CHAPTER VII.
Then,—
“But Reginald’s mother died,” said Alitza, in a singularly half-muffled tone, as if she had been long going forward with the story, and now but made an addition. “Then Uncle George (as I called old Grove) sent me to a good school. It was thought by some to be very good of him; but there was much more back of all that, you must know. I was a thin ghost of a girl then; thinner than I have now become, and I had cross-eyes (as people call it), and I was sallow. But little Reg was used to me; so to come to it at once, the summer I was seventeen I came home from school to the old Grove place. There was no one there but one old servant and Reg, who had been suspended from the academy on some charge; so there we were together two months, as good as in a wilderness.
“The first thing I knew we were engaged to be married, and then nothing would do for Reg but a drive to Hartford, to the minister’s; but I knew the minister would not marry us if he knew we were both under age. So as quick as he asked how old we were, I said I was eighteen and Reg was twenty-one. And then came the trouble; for truth, of a sort, was always Reg’s strong point. And as we rode away together, married tight enough by the minister, he looked at me with absolute dislike, and wanted to know what I told that story for.
“I told him that as he had been teasing me for six weeks to marry him, and as I had at last said I would, some one had got to tell the lie; and as he hated to, I did it for him out of kindness. I felt bad about it myself. And then the minister had looked at us in a queer way; and Ethel, I was such a simple, ignorant little child, that I did not even know then what disagreeable thing the minister might have been thinking,other than that I was telling a lie. And I knew I was, and that made me color up; and that had made Reginald mad. And so the outcome of his haste to tie me to him by that ceremony was that he had called me a liar, and I had told him I hated him. Then I would do nothing other but drive straight to the old home, half frightened to death at what I had done.
“Then you must know, as we drove up to the house up came a common sort of a fellow on horseback; and the first thing he did was to joke Reg for riding with me, when he was suspended for a flirtation, at least, with a common sort of a girl who lived in the academy town. I was as mad as a lunatic at that; for though I understood nothing about such sort of talk, I loathed the least breath of it as badly as Reg hated lying. And while I was in a frenzy of wrath, and tearing away at both of the impossible rowdy boys, up came old Grove, driving in from somewhere with ‘friends’ to whom he was going to sell the so-called Grove place. The sight of me there made him mad anyway, for a reason that I can now understand; and in a minute the other young boor had let out all about our foolish work at the minister’s house; and, too, Reg’s affair with the other girl; all this—imagine it—was blazed out before those four men; mixing me, Reginald’s good straight maiden wife, up with things which I simply felt sure were very detestable.
“Well, I went to my old nurse’s room (she had always staid there in the family for my sake), and I got from her papers which auntie had gotten from old Grove before she died, and had made nurse keep privately for me, though he had hunted for them everywhere. For you must know that they were legal documents which showed that the estate we lived on and every cent of money on which he had been speculating was my money, which he, as one guardian, held in trust for me, and was bound to invest for me. So the more successfully he turned it over, the richer I was growing. Well, you see? But the point with me was, I knew the possession of this paper gave me a jack-wrench to put on old Grove, whenever I got ready. But I loved Reg then in a way,and could not disgrace his father without disgracing him. And I didn’t see how I could go to my other guardian without letting him know how bad old Grove was. My nurse had talked a good deal to me about it, and I had made up my mind the week before, romantically, that I would marry Reg and turn my property all over to him, and save his feelings, and keep him as rich as he thought himself to be, and give him a surprise the day after we should be married, by telling him all about it.
“What I did do was to take all those papers and my wedding certificate and get away, carrying with me a look as if I would just as lief kill anyone who spoke to me disrespectfully, like old Grove had done. I was hateful enough looking to get on quite well. I got a good place to do housework under the name of Jane Collins. I stayed there two years, saving money, and terribly frightened lest Grove or Reg should find me. Next, the lady I worked for recommended me as housekeeper for a half-paralyzed old man, because I was good, and as ugly looking as gloomy sin. I was a good nurse, and he said my touch made him stronger. He was kind, but rather romantic; and finally I had to tell him my story, because he wanted to marry me. I showed him my certificate, and then I showed him my other papers; and because I could trust him, I told him I had a plan of my own. I wanted a very fine education, and I wanted to put my other guardian on old Grove’s track, so as to get my money all into my own hands clear and fair, and then make it all over to Reg, who wasn’t fit to rough it, somehow. But that I had got to do carefully, for I was legally his wife, and so the money was his in a way; but that I would never be Reg’s wife any longer than till the day I could find myself in a condition to be divorced, and could make him marry the girl who had been a good girl till he ruined her. My idea was that she really was (law or no law) his wife more than I was. Heaven knows I didn’t want ever to see him again. Yet I had that romantic, real, dispassionate sort of principle which made me determined to keep my vow to do him good and not evil, all the days of his life. So, as I say, I was bound he should have the money, and marry the girl of whom I have told you, but whom I never could find.
