. After the first few days of strangeness
and mutual curiosity she saw that none cared how she had come by
her situation. Nor were her duties burdensome; without the normal
occupation they gave her she would have been ill at ease.

The picture of a drab and bitter Ellen, clattering about a sordid
environment with pail and mop--which gave Potter so many secret twinges
in his New York room--never came true.

She interested herself in the patients, most of whom she discovered
to her surprise were even less able to cope with misfortune than she;
the small purse which Dr. Schottman allowed her from the funds Potter
had given her was always half open. The many varieties of mothers,
and the innumerable enchanting babies fascinated her; but no more so
than the coming of her own. As the weeks went by her condition, the
manifestations of life within her, gave her increasing importance. It
made her for the first time interesting to herself. She thought that
she grew more attractive. Her body, long attenuated, took on softer
contours under the wholesome diet and freedom from responsibility; her
breasts were her particular pride. They changed magically; from stubby
protrusions without any character at all, they grew round and firm as
they had not been since girlhood.

Then there were the visits of Dr. Schottman. His humorous sallies
dispelled in a moment the few worries that came with the long days of
waiting. He brought scant news of the Meadowburns, not seeming to care
to talk of them. They had been very eager to find her at first, had
made a great stir and called upon the police. Then, as suddenly as they
took up the search, they had dropped it.

“Ah, they didn’t care much, you may be sure,” laughed Ellen. It was far
from displeasing to her to know that she need not depend upon them.
But immediately she remembered that it was the doctor to whom she owed
her present good fortune, not herself; and she felt remorseful.

To Schottman, the hospital seemed to be something of a continuous
comedy, and all these mothers, many of them abandoned, caught
unwillingly in the grip of natural force, were the victims of a mild
practical joke. How much of this was a pose which he found useful in
dealing with them, and how much of it a mask to hide a disillusioning
experience nobody knew, but it never gave offence. His homely grin and
bracing philosophy made him a favourite everywhere.

When she held her child in her arms for the first time a momentary
grief oppressed her that it should be fatherless. But the child grew
far more pleasing to look at than she had hoped it would be. Its dark
hair and unexpected blue eyes made it look unlike either herself or
Potter at first. Then a vague resemblance asserted itself, and more
strongly on the mother’s side. This seemed right to Ellen. The less her
daughter resembled the father she was never to see, the better.

Before long she was allowed to take it out in the perambulator
Schottman had bought for her. The hospital was located in a bleak,
northern section of town, a region long associated in Ellen’s mind
with the foreign population, principally German, and much sniffed at
by people of the West End where she had lived. She remembered how
depressing that day had been when they first drove to the hospital,
through wintry streets between endless rows of low-roofed, packed-in
brick houses and frame cottages. They had a humbler and more domestic
air than she was used to, and gave forth odors of strong cookery, stale
lager and of musty parlours seldom opened to the air. But the four
months of hospital life in their midst had accustomed her to these
exotic touches, and when the people began to overflow into the streets
at the first hint of warm weather and to take a kindly interest in her
child, she felt drawn to them. It amused her to have them think, as
they sometimes did, that she was the nurse or governess.

It was a mistake, perhaps natural, that Dr. Schottman at least viewed
with satisfaction. The little girl’s charm would serve his purpose
with the Blaydons to whom he was taking them. He had never entertained
any doubt that Ellen would win them in her own way. Her willingness
and modesty, a form of rough good breeding, would recommend her well.
But if the child should be really attractive, so much the better for
everybody.

“Come now,” he teased Ellen, “this little chick has a high tone about
her. What you think? Better let me hunt up the young scapegrace and
show him what a handsome little rascal he’s responsible for.”

“How do you know he’s young?” laughed Ellen. He had never pressed the
question of fatherhood, and she was not afraid that he would ever try
to.

“And what will you name it? For it’s mother, eh?”

Ellen had settled that matter. She had decided long before on the name
of Moira, for Moira McCoy, the pretty, laughing, assistant head nurse,
who had been the first to befriend her. But concerning this she also
chose to keep her counsel for the present. Another thing troubled her
mightily.

“Are these--these people I’m going to live with Episcopalians?”

He laughed.

“I believe there’s a division in the family. Ach, these Christian
distinctions! They split God up into small pieces like a pie, and
each one takes a different slice. They are afraid to get indigestion
from too much goodness, eh? But ‘Aunt Mathilda’--that is the
sister-in-law--is Episcopalian. High church they call it. Oh, very
high! It will suit you that way, I guess. And she is the boss. You’ll
find that out.”

High church. That would do very well. It was the serious question of
her daughter’s christening that disturbed her.

The day came at last to take their fearsome step into a new home. Ellen
wept a little over her farewells, but on such a lovely morning she
could not be sad very long. She felt so good, so well, and in the new
clothes she had bought for this event she radiated unaccustomed health.

“Look at you,” said the doctor. “I told you it would be good medicine.
If your old friends could see you they wouldn’t know it was the same
Ellen.”

She blushed. She had never expected to leave the hospital so merry. In
a few moments they were driving along in a new-fangled thing called
a taxicab, and she had to hold the baby carefully to keep it from
bumping. It was the first time she had ever ridden in an automobile,
but her thoughts were too far ahead to concern themselves with the
novelty. A year ago it would have been a great adventure.

First of all she reflected:

“When Moira is grown up she will love me, and we will do so many nice
things together.” Then she thought, “Who knows, Moira may have a father
some day, and never be the wiser.”

The doctor had decided that she was to be known as Mrs. Williams at the
Blaydons’. “Aunt Mathilda” herself had suggested this, and Ellen was
willing enough to consent. But she accepted with greater reluctance his
proposal of a gold band for her finger. The idea smacked of a deception
that was too bold by far, a deception that involved higher powers than
those of earthly authority, in her mind. She felt almost a criminal
whenever she looked at it.

The rattling vehicle swung through an impressive high gate and they
were looking down between a row of trees. To their left, running
straight through the middle of the thoroughfare lay a grass grown
parkway so dotted with shrubs that she got only fleeting glimpses
of the houses on the other side. Those on her own side she gazed at
with wonder. They were set far apart, with generous lawns, and the
suggestion of gardens farther back behind walls and iron grill work.
The big houses revealed their age, not only by their old-fashioned and
heterogeneous architecture, but by the smoke-grimed look of their brick
and stone.

“How lovely and peaceful,” thought Ellen, fascinated at the fresh sight
of green everywhere spotted and patched with sunlight. She seemed to
have been wearing dark glasses for months and months.... She noticed
that the driver was slowing down his vehicle and was craning his neck
for the house numbers.

“My land,” she murmured, “we’re going to live here.... Look, Moira,
look!” she could not help but cry aloud--and then flushed pink when she
saw the doctor had heard the name.

This was Trezevant Place, its fame already beginning to dwindle, so
that Ellen, acquainted only with the new city, had heard of it but once
or twice. For two generations the patrician families had housed there,
and a few of the original owners had remained, standing on their
dignity, defying the relentless town, which had long sprawled up to it,
and around it and far beyond, unsightly, clamorous and vulgar. The snob
that is in everybody claimed Ellen at that moment and she longed for an
audience of Meadowburns and Potters to watch them disembark.

The cab came to an abrupt stop before the bronze figure of a barefooted
negro boy holding out an iron ring in one chubby paw. Ellen faced a
front door of many bevelled panes of glass which reflected the bright
sky into her eyes. Her knees failed her, but with a free hand she
grasped the doctor’s sleeve, finding in the act reassurance enough to
mount the steps between the red stone pillars. A maid appeared in the
doorway.

“Oh, it’s you, doctor,” she said, beaming at them from under her neat
white cap. “Mrs. Seymour is waiting in the library. Go right in,
please.”

Ellen found herself in a room filled with book-shelves, and mahogany,
and leather-covered chairs, facing a small lady who did not leave her
straight, uncomfortable seat. The greying hair was done up in a knot on
the top of her head and behind it was a dark spreading comb. She wore a
light blue silk frock with a white collar of lace that folded back over
her shoulders and left her neck bare. It was old-fashioned looking,
Ellen thought, yet “nice” as she would have put it, meaning smart, and
she noticed that the woman’s throat was smooth and plump. Her graceful
ankles showed, crossed, above a pair of little grey slippers with very
high heels. What a little doll of a person! she thought.

“Good morning, doctor,” said the lady, shaking hands with Schottman,
while Ellen stood in the door. Then she turned to her.

“Sit down, Mrs. Williams. You mustn’t feel strange here, because I
am sure we are going to like each other. The doctor has told me nice
things about you.”

Ellen thought no more of dolls. The assured voice, and what she could
only describe as the foreign way “Aunt Mathilda” pronounced her words,
awed her. She did not know that this was what people called cultivated.
She obeyed the injunction to sit down, her eyes glued trustfully but
timidly upon her new mistress.

“I’m not going to keep you long this morning, because for the next day
or two you will have little to do and will be getting accustomed to the
place. You can take care of the child yourself?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” said Ellen, and smiled. “I’ve taken care of many more
than this one, and done the work besides.”

“I see. That’s splendid. Well, you will have plenty of time for her. It
can be managed very well. Gina is fond of children and will look after
the baby when you are busy, and then there is my nephews’ nurse, Mrs.
Stone. Gina is my personal maid. The other servants are Marie, who is
the parlour maid and waitress, John, the gardener and stable man, and
the laundress Annie, who lives out. So the work is pretty well divided.
And then there is Miss Wells, the trained nurse for Mrs. Blaydon. The
doctor may have told you that Mrs. Blaydon never leaves her room.”

Ellen lost track of this catalogue of servants, yet she felt a
happy sense of importance in listening to these matter-of-fact and
self-respecting details. It was as though she were being taken into the
confidence of the household. She tried to attend Mrs. Seymour’s every
word with seriousness, and felt her embarrassment dropping away from
her.

“Dr. Schottman tells me that you have been the only help in the family.
I suppose you have done only plain cooking?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, you will have no trouble learning our likes and dislikes, and
the way things must be served. Miss Wells will prepare most of Mrs.
Blaydon’s meals, which are separate. The present cook is to stay until
the end of the month, and that will give you plenty of time to catch
on. And you mustn’t be afraid. We expect to make allowances. Of course,
your wages will begin at once, but I can’t tell just what they should
be until we try you, so we won’t discuss that to-day.”

“Oh, not at all, ma’am--” began Ellen, and stopped suddenly. “Aunt
Mathilda” covered her embarrassment by rising, and Ellen stood also,
with her child in her arms. The act brought them close enough together
for Mrs. Seymour to see the baby’s face.

“What a sweet little thing,” she said, and smiled cordially at Ellen.
“I hope you are going to be happy here, Mrs. Williams. Marie will show
you your room and give you everything you need. Don’t bother about your
bags. John can take them up at once.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Ellen. She stood hesitating, after saying a
halting, awkward good-bye to the doctor. It was not easy to leave his
friendly presence and impossible to thank him as she wanted to. But she
turned and in the wake of Marie climbed the broad front steps.

Their carved, heavy banisters and the thick rugs rebuked her. It was as
though she realized that in this well-ordered house it would be rarely
indeed that she would tread them. Here she was more definitely placed
than she would ever have been at the Meadowburns’.

As they passed the second story landing two very small, cleanly dressed
boys came out of a big bedroom, with a matronly hospital nurse between
them.




VII


Ellen spent her days learning more about the quaint art of cookery than
she ever dreamed there was to know, and discovering the ways of rich
people which were strange indeed.

One of the first things that impressed her was the unvarying quiet.
Never was a voice raised that could be heard beyond the room in which
it was spoken, and this applied even to the young masters, who, if they
ever made a regular boy-racket, must have done so behind the closed
doors of the nursery. Compared to the shouting up and down stairs,
the banging of pianos and doors, the general uproar of the Meadowburn
household, this was like living in a church. The stately high ceilings
and big stained glass windows intensified the illusion.

And the armies of tradesmen who came! She had been accustomed to
dealing with one butcher, one grocer, one baker. Here there were
dozens who handled a farrago of specialties. There were three or four
different dessert-makers, a pork butcher, a beef butcher, a poultry
butcher, and a fish monger of high degree; there were a plain grocer,
a grocer-importer, a wine-dealer, a liquor agent, coffee merchants and
tea merchants, purveyors of spices and sweet-meats, apothecaries and
fruiterers, dealers in milk, eggs and butter, and a score of others
whose business did not happen to be with Ellen. All day they came and
went. She had thought that supplying a kitchen was a matter of taking
in a certain fixed number of staples and making the most of them. But
here she found herself in the midst of an immense variety of esoteric
materials whose names suggested the index of a geography. The kitchen
with its vast conveniences for housing all these things in their
appointed places was not unlike a large shop itself.

Formal dinner parties there were, but they were rare during those days,
because of the sick woman in the house. And it was well they were!
thought she, judging by the lavishness of those she helped to prepare.
Mrs. Seymour, however, gave many luncheons to her friends, and for
these Ellen delighted to outdo herself, since Aunt Mathilda was not
ungenerous with compliments when they were deserved.

These refinements of luxury affected her unconsciously. She was soon
trying to acquire the atmosphere of the house, to train her manners
after her mistress, to soften her voice and even to alter the accent
of her speech, which had always, though she knew it not, been more
agreeable than the average.

This instinct of imitation led her to listen, whenever she could, to
the conversations of Blaydon and his sister. She understood very little
of what they said that did not concern the surface news of the family.
Often they talked of books, and books were a strange world to Ellen.
But one day the thought struck her that Moira, living her childhood
in such a house would certainly acquire some of its cultivation, even
though no one deliberately undertook to teach her.

But would Moira’s mother be worthy of such a companion? Ought she
not to make an effort to improve her mind, so that Moira would be a
little less ashamed of her in that rosy time ahead when they would
understand each other? To Ellen the difficulties of reading were almost
insurmountable. Nothing terrified her so much as twenty pages of print.
However, once the thought of her unworthiness in Moira’s eyes occurred
to her, she did not hesitate a moment. From one of the upstairs
book-cases she selected the largest volume she could find. It proved to
be “Les Misérables,” and there was something she liked about the title.
That night she began bravely to read.

Hard as it was to make headway in it, she had chosen the only amusement
possible to her. When she was not busy in the kitchen, mastering the
problems of the stove and the mixing bowl, she sat beside her daughter.
There was no chance to think of more exciting pleasures, for which,
often enough, the youth in her still yearned. Yet these duties were
only confining, never exhausting. From the sheer drudgery of hard
manual labour, to which she once thought herself condemned until she
dropped, a miracle had suddenly delivered her. And that miracle was a
little child, unlawfully born. Life held many mysteries for Ellen, but
none of them was as incomprehensible as this.

The first inkling that they were ever likely to move from the Trezevant
place came to her through one of those overheard talks between
Sterling Blaydon and his sister. They were sitting one morning in the
brick-walled garden just off the rear drawing room, a lovely place, as
Ellen knew, to dream and idle in, if it was deserted and she could have
Moira tumbling about on the rugs at her feet. There were rows of green
boxed plants along the top of the high walls, a striped awning and the
clear sky spread between, like another mysterious ceiling farther away.
There was comfort and security and the sense of distance too. It was
like many other of the civilized refinements which Ellen discovered at
the Blaydons’, suggestive of an almost incredible degree of foresight,
of attention to the details of luxury, which the fortunate of the world
had been developing illimitably since the first man was carried on the
backs of other men. Mr. Blaydon and his sister often breakfasted in
this inner garden on fine mornings, and Ellen sometimes served them
herself in the absence of Marie.

She believed Sterling Blaydon the most romantic personage she had ever
seen. His hair was almost white, but he was young in body and in years.
His lean, brown face, which she thought had a tired expression when in
repose or when he was reading, lighted up marvellously when he smiled.
His tall, solid form would have made two of Aunt Mathilda’s. Ellen
loved to peep through the butler’s pantry doors and see him decant the
special brandy for his friends after dinner, languid and big-handed and
jovial through the smoky fog.

This morning while he sat in the garden in the softest of grey tweeds,
with his outstretched legs crossed and resting upon the tiles, she
heard his drawling voice as she placed the coffee service fastidiously
on the big silver tray in the pantry. Ellen liked to fondle the Blaydon
china and silver. It was spoiling her; she would never want to touch
anything less valuable.

“I dare say it sounds like blasphemy to you,” Mr. Blaydon was saying,
“but I’m sick of this place after all. I used to think I never should
be.”

“It’s partly Jennie’s long illness. Poor boy, you’ve had a good deal to
contend with.”

“I? Nonsense! But I ought to get her away from here. She could pull
together faster in the country. That is to say, if she ever has
strength enough to be moved. And there are the boys. I’m beginning to
think this is no locality for them to grow up in. If I toss a pebble
over the wall there it will land square in the melting pot--perhaps on
some anarchist’s head who will throw a bomb at me one of these days.”

“It’s extraordinary how well Trezevant has held its own. There seems to
be a spirit in the place that won’t allow it to be tainted.”

“Tainted enough by coal smoke!” he retorted. “Spirits won’t stop that.
I’d really like to get out, way out. Not just to follow the crowd, as
they say, but we’ve never had a satisfactory country place, and I’ve
come to think you can’t unless you make it a life accomplishment.”

“A life is hardly enough, my dear brother,” replied Mrs. Seymour.
“Trezevant is the accomplishment of three generations.”

“Bah!” he replied, good-humouredly, “we’re not the slow coaches we used
to be. You can get twice as much done these days in a third of the
time.”

“Well, at any rate, it’s unpractical now,” she replied, and he
recognized the finality of her tone.

Blaydon smoked his cigar in silence, while she finished her second
black coffee and leaned back in her chair swinging a tiny foot of
which she was proud. In the shimmering, palpable light, shot with many
colours, Mathilda’s face and hair were still amazingly pretty. There
were many who would have accepted the kind of slavery that marriage
with her would have entailed, and some among them who had no need for
her money. But she was not thinking of that. The arts of vanity had
ceased to be a conscious lure; they were the essentials of well-bred
self-cultivation. She had accepted her widowhood as the final failure
of man, so far as she was concerned. It had been a romantic love
match, ecstatic but unhappy, the kind that she fancied exhausted the
capacity for passion; and now her thoughts ran upon the future of her
brother’s household. For if Blaydon entertained any illusions about the
possibility of his wife’s recovery, Mathilda did not.

She had long held certain opinions regarding Jennie, which were not
shared by the outside world. One of them was that her brother had
never loved her, that he had found this out almost immediately after
marrying, and determined to live the thing through because of his
old-fashioned loyalty. Mathilda had quite certain knowledge that in the
midst of the honeymoon he had rushed away and stayed several days. She
knew it had been his hour of terrible trial, his angry realization of
having made the first major mistake of his life, and made it in full
maturity. His sister was proud of him for remaining a tree of marriage
in a clearing of divorce stumps--for such their social world was
rapidly becoming.

But her theory was that Jennie had never forgiven him, never in a
sense recovered from it. She had welcomed her children in order the
more to seal up the truth from others; but she had borne them late,
and the birth of the second son, Robert, had doomed her to physical
helplessness.

This theory explained to Mathilda every peculiarity of Mrs. Blaydon’s
character, every inexplicable episode which had occurred in the
house since she had joined them. Jennie had never liked her; perhaps
suspected that she knew her secret. Part of Jennie’s satisfaction
in having the children was that they would help her to dominate her
sister-in-law and the household, in the rôle of mother. As adversaries
they had a healthy respect for each other. But Jennie’s sustained
firmness of will was less effective than Mathilda’s, because it was
less charming and less hidden. Luck was simply against Jennie. It was
Mathilda who would win and then (though Blaydon did not know she had
thought much about it) they would go to the country. Naturally this
would be their first move. It was inevitable because it was the thing
that people of their sort were doing, and because automobiles had made
it feasible.

As though she felt that she might hint some of this that was in her
mind, she broke the silence.

“Speaking of the country, I’ve had my eye for a long time on those
tracts in the Errant River hills, where the McNutts have bought.”

Sterling Blaydon slowly took his cigar from his mouth and smiled.
Like all men of means he liked to have opportunities to display his
foresight presented to him without going out of his way to invite them.

“Well then, you’ve had your eye on what will in all probability be
your future home. I’ve been picking up that land right along. I’ve got
about three hundred acres of it. Moreover, though the Country Club site
committee hasn’t decided officially yet, I know for a fact they are
going to take the contiguous property. It’s cheap enough just now, and
the club isn’t lavish.”

He was fully satisfied with the glance of admiration Mathilda gave him.

“Why, Sterling,” she said, “how long have you been at that?”

“Since a little while after Hal was born. I got to thinking then this
wouldn’t do.”

“Well, it never occurred to me until this year.”

He rose, stretching to his full height to shake the indolence from his
body.

“I’ve even got an architect to work. But I dare say you’re right and
we can’t think about it yet. I certainly can’t drag Jennie through a
radical change like that, and I haven’t even told her for fear it would
fret her. But the moment she’s better--You don’t say whether you would
really like it or not, Mathilda.”

“Certainly I shall like it, dear boy.”

He went off humming to his wife’s room, before going out. He was,
Mathilda thought, more attentive to her than many an enamoured husband,
and she admired him for it.

The idea of moving to the country at first frightened Ellen, with that
pitiful fear which all dependents have of impending change. What will
become of them, they ask themselves, in the general forgetfulness?--and
a hundred misgivings and imagined instances of dissatisfaction on the
part of their masters throng their minds.

But had she felt secure it would have pleased her. The old house was
too formal, too heavy with the fragrances and lingering stiffness of
a past day. She could never quite grow to like the eternal quiet.
A hearty clattering now and then would have relieved her pent-up
vitality. She would have liked, just once in a long, long while to
listen to one of Tom Meadowburn’s stories, or hear Bennet shouting in
the back yard.




VIII


But Mrs. Blaydon grew neither better nor worse and they remained at
Trezevant Place. And when Moira was a year and a half old a fresh
sorrow visited her mother. So rapid and unforeseen were the steps by
which it came that Ellen scarcely realized what was happening.

To her, indeed, the child seemed to acquire new marvels of goodness and
beauty every day, but she imagined it was only her mother’s pride that
made her think so. She was not the sort who would boast of the deeds of
her offspring.

Then she grew aware that others shared her interest. More and more, in
particular, she found the child, when she came to look for her, in the
company of Aunt Mathilda, even in that lady’s arms, most happily at
home and warmly welcome.

“It is going to be very improving for Moira,” was her thought, and she
realized with a pang that she had been reading Hugo’s book for more
than a year now, and was not yet halfway through it.

Mrs. Seymour’s brother was among those who noticed her partiality for
the baby.

“Look,” she said to him one day, with enthusiasm, holding out one of
the child’s tiny pink hands, “how remarkably made they are. She’s the
same all over. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a perfect baby.”

Blaydon laughed, thereby eliciting a brilliant response in kind from
Moira. The vibrations of his big voice had tickled her young flesh.

“Well, Mathilda, the broadest road to your heart is still a pair of
hands. I remember your telling me that poor old Ned first got you with
his.”

“Hands and feet,” she replied. “I don’t mind anything else but they
ought to be beautiful.”

A few days afterward he came upon her in the garden, again with Ellen’s
daughter.

“Que voulez-vous,” she was saying, “que voulez-vous, ma p’tite?
Voulez-vous maman?”

The soft syllables seemed to please Moira’s ears, for she was
mirthfully bubbling things that sounded not unlike them. As Blaydon
stepped out he thought his sister a little apologetic, but she did not
put down the child.

“The little thing wandered out here while I was reading,” she said.
“She quite seems to follow me about.”

“You don’t find it annoying?” he asked.

Her reply served notice upon him that she had caught his note of irony.

“Oh, no.... I’m not such a busy woman as all that.”

He glanced at the book she had been reading. It lay flung face
downward with both backs spread out on the table, “Le Crime de
Sylvestre Bonnard.” Blaydon recalled the story and somehow connected it
in his mind with his sister’s essential solitude--her dependence upon
his own family for affection.

“I suppose,” he pursued, the thought forming suddenly from nowhere,
“that you are going to adopt her?”

Mathilda looked up sharply. She pretended to detect in his words more
of approval than of inquiry and replied as though he had offered a
suggestion.

“You’re not serious, Sterling?”

Blaydon’s intuition surprised him. He had struck fire, where hardly
more than a joke had been intended.

“Why not?” he asked, with a good-natured shrug.

“It seems cruel, somehow,” she replied. Her tone was as detached as
though she had said, “it seems too green,” of a dress-cloth.

“I can’t quite see that. Mothers are proverbially unselfish--”

“She would have to be brought up with your boys, Sterling. Have you
thought of that?”

He had not thought of that and there was more to Mathilda’s remark than
banter. As if to influence his reply, the youngest boy, Robert, three
and a half, scampered past them and climbed upon a favourite seat,
between two clipped boxwood trees, chattering to himself and grinning
across at his father as if to say, “I dare you to come and get me!” But
Blaydon ignored him for the moment. He did not know that Mathilda’s
mind had gone all over this matter of adoption, and that the question
she had just put to him, in spite of its unconcerned air, was really a
crucial one with her. Upon his feeling about it would depend a great
deal, yet this did not imply that she felt herself bound to accept
his decisions. There were scores of things that she might do if the
whim possessed her, in spite of him. Blaydon was aware of this, and
though he did not know how much she had thought about the child, he was
inclined toward caution. She was a good sister--a better mother, he
honestly believed, for his children than their own.... When he answered
it was with a laugh that had the effect upon Mathilda of some one
opening a door she wanted to go through.

