THEfire was burning low, and after Blackburn had thrown a fresh log on the andirons, he sat down in one of the big leather chairs by the hearth, and watched the flames as they leaped singing up the brick chimney. It was midnight—the clock in the hall was just striking—and a few minutes before, Angelica had gone languidly upstairs, after their belated return from a dinner in town. The drive home had been long and dreary, and he could still see the winter landscape, sketched in vivid outlines of black and white, under a pale moon that was riding high in the heavens. Road, fields, and houses, showed as clearly as a pen and ink drawing, and against this stark background his thoughts stood out with an abrupt and startling precision, as if they had detached themselves, one by one, from the naked forms on the horizon. There was no chance of sleep, for the sense of isolation, which had attacked him like physical pain while he drove home with Angelica, seemed to make his chaotic memories the only living things in a chill and colourless universe.
Though it was midnight, he had work to do before he went up to bed—for he had not yet given his final answer to Sloane. Already Blackburn had made his decision. Already he had worked out in his own mind the phrases of the letter; yet, before turning to his writing-table, he lingered a moment in order to weighmore carefully the cost of his resolve. It was not an age when political altruism was either mentally convincing or morally expedient, and the quality of his patriotism would be estimated in the public mind, he was aware, by the numbers of his majority. Sloane, he was sure, had been sounding him as a possible candidate in some future political venture—yet, while he sat there, it was not of Sloane that he was thinking. Slowly the depression and bitterness gathered to a single image, and looked out upon him from the pure reticence of Angelica's features. It was as if his adverse destiny—that destiny of splendid purpose and frustrated effort—had assumed for an instant the human form through which it had wrought its work of destruction.
"Well, after all, why should I decline? It is what I have always wanted to do, and I am right."
The room was very still, and in this stillness the light quivered in pools on the brown rugs and the brown walls and the old yellowed engravings. From the high bookshelves, which lined the walls, the friendly covers of books shone down on him, with the genial responsiveness that creeps into the aspect of familiar inanimate things. Over the mantelpiece hung the one oil painting in the room, a portrait of his mother as a girl, by an unknown painter, who drew badly, but had a genuine feeling for colour. The face was small and heart-shaped, like some delicately tinted flower that has only half opened. The hair lay in bands of twilight on either side of the grave forehead, and framed the large, wistful eyes, which had a flower-like softness that made him think of black pansies. Though the mouth was pink and faintly smiling, it seemed to him to express an infinitepathos. It was impossible for him to believe that his mother—the woman with the pallid cameo-like profile and the saintly brow under the thin dark hair—had ever faced life with that touching, expectant smile.
There had been a strong soul in that fragile body, but her courage, which was invincible, had never seemed to him the courage of happiness. She had accepted life with the fortitude of the Christian, not the joy of the Pagan; and her piety was associated in his mind with long summer Sundays, with old hymns played softly, with bare spotless rooms, and with many roses in scattered alabaster vases. Her intellect, like her character, he recalled as a curious blending of sweetness and strength. If the speculative side of her mind had ever existed, life had long ago hushed it, for her capacity for acquiescence—for unquestioning submission to the will of God—was like the glory of martyrdom. Yet, within her narrow field, the field in which religion reigned as a beneficent shade, she had thought deeply, and it seemed to Blackburn that she had never thought harshly. Her sympathy was as wide as her charity, and both covered the universe. So exquisitely balanced, so finely tempered, was her judgment of life, that after all these years, for she had died while he was still a boy, he remembered her as one whose understanding of the human heart approached the divine. "She always wanted me to do something like this," he thought, "to look forward—to stand for the future. I remember...."
From the light and warmth of the room there streamed the sunshine and fragrance of an old summer. After a hot day the sun was growing faint over the garden,and the long, slim shadows on the grass were so pale that they quivered between light and darkness, like the gauzy wings of gigantic dragon flies. Against a flushed sky a few bats were wheeling. Up from the sun-steeped lawn, which was never mown, drifted the mingled scents of sheepmint and box; and this unforgotten smell pervaded the garden and the lane and the porch at the back of the house, where he had stopped, before bringing home the cows, to exchange a word with his mother. The lattice door was open, and she stood there, in her black dress, with the cool, dim hall behind her.
"Mother," he said, "I have been reading about William Wallace. When I grow up, I want to fight kings."
She smiled, and her smile was like one of the slow, sad hymns they sang on Sunday afternoons. "When you grow up there may be no kings left to fight, dear."
"Will they be dead, mother?"
"They may be. One never knows, my son."
All the romance faded suddenly out of the world. "Well, if there are any left," he answered resolutely, "I am going to fight them."
He could still see her face, thin and sad, and like the closed white flowers he found sometimes growing in hollows where the sun never shone. Only her eyes, large and velvet black, seemed glowing with hope.
"There are only three things worth fighting for, my son," she said, "Your love, your faith, and your country. Nothing else matters."
"Father fought for his country, didn't he?"
"Your father fought for all three." She waited a moment, and then went on more slowly in a voice that sounded as if she were reciting a prayer, "This is whatyou must never forget, my boy, that you are your father's son, and that he gave his all for the cause he believed in, and counted it fair service."
The scene vanished like one of the dissolving views of a magic lantern, and there rose before him a later summer, and another imperishable memory of his boyhood....
It was an afternoon in September—one of those mellow afternoons when the light is spun like a golden web between earth and sky, and the grey dust of summer flowers rises as an incense to autumn. The harvest was gathered; the apples were reddening in the orchard; and along the rail fence by the roadside, sumach and Virginia creeper were burning slowly, like a flame that smoulders in the windless blue of the weather. Somewhere, very far away, a single partridge was calling, and nearer home, from the golden-rod and life-ever-lasting, rose the slow humming of bees.
He lay in the sun-warmed grass, with his bare feet buried in sheepmint. On the long benches, from which the green paint had rubbed off, some old men were sitting, and among them, a small coloured maid, in a dress of pink calico, was serving blackberry wine and plates of the pale yellow cake his mother made every Saturday. One of the men was his uncle, a crippled soldier, with long grey hair and shining eyes that held the rapt and consecrated vision of those who have looked through death to immortality. His crutch lay on the grass at his feet, and while he sipped his wine, he said gravely:
"A new generation is springing up, David's generation,and this must give, not the South alone, but the whole nation, a leader."
At the words the boy looked up quickly, his eyes gleaming, "What must the leader be like, uncle?"
The old soldier hesitated an instant. "He must, first of all, my boy, be predestined. No man whom God has not appointed can lead other men right."
"And how will he know if God has appointed him?"
"He will know by this—that he cannot swerve in his purpose. The man whom God has appointed sees his road straight before him, and he does not glance back or aside." His voice rose louder, over the murmur of the bees, as if it were chanting, "If the woods are filled with dangers, he does not know because he sees only his road. If the bridges have fallen, he does not know because he sees only his road. If the rivers are impassable, he does not know because he sees only his road. From the journey's beginning to its end, he sees only his road...."
