“’Tis an awkward thing to play with souls,And matter enough to save one’s own.Yet think of my friend and the burning coalsWe played with for bits of stone.”
“’Tis an awkward thing to play with souls,And matter enough to save one’s own.Yet think of my friend and the burning coalsWe played with for bits of stone.”
They could not know that I had had anything to do with it; yet, if ill came of it, I should blame myself all the rest of my life.
Not long afterwards they were married very quietly and went away for a few weeks. When they returned I sought Louise with eagerness, and found that my fears were not groundless. I tried to think what to do. If it would have eased matters, I would willingly have gone to her and confessed that I instigated Charlie Hardy’s confession. But I felt that the root of the matter lay deeper than that, so I said nothing that could be construed into an unwelcome knowledge of her affairs.
In the short time which elapsed between their return and the date set for their departure for Europe, where they were to stay a year, I saw Louise continually. She sought me as if she liked to be with me, although her eyes never lost the anxious, hunted expression which you sometimes see in the eyes of some trapped wild creature.
It was a raw morning, with a chill wind blowing, when their steamer was to sail.Mr. Whitehouse, thinking I might have some last private word to say to Louise, skilfully detached everybody else and strolled with them beyond earshot, but where his eyes could continually rest upon his wife’s face.
As Louise and I walked up and down I took in mine the small hand which emerged from the great fur cuff of her boat cloak, and gradually its rigidity relaxed under my friendly pressure. I remembered, as I occasionally tightened my grasp upon it, that my dear little baby sister Lois, who was taken away from us before she outgrew her babyhood, used to squeeze my hand in this fashion, and when I asked her what it meant, she invariably said, “It means dat it loves you.” I wondered if the same inarticulate language could be conveyed to poor, suffering Louise. Suddenly she turned to me and said,
“You have thrown something gentle, a softness around me this morning. I can feel it. What is it, Ruth?”
“I don’t know, dear, unless it is my love for you.”
“It is something more. Your eyes look into mine as if you knew all about it and wished to comfort me.”
As I made no answer, she turned and looked down at me from her superb height.
“Tell me,” she said quite gently; “I shall not be angry. Tell me,doyou know?”
“Yes, Louise, I know.”
She hesitated a moment as if she really had not believed it. Then she said slowly,
“If any other person on earth except you had told me that, I should die. I could not live in the knowledge. But you—well, your pity is not an insult somehow.”
“Because it is not pity, Louise,” I said steadily. “There is a difference between pity and sympathy. One is thrown at you—the other walks with you.”
She only pressed my hand gratefully. Suddenly she turned and said impulsively,
“Then you must know how utterly wretched I am.”
Glancing over her shoulder I could see the eyes of her husband fastened upon her with an expression which stirred me to put forth my best efforts.
Then it came over me how pent-up all this intensity of feeling must be. I realized how impossible it would seem to her to speak of it. Taking my life in my hand—for I was mortally afraid—I rushed in, after the manner of my kind, where angels fear to tread.
“Did you love him then so much?”
The pupils of her eyes enlarged until they were all black with excitement. She caught both my hands in hers.
“Only God Himself knows how I loved him,” she whispered.
I knew then that all Charlie had said was true, and, weak coward that I was, if I could have undone the past, I would have given him back to her. I was borne away by a glimpse of such love. O Charlie Hardy! And you cast this from you for a pair of blue eyes!
“How came you to love such a weak man?” I asked tremblingly.
“That is what I want to know. How could I? How can girls of my sort love so hopelessly beneath us? I’ve thought and wondered over that question until my brainhas almost turned, and the only consolation I find is that I am not the only one. Other women, cleverer than I, have loved the most contemptible of men and have been deceived just as I was. Oh, if he or I had only died before I discovered the truth! If I could have mourned him honorably and felt that my grief was dignified! But I won’t allow myself to grieve over him. I tell myself that I am well out of it and that I ought to be glad. But instead of gladness there is a dull, miserable ache in my heart, which I feel even in my sleep. Not for him; I don’t mourn for him, but for myself—for my fallen idols and my shattered ideals. What will such men have to answer for? I doubt if I ever can believe in anything human again.”
