CHAPTER XVI
I did not, however, do it that spring, since the event that compelled me at last to the step took up all my attention.
It was toward the end of April that I received a telegram signed by my sister’s name:
“Mother seriously ill. Wants to see you. Come at once.”
In spite of my alarm at this summons I saw the opportunity of putting up a good front before my relatives. Taking Lovey with me as valet, and stopping at the best hotel, I presented the appearance of a successful man.
Though anxiety on my mother’s account made my return a matter of secondary interest, I could see the surprise and relief my apparent prosperity created. My brothers had been expecting one of whom they would have to be ashamed. Furthermore, they had not been too confident as to my attitude with regard to my father’s will. Looking for me to contest it, they had suspected that behind my acquiescence lay a ruse. When they saw that there was none, that I made no complaint, that I seemed to have plenty of money, that I traveled with a servant, that I had the air of a man of means—a curious note of wonder and respect stole into their manner toward me. I know that in private they were saying to each other that they couldn’t make me out; and I gave them no help in doing so.
I gave them no help during all the month I remained in Montreal. I arranged with Coningsby to take that time, and my little stock of savings was sufficient to finance me. Though I was once more putting up a bluff, it was a bluff that I felt to be justified; and in the end it found its justification.
I have no intention of giving you the details of those four weeks of watching beside a bed where the end was apparent from the first. Now that I look back upon them, I can see that they were not without their element of happiness, since to my mother at least it was happiness to know that I was beside her. The joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth was on her face from the day I appeared, and never left it up to that moment when we took our last look at her dear smiling features.
When the lawyer came to read us her will I found, to my amazement, that she had left me everything she possessed.
It was then that I reaped that which I had sown at Andy Christian’s suggestion. Since with a good grace I had accepted my father’s will, the rest of the family could hardly do otherwise with regard to my mother’s. She left a note saying that, had my father lived a few months longer, he would have seen that I had re-established myself sufficiently to be allowed to share equally with the rest of the family in what he had to leave; but, as it was too late for that, she was endeavoring to right the seeming injustice—which he had not meant as an injustice—as far as lay in her power. These words from her pen being much more emphatic than any I could remember from her lips, my brothers and sisters, whatever they felt inwardly, could only give their assent to them.
What my mother possessed included not only the personalestate she had inherited from her father, considerably augmented by her husband’s careful management, but books, furniture, and jewelry. The books and furniture I made over to my sister to remain in the two houses, the one in Montreal, the other on the Ottawa. Some of the jewelry I gave to her, to my sister in England, and to my two sisters-in-law, though keeping the bulk for my wife—when I got one.
For I was now in a position to marry. Though my mother had had no great wealth, what she left me, together with the trust fund established by my father and what I earned, would assure me enough to live in at least as much comfort as Ralph Coningsby. I could, therefore, propose to Regina Barry and feel I could make a home for her.
I had again come to the conclusion that if I asked her she would accept me. I make no attempt to analyze this feeling on her part, because I saw plainly enough that it was founded on mistake. That is to say, having developed an ideal of the man whom she could marry, she had nursed herself into the belief that I came up to it, when, as a matter of fact, I did not.
Now I had seen enough of husbands and wives to know that in most marriages there is some such illusion as this, and that it can be successfully maintained for years. When the illusion itself has faded it can live on as the illusion of an illusion. By the time there is no illusion or shadow of illusion left at all it has ceased in the majority of cases to matter. Time has welded what mutual distaste might have put asunder, and the married state remains undisturbed.
I was, therefore, obliged to face the consideration that if I married the woman I loved she would probably neverdiscover what I felt it my duty to confess. Was it really, then, my duty to confess it? Since no one knew it but myself, was it not rather my duty to keep it concealed? Other men had secrets from their wives—especially those that concerned the days when they were unmarried—and all were probably the happier for the secrecy. Even Ralph Coningsby, who was the most model husband I could think of, had said that if he were to tell his wife all he could tell her about himself he would be ashamed to go home. There were weeks when I debated these questions every day and night, arriving at one conclusion by what I may call my rough horse sense, and at another by my instinct. Horse sense said, “Marry her and keep mum.” Instinct warned, “You can never marry her and be safe and happy with such a secret as this to come between you.”
Throughout this wavering of opinion I knew that when the time came I should act from instinct. It wasn’t merely that I wanted to be safe; it was also that, all pros and cons apart, there was such a thing as honor. Not even to be happy—not even to make the woman I cared for happy—could I ignore that.
