One afternoon in March, Patience, glancing out of the library window, saw Hal coming up the lawn from the path that led down the slope to the station. She suppressed a war-whoop with which she and Rosita had been used to awake the echoes of the Californian hills, opened the window, and vaulted out.
“Well,” cried Miss Peele, as Patience ran toward her, “you do look glad to see me, sure enough. Bev can’t be very exciting, for you don’t look as if it were me particularly—just somebody. Oh, matrimony! matrimony! I envy the women that have solved the problem in some other way—the journalists and artists, and authors and actresses, and even the suffragists, God rest them. Hello, there’s Bev. He looks as if he were about to cry. What have you been doing to him?”
“I left him writing an order for some new kind of horse-feed,” said Patience, indifferently. Her husband stood at the window, staring gloomily at the beaming faces. When the girls entered the room he had gone.
“He looks as if he had just been let out of the dark room. Do you beat him? What do you suppose my mother will say?”
“Oh, I suppose he’s bored too. You see it’s nearly three months now. I tried to make him read, but after the third day he went to sleep.”
Hal drew a low chair to the fire, close to the one Patience occupied. She laughed merrily.
“Fancy your trying to make Bev intellectual! That would be a good subject for a one-act farce. Well, I’ve come up here to tell you something, and to talk it over. I, too, am contemplating matrimony.”
“Oh, don’t!” cried Patience.
“I believe that is usually the advice of married people, but the world goes on marrying itself just the same. But my problem is much more complicated than the average, for there are two men in the question.”
“Two? You don’t mean to say you don’t know your own mind?”
“That is exactly the fact in the case. You remember Reginald Wynne? Well, Patience, I do like that man. I never liked any man one tenth as much. I might say he’s the only serious man I’ve ever met, the only one, to put it in another way, that I ever could take seriously as a man. He has brains—he’s a lawyer, you know, and they say very fine things of him—and he is so kind, andstrong. When I am with him I don’t feel frivolous and worldly and one of a dozen. If I have any better nature and any apology for a brain, they are on top then. He is the last sort of man I ever thought I’d fall in love with, but it takes us some years to become acquainted with ourselves, doesn’t it? I do respect him so, and it is such a novel sensation. He even makes me read. Fancy! And I’ve even promised him that I won’t read any more French novels, excepting those he selects, nor smoke cigarettes. So, you see, I am in love.
“But, Patience,” she continued with tragic emphasis, “he hasn’t a red—and I know I’d be miserable, poor. When papa saw which way the wind was blowing, he took me into the library and told me that although he made fifty thousand dollars a year, we spent nearly all of it, and that he should not have much to leave besides his life insurance—one hundred thousand—which of course would go to mamma. It is a matter of honour never to sell this place, and the revenue from the farm—which is to go to Beverly—would keep it up in a small way. The town house is to be May’s and mine; but what will that amount to? May and I have always pretty well understood that if we want to keep on having the things that habit has made a necessity to us, we must marry rich men! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”
“Well, the other man?”
“He has appeared on the scene lately. He is not the usual alternative by any means, for he is very attractive in his way. He has the manners of the man of the world, afin de sièclebrain, and the devil in his eye. He is rather good-looking and tremendously good form. And, my dear, he has three cold millions. Think what I should be with three millions! Fancy me in Boston on three or four hundred dollars a month. Oh, Patience, what shall I do?” And Hal, the most undemonstrative of women, laid her head on Patience’s knee and sobbed bitterly.
“I had to come to see you, Patience,” she continued after a moment. “I have no one else; I could never have said a word of this to mamma or May. And I like you better than any one in the world except Reginald Wynne. And you seem to understand things. Do tell me what to do.”
“Do this: Be true to your ideals. If love means, and has always meant more to you than anything else in the world, marry Reginald Wynne. If money and power and luxury are the very essentials of happiness to you, marry the other man. No temporary aberration can permanently divert one’s paramount want from its natural course. As soon as the novelty has gone, the ego swings back to its old point of view as surely as water does that has been temporarily dammed. There is only one thing that persists, and that is the ideal,—that habit of mind which is bred of heredity and environment, even where care or consciousness is lacking. It is as relentless and pitiless as the law of cause and effect. I believe it would outlive a very leprosy of the soul. And it makes no difference whether that ideal be great or small, high or low, its hold is precisely the same, for it is individuality itself. Rosita is happy because she has realised her ideal. Miss Tremont was happy because she lived up to hers. Miss Beale was supremely satisfied with herself when she let a man die whom she might have saved by smirching her ideals. The religionists are happy generally, not through communion with the presiding deity, as they imagine, but because they have arbitrarily created a sort of spiritual Blackstone whom they delight to obey. The author is happy when he toils, even without hope of reward. Martyrs have known ecstasy—But one could go on for a week. Don’t marry Wynne if you feel that you would be unhappy in poverty after the first few months; and if you feel that great wealth without love would be misery, don’t marry the other.”
“Oh, I could like Latimer Burr well enough,” said Hal, staring gloomily at the fire; “and after a time I suppose I’d forget. You see, I have been in love so short a time that the wrench would be a good deal less violent than the wrench from luxury—I’d soon get over it, I expect. But I do like him—I never thought I could feel like this.”
Patience fondled the sleek head, but she was not in a mood to feel in sympathy with love. The only thing that to her seemed of paramount importance was to fix a clear eye on the future.
“You see,” she said, “the present is ever with us, and the past recedes farther and farther. If the rich man can give you what you most want, time will make you forget the very sensation of love. If you marry Wynne and the love goes, you will have equal difficulty to recall it, and nothing to compensate in the present.”
“I’m not afraid that it would go; but I know that I should be thoroughly miserable poor, and make him miserable too. I do love it all so—all that money means—why, one can’t even be well groomed without money. It has gone to make up nine-tenths of my composition; the other tenth is only a bit of miserable wax. But I love this new feeling, and I never believed that anything could be so sweet. Oh, dear; I’ll have to dry up. Here comes Bev.”
“Remember this,” said Patience, “and let it console you: however you feel or are torn, you’ll do one thing only,—follow along the line of least resistance.”
Beverly entered and kissed his sister affectionately. Her back was to the light, and he did not notice her swollen eyes.