“All this seemed just fun to old Mr. Mancredo, and he took so much interest in the ‘joke of the thing,’ as he called it, putting a lawyer on Grove’s track, and fixing things up a little, while getting at facts, that he grew better in health under it; and he had my eyes straightened, and gave me the best of teachers, of which he was chief. And with kindness, approbation, good treatment and all, by the time I was twenty-four I was not only quite handsome, but had everything all about my business in my own hands. But the poor little girl had died,—so somebody said, but I’m not sure,—and that took my courage down. And Reg was at West Point, ‘swinging round on my money,’ Mr. Mancredo said. But you see Reg had called me a liar, and I loathed the whole mess. But you see I had a woman’s pride in being, myself,intrinsic wealthof a finer sort than that thing called ‘money’ can fully represent. I wanted to know how to do well (and in a way which would be of marketable value) every sort of thing which could be needed in the economics of a broad social-system. It made me sick to see men, who inherently had nothing worth exchanging, quarreling so much to get their clutch on the ‘medium of exchange’ called money. But not to stop about all that now, I can only tell you that old Mr. Mancredo laughed so much, and had such a good time over my theories, that he legally adopted me as his heiress and daughter, and then got so well that we travelled all over Europe and the Nile country, and he made my guardian stop bothering about the laws of the matter, and appearances, and the rest of it. For why should I go back to Reginald, who hated me, and force on him my money as a gift, which he now was enjoying much better under the supposition that it was his of right? Besides, I was really punishing old John Grove most deliciously; and I relished that. For he was a singularly offensive old animal; and besides, ‘if your enemy thirst, give him drink,’ and he was awful on the money-thirst. And I was helping him to pour gold down his own throat, with just enough of a scare with every gulp to make life a terror to the old animal; and it was fun to me. But just before we sailed for theMediterranean I did send Reg one ringing slap. For I was angry that he was such a coward as not to have fought for me against his father. But then he was afraid as death of his ‘old dad,’ as he called him; just as his mother had been. I wrote to him that his mother in heaven would never forgive him for his treatment of me; for that she had left me in his care, as a younger sister. And that now, however low he sunk, he might look about him in the sloughs there, for any woman whom he met might be the sister to whom he had betrayed his trust. I did not mean to give him a chance to take much comfort in his badness. But I meant to do more than to merely put a ‘death’s head’ at the feast of life which he had spoiled for me. I knew that this letter would put him on the wrong track, so that he would never look for me among the cultivated, scholarly, useful women, whom I intended to lead before I was forty. And besides, I felt it would give him an idea of the fact that all women are the sisters of all men, and that a man is a felon if he betrays their trust. So I thought this letter hit off all these things pretty well; don’t you see that it did?
“Well, we travelled everywhere, Mr. Mancredo and I, and I cultivated a leisurely, haughty manner, and grew high-colored, with magnificent eyes, they said, and then I knew how to dress. And people commonly called me ‘Mrs. Mancredo.’ Sometimes I corrected it and sometimes I did not. The world was so full of tangles that I scorned to bother myself about names. I knew how staunch I was. And besides, I had such an innate passion for chastity and continence, that the other sort of life seemed as idiotic to me as to have dashed my brains out a little every day would have seemed. Dear old Mancredo called me a very brainy woman, and I valued that, and I enjoyed being good without letting anybody know it, if you can imagine such a notion. But then, always, Miss Ethel, I have devotedly loved my guardian angel.”
She became silent, and the silence was preserved. Then—
“We lived in Italy several years. My mother was an Italian, and sowas Mr. Mancredo, and I felt to be the middle-aged, rich Italian woman whom, by adapting myself to dear Mr. Mancredo’s language and needs, in his lameness, I was becoming. When he died I was as much a widowed heart as if I had been his wife. He called me always a truthful, sound nature, and encouraged me to believe that my last ‘slap’ at Reginald would sicken him of vice, which, by the way, he curiously enough did not believe Reginald was particularly guilty of. He said the false conditions of woman’s environment had cultivated lack of frankness in me, and that a certain sort of farcical manœuvering even now made me like to put people in the wrong, to my own disadvantage, rather than to allow them to intrude on my business, which is true. ‘You are too fond of being privately good,’ said he, which was a funny fact.
“After everything was over and I had gotten back to America, Mr. Mancredo’s lawyer (and he was my guardian) wanted me to come down on old Grove, whose touch was turning everything to gold. They had come out West here, and Reg was riding the social wave buoyed up by my money, and I decided to come West and take a look at him, with the agreement that at a word from me my lawyer should come on and fetch old Grove with him, for he was under close surveillance on two accounts.
“And then at the hotel I found the poor fellow, awfully gone down, and drinking away like a man with something on his conscience. I felt vexed with him for getting nothing but brandy-slings out of all that money, for there were people who needed it, and could have used it if he couldn’t. I found it was said that he was a fellow who was afraid of women. He had a queer way of looking at them, and his way with me was his general way. Perhaps he thought any one of them might be me, and the dreadworeon him. But he did not know me, and I rather had to press myself on his attention, to try to make things come about so we could settle on a divorce. But my attention to him made him shyer and more distrustful than ever; yet he was perplexed by a half recognition at times, too, I think.
“He never knew me, though, till that night on the stairs when I asked him what would have become of that sister of his if she had been as unprincipled as he had been. And then, oh dear, poor fellow, that was the end of all for him! I have never been much to him, and never anything to anyone else, but I have always been true to myself and to my guardian angel.”
She stopped and gave way to the weeping that had twice interrupted her, then said, drawing a full breath:
“So I am honestly and only Mrs. Reginald Grove.”
“Oh, my good Lord!”
It was Reginald’s voice, in full manhood’s tone.
“Oh, go to him, Ethel, I am afraid!” said Alitza.
But Reginald, parting the blinds, stepped out of the long window and stood in the moonlight looking about him, with his hand to his head, gazing at Ethel, who, rosy-red with joy, looked into the eyes of an irate but not insane man.
“I have had enough of this talking outside my window. I tell you I don’t know where I am. Send for Mrs. Mancredo. She’s a straight woman, but by George, how shewilllie. Why, Miss Ethel, I didn’t know you. You are looking old and queer, somehow. I’m frightened somehow. This room and place—? Send for Robert. He’ll take me round to my hotel in his trap, as he did yesterday.”
“Take my arm for a moment, and we will walk up and down the balcony,” said Ethel. “Your foot feels as if it were asleep, does it not?”
“It feels as though it were waking up. Get out, man! Hold off there!” said he, bracing back against the wall ready to strike out at Fleetwood, his nurse, who approached too much in the character of an attendant to escape distrust.
“I am here, Captain Grove,” said Ethel. “You are my guest.”
