The time passed very quietly now, and if it had not been for Hoskins, the ladies must have found it dull. He had nothing to do, except as he made himself occupation with his art, and he willingly bestowed on them the leisure which Elmore could not find. They went everywhere with him, and saw the city to advantage through his efforts. Doors, closed to ordinary curiosity, opened to the magic of his card, and he showed a pleasure in using such little privileges as his position gave him for their amusement. He went upon errands for them; he was like a brother, withsomething more than a brother's pliability; he came half the time to breakfast with them, and was always welcome to all. He had the gift of extracting comfort from the darkest news about the war; he was a prophet of unfailing good to the Union cause, and in many hours of despondency they willingly submitted to the authority of his greater experience, and took heart again.
"I like your indomitable hopefulness, Hoskins," said Elmore, on one of those occasions when the consul was turning defeat into victory. "There's a streak of unconscious poetry in it, just as there is in your taking up the subjects you do. I imagine that, so far as the judgment of the world goes, our fortunes are at the lowest ebb just now—"
"Oh, the world is wrong!" interrupted the consul. "Those London papers are all in the pay of the rebels."
"I mean that we have no sort of sympathy in Europe; and yet here you are, embodying in your conception of 'Westward' the arrogant faith of the days when our destiny seemed universal union and universal dominion. There is something sublime to me in your treatment of such a work at such a time. I think an Italian, for instance, if his country were involved in a life and death struggle like this of ours,would have expressed something of the anxiety and apprehension of the time in it; but this conception of yours is as serenely undisturbed by the facts of the war as if secession had taken place in another planet. There is something Greek in that repose of feeling, triumphant over circumstance. It is like the calm beauty which makes you forget the anguish of the Laocoön."
"Is that so, Professor?" said Hoskins, blushing modestly, as an artist often must in these days of creative criticism. He seemed to reflect awhile before he added, "Well, I reckon you're partly right. If we ever did go to smash, it would take us a whole generation to find it out. We have all been raised to put so much dependence on Uncle Sam, that if the old gentleman really did pass in his checks we should only think he was lying low for a new deal. I never happened to think it out before, but I'm pretty sure it's so."
"Your work wouldn't be worth half so much to me if you had 'thought it out,'" said Elmore. "It's the unconsciousness of the faith that makes its chief value, as I said before; and there is another thing about it that interests and pleases me still more."
"What's that?" asked the sculptor.
"The instinctive way in which you have given thefigure an entirely American quality. There was something very familiar to me in it, the first time you showed it, but I've only just been able to formulate my impression: I see now that while the spirit of your conception is Greek, you have given it, as you ought, the purest American expression. Your 'Westward' is no Hellenic goddess: she is a vivid and self-reliant American girl."
At these words, Hoskins reddened deeply, and seemed not to know where to look. Mrs. Elmore had the effect of escaping through the door into her own room, and Miss Mayhew ran out upon the balcony. Hoskins followed each in turn with a queer glance, and sat a moment in silence. Then he said, "Well, I reckon I must be going," and went rather abruptly, without offering to take leave of the ladies.
As soon as he was gone, Lily came in from the balcony, and whipped into Mrs. Elmore's room, from which she flashed again in swift retreat to her own, and was seen no more; and then Mrs. Elmore came back, with a flushed face, to where her husband sat mystified.
"My dear," he said gravely, "I'm afraid you've hurt Mr. Hoskins's feelings."
"Do you think so?" she asked; and then she burst into a wild cry of laughter. "O, Owen, Owen! you will kill me yet!"
"Really," he replied with dignity, "I don't see any occasion in what I said for this extraordinary behavior."
"Of course you don't, and that's just what makes the fun of it. So you found something familiar in Mr. Hoskins's statue from the first, did you?" she asked. "And you didn't notice anything particular in it?"
"Particular, particular?" he demanded, beginning to lose his patience at this.
"Oh," she exclaimed, "couldn't you see that it was Lily, all over again?"
Elmore laughed in turn. "Why, so it is; so it is! That accounts for everything that puzzled me. I don't wonder my maunderings amused you. Itwasridiculous, to be sure! When in the world did she give him the sittings, and how did you manage to keep it from me so well?"
"Owen!" cried his wife, with terrible severity. "You don't think that Lily wouldlethim put her into it?"
"Why, I supposed—I didn't know—I don't see how he could have done it unless—"
"He did it without leave or license," said Mrs. Elmore. "We saw it all along, but he never 'let on,' as he would say, about it, and we never meant to say anything, of course."
"Then," replied Elmore, delighted with the fact, "it has been a purely unconscious piece of cerebration."
"Cerebration!" exclaimed Mrs. Elmore, with more scorn than she knew how to express. "I should think as much!"
"Well, I don't know," said Elmore, with the pique of a man who does not care to be quite trampled under foot. "I don't see that the theory is so very unphilosophical."
"Oh, not at all!" mocked his wife. "It's philosophical to the last degree. Be as philosophical as you please, Owen; I shall love you still the same." She came up to him where he sat, and twisting her arm round his face, patronizingly kissed him on top of the head. Then she released him, and left him with another burst of derision.
After this Elmore had such an uncomfortable feeling that he hated to see Hoskins again, and he was relieved when the sculptor failed to make his usual call, the next evening. He had not been at dinner either, and he did not reappear for several days. Then he merely said that he had been spending the time at Chioggia, with a French painter who was making some studies down there, and they all took up the old routine of their friendly life without embarrassment.
At first it seemed to Elmore that Lily was a little shy of Hoskins, and he thought that she resented his using her charm in his art; but before the evening wore away, he lost this impression. They all got into a long talk about home, and she took her place at the piano and played some of the war-songs that had begun to supersede the old negro melodies. Then she wandered back to them, with fingers that idly drifted over the keys, and ended with "Stop dat knockin',"in which Hoskins joined with his powerful bass in the recitative "Let me in," and Elmore himself had half a mind to attempt a part. The sculptor rose as she struck the keys with a final crash, but lingered, as his fashion was when he had something to propose: if he felt pretty sure that the thing would be liked, he brought it in as if he had only happened to remember it. He now drew out a large, square, ceremonious-looking envelope, at which he glanced as if, after all, he was rather surprised to see it, and said, "Oh, by the by, Mrs. Elmore, I wish you'd tell me what to do about this thing. Here's something that's come to me in my official capacity, but it isn't exactly consular business,—if it was I don't believe I should askanylady for instructions,—and I don't know exactly what to do. It's so long since I corresponded with a princess that I don't even know how to answer her letter."