“Well, I don’t know,” he went on, slowly. “I suppose that Ellen is a
fixture anyhow, and young cubs are more likely to fall in love with a
really beautiful Cinderella than just a handsome cousin. That is if the
child is beautiful. How on earth can you tell anything about them at
that age?”

“You can tell the day after they are born,” snapped back Mrs. Seymour.
“I would venture to sit down and write the lives of your two sons
to-day, and I shouldn’t be far from the truth, barring death and
accidents.”

“So?” he asked, “and have I anything to fear?”

“Oh, no, they’ll come back to the fold, even as you did!”

Her look was one of benevolent sarcasm and he grinned. There were many
things worse to remember than the pretty women of his younger days.
But he had come back to the fold ... that was true, and it was not so
pleasant after all. Change would be kind. He reached over and touched
the blond head of his boy, who was sitting on the tiles now at his feet.

“Poor old Rob, she’s got you catalogued,” he said, and the talk of
adoption stopped. Neither of them had taken it seriously--Jennie,
unmentioned, remained insurmountable. But Mathilda had entered her
wedge, without an effort. Being intensely feminine, circumstances moved
toward her, not she toward them, an achievement that resulted from
indicating definitely first, then vaguely opposing, everything she
wanted.

Blaydon lifted his boy to his shoulder and walked through the house to
the drawing room windows. He talked little more than monosyllabically
to his children and had a great way of stilling their excited glee,
when he wanted to, by the tone of his voice. As they stood at the
window he wished that his gaze could go on over rolling hills to the
horizon. He wanted these boys to grow up with horses and vigorous
sports; to see them framed against green earth and wide skies. He
wanted them to draw in their early appreciations from the bare soil of
their own land. Somehow that now appeared to him a spiritual necessity
of which he had had too little himself, and it was the leading ambition
that possessed him after a life of sophisticated pleasure.

A week later Mrs. Blaydon died. It was as though the new direction of
their thoughts had penetrated to her intuitively and left her without
strength to battle further.

It was not long before Blaydon felt free to go ahead with his plans.
But the speed with which Mathilda proceeded to execute hers surprised
and even shocked him. She did not go directly to Ellen. Instead she
consulted Dr. Schottman, and readily gained his partisanship. It was
from Schottman that Ellen first heard of Aunt Mathilda’s intentions
toward Moira....

For the life of her she could not tell at first whether she was happy
or miserable at the suggestion. In one moment she rejoiced over the
good fortune of her daughter; in the next she experienced a sense of
terrible deprivation and loneliness. She was not so sentimental as to
minimize the extent of her renunciation--to hope that some crumbs from
the table of Moira’s affection would fall to her. It meant a thorough
transfer of parenthood and a ruthless blotting out of the truth.
One of Mrs. Seymour’s reasons for adopting the child at once, as she
explained to Schottman, was that the boys were young enough to grow up
none the wiser. Ellen did not deceive herself. Moira would never know
her, never think of her except as a servant.

She recalled sorrowfully the two happy prospects she had brought with
her into that house, “Moira will love me when she is grown up, and we
will do so many nice things together,” and “Who knows, some day Moira
may have a father....” But Moira would never have a real father now
through her, and Moira would never love her in the sense she had meant.
A gleam of comfort crept in the chinks of her hopeless speculation.

“If Moira should learn about this, much, much later--years later when
it could do no harm--about how I have given her up, she would love me
all the more!”

But the stray gleam crept out at once, leaving her mind darker than
before. Moira would never know, never understand anything of all she
had gone through. She buried her face in the pillow. In the middle
of the night she suddenly started up, feeling frantically about the
room for she knew not what. Was it affection, love, just the touch of
something familiar? For Moira, of course ... but what a fool! Moira was
gone, even the crib was gone. She was alone, absolutely alone, for the
rest of her life.

As she stumbled back to her bed, her hand encountered the big volume of
“Les Misérables.” She caught it up and held it to her breast. The book
had grown to be a symbol for her of their life together in fabulous
years to come. Now those years were dead. The book was no longer
necessary, no longer had any meaning.... Ellen put it away in one of
the drawers of her bureau. She would never have to read in its pages
again. It would be better if she did not, better that the gulf between
them should widen rather than diminish.




IX


It is four o’clock of a September afternoon and brightly still. Over on
the clean rolling golf course tiny figures in all combinations of white
and grey and brown move like insects soundlessly from one point to
another making odd motions. Even the jays which have been haggling and
shrieking all day are quiet. An occasional tree-toad or katydid creaks
from the false dusk of the Eastern woods. Locusts drone, and from a
long way off comes the faint click of a reaping machine at intervals,
but all these sounds only accentuate the silence. An eternal,
slow-breathing calm rests upon the treetops waiting patiently for the
cold of autumn.

With a murmur that grows into a rumble the stillness is broken by a
monstrous motor truck which swerves into the driveway from the road a
quarter of a mile away and comes tumbling down the white track, its
racket increasing with its nearness. The driver noisily shunts his
gears at the kitchen door, and Ellen Sydney comes out to superintend
the unloading and disposition of supplies. This done and the truckman
sent away with a laugh, she strolls into the garden on that side of the
house and is presently at work with a pair of shears snipping asters
and marigolds for the table. There are many of them, so many they must
be gathered in profusion. She has the air of one who is at home among
the beds, who has worked on them and cherished them with her own hands.

She is a handsomer woman than before. Her figure has decidedly taken
on dignity, and the colour of her face is a healthy brown pink. Her
cheeks, thanks to the best skill of the Blaydon dentist, have lost
their sunken hollows and her eyes have deepened from the effect
of well-being and contented activity. She bears herself with some
authority too, having taken a favoured place in her division of the
housework. Her hair is greying very slightly over the ears and temples,
but her step is as quick and her back as straight as a girl’s. She
wears a blue uniform with sleeves rolled up and a white apron.

As she reaches the entrance portico, her arms overflowing with the
yellow and brown and purple flowers, a little girl of six or so with
dark hair bursts from the screen door.

“Ellney, Ellney. Give me a cookie. I’m hungry.”

“Can’t you wait till dinner, Miss Moira? Your mother wouldn’t like it.”

“Oh, what’s one cookie? _Maman_ won’t mind just one.”

“She will if she finds out, and if you don’t eat your dinner. It’s me
that will get the lecture, not you!”--and with a look backward into the
past, Ellen thinks of a boy who was once always asking for something to
eat. The boy’s face has so dimmed in her mind now that if there is a
resemblance she does not notice it.

“_Maman_ shan’t lecture you, Ellney. I shan’t ever let her lecture you.”

Ellen laughs, not only at what Moira says, but at the way she says
it. She cannot ever get over the fact that her own child--who is now
no longer her child--speaks the King’s English quite as carefully as
her well-bred elders, and has adopted an air of superiority in her own
right. But in Ellen’s laughter there is no ridicule. It is the sheer
pleasure of maternal pride. Does not Moira, they say, speak French
almost as well as English?

“You little darling,” she cries, stooping and endeavouring to take the
child’s hand in spite of her overflowing burden, “I’ll give you just
one.”

“No, two, Ellney--but one is for Hal, on my word. Isn’t it funny, he’s
afraid to ask!”

Ellen thought there never had been a child whose laughter was more like
everything good and who laughed more often than Moira....

       *       *       *       *       *

Turning in from the Marquette road to Sterling Blaydon’s new country
house, “Thornhill” as they called it, a visitor with a sculptor’s eye
might describe the formation of the land as the huge thigh of a woman,
resting horizontally on the earth. The private driveway ran along the
crest which sloped on both sides downward to gentle valleys, while the
whole ridge tapered in width gradually to a round end or knee on which
rested the house in a semi-circle of green. Beyond the house lay a few
hundred feet of clipped lawn and well spaced trees, and then the Titan
calf plunged into the earth, its declivitous sides covered with exposed
rock and a thick undergrowth of every imaginable scrub and bramble,
with a plentiful scattering of dogwood and plumb and thorn. It was holy
with blossoms in the Spring, beginning with the ghostly shad-bush. The
edge of the hill overlooked a broad meadow fifty yards below, as flat
as a lake.

Spread out in three directions from this crowning point lay Blaydon’s
land, perhaps a third of it in rocky knolls and wood, and the remainder
under cultivation by tenant farmers. The driveway to the site led
almost due west but the axis of the house itself, which was narrow and
long despite its irregularities, turned toward the south. It was built
to the shingle eaves of rubble-rock and dominated at either end by two
enormous chimneys of the same gorgeous, parti-coloured material, all
of which had been found on the place. Broad verandahs, a wide, tiled
terrace reached by French windows; a quaint Dutch Colonial door and
portico facing the road; screened balconies skilfully masked by the
eaves; the great living and dining rooms and library which took up
almost all of the lower floor; the correspondingly spacious chambers
overhead, attested its inhabitants’ means and love of comfort. The
entrance lawn and slopes to the north were laid out in series of
irregular, charming gardens. On the southeast the hill descended almost
horizontally from the tiled and parapeted terrace near the house, so
that from the living room windows one looked through the tops of trees
to the Country Club on another hill less than a mile away.

With greater spaces had come more movement, more things to be
interested in, more excitement and sound, all of which Ellen had
welcomed. She meddled in everything. She had become a creditable
sub-assistant gardener and something of a bee-keeper, having watched
the professionals at work. The four dogs were her especial care. Two
were morbidly shy collies called “Count” and “Countess” by Mathilda,
and Ellen won the privilege of touching their magnificent coats and
standing by while they fed, only after many months of gentleness and
coaxing. They seldom allowed the other members of the household to come
near them and ran wild in the woods. On the other hand the beagle and
setter were almost annoyingly chummy. The animals in the stable had
their daily histories also, which concerned her intimately. She was a
splendid milker in emergencies and would have liked to keep fowls, but
this Mathilda, who respected sleep in the mornings, would not permit.

Of the two boys in the house, Hal, nine and a half, was the
keener-witted and the more attractive. He was already at home among
the horses and rode bare-back as well as in the saddle. She often
felt sorry for Rob, who was left behind much of the time by his older
brother and the swift, tiny Moira, but she did not humour him as much
as she did Hal.

It was Hal, however, who had ridden a cow so successfully one day that
Moira pleaded to be helped up herself, and whether the beast thought
her a less formidable antagonist, or was frightened by her skirts,
the little girl was thrown off and severely jolted. Hal supported her
into the house, himself more frightened than she, and vowed to his
aunt solemnly that from that day he would never lead her into danger
again, and if she got into it he would get her out. Yet she and the
boy quarrelled too and sometimes went for days without speaking. Moira
would take up with Rob then, scheming with all her mind to devise
adventures that would make his brother envious. She often succeeded in
these stratagems, until a time came when he did not concern himself
with her at all, being grown beyond little girls.

The elaborate arrangements which had been made for Moira from the
first, and the increasing complexity of the child’s education, which
had been undertaken very early by Mrs. Seymour, made it easier for
Ellen to regard her as a member of the Blaydon family. It was only when
Moira misbehaved within her knowledge or in her sight, that the true
mother felt it hard to play her neutral rôle. While Moira was good she
was a Seymour, naturally, but when she was bad she seemed to Ellen
to be wholly her own. Ellen’s impulse then, in spite of the habit of
suppression, was to correct her as a mother would.

When these occasions had passed and she could reflect back on them,
she thought it a blessing that Moira’s correction was in the hands of
others than herself. One instance of Mrs. Seymour’s wise manner of
dealing with unusual conduct filled her mind with wonder and created
for her almost a new conception of life.

Aunt Mathilda was consulting with her in the kitchen when Moira burst
in and cried:

“_Maman_, oh, _Maman_, the calf came right out of the cow! I saw it. I
did.”

The child’s face was a study. She did not apparently know whether to
be very grave, or a little frightened or to laugh, and in one who
was so rarely puzzled it would have seemed pathetic had her sudden
announcement been less shocking than it was. As they learned afterward,
she had witnessed the birth, by sheer accident, while in the stables
with Harvey. Ellen blushed scarlet and was on the point of exclaiming
indignantly, but Mrs. Seymour checked her with a gesture and took the
child in her lap. Then she said in a tone the most natural in the world:

“Why, certainly, my dear. That is what happens when all animals are
born, and people too. First we are carried in our mothers. Then we walk
by ourselves, just as the calf will in a day or two. Now you won’t ever
forget that, will you?”

Beginning the middle of September and for eight months each year, Miss
Cheyney, the governess, came every morning at nine, and quiet reigned
while she went over the lessons with the three children shut up in the
library. After luncheon, Eberhard, the man, took her back by motor to
the train as he had brought her.

Ellen was always glad to see her visits begin, not only because Miss
Cheyney was very democratic and “nice” to her, and proud of Moira’s
progress, but because they ushered in the Fall. She loved the glorious
colours that spread out in widening and deepening hues over the wooded
hills, until all the world seemed to have put on a flaming cloak. She
and the children would fill the house with sumach and maple branches
then. And when the men began bringing up the heavy logs that had lain
drying in the woods all summer and sawing and splitting them for the
fireplaces in the house, she could see in anticipation the flames
leaping in the chimney and hear the crackling of the wood in the fierce
heat, and watch the glow of dancing light on the children’s faces. She
had not seen open fireplaces since the New Orleans days, when they
were lighted only for a few weeks in the year; and never had she seen
anything to compare with the one in the Blaydon living room which was
so high a woman could stand in it while she cleaned.

And then the parties began. There were nearly always two big ones each
Winter, and between them a constant stream of dinners and late motor
parties, and informal crowds who tramped over from the Club to dance.
Ellen loved to hear the music going at full tilt, the new jazz music
that was just coming in. She didn’t mind, as much as she should have,
the young men getting tipsy. She was thrilled to watch the couples
disappear down through the trees, laughing and chatting, eager to
escape the floods of light that poured from every window in the house;
or slip into their motors for a drive along the dark roads.

She had always thought of Sterling Blaydon as a reserved and serious
man, and she wondered how he stood so much excitement. Then she
realized that she was dealing with a new Sterling Blaydon, who not only
stood it but encouraged it. His pride in the place and his love of
filling it with people was like a boy’s.

A great part of the pleasure she took in these affairs arose from
the fact that her daughter was a favourite. Tall, important men and
dazzling young women were attentive to Moira and Moira enjoyed it as
much as they did. She was growing extraordinarily self-possessed,
particularly with her elders. Often enough the frank equality she
adopted toward them made Ellen gasp.

Only in the dead of winter, when the snow piled up a foot or two
everywhere and the drifts sometimes were up to a man’s middle, would
they be without company for many days at a time. During this brief
closed season--for it did not last long at the worst--Mr. Blaydon
usually lived in town, and sometimes Mrs. Seymour would join him there,
when engagements came in bunches or the theatres were particularly
interesting. And the children, freed from their teacher, would be idle.

Coming upon Moira alone at such times, with her constituted guardians
away and out of mind, Ellen experienced her moments of gravest
temptation. How she longed then to take the youngster in her arms and
pour out the floods of love pent up within her. These yearnings were
made all the more unbearable by the simple affection with which she
was nearly always greeted by her daughter; yet at the same time the
child’s own attitude strengthened her resistance. For Ellen stood in
awe of her. The force of training, the sedulously cultivated point of
view, the entirely different environment had already stamped her with
the mark of another caste. Ellen could not look upon her for more than
an instant as simply the object of possessive human feeling. It would
sweep over her at some childlike expression, some quaint, serious look.
It would be checked by some unlooked for sophistication of gesture or
remark.

Moira familiarly uttered the names of grown young men who to Ellen were
no more than shadows from an upper world, coldly courteous ghosts who
did not see her even when they looked at her. Every season the little
girl extended her interests and knowledge into a wider world and grew
more alien. And gradually as the years flew by even the servants who
had been in the old Trezevant place when they came there, and who
somehow seemed to preserve for her, by their presence, the actuality
of her motherhood, passed, until there was not one left. Gina, whose
sympathy she had felt most keenly, though the sprightly Italian said
nothing, was the last. And Gina went away to be married....




X


To be nearly sixteen; to have a great room all to oneself, with
high windows that looked upon surfs of close, glittering, talkative
leaves, and hills far off between them; to have a small library of
one’s favourite books, and a whole corner of the room devoted to the
paraphernalia of one’s dearest hobby, which was painting; to have a
square high bed, covered with a tester, and a wonderful, many-shelved
Sheraton table beside it, and candles in old green brass candlesticks;
to have a row of white, built-in armoires full of pretty dresses and
cloaks and shoes; to have all this and to know one has helped to create
it, was to possess a shrine where the thoughts of girlhood might
safely let themselves go to all the four winds of the imagination,
like many-coloured birds set free, unmindful of the traps and huntsmen
scouring the world beyond.

But Moira’s real favourite was not the lovely golden brown tapestry,
nor the stained little bas relief of the Child, nor even the drawings
of Michelangelo and Rembrandt, but a painting hung on the wall facing
the foot of her bed, where she could look at it the first thing in
the morning as she rose, and the last thing at night as she retired.
It was a portrait of Mathilda’s grandmother at eighteen, painted in
Virginia, a year before she crossed the plains with her young husband.
The smooth, dark red hair was parted and drawn about the head above
the ears like a cap, its gleam of colour apparent only in the gloss of
the high lights. The blue eyes and fresh complexion and fine, regular
features were done with infinite tenderness. She sat in a black gown,
opening wide at the neck, against a red background formed by a cloak
thrown over the chair. Moira knew it was good painting, of an exquisite
older style, though the name of the painter was unsigned and had long
been forgotten. She amused herself making little verses about it.

  “My young great grandmother sits in her frame
  And the red of her cloak burns warm as a flame....”

Many a time she sat up in her bed pretending to have conversations
about the stirring adventures of her grandmother’s early days, for she
had heard the whole story of the young woman’s arduous journey and
home-building--and also about the young men who came to Thornhill,
discussing their characters without reserve. One could do this in
perfect propriety with a dead great grandmother.

“Tommy McNutt wants to come over every day and ride with me,
Grandmother. But he squints out of doors, and he always wants to help
you on a horse and he talks like a newspaper piece. I’d rather have
somebody to talk to like old George Moore, wouldn’t you, dear? It’s a
pity you were born too early to read George Moore. I know you would
like him”--and she broke off for rhyme again:

  “The courtly old painter I am sure wore lace
  And the things he said brought a flush to her face.”

“But if I should like Tommy I’d have a whole house as big as this one
all my own. And if I should like Mark Sturm, the young brewer, I’d have
two.... I don’t care, _Maman_ will give me a house.”

“Then there’s Selden Van Nostrand. He’s tremendously popular because he
makes up verses about ‘Aphrodite in a nightie,’ but he sometimes does
better than that. The other day he said his heart was a leaf devoured
by the worm of Egotism, shrivelled in the fire of Sex, and trampled
by the feet of Virtue. I see you like that one, Grandma. Beautiful
Grandma, I have your eyes--

  “Her wide blue eyes have a trace of play
  And the day she sat was a fine bright day!”

Moira finished her morning cup of tea on the stand beside the bed
and recalled suddenly that this fine, bright day was one of special
significance, for Hal was coming home from his last year at prep
school. Hal was the one young man she never talked to her great
grandmother about, because, as she explained to herself, she was his
great grandmother also and would be prejudiced. She stood in the
sunlight pouring through the window, watching it gleam upon her firm
shoulders and flanks. She had not decided whether she would go to the
station with her mother and Uncle Sterling or not.

Hal had treated her pretty badly the summer before and been very
satirical, and the worst of it was she had found it hard to resent
because he had seemed suddenly to be much older and to have some right
to authority. He had been nicer at Christmas, taking her to two parties
and giving her a set of Verlaine bound in tooled leather, but even when
he tried to be nice to her he had somehow seemed condescending.

She was in great doubt. Nobody, of course, would attach any
significance to it, whichever she did, not even Hal, probably. It was
only important to herself. She knew something had happened to her
during the past year that was comparable to the change in Hal the year
before. She had evidence now under her hands and in her eyes as she
stood undressed, evidence that did not wholly please her, for she had
lately taken a fancy to dislike women. More satisfactory evidence was a
sense of mental growth.

She had just returned from a long Spring vacation in New York with
Mathilda, not her first visit but her most exciting one, and her
thoughts were awhirl with Pavlova and Rachmaninoff and the Washington
Square Players, bobbed hair and the operas at the Metropolitan, and a
dozen startling, vivifying, even violent art exhibitions. She felt that
she was probably much more splashed by the currents than Hal himself,
for certainly one did not really learn anything at a boy’s school. Such
places could only be high class stables for thoroughbred colts to pass
the awkward stage in, under trainers far less capable than those they
would have had if they were horses.

And now the question was whether to test the glamour of these mental
and physical acquisitions upon Hal by waiting to meet him alone, or
to go like a good fellow and see him with the family. There was, of
course, nothing personal about it; Hal was no more than an opportune
judge. He represented the best criticism the East had to send back to
them.

After her bath she decided for action. She would go with the others and
meet him. “Anyway, why attach so much importance to Hal? He’s quite
capable of attaching enough to himself.”

There was the possibility, too, of dramatic interest in his arrival.
The year before, on his return, at eighteen, he had boldly announced
to his father he was going to war. There wasn’t to be a day lost, he
wanted to go at once. Every man in his class was going somehow or
other. Sterling Blaydon opposed it, the argument dragged out for days,
and finally the family won. But it was only with the understanding
that if Hal would finish his last year at school he might make his own
decision. The country’s participation in the war was now over a year
old and the outlook was dismal, one German advance after another having
succeeded. There were plenty of youngsters of nineteen and twenty in
it, and Hal would insist upon enlisting. He had, as a matter of fact,
and as his letters showed, done almost no schooling at Fanstock that
year. The entire institution had been made over into a training camp.

Moira remembered how her cousin had chafed the summer before, hating
his idleness and the wretched fate of being in excessive demand to
entertain girls. Her sympathy with his groans had gone a long way to
help her forgive his ill treatment.

And yet she had never been worked up to a pitch of great excitement
about the war.

One failing had troubled her ever since she could remember--the
tendency to disagree with opinions as soon as an overwhelming majority
held them.

It was partly due to the example of Mathilda’s own fastidiousness and
independence of judgment, but she went farther than Mathilda, and
supposed that she must have inherited this inconvenient trait from that
mythical father of whom she had been told so little and longed to know
so much. At all events, she arrived at certain conclusions, by herself,
about the war: for example, that perhaps Germany was not entirely the
instigator, that cruelties were probably practised on both sides--war’s
horrors produced them--and that after all it did seem as though the
whole world was furiously pitted against two or three caged-in nations.

She did not entirely like herself for these heresies and kept silent
upon them. But she promised herself the fun of an argument with Hal.
How it would irritate him!

“He’ll think I’ve lost my mind. Perhaps he’ll surrender me to the
authorities. How wonderful--I wish he would!”

She took one final glimpse of herself and walked slowly out of the room
to face a hard day. She felt she would prove a formidable antagonist
for Hal.

But downstairs a surprise was waiting. She found Mathilda, suppressing
a few tears, and her Uncle sitting in a profound study. Their
disappointment communicated itself to her at once. Something had
happened about Hal.

Mrs. Seymour indicated the yellow night-letter on the table.

  “Dear Father and Aunt [it read]: Offered chance to join aviation
  training corps, Long Island, at once. No time to come home. Wish me
  luck enough to get over soon. Love. Hal.”

Well, that was sensation enough for her. He had acted with divine
independence.

The months that followed until the Armistice were dull and tragic.
She would a hundred times rather have gone over herself, though it be
as a rank flag-waver. It was all stupid, cunning, criminal, got up by
old men to kill young ones. It would be stupid enough to take Hal, her
playmate. Night after night she saw him, mutilated or dead; she got
so she could picture exactly the way a small hole looked in a man’s
forehead, just the degree of red and blue about its tiny rim, and the
relaxed, livid expression of a face that had been dead several hours.
These pictures haunted her wakeful nights in many different guises, but
always with Hal’s features. She learned in imagination how flesh looked
when it was laid open or gangrened, and the appearance of the end of a
limb that had been taken off. And she grew so bitter that she found she
could not pray, though she had always experienced a soothing pleasure
from the language of the Book of Common Prayer. She never said those
pieces again. She would sit up suddenly in bed, as though she had been
wakened by a barrage, and talk by fitful candlelight to her portrait.




XI


“And you aren’t really sorry you didn’t get over?”

“Sorry? Wouldn’t you be?”

“Well, I don’t know. Considering the hordes of disillusioned veterans
I’ve met this winter--”

“At least they had a chance to get disillusioned in action. Something
for their money. With me it’s just two years--practically three
years--gone to pot, and a sort of feeling it isn’t worth while to go
back at all. To college, I mean.”

“You couldn’t start this time of year, could you?”

“I suppose I could do something.”

“It would be fun having you around until Fall--like old times.”

Hal laughed shortly.

“You’d care?”

“I’ve had a good long spell of Thornhill alone, you know. Next year I
shan’t mind, because I’ll be away at school myself.”

“My Lord, Moira, have you anything more to learn?”

“Oh, yes, I could learn to be useful, for instance.”

“You manage to be most anything, if the notion strikes you.”

“I’m not so crazy to go,” she mused. “I imagine it’ll be rather awful.
Formalities, lady lecturers, highbrow girls with shell-rimmed glasses.
They’ve been cramming education down the throats of the fashionable
young for a generation and what’s the result? Country clubs,
prohibition, and a beastly war.”

