According to the theory that vices are but virtues run to seed, moderation was the dominant characteristic of Anthony Algarcife. At the time of his meeting with Mariana, his natural tendencies, whatever they may have been, were atrophied in the barren soil of long self-repression. It is only when one is freed from the prejudices engendered by the play of the affections that one's horizon is unbroken by a vision of the objects in the foreground, and the forest is no longer lost in consideration of the trees.
And it was under the spell of this moderation that Mariana had fallen. Her own virtues were of that particular quality of which the species is by no means immutable, and of which the crossing often produces an opposite variety, since a union of negative virtues has not infrequently begotten a positive vice. But Mariana's character, of which at that time even the verdict of society had not deprived her, possessed a jewel in its inconsistency. Her very faults were rendered generous by their vivacity, and redeemed her from inflexibility, that most unforgivable trait in womanhood, which, after all, is merely firmness crystallized. And as the lack of formativeness in Mariana left her responsive to the influences beneath which she came, so the anger of yesterday was tempered into the tenderness of to-day, and her nature modified by the changes rung upon her moods.
So far, the influence of Anthony had worked for good. The girl was startled at the wave of gentlenesswhich pervaded her. With a sudden fervor she strained towards an indistinct ideal of goodness, an ideal borrowed in its sanctity from a superficial study of Thomas à Kempis, and in its unreality from the faded recollection of certain Sunday-school literature read in her childhood. She aspired to be good almost as much as she had once aspired to be famous, and set about it with quite as unprincipled an abandon. But her ambition for holiness was ill-timed. An excess of virtue is often as disastrous a form of dissipation as an excess of vice, and the wreck of one's neighbor's peace of mind no less to be deplored than the wreck of one's own physique. For a fool may jog shoulder to shoulder with a comfortable sinner, but it takes a philosopher to support the presence of an unmitigated saint.
So it was as well that Mariana's aspirations were short-lived. She confessed them to Anthony, and they were overruled.
"My dear girl," he said, "stop fasting, and don't wear away your knees at prayer. All the breath in your body isn't going to affect the decision of Omniscience. The only duty you owe to the universe is to scatter as much pleasure in life as you can. Eat good red beef and ward off anæmia, and give the time you have wasted in devotions to exercise and fresh air. If we are all doomed to hell, you can't turn the earth out of its track by bodily maceration. Evil plus evil doesn't equal good."
Mariana ceased praying and went out to walk. She was conscious of strange quickenings of sympathy. She loved the world and the people that passed her and the children laughing in the gutter. She bought a pot of primroses from the flower-stall at the corner, and, having spent a week's car-fare, walked a couple of miles in the sun to carry them to a rheumatic old lady who had once been kind to her. With patient good-humor she sat an hour in the sick-room, and,when she left, the rheumatic old lady kissed and blessed her.
The praise stirred her pulses with pleasure. She wondered if she might not become a Sister of Charity and spend her life in ministering to others, and when a ragged boot-black in the street begged for a dime she gave him the money she had saved for a pair of gloves, and glorified the sacrifice by the smile of a Saint Elizabeth. She felt that she would like to give some one the coat from her back, and, as she passed in and out of the crowd around her, her heart stirred in imaginative sympathy for humanity. That vital recognition of the fellowship of man which is as transient as it is inspiring, uplifted her. She wished that some one from the crowd would single her out, saying, "I am wretched, comfort me!" or, "I am starving, feed me!"
But no one did so. They looked at her with indifferent eyes, and her impulses recoiled upon themselves. At that moment she felt capable of complete self-abnegation in the cause of mankind, and even commonplace goodness possessed an attraction. But she realized that the desire to sacrifice is short-lived, and that, after all, it is easier to lay down one's life for the human race than to endure the idiosyncrasies of its atoms.
To us who adopt the proprieties as a profession and wear respectability for a mantle, unauthorized impulses in any form are to be contemned, and Mariana, flushed with generous desires, was as unacceptable as Mariana submerged in self.
After paying a couple of calls the girl's spirit of altruism evaporated. It was warm and close, and the sun made her head ache, while the fatigue from the unusual exercise produced a fit of ill-humor. She wondered why she had left her room, and then looked at her soiled gloves and regretted her encounter withthe boot-black. The recollection of the pot of primroses and the week's car-fare caused her even more annoyance.
A block from The Gotham she ran upon Jerome Ardly, and her irritation vanished.
"Hello!" he ejaculated, "you are as white as a sheet. Too much September sun. Had luncheon?"
"Yes," responded Mariana; and she added, plaintively, "I am so tired. I have walked myself to death—and all for nothing."
"Form of monomania?" he inquired, sympathetically. "Nothing short of arrant idiocy would take any one out for nothing on a day like this."
Mariana looked at him and laughed. "I have been paying calls," she said. "I went to see Mrs. Simpson and she told me all about the rights of women. It was very instructive."
"If they resemble the rights of man," remarked Ardly, "they are not to be seen, heard, or felt."
"Ah, but it is all the fault of men," responded Mariana; "she told me so. She said that men were the only things that kept us back."
Ardly laughed.
"And you?" he inquired.
"I! Oh, I agreed with her! I told her that if men hindered us we would stamp them out."
"The devil you did!" retorted Ardly. "I know of no one better fitted for the job. You will begin on your fellow-lodgers, I suppose. As if you had not been treading on our hearts for the last year!"
Mariana lowered her parasol and entered The Gotham. As she mounted the stairs she turned towards him. The time had been when the presence of Jerome Ardly had caused a flutter among the tremulous strings of her heart, but that had been before Anthony crossed her horizon. And yet coquetry was not extinguished. "Our?" she emphasized, smiling.
Ardly grasped at the hand which lay upon the railing, but Mariana eluded him.
"Why, all of us," he returned, with unabashed good-nature—"poor devils that we are! Myself, Nevins, Mr. Paul, to say nothing of Algarcife."
Mariana's color rose swiftly. "Oh, nonsense!" she laughed, and sped upward.
Upon the landing Mr. Nevins opened the door of his studio and greeted them.
"I say, Miss Musin, won't you come and have a look at 'Andromeda'?"
Mariana entered the studio, and Ardly followed her. In the centre of the room a tea-table was spread, and Miss Freighley, a smear of yellow ochre on the sleeve where she had accidentally wiped her brush, was engaged in brewing the beverage. Upon the hearth-rug Juliet Hill was standing, her tall, undeveloped figure and vivid hair relieved against a dull-brown hanging, and around the "Andromeda" a group of youthful artists were gathered.
"How delightful!" exclaimed Mariana, genially. She kissed Miss Freighley, and pressed the extended hands of the others with demonstrative cordiality.
"Oh, if I could only paint!" she said to Miss Freighley, in affectionate undertones. "If I could only go about with a box of brushes, without feeling silly, and wear a smudge of paint upon my sleeve without being dishonest." And she wiped Miss Freighley's sleeve upon her handkerchief.