The ladies perhaps feared a hoax of some sort, and would not ask to see the letter; and then Hoskins recognized his failure to play upon their curiosity with a laugh, and gave the letter to Mrs. Elmore. It was an invitation to a mask ball, of which all Venice had begun to speak. A great Russian lady, who had come to spend the winter in the Lagoons, and had taken a whole floor at one of the hotels, hadsent out her cards, apparently to all the available people in the city, for the event which was to take place a fortnight later. In the mean time, a thrill of preparation was felt in various quarters, and the ordinary course of life was interrupted in a way that gave some idea of the old times, when Venice was the capital of pleasure, and everything yielded there to the great business of amusement. Mrs. Elmore had found it impossible to get a pair of fine shoes finished until after the ball; a dress which Lily had ordered could not be made; their laundress had given notice that for the present all fluting and quilling was out of the question; one already heard that the chief Venetian perruquier and his assistants were engaged for every moment of the forty-eight hours before the ball, and that whoever had him now must sit up with her hair dressed for two nights at least. Mrs. Elmore had a fanatical faith in these stories; and while agreeing with her husband, as a matter of principle, that mask balls were wrong, and that it was in bad taste for a foreigner to insult the sorrow of Venice by a festivity of the sort at such a time, she had secretly indulged longings which the sight of Hoskins's invitation rendered almost insupportable. Her longings were not for herself, but for Lily: if she could provide Lily with the experience of a masquerade inVenice, she could overpay all the kindnesses that the Mayhews had ever done her. It was an ambition neither ignoble nor ungenerous, and it was with a really heroic effort that she silenced it in passing the invitation to her husband, and simply saying to Hoskins, "Of course you will go."
"I don't know about that," he answered. "That's the point I want some advice on. You see this document calls for a lady to fill out the bill."
"Oh," returned Mrs. Elmore, "you will find some Americans at the hotels. You can take them."
"Well, now, I was thinking, Mrs. Elmore, that I should like to take you."
"Take me!" she echoed tremulously. "What an idea! I'm too old to go to mask balls."
"You don't look it," suggested Hoskins.
"Oh, I couldn't go," she sighed. "But it's very, very kind."
Hoskins dropped his head, and gave the low chuckle with which he confessed any little bit of humbug. "Well, youorMiss Lily."
Lily had retired to the other side of the room as soon as the parley about the invitation began. Without asking or seeing, she knew what was in the note, and now she felt it right to make a feint of not knowing what Mrs. Elmore meant when she asked, "What doyousay, Lily?"
When the question was duly explained to her, she answered languidly, "I don't know. Do you think I'd better?"
"I might as well make a clean breast of it, first as last," said Hoskins. "I thought perhaps Mrs. Elmore might refuse, she's so stiff about some things,"—here he gave that chuckle of his,—"and so I came prepared for contingencies. It occurred to me that it mightn't be quite the thing, and so I went round to the Spanish consul and asked him how he thought it would do for me to matronize a young lady if I could get one, and he said he didn't think it would do at all." Hoskins let this adverse decision sink into the breasts of his listeners before he added: "But he said that he was going with his wife, and that if we would come along she could matronize us both. I don't know how it would work," he concluded impartially.
They all looked at Elmore, who stood holding the princess's missive in his hand, and darkly forecasting the chances of consent and denial. At the first suggestion of the matter, a reckless hope that this ball might bring Ehrhardt above their horizon again sprang up in his heart, and became a desperate fear when the whole responsibility of action was, as usual, left with him. He stood, feeling that Hoskins had used him very ill.
"I suppose," began Mrs. Elmore very thoughtfully, "that this will be something quite in the style of the old masquerades under the Republic."
"Regular Ridotto business, the Spanish consul says," answered Hoskins.
"It might be very useful to you, Owen," she resumed, "in an historical way, if Lily were to go and take notes of everything; so that when you came to that period you could describe its corruptions intelligently."
Elmore laughed. "I never thought of that, my dear," he said, returning the invitation to Hoskins. "Your historical sense has been awakened late, but it promises to be very active. Lily had better go, by all means, and I shall depend upon her coming home with very full notes upon her dance-list."
They laughed at the professor's sarcasm, and Hoskins, having undertaken to see that the last claims of etiquette were satisfied by getting an invitation sent to Miss Mayhew through the Spanish consul, went off, and left the ladies to the discussion of ways and means. Mrs. Elmore said that of course it was now too late to hope to get anything done, and then set herself to devise the character that Lily would have appeared in if there had been time to get her ready, or if all the work-people had not been so busy that itwas merely frantic to think of anything. She first patriotically considered her as Columbia, with the customary drapery of stars and stripes and the cap of liberty. But while holding that she would have looked very pretty in the dress, Mrs. Elmore decided that it would have been too hackneyed; and besides, everybody would have known instantly who it was.
"Why not have had her go in the character of Mr. Hoskins's 'Westward'?" suggested Elmore, with lazy irony.
"The very thing!" cried his wife. "Owen, you deserve great credit for thinking of that; no one else would have done it! No one will dream what it means, and it will be great fun, letting them make it out. We must keep it a dead secret from Mr. Hoskins, and let her surprise him with it when he comes for her that evening. It will be a very pretty way of returning his compliment, and it will be a sort of delicate acknowledgement of his kindness in asking her, and in so many other ways. Yes, you've hit it exactly, Owen; she shall go as 'Westward.'"
"Go?" echoed Elmore, who had with difficulty realized the rapid change of tense. "I thought you said you couldn't get her ready."
"We must manage somehow," replied Mrs. Elmore. And somehow a shoemaker for the sandals, a seamstress for the delicate flowing draperies, a hair-dresser for the adjustment of the young girl's rebellious abundance of hair beneath the star-lit fillet, were actually found,—with the help of Hoskins, as usual, though he was not suffered to know anything of the character to whose make-up he contributed. The perruquier, a personage of lordly address naturally, and of a dignity heightened by the demand in which he found himself came early in the morning, and was received by Elmore with a self-possession that ill-comported with the solemnity of the occasion. "Sit down," said Elmore easily, pushing him a chair. "The ladies will be here presently."
"But I have no time to sit down, signore!" replied the artist, with an imperious bow, "and the ladies must be here instantly."
