"Ah! who with clear account remarks
The ebbing of Time's glass,
When all his sands are diamond sparks
That dazzle as they pass!"
She smiled a derisive little smile, all to herself, as she thought how small a power lay in jewelled pendulums to make a brilliant evening, and she felt a certain thrill of pride at the thought that her associations lay in a world removed from all this smothering materialism. The lavish sumptuousness which till now had appealed to her rather strongly, seemed suddenly tainted with vulgarity, and her thoughts wandered half unconsciously to the bare little room where she had gone to see Nora Costello. The name brought a slight quickening of her pulses, and she wanted time to think over things alone.
As the men came in from the dining-room Miss Anstice's carriage was announced, and she rose to bid her hostess good-night.
"Must you run away so early, my dear?"
"Thank you, yes; I promised Papa to come home early. He likes to see me before he goes to bed, and to hear an account of my evening."
"You will be at home at five to-morrow, and I may bring Captain Blathwayt?"
[Pg 287]
"Any friend of yours, of course," murmured Winifred, in a tone which could hardly have proved encouraging to the vanity or incipient sentiment of the guardsman.
"If you will permit me," said Flint to Graham as Winifred came down the stairs, "I will put Miss Anstice into her carriage, and then come back for that last cigar."
Never in his life had Flint so raved against his own lack of readiness as now, when he felt the passing moments slipping by, and could find no words to set himself right in the eyes of the woman he loved,—the woman whose little gloved hand rested on his arm. Judge then of his feeling when, smiling up into his eyes with perfect friendliness, Winifred said under her breath, "Why do we go there—you and I? They really aren't our kind at all."
The remark carried with it full assurance that no words uttered by Hartington Graham had power to shake for an instant her faith in the man whom she had called her friend; but beyond that her confident use of the wordour, as if their interests and associations were the same, thrilled him with a sort of intoxication.
"Oh, thank you!" was all that he could find to say to express his complicated state of mind.
"I do not deserve any thanks at all," Winifred answered. "I ought to be well scolded for[Pg 288]speaking slightingly of people whom I have just been visiting. I do not often do such ill-mannered things, and I should not have said it to any one but you."
Again Flint thrilled at the unconscious flattery.
"Will you come in to-morrow afternoon?" she asked, as he shut the carriage door.
"To meet Captain Blathwayt? No, thank you."
"The day after then."
"So be it—till then, farewell!"
[Pg 289]
As the cab rattled down the avenue, Winifred sank back against the cushions. She sat in the corner in a sort of daze, marking the glimmer of the electric lights, which seemed so many milestones in her life, as she passed them one after another. After all, it is experience which marks time, and in this day Winifred Anstice had tasted more of life than in many a year before. Crashing into her world of calm commonplace had fallen the dynamite bomb of an overwhelming emotion. Her present, with all its preoccupying trifles, lay in wrecks about her. For the future—it was too tumultuous to be faced.
She was like a person who has been walking in the darkness along a familiar road, and suddenly feels himself plunging over an unsuspected precipice. She was conscious of nothing but a gasping sense of dizziness—all control of herself and her life seemed passing out of her hands[Pg 290]into those of another, and she scarcely knew whether to be glad or sorry. Was it only this afternoon that she had looked upon a marriage with Jonathan Flint as impossible? If she had thought so a few hours ago, why not now? Nothing had occurred since. No transcendent change had come over him or her—why should it all look so different to her now? Perhaps, she told herself, this mood too would pass like its precursor. She dared not feel sure of anything—she who had swung round the whole compass of feeling like a weather-vane before a thunder-storm.
These introspective reflections brought back irresistibly the feelings with which she had read Flint's letter, little dreaming that it was his,—the letter so full of wise and friendly counsel. She remembered how, as she read, she had been filled with a yearning desire to rise to the ideal her unknown counsellor had set before her, and filled too with a longing that Fate might send it in her way, to be something to him, to return in some measure the spiritual aid and comfort which she had received at his hands.