A log, charred through the middle, broke suddenly, scattering a shower of sparks. The multitudinous impressions of his boyhood had gathered into these two memories of summer, and of that earlier generation which had sacrificed all for a belief. It was like a mosaic in his mind, a mosaic in which heroic figures waited, amid a jewelled landscape, for the leader whom God had appointed.
The room darkened while he sat there, and from outside he heard the crackling of frost and the ceaseless rustle of wind in the junipers. On the hearthrug, across the glimmering circle of the fire, he watchedthose old years flock back again, in all the fantastic motley of half-forgotten recollections. He saw the long frozen winters of his childhood, when he had waked at dawn to do the day's work of the farm before he started out to trudge five miles to the little country school, where the stove always smoked and the windows were never opened. Before this his mother had taught him his lessons, and his happiest memories were those of the hours when he sat by her side, with an antiquated geography on his knees, and watched her long slender fingers point the way to countries of absurd boundaries and unpronounceable names. She had taught him all he knew—knowledge weak in science, but rich in the invisible graces of mind and heart—and afterwards, in the uninspired method of the little school, he had first learned to distrust the kind of education with which the modern man begins the battle of life. Homespun in place of velvet, stark facts instead of the texture of romance! The mornings when, swinging his hoe, he had led his chattering band of little negroes into the cornfields, had been closer to the throbbing pulse of experience.
When he was fourteen the break had come, and his life had divided. His mother had died suddenly; the old place had been sold for a song; and the boy had come up to Richmond to make his way in a world which was too indifferent to be actually hostile. At first he had gone to work in a tobacco factory, reading after hours as long as the impoverished widow with whom he lived would let the gas burn in his room. Always he had meant to "get on"; always he had felt the controlling hand of his destiny. Even in those years of unformed motives and misdirected energies, he had beensearching—searching. The present had never been more than a brief approach to the future. He had looked always for something truer, sounder, deeper, than the actuality that enmeshed him.
Suddenly, while he sat there confronting the phantom he had once called himself, he was visited by a rush of thought which seemed to sweep on wings through his brain. Yet the moment afterwards, when he tried to seize and hold the vision that darted so gloriously out of the shining distance, he found that it had already dissolved into a sensation, an apprehension, too finely spun of light and shadow to be imprisoned in words. It was as if some incalculable discovery, some luminous revelation, had brushed him for an instant as it sped onward into the world. Once or twice in the past such a gleaming moment had just touched him, leaving him with this vague sense of loss, of something missing, of an infinitely precious opportunity which had escaped him. Yet invariably it had been followed by some imperative call to action.
"I wonder what it means now," he thought, "I suppose the truth is that I have missed things again." The inspiration no longer seemed to exist outside of his own mind; but under the clustering memories, he felt presently a harder and firmer consciousness of his own purpose, just as in his boyhood, he would sometimes, in ploughing, strike a rock half buried beneath the frail bloom of the meadows. It was the sense of reality so strong, so solid, that it brought him up, almost with a jerk of pain, from the iridescent cobwebs of his fancy; and this reality, he understood after a minute, was an acute perception of the great war that men were fighting on the other side of the world. His knowledgeof these terrible and splendid issues had broken through the perishable surface of thought. The illusion vanished like the bloom of the meadows; what remained was the bare rocky structure of truth. He had not meant to think of this now. He had left the evening free for his work—for the decision which must be made sooner or later; yet, through some mysterious trend of thought, every personal choice of his life seemed to become a part of the impersonal choice of humanity. The infinite issues had absorbed the finite intentions. Every decision was a ripple in the world battle between the powers of good and evil, of light and darkness. And he understood suddenly that the great abstractions for which men lay down their lives are one and indivisible—that there was not a corner of the earth where this fight for liberty could not be fought.
"I can fight here as well as over there," he thought, "if I am only big enough."
Now that his mind had got down to solid facts, to steady thinking, it worked quickly and clearly. It would be a hard fight, with all the odds against him, and yet the very difficulties appealed to him. Out of the dense fog of political theories, out of the noise and confusion of the Babel of many tongues, he could discern the dim framework of a purer social order. The foundation of the Republic was sound, he believed, only the eyes of the builders had failed, the hands of the builders had trembled. That the ideal democracy was not a dream, but an unattained reality, he had never doubted. The failure lay not in the plan, but in the achievement. There was obliquity of vision, there was even blindness, for the human mind was still afflicted by the ancient error which had brought the autocraciesof the past to destruction. Men and nations had still to learn that in order to preserve liberty it must first be surrendered—that there is no spiritual growth except through sacrifice. But it must be surrendered only to a broader, an ever-growing conception of what liberty means.
As in the sun-warmed grass on those Sunday afternoons, he still dreamed of America leading the nations. The great Virginians of the past had been Virginians first; the great Virginians of the future would be Americans. The urgent need in America, as he saw it, was for unity; and the first step toward this unity, the obliteration of sectional boundaries. In this, he felt, Virginia must lead the states. As she had once yielded her land to the nation, she must now yield her spirit. She must point the way by act, not by theory; she must vote right as well as think right.
"And to vote right," he said presently, thinking aloud, "we must first live right. People speak of a man's vote as if it were an act apart from the other acts of his life—as if they could detach it from his universal conceptions. There was a grain of truth in Uncle Carter's saying that he could tell by the way a man voted whether or not he believed in the immortality of the soul." It was Uncle Carter, he remembered, who had described the chronic malady of American life as a disease of manner that had passed from the skin into the body politic. "Take my word for it," the old soldier had said, "there is no such thing as sound morals without sound manners, for manners are only the outer coating—the skin, if you like—of morals. Without unselfish consideration for others there can be no morality, and if you have unselfish consideration inyour heart, you will have good manners though you haven't a coat on your back. Order and sanity and precision, and all the other qualities we need most in this Republic, are only the outward forms of unselfish consideration for others, and patriotism, in spite of its plumed attire, is only that on a larger scale. After all, your country is merely a tremendous abstraction of your neighbour." Well, perhaps the old chap had been talking sense half the time when people smiled at his words!
Rising from his chair, he pushed back the last waning ember, and stood gazing down on the ashes.
"I will do my best," he said slowly. "I will fight to the last ditch for the things I believe in—for cleaner politics, for constructive patriotism, and for a fairer democracy. These are the big issues, and the little ends will flow from them."
As he finished, the clock in the hall struck twice and stopped, and at the same instant the door of the library opened slowly, and, to his amazement, he saw Mary standing beyond the threshold. She carried a candle in her hand, and by the wavering light, he saw that she was very pale and that her eyes were red as if she had been weeping.
"The lights were out. I thought you had gone upstairs," she said, with a catch in her voice.
"Do you want anything?"
"No, I couldn't sleep, so I came for a book."
