AN ACCIDENTAL ROMANCE.By Matthew White, Jr.
By Matthew White, Jr.
His friends called Radnor Hunt a cynic. He laughed lightly when accused of being cold and unresponsive, and declared that he must have imbibed the trait unconsciously from the nature of his work, for winter landscapes were his specialty. But now and then when he was alone, in the little studio over the stable in Fifty Fifth Street, where he worked by day and slept by night, he would look at himself in the mirror over his dressing case and—laugh again, such a hard, bitter laugh, that sometimes he shuddered on hearing it, and glanced fearfully around him as if dreading to see the author of the sound.
“I, a cynic, a woman hater!” he would mutter, putting his hand above his eyebrows and leaning forward to peer more closely at himself in the glass. “Bah! how blind the world is! Who would believe fromthiswhat rageshere?”
And with a quick motion he would sweep his hand across his face and place it for an instant over his heart. Then, as if in utter disgust with himself, he would hastily turn out the light, fling himself on his bed, just as he was, and sleep thus till morning.
And yet Radnor Hunt was reckoned a moderately fortunate young man. He had come to New York knowing no one, and now, after a two years’ residence, he had had a picture in the Water Color which brought him orders for three others, while half a dozen periodicals were always ready to pay well for his “pot boilers,” the pen and ink work which Radnor despised.
He was an only child. His father had been a country doctor in a Connecticut town, who, contrary to the usual rule, had been proud of his son’s artistic tastes and had encouraged him in them. This, instead of being grateful for it, Radnor frequently recalled with bitter regret.
“If he had only laughed at my first attempt, taken my paints away from me and put me to some business,” he would sigh. “Then perhaps——”
But here he usually broke off his reflections, while a strange light would come into his eyes. It was in this mood that he frequently sprang up from his work to jam his hat fiercely over his brows and go out to take a long walk that was utterly aimless.
Mr. and Mrs. Hunt had both died within a few months of one another the winter before Radnor left home. He was twenty three then, and that summer he had passed with his cousin, Mrs. Stilton Barnes, in the Adirondacks. Mrs. Stilton Barnes was a Philadelphian who lived south of Market Street and who had at once conceived a great fondness for the handsome young relative whom she met for the first time in thirteen years at his mother’s funeral.
Radnor well remembered having worshiped her at a respectful distance when he was a small boy. She was then a happy hearted girl just leaving her teens behind her, and with her head too full of lovers, one of whom might turn out to be a husband, to pay much attention to the little fellow in knickerbockers whom she often caught looking at her with unveiled admiration in his great blue eyes.
Now positions were reversed. Camilla Hunt had become Mrs. Stilton Barnes, the wife of the well to do jeweler. The plumpness that had been the beauty of her youth had transformed itself into a buxomness that positively shocked Radnorwhen he first beheld it. He wondered how he could ever have found this woman charming and—here she was becoming really enthusiastic over him.
“My dear cousin,” she exclaimed, “why did you not let me know what I was missing? Why, you would have been a treasure indeed at my Friday evenings last winter,” and she would put up her lorgnettes for another survey which sent the blood surging to poor Radnor’s cheeks and made him look handsomer than ever.
Camilla Barnes was thoroughly candid and outspoken. Before she left Cheltenham she told Radnor that if she had had the slightest idea that he had developed into such a presentable specimen of humanity she would have had him out of that sleepy old town long before.
“It’s too late in the season to do anything now,” she added, “but I must insist on your spending the month of August with us at Lorimac. We shall then have plenty of opportunity to talk over the future.”
Nor would she go away until Radnor had given his consent. After all, she was his cousin, and if she chose to extend to him the hospitality of a hotel, why should he not accept it, as he would have done at her own home?
Radnor’s pride was the most notable element in his make up. It was indomitable, unyielding. Even as a boy it permeated his life, and made him miserable whenever in his studies he fell short of the high standard he had set for himself.
But for the reasons given he finally decided to accept his cousin Camilla’s invitation. If he could have read the future and foreseen the consequences of that Adirondack visit, he would have shunned the place as a plague spot.