"Well," she told herself gloomily, "the opportunity had come, and this was how she had used it—not only by denying his petition,—that, of course, was inevitable, feeling as she did,—but by accusing him of selfishness, by insisting[Pg 291]that he should accept her terms of friendship.Friendship, bah!—how stale and flat it sounded! Could she not have devised some newer way of wounding an honorable man who had offered her his heart?"
It seemed to her excited consciousness that she must appear to him a vain and empty coquette, eager to retain a homage for which she intended no return. When once he awoke to that view, his love would die out, for he was not a man to continue devotion where he had lost respect; and so it was all over, or as good as over, between her and him.
The cab lurched sharply across the tracks at Twenty-Third Street, jostling Winifred's flowers and fan out of her lap. The maid stooped to pick them up. As she returned them she caught a glimpse of the set look in the face of her mistress.
"Are you feelin' bad?" she asked.
"No, no, I am quite well, Maria, only a little tired—are we near home?"
"Yes'm, we've passed Gramercy Park, and there's the steeples of St. George's that you see from your windows."
"Yes, yes, I see. Here we are close at home. You may go to bed, Maria, after you have lighted the lamp in my room. I shall not need you to-night."
[Pg 292]
"Well, well," thought the maid, "something's the matter sure. I never knew no one more fussy about the unhooking of her gown. She can't do much herself, but she does know how things ought to be done, and that's what I calls a real lady."
"Winifred, my dear, is that you?" Professor Anstice called, as the rustle of his daughter's dress caught his ear on the stair.
"Oh, Papa, are you awake still?"
"Still!Why it is not so very late!" said her father, as Winifred entered the study and threw herself into the deep upholstered chair beside the fire, which was just graying into ashes in the grate.
Her father was sitting in his cane-seated study-chair with a conglomeration of volumes piled about the table. His face, perhaps from the reflection of the green-shaded student-lamp, looked pale and worn. His shoulders, too, seemed to Winifred's abnormally quickened perception to have caught a new stoop. The fact forced itself upon her consciousness with a sudden, swift pang, that her father was growing old. She had never thought of age in connection with him before. To her he had been simply and sufficiently "my father," without thought of other relations or conditions; but now it rushed upon her with a wave of insistent remorse, that his life[Pg 293]was slipping by, while she was doing so little for his happiness. A rather bare and dreary life it seemed to her now, as she contemplated its monotony; for Winifred had no appreciation of "the still air of delightful studies." Her world was peopled with live, active figures, always pushing forward, seeking, striving, loving. And her father had loved once. Yes, that too struck her now, almost with a shock of surprise. He, too, had asked for some one's love as ardently, perhaps, as Jonathan Flint for hers. More than that, he had won the love he sought. Won it and lost it again. Could it ever come to that for her? The thought smote her with an intolerable sharpness.
Mr. Anstice was a strange man to be the parent and guardian of such a girl as Winifred. The world for him was bounded by the walls of his study. Even his teaching seemed an interruption to the real business of his life, and he turned his back upon his class-room with a sensation of relief.
He was not a popular professor among the body of the students; but the unfailing courtesy of his manner, and the solidity of his scholarship, won the respect of the many, and the esteem and warm admiration of the few.
His bearing, in spite of the scholar's stoop, was marked by a certain distinction, and the lines of[Pg 294]his worn face curiously suggested the fresh curves which marked his daughter's brow and cheek. The beauty of youth is an ivorytype; the beauty of age is an etching, bitten out by the burin and acid of thought, experience, and sorrow.
The prevailing mood with James Anstice was one of gentle weariness. He felt that his life was ended, and that the years were going on in a sort of monotonous anti-climax. Yet, in spite of this undertone of depression, his manner was responsive, genial, even gay at times, and he lived much in the reflected light of Winifred's youth and energy.
If it caused him some surprise that any one should want anything as much as Winifred wanted everything for which she cared at all, he treated her enthusiasms with amused toleration, and made as much effort to secure for her the successive desires of her heart as though they had assumed the same importance in his own mind as in hers.
To-night he forced himself away from his own train of thought with an effort, to throw himself into Winifred's evening experiences. He watched her for some time as she sat in silence, with head bent forward and gloved hands clasped about her knee.