“Cynical, eh?”

“No more than you would be, if you’d done nothing but read newspapers
these last two years. I suppose now they’ll all combine and squeeze
everything out of Germany that she has left--just as the Persians and
the Greeks did, and the kings in the Bible. And there’ll be a lot of
moralizing--more than ever. Of course, you’ll be glad. The victor is
always spoiled.”

“Pooh,” he laughed. “You’ve got me wrong. I don’t give a damn what
they do. Say, the only principles I have left are principles of
horsemanship. I’m highly interested in the way you sit Elfin.”

“Isn’t she a beauty!”

“She’s a pretty horse. But I wasn’t referring entirely to the equine
part of the combination.”

It was the first real day they had had together since Hal’s discharge
from camp the week before. The weather was like an Indian summer
afternoon, one of those exceedingly mild days of February between
spells of stiff cold. They had been galloping along the high road,
when Moira suddenly pulled up and turned her horse into a meandering
lane, so narrow that the stripped branches met in sharply accentuated
patterns overhead against the sky. The fields were a monotonous, hard
stubbly brown, except where pockets of soiled snow lay in the holes and
under the protecting sides of hillocks.

“Is Selden Van Nostrand coming out to-morrow?” asked Hal, after they
had ridden a hundred yards in silence.

“Yes.”

“Does he come out often?”

“Yes ... let’s go as far as Corey’s Inn for a bite. I’m famishing,
aren’t you?”

“I don’t like him. I suppose you know that.”

“You’re not going to be like the rest of the patriots, are you? Get so
you despise anybody with a critical mind?”

“I admire people who say what they mean as much as anybody. But I do
object to Van Nostrand, because he’s faintly rotten, and even his wit
is literary. He always seems to be rehearsed. Anybody can do that Wilde
thing if they study up on it long enough. The point is, is it worth
while?”

She laughed with a touch of malice.

“You sound like a book review, Hal. His line is pretty easy, but it’s a
line. Nobody ever even tries to be amusing here, and he not only tries
but I think he succeeds.”

“It’s from him, I suppose, you got this fellow-feeling for the Germans.
Well, he had plenty of opportunity to cultivate it, staying at home.”

Moira gave him a glance of friendliness.

“Oh, it’s such fun to have you back, I don’t care what you say. If you
knew all the dreams I’ve had, terrifying dreams, seeing you--hurt and
cut up and dead. I’d wake up mad enough to kill Germans myself.”

“Did you really dream about me, Moira?” He pulled his horse closer to
hers, leaning as far as he could. The girl’s mount, disliking to be
crowded, pranced out of control, and Hal had to swerve away, but he
kept his eyes on the straight, slim figure.

“God, Moira, what a beauty you’ve grown!”

She began to murmur aloud:

  “When I was one and twenty
    I heard a wise man say
  Give crowns and pounds and guineas
    But not your heart away,
  Give gold away and rubies
    But keep your fancy free,
  But I was one and twenty,
    No use to talk to me.”

“Moira!” he cried, but she was gone, at full gallop down the lane.

“Hurry!” she called back, “I’m nearly dead with hunger.”

And from there to the inn was a race.

When they returned it was dark, and both were eager to reach the
stables, but as they wheeled into the little pasture road which led
through the tenant’s land and past Hermann Dietz’ house, a curious
scene halted them.

The house was a very old-fashioned small wooden dwelling, with a high
stone foundation, built by the past generation of Dietzes twenty-five
or thirty years before. The barn, larger than the house, was some
twenty yards from the kitchen door, across a squalid cow yard. A dim
lamp or two was burning in the house, but this was completely deserted,
the doors hanging open and giving it a half-witted grimace. The centre
of attraction was a big double barn door. Around this, in a lighted
semi-circle stood the Dietz family, consisting of the bony, tall,
salmon-faced father, the emaciated, dreadfully stooped mother, and four
children of varying ages. A curious murmur arose from the group, and
riding closer, Moira and Hal saw that they were weeping. Beyond, they
could catch a glimpse of the body of a horse, swaying slightly from
side to side in its last agony, and casting monstrous shadows on the
high cobwebbed walls behind, thrown by the lantern which stood on the
ground at Hermann’s feet.

Moira dismounted and signalled to Hal to follow her.

“They’ve been grieving this way since yesterday,” she whispered, “and
to-day the veterinary told them he couldn’t save the horse.”

The sobs arising from the pitiful group, two of the smallest of whom
clung to their mother’s skirts and hid their faces, more frightened
at the commotion than troubled about the horse, rose and fell with
the spasms of suffering that swept over the dying beast. Moira heard
Ellen’s reassuring voice and saw her face for the first time in the
lantern light at the far end of the group.

“Ah, Mrs. Dietz, let them put the poor animal out of its pain,” she was
saying in a loud whisper to the mother. “It can’t live.”

Moira turned to Hal and took his arm. He had been smiling grimly at the
scene, but as her hand fell upon his sleeve he covered it with his own.
The horse, the drama of primitive sorrow, everything was forgotten,
except her features and hair, and gipsy loveliness in the wavering
light.

“They’re Ellen’s children, these people,” she said. “She’s wonderful
to them. She told me yesterday ‘that horse is like a member of their
family, Miss Moira. It’ll be terrible when it dies.’ Isn’t she fine to
come down here and comfort them?”

They turned at the sound of foot-steps crossing the hard earth and
stubble, and two stocky figures passed them.

“Hullo,” said one, with a grin. It was Rob Blaydon, carrying in his
hand something from which they caught a quick gleam as he passed. The
veterinary was with him. Both went up to Hermann and held a hurried
consultation, and during this the family fell silent. Presently the
three men parted. Hermann spoke up in a high, quavering voice.

“Well, Momma, they say it’s jest got to be done. We jest got to give
her up, and put her out of her misery. I don’t know where we’re a-goin’
to git another one like her. I don’t know--that I don’t. Poor old
Molly. She’s been with us now longer than my boy there, pretty near
as long as Lilly here. It breaks me up to lose her. Yes, sir, it goes
hard, but there ain’t no helping it.”

“That’s the way to look at it, Hermann,” said Rob, with gruff good
nature.

Hal raised his voice from where he stood with Moira at some distance.

“I’ll give you another horse, Dietz,” he said. Moira squeezed his arm.

“Thank you, thank you, Mr. Hal,” the farmer responded, obsequiously,
peering for him in the weak light. “Now, Momma, ain’t that fine! Well,
children, I guess we better be movin’ in. Poor Molly--I’d rather not
see you do it, gentlemen, if you don’t mind.”

The family turned to obey, exhibiting a variety of expressions, from
fright to the deepest woe, but Moira observed that there was one who
had not shared the general grief--the short, mature, straw-haired girl
of sixteen or seventeen, whose face bore a stolid, disdainful look. She
followed toward the kitchen after Ellen and one of the small children,
but as she reached the porch she turned and gazed at Rob Blaydon,
fascinated by the revolver in his hand. In the weird light, which cast
a romantic glow over her figure and uncouth clothing, Moira thought the
girl had a touch of beauty, fresh and coarse and natural as earth.

“Poor Hermann,” she said, “he’s a rustic Pierrot, Hal.”

Just as they topped the ridge they heard the harsh double-fire of Rob
Blaydon’s revolver. She was glad to see the lights of Thornhill.

“Well,” said Hal, “Rob had a good hunch to-night--even if it was fun
for him. Just the sort of thing he’d love. There’s the boy who needed
to go to France. As it is he’ll get over that raw streak very slowly.”

“Rob’s a dear,” she broke in, earnestly. “I’m not one of those who
worry about him. He’s a good animal--without a shred of theory in him.
I let him get me most beautifully pickled twice last Fall.”

“The devil you did!” exclaimed Hal.

“Why not? He knows everybody everywhere and they like him. And he
drives like a wild man--when he’s had a few. Now you wouldn’t be such
a good fellow, would you, Hal? You’d be cautious and look after my
morals, and count my drinks and take me home early.”

“Yes, I’m afraid I would,” he said. “And I suppose you wouldn’t like
it.”




XII


It was Ellen’s night off and after the dispatching of the horse, she
stayed with Mrs. Dietz to cheer her up and help put the two youngest
children to bed. She had been so long a constant visitor and benefactor
that they had ceased to regard her as an emissary from the big house
and talked of their troubles freely before her.

The five of them sat about the lamp in the comfortless but warm living
room of the farmhouse, listening to a monologue by Hermann Dietz on the
virtues of the dead horse. Although he had been born within a hundred
feet of that spot, and his father had come to America as a boy, Dietz’
accent, like many of his kind bred to the farms thereabouts, still bore
traces of the German. They were a squatter-like tribe, never prosperous.

“Poor old Molly, she was not so old, yet, but it seemed like we had had
her always, Mrs. Williams. She did her share, Molly.”

“What did Mr. Robert do to Molly?” asked the boy, plaintively. “Did he
shoot her? Can I go see?”

“No, no, you wait until morning. Don’t you mind about Molly. She was
sufferin’ terrible, and she’s better where she is. But we’ll miss her.
Yes, Johnnie, when you was a little bit of a feller, two, three years
old, Poppa used to put you on Molly’s back and hold you, and you’d
laugh and holler and she’d walk so easy just as if she knew you was a
baby.”

“Things was different in them days,” piped his wife. “Them automobile
horns, now. We didn’t never used to hear them. But nowadays it’s half
the night, Mrs. Williams. I can’t get used to ’em. They keep me awake
so.”

“Ah, they wouldn’t be so bad,” put in the girl Lilly, “if we could ride
in ’em now an’ then, the way others do. Johann Hunker’s got a m’chine.”

“Ach, you are always bellerin’ about a m’chine,” her father burst out.
“When you got one you got a hole to throw money in. Listen to them rich
people even, talkin’ about how much they cost. What have I got to do
with a m’chine? An’ whose goin’ to run it, your Momma? I ain’t goin’
to take no risks with ’em, not since I got that sunstroke last August
anyways. I git so dizzy sometimes I think I can’t get home to the
house.”

“I could run it,” grumbled Lilly.

“You now, Lilly! You’ve got plenty to do without that. You don’t tend
to your work the way it is.”

“She’s gettin’ so lazy she’s got no head to remember anything,” put in
her mother. “I don’t dare leave the children with her.”

“M’chine!” Dietz quavered on, “I ain’t got no money for ’em if I wanted
one.”

“You’ve got the money, I guess,” said Mrs. Dietz querulously, “the same
as Johann Hunker, if you wanted to spend it.”

“Now, Momma, I told you twenty times already I’m takin’ care of your
money. Who’s goin’ to keep it safe for a rainy day, if it ain’t me?”

“Well, we don’t see anything of it, Hermann, not since you got hold of
it ... sellin’ off the farms, an’ leavin’ us with hardly a place to put
foot to the ground.”

“Yes, Momma,” rejoined her husband earnestly. “I did sell off the
farms. But you know what Mr. McNutt said. He said if I didn’t want
to take that two hundred dollars an acre Mr. Blaydon offered, they’d
all go somewheres else an’ build, and our land never would git a high
price. You couldn’t git a hundred for it in them days.”

“There’s some of them waited longer an’ got more. Johann Hunker did.”

“Johann Hunker may be a slick feller, but if I hadn’t sold when I did
they mightn’t have come here at all, an’ then where would Johann Hunker
be? Never you mind about that money. It’s a-drawin’ good interest.”

Dietz lifted his tall, bent form from his chair and shuffled over to
the stove to dump his pipe. Then he turned again to his wife, a sudden
grin spreading over his cheeks.

“Well, Momma, what about a little wine? Seeing Mrs. Williams is here,
eh? A little home-made wine and coffee cake. We’ll give the childern
some wine to-night, eh? Lilly, bring up the chairs to the table.”

The girl rose languidly to obey and Mrs. Dietz departed for the
bedroom, returning a moment later with a long bottle. Lilly brought
glasses and placed them on the red-figured table cover.

“Get the coffee cake, Lilly,” her mother ordered.

Dietz toyed affectionately with the stem of his glass filled with
bright red liquid.

“Ach, the home-made wine--that is good! Well, it is like old times,
Momma--when the older children, Lena and Fred was here, and Lilly was a
little girl about Johnnie’s size. Yes, it was fine then. None of these
rich people with big houses and all that. We was the bosses then.”

“We had all the land,” put in Mrs. Dietz gloomily. “We could get enough
off of it to sell a good crop every year and plenty of vegetables to
the commission men, and you always had money, if you needed it for
anything, like Molly dying. Now it’s in the bank and we can’t spend
nothing. No, the land was better than the money.”

“Mr. Blaydon, he gives me sixty dollars a month, and all the feed for
the stock, and half the money from the truck. That is something, sixty
dollars sure every month.”

“But you’ve got to work for Mr. Blaydon, and I do, and even the
childern. It ain’t the same as when we worked for ourselves.”

“Poppa,” broke in Lilly, as she cut the long flat sections of coffee
cake, “Mary Hunker was selling some of Johann’s wine over at Corey’s
last week. She got a big price, enough to buy a new dress. Can I sell
some of Momma’s wine? We can’t ever drink up what we got every year.”

“Ach Himmel!” Dietz cried, bringing his glass down with a rattle upon
the table. “There is that girl. We have the land and sell that. We have
the wine and we got to sell that too. Ain’t there nothing we can call
our own? No, Lilly, you let the wine be.”

“I never get clothes at all like the Hunker girls,” she replied
sullenly. “I saw a green dress, a pretty one, over at town that was
only thirteen dollars and fifty cents.”

“But, Lilly, your sister Lena never bought no dresses for thirteen
dollars and fifty cents. And Lena always looked nice. She married a
man with a fine bakery business on Oak Street. He took Lena already
because she was a neat, sensible girl and wouldn’t throw away his money
for him. I don’t know what to think of you, Lilly. A honest, Christian
girl, the way you’ve been brought up. You ain’t like your sister, is
she, Momma?”

“You wouldn’t expect all girls would be alike, Hermann,” said her
mother. “Lilly is a good girl, but times have changed since Lena was
her age. You give me the money, now, and I’ll go with her to look at
the dress.”

“Well, well, I guess so,” replied Hermann, mollified by his wife’s
firmness. “That is a lot of money, but Lilly is a pretty girl, eh? I’ll
give you the money to-morrow and maybe you can buy the dress before
Sunday. Then them Hunker girls won’t be so fresh up at church.”

“Pour some more wine for Mrs. Williams, Lilly,” said Mrs. Dietz.

“No,” said Ellen, “I must be going.”

“Yes, a night cap, Mrs. Williams,” said Dietz, in his best manner. “A
little more wine for all of us, and then we’ll go to bed. I got to get
Meyer, if I can, or Ed Becker, to help me bury poor Molly to-morrow.
You got to dig a big hole for a horse.”

As Ellen left the cottage and started homeward she did not know
whether to laugh or cry. It was always the same story, poverty and
hard work, and the vanity of the young girl tempted as she had been
most of her life by the strange, glamorous panorama of the rich at her
very doorstep. And she had not the sense of pride the older folks had
enjoyed, the knowledge of having been masters of the neighbourhood.
Mrs. Dietz’ remark haunted her mind. “The land was better than the
money.” For such as these people, it was. It had given them all they
had, all they could possibly have, to live for.

The shortest path up the hill to the Blaydon house was rocky and steep,
and a third the way up Ellen stopped for breath and regretted she had
not walked around the longer way. It was dark under the trees and hard
to stick to the path. She sat down to remove a pebble from her low
shoe. As she stood up again facing the foot of the hill, she could see
a broad patch of Dietz’ field through an opening in the branches. At
that moment a figure stepped out from the trees into the open space and
came to a stop as if waiting. It was a man undoubtedly, she thought,
but she was curious to make sure. So few prowlers ever disturbed the
peace of the place. She crept down the path, holding on to the shrubs
and tree-trunks and making as little noise as possible. She decided
she would wait until the man moved on and go around by the road after
all. Reaching the bottom she found herself within a few yards of Rob
Blaydon. A moment later, nearer the already dark and silent Dietz
house, she saw another figure stirring. What could Rob be up to and who
was his confederate? Then swiftly, Lilly darted from the shadow of the
house and joined him. The two disappeared, exchanging whispers, around
the side of the hill.

Ellen started impulsively, as though she would stop them, but she did
not go far. What could she do? She knew Rob Blaydon too well to think
that he would take any interference from her or from any inferior. He
was not a mean boy, but he was headstrong. He would tell her that he
thought her a busybody and a nuisance. And supposing she went to Lilly?
Lilly would be frightened and cowed for the moment. But Ellen realized,
far more sharply than the girl’s family, how deep her rebellion lay. In
the end she would throw advice to the winds.

There was left the alternative of warning Mathilda or Sterling Blaydon.
If she did so what could she prove? Rob was bold enough to make the
thing appear in any light he desired, some boyish escapade in which he
had inveigled the girl to join. To excite the Dietz family about the
girl’s danger was as useless. They could not control her in any case,
and it might fire her to desperate measures. Ellen could do nothing
that would result in any good, nothing except create a scandal.

She sat down and wondered if she cared. She certainly cared about the
child’s welfare, but now that she felt it was impossible to prevent
what was happening, she could reason about it calmly. Life was a
dreadfully sad thing any way you took it. But could this love affair do
the girl more harm than she was sure to meet with in any event--perhaps
at the hands of worse men? Might it not come to mean something to
her she would cherish despite its cost? Ellen’s only answer to these
questions was her own experience. Perhaps it had been worth while. Her
daughter was happy, with an unclouded future, and she was contented.
Knowledge of herself had suddenly shaken her faith in the creed that
one must inevitably suffer pain because of sin.




XIII


From the house far above them came the indistinct sound of Mathilda
at the piano. Was it “_Reflets dans l’eau_” she was playing? As the
music stopped the chaotic noises of life took up their endless staccato
rhythm--cows lowing in the pasture, a workman calling to another, the
beat of a hammer in some farmhouse, the restless twitter and trilling
of birds, the snapping and stirring of branches, a motorhorn sounding
a thousand miles away, it seemed--the music of the universe that was
flowing through her now in a full stream. Moira opened her book at
random:

  “Leave go my hands, let me catch breath and see;
  Let the dew-fall drench either side of me;
    Clear apple leaves are soft upon that moon
  Seen side-wise like a blossom in the tree;
    Ah God, ah God, that day should come so soon....”

She stopped and looked off through the leaves to the wide fields where
the sun lay.

“Don’t you love it, Hal,” she said, “just the sound of it, the perverse
beauty of it? Is there anything more wonderful?”

Hal rolled over upon the flat of his back staring thoughtfully up
from the shady chamber of green, the tiny grotto at the cliff-foot,
up at the grey old overhanging boulders, like moles and maculations
on the brow of an ancient crone, the massy tangle of branches and
leaves bursting from among them and cutting off half his vision of
the glittering blue heaven, wherein floated great flocks of clouds as
artificial in their sheer whiteness and hard outlines as puff-balls on
a pool. His muscular brown arms and neck were bare to the white bathing
shirt. His bright blonde hair was tousled over his face, which was
mature and strong. The girl’s voice made little ripples of pleasure run
over his limbs; it gave the words a significance which would never have
reached him without her--

  “The grass is thick and cool, it lets us lie,
  Kissed upon either cheek and either eye.
    I turn to thee as some green afternoon
    Turns toward sunset and is loth to die;
    Ah God, ah God, that day should come so soon.”

That certainly he could feel supremely, experience in himself. He let
his gaze rest upon her. The fine black hair, bobbed at last in spite
of Aunt Mathilda’s anxious objections, made a quaint pattern on the
face. Against it the glow of her skin and lips was the more brilliant
by contrast, and beneath the white angle of brow, the eyes, looking
suddenly at him from the page, were as clear, cool, vivid blue as
violets in a snowbank.

There was in that face the necessary balance between strength and
frailty, self-possession and emotion, at least, so he thought, the
features not quite absolutely regular. He preferred that touch of
oddness; it was the stamp of her will, her curious insights, her traits
of unusual justice. It mitigated too much beauty. Greek models were all
very well in statues, but in a woman one wanted a lively difference....
Moira’s book suddenly snapped shut, as though his slowly relished
inspection were too much for her. Her short laugh came like a chain of
melody from her whole body.

“Poor Hal,” she cried, “aren’t you sorry you will have to listen to
Swinburne all your life?”

He reached out an Indian forearm and drew her to him. They were silent
for a long time. Then she sat back, her eyes admiring the relaxed
strength of his body.

“God!” he muttered, “and I once thought because we were cousins this
could never happen--I should never be allowed to speak.”

“Such a good little boy,” she said. “You would have waited to be
allowed.”

“It’s odd how I’ve never been able to think of you as Aunt’s daughter.”

“Neither have I,” she replied. “But it is easy to explain. It takes
a man--a father--about the house to establish parentage. Mother is a
dilettante on her job, anyway. But I have some qualities from her, I
know.... What _was_ father like?”

“I wasn’t exactly his playmate, you know!” he laughed. “I don’t
remember him any more than you do. But he must have been a regular,
from all I’ve heard. He was your father, all right.”

“H’m.... Ned Seymour _sounds_ like a man who might be my father. And
names are wonderful--better than portraits--to read people by. I can’t
tell much by father’s looks. Poor Daddy, Maman stood by him, I’m glad
of that. She’s always been a heretic among her own. But if Daddy was
so ambitious, so indifferent to the world and all that, why didn’t he
leave me a sign, why didn’t he leave glorious works? He should have.”

“He left you,” laughed Hal.

“The work of an idle moment.”

“Aren’t they the best? But I rather like that about your father, the
fact that he was a spectator rather than a spouter. So many darned
people aren’t content with their limitations. They have to puddle about
with paint and ink.”

“As I do.”

“It’s yours by right, I suppose. At least, you really like it.”

“I have invented a litany, Hal. Will you listen to it? I invented it
for the saddest people in the world. It goes like this: O God, be
merciful to those who are free and must live with the fettered; to
the scornful laughers who are bound to the humourless; to the swift
who walk by the slow; and the idle who are bondsmen to the busy--and
especially, O God, be merciful to all those whose spirits were young
and whose generation denied them youth’s chance, amen. There must have
been many like Daddy in his day.”

Through the trees the half moon glowed like the polished end of a
woman’s nail against a pink and sapphire West. It was an infinitely
tender moment, the end of a week of betrothal, the eve of his departure
for a trip North.

“Let me, please, once more,” whispered Moira, “one I love.” And she
quoted:

  “La lune blanche
  Luit dans les bois,
  De chaque branche
  Parte une voix,
  Sous la ramée,
  Oh, bien-aimée.

  “Une vaste et tendre
  Apaisement
  Semble descendre
  Du firmament
  Que l’astre irise....
  C’est l’heure exquise!”

“You gave me those,” she said. “They were a peace offering one
Christmas, one year you had treated me very badly. I love them because
they are all young, all fresh, ageless. Let’s you and I, dear, resolve
to be young forever. Let’s make a bond of youth, cherish it, study to
keep it, never let it go.”

“Moira, you will never be older than this day.”

“I think it is easy to stay young if one keeps one’s unreasonable
likes. One should always like things that are a little twisted and
strange, in spite of what people think. One must like Verlaine’s
absinthe as well as Verlaine, Swinburne and Swinburne’s perversity
also, Rob and his wickedness--the wickedness he doesn’t understand. You
know, Hal, I didn’t go to college after all, because I was afraid it
would make me old, it would give me ‘interests.’ I hate the word. As if
everything wasn’t an interest!”

They walked around by the flat, broad meadow, hushed in the dusk. The
first whip-poor-will was calling. She clung to his arm, enjoying the
sensation of firm muscles flexing under her hand.

“I don’t care,” she cried. “I’m not afraid of anything. I would as soon
give myself to you, all of me, now, to-night. The rest, all the fuss,
does not count. What is there to fear in this glorious wide world, Hal?”

“Nothing--but fear, I suppose,” he replied.

Two white figures swaying together across the dusty furrows, they
merged into the darkness like birds fluttering out of sight in the
clouds.




XIV


Moira had considered Mathilda not at all in the swift, sudden, almost
cyclonic romance with Hal Blaydon, no more indeed than in any of her
flirtations. There had been many others, of all ages, from her own
up to fifty, and she had vaguely realized that when her choice was
made, if she made a choice, her mother would have to be counted in.
At times during the past week of incredible magic, she had feared the
possibility of a clash between them, owing to the good Episcopalian
views, to which Mathilda still clung, despite the advanced and
advancing habits of thought that surrounded her. But the logic with
which the girl faced this possibility was serene: harmony had always
prevailed between them, too much harmony perhaps, and some conflict was
inevitable sooner or later. It had better occur over this biggest and
most important choice of her youth.

She had begun to wonder, of late, just how she felt toward her mother.
Certainly she was very fond of her, but it seemed hardly a filial
fondness. She admired Mathilda’s little fantasticalities; it was clear
that she had in her time been something of an idol-breaker; but it
was equally clear that her cherished image of herself as a person
of great independence of mind was somewhat out-worn. The daughter
had gone far beyond the older woman, or so she thought, and there
lurked small matters on which they concealed their opinions from each
other. Moreover, Moira had loved her most for the brightness and charm
of her manner and these were becoming clouded by a new development
that touched her closely--a secret in her brother’s life. Mathilda
had discovered the truth with amazement, but to all appearances had
reconciled herself to it. So long, she argued, as the apartment he
kept in town remained only a rendezvous for discreet meetings, she
did not greatly care. But more and more this other establishment was
taking Blaydon away from them. Could her brother possibly bring himself
to marry the woman--not now perhaps--but when age had weakened his
resistance and laid him open to appeals to sentiment and protection?
He was already far from a young man.... It was a situation that had a
profound effect upon her accustomed poise, because it was one which she
could not influence nor even speak of in his presence.