“Well, you are looking hilarious,” she remarked in her usual flippant tones. “Has Tammany gone lame, or Mrs. Langtry refused to take her five bars?”
“My wife doesn’t love me!” Beverly had brooded upon his wrongs for two months. Hal’s words were as a match to a mine.
“Oh!” exclaimed Patience, springing to her feet, “don’t let us have a scene for Hal’s benefit. Do cultivate a little good taste, if good sense is too far beyond you.”
Her words were not soothing, and Beverly exploded in one of his most violent passions. He tore up and down the room, banging his fist alternately on the table, the mantel, and the books, and once he hit the panel of a door so heavy a blow that it sprang. Patience sat down and turned her back. Hal endeavoured to stop him; but he had found a listener, and would discharge his mind of its accumulated virus. He told the tale of the winter in spasmodic gusts, hung and fringed with oaths. Finally he flung himself out of the room, shouting all the way across the hall.
For a moment there was an intense and meaning silence between the two women; then Hal stood up and laid her palms to her head.
“Patience!” she said, “Patience! this is awful. What have I done? Oh, does it really mean anything? I have seen Bev go into tempers all my life—but—Tell me, please—does this really mean anything—”
“Whether it does or does not it need not worry you beyond warning you against mistakes on your own account. I married with my eyes open, and I can take care of myself. Don’t marry your rich man unless you like him well enough to pretend to like him a good deal more. If you do, you’ll end by loathing him and yourself—and what is more, he’ll know it.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think I am as intense as you are—but what do you suppose makes Beverly such a wild animal? We are none of us like that, and never have been, as far as I know, although some of the old boys were pretty gay, not to say lawless. But for two or three generations we seem to have been a fairly well-conducted lot. Beverly is almost a freak.”
Patience crossed the room, and lifting down a volume of Darwin’s “Descent of Man” read from the chapter on Civilised Nations:—
“‘With mankind some of the worst dispositions which occasionally, without any assignable cause, make their appearance in families, may perhaps be reversions to a savage state from which we are not removed by very many generations.’”
“‘With mankind some of the worst dispositions which occasionally, without any assignable cause, make their appearance in families, may perhaps be reversions to a savage state from which we are not removed by very many generations.’”
Two weeks later Patience received a letter from Hal which induced no surprise.
The die is cast [it read]. Reginald Wynne has gone back to Boston, and I am going to marry Latimer Burr. On the first of April we sail for Europe—mamma and May and I—to get our things.Don’t imagine that I am doing the novel-heroine act, and sprinkling my pillow o’ nights. I did feel terribly, and I’ll never love any other man; but the thing is done, and done for the best, and that is the end of it. What you said about following along the line of least resistance is as sure as love and fate and a good many other things; for what Latimer Burr can give me I want more than what Reginald Wynne can give me, and it drew me like a magnet. And the other thing you said is equally true,—that the only joy in life is to pursue your ideals to the bitter end. Mine are not lofty, but they areme, and that is all there is to it. I shall not weep it out, because I’ve no beauty to lose, and weeping does no earthly good, anyway. If it would give Wynne Burr’s fortune I’d drown New York.We’ll be back on the first of June. We’re only going over to order things. I wish you joy of Honora. It’s too bad Bev is so much in love with you, or you might switch him off on to her. Oh, Patience, dear, you don’t know how much I’ve thought about you. It hurts mehardto think that you are unhappy. I feel as guilty as a murderer, but really I thought you’d get along. So many women had been in love with Bev, I thought you would be, too. I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that women sometimes had a soul. If I had known as much then as I do now I’d have done all I could to keep you apart, for Beverly Peele certainly has not the attenuated ghost of a soul.But Patience, dear, do stand it out. Don’t,don’tget a divorce. Remember that all over the world women are as miserable as you are, and as I might be if I would let myself go. Now, at least, you have compensations; and when I am married I’ll do everything I can to make life gay and pleasant for you; but don’t make a horrid vulgar newspaper scandal and leave yourself without resources. This world is a pretty good place after all when you are on top, but it must be hell underneath.LovinglyHal.
The die is cast [it read]. Reginald Wynne has gone back to Boston, and I am going to marry Latimer Burr. On the first of April we sail for Europe—mamma and May and I—to get our things.
Don’t imagine that I am doing the novel-heroine act, and sprinkling my pillow o’ nights. I did feel terribly, and I’ll never love any other man; but the thing is done, and done for the best, and that is the end of it. What you said about following along the line of least resistance is as sure as love and fate and a good many other things; for what Latimer Burr can give me I want more than what Reginald Wynne can give me, and it drew me like a magnet. And the other thing you said is equally true,—that the only joy in life is to pursue your ideals to the bitter end. Mine are not lofty, but they areme, and that is all there is to it. I shall not weep it out, because I’ve no beauty to lose, and weeping does no earthly good, anyway. If it would give Wynne Burr’s fortune I’d drown New York.
We’ll be back on the first of June. We’re only going over to order things. I wish you joy of Honora. It’s too bad Bev is so much in love with you, or you might switch him off on to her. Oh, Patience, dear, you don’t know how much I’ve thought about you. It hurts mehardto think that you are unhappy. I feel as guilty as a murderer, but really I thought you’d get along. So many women had been in love with Bev, I thought you would be, too. I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that women sometimes had a soul. If I had known as much then as I do now I’d have done all I could to keep you apart, for Beverly Peele certainly has not the attenuated ghost of a soul.
But Patience, dear, do stand it out. Don’t,don’tget a divorce. Remember that all over the world women are as miserable as you are, and as I might be if I would let myself go. Now, at least, you have compensations; and when I am married I’ll do everything I can to make life gay and pleasant for you; but don’t make a horrid vulgar newspaper scandal and leave yourself without resources. This world is a pretty good place after all when you are on top, but it must be hell underneath.
LovinglyHal.
The day Mrs. Peele and her daughters sailed for France Mr. Peele and his niece returned to the Manor. Honora kissed Patience on either cheek.
“Oh, I am so glad to come back to my lovely room, and to see you, Patience dear,” she said wearily. “We have had such a gay winter, and I am so tired. Dear me, how fresh and sweet you look in that white frock. I just long to get into thin things.”