"Well, little girl," he said at last, "you[Pg 295]seem to have fallen into a brown study. Was the dinner so dull?"
"No, Papa, not dull exactly; rather brilliant in some ways."
"I understand—brilliant materially, dull spiritually, like the mantles those fellows wore in the Inferno—gilt on the outside, and lead within. 'Oh, everlastingly fatiguing mantle!' I am gladder than ever that I stayed at home."
"I am glad too, for I think you would have been bored, and when you are bored you make no concealment of the fact."
"Of course not,—why should I? If I seemed to be having a good time, I should be compelled to go through it again. No, society is organized for people under twenty-five. They really enjoy it. For the rest of the world it is a sham."
Winifred smiled absently.
"Who was there?" Professor Anstice asked at length, pushing away his books as if bidding them a reluctant good-night.
"Oh, no one whom you know, I think, except Mr. Flint."
"Flint? Does he go to such things?"
"Yes, and appears to find them sufficiently entertaining, though I fancy he must be decidedly over twenty-five. By the way," she added, with an elaborately careless aside, "what do you think of Mr. Flint, on the whole?"
[Pg 296]
"I think, for a clever man, he plays the worst game of whist I ever saw."
"Yes, yes," admitted Winifred, with light mockery in her tone; "but what do you think of him in lesser matters,—general character, for instance?"
The Professor looked at his daughter with a little quizzical sadness in his faded gray eyes. He began to perceive the drift of her banter.
"It would be difficult to state exactly what I think of him when you put it so broadly as that," he answered. "Flint's character is complex. He has in him the making of a fine man; but the question is, will it ever be made? He seems to me abnormally lacking in personal ambition,—does not seem to care whether he is heard of or not,—has a sort of contempt for the little neighborhood notorieties which give most men pleasure. It is as if he were taking a bird's-eye view of himself, and every one else, and they all looked so small that the trifling variations in prominence did not matter."
Winifred looked at her father in silent surprise. She had no idea that he had made such a study of the younger man. He paused for a moment; but meeting his daughter's absorbed gaze, he continued: "The thing which gives me most hope of Flint is his genuine devotion to truth. Positive or negative truth—it is all[Pg 297]the same to him. Now, many a man is loyal to his convictions; but very few are loyal to their doubts. He will 'come into port greatly or sail with God the seas.' Fine line that, isn't it? The sound is quite majestic if you say it over aloud—'Come into port—'"
"But, Papa," interrupted Winifred a little impatiently, "you were talking of Mr. Flint."
"To be sure, so we were,—at least I was; but I should like to hear a little of your opinion of him. A woman's estimate of a man is always worth having, though not always worth heeding. You see too much in high lights and deep shadows, not enough by clear daylight; still, I should like to know how Flint strikes you. I remember at first you found him absolutely disagreeable."
"Yes, Papa."
"But of late you have seemed to change your mind, or at least to feel less prejudice against him."
"Yes, Papa."
A silence fell between them after this. At length Winifred rose and turned down the lights. Then she drew a low stool to the side of her father's chair, and sitting down by his knee began to rub her hand gently up and down over the broadcloth.
"Papa," she said after a while, "I haven't been very nice to you; have I?"
[Pg 298]
"Nonsense, child,—what put such an idea into your head? As if I had had any happiness in all these years since—since your mother died—except through my children!"
"Oh, yes, I know you have found your happiness in taking care of us, but I have found my happiness in being taken care of; and I have enjoyed having my own way and doing the things I liked, and now I would give—oh, so much!—if I had been different."
"What does this mean?" exclaimed Professor Anstice, anxiously fumbling about Winifred's wrist in the vain effort to find her pulse. "Are you ill? You have not had a hemorrhage or anything, have you?"
"Don't worry about me, dear! I shall live to plague you for many a year yet. I'm as well as can be, except for the mind ache." Here she gave a nervous little laugh. The Professor looked down at her, sitting there on the stool, her head drooping to the side as he remembered to have seen it years ago when she was a little chidden child. The waving hair hid her face from his sight,—all but the delicate oval of the cheek and the curve of the full, rounded chin.