Mrs. Elmore always said that if she had not heard this conversation, and hurried in at once, the perruquier would have left them at that point. But she contrived to appease him by the manifestation of an intelligent sympathy; she made Lily leave her breakfast untasted, and submit her beautiful head to the touch of this man, with whom it was but a head of hair and nothing more; and in an hour the work was done. The artist whisked away the cloth which covered her shoulders, and crying, "Behold!" bowed splendidlyto the spectators, and without waiting for criticism or suggestion, took his napoleon and went his way. All that day the work of his skill was sacredly guarded, and the custodian of the treasure went about with her head on her shoulders, as if it had been temporarily placed in her keeping, and were something she was not at all used to taking care of. More than once Mrs. Elmore had to warn her against sinister accidents. "Remember, Lily," she said, "that if anythingdidhappen,nothingcould be done to save you!" In spite of himself Elmore shared these anxieties, and in the depths of his wonted studies he found himself pursued and harassed by vague apprehensions, which upon analysis proved to be fears for Miss Lily's hair. It was a great moment when the robe came home—rather late—from the dressmaker's, and was put on over Lily's head; but from this thrilling rite Elmore was of course excluded, and only knew of it afterwards by hearsay. He did not see her till she came out just before Hoskins arrived to fetch her away, when she appeared radiantly perfect in her dress, and in the air with which she meant to carry it off. At Mrs. Elmore's direction she paraded dazzlingly up and down the room a number of times, bending over to see how her dress hung, as she walked. Mrs. Elmore, with her head on one side, scrutinized her in every detail, and Elmore regarded her young beauty and delight with a pride as innocent as her own. A dim regret, evaporating in a long sigh, which made the others laugh, recalled him to himself, as the bell rang and Hoskins appeared. He was received in a preconcerted silence, and he looked from one to the other with his queer, knowing smile, and took in the whole affair without a word.
"Isn't it a pretty idea?" said Mrs. Elmore. "Studied from an antique bas-relief, or just the same as an antique,—full of the anguish and the repose of the Laocoön."
"Mrs. Elmore," said the sculptor, "you're too many for me. I reckon the procession had better start before I make a fool of myself. Well!" This was all Hoskins could say; but it sufficed. The ladies declared afterwards that if he had added a word more, it would have spoiled it. They had expected him to go to the ball in the character of a miner perhaps, or in that of a trapper of the great plains; but he had chosen to appear more naturally as a courtier of the time of Louis XIV. "When you go in for a disguise," he explained, "you can't make it too complete; and I consider that this limp of mine adds the last touch."
"It's no use to sit up for them," Mrs. Elmoresaid, when she and her husband had come in from calling good wishes and last instructions after them from the balcony, as their gondola pushed away. "We sha'n't see anything more ofthemtill morning. Now this," she added, "is something like the gayety that people at home are always fancying in Europe. Why, I can remember when I used to imagine that American tourists figured brilliantly insalonsandconversazioni, and spent their time in masking and throwingconfettiin carnival, and going to balls and opera. I didn't know what American tourists were, then, and how dismally they moped about in hotels and galleries and churches. And I didn't know how stupid Europe was socially,—how perfectly dead and buried it was, especially for young people. It would be fun if things happened so that Lily never found it out! I don't think two offers already,—or three, if you count Rose-Black,—are very bad foranygirl; and now this ball, coming right on top of it, where she will see hundreds of handsome officers! Well, she'll never miss Patmos, at this rate, will she?"
"Perhaps she had better never have left Patmos," suggested Elmore gravely.
"I don't know what you mean, Owen," said his wife, as if hurt.
"I mean that it's a great pity she should give herself up to the same frivolous amusements here that she had there. The only good that Europe can do American girls who travel here is to keep them in total exile from what they call a good time,—from parties and attentions and flirtations; to force them, through the hard discipline of social deprivation, to take some interest in the things that make for civilization,—in history, in art, in humanity."
"Now, there I differ with you, Owen. I think American girls are the nicest girls in the world, just as they are. And I don't see any harm in the things you think are so awful. You've lived so long here among your manuscripts that you've forgotten there is any such time as the present. If you are getting so Europeanized, I think the sooner we go home the better."
"Igetting Europeanized!" began Elmore indignantly.
"Yes, Europeanized! And I don't want you to be so severe with Lily, Owen. The child stands in terror of you now; and if you keep on in this way, she can't draw a natural breath in the house."
There is always something flattering, at first, to a gentle and peaceable man in the notion of being terrible to any one; Elmore melted at these words,and at the fear that he might have been, in some way that he could not think of, really harsh.
"I should be very sorry to distress her," he began.
"Well, you haven't distressed her yet," his wife relented. "Only you must be careful not to. She was going to be very circumspect, Owen, on your account, for she really appreciates the interest you take in her, and I think she sees that it won't do to be at all free with strangers over here. This ball will be a great education for Lily,—agreateducation. I'm going to commence a letter to Sue about her costume, and all that, and leave it open to finish up when Lily gets home."
When she went to bed, she did not sleep till after the time when the girl ought to have come; and when she awoke to a late breakfast, Lily had still not returned. By eleven o'clock she and Elmore had passed the stage of accusing themselves, and then of accusing each other, for allowing Lily to go in the way they had; and had come to the question of what they had better do, and whether it was practicable to send to the Spanish consulate and ask what had become of her. They had resigned themselves to waiting for one half-hour longer, when they heard her voice at the water-gate, gayly forbidding Hoskins to come up; and running out upon the balcony, Mrs. Elmore hada glimpse of the courtier, very tawdry by daylight, re-entering his gondola, and had only time to turn about when Lily burst laughing into the room.
"Oh, don't look at me, Professor Elmore!" she cried. "I'm literally danced to rags!"
Her dress and hair were splashed with drippings from the wax candles; she was wildly decorated with favors from the German, and one of these had been used to pin up a rent which the spur of a hussar had made in her robe; her hair had escaped from its fastenings during the night, and in putting it back she had broken the star in her fillet; it was now kept in place by a bit of black-and-yellow cord which an officer had lent her. "He said he should claim it of me the first time we met," she exclaimed excitedly. "Why, Professor Elmore," she implored with a laugh, "don't look at meso!"
Grief and indignation were in his heart. "You look like the spectre of last night," he said with dreamy severity, and as if he saw her merely as a vision.
"Why, that's the way Ifeel!" she answered; and with a reproachful "Owen!" his wife followed her flight to her room.
Elmore went out for a long walk, from which he returned disconsolate at dinner. He was one of those people, common enough in our Puritan civilization, who would rather forego any pleasure than incur the reaction which must follow with all the keenness of remorse; and he always mechanically pitied (for the operation was not a rational one) such unhappy persons as he saw enjoying themselves. But he had not meant to add bitterness to the anguish which Lily would necessarily feel in retrospect of the night's gayety; he had not known that he was recognizing, by those unsparing words of his, the nervous misgivings in the girl's heart. He scarcely dared ask, as he sat down at table with Mrs. Elmore alone, whether Lily were asleep.
"Asleep?" she echoed, in a low tone of mystery. "I hope so."
"Celia, Celia!" he cried in despair. "What shall I do? I feel terribly at what I said to her."
"Sh! At what you said to her? Oh yes! Yes, that was cruel. But there is so much else, poor child, that I had forgotten that."
He let his plate of soup stand untasted. "Why—why," he faltered, "didn't she enjoy herself?" And a historian of Venice, whose mind should have been wholly engaged in philosophizing the republic's difficult past, hung abjectly upon the question whether a young girl had or had not had a good time at a ball.