“Anythinghuman,” I repeated gladly.
Louise looked down.
“He was not omnipotent,” she said huskily. “He ruled my heart only, not my soul.”
“I suppose you have tried to love your husband?” I said.
“Tried? Oh, Ruth, I have tried sohard! He is so good to me. He knows everything. Of course I told him. That was why we were married so suddenly. He wished it and urged such excellent reasons, and I had so much respect for him and his wisdom in what is best, that I married him. I thought I could love him. I always thought that if I didn’t love—the other one—I should love Norris; but I can’t. I believe my power of love is gone forever. I feel sometimes as if the best part of me had been killed—not died of its own accord, but as if it had been murdered.”
“Poor child!” I said. “Why don’t you talk this over with your husband?”
“Oh, Ruth, how could I?”
“Well, may I talk to you? Will it hurt you?”
“Nothing that you would say can hurt me, dear.”
“Then let me say just this. You have been trying to do in weeks what nature would take years to do. In real life you cannot lose your love and heal your worse than widowed heart and love anew as you would in private theatricals. You haveoutraged your own delicate sensibilities, but not with your husband’s consent. He does not want you to try to love him. No good man does. He wants you to love him because you can’t help yourself—because it seems to your heart to be the only natural thing to do. ‘When the song’s gone out of your life, you can’t start another while it’s a-ringing in your ears. It’s best to have a bit o’ silence, and out of that maybe a psalm’ll come by and by.’”
“Oh, Ruth, dear Ruth, say that again,” she cried, turning towards me with tears in her lovely eyes. I repeated it.
“How restful to dare to take ‘a bit o’ silence’!”
“No one can prevent you doing so but yourself. Mr. Whitehouse married you to give you just that, confident that he loved you so much that the psalm would come by and by.”
“I believe he did,” said Louise gently, with color rising in her cheeks.
“Another thing. Don’t try not to grieve. Don’t repress yourself. It is right that you should mourn over your lost ideals.Nothing on earth brings more poignant grief than that. You will never get them back. Do not expect what is impossible. They were false ideals, none the less beautiful and dear to you for being that, but truly they were distorted. You will see this some time. You have begun to see it now. You realize that this man was in no way what you thought him. You had idealized him, had almost crowned him. Now you can’t help trying to invest Mr. Whitehouse with the same unnamable, invisible qualities. But no man has them. Your husband is a thousand times more worthy than the other, yet even he does not deserve worship. Let the man do the crowning if you can, although a woman of your temperament would find even that difficult—that which the most inane of women could accept with calmness and a smile. You have the magnificent humility of the truly great. Still it is not appreciated in this world. Try resting for a while and let your husband love you.”
I knew that I was saying, though perhaps in a different way, things which Norris Whitehouse had urged upon her. Notthat she said so. She would have regarded that as sacrilege. But it was a look, a little trembling smile, which betrayed the ingenuous young creature to me. I felt that I was in the presence of a nature very fair and exquisitely pure. It was a sacred feeling. I almost felt as if I ought not to read the signs in her face, because she had no idea that they were there.
“I have such horrible doubts,” she said suddenly with suppressed bitterness. “I do not belittle my love. I know that I loved him with all my heart and soul, and that I gave him more than most women would have done, because love means infinitely more to me than it does to them. I knew all the time that I loved him more than he loved me, but I did not care, for I believed, blind as I was, that we loved each other all we were capable of doing, and if I had more love to give it was only because I was richer than he, and I meant to make him the greater by my treasure. Now I feel that both I and my love have been wasted. Oh, it was a cruel thing, Ruth. I feel so poor, so poor.”