After Hal had left on his trip that night, Moira put up her car--she
had driven him to the station herself--and walked into the library.
She found Mathilda embroidering, a pastime in which she was skilful,
and took a frank pride. It was her substitute for artistic expression,
as she said, a gift she had always honestly envied. Everybody they
knew, Moira thought, longed for artistic expression--and Hal had been
right to scorn it. There were Mary Cawthorn and Tempe Riddle--as
soon as people like that had taken up writing verse, she herself had
dropped it. She had turned exclusively to her painting. That, at least,
you couldn’t do at all, without some foreground, some knowledge and
practice. She was happy that her youth had been industrious enough to
bring her a measure of these. And she did not take it seriously.

“Well,” said Mathilda, “you’ve seen your darling off?”

The girl did not attempt to conceal her surprise. Then she laughed.

“I suppose nobody could really have failed to know, who had been around
the house these last few days. Still, we thought we were so clever.”

“There’s such a thing as being too clever. When you and Hal began to be
stiff toward each other, I knew what was happening.”

“We must have been a fine pair of actors.”

“But I’ve seen it coming all along. Before either of you did, I
believe.”

Moira flopped upon the cricket at her mother’s feet, and looked into
her face affectionately.

“And that means, darling, that you don’t object?”

Mathilda ran her slim hand through the short, dark curls leaning
against her knee.

“Of course not, my child. It’s the most perfect thing that could have
happened.”

“Mother,” asked the girl, looking up at her whimsically, “when are we
ever going to quarrel, you and I?”

“Never, I hope.”

“Isn’t it rather unhealthy never to quarrel? Hal and I do, frequently,
and I’m glad of it.”

“You won’t think that way when you are my age.”

“_Maman_, are you very miserable about Uncle Sterling?”

Mathilda’s reply was preceded by a short pause and a quick glance.

“How did you know that?” she asked.

“I have ears and eyes--and can put things together, you know,” laughed
Moira. Then she added, more gravely, “I really don’t think many people
know. When Selden hinted about it I denied the story flatly--for his
benefit.”

“Why deny the truth?” It was one of Mathilda’s traits to be able to say
things the implications of which were unpleasant to her.

“Oh, one must to busybodies. Only I do wish you wouldn’t be unhappy
about it.”

“I’m not,” said the other, “so long as matters remain as they are.”

“I see what you mean, dear. People who have professionally renounced
marriage ought to have some pride. They ought to observe the ethics of
their profession.”

Mathilda smiled.

“I’m afraid my attitude is not so impersonal. Isn’t that somewhere in
Shaw?”

“It must be,” replied the girl. “But I’m quite thrilled over the whole
thing. Please forgive me for saying so. To think of Uncle Sterling
being so delightfully biblical!”

She went to the table and brought the cigarettes. The older woman took
one from her and laid aside her embroidery. “You’ll do something for
me, you two?” she asked.

“What?”

“Get married as soon as possible.”

“Oh, my dear! I’m only nineteen.”

“Do you think you would ever change?”

“No, I don’t think that.”

“Then why not marry? I can’t understand the modern idea of waiting
until life is over to marry. It’s good for people to have their youth
together--when they can.”

“Well, Hal has done all the planning, and I think it is very sensible.
In the first place, he’s going on with his chemistry. He doesn’t want
to go into the brokerage office, and you mustn’t tell Uncle yet.”

“I approve of that. Brokerage will do for Robert.”

“It means two more years for him at college. The first of them I shall
spend in New York studying. The next I want to spend in Paris, and I
want you to come with me, dear. How about it? And then--married in
Paris, and the Sorbonne or some German University for Hal. Isn’t that a
glorious programme? He really didn’t plan all of it.”

“No, I imagine not,” laughed Mathilda. “He would probably have planned
it as I would, by beginning with the end. But I shan’t oppose you. I’ve
never opposed you much, Moira, not even when I might have done so with
justice. And the reason is that I have always wanted to live to see one
completely happy person. I hope you are going to be the one.”

Mathilda concluded with a wistful note.

“Darling,” cried the girl. “How good you have been to me. And I wonder
if I am going to be completely happy. I’ll try, and I shan’t be ashamed
or modest about it, either. Is that--egotistical?”

A few minutes later as she passed Hal Blaydon’s door on the way to her
own, she could not resist the temptation to go in. She had never done
that before deliberately, and she felt a little like an intruder. She
had a great distaste for the practice of assuming privileges with
those one cared for, but she knew he would be pleased if he saw her
patting his bed affectionately and looking around at his belongings. As
she stopped in front of the untidy book-shelves, she smiled at their
incongruous juxtaposition of textbooks, modern novels and classic
survivals of adolescence--“This Side of Paradise” between a Latin
grammar and a Dictionary of Physics; “Cytherea,” which reminded her
just then of many men she knew, alongside of “Plutarch’s Lives.” She
reflected that she would probably not sleep very early to-night and had
no fresh reading in her bedroom. She quickly pulled out a volume and
went to her room.

With her clothes off and three pillows behind her back, and a cigarette
between her lips, she picked up the book she had borrowed. There had
been a certain degree of method in her selection. It was an old,
loose-backed, green-covered copy of “Les Misérables,” one of her long
and growing list of “duty books,” that is to say, books she ought
to have read years ago and had not. This happened also to belong to
the classification of “school-piece” books. An English reader had
contained a selection from it, and she had once resolved, in a fit of
rebellion against the academic, never to read any books that yielded
school pieces for the boredom of the young. Later the conscience of
a cultivated adult had forced her to recant, and her _index librorum
prohibitorum_ had become an index obligatory.

The book in her hand was a long one. She would just about finish it by
the time Hal came back, and that would be killing two birds with one
stone.

She opened it at random and as she removed her thumbs the pages leaped
back to a marked place, occupied by a letter. She picked it up. It
was an old and faded letter, addressed to “Mrs. Ellen Williams, 21
Trezevant Place.” That was Ellen, the cook, of course. She smiled a
little at the thought of Ellen reading a monstrous book like this. She
had never seen Ellen read anything except a recipe or a label. But,
of course, humble people did like Hugo. She had read “Notre Dame” and
“Ninety-Three.”

Moira would have put the letter aside at once to hand it to the servant
in the morning had she not noticed two markings on the envelope that
strangely interested her. One was the date, just a month after she was
born. The other was the inscription on the flap in back, which read as
follows:

  from Miss Moira McCoy,
    Lutheran Maternity Hospital,
      2243 Bismarck Street.

Her own name, on a letter almost as old as she was! She laid it down.
She ought not to read it, of course. But it certainly was hard to
resist knowing what some little Irish girl in the hospital (who made
her capital “m’s” with three vertical lines and a horizontal bar across
the top) was thinking and doing a month after she was born. Wasn’t
there a “statute of limitations” on letters? No letter nearly twenty
years old could be private. The lure of romance that lurked in the
envelope was too strong. She hastily drew out the folded sheet and read:

  MY DEAR MRS. WILLIAMS:

  Just a note to tell you how honoured and tickled I am that you are
  going to name your little daughter after me.

  I hope to see her sometime soon, and you also. I am so busy now, but
  in two or three weeks I could call on my day off, Thursday, if it
  could be arranged.

  So you love your new place? I’m so glad. We all miss you and--my
  pretty little namesake. How proud it makes me.

                                    Sincerely your friend,
                                                            MOIRA McCOY.

She had never heard of Ellen’s having a baby, and if she had just been
naming it when this letter was written it should have been about the
same age as herself. How curious it was that she and Ellen’s baby
should have had the same name. Perhaps her mother had liked the name
and borrowed it from Ellen, for Mathilda would take what she wanted;
but it did seem unlikely she would take the name of the cook’s baby
for her own. And what had become of Ellen’s Moira? She would ask Ellen
about it in the morning. Never had her curiosity been so oddly and
intensely aroused.

She cast the letter from her and opened Hugo, but her eyes were heavy
and her mind weary with the thoughts and excitements of that day. In a
few moments she was asleep.

When she awoke in the morning the first thing she thought of was the
letter, and she reread it. The mystery had clearly taken a strong hold
upon her mind. While dressing she decided to postpone seeing Ellen,
and every time she went to her room during the day she read the letter
again and asked herself more and more puzzling questions about it. Why,
for example, had Ellen never spoken of her child, particularly if it
had the same name as herself? Was there something distasteful in the
recollection either to Ellen or to her mistress?

Moira could not get into the Hugo book at all. Instead she took a long
drive in her car and, finding that a bore, she tried riding which
proved no better. She was tempted to hunt up Rob or telephone for
Selden and go somewhere for a cocktail and a dance. Failing to reach
either of them or to decide on anything definite to do, she began to
find Ellen a source of enormous interest. Hardly realizing it, she
spied upon her all afternoon, and searched her smiling, unconcerned
features whenever she appeared. It was hard to think of Ellen ever
having had a baby. She stopped herself from pursuing this obsession a
half a dozen times, but the spell of curiosity lingered. And still she
could not bring herself to speak to the woman. By nightfall she was
scattered and depressed, with the feeling of having spent a wasted day.

She went to bed early and tried again to read Hugo, but instead, she
found herself rereading the McCoy letter. It drew her like a sinister
charm. She threw on a dressing gown and began walking in the room. For
the first time in her whole life her fingers shook as she started to
take a cigarette from her box, and actually muffed it. This made her
angry, and she lit the cigarette swiftly and fiercely and clattered the
box down on the table. Then she was able to laugh and upbraid herself.

“Good Lord!” she cried. “What has the cook and her offspring to do with
me? Why am I so excited?”

But even as the words died on her lips her reassurance departed. She
would never get control of herself until she investigated. Why hadn’t
she talked to Ellen that day and got this foolish curiosity off her
mind? The woman would think it strange if she called on her at this
late hour to return a twenty-year-old letter, even though it contained
sacred memories. Yet why should Ellen think that? She would simply
slip down and hand her the letter with some gay nonsense about it
being better twenty years late than never, and if Ellen wasn’t tired
and seemed talkative she would ask her about the coincidence of names.
It was certainly no new thing in that house for Moira to do whimsical
and unexpected things. She could come back and sleep and dream of her
blessed Hal--poor Hal, he had hardly had a thought from her all day.

The regular servants’ rooms were at the top of the house, but Ellen
lived alone in the little wing off the kitchen. She had chosen this
ground floor room because it was closer to the affairs that directly
concerned her, outside and in, and because she was a privileged person,
the dean of the servants. Moira’s visit then would disturb nobody. She
drew her pretty gown about her and walked boldly downstairs, knocked,
made a laughing request to be admitted and waited for the startled
woman to put something around her and unlock the door.

“Is this your letter, Ellen?” she asked. “I found it last night and
meant to give it to you to-day, but forgot it. I thought you’d be so
glad to get it back, I’d just come down and give it to you before I
went to sleep. You see ... I read it--the date was so near my birthday.”

Ellen opened the letter and read it through with apparent awkwardness
and difficulty.

“Why, Miss Moira, where did you get this? It’s been lost for years. I
didn’t know it was in existence.”

“I found it in a book upstairs.”

“My land! How did it get there, I wonder?”

“It was an old volume of Hugo’s--‘Les Misérables.’”

The girl winced a little as Ellen repeated the name after her and
mispronounced it schoolboy fashion.

“Oh, yes, yes, I remember. That’s so many years ago. To think this
letter has been there all that time!”

“I didn’t know you had ever had a baby, Ellen. Tell me about it. Are
you too sleepy?”

“No, I’m not sleepy, Miss Moira--” Ellen’s politeness prompted the
words, yet the girl caught a hint that she would have liked to end the
conversation. “You--you startled me so,” she went on. “But--there isn’t
anything to tell.”

“Did she die?”

“Yes, Miss Moira.”

The fidgety excitement which seized the grey-haired woman was
understandable on the ground of old memories being suddenly aroused.
Moira’s voice expressed the tenderest sympathy.

“How sad. She would have been such a comfort to you now.”

“Yes. But that’s all so long ago, ma’am. It’s the way things happen in
this world for some of us.”

“And your husband? Is he dead, too?”

The questioning was becoming more and more difficult for Ellen. When
she answered it was with a touch of impatience.

“I don’t know. I don’t know where he is.”

“He deserted you?”

“Yes.”

Moira felt the need of some apology, induced by Ellen’s uneasiness,
but the very fact that the information was unsatisfactory made her
perversely eager to stay, although the little room oppressed her.

“I suppose you think I’m awfully curious, Ellen,” she said, with a
short laugh. “And very inconsiderate to come and talk to you about
these things at this time of night. But it seems so strange that you’ve
been here ever since I can remember, and I’ve never heard about them--I
suppose I thought you didn’t have an early life. You’re so cheerful,
one doesn’t imagine you’ve had sorrows.”

“People forget, ma’am. You can’t stay sad always.”

“Isn’t it funny,” Moira broke in, “that I’ve got the same name your
daughter had?”

“Ye-es--I guess it is.”

Ellen’s forced laugh and strained expression, and the tongue-tied
moment that followed, were as hard for Moira as for the speaker. The
silence lengthened. The older woman twisted in her uncomfortable seat
on the bed. She obviously did not want to be looked at nor to look at
the girl. Why, thought Moira, should she make all this fuss over old
memories? What harm was in them? Ellen was not naturally shy--she could
be voluble enough at times, and quite intelligent.

“And we were just about the same age, weren’t we?”

“No, oh, no,” burst out the other, and stopped suddenly.

“But the letter is dated so near my birthday,” said Moira, a little
brusquely, “and speaks of your baby’s christening. We’d have to be.”

“Bu-but--my little girl was christened very late.”

“She was christened about the time I was, by the same name, and in the
same house? Why, it’s really a romantic idea, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Ellen, “that was how it was. Your--your mother liked the
name too.”

Moira felt a wave of compassion for the lonely old woman. There seemed
to be nothing left to do but to go. She rose as if to do so, and then
that impulse of sympathy caused her to sit down beside the other on the
bed. She spoke very gently.

“Ellen, I’m sorry, I’ve been opening an old wound, haven’t I? I can see
that it hurts you. You understand why I am so interested--because of
the name? That’s natural, isn’t it? But I’m glad to have learned about
it. I shall think of you so differently from now on.”

“Yes, Miss Moira, thank you.” The girl’s closeness to her and sympathy
made Ellen’s voice tremble. She looked down at the letter which she had
been rolling and twisting in her fingers, and following her glance,
Moira realized that her own curiosity was not appeased at all. The
mystery was as much a mystery as ever.

“Why, you’re destroying your letter,” she said with a laugh, and took
it from her and straightened it out. “You must have been fond of Miss
McCoy,” she added gently. “Was she your friend?”

“Yes.”

“Was she sick, in the hospital?”

“No, she--she was a nurse.”

“Oh, of course. She speaks of being so busy and of missing you. And you
had your baby there?”

“Yes.”

“That old hospital is still there, Ellen. I’ve driven by it a dozen
times going to town. It doesn’t look like a very cheerful place to have
a baby, but I guess it was nicer in those days.”

“It was all right,” said Ellen. Moira impulsively reached an arm about
her waist.

“Well, I’m going now. You don’t want to talk any more about it, do you,
dear? I’ll ask mother to tell me the story. Can I--can I keep this
letter, just to show her? I’ll tell her the odd way I came across it.”

Ellen’s hand flew in terror to the crumpled letter.

“No--no, please, Miss Moira. Give it to me,” she begged.

The violence of her action, its commanding tone, brought a flush of
anger to Moira’s face. She relinquished the letter.

“Oh,” she said, in a changed voice. “I suppose I should apologize--that
is, no doubt you are angry that I read it.”

“Yes, you shouldn’t have done that.”

The servant spoke for the first time naturally, sincerely and
vigorously, and by contrast it made all her previous answers seem to
Moira like a patch-work of unreality and embarrassed evasion. Moreover,
the accusing tone of the remark added fuel to her resentment. She arose
and drew her dressing gown about her with a gesture of dignity. This
time she certainly must go. And yet she was hurt and offended. Her only
intent had been one of genuine interest and sympathy, and it had been
badly received. As she stood in the floor in this puzzled, dissatisfied
state, she caught sight of Ellen’s face appealing to her pathetically.

“Please, Miss Moira,” the woman whispered hoarsely, “don’t tell Mrs.
Seymour, don’t tell her about this letter, or that you were here, or
anything.”

The girl answered with an abrupt gesture of impatience.

“Ellen, I don’t understand. What is all this secrecy, this mystery for?
I found your letter, I came to give it back to you and asked a simple
question--and you treat me as though I had done something criminal.
It’s foolish. I don’t see why I shouldn’t ask mother.”

A blank panic seemed to have seized Ellen. She snatched the girl’s hand
and went on in the same hoarse voice:

“I can’t explain, but only don’t, don’t say anything to her. For her
sake, for everybody’s sake, please!”

Moira experienced a momentary insane illumination. It made her heart
stop and then flutter and then stop again. Twice in her life she had
felt herself near death--once in an accident with her car, and once
when her horse had thrown her. She felt now the same sensation she had
felt then. The questions that came to her lips would have seemed to her
idiotic a moment before. Yet they came irresistibly.

“Ellen,” she cried, “what does all this mean? Have I got anything to do
with it?”

“You? Oh, no, no,” cried Ellen. “No, you mustn’t think that!”

“Was that baby me?”

“Oh, Miss Moira, how can you--how can you dream--?”

“Are you my mother, Ellen? Tell me the truth. I’ll never leave here
until I hear the truth. I’ll search this room, every inch of it.”

But she did not need her answer in words. Ellen’s strength was gone.
Her mouth gibbered and her face ran tears. The girl sat down heavily,
as though she were facing a job that had to be got over with. She never
doubted the truth after that first glimpse of it, never tried to find
a loophole. There were simply details to be heard, the future to be
considered. She must get the whole story from Ellen, talk it over, make
some decision. It would be half the night before she was through with
it, and she hated it....

The sun had, in fact, appeared when she emerged from the little room,
with a strange tale in her possession, pieced together from the
incoherent reminiscences of Ellen. She had forgiven Mrs. Seymour,
forgiven her real mother, forgiven all of them for the deception. It
was only herself that she could not forgive, herself, humiliated by the
degrading masquerade of twenty years.

The knowledge that gave her most courage was her illegitimacy--which
was clear from Ellen’s reticence. Better that a thousand times, better
a complete outcast, than a respectable nobody. She would go, of course,
go in secret, that day. She could take the fewest possible things, put
them in her car when no one was looking, and drive to town. What money
she needed to get established elsewhere she would have to take from her
own account at the bank, as a loan. Ellen had been sworn to say nothing
of the discovery.

She stood at her window watching the first sun gild the tops of the
knolls, drive the low-lying mists slowly before it. This great knee of
a hill, this Penthesilea’s knee, had been a mother’s knee to her, more
truly than any human one. There were no relationships in Nature, and
this, the memory of her youth, could not be taken from her.... But it
would be long before she would see the morning rise from that window
again, and she lingered over it; not sentimentally. Why couldn’t she
feel sad? Why was she so hard--why had she been so cruel to Ellen? She
could hear her now pleading that she had given up Moira for her good,
pleading the advantages that had come to them by the sacrifice. Empty
advantages, thought their possessor, immorally got and useless to her
now, just so many more things to bid good-bye to. The only thing that
counted was Hal; if she was bitter it was because she feared yielding
to that. Fate had thrown her to Hal and snatched her away in the moment
of realization....

She turned from the full day flooding the window and went to her desk.
She wanted to write to him now, while she was strongest.

  Dear [she wrote]: I know what you would say. You would say that it
  made no difference, and it would not now. But some day it would, it
  would grow upon us and smother us. It would be ‘my past,’ and the
  time would come when your pride might make you hate me, for I would
  hate myself. I can face this now. I don’t know whether I could face
  it later. I must go away and do something to absolve myself in my
  own eyes. And you must not interfere--you cannot. It will be years
  before I can see you again. I shall never forget these short days,
  too precious to describe. It is almost enough, that memory, without
  anything more. Good-bye.

She could write no more, explain no more, though she wanted to.
She suddenly reflected on the injustice of having to carry all the
responsibility herself. She would have to repulse every advance,
however much she might long to accept it.

She laid down her pen--a gold one that matched the other little tools
on her writing table--with a gesture that signified she was laying
down everything else in the room, the thousand things she had used and
loved, the horses, the trees, the long, dear roads, the very air of
Thornhill.




XV


The only things she saw at first were as dreary and tragic as herself.
It began the moment she left Thornhill, with her last vision of Ellen’s
agonizing, tear-stained face hiding at her window on the circular
drive. Then came the ride alone, through hot rows of dusty, dull brick
houses; the terror-inspiring sight of lives straitened and stagnant
through poverty; the abysmal reek of the neighbourhood, near a glue
factory, where she left her car in the garage, with instructions to
return it on the morrow, and engaged an express man to take her trunk;
the long file of weary, hopeful people with little green bills in their
hands at the bank--worshippers in the modern temple; the immigrants at
Union Station, sprawling on the circular benches about the pillars,
hemmed in by their squalid baggage and children; the herding of
exhausted, stupid families from the country trains to the street-cars
and from the street-cars to the trains; the smoke-patined inferno of
the city sweating in the heat after the clean beauty of her home....

She had been unable to get away in time to buy a berth in the fast
train. In order to leave that day, which was imperative, she was forced
to take the “two-day” train, and tried to console herself with the
thought that its second-rateness would more effectually cover her
flight. But the endless trip in coaches that contained unprepossessing
persons from the lower social chaos added to the weight that lay on her
spirit.

The first night on the train she slept early and long, fatigued by
a day full of tasks, but the second she lay staring at the polished
red back of the berth above, her shade drawn up, her smarting eyes
conscious of the jabbing flashes of light as they passed through
sleeping towns, or straining out over dark, shuddering mysteries of
country; planning, wondering, trying to anticipate what life would
be like one year, two years, five years from to-night. Where should
she be; whom should she know? Should she be alive? Yes, she promised
herself, she would be that. The one thing she could not admit was that
life might end before she had fought it out.

Once she asked herself what Mathilda was doing, for by this time her
flight was an old story, the worst of the scene between Ellen and
Mathilda was over. But they would be dreadfully unhappy nevertheless,
and the pity she could spare to them softened her own sense of wrong.
She flashed on the electric light in the berth and looked at her watch.
In six hours, had it not been for Victor Hugo, for a little scrawled
note written a fifth of a century ago, she would have been meeting
Hal Blaydon at the Blythedale platform. And who could say--if she had
married Hal and learned the truth afterward--would it have made any
difference after all?

It was morning when they got beyond Pittsburgh and, sleepless and
discouraged, the grey day greeted her dismally. All she was able to
see beyond the window were little grimy houses belonging to coal
miners--they painted them a deep red or black in those parts, she
supposed because all life was accursed. For long distances nothing
caught her eye but these colours of Hell borrowed for earthly use. On a
high slope, dingy with slag and coal screenings and dust, there was a
black, sorry-looking house, where two children were swinging across the
cheap frame porch far above the train. They were singing, and it struck
her as the oddest thing she had ever witnessed. There were many houses
like it on that coal bank. Where there wasn’t coal there was yellow
mud. Where there were not either there were piles of rusty iron. She
might come to this herself, to ugliness and hunger. She shuddered and
darkened the berth, hiding her face from the vision as though it would
sear her beauty and put an end to her youth. Hardly a moment later, it
seemed, the porter awakened her from a deep sleep. They were in the
Pennsylvania station.

Moira’s mood changed the moment she stood in the rotunda. The powerful
magic of the city stirred her. Had it been raining as only it can rain
in New York, had the streets been ice-bound or blistering in mid-summer
heat, she would have felt that great surge unabated.

But to-day the city was in one of its magnificent sunny moods, laughing
at its own comic and gracile charms, whimsical with unreliable winds,
one of those startling, extravagant days when a walk in any street has
the effect of champagne. On a sudden impulse she ordered the cab to
the Ritz. She would enjoy one day, one supreme spell of indifference
and the sense of power, one hour at court when the regal town must
treat her with its finest smiles and courtesies. She wrote boldly on
the register “Mary Smith,” and the simple dignity of the name made it
distinguished in that long list of high-sounding titles.

She breakfasted in state in her bedroom, looking over Park Avenue
toward the great railroad terminus, the innumerable roofs, which
stretched like irregular stepping stones to the river, the gracious
bridge uptown. She drove in a barouche to the Metropolitan Museum
and then down the Avenue, scenting its fine airs, and lingering on
its elegant details in the slow-moving vehicle; the gay pile of the
Plaza, like a monument erected to an Empress’ holiday; the pearly
home of the Vander-somethings, with its birdlike little statue of the
architect in a Rembrandt cap, perched among the décor of its roof; the
quaintly painted florist’s building in the forties; broad, gleaming
windows wherein the comfort of grizzled millionaires was framed for
the public’s delectation; the sleek cathedrals, English and Roman,
agreeably sunning themselves--almost tête-à-tête, with an air of
after-dinner ease; the occasional brown, old-fashioned banks, which one
took at first glance to be dwellings; the Library, squat with sedentary
scholarship and stained by too much knowledge of good and evil; the
mosque-like corner of the Waldorf; and far down where the Avenue
narrowed, pleasant-memoried houses of the older time, and a freshly
be-painted little French hotel, bright and impudent as a hat box from
the Rue de La Paix.