"Yes. Oh, yes! Sheenjoyedherself—if that's all you require," replied his wife. "Of course she wouldn't have stayed so late if she hadn't enjoyed herself."
"No," he said in a tone which he tried to make leading; but his wife refused to be led by indirect methods. She ate her soup, but in a manner to carry increasing bitterness to Elmore with every spoonful.
"Come, Celia!" he cried at last, "tell me what has happened. You know how wretched this makes me. Tell me it, whatever it is. Of course, I must know it in the end. Are there any new complications?"
"Nonewcomplications," said his wife, as if resenting the word. "But you make such a bugbear of the least little matter that there's no encouragement to tell you anything."
"Excuse me," he retorted, "I haven't made a bugbear of this."
"You haven't had the opportunity." This was so grossly unjust that Elmore merely shrugged his shoulders and remained silent. When it finally appeared that he was not going to ask anything more, his wife added: "If you could listen, like any one else, and not interrupt with remarks that distort all one's ideas"—Then, as he persisted in his silence, she relented still further. "Why, of course, as you say, you will have to know it in the end. But I can tell you, to begin with, Owen, that it's nothing you can do anything about, or take hold of in any way. Whatever it is, it's done and over; so it needn't distress you at all."
"Ah, I've known some things done and over that distressed me a great deal," he suggested.
"The princess wasn't so very young, after all," said Mrs. Elmore, as if this had been the point in dispute, "but very fat and jolly, and very kind. She wasn't in costume; but there was a young countess with her, helping receive, who appeared as Night,—black tulle, you know, with silver stars. The princess seemed to take a great fancy to Lily,—the Russians alwayshavesympathized with us in the war,—and all the time she wasn't dancing, the princess kept her by her, holding her hand and patting it. The officers—hundreds of them, in their white uniformsand those magnificent hussar dresses—were very obsequious to the princess, and Lily had only too many partners. She says you can't imagine how splendid the scene was, with all those different costumes, and the rooms a perfect blaze of waxlights; the windows were battened, so that you couldn't tell when it came daylight, and she hadn't any idea how the time was passing. They were not all in masks; and there didn't seem to be any regular hour for unmasking. She can't tell just when the supper was, but she thinks it must have been towards morning. She says Mr. Hoskins got on capitally, and everybody seemed to like him, he was so jolly and good-natured; and when they found out that he had been wounded in the war, they made quite a belle of him, as he called it. The princess made a point of introducing all the officers to Lily that came up after they unmasked. They paid her the greatest attention, and you can easily see that she was the prettiest girl there."
"I can believe that without seeing," said Elmore, with magnanimous pride in the loveliness that had made him so much trouble. "Well?"
"Well, they couldn't any of them get the hang, as Mr. Hoskins said, of the character she came in, for a good while; but when they did, they thought it wasthe best idea there: and it was allyouridea, Owen," said Mrs. Elmore, in accents of such tender pride that he knew she must now be approaching the difficult passage of her narration. "It was so perfectly new and unconventional. She got on very well speaking Italian with the officers, for she knew as much of it as they did."
Here Mrs. Elmore paused, and glanced hesitatingly at her husband. "They only made one little mistake; but that was at the beginning, and they soon got over it." Elmore suffered, but he did not ask what it was, and his wife went on with smooth caution. "Lily thought it was just as it is at home, and she mustn't dance with any one unless they had been introduced. So after the first dance with the Spanish consul, as her escort, a young officer came up and asked her; and she refused, for she thought it was a great piece of presumption. Afterwards the princess told her she could dance with any one, introduced or not, and so she did; and pretty soon she saw this first officer looking at her very angrily, and going about speaking to others and glancing toward her. She felt badly about it, when she saw how it was; and she got Mr. Hoskins to go and speak to him. Mr. Hoskins asked him if he spoke English, and the officer said No; and it seems that he didn't knowItalian either, and Mr. Hoskins tried him in Spanish,—he picked up a little in New Mexico,—but the officer didn't understand it; and all at once it occurred to Mr. Hoskins to say, 'Parlez-vous Français?' and says the officer instantly, 'Oui, monsieur.'"
"Of course the man knew French. He ought to have tried him with that in the beginning. What did Hoskins say then?" asked Elmore impatiently.
"He didn't say anything: that was all the French he knew."
Elmore broke into a cry of laughter, and laughed on and on with the wild excess of a sad man when once he unpacks his heart in that way. His wife did not, perhaps, feel the absurdity as keenly as he, but she gladly laughed with him, for it smoothed her way to have him in this humor. "Mr. Hoskins just took him by the arm, and said, 'Here! you come along with me,' and led him up to the princess, where Lily was sitting; and when the princess had explained to him, Lily rose, and mustered up enough French to say, 'Je vous prie, monsieur, de danser avec moi,' and after that they were the greatest friends."
"That was very pretty in her; it was sovereignly gracious," said Elmore.
"Oh, if an American girl is left to manage for herself she canalwaysmanage!" cried Mrs. Elmore.
"Well, and what else?" asked her husband.
"Oh,Idon't know that it amounts to anything," said Mrs. Elmore; but she did not delay further.
It appeared from what she went on to say that in the German, which began not long after midnight, there was a figure fancifully called the symphony, in which musical toys were distributed among the dancers in pairs; the possessor of a small pandean pipe, or tin horn, went about sounding it, till he found some lady similarly equipped, when he demanded her in the dance. In this way a tall mask, to whom a penny trumpet had fallen, was stalking to and fro among the waltzers, blowing the silly plaything with a disgusted air, when Lily, all unconscious of him, where she sat with her hand in that of her faithful princess, breathed a responsive note. The mask was instantly at her side, and she was whirling away in the waltz. She tried to make him out, but she had already danced with so many people that she was unable to decide whether she had seen this mask before. He was not disguised except by the little visor of black silk, coming down to the point of his nose; his blond whiskers escaped at either side, and his blond moustache swept beneath, like the whiskers and moustaches of fifty other officers present, and he did not speak. This was a permissible caprice of his,but if she were resolved to make him speak, this also was a permissible caprice. She made a whole turn of the room in studying up the Italian sentence with which she assailed him: "Perdoni, Maschera; ma cosa ha detto? Non ho ben inteso."
"Speak English, Mask," came the reply. "I did not say anything." It came certainly with a German accent, and with a foreigner's deliberation; but it came at once, and clearly.
The English astonished her, and somehow it daunted her, for the mask spoke very gravely; but she would not let him imagine that he had put her down, and she rejoined laughingly, "Oh, I knew that you hadn't spoken, but I thought I would make you."
"You think you can make one do what you will?" asked the mask.
"Oh, no. I don't think I could make you tell me who you are, though I should like to make you."
