"I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ, His only Son— ... I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints—the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body—and the life everlasting—Amen."
"I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ, His only Son— ... I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints—the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body—and the life everlasting—Amen."
When the organ burst forth into the recessional hymn, Driscoll turned to his companion. "Come outside," he said. "I feel as if I had been drinking. And it was Algarcife—"
Half an hour later Father Algarcife left the church, and, crossing to Broadway, boarded a down-town car. At Twentieth Street he got out and turned eastward. He walked slowly, with long, almost mechanical strides. His head was bent and his shoulders stooped slightly, but there was a suggestion of latent vigor in his appearance, as if he carried a reserve fund of strength of which his brain had not yet taken account. Beneath the rich abundance of his hair his features struck one with peculiar force. They had the firm and compressed look which is the external mark of sterile emotions, and the traces of nervous wear on brow and lips showed like the scars of past experiences rather than the wounds of present ones. His complexion possessed that striking pallor resulting from long physical waste, a pallor warmed by tawny tones beneath the surface, deepening into bluish shadows about his closely shaven mouth and chin. In his long clerical coat he seemed to have gained in height, and the closest observer would perhaps have detected in his face only a physical illustration of the spiritual function he fulfilled. In another profession he would have suggested the possible priest—the priest unordained by circumstances. As it was, he presented the appearance of having been inserted in his ecclesiastical position from a mere æsthetic sense of fitness on the part of Destiny.
Although it was an afternoon in early October, the winds, blowing from the river along the cross-town blocks, had an edge of frost. Overhead the sky was paling into tones of dull lavender that shaded into purple where the west was warmed by stray vestigesof the afterglow. Through the dusk the street lights flickered here and there like swarming fire-flies. As he passed the Post-graduate Hospital at the corner of Second Avenue a man came down the steps and joined him.
"Good-afternoon, father," he said. "Your charge is coming on finely. Going in?"
His name was Salvers, and he was a rising young specialist in pulmonary troubles. He had met Father Algarcife in his work among the poor on the East Side.
"Not to-day," responded the other; "but I am glad to have good news of the little fellow."
He was known to have endowed one of the babies' cots and to feel great interest in its occupant.
Dr. Salvers returned his quiet gaze with one of sudden admiration. "What a wonder you are!" he said. "If there is a man in New York who does your amount of work, I don't know him. But take my advice and slacken speed. You will kill yourself."
Into Father Algarcife's eyes a gleam of humor shot. It went out as suddenly as it had come, and a tinge of sadness rose to the surface.
"Perhaps I am trying to," he answered, lightly.
"It looks like it. Here's Sunday, and you've come from a half-dozen services to run at the call of a beggar or so who might have had the politeness to wait till week-day. How is the Bowery Mission?"
"Very well," responded the other, showing an interest for the first time. "I have persuaded ten converts to take the pledge of a daily bath. It was tough work."
Salvers laughed. "I should say so. But, you know, that is what I like about your mission. It has the virtue of confusing cleanliness with godliness. Are you still delivering your sermons on hygiene?"
"Yes. You know we have been sending out nursesto women in confinement in connection with those Sunday-night lectures on the care of children. The great question of the tenement-house is the one of the children it produces."
The light that fired his features had chased from them their habitual expression of lethargic calm.
"It is a great work," said the doctor, enthusiastically. "But, do you know, father, it seems to me odd that so intense a believer in the rules of the rubric should have been the first to put religion into practical use among the poor. It seems a direct contradiction to the assertion that the association of the love of beauty with the love of God destroys sympathy for poverty and disease."
A cloud passed over the other's face.
"My predecessor prepared the ground for me," he replied, constrainedly. "I hope to sow the seed for future usefulness."
"And capital seed it is. But, as I said, it saps the sower. You are running a race with Death. No man can work as you work and not pay the penalty. Get an extra assistant."
Father Algarcife shook his head.
"They cannot do my work," he answered. "That is for me. As for consequences—well, the race is worth them. If Death wins or I—who knows?"
His rich voice rang with an intonation that was almost reckless. Then his tone changed.
"I go a block or two farther," he said. "Good-day."
And he passed on, the old lethargy settling upon his face.
At some distance he stopped, and, entering a doorway, ascended the stairs to the second landing. A knock at the first door brought a blear-eyed child with straight wisps of hair and a chronic cold in the head. She looked at him with dull recognition.
"Is Mrs. Watson worse?" he asked, gently.
A voice from the room beyond reached him in the shrill tones of one unreconciled to continual suffering.
"Is it the father?" it said. "Show him in. Ain't I been lying here and expecting him all day?" The voice was querulous and sharp. Father Algarcife entered the room and crossed to where the woman lay.
The bed was squalid, and the unclean odors of the disease consuming her flesh hung about the quilt and the furniture. The yellow and haggard face upon the pillow was half-obscured by a bandage across the left cheek.
As he looked down at her there was neither pity nor repulsion in his glance. It was merely negative in quality.
"Has the nurse been here to-day?" he asked, in the same gentle voice.
The woman nodded, rolling her bandaged head upon the pillow. "Ain't you going to sit down, now you've come?" she said.
He drew a chair to the bedside and sat down, laying his hand on the burning one that played nervously upon the quilt.
"Are you in pain?"
"Always—night and day."
He looked at her for a moment in silence; then he spoke soothingly. "You sent for me," he said. "I came as soon as the services were over."
She answered timidly, with a faint deprecation:
"I thought I was going. It came all faint-like, and then it went away."
A compassion more mental than emotional awoke in his glance.
"It was weakness," he answered. "You know this is the tenth time in the last fortnight that you have felt it. When it comes, do you take the medicine?"
She stirred pettishly.
"I 'ain't no belief in drugs," she returned. "But I don't want to go alone, with nobody round but the child."
He held the withered hand in his as he rose. "Don't be afraid," he answered. "I will come if you want me. Has the milk been good? And do you remember to watch the unfolding of that bud on the geranium? It will soon blossom."
He descended the stairs and went out into the street. At Madison Avenue he took the car to Fortieth Street. Near the corner, on the west side, there was a large brown-stone house, with curtains showing like gossamer webs against the lighted interiors of the rooms. He mounted the steps, rang the bell, and entered through an archway of palms the carpeted hall.
"Say to Miss Vernish that it is Father Algarcife," he said, and passed into the drawing-room.
A woman, buried amid the pillows of a divan, rose as he entered and came towards him, her trailing skirts rustling over the velvet carpet. She was thin and gray-haired, with a faded beauty of face and a bitter mouth. She walked as if impatient of a slight lameness in her foot.
