The following week Verrian and his mother were at a show of paintings, in the gallery at the rear of a dealer’s shop, and while they were bending together to look at a picture he heard himself called to in a girlish voice, “Oh, Mr. Verrian!” as if his being there was the greatest wonder in the world.
His mother and he lifted themselves to encounter a tall, slim girl, who was stretching her hand towards him, and who now cried out, joyously, “Oh, Mr. Verrian, I thought it must be you, but I was afraid it wasn’t as soon as I spoke. Oh, I’m so glad to see you; I want so much to have you know my mother—Mr. Verrian,” she said, presenting him.
“And I you mine,” Verrian responded, in a violent ellipse, and introduced his own mother, who took in the fact of Miss Andrews’s tall thinness, topped with a wide, white hat and waving white plumes, and her little face, irregular and somewhat gaunt, but with a charm in the lips and eyes which took the elder woman’s heart with pathos. She made talk with Mrs. Andrews, who affected one as having the materials of social severity in her costume and manner.
“Oh, I didn’t believe I should ever see you again,” the girl broke out impulsively upon Verrian. “Oh, I wanted to ask you so about Miss Shirley. Have you seen her since you got back?”
“No,” Verrian said, “I haven’t seen her.”
“Oh, I thought perhaps you had. I’ve been to the address that Mrs. Westangle gave me, but she isn’t there any more; she’s gone up into Harlem somewhere, and I haven’t been able to call again. Oh, I do feel so anxious about her. Oh, I do hope she isn’t ill. Do you think she is?”
“I don’t believe so,” Verrian began. But she swept over his prostrate remark.
“Oh, Mr. Verrian, don’t you think she’s wonderful? I’ve been telling mother about it, and I don’t feel at all the way she does. Do you?”
“How does she feel? I must know that before I say.”
“Why, of course! I hadn’t told you! She thinks it was a make-up between Miss Shirley and that Mr. Bushwick. But I say it couldn’t have been. Do you think it could?”
Verrian found the suggestion so distasteful, for a reason which he did not quite seize himself, that he answered, resentfully, “It could have been, but I don’t think it was.”
“I will tell her what you say. Oh, may I tell her what you say?”
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t. It isn’t very important, either way, is it?”
“Oh, don’t you think so? Not if it involved pretending what wasn’t true?”
She bent towards him in such anxious demand that he could not help smiling.
“The whole thing was a pretence, wasn’t it?” he suggested.
“Yes, but that would have been a pretence that we didn’t know of.”
“It would be incriminating to that extent, certainly,” Verrian owned, ironically. He found the question of Miss Shirley’s blame for the collusion as distasteful as the supposition of the collusion, but there was a fascination in the innocence before him, and he could not help playing with it.
Sometimes Miss Andrews apparently knew that he was playing with her innocence, and sometimes she did not. But in either case she seemed to like being his jest, from which she snatched a fearful joy. She was willing to prolong the experience, and she drifted with him from picture to picture, and kept the talk recurrently to Miss Shirley and the phenomena of Seeing Ghosts.
Her mother and Mrs. Verrian evidently got on together better than either of them at first expected. When it came to their parting, through Mrs. Andrews’s saying that she must be going, she shook hands with Mrs. Verrian and said to Philip, “I am so glad to have met you, Mr. Verrian. Will you come and see us?”
“Yes, thank you,” he answered, taking the hand she now offered him, and then taking Miss Andrews’s hand, while the girl’s eyes glowed with pleasure. “I shall be very glad.”
“Oh, shall you?” she said, with her transparent sincerity. “And you won’t forget Thursdays! But any day at five we have tea.”
“Thank you,” Verrian said. “I might forget the Thursdays, but I couldn’t forget all the days of the week.”
Miss Andrews laughed and blushed at once. “Then we shall expect you every day.”
“Well, every day but Thursday,” he promised.
When the mother and daughter had gone Mrs. Verrian said, “She is a great admirer of yours, Philip. She’s read your story, and I suspect she wants an opportunity to talk with you about it.”
“You mean Mrs. Andrews?”
“Yes. I suppose the daughter hasn’t waited for an opportunity. The mother had read that publisher’s paragraph about your invalid, and wanted to know if you had ever heard from her again. Women are personal in their literary interests.”