"And why should you wish to know me? If you met me in Piazza, you would not recognize my salutation."
"How do you know that?" demanded Lily. "I don't know what you mean."
"Oh, it is understood yet already," answered the mask. "Your compatriot, with whom you live, wishes to be well seen by the Italians, and he would not let you bow to an Austrian."
"That is not so," exclaimed Lily indignantly.
"Professor Elmore wouldn't be so mean; and if he would,Ishouldn't." She was frightened, but she felt her spirit rising, too. "You seem to know so well who I am: do you think it is fair for you to keep me in ignorance?"
"I cannot remain masked without your leave. Shall I unmask? Do you insist?"
"Oh, no," she replied. "You will have to unmask at supper, and then I shall see you. I'm not impatient. I prefer to keep you for a mystery."
"You will be a mystery to me even when you unmask," replied the mask gravely.
Lily was ill at ease, and she gave a little, unsuccessful laugh. "You seem to take the mystery very coolly," she said in default of anything else.
"I have studied the American manner," replied the mask. "In America they take everything coolly: life and death, love and hate—all things."
"How do you know that? You have never been in America."
"That is not necessary, if the Americans come here to show us."
"They are not true Americans, if they show you that," cried the girl.
"No?"
"But I see that you are only amusing yourself."
"And have you never amused yourself with me?"
"How could I," she demanded, "if I never saw you before?"
"But are you sure of that?" She did not answer, for in this masquerade banter she had somehow been growing unhappy. "Shall I prove to you that you have seen me before? You dare not let me unmask."
"Oh, I can wait till supper. I shall know then that I have never seen you before. I forbid you to unmask till supper! Will you obey?" she cried anxiously.
"I have obeyed in harder things," replied the mask.
She refused to recognize anything but meaningless badinage in his words. "Oh, as a soldier, yes!—you must be used to obeying orders." He did not reply, and she added, releasing her hand and slipping it into his arm, "I am tired now; will you take me back to the princess?"
He led her silently to her place, and left her with a profound bow.
"Now," said the princess, "they shall give you a little time to breathe. I will not let them make you dance every minute. They are indiscreet. You shall not take any of their musical instruments, and so you can fairly escape till supper."
"Thank you," said Lily absently, "that will be the best way"; and she sat languidly watching the dancers. A young naval officer who spoke English ran across the floor to her.
"Come," he cried, "I shall have twenty duels on my hands if I let you rest here, when there are so many who wish to dance with you." He threw a pipe into her lap, and at the same moment a pipe sounded from the other side of the room.
"This is a conspiracy!" exclaimed the girl. "I will not have it! I am not going to dance any more." She put the pipe back into his hands; he placed it to his lips, and sounded it several times, and then dropped it into her lap again with a laugh, and vanished in the crowd.
"That little fellow is a rogue," said the princess. "But he is not so bad as some of them. Monsieur," she cried in French to the fair-whiskered, tall mask who had already presented himself before Lily, "I will not permit it, if it is for a trick. You must unmask. I will dispense mademoiselle from dancing with you."
The mask did not reply, but turned his eyes upon Lily with an appeal which the holes of the visor seemed to intensify. "It is a promise," she said to the princess, rising in a sort of fascination. "I have forbidden him to unmask before supper."
"Oh, very well," answered the princess, "if that is the case. But make him bring you back soon: it is almost time."
"Did you hear, Mask?" asked the girl, as they waltzed away. "I will only make two turns of the room with you."
"Perdoni?"
"This is too bad!" she exclaimed. "I will not be trifled with in this way. Either speak English, or unmask at once."
The mask again answered in Italian, with a repeated apology for not understanding. "You understand very well," retorted Lily, now really indignant, "and you know that this passes a jest."
"Can you speak German?" asked the mask in that tongue.
"Yes, a little, but I do not choose to speak it. If you have anything to say to me you can say it in English."
"I cannot understand English," replied the mask, still in German, and now Lily thought the voice seemed changed; but she clung to her belief that it was some hoax played at her expense, and she continued her efforts to make him answer her in English. The two turns round the room had stretched to half a dozen in this futile task, but she felt herself powerless to leave the mask, who for his part betrayed signs of embarrassment, as if he had undertaken a ruse of which he repented. A confused movement in the crowd and a sudden cessation of the music recalled her to herself, and she now took her partner's arm and hurried with him toward the place where she had left the princess. But the princess had already gone into the supper-room, and she had no other recourse than to follow with the stranger.
As they entered the supper-room she removed her little visor, and she felt, rather than saw, the mask put up his hand and lift away his own: he turned his head, and looked down upon her with the face of a man she had never seen before.
"Ah, you are there!" she heard the princess's voice calling to her from one of the tables. "How tired you look! Here—here! I will make you drink this glass of wine."
The officer who brought her the wine gave her his arm and led her to the princess, and the late mask mixed with the two-score other tall blond officers.
The night which stretched so far into the day ended at last, and she followed Hoskins down to their gondola. He entered the boat first, to give her his hand in stepping from theriva; at the same moment she involuntarily turned at the closing of the door behindher, and found at her side the tall blond mask, or one of the masks, if there were two who had danced with her. He caught her hand suddenly to his lips, and kissed it.
"Adieu—forgive!" he murmured in English, and then vanished indoors again.
"Owen," said Mrs. Elmore dramatically at the end of her narration, "who do you think it could have been?"
"I have no doubt as to who it was, Celia," replied Elmore, with a heat evidently quite unexpected to his wife, "and if Lily has not been seriously annoyed by the matter, I am glad that it has happened. I have had my regrets—my doubts—whether I did not dismiss that man's pretensions too curtly, too unkindly. But I am convinced now that we did exactly right, and that she was wise never to bestow another thought upon him. A man capable of contriving a petty persecution of this sort—of pursuing a young girl who had rejected him in this shameless fashion,—is no gentleman."
"Itwasa persecution," said Mrs. Elmore, with a dazed air, as if this view of the case had not occurred to her.
"A miserable, unworthy persecution!" repeated her husband.
"Yes."
"And we are well rid of him. He has relievedmeby this last performance, immensely; and I trust that if Lily had any secret lingering regrets, he has given her a final lesson. Though I must say, in justice to her, poor girl, she didn't seem to need it."
Mrs. Elmore listened with a strange abeyance; she looked beaten and bewildered, while he vehemently uttered these words. She could not meet his eyes, with her consciousness of having her intended romance thrown back upon her hands; and he seemed in nowise eager to meet hers, for whatever consciousness of his own. "Well, it isn't certain that he was the one, after all," she said.
