“It is you who have inspired me to a new faith,” he answered, tremulously. “It is you who have awakened me to Art. Do you know what happened to me this morning when I went to seek you out? I, too, was reborn.”
He told her the auspicious incident—how he had been photographed as part of the fresh young art-life.
She clapped her jewelled hands.
“It is providential—foreordained. We are to be happy.”
“Happy!” He shivered with sudden foreboding. “Another prophetess declared I was never to be happy,” he said, sadly. “To thirst, and to thirst, and never to quench my thirst!”
“Oh, that is all superstitious nonsense!” she cried, vehemently. “Youmustbe happy; youshallbe happy; the world must not lose your Art;Iwill save it.”
Her face was glorified.
“But the cost to yourself,” he faltered.
“I will pay the price. You love me. For me to ruin your life—thatwould be sin.”
She drew his head to her bosom and smoothed back the curly hair from his forehead.
“My dear, my dear,” she murmured.
He gulped back the lump in his throat. “No, this is not sin. You have redeemed me; I never felt so at peace with all things,” he said, in low, religious tones. “Oh, we will shame the world—we will live high and true. Our happiness shall radiate to all that sorrows and suffers. Our home shall be the home of Art. It shall stand open to all the young artists striving faithfully in poverty—it shall be a centre of blessing. Suffering has made me morose, now I feel at one with my kind, longing to do my truest work. Oh, God bless you, my dear.”
A startled look of alarm had come into her face. She loosed her embrace of him.
“But, Matt! We cannot have a home.”
He had a chill of apprehension, which even the sweetness of that first clipping of his name could not counteract.
“But we love each other!”
She waved her hands agitatedly. “The world would spurn me—”
“We will spurn the world.”
“Oh, but you are not thinking! Who would come to the house? How is it to be a centre of blessing?”
“We will win the world’s respect. What! You and I! Are we not strong enough? You, with your noble past—I, who come from nothing and have wonyou.”
“You talk like a dreamer, a poet, and I love you for it. But you do not know the world—how it ignores the realities of things.”
“Oh, I know the canting hypocrisy that puts its faith in shows, and honors loveless marriage. I will teach it to respect a home of love, and the work that is its fruit. You are right, happiness is the mother of Art. Oh, how I shall work now, my dear!”
“You may overtop Raphael; you will never be a Royal Academician.”
“What has my private life to do with Art?”
“Nothing with Art, but everything with English Art. You will lose your R.A.”
“I shall gain you.”
She shook her head.
“Why not gain both?”
“Ah, but you say it is impossible!”
“I do not say so. What need is there to wear our hearts upon our sleeves?” She touched his sleeve now, insinuating caressing fingers. “Darling, don’t you see how hard it would be for me to bear—I am not a man. The worst of the scorn would be for me. Society is very hard upon those who will not be unconventional in secret. I have not your courage and strength. You will not shame me.”
He weakened.
“Oh, I am thoughtless,” he said, and stood miserable, unconscious of the caressing fingers.
Then his brow lightened.
“Nobody knows I’m married. If we came back and set up house together, people would think we had been married abroad.”
She put her hands to her face with a desperate gesture. “Oh, but I could not bear Olive to know.”
His heart leaped. “Has Herbert told her I’m married?”
“No, she doesn’t know.”
“He is a fine fellow.”
“But she would be sure to learn it one day—it would leak out.”
“Then she would keep the secret.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know Olive,” she said from between her palms. “She is hard on women. I would have sat to you ages ago, only I was afraid of her sneers. I wouldn’t have her know for worlds. I used to think her sexless.”
“But now that she is to be married—”
“She will be more conventional than ever.”
He tossed back his hair, impatiently. “Then we must dispense with Olive.”
For a long time she did not reply. He thought his harshness towards her friend had set her crying again. He gently forced her hands from her face. It was flushed and pain-stricken.
“Forgive me. I have hurt you,” he said, in contrition.
“No, you do not understand. And Olive has been so good to me. She takes charge of all my affairs—” She hesitated. “I don’t even know what my income is, or”—with a pathetic engaging smile—”whether I have an income at all. And I’m afraid I spend a great deal.”
He straightened his shoulders. “I am very glad of that. I will work for you. I can wring gold from the world.” Rapid calculations flashed through his mind—already he regretted his last year’s inactivity, the destruction of his picture.
She was blushing adorably. “No, I could not take anything from you ... if we lived apart. No, no.”
“Not from me? Oh, Eleanor. Then we must make our home together.”
“But don’t I tell you that is impossible?” she said, almost pettishly, on the brink of tears. “The world would get to know the truth. There is that Ruth Hailey you spoke of, who knows your brother, and who through her connection with Linda Verder gets brought into contact with all sorts of people. And your wife would hear of it, too. Unscrupulous persons would egg her on to move. There would be blackmailing, everything sordid and horrible.” She shuddered violently.... “Oh, you do not know the world—you have lived with your eyes shut, fixed on inward visions.”
He opened them now, startled to find himself lectured for want of worldliness by this ethereal creature. She dissipated his uneasy bewilderment by a swift transition, her face dimpled itself with reassuring smiles. She pulled the little curly lock at his forehead with a fascinating tug.