I am not sure how much Andrew Christian understood of the circumstances when, without giving him the facts or mentioning a name, I asked his advice. He only said:
“You’ve had some experience, Frank, of the potency of love, haven’t you? Well, love has a twin sister—truth. In love and truth together there’s a power which, if we have the patience to wait for its working out, will solve all difficulties and meet all needs.”
My experiences during the past few months having given me some reason to believe this, I decided, so far as I came actively to a decision, to let it rule my course;but in the end the critical moment came by what you would probably call an accident.
It was the last Sunday in June. My work in Atlantic City being over, Mrs. Grace had asked me to come down for the week-end to her little place in Long Island. It was not exactly a party, though there were two or three other people staying in the house. My chief reason for accepting the invitation—as I think it was the chief reason for its being given—was that the Barry family were in residence on the old Hornblower estate, which was the adjoining property.
As a matter of fact, Mrs. Grace and her guests were all asked to Idlewild, as the late Mrs. Hornblower had named her house, to Sunday lunch.
The path from the one dwelling to the other was down the gentle slope of Mrs. Grace’s gardens, across a meadow, at the other side of which it joined the Idlewild avenue, and then up a steep hill to the rambling red-and-yellow house. Here one dominated the Sound for a great part of the hundred and twenty miles between Montauk Point and Brooklyn.
Sauntering idly through the hot summer noon, I found myself beside Mrs. Grace, while the rest of the party straggled on ahead. As my hostess was not more free than other women from the match-making instinct, it was natural that she should give to the conversation a turn that she knew would not be distasteful to me.
“She’s a wonderful girl,” she observed, “with just that danger to threaten her that comes from being over-fastidious.”
“I know what you mean by her being over-fastidious; but why is it a danger?”
“In the first place, because people misunderstand her.They’ve ascribed to light-mindedness what has only been the thing that literary people call the divine searching for perfection.”
“And do you know the kind of thing she’d consider perfect?”
It was so stupid a question that I couldn’t be surprised to see a gleam of quiet mischief in her glance as she replied, “From little hints she’s dropped to me, quite confidentially, I rather think I do.”
Fair men blush easily, but I tried to ignore the fact that I was doing it as I said, “That’s quite a common delusion at one stage of the game; but suppose she were to find that she was mistaken?”
The answer shelved the question, though she did it disconcertingly: “Oh, well, in the case she’s thinking of I don’t believe she will.”
I was so eager for data that I pushed the inquiry indiscreetly.
“What makes you so sure?”
“One can tell. It isn’t a thing one can put into words. You know by a kind of intuition.”
“Know what?”
“That a certain kind of person can never have had any but a certain kind of standard.” She gave me another of those quietly mischievous glances. “I’ll tell you what she said to me one day not long ago. She said she’d only known one man in her life—known him well, that is—of whom she was sure that he was a thoroughbred to the core.”
“But you admitted at the beginning that that kind of conviction is a danger.”
“It would be a danger if her friends couldn’t bear her out in believing it to be justified.”
Unable to face any more of this subtle flattery, I was obliged to let the subject drop.
The lunch was like any other lunch. As an unimportant person at a gathering where every one knew every one else more or less intimately, I was to some extent at liberty to follow my own thoughts, which were not altogether happy ones. For telling what I had to tell, the necessity had grown urgent. What was lacking, what had always seemed to be lacking, was the positive opportunity. This I resolved to seek; but suddenly I found it before me.
This was toward the middle of the afternoon, when the party had broken up. It had broken up imperceptibly by dissolving into groups that strolled about the lawns and descended the long flights of steps leading to the beach below. As I had not been seated near Miss Barry at table, it was no more than civil for me to approach her when the party was on the veranda and the lawn. Our right to privacy was recognized at once by a withdrawal of the rest of the company. It was probably assumed that I was to be the fourth in the series of experiments of which Jim Hunter and Stephen Cantyre had been the second and the third; and, though my fellow-guests might be sorry for me, they would not intervene to protect me.
Considering it sufficient to make their adieux to Mrs. Barry, they left us undisturbed in a nook of one of the verandas. Here we were out of sight of any of the avenues and pathways to the house, and Mrs. Barry was sufficiently in sympathy with our desire to be alone not to send any one in search of us. On the lawn robins were hopping, and along the edge of shorn grass the last foxgloves made upright lines of color against the olive-greenscrub-oak. Far down through the trees one caught the silvery glinting of water.
The sounds of voices and motor wheels having died away, Miss Barry said, languidly: “I think they must be all gone. They’ll say I’m terribly rude to keep myself out of sight. But it’s lovely here, isn’t it? And this is such a cozy spot in which to smoke and have coffee. I read here, too, and— Oh, dear, what’s happening?”