When Mr. Peele came up in the evening he narrowed his lids as he kissed Patience, and regarded her critically. “Well, how does Beverly wear in a three months’tête-à-tête?” he asked. “Gad! I shouldn’t care to try it.”
“Oh,” she said flushing, “we didn’t talk much. He had the farm and the horses to attend to, you know, and I had the library. Oh, I am so glad you have that library.”
He laughed aloud, with the harsh notes of a voice unused to such music.
“I see you have had a Paul and Virginia time, as Hal would say. I’m sorry you’ve put your foot in it, for even you can’t make anything of him; but make the best of it. Don’t leave him—Hal has told me something, you see. It was best that she should. There must be no scandal. If he makes too great a nuisance of himself come to me; and if he cuts off your allowance at any time just let me know, and I’ll see that you have all the money you want. He doesn’t own the farm. I like you. You’re a clever woman. If you’d been my daughter I’d have been proud of you.”
And whether he really found pleasure in his daughter-in-law’s society, or whether he merely thought it politic to lighten her burden, from that time until the return of the family he devoted his evenings to her. He was deeply read, and Patience, after years of mental loneliness, was grateful for his companionship, although personally he antagonised her. He was a mentality without heart or soul, and she knew that he would sacrifice her as readily as he accepted her if it better suited his purpose.
She clung to Honora during the day and read aloud to her in the Tea House, while that devoted young Catholic embroidered for the village church or sewed for the poor of her beloved priest. Father O’Donovan, a young man with a healthy serious face and a clear eye, frequently joined them. Every morning the girls rode or sailed. Beverly frequently made one of the party, and Patience and Honora exercised all their tact to keep him in good humour. In the evening he played duets with his cousin. Her touch was as light and hollow as an avalanche of icicles from the roof, he pounded the piano as if it were a prize fighter’s chest.
One evening Patience did not go downstairs until a few moments before dinner was announced. As she entered the library she saw that a stranger stood at the window with Mr. Peele. The priest was present, and she shook hands with him before going over to greet the stranger and her father-in-law. While she was agreeing with him that Honora in her white robe and blue sash looked exactly like an angel, the man at the window turned, and she recognised Mr. Field. She ran forward and held out her hand.
“Oh! Oh!” she cried. “I’m so glad to see you again. I’ve wanted and wanted to.”
He took her hand, smiling, but regarded her with the keen gaze she so well remembered.
“Bless my soul,” he said, “but you have changed. It is not too much to say that you have improved. Even the freckles have gone, I see. I thought I was to make a newspaper woman of you. I felt rather cross when you married. But this life certainly agrees with you. You look quite thegrande dame—quite—ah! Good evening, sir,” as Beverly entered and was presented. Mr. Field darted a glance from one to the other, his mouth twitching sardonically.
He sat at Patience’s right during dinner, and they talked constantly. Beverly was sulky, and said nothing. Mr. Peele rarely talked at table, even to Patience. Honora and the priest conversed in a solemn undertone. It is doubtful if two courses had been served before the terrible old man understood the situation.
“There’s tragedy brewing here,” he thought, grimly. “That fellow has the temper of a fiend in the skull of a fool, and this girl is not the compound I take her to be if she lives a lie very long for the sake of champagne and truffles. I’d give a good deal to foresee the outcome. Unless I’m all wrong there’ll be a two column story on the first page of the ‘Day’ some fine morning. Well, she’ll have its support, right or wrong. She’s a brick, and he’s the sort of fellow a man always wants to kick.—What is that?” he asked of the priest, who had begun a story that suddenly appealed to Mr. Field’s editorial instinct.
“A physician over at Mount Vernon, who stands very high in his profession, has been accused of poisoning his wife. She died in great agony, and her mother insisted upon a post-mortem. Her stomach was full of strychnine. He maintains that she threatened to commit suicide repeatedly, and that he is innocent; but opinion is against him, and people seem to think that the jury will convict him. I knew both, and I feel positive of his innocence.”
“Undoubtedly he is innocent,” said Mr. Field. “No physician of ordinary cleverness would bungle like that. Strychnine! absurd! Why, there are poisons known to all physicians and chemists which absolutely defy analysis. I don’t doubt that more than one doctor has put his wife out of the way, and the world none the wiser.”
“Is that true?” said Patience, eagerly, leaning forward. Her curious mind leapt at any new fact. “What are they like?”
“That I can’t say. That is a little secret known to the fraternity only, although I don’t doubt they give their friends the benefit of their knowledge occasionally. Indubitably a large proportion of murderers are never discovered—unless they discover themselves, like the guilty pair in ‘Thérèse Raquin.’”
“Oh, they belonged to the cruder order of civilisation,” said Patience, lightly. “I am sure that if I committed a murder, I should not be bothered by conscience if I had felt myself justified in committing it. It seems to me that if the development of the intellect means anything it means the casting out of inherited prejudices. Of course I don’t believe in murder,” she continued, carried away as ever by the pleasure of abstract reasoning, “but if a man of the world and of brains, after due deliberation, makes way with a person who is fatal to his happiness or his career, then I think he must have sufficient development of mental muscle to scorn remorse. The highest intelligences are anarchistic.”
“Undoubtedly there are those that have reached that point of civilisation,” said Mr. Field, “but for my part, I have not. Although I keep abreast of this extraordinary generation, my roots are planted pretty far down in the old one. But assuredly if I did feel the disposition to murder, and succumbed, I’d cover up my tracks.”
“Do these poisons give pain? Are they mineral or vegetable?”
As Mr. Field was about to answer, a peculiar expression crossed his face, and Patience, following his eyes, looked at Beverly. Her husband was staring at her with his heavy brows together, the corners of his mouth drawn down in an ugly sneer. To her horror and disgust she felt the blood fly to her hair. At the same time she became conscious that Mr. Peele, the priest, and Honora were exchanging glances of surprise. Beverly gave an abrupt unpleasant laugh, and pushing his chair violently back, left the room. Patience glanced appealingly about, then dropped her glance to her plate. She felt as if the floor were dissolving beneath her feet.
A week later, after a pleasant morning in the Tea House with Honora and Father O’Donovan, she left it to go to the library. As she turned the corner of the house she saw Beverly standing close to one of the windows.