"Thanks," responded that young lady, amiably; "but you can carry a music-roll, you know, which is much handier and a good deal tidier."
Mariana had turned to the "Andromeda." "Oh, Mr. Ponsonby!" she remarked, to one of the group surrounding it, "don't you uphold me in thinking the shadows upon the throat too heavy?"
Mr. Ponsonby protested that he would uphold herin any statement she might choose to make, so long as he was not expected to agree with her. Mariana appealed to Mr. Nevins, who declared that he would agree with her in any matter whatsoever, so long as he was not expected to change his "Andromeda."
Mariana frowned. "Mr. Ardly thinks as I do—now don't you?"
Ardly sauntered over to them.
"Why, of course," he assented. "That shadow was put on with a pitchfork. I am positively surprised at you, Nevins."
"On your conscience?" demanded Mariana.
"Haven't any," protested Ardly, indolently. "Left it in Boston. It is indigenous to the soil, and won't bear transplanting."
"Miss Ramsey brought hers with her," replied Mariana, with a smile. "It worries her dreadfully. It is just like a ball on the leg of a convict. She has to drag it wherever she goes, and it makes her awfully tired sometimes."
"A good Bohemian conscience is the only variety worth possessing," observed Mr. Nevins. "It changes color with every change of scene and revolves upon an axis. Hurrah for Bohemia!"
"Hear! hear!" cried Mariana, gayly. She lifted a glass of sherry, and, lighting a cigarette, sprang upon the music-stool. Mr. Ponsonby drew up a chair and seated himself at the piano, and, blowing a cloud of smoke about her head, Mariana sang a rollicking song of the street.
As she finished, the door opened and Algarcife stood upon the threshold. For a moment he gazed at the scene—at Mariana poised upon the music-stool with upraised arms, her hat hanging by an elastic from her shoulder, her head circled by wreaths of cigarette smoke, her eyes reckless. His look was expressive of absolute amazement. Innocent as the scene was inreality, to him it seemed an orgy of abandon, and there was not a man in the room who would not have understood Mariana at that moment better than he did.
"I beg your pardon, Nevins," he said, abruptly. "No, I won't come in." And the door closed.
But Mariana had seen his face, and, with a flutter of impulse and a precipitate rush, she was after him.
"Mr. Algarcife!" Her voice broke.
He turned and faced her.
"What is it?"
"You—you looked so shocked!" she cried.
She stood before him, breathless and warm, the smoking cigarette still in her hand.
"Throw that away!" he said.
She took a step forward, struggling like a netted bird beneath the spell of his power.
"How absurd!" she said, softly. The cigarette dropped from her fingers to the floor.
He laughed. His eyes burned steadily upon her. Before his gaze her lashes wavered and fell, but not until she had seen the flashing of latent impulse in his face.
"But you dropped it," he said.
"Yes."
"Why did you?"
Mariana made a desperate effort at her old fearlessness. It failed her. Her eyes were upon the floor, but she felt his gaze piercing her fallen lids. She spoke hurriedly.
"Because—because I did," she answered.
He came a step nearer. She felt that the passion in his glance was straining at the leash of self-control. She did not know that desire was insurgent against the dominion of will, and was waging a combat with fire and sword.
She put up her hands.
"You are my friend," she said. Her tones faltered. The haze of idealism with which he had surrounded her was suffused with a roseate glow. He caught her hands. His face had grown dark and set, and the lines upon his forehead seemed ineffaceable.
Mariana was conscious of a sudden uplifting within her. It was as if her heart had broken into song. She stood motionless, her hands closing upon his detaining ones. Her face was vivid with animation, and there was a suggestion of frank surrender in her attitude. He caught his breath sharply. Then his accustomed composure fell upon him. His mouth relaxed its nervous tension, and the electric current which had burned his fingers was dissipated.
At the other end of the corridor a door opened and shut, and some one came whistling along the hall.
"It is Mr. Sellars," said Mariana, smiling. "I recognize his whistling two blocks away, because it is always out of tune. He thinks he is whistling 'Robin Hood,' but he is mistaken."
"Is he?" asked Anthony, abstractedly. His mind was less agile than Mariana's, and he found more difficulty in spanning the space between sentiment and comic opera.
Mr. Sellars greeted them cheerfully and passed on.
"I must go," said Mariana. "I promised to dine with Miss Ramsey."
There was an aggrieved note in her voice, but it had no connection with Anthony. With the passing of the enjoyment of emotion for the sake of the mental exaltation which accompanied it, the dramatic instinct reasserted itself. She even experienced a mild resentment against fate that the emotional altitude she had craved should have been revealed to her in the damp and unventilated corridor of The Gotham apartment-house. At a glance from Anthony the resentment would have vanished, and Mariana have been sweptonce more into a maze of romanticism. But he did not look at her, and the half-conscious demand for scenic effects was unsatisfied.
"Yes," said Anthony, "it is late." His voice sounded hushed and constrained, and, as he stood aside to allow her to pass, he looked beyond and not at the girl.
She turned from him and entered her room.
Mariana found Miss Ramsey lying at length upon the hearth-rug in her tiny sitting-room, her head resting upon an eider-down cushion.
At the girl's entrance she looked up nervously. "I can't rest," she said, with a plaintive intonation, "and I am so tired. But when I shut my eyes I see spread before me all the work I've got to do to-morrow."
She sat up, passing her hand restlessly across her forehead. In her appearance there might be detected an almost fierce renunciation of youth. Her gown was exaggerated in severity, and her colorless and uncurled hair was strained from her forehead and worn in a tight knot upon the crown of her head. The prettiness of her face was almost aggressive amid contrasting disfigurements.
Miss Ramsey belonged to that numerous army of women who fulfil life as they fulfil an appointment at the dentist's—with a desperate sense of duty and shaken nerves. And beside such commonplace tragedies all dramatic climaxes show purposeless. The saints of old, who were sanctified by fire and sword, might well shrink from the martyrdom sustained, smiling, by many who have endured the rack of daily despair. To be a martyr for an hour is so much less heroic than to be a man for a lifetime.
But in Miss Ramsey's worn little body, incased in its network of nerves, there was the passionless determination of her Puritan ancestors. Life had been thrust upon her, and she accepted it. In much thesame spirit she would have accepted hell. Perhaps, in meeting the latter, a little cheerfulness might have been added to positive pain—since of all tragedies her present tragedy of unfulfilment was the most tragic of all.
Mariana knelt beside her and kissed her with quick sympathy.
"I can't rest," repeated the elder woman, fretfully. "I can't rest for thinking of the work I must do to-morrow."
"Don't think of it," remonstrated Mariana. "This isn't to-morrow, so there is no use thinking of it."