“Louise, you think, but you do not think rightly.Areyou poorer for having loved him? What is his unworth compared with your worth? Isn’t your love sweeter and truer for having grown and expanded? No love was ever wasted. It enriches the giver involuntarily. You are a sweeter, better woman than before you loved, unless you made the mistake of small natures and let it embitter you. You have no right to feel that it has been wasted.”
“Do you think so?” she said doubtfully. “That is an uplifting thought.” Then she added in a low voice, “There is one thing more. It is very unworthy, I am afraid, but it is a canker that is eating my heart out. And that is the mortification of it. Can you picture the thing to yourself? Can you form any idea of how I felt? It grows worse the more I think of it.”
“I know, I know. But, dear child, there is where I am powerless to help you. If I were in your place I think I should feel just as you do. It was a cruel thing. I wonder that you bore it as well as you did.”
“What! Shouldyoufeel that way? Then you do not blame me?”
“Why mention blame in connection with yourself? You are singularly free from it. But did you ever consider what an honor the love of such a man as your husband is? Do you know how he is admired by great men? Do you realize how he must love you, and what magnificent faith he must have to wish to marry a young girl like you who admits that she does not love him? If you never do anything else in this world except to deserve the faith he has in you, you will live a worthy life.”
We were standing still now, and Louise was looking at her husband at a distance with a look in her eyes which was good to see.
“You never can love him as you loved the other one. A first love never comes again. Would you want it to? When you love your husband, as he and I both know that you will do some time—perhaps not soon, but he is very patient—still, I say, when you love him you will love him in a gentler, truer way.”
“Can you tell me why such a bitter experience should have been sent to me so early in life?”
“To save you pain later and to make of you what you were planned to be.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks and she bent to kiss me, for the last mail had been put aboard and we had only a moment more.
What she whispered in my ear I shall never tell to any one, but it will sweeten my whole life.
As we went towards Mr. Whitehouse Louise involuntarily quickened her pace a little and held out her hand to him with a smile. It was good to see his face change color and to view the quiet delight with which he received her.
Then there were good-byes and hurried steps and a great deal of shouting and hauling of ropes, and there were waving of hands and a tossing of roses from the decks above and a few furtive tears and many heart-aches, and then—the great steamer had sailed.
IN WHICH I WILLINGLY TURN MY FACE WESTWARD
“Grow old along with me.The best is yet to be,The last of life, for which the first was made.Our times are in His handWho saith, ‘A whole I planned,Youth shows but half; trust God, see all, nor be afraid.’”
“Grow old along with me.The best is yet to be,The last of life, for which the first was made.Our times are in His handWho saith, ‘A whole I planned,Youth shows but half; trust God, see all, nor be afraid.’”
The years cannot go on without destroying the old landmarks, and I am so old-fashioned that change of any kind saddens me. People move away, strangers take their houses, the girls marry, children grow up, and everything is so mutable that sometimes my cheerfulness has a haze to it.
I am in a mood of retrospection to-night. I am living over the past and knitting up the ravelled ends.
Dear Rachel! I am thankful that she and Percival continue so happy. It iswonderful how every one recognizes and speaks of the completeness of these two. They do not parade their affection. They seem rather to try to hide it even from me, as if it were almost too sacred for even my kindly eyes. It is in the atmosphere, and, though they go their separate ways, they are more thoroughly together than any other married people I know.
Both Percival and Rachel are becoming very generally recognized now. People are discovering how wonderfully clever their work is, and they share themselves with the public, although it is a sacrifice every time they do so. Rachel’s rather turbulent cleverness has softened down. She says it is because it is “billowed in another greater and gentler sort.” She looks at me rather wistfully sometimes. I know what she thinks, but she does not bore me with questions. I wonder if she thinks I regret anything. Unless I consider that the Percivals have redeemed the record I am keeping, there is nothing especially tempting in the marriages I am watching. I cannot think that they are any happier than I am.