"So you got my message," she said. "I waited for you all day yesterday. I am ill—ill and chained to this couch. I have not been to church for eight weeks, and I have needed the confessional. See, my nerves are trying me. If you had only come sooner."
She threw herself upon the couch and he seated himself on a chair beside her. The heavily shaded lamplight fell over the richness of the room, over the Turkish rugs scattered upon the floor, over the hangings of old tapestries on the walls, and over the shining bric-Ã -brac reflected in long mirrors. As he leaned forward it fell upon his features and softened them to sudden beauty.
"I am sorry," he answered, "but I could not comeyesterday, and to-day a woman dying of cancer sent for me."
She crushed a pillow beneath her arm, smiling a little bitterly.
"Oh, it is your poor!" she said. "It is always your poor! We rich must learn to yield precedence—"
"It is not a question of wealth or of poverty," he returned. "It is one of suffering. Can I help you?"
The bitterness faded from her mouth. "You can let me believe in you," she said. "Don't you know that it is because you despise my money that I call for you? I might have sent for a hundred persons yesterday who would have outrun my messenger. But I could not bring you an instant sooner for all my wealth—no, not even for the sake of the church you love."
"How do you know?" he asked, gravely. "Call no man unpurchasable until he has been bargained for."
She looked at him passionately. "That is why I give to your church," she went on; "because to you my thousand counts no more than my laundress's dime."
"But it does," he corrected; "and the church is grateful."
"But you?"
"I am the instrument of the church."
"The pillar, you mean."
He shook his head. There was no feeling in voice or eyes—but there was no hardness.
"I love your church," she went on, more gently. "I love what you have made of it. I love religion because it produces men like you—
"Stop," he said, in a voice that flinched slightly.
She raised her head with a gesture that had a touch of defiance. "Why should I stop?" she asked. "Do you think God will mind if I give His servant his due? Yesterday religion was nothing to me; to-day it iseverything, and it is you who have been its revelation. Why should I not tell you so?"
He was regarding her with intentness.
"And you are happier?" he asked.
"Happier! It is an odd word for a woman like me. I am fifty years old, I am alone, I am loveless. It has given me something to hope for, that is all."
"Yes?"
With a sudden yearning she stretched out her thin, white hands in appeal.
"Talk to me," she said. "Make me feel it. I am so alone."
When Father Algarcife descended the brown-stone steps an hour later, his face was drawn and his lips firmly closed. The electric light, shining upon his resolute features, gave them the look of marble.
He turned into Fifth Avenue and continued his way to Fifty-eighth Street. Before the door of the rectory, which was at the distance of a stone's-throw from the church, a carriage was drawn up to the sidewalk, and as he passed his name was called softly in a woman's voice:
"It is I—Mrs. Bruce Ryder. I have been waiting in the hope of seeing you."
He paused on the sidewalk and his hand closed over the one she gave him. She was a large, fair woman, with a superb head and shoulders, and slow, massive movements, such as the women of the old masters must have had.
"It is to force a promise that you will dine with me to-morrow," she said. "You have disappointed me so often—and I must talk with you." Her voice had a caressing inflection akin to the maternal.
He smiled into her expectant face.
"Yes," he said. "To-morrow—yes; I will do so. That is, if you won't wait for me if I am detained."
"That is kind," she responded. "I know you hateit. And I won't wait. I remember that you don't eat oysters."
The maternal suggestion in her manner had deepened. She laughed softly, pleased at the knowledge of his trivial tastes her words betrayed.
"But I won't keep you," she went on, "Thank you again—and good-bye."
The carriage rolled into the street, and he drew out a latch-key and let himself in at the rectory door, which opened on the sidewalk.
Mrs. Bruce Ryder unfolded her napkin and cast a swift glance over the heavy damask, sparkling with glass and silver.
"Yes; he is late," she said; "but he doesn't like to be waited for."
From the foot of the table Mr. Bruce Ryder smiled complacently, his eye upon his Blue Points.
"And his wish is law, even unto the third and fourth courses," he responded, pleasantly. "As far as Mrs. Ryder is concerned, the pulpit of the Church of the Immaculate Conception is a modern Mount Sinai."
"Bruce, how can you?" remonstrated his wife, upbraiding him across the pink shades of candles and a centre-piece of orchids. "And you are so ignorant. There is no pulpit in the church."
"The metaphor holds. Translate pulpit into altar-step—and you have the Mount Sinai."
"Minus Jehovah," commented Claude Nevins, who sat between a tall, slight girl, fresh from boarding-school, and a stout lady with an enormous necklace.
Ryder shook his head with easy pleasantry. He had been handsome once, and was still well groomed. His figure had thickened, but was not unshapely, and had not lost a certain athletic grace. His face was fair, with a complexion that showed a faint purplish flush beneath the skin, paling where his smooth flaxen hair was parted upon his forehead. On the crown of his head there was a round bald spot which had the effect of transparency. His deceptive frankness of mannerwas contradicted by an expression of secretiveness in his light-blue eyes.
He lifted the slice of lemon from his plate, squeezing it with his ruddy and well-formed fingers.
"Oh, but he's a divinity in his own right!" he retorted. "Apollo turned celibate, you know. He is the Lothario of religions—"
"Bruce!" said his wife again. A vexed light was shining in her eyes, giving a girlish look to her full and mature beauty. She wore a dress of black gauze, cut low from her splendid shoulders, above which her head, with its ash-blond hair, rose with a poise that was almost pagan in its perfection.
"For my part," said a little lady upon Mr. Ryder's right, "Mount Sinai or not, I quite feel that he speaks with God."
Her name was Dubley, and she was round and soft and white, suggesting the sugar-coated dinner-pills which rested as the pedestal of her social position, since her father, with a genius for turning opportunities to account, had coined into gold the indigestion of his fellows.
"Ah! You are a woman," returned Ryder, smilingly. "You might as well ask a needle to resist a magnet as a woman to resist a priest. I wonder what the attraction is?"
"Aberration of the religious instinct," volunteered Nevins, who had not lost his youthful look with his youthful ardor, and whom success had appeared to settle without surfeiting.
"On the contrary," interposed a short-sighted gentleman in eye-glasses, who regarded the oyster upon his fork as if he expected to recognize an old acquaintance, "the religious instinct is entirely apart from the vapid feminine sentimentalizing over men in long coats and white neckties. Indeed, I question if woman has developed the true religious instinct. Iam collecting notes for a treatise upon the subject."