In Miss Ramsey's eyes there shone a flicker of girlishness which, had fate willed it, might have irradiated her whole face.
"I have been wondering," added Mariana, softly, "what you need, and I believe it is a canary. I will buy you a canary when my allowance comes."
For the girl had looked into her own heart and had read an unwritten law. She had seen sanctification through love, and she felt that a woman may owe her salvation to a canary.
"How could I care for it?" asked the other, a little wistfully. "I have no time. But it would be nice to own something."
Then they left the hearth-rug and ate dinner, and Mariana drove the overhanging cloud from Miss Ramsey's eyes. The desire to be first with all who surrounded her had prompted her to ingratiate herself in every heart that throbbed and ached within. The Gotham, from little, overworked Miss Ramsey to the smaller and more overworked maid who dusted her chamber.
After dinner, when Mariana returned to her room, she found a letter awaiting her. It was from her father, and, as was usual with his utterances, it was straight and to the mark.
"I have met with reverses," it stated, "and the family is growing large. In my present position I find it impossible to continue your allowance, and I think that, on the whole, your duty is at home. My wife has much care with the children, and you would be of service in educating them."
Mariana dropped the letter and sat motionless. In a flash she realized all that it meant. It meant returning to drudgery and hideous monotony. It meant returning to the house she hated and to the atmosphere that stifled her. It meant a colorless life of poverty and sordid self-denial. It meant relinquishing her art and Anthony.
With a rush of impulse she stepped out upon the fire-escape, the letter fluttering in her hand.
"Mr. Algarcife!" she called, softly.
As his figure darkened the lighted space between the window-sashes she went towards him. He faced her in surprise. "What is it?" he inquired, abruptly.
Mariana held out the letter, and then followed him as he re-entered his room.
"I cannot do it!" she said, passionately. "I cannot! I cannot!"
Without heeding her, Anthony unfolded the letter, read it and reread it with judicial composure; after which he folded it again, placed it in the envelope, and stood holding it in his right hand. The only visible effect it produced upon him was a nervous twitching of his thin lips.
"And what have you decided?" he asked, slowly.
Mariana interlaced her fingers impatiently. She looked small and white, and excitement caused her eyes to appear abnormally large. Her features quivered and her tone was tremulous.
"I will not go back," she protested. "I will not! Oh, I will not!"
"Is it so bad?" He still held the letter.
"Bad! It is worse than—than anything. If I had stayed there I should have gone mad. It was paralyzing me inch by inch. Oh, if you could only know what it is—a dusty, dirty little house, smelling of cabbage, a troop of screaming children, and quarrels all day long."
He met her outburst with a remonstrative gesture, but there was a mellow light in his eyes and his face had softened. As if resenting a voluntary restraint, he shook back a lock of hair that had fallen upon his forehead.
"But your father?"
Mariana looked at him as if he represented the bar of judgment and she were pleading her cause. She spoke with feverish conviction.
"Oh, he doesn't want me! If you only knew what a relief it was to him when I came away. Things were so much quieter. He likes his wife and I hate her, so we don't agree. There is never any peace when I am there—never."
"And the children?" His eyes met Mariana's, and again his lips twitched nervously. He held the check-rein of desire with a relentless hand, but the struggle told.
"They are horrid," responded Mariana, insistently. "They are all hers. If they had really belonged to me, I wouldn't have left them, but they didn't, not one. And I won't teach them. I'd rather teach the children of that shoemaker across the way. I'd rather scrub the streets."
Anthony smiled, and the tenderness in his eyes rained upon her. The fact that she had thrown herself upon his sympathy completed the charm she exercised over him.
Still he held himself in hand.
"You know of nothing that could call you back?" he asked.
"Nothing," answered Mariana. "I shouldn't like to starve, but I'd almost as soon starve as live on cabbage." Then she faced him tragically. "My father's wife is a very coarse woman. She has cabbage one day and onions the next."
The smile in Anthony's eyes deepened. "It would be impossible to select a more wholesome article of food than the latter," he observed.
But Mariana was unmoved.
"Before I left, it was horrible," she continued. "Whenever onions were served I would leave the table. My father's wife would get angry and that would make me angry."
"A congenial family."
"But when we get angry we quarrel. It is our nature to do so." She lifted her lashes. "And when we quarrel we talk a great deal, and some of us talk very loud. That is unpleasant, isn't it?"
"Very," Algarcife commented. "I find, by the way, that I am beginning to harbor a sympathy for your father's wife."
Mariana stared at him and shook her head.
"I wasn't nice to her," she admitted, "but she is such a loud woman. I am never nice to people I dislike—but I don't dislike many."
She smiled. Algarcife took a step forward, but checked himself. "We will talk it over—to-morrow," he said, and his voice sounded cold from constraint.
"I won't go back," protested Mariana. "I—I will marry Mr. Paul first."
He held out his hand, and it closed firmly over the one she gave him. "You will not do that, at all events," he said; "for Mr. Paul's sake, as well as your own."
Then he drew aside, and Mariana went back to her room.
Anthony recrossed the window-sill and paced slowlyup and down the uncarpeted floor. His head was bent and his gaze preoccupied, but there was composure in his bearing. He had sent the girl away that he might think before acting. Not that he was not fully aware what the result of his meditation would be, but that for six years he had been in training to resist impulse, and the habit was strong. But there are things stronger than habit, and emotion is among them. In a man who has neither squandered feeling in excesses nor succumbed to the allurement of the senses, passion, when once aroused, is trebly puissant, and is apt to sweep all lesser desires as chaff before the whirlwind. In the love of such a man there is of necessity the freshness of adolescence and the tenacity of maturity. When one has not expended lightly the fulness of desire, the supply is constantly augmented, and its force will be in proportion to the force of the pressure by which it has been restrained. Algarcife, pacing to and fro between his book-lined walls, felt the current of his being straining towards emotion, and knew that the dominance of will was over. In the realization there existed a tinge of regret, and with the rationality which characterized his mental attitude he lamented that the pulseless sanity of his past was broken. And yet he loved Mariana—loved her with a love that would grow with his growth and strengthen with his weakness. He bowed his head, and his hands clinched, while the edge of his blood was sharpened. He beheld her eyes, curtains veiling formless purity—he felt the touch of her hands, the breath of her lips—he heard the rustle of her skirts—and the virginal femininity of her hovered like an atmosphere about him.
Presently he crossed to the fire-escape, stepped outside, hesitated an instant, and then went to Mariana's window. The shutters were closed, but the light burned behind them.
"Mariana!" he called; and again, "Mariana!"
Through the slats of the shutters the figure of Mariana was visible in high relief against the brightness.
"What is it?" she asked, coming nearer.
He spoke slowly and with constraint.
"Mariana, you will not marry Mr. Paul."
She laughed. The sound was like wine in his blood, and constraint was shattered.
"Is there any obstacle?" she inquired.