"Winifred," he said gently, "I think you have something to tell me."
"Yes, I have, only I don't know how to begin."
[Pg 299]
"Is it, perhaps, about Mr. Flint?"
"Yes, about Mr. Flint," Winifred admitted.
"He has been asking you to marry him?"
"Yes, asking me to marry him," Winifred repeated, still like a child reciting her catechism.
"And you promised."
"No, I did not," Winifred answered with sudden energy; "I told him I never could, would, or should marry him,—that I would go on being friends with him as long as he liked, but on condition that he gave up the other idea entirely."
Professor Anstice reached out his thin white scholarly fingers and stroked the rebellious waves of his daughter's hair.
"Winifred," he said, "you are always acting on impulse. You never take time to consider anything, but jump and plunge like a broncho. Now let us talk this matter over calmly: I am afraid you have made a mistake—a serious mistake, my dear, though it may not be too late to remedy it."
"There is nothing to remedy," said Winifred, with a tremulous attempt at cheerfulness; "he asked me and I said 'No,' and he said he should never ask me again, and I said I hoped he wouldn't, or something like that, and so the matter ended; and I am always going to live with you and be good to you,—and you won't be sorry for that, will you?"
[Pg 300]
"I should be very sorry if it came about so. Listen, Winifred. Because you see me a delver in dusty old books, you think perhaps that I don't know what love is; but I tell you as I grow older it comes to fill a larger and larger part of the horizon, to seem perhaps the only reality. I don't mean just the love of a man for a woman, but the great throbbing bond of human affection and sympathy; and of all the kinds of affection, there is none that has the strength and toughness that belong to the love of husband and wife. I wish you to marry, Winifred,—I have always wished it,—only let it be to a true man, my dear,—let it be to a true man!"
"Father, heisa true man," said Winifred, speaking low and with a timidity wholly new to her.
"I think so,—I earnestly believe it. He seems to me to have more ability, more strength, and more tenderness than he has shown yet. Some wrong ideas have twisted themselves persistently among the very fibres of his life and warped it; but it is not yet too late to tear them away."
"Some one else may do it," said Winifred, in exaggerated discouragement, "I let the opportunity slip by. He will never ask me again, and as for me—do you think I will ever go to any man with the offer of my love? Not if my heart broke for him!"
[Pg 301]
"He said he would never ask you again?"
"Yes, Papa; he said it twice."
"Well, if he said it twice fifty times, it was a lie, or would have been if he had not believed it himself at the time. Never fear but you will have a chance to tell him that you have changed your mind, and without any wound to your pride either."
"Oh, Papa!" cried Winifred, rising and throwing her arms about his neck, "you are such a comfort!"
The old clock on the landing of the stairway struck one.
"There, it is morning already," said her father. "Off to bed with you, else I shall have no one to pour out my cup of coffee to-morrow." As he spoke, he gently unclasped her arms from about his neck, but she would not go quite yet.
"If—if—all this should ever come about, are you quite sure you would be willing to have me leave you?"
"Quite sure, my dear. It is the natural thing, and what is natural must be right. Now, good-night."
Winifred wiped away the tears which had been hanging on the fringe of her eyelashes, and after a parting hug gathered up her wraps and swept away to her room. Her father watched her tenderly till the last trace of her gown had vanished[Pg 302]up the stairs; then he closed the door softly, took a miniature from its case in the drawer, laid it on the table, and bowed his head on both arms above it.
"'Father and Mother both.' Yes, that was what I promised, and that is what I must be so far as I can, and may God help me!" he murmured.
[Pg 303]
Despair fells; suspense tortures. The forty odd hours which lay between the ending of the Grahams' dinner and the promised interview with Winifred Anstice stretched out into an eternity to the impatience of Flint. By turns he tried occupation and diversion; yet his ear caught every tick of the clock, which seemed to his exaggerated fancy to have retarded its movement. He found it so impossible to work at his office that he packed up his papers and started for home.
"What! going so early?" called Brooke from his desk.