At least this was what he told himself almost always when he recalled it. At other times he felt that he would not have had the experience left out of his life for all the joys that the entire span of three score and ten might have in store for him.
Even before this period he had gained some fame and a little money as an illustrator of children’s books, and now that the last tie that bound him to Cheltenham was severed by his mother’s death, he decided that he would take the step which the nature of his work rendered almost a necessity—settlement in some city close to his markets.
However, this could now easily be deferred till fall, and meantime he had the estate to close up, and then the month with Mrs. Barnes would doubtless do much toward the shaping of his plans.
Radnor had traveled but little, still he possessed that quality of adaptiveness that made him seem easy and at home wherever he was. His mother had been a Bournie, of Huguenot descent, and of the most delicate refinement. Radnor inherited this quality from her in very large degree, tempered with the rugged persistency and vigor of his father.
Her cousin’s arrival at the Lorimac House created all the sensation Mrs. Stilton Barnes could have wished. With the tact of a true diplomatist she had said but little about him beforehand. Expectations too fully roused, she well knew, were almost invariably doomed to disappointment. So she had merely told a few of her most particular friends that she expected a cousin of hers from New England.
“A young artist,” she added, “who has recently lost his mother, so I shall not be expected to give him a gay time.”
Men, of course, were scarce at this distance from the cities. There were any number of boys in their teens, and several dudes, who spent almost as much time as the ladies in devising new combinations of sash and hat bands, outing jackets and shirts. This fact had been uppermost in Camilla Barnes’s mind when she asked Radnor to come to Lorimac. She felt that he would tower head and shoulders above all the other males at the hotel.
“And who knows but he may makea rich catch?” she even whispered to herself.
It was a reversal of things, she knew, this exploiting of a man, but then the very uniqueness of the process added zest to it for this woman whose nature craved excitement of this sort above all other things.
When Radnor’s train came in she walked across the road to the station to meet him. She had seen to it that he took the express, which would bring him to Lorimac just before the supper hour, when everybody was on the piazzas, looking out for the new arrivals.
“You are very welcome, Radnor,” she said, when he came up to her amid the crowd.
She gave him both her hands, forcing him to drop his valise while he took them for a moment. Then they walked across to the hotel together, and while he registered, Mrs. Barnes tapped her jeweled fingers together and glanced half carelessly around the great office, with its big fire place in one corner and the many groups scattered about. And she saw in that apparently casual glance all she wanted, and knew that the first impression Radnor had made was an extremely favorable one.
That evening, however, she introduced him to no one. They sat together in a remote corner of the piazza, talking over old times, the future, the walks and drives around Lorimac.
Radnor said but very little. It was not necessary. His cousin was fond of talking, and she certainly found Radnor a most attentive listener. The only fault she had to find with him was that he did not ask questions enough. There were dozens of pretty girls in the dining room at supper time, in a few of whom it might be supposed he would have some little interest. But he always allowed Camilla to speak of them first, except in one instance, and then he asked about a young lady whom she did not know and had not observed.
“She came up on the train with me,” Radnor explained then, and Mrs. Barnes made a resolve to find out the entire facts about the new comer before she went to sleep that night.
This was not difficult to do. Pleading fatigue from his journey, Radnor went to his room before ten, leaving his cousin to join a group of ladies who each evening occupied the same corner of the drawing room, and gossiped—gossiped of all that went on before their eyes, and of much else that never went on at all, with indefatigable zeal.
“Oh, didn’t you see her?” exclaimed Mrs. General Barentham when Mrs. Barnes mentioned the matter. “Ah, of course, you were absorbed in that charming cousin of yours. I trust you are not going to make a practice of keeping him entirely to yourself. But about Miss Bellman; you must have heard of her coming. She is that New York girl who is so immensely wealthy in her own right, and with it all is so sublimely beautiful. Did you ever, Mrs. Penford, see more exquisite coloring?”
“Never,” was Mrs. Penford’s emphatic acquiescence.
“And such repose of manner,” went on Mrs. Barentham.