"There will be," he answered, and his voice rang clear.
"What?" She was leaning against the shutters. He felt her breath upon his brow.
"You will marry me."
"Oh!" gasped Mariana, and was silent.
Suddenly he surrendered self-control. "Open the shutters," he said.
The shutters were unfastened, they swung back, and Mariana came out. She looked very young, her hair hung about her shoulders, and in the dim light her face showed small and white. For a moment they stood motionless, each dumb before the knowledge of the other's dominance. Anthony looked at her in heated silence. His face was pale, his eyes glowing.
"Mariana!" He did not move nearer, but his voice thrilled her like a caress. She shrank from him, and a heavy shadow fell between them.
"Mariana, you will marry me?" In the stillness following his words she heard the sharpness of his breathing.
"I—I am not good enough," said Mariana.
"My saint!"
As if impelled, she leaned towards him, and he caught her in his arms. Beneath them the noise of traffic went on, and with it the hunger and the thirst and the weariness, but they stood above it all, and he felt the beating of her pulses as he held her.
"Say you love me," he pleaded—"say it." His breath burned her forehead.
"Oh, don't you see?" she asked—"don't you see?"
She lifted her head and he took her hands and drew her from the darkness into the light and looked into her eyes. They shone like lamps illuminating an altar, and the altar was his own.
"Yes," he said; "but say it."
Mariana was silent for an instant, and when she spoke her voice was vibrant with passion.
"You are my love, and I love you," she answered. "And I?"
"The desire of my eyes."
She came nearer, laying one hand upon his arm. He did not move, and his arm hung motionless, but his eyes were hot.
"I am yours," she said, slowly, "for ever and ever, to have and to hold, to leave or to take—yours utterly."
The news of Mariana's engagement was received without enthusiasm in The Gotham. A resentment against innovations of so sweeping an order was visible in the bearing of a number of the lodgers, and Mr. Nevins was heard publicly expressing his disapproval. "I never got comfortably settled anywhere in my life," he announced, "that somebody didn't step in and disarrange matters. At the last place the head waiter married the cook, and now Algarcife is marrying Mariana. After our discovering her, too. I say, it's a beastly shame!"
Mr. Ardly was of one mind with him; so was Mr. Morris. Alone, of all the table, Mr. Paul stood firm upon the opposite side. An hour after the news was out he encountered Algarcife upon the stairs and smiled compassionately.
"I have heard with concern," he began, stiffly, "that you contemplate taking a serious step."
"Indeed?" returned Anthony, with embarrassment. "I believe I do contemplate something of the kind, but I had hoped to get it over before anybody heard of it."
"Such things travel fast," commented Mr. Paul, cheerfully. "I think I may say that I was in possession of the fact five minutes after your ultimate decision was reached. It is a serious step, as I have said. As for the young woman, I have no doubt of her worthiness, though I have heard contrary opinions—"
"Who has dared?" demanded Anthony.
"Merely opinions, my dear sir, and the right of private judgment is what we stand on. But, I repeat, I have no doubt of her uprightness. It is not the individual, sir, but the office. It is the office that is at fault."
Mr. Paul passed on, and upon the next landing Algarcife found Mr. Nevins in wait.
"Look here, Algarcife," he remonstrated, "I don't call this fair play, you know! I've had my eye on Mariana for the last twelve months!"
A thunder-cloud broke upon Anthony's brow. "Then you will be kind enough to remove it!" he retorted, angrily.
"Oh, come off!" protested Mr. Nevins. "Why, Mariana and I were chums before you darkened this blessed Gotham! She'd have married me long ago if I'd had the funds."
"Confound you!" exclaimed Anthony. "Can't you hold your tongue?"
Mr. Nevins smiled amiably and spread out his hands.
"No, I cannot," he answered, imperturbably. "Say, old man, don't get riled! You'll let me appear at the wedding, won't you?"
Algarcife strode on in a rage, which was not appeased by Ardly's voice singing out from his open door.
"Congratulations, Algarcife! You are a lucky dog! Like to change shoes."
Upon the balcony he found Mariana, with a blossom of scarlet geranium in her hair. She stretched out both hands and flashed him a smile like a caress. "You look positively furious," she observed.
Algarcife's sensitiveness had caused him to treat Mariana much as he would have treated a Galatea in Dresden, had one been in his possession. But Claude Nevins had annoyed him, and he spoke irritably.
"I wish you would have nothing to do with that fellow Nevins," he said.
"Why, what has he done?"
"Done? Why, he's an ass—a consummate ass! He told me he had his eye on you!"
Mariana's laugh pealed out. She raised her hand and brushed the heavy hair from his forehead. Then she tried to brush the lines from his brow, but they would not go.
"Why, he's going to give me a supper the night before our marriage," she said; "that is, they all are—Mr. Ardly, Mr. Sellars, and the rest. They made a pot of money for it, and each one of them contributed a share, and it is quite a large pot. We are to have champagne, and I am to sing, and so will Mr. Nevins. I wanted them to ask you, but Mr. Nevins said you'd be a damper, and Mr. Ardly said you would be bored."
"Probably," interpolated Anthony.
"But I insisted I wanted you, so Mr. Ardly said they would have to have you, and Mr. Nevins said they'd have Mr. Paul, if I made a point of it; but they thought I might give them one jolly evening before settling down, so I said I would."
"You will do nothing of the kind," retorted Algarcife.
"But they are so anxious. It will be such a dreadful disappointment to them."
"I will not have it."
"But I've done it before."
"Don't tell me of it. You want to go, and without me?"
"Of course I'd rather you should be there, but it is cruel to disappoint them," Mariana objected, "when they have made such a nice pot of money."
"But I do not like it," said Anthony.
Mariana laughed into his eyes. "Then you sha'n't have it," she said, and leaned against the railing and touched his arm with her fingers. "Say you love me, and I will not go," she added.
Anthony did not touch the hand that lay upon his arm. His mood was too deep for caresses.
"If you knew how I love you," he said, slowly—"if you only knew! There is no happiness in it; it is agony. I am afraid—afraid for the first time in my life—afraid of losing you."
"You shall never lose me."
"It is a horrible thing, this fear—this fear for something outside of yourself!" He spoke with a sudden, half-fierce possession. "You are mine," he said, "and you love me!"
Mariana pressed closer to his side. "If I had not come," she began, softly, "you would have read and worked and fed the sparrows, and you would never have known it."
"But you came." The hand upon the railing relaxed. "My mother was a Creole," he continued. "She came from New Orleans to marry my father, and died because the North was cold and her heart was in the South. You are my South, and the world is cold, for my heart is in you."