He stopped breathlessly, swallowed his oyster, and looked gloomily at the table-cloth. His name was Layton, and he was a club-man who had turned criminologist for a whim. Having convinced himself by generalizations from experience of the total depravity of the female sex, he had entered upon his researches in the hope of verifying his deductions.
The point he advanced being called in question by a vivacious and pretty woman who sat next him, there followed a short debate upon the subject. When it was ended, John Driscoll looked up languidly from Mrs. Ryder's left hand.
"My dear Layton," he advised, "return to the race-course if you value your sanity. The enigma of the Sphinx is merely the woman question in antiquity and stone." Then he turned to Mrs. Ryder. "How is the renowned father?" he inquired. "I was decoyed into buying a volume of his sermons this morning."
A smile shone upon him from her large, pale eyes. "Oh yes," she responded, her beauty quickening from its repose. "They are in answer to those articles in theScientific Weekly. Are they not magnificent?"
Driscoll assented amiably.
"Yes," he admitted. "He has the happy faculty of convincing those who already agree with him."
She reproached him in impulsive championship, looking hurt and a little displeased. "Why, the bishop was saying to me yesterday that never before had the arguments against the vital truths of Christianity been so forcibly refuted."
"May I presume that the bishop already agreed with him?"
Mrs. Ryder's full red lips closed firmly. Then she appealed to a small, dark man who sat near her. "Mr.Driscoll doesn't like Father Algarcife's sermons," she said. "I am disappointed."
"On the contrary," observed Driscoll, placidly, "I like them so well that I sent them to a missionary I am trying to convert—to atheism."
"But that is shocking," said Mrs. Dubley, in a low voice.
"Shocking," repeated Driscoll. "I should say so. Such an example of misdirected energy you never saw. Why, when I met that man in Japan he was actually hewing to pieces before the Lord one of the most adorable Kwannons I ever beheld. The treasures he had shattered in the name of religion were good ground for blasphemy. In the interest of art, I sought his conversion. At first I tried agnosticism, but that was not strong enough. He said that if he came to believe in an unknown god he should feel it his duty to smash all attempts to sculpture him. So I said: 'How about becoming an out-and-out infidel? Then you wouldn't care how many gods people made.' He admitted the possibility of such a state of mind, and I have been working on him ever since."
Mrs. Ryder looked slightly pained.
"If you only weren't so flippant," she said, gently. "I can't quite follow you."
Driscoll laughed softly.
"Flippant! My dear lady, thank your stars that I am. Flippant people don't go about knocking things to pieces for a principle. The religion of love is not nearly so much needed as the religion of letting alone."
"I am sure I shouldn't call Father Algarcife meddling," commented Mrs. Dubley, stiffly; "and I know that he opposes sending missionaries to Japan."
"As a priest he is perfection," broke in Mr. Layton, argumentatively.
"The chasuble does hang well on him," admitted Nevins in an aside.
Mr. Layton ignored the interruption. "As a priest," he went on, "there is nothing left to be desired. But I consider science entirely outside his domain. Why, on those questions, theScientific Weeklyarticles do not leave him a—a leg to stand on."
"The truth is that, mentally, he is quite inferior to the writer of those articles," remarked the short, dark gentleman in a brusque voice. "By the way, I have heard that they were said to be posthumous papers of Professor Huxley's. An error, of course."
At that moment the door was opened and Father Algarcife was announced. An instant later he came into the room. He entered slowly, and crossed to Mrs. Ryder's chair, where he made his excuses in a low voice. Then he greeted the rest of the table indifferently. He wore his clerical dress, and the hair upon his forehead was slightly ruffled from the removal of his hat. About the temples there were dashes of gray and a few white hairs showed in his heavy eyebrows, but eyes and mouth blended the firmness of maturity with an expression of boyish vigor. As he was about to seat himself at Mrs. Ryder's right, his eye fell upon Driscoll, and he paled and drew back. Then he spoke stiffly.
"So it is you, John?"
"I had quite lost sight of you," responded Driscoll.
There followed an awkward silence, which was abridged by Mrs. Ryder's pleasant voice.
"I like to watch the meeting of old friends," she said; "especially when I believed them strangers. Were you at college together?"
"Yes," answered Driscoll, his assurance returning. "At college—well, let me see—not far from twenty years ago. Bless me! I am a middle-aged man. What a discovery!"
"You were in the Senior class," observed FatherAlgarcife, almost mechanically, and with little show of interest. "You were the pride of the faculty, I believe."
"I believe I was; and, like pride proverbial, I ended in a fall. Well, there have been many changes."
"A great many."
"And not the least surprising one is to find you in the fold. You were a lamb astray in my time. Indeed, I remember flattering myself in the fulness of my egoism that I had opened other channels for you. But a reaction came, I suppose."
"Yes," said Father Algarcife, slowly, "a reaction came."
"And my nourishing of the embryonic sceptic went for naught."
"Yes; it went for naught."
"Well, I am glad to see you, all the same."
"How serious you have become!" broke in Mrs. Ryder. "Don't let's call up old memories. I am sure Mr. Nevins will tell us that those college days weren't so solemn, after all."
Nevins, thus called upon, glanced up from his roast, with accustomed disregard of dangerous ground.
"I can't answer for Mr. Driscoll," he responded. "His fame preceded mine; but the first time I saw Father Algarcife he had just won a whiskey-punch at poker, and was celebrating."
Mrs. Ryder colored faintly in protest, and Driscoll cast an admonishing glance at Nevins, but Father Algarcife laughed good-naturedly, a humorous gleam in his eyes.
"So the sins of my youth are rising to confound me," he said. "Well, I make an honest confession. I was good at poker."
Nevins disregarded Driscoll's glance with unconcern.
"An honest confession may be good for the soul,"he returned, "but it seldom redounds to the honor of the reputation."
"Happily, Father Algarcife is above suspicion," remarked Ryder, pleasantly. Then he changed the subject. "By the way, Mr. Nevins, I hear you have been displaying an unholy interest in the coming elections."
"Not a bit of it," protested Nevins, feelingly. "They might as well be electing the mayor of the moon for aught I care. But, you see, my friend Ardly has got himself on the Tammany ticket for alderman."
"What! You aren't working for Tammany?"
"Guess not. I am working for Ardly. The mayor is a mere incident."
"I wish he would remain one," announced the short, dark gentleman. "The Tammany tiger has gorged itself on the city government long enough."
"Oh, it has its uses," reasoned Driscoll. "Tammany Hall makes a first-rate incubator for prematurely developed politicians."