With a hurried movement, she came over to the table and caught up a book without glancing at the title.
"Are you ill?" he asked. "Is anything the matter?"
"No, nothing. I am well, only I couldn't sleep."
"There is no trouble about Alan, is there? Have you quarrelled?"
"Oh, no, we haven't quarrelled." She was plainly impatient at his questioning. "Alan is all right. Really, it is nothing."
Though his affection for her was deep and strong, they had never learned to be demonstrative with each other, perhaps because they had been separated so much in childhood and early youth. It was almost with a hesitating gesture that he put out his hand now and touched her hair.
"My dear, you know you can trust me."
"Yes, I know." The words broke from her with a sob, and turning hastily away, she ran out of the room and back up the stairs.
INLetty's nursery the next afternoon, Blackburn came at last to know Caroline without the barrier of her professional manner. The child was playing happily with her paper dolls in one corner, and while she marched them back and forth along a miniature road of blocks, she sang under her breath a little song she had made.
Oh, my,I'd like to flyVery highIn the sky,Just you and I.
"I am very cold," said Blackburn, as he entered. "Mammy Riah has promised me a cup of tea if I am good."
"You are always good, father," replied Letty politely, but she did not rise from the floor. "I'm sorry I can't stop, but Mrs. Brown is just taking her little girl to the hospital. If I were to get up the poor little thing might die on the way."
"That must not happen. Perhaps Miss Meade will entertain me?"
"I will do my best." Caroline turned from her writing and took up a half-finished sock. "If you had come an hour earlier you might have seen some of Mrs. Blackburn's lovely clothes. She was showing us the dress she is going to wear to dinner to-night."
"You like pretty clothes." It was a careless effort to make conversation, but as he dropped into the armchair on the hearthrug, his face softened. There was a faint scent of violets in the air from a half-faded little bunch in Caroline's lap.
She met the question frankly. "On other people."
"Do you like nothing for yourself? You are so impersonal that I sometimes wonder if you possess a soul of your own."
"Oh, I like a great many things." Mammy Riah had brought tea, and Caroline put down her knitting and drew up to the wicker table. "I like books for instance. At The Cedars we used to read every evening. Father read aloud to us as long as he lived."
"Yet I never see you reading?"
"Not here." As she shook her head, the firelight touched her close, dark hair, which shone like satin against the starched band of her cap. Almost as white as her cap seemed her wide forehead, with the intense black eyebrows above the radiant blue of her eyes. "You see I want to finish these socks."
"I thought you were doing a muffler?"
"Oh, that's gone to France long ago! This is a fresh lot Mrs. Blackburn has promised, and Mrs. Timberlake and I are working night and day to get them finished in time. We can't do the large kind of work that Mrs. Blackburn does," she added, "so we have to make up with our little bit. Mrs. Timberlake says we are hewers of wood and drawers of water."
"You are always busy," he said, smiling. "I believeyou would be busy if you were put into solitary confinement."
To his surprise a look of pain quivered about her mouth, and he noticed, for the first time, that it was the mouth of a woman who had suffered. "It is the best way of not thinking——" She ended with a laugh, and he felt that, in spite of her kindness and her capability, she was as elusive as thistle-down.
"I can knit a little, father," broke in Letty, looking up from her dolls. "Miss Meade is teaching me to knit a muffler—only it gets narrower all the time. I'm afraid the soldiers won't want it."
"Then give it to me. I want it."
"If I give it to you, you might go to fight, and get killed." As the child turned again to her dolls, he said slowly to Caroline, "I can't imagine how she picks up ideas like that. Someone must have talked about the war before her."
"She heard Mrs. Blackburn talking about it once in the car. She must have caught words without our noticing it."
His face darkened. "One has to be careful."
"Yes, I try to remember." He was quick to observe that she was taking the blame from Angelica, and again he received an impression that she was mentally evading him. Her soul was closed like a flower; yet now and then, through her reserve and gravity, he felt a charm that was as sweet and fresh as a perfume. She was looking tired and pale, he thought, and he wondered how her still features could have kindled into the beauty he had seen in them on that snowy afternoon. It had never occurred to him before, accustomed as he was to the formal loveliness of Angelica, that the samewoman could be both plain and beautiful, both colourless and vivid.
This was perplexing him, when she clasped her hands over her knitting, and said with the manner of quiet confidence that he had grown to expect in her, "I have always meant to tell you, Mr. Blackburn, that I listened to everything you said that day on the terrace—that afternoon when you were talking to Colonel Ashburton and Mr. Sloane. I didn't mean to listen, but I found myself doing it."
"Well, I hope you are not any the worse for it, and I am sure you are not any the better."
"There is something else I want to tell you." Her pale cheeks flushed faintly, and a liquid fire shone in her eyes. "I think you are right. I agree with every word that you said."
"Traitor! What would your grandmother have thought of you? As a matter of fact I have forgotten almost all that I said, but I can safely assume that it was heretical. I think none of us intended to start that discussion. We launched into it before we knew where we were going."
Her mind was on his first sentence, and she appeared to miss his closing words. "I can't answer for my grandmother, but father would have agreed with you. He used to say that the State was an institution for the making of citizens."
"And he talked to you about such things?" It had never occurred to him that a woman could become companionable on intellectual grounds, yet while she sat there facing him, with the light on her brow and lips, and her look of distinction and remoteness as of one who has in some way been set apart from personal joy orsorrow, he realized that she was as utterly detached as Sloane had been when he discoursed on the functions of government.
"Oh, we talked and talked on Sunday afternoons, a few neighbours, old soldiers mostly, and father and I. I wonder why political arguments still make me think of bees humming?"
He laughed with a zest she had never heard in his voice before. "And the smell of sheepmint and box!"
"I remember—and blackberry wine in blue glasses?"
"No, they were red, and there was cake cut in thin slices with icing on the top of it."
"Doesn't it bring it all back again?"
"It brings back the happiest time of my life to me. You never got up at dawn to turn the cows out to pasture, and brought them home in the evening, riding the calf?"
"No, but I've cooked breakfast by candlelight."
"You've never led a band of little darkeys across a cornfield at sunrise?"
"But I've canned a whole patch of tomatoes."
"I know you've never tasted the delight of stolen fishing in the creek under the willows?"
Her reserve had dropped from her like a mask. She looked up with a laugh that was pure music. "It is hard to believe that you ever went without things."
"Oh, things!" He made a gesture of indifference. "If you mean money—well, it may surprise you to know that it has no value for me to-day except as a means to an end."
"To how many ends?" she asked mockingly.
"The honest truth is that it wouldn't cost me a pang to give up Briarlay, every stock and stone, and go backto the southside to dig for a living. I made it all by accident, and I may lose it all just as easily. It looks now, since the war began, as if I were losing some of it very rapidly. But have you ever noticed that people are very apt to keep the things they don't care about—that they can't shake them off? Now, what I've always wanted was the chance to do some work that counted—an opportunity for service that would help the men who come after me. As a boy I used to dream of this. In those days I preferred William Wallace to Monte Cristo."