Sallie Cox seems contented most of the time. She has a magnificent establishment, handsomer than all the rest of the girls’ put together. Her husband “doesn’t bother” her, she says, and the Osbornes are very popular.
“I’m glad I’m shallow,” she said to me once. “Shallow hearts do not ache long. If I had a deep nature I should go mad or turn into a saint. As it is, I wear the scars.”
Once, when I went with her to Rachel’s, she sat and looked around the simple, inexpensive house, with the walls all lined with books and no room too good to live in every day, and she said,
“This is the prettiest home I ever was in in my life, and there is not a lace curtain in the house!”
We laughed—everybody laughs at Sallie—and Rachel said gently,
“We don’t need them.”
Sallie looked up quickly and took in the full significance of the words, as she answered in the same tone,
“No, you do not, but I do.” And each woman had told her heart history. Now,Rachel must know almost as much about Sallie as I do; but she never will know all.
Sallie said she went home and hated every room in her house separately and specifically; then she had a good cry over “the perfectness of the Percivals,” and issued invitations to a masked ball.
“That ball was full of significance, Ruth,” she told me afterwards with her most whimsically knowing look. “It was bristling with it. But nobody thought of it except a certain little goose I know named Sara Cox Osborne.”
Jack Whitehouse and Pet Winterbotham are married. They had the most beautiful wedding I ever saw; but it was like watching the babes in the wood, for they aresucha young-looking pair.
I understand better now what Pet meant when she talked about Jack’s appearance so much. I think he expressed to her the idea of perpetual youth and eternal spring-time. To me, too, it seems as if he ought always to be yachting in blue and white, or lying at full length on the grass at some girl’s feet. And Pet herself makes an admirablecompanion-piece. When I see her in a misty white ball-dress, with one man bringing her an ice and another holding her flowers and a third bearing her filmy wraps, I feel that things are quite as they should be. Some people seem to be born for fair weather and smooth sailing.
It is too soon to judge them finally. Norris Whitehouse’s nephew will outgrow the ball-room, and Pet will find in Louise an incentive to grow womanly.
The Asburys have built a fine house since Alice’s father died, and go about a great deal, but seldom together. Asbury lives at the club, and Alice has her mother with her. Alice has embraced Theosophy and spells her name “Alys.” She always is interested in something new and advanced, and whenever I meet her I am prepared to go into ecstasies over a plan to save men’s souls by electricity, or something equally speedy in the moral line. She is daft on spiritual rapid transit.
She does these things because she is a disappointed, clever, ambitious woman, who would have made a noble characterif she had been surrounded by right influences.
What would have been the result if Alice had taken as her creed: “The situation that has not its duty, its ideals, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out therefrom, and working, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself; thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same ideal out of; what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? Oh, thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see”?
Ah, well, she could not. She still is crying to the gods and spelling her name “Alys.” Her cleverness must have an outlet, and, with worse than no husband to lavish it upon, she scatters it to the four windsof heaven and gets herself talked about as “queer.”
May Brandt has bitten into her apples of Sodom, and the taste of ashes is bitter indeed to her. She knows now that Brandt never loved her, and did love Alice. I do not know whether she thinks he still cares for Alice or not. May never had much beauty to lose, but she looks worn and unhappy, and watches Alice with a degree of feeling which would appear vulgar to me if I did not know just how miserable she is. She is hopelessly plain now, and Alice is still like a tall, stately lily. Brandt devours her with his eyes, but Alice makes him keep his distance.
Sallie Cox has been diplomatic and harmless enough to make Alice forgive her, and they are quite good friends; but Alice is magnificent in her scorn of Brandt’s wife, who almost cowers in her presence.
Poor May! I wish I could take that look of suffering from her little pinched, three-cornered face for just one hour. But how could I? How could anybody who knew all about it?