"And peoples the country with them," said Ryder. "I always look upon a politician as a decent citizen spoiled."
"And you really think they will elect Vaden?" asked the vivacious and pretty young woman at Layton's left. "It does seem a shame. Just after we have got clean streets and a respectable police force."
"But what does it matter?" argued Driscoll, reassuringly. "Turn about is fair play, and a party is merely a plaything for the people. In point of impartiality, I vote one ticket at one election and another at the next."
When Driscoll left, that evening, he joined Claude Nevins on the sidewalk, and they walked down the avenue together. For some blocks Nevins was silent, his face revealing rising perplexity. Then, as they paused to light cigars, he spoke:
"I believe Algarcife was a friend of yours at college?" he said.
Driscoll was holding his palm around the blue flame of the match. He drew in his breath slowly as he waited for a light.
"Yes," he responded, "for a time. But he has made his reputation since I knew him—and I have lost mine. By Jove, he is a power!"
"There is not a man of more influence in New York, and the odd part of it is that he does nothing to gain it—except work along his own way and not give a hang for opposition. I believe his indifference is a part of his attraction—for women especially."
"Ah, that reminds me," said Driscoll, holding his cigar between his fingers and slackening his pace. "I was under the impression that he married after leaving college."
Nevins's lips closed with sudden reserve. It was a moment before he replied.
"I believe I did hear something of the sort," he said.
When Mrs. Bruce Ryder turned back into the drawing-room, where Father Algarcife sat alone, the calm color faded from her face. "I am so glad," she said. "I have waited for this the whole evening."
She seated herself near him, resting one large, fair arm on the table beside her. With the closing of the door upon her guests she had thrown aside the social mask, and a passionate sadness had settled upon her face.
"I wanted to go to the sacristy on Friday," she went on, "but I could not. And I am so unhappy."
Brought face to face, as he often was, with the grinning skeleton that lies beneath the fleshly veil of many a woman's life, Father Algarcife had developed an almost intuitive conception of degrees in suffering. Above all, he had learned, as only a priest and a physiciancan learn, the measures of sorrow that Fate may dole out to the victim who writhes behind a smile.
The sympathetic quality in his voice deepened.
"Have you gained no strength," he asked, "no indifference?"
"I cannot! I have tried, tried, tried so long, but just when I think I have steeled myself something touches the old spring, and it all comes back. On Thursday I saw a woman who was happy. It has tortured me ever since."
"Perhaps she thought you happy."
"No; she knew and she pitied me. We had been at school together. I was romantic then, and she laughed at me. The tears came into her eyes when she recalled it. She is not a wealthy woman. The man she married works very hard, but I envy her."
"Of what use?"
She leaned nearer, resting her chin upon her clasped hands. The diamonds on her fingers blazed in the lamplight. "You don't know what it means to me," she said. "I am not a clever woman. I was made to be a happy one. I believe myself a good one, and yet there are days when I feel myself to be no better than a lost woman—when I would do anything—for love."
"You fight such thoughts?"
"I try to, but they haunt me."
"And there is no happiness for you in your marriage? None that you can wring from disappointment?"
"It is too late. He loved me in the beginning, as he has loved a dozen women since—as he loves a woman of the town—for an hour."
A shiver of disgust crossed her face.
"I know." He was familiar with the story. He had heard it from her lips before. He had seen the whole tragic outcome of man's and woman's ignorance—the ignorance of passion and the ignorance of innocence. He had seen it pityingly, condemning neither the onenor the other, neither the man surfeited with lust nor the woman famished for love.
"I cannot help you," he said. "I can only say what I have said before, and said badly. There is no happiness in the things you cry for. So long as self is self, gratification will fail it. When it has waded through one mirage it looks for another. Take your life as you find it, face it like a woman, make the best of what remains of it. The world is full of opportunities for usefulness—and you have your faith and your child."
She started. "Yes," she said. "The child is everything." Then she rose. "I want to show him to you," she said, "while he sleeps."
Father Algarcife made a sudden negative gesture; then, as she left the room, he followed her.
As they passed the billiard-room on their way up-stairs there was a sound of knocking balls, and Ryder's voice was heard in a laugh.
"This way," said Mrs. Ryder. They mounted the carpeted stairs and stopped before a door to the right. She turned the handle softly and entered. A night-lamp was burning in one corner, and on the hearth-rug a tub was prepared for the morning bath. On a chair, a little to one side, lay a pile of filmy, lace-trimmed linen.
In a small brass bedstead in the centre of the room a child of two or three years was sleeping, its soft hair falling upon the embroidered pillow. A warm, rosy flush was on its face, and the dimpled hands lay palms upward on the blanket.
Like a mounting flame the passion of motherhood illuminated the woman's face. She leaned over and kissed one of the pink hands.
"How quietly he sleeps!" she said.
The child stirred, opened its eyes, and smiled, stretching out its arms.
The mother drew back softly. Then she knelt down, and, raising the child with one hand, smoothed the pillow under its head. As she rose she pressed the blanket carefully over the tiny arms lying outside the cover.
When she turned to Father Algarcife she saw that he had grown suddenly haggard.
Father Algarcife withdrew the latch-key from the outer door and stopped in the hall to remove his hat and coat. He had just returned from a meeting of the wardens, called to discuss the finances of the church.
"Agnes!" he said.
A woman came from the dining-room at the end of the hall, and, taking his coat from his hands, hung it upon the rack. She was stout and middle-aged, with a face like a full-blown dahlia beneath her cap of frilled muslin. She had been house-keeper and upper servant to Father Speares, and had descended to his successor as a matter of course.
"Have there been any callers, Agnes?"
"Only two, sir. One of the sisters, who left word that she would return in the evening, and that same woman from Elizabeth Street, who wanted you to take charge of her husband who was drunk. I told her a policeman could manage him better, and she said she hadn't thought of that. She went to find one."
"Thank you, Agnes," replied Father Algarcife, with a laugh. "A policeman could manage him much better."
"So any fool might have known, sir; but those poor creatures seem kind of crazy. I believe they get you twisted with the Creator. They'll be asking you to bring back the dead next. Will you have dinner at eight?"
"Yes, at eight."
He passed into his study, closing the door after him. A shaggy little cur, lying on the hearth-rug, jumped up at his entrance, and came towards him, his tail cutting semicircles in the air.
"How are you, Comrade?" said the man, cheerfully. He bent over, running his fingers along the rough, yellow body of the dog. It was a vagrant that he had rescued from beneath a cable-car and brought home in his arms. His care had met its reward in gratitude, and the bond between them was perhaps the single emotion remaining in either life.