"The opportunity may come now."
"If we go into this war—and, by God, we must go into it!—that might be. I'd give ten—no, twenty years of my life for the chance. Life! We speak of giving life, but what is life except the means of giving something infinitely better and finer? As if anything mattered but the opportunity to speak the thought in one's brain, to sing it, to build it in stone. There is a little piece of America deep down in me, and when I die I want to leave it somewhere above ground, embodied in the national consciousness. When this blessed Republic leaves the mud behind, and goes marching, clean and whole, down the ages, I want this little piece of myself to go marching with it."
So she had discovered the real Blackburn, the dreamer under the clay! This was the man Mrs. Timberlake had described to her—the man whose fate it was to appear always in the wrong and to be always in the right. And, womanlike, she wondered if this passion of the mind had drawn its strength and colour from the earlier wasted passion of his heart? Would he love America so much if he loved Angelica more? As shedrew nearer to the man's nature, she was able to surmise how terrible must have been the ruin that Angelica had wrought in his soul. That he had once loved her with all the force and swiftness of his character, Caroline understood as perfectly as she had come to understand that he now loved her no longer.
"If I can cast a shadow of the America in my mind into the sum total of American thought, I shall feel that life has been worth while," he was saying. "The only way to create a democracy,—and I see the immense future outlines of this country as the actual, not the imaginary democracy,—after all, the only way to create a thing is to think it. An act of faith isn't merely a mental process; it is a creative force that the mind releases into the world. Germany made war, not by invading Belgium, but by thinking war for forty years; and, in the same way, by thinking in terms of social justice, we may end by making a true democracy." He paused abruptly, with the glow of enthusiasm in his face, and then added slowly, in a voice that sounded curiously restrained and distant, "I must have been boring you abominably. It has been so long since I let myself go like this that I'd forgotten where I was and to whom I was talking."
It was true, she realized, without resentment; he had forgotten that she was present. Since she had little vanity, she was not hurt. It was only one of those delicious morsels that life continually offered to one's sense of humour.
"I am not quite so dull, perhaps, as you think me," she responded pleasantly. After all, though intelligence was sometimes out of place, she had discovered that pleasantness was always a serviceable quality.
At this he rose from his chair, laughing. "You must not, by the way, get a wrong impression of me. I have been talking as if money did not count, and yet there was a time when I'd willingly have given twenty years of my life for it. Money meant to me power—the kind of power one could grasp by striving and sacrifice. Why, I've walked the streets of Richmond with five cents in my pocket, and the dream of uncounted millions in my brain. When my luck turned, and it turned quickly as luck runs, I thought for a year or two that I'd got the thing that I wanted——"
"And you found out that you hadn't?"
"Oh, yes, I found out that I hadn't," he rejoined drily, as he moved toward the door, "and I've been making discoveries like that ever since. To-day I might tell you that work, not wealth, brings happiness, but I've been wrong often enough before, and who knows that I am not wrong about this." It was the tone of bitterness she had learned to watch for whenever she talked with him—the tone that she recognized as the subtle flavour of Angelica's influence. "Now I'll find Mary," he added, "and ask her if she saw the doctor this morning. The reading I heard as I came up, I suppose was for her benefit?"
"I don't know," replied Caroline, wondering if she ought to keep him from interrupting a play of Alan's. "I think Mr. Wythe had promised to read something to Mrs. Blackburn."
"Oh, well, Mary must be about, and I'll find her. She couldn't sleep last night and I thought her looking fagged."
"Yes, she hasn't been well. Mrs. Timberlake has tried to persuade her to take a tonic."
For a minute he hesitated. "There hasn't been any trouble, I hope. Anything I could straighten out?" He looked curiously young and embarrassed as he put the question.
"Nothing that I know of. I think she feels a little nervous and let-down, that's all."
The hesitation had gone now from his manner, and he appeared relieved and cheerful. "I had forgotten that you aren't the keeper of the soul as well as the body. It's amazing the way you manage Letty. She is happier than I have ever seen her." Then, as the child got up from her play and came over to him, he asked tenderly, "Aren't you happy, darling?"
"Yes, I'm happy, father," answered Letty, slowly and gravely, "but I wish mother was happy too. She was crying this morning, and so was Aunt Mary."
A wine-dark flush stained Blackburn's face, while the arms that had been about to lift Letty from the floor, dropped suddenly to his sides. The pleasure his praise had brought to Caroline faded as she watched him, and she felt vaguely disturbed and apprehensive. Was there something, after all, that she did not understand? Was there a deeper closet and a grimmer skeleton at Briarlay than the one she had discovered?
"If your mother isn't happy, Letty, you must try to make her so," he answered presently in a low voice.
"I do try, father, I try dreadfully hard, and so does Miss Meade. But I think she wants something she hasn't got," she added in a whisper, "I think she wants something so very badly that it hurts her."
"And does your Aunt Mary want something too?" Though he spoke jestingly, the red flush was still in his face.
Letty put up her arms and drew his ear down to her lips. "Oh, no, Aunt Mary cries just because mother does."
"Well, we'll see what we can do about it," he responded, as he turned away and went out of the door.
Listening attentively, Caroline heard his steps pass down the hall, descend the stairs, and stop before the door of the front drawing-room. "I wonder if Mr. Wythe is still reading," she thought; and then she went back to her unfinished letter, while Letty returned cheerfully to her play in the corner.
This is an ugly blot, mother dear, but Mr. Blackburn came in so suddenly that he startled me, and I almost upset my inkstand. He stayed quite a long time, and talked more than he had ever done to me before—mostly about politics. I have changed my opinion of him since I came here. When I first knew him I thought him wooden and hard, but the more I see of him the better I like him, and I am sure that everything we heard about him was wrong. He has an unfortunate manner at times, and he is very nervous and irritable, and little things upset him unless he keeps a tight grip on himself; but I believe that he is really kind-hearted and sincere in what he says. One thing I am positive about—there was not a word of truth in the things Mrs. Colfax wrote me before I came here. He simply adores Letty, and whatever trouble there may be between him and his wife, I do not believe that it is entirely his fault. Mrs. Timberlake says he was desperately in love with her when he married her, and I can tell, just by watching them together, how terribly she must have made him suffer. Of course, I should not say this to any one else, but I tell you everything—I have to tell you—and I know you will not read a single word of this to the girls.