"Yes, a man cannot do any work here with this everlasting steam-drill outside."
"You are growing too sensitive for this world, Flint. We shall have to build you a padded room, like Carlyle's, on top of the building."
Flint vouchsafed no answer. He posted out and up Broadway as if he were in mad haste. Then suddenly recollecting that his chief purpose[Pg 304]was to kill time, he moderated his stramming gait to a stroll. At a jeweller's on Union Square he paused, and turned in, ostensibly to order some cards; but passing out he stopped surreptitiously before the case of jewels. The rubies interested him most. How well they would look against a certain gray-silk gown! Should he ever dare— He caught a meaning smile on the face of the clerk, and bolted out of the door.
He paused again at a fashionable florist's shop tucked deftly in among the theatres of central Broadway. The men at the counter were busily engaged over curiously incongruous tasks,—one binding up a cross of lilies, another a wreath for a baby's coffin, and a third preparing a beribboned basket, gay with chrysanthemums, for a dinner-table. Heedless, like us all, of every one's experiences but his own, Flint stood by, waiting impatiently for the clerk who was putting the last lily in the cross. From the great heaps of roses which stood about he selected an overflowing boxful of the longest-stemmed and most fragrant. The clerk smiled as he watched his recklessness. "I've seen 'em like that," he said to himself, "and two or three years after they'll come in and ask for carnations, and say it doesn't matter if theywerebrought in yesterday."
Unconscious of the florist's cynical reflections,[Pg 305]Flint tossed him his card, and emerged once more to add one to the moving mass of humanity on the street. At Madison Square he dropped in at the club and looked over the latest numbers of "Life" and "Punch."
Still time hung heavy on his hands. He looked at his watch; it was just five o'clock,—exactly the time when that objectionable Blathwayt was to call in Stuyvesant Square. Still two hours before dinner.
He left the club, crossed over to Broadway, and jumped onto the platform of the moving cable-car at imminent peril to life and limb. He rode on in a sort of daze, till he was roused by a sudden jerk and the conductor's call of: "Central Park—all out here!" Moving with the moving stream of passengers, he stepped out of the car, and refusing a green transfer ticket he crossed the street and entered the park at the Seventh Avenue gate, where the path makes a sudden dip from the level of the street. The sun was near its setting, and the chilly wind had swept the walks clear of tricycles and baby carriages. The gray-coated guardian of the peace blinked at him from his sentry box. Otherwise he had the park to himself, and found an intense pleasure in the solitude, the keen air, and the sharp outlines of the dreary autumn branches against the gorgeous sky.
[Pg 306]
The west had that peculiar brilliancy which the dwellers on Manhattan would recognize as characteristic of their island in November, if there were not so few who ever get a peep at the sky except perpendicularly at noonday, as they emerge from rows of brownstone houses or overshadowing buildings of fabulous height. Flint was in no mood to sentimentalize over sunsets. The intensely human interests before him drove Nature far away, as a cold abstraction akin to death; yet half unconsciously the scene imprinted itself upon his senses, and long afterward he recalled distinctly the pale grayish-blue of the zenith shading into the rare, cold tint of green, and that again barred over with light gossamer clouds, beneath which lay the glowing bands of orange, red, and violet.
As the sun dropped, the temperature followed it. The wind whistled more keenly through the bare branches. Flint turned up the collar of his overcoat, thrust his hands into his pockets, and quickened his pace.
The relief of rapid motion told upon his overstrained condition. By the time he had rounded the lakes he was calmer. The ascent of the steep, rock-hewn steps of the ramble rested his nerves as much as it taxed his wind, and as he came stramming down the mall, his mind was sufficiently detached from its own hopes[Pg 307]and fears to be able to realize that the overhanging elms recalled agreeably the long walk at Oxford, and that the Cathedral spires were fine in the gathering dusk, as one emerged from the Fifth Avenue entrance. The return to the world of men stimulated him, and the long undulating waves of electric lights seemed to beckon to him hopefully as he went on.