This last looked so suitable to her state of high spirits that she
called to the driver to stop there. Strangely enough she had never been
in the Brevoort. She slipped down into the basement café and was soon
looking at the multiplied images of people in the mirrors that panelled
the walls; among them stocky, dapper bachelors, arty, bearded men, a
tall tan young fellow in a Norfolk, seemingly much fascinated with his
companion, a much older woman with a weathered elegant face. She liked
these. This, she supposed, had something to do with Greenwich Village,
though except through picture and story, she knew nothing of it. But
as she poured her tea for herself, she felt suddenly it was not the
place to be alone. How easy it would be to go upstairs now, to send
a telegram to Hal. The unholy notion made her finish her luncheon and
leave.

She went back by bus and walked about through half a dozen shops, then
to a round of galleries, and finally, tired out, to the hotel. The
thrill was over as she watched the day die on the house-tops of the
East Side, and she almost wished she did not have to spend the night
there. She wanted to be at work, after all, the sooner the better;
nothing else could save her from boredom and despair. To-morrow she
would launch herself on the unknown stream.

She bought a ticket to a Russian variety show, which was just then
having a vogue on Broadway, and found forgetfulness between its exotic
charm and the night-view from the theatre roof, of the yellow-dappled
park, its motors skimming and swerving upon curved ribbons of road.
As she turned for a last look at it, standing apart from the crowd
filing out, her solitary figure attracted the glances of a score of
prosperous-looking men. But she did not see them. She thought:

“This is so vast, what can it matter who one is? The Moira of yesterday
is just as small compared to it, as this one here. Why should I care?”

She laughed at this bit of philosophy. It was not particularly
comforting, but it helped her to believe that she had given
up the past.... In her dreams the visions of the day mingled
kaleidoscopically.

Moira knew nothing about New York in a practical way. Her path had
always been the narrow round tripped by the fashionable visitor.
Therefore, as she sat at breakfast with the “classified” columns of
the _Times_ before her she had no idea where she wanted to live. It
happened that the first addresses that she jotted down in her notebook
were far downtown and to these she went looking for the cheapest single
room she could find.

The sights that met her eye filled her with half-humorous, half-tragic
emotions. The landladies who greeted her were in the main revolting;
she was taken into rooms that smelled, rooms that had cheap iron beds
with battered brass knobs, that had carpets with holes in them and
frayed lace curtains, grey with dirt, and hideous oak furnishings and
coloured calendars on the walls. Three-fourths of them were not cleaned
oftener than once a month, she was certain, and she determined to have
cleanliness though every other comfort failed.

She found it at last. On the west side of the Village she was attracted
by a neat card bearing the words “furnished rooms” on the door of a
brick house that looked many degrees better kept than its neighbours.
A shy grey-haired woman admitted her. There were several rooms, all
spotless, and she selected one reasonably priced, with white painted
woodwork and plain furniture that she thought she might manage to
live with. When she asked for the telephone to send for her luggage
from the hotel, she was shown into the daughter’s room. In one corner
of this pure haven was a small, square stand covered with chintz and
draped with flowered cretonne. Upon it stood a discarded perfume bottle
filled with holy water, a prayer-book and catechism, and a tall white
statuette of the Virgin and child, with the monogram M. A. on the
rococo base. On the wall above the stand was a black crucifix with
the Christ in gilt. Behind the Christ was thrust a little palm cross.
Still higher than the crucifix hung a photo-engraving of the Madonna
and child from some Italian master, in a gilded frame. The homely
simplicity of the scene brought tears to the girl’s eyes....

But she felt a little less benevolent the next day when she asked Mrs.
McCabe why there were no mirrors in the bathroom. That lady gazed at
her with the sad severity of the timid and replied:

“I don’t know. There just ain’t, and there won’t be.”

In this atmosphere of staggering piety began the career of “Mary
Smith.”




XVI


By the end of two years Moira had repaid the last of the five
hundred with which she had possessed herself on leaving Thornhill;
and accumulated a surplus of her own. From the day she quitted the
Munson School of Stenography and Typewriting she had never experienced
difficulty in securing a job and in making an excellent impression. The
two changes which she had made were of her own volition. For more than
six months now she had been secretary to the executive vice-president
of a soap company and had become something of an executive herself, on
a salary that still had a good margin in which to grow.

This man was typical of the average young organizing and selling marvel
of the day, but he had a quality of intelligence in matters outside of
business--limited, yet enough to be refreshing after the others she had
encountered. Moira did not feel, as she had in other places, that she
must suppress all the evidences of her breeding and education. This
she had actually attempted to do hitherto; diplomatically ignoring
awkward and ungrammatical English, adopting as much slang as she could
retain without practice on the outside, and generally pretending to be
quite as much the low brow as most of the other girls whose chatter
bewildered her in the washroom.

With Barcroft, for the first time, she could permit herself to be
natural, and this sense of ease increased her value enormously in
“meeting the trade” and handling difficult people in his absence. She
checked him up on his errors of dictation without shame, but she had
the rare good sense to know just when he was wiser in being wrong.
She grew to respect, rather than disdain, the qualities that made men
successful in business. They were qualities that did not interest her
essentially, yet Barcroft’s mind had mysterious powers of insight that
often called for silent applause.

Their relations developed into friendliness, and she felt his honest
admiration without the fear that it would lead to complications. She
had never yet herself encountered the boss-turned-lover--and the case
was reputed to be so common that she felt far from flattered. She tried
to account for it on the score of her natural dignity, her quiet mode
of dressing, her application to work, and her reticence; but these did
not explain. She was not conspicuously dignified--when it seemed to her
good to laugh she did so. Nor did she dress unattractively, much as she
respected her budget. And her efficiency was not nearly so obtrusive
as some brands of it she had observed. Moreover these qualities, she
believed, in a young and good-looking woman, would only make her more
pleasing to men. She mocked at the whole business; it was another of
those favourite American panics, like the white slave traffic, the
German spy-hunt, and the innumerable other horrors that supported the
newspapers and bred the violence of mobs.

She congratulated herself, nevertheless, that in spite of Barcroft’s
understanding and deference, nothing of that sort was remotely likely
to happen. She had found a good post, agreeably within her powers and
therefore easy, and she would be able to keep it indefinitely, with the
hope of a steadily mounting salary. Then one evening they fell into a
conversation after office hours. It ranged everywhere from the staging
of Arthur Hopkins to the value of rotogravure as an advertising medium,
from the proper length of skirts to the latest novel, and Barcroft
broke into the discussion suddenly by making love to her. He too was a
victim, as it appeared, of the quarrelsome and haphazard home.

She had often asked herself, with some bitterness, what advantage her
early life gave her in such a career as she now had to follow. She
found it in this instance the most useful equipment she could have.
Another girl would have thrown up the job. She managed adroitly to save
it. She was not at all shocked by Barcroft’s love-making. She felt
sorry for him; she talked to him sympathetically about his troubles,
and in the end they were better friends than ever. Moreover, he was not
long afterward grateful to her ... the wife had come out victor over
her lord ... the yoke was again pleasing to his neck.

Her life outside of the office was so devoid of romance that this brush
with it at the soap company was not unpleasant. She had occupied more
than one furnished room since the start at Mrs. McCabe’s, and in her
wanderings she had come necessarily in contact with the Village life,
but she did not adopt its easy associations. She discovered very early
that the Village was the gossip shop of the country. National--and
international--news travelled fast there from tongue to tongue,
concerning people even slightly known or connected with the known. You
could not say when you would walk into one of its restaurants and find
at the next table a prominent matron of your city. A half a dozen times
she had dodged or stared down old acquaintances on the upper Avenue.

There were girls she met from day to day, willing to become her
friends--attractive girls who were doing interesting things. A few
good cronies of this sort would have lightened her solitary evenings
and perhaps helped her to find work more congenial than business. But
friendships, to be worth while, had to be frank. She knew she would be
tempted defiantly to tell all about herself, and she shrank from doing
so. Native resourcefulness made it easy to draw the line of separation,
but pride made it hard. She realized that her aloofness was causing
criticism. In the two restaurants where she took most of her evening
meals--because they were cheap and clean--the talk was not sympathetic.
If one was free to have lovers _ad lib._ in the Village one was
obviously not free to dispense with friends entirely. She seemed a snob.

There were times when she gave herself up to storms of grief. It
grew to be an act of self-preservation, a part of her philosophy of
endurance. Long spells of weeping, or of a weary, helpless state of
the spirit that was more thoroughly a surrender and resignation than
tears. Again and again she would cry through the darkness for Hal
with the plaintive voice of a sick child--and even for the kind ghost
of Mathilda Seymour. If she felt ashamed of these indulgences, she
argued that there could be no harm in them. Her old friends could not
hear her. She was alone in all those little rooms, completely cut off
from anything familiar, from all but the fluttering, unreal, poignant
memories of her beautiful childhood. Waves of passionate self-pity
swept over her; she rebelled aloud against the bitter meanness of her
betrayal; the awful burden of carrying her secret alone.

In the end it was wise that she did not deny these moods when they
came to her and did not try to control them. From them she rose
calm and clear-headed, charged with newly stored courage. They were
spiritual baths, which cleaned her, a sort of self-asserting prayer.
When they had gone not a vestige of rebellion was left in her; she felt
grown in stature, ready to carry her fate like a flag. For a day or two
afterward she would be sentimental and overfull of feeling. She would
go out of her way to help beggars and walk a block to give dimes to
the hurdy-gurdy man; and comfort the little girls in the filing room
if they weren’t feeling well, or had just been called down by the head
clerk.

One thing that these rituals of solitary suffering gave her was the
buoyant, happy consciousness of artistic power, and she longed to
return to painting. Until now it had seemed impossible. She could
not command the space, the office robbed her of daylight, materials
were too costly. Now she began to dream of creating a studio--the
opportunity to work might be managed somehow, once she had acquired
the facilities. She saved more sedulously, giving up a part of
her pleasures, an occasional new book and a theatre now and then,
furbishing clothes for herself despite her hatred of the needle.




XVII


The floors were done and dry. Elsie Jennings, who had come in to
help, was putting the third coat of black upon the new book-shelves,
and Moira was waiting for the delivery of her three last pieces of
furniture, which completed the picture, for a time at least. Whether
they came as they had been promised or not, the house-warming party
was to be held that evening, with Elsie, Jade Sommers, and Arthur, her
husband.

Arthur Sommers she had met as a printing salesman, visiting her office,
and later had run across with Jade in a restaurant. He was a good sort,
in his early thirties, jovial and proud of his plain citizenship,
inclined to stoutness and much in love with his wife, the story writer.
Elsie ran a shop in which she sold hand-made novelties and small house
furnishings, that caught the sightseers from the States and uptown
with their faintly futurist air. It was a Saturday in the Spring, and
had the party been postponed two days it might have celebrated Moira’s
birthday. But she did not divulge that fact.

“There,” said Elsie, “it’s done. And I think three coats will be
enough.”

“Not so bad,” replied Moira. She stood making an inspection of her
nearly finished home. The apartment itself was a discovery--quite a
bargain--one huge room with tall windows, and a tiny bedroom and bath
and kitchen closet, in an old five-story house, occupied by a small
army of nondescript tenants.

“How good you look to me, old barn!” was her fervent thought, which
Elsie, watching her, divined. “If those chairs don’t come pretty soon,”
she went on aloud, “they won’t come at all, and somebody will have to
sit on the floor. I’m going out to shop for food.”

“Yes, go ahead,” said Elsie. “This box of china has got to be unpacked
and washed. I’ll do that in the meantime.”

Moira had been in and out of the building on many occasions during the
past week, but her curiosity had been slight regarding her neighbours.
She couldn’t afford to be particular about them, so it seemed to her
pointless to be curious. As she went downstairs, however, on the way to
the grocery, a name on the door to a small room caught her attention.

“Miles Harlindew!” she said, and found her memory flying to years
before at Thornhill, and her lips repeating some lines about:

  “All shining parallels of track,
    All brown roads leading up.”

She had begun to see the man’s verses in the literary magazines when
she couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, and many of
them had sung themselves into her memory. One or two had given her
an experience of discovery. But for the last few years she had found
no more of his work. She had imagined him for some reason, as people
are likely to think of anybody at all who gets things published, as
successful, comfortable, arrived.

“He must be getting along in years,” she thought. “Poor fellow!”
For she knew that room corresponded to her bedroom above, a mere
cubby-hole, so small that she had to sit on her bed to look in the
dressing table mirror.

It was her first party in years, and she did not need the
cocktails--which Arthur Sommers had brought in a silver flask--to give
her a thrill. She fell in love with her guests and charmed them into
something like wonder. So this was the unapproachable Mary Smith!

“Oh, I’ve got distinguished literary neighbours,” she announced. “Miles
Harlindew is on the floor below.”

A ripple of amusement greeted her remark.

“But I remember some stunning poems of his,” she went on.

“Oh, yes,” put in Jade, “but nobody knows he’s alive these days. He
doesn’t even know it himself.”

“Come off,” said her husband. “I see him often, very much alive. Any
man who does his duty violating the Eighteenth Amendment as regularly
as Miles, has my vote. What do you say if I get him.”

“If he’s sober,” put in Jade.

Sommers glanced at Moira for consent, and she gave it with a brisk
nod. These people knew more about the man than she and no doubt were
justified in what they said; nevertheless she felt a vague resentment.
What would they say if they knew all there was to be known about
herself? Experience had already taught her that beneath the literal
and semi-bohemian veneer of her friends there was a stern core of
respectability.

Harlindew came and was sober. He was painfully and tiresomely sober,
and she heartily wished they had saved some of Arthur’s cocktails.
He sat down stiffly and ventured commonplaces when spoken to. She
found him a satisfactory physical specimen, showing more years than
she expected, in premature lines. He was neither tall nor short, of
the type that never acquires flesh, somewhat shaggy behind the ears,
with a lop-sided face. One jaw was stronger than the other, one eye
keener than the other, one brow more pleasing in conformation than the
other--and these inequalities were not all on the same side of his
face.

When she recited his verses, he was not pleased. He depreciated them
vigorously and was very uncomfortable. He called them the errors of
his youth. The one thing that he took extraordinary interest in was
a talk with Sommers about business. She then watched his gestures
and animation with pleasure. They made a change in the man’s whole
appearance.

“I’m thinking seriously of going into business,” he announced in a
grave voice, and seemed a little disappointed that this statement was
not received with greater acclaim. The evening ended, dampened, on the
whole, by his presence.

“How fiercely shy he is about his work,” said Moira to the others, as
they stood at the door ready to go.

“Big night last night,” said Arthur, in a stage whisper. “Feeling
rocky.”

“I hope you don’t meet him somewhere at three in the morning,” added
Elsie. “He’ll reel it off to you then until you’ll be sorry.”

Yet she thought more about what she saw of Harlindew, during his short
stay in her rooms, than of anything else that had happened that night.
He was the only young man she had met in New York whom she wanted to
talk to. It was, possibly, a childish delusion, a fancy arising out of
the fact that both of them were miserable about something, obviously
about something it was impossible to discuss.

A few days later she met him on the stairs, and he blushed and
stammered:

“I believe you are the only person alive who still cares anything for
my poetry.”

He was gone too quickly for her to answer. She did not see him again
for a week, and when she did she invited him to tea. In an hour he was
as much at his ease as though he had known her forever, and stayed so
long he expressed the fear of having bored her. Soon after that she was
seeing him two or three times a week.

He came because she listened to his monologues. Moira found that
this was the man’s characteristic. Shy to the point of morbidness in
company, she no sooner began to encourage him alone than he talked
without end. His ideas were neither very well thought out nor very
clearly expressed, but they stimulated her. He poured forth the most
curious tag-ends of experience, made extraordinary confessions with
few traces of shame, chattered cynically, humorously, passionately
and autocratically by turns about writing and all the arts, and then
stopped suddenly in the midst of things, frightened to silence by
the realization of her presence and the boldness of his own tongue.
Only one thing could have enabled him to indulge this luxury and keep
coming--a knowledge of her interest, and she gave it honestly. She saw
that the inner life of this young man and her own had been similar. He
soon passed from Miss Smith to Mary, and from Mary to Madonna, and
finding that the last was to his taste, he held to it. Before long he
was giving full rein to a natural streak of fantastic high spirits and
messing about her place like a privileged person.

She was, for some reason, wholly delighted by all this. The crushed
spirit he had shown at their first meeting had seemed tragically
inappropriate and she was glad to be drawing anybody out who needed
it. The man, set beside most of the people she had known, was a freak,
certainly, but he was not an impossible freak. And he differed from
such people as Selden Van Nostrand in depth, breadth and sensitive
contact with life. With a perfectly conventional background, he had
simply, she thought, allowed his spiritual life to express itself
in his physical life from an early age. His courtesy was innate and
usually unfailing, on some occasions oppressive--but it was a quality
she would not have liked to find lacking. His flattery she had to
accept as simply as she could; he exhausted his vocabulary in finding
terms for her beauty. It seemed an ever-renewed miracle to him, which
he had to talk about to enjoy.

“Madonna,” he said one day, “you should be some queen like Margaret of
Navarre. I should like to be one of the story tellers of your court.
It is a commentary on our beastly times that such a one as you is a
stenographer.”

“If I had the courage--as you have--I wouldn’t be,” she laughed, “but
it scares me to think of going my own way.”

“Ah, that is one thing I came to ask you about. I must have told you
that I intend going into business.”

“But why?” she asked, “why should you, after all?”

“Well, when we are young we expect all things to come to us. We don’t
want them just to-day, but to-morrow?--we’ll whistle and down they
will come from the sky. That’s what we think. In my case, however,
they haven’t come. Ergo, I have lived disgracefully. Now I must begin
to die gracefully by turning to work. Yet isn’t it possible to look
upon the grotesque preoccupation of the American male as a trade, a
form of artisan-ship, a deed of the left hand? I know a man who sells
advertising, and who has more confidence in me than I should dare to
have in myself. He is decent enough to think that I can supply what he
wants. Why not try it?”

“Aren’t you writing anything nowadays, Miles?”

“Nothing,” he said, with a shrug. “Book reviews! What are book reviews?
Every time I have to go to see an editor and ask for a book, it
makes me feel as though selling hairpins from house to house is more
respectable. Besides, the literary world has forgotten me. I only fill
up space.”

“Nonsense,” said she vehemently. “And you’re wrong about business.
Business is pretty awful. I suppose you’ll have to find that out for
yourself.”

“There _are_ more delightful occupations, true. I have always had an
ambition to be a cab-driver. It is the sole profession in which one
becomes a licensed eavesdropper. Excellent for the literary man. You
know people mind the cabby no more than if he were the horse. I mean
a horse-cab, of course ... only in such leisurely vehicles do people
expose their souls, their most intimate secrets. But I haven’t the
cabby’s training. From things you have said, I fancied you knew horses.”

“A little. When I was a young girl I had some playmates who owned them.”

“Noble beasts. I’m sure they would break the neck of any poor fool who
had condescended to Pegasus.”

“The trouble with you, Miles, is that you don’t condescend often
enough, nor persistently enough. You ought to be writing poems at this
moment. You should have been doing it these last five years.”

“The impulse to creation begins with a peculiar tickling of the tummy
that I haven’t felt for ages.”

Her eagerness to start him writing usually came to nothing in some such
joke. At other times he would grow more serious.

“No, Madonna, I cannot. The blossom of life is gone--only the bare
stalk is left. It may flower again, but it must be watered and fed. My
affair with poetry has ended like so many marriages--in disillusion.
That is rough, when one realizes that poetry demands the hardest
labour for the smallest return of any occupation on earth. It takes
all one’s youth, at the expense of practical things--and one is left
with a handful of frail results that are hardly more substantial than
memories. But the greater the early love, the more complete must be the
separation, and one must recognize it when it comes. One must renounce;
in that lies the only hope of renewal. People are mistaken about life
being a steady progress from youth to age, anyway. It’s a constant
shuttling from age to youth and back again. We all grow senile about
every seven years, and then young again. I am in a senile period. Why
should I do poetry the dishonour of pursuing her in such a state? Bah,
it is better to do anything else. You mustn’t be impatient with me. I
do not flower very often--but neither does the century plant. And it is
counted among the world’s wonders.”

“Well,” she said consolingly, “perhaps you are right. Better a little
that is good than a lot that is indifferent. All I know is that there
are reputations built on no more talent than yours.”

“If I could believe that,” he said thoughtfully, “I should not
surrender. But I can’t believe it. I shall have to squeeze business
for a time, as one squeezes an orange--for the golden juice. I shall
hoard it, as if every ounce meant a golden hour. Then we shall see. My
God! Madonna,” he burst forth. “Fifty dollars a week--there in my hand,
_every week_. Think of it. All my life fifty dollars has seemed like
the other side of the moon.”

The next day he began the work of which he had talked so much. She had
known him a month. Now for some time, she was to see little of him.
He left early and returned late, and with the long summer evenings at
hand, she began to paint.

It was very hard to drive herself to work. Her hands were stiff; her
senses were clumsy, and her first efforts resulted in little more
than a waste of valuable materials. She needed everything--models,
encouragement, criticism. These even Elsie or Miles could have
furnished after a fashion, but she dared not ask them--she was not
ready for that. She contented herself with trials at still life, with
experiments, with attempts at self-portraiture.

Then slowly the love of simply applying the brush, the fever of trying
and trying again for the effects she wanted, the joy of feeling
momentary hints of power, and of succeeding now and then with some
little thing, quickened her interest, until the time came when she
found herself standing up to her canvas until it had grown almost dark.

She went with Elsie one night to the theatre and when they returned to
Elsie’s rooms, Moira confessed that she had begun to work. They talked
until three in the morning. She came away elated, and still sleepless,
not the least bit tired. The mere divulging of her modest ambitions had
started her blood bounding, and she swung buoyantly down the street.

A block or two from her house she heard voices, and against the glow
of a lamp she saw the figure of a policeman leaning over a man who lay
on the pavement luxuriously supporting his head from the flagging with
folded arms.

“Come on, now, get up,” said the officer. “I’ve fooled long enough. If
you don’t get up I’ll take you where you’ll have a long rest.”

The voice that replied was unmistakably Miles Harlindew’s.
“Preposterous,” he said, running his consonants together. “I am lying
on m’own prop’ty. It was legally d’vised to me by God the Father. Six
feet by three of solid earth. That’s my allotment. You’ve spoiled it by
putting concrete on it, but I’ll be a good fellow. Won’t complain. It’s
all right. Just go away.”

“Get up, I tell ya.”

“What! Can’t a man lie on his own pat-patrimony, you blamed ass? It’s
goin’ to be mine f’r eternity, and I choose to use it now!”

“We’ll see who’s a blamed ass, young feller. Come on!”

Moira interrupted as the patrolman was about to grasp Harlindew’s
shoulder.

“Officer,” she said hurriedly, “I know this man. He lives in the same
house I am in. I think I can get him to go with me, if you won’t take
him.”

“Sure. That’s all right. I don’t want him if he’ll get out of here.
I’ve had this bird before, and it might go hard with him.”

“Thank you,” she said fervently. Miles was on his feet in a second,
a little unsteady but effusively polite, repeating the words “divine
Madonna” in a voice that must have carried to many windows.

“Officer,” he said, “meet Madonna--no, meet Ariadne. Ariadne, the night
is a labyrinth--you bring me a thread.”

At his door he insisted upon going up with her--“just for a
second”--and she could not refuse him. He sat on the couch, pursuing a
strange, disjointed tale of the day’s adventures. He told twice about a
steel-worker he had met in a bootlegger’s house, who once had worked on
the Woolworth, forty stories up. “Said he never went up on the steel in
the morning without three whiskies--if he had he’d a fallen off,” said
Miles. “That’s good--if he had he’d a fallen off.” The idea seemed to
fill him with extraordinary delight. But other things were on his mind
also. Some one he called “the damn buzzard at the office” came in for a
large share of abuse.

“If you want to see the damned buzzard to-morrow, you’d better go
downstairs and sleep,” she suggested. “You won’t feel much like work.”

“Work? Never mind work.... Valuable man.... Know my own value.... Not
at all sleepy, anyway....” A moment later while she was out of the room
he stretched full length on the couch and fell asleep.

She did not have the heart to wake him in the morning. If her own
racket, as she flew about preparing to leave, had no effect upon his
deep unconsciousness, it would probably take too much effort anyway.
At noon, however, she found him just beginning to stir about, making
coffee in her little kitchen, for which he apologized, but with no
sheepishness. He seemed, on the contrary, to find excessive enjoyment
in having awakened in a strange place, invaded by a lovely hostess. She
took the rôle of cook out of his hands.

“Well,” he said when they were seated, “I suppose I am in a pickle.
Must say something to Jones. Wonder what it’ll be. All’s fair, I
imagine, in war and business. Any old alibi goes.”

“But you’re a valuable man, Miles, you know,” she mocked, “as you said
several times last night.”

His smile was a trifle wan. It was too soon by all means to bid
good-bye to the other side of the moon--that regular fifty a week.

“You know, I’ve never had to be anywhere I didn’t want to be, in ...
in God knows when,” he declared. “Not easy to get the habit. But I’m
doing well down there. Honest, I’m sort of proud about it.”