The room was small, and furnished in a manner that suggested luxurious comfort. It had been left thus by Father Speares, and the younger man, moved by a sense of loyalty, had guarded it unchanged. Over the high mantel one of Father Speares's ancestors looked down from a massive frame, and upon the top of the book-shelves lining the four walls there was the marble bust of another. Heavy curtains of russet-brown fell from the windows, and a portière of the same material hung across the door. In the centre of the room, where the light fell full upon it while it was yet day, there was a quaint old desk of hand-carved mahogany. On the lid, covered by a white blotter, lay a number of unanswered letters, containing appeals for charities, the manuscript of an unfinished sermon, and the small black-velvet case in which the sermon would be placed upon its completion. In the open grate a fire burned brightly, and a table bearing an unlighted lamp was drawn into the glow.
The dog, trembling with welcome, curled upon the rug, and Father Algarcife, throwing himself into the easy-chair beside the table, stretched his hands towards the blaze. They were thin and virile hands, and the firelight, shining behind them, threw into relief the lines crossing and recrossing the palms, giving to them the look of hieroglyphics on old parchment.His face, across which the flickering shadows chased, assumed the effect of a drawing in strong black and white.
Before the intense heat of the grate, a languor crept over him, a sensation of comfort inspired by the firelight, the warmth, and the welcome of the fellow-mortal at his feet. Half yawning, his head fell back against the cushion of the chair and his thoughts stirred drowsily.
He thought of the ruddy reflection dancing on the carving of the desk, of the text of the unfinished sermon, of a pamphlet on the table beside the unlighted lamp, and of a letter to his lawyer that remained unwritten. Then he thought of Mrs. Ryder in her full and unsatisfied beauty, and then of a woman in his congregation who had given a thurible of gold to the church, and then of one of the members of the sisterhood. He wondered if it were Sister Agatha who had called, and if she wished to consult him about the home of which she had charge. He feared that the accommodations were too crowded, and questioned if the state of the finances justified moving into larger quarters. In the same connection, he remembered that he had intended mentioning to the sacristan the insufficient heating of the church during services. From this he passed suddenly to the memory of the face of the woman who had died of cancer that morning. He recalled the dirt and poverty and the whimpering of the blear-eyed child with the chronic cold.
"What a life!" he said, and he glanced about the luxurious room calmly, half disdainfully. His eyes fell on the arm of the sofa which was slightly worn as if from friction, and he remembered that he never used it, and that it was the one on which Father Speares had been accustomed to take his daily nap. He shivered faintly, brushed by that near association with the dead which trivialities invoke.
It seemed but yesterday, that morning eight years ago, when he had fainted in the crowded square. He could close his eyes now and review each detail with the dispassionateness of indifference. He could see the flaming blue of the sky, the statue of Horace Greeley across the way, and the confused blur of the bulletin-board before theWorldbuilding. He could hear the incessant falling of the water in the fountain, and he could feel the old sensation of nausea that had blotted out the consciousness of place. He remembered the long convalescence from the fever that had followed—the trembling of his limbs when he moved and the weakness of his voice when he spoke—the utter vanquishment of his power of volition. He reviewed, almost methodically, that collapse into black despair and the mental and emotional stagnation that had covered all the crawling years. The fever, mounting to his brain, had left it seared of energy and had sapped the passion in his blood. It had consumed his old loves, with his old ambitions, and had left his emotions as sterile as his mind.
He remembered the struggle that had come, his resistance and his defeat, and he saw the joy in the older man's eyes when he had laid before him the remainder of his life—when he had said, "I no longer care. Make of me what you will."
The other had answered, "I will not take the sacrifice without sincerity or without the will of God."
"It is no sacrifice," he had replied. "It is a debt. If I can believe, I will."
And he had felt the words as a man half drugged by ether feels the first incision of the knife.
But he had not believed. Sitting now in his clerical dress, before the fire kindled by his ordination, he knew that it was his weakness, not his will, that had bent. Whether the motive was gratitude or despair he did not question. There had been a debt, and he had metit by the bond of flesh and blood. Yes, he had repaid it in full.
From the moment when he had been called into Father Speares's place he had striven untiringly to do honor to the dead. He had spared neither himself nor others. He had toiled night and day, as a man toils who loves a cause—or is mad. Though his heart was not in the work, his will was, and he was goaded to it by the knowledge that his intellect revolted. Because the life was loathsome to him he left not one detail unperformed. He had given a bond, and he fulfilled it, though his bond was a lie.
He lifted his head impatiently and looked before him. Then he smiled, half bitterly, in the flickering firelight. Across the drawn curtains at the window he could see the almost indistinguishable forms of people passing in the street. He felt suddenly that his whole existence was filled with such vague outlines, surrounded by gray dusk. The only thing that was real was the lie.
That was with him always, at every instant of the day. It lay in his coat, in his clothes, in his very necktie. It filled the book-shelves in the room and covered the closely written sheets upon his desk. It was in the cope and in the chasuble, in the paten and in the chalice, in the censer and in the Creed. Yes; he had sworn his faith to a myth, and had said "I believe—" to a fable.
The words of the Creed that he had chanted the day before rang suddenly in his ears:
"And in our Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God—"
"And in our Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God—"
What if he had lived a lie decently, what if he had fought a good fight for a cause he opposed, what if he,in the name of that cause, had closed his eyes and his nostrils to the things that repel and had labored to cleanse the sewer at his door, was it any the less a lie?
"Father, dinner is served."
He raised himself and stood upon the hearth-rug. The dog awoke and circled about his feet. Then together they passed into the dining-room.
For a moment he stood before his chair, silently making the sign of the cross. Then he sat down and unfolded his napkin. It was a simple meal, and he ate it in silence. When the soup was finished and the meat brought on, he cut up a portion for the dog at his side, placing the plate upon the floor. Then he pushed his own plate away, and sat looking into his glass of claret as it sparkled in the light.
The bell rang, and the maid went to answer it. In a moment she came back.
"It is the sister," she said. "She is in your study."
"Very well," Father Algarcife responded.
He laid his napkin upon the table and passed out.
Jerome Ardly turned into one of the entrances leading to the Holbein studios, ascended the long flight of stairs, and paused before a door bearing a brass plate, on which was engraved
CLAUDE NEVINS
As the knocker fell beneath his touch the door swung open, revealing Nevins in a velvet smoking-jacket rather the worse for wear, his flaxen hair standing on end above his wrinkled brow.