I used to hope that Letty's illness would bring themtogether—wouldn't that have been just the way things happen in books?—but everybody blamed him because she went to the tableaux, and, as far as I can see, she lets people think what is false, without lifting a finger to correct them. It is such a pity that she isn't as fine as we once thought her—for she looks so much like an angel that it is hard not to believe that she is good, no matter what she does. If you haven't lived in the house with her, it is impossible to see through her, and even now I am convinced that if she chose to take the trouble, she could twist everyone of us, even Mr. Blackburn, round her little finger. You remember I wrote you that Mr. Wythe did not like her? Well, she has chosen to be sweet to him of late, and now he is simply crazy about her. He reads her all his plays, and she is just as nice and sympathetic as she can be about his work. I sometimes wish Miss Blackburn would not be quite so frank and sharp in her criticism. I have heard her snap him up once or twice about something he wrote, and I am sure she hurt his feelings. One afternoon, when I took Letty down to the drawing-room to show a new dress to her mother, he was reading, and he went straight on, while we were there, and finished his play. I liked it very much, and so did Mrs. Blackburn, but Miss Blackburn really showed some temper because he would not change a line when she asked him to. It was such a pity she was unreasonable because it made her look plain and unattractive, and Mrs. Blackburn was too lovely for words. She had on a dress of grey crêpe exactly the colour of her eyes, and her hair looked softer and more golden than ever. It is the kind of hair one never has very much of—as fine and soft as Maud's—but it is the most beautiful colour and texture I ever saw.
Well, I thought that Miss Blackburn was right when she said the line was all out of character with the speaker; but Mrs. Blackburn did not agree with us, and when Mr. Wythe appealed to her, she said it was just perfect as it was, and that he must not dream of changingit. Then he said he was going to let it stand, and Miss Blackburn was so angry that she almost burst into tears. I suppose it hurt her to see how much more he valued the other's opinion; but it would be better if she could learn to hide her feelings. And all the time Mrs. Blackburn lay back in her chair, in her dove grey dress, and just smiled like a saint. You would have thought she pitied her sister-in-law, she looked at her so sweetly when she said, "Mary, dear, we mustn't let you persuade him to ruin it." You know I really began to ask myself if I had not been unjust to her in thinking that she could be a little bit mean. Then I remembered that poor old woman in Pine Street—I wrote you about her last autumn—and I knew she was being sweet because there was something she wanted to gain by it. I don't know what it is she wants, nor why she is wasting so much time on Mr. Wythe; but it is exactly as if she had bloomed out in the last month like a white rose. She takes more trouble about her clothes, and there is the loveliest glow—there isn't any word but bloom that describes it—about her skin and hair and eyes. She looks years younger than she did when I came here.
I wanted to write you about Mr. Blackburn, but his wife is so much more fascinating. Even if you do not like her, you are obliged to think about her, and even if you do not admire her, you are obliged to look at her when she is in the room. She says very little—and as she never says anything clever, I suppose this is fortunate—but somehow she just manages to draw everything to her. I suppose it is personality, but you always say that personality depends on mind and heart, and I am sure her attraction has nothing to do with either of these. It is strange, isn't it, but the whole time Mr. Blackburn was in here talking to me, I kept wondering if she had ever cared for him? Mrs. Timberlake says that she never did even when she married him, and that now she is irritated because he is having a good many financial difficulties, and they interferewith her plans. But Mr. Blackburn seems to worry very little about money. I believe his friends think that some day he may run for the Senate—Forlorn Hope Blackburn, Colonel Ashburton calls him, though he says that he has a larger following among the Independent voters than anybody suspects. I shouldn't imagine there was the faintest chance of his election—for he has anything but an ingratiating manner with people; and so much in a political candidate depends upon a manner. You remember all the dreadful speeches that were flung about in the last Presidential elections. Well, Mr. Sloane, who was down here from New York the other day, said he really thought the result might have been different if the campaign speakers had had better manners. It seems funny that such a little thing should decide a great question, doesn't it? I suppose, when the time comes for us to go into this war or stay out of it, the decision will rest upon something so small that it will never get into history, not even between the lines. You remember that remark of Turgot's—that dear father loved to quote: "The greatest evils in life have their rise from things too small to be attended to."
After hearing Mr. Blackburn talk, I am convinced that he is perfectly honest in everything he says. As far as I can gather he believes, just as we do, that men should go into politics in order to give, not to gain, and he feels that they will give freely of themselves only to something they love, or to some ideal that is like a religion to them. He says the great need is to love America—that we have not loved, we have merely exploited, and he thinks that as long as the sections remain distinct from the nation, and each man thinks first of his own place, the nation will be exploited for the sake of the sections. He says, too, and this sounds like father, that the South is just as much the nation as the North or the West, and that it is the duty of the South to do her share in the building of the future. I know this is put badly, but you will understand what I mean.
Now, I really must stop. Oh, I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Blackburn wants to know if you could find time to do some knitting for her? She says she will furnish all the wool you need, and she hopes you will make socks instead of mufflers. I told her you knitted the most beautiful socks.
I am always thinking of you and wondering about The Cedars.
Your loving,CAROLINE.
It looks very much as if we were going to fight, doesn't it? Has the President been waiting for the country, or the country for the President?
FROMthe second drawing-room, where Angelica had tea every afternoon, there drifted the fragrance of burning cedar, and as Blackburn walked quickly toward the glow of the fire, he saw his wife in her favourite chair with deep wings, and Alan Wythe stretched languidly on the white fur rug at her feet. Mary was not there. She had evidently just finished tea, for her riding-crop lay on a chair by the door; but when Blackburn called her name, Alan stopped his reading and replied in his pleasant voice, "I think she has gone out to the stable. William came to tell her that one of the horses had a cough."
"Then I'll find her. She seems out of sorts, and I'm trying to make her see the doctor."
"I am sorry for that." Laying aside the book, Alan sprang to his feet, and stood gazing anxiously into the other's face. "She always appears so strong that one comes to take her fitness as a matter of course."
"Yes, I never saw her look badly until the last day or two. Have you noticed it, Angelica?"
Without replying to his question, Angelica rested her head against the pink velvet cushion, and turned a gentle, uncomprehending stare on his face. It was her most disconcerting expression, for in the soft blankness and immobility of her look, he read a rebuke which she was either too amiable or too well-bred toutter. He wondered what he had done that was wrong, and, in the very instant of wondering, he felt himself grow confused and angry and aggressive. This was always the effect of her stare and her silence—for nature had provided her with an invincible weapon in her mere lack of volubility—and when she used it as deliberately as she did now, she could, without speaking a syllable, goad him to the very limit of his endurance. It was as if her delicate hands played on his nerves and evoked an emotional discord.
"Have you noticed that Mary is not well?" he asked sharply, and while he spoke, he became aware that Alan's face had lost its friendliness.
"No, I had not noticed it." Her voice dropped as softly as liquid honey from her lips. "I thought her looking very well and cheerful at tea." She spoke without movement or gesture; but the patient and resigned droop of her figure, the sad grey eyes, and the hurt quiver of her eyelashes, implied the reproach she had been too gentle to put into words. The contrast with her meekness made him appear rough and harsh; yet the knowledge of this, instead of softening him, only increased his sense of humiliation and bitterness.