Long after the ball Lily seemed to Elmore's eye not to have recovered her former tone. He thought she went about languidly, and that she was fitful and dreamy, breaking from moods of unwonted abstraction in bursts of gayety as unnatural. She did not talk much of the ball; he could not be sure that she ever recurred to it of her own motion. Hoskins continued to come a great deal to the house, and she often talked with him for a whole evening; Elmore fancied she was very serious in these talks.
He wondered if Lily avoided him, or whether this was only an illusion of his; but in any case, he was glad that the girl seemed to find so much comfort in Hoskins's company, and when it occurred to him he always said something to encourage his visits. His wife was singularly quiescent at this time, as if, having accomplished all she wished in Lily's presence at the princess's ball, she was willing to rest for a while from further social endeavor. Life was falling into the dullroutine again, and after the past shocks his nerves were gratefully clothing themselves in the old habits of tranquillity once more, when one day a letter came from the overseers of Patmos University, offering him the presidency of that institution on condition of his early return. The board had in view certain changes, intended to bring the university abreast with the times, which they hoped would meet his approval.
Among these was a modification of the name, which was hereafter to be Patmos University and Military Institute. The board not only believed that popular feeling demanded the introduction of military drill into the college, but they felt that a college which had been closed at the beginning of the Rebellion, through the dedication of its president and nearly all its students to the war, could in no way so gracefully recognize this proud fact of its history as by hereafter making war one of the arts which it taught. The board explained that of course Mr. Elmore would not be expected to take charge of this branch of instruction at once. A competent military assistant would be provided, and continued under him as long as he should deem his services essential. The letter closed with a cordial expression of the desire of Elmore's old friends to have him once more in their midst, at the close of labors which they weresure would do credit to the good old university and to the whole city of Patmos.
Elmore read this letter at breakfast, and silently handed it to his wife: they were alone, for Lily, as now often happened, had not yet risen. "Well?" he said, when she had read it in her turn. She gave it back to him with a look in her dimmed eyes which he could not mistake. "I see there is no doubt of your feeling, Celia," he added.
"I don't wish to urge you," she replied, "but yes, I should like to go back. Yes, I am homesick. I have been afraid of it before, but this chance of returning makes it certain."
"And you see nothing ridiculous in my taking the presidency of a military institute?"
"They say expressly that they don't expect you to give instruction in that branch."
"No, not immediately, it seems," he said, with his pensive irony. "And the history?"
"Haven't you almost got notes enough?"
Elmore laughed sadly. "I have been here two years. It would take me twenty years to write such a history of Venice as I ought not to be ashamed to write; it would take me five years to scamp it as I thought of doing. Oh, I dare say I had better go back. I have neither the time nor the money togive to a work I never was fit for,—of whose magnitude even I was unable to conceive."
"Don't say that!" cried his wife, with the old sympathy. "You will write it yet, I know you will. I would rather spend all my days in this—watery mausoleum than have you talk so, Owen!"
"Thank you, my dear; but the work won't be lost even if I give it up at this point. I can do something with my material, I suppose. And you know that if I didn'twishto give up my project I couldn't. It's a sign of my unfitness for it that I'm able to abandon it. The man who is born to write the history of Venice will have no volition in the matter: he cannot leave it, and he will not die till he has finished it." He feebly crushed a bit of bread in his fingers as he ended with this burst of feeling, and he shook his head in sad negation to his wife's tender protest,—"Oh, you will come back some day to finish it!"
"No one ever comes back to finish a history of Venice," he said.
"Oh, yes, you will," she returned. "But you need the rest from this kind of work, now, just as you needed rest from your college work before. You need a change of standpoint,—and the American standpoint will be the very thing for you."
"Perhaps so, perhaps so," he admitted. "At any rate, this is a handsome offer, and most kindly made, Celia. It's a great compliment. I didn't suppose they valued me so much."
"Of course they valued you, and they will be very glad to get you. I call it merely letting the historic material ripen in your mind, or else I shouldn't let you accept. And I shall be glad to go home, Owen, on Lily's account. The child is getting no good here: she's drooping."
"Drooping?"
"Yes. Don't you see how she mopes about?"
"I'm afraid—that—I have—noticed."
He was going to ask why she was drooping; but he could not. He said, recurring to the letter of the overseers, "So Patmos is a city."
"Of course it is by this time," said his wife, "with all that prosperity!"
Now that they were determined to go, their little preparations for return were soon made; and a week after Elmore had written to accept the offer of the overseers, they were ready to follow his letter home. Their decision was a blow to Hoskins under which he visibly suffered; and they did not realize till then in what fond and affectionate friendship he held them. He now frankly spent his whole time withthem; he disconsolately helped them pack, and he did all that a consul can do to secure free entry for some objects of Venice that they wished to get in without payment of duties at New York.
He said a dozen times, "I don't know what Iwilldo when you're gone"; and toward the last he alarmed them for his own interests by beginning to say, "Well, I don't see but what I will have to go along."
The last night but one Lily felt it her duty to talk to him very seriously about his future and what he owed to it. She told him that he must stay in Italy till he could bring home something that would honor the great, precious, suffering country for which he had fought so nobly, and which they all loved. She made the tears come into her eyes as she spoke, and when she said that she should always be proud to be associated with one of his works, Hoskins's voice was quite husky in replying: "Is that the way you feel about it?" He went away promising to remain at least till he finished his bas-relief of Westward, and his figure of the Pacific Slope; and the next morning he sent around by afacchinoa note to Lily.
She ran it through in the presence of the Elmores, before whom she received it, and then, with a cry of "I think Mr. Hoskins is toobad!" she threw itinto Mrs. Elmore's lap, and, catching her handkerchief to her eyes, she broke into tears and went out of the room. The note read:—
Dear Miss Lily,—Your kind interest in me gives me courage to say something that will very likely make me hateful to you forevermore. But I have got to say it, and you have got to know it; and it's all the worse for me if you have never suspected it. I want to give my whole life to you, wherever and however you will have it. With you by my side, I feel as if I could really do something that you would not be ashamed of in sculpture, and I believe that I could make you happy. I suppose I believe this because I love you very dearly, and I know the chances are that you will not think this is reason enough. But I would take one chance in a million, and be only too glad of it. I hope it will not worry you to read this: as I said before, I had to tell you. Perhaps it won't be altogether a surprise. I might go on, but I suppose that until I hear from you I had better give you as little of my eloquence as possible.Clay Hoskins.
Dear Miss Lily,—Your kind interest in me gives me courage to say something that will very likely make me hateful to you forevermore. But I have got to say it, and you have got to know it; and it's all the worse for me if you have never suspected it. I want to give my whole life to you, wherever and however you will have it. With you by my side, I feel as if I could really do something that you would not be ashamed of in sculpture, and I believe that I could make you happy. I suppose I believe this because I love you very dearly, and I know the chances are that you will not think this is reason enough. But I would take one chance in a million, and be only too glad of it. I hope it will not worry you to read this: as I said before, I had to tell you. Perhaps it won't be altogether a surprise. I might go on, but I suppose that until I hear from you I had better give you as little of my eloquence as possible.