“I am your guest, Miss Ethel? Well, that’s all right then. You hear that, you peeping idiot back there? I’m Miss Ethel’s guest; but I tell you others, the whole posse of you, to keep away from me, or I’llknock you all down, like ninepins in an alley. They are for shutting me up somewhere. I have heard lots of talk about it, and if that dark fellow isn’t a doctor, what is he, with his soft-stepping ways?
“There, look at that. There are my roses, not wilted yet; and there is my Petrarch. There’s no drunk about me. I was here yesterday. I remember everything: only I forget some of it. Oh,—oh, Miss Ethel, what has happened?”
“Just this: you have been ill, but you are getting well now.”
“There now, you’re telling the truth. But when have I been ill, and where have I been ill?” said he, reassured, yet with the anger of a proud man fighting against the treachery of his faculties. “Look here. That’s—that’sMrs. Mancredo that I hear crying somewhere. It breaks me all up to have that woman so unhappy. Come, Miss Ethel, if you believe in prayer, down on your knees, and tell them up there to keep paralysis off a fellow like me. I’m not half a bad lot, I tell you. No, indeed; I’m not half bad.”
At last Ethel brought him to see that if he would submit to patient thought he would soon bridge the mental hiatus that now afflicted him, since his mind had been abstracted from things about him. But that only made him anxious to have one good fight with the best fellow there, to prove that there was nothing the matter with him, and never had been.
“Well, then, take me,” said Daniel Daksha, coming up; his presence so full of blessed content that Reginald laid his hand in that man’s with a comforted sense that “old Heem,” as he was sometimes called, would see him through all right.
It was held to be desirable that Reginald should be saved from the sudden shock of the knowledge that as thirty odd years had been blotted out of his memory at the time of his paralysis, so now at this crisis of probable recovery the years which had since intervened, with their life of other worldliness and other consciousness, were swept away for the moment, like a dream forgotten.
Daniel’s full comprehension of a brief but similar lapse from consciousness that had once befallen him, prepared him to help Reginald thoroughly.
Reginald was singularly, courteously grateful for the care which he saw had been taken of him, in bringing him to this private home. But his mind was full of shadowy incidents related to the two worlds in which he had lived. And Daniel well knew the terrors and mental perils of a man recently returned as from a far country. He knew Reginald Grove felt badgered and broken-hearted at the incongruous, conflicting memories which bewildered him; and he felt that presently, when Reginald should begin to recall the blissful states of existence now left behind him as in a dreamland, he would fall into conditions of homesickness for those states of exaltation, which might result in settled melancholia or suicide.
The possibility of this man’s being mentally wrecked, after all the lofty care which had been bestowed on him, seemed a disaster which could and should be diverted. For it was Daniel’s theory that a man who had gone through such an experience as this, should find a way to make himself of use to others tempted and tried in a like way; and that therefore he must pull through.
So rising to his feet, and standing between Reginald and Ethel, he said staunchly, looking at Reginald:
“Ethel, he is well now; and what I have to say is, that a man who has been so expensively educated by angels in heaven and on earth, as this Captain Reginald Grove has been, will of course be honorable and soldierly enough to review coolly all the extraordinary lessons he has learned, digesting the facts which seem confusing, and winning out of them at last an order of knowledge which will fit him to do for other needy fellows the same things which we Dakshas have done for him.”
Reginald looked up with a glad, proud expectancy, now quite sure that all was right enough with him, and that he had had some unusually good thing befall him, which in some way fitted him to be quite a friend with the Dakshas, and a coworker with them in unusual lines.
Then with the strong tone of one determined to get at facts, he said: “Miss Ethel, what whitened your hair since—since the day on the balcony?”
“It turned white in one night. For I will tell you this: there is a world where a day is as a thousand years; and we learn fast in a few seconds there.”
“And did you go to that world?”
“I did,” said Ethel.
“How did you get back?”
“It was my inner self that went. No one looking at my outer self—my body—could have seen that I was away.”
“Well,” said Reginald, after a prolonged look into her face and his own memories: “I see that you are the same old truthful young girl, who said kind words to me one day out on your balcony, all about my mother and roses, and the goodness of wealth, and that you wished, with me, that I was but five years old. Now what you say would look to some people uncommon unlikely. But—but if you don’t know about your own hair—whose hair should—” He heard an hysterical giggle.
“Oh, there she is at her old tricks. There’s Mrs. Mancredo making fun of a fellow,” he said irritably.
“But then, you see,” said Ethel, “she’s not been away, as you and Daniel and I have. But you will soon find your way back; we did, though it seemed unnatural at first, and we felt homesick for the upper air. Sleep now; in the morning all will seem more natural, and Mrs. Mancredo will help you.”
He slept, and slept soundly. In the morning he was up early. What he wanted to see now, was Mrs. Mancredo. She seemed to him somehow to be his oldest friend; and a homesickness for old, old friends had begun to lay hold on him.
He warily looked about. The doors were open; he would go out. If any one stopped him he would know they thought him mad; and if they did, he would knock them down and run. But no one seemed tocare where he was going. He passed Ethel and she bowed to him, with a cordial good-morning; and Daniel Heem, who was reading on the other balcony, bowed cordially; but it was all with the air that they were all alike, and at their ease in that house.
There were two men down by the lake-bluffs. But no one seemed to care where he was going. The air and the sunshine were good; and it felt strangely good (though queer) to use his own legs. He looked about warily, tarrying in the rose-garden. But no infant ever longed more than he for caressing love; and no man fired with wrath against some tormenting thing, felt readier than he to deal a death-blow. Yes, he would get away to the little old arbor in the shrubbery, and there, all alone, he would cry his heart free (he told himself) for something he had lost. Then crying as he ran, and running as he cried, he at last flung himself down on the breast of mother earth, longing for some unnamable treasure.
What had befallen? Realms of being had been opened to his knowledge, whose delights the repeating power of his brain could not repicture. He felt as if starving for what he had lost. He bit at the earth, with inarticulate cries of soul-bereftness.