"Perhaps, then, there is no need of my speaking to her?" he said.
"It might please her." She was sympathetic now about Mary. "I am sure that she would like to know how anxious you are."
For the first time since he had entered the room she was smiling, and this slow, rare smile threw a golden radiance over her features. He thought, as Caroline had done several afternoons ago, that her beauty, which had grown a little dim and pale during the autumn,had come back with an April colour and freshness. Not only her hair and eyes, but the ivory tint of her skin seemed to shine with a new lustre, as if from some hidden fire that was burning within. For a minute the old appeal to his senses returned, and he felt again the beat and quiver of his pulses which her presence used to arouse. Then his mind won the victory, and the emotion faded to ashes before its warmth had passed to his heart.
"I'll go and find her," he said again, with the awkwardness he always showed when he was with her.
Her smile vanished, and she leaned forward with an entreating gesture, which flowed through all the slender, exquisite lines of her body. Instinctively he knew that she had not finished with him yet; that she was not ready to let him go until he had served some inscrutable purpose which she had had in view from the beginning. His mind was not trained to recognize subtleties of intention or thought; and while he waited for her to reveal herself, he began wondering what she could possibly want with him now? Clearly it was all part of some intricate scheme; yet it appeared incredible to his blunter perceptions that she should exhaust the resources of her intelligence merely for the empty satisfaction of impressing Mary's lover.
"David," she began in a pleading tone, "aren't you going to have tea with me?"
"I had it upstairs." He was baffled and at bay before an attack which he could not understand.
"In the nursery?" Her voice trembled slightly.
"Yes, in the nursery." As if she had ever expected or desired him to interrupt her amusements!
"Was Cousin Matty up there?" Though he was still unable to define her motive, his ears detected the faint note of suspense that ruffled the thin, clear quality of her voice.
"No, only Letty and Miss Meade."
A tremor crossed her face, as if he had struck her; then she said, not reproachfully, but with a pathetic air of self-effacement and humility, "Miss Meade is very intelligent. I am so glad you have found someone you like to talk to. I know I am dull about politics." And her eyes added wistfully, "It isn't my fault that I am not so clever."
"Yes, she is intelligent," he answered drily; and then, still mystified and dully resentful because he could not understand, he turned and went out as abruptly as he had entered.
While his footsteps passed through the long front drawing-room and across the hall, Angelica remained motionless, with her head bent a little sadly, as if she were listening to the echo of some half-forgotten sorrow. Then, sighing gently, she looked from Alan into the fire, and reluctantly back at Alan again. She seemed impulsively, against her will and her conscience, to turn to him for understanding and sympathy; and at the sight of her unspoken appeal, he threw himself on the rug at her feet, and exclaimed in a strangled voice,
"You are unhappy!" With these three words, into which he seemed to put infinity, he had broken down the walls of reticence that divide human souls from each other. She was unhappy! Before this one torrential discovery all the restraints of habit and tradition, of conscience and honour, vanished like the imperfect structures of man in the rage of the hurricane.
She shivered, and looked at him with a long frightenedgaze. There was no rebellion, there was only a passive sadness in her face. She was too weak, her eyes said, to contend with unhappiness. Some stronger hands than hers must snatch her from her doom if she were to be rescued.
"How can I be happy?" The words were wrung slowly from her lips. "You see how it is?"
"Yes, I see." He honestly imagined that he did. "I see it all, and it makes me desperate. It is unbelievable that any one should make you suffer."
She shook her head and answered in a whisper, "It is partly my fault. Whatever happens, I always try to remember that, and be just. The first mistake may have been mine."
"Yours?" he exclaimed passionately, and then dropping his face into his hands, "If only I were not powerless to protect you!"
For a moment, after his smothered cry, she said nothing. Then, with an exquisite gesture of renunciation, she put the world and its temptations away from her. "We are both powerless," she responded firmly, "and now you must read me the rest of your play, or I shall be obliged to send you home."
Blackburn, meanwhile, had stopped outside on his way to the stable, and stood looking across the garden for some faint prospect of a clearer to-morrow. Overhead the winter sky was dull and leaden; but in the west a thin silver line edged the horizon, and his gaze hung on this thread of light, as if it were prophetic not only of sunshine, but of happiness. Already he was blaming himself for the scene with Angelica; already he was resolving to make a stronger effort at reconciliation and understanding, to win her back in spite of herself, to bepatient, sympathetic, and generous, rather than just, in his judgment of her. In his more philosophical moments he beheld her less as the vehicle of personal disenchantment, than as the unfortunate victim of a false system, of a ruinous upbringing. She had been taught to grasp until grasping had become not so much a habit of gesture, as a reflex movement of soul—an involuntary reaction to the nerve stimulus of her surroundings.
Though he had learned that the sight of any object she did not own immediately awoke in her the instinct of possession, he still told himself, in hours of tolerance, that this weakness of nature was the result of early poverty and lack of mental discipline, and that disappointment with material things would develop her character as inevitably as it would destroy her physical charm. So far, he was obliged to admit, she had risen superior to any disillusionment from possession, with the ironic exception of that brief moment when she had possessed his adoration; yet, in spite of innumerable failures, it was characteristic of the man that he should cling stubbornly to his belief in some secret inherent virtue in her nature, as he had clung, when love failed him, to the frail sentiments of habit and association. The richness of her beauty had blinded him for so long to the poverty of her heart, that, even to-day, bruised and humiliated as he was, he found himself suddenly hoping that she might some day change miraculously into the woman he had believed her to be. The old half-forgotten yearning for her swept over him while he thought of her, the yearning to kneel at her feet, to kiss her hands, to lift his eyes and see her bending like an angel above him. And in his thoughts she came back to him, not as she was in reality, but as he longed for herto be. With one of those delusive impersonations of memory, which torment the heart after the mind has rejected them, she came back to him with her hands outstretched to bless, not to grasp, and a look of goodness and love in her face.
He remembered his first meeting with her—the close, over-heated rooms, the empty faces, the loud, triumphant music; and then suddenly she had bloomed there, like a white flower, in the midst of all that was ineffectual and meaningless. One minute he had been lonely, tired, depressed, and the next he was rested and happy and full of wild, startled dreams of the future. She had been girlish and shy and just a little aloof—all the feminine graces adorned her—and he had surrendered in the traditional masculine way. Afterwards he discovered that she had intended from the first instant to marry him; but on that evening he had seen only her faint, reluctant flight from his rising emotion. She had played the game so well; she had used the ancient decoy so cleverly, that it had taken years to tear the veil of illusion from the bare structure of method. For he knew now that she had been methodical, that she had been utterly unemotional; and that her angelic virtue had been mere thinness of temperament. Never for a moment had she been real, never had she been natural; and he admitted, in the passing mood of confession, that if she had once been natural—as natural as the woman upstairs—the chances were that she would never have won him. Manlike, he would have turned from the blade-straight nature to pursue the beckoning angel of the faint reluctance. If she had stooped but for an instant, if she had given him so much as the touch of her fingers, she might have losthim. Life, not instinct, had taught him the beauty of sincerity in woman, the grace of generosity. In his youth, it was woman as mystery, woman as destroyer, to whom he had surrendered.