Moira thought that he seemed to be worrying very little about his
remissness, not even very actively at work on the problem of finding an
excuse. And it was late, even for that. She almost hated to undeceive
him, it concerned him so slightly. Finally she said:

“I telephoned your Jones. I told him you were too ill to come down. Was
that right?”

But obviously this service was in his eyes incalculably great. The look
he gave her made her want to laugh. She had not thought it possible for
a man to be so pathetically helpless, so profoundly grateful for an act
of friendly foresight.

“How did it happen, Miles?”

“Oh, I think the monotony got on my nerves. Then yesterday everything
went wrong; and I thought five o’clock would never come. Eight hours!
By Jove, it sometimes seems like eight years.”

“Yes, it does,” she replied, remembering her first months of it.

“Do you get used to it?” he asked anxiously.

“Oh, yes, it comes to be a good deal like breathing.”




XVIII


They started out without objective, left the train at a little station
far down the southern part of Long Island and walked miles through a
flat country of stunted woods and sandy, almost deserted roads.

It was toward the end of a coppery afternoon, the hazy air aflame
with the sun taking on the colour of the burnished trees. To Moira,
it had been an unreal day too, for her thoughts were running upon
revolutionary impulses, plans that would have seemed impossibly
romantic a few months before. Was it only because of this suddenly
important comradeship with Miles Harlindew that she had quite painfully
realized a sense of loss? She needed much more than life was giving
her, much more than her mere comfort and independence, even than her
painting. Their half year together had been full of a strangely wide
sympathy. But it had also been casual, without purpose and without end.
The first tang and odour of Autumn cold always brought a stirring of
unreasonable energy in her, a sense of dissatisfaction ... a prophecy
of change. But now it was like nothing she had ever known before, a
stifling in the midst of limitless air to breathe.

“Seasons must be responsible for a great deal in life,” she said. “I
wonder if anything would get itself done at all, if it were not for
them, for the urging they give us to act.”

“I have thought that too,” replied Miles. “You could almost live,
simply by letting the time of the year do what it will with you. I
shouldn’t be shocked if some one told me I had lived that way myself,
most of my life.”

He drew out a pipe, filled and lighted it, and the fragrant smell
was pleasing to her nostrils. She liked his agreeable, easy ways. He
needed little to be happy, his thoughts, his books, tobacco, clothes
that seemed to have grown older with him. Since that diffused night
he had spent in her rooms in June, his life had run along in a quiet
groove, free from excitement or discontent--a period during which,
as he told her, weeks seemed so much longer because they were filled
with so many more and varied impressions, and these impressions
were caught and relished and fixed as they passed. Excitement and
sprees were monotonous, not varied, and one lost almost all of one’s
impressions.... She had shared this slow magic with him, and she
understood what he meant. Suddenly she found herself asking him to
marry her.

“But, child,” he said, with amusement in his face and voice, “you
couldn’t do that.”

“I’m not a child,” she replied, with unmistakable seriousness, “and I
could. I love you.”

He stopped walking and faced her, holding his pipe halfway to his mouth
and looking at her in blank amazement.

“My dear Mary!” he exclaimed.

“My name isn’t Mary,” she broke in. “It’s Moira. Do you like it?”

“Moira? Why haven’t you told me that?”

“There’s even more to tell, Miles.”

“But what do you mean?”

“I suppose you won’t answer my question, until you hear the rest?”

“I shall be glad to hear anything you want to tell,” he replied slowly.
“But first, my dear girl, do you know you are the stars in the sky? Do
you know you are a prize for sultans, for emperors, for decent people,
for people infinitely better than I am? I’m a stopping place in your
passage. Not that.... I’m as worthless as a man can very well be. I
think, in short, something has made you a little mad.”

“You’re _not_ worthless,” she replied vehemently. “I’m tired of hearing
you say you are.... If all this means you don’t love me and don’t want
me, there’s nothing more to be said. If it means that you think you
are not good enough for me, that’s foolish. And in that case--there
_is_--more to be said.”

She trembled a little. Both were under the stress of a new and powerful
feeling.... She wanted more than anything else in the world to take
hold of him, to shake him, to keep on shaking him, because he had not
been equal to asking of her what she had just now asked of him. She
wanted to love him as nobody had ever loved him; to love him until he
respected himself. It needed no more than a spur, something to make him
so proud that he could scarcely believe in his happiness. She could do
that for him, she was equal to it, because she did love him and she
was beautiful and desirable. She thought of herself, in that instant,
as Moira Seymour of Thornhill. But in the next she did not. It was so
terribly hard to say what she had to tell him.

Moira’s persistence in her reckless proposal had given rise to a
tempest of forces in Miles Harlindew. The notion of marrying her
had never even formed in his dispirited brain. Now it swept through
him like a cleansing and strengthening hope. He faced her with the
uncertainty of a man who is still afraid to trust his own understanding.

“Wait, Miles!” she said, “I’ve something more to tell you.” She
began hurriedly, like a guilty child, but as she went on her voice
became firm. “I don’t know who my father was. I was told his name was
Williams, but I don’t know whether he is alive or dead. I’m the child
of a servant who was never married. You see if you married me, it might
be said that I wanted the protection of your name. I’ve none of my own.”

It was his turn to be impatient, and he had an impulse now to laugh
and take her in his arms. But he held back.

“Mary,” he said seriously, “in the first place what has all that to do
with it?”

“But it’s true. And you’ve forgotten my name is Moira.”

“I don’t care. It’s all beside the point. I’ve never been strong for
relatives, my own kin into the bargain. I might not enjoy yours. But do
you suppose it makes any difference to any one who your father is? Your
father and mother are your face, your beautiful, glorious face. Your
birthright is yourself, your incredible perfection. Don’t you see, it
isn’t your father or your mother you’re giving up, but yourself, all
this miracle? You can’t give all that to me. I’m not worth it. I can’t
count on myself. How can I ask you to count on me?”

“You don’t know yourself. You never have.”

“Mary!” he cried, and she let him continue using the old name which
came so naturally. She felt his intense desire to be honest, while it
angered and annoyed her. Why should he decide these things for her? But
he went on, “Don’t you see? This is just a--a sentiment, a ridiculous
illusion about your birth.”

“It’s _true_,” she replied. “I must know that you believe it’s true--or
nothing can go on.”

“If it were a thousand times true it wouldn’t make me good enough for
you.”

She sat down beside the road. Tears were coming to her eyes, and she
hated to have him see them.

“Miles,” she said, “I thought once I couldn’t love again, but you’ve
seemed like something lost to me and come back. It’s the same thing in
my heart, only older and more real. If you don’t mind my being what I
am, if you want me, please come and take me. Only don’t argue.”

His close embrace was like the end of a journey she had been travelling
all these last weeks quite unconsciously. His passion, the fierce,
sudden, exacting eagerness of the luckless taken unaware by great good
fortune, could not hurt her too much.

“You must forgive me if I am quite mad,” he stammered. “Look at me. Am
I sane, Madonna beloved?”

She did look at him, but she saw, beyond the cadaverous face and humble
eyes, a man who carried, she hoped, the power of change within him. She
was completely happy to have that job for her own. Yesterday she had
had loneliness, a heavy secret, futility. Now she had everything that
she had ever lost; and more, the knowledge of her own strength. What if
it did fail, it would be this while it lasted....




XIX


  “Oh, when I was in love with you
    Then I was clean and brave,
  And miles around the wonder grew
    How well did I behave....”

“It’s old Housman all over again,” cried Harlindew, in high glee.
“Since I married you, I’ve become a respected citizen. People stop me
on the street and want to talk who haven’t deigned to give me a wink in
years.”

“Don’t forget there is a second verse,” said Moira.

  “But now the fancy passes by
    And nothing will remain
  And miles around they’ll say that I
    Am quite myself again.”

“Yes, but he had to add that to make it a well-rounded thought. The
first is the only one that counts. Well-rounded thoughts are an
abomination. Or else he had to live up to the well known Housman
cynicism. But isn’t this enough for one sitting? I’m hungry.”

“Just five minutes more. There’s something I don’t want to miss about
that light. I can’t ever get you into the same position twice. You’re
changeable enough--physically!” she concluded.

He strolled over to the portrait when she had released him and
criticized it outrageously. The face was all wrong, the colour of the
hair absurd, the brow too handsome. It was a good picture perhaps,
but a poor portrait. Her sketches of him were better. She had a nice
loose line in sketching and didn’t flatter so much. Women ought never
to paint men, at least never their sweethearts. They weren’t honest
enough. They were too romantic. But this was all delivered in the
utmost good nature and she did not resent it. She thought he was quite
a good critic of painting. He liked things of very crude strength,
directness. Her work, she herself was inclined to admit, indulged in
glamour--it was the hardest thing to avoid. But she hoped that in ten
or twenty years she would do something good; that was time enough.

As a matter of fact, Miles Harlindew thought his wife’s work remarkably
fine and had often said so. Then, discovering she was so modest
about it that praise was downright displeasing to her, he adopted
the bantering tone. He catered to her modesty by giving her all the
severe criticism he dared to. And on the whole it resulted in a better
understanding.

Standing in the doorway, he watched her with some impatience, while
she put on a hat, powdered her nose, dabbed at her nails and stood in
front of the mirror gazing at herself in satisfied animation. She
liked to make him wait. Then they slipped down the narrow carpeted
stairs and into the brilliant afternoon, breathless and laughing. It
was not surprising that people looked twice at the pair. She wondered
if there were any two lovers who enjoyed their holidays together as
much as they. There were so many things to do and it needed so little
to make them memorable. A walk through Italian streets, flooded with
little bodies and loud with cries, to some unknown restaurant; or up
the Avenue in the dusk to the Park; or a long ride in front of the
bus--whatever met their eyes on these jaunts was fresh and new though
they had seen it a hundred times before. There was no place for a
honeymoon like New York: it meant that the honeymoon never ended.

Marriage had hardly changed an outward detail of their lives. She had
refused to give up her job, which he somehow expected she could do.
Perhaps she could paint and try to sell her work. It appeared to him so
much more fitting. But Moira did not wish to sell her paintings, even
if she had thought them worth any money. All that could wait. Wasn’t
his work waiting too? Poor boy! How could any one expect him to write
with his time all taken up?

“But,” he objected, “I may have to take care of more than you one of
these days. Hadn’t I better get used to it?”

“Nonsense,” she replied. “That’s all the more reason why I should be
earning now.”

Miles had retained his room downstairs, much as it was, except that
she saw it was kept in some sort of order for him. Her own tiny living
quarters were not enough comfortably for two, and she had foreseen that
he would have many a spell when he wanted to be quite alone. To her
mind he was very chivalrous in hiding his low-spirited moments from
her. When he left her early after dinner to spend the evening and the
night in his room, she knew that it was a signal for one of these.
He was working off some disappointment, some mood of defeat. These
troubles had generally fled by morning. He would be in her bedroom,
before she woke up, noisy and hungry, and full of jokes.

“You’re making me too happy to write,” he told her on one such
occasion, as he sat on her bedside and put her hand to his lips. “You
remember Rossetti says:

  “By thine own tears thy song must tears beget
    O Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none
    Except thy manifest heart and save thine own
  Anguish or ardour, else no amulet.”

He had the old-fashioned way of reading poetry, intoning it without
much shading or expression--and he threw himself into it. She thought
nobody was just like him when he did that entirely for his own
pleasure.

“But he speaks of ardour as well as anguish,” she objected.

“Yes, I suppose poetry itself does not have to be sad. But it comes
out of something like sadness. Rossetti was right. It is as foolish to
write poetry in the midst of happiness as to try to find words for what
you look like now--when I can be looking at you instead. How beautiful
you are when you wake.”

It occurred to Moira that she might be a little distressed over all
this. She wanted him to be happy, but she also wanted him to write--and
become famous or at least deserve it in her eyes. But her good sense
brushed his idle words aside. Why encourage harbouring such notions?
She had never known any one who spoke his mind aloud so continuously
as he did, and she knew that many of the things he said simply passed
through it aimlessly. They were without significance except the
significance of always tossing up other thoughts, and still others,
until the right one came. This thinking aloud had a ruthless quality
that would have hurt a more sensitive wife. It did not trouble her.

She decided there was no hurry about his getting to work. She did not
want him to do it until he could do his best. Nothing less than that
she wished to foster. They were living their lives to the full, now,
through each other. In good time they would branch out and live in
wider circles. Miles was storing up treasures that would find utterance
one of these days. Indeed he was writing--slight, experimental things
which she did not like, it was true, but which would help to open
up the dried springs of his invention. This period of his life was
certainly not less promising than the five years before she had met
him, arid years of picking up a mere living by critical trifles.

An event that she did not foresee, however, happened shortly afterward.
A week came when Harlindew spent almost no time with her. He
disappeared into his room early; at breakfast he seemed to have slept
little, and he was distracted and irritable. When the time came to go
downtown, she felt that he resented it. He would dawdle and temporize
and start off anywhere from a quarter to a half hour late. The secrecy
of his movements were a trial to her, and she could not get anything
out of him by casual questioning. His answers were indirect, hinting at
work. Then her questioning stopped. She realized that she was growing
angry; malicious impulses came to her, a desire for petty revenge, and
all this warned her that she was vainer than she had believed. She
depended upon his attentions, his love-making, his continual amusing
flattery. That was the unfairness of marriage, she argued. It taught
you to expect certain things you had got on very well without before.
But if your single mate withheld them, you could not go elsewhere to
supply them.... After six days of this, Moira began to believe herself
a philosopher, and something of a cynic as well. She had kept her
temper, but she had also been experimenting with the green serpent of
disillusionment.

The thing ended with a visit to her bedroom at two in the morning.
He was a little excited by liquor, a most unusual thing since their
marriage, yet she was sure he had not been away. Most of this
excitement came from another cause. He held in his hand a half a dozen
sheets of paper and began without preliminaries to read them to her.
They were new poems, of course--how stupid she had been not to suspect
it! When he had finished reading them she snatched them from him with
cries of delight and read them herself.

“I have to see the words--the blessed words!” she declared.

He walked out of the room, leaving the crinkly papers with her, walked
on air yet timorously, jumping half out of his boots at every slight
noise she made with the sheets. When he came back he found tear-drops
clinging to her lashes. She was still reading the poems as though to
fix them then and there in her mind. She laid back on the pillows and
asked him to read them all over himself aloud, and “very slowly.” It
was a long moment after he had ended that she spoke.

“They’re better than anything you’ve done,” she said, with a
contentment that filled him with torturing pangs of delight. “As good
and better than the best in your book. It’s come back to you, Miles, I
always knew it would. Oh, isn’t it wonderful!”

He sat down, suddenly downcast and sheepish in the midst of his elation.

“But if this is going to happen to me often, what am I going to do?”
he said. “I’ve lived those things. It’s been hell and heaven, Moira.
I took two afternoons off from the office. I had to. It was all but
impossible to go.”

She sat up in bed and gazed at him in profound reflection. She felt she
knew what he meant. It was not childish, not perverse. How could such
things be mixed up in the same day, this fine fervour of creation, and
that mechanical, wretched work? What she most desired him to be he was
now, and that he must continue to be at the cost of everything else.
She suddenly saw life rosy and fresh ahead of them, untrammelled by
anything base, full of brave expression.

“Never mind, never mind!” she cried excitedly. “Listen, you can hold
on two months longer somehow. In two months my lease will be up. We’ve
got eighteen hundred dollars between us now, and by that time we ought
to have two thousand. We’ll just quit cold, Miles, drop everything.
Somewhere in Europe we can live for nothing, live forever on that. Who
knows what can happen before it is gone? We might never have to come
back--never until we wanted to. You can go on writing and writing these
gorgeous things!”

“My God,” he murmured, “it would be marvellous. It could be done.... O
Magician!”




XX


The experience of that night was one of those moments on the Olympus
of extravagant hope, before which it is merciful to draw the veil. In
one hour they seemed to have attained all that life held for the most
fortunate--freedom, work, love.

Therefore, had they stepped from the tropical belt to the Arctic
circle; had they plunged from the top of a sunlit tower to the depths
of a coal shaft, the change which came during the next month could
not have been greater. Moira had never anticipated resenting her
first baby. Preparations for the trip, expenditures for the trip, had
first been slackened up in mid-career, as they waited apprehensively
and then had been abandoned with the abruptness that only comes when
death enters a house. There lay the paraphernalia of travel, new and
useless. They had drifted into a state of divine negligence. Jobs and
all practical affairs went along any old way; they were matters soon to
be jettisoned like an old coat. Then came this reality as if the four
walls of a prison had been dropped about them in a day.

It was not so bad as that of course, when the first rude awakening had
passed. Life substitutes one enthusiasm for another. Miles recovered
admirably at once; he spent his eloquence reassuring her that this was
the best thing that could have happened to them. He had all the normal
delight in the prospect of fatherhood.

But Moira was not so easily reconciled. She would always look upon that
baby as something a little too unreasonably expensive. She was not
ready for it, and had the plan of going abroad been broached earlier
she would never have had it. She would have been more pleased had Miles
not tried so hard to make her see it in a better light. She did not
doubt his sincerity, nor that he would be one whose joy in children of
his own would be unbounded. But she hated to think of his taking one
burden after another from her shoulders until he would be carrying them
all, while she waited helplessly. She had never thought him, as yet,
strong enough without her.

So she did not relinquish her burdens until she had to. She worked on,
until the last day she could without embarrassment. After a season of
careful figuring she estimated that what they had saved, with Miles’
salary (which had been slightly increased not long before) would enable
them to maintain their present comforts until she got back to earning.
She hoped that could be managed somehow within two years.

But if the idea of having a child was an adventure, they both had to
admit that the conditions it called for were somewhat depressing. For
one thing, they had to have more space. The first work she did after
leaving Barcroft’s establishment was to move to a flat in the eighties
on the west side. In every particular this place lacked the charm of
her studio, nor could anything they did to it or put into it make it
seem the same. The little kennel-like separations called rooms were
diabolically invented for people who had to have children, and so
constructed as to make them hate the fact that they had them.

At the earliest hint of the baby’s coming she noticed changes in Miles.
He had never been very regular or responsible about office hours. Now
it worried him if he was a half minute late in getting started. He
talked less, he exaggerated less. He seemed to be unwilling to discuss
books, or any of the old subjects that had enthralled him. He spoke
much of there being a future “in the firm,” for a chap who “really
buckled down and dug up results.” She realized that he was beginning to
regard his job as a permanent support.

He came home sometimes with bundles of papers filled with figures and
sat in the little study at night, writing what he called “plans” and
“copy” and making “market analyses.” It was the same sort of jargon
that Barcroft talked incessantly--“sales and distribution,” “consumer
demand,” and “dealer helps.” It had sounded all right from Barcroft;
but from Miles.... She found among his papers rough drafts in his own
hand of advertisements extolling the value of hog foods, lice powder,
piston rings--and one long story about “How I raised my salary from
fifty to two hundred dollars a week in six months.” When she read these
she went into her room and cried. They had meant nothing to her so long
as he took them lightly; now that he applied his whole mind to them and
sat absently dreaming of them, they seemed blasphemous. But she dared
not complain; she had no remedy to offer.

In a little while--after the baby was a few months old--he began to
bring home news of certain results from all this energy and absorption.
His salary took a sudden jump. He was “meeting clients” continually,
doing executive work. Soon, he told her, he would have a small office
to himself. She simulated pleasure at these announcements, but she
felt none. Every triumph of that sort meant a surrender of himself.
She even resented the care he had begun to take in his clothes and his
hair-cuts, the change in his style of dress.

The ugliness of the little apartment in a building which held perhaps
fifty tiresome families, the dreary parade of bourgeois virtues, and
fourth or fifth rate finery, the strident female voices in the street
and halls, the newness of everything one touched and looked at, the
lack of shadows and mystery and ease, the pervasive, obvious travail
for money--all these things were to Moira an education in American
life which her youth had escaped. She disliked them, but she regarded
them, because they were strange to her, with a detached, half-amused
curiosity.

To Miles, however, they were a return to the hated past--from just such
a street in Cincinnati he had fled in horror years before. She saw
that it really involved him; that daily, as it were, he had to brush
its overwhelming effect from his clothes and from his mind. It was
she who was putting him through all this.... And it was only an added
irony that Miles, junior, turned out such a satisfactory child, normal
and vigorous and good-tempered. It did not improve matters any that he
deserved this sacrifice, for with every new fascination he exerted,
every delightful characteristic he exhibited, the subjection of all
their hopes to his demands became more complete....

       *       *       *       *       *

Three years passed this way, and though the affairs of the Harlindew
family went on quite as ever in outward appearance, much had happened
underneath to both.

In the first place she had learned that a child was not a temporary
encumbrance, one that she could throw off in a year or two for outside
work. If certain of its wants diminished with its growth, others
increased, and the habit of being an attendant mother became fixed. She
had had to abandon her plan of returning to offices. Cheap servant
girls and the risk run in trusting them worried her too much as it was.
She became as helpless a house-person as the scores of other young
mothers in her teeming block.

With the relinquishment of this notion came the gradual realization
that they might never be able to take up again that shoulder to
shoulder independence which had seemed so fine while it lasted. Miles
from now on was the provider--she and her child the dependents. She
discovered that he had seen this more clearly than she from the
beginning.

He ceased to take an interest in himself at all. His mind settled into
a hopeless groove of dogged, disinterested work. To see him pick up
a book and lay it aside was a gesture that came to hold a veritable
sense of tragedy for her. To watch the effect of a fine play upon him
was pathetic. While its beauty filled him with happiness, he dared
not allow himself to be lifted too far into that rarified atmosphere.
He ventured no opinions about any of the hundreds of stimulating
personalities who were coming up on the horizon of culture everywhere.
Poetry he spoke of with whimsical condescension, even with contempt. It
seemed to him an impudent excrescence, a meaningless dream that had no
right to existence in a life of reality.

All this came more swiftly than she knew, occupied as she was with the
absorbing bit of life under her care. In three years she thought she
scarcely knew Miles. The poems he had shown her that night before the
baby’s coming were often in her hands, though she dared not mention
them to him. They were as fine as they had been then. Could this
plodding man--who loved her still with a desperate, clinging love, a
love, as it seemed, that was the breath of his life--be the same man
who had written them? And was it possible that he must stop that divine
occupation for no other reason than that three people had to live? The
future seems short when life is meaningless and tiresome, and we become
seized with a fierce impatience. Moira fought against a feeling that
they were old and life was declining to its end....

An ominous fact was apparent. In spite of Harlindew’s devotion to work
at the office he was achieving very little. He had reached a certain
point and come to a standstill. His salary, large according to the
ideas with which he had begun, was a dwindling insufficiency when it
came to paying their bills. He was beginning to be afraid that he
might never go farther. She remembered now a saying that Barcroft had
repeated to her: “Push may start behind, but it’s got brains beat all
hollow in the end.” He was referring to the kind of brains Miles had,
theoretic and literary. Miles himself tried to explain his predicament
in words of much the same import. There was a “point of saturation,”
he said, in salaries and advancement, unless you “got outside and went
after the business.” Apparently that was what he could not do.

At the same time, an incredible number of new expenses, roundly
chargeable to the item named “baby” had absorbed all their early
savings except a few hundred dollars, which she jealously kept--not so
much in fear of an emergency, as with the hope that it might be the
magic key to open the door to some way out of their life. But she went
into this treasure to buy Miles decent business suits. They were both
behind in similar comforts and vanities.

Harlindew seemed to resent any invasion of his evenings, to prefer
to sit with her and his thoughts. Yet in reality he was full of an
enormous restlessness to which he dared not surrender. The office
needed all his energy; he could not spend it. So he thought.... Moira
would take the bored man out whenever her maid would stay, trying to
revive the spirit of their old comradeship. It came to life only in
rare flashes.

Her twenty-eighth year passed. She found herself with more freedom on
her hands now, and she obtained work from Elsie Jennings which brought
in a few dollars a week. She was not sure which feeling was uppermost
in Miles, his pleasure at seeing the money or his disgust at finding
her painting silly gift cards. Her painting, the fact that she had
always kept it up to some extent, was his consolation, a vicarious
substitute for his own emptiness.... But the money made them more
comfortable.

Then she discovered that she was going to have another baby. He took
the announcement casually, even with a joke.

“By Jove, my dear,” he said, “I’m succeeding in something, anyway.”

He sat down and chuckled to himself. Three things had struck him as
very funny. One was that he had never in his life pictured himself as
a prolific father--like his own father; another was that he would be
thirty-seven that week--and the third that he had come home to tell
Moira his salary had been cut.

She dropped quickly, beseechingly beside him, disliking the sound of
his laugh.

“What’s the matter, darling, is it too much?”

He put his arms across her shoulders in an accustomed gesture.

“No, no, dear. How absurd. I’m as glad as I can be.”

He laughed again, attempting naturalness, and ruffled his hair with a
sudden motion of his hand. But she felt the husband slipping from her
grasp, turning defiantly before her eyes into the vagrant poet....




XXI


They moved again, the landlord uptown having raised the rent at the
expiration of their lease. The new place was in two large, bare rooms
four stories up, lighted by gas, and without any kitchen except a
small gas stove in a corner and some shelves concealed by a wall-board
screen. There was a dilapidated bathroom, and a roof above where she
could take the children in good weather. The place was in the Italian
quarter and was cheap. The move seemed a logical one to Moira, for it
brought them down in the social scale. If they were to be poor, it was
better to live with the poor than with the pretentious. And the Italian
section was in the Village, of which they had both become incurably
fond, and where for many reasons they felt most comfortable.