Suddenly two arms closed about him, lifting him till his head rested on a throbbing bosom. They tightened till he felt himself swayed gently to and fro, while sobs, strong as his own, shook the rocking form which held him. As he lay extended, half along the ground and half in this sheltering care, there came to him something of that sort of peace in which his senses had been enveloped when he before had floated away into that child-kingdom from which he had had last night so rude an awakening. He waited wonderingly.
A hand pressed back the hair from his forehead.
“Don’t you know me, Reginald?”
He opened his eyes and saw black velvet. Was he dead? Was coffin couch so soft? Did angel arms so sweetly clasp poor mortal form within that narrow bound?
Not yet, at least. For bending over him he saw black orbs and cheeks tear-flushed. The velvet was a woman’s dress; and laces there rose and fell with the palpitations of a woman’s heart.
It was Mrs. Mancredo; and she held him tight, as if she would never let him go.
“I thought you were my mother,” he said.
“Ethel Daksha, do you mean?” she asked, after a strange pause.
“No-o-o, my own dear mother. I thought I was well dead at last; I wish I were. I have been so knocked about.”
Presently he said, out of the silence, in a good common-sense way: “I must be awfully sick, or you wouldn’t hold me—like this, as if—as if I were fainted, you know.”
She shivered. “Don’t you know me?” He sat up and looked at her, and wondered if he must doubt his own senses next. No, the flush on the dark cheek, the soft brown orbs and wealth of black hair, were all beauties possessed by his tormenting friend, Mrs. Mancredo. Like a summer night-lightning memory flashed, sending him to search her face to find in it—the link lost in his twice-dissevered life.
“Of course I know you,” he said angrily; “and as I don’t seem to be dying, I’ll stand on my feet.” And he gave her his hand, helping her to rise, with his wits all about him.
Something in his act and look whelmed the soul of this strange woman who had been his playmate from childhood up, and had parted from him on the bridal hour. And sinking on the arbor-seat she wept violently. With a scowl of distress and of another emotion, in which there was no liking, tortured by the mental hiatus which the sight of Mrs. Mancredo intensified, he said suddenly: “Why do you tell such falsehoods? I hate it in woman.”
Astonished, and giggling nervously at his queer starts and turns, her eyes shining like lambent stars through the mist, chiefly concerned not to startle him, and falling back into the way which, as “little Alitza,” she had had to use toward him for the last five years, she gently said:
“Well, Regie, I never will again.”
“Oh, oh, they speak like that where I just came from!” he cried. “Tell me, oh, tell me, was it a trance? I cannot endure this cloud over my mind which is so thin that I can almost see through it, and yet so dense that it stifles me. Tell me all!” he pleaded.
“I will. Stop me if I skip anything that you want explained. You have been for quite a while with the Dakshas. I have been here, too. You have lived a double existence; and though I could see you every day, you seemed never to see Mrs. Mancredo, but instead, your thoughts were away in some other world and time. You thought Ethel Daksha was your mother, and always called her so. And once I dreamed, or I saw you, with your real mother and Ethel Daksha together in the unseen world, and—”
“Yes, yes, angels and my mother’s touch—and—Laura and Petrarch, and sustained ecstasies she brought in on my soul, flooding my very brain with joys, warm, white, flying joys—which—oh, it is gone, I am lost again. No, no, I have it. There was great whiteness, great light, Alpine heights and woman there, in the grace and glory of electric might, competent to make man mount as on wings, as eagle’s wings ascending heights, else inaccessible! I was a boy, always playing with joys, sweeter than wine and more freely fine. No one blamed another there, and no one hurried. And I saw always Alitza there; and nothing had harmed her, for her angels had guarded her at every step. Oh, take me back! No, no, I will not go back! You think I rave; I do not, I only remember too much at once. I must remember that Daniel just said—you heard it yourself—that a man so expensively educated by angels of earth and heaven must be honorable and soldierly, and gather himself to do for others what has been done for his redemption to good use on earth. Come, oh, once more try and bring me what I lack!”
“You know, Reginald, after we all had last night a strange, a heavenly strange evening, you suddenly roused out of your long, long inattention to what was going on about you. And now you seem tohave forgotten everything since the night five years ago when you quarrelled (are you listening?) with Mrs. Mancredo on the stairs of the hotel, when—”
“Oh where, where is little Alitza—playmate, sister, and—she, you—it is strange you are both such liars!”
“Reginald Grove! You miserable thing,” she said in wholesome anger; “is that all you can remember about me—us? You are not worth saving.”
“Oh, Mrs. Mancredo, you are—are only and honestly Mrs. Reginald Grove! I heard you say it. Wait, my brain can’t stand it. You are—”
“Only and honestly Mrs. Reginald Grove,” she repeated. “My only marriage is with you, just as you understand and remember its limitation, nothing more. We are all seeking a simple life here, with little marriage or giving in marriage, because the power of the angels, with whom we co-operate for the redemption of the Cerberi, is all and in all for us.
“And Reginald, listen to me carefully: No one blames another here; no one hurries or worries, or enters on wordy discussions of past blunders or future plans. We act, leaving no room for license, but taking the liberty to each one be his or her best self, according to individual judgment.
“Now, Reginald, my permanent relation to you is that of sister. I have in no real sense ever been, or wanted to be, your wife; neither shall I ever be. You will hear from the lawyer tomorrow how absolutely sisterly was the affection which impelled me to agree to your wish for our marriage, such as it was; and you will see that the plans I laid in my own mind at eighteen, will be carried out if you like them, now in our maturity. I shall then be legally divorced from you, and—”
She looked at him. His face was bright and cheerful, interested, and perhaps a little perplexed; but above all, cheerful, alert and rather exhilarated.