The afternoon was gone. That was one comfort, he said, as he reached his own room. It would take half-an-hour to dress for dinner, and that meal might be prolonged to cover another hour; but the evening still stretched onward, seeming interminable to his restless fancy. It was a relief when Brady came in and suggested that they drop in at a meeting of the Salvation Army to be held at a slum post in a region of the city known as Berry Hill.
"Will I go?" he said, echoing the question of his friend, who stood looking out of the window with an appearance of indifference, which deceived no one. "Yes, I will; but I want you to understand that I don't go as you do, out of pure emotional piety, but only to see and hear Nora Costello."
"Well, she is worth it, isn't she?" Brady responded.
"Worth a trip down-town? Without doubt; but that is not the question that is lying down[Pg 308]in the depths of the locality you are pleased to call your heart. Come, now," he added, walking across to the window and throwing his arm over Brady's shoulder with one of his rare exhibitions of affection,—"come; make a clean breast of it, and let us talk the thing out from A to Z.Imprimis, you are in love with Nora Costello."
Brady started and moved away a trifle, but made no effort at denial till after a minute, when he said rather weakly, "What makes you think so?"
"Thinkso! Why, man, I must be deaf, dumb, and blind not toknowit. Do you suppose I believed that a man at your time of life, brought up as you have been, had suddenly gone daft on this Salvation Army business?"
"It's a 'business', as you call it, that does more good than all the churches put together," answered Brady, hotly.
"Hear him!" echoed Flint, mockingly.
"Hear this son of New England actually declaring that there may be a way to heaven which does not lie between church-pews or start from a pulpit!"
"Flint, you are a scoffer."
"What do I scoff at?"
"Religion."
"Pardon me, but I do not."
"Well, theology, anyway."
"Ah, that is a different matter."
[Pg 309]
"You call yourself an agnostic."
"No, I don't. 'Agnostic' is too long and too pretentious a word. I prefer to translate it and call myself a know-nothing."
"Don't you believe in God and a future life—and—and all that sort of thing?" Brady ended rather disjointedly.
"Don't you believe Mars is inhabited? and that the lines on its surface are canals for irrigation?"
"I don't know," answered Brady, whose mental processes were simple.
"Neither do I," said Flint; "and what is more, neither does any man, any more than he knows about God and a future life; and so why should we go to making up creeds and breaking the heads of people who don't agree with us when we are all just guessers, and probably all of us wrong?"
"Then you would take away faith out of the world?"
"Not I,—at least not unless I could see something to take its place, which at present I don't; and as for these poor devils who are consoling themselves for their hard lot in this world by the expectation of a soft thing in the next, I would not be such a brute as to shake their confidence if I could, and I don't blame them much if in addition to their heaven they set up a hell where, in imagination at least, they can put the folks[Pg 310]who have been having a too good time here while they were grunting and sweating under their weary load."
"Then I wonder you have not more sympathy with an organization like the Salvation Army, which is doing its best to lighten the burden of the grunters and sweaters."
"Ah," answered Flint, "I had forgotten the Salvation Army,—it seems so small a branch of a big subject. I am glad you brought me back. But let us go a little further back still, for you know it was not the Army at all that we started to discuss, but only one of its officers, with a slender little figure and a pale face and a big pair of rather mournful dark eyes."
"Oh!" said Brady, taken somewhat off his guard, "but you should see her when she is pleased! They light up just as if a torch had been kindled in them."
"Oh, they do, do they?" said Flint, with genial raillery; "well, you see I never saw her so pleased as that."
"Why, don't you remember on her birthday, when I gave her back the locket?"
"I remember the occasion; but I had precious little chance to see how her eyes looked, for you stood so close to her that nobody else could catch a glimpse. I did see something, though."
"What?"
[Pg 311]
"I sawyou, and any one more palpably sentimental I never did see."
"Well, what of it? It isn't a crime, I suppose—"
"That depends," Flint answered dryly.
Brady shook off his hand. "What do you mean by that?" he asked angrily.
"I mean," said Flint, folding his arms and looking at his friend steadily, "that you have come to the cross-roads. You cannot go on as you are. You must either give up hanging about Nora Costello, or you must make up your mind to marry her."