"Hello!" was his greeting, taking the end of a camel's-hair brush from his mouth. "So you've turned up at last. I've been doing your dirty work all the morning."
Ardly entered with a swing, closing the door after him. He had grown handsomer in the last eight years, though the world had gone less well with him than with Nevins. His large brown eyes still held their old recklessness, and there had come into his voice a constant ring of bravado.
"Plenty for us both," he responded, blandly, throwing his hat on the divan and himself into a chair. "My hand hath found its share to do, and I have done it with all my might. I've been interviewing a lot of voters in the old Ninth Ward. If Tammany doesn't make a clean sweep of that district I'm a—a fool."
"I wish you were not. Then you wouldn't be polling round these confounded politicians. It seems tome your own district is more than you can manage, but somehow you seem to be attending to everybody else's. What under heaven does any self-respecting man want to be alderman for, anyway? I wouldn't look at it."
"My dear fellow, view it as a stepping-stone to greater glory."
"A deuced long step downward."
Ardly laughed, then, stretching himself, looked idly at the opening in the ceiling through which the daylight fell. It framed a square of blue sky across which a stray cloud drifted.
The room was large and oblong, and the atmosphere was heavy with the odors of oil and turpentine. The furniture consisted of a number of covered easels, several coarse hangings ornamented in bizarre designs, and a divan surmounted by an Oriental canopy. Over the door there was a row of death-masks in plaster, relieved against a strip of ebony, and from a pedestal in one corner a bust of Antinous smiled the world-worn smile of all the ages.
"Temper seems soured," remarked Ardly, raising himself and turning to survey Nevins. "What's up?"
Nevins smiled mysteriously, then waxed communicative.
"Saw Algarcife to-day," he said, carelessly.
"Oh! What did he say for himself?"
Nevins laughed.
"Does he ever say anything?" he demanded. "I asked him what he thought of the elections, and he replied that they did not come within the sphere of his profession."
Ardly grinned.
"Guess not," he ejaculated. "Was that all?"
"Oh, the rest was about as follows: I went to his house, you know, and told him I wanted his spiritual certificate as to your modesty and worth. I also observedthat the newspapers had undertaken to throw moral search-lights indiscriminately around—"
"What did he say to that?" chuckled Ardly.
"He: 'Ardly can sustain them, I suppose.'
"I: 'Don't know, I'm sure. Would like to have your opinion.'
"He: 'It seems to me that you are in a better position to pass judgment on that point than I am.'
"I: 'But the standards are not the same, father.' (That 'father' ripped out as pat as possible.)
"He (rather bored): 'Oh, he is a fine fellow. I wish there were more like him.'"
"He is a fine fellow himself," retorted Ardly, loyally.
Nevins examined his brushes complacently. "If I were a Tammanyite," he said, "I'd post his certificate in the districts lying off the Bowery."
"It would be a shame," returned Ardly. Then he smiled. "By Jove! I believe if those districts knew Algarcife favored the little finger of a candidate, they would swallow the whole Tammany ticket."
"Queer influence, isn't it?"
"Well, I don't know. He works night and day over these people—and he knows how to deal with them. Leave it to the Bowery or to the ladies in his congregation, and he might turn this government into a despotism without a single dissenting vote."
"I believe you're right. By the way, you know he gave me that portrait of Father Speares to do for the church."
"Glad to hear it. But I never understood his conversion, somehow."
"Oh, I don't know. Men change like that every day."
"But not for logic. I say, it happened shortly after Mariana left, didn't it?"
"I think so."
"Heard anything of her?"
Nevins shook his head.
"Only what you know already," he answered.
"Deuced little, then."
"She came back, you know that, and went out West for a divorce. Then she married an ass of an Englishman, named the Honorable Cecil somebody."
"Good Lord! You've known that all these years?"
"Pretty nearly."
"Why in the devil didn't you tell me before?"
Nevins shrugged his shoulders. "My dear fellow, I don't feel the necessity to confide to you the secrets of my bosom."
"I call that a sneak."
"Why couldn't you find it out for yourself?"
"Because I don't go round diving into other people's affairs."
"Neither do I," responded Nevins, with dignity.
"How did you know, then?"
"It just came to me."
"Humph!" retorted Ardly, suspiciously.
Nevins squeezed a trifle of white-lead on his palette. Then he rose and drew the cord attached to the shade beneath the skylight. After which he stood to one side, studying the canvas with half-closed eyes, and shaking his dissatisfied head. As he returned to his seat he brushed the mouth of a tube of paint with his trousers, and swore softly. At last he spoke.
"I know something else," he volunteered, cautiously.
"About Mariana?"
"Yes."
"Let's have it, man."
Nevins laid his palette aside, and, seating himself astride the back of a chair, surveyed Ardly impressively.
"I can't see that there is any use," he remarked.
Ardly threw the end of a cigar at him and squared up wrathfully. "Are you a damned fool or a utilitarian?" he demanded.
"She left the Honorable somebody," said Nevins, slowly.
"By Jove! what a woman!"
"She came to America."
"You don't say so!"
"She is in New York."
"What!"
Ardly left his chair and straightened himself against the mantel.
"How do you know?" he asked.
"I have seen her."
"Seen her!"
"Her photograph," concluded Nevins, suavely.
"Where?"
"In Ponsonby's show-case, on Fifth Avenue, near Thirtieth Street."
"How do you know it is she?"
"Well, I'll be damned! Don't I know Mariana?"
"Is it like her?"
"It is a gem; but you know she always photographed well. She knew how to pose."
"Has she changed?"
"Fatter, a trifle; fairer, a trifle; better groomed, a great deal—older and graver, I fancy."
"Well, I never!" said Ardly, and he whistled a street song between half-closed lips.
Nevins spoke again.
"She is a kind of rage with a lot of club-men," he said, "but the women haven't taken her up. I heard Mrs. Ryder call her an adventuress. But Layton told me Ryder was mad about her."
"Queer creatures, women," said Ardly. "They have a margin of morality, and a woman's virtue is determined by its difference in degree from the lowest stageworth cultivating. They imagine her not worth cultivating, I suppose."
"Oh, Mariana is all right," rejoined Nevins. Then he went on, reflectively: "Odd thing about it is her reputation for beauty. Judge her calmly, and she isn't even pretty."
"But who could judge her calmly?" responded Ardly. He picked up his hat and moved towards the door. "Well, I'll be off," he said.
"To the club?"
"No, just a little stroll down the avenue."
Nevins smiled broadly.