"I have wanted love all my life," said Mariana, "and now I have found it. I have thought before that I had it, but it was only a shadow. This is real. As real as myself—as real as this railing. I feel glad—oh, so glad!—and I feel tender. I should like to pray and go softly. I should like to make that old woman at the flower-stall happy and to freshen the withered flowers. I should like to kiss the children playing on the sidewalk. See how merry they look," and she leaned far over. "I should like to pat the head of that yellow dog in the gutter. I should like to make the whole world glad—because of you."
"Mariana!"
"The world is beautiful, and I love you; but I am sorry—oh, so sorry!—for the people in the street."
"Forget them, beloved, and think of me."
"But you taught me to think of them."
"I will teach you to think of me."
"That I have learned by heart."
"Mariana!"
They stood with locked hands upon the balcony, and the roar of the elevated road came up to them, and the old flower-woman put up her withered flowers and went her way, and the children's laughter grew fainter upon the air, and the yellow dog gnawed at a rock that it took for a bone; and the great, great wheel ground on, grinding to each man and to each dog according to his kind his share of the things written and unwritten in the book of life.
A week later they were married. Mariana had coveted a church ceremony, and Anthony had desired a registrar's office, so they compromised, and the service was read in Mr. Speares's study.
"I should have dearly liked the 'Lohengrin March' and stained-glass windows," remarked Mariana, a little regretfully, as they walked homeward. "It seems as if something were missing. I can't tell just what."
"What does it matter?" asked Algarcife, cheerfully. "A street corner and an organ-grinder would have answered my purpose, had he been legally empowered to pronounce the blessing. It is all rot, I suppose, but I'd face every priest and rabbi in New York if they could bind us closer."
He smiled at Mariana. His eager face looked almost boyish, and he walked with the confident air of one who is sure of his pathway.
"But they could not," added Mariana, and they both laughed, because they were young and life was before them.
They retained the rooms in The Gotham with the fire-escape outside the windows, though Anthony found that his income, after deducting a portion for Mariana's expenses, was barely sufficient. He had not realized before how complete was his reliance for existence upon the Bodley College. Even in the thrill of his first happiness there was a haunting vision of Mariana reduced to poverty and himself powerless. He endeavored to insure an independent livelihood by contributing semi-scientific articles to various reviews, but the work was uncongenial, and he felt it to be a failure. The basis of his mental attitude was too firmly embedded to yield superficial product, and he tasted the knowledge that, had he known less, he might have lived easier.
At this time his great work was laid aside, a sacrifice to necessity, and he spent his days and nights in unmurmuring toil for the sake of Mariana. He was willing to labor, so long as he might love in the intervals of rest.
As for Mariana, she was vividly alive. Beneath the warmth of emotion her nature expanded into fulfilment, and with fulfilment awoke the subtle charm of her personality.
"Have you seen Mariana?" inquired Nevins of Ardly one day. "If so, you have seen a woman in love."
Ardly smiled and flicked the ashes from his cigar.
"Is she?" he asked, cynically; "or is it that the froth of sentiment above her heart is troubled and she believes the depth of passion is stirred? I have lived, my dear fellow, as you probably know, and I have seen strange things, but the strangest of these is the way of a maid with a man."
"Be that as it may, she is charming," returned Nevins. "And Algarcife ought to thank his stars, though why she married him is a mystery I relegate to the general unravelling of judgment-day."
"She probably had sense enough to appreciate the most brilliant man in New York," concluded Ardly,loyally, as he took up a volume of Maupassant and departed.
And that Mariana did appreciate Algarcife was not to be questioned. She threw herself into the worship of him with absolute disregard of all retarding interests. When he was near, she lavished demonstrations upon him; when he was away, she sat with folded hands and dreamed day-dreams. She had given up her music, and she even went so far as to declare that she would give up her acquaintances, that they might be sufficient unto each other. For his sake she discussed theories which she did not understand, and accepted doctrines of which she had once been intolerant. That emotional energy which had led her imagination into devious ways had at last, she told herself, found its appropriate channel. Even the stringent economy which was forced upon them was turned into merriment by the play of Mariana's humor.
"Life must only be taken seriously," she said, "when it has ceased to be a jest, and that will be when one has grown too dull to see the point—for the point is always there."
"And sometimes it pricks," laughed Anthony.
In an up-town block, a stone's-throw west of Fifth Avenue, stands the Church of the Immaculate Conception. It is a newly erected structure of gray stone, between two rows of expressionless tenements, and, despite the aggressive finality emphasized in its architecture, wearing a general air of holding its ground by sheer force of stolidity.
The interior of the church is less suggestive of modernity, and bears, on the whole, a surface relationship to a mediæval cathedral. The purple light filtering through the stained-glass windows is, in its essential quality, a European importation, and the altar-piece is a passable reproduction of a painting of Murillo's.
More than fifty years ago the church, then an unpretentious building of red brick, endowed neither with rood-screen nor waxen candles, had called to its rectorship the Reverend Clement Speares, a youthful leader of the ritualistic element in Episcopalianism. Father Speares heard the call and accepted the charge, and within a dozen years he had succeeded in trebling the number of his congregation, and in exchanging the red-brick building for the present Church of the Immaculate Conception, with its mystic light of mediævalism.
The congregation, of that class who toil not, neither spin, but before whose raiment Easter lilies falter, was fashionable, and also wealthy. The single-hearted zeal which its priest had put into fifty years of service had failed to wean his flock from a taste for the flesh-pots.In return for the generosity with which they supported their place of worship and its appurtenances, they claimed the indefeasible right to regulate their own attire and to reserve their pews from the encroachment of aliens. They were willing to erect a mission chapel in the slums, but they submitted to no trespassing upon the exclusiveness of their accustomed preserves.
Father Speares, who, had his temporal power been in proportion to his ecclesiastical influence, would have thrown open the Holy of Holies to the beggar in the street, and have knelt with equal charity between the Pharisees and Publicans, resigned himself to the recognition of spiritual caste, and devoted his days to Fifth Avenue and his evenings to the Bowery.
To his honor be it said that he made no more valiant stand for the salvation of the one than of the other. A soul was a soul to him, and personal cleanliness a matter of taste.
He was a man of resolute convictions and unswerving purpose. If he did not possess eloquence of speech, he possessed sincerity of mind, which is quite as rare, and very nearly as effective. He had a benevolent countenance combined with a sympathetic manner, and the combination exercised a charm over those of his hearers who attended his church in the endeavor to narcotize troublesome nerves. Unconsciously, by his adoption of celibacy from the mother church, he had borrowed from the elder faith the powerful weapon of romanticism, exciting the imaginative qualities, while he emphasized the maxim of the right of private judgment by rejecting the dogma of papal infallibility.