She continued. “Remember this: We here are all dwellers on the threshold which is between things seen with the physical vision (so to say) and the things which are invisible to those eyes. We are chiefly interested in getting ourselves (and keeping ourselves) in right relations to the realms of supersensuous life, with which we may choose to surround ourselves. For of course we draw about us spirits, which in tendencies and longings are like ourselves. Listen to me: One of the family here, who has a far-reaching inheritance of psychic-faculty and self-poised spiritual power, is—”
“Is,” said Reginald, “the one woman in the world who is, in a way, my wife more than you are.”
Alitza sprang to her feet, flushed and with blazing eyes. For however thoroughly she ought to have been glad that the way was so clear, and Reginald so evidently relieved and ready to give her up, she was not prepared for this raw style of arriving at the conclusion. Till, suddenly, “Truth is his strong point, you know,” seemed uttered in her ears, as if in Ethel’s distant spirit tone. She caught herself up and steadied her angry pulse, and listened, trembling and expectant; but there was nothing more.
Then “Very well, you know your business and I know mine,” she said, and left him.
He had all his wits about him, and filled with a sudden sense of the electric shock which Bertha’s finger-point had sent through him on the day of Ethel’s conversation with her, he gathered up (with a tingling sense of shame) all that they together had one day said of him, as being “a fool not worth mothering.”
The blood surged through his brain, bubbling up cleansingly through all the stagnant cells, bringing him in its parts and as a whole, a memory of the things which had been going on about him for the five years of double-consciousness through which he had lived.
Later in the day he felt strangely happy, and clear-headed and proud, and ready for life; as if he had been assured by competent judges thathe was really a much more level-headed man, and had always been more level-headed, with a much clearer eye for the main point at stake, than anything in his stultified life heretofore had proved.
He saw perfectly well that the story of his life could not end here amid the congratulations of his friends over his return to health, and their assurances in relation to Mrs. Mancredo that he was a lucky fellow, with a wife possessed of such faithfulness and maturity of youthful power. For of course the story that she was his wife, and all the rest of it, had gotten abroad. And Reginald knew it had.
Perhaps if his mental grasp as to moral relations had been as bewildered as it was when, five years before, he regularly turned to his “drinks” in order to quiet his perplexities, he would have accepted the congratulations and slipped along the lines as publicly expected of him. But five years’ immersion in the blithesome delights of a world where righteousness reigned, had fortified Reginald in his inherent love of truth and straightforward dealing, and had enabled him to adopt as theories to be immediately practicalized, the methods of honor (founded on simplicity and courage) toward which the Dakshas aspired.
So when a few days later he found Alitza had legally passed over to him a good little fortune, and had taken steps to secure (on some of the many available pleas) a legal release from the results of that marriage-ceremony, he said, cheerfully and blithely: “That’s all right.” And when he further learned that Alitza had deeded a further amount of wealth to Bertha Gemacht, he said: “That’s all wrong; I won’t allow it. I hope to marry her, and so right up things. And the other money is enough for both of us,” showing that, as Alitza said to herself, “five years, even in the society of angels, could not rid the Grove blood of the thought that a man can cast off a woman when he chooses, and then marry her when he gets ready; but that, having married her, such a man felt it was better for him that she should possess as little of that legal tender called money, as possible; seeing (to the Grove notion of things) it was sum and substance of independence. She told Ethel thatthe irrepressible young hoodlum stood confessed at this touchstone, as far as his relations to what he would have called ‘this sort of a woman’ were concerned. Then she said to Grove: “It seems difficult for you to understand that you have nothing to do with what money someone else may choose to give to a third person, let that third person be whom it may.” For quarrel these two people must, by nature. And glad Alitza was that she had always kept him beyond arm’s length, and now had not let her sympathy with his sickness, or her joy at his recovery, cause her to abbreviate the distance between their ineradicable antagonisms.
“This is a different case,” said he.
“All cases are alike here, for all are individuals,” said she.
“But—she—she’s to be my wife.”
“That’s what you don’t yet know,” said Alitza. “Pah, it takes more than a visit to paradise to take that sort of stuff out of your brains. I see the use of purgatory now. You ought to have gone there and staid longer. We’ve all agreed to let you drop, the next time you knock yourself to pieces. So look out!”
“All right, then, I won’t take your money,” said he.
“Well, leave it; or you can put it into the sinking fund for the enterprise of this family,” she said. “No one is overinfluenced here.”
And he did it that day.
And then the divorce was amicably enough accomplished, but the other marriage did not occur.
He said to Ethel afterwards, with wide eyes full of childlike wonder: “How queer! Do you knowsherefused me? I’m—I’m afraid, you know, she’s somehow gone wrong, in spite of all your good opinions.”
And Alitza, speaking of this remark, said, irate, to Daniel: “After all, it does seem as if it took a burial six feet under ground to get that stuff out of him and his like. Why can’t they take to decency as naturally as women do?”
“Oh, all he needs is some real misery,” said Daniel. “Leave him to get it in his own way. He has dreamed of heaven and languished sentimentallyin paradise, but his business is now to pull himself up out of sluggish uselessness to others. Turning away that money of yours into the public good, is a hint at something courageous.”
“Anyway,” said Alitza, “Regie’s as truthful as a dumb brute, even when he is tossed about by his instincts. He told me, today that he had never had any feeling toward me but a brother’s anxiety and sense of responsibility, and that he knew all about the property matter from the nurse; and that he did hate his ‘old dad,’ and had a sort of hankering after revenge; and besides, felt it was too mean for the old man to be cheating me out of my money. And when the nurse said ‘there was enough for both, and for him to ask me to marry him,’ he thought it would be about the only way to fix things up easy all round. Yet that when it was done, and we quarreled all the way home from the minister’s, he felt sick of it. For he had no love for me like that. And the sight of his ‘old dad’s’ fury threw him into confusion and terror, and a sort of dumb sickness, just as he had seen in his mother many a time. So he said today, in his simple way, he was as glad as anything that I had pulled through life so splendidly; and was glad, in a way, that we didn’t in the least care for each other, and could be divorced all comfortably.”