It was then that the little accident which was to play so large a part in my life occurred. She had leaned forward from her wicker chair to set her empty coffee-cup on the table. As she did so the string of pearls which she wore at the opening of her simple white dress loosened itself and slipped like a tiny snake to the floor of the veranda. From a corresponding chair on the other side of the table I sprang up and stooped. When I raised myself with the pearls in my right hand I slipped them into my pocket.
Between the fingers of my left hand I held a lighted cigar. Bareheaded, I was wearing white flannels and tennis shoes. Now that the moment had come, I felt extraordinarily cool—as cool as on the night when I had slipped this string of pearls into my pocket before. I looked down and smiled at her. Leaning back in her chair, she looked up and smiled at me.
I shall always see her like that—in white with a slash of silk of the red of her lips somewhere about her waist, and a ribbon of the same round her dashing Panama hat. Her feet in little brown shoes were crossed. With an elbow on the arm of her chair, she held a small red fan out from her person, though she wasn’t actively using it.
“What does that mean?” she asked, idly, at last.
“Didn’t you ever see any one put these pearls into his pocket before?”
“Didn’t you ever see any one put these pearls into his pocket before?”
“Doesn’t it remind you of anything?”
“No—of nothing.”
“Didn’t you ever see any one put these pearls into his pocket before?”
“Why, no!” She added, as if an idea had begun to dawn in the back of her memory, “Not in that way.”
“Oh, I remember. You didn’t see him put them in at all. You only saw him take them out.”
The smile remained on her features, but something puzzled gave it faint new curves.
“Why—”
“It was like this, wasn’t it?”
I drew out the pearls and threw them on the table.
She bent forward slightly, still smiling, like a person watching with bewildered intensity a conjurer’s trick.
“Why—”
“Only your gold-mesh purse was with them—and your diamond bar-pin—and your rings.”
“Why—who, who on earth could have told you?”
I, too, continued to smile, consciously wondering if I should be as calm as this in the hour of death.
“Who do you think?”
“It wasn’t Elsie Coningsby?”
“No. She was in the house, but—”
“How did you know that?” She uttered a mystified laugh. “Shewasthere! It was one of the nights she stayed with me when papa and mamma were down here superintending some changes before we could move in. But I never told her anything about it.”
“Why didn’t you—when she was right on the spot?”
“Oh, because.”
The smile disappeared. She stopped looking up at me to turn her eyes toward the foxgloves and scrub-oak.
“Yes? Because—what?”
“Because I promised—that man—I wouldn’t.”
“Why should you have made him such a promise?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Just at the time I was—I was sorry for him.”
“And aren’t you sorry for him still?”
She looked up at me again with one of her bright challenges.
“Look here! Do you know him?”
“Tell me first what I asked you. Aren’t you sorry for him still?”
“I dare say I am. I don’t know.”
“What did you—what did you—think of him at the time?”
“I thought he was—terrible.”
“Terrible—in what way?”
“I don’t know that I can tell you in what way. It was so awful to think that a man who had had some advantages should have sunk to that. If he’d been a real burglar—I mean a professional criminal—I should have been afraid of him; but I shouldn’t have had that sensation of something meant for better things that had been debased.”
“Didn’t he tell you he was hungry?”
The smile came back—faintly.
“You seem to know all about it, don’t you? It’s the strangest thing I ever knew. No one in this world could have told you but himself. Yes, he did say he was hungry; but then, a man who’d been what he must have been shouldn’t have got into that condition. He’d stolen into our pantry, poor creature, and drunk the cooking-wine. He told me that—” Without rising, her figure became alert with a new impulse. “Oh, I see!You do know him. He was an Englishman. I remember that.”
I placed myself fully before her. “No, he wasn’t an Englishman.”
“He spoke like one.”
“So do I, for the matter of that.”
“Then he was a Canadian. Was he?”
“He was a Canadian.”
“Oh, then that accounts for it. But you did puzzle me at first. But how did you come to meet him? Was it at that Down and Out Club that papa and Mr. Christian are so interested in? You go to it, too, don’t you? I think Stephen Cantyre said you did.”
“Yes, I go to it, too.”
She grew pensive, resting her chin on a hand, with her elbow on the arm of the chair.
“I suppose it’s all right; but I never can understand how men can be so merciful to one other’s vices. It looks as if they recognized the seed of them within themselves.”
“Probably that’s the reason.”
“Women don’t feel like that about one another.”
“They haven’t the same cause.”
“I hope he’s doing better—that man—and picking up again.”
“He is.”
She asked, in quite another tone, “You’re not going back to New York to-morrow, are you?”
“I’m not sure—yet.”