"Don't forget that Ponsonby's window-case is on the avenue," he remarked, placidly.
"Oh; so it is!"
Ardly went out into the crisp sunshine, a rising glow in his face. He walked briskly, with an almost impatient buoyancy. Near Thirtieth Street he stopped before the window-case and looked in.
From a square of gray card-board Mariana smiled at him, the aureole of her hair defined against a dark background. For a moment he stared blankly, and then an expression of hunger crept into his eyes—the hunger of one who has never been satisfied.
She was fairer, older, graver, as Nevins had said. There was a wistful droop in her pose, and in the splendor of her half-closed eyes there was something the old Mariana had never known—something left by the gathering of experience and the memory of tears.
He turned abruptly away, his face darkening and the buoyancy failing his step. He knew suddenly that the world was very stale and flat, and politics unprofitable. He crossed to Broadway and a few blocks farther down met Father Algarcife, who stopped him.
"Nevins was talking to me about you this morning," he said. "And so you are taking the matter seriously."
"As seriously as one takes—castor-oil."
The other smiled.
"Why, I thought you liked the chase."
"Like it! My dear sir, life is not exactly a question of one's likes or dislikes."
Father Algarcife looked at him with intentness.
"What! has not the world served you well?" he asked.
Ardly laughed.
"As well as a flute serves a man who doesn't know how to play it," he answered. "I am a master of discords."
"And so journalism didn't fit you?"
"Oh, journalism led to this. I did the chief a good turn or two, and he doesn't forget."
"I see," said Father Algarcife. Then he laughed. "And here is the other side," he added. Across the street before them hung a flaunting banner of white bunting, ornamented in red letters. Half mechanically his eyes followed the words:
SAMUEL J. SLOANE SAYS,
If I am elected Mayor, the government of New York will be conducted upon the highest plane of
EFFICIENCY! JUSTICE! AND RIGHT!
The wind caught the bunting and it swelled out as if inflated by the pledges it bore.
Ardly laughed cynically.
"I wish he'd drop a few hints to Providence," he remarked. "It is certainly a plane upon which the universe has never been conducted."
Father Algarcife walked on in silence, making his way along the crowded street with a slow yet determined step. The people who knew him turned to look after him, and those who did not stepped from before his way, moved by the virile dignity in his carriage,which suggested a man possessed by an absorbing motive.
Ardly looked a little abashed, and laughed half apologetically.
"I have been in harness all my life," he said, "and now I'm doing a little kicking against the traces."
A boyish humor rushed to the other's lips.
"In that case, I can make but one recommendation," he replied: "if you kick against the traces—kick hard."
He drew out his watch and paused a moment as if in doubt.
"Yes, I'll go to the hospital," he said; "there is a half-hour before luncheon," and he turned into East Twentieth Street on his way to Second Avenue. When he reached the hospital, he entered the elevator upon the first floor and ascended to the babies' ward. As he stepped upon the landing, a calm-faced nurse in a fresh uniform passed him, holding a glass of milk in her white, capable hand.
His eyes brightened as he saw her, and under the serene system of the place he felt a sense of restfulness steal over him like warmth.
"How is my charge?" he asked.
A ripple of tenderness crossed the nurse's lips as she answered:
"He has been looking for you, and he is always better on the days that you come."
She passed along the hall and entered a large room into which the daylight fell like a bath of sunshine. In the centre of the room there was a tiny table around which a dozen children were sitting in small white chairs. Despite the bandaged heads and the weak limbs, there was no sign of suffering. It was all cheerfulness and sunshine, as if the transition from a tenement-house room to space and air had unfolded the shrunken little bodies into bloom.
In a cot near a window, where the sunlight flashedacross the cover, a boy of three or four years lay with a strap beneath his small pink wrapper, fastening him to a board of wood. At the head of the bed was printed the name, and below:
As he saw the priest he stretched out his pallid little hands with a gurgle of welcome, merriment overflowing his eyes.
Father Algarcife took the hands in his and sat down beside the cot. Since entering the room he seemed to have caught something of the infant stoicism surrounding him, for his face had lost its strained pallor and the lines about his mouth had softened.
"So it is a good day," he said. "The little man is better. He has been on the roof-garden."
The child laughed.
"It ith a good day," he made answer. "There ith the woof-garden and there ith ithe-cream."
"And which is the best?"
"Bofe," said the child.
"That's right, little soldier; and what did you do in the garden?"
The child clapped his hands.
"I played," he responded; "an' I'm goin' to play ball on my legs when I mend."
One of the nurses came and stood for a moment at the foot of the bed. "He has learned a hymn for you," she said. "He is teaching the other children to sing—aren't you, baby?"
"Yeth."
"And you'll sing for the father?"
The child's mouth quivered with pleasure and his eyes gleamed. Then his gay little voice rang out in a shrill treble:
He ended with a triumphant little gasp and lay smiling at the sunshine.
A quarter of an hour later Father Algarcife returned to the street. It was Friday, and at two o'clock he was to be in the sacristy, where it was his custom to receive the members of his parish. It was the most irksome of his duties, and he fulfilled it with a repugnance that had not lessened with time. Now it represented even a greater strain than usual. He had been soothed by his visit to the hospital, and he dreaded the friction of the next few hours—the useless advice delivered, the trivialities responded to, the endless details of fashionable foibles that would be heard. He wondered, resentfully, if there were not some means by which this office might be abolished or delivered into the hands of an assistant. Then his eyes shot humor as he imagined Miss Vernish, Mrs. Ryder, or a dozen others consenting to receive spiritual instruction from a lesser priest with a snub-nose.
As he passed a book-shop in Union Square, a man reading the posters upon the outside attracted his notice.
"Oh, I say, Mr. Algarcife!"
He stopped abruptly, recognized the speaker, and nodded.
The other went on with a heated rush of words.
"Those are fine things of yours, those sermons. I congratulate you."
"Thank you."
"Yes, they are fine. But, I say, you got the better of theScientific Weeklywriter. It was good."
"I don't know," responded Father Algarcife. "It is a good deal in the way you look at it, I suppose."
"Not at all. I am not prejudiced—not in the least—never knew anybody less so. But he isn't your equal in controversy, by a long shot."
A sudden boyish laugh broke from Father Algarcife—a laugh wrung from him by the pressure of an overwhelming sense of humor. "I don't think it is a question of equality," he replied, "but of points of view."
The next afternoon Ardly burst into Nevins's studio without knocking, and paused in the centre of the floor to give dignity to his announcement.
"I have seen her," he said.