But since the Church of the Immaculate Conception had risen into being with Father Speares, there was an Ishmaelitish rumor afloat that with Father Speares it would pass away. Father Speares himself was not insensibleto the danger, and with the fervor of an enthusiast he labored to perpetuate the ceremonials his soul loved. With the force of a revelation there was borne upon him the conception that on him and his successors rested the mission to impel the conservative wing of Episcopalianism into that assimilation to Roman Catholicism whose resultant is the Ritualistic movement. Unto this end he had spent more than fifty years of labor. At the close of the nineteenth century he stood a picturesque and pathetic figure, combating with a mediæval eloquence the advancing spirit of his time, a representative of the lost age of faith lingering far into the new-found age of rationalism.
When Anthony Algarcife, a young orphan, had been sent to him, he had taken the child into his confidence.
"I will help you," the boy had said, enthusiastically—"I will help you." And he rolled up his little shirt-sleeves in the desire to settle spiritual differences in the good old fashion of physical force.
Father Speares had smiled and patted him upon the shoulder. "Please God, you shall, my boy!" he had answered, and had made the child a white-robed acolyte, that he might ignite by youthful hands the fires of faith.
Anthony had been a disappointment, he had said, but of the bitterness of the disappointment he had made no mention. Beneath his teaching he had seen the young mind unfold and expand strenuously, and then, while his eager eyes were watching, he had seen it shoot from him and beyond his grasp, trampling his cherished convictions beneath ruthless feet.
"It is all rubbish," Anthony had declared in the first intolerance of his youth. "The mental world is filled with a lot of decaying theology, which has been accumulating for centuries. It remains for us to sweep it away."
"And you would sweep me with it," said Father Speares, a little bitterly.
"The ground must be cleared," returned Anthony. "You are sitting upon the rubbish, as a miser in Pompeii might have sat upon his gold while Vesuvius overflowed. It is wiser to flee and leave hoarded treasure to be ingulfed. That the rubbish was once sound theology, I grant, but it has crumbled, and its usefulness of a thousand years ago will not it save from the ash-heap of outgrown ideas to-day."
Father Speares sighed and set his lips. "The boy is young," he said, with the yearning self-deception of age. "It will pass, and he will return the stronger for his wandering."
But the event had not borne out his prophecy. It did not pass, and Anthony did not return.
"It is my head," he explained, half irritably. "There is a wall of scepticism surrounding my brain, through which only the toughest facts may penetrate. I am minus the faculty of credulity."
"Or reverence," Father Speares added, reproachfully. "You regard spiritual things as a deaf man regards sound or a blind man sight."
Anthony's irritation triumphed.
"Or as a man awake regards a dream," he suggested. "The film of superstition has cleared from my eyes, and I see. The truth is that I regard all religions exactly as you regard all except the one which you inherited. An accident of birth has made you a Christian instead of a Moslem or a Brahman, that is all."
"And a twist of the mind has made you an atheist."
"As you please—atheist, agnostic, sceptic, what you will. It only means that you offer me an irrational assumption, and I reject it. It is the custom of you theologians to fit ugly epithets to your opponents, whereas the denial of Christianity no moreargues atheism than the denial of Confucianism does. It merely proves that a man refuses to acknowledge any one of the gods which men have created, and that he leaves the ultimate essence outside his generalizations. Such a man has learned the first lesson in knowledge—the lesson of his own ignorance."
"And has missed the greater lesson of the wisdom of God."
Algarcife shrugged his shoulders.
"It is no use," he said; "I can't believe, and I wouldn't if I could."
So he had gone from Father Speares into the world. Virile, strenuous, and possessed with intellectual passion, he had closed the doors of his mind upon commonplaces, and with the improvidence from which mental stamina failed to redeem him had wedded himself to poverty and science.
Five years after leaving Father Speares's roof he returned with Mariana at his side.
"We have come to be married," he announced.
Father Speares gasped and suggested prudence. "It is unwise," he remonstrated—"it is utterly unwise."
"I agree with you," admitted Anthony. "It is unwise, and we know it; but there is nothing else to be done—is there, Mariana?"
Mariana looked into Father Speares's face and smiled.
"Of course you are right," she said, "and we are very foolish, but—but there really isn't anything else to do."
And Father Speares was silenced. He looked at the license a little ruefully, read the service, and sent them off with a benediction.
"God knows, I wish you happiness," he assured Mariana when she kissed him.
Several months later, meeting Algarcife on Broadway, he repeated the words.
"I am happy," returned Algarcife, emphatically. "Mariana is an angel."
"I am glad to hear it," said Father Speares, and he sighed irrelevantly. "A good woman is a jewel of rare value."
The term "good woman," applied to Mariana, gave Anthony a sense of unfitness. Mariana was certainly a jewel, but, somehow, it had never occurred to him to look upon her as a "good woman."
"She is very charming," he remarked, quietly.
Father Speares was regarding him critically. "You are not looking well," he said. "Is it work or worry?"
Algarcife shook his head impatiently. "I—oh, I am all right," he rejoined. "A little extra work, that's all."
"Your book?"
Algarcife's face contracted, and the harassed expression about his mouth deepened.
"No, not my book," he answered, hastily. "I've put that aside for a while. I am trying a hand at bread-winning."
"With satisfactory results, I hope."
Anthony's laugh was slightly constrained.
"Why, certainly! Am I the man to fail?"
"I don't know," commented Father Speares—"I don't know. I never thought of you in that light, somehow. But if I can help you, remember that you were once my boy."
Anthony held out his hand quickly, his voice trembling.
"You are generous—generous as you have always been, but—I am all right."
They parted, Algarcife turning into a cross street. He walked slowly, and the harassed lines did not fade from his mouth. He seemed to have grown older within the last few months, and the fight he was making had bowed his shoulders and sown the seeds of future furrows upon his face.
At the corner he bought a box of sardines and a pound of crackers for Mariana, who liked a late supper. Then he crossed to The Gotham and ascended the stairs.
He found Mariana in a dressing-sack of pink flannel, sitting upon the bed, and engaged in manufacturing an opera-bonnet out of a bit of black gauze and a few pink rose-buds. She was trying it on as he entered, and, catching sight of him, did not remove it as she raised her hand warningly. "Tell me if it is becoming before you kiss me," she commanded, pressing her thimble against her lips.
Anthony drew back and surveyed her.
"Of course it is," he replied; "but what is it, anyway?"
Mariana laughed and leaned towards him.
"A bonnet, of course; not a coal-scuttle or a lamp-shade."
Then she took it from her head and held it before her, turning it critically from side to side.
"Don't you think it might have a few violets against the hair, just above the left temple? I am sure I could take some out of my last summer's hat."
She left the bed and stood upon a chair, to place the bonnet in a box upon the top of the wardrobe. "As a scientific problem it should interest you," she observed. "I created it out of nothing."
Anthony caught her as she descended from the chair.
"As a possible adornment for your head it interests me still more," he replied.
"Because you haven't been married long enough to discover what an empty little head it is?"
"Because it is the dearest head in the world, and the wisest. But what a thriftless house-keeper, not to have set the table!" A door had been cut into his study, and he glanced through. "Do you think you are stillbelow Mason and Dixon's line, where time is not recognized?"