“It’s a queer case, and, in a way, uncommonly sweet, take it altogether, as these sorts of confusing marital troubles go in these days. For I was privately planning to marry him, so that he could have the house and money that he thought were his own, without creating any fuss with old Grove over the affair. And he was chivalrously going to marry me (in fact did in a way) so as to deliver me and my money out of old Grove’s clutches without disgracing his father. Of course it was all quite as if the question of managing the money were the one question on earth to be considered. Isn’t it disgraceful? Think of the confusion that comes of unintelligent conduct, in regard to what real love and real marriage is. In a way, Reg is a lovable fellow, and has some common sense in him. He is my own cousin, anyway, and Iwould do anything to save him except to marry him, and luckily he don’t want me to do that; so I can mother him still, as I have always done. I promised his mother I would do my best for him; and I find he had promised to do the same by me. And I think we have both blunderingly tried.”
“Oh, he’ll be well mothered among them all,” said Robert, when Daniel one day told him all this. “And the queer part is, it is my opinion that Mrs. Mancredo loves him with the soundest kind of a real wife love, whether she knows it or not. But as for him, he says he has never had a permanent attraction toward any woman except the mother of his child. And now she dreads him with a furious fear, lest he should somehow set up a claim, and get power over her boy. I’ve seen women like that before. I wonder where these transitional states will land us all.”
“It is the great question of the day,” said Daniel. “But manœuvres on the part of men to disguise from women the conditions of this crucial epoch will not help the cause along. Men must come into recognition of the fact that perfect frankness between men and women will lead up to a natural settlement of the matter as nothing else will do. In fact, it depends altogether upon the courageous doings of the dualized.”
“Just what do you mean by dualized?” said Robert.
“I mean first, as Bacon says, the men and women ‘who have procured the will to obey the reason, not to invade it.’”
“He called that the moralization of the whole being; you call it the dualization. But you include something else,” said Robert, “in your last meaning.”
“Oh, that last point comes later. And no person is ready even to discuss that, until first the subjection of the will to the reason is accomplished by them and in them. That includes the real moralization of the whole being, body and spirit,” said Daniel.
“And so, Robert,” said Ethel, “it is mother-wisdom, full of divinestlove which impels Bertha to protect herself and child against what she fears in Reginald. But perhaps the same mother-wisdom, full of divine love, will—now that she is financially independent of him—bring her, in the near future, to be as noble a wife-friend to Reginald as ever a poor, struggling fellow-creature had. She is a noble woman, rightly considered.”
“She is,” said Mrs. Mancredo. “And she is quite the person to never rest until she puts one for whom she feels responsible (as she now does for Reginald) into the way of finding his best self. She wants to help Reginald exactly as she will Waldemar. That is, to tell him all the facts, and then leave him free to become what he adores in—well—that is—oh, how can one express it!
“For my part,” she resumed, “my love for humanity is and always has been broader, more intelligent and spiritualizing than a self-arrested, masculine soul can imagine. The fact is, men in the past have praised asimulacrumof womanhood which with direARTSand infernal-wizzardry they, themselves demonologically concocted. Then they have set up before theandrogynousmind of a vigorous, virginal womanhood, this uncleanSIMULACRUMof woman, as the thing that she must emulate, or be damned, to use ‘pulpit words.’
“It is of no use opening your eyes, Robert; I may take my departure thenextmoment, but I will tell the truththis. But the best way to stop talking disagreeable things is to set vigorously about doing agreeable things. So now what I have to propose is this: In this house we bachelor-maids (glancing toward Ethel) andMAIDENLY-MOTHERSwhoenjoya celibate life, and who are legally and financially independent of men, should hold on to our shekels and our homes (NOT AS FOOLISH SOCIAL-CENTERSor as unremunerative idols, to be scrubbed and garnished, but) as centers where we can do what the Bible speaks of when it says, ‘He sets the solitary in families.’
“It takes so much time to run up and down the earth and to salary officers to show us hownotto do it, that I would rather permanently goright on here, ready for emergencies, with an occasional timely home-extension.”
“Oh, I imagine that really would be about like our Daniel’s idea, when I was a little fellow,” said Robert. “When we first came out West, and when we had plenty of grain and three or four cows, and a well-built, sunny house, and the big windows full of plants, and an outfit of kinder-garden ‘gifts’ and Daniel’s perfect knowledge of the philosophically-religious-science of child-gardening; and when I had agreed to buy all the clothes for as many children as happened to come to the door, and when we were hindered, because the mother there,” he said, halting with a quizzical glance at Althea, “would not have all sorts of nondescript children homing themselves in our house. Your thought, Mrs. Mancredo, is about like Daniel’s and mine then was.
“But, Mrs. Mancredo, my mother was queen of that home, and was a splendid homemaker, with Daniel’s help; only in our case she was the money-maker, and Daniel was the family philosopher. Yet she would no more tolerate the thought than as if there were some moral taint, in being simply good to folks. And as Daniel was taking the part of mother-man and Althea of theman-mother, Daniel succumbed. Now seeing we are all telling the truth,JUST AS IF THE LIGHT THAT LIGHTETH EVERY MAN WAS SHINING RIGHT THROUGH US, REVEALING ALL THAT IN EACH OF US HINDERS THE GROWTH OF ‘THE LILIES’ OF THIS RESURRECTION TIME,—let’s have the man-mother tell us, if she can, why she did not let other children share Ethel’s ideal surroundings and true academical-advantages, which that man-of-men, Daniel, was so lavishly bestowing on one little solitary girl. Will you tell us, lady?” said Robert.
The giant was timid and fragmentary in his statements, like one whose brain was crowded full of self-adjusting ideals. His headaches made him distrustful of himself in these days. But better times were coming.