The house was managed by an Italian woman named Respetti, who had
once done odd jobs of sewing for Moira and for whom she felt a strong
liking. Mrs. Respetti had appeared to be quite overjoyed to see her
again, delighted to hear of her marriage and her children, and had
offered to help her look after them when she could. Her willingness in
this regard was the deciding factor in Moira’s choice of the house.

She had not been installed there more than a few weeks when Miles
finally lost his job outright, an event she had anticipated almost
any day since before the birth of her little girl. He made efforts to
obtain work of the same kind, but unsuccessfully. He got books for
review. He did whatever came along. One day he brought her a check
signed by his father. He began shortly afterwards to be somewhat
worse than idle, and sought forgetfulness of his troubles in a way to
increase them....

Moira had lived to see three men in him: the skylarking poet, the
dogged misfit in business, and finally the self-drugged and nearly
self-convinced failure. And still the vision of the first one haunted
her and she hoped to bring it back to life.

Left to herself, she made friendships in the Village and built up
her own income to fairly respectable proportions. She was, at least,
preserved from downright anxiety about the children. In her youth at
Thornhill, had she witnessed the privations and makeshifts which now
made up her life she would have thought them a chapter out of some
incredible tale of human misfortune.

One night when she had waited late for Miles and he had not come, she
went to Sophie’s Kitchen.

This was a dimly lighted little restaurant, with two rows of board
tables down each wall, and an exotically foreign air, where the food
was well-flavoured and not so expensive as in most of the show
places of the section. She was very fond of Sophie, the proprietress,
a whole-souled woman, discriminating in her intimates, with a soft,
pleasing voice, and remarkably long, narrow hazel eyes.

As Moira seated herself at one of the tables she was conscious of a
fashionable party across the room. Such people were not unusual in
Sophie’s and she paid little attention to them. She saw the handsome
proprietress in the open pantry at the back of the room and waved
to her with a cry of greeting. Sophie replied by calling her name.
Immediately afterward, Moira looked up to see a man coming toward her
from the group she had spotted upon entering. He reached her table and
thrust out his hand.

“Well, Rob Blaydon!” she cried.

“Moira.”

She had recognized him at once, but she looked him over more carefully
as he sat down opposite her. He was stouter. She found herself
experiencing a sensation she had never known before, that of meeting a
youthful companion grown mature in her absence, one she was fond of. It
wasn’t such an extraordinary sensation. It might have been only a few
days ago when she was seeing Rob constantly. Nothing happened to people
at all. Perhaps his face had changed a little, but whatever change
there was she would have expected. Yes, she felt he was an even more
wicked and human Rob than before.

“I’ll tell you what, Moira,” he went on at once. “I don’t care what
you’ve got on hand to-night, you’ve got to spend the evening with me.
If you will wait just a minute I’ll get away from these people on some
pretext. I’ve simply got to talk to you, Moira. What do you say?”

“Go ahead, Rob, if you want to. I’d love it,” she replied with
unaffected pleasure.

He came back in a few moments.

“Evidently they are used to your whims,” she said. “They don’t seem to
mind.”

“Forget ’em,” he replied, with a clipped ruthlessness she remembered
well.

The two women had in fact glanced at her curiously and critically,
but she did not care. They were certainly a very smart party. She
wondered what they would think if they knew that she, too, not so
many years ago, had worn the clothes they were wearing and cultivated
their dry, sophisticated smiles. It appeared to her now a diluted and
uninteresting sophistication....

“Moira,” he was saying, “I’ve got to know all about you. I’m hungry for
information. You don’t look any younger. But you don’t look any the
worse, either. What wouldn’t they give back home to be with me now!”

“Rob, it’s good to see you!”

“Honest? Well, I’m certainly glad you feel that way. Still, I always
knew you’d be just the same. Why did you do it, Moira? Why in the devil
did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Oh, all that--rot. It was silly, Moira. You’re one of us, to this day.
Always will be, you know. Who cared?”

She laughed a few notes of warm laughter that was still a clear stream
free from the sediment of bitterness.

“I never think of that any more. Perhaps it was silly. But I’ve been
happier.”

“H’m.” She was conscious that his eyes searched her face, and rather
proud that what he found there would make it impossible to pity her.
“H’m,” he repeated, “well, maybe you have. I guess you know a lot.”

“How are they, Rob? I’d like to see them all. I really would. Goodness,
it’s been ten years! How’s Hal?”

There was no challenge in the tone--it was just a natural question.

“You haven’t heard about Hal? Well, Hal is in China. Been there for
six years and I reckon he won’t come home. You know he looked high
and low for you--thought he was going out of his mind. There were
difficulties, you understand, or perhaps you counted on them. Fear
of publicity--truth leaking out--abduction--shouting your name from
the house-tops. But he wore himself out. Then one night he came home,
and broke down. Well, he told me he guessed it was better the way it
turned out--that he admired you and knew you’d never be moved. Thought
after what happened you’d never feel right. My God, you high and mighty
idealists!”

“Is he happy?”

“I don’t know. Hal and I were always so confounded different, it’s
hard for me to get him. He wasn’t cut out to be happy or the opposite.
He’s turned out one of those quiet, square-jawed gumps, Moira. I met
him in Paris two years ago, and we had a rotten dull time of it. I
suppose he’ll mope around the Orient the rest of his life, working for
corporations, get richer and richer and marry somebody’s sister equally
rich. Now, I’m another breed of coyote. I’m always satisfied when I
have a clean shirt on. It’s the thoughtless life I like.”

“I’m sorry Hal isn’t happy,” said Moira ruefully.

“I wouldn’t be sorry about him!” snapped Rob. “Damn it, Moira, I don’t
say you weren’t clever as the devil. But if Hal had been me I’d have
found you.”

“You’re the same Rob!” she laughed. “You know, of course, you’re
the only one of them I could have run into this way and talked to
comfortably. And the others--how are they? Your father I”--she dropped
her voice--“read about in the papers.”

“Poor Dad. He must have felt he was buncoed sometime or other in his
life. He tried to overcrowd the last few years. I think Aunt Mathilda
felt he went off about in time.... Those two old women--I mean your
mother, Moira, and my aunt. It’s a curious friendship that’s grown up
between them. They keep that big house together and think mostly about
cows and flowers--and old times.”

She did not reply to that nor look at him directly. She was glad when
he burst out in a more immediate vein.

“Well, what do you say to a night of it? I find it’s a dull world,
Moira. You may have more money than I have, and it may bore you to do
the bright lights ... but that’s my form of entertainment. However, I’m
only going to do what you say. It’s your night. But I don’t imagine you
want me to take you to church!”

“I haven’t money,” she answered, smiling. “I never have a night of it,
Rob. I’d love one.”

“Good! Come on.”

“No. I want you to wait here while I change. These clothes won’t do.”

“Just as you say. But can’t I take you--wherever it is you go to change
your clothes?”

“What’s the use?” she queried, tentatively, as much to herself as to
him. “No, I’d rather you wouldn’t.”

“Just as you say.”

“Rob, you’re a dear. In fifteen minutes I’ll be back. Meantime you talk
to Sophie. Oh, Sophie,” she called, and while she waited for Sophie to
come, she added, “Sophie will like you fine. She might even put you on
the poor list.”

“What’s that?”

“Sophie has a sliding scale of prices. But that’s a secret.”

Moira’s one black evening gown was rather old, but she felt
extraordinarily happy as she stepped out of the restaurant a little
later on his arm. The sweet, leathery smell of the taxicab’s interior
held almost a new shiver for her. How long it had been since she had
smelled that with a good conscience and seen the lights of the little
squares and the upper Avenue slip by like a single glittering chain,
to the slinky whirr of wheels. She looked forward to the evening for
itself--its adventure in colours--and for Rob. She begged him not to
ask her questions, not until they had had a few dances and found a
quiet corner after the fun.

“I see,” he said. “You’re starved for a fling--even if you won’t let
on.”

“I am--with you.”

“No kidding? But I guess you always did like me pretty well. You
used to be my only champion. And I needed one often. Well, I’m an
unrepentant sinner.”

After dining they took in a part of the Follies and then went to dance.
It was the same, she found, here as it had been at home. Whenever
they stopped, at the Tom-Tom and La Fleur de Nuit, he was known and
served like the old-timers. She begged him to go on drinking while she
skipped, and he did so without apology, explaining that it was his
forte. She wondered at his power of absorbing continuously without the
trembling of an eyelash. It pleased her to meet admiring eyes, and be
asked to dance by his friends.

He steered her afterward to a place furnished like a very intimate
club, where they sat in deep armchairs under dim lights and had
scrambled eggs and bacon on little French stands. There she took a long
Scotch highball and told him something of herself.

“Moira,” he said. “It’s a weird sensation to listen to such a tale from
you. You belong in this sort of thing.” He indicated the too elegant
room.

She rose to go.

“It’s better fun to feel you belong in the whole crazy world. I wonder
if you do?”

She laughed and then added with a sudden burst of bravado: “Rob, I’d
like to take you home and let you see my kids. I’d like to to-night.
Could you come?”

“Yep. I get a train out of here at nine in the morning and there’s more
than six hours to make it.”

She felt it was an odd experience for him climbing up the dark, gas-lit
stairs. She led him back to the cribs with candelabra in her hand,
and he looked longest at the blond-haired little Joanna, seeing in
her broad, upturned, warm face some misty resemblance to his earliest
vision of her mother.

“They’re great kids, Moira. But I won’t bluff--I like ’em all best when
they’re asleep.”

They came out into the shadowy, haphazard studio, and she knew he felt
uneasy and shocked at her surroundings.

“Well,” he said coolly, “of course you’re going to let me help you.
I’ve got plenty--more than is good for me--and nobody has more right to
it than you. If you say so, I’ll ditch that train to-morrow and have
you out of here by noon with the children, into a comfortable place.”

“No, sir,” she laughed.

“But, my God!” he protested, and then added severely. “Moira, I told
you early in the evening you looked none the worse for everything....
But you do--you look peaked. You’re fagged.”

“Who wouldn’t be, after a night of it with you! No, no, you dear boy.
But we’ll have a night of it again.”

“Thanks for that.”

“And only with you, Rob,” she continued, with emphasis. He caught the
hint that he was to keep the secret of her whereabouts.

“Just as you say. I shan’t talk. But I’m going to get you out of this,
somehow, sometime. I can’t tell you where to reach me, to-night, except
that Thornhill does, in a roundabout way. I’m going to locate in the
East in a few days and you’ll hear from me. I’m going now. There’s no
use talking, Moira, this pulls me down”--he made a gesture with his
hand about the room and then added apologetically--“Don’t be offended.
It’s just because it happens to be you.”

As he stood awkwardly, with hat and stick under one arm, he took out a
long box of cigarettes and threw it on the table.

“At least let me give you those,” he said with a sheepish grin.

“Rob, please don’t worry about me,” she pleaded. She stepped toward
the table to take a cigarette from the box he had thrown down, but his
outstretched arm stopped her.

“Here,” he said, offering his opened case, “take one of these....
Moira, you’re the woman who makes all my conceptions about the sex go
blooey. Damn it, I wish I were Harold. I wish I had some prior rights
in the matter.”

“You’ve more rights this minute than Hal,” she said firmly.

After he had gone she sat puffing smoke into the dim upper reaches of
the room, and watching the petals of candlelight waver and dip. What
fun it had been! Life held strange meetings. Perhaps it held many more
for her. She was a little unhappy, dissatisfied ... the place did look
dismal, unclean, comfortless.

In the morning she found Miles pacing the studio waiting for her to
rise. He was nervous and evasive, but in better shape than she had
expected to see him. Obviously, he had done his recovering elsewhere,
and bathed while she slept. She kissed him, her quarrel with him lost
in pleasant afterthoughts of the night before, but he seemed troubled
and strange. At breakfast, he suddenly asked:

“What the devil is this?”

“What?”

He tossed a Pall Mall cigarette box across the table and she opened it.
The silver paper was folded carefully over the top. Between it and the
bottom layer of cigarettes lay five one hundred dollar bills.

“It’s a long story,” she said, recovering from her surprise. Then she
told him about Rob. He stood up to go after she had finished.

“Well,” he said, with some embarrassment, “I do hope you feel it’s a
perfectly natural thing for a fellow to open a box of cigarettes lying
around on a table. I mean to say--”

“Nonsense. I should have done it myself.”

Miles left her, to go to his accumulated work, bitterly, she knew, and
more completely convinced of his uselessness. She sat down to try to
think out what was to be done. The owner of the five hundred had taken
his train long ago. She did not know where to reach him, and if she
did, it would be downright mean to send the money back. She remembered
how he had prevented her from opening the box before he had left her.
The money was not there by accident. Rob was her schoolboy friend.
Perhaps she was only giving herself an excuse, but what good would her
self-righteousness do to temper the hurt she knew he would feel? She
would accept his gift simply and with thanks. Besides, she had a plan.
On the children’s account, on Miles’, on her own, she had long been
wanting to put it into execution. This money would enable her to do so,
beautifully and without a hitch.




XXII


In the open country near a southern village of Connecticut, not over a
brisk morning’s walk to the Sound, sat a smallish farmhouse which was
probably a century old. It was an innocent and ordinary enough looking
house from the road. It topped a swell of land that was somewhat higher
than its immediate surroundings and bare of large trees except for a
single magnificent elm halfway between the house and the road. The
lawn was allowed to grow wild, but nearer the house and covering the
approach to its graceful old doorway were several shrubs in more or
less cultivated condition placed on a few feet of clipped sod. In the
spring the lawn and the fields which rolled out downward from the house
were thickly starred with buttercups whose tiny yellow bowls glistened
like lacquered buttons in the sun. Later the same meadows turned to a
waving lake of red clover.

Potter Osprey, when upbraided by his friends for not making more of
his handful of acres, declared he was no gardener. He could neither
adorn nature nor gain his feed from her by his own hands, for she was a
wild beast whose moods and colours and contours he had struggled with
all his life, and there was no quarter between them. To all offers to
prettify her in his immediate neighbourhood he was politely deaf. He
wanted her rugged and plain as his plastic, solid canvases liked to
interpret her, and that way he could love her as one loves a worthy foe.

On the house itself he had lavished more care. Eight years of his own
proprietorship had made it, without any great loss of its ancient
character, a place of personal charm inside. In the rear the hill
fell sharply from the foundation, and here he had built up a broad
concrete terrace, looking northward to an unbroken view of horizon
and low hills. Above the terrace for ten or twelve feet in height and
almost as wide, rose a vertical sheet of heavy, transparent glass in
narrow panels, and this gave light to a large room, which had been made
by knocking out walls and upper flooring so that half of it was two
stories high. The house practically consisted of this room, a cellar
under it, and some small bedrooms above. Outhouse and kitchen stepped
away to the west.

From Osprey’s north terrace could be seen a smaller house on the
eastern slope, nestling in a very old, gnarled and worn-out orchard.
Some of its trees reminded one of those anatomical designs in
physiological books; they were half bare-branched skeleton and half
green, waving body.

To the larger house Moira Harlindew came one morning in answer to an
advertisement in a New York paper, describing a “small, furnished
house in the country with conveniences.”

She was admitted by the painter himself, a man of medium height, who
showed his fifty years more in his figure, his careless gait, and
the way he wore his old clothes, than in the face, which was of no
definite age, so Moira thought. What lines had been worn upon it made
the man seem more youthful. The eyes were candid and reposeful, but
extremely responsive to passing moods. This she detected in his look
of anxiety as he first opened the door for her, and in the evident
relief that followed his swift inspection. The mouth, under a gray
wisp of moustache that tended to turn upwards at the ends, slanted a
bit so that more than half of the smile was on one side. There was a
suggestion of the satirical in it. Yet Moira found the face, on the
whole, a pleasant one to look at, especially when he had recovered his
composure and was welcoming her.

“Come in,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’ve come to see the house for rent.”

“Good. You’re early. I hardly expected any answers to-day before
noon. It’s quite a little way to come from the city, you know. By the
way, I’m at my breakfast. Suppose you come along and sit down while I
finish. Do you mind?”

He led her into the studio and she sank into a large chair, a little
tired after the long, warm walk from the station. She felt instantly
and completely happy. The big room, with its cool, even light, its
smell of wood and paint, and its thousand and one objects familiar
and dear to her trade, drove everything else from her mind, even the
anxiety she had felt lest the place be taken--for it was Monday morning
and all day Sunday had elapsed since she had seen the advertisement. He
noticed her fatigue and glanced at her dusty shoes.

“You’ve walked up,” he exclaimed, surprised. “Well, perhaps you will
join me.” He sat down before a low table which gleamed with silver and
yellow china. “Coffee? My morning tipple is tea, but Nana always has
some coffee because she loves it herself.”

“If you really have it,” said Moira, “I’d like some coffee.”

A large, impassive negress soon served her.

“It isn’t much of a house you’re going to see,” he went on. “I call
it the orchard bungalow and it is nearly as decrepit as the orchard
itself. But it will shed the rain.”

“And it’s not taken?” asked Moira warmly.

“Well, no--not exactly. But I’m afraid it’s too--well, unpretentious
for you.”

“It couldn’t be that,” she laughed. As he finished his toast her gaze
went on embracing the room with frank pleasure, and she was aware he
took sly glances at her.

“Do you paint?” he asked suddenly.

Moira had been afraid of the question. Though her host had only given
his last name she had read it on pictures in the studio, and knew
now that he was an American painter of reputation whose work she had
worried over at various exhibitions. She felt extremely humble, but her
fear arose from the suspicion that a successful painter might object to
having irresponsible and immature dabblers running about in his near
neighbourhood. She could not hide in the immediate safety of a lie.
Eventually that would be found out, though it tempted her.

“I’m just a student,” she replied, and went on quickly, “but the real
reason I want a country place is because I’ve two young children. Do
you mind that? I’m sure they will not bother you.”

“Not at all,” he said cordially. “On the contrary.... However,” he
added, rising, “I think we had better look at this humble dwelling
before you grow too enthusiastic, my dear young lady.”

As Moira had entered the place, her mind’s eye had pictured the
four-year-old Miles playing among those buttercups, and learning
things he might never get to know if he grew much older in the city.
Now every step confirmed her in the desire to live here at any cost.
The nostalgia for Thornhill which she had felt in many a solitary hour
during these last ten years, together with a flood of early memories,
swept over her. The orchard, upon which a few apple blossoms lingered,
was enchantingly old and weird. Standing in the high grass beneath
it one could see a pattern of winding stone fences crisscrossing the
fields, and up a near-by hill danced three pale birches like a trio of
white-legged girls with green veils trailing about them. Even a bit of
decayed brown board by the path made her sentimental. She wanted to run
after a butterfly or to lie full length in the grass of the meadow,
letting the sun drink her up....

The house was small, but a moment’s speculation and mental
rearrangement convinced her that it was adequate. She and the genial
owner found themselves making plans together for the comfort of the
Harlindew family.

“I don’t see what you are going to do with your maid,” said he, “unless
she sleeps on the couch out here in the sitting room.”

“I shan’t have a maid,” Moira replied, and he looked at her with
another of his glances of wondering curiosity.

“But,” he began, and then stopped, thinking better of what he had
intended to say. “Well, there’s my Nana. She often has time lying heavy
on her hands and she doesn’t object to an occasional extra fee. No
doubt she can help you.”

“Oh, that will be splendid,” she cried. The suggestion did solve a
minor problem in her mind, but she had no patience just now with minor
problems. “I love the old furniture you have in here.”

“Most of it was here when I came, in the house up above. I made one
room out of three when I built the studio, and these are the handful
of pieces I could not use. If you haven’t enough, there are a few more
odds and ends stored away.”

“You’re going to let me take it, then?” asked Moira breathlessly.

He seemed surprised at the question, as though the matter had been
settled between them, and then laughed.

“I’ll tell you the truth now, Mrs. Harlindew. There have been several
other applicants but I put them off somehow--I didn’t like any of
them.... But!” he exclaimed suddenly--“but my dear girl! Well, well!”

She was crying after all, as she had feared she would in the orchard,
ten minutes before. Tears that she could not keep back rolled down her
smiling cheeks....




XXIII


Moira’s hope had been that their move to the country would bring Miles
to his senses. With nothing to do but rest and lose himself in the
beauty and peace of outdoors, with not even the responsibility, for
some months at least, to earn any money, she confidently believed he
would drop the habits which had regained their hold upon him of late,
get possession of his impulse to work, and begin to write the things of
which she dreamed he was capable. And in the beginning each day after
they arrived confirmed her hope. He seemed to cast heavy burdens from
his shoulders and his mind, to love spending hours with the children,
romping and making the place merry with their laughter and his. From
time to time he wandered off alone with his pockets stuffed with paper,
boyishly promising great results, or stayed up with the lamp at night.
When they had been there no more than ten days it seemed already a long
time ago that their lives had changed and taken a turn for the better.
She was for that ten days serenely happy.

Then the country began to pall on Miles. He grew restless and evasive;
at breakfast he would hint at various reasons for going to New York.
When their second week end came around he managed a convincing excuse
and disappeared with a small handbag full of over-night clothing.

Moira’s heart sank at this unexpected turn of affairs, and she spent
the days in his absence giving way to more real despair than she
had ever known with him. This time she had done her best, done what
a little while ago she would have thought impossible, and she had
failed....

He seemed to come back passionately eager to see her, and so long as he
did that she could only surrender to him and see in him still her lover
and her first lover, her lover for all time. But these waves of passion
died away; her presence and the children’s began to irk him in a day
or two, sometimes in a few hours, and it soon appeared to her that he
regarded a week as an interminable visit.

She set herself to observing him, to studying his chance remarks, and
for the first time a genuine doubt of his fidelity oppressed her. There
was nothing tangible, except his trips to the city, to justify this
suspicion, and these would have been inadequate despite his evasions.
She could quite naturally think of him as being restless, as wanting
to go away, without dreaming that he would belie her faith in him.
The suspicion of infidelity came before the evidence, but once the
suspicion was lodged in her mind, the evidence, all unconsciously
furnished by Miles, piled up by little and little.

She saw that this warmth of love-making with which he returned to her
did not last an hour. Bitter thoughts assailed her. Evidently he was
not always successful with his hypothetical sweetheart or sweethearts
and was driven back to his wife. She could not keep fantastic
exaggerations out of her head, though in her sober moments she told
herself that the truth, if probably serious, was far less florid than
she imagined.

Nevertheless, there grew upon her an increasing repugnance toward
his advances. She made no issue of it. She did not want conflict.
He was very appealing, very hard on her sympathies, very skilful in
inventions. She could not quickly forget that he had suffered and
struggled while he still loved her. But her inescapable conclusion,
reached in hours of cold reflection, was that they were parting; that
sooner or later an end would come. She determined not to invite it
so long as her pride was not sacrificed; to wait for it sensibly and
coolly.

Another explanation of Miles’ conduct brought a curious sort of
consolation and corrective. This was that he simply wanted to be
free--but did not have the strength. The opportunity had been placed in
his way to leave, and, feeling himself ultimately unequal to marriage
and its burdens and limitations, he believed he ought to take it. His
love still held him tenuously to her and the children, his sentiment
for their past together, his need for a woman’s support--whatever
it was--and he could not find the courage to make the break. He
had probably been strengthened in entertaining this purpose by the
knowledge that somebody had turned up from Thornhill, and she would be
taken care of. Much as that base notion offended her, this last theory
was frankly pleasing. It was better than the thought of betrayal with
another woman.

By the time she had reached this state of enlightenment she was so
skilled in reading poor Miles’ motives that she felt as though she had
acquired supernatural powers of clairvoyance. The summer was more than
half gone.

But she had not thought exclusively of Miles. She had the children to
care for and teach a whole new set of fascinating things, and she had
her painting. The opportunity presented by these untrammelled days was
not to be lost over heart-burnings, and a new power and certainty had
come to her. She wasted less time carrying her attempts to the last
degree of finish. She was trying by experiment after experiment to
get the feel and solidity of the earth and to express her warm daily
contact with it.

She had been very timid toward Osprey where painting was concerned. She
had resolved never to speak to him about it and to keep out of his way
while she was at it. One ought not to expect to rent the cottage of a
famous painter and have advice thrown in. But it was he who sought
her in the orchard one morning and made comments for which she was
grateful, because she understood them and could profit by them, and
also because they were not uncomplimentary.

“Most of us,” he said, “gamble frightfully in choosing art as a career.
That’s why there are so many hopeless artists. We mistake an urge for a
talent, and the devil of it is there is no sure way of knowing whether
we’re on the right road or not. But I think you are. In the first place
you have the steady enthusiasm and not just mere plugging industry.
In the second place you are a self-teacher. Everybody worth a hang is
that.”

They were the first really golden words she had ever heard, and she
was certain afterward that simply hearing them had improved her work
miraculously--made her surer of the knowledge she had gained and helped
her to discard excrescences.

Osprey had few visitors. Perhaps twice a year a gathering of
extraordinary individuals with whom he had consorted at various periods
and in many parts of the world crowded into the house, took possession
of it, kept up a racket until morning and departed, leaving him with a
few more intimate cronies, some to recover from the effects and others
simply to prolong the reunion. These entertainments occurred usually
in the early spring or fall, the seasons of change when people come
together most spontaneously. And they were spontaneous. He had no use
for set affairs.

On rare occasions women drove out to see him, for luncheon or tea; and
he himself went to town about once a month, seldom remaining longer
than over night. He seemed to have cultivated not only the love of
solitude, but the power to enjoy it for long periods.