Clay Hoskins.
"Well, upon my word," said Elmore, to whom his wife had transferred the letter, "this is very indelicate of Hoskins! I must say, I expected something better of him." He looked at the note with a face of disgust.
"I don't know why you had a right to expect anything better of him, as you call it," retorted his wife. "It's perfectly natural."
"Natural!" cried Elmore. "To put this upon us at the last moment, when he knows how much trouble I've——"
Lily re-entered the room as precipitately as she had left it, and saved him from betraying himself as to the extent of his confidences to Hoskins. "Professor Elmore," she said, bending her reddened eyes upon him, "I want you to answer this letter for me; and I don't want you to write as you—I mean, don't make it so cutting—so—so—Why, IlikeMr. Hoskins! He's been sokind! And if you said anything to wound his feelings—"
"I shall not do that, you may be sure; because, for one reason, I shall say nothing at all to him," replied Elmore.
"You won't write to him?" she gasped.
"No."
"Why, what shall I do-o-o-o?" demanded Lily, prolonging the syllable in a burst of grief and astonishment.
"I don't know," answered Elmore.
"Owen," cried his wife, interfering for the first time, in response to the look of appeal that Lily turned upon her, "youmustwrite!"
"Celia," he retorted boldly, "Iwon'twrite. I have a genuine regard for Hoskins; I respect him, and Iam very grateful to him for all his kindness to you. He has been like a brother to you both."
"Why, of course," interrupted Lily, "I never thought of him as anythingbuta brother."
"And though I must say I think it would have been more thoughtful and—and—more considerate in him not to do this—"
"We did everything we could to fight him off from it," interrupted Mrs. Elmore, "both of us. We saw that it was coming, and we tried to stop it. But nothing would help. Perhaps, as he says, hedidhave to do it."
"I didn't dream of his—having any such—idea," said Elmore. "I felt so perfectly safe in his coming; I trusted everything to him."
"I suppose you thought his wanting to come was all unconscious cerebration," said his wife disdainfully. "Well, now you see it wasn't."
"Yes; but it's too late now to help it; and though I think he ought to have spared us this, if he thought there was no hope for him, still I can't bring myself to inflict pain upon him, and the long and the short of it is, Iwon't."
"But how is he to be answered?"
"I don't know.Youcan answer him."
"I could never do it in the world!"
"I own it's difficult," said Elmore coldly.
"Oh,Iwill answer him—I will answer him," cried Lily, "rather than have any trouble about it. Here,—here," she said, reaching blindly for pen and paper, as she seated herself at Elmore's desk, "give me the ink, quick. Oh, dear! What shall I say? What date is it?—the 25th? And it doesn't matter about the day of the week. 'Dear Mr. Hoskins—Dear Mr. Hoskins—Dear Mr. Hosk'—Ought you to put Clay Hoskins, Esq., at the top or the bottom—or not at all, when you've said Dear Mr. Hoskins? Esquire seems so cold, anyway, and Iwon'tput it! 'Dear Mr. Hoskins'—Professor Elmore!" she implored reproachfully, "tell me what to say!"
"That would be equivalent to writing the letter," he began.
"Well, write it, then," she said, throwing down the pen. "I don'taskyou to dictate it. Write it,—write anything,—just in pencil, you know; that won't commit you to anything; they say a thing in pencil isn't legal,—and I'll copy it out in the first person."
"Owen," said his wife, "you shall not refuse! It's inhuman, it's inhospitable, when Lily wants you to, so! Why, I never heard of such a thing!"
Elmore desperately caught up the sheet of paper onwhich Lily had written "Dear Mr. Hoskins," and groaning out "Well, well!" he added,—
I have your letter. Come to the station to-morrow and say good-by to her whom you will yet live to thank for remaining onlyYour friend,Elizabeth Mayhew.
I have your letter. Come to the station to-morrow and say good-by to her whom you will yet live to thank for remaining only
Your friend,
Elizabeth Mayhew.
"There! there, that will do beautifully—beautifully! Oh, thank you, Professor Elmore, ever and ever so much! That will save his feelings, and do everything," said Lily, sitting down again to copy it; while Mrs. Elmore, looking over her shoulder, mingled her hysterical excitement with the girl's, and helped her out by sealing the note when it was finished and directed.
It accomplished at least one purpose intended. It kept Hoskins away till the final moment, and it brought him to the station for their adieux just before their train started. A consciousness of the absurdity of his part gave his face a humorously rueful cast. But he came pluckily to the mark. He marched straight up to the girl. "It's all right, Miss Lily," he said, and offered her his hand, which she had a strong impulse to cry over. Then he turned to Mrs. Elmore, and while he held her hand in his right, he placed his left affectionately on Elmore's shoulder, and, looking at Lily, he said, "You ought to get Miss Lily to helpyou out with your history, Professor; she has a very good style,—quite a literary style, I should have said, if I hadn't known it was hers. I don't like her subjects, though." They broke into a forlorn laugh together; he wrung their hands once more, without a word, and, without looking back, limped out of the waiting-room and out of their lives.
They did not know that this was really the last of Hoskins,—one never knows that any parting is the last,—and in their inability to conceive of a serious passion in him, they quickly consoled themselves for what he might suffer. They knew how kindly, how tenderly even, they felt towards him, and by that juggle with the emotions which we all practise at times, they found comfort for him in the fact. Another interest, another figure, began to occupy the morbid fancy of Elmore, and as they approached Peschiera his expectation became intense. There was no reason why it should exist; it would be by the thousandth chance, even if Ehrhardt were still there, that they should meet him at the railroad station, and there were a thousand chances that he was no longer in Peschiera. He could see that his wife and Lily were restive too: as the train drew into the station they nodded to each other, and pointed out of the window, as if to identify the spot whereLily had first noticed him; they laughed nervously, and it seemed to Elmore that he could not endure their laughter.
During that long wait which the train used to make in the old Austrian times at Peschiera, while the police authoritiesvisédthe passports of those about to cross the frontier, Elmore continued perpetually alert. He was aware that he should not know Ehrhardt if he met him; but he should know that he was present from the looks of Lily and Mrs. Elmore, and he watched them. They dined well in waiting, while he impatiently trifled with the food, and ate next to nothing; and they calmly returned to their places in the train, to which he remounted after a last despairing glance around the platform in a passion of disappointment. The old longing not to be left so wholly to the effect of what he had done possessed him to the exclusion of all other sensations, and as the train moved away from the station he fell back against the cushions of the carriage, sick that he should never even have looked on the face of the man in whose destiny he had played so fatal a part.