Philip asked, in dismay, “You didn’t give it away did you, mother?”
“Certainly not, my dear. You have brought me up too carefully.”
“Of course. I didn’t imagine you had.”
Then, as they could not pretend to look at the pictures any longer, they went away, too. Their issue into the open air seemed fraught with novel emotion for Mrs. Verrian. “Well, now,” she said, “I have seen the woman I would be willing my son should marry.”
“Child, you mean,” Philip said, not pretending that he did not know she meant Miss Andrews.
“That girl,” his mother returned, “is innocence itself. Oh, Philip, dear, do marry her!”
“Well, I don’t know. If her mother is behaving as sagely with her as you are with me the chances are that she won’t let me. Besides, I don’t know that I want to marry quite so much innocence.”
“She is conscience incarnate,” his mother uttered, perfervidly. “You could put your very soul in her keeping.”
“Then you would be out of a job, mother.”
“Oh, I am not worthy of the job, my dear. I have always felt that. I am too complex, and sometimes I can’t see the right alone, as she could.”
Philip was silent a moment while he lost the personal point of view. “I suspect we don’t see the right when we see it alone. We ought to see the wrong, too.”
“Ah, Philip, don’t let your fancy go after that girl!”
“Miss Andrews? I thought—”
“Don’t you be complex, my dear. You know I mean Miss Shirley. What has become of her, I wonder. I heard Miss Andrews asking you.”
“I wasn’t able to tell her. Do you want me to try telling you?”
“I would rather you never could.”
Philip laughed sardonically. “Now, I shall forget Thursdays and all the other days, too. You are a very unwise parent, mother.”
They laughed with each other at each other, and treated her enthusiasm for Miss Andrews as the joke it partly was. Mrs. Verrian did not follow him up about her idol, and a week or so later she was able to affect a decent surprise when he came in at the end of an afternoon and declined the cup of tea she proposed on the ground that he had been taking a cup of tea with the Andrewses. “You have really been there?”
“Didn’t you expect me to keep my promise?”
“But I was afraid I had put a stumbling-block in the way.”
“Oh, I found I could turn the consciousness you created in me into literary material, and so I was rather eager to go. I have got a point for my new story out of it. I shall have my fellow suffer all I didn’t suffer in meeting the girl he knows his mother wants him to marry. I got on very well with those ladies. Mrs. Andrews is the mother of innocence, but she isn’t innocence. She managed to talk of my story without asking about the person who wanted to anticipate the conclusion. That was what you call complex. She was insincere; it was the only thing she wanted to talk about.”
“I don’t believe it, Philip. But what did Miss Andrews talk about?”
“Well, she is rather an optimistic conscience. She talked about books and plays that some people do not think are quite proper. I have a notion that, where the point involved isn’t a fact of her own experience, she is not very severe about it. You think that would be quite safe for me?”
“Philip, I don’t like your making fun of her!”
“Oh, she wasn’t insipid; she was only limpid. I really like her, and, as for reverencing her, of course I feel that in a way she is sacred.” He added, after a breath, “Too sacred. We none of us can expect to marry Eve before the Fall now; perhaps we have got over wanting to.”
“You are very perverse, my dear. But you will get over that.”
“Don’t take away my last defence, mother.”
Verrian began to go rather regularly to the Andrews house, or, at least, he was accused of doing it by Miss Macroyd when, very irregularly, he went one day to see her. “How did you know it?” he asked.
“I didn’t say I knew it. I only wished to know it. Now I am satisfied. I met another friend of yours on Sunday.” She paused for him to ask who; but he did not ask. “I see you are dying to know what friend: Mr. Bushwick.”
“Oh, he’s a good-fellow. I wonder I don’t run across him.”
“Perhaps that’s because you never call on Miss Shirley.” Miss Macroyd waited for this to take effect, but he kept a glacial surface towards her, and she went on:
“They were walking together in the park at noon. I suppose they had been to church together.”
Verrian manifested no more than a polite interest in the fact. He managed so well that he confirmed Miss Macroyd in a tacit conjecture. She went on: “Miss Shirley was looking quite blooming for her. But so was he, for that matter. Why don’t you ask if they inquired for you?”
“I thought you would tell me without.”