"And why not, pray, if I could induce her to accept me?"
"Great Heavens!" cried Flint; "has it gone so far as that?"
"Yes, it has," answered Brady, as defiantly as though Flint had represented his whole family circle; "and if she will marry me I shall be a proud and happy man."
"And your relatives,—the Bradfords and Standishes and all?"
"Plymouth Rock may fall on them for all I care," exclaimed Brady.
"And how about the tambourines and torches?"
Brady colored a little, but he stood his ground manfully.
[Pg 312]
"I shall never presume to dictate," he answered. "I will go my way and she shall go hers; and if I can lend a helping hand to any of the poor wretches she is trying to save, I shall do it, if I have to take off my kid gloves and get down into the gutter, as many a better man has done before me."
"Well," answered Flint, "if that is the way you take it I have nothing more to say. But if you don't object I would like to be present when you announce the engagement to Miss Standish."
"Miss Standish be hanged!" cried Brady. "It is a question of Miss Costello, I tell you. My only anxiety lies right there. If you had ever been in love you would know how it feels."
"I can imagine," Flint answered, taking up his pipe and looking scrutinizingly into the bowl; "I have read about it in books. But come! if we are going to the rally we must be about it. It is nearly eight by my watch. How long is the confounded thing—excuse me—I mean the gospel gathering?"
"If you are going to make fun of it, Flint, you would better stay at home," said Brady, stiffly.
"No, no, forgive me, Brady! I meant nothing of the kind; it is my accursed habit of joking[Pg 313]when I am in earnest, and being so solemn when I try to be funny that I am never in harmony with the occasion. Go on; I will close the door. I ought not to go, for I half expect Brooke of the Magazine. No matter; I will leave word for him."
As they passed the janitor, Flint said, "I shall be back by ten. If any one comes to see me you have the key of my rooms, and let any visitor come in and wait."
"All right, sir!"
"And see that the fire is kept up."
"Yes, sir."
Flint shivered as he passed out of the warm, heavily carpeted halls into the chilly night of late November.
"To-morrow will be Thanksgiving, won't it?" Brady observed.
"Yes, and judging by the number of turkeys on this avenue there will be no family without one. I heard last year of a poor widow who hadsixsent her by different charitable institutions. That is what I call a pressure of subsistence on population."
Something in Flint's manner jarred upon his companion. It seemed like a determined opposition to any undue influence of sentiment or emotion. Brady could not have defined the attitude of his friend's mind; but he felt it, and[Pg 314]resented it to the extent of keeping silence after they had taken their seats in the car of the elevated road.
There were few other passengers, and the car smelled of lamp-oil. All surrounding influences tended to depress Brady's ordinarily buoyant spirits, and he wished he had stayed at home, or at any rate had left Flint behind. Meanwhile his companion, apparently wholly oblivious of the frigidity of his companion's manner, sat with his hat pulled over his eyes, and his face as undecipherable as the riddle of the Sphinx.
As the cars stopped at a station half-way between the up-town residences and the downtown offices, in the slum belt of the city, Brady buttoned up his overcoat and rose, saying shortly, "We get out here."
"He has been here more than once," was Flint's inward comment; but he made no reply, only followed in Brady's footsteps down the iron stairs, and under the shadow of the elevated track for a block or two, when Brady made a sharp wheel to eastward.
"Is this our street?" asked Flint, speaking for the first time.
"Yes, this is our street. Turn to the right—there where you see the red lantern hanging out from the second story."
"Ah, you know the neighborhood well, I see.[Pg 315]Lead on, and I will follow. How dark it is down here!"
"Yes, electric lights are reserved for the quarters where you rich people live."
"Yourich people!" Flint smiled to himself. "Pretty soon," he thought, "Brady will be classing me among the greedy capitalists who are battening on the sorrows of the poor." He was almost conscious of a feeling of guilt as he recalled the fresh, pure air of the park and contrasted it with this atmosphere. The name of Berry Hill seemed curiously inappropriate for the level streets lined with tumble-down tenements; and its suggestion of the long-ago days when vine-clad uplands swelled between the narrowing rivers, and little children steeped their fingers in nothing more harmful than the blood of berries, lent an added pathos to the gloom of the contrasting present.