“What are you doing there?” she asked in surprise.
His brows were lowered and his skin looked black, as it always did when his angry passions were risen.
“I’ve been watching you and that priest,” he said savagely, following her as she retreated hastily out of earshot of the people in the Tea House. “I saw you exchanging glances with him! Now I know why you want to know so much about poisons—”
“Are you insane?” she cried. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“No, I’m not insane—by God! You’re in love with that priest, and I know it. But I’m on the watch—”
“Oh,—you—you—” stammered Patience. She could not speak. Her face was crimson with anger and disgust. In her husband’s eyes she was an image of guilt. He burst into a sneering laugh.
“You think I’m a fool, I suppose, because I don’t know anything about books. But a woman said once that I had the instincts of the devil, and I’ve no idea of—”
Patience found her tongue. “You poor fool,” she said. “It was ridiculous of me to pay any attention whatever to you; but I am not used to being insulted, even by you. And remember that I am not used to any display of imagination in you. As forlove—” the scorn with which she uttered the word made even him wince—“do not worry. You have made me loathe the thing. I could not fall in love with a god. Don’t have the least fear that I shall be unfaithful to you. I couldn’t!”
She walked away, leaving Beverly trembling and speechless. When she reached her room she locked the doors and sobbed wildly.
“Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?” she thought. “I can’t stand it any longer. I believe I really would kill him if I stayed. I feel as if my nature were in ruins. I hate myself! I loathe myself! I’ll leave this very day!”
But she had said the same thing many times. Why does a woman hesitate long before she leaves the man who has made life shocking to her? Indolence, abhorrence of scandal, shame to confess that she has made a failure of her life, above all, lack of private fortune and the uncertainty of self-support. For whatever the so-called advanced woman may preach, woman has in her the instinct of dependence on man, transmitted through the ages, and a sexual horror of the arena. Patience let the days slip by, hoping, as women will, that the problem would solve itself, that Beverly Peele would die, or become indifferent, or that she would drift naturally into some other sphere.
Mrs. Peele and the girls returned with the June roses; the house was filled with guests at once. The Cuban had gone to his islands for the summer, and May chose to wear the willow and occasionally to weep upon Patience’s unsympathetic shoulder; but as frequently she consoled herself with the transient flirtation. Hal, apparently, was her old gay self. She did not mention Wynne’s name, and Patience was equally reticent.
“I should be the last to remind any woman of what she wished to forget,” she thought. “And love—what does it amount to anyhow? If He came I believe I should hate him, because once I felt something like passion for him too.”
She had looked forward with some curiosity to meeting Latimer Burr. He also had been in Paris. He followed his lady home on the next steamer, and immediately upon his return came to Peele Manor. Patience did not meet him until dinner. She sat beside him, and at once became acutely aware that he was a man of superlative physical magnetism. She proscribed him accordingly—magnetism was a repellent force at this stage of her development. She was rather surprised that she could feel it again, so completely had Beverly’s evaporated.
Burr was a tall heavily built man about forty years old. He carried himself and wore his clothes as only a New York man can. His face was florid and well modelled, his mouth and half closed eyes sensual. But his voice and manners were charming. He appeared to be deeply in love with Hal, and his voice became a caress when he spoke to her. Patience did not like his type, but she forgave him individually because he was fond of Hal and appeared to possess brains.
She fell into conversation with him, and his manner would have led her to believe that while she spoke neither Hal nor any other woman existed. To this Patience gave little attention: she had met that manner before; it was pleasant, and she missed it when lacking; but she had practised it too often herself to feel more than its passing fascination. His eyes, however, were more insistently eloquent than his manner, and their eloquence was of the order that induced discomposure.
Patience at times looked very lovely, and she was at her best to-night. Her white skin was almost transparent, and the wine had touched her cheeks with pink. The sadness of her spirit had softened her eyes. Her gown of peacock blue gauze fitted her round elastic figure very firmly, and her bare throat and neck and arms were statuesque. She had by no means the young married woman look, but she had some time since acquired an “air,” much to Hal’s satisfaction. To all appearances she was a girl, but her figure was womanly. Although about five feet six, and built on a more generous plan than the average New York woman, she walked with all their spring and lightness of foot. Her round waist looked smaller than it was; she never laced. Lately she had discovered that she “had an arm,” as Hal would have phrased it, and the discovery had given her such satisfaction that she had forgotten her troubles for the hour, and sent for a dressmaker to take the sleeves out of her evening gowns.
Mr. Burr also discovered it, and murmured his approval as caressingly as were he addressing his prospective bride.
“The milk-white woman!” he ejaculated softly. “The milk-white woman!”
“Can’t you get any farther?” asked Patience. “If you were a poet now, that would make a good first line for a rhapsody—to Hal, for instance.”
He laughed indulgently. “How awfully bright you are. I am afraid of you.” But he did not look in the least afraid. “You are to be my sister, you know. We must become friends at once.”
“And flattery is the quickest and surest way of establishing the fraternal relation? Well, you are quite right; but just look at my hair for a change, will you?” (She felt as if her skin must be covered with red spots.) “Or my profile. They are also good points.”
“They are exquisite. I have rarely seen a woman so beautiful.”
“Dear! Dear! How relieved you must be to feel that you can keep your hand in without straying too far from Peele Manor. And there is also Honora.”
“I don’t admire Miss Mairs. She is too tall, and her nose is too long.”
“Poor dear Honora! But how well you understand women! What tact! I like you so much better than I did before.”
He laughed again in his indulgent way. “You mustn’t guy me. It is your fault if I pay you too many compliments. You are a very fascinating woman.”
“You are wonderfully entertaining. What must you be when you are in love! What do you and Hal talk about?”
“Isn’t Hal a dear little girl? I do love her. I never loved a woman so much in my life—never proposed before. She is so bright. She keeps me amused all the time. I always said I’d never marry a woman that didn’t amuse me, and I’ve kept my word. It isn’t so much what she says, don’t you know, as the way she says it. Dear little girl!”
On this subject they could agree, and Patience kept him to it as long as possible.