“I will tell you if he did. He was very cordial in his inquiries; and I had to pretend, to gratify him, that you were very well. I implied that you came here every Tuesday, but your Thursdays were dedicated to Miss Andrews.”
“You are a clever woman, Miss Macroyd. I should never have thought of so much to say on such an uninteresting subject. And Miss Shirley showed no curiosity?”
“Ah, she is a clever woman, too. She showed the prettiest kind of curiosity—so perfectly managed. She has a studio—I don’t know just how she puts it to use—with a painter girl in one of those studio apartment houses on the West Side: The Veronese, I believe. You must go and see her; I’ll let you have next Tuesday off; Tuesday’s her day, too.”
“You are generosity itself, Miss Macroyd.”
“Yes, there’s nothing mean about me,” she returned, in slang rather older than she ordinarily used. “If you’re not here next Tuesday I shall know where you are.”
“Then I must take a good many Tuesdays off, unless I want to give myself away.”
“Oh, don’t do that, Mr. Verrian! Please! Or else I can’t let you have any Tuesday off.”
Upon the whole, Verrian thought he would go to see Miss Shirley the next Tuesday, but he did not say so to Miss Macroyd. Now that he knew where the girl was, all the peculiar interest she had inspired in him renewed itself. It was so vivid that he could not pay his usual Thursday call at Miss Andrews’s, and it filled his mind to the exclusion of the new story he had begun to write. He loafed his mornings away at his club, and he lunched there, leaving his mother to lunch alone, and was dreamily preoccupied in the evenings which he spent at home, sitting at his desk, with the paper before him, unable to coax the thoughts from his brain to its alluring blank, but restive under any attempts of hers to talk with him.
In his desperation he would have gone to the theatre, but the fact that the ass who rightfully called himself Verrian was playing at one of them blocked his way, through his indignation, to all of them. By Saturday afternoon the tedious time had to be done something with, and he decided to go and see what the ass was like.
He went early, and found himself in the end seat of a long row of many rows of women, who were prolonging the time of keeping their hats on till custom obliged them to take them off. He gave so much notice to the woman next him as to see that she was deeply veiled as well as widely hatted, and then he lapsed into a dreary muse, which was broken by the first strains of the overture. Then he diverted himself by looking round at all those ranks of women lifting their arms to take out them hat-pins and dropping them to pin their hats to the seat-backs in front of them, or to secure them somehow in their laps. Upon the whole, he thought the manoeuvre graceful and pleasing; he imagined a consolation in it for the women, who, if they were forced by public opinion to put off their charming hats, would know how charmingly they did it. Each turned a little, either her body or her head, and looked in any case out of the corner of her eyes; and he was phrasing it all for a scene in his story, when he looked round at his neighbor to see how she had managed, or was managing, with her veil. At the same moment she looked at him, and their eyes met.
“Mr. Verrian!”
“Miss Shirley!”
The stress of their voices fell upon different parts of the sentences they uttered, but did not commit either of them to a special role.
“How very strange we should meet here!” she said, with pleasure in her voice. “Do you know, I have been wanting to come all winter to see this man, on account of his name? And to think that I should meet the other Mr. Verrian as soon as I yielded to the temptation.”
“I have just yielded myself,” Verrian said. “I hope you don’t feel punished for yielding.”
“Oh, dear, no! It seems a reward.”
She did not say why it seemed so, and he suggested, “The privilege of comparing the histrionic and the literary Verrian?”
“Could there be any comparison?” she came back, gayly.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the histrionic Verrian yet.”
They were laughing when the curtain rose, and the histrionic Verrian had his innings for a long, long first act. When the curtain fell she turned to the literary Verrian and said, “Well?”
“He lasted a good while,” Verrian returned.
“Yes. Didn’t he?” She looked at the little watch in her wristlet. “A whole hour! Do you know, Mr. Verrian, I am going to seem very rude. I am going to leave you to settle this question of superiority; I know you’ll be impartial. I have an appointment—with the dressmaker, to be specific—at half-past four, and it’s half-past three now, and I couldn’t well leave in the middle of the next act. So I will say good-bye now—”
“Don’t!” he entreated. “I couldn’t bear to be left alone with this dreadful double of mine. Let me go out with you.”
“Can I accept such self-sacrifice? Well!”