"I forgot it," said Mariana; "but there isn't any bread, so you must go after it. Oh, you didn't get sardines again, did you? I said potted ham—and it is really a very small chicken they sent us."
"Well, no matter. It might have been a chop. By the way, I met Mr. Speares—"
"Father Speares," corrected Mariana.
"Mr. or Father, he's a nice old chap, isn't he?"
"He's a saint," said Mariana. Then she grew serious. "If you could have gone into the Church—honestly, I mean—how pleased he would have been, dearest."
"Yes; but I couldn't, you know, and if I had I could not have married you. He is High Church, you see. Celibacy is his pet institution."
Mariana colored. "Then I am glad you didn't." She flung herself upon him; then, drawing back, added, wistfully, "But you wouldn't have been poor."
"Do you find it so hard?"
"I hate it—for you. You work so hard. And I can't help you."
"My beloved!"
"I mind it most for you. But, of course, I feel badly when the washer-woman comes and there isn't any money—and I should like to have some gloves—"
"You shall have them, my darling. Why didn't you tell me?"
Mariana leaned upon his breast and swept her loosened hair across his arm. "It doesn't matter very much," she answered. "If I were starving and you kissed me I should forget it." And she added, with characteristic inconsequence: "Only I haven't been out for several days because I didn't have any."
"You shall have them to-morrow. Is there anything else, dearest?"
"Nothing!" laughed Mariana.
She went to the mirror and began coiling her hair. From the glass her eyes met Anthony's, and she threw him a smiling glance.
"I have been reading one of your books," she said, pointing with the brush; "there it is."
Anthony lifted the volume from the bureau and grew serious. "Mill?" he observed. "It is a good start. Every woman should know political economy. I am glad it interests you."
"I haven't gone beyond the first page yet," returned Mariana, putting up both hands to fluff her aureole, and pausing to run her fingers over her eyebrows in the attempt to narrow them. "There was something in the first page about 'a web of muslin,' and, somehow, it suggested to me the idea of making that bonnet. Odd, wasn't it? And I am so glad I read it, for I am sure I should never have thought of the bonnet otherwise—and it is becoming."
"But you like Mill?"
"Oh yes," said Mariana; "I find him very suggestive."
Anthony and Mariana founded their life together upon well-worn principles. They accepted in its entirety the fallacy that love is a self-sustaining force, independent of material conditions.
"So long as we love each other," Mariana declared, "nothing matters."
And Anthony upheld this declaration. To Algarcife those first months of intimate association were inexpressibly fresh and inspiriting. That acute sense of nearness to Mariana supplied what had been a void in his existence, and he looked back upon the time he had spent without her as a colorless stretch of undifferentiated days.
And yet, with a feminine presence beside him, work was less easy. In the evenings, when Mariana followed him to his study and seated herself in a rocking-chair beneath the lamplight, he sometimes experienced a vague recognition of its inappropriateness. He found the old absorption to have grown intractable, and the creak of Mariana's rocker, or the low humming of her voice, was sufficient to surprise in him that repressed irascibility from which he had never been able to shake himself free. Even in the midst of his passionate delight in her, a profound melancholy would seize him at times, and he would find the cravings of his intellectual nature harassed by the superficial tenor of his daily employment. Again, as Mariana sat in the lamplight, her swift fingers busy with some useless bit of millinery, he would regard her with a sudden tighteningof his pulses, and a thrill of fear at the prospect of a coming separation. The droop of her head, the contour of her face where the bone of her chin was accentuated by thinness, the soft line of throat above the full collar, the nimbus of hair shining in the light, the fall of her skirt, the slender slippered feet, aroused in him a tumultuous sense of possession. He would turn from his writing to rest upon her a warm and magnetic glance, before which her lowered lashes would be lifted, her pensive lips break into a smile.
Then, again, the instinct for solitude, which his years of study had intensified, would reawaken, and the creaking of the rocker would act as an irritant upon his nerves.
It was at such a moment that Mariana had looked up and spoken, the bright inflection of her voice aggravating the interruption.
"Anthony!"
Algarcife turned towards her, his pen raised as if in self-defence.
"When did you begin to love me?"
The pen was lowered, Algarcife smiled. "In the beginning," he answered; then he frowned, his tone grew captious. "I can't, Mariana," he protested—"I really can't. I must get this work over."
"You are always working."
"Heaven knows, I am! If I weren't, we would starve."
"It is horrible to be poor."
"We don't improve matters by exclaiming over them. On the contrary, you will prevent my getting this article off to-night, and we will be a few dollars the poorer."
"You never talk to me. You are always working."
She spoke pettishly, with an impulse to exasperate.
"Mariana!"
Mariana threw aside her work and clasped her hands.Her face was upturned, her head supported by the back of the chair. He could see the violet shadow which rested like a faint suffusion where the heavy hair swept from behind her ear.
Suddenly her head was lowered, and the mellow lamplight irradiated across the pallor of her face.
"Of course I know you are working for me," she said, "but I had rather have less labor and more love."
"I love you as much when I am working for you as when I am shouting it in your ear."
"But I like to hear it."
"I love you. Now be quiet."
Mariana came and leaned over him. She put her arms about his shoulders and rested her head upon them. There was a sob in her voice. "Let me help you," she said. "It is so hard to sit still and do nothing, while you are killing yourself. Let me help you."
Anthony turned and caught her, and she lay limp and motionless in his embrace. He kissed her with sudden passion.
"You help me by living," he said, "by breathing, by being near me, by giving yourself to me unreservedly. Without you I lived but half a life—without you, now that I have had you, I should go to pieces—absolutely. I love you as a man loves once in a thousand years. But we must live, and I must work."
He released her and went back to his writing, while Mariana, in passionate elation, picked up Mill'sPolitical Economy, and fell to studying.
It was shortly after this that she sought to turn her own talents to financial results. With this end in view she invested her pocket-money in a yard or so of white linen and a mass of colored silks, and wove a garland of nasturtiums around a centre-piece intended to decorate a dinner-table. When it was finished she wasseized with a fit of sanguineness, and as she rinsed it in a dozen different waters to insure whiteness, she calculated what the annual products of her labor would amount to. "If I manage to do one a month," she remarked, pressing the centre-piece lightly between her moistened hands, "and say I get about fifteen dollars for each one, I should soon have quite a little income; twelve times fifteen is—how much, Anthony?"
"More than I am going to let you work for," replied Algarcife. "Your eyes have been red ever since you started that confounded table-cover. It is the very last."
Mariana placed one finger to her lips, and then applied it lightly to the iron she held in her hand. "I do hope I won't scorch it," she observed. "Oh, do give me that blanket! It must be ironed on a blanket to make the flowers stand out. Aren't they natural?"
She lifted her heated face and glanced at him for approbation.