Nevins, who was stretched upon the divan, with his feet in the air and a cigarette in his mouth, rolled his eyes indolently in Ardly's direction.
"My dear fellow," he returned, "am I to presume that the pronoun 'her' refers to an individual or to a sex?"
"Don't be an ass," retorted Ardly. "I tell you I've seen Mariana."
Nevins turned upon his side and removed the cigarette from his lips.
"Where?" he responded, shortly.
"She was coming out of Thorley's. She wore an acre of violets. She has a footman in livery."
"How do you know it was she?"
"Well, I'll be damned! Don't I know Mariana?"
Nevins sat up and rested his head in his hands.
"How did she look?" he asked.
"Stunning. She has an air about her—"
"Always had."
"Oh, a new kind of air; the way a woman moves when she is all silk on the wrong side."
Nevins nodded.
"Speak to you?"
"I didn't give her a chance," returned Ardly, gloomily. "What's the use?"
The knocker rose and fell, and Mr. Paul entered, as unaltered as if he had stepped aside while the eight years slid by.
Nevins greeted him with a slight surprise, for they had drifted different ways.
"Glad to see you," he said, hospitably; "but this is an unusual honor."
"It is unusual," admitted Mr. Paul, seating himself stiffly on the edge of the divan.
"I am afraid to flatter myself with the hope that a whisper of my spreading fame has brought you," continued Nevins, nodding affably.
Mr. Paul looked up absently. "I have heard no such rumor," he replied, and regarded the floor as if impressed with facts of import.
"Perhaps it is your social charm," suggested Ardly; "or it may be that in passing along Fifty-fifth Street he felt my presence near."
Nevins frowned at him and lighted a fresh cigarette.
"I hope you are well, Mr. Paul," he remarked.
Mr. Paul looked up placidly.
"I may say," he returned, "that I am never well."
"Sorry to hear it."
There was a period of silence, which Mr. Paul broke at last in dry tones.
"I have occasion to know," he announced, "that the young woman whom we knew by the name of Mariana, to which I believe she had no legal title, has returned to the city."
Nevins jumped. "You don't say so!" he exclaimed.
"My information," returned Mr. Paul, "was obtained from the elevator boy who took her to the apartment of Miss Ramsey."
"Did she go to see Miss Ramsey?" demanded Nevins and Ardly in a breath.
Mr. Paul shook his head.
"I do not know her motive," he said, "but she has taken Miss Ramsey away. For three days we have had no news of her."
The knocker fell with a decisive sound. Nevins rose, went to the door, and opened it. Then he started back before the apparition of Mariana.
She was standing near the threshold, her hand raised as when the knocker had fallen, her head bent slightly forward.
With an impulsive gesture she held out her gloved hands, her eyes shining.
"Oh, I am so glad!" she said.
Nevins took her hands in his and held them while he looked at her. She was older and graver and changed in some vital way, as if the years or sorrow had mellowed the temperament of her youth. There was a deeper thrill to her voice, a softer light in her eyes, and a gentler curve to her mouth, and over all, in voice and eyes and mouth, there was the shadow of discontent.
She wore a coat of green velvet, with ruffles of white showing at the loosened front, where a bunch of violets was knotted, and over the brim of her hat a plume fell against the aureole of her hair.
"I am so glad," she repeated. Then she turned to Ardly with the same fervent pressure of the hands.
"It is too good to be true," she went on. "It is like dropping back into girlhood. Why, there is dear Mr. Paul!"
Mr. Paul rose and accepted the proffered hands.
"You have fattened, madam," he remarked, with a vague idea that she had in some way connected herself with a title.
Mariana's old laugh pealed out.
"Why, he is just as he used to be," she said, glancing brightly from Ardly to Nevins in pursuit of sympathy. "He hasn't changed a bit."
"The changes of eight years," returned Mr. Paul, "are not to be detected by a glance."
Mariana nodded smilingly and turned to Nevins.
"Now let me look atyou," she said. "Come under the light. Ah! you haven't been dining at The Gotham."
"Took my last dinner there exactly six years ago next Thanksgiving Day," answered Nevins, cheerfully. "Turkey and pumpkin-pie."
She turned her eyes critically on Ardly.
"Well, he has survived his sentiment for me," she said.
Ardly protested.
"I don't keep that in the heart I wear on my sleeve," he returned. "You would need a plummet to sound the depths, I fancy."
Mariana blushed and laughed, the faint color warming the opaline pallor of her face. Then she glanced about the room.
"So this is the studio," she exclaimed, eagerly—"the studio we so often planned together—and there is the divan I begged for! Ah, and the dear adorable 'Antinous.' But what queer stuff for hangings!"
"If you had sent me word that you were coming," returned Nevins, apologetically, passing his hands over his hair in an endeavor to make it lie flat, "I'd have put the place to rights, and myself too."
"Oh, but I wanted to see you just as you are every day. It is so home-like—and what a delightful smell of paint! But do you always keep your boots above the canopy? They spoil the effect somehow."
"I tossed them up there to get rid of them," explained Nevins. "But tell me about yourself. You look as if you had just slid out of the lap of luxury."
"Without rumpling her gown," added Ardly.
"I was about to observe that she seemed in prosperous circumstances," remarked Mr. Paul.
"Oh, I am," responded Mariana. "Stupidly prosperous. But let me look at the paintings first, then I'll talk of myself. What is on the big easel, Mr. Nevins?"
"That's a portrait," said Nevins, drawing the curtain aside and revealing a lady in black. "I am only a photographer in oils. I am painting everybody's portrait."
"That means success, doesn't it? And success means money, and money means so many things. Yes, that's good. I like it."
Nevins smiled, enraptured.
"You were the beginning," he said. "It was the painting of you and—and the blue wrapper that did it. It gave me such a push uphill that I haven't stood still since."
The wistfulness beneath the surface in Mariana's eyes deepened suddenly. Her manner grew nervous.
"Oh yes," she said, turning away. "I remember."
Mr. Paul, who had watched her gloomily, with traces of disapprobation in his gaze, took his leave with a stilted good-bye, and Mariana threw herself upon the divan, while Ardly and Nevins seated themselves on footstools at her feet and looked into her eyes.
"I want to hear all—all," she said. "Are you happy?"
"Are you?" asked Ardly.
She shook her head impatiently. "I? Oh yes," she answered. "I have clothes, and a carriage, and even a few jewels."
She slipped the long glove from her hand, which came soft and white from its imprisonment, with the indentation of the buttons on the supple wrist. She held up her fingers, where a blaze of diamonds ran. Then she smiled.