After dinner Burr went with Mr. Peele into the library. Patience, passing through the room, found them talking earnestly upon the great question of the day,—the financial future of the country. She paused a moment, then sat down. To her surprise she found that Burr was master of his subject, and possessed of a gift of words which fell little short of eloquence.
The argument lasted an hour, during which Patience sat with her elbows on the table, her chin on her folded hands, her eager eyes glancing from one to the other. Occasionally she smiled responsively as Burr made some felicitous phrase. When the discussion was over, Mr. Peele left the room. Burr arose at once and seated himself beside her.
“I never talked so well,” he said. “You inspired me;” and he took her hand in the matter-of-fact manner she knew so well.
“You talked quite as well before you saw me—”
“I knew you were there—”
“Kindly let me have my hand. I have only two—”
“Nonsense! Let me hold your hand. I want to! I am going to—Why are you—”
“Haven’t you Hal’s hand?”
“Oh, my God! You don’t expect me to go through life holding one woman’s hand? Hal is the most fascinating woman in the world, and I love her—but I want you to let me love you, too.”
“It is quite immaterial to me whether you love me or not; and, I think, if you want plain English, that you are a scoundrel.”
“Oh, come, come. You—you—must know more of the world than to talk like that. Why am I a scoundrel?” He looked much amused.
“You are engaged to one woman and are making love to another.”
“Well, what of that so long as she doesn’t know it? I shall be the most uxorious and indulgent of husbands—but faithful—that is not to be expected.”
“You must have great confidence in me. Suppose I describe this scene and conversation to Hal?”
“You will not,—not out of regard for me, but because you love Hal—dear little girl! And you are one of the few women devoid of the cat instincts. That long-legged girl, now, has a whole tiger inside of her, but you have only the faults of the big woman. I hope you have their weaknesses.”
“Well, you shall never know if I have. Please let go my hand.”
He flung it from him. “Oh, well,” he said, haughtily, “I hoped we should be friends, but if you will have it otherwise, so be it;” and he stalked out, and devoted himself to Hal for the rest of the evening.
“Funny world,” thought Patience. She shrugged her beautiful young shoulders cynically, and went forth to do her duty by the guests. As she passed out of the front door to join some one of the scattered groups on the lawns, she heard a voice which made her pause and tap her forehead with her finger. It was a rich deep voice, with a vibration in it, and a light suggestion of brogue. She turned to the drawing-room, whence it came. A man in riding clothes was talking to Mrs. Peele, who was listening with a bend of the head that meant much to Patience’s trained eye. The man had an athletic nervous figure, suggestive of great virility and suppressed force, although it was carried with a fine repose. The thick black hair on his large finely shaped head glinted here and there with silver. His profile was aquiline, delicately cut and very strong, his mouth, under the slight moustache, neither full nor thin, and both mobile and firm, the lips beautifully cut. The eyes, deeply set, were not large, and were of an indefinite blue grey, but piercing, restless, kind, and humourous. There were lines about them, and a deep line on one side of his mouth. His lean face had a touch of red on its olive. He might have been anywhere between thirty-five and forty.
Patience recognised him and trembled a little, but with excitement, not passion. She had understood herself for once when she had said that in her present conditions she was incapable of love. Beverly Peele would have to go down among the memories before his wife could shake her spirit free, and turn with swept brain and clear eyes to even a conception of the love whose possibilities dwelt within her.
But she was fully alive to the picturesqueness of meeting this man once more, and suddenly became possessed of the spirit of adventure. There must be some sort of sequel to that old romance.
She withdrew to the shadow of a tree, where she could watch the drawing-room through the window. Burr entered, slapped the visitor on the back, and bore him away to the dining-room, presumably to have a drink. When they returned, Mr. Peele was in the room. He shook hands with the stranger more heartily than was his wont. In a few moments he crossed over to the library, and Patience, seeing that her early hero would be held in conversation for some time to come, followed her father-in-law and asked casually who the visitor was.
“Oh, that’s Bourke, Garan Bourke, the legal idol,” sarcastically, “of Westchester County. In truth he’s a brilliant lawyer enough, and one of the rising men at the New York bar, although he will go off his head occasionally and take criminal cases. I don’t forgive him that, if heisalways successful. However, we all have our little fads. I suppose he can’t resist showing his power over a jury. I heard an enthusiastic youngster assert the other day that Bourke whips up a jury’s grey matter into one large palpitating batter, then moulds it with the tips of his fingers while the jury sits with mouth open and spinal marrow paralysed. Personally, I like him well enough, and rather hoped he and Hal would fancy each other. But he doesn’t seem to be a marrying man. You’d better go over and meet him. He’ll just suit you.”
Patience returned to her post. Burr had disappeared, Bourke was talking to half a dozen women. In a few moments he rose to go. Patience went hastily across the lawns to the narrow avenue of elms by the driveway. No two were billing and cooing in its shadows, and Beverly was in bed with a nervous headache.
The moon was large and very brilliant. One could have read a newspaper as facilely as by the light of an electric pear. As Bourke rode to the main avenue a woman came toward him. He had time to think her very beautiful and of exceeding grace before she surprised him by laying her hand on his horse’s neck.
“Well?” she said, looking up and smiling as he reined in.
“Well?” he stammered, lifting his hat.
“I am too heavy to ride before you now.”
He stared at her perplexedly, but made no reply.
“Still if I were up a tree—literally, you know—and a band of terrible demons were shouting at a man beside a corpse—”
“What?” he said. “Not you?—not you? That homely fascinating little girl—no, it cannot be possible—”
“Oh, yes,” lifting her chin, coquettishly. “I have improved, and grown, you see. I was more than delighted when I saw you through the window. It was rather absurd, but I disliked the idea of going in to meet you conventionally—”
He laid his hand strongly on hers, and she treated him with a passivity denied to Latimer Burr.
“I am going to tie up my horse and talk to you a while, may I?” America and the law had not crowded all the romance out of his Irish brain, and he was keenly alive to the adventure. He had forgotten her name long since, and it did not occur to him that this lovely impulsive girl was the property of another man; but although he had lived too long, nor yet long enough, to lose his heart to the first flash of magnetism from a pretty woman, yet his blood was thrilled by the commingling of spirituality and deviltry in the face of this high-bred girl who cared to give the flavour of romance to their acquaintance. He saw that she was clever, and he had no intention of making a fool of himself; but he was quite willing to follow whither she cared to lead. And it was night and the moon was high; the leaves sang in a crystal sea; a creek murmured somewhere; the frogs chanted their monotonous recitative to the hushed melodies and discords of the night world; the deep throbbing of steamboats came from the river.