The slum post was a forlorn wooden building which had quite forgotten, if it had ever owned, a coat of paint. The windows of the lower story were guarded by a wire netting, behind which reposed the treasures of the poor under the temporary guardianship of the pawnbroker. On one side lay bits of finery, tawdry rings of plate and silver set with sham diamonds and pearls, which if the product of nature, would have bankrupted a Rothschild. In among them were[Pg 316]infants' rattles and spoons marked for life with the impress of baby teeth. Behind the smaller articles hung a row of musical instruments, fifes and fiddles sadly silent, and hinting of moody, mirth-robbed homes. Behind these again, by the dim light within, Flint caught a glimpse of miscellaneous piles of household articles wrung from the reluctant owners who had already parted with vanity and mirth, and now must banish comfort too.
The door on one side of the window stood open, and a rather dim light within showed a bare hall-way with a worn shabby staircase leading to the room above. Flint and Brady toiled up two flights. "The path to heaven is not to be made too easy, is it?" said Flint, pausing to take breath.
"No; did you expect elevators?" his friend asked with some asperity.
Flint's good humor was not to be shaken, however.
"To heaven? Why, yes. Angels' wings I've always understood were to be at our service. Here it seems not."
At the door Brady stopped to drop a quarter into the basket labelled "Silver contribution," held by a buxom and not unpleasing young woman in the Army uniform.
"They understand the first principles of the[Pg 317]church, I see," Flint whispered. "They have dropped the communion, but they keep the contribution-box."
Brady did not attend to him. As the two men entered, several turned to look at them. Clearly they were not of the class expected. Brady, however, nodded to one or two, and he and his friend sat down on a bench near the door, in the corner of the hall. Flint wished it were in order to keep his hat on to shield his eyes from the unshaded gas, which struck him full in the face. But he resigned himself to that, as well as to the heat and the odor, and charged it off to the account of a new experience.
The interior was bare and cheerless, colorless save for the torn red shades above the high dormer windows, and the crudely painted mottoes over the platform and around the wall. "Berry Hill for God!" sprawled along one side, flanked by "Remember Your Mother's Prayers!" and in front the sinner's trembling gaze was met by the depressing suggestion, "What if you Was to Die To-night?"
The ceiling was low, and the air already over-heated and over-breathed. Flint was an epicure in the matter of air. He looked longingly at the door, which offered the only method of escape. But he had come for the evening, and he made up his mind to endure to the end.
[Pg 318]
A Hindoo was speaking as they came in, shaking his white turban with much vehemence, and waving his small delicate hands in the air as he told of "The General's" work in India, and how he had been drawn by the gospel (which he pronounced go-spell) to give up his rank in the Brahmin caste, to wander over the world as an evangel.
"Queer," muttered Flint, "that every converted Hindoo was a Brahmin. Booth seems to have had great luck with the aristocracy."
For a few moments the strangeness of the Hindoo's speech amused Flint; then he grew bored, and finally irritated. He took out his watch, looked at it conspicuously, then closed it with an audible click. If there is a depressing sound on earth it is the click of a watch to the ear of an orator. The speaker felt it, and looked round deprecatingly, reflecting perhaps that however superior in morals, Occidentals have something to learn of the Orientals in manners.
When the high-caste Hindoo sat down, there was much clapping of hands and shaking of tambourines, and then to the tune of Daisy Bell rose a chorus of,—
"Sinner, Sinner, give me your answer, do!"
Flint felt a convulsive twitching at the corner of his mouth, but he had sworn to himself that he[Pg 319]would betray no levity. Brady looked so uncomfortable that his friend pitied him. There is much which disturbs us, chiefly through the sensibility of others. At the end of the singing, a man rose to tell of what the Army had done for him in rescuing him from the gutter; but his legs were so unsteady and his speech so frequently interrupted by hiccoughs that an audible titter ran around the room, and there was great propriety in the song following his remarks.