“Are you sure about that heiress part of it?” inquired Mrs. Barnes earnestly. “You know how often these rumors get out without one particle of foundation.”
“Oh, that is perfectly trustworthy, my dear,” rejoined the general’s wife. “The Bellman estate in New York is one of the best known of the vested interests in the metropolis.”
“With whom is she here?” Mrs. Barnes now wanted to know.
“With her uncle’s family, the Grants; very distinguished people, too. The McBrintons know them, so I suppose we shall all be presented tomorrow.”
It was very seldom that Camilla Barnes’s conscience troubled her, and on this particular night it was not that which kept her awake long after she had sought rest. The single instance of Radnor’s manifestation of interest in the girls of the Lorimac, the exalted positionfinancially occupied by Olive Bellman, the coincidence of their having come up on the same train—these three facts combined kept Camilla’s brain in busy ferment for many hours.
“But I must be cautious,” she kept reminding herself. “I must make haste very slowly. I wonder how long they are going to stay—how much time they will give me?”
She was introduced to the Grants the next morning by Miss McBrinton, while the ladies were all gathered with their fancy work in a shady corner of the piazza. Olive was included in the presentation, but she seemed scarcely to heed the ceremony.
She had no work in her lap, but sat there with one hand on the railing of the piazza, while her eyes were fixed most of the time on the hills across the lake.
Radnor had gone by himself for a row. Mrs. Barnes never ventured on the water except for a few minutes in the evening. She had told him where to look for her when he came back. Everything had turned out so far exactly as she had planned. She hoped he would not stay out too long. With this one thought she returned to active participation in the discussion of Mrs. Dorrington’s nursemaid, who insisted on calling herself a governess, and hence declared that she had a perfect right to sit at the first table with the others.
Olive rose presently and walked towards the front door, where she remained standing for a while, evidently drinking in to the full the exquisite view of the lake from this point.
“My dear,” called her aunt, “you are in the sun. Let me send for your hat.”
“Don’t bother, Aunt Elizabeth. I was just going up stairs, and I’ll get it myself.”
The girl disappeared, and at that moment Mrs. Barnes caught sight of Radnor returning in his boat.
And the same thing happened during the next two days. It seemed as if fate had decreed that the two were not to meet.
But Camilla had ascertained that the Grants were to remain through the month, and she endeavored to possess her soul in patience, feeling that after all this was the very best of beginnings.
“How like him she is,” she said to herself more than once, when noticing traits in Olive that made her seem different from the other girls. “They say that men always find their ideal in their opposites, but then it is the exceptions that prove the rule.”
Of Olive herself she never once spoke to Radnor, but then so far as the girl’s position and prospects went there was no need for her to say a word. By nightfall of the day succeeding her arrival the facts were known throughout the hotel. Radnor had played two or three games of billiards with General Barentham, and the general was almost as great a gossip as his wife.
It was not until the third evening that the meeting took place, and then, oddly enough, it came about without the agency of Camilla at all, and while she was working hard to compass it in an entirely different way—seated in the writing room with Mr. McBrinton trying to persuade him to join her in getting up a launch party.
Radnor meanwhile was in the parlor, entertaining a large company of boys with stories of his bicycling experiences. It was while thus engaged that Mrs. McBrinton touched him on the shoulder and asked him if he would not make up a hand at whist.
When Mrs. Barnes came in a few moments later she caught her breath quickly on beholding her cousin seatedvis-a-visto Olive Bellman at the card table.
After that the acquaintance progressed as rapidly as she could have desired. Nearly every morning found the two on the tennis courts, where they were the most evenly matched pair of players that the Lorimac had seen that season. Then in Olive Radnor found as enthusiastic a loverof the water as himself, and the afternoons were devoted to exploring tours around the shores of the lake.
Mrs. Grant or Mrs. McBrinton generally accompanied them on these expeditions, and it was odd to hear them sing Radnor’s praises among themselves.
He was naturally chivalric towards all, and the little attentions he bestowed on the chaperones were so self evidently spontaneous and disinterested that the hearts of the old ladies were completely won.