“Hilda said she was going to try to persuade you and the Grahams to stay till Tuesday. If you can stay, mamma and I were planning—”
I put myself directly in front of her, no more than a few feet away, my hands in the pockets of my jacket.
“Look at me again. Look at me well. Try to recall—”
Slowly, very slowly, she struggled to her feet. The color went out of her lips and the light from her eyes as she backed away from me in a kind of terror.
“What—what—are you trying to make me—to make me understand?”
“Think! How should I know all that I’ve been saying if—”
“If the man himself didn’t tell you. But he did.”
“No, he didn’t. No one had to tell me.”
She reached the veranda rail, which she clutched with one hand, while the other, clenched, was pressed against her breast.
“You don’t mean—”
“Yes, I do mean—”
“Oh, you can’t?”
“Why can’t I.”
“Because—because it isn’t—it isn’t possible! You”—she seemed to be shivering—“you could never have—”
“But I did.”
She gasped brokenly. “You? You?”
I nodded. “Yes—I.”
I tried to tell her, but I suppose I did it badly. Put into a few bald words the tale was not merely sordid, it was low. I could give it no softening touch, no saving grace. It was more beastly than I had ever imagined it.
Fortunately she didn’t listen with attention. The means were indifferent to her when she knew the end. For the minute, at any rate, she saw me not as I stood there, clean and in white, but as I had been a year before,dirty and in rags. But she saw more than that. With every word I uttered she saw the ideal she had formed broken into shivers, like a shattered looking-glass.
She interrupted my preposterous story to gasp, “I can’t believe it!”
“But it’s true.”
“Then you mustn’t mind if—if I put you to a test. Did you—did you write anything while you were there?”
“I printed something—in the same kind of letters you’ve seen at the bottom of architects’ plans.”
“And how did you come to do it?”
I recounted the circumstance, at which she nodded her head in verification.
“So that was how you knew the words you repeated to me a few months ago?”
“That was how. I said there were men in the world different from any you’d seen yet; and I told you to wait.”
She made a tremendous effort to become again the daring mistress of herself which she generally was. She smiled, too, nervously, and with a kind of sickening, ghastly whiteness.
“Funny, isn’t it? There are men in the world different from any I’d seen before that time. I’ve—I’ve waited—and found out.”
Before I could utter a rejoinder to this she said, quite courteously, “Will you excuse me?”
I bowed.
With no further explanation she marched down the length of the veranda—carrying herself proudly, placing her dainty feet daintily, walking with that care whichpeople show when they are not certain of their ability to walk straight—and entered the house.
I didn’t know why she had gone; but I knew the worst was over. Though I felt humiliation to the core of the heart’s core, I also felt relief.
With a foot dangling, I sat sidewise on the veranda rail and waited. Glancing at my watch, I saw it was not yet four, and I had lived through years since I had climbed the hill at one. My sensations were comparable only to those of the man who has been on trial for his life and is waiting for the verdict.
I waited nervously, and yet humbly. Now that it was all over, it seemed to me that the bitterness of death was past. Whatever else I should have to go through in life, nothing could equal the past quarter of an hour.
The sensations I hadn’t had while making my confession began to come to me by degrees. Looking back over the chasm I had crossed, I was amazed to think I had had the nerve for it. I trembled reminiscently; the cold sweat broke out on my forehead. It was terrible to think that at that very minute she was in there weighing the evidence, against me and in my favor.
Mechanically I relighted the cigar that had gone out. Against me and in my favor! I was not blind to the fact that in my favor there was something. I had gone down, but I had also struggled up again; and you can make an appeal for the man who has done that.
She was long in coming back. I glanced at my watch, and it was nearly half past four. Her weighing of the evidence had taken her half an hour, and it was evidently not over yet. Well, juries were often slow in coming to a verdict; and doubtless she was balancing the extenuatingcircumstance that I had struggled up against the main fact that I had gone down.
What she considered her ideal had during the past few weeks been gradually transferring itself from her mind to my own. She wouldn’t marry a man she couldn’t trust; she wouldn’t marry a man who hadn’t what she called spirit; she wouldn’t marry a milksop. But she had well-defined—and yet indefinable—conceptions as to how far in spirit a man should go, and of the difference between being a milksop and a man of honor. She might find it hard to admit that the pendulum of human impulse that swung far in one direction might swing equally far in the other; and therein would lie my danger.
But I must soon know. It was ten minutes of five. The jury had been out more than three-quarters of an hour.
A new quality was being transmuted into the atmosphere. It was as if the lightest, flimsiest veil had been flung across the sun. In the distant glinting of the sea, which had been silver, there came a tremulous shade of gold. The foxgloves bowed themselves like men at prayer. The robins betook themselves to the branches. From unseen depths of the scrub-oak there was an occasional luscious trill, as the time for the singing of birds wasn’t over yet.