He tied his horse to a tree, and they entered the avenue.
“You told me that it was a small world, and that we should probably meet again,” she said; “and I never doubted that we should.”
“Oh, I never did either,” he exclaimed. He was racking his brains to recall the conversation which had passed between them a half dozen years ago, and for the life of him could not remember a word; but he was a man of resource.
“I am glad that it is at night,” he continued, “even if the scene is not so charming as Carmel Valley from that old tower. How beautiful the ocean looked from there, and what a jolly ride we had in the pine woods!”
She understood perfectly, and grinned in the dark.
“Ah! I remember I gave you some advice,” he exclaimed with suspicious abruptness. “I thought afterward that it was great presumption on my part.”
“I wonder if you had an ideal of your own in mind when you spoke?”
“An ideal?” He cursed his memory and floundered hopelessly. Even his Irish wit for once deserted him.
“Oh, I hoped you had not forgotten it. Why, I have made a little ‘Night Thoughts’ of what you said, and it has been one of the strongest forces in my development. Shall I repeat it to you?”
“Oh, please.” He was blushing with pleasure, but sore perplexed.
And she repeated his comments and advice, word for word.
“Is it possible that you remember all that? I am deeply flattered.” And he was, in fact.
“What more natural than that I should remember? I was a lonely little waif, full of dreams and vague ideals, and with much that was terrible in my actual life. I had never talked with a young man before—a man of seventy was my only experience of your sex, barring boys, that don’t count. And you swooped down into my life in the most picturesque manner possible, and talked as no one in my little world was capable of talking. So, you see, it is not so remarkable that I retain a vivid impression of you and your words. I was frightfully in love with you.”
“Oh—were you? Were you?” He was very much at sea. It was true that she had paid him the most subtle tribute one mind can pay to another, but her very audacity would go to prove that she was a brilliant coquette. He had a keen sense of the ridiculous, and he was still a little afraid of her. He took refuge on the broad impersonal shore of flirtation, where the boat is ever dancing on the waves.
“If you felt obliged to use the past tense you might have left that last unsaid.”
“Oh, there are a thousand years between fifteen and twenty-one. I am quite another person, as you see.”
“You are merely an extraordinary child developed; and you have carried your memory along with you.”
“Oh, yes, the memory is there, and the tablets are pretty full; but never mind me. I want to know if your ideals are as strong now as I am sure they were then—if any one in this world manages to hold onto his ideals when circumstances don’t happen to coddle them.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t thought much about them since that night. I doubt if I’d given too much thought to them before. Deep in every man’s brain is an ideal of some sort, I imagine, but it is seldom he sits down and analyses it out. He knows when he’s missed it and locked the gates behind him, and perhaps, occasionally, he knows when he’s found it—or something approximating it. We are all the victims of that terrible thing called Imagination, which, I sometimes think, is the sudden incursion of a satirical Deity. I have not married—why, I can hardly say. Perhaps because there has been some vague idea that if I waited long enough I might meet the one woman; but partly, also, because I have had no very great desire to marry. I keep bachelor’s hall over on the Sound, and the life is very jolly and free of small domestic details. There are so many women that give you almost everything you want—or at least four or five will make up a very good whole—that I have never yet faced the tremendous proposition of going through life expecting one woman to give me everything my nature and mind demand. But there are such women, I imagine,” he added abruptly, trying to see her face in one of the occasional splashes of moonlight.
“A very clever woman—Mrs. Lafarge; perhaps you know her—said to me the other day, that many men and women of strong affinity took a good deal of spirituality with them into marriage, but soon forgot all about it—matrimony is so full of reiterant details, and everything becomes so matter of course. Do you think that is true?”
“I am afraid it is. The imagination wears blunt. The Deity is sending his electricity elsewhere—to those still prowling about the shores of the unknown. Perhaps if one could keep the danger in mind—if one were unusually clever—I don’t know. I fancy civilisation will get to that point after a while. Unquestionably the companionship of man and woman, when no essentials are lacking, is the one supremely satisfying thing in life. If we loved each other, for instance—on such a night—it seems to me that we are in tune—”
“But we don’t love each other, as it happens, and we met about three quarters of an hour ago. We’ll probably hate each other by daylight.”
“Oh, I hope not,” he said, accepting the ice-water. “But tell me what your ideals were. I hope they have proved more stable than mine.”
“Oh, mine were a sort of yearning for some unseen force in nature; I suppose the large general force from which love is a projection. Every mortal, except the purely material, the Beverly Peele type, for instance, has an affinity with something in the invisible world, an uplifting of the soul. Christianity satisfies the great mass, hence its extraordinary hold. Do you suppose the real link between the soul of man and the soul of nature will ever be established?”
He laughed a little, piqued, but amused. “You are very clever,” he said, “and this is just the hour and these are just the circumstances for impersonal abstractions. Well—perhaps the link will be established when we have lived down this civilisation and entered upon another which has had drilled out of it all the elements which plant in human nature the instincts of cupidity and sordidness and envy and political corruption, and all that goes to make us the aliens from nature that we are. About all that keeps us in touch with her now are our large vices. There is some tremendous spiritual force in the Universe which projects itself into us, making man and nature correlative. What wonder that man—particularly an imaginative and intelligent child—should be affected and played upon by this Mystery? What wonder that the heathens have gods, and the civilised a symbol called the Lord God?—a concrete something which they can worship, and upon which unburden the load of spirituality which becomes oppressive to matter? It is for the same reason that women fall in love and marry earlier than men, who have so many safety-valves. On the other hand, men who have a great deal of emotional imagination and who can neither love nor accept religion take refuge in excess. It is all a matter of temperament. Cold-blooded people—those that have received a meagre share of this great vital force pervading the Universe, which throws a continent into convulsions or a human being into ecstasy—such, for instance, are religious only because their ancestors were,—their brain is pointed that way. Their blood has nothing to do with it, as is the more general case—for Christianity is pre-eminently sensuous.”