She had put on her hat and risen, and he now stepped out of his place to let her pass and then followed her. At the street entrance he suggested, “A hansom, or a simple trolley?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured, meditatively, looking up the street as if that would settle it. “If it’s only half-past three now, I should have time to get home more naturally.”
“Oh! And will you let me walk with you?”
“Why, if you’re going that way.”
“I will say when I know which way it is.”
They started on their walk so blithely that they did not sadden in the retrospect of their joint experiences at Mrs. Westangle’s. By the time they reached the park gate at Columbus Circle they had come so distinctly to the end of their retrospect that she made an offer of letting him leave her, a very tacit offer, but unmistakable, if he chose to take it. He interpreted her hesitation as he chose. “No,” he said, “it won’t be any longer if we go up through the park.”
She drew in her breath softly, smoothing down her muff with her right hand while she kept her left in it. “And it will certainly be pleasanter.” When they were well up the path, in that part of it where it deflects from the drive without approaching the street too closely, and achieves something of seclusion, she said:
“Your speaking of him just now makes me want to tell you something, Mr. Verrian. You would hear of it very soon, anyway, and I feel that it is always best to be very frank with you; but you’ll regard it as a secret till it comes out.”
The currents that had been playing so warmly in and out of Verrian’s heart turned suddenly cold. He said, with joyless mocking, “You know, I’m used to keeping your secrets. I—shall feel honored, I’m sure, if you trust me with another.”
“Yes,” she returned, pathetically, “you have always been faithful—even in your wounds.” It was their joint tribute to the painful past, and they had paid no other. She was looking away from him, but he knew she was aware of his hanging his head. “That’s all over now,” she uttered, passionately. “What I wanted to say—to tell you—is that I am engaged to Mr. Bushwick.”
He could have answered that she had no need to tell him. The cold currents in and out of his heart stiffened frozenly and ceased to flow; his heart itself stood still for an eternal instant. It was in this instant that he said, “He is a fine fellow.” Afterwards, amid the wild bounding of his recovered pulse, he could add, “I congratulate him; I congratulate you both.”
“Thank you,” she said. “No one knows as I do how good he is—has been, all through.” Probably she had not meant to convey any reproach to Verrian by Bushwick’s praise, but he felt reproach in it. “It only happened last week. You do wish me happy, don’t you? No one knows what a winter I have had till now. Everything seeming to fail—”
She choked, and did not say more. He said, aimlessly, “I am sorry—”
“Let me sit down a moment,” she begged. And she dropped upon the bench at which she faltered, and rested there, as if from the exhaustion of running. When she could get her breath she began again: “There is something else I want to tell you.”
She stopped. And he asked, to prompt her, “Yes?”
“Thank you,” she answered, piteously. And she added, with superficial inconsequence, “I shall always think you were very cruel.”
He did not pretend not to know what she meant, and he said, “I shall always think so, too. I tried to revenge myself for the hurt your harmless hoax did my vanity. Of course, I made believe at the time that I was doing an act of justice, but I never was able to brave it out afterwards.”
“But you were—you were doing an act of justice. I deserved what you said, but I didn’t deserve what has followed. I meant no harm—it was a silly prank, and I have suffered for it as if it were a crime, and the consequences are not ended yet. I should think that, if there is a moral government of the universe, the Judge of all the earth would know when to hold his hand. And now the worst of it is to come yet.” She caught Verrian’s arm, as if for help.
“Don’t—don’t!” he besought her. “What will people think?”
“Yes, Yes!” she owned, releasing him and withdrawing to the other end of the seat.
“But it almost drives me wild. What shall I do? You ought to know. It is your fault. You have frightened me out of daring to tell the truth.”
Had he, indeed, done that? Verrian asked himself, and it seemed to him that he had done something like it. If it was so, he must help her over her fear now. He answered, bluntly, harshly: “You must tell him all about it—”
“But if he won’t believe me? Do you think he will believe me? Would you believe me?”
“You have nothing to do with that. There is nothing for you but to tell him the whole story. You mustn’t share such a secret with any one but your husband. When you tell him it will cease to be my secret.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Well, then, you must tell him, unless—”
“Yes,” she prompted.
Then they were both silent, looking intensely into each other’s eyes. In that moment all else of life seemed to melt and swim away from Verrian and leave him stranded upon an awful eminence confronting her.