She does not understand Alice in all hermoods and vagaries, and Alice does not condescend to explain herself even to her friends. I do not believe that Alice and Brandt have ever spoken on the subject which occupies three minds whenever they two are thrown together. Yet I imagine it would be a relief to May if she were told that. However, she is scarcely noble enough to believe it, even if Alice herself should tell her. But Alice never will. She never gives it a thought. Brandt, too, has honor, though, even if he had not, Alice would have it for him and forbid a word.
It is a fortunate thing for some people’s chances for a future life that there are a reasonable number of consciences distributed through the world, although it would be an Old Maid’s suggestion that sometimes they be allowed to drive instead of being used as a liveried tiger—for ornament and always behind. It is a great pity that people who are supplied with them—and well-cultivated consciences too—have not the courage to live up to them, but allow themselves to be gently and feebly miserable all their lives.
Now, Charlie Hardy has periods of being the most miserable man I ever knew. His last interview with Louise must have been as serious a thing as he ever experienced. He has married Frankie Taliaferro, and she makes the sweetest little kitten of a wife you ever saw. In Louise he would have been protected by a coat of mail. In Frankie he finds it turned into a pale-blue eider-down quilt, which suits his temperament much better.
Louise Whitehouse is coming home soon. Her year abroad has lengthened into several years, and they have been the most beautiful of her life, she writes. “Living with a song in one’s life may be the sweetest while it lasts and before one thinks; but to live by a psalm is to find life infinitely more beautiful and worthier. I never can be thankful enough that my life was taken out of my hands at the time when I clung to it most blindly, and ordered anew by One stronger and wiser than I.”
Tears come to my eyes whenever I think of this girl. I do not quite know why, unless it is that there always is somethingsad in watching the tempering of a bright young enthusiasm, even though it becomes more useful than when so sparkling and high-strung.
I have been at great pains to have Charlie Hardy realize how happy Louise is, but his conscience still troubles him at times. He says he knows he did the right thing for every one concerned, but he dislikes the idea of himself in so disagreeable a rôle; and Louise’s opinion of him now, after the one she did have, is a constant humiliation to him. Women always have admired him, and he objects very strongly to any exception to the rule. I think he misses the mental ozone which he found in Louise. I often wonder if men who have loved superior women and married average ones do not have occasional wonderings and yearnings over lost “might have beens.”
The Mayos still live in the brown house, which has been enlarged and greatly beautified recently. I have an enthusiastic friendship with the children, who are growing into slim slips of girls and sturdy, clear-eyed boys, and their house is still a home. Frank’sadmiration for soubrettes died a sudden and violent death at the masked notoriety of his initial escapade, and for a time he was shocked into better behavior. We hear odd rumors floating around, however, of whose truth we never can be sure, but which we shake our heads over, after the fashion of those whose confidence has been caught napping once. We never knew whether Nellie discovered the truth or not. If Frank denied it, it would not affect matters with her if the world rang with it. Her idolatry has a certain blind stubbornness in it which I should not care to beat against.
Bronson does not stand as straight as he did when I first knew him. Rachel says he has “a scholarly stoop.” But she knows, and I know, that something besides law-books and parchment has taken the elasticity out of his step.
Many years have gone by since I became an Old Maid. I want to call my Alter Ego’s attention to this fact gently but firmly, because I have an idea that she still considers herself “only thirty,” and that she thinks she has just begun to be an Old Maid.Whereas she is old and so am I. I do not mind it at all. Neither does she; it is only that she had not realized it. We have so much to think about more important than our stupid ages. People have grown used to seeing us about, and we like the same things, and keep going at about the same pace and in the same road, and I think we have come to be an Institution.
I have no worries which I do not borrow from my married friends. I keep up with the fashions; my clothes fit me; my fingers still come to the ends of my gloves; I feel no leaning towards all-over cloth shoes; I have not gone permanently into bonnets. I have tried to be a pleasant Old Maid, and my reward is that my friends make me feel as if they liked to have me about. I am not made to feel that I ampassé. One’s clothes and one’s feelings are all that ever make onepassé.