"I feel like plucking them," returned Algarcife. "Don't tire yourself. Good-bye." And he passed into the next room and closed the door.
Mariana ironed the centre-piece, wrapped it in yellow tissue-paper, and carried it to an exchange for women's work around the corner. It was placed in a glass-case amid a confusion of similar articles, where it languished for the space of several months. At the end of that time she redeemed it.
The failure of the enterprise precipitated an attack of hysteria, which spent itself in Anthony's arms and left her resigned and exhausted.
"I can't do anything to help you," she observed, hopelessly. "I hoped to clear at least fifteen dollars from that centre-piece, and, instead, I lost five. I shall always be an encumbrance."
"You are my beloved counsellor."
"My love isn't of much use, and you never take my advice."
"But I like to listen to it."
Mariana rested her head upon his shoulder and closed her eyes.
"I am only a luxury," she said, "like wine or cigars, but it wouldn't be pleasant to dispense with me, would it?"
"It would be death."
She sighed contentedly, her hand wandered across his brow. There was a faint, magnetic force in her finger-tips which left a burning sensation like that caused by a slightly charged electric current.
"I made you marry me, you know," she remarked, complacently, "so I am glad you don't regret it."
"Nonsense," remonstrated Algarcife, his lips upon her hair, the warm contact of her body inducing a sense of nearness. "I married you by force. I quite took your breath away. If you had resisted, I should have had you whether or no."
"Oh, but I did make you," returned Mariana. "But there was nothing else to do. I couldn't possibly have gone home, and I did love you so distractedly."
"As you do now."
"As I do now. Of course I must have known that rushing to you that night with the letter was just like a proposal of marriage."
"It was, rather," concluded Algarcife.
"But you needn't have married me unless you wanted to," urged Mariana. "There was Mr. Paul—"
Anthony laughed. "I was a vicarious sacrifice," he declared, "to insure the peace of Mr. Paul."
The next day Algarcife received an unexpected sum of money, and they agreed to celebrate their rising fortunes by a night at the opera. It was "Tannhauser," and Mariana craved music.
"I am afraid it is improvident," Anthony, whom theopera bored, remarked, dubiously; then looking into Mariana's wistful face, he recanted. "It doesn't matter," he added. "A little extravagance won't affect the probability of future starvation. We will go."
And they went. Mariana wore her freshest gown and the little bonnet with the knot of violets above the left temple. She was in her gayest mood, which was only dampened in a slight degree by the odor of the benzine clinging to her newly cleaned gloves.
As she leaned against the railing in the fifth gallery, gazing plaintively down into the pit, she looked subtle and seductive—like a creation in half-tones, swept by fugitive lights and shadows. The pallor of her face was intensified, her radiant lips compressed, and the green flame in her glance scintillated beneath luxurious lashes. Anthony, fastening upon her contented eyes, wondered at the singular charm which she radiated. Small, slight, insignificant, and charged with imperfections as she was, her very imperfections possessed the fascination of elusiveness. Her radiance was intensified in the memory by the plainness succeeding it; the sensitive curve of her nostrils was heightened in effect by the irregularity of feature, and the angular distinctness of the bones of her chin emphasized the faint violet shadows suffusing the hollows. Had her charm been less impalpable it would have lost its power. The desire of beauty might have satiated itself in a dozen women, or of amativeness in a dozen others, but Mariana fascinated instinctively, and her spell was without beginning in a single attribute and without end in possession.
As she sat there in the fifth gallery, drinking with insatiable thirst the swelling harmony, her emotional nature, which association with Algarcife had somewhat subdued, was revivified, and she pressed Anthony's responsive hand in exaltation. The music reverberating round her brought in its train all those lurid dreamswhich she had half forgotten, and the dramatic passion awoke and burned her pulses. She felt herself invigorated, swept from the moorings of the commonplace, and subverted by the scenic intensity before her. She felt taller, stronger, fuller of unimpregnated germs of power, and, like an infusion of splendid barbaric blood, there surged through her veins a flame of color. With a triumphant crash of harmonious discord, she felt that the artistic instinct was stimulated from its supineness, and the desire to achieve was aglow within her. The electric lights beneath the brilliant ceiling, the odor of hot-house flowers, the music sweeping upward and bearing her on its swelling tide, acted upon her overwrought sensibilities like an intoxicant. She drew near to Anthony; her lips quivered.
"Oh, if it would last," she said—"if it would last!"
But it did not last, and when it was over Mariana pressed her hand to her brow like one in pain. The return to reality jarred upon her vibrant nerves, and she became aware of shooting throbs in her temples, and of the depressing moisture in the atmosphere.
"I am faint," she complained. "I must have something—anything."
"It is all that clashing and banging," responded Anthony. "What a relief silence is!"
They bought ale and cheese and crackers from a grocery at the corner, and carried the parcels to their room. Mariana let down her hair, put on her dressing-gown, and threw herself upon the hearth-rug. She felt weak and hungry. "If there were only a fire," she lamented regretfully, stretching her hands towards the register; after which she opened the paper-bags and ate ravenously.
In the night she awoke with a start and a sob. She reached out moaningly in the darkness. Her hands were trembling and the neck of her gown was dampand chill. "I believe I shall go mad," she said, desperately.
Anthony struck a match, lighted the candle, and looked at her. He laid a cool hand upon her forehead.
"What is it?" he asked. "Are you nervous? Have you been dreaming?"
"No, no," cried Mariana, rolling her head upon the pillow, "but I want music. I want art. There is so much that is beautiful, and I want something."
She wept hysterically. Anthony got up and made her a cup of tea, which she could not drink because it was smoked.
But on the morrow she was herself again. As she was arranging her hair she laughed and chattered gayly, and the effect of the previous evening was shown only in a tendency to break into song. Before drinking her coffee she turned to the piano and trilled an Italian aria, the fingers of one hand wandering over the key-board in a careless accompaniment.
During the day her buoyancy was unfailing. She took up her studies zealously, and the morning devoted to Mill was rich in results. Her acuteness of apprehension was a continual marvel to Algarcife's steadier perception, and he regarded with deference the quickness with which she grasped the general drift of unstudied social problems. An exaggerated example of feminine intuition he ascribed unhesitatingly to a profundity of intellectual ability. That Mariana was adapting herself to his theories of life, he recognized and accepted. There was relief in the thought that his influence over her was weightier than the appeal of her art. With adolescent egotism, he convinced himself that he was shaping and perfecting a mental energy into channels other than the predestined ones; and while Mariana was matured into a palpitant reflection of his own image, he believed that he was liberating an intellect enthralled by superficialities. But,in truth, the stronger force was assimilating to itself the weaker, and the comradeship existing in their love was perfect in smoothness and finish. The opinions which Anthony radiated Mariana reflected, and they presented to the world proof of a domestic unity complete in its harmony.