In America, life soon settled into form about the daily duties of Elmore's place, and the daily pleasures and cares which his wife assumed as a leader in Patmos society. Their sojourn abroad conferred its distinction; the day came when they regarded it as a brilliant episode, and it was only by fitful glimpses that they recognized its essential dulness. After they had been home a year or two, Elmore published his Story of Venice in the Lives of her Heroes, which fell into a ready oblivion; he paid all the expenses of the book, and was puzzled that, in spite of this, the final settlement should still bring him in debt to his publishers. He did not understand, but he submitted; and he accepted the failure of his book very meekly. If he could have chosen, he would have preferred that the Saturday Review, which alone noticed it in London with three lines of exquisite slight, should have passed it in silence. But afterall, he felt that the book deserved no better fate. He always spoke of it as unphilosophized and incomplete, without any just claim to being.
Lily had returned to her sister's household, but though she came home in the heyday of her young beauty, she failed somehow to take up the story of her life just where she had left it in Patmos. On the way home she had refused an offer in London, and shortly after her arrival in America she received a letter from a young gentleman whom she had casually seen in Geneva, and who had found exile insupportable since parting with her, and was ready to return to his native land at her bidding; but she said nothing of these proposals till long afterwards to Professor Elmore, who, she said, had suffered enough from her offers. She went to all the parties and picnics, and had abundant opportunities of flirtation and marriage; but she neither flirted nor married. She seemed to have greatly sobered; and the sound sense which she had always shown became more and more qualified with a thoughtful sweetness. At first, the relation between her and the Elmores lost something of its intimacy; but when, after several years, her health gave way, a familiarity, even kinder than before, grew up. She used to like to come to them, and talk and laugh fondly over their old Venetian days. But often she sat pensive and absent, in the midst of these memories, and looked at Elmore with a regard which he found hard to bear: a gentle, unconscious wonder it seemed, in which he imagined a shade of tender reproach.
When she recovered her health, after a journey to the West one winter, they saw that, by some subtile and indefinable difference, she was no longer a young girl. Perhaps it was because they had not met her for half a year. But perhaps it was age,—she was now thirty. However it was, Elmore recognized with a pang that the first youth at least had gone out of her voice and eyes. She only returned to arrange for a long sojourn in the West. She liked the climate and the people, she said; and she seemed well and happy. She had planned starting a Kindergarten school in Omaha with another young lady; she said that she wanted something to do. "She will end by marrying one of those Western widowers," said Mrs. Elmore.
"I wonder she didn't take poor old Hoskins," mused Elmore aloud.
"No, you don't, dear," said his wife, who had not grown less direct in dealing with him. "You know it would have been ridiculous; besides, she never cared anything for him,—she couldn't. You mightas well wonder why she didn't take Captain Ehrhardt after you dismissed him."
"Idismissed him?"
"You wrote to him, didn't you?"
"Celia," cried Elmore, "this Icannotbear. Did I take a single step in that business without her request and your full approval? Didn't you both ask me to write?"
"Yes, I suppose we did."
"Suppose?"
"Well, wedid,—if you want me to say it. And I'm not accusing you of anything. I know you acted for the best. But you can see yourself, can't you, that it was rather sudden to have it end so quickly—"
She did not finish her sentence, or he did not hear the close in the miserable absence into which he lapsed. "Celia," he asked at last, "do you think she—she had any feeling about him?"
"Oh," cried his wife restively, "how shouldIknow?"
"I didn't suppose youknew," he pleaded. "I asked if you thought so."
"What would be the use of thinking anything about it? The matter can't be helped now. If you inferred from anything she said to you—"
"She told me repeatedly, in answer to questions as explicit as I could make them, that she wished him dismissed."
"Well, then, very likely she did."
"Very likely, Celia?"
"Yes. At any rate, it's too late now."
"Yes, it's too late now." He was silent again, and he began to walk the floor, after his old habit, without speaking. He was always mute when he was in pain, and he startled her with the anguish in which he now broke forth. "I give it up! I give it up! Celia, Celia, I'm afraid I did wrong! Yes, I'm afraid that I spoiled two lives. I ventured to lay my sacrilegious hands upon two hearts that a divine force was drawing together, and put them asunder. It was a lamentable blunder,—it was a crime!"
"Why, Owen, how strangely you talk! How could you have done any differently under the circumstances?"
"Oh, I could have done very differently. I might have seen him, and talked with him brotherly, face to face. He was a fearless and generous soul! And I was meanly scared for my wretched little decorums, for my responsibility to her friends, and I gave him no chance."
"We wouldn't let you give him any," interrupted his wife.
"Don't try to deceive yourself, don't try to deceiveme, Celia! I know well enough that you would have been glad to have me show mercy; and I would not even show him the poor grace of passing his offer in silence, if I must refuse it. I couldn't spare him even so much as that!"
"We decided—we both decided—that it would be better to cut off all hope at once," urged his wife.
"Ah, it was I who decided that—decided everything. Leave me to deal honestly with myself at last, Celia! I have tried long enough to believe that it was not I who did it!" The pent-up doubt of years, the long-silenced self-accusal, burst forth in his words. "Oh, I have suffered for it! I thought he must come back, somehow, as long as we stayed in Venice. When we left Peschiera without a glimpse of him—I wonder I outlived it. But even if I had seen him there, what use would it have been? Would I have tried to repair the wrong done? What did I do but impute unmanly and impudent motives to him when he seized his chance to see her once more at that masquerade—"
"No, no, Owen! He was not the one. Lily was satisfied of that long ago. It was nothing but a chance, a coincidence. Perhaps it was some one he had told about the affair—"
"No matter! no matter! If I thought it was he, my blame is the same. And she, poor girl,—in my lying compassion for him, I used to accuse her of cold-heartedness, of indifference! I wonder she did not abhor the sight of me. How has she ever tolerated the presence, the friendship, of a man who did her this irreparable wrong? Yes, it has spoiled her life, and it was my work. No, no, Celia! you and she had nothing to do with it, except as I forced your consent—it was my work; and, however I have tried openly and secretly to shirk it, I must bear this fearful responsibility."
He dropped into a chair, and hid his face in his hands, while his wife soothed him with loving excuses for what he had done, with tender protests against the exaggerations of his remorse. She said that he had done the only thing he could do; that Lily wished it, and that she never had blamed him. "Why, I don't believe she would ever have married Captain Ehrhardt, anyhow. She was full of that silly fancy of hers about Dick Burton, all the time,—you know how she used always to be talking about him; and when she came home and found she had outgrown him, she had to refuse him, and I suppose it's that that's made her rather melancholy." She explained that Major Burton had become extremelyfat, that his moustache was too big and black, and his laugh too loud; there was nothing left of him, in fact, but his empty sleeve, and Lily was too conscientious to marry him merely for that.