Mrs. Barnes felt as though she were on wings. It was a real effort for her to keep her exultation under. Indeed, even now she never trusted herself to mention Olive’s name to her cousin.
Thus affairs went on till the last week in August, when the grand Venetian Carnival was held on the lake. General Barentham took the greatest possible interest in the celebration and was determined that the Lorimac House should outdo all competitors in the grand procession. He constructed a Lohengrin swan boat out of his naphtha launch, and after begging and entreating for three days, almost on his knees, succeeded in obtaining Olive Bellman’s consent to be the Venus who should sail in it.
“But you don’t want a Venus, General Barentham,” she protested. “Venus belongs to Tannhaeuser. You want a Lohengrin if you are going to have a swan boat.”
“I want nothing of the kind,” the general responded. “I want you, and I am going to have you,” and in the end he triumphed.
Radnor was selected to be Olive’s companion in the launch and do the steering in the dress of the Swan Knight, while the engineer, concealed as deftly as possible by the counterfeited wings, was tucked away in the stern. General Barentham was here, there and everywhere, managing the rest of his flotilla, and the guests of the Lorimac not in the “show,” as Radnor insisted on terming it, were accommodated on the steam launch Meteor.
The procession started at four o’clock to make the tour of the lake, and the plaudits that greeted the swan barge everywhere were loud and prolonged. But the engine of the launch worked badly, and once the engineer was forced to run ashore to see what he could do at easing matters.
This put them behind, and when they started on again it was already beginning to grow dark.
The wind was rising too, and presently the boat was tossing in quite a sea. Radnor took off his coat and insisted on wrapping it around the “Venus,” and they both cowered behind the windward wing of the Swan to escape as much as possible the pelting rain that now began to descend.
Not a very romantic situation truly, but nevertheless Radnor found in it his perilous turning point. Olive was so brave, so patient, so confident in his ability to bring them safely into port, showed to him, in short, a side of her character that had not yet been presented to him, that—well, he went down before it as so many men before him have done before their fates, and when he helped a wet, bedraggled Venus out of the boat at the Lorimac pier he realized that the sooner he got out of the Adirondack woods the better for his peace of mind.
It had all come on him like a lightning stroke, or, as he preferred to compare it himself, with the swiftness of the flash in night time photography. He had gone on so joyously, so confidently, with no thought beyond the contentment of the present.
“But why should I not go on and be happy?” he asked himself that night as he tried calmly to review the situation.
To be sure there were Miss Bellman’s millions, contrasted with his own poverty. The world would be sure to talk, but then he would wait and work, and perhaps some day he would feel that the gulf between them was not too wide to be spanned by their clasped hands. And withthis ravishing possibility for his last waking thought he fell asleep.
He woke early, and with the new hope strong within him, he felt he could not endure the confinement of four walls until his customary rising time. He dressed and went out to walk beside the lake, which now reflected back the overshadowing hills from a mirror-like surface that it seemed could not be the same on which the swan boat had been so rudely tossed but yesterday. He had never seen the Lorimac so peaceful; all was quiet in the early morning; even the birds seemed to have hushed their music for the moment. There was not a sound but the tiniest lap of the ripples against the stony shore at his feet and—yes, here was a jarring discord overhead as his walk brought him just beneath the summer house.
Two French nursemaids were sitting there, talking in their own language, in which Radnor was well versed.
“See there!” one of them exclaimed. “Here he comes now. Madame Barnes arranged it well, did she not, that they go off in the swan boat? Such a fortune is not to be trapped every day, and as she couldn’t marry it herself, she wanted to have it in the family somewhere. It’s the talk of the house how she’s been playing off the handsome cousin for the——”
But by this time Radnor was out of hearing, his cheeks flaming with indignation, his teeth set fiercely together, his fingers tightly pressed against his palms.
So he had been a puppet in the hands of the scheming Camilla. “A very docile and obedient little puppet,” as he told himself, for he had gone and done the very thing expected of him.
As he would have scorned and loathed another man who would have deliberately lent himself to such a scheme, he now scorned and loathed himself, all innocent as he was. And his cousin Camilla? He felt that he could not bring himself even to see her again.