“What do you suppose will take its place? The world is bound to become wholly civilised in time; but still human nature will demand some sort of religion (which is another word for ideality), some sort of lodestar.”
“A superlative refinement, I think; a perfected æstheticism which shall by no means eradicate the strong primal impulses; which shall, in fact, create conditions of higher happiness than now exist. Do we not enjoy all arts the more as they approach perfection? Does not a nude appeal with more subtle strength to the senses the more exquisite its beauty, the more entire its freedom from coarseness? When people strive to place human nature on a level with what is highest in art and in nature itself, the true religion will have been discovered. So far, man himself is infinitely below what man has achieved. It is hard to believe that genius is the result of any possible combination of heredity. It would seem that it must, like its other part, imagination, be the direct and more permanent indwelling of the supreme creative force—as if the creator would lighten his burden occasionally, and shakes off rings which float down to torment favoured brains.”
“I always knew that I should love to hear you talk,” murmured Patience.
His hand closed over hers. He drew it through his arm and held it against his heart, which was beating irregularly.
“And I haven’t talked so much nor such stuff to a woman since God made me. I believe that I could talk to you through twenty years. You have said enough to-night to make me hope that our minds have been running along the same general lines. Tell me—honestly—no coquetry—has what I said that night had the slightest effect in your development?”
She told the tale of the day in the crystal woods, giving a sufficiently comprehensive sketch of the events which had led up to it to make her the more keenly interesting to the man whose brain was beginning to whirl a little.
“If you had come at that moment,” she concluded, “I would have gone with you to the end of the earth. I have a pretty strong personality, but there was a good deal of wax in me then, and if you could have gotten it between your hands I think that what you moulded would have closely resembled your ideal—the impression you had already made had so strongly coloured and trained my imagination. But,” she continued hastily, and glancing anxiously to the far distant end of the avenue, “you see my life changed immediately after that, and I went into the world and became hard and bitter and cynical. I have no ideals left, and I do not want any—I have seen too much—”
“Hush!” he said passionately, “I do not believe a word of it. Why, that was not two years ago, and you are still a young girl. Have you loved any one else?” he asked abruptly, his voice less steady.
“No!”
He was too excited to note the meaning of her emphasis. He was only conscious that he was very close to a beautiful woman who allured him in all ways as no one woman had ever done before.
“You are full of a girl’s cynicism,” he said; “you have seen just enough to make you think you know the world—to accept the superficial for the real. You—you yourself are an ideal. All you need is to know yourself, and I am going to undertake the task of teaching you—do you hear? If I fail—if I have made a mistake—if it is only the night and your beauty that have gone to my head—well and good; but I shall have the satisfaction of having tried—of knowing—”
“No, no! No, no!” she said. “You must not come here again. I do not want to see you again—”
“Nonsense! You have some sentimental foolish idea in your head,—or perhaps you are engaged to some man who can give you great wealth and position. I shall not regard that, either. If I feel to you by daylight as I do now, I’ll have you—do you understand?”
Patience opened her lips to tell him the truth, then cynically made up her mind to let matters take their course. At the same time she was bitterly resentful that she should feel as she did, not as she had once dreamed of feeling for this man.
“Very well,” she said, “I shall be here for a while.”
“And I shall see you in the course of a day or two. I’m going now. Good-night.” He let her arm slip from under his, but held her hand closely. “And even if it so happened that I never did see you again, I should thank you for the glimpse you have given me of a woman I hardly dared dream existed.”
When he had gone she anathematised fate for a moment, then went back to her guests.
Latimer Burr was evidently a man upon whom rebuff sat lightly. The next morning he came suddenly upon Patience in a dark corner, and tried to kiss her. Whenever the opportunity offered he held her hand, and once, to her infinite disgust, he planted his foot squarely on hers under the dinner table. A few hours later they happened to be alone in one of the small reception-rooms.
“Look here,” exclaimed Patience, wrathfully, “will you let me alone?”
“No, I won’t,” he said good-naturedly. “Jove! but you are a beauty!”
She wore a gown of white mull and lace, trimmed with large knots of dark-blue velvet. She had been talking all the evening with Mr. Peele, Mr. Field, and Burr, and was somewhat excited. Her lips were very pink, her eyes very bright and dark. She held her head with a young triumph in beauty and the intellectual tribute of clever men.
“Hal would be delighted. She has always wanted me to become the fashion.”
“You never will be that, for there are not enough brainy men in society to appreciate you. If all were like myself, you would be wearied with the din of admiration—”
“There’s nothing like having a good opinion of oneself.”
“Why not? I don’t set up to be an intellectual man—intellectual men are out of date; but I’m a brainy man, and I’d like to know how I’m to help being aware of the fact. I certainly don’t claim to be pretty, so you can’t say I’m actually wallowing in conceit.”
Patience was forced to laugh. “Oh, you’d do very well if you’d exercise as much sense in regard to women as you do to affairs. Just answer me one question, will you? Are you so amazingly fascinating that women have the habit of succumbing at the end of the second interview?”
“I never set up to be an ass.”
“But your manner is quite assured. You seem very much surprised that I don’t tumble into your arms and say ‘Thank you.’ Oh, you New York men are so funny!”
“Well, answer me one question—you don’t love your husband, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Do you like me?”
“I would if you wouldn’t make such an idiot of yourself. You certainly are very agreeable to talk to.”
He came closer, his lids falling. The fine repose of his manner was a trifle ruffled. “Do you love anybody else?” he asked.
“I do not.”
“Then let me love you.”
“I shall not.”
“Then if you don’t love your husband and you like me and will not let me love you, you must have a lover.”
Patience burst into brief hilarity.
“Is that the logic of your kind?”
“A beautiful woman that does not love her husband always loves another man.”
“Or is willing to be loved by the first man that happens to have no other affair on hand.”
“You have said that you like me.”
“I didn’t say I loved you!”
“I’d make you!”
“Oh!” with a deep contempt he was incapable of understanding, “you couldn’t. But tell me another thing; I’m very curious. Has it never occurred to you that a woman must be wooed, that it is somewhat necessary to arouse sentiment and feeling in her before she is willing to advance one step? Why, you and your kind demand her off-hand in a way that is positively funny. What has become of all the old traditions?”