Descending the steps from the terrace, he walked slowly along the brick way to the stable, where he found Mary giving medicine to her favourite horse.
"Briar Rose has a bad cough, David."
He asked a few questions, and then, when the dose was administered, they turned together, and strolled back through the garden. Mary looked cross and anxious, and he could tell by the way she spoke in short jerks that her nerves were not steady. Her tone of chaffing had lost its ease, and the effort she made to appear flippant seemed to hurt her.
"Are you all right again, Mary?"
"Quite all right. Why shouldn't I be?"
"There's no reason that I know of," he replied seriously. "Have you decided when you will be married?"
She winced as if he had touched a nerve. "No, we haven't decided." For a minute she walked on quickly, then looking up with a defiant smile, she said, "I am not sure that we are ever going to be married."
So the trouble was out at last! He breathed heavily, overcome by some indefinable dread. After all, why should Mary's words have disturbed him so deeply? The chances were, he told himself, that it was nothing more than the usual lovers' quarrel.
"My dear, Alan is a good fellow. Don't let anything make trouble between you."
"Oh, I know he is a good fellow—only—only I am not sure we—we should be happy together. I don'tcare about books, and he doesn't care any longer for horses——"
"As if these things mattered! You've got the fundamental thing, haven't you?"
"The fundamental thing?" She was deliberately evading him—she, the straightforward Mary!
"I mean, of course, that you care for each other."
At this she broke down, and threw out her hands with a gesture of despair. "I don't know. I used to think so, but I don't know any longer," she answered, and fled from him into the house.
As he looked after her he felt the obscure doubt struggling again in his mind, and with it there returned the minor problem of his financial difficulties, and the conversation he must sooner or later have with Angelica. Nothing in his acquaintance with Angelica had surprised him more than the discovery that, except in the embellishment of her own attractions, she could be not only prudent, but stingy. Even her extravagance—if a habit of spending that exacted an adequate return for every dollar could be called extravagance—was cautious and cold like her temperament, as if Nature had decreed that she should possess no single attribute of soul in abundance. No impulse had ever swept her away, not even the impulse to grasp. She had always calculated, always schemed with her mind, not her senses, always moved slowly and deliberately toward her purpose. She would never speak the truth, he knew, just as she would never over-step a convention, because truthfulness and unconventionality would have interfered equally with the success of her designs. Life had become for her only a pedestal which supported an image; and this image, as unlike the actual Angelica as a Christmas angel is unlikea human being, was reflected, in all its tinselled glory, in the minds of her neighbours. Before the world she would be always blameless, wronged, and forgiving. He knew these things with his mind, yet there were moments even now when his heart still desired her.
An hour later, when he entered her sitting-room, he found her, in a blue robe, on the sofa in front of the fire. Of late he had noticed that she seldom lay down in the afternoon, and as she was not a woman of moods, he was surprised that she had broken so easily through a habit which had become as fixed as a religious observance.
"It doesn't look as if you had had much rest to-day," he said, as he entered.
She looked up with an expression that struck him as incongruously triumphant. Though at another time he would have accepted this as an auspicious omen, he wondered now, after the episode of the afternoon, if she were merely gathering her forces for a fresh attack. He shrank from approaching her on the subject of economy, because experience had taught him that her first idea of saving would be to cut down the wages of the servants; and he had a disturbing recollection that she had met his last suggestion that they should reduce expenses with a reminder that it was unnecessary to employ a trained nurse to look after Letty. When she wanted to strike hardest, she invariably struck through the child. Though she was not clever, she had been sharp enough to discover the chink in his armour.
"Did you find Mary?" she asked.
"Yes, she seems out of sorts. What is the trouble between her and Alan?"
"Is there any trouble?" She appeared surprised.
"I fear so. She told me she was not sure that they were going to be married."
"Did she say that?"
"She said it, but she may not have meant it. I cannot understand."
Angelica pondered his words. "Well, I've noticed lately that she wasn't very nice to him."
"But she was wildly in love with him. She cannot have changed so suddenly."
"Why not?" She raised her eyebrows slightly. "People do change, don't they?"
"Not when they are like Mary." With a gesture of perplexity, he put the subject away from him. "What I really came to tell you isn't very much better," he said. "Of late, since the war began, things have been going rather badly with me. I dare say I'll manage to pull up sooner or later, but every interest in which I am heavily involved has been more or less affected by the condition of the country. If we should go into this war——"
She looked up sharply. "Don't you think we can manage to keep out of it?"
"To keep out of it?" Even now there were moments when she astonished him.
For the first time in months her impatience got the better of her. "Oh, I know, of course, that you would like us to fight Germany; but it seems to me that if you stopped to think of all the suffering it would mean——"
"I do stop to think."
"Then there isn't any use talking!"
"Not about that; but considering the uncertainty of the immediate future, don't you think we might try, in some way, to cut down a bit?"
Turning away from him, she gazed thoughtfully into the fire. "If it is really necessary——?"
"It may become necessary at any moment."
At this she looked straight up at him. "Well, since Letty is so much better, I am sure that there is no need for us to keep a trained nurse for her."
She had aimed squarely, and he flinched at the blow. "But the child is so happy."
"She would be just as happy with any one else."
"No other nurse has ever done so much for her. Why, she has been like a different child since Miss Meade came to her."
While he spoke he became aware that she was looking at him as she had looked in the drawing-room.
"Then you refuse positively to let me send Miss Meade away?"
"I refuse positively, once and for all."
Her blank, uncomprehending stare followed him as he turned and went out of the room.
A fortnight later light was thrown on Blackburn's perplexity by a shrewd question from Mrs. Timberlake. For days he had been groping in darkness, and now, in one instant, it seemed to him that his discovery leaped out in a veritable blaze of electricity. How could he have gone on in ignorance? How could he have stumbled, with unseeing eyes, over the heart of the problem?
"David," said the housekeeper bluntly, "don't you think that this thing has been going on long enough?" They were in the library, and before putting the question, she had closed the door and even glanced suspiciously at the windows.
"This thing?" He looked up from his newspaper, with the vague idea that she was about to discourse upon our diplomatic correspondence with Germany.
"I am not talking about the President's notes." Her voice had grown rasping. "He may write as many as he pleases, if they will make the Germans behave themselves without our having to go to war. What I mean is the way Mary is eating her heart out. Haven't you noticed it?"
"I have been worried about her for some time." He laid the paper down on the desk. "But I haven't been able to discover what is the matter."
"If you had asked me two months ago, I could have told you it was about that young fool Alan."