There was one visitor, however, who arrived often. Moira saw his heavy
blue roadster drawn up beside the lawn three times during the first
month of her stay, and she wondered who the impressive man was, with
short grey curly hair, and the easy bearing of accomplishment. She was
not surprised to learn later that he was somebody--no less a person, in
fact, than Emmet Roget, the producer, a man who was both a power in the
business phase of the theatre and an artistic radical in his own right.

The friendship between these two men appeared to be less extraordinary
now than it had been in past years, but it was still a friendship in
which a certain inequality was apparent. The rôle of Roget toward
Osprey, during three-fourths of their adult lives, had been that of
a detached but watchful guardian. A dozen years ago Osprey had been
something of a riderless horse, a centre of explosions, the victim of
unexpected mishaps and misunderstandings, constantly involved with a
woman, and taking his affairs with desperate seriousness, careless
of his talent and his time. Much of this relationship he skilfully
suggested to her himself, in his humorously philosophic moments.

As he put it, he was born somewhere between his thirty-eighth and his
fortieth year, and began to live his life in a sense backward; for
though he went on having experiences it was always something in his
life before his thirty-eighth year that he seemed to be living over
in these experiences, and relishing where he previously had suffered.
The actual occasion of the change had been a painful separation from
the last of his devastating loves, and more or less complete celibacy
since. The result was a fresh joy in work, a really enormous volume of
production ... peace and contentment and plenty.

The life of Emmet Roget had been exactly the antithesis. He was
penniless in his youth. No sooner had he reached New York--to which
initial step Osprey had assisted him--than he began to have means
for his needs. At twenty-nine he left Europe, after having immersed
himself in as much of French culture as an able young foreigner can
obtain with diligence and enthusiasm, and studied the beginnings of the
German theatre movement. A season was spent directing a Denver “little
theatre,” but the provinces offered too little future and freedom. Once
more in New York, Roget was designing sets and directing productions.
In his late thirties he was instituting new methods into the theatre
which were hailed and copied abroad.

Many regarded Emmet Roget as primarily a “man for the future,” yet to
him the present seemed invariably kind. Unlike his friend, nothing
touched him; but whatever he touched gained from his personality,
took on fascination and beauty. Hard at the core, immovable and
unimpressionable, he was yet acutely sensitive, capable of profound
appreciations, for music, for colour, for a scene, a woman--and
surprisingly human in his contacts. No doubt it was this intuitive
appreciation, coupled with early friendship, which had made him cling
to Osprey through many hopeless seasons and experiments.

The first two or three times that Roget visited him that summer, Osprey
did not refer to his new tenants except casually. Later, however, when
he had had a half dozen talks with Moira, he introduced the subject to
his friend at the dinner table.

“That’s rather a remarkable young woman I’ve got down there in the
orchard,” he said. “Did I tell you that she painted?”

“I believe so--something of the kind,” replied Roget. He had met with
his share of disillusionment among his own protégés, and he was not
given to more than passing interest in the mere fact that a young woman
painted.

“Well,” pursued Osprey, “I’ve got something to show you after dinner.”

When they had finished he led the producer to a picture on the studio
wall and switched on a light he had put up to illuminate it.

“That’s one of hers,” he said. “I think there are extraordinarily good
things in it as well as bad. At all events, I liked it so well I bought
it.”

Roget studied the picture for a moment, but without enthusiasm.

“Yes,” he said. “Obviously you’ve influenced her already, or she’s
known your work for some time.”

“I don’t think it’s so obvious,” protested the other. “There’s personal
insight in that modelling, and it has a back to it. Anyway, she’s
young. Fact is, there’s something really unusual about the girl. I
fancy she had things her own way at one time. The marks are there,
overlaid by experience since.”

“Of course,” laughed Roget quietly, “it makes a difference if you know
the young lady.”

“Hang it, my dear fellow, the girl is poor. Has two children, and a
husband who may be talented and may be a fool. But he’s certainly no
support.”

“Charity and art do not mix, old man.”

“The hell they don’t,” replied Osprey testily. “But as you say,
one must see for oneself. You are going to make Mrs. Harlindew’s
acquaintance, and whatever you think of charity, you will buy a picture
from her as a favour to me. Not too soon, you understand, and not too
obtrusively. She shied at me frightfully when I bought this one. I had
to tell her that I had made quite a collection of the work of promising
beginners for reasons of my own.”

Roget found his friend nearly always transparent. Ten years ago he
would have said there was considerably more than the mere fervour of
the artist in this championship. But he had since become acquainted
with a wholly new side of the man, and it was difficult to believe him
capable of losing his head over a pretty bride who happened to rent his
house.

“You say she is married?” he contented himself with asking, dryly.

A flicker of humorous comprehension passed over the other’s face.

“Yes,” he replied shortly, “but the fellow neglects her.”

Roget’s manner became once more indulgent.

“Well, I shall try to buy this picture. I don’t know what to do with it
after I get it. There are mighty few pictures worth buying. Perhaps not
more than twenty in the world.”

He dismissed the subject and sat down at Osprey’s piano. His study of
the instrument had come late, in young manhood. Lacking any great
musical scholarship or conventional training, he nevertheless played
whatever he had heard that pleased him, with extraordinary tenderness
and effect.




XXIV


For Moira the summer grew increasingly fruitful, and, in a reflective
way, full of satisfactions, despite the continued absences of Miles.
A profound sympathy came over her, which she did not remember to have
experienced before, for the average discontented wife, who had to
endure this sort of thing with empty hands and no refuge of the spirit
in which to lose herself.... That could never be the case with her.

It is true that she would have been less serene were it not for the
fact that she had found companionship that answered a real want. Osprey
had none of the qualifications of the teacher, and his criticisms
struck deep. If she had been younger and greener they might only
have puzzled and not helped her, but now she welcomed surgery and
destruction. Her own hard years of unaided application rendered her
capable of understanding his language remarkably well, and she was
ready to discard and forget everything she had ever known.

Their discussions were often continued after brushes were laid aside.
She accepted invitations to tea in the studio or sat on his terrace
on warm nights after the children were asleep. The long drawn out
culmination of her relationship to Miles had given her the habit of
self-analysis, and she laughed somewhat over the appeal that Osprey
made to her as a man. She could not deny that it was the same that
originally had drawn her to her husband. She dealt here with a greater
Miles, wiser and more experienced. Nevertheless, she sensed in him the
type that was not self-sufficient, that required sympathy of a subtle
kind, and required it, when found, with an intensity that in this
case was beginning to prove hypnotic to her. Unquestionably Potter
Osprey was gradually becoming a necessary part of her life, and this
was not her fault but his. She had hinted at, more than revealed, the
state of affairs between herself and Miles. It was impossible not to
do so, appearances being what they were; and the older man’s complete
understanding coupled with hesitation to advise, was a soothing remedy
to her hurts.

The attraction which was growing between herself and Osprey was
totally different from her feeling for his friend, Roget, with whom
she had become acquainted. The distinguished producer treated her
with bantering equality from the start. It was as if they recognized
a likeness to each other in essential strength, and the hesitation,
almost anxiety, which Roget had felt over the painter’s passionate
adoption of Moira’s cause disappeared on knowing her. He began to
think of the whole affair as a pleasant and lasting alliance for his
friend, of some sort, and he little doubted of what sort it would be.
Obstacles there were, which he did not concern himself with. Once a
possibility took life in Roget’s brain, obstacles did not exist. He had
seen too many large ones swept aside.

To Moira, the obstacles were more significant, and yet they had
diminished amazingly in the last three months. The prospect that Osprey
would take their friendship seriously did have about it a quality of
dark adventure which made even her steady pulses jump uncomfortably.
But to the young woman who sees her marriage being slowly broken up
before her eyes, while she is helpless to restore it, everything is
touched by the shimmer of madness. And she asked herself what could
have been more mad, more out of all normal reason, than her whole life?
Moreover, she had a firm support now, one that gave her the strength
to adventure--her art. The intimation had visited her at last that she
might triumph in it; and, having reached that certainty, she felt it a
more present help than coffers heaped with gold.... The picture which
Roget had tried to buy she laughingly refused to sell him, but he had
countered with a problem in stage design which he promised to accept if
it offered a suggestion to work on. Here was a beginning, at least.

Her children ... it was strange how she felt toward them, how little
she feared for them. Certainly they were to be shielded, but also
they were not to be deceived about the life into which they had been
brought. The truth would not hurt them.

It was late in September that Moira received the letter from Miles
saying that he had left and would not return. The letter was a
mixture of unhappy self-accusation, and charges against her for
various shortcomings, chief of which appeared to be that she had
become self-sufficient and had accepted assistance from others. She
thought he might have spared her that, as well as the taunt about her
preoccupation with Osprey.... She had expected a parting shot of some
kind, yet when it came it was a painful blow, and she spent a week
brooding over it and wholly beside herself.

During this week Osprey saw nothing of her, and when she came up the
hill one evening to join him, he revealed in his eagerness what the
deprivation had meant. He led her to a seat, fussed about her comfort
and lighted her cigarette.

“I’ve been ill,” she said. “I go off and hide when that happens, like
an animal. Now I’m well.”

“Ill?” he asked, disturbed. He reflected that he should have been less
squeamish and forced a visit upon her. He had never done just that.
Invitations, dropped at chance meetings or at the end of discussions
while they worked had been enough. This time he had gone a little
further, approached her door on an impulse twice, but stopped before
making his presence known. “But,” he resumed, “Nana didn’t tell me
about your being ill. Did she take care of you?”

Moira knew what was in his mind. While she had been ill, her husband
had not been at home.

“Well,” she confessed lightly, “ill is not strictly true. I’ve been
just out of sorts. I had some news, but it doesn’t matter.”

“Good. I’m glad you’re feeling better. Particularly, as Nana tells me,
you’re expecting a guest to-morrow.”

“Yes, an old friend, a Mr. Blaydon. An old schoolmate, really, who has
been very kind to us.”

“I wonder if you wouldn’t bring him and Mr. Harlindew to dinner
to-morrow night? I shall be delighted to have you all; and as for Nana,
she suggested it herself.”

Miles had always been included in Osprey’s formal invitations, whether
present or not, and had, in fact, attended once and contributed not
unpleasantly to the evening.

“I’m afraid I can’t promise for my husband,” said Moira slowly.

“H’m. That’s too bad. But I can count on you and your friend, Mr.
Blaydon, anyway?”

“I should love to bring him,” she replied and paused.... It was better,
she thought, to have matters understood.... “My husband ... won’t come
back here,” she went on. “He has left me.”

“It was that,” he asked kindly, “the news you had?”

“Yes, he wrote me a letter.”

Osprey spoke quietly but she was conscious of the emotion in his voice.

“And you will accept that? You will not seek him, try to bring him
back?”

“No,” she replied. “Too much has happened before this. It is over.”

“You poor girl. You’ve suffered over it.”

“I put a good deal into it.... But this had to happen. Miles must have
no ties.”

Osprey’s animation returned and he spoke in a more impersonal tone.

“Perhaps you’re right. I think the young man has not grown up in spite
of his years. But he may find himself. They have a kind of strength,
fellows like that, a kind of terrible strength that no one suspects.
I’ve seen his type before. The fact is,” he added, with a half-serious
smile, “I’ve been something of the sort myself. It’s often hard to
locate the origin of a fool’s folly, but I think in my case it was an
experience I had when I was a boy. It wasn’t a peccadillo with me. It
haunted me for years, so much that I can’t talk freely about it to this
day. It made life a desperate adventure; it was at the back of most of
my troubles....” He laughed. “I seem like an old fool to be telling you
all this. And truly my nightmares appear absurd to me now.”

Moira laughed a little bitterly. “Something happened to me too when I
was young.... But I am free.... I tore myself free from it.”

“I thought so,” he said gently. “There is a great difference in our
ages, but if I may say so, we seem to have--well, had something alike
to face in life. No, I do not mean just that--it’s presumptuous. I have
never, I think, before met any woman quite like you. Strength and the
genius for insight, such as yours, rarely meet in the same body.”

A hungry intensity in his words escaped him unawares. Though he had
spoken nothing of significance, the feeling that shook him reached
her through the dusk with sinister force. She had felt the same thing
before and had had a momentary impulse to run, to break free from it.
She did not want to be subjected to another tyranny of her emotions....
Yet she had reasoned with herself. Here was a future that could in
every sense be ideal, a man with whom she had everything in common and
whom she knew she could trust....

A moment later he changed the subject and she was glad.

“By the way,” he said, “why not have your guest stay over, if he will?
You know I’ve extra bedrooms, and there is no reason why he should not
occupy one as long as he likes.”

It was a point that had worried and embarrassed her, and she was
inexpressibly pleased that he had thought of it.

“You’re too good,” she said fervently, “and I would love to keep him.”

They chatted on over impersonal shallows until the time came for her to
return to the cottage.




XXV


As she left him that night she wondered if her conscience troubled her.
She was certainly encouraging Osprey. Standing in her own sitting room,
she recalled vividly how, when he took her hand in good-night, she had
felt the fierce stream that poured through him, and her very silence
had given him permission to unburden himself. She was thankful for his
restraint. Moreover her silence had been the result of pleasure, and
not mere lack of words. How little she had known of anything quite so
contained and yet so overpowering in Miles.... She could respond to
that, she knew: she had only to yield a little and she could respond.

The thought of Osprey in this personal sense, of some one beside her
husband in a personal sense, caused her to realize how much importance
she had gone on attaching to Miles. How ridiculous and womanly of her!
she reflected. Miles had taken his departure, and yet she had not until
now seemed quite to believe in it. Perhaps even yet she did not believe
in it. She had told Osprey that it was over; she kept repeating to
herself that it was over. Everything pointed to it, Harlindew’s own
unequivocal statement and her angry resentment of the manner of his
desertion, particularly his letter. But in her real consciousness she
had continued to expect his return ... during the whole of her talk
with Osprey, Miles had been present as a reality--a definite bar--in
her thought.

But now a new thing happened to her. She suddenly faced her whole life
spread out before her as on a single canvas, or rather as a continuing
panorama--and not just one small segment of it. Miles had not been her
whole life; he had been but a part. He might have continued to be that
part indefinitely and still not become her whole life. She had been
magnifying him until she had lost sight of the rest, all that other
strange web of adventure and catastrophe which had included her birth,
her childhood, her love for Hal, her tragic discovery, her runaway, her
struggle to help herself.... That would go on, no matter what happened,
whether Miles returned or stayed away, and it would go on according to
her own terms.

The notion of herself as an entity, surviving, growing, separate and
alone, filled her for the first time with a curious excitement. It
released so many fresh and irresistible currents within her. She began
to think more consciously of other men, of Potter Osprey in particular.
She rose and went out into the orchard. The painter had had constructed
a table and seats for them earlier in the summer, and she sat down in
one of the gaily painted stationary benches which gave the children so
much pleasure. They recalled to her his scores of other attentions; the
flowers and delicacies of one sort or another which he had sent down
regularly by Nana, his numerous subterfuges to help her with money, the
little comforts that he had added to the house, his presents to young
Miles and Joanna. These things, of which her husband--most younger men
indeed--would never have thought, were dear to her. And once he had
hinted, in a joking manner, of “leaving her the cottage” in his will.

“You can’t tell--I may be knocked off some day,” he had said. “I’ve
become such an absentminded countryman that I’m always a little
surprised to find myself alive after crossing a New York street.”

She had turned such overtures off with pleasantries, which they
deserved, and yet she had entertained them; they had wooed her and
become a part of her dilatory dreaming. As she sat there in the
caressingly cool night she felt this keenly; she felt a sense of
permanency and peace under the protecting boughs of the orchard. She
could not remember such a feeling since long ago at Thornhill.

She rose reluctantly and went into the house. Unquestionably she
had reached a point where she could regard Osprey’s passion without
disturbance; and yet she longed for a temporary refuge from it,
knowing that at any moment they might be brought together by some turn
of the conversation such as that to-night and his reserve would give
way. She wanted to escape that contingency for a long time, to think
out her relationship to the future. But she had no reasonable means
or excuse to flee. Her plans had not been made for the winter, and
according to their informal agreement she was to remain in the cottage
another month.

Robert Blaydon’s visit furnished a safe diversion for three days. She
was able to keep him that long through the insistent hospitality of
Osprey, and the fact that the two took a strong liking to each other.
They sat up late together in the studio one night over a fine brand of
Scotch whisky which Blaydon had brought with him, and the younger man
submitted amiably to a questioning about Moira which disclosed little
more than that he had been her boyhood companion at one time, and her
circumstances had once been opulent. He told Osprey, however, that he
had heard his own name often.

“Yes?” inquired his host. “Well, perhaps that’s natural, as you say we
have been fellow townsmen.”

“Fact is,” replied Blaydon, “I’ve an aunt out there who has become
vastly interested in painters, in her old age, and I’ve heard her
speak of you. A Mrs. Seymour.”

“Don’t ask me to remember names back home,” laughed Osprey. “You would
think me a pretty determined exile if I told you how long it had been
since I was there.”

“In any case, she’ll be much excited when I tell her that I have met
you,” said the other, reflecting on the humour and difficulty of his
situation, in which discretion constrained him with Osprey from telling
Moira’s connection to his aunt, and with his aunt from telling Moira’s
connection with Osprey.

“Mysteries are a damned nuisance among such likeable people,” he
concluded to himself. “I hope this one gets cleared up some day.” And
his conviction was that it would.




XXVI


Moira awoke late, long after Potter Osprey had departed for the city,
where he was to meet Roget and return with him in the car sometime that
night.

It was her last week in the cottage. A few days after the departure
of Rob Blaydon for the west, Elsie Jennings had paid her a visit
and talked. Miles Harlindew was living with a young woman in the
Village. There was a rumour of their going to Europe together....
Moira suppressed a twinge at this, in which at first there was more
of sardonic humour than of pain. The pain came sharply afterward,
but it did not remain long this time, and it left her at last aloof.
She no longer felt the vestige of an obstacle to following her own
inclinations, and she also had no further defence against Osprey’s
attentions.

The growth of understanding between them was almost wordless,
monosyllabic. It made her intensely happy to discover in his eyes how
much she was bringing to him. A long time would have to elapse before
she could give a worthy response to that emotion, but she felt that it
would come....

The troublesome details of her future were therefore on this morning a
matter of no concern to her at all. What filled her with delight was
the immediate present. Never had she seen such weather as that October
day, or if she had, never before had she been alive to its innumerable
aspects at once. After the dubiousness and suffering of the past few
weeks she felt both older and younger, both cleansed by experience and
ready for more to come. Her whole womanly being was gathering itself
for something new, and she meant to grasp it to the full. The ship’s
engines were throbbing in her blood and the open sea lay beyond, but
her hand was firm on the wheel....

It was a day to idle, one of those days when the children were
positively in the way and work impossible. It was a day of heady
egoism, of reveling in her securely felt advantages, and a certain
sense of having won the spurs of lawlessness. She would be restless
until to-morrow when the men came. What fine friends they were!

It was eleven o’clock, and, following her usual custom, she walked down
to the grey metal box in which both her own mail and that of the Osprey
house was deposited. She half expected to hear from Rob Blaydon who had
promised to write her from Thornhill.

She ran through the letters quickly. There were none for her, but she
went back to look again at a large envelope addressed to Osprey. She
supposed she had done this simply because it was larger than the others
and extended out around them while she held them in her hand. But
there had been another reason, as she discovered on second examination.
The handwriting was familiar....

She realized in fact that she was looking at the handwriting of
Mathilda Seymour. She could not have mistaken it, even with nothing
else to guide her, but there was the postmark of her city. She turned
the envelope over, only to find confirmation in the return address.

She caught herself almost in the gesture of tearing it open. Her
first thought had been that it was her letter, no matter whom it was
addressed to. But she stopped herself in time. She could not open
Potter Osprey’s letter. She wondered that she could have had the
impulse to do so. Yet, as if she feared the temptation would be too
strong, she kept repeating to herself, “I must not open it, I must
not open it....” The temptation passed and did not return, but her
disturbance and her curiosity were more stubborn.

It was almost uncanny that Mathilda should be writing to Potter
Osprey....

But was it? Now she remembered he had told her the place of his
birth--a mere conversational allusion, which she had passed over
quickly, not wishing to discuss the city. It had surprised her mildly;
then she had recalled in passing that years ago there had been some
people named Osprey whom she never knew. Could Mathilda have known
them? Could she have known the painter, perhaps in his youth? It was
unlikely; she had never mentioned the name in Moira’s hearing.

There was nothing to be gained on that tack, and soon she was off on
a more fruitful one. Rob Blaydon had told her about Mathilda’s new
hobbies, one of them helping young artists, another buying pictures
for the city museum. She had drifted out of social life and interested
herself in a little club, not very prosperous, where the artists of the
city met.

Here was a possible even a probable, explanation. Osprey was a native
painter, who had gained reputation elsewhere. He had been a struggling
boy at home, and what could be more natural than that Mathilda should
decide the city must be enriched by one of his works? Or if this was
not exactly the case, there were a dozen other reasons why, on behalf
of the club of which Rob had spoken, she might be communicating with
him.

The reason was enough for Moira, or at least she made it suffice. She
would find out the truth before long, and in any case it could not
concern herself. For it was incredible to her that Rob, in the face of
their definite understanding, had mentioned her at home. “At home!”
How naturally she used the phrase. Well, there was much to be cleared
up--both there and here. She troubled herself no more about the letter.
She laid it with the others on Osprey’s table, took the children up to
Nana to look after, and went off for a long walk. By ten o’clock that
night she was in bed asleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

The two men drove up to the farmhouse, in accordance with their plan,
at about two o’clock in the morning in Roget’s car. They lingered in
the hall and studio for a few moments and went upstairs, the painter
taking his mail with him.

Some hours later the same sound woke not only Roget, but Moira, down
in the cottage. It was a sharp report, and her first clear thought was
that a passing automobile had back-fired, perhaps Emmet Roget’s, just
arriving. She sat up for a time listening and then prepared to sleep
again. Some one knocked on the outside door.

It was the producer, looking ominous as he stood in the half darkness,
in a long black dressing gown.

“Mrs. Harlindew, an accident has happened,” he said gravely. “I think,
perhaps, I had better ask you to step up to the house with me.”

She went with him up the steep bank, thoroughly unnerved. His hold on
her arm was firm and decidedly helpful on the rough path. They passed
through the lower part of the house and upstairs without a word.
She knew before she arrived what had happened and dared not ask the
question on her lips.

Osprey lay on his bed dressed, with a small, old-fashioned revolver in
his hand. He was not breathing. The round, bleeding wound was near one
temple. On the table beside him lay a photograph of herself, face up,
the face of a half-smiling girl of eighteen. Beside it was Mathilda’s
letter. Moira snatched the letter and read, at first rapidly, then very
attentively and slowly. “My dear Mr. Osprey,” it began:

  You will not remember an old woman of your native city, but I used
  to meet your father at the Round Robin Club long ago and admired his
  wit and character. I was even introduced to you once, when you were a
  very little boy. You had been left there one night to be taken home.
  Since then, of course, I have followed, though at a distance, your
  progress in the world as an artist. But it is not merely to presume
  on this slender acquaintance that I write to you.

  I have a strange story to tell. There has lived in this house for
  thirty years, ostensibly as a servant but in fact more a companion
  and friend to me, a woman named Ellen Sydney. She came to my house as
  Mrs. Ellen Williams and brought with her a baby daughter, whom she
  called Moira. I adopted this child and raised her and loved her as
  though she had been my own. She believed she was my own until her
  nineteenth year, when she discovered the truth. She proved to be as
  high-spirited as she was adorable, for although her life here offered
  every advantage, and was, I know, one long unclouded happiness, she
  gave it up in a day on learning her true parentage. I can understand
  that spirit and yet I have suffered cruelly because of her act. She
  left without a word, effacing every trace of herself, and from that
  day to this I have never been able to find her, though I have made
  repeated efforts. I had little hope, it is true, of persuading her to
  return even if I did so, knowing her nature and her capacity to carry
  out her own decisions.

  I am convinced she has spent a large part of her life in New York,
  for at first, certain communications came from her there. Furthermore
  she loved the study of art and could only have followed it to her
  taste in that city. She may still be there. For that reason I write,
  thinking it possible if you have not met her you will, and she will
  then have a friend who has good reason to protect her. I am sending
  the latest photograph I possess of her.

  You will ask why I have never addressed you before. It is because I
  have always hesitated to ask Ellen the name of her child’s father.
  Moira, herself, is in ignorance of it. Only a month ago Ellen was
  persuaded, by the arguments I have used above, to tell her story to
  me in confidence, and now I write with her consent. To complete the
  coincidence, my nephew, Robert Blaydon, having met you, has given me
  your address.

  You may be sure that should you ever meet with your daughter or be
  able to send us word of her, two lonely old women will be grateful.

  I have considered that you may not be the kind of man who will care
  to receive this letter, but I do not believe that is possible. The
  passage of time softens our errors and may even turn them into
  blessings.

                                Yours very sincerely,
                                                       MATHILDA SEYMOUR.

Moira put down the letter and sank beside the bed. She threw her arms
over the figure that lay there.

“But, father,” she cried softly, “I could have loved you as my father,
too....”

The tall figure of Roget was standing beside her, with bent head, his
penetrating glance, full of profound compassion, searching the face of
his friend.

“Perhaps he could not, Mrs. Harlindew,” he said, as if thinking aloud.


THE END




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.



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