Round me there was silence. I might have been sitting at the door of an empty house. I listened intently for the sound of returning footsteps, but none came.
At a quarter past five a chill about the heart began to strike me. I had been waiting more than an hour. Could it be possible that...?
It would be the last degree of insult. Whatever she did, she wouldn’t subject me to that. It would be worsethan her glove across the face. It was out of the question. I couldn’t bear to think of it. Rather than think of it, I went over the probabilities that she would come back with the smile of forgiveness. It would doubtless be a tearful smile, for tears were surely the cause of her delay. When she had controlled them, when she was able to speak and bid me be of good comfort, I should hear the tap of her high heels coming down the uncarpeted stairway. No red Indian ever listened for the tread of a maid’s moccasins on forest moss so intently as I for that staccato click.
But only the birds rewarded me, and the cries of boys who had come to bathe on the beach below. There was more gold in the light; more trilling in the branches; a more pungent scent from the trees, the flowers, and the grass; and that was all.
It was half past five; it was a quarter to six; it was six.
At six o’clock I knew.
My hat was lying on a chair near by. I picked it up—and went.
I went, not by the avenue and the path, but down the queer, rickety flights of steps that led from one jutting rock to another over the face of the cliff, till I reached the beach. It was a broad, whitish, sandy beach, with a quietly lapping tide almost at the full. Full tide was marked a few feet farther up by a long, wavy line of seaweed and other jetsam.
It was the delicious hour for bathing. As far as one could see in either direction there were heads bobbing in the water and people scrambling in and out. Shrill cries of women and children, hoarse shouts of men, mingled with the piping of birds overhead. Farther out than the bathers there were rowboats, and beyond therowboats sails. In the middle of the Sound a steamer or two trailed a lazy flag of smoke. Far, far to the south and the west a haze like that round a volcano hung over New York. I should return there next day to face new conditions. I only wished to God that it could be that night.
The new conditions were, briefly, three: I could use the revolver still lying in my desk; or I could begin to drink again; or, like the bull wounded in the ring, I could seek shelter in the dumb sympathy of the Down and Out.
The last seemed to me the least attractive. I had climbed that hill, and found it led only to a precipice that I had fallen over.
Neither did the first possibility charm me especially. Apart from the horror of it, it was too brief, too sudden, too conclusive. I wanted the gradual, the prolonged.
It was the second course to which my mind turned with the nearest approach to satisfaction. Christian had told me that some of my severest tussles lay ahead; and now I had come to the one in which I should go under. In that the flesh at least would get its hour of compensation, when all was said and done.
At the foot of Mrs. Grace’s steps I paused to recall Christian’s words of a few days previously:
“In love and truth together there’s a power which, if we have the patience to wait for its working out, will solve all difficulties and meet all needs.”
I had tried that—love and truth together!—and at the result I could only laugh.
My immediate fear was lest Mrs. Grace and the Grahams would be on the veranda, vaguely expecting to offer me their congratulations. When half-way up the steps I heard voices and knew that they were there. So be it!I had faced worse things in my life; and now I could face that.
But as I advanced up the lawn I saw them moving about and talking with animation. As soon as Mrs. Grace caught sight of me she hurried down the steps, meeting me as I passed among the flower-beds. She held a newspaper marked Extra in her hand, and seemed to have forgotten that I had love-affairs.
“Have you seen this? Colt, the chauffeur, was at the station and brought it back. It’s just come down from New York.”
Glad of anything that would distract attention from myself, I took the paper in my hand and pretended to be reading it. All I got was the vague information that some one had been assassinated—some man and his morganatic wife. What did it matter to me? What did it matter to any one? Of all that was printed there, only five syllables took possession of my memory—and that because they were meaningless, “Gavrilo Prinzip!”
I was repeating them to myself as I handed the paper back, and we exchanged comments of which I have no recollection. More comments were passed with the Grahams, and then, blindly, drunkenly, I made my way to my room.
There I found nothing to do less classic than to sit at the open window, to look over at the red-and-yellow house on the opposite hill. It was my intention to think the matter out, but my brain seemed to have stopped working. Nothing came to me but those barbaric sounds, that kept repeating themselves with a kind of hiss: “Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip!”
From my stupefied scanning of the paper I hadn’t grasped the fact that a name utterly unknown that morningwas being flashed round the world at a speed more rapid than that of the earth round the sun. Still less did I suspect that it was to become in its way the most sinister name in history. I kept repeating it only as you repeat senseless things in the minutes before you go to sleep.
“Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip!”