"About Wythe? Why, I thought she and Wythe were particularly devoted." If he were sparring for time, there was no hint of it in his manner. It really looked, the housekeeper told herself grimly, as if he had not seen the thing that was directly before his eyes until she had pointed it out to him.
"They were," she answered tartly, "at one time."
"Well, what is the trouble now? A lovers' quarrel?"
It was a guiding principle with Mrs. Timberlake that when her conscience drove her she never looked at her road; and true to this intemperate practice, she plunged now straight ahead. "The trouble is that Alan has been making a fool of himself over Angelica." It was the first time that she had implied the faintest criticism of his wife, and as soon as she had uttered the words, her courage evaporated, and she relapsed into her attitude of caustic reticence. Even her figure, in its rusty black, looked shrunken and huddled.
"So that is it!" His voice was careless and indifferent. "You mean he has been flattered because she has let him read his plays to her?"
"He hasn't known when to stop. If something isn't done, he will go on reading them for ever."
"Well, if Angelica enjoys them?"
"But it makes Mary very unhappy. Can't you see that she is breaking her heart over it?"
"Angelica doesn't know." He might have been stating a fact about one of the belligerent nations.
"Oh, of course." She grasped at the impersonal note, but it escaped her. "If she only knew, she could so easily stop it."
"So you think if someone were to mention it?"
"That is why I came to you. I thought you might manage to drop a word that would let Angelica see how much it is hurting Mary. She wouldn't want to hurt Mary just for the sake of a little amusement. The plays can't be so very important, or they would be on the stage, wouldn't they?"
"Could you tell her, do you think?" It was the first time he had ever attempted to evade a disagreeable duty, and the question surprised her.
"Angelica wouldn't listen to a word I said. She'd just think I'd made it up, and I reckon it does look like a tempest in a teapot."
He met this gravely. "Well, it is natural that she shouldn't take a thing like that seriously."
"Yes, it's natural." She conceded the point ungrudgingly. "I believe Angelica would die before she would do anything really wrong."
If he accepted this in silence, it was not because the tribute to Angelica's character appeared to him to constitute an unanswerable argument. During the weeks when he had been groping his way to firmer ground, he had passed beyond the mental boundaries in which Angelica and her standards wore any longer the aspect of truth. He knew them to be not only artificial, but false; and Mrs. Timberlake's praise was scarcely more than a hollow echo from the world that he had left. That Angelica, who would lie and cheat for an advantage, could be held, through mere coldness of nature, to be above "doing anything really wrong," was a fallacy which had once deluded his heart, but failed now to convince his intelligence. Once he had believed in the sacred myth of her virtue; now, brought close againstthe deeper realities, he saw that her virtue was only a negation, and that true goodness must be, above all things, an affirmation of spirit.
"I'll see what I can do," he said, and wondered why the words had not worn threadbare.
"You mean you'll speak to Angelica?" Her relief rasped his nerves.
"Yes, I'll speak to Angelica."
"Don't you think it would be better to talk first to Mary?"
Before replying, he thought over this carefully. "Perhaps it would be better. Will you tell her that I'd like to see her immediately?"
She nodded and went out quickly, and it seemed to him that the door had barely closed before it opened again, and Mary came in with a brave step and a manner of unnatural alertness and buoyancy.
"David, do you really think we are going to have war?" It was an awkward evasion, but she had not learned either to evade or equivocate gracefully.
"I think we are about to break off diplomatic relations——"
"And that means war, doesn't it?"
"Who knows?" He made a gesture of impatience. "You are trying to climb up on the knees of the gods."
"I want to go," she replied breathlessly, "whether we have war or not, I want to go to France. Will you help me?"
"Of course I will help you."
"I mean will you give me money?"
"I will give you anything I've got. It isn't so much as it used to be."
"It will be enough for me. I want to go at once—next week—to-morrow."
He looked at her attentively, his grave, lucid eyes ranging thoughtfully over her strong, plain face, which had grown pale and haggard, over her boyish figure, which had grown thin and wasted.
"Mary," he said suddenly, "what is the trouble? Is it an honest desire for service or is it—the open door?"
For a minute she looked at him with frightened eyes; then breaking down utterly, she buried her face in her hands and turned from him. "Oh, David, I must get away! I cannot live unless I get away!"
"From Briarlay?"
"From Briarlay, but most of all—oh, most of all," she brought this out with passion, "from Alan!"
"Then you no longer care for him?"
Instead of answering his question, she dashed the tears from her eyes, and threw back her head with a gesture that reminded him of the old boyish Mary. "Will you let me go, David?"
"Not until you have told me the truth."
"But what is the truth?" She cried out, with sudden anger. "Do you suppose I am the kind of woman to talk of a man's being 'taken away,' as if he were a loaf of bread to be handed from one woman to another? If he had ever been what I believed him, do you imagine that any one could have 'taken' him? Is there any man on earth who could have taken me from Alan?"
"What has made the trouble, Mary?" He put the question very slowly, as if he were weighing every word that he uttered.
She flung the pretense aside as bravely as she haddashed the tears from her eyes. "Of course I have known all along that she was only flirting—that she was only playing the game——"
"Then you think that the young fool has been taking Angelica too seriously?"
At this her anger flashed out again. "Seriously enough to make me break my engagement!"
"All because he likes to read his plays to her?"
"All because he imagines her to be misunderstood and unhappy and ill-treated. Oh, David, will you never wake up? How much longer are you going to walk about the world in your sleep? No one has said a breath against Angelica—no one ever will—she isn't that kind. But unless you wish Alan to be ruined, you must send him away."
"Isn't she the one to send him away?"
"Then go to her. Go to her now, and tell her that she must do it to-day."
"Yes, I will tell her that." Even while he spoke the words which would have once wrung his heart, he was visited by that strange flashing sense of unreality, of the insignificance and transitoriness of Angelica's existence. Like Mrs. Timberlake's antiquated standards of virtue, she belonged to a world which might vanish while he watched it and leave him still surrounded by the substantial structure of life.
"Then tell her now. I hear her in the hall," said Mary brusquely, as she turned away.
"It is not likely that she will come in here," he answered, but the words were scarcely spoken before Angelica's silvery tones floated to them.
"David, may I come in? I have news for you." An instant later, as Mary went out, with her air of arrogantsincerity, a triumphant figure in grey velvet passed her in the doorway.
"I saw Robert and Cousin Charles a moment ago, and they told me that we had really broken off relations with Germany——"
She had not meant to linger over the news, but while she was speaking, he crossed the room and closed the door gently behind her.
"Don't you think now we have done all that is necessary?" she demanded triumphantly. "Cousin Charles says we have vindicated our honour at last."
Blackburn smiled slightly. The sense of unreality, which had been vague and fugitive a moment before, rolled over and enveloped him. "It is rather like refusing to bow to a man who has murdered one's wife."
A frown clouded her face. "Oh, I know all you men are hoping for war, even Alan, and you would think an artist would see things differently."