“Hello, hello!” a gay voice called, as if calling to them both. “What are you two conspiring?” Bushwick, as suddenly as if he had fallen from the sky or started up from the earth, stood before them, and gave a hand to each—his right to Verrian, his left to Miss Shirley. “How are you, Verrian? How are you, Miss Shirley?” He mocked her in the formality of his address. “I’ve been shadowing you ever since you came into the park, but I thought I wouldn’t interrupt till you seemed to have got through your conversation. May I ask what it was all about? It seemed very absorbing, from a respectful distance.”
“Very absorbing, indeed,” Miss Shirley said, making room for him between them. “Sit down and let me tell you. You’re to be a partner in the secret.”
“Silent partner,” Bushwick suggested.
“I hope you’ll always be silent,” the girl shared in his drolling. She began and told the whole story to the last detail, sparing neither herself nor Verrian, who listened as if he were some one else not concerned, and kept saying to himself, “what courage!” Bushwick listened as mutely, with a face that, to Verrian’s eye, seemed to harden from its light jocosity into a severity he had not seen in it before. “It was something,” she ended towards Bushwick, with a catch in her breath, “that you had to know.”
“Yes,” he answered, tonelessly.
“And now”—she attempted a little forlorn playfulness—“don’t you think he gave me what I deserved?”
Bushwick rose up and took her hand under his arm, keeping his left hand upon hers.
“He! Who?”
“Mr. Verrian.”
“I don’t know any Mr. Verrian. Come, you’ll take cold here.”
He turned his back on Verrian, who fancied a tremor in her hat, as if she would look round at him; but then, as if she divined Bushwick’s intention, she did not look round, and together they left him.
It was days before Verrian could confess himself of the fact to his mother, who listened with the justice instinctive in her. She still had not spoken when he ended, and he said, “I have thought it all over, and I feel that he did right. He did the only thing that a man in love with her could do. And I don’t wonder he’s in love with her. Yes”—he stayed his mother, imperatively—“and such a man as he, though he ground me in the dirt and stamped on me, I will say, it, is worthy of any woman. He can believe in a woman, and that’s the first thing that’s needed to make a woman like her, true. I don’t envy his job.” He was speaking self-contradictorily, irrelevantly, illogically, as a man thinks. He went on in that way, getting himself all out. “She isn’t single-hearted, but she’s faithful. She’ll never betray him now. She’s never given him any reason to distrust her. She’s the kind that can keep on straight with any one she’s begun straight with. She told him all that before me be cause she wanted me to know—to realize—that she had told him. It took courage.”
Mrs. Verrian had thought of generalizing, but she seized a single point. “Perhaps not so much courage as you think. You mustn’t let such bravado impose upon you, Philip. I’ve no doubt she knew her ground.”
“She took the chance of his casting her off.”
“She knew he wouldn’t. She knew him, and she knew you. She knew that if he cast her off—”
“Mother! Don’t say it! I can’t bear it!”
His mother did not say it, or anything more, then. Late at night she came to him. “Are you asleep, Philip?”
“Asleep? I!”
“I didn’t suppose you were. But I have had a note to-day which I must answer. Mrs. Andrews has asked us to dinner on Saturday. Philip, if you could see that sweet girl as I do, in all her goodness and sincerity—”
“I think I do, mother. And I wouldn’t be guilty of her unhappiness for the world. You must decline.”
“Well, perhaps you are right.” Mrs. Verrian went away, softly, sighing. As she sealed her reply to Mrs. Andrews, she sighed again, and made the reflection which a mother seldom makes with regard to her son, before his marriage, that men do not love women for their goodness.
PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
Almost incomparably ignorant womanAlmost to die of hunger for something to happenBelief of immortality—without one jot of evidenceBrave in the right time and placeContinuity becomes the instinctive expectationFound her too frankly disputatiousGirls who were putting on the world as hard as they couldIf there’s wrong done the penalty doesn’t right itNever wanted a holiday so much as the day after you had onePersonal view of all things and all persons which women takeProof against the stupidest praiseRead too many stories to care for the plotShe laughed too much and too loudSick people are terribly, egotisticalThe fad that fails is extinguished foreverTimidity is at the bottom of all fondness for secrecy