Nevertheless, I have turned my face resolutely towards the setting sun. I am resting now. I have given up struggling against the inevitable. That is a privilege and an attribute of youth. I feel as though I wereonly beginning to live, now that I have passed through the period of turmoil and come out from the rapids into gently gliding water. There is so much in life which we could not see at the beginning, but which grows with our growth and bears us company in the richness of evening-tide. I have learned to love my life and to cultivate it. Who knows what is in her life until she has tended it and made it know that she expects something from it in return for all her aspirations and endeavors? Even my wasted efforts are dear to me.
“’Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours,And ask them what report they bore to Heaven,And how they might have borne more welcome news.”
“’Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours,And ask them what report they bore to Heaven,And how they might have borne more welcome news.”
Yet there is a sadness in looking back. I see the many lost opportunities lifting to me their wistful faces, and dumbly pleading with me to accept them and their promises; yet I carelessly passed them by. I see worse. I see the rents in the hedge, where I forced my wilful way into forbidden fields, and only regained my path after wearywandering, brier-torn, and none the better for my folly. Lost faces come before me which I might have gladdened oftener. Voices sound in my ear whose tones I might have made happier if I would. Withheld sympathy rises up before me deploring its wasted treasure. How can any one be happy in looking back? The only pleasure in looking forward is in hope. Yet now both grief and joy are tempered with a softness which enfolds my fretted spirit gratefully.
“Time has laid his handUpon my heart gently; not smiting it,But as a harper lays his open palmUpon his harp to deaden its vibrations.”
“Time has laid his handUpon my heart gently; not smiting it,But as a harper lays his open palmUpon his harp to deaden its vibrations.”
And so I am looking forward to-night to an old age more peaceful, less turbulent, than my youth has been. I reach forward gladly, too, for life holds much that is sweet to old age, which youth can in no wise comprehend. Possibly this is one reason why youth is so anxious to concentrate enjoyment. But I am tired of concentration. There is a wear and tear about it which precludes the possibility of pleasure. I wantto take the rest of my life gently, and by redoubled tenderness repay it for rude handling in my youth—that youth which lies very far away from me to-night and is wrapped in a rainbow mist.
THE END
OF A
By Mrs.W. K. Clifford, Author of “Aunt Anne,” “Mrs. Keith’s Crime,” etc. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $1 25.
This volume contains three brilliant love-stories well worth reading.... The letters are original and audacious, and are full of a certain intellectual “abandon” which is sure to charm the cultivated reader.... We trust that Mrs. W. K. Clifford will give us more fiction in this delicately humorous, subtle, and analytic vein.—Literary World, Boston.
Mrs. Clifford’s literary style is excellent, and the love-letters always have their special interest.—N.Y. Times.
There is abundant cleverness in it. The situations are presented with skill and force, and the letters are written with great dramatic propriety and much humor.—St. James’s Gazette, London.
In short analytical stories of this kind Mrs. Clifford has come to take a unique position in England. In the delicate, ingenious, forcible use of language, to express the results of an unusual range of observation, she stands to our literature as De Maupassant and Bourget stand to the literature of France.—Black and White, London.
The study of character is so acute, the analysis of motives and conduct so skilful, and, withal, the wit and satire so keen, that the reader does not tire.—Christian Intelligencer, N.Y.
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OF
ByThomas Hitchcock. With Twelve Portraits. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25.
A fascinating book. So taking are its rapidly interchanging lights and shadows that one reads it from beginning to end without any thought of possible intrusion.—Observer, N.Y.
The simple and perspicuous style in which Mr. Hitchcock tells these stories of unhappy loves is not less admirable than the learning and the extensive reading and investigation which have enabled him to gather the facts presented in a manner so engaging. His volume is an important contribution to literature, and it is of universal interest.—N.Y. Sun.
The stories are concisely and sympathetically told, and the book presents in small compass what, in lieu of it, must be sought through many volumes.—Dial, Chicago.
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