Althea, the man-mother, the business head of the family (for that she had been), looked perturbed. She wished Robert had not brought upthat question, either publicly or privately. She looked at him in a way that meant: “Robert, tell them it’s no matter about it.” But he did not tell them so; he wanted to know. They were all hunting for truth, and women were wanting men to tell the truth squarely to them, so that men could startand eventually“square the circle.” By inference, women are to now explicitly unveil the remote recesses of their mental-hidingplaces; and that was what the judicial-looking Robert now said blankly to Althea.
Althea, quite amazed, raised her eyes, so like Robert’s, with a half-challenging shake of the head. But he looked stringent and unmoved.
She rose a little uneasily on her chair, quaintly folding her handsome hands, like a child who “did not know the answer.” No one smiled. All gazed at her unflinchingly, every eye magisterially beholding her.
For all the years of the children’s livesshehad takenthemto task like this, saying: “Of course you knowwhyyou do each act; or, of course you would refrain from action till you found out.”
Shehad never been taken to task before, and had rushed through too many strokes of big business to submit to much interference.
It was not that she was unwilling to explain the facts of this affair; it was that she did not “understand such a little thing.” So she said: “I do not know.”
“Oh, oh, Robert, wouldyouever dare to ‘NOT KNOW’?” said Ethel, folding her hands in imitation of Althea.
“Not in my wildest moments,” said Robert.
“Why,” interposed Althea, “what else would you have me say, when I don’t? Doubtless it is something to do with some two or three-thousand-year-old-scare which some antediluvian ghost of you men put on my ancient shade, when you tried to tell as bad falsehoods as are betimes told now, concerning woman’s nature, duty and—concerning thesecrecynecessary to be sustained about home-affairs, because of the untellable horrors prevalent within palace and hut,—where worse than brute passions usurp control over the priestesses of what—home?No, that is a word very generally needing to be illustrated by a new style of marital life. However, Daniel and I know what home is; and so do my children. There was nothing in our home which would not have bettered the world to know about. That is the reason I can’t tell youwhyI was averse to have a lot of little children educated and homed and cared for with Ethel,” she said perplexed. “Perhaps I was feeling stingy and tired. At any rate, I remember I wanted to get rich.
“But Daniel; consider what an exclusive home I was born and bred in, and how long ago it was, and what departures from old-fashioned dependency I even then had risked. The fact that of old, woman was chiefly protected in an enforced-penury, of which she was bitterly ashamed, tended to give her that preposterous fashion of (metaphorically) peeping out of doors and windows, and scurrying round to make the best of things before admitting eyes (much less individuals) into the secrets of the domicile where she slaved (as I never did); but where she did not intellectually and morally reign, as Daniel and I together did.
“Now, Robert, I hope you are satisfied. I have told the truth as to an age-long tendency in women ‘to want their home all to themselves.’ But other things and complications there might have been about it, too. I am tired of that subject now, Robert.”
“But just one word. Why should women feel so afflicted about this penury business?”
Althea, for reasons of her own, did not like this following up of this matter, and Ethel took on herself to answer:
“The reason was and is, because the world is the continent of every form of life, knowledge and beauty necessary for all the needs and delights of an intellectualized humanity. So woman’s discontent, anger and unrest at stagnant, self-stultifying conditions, are elements especially serviceable to her less alert and foreseeing companion.”
Adding: “‘The sense of beauty,next to the miraculous, divine suasion, is the means through whichHUMANcharacter is purified and elevated.’”
“I like that answer well,” said Robert. “And I think the power which beauty has over us all makes us more amenable to that ‘miraculous, divine suasion’ through which man is finally purified and elevated.
“Well, that’s finely finished, and I think we are to be congratulated on the success of our attempt at square dealing,” continued Robert. “But you know, Ethel, in the old days you and Daniel had some mysterious talisman by which you discovered if anygoddessescame to town in the Civil (?) War-time days, when so many unhappy babies were likely to be neglected. Other kinds than the goddess sort you seemed to think were material not worth your time and attention. I have thought of your way of discriminating then, in association with the amount of time which you blessed souls have since seen fit to give to that Reginald?”
He put this in the form of a question, and Ethel said:
“There is in Reginald ‘a little seed of immortal power, which will save its kind alive.’ Therefore he was especially worth saving. He will help progress toward conditions in which theARTS OF PEACEwill prosper. For this progress is dependent on theintelligibility of the doings of dualized—self-harmonized natures.Hewill make such things intelligible when he gains equilibrium.
“Bertha, now, is such an one. She has come up out of the scarth of great tribulation, and she has washed her robes white in the life-blood of her own bleeding heart, image as it is of the bleeding heart of the Mother of divine Humanity. She, the outraged, has become pitiful to him who crucified her and put her to open shame—a shame which she will never forget. And,” continued Ethel, after a strange pause, “which I should be sorry to see her forget. For such dealings with woman are not to be permitted nor condoned. Nevertheless, Reginald is worth saving, though he should not be encouraged, Mrs. Mancredo, to suppose Bertha will have anything more to say to him than to—”
“What, Miss Ethel, do you really mean that you women are going to conspire to make all other women leave us men alone in peace?” said Reginald, walking out from his secluded chair in the corner behind theportières, where he had half relapsed into his old fashion of floating away into union withreflective agencies. “Do you mean,” he repeated stumblingly, as he came into their circle, “Do you mean that women are to be taught somehow to leave us men to mind our business? We men are dead tired of women, all of us; but we can’t really get rid of them. We often feel like shrieking out at women: ‘For heaven’s sake, take yourselves out of sight and hearing for a thousand years. Get out of our light, and give us a chance to findourselves!’
“They take too much out of our self-esteem when they tell the truth; and when they don’t, they take too much out of our esteem forthem, which is worse yet, for our comfort. We know there is something wrong about us, but as we don’t quite understand ourselves, of course we can’t make them understand us. The reason I want to shriek out at them is—well—it is queer, but it is because I likethem so much.”