“Oh, bother,” he said. “Life is too short to waste time on old-fashioned nonsense. If a man wants a woman he says so, and if she’s sensible and likes him she meets him half way. Men and women of the world know what they want.”
“That is all there is to love then? It no longer means anything else whatever?”
“Oh—you are all wrong. If you were not a spiritual woman I wouldn’t cross the room to win you. One can buy the other sort. It is your spirituality, your intellectuality, that fascinates me as much as your beauty.”
“What do you know about spirituality?” she said contemptuously. “I don’t like to hear you speak the word. You desecrate it.”
He flushed purple. “There are few things I don’t understand—and a good deal better than you do, perhaps.”
“You have a clever man’s perception, that is all. Association with all sorts of women has taught you the difference between them. But what could you give a spiritual woman? Nothing. You have not a shrunken kernel of soul. The sensual envelope is too thick; your brain too crowded with the thousand and one petty experiences of material life. You are as ingenuous as all fast men, for the women you have spent your life running after make no demands upon subtlety—”
“Take care,” he said angrily; “you are going too far. I tell you I have as much soul as any man living.”
“Perhaps. I doubt if any man has much. Men give women nothing, as far as I can see. If we want companionship there seems nothing to do but to descend to your level and grovel with you.”
“I would never make you grovel. I would reverence—”
“Oh, rot!” she cried, stamping her foot. “What a fool—and worse—the average woman must be. You have no idea how ingenuously you are giving away the women of society. And soul! The idea of a man who pretends to love the woman he is engaged to and is making love to another, and that her sister-in-law and most intimate friend, claiming to have a soul! Have you no sense of humour? I say nothing about honour, as I wish to be understood, if possible; but you are clever enough to see the ridiculous in most things—Please don’t walk over me. There is plenty of room. And the windows are open, you know—”
“Yes, and I am here,” cried a furious voice, and Beverly sprang into the room.
Patience stepped back with a faint exclamation. Burr turned white. Beverly was shaking with rage. His face was almost black; there were white flecks on his nostrils.
“I kept quiet,” he articulated, “to hear every word. You dog!” to Burr. “I may be pretty bad, but I’d never do what you have done. And as for you,” he shook his fist at his wife, “you were only leading him on. If I could only have held myself in another moment I’d have seen you in his arms. Get out of this house,” he roared, “both of you. You’ll never marry my sister. I’m going to tell her this minute—”
Burr sprang forward and caught him by the collar; but Beverly was not a coward. He turned, flinging out his fist, and the two men grappled. Patience closed the door and glanced out of the window. No one was near. Voices floated up from the cliffs. Burr was the more powerful man of the two, and in a moment had flung Beverly, panting, into a chair.
“Keep him here,” said Patience, rapidly, and she left the room.
“Man is certainly still a savage, a brute,” she thought. “What is the matter with civilisation?”
As she crossed the lawn, she met one of the servants.
“Go and find Miss Hal, and ask her to come here,” she said. A few moments later her sister-in-law hurried up from the cliffs.
“What is it?” she called cheerily. “Has Bev had an apoplectic fit?”
“Beverly has been making a greater fool of himself than usual,” said Patience, as the girls met, “and I want to see you before he does. I was standing in one of the reception-rooms talking to Mr. Burr after Mr. Field and Mr. Peele had gone out, and he had on all his manner and was telling me how beautiful I was, in his usual after dinner style, when Beverly leaped through the window like the wronged husband in the melodrama and accused us of making love. He threatened to come and tell you, and he and Mr. Burr wrestled like two prize-fighters. If Beverly were put on the witness stand he’d be obliged to admit that Mr. Burr had not so much as touched my hand. I suppose you will believe me?”
Hal gave her light laugh. “Certainly, my dear, certainly; although if I were a man I should fall in love with you myself. I wouldn’t bet on Latimer, but I would on you—so don’t worry your little head. Do you suppose I expect a man with that mouth and those eyes to be faithful to me? Still, I must say that I should have given him credit for more decency than to make love to my sister-in-law—”
“He didn’t! I swear he didn’t.”
“Oh, of course not! Nor will he make love to every pretty woman he finds himself alone with for five minutes. He can’t help it, poor thing. Let us go and talk to the gentlemen.”
As they entered the little room she exclaimed airily, “Been making a fool of yourself again, Bev? No, don’t speak. Patience has told me all about it. I have every confidence in her and Latimer. Better go and take a spin with Tammany. Latimer, you really must mend your manners. They’re too good. From a distance a stranger would really think you were making love when you are swearing at the heat. Now, come down to the Tea House. Good-night, Bevvy dear.”
And she went off between her lover and her sister-in-law, leaving her brother to swear forth his righteous indignation.
That night Patience opened the door of her husband’s room for the first time. Beverly, who had just entered, was so astonished that the wrath he had carefully nourished fell like quicksilver under a cool wave, and he stared at her without speaking.
“I wish to tell you,” said his wife, “that you were entirely justified in being angry to-night. I could have suppressed Burr by a word, but I chose to lead him on to gratify my curiosity. Hal wishes to marry him, and I am determined that she shall. If I had admitted the truth to her or permitted you to enlighten her, her self-respect would have forced her to break the engagement. That would have been absurd, for the match is exactly what she wants, and she is not marrying with illusions. But you have been treated inconsiderately, and I apologise for my share in it. Will you forgive me?”
“Of course I’ll forgive you,” said Beverly, eagerly. “I wasn’t angry with you, anyhow—only with that scoundrel. But I never believed you’d do this. Do you care for me a little?”
Patience averted her face that she might not see the expression on his. Despite her loathing of him she gave him a certain measure of pity. With all the preponderance of the savage in him and the limitations of his intelligence he had his own capacity for suffering, and to-night he stood before her crushed under the sudden reaction, his eyes full of the dumb appeal of shrinking brutes.
“If we are going to live peacefully don’t let us discuss that subject,” she said gently. “We have both missed it, and I sometimes think that you are more to be pitied than I am. However, I shall not flirt—I promise you that. Good-night.”
That was the last of Mr. Burr’s illegal love-making at Peele Manor. He had had a fright and a lesson, and he forgot neither.