The common talk of the house, forsooth! Aye, this was easily believable, for had he not heard it with his own ears from the very nursemaids? The Bournie pride rose tumultuously in Radnor’s breast. He wanted to get away from Lorimac, from men and women, from himself, from everything that could remind him of his humiliation.
His walk had now brought him to the fence which separated the hotel grounds from the forest adjoining. Placing his hands on the topmost rail Radnor vaulted lightly over and plunged into the underbrush, taking a certain sort of satisfaction in trampling down the low bushes that lay in his path.
For an hour he roamed on, by some instinct always holding the lake in view. It seemed that he must keep in motion or be overwhelmed by the wild, maddening thoughts that were surging through his brain.
He could liken himself only to Tantalus, about to drink of the life giving draught, to have it dashed from his very lips. But in his own case another cup had been substituted—a cup so bitter and revolting that, strong man as he was, he shuddered at the realization of its existence.
When or why he turned around he knew not, but presently he found himself approaching the hotel again. As soon as he caught sight of its outlines he paused, half determined to strike off into the deeper woods. And at that instant he heard his name called.
It was his cousin Camilla. She had been out looking for him, and now came forward, keen anxiety on her face and in her voice, as she exclaimed: “My dear Radnor, what has come over you? I have been really concerned about you. Here it is almost ten and you have not been to breakfast yet. A maid said you had come into the woods, and you can imagine how eager I was to find you when I ventured here myself.”
She held up her gown, to the trimming of which a many forked twig had fastened itself, shaking it at himsuggestively. But he neither answered her smile with another, nor made any motion to disengage the dress. His face took on a hard, stern look Camilla had never seen on it before, and if Radnor had not been too fully preoccupied to notice it he would have been interested in observing the fading out of the smile on hers and the creeping into its place of a strange expression of commingled fear and defiance.
There was a moment’s pause, the silence broken only by the stirring of the leaves overhead in the gentle breeze that had just sprung up, and by the shrill voice of one of the Carew boys calling out—“Love, fifteen,” on the tennis grounds. Then Radnor spoke.
“Why did you do this, Camilla?” he said. “No,” he went on hurriedly, as she opened her eyes in real or assumed mystification. “You need not waste time in asking what. I shall tell you all. You wanted me to marry rich, deliberately planned to have me do it, as any silly match making mother with a daughter to get off her hands would have done, and now the whole scheme is the talk of the servants’ hall and the sculleries. I am sorry to have to disoblige a lady, but under the circumstances I must make my adieux to you at once.”
He lifted his hat and struck off towards the hotel.
“Radnor, you are mad,” Camilla called after him, but he never turned his head; and it was the talk of the house for the rest of the day that Radnor Hunt and his cousin had breakfasted separately.
But the gossips had a yet richer feast in store. Radnor left on the noon train, and—how it got out no one exactly knew—but it was rumored for a fact that he had insisted on paying his own bill. Mrs. Stilton Barnes took her departure almost immediately afterwards, and the following week the Grants left for Au Sable Chasm, Miss Bellman of course accompanying them.
All this, as has been explained, happened two years previous to the opening of the present account of Radnor Hunt. He had gone straight from Lorimac to New York, and plunged into work with desperate earnestness. And so well had he succeeded that, starting in the metropolis without a friend, he had now not only a comfortable income, but would have been warmly welcomed at a dozen homes had he chosen to accept the invitations he received.
He was even chary of companionship with his own sex. It seemed as if his faith in the entire human species had been shaken, and while his fellow artists and the literary men with whom he came in contact, all liked him, none ever succeeded in becoming more than an acquaintance.
And thus, lonesome as a hermit, Radnor lived on, taking his successes without enthusiasm, for there was no one else to reap the benefit of them. He suffered as one without hope, for no matter now what fame or riches he might attain, he felt that after what had happened he could never make any attempt to secure the only thing in the world that was precious to him.