Robert laughed out, as if he had a fellow feeling for Reginald in this difficulty.
“Now that sounds queer, but it is the truth, isn’t it, Robert?” he said, with translucent, beautiful orbs raised in integrity. For Reginald was having an amazing good time, telling the truth as he understood it. But then he went on and told other truths so simply and helpfully, that they began to fear he was really getting sick again.
“See that? Now look at that,” he said. “I have been listening to you, to see how much you would bear in the way of real endeavor at truth-tellings. And now, when I speak as plainly as I can, you think my brain is giving way. Now listen to me. If a lot of good men and women don’t speak the truth about this matter of love, a lot of good brains will give way under the contradictory teachings that some sorts of churches are by silence consenting to, while protecting men in debauching woman-power, in marriage and out. Protestant churches never, in my experience of their doings, assist women to establish themselves on their own moral heights; even though these churches know that, standing thus and there, women would lift men up to theseheights, and so easily hasten forward man’s truly human development. Besides, such women’s sons would be born right the first time, and have less need of a second birth. Woman could do so much for us if we would only give her a fair chance to work according to her genius.
“You know how it was withLaura?” Nothing could exceed his tenderness and devotion as Reginald uttered this name, once so dear to Petrarch. And then, as if reciting a memorized matter he went on in his distant, ventriloquized voice:
“If that idolized object of Petrarch’s vehement passion had not held to her rectitude (notwithstanding the harsh vicissitudes of her home), that man Petrarch would never have known thatthatwoman’s personal attractions were not herrealcharm for him. For thattheywere excelled by her inherent moral glory and her spiritual-percipience.
“He would not have known that what he really adored was herinteriorSELF, whichSELFit was his business by the grace ofHE-VAHto developin himself. And if by lack of rectitude she had failed of holding him up to the business of understanding her spirit (instead of merely possessing her personal attractions), he might not have learned the truth as toWHAT LOVE FOR WOMAN IS FOUNDATIONED UPON EVEN IN THIS LIFE. And in that case he would not, at her translation to the unseen world, have been carried forward by his love toTHE TRIUMPHS OF SELF-DISCOVERYwhich befalls us when the Lord into his garden comes and theLILIES GROW AND THRIVE.”
He was looking straight into the air as one does when remembering (or putting together again) the parts of a total, which, though perfect in its whole, is yet painfully puzzling in its stages of partial development.
He was looking into the air much as he had been used to do before his recovery of speech, when in mellifluous tones, scarcely audible, he had talked on in a language quite unknown as the listening Ethel upbore his highest intelligence, aiding him as he tried to tell what Petrarch had sought and at last had found in his “VITA SOLITARIA.”
“As it was, after Laura’s translation to the unseen world his love for her spiritualized into a worship for thatlove-full-of wisdomwhich our Lord promised to send to lead us into all truth, and which he called ‘the Comforter,’ which was to dwell in disciples of holiness.
“Well would it be for us if we could first, chastely love all womanhood as sisters; and then as mothers, noble and dignified, which is far from being cold and proud. I am sure woman could (if we cleared her way respectfully) put us at our ease with her on her own supernal plane, without descending to us from it. If woman remained on her lawful heights she would leave us men always aspiring toward some veiled and virgin loveliness which would quicken each dulled spirit, and set it free from the chains that bindthoughtto the person, instead of to thespiritual-principletoward which, in reality, man’s interior nature aspires.
“Of course all this is only saying that woman is a help, able to meet her brother’s painful needs at thisfin de siècle. And that she is awfully benevolent to do it, when she has a right to better enjoyments than that of the misery of birthing and burying babies—many of whom are not fit to be born—and to better enjoyment than this taking care of men, who are not fair enough to secure toherthose advantages which would enable her to act freely, according to the teachings of supernal light.
“I have always been sure,” added Reginald, “that at a certain stage in man’s development the best thing a wisely-helpful-woman can do for a man, is to set him absolutely free from love toher. That, chained toher no more, she can then, with kind demeanor and dear reserve, explain him to himself by revealing to him the mental-mystery of that finished femininity, which is type and potency of the ‘sleeping beauty’ within his own being,—a sleeping beauty yet to be electrified into activity by man’s strenuous englobement of his brain substance. Thus, a fair face will conduct men by a fairer way to his one means of self-releasement from loving an extraneous self, and will bring him to the treasured bliss which will ne’er abandon the man who attains it! Thus man—like woman—will become wholly sexed: neither male nor female, but-both;being self-whole, self-harmonized, like the lilies of the Resurrection.”
Robert had grasped Reginald’s hand.
A silence had settled upon them.
Then Robert, with smouldering rage, broke forth relative to he—knew—what—
“And yet in the face of all this, think of the embrutalized form of marriage-ceremony which thrusts words into the mouth of a spiritual man who is suitor for a life-long union with a woman who is an image of the feminine in Deity! Think of a decent man having to take into his mouth that indecent, shoppy remark; a remark which is prescribed to him by a shoppy-church in response to woman’s enforced promise that she will obey him. The decent man is made to say (and worse still, the intellectually-hungry maiden is made to hear him say) ‘With my body (why not with my brain?) I thee worship.’ ‘And with all my worldly goods (why not with his best intelligence?) I thee endow.’”
“Is there not some immediate way to lift the grace of fine living out of the sloughs with which a most materialistic on-striding form of religion is saturating it?” he asked impatiently. “It is you women who are to blame for upholding this materialistic-sacerdotalism,” continued Robert.
“There is a way,” said Daniel.
“And we will fetch it forward,” said they all at once, steadying poor Robert, who had had a peculiar state of nature, added to a sight of “the better way,” to rightly adjust.
“Yes,” said Daniel, “there is a way; and it is bourgeoning forth on every side. It is the Resurrection-dawn, for now the Lord into his garden has come, and the lilies grow and thrive.”