Sometimes during his long solitary vigils in the studio he would try and plan how things might have gone if he had not chanced to understand French. Already before the Carnival he had received an invitation to call if he made up his mind to settle in New York. He might have been very intimate at the great house on Madison Avenue by this time. He passed it now and then in his walks, and once he met Olive just as she was crossing the sidewalk to step into the carriage.
She smiled as she bowed, and turned partially as if she expected he was going to stop, but he walked on rapidly, and always after that avoided the avenue whenever possible.
The first summer after his settlement in New York he spent in Europe, traveling and sketching; the second he went to Labrador with a scientific expedition. From this he had now returned, as the earlyOctober frosts were sending the reddened leaves skurrying to earth, and the out of town sojourners were hurrying back to their city homes.
Radnor experienced a strange feeling of gladness when he caught sight of the uneven roof lines of the Knickerbocker town as he steamed up the bay. And yet he expected no one to meet him, and anticipated taking up the old life just where he had left off.
Nevertheless this sense of odd contentment abided with him all through the turmoil and confusion of arriving, and sent him for the night to one of the new palace hotels instead of to his lonely quarters in the studio.
Had time cured the old wound, he asked himself? But no; he knew that could not be, and he expected to wake up the next morning his old self again.
But the morrow found him still with the same inexplicable buoyancy of spirit, and the business friends whom he called on during the forenoon congratulated him on the great good his trip had done him. Among the orders he received was one for a sketch in Central Park, and early in the afternoon he went up to the city’s great pleasure ground to refreshen his memory of it.
It was Saturday, and children were everywhere. A crowd of them of all sizes were eagerly gathering around the Lohengrin boats as Radnor strolled along the path that skirts the pond.
The swan-like craft sent the young man’s mind backward with a rush; and yet in his present mood he did not try to stem the current of thought. On the other hand, he astonished himself by stepping aboard one of the boats for a sail. A nurse with three young charges occupied the seat with him, and had her hands and eyes fully occupied in keeping them all out of the water. Radnor took pity on her at length, and offered to take one of them, a little girl, on his knee.
This arrangement delighted the child, to say nothing of relieving the nurse, and presently the little thing began to prattle away to Radnor as though he were an old acquaintance.
“I’ve seen you before,” she presently announced, turning her gaze from the water in front of them to look up earnestly into his face.
“Oh, I guess not,” he answered, smiling down into the deep blue eyes, the brows of which now began to knit in perplexed thought. “I never saw you in my life before today, so how could you see me?”
“Yes, I did!” she persisted, “and it was in a boat with a swan to it just like this.”
Radnor started. What could the child mean? She was certainly not over six. It was not possible she could remember that Lake Lorimac incident of two years before.
“Where was it?” he asked. “Here in Central Park?”
“Oh no, it was in a picture, and Cousin Olive wouldn’t tell me where the boat was, but she was in it too, all dressed in white and—why, then you must know Cousin Olive. I wonder if you like her as well as I do. Only she was cross—almost, when Flo and I found that picture. It was all wrapped up and—oh dear, she told me never to tell anybody and it would be all right, and now I’ve told you. But you won’t tell, will you?”
Radnor, however, was not compelled to make a promise. The boat at this point reached the landing stage again, and the nurse carried all her charges ashore with small ceremony, the “polite gentleman” seeming scarcely to notice that they were gone.
He sat there perfectly still while the boat made another tour of the lake. He was recalling incidents which he had thought never to recollect again. One of them, that of the photograph Miss Carew took of the swan boat just before they started. So Olive Bellman had kept this secretly as a treasure, not as a forbidden object. Radnor had met Mr. Grant more than once and had been asked why he did not call. What if—well, what if there were two sides to the picture, and money were to standin the way of the happiness of the one who possessed it because of pride in the other?
How should he, Radnor Hunt, deal with the problem?
This was the question that kept the young artist’s thoughts active as he strode homewards that afternoon. The air was coming on chill as the sun dipped towards the west, and the dead leaves blew up about him spitefully as he walked rapidly along, but somehow it seemed to Radnor, as one struck him in the face now and then, as if they were not the withered remnants of a dead summer, but the hopeful blossoms of a dawning spring.