“Don’t be such a hot-headed Quixote, dear. There is time enough to plan out the future. Circumstances may change—” Her face saddened. “The poor creature may be taken ... and your idea may seem more plausible when I have got used toit—you come with a rush and a crash—like those waves that night.” She smiled wistfully. “And I am only a woman, and timid. Can’t you see I have been frightened to death all this last half-hour?”
“Frightened of me?”
“No,” with a pathetic smile. “Frightened of Olive. Twenty times I thought I caught her footsteps.”
“What if she does come! She won’t be surprised to see me here.”
“No, but I have a plan. It will be safest if she doesn’t know you’re in Paris at all. You must leave me at once.”
His heart sank. “But when do I see you?”
“Next Sunday evening.”
“A whole week?” The sunlight seemed gone.
“On Sunday morning Olive goes to Brussels for a few days—she’s only waiting to finish that statuette of Fate, isn’t it weird? All those things there are Olive’s handiwork; how clever she is! I only do the menial work of pouring in the plaster. It saves money, because—”
“Yes, yes,” he interrupted, impatiently. “And on Sunday evening?”
“You will call for me here—say about seven—you will take me to dinner, somewhere quiet in this great free Paris.” She made a great circle with her arms, as if enjoying the elbow-room. “And then—” she smiled intoxicatingly, “then we can talk over the future.” Her eyes looked heavenly promise. He caught her in his arms. This time she struggled away.
“No, no! She may be back at any moment. I hear footsteps. You must go.”
She pushed him towards the door.
“Mayn’t I write?”
“No, Olive would see the letter.”
The footsteps passed by.
He looked back in reluctant farewell, as he fumbled at the door-handle. She was close behind him.
She opened her arms, and his head was on her breast again. “Oh, my dear, my dear,” she murmured, “it is hard to wait.”
Then she pushed him outside, her face grown spiritual againin its anxiety, and she slammed the door, and he reeled like a drunken man.
Her last look haunted him—soulful, alluring, intoxicating. He was almost sobbing with happiness. Heaven had been kind to him at last. The balmy air of the court-yard fanned his brow. He walked on aimlessly, in a beatific dream, past the beautiful Ionic portico, through the corridor, into the street, no longer grimy, and so on to the Boulevards.
How happy the world was! How the sunshine streamed with its dancing motes! How gay the kiosks with their dainty posters and the piquant designs of great caricaturists laughing from the front pages of the illustrated journals! How light-hearted those bourgeois drinking red wine at theal frescotables! What a jolly, bulbous-nosed old cabman that was who hailed him, not knowing he had quicksilver in his veins, and must needs give his limbs to lively motion. He sauntered on at random, buoyant, treading on sunbeams, a song at his heart, breathing in the sense of the spacious, airy city that sparkled in the spring sunshine, mother of nimble spirits; he crossed the river, glittering in a long sweep, with Notre Dame rising on its island in picturesque antiquity; the book-stalls on the quays thrilled him with a remembrance of the joys of reading; he strode on humming a merry tune, the bustle of traffic was a musical accompaniment to it; he stopped at a great leafy square, alive with pedestrians, to watch the limpid water leaping from a beautiful fountain; around him were the seductive programmes of theatres, eloquent of artistic acting, of fine comedy, of poetic tragedy. He strolled along, absorbing noble buildings, and churches, and splendid public monuments. How fair life was, how marvellously compacted! Gladness was at the heart of all things.
The city passed into his soul as never before; its radiant message of elegance, proportion, style, sanity, unity, lucidity, exquisite sensibility to the material, balanced by an æsthetic delight in ideas, and the spirit of gayety all over; henceforth, thanks to Eleanor, he would be of it, following Art for the joy of Art, out of the happiness of the soul, sun-clear, without stagnant vapors of discontent, those fits of spleen bred of foggy, uncouth London; he would be fixed at last, swinging steadilyon a pivot of happiness, a lover of life and a praiser thereof. All its sweetness had been diverted from him—it had passed to others. Now at last he would be self-centred. He rambled on, he crossed the Pont Passy, and saw the old city rising quaint and steep in wooded terraces. Oh, love and life! Oh, life and love! Why had people besmirched the Creation with soilures of cynicism, plaguing the air with pessimistic laments, graceless grunts of swine nosing garbage?
What good times he had had himself, he who had won fame and gold while still young! And how ungraciously he had accepted these gifts of the gods, mewling and whining like a sulky child. Surely he deserved that hell allotted in Dante for those who had wilfully lived in sadness. The gracious romance of life—that was what his Art should henceforth interpret. He began to dream beautiful masterpieces, and they reminded him that he had come to see the Salon. He retraced his steps towards the Champs Elysées, watching the endless procession of elegant equipages rolling steadily to and from the Bois, with their panorama of luxurious women. He entered the Salon; the pictures delighted him, the crowd enraptured him, a young girl’s face stirred him to a mood of paternal benediction; he met Edward Cornpepper, A.R.A., there, and felt the little man was his dearest friend. Cornpepper introduced him to his newly-acquired wife, who said the Exhibition was indecent.
“You are right, my dear, there isn’t a decent picture here,” Cornpepper chuckled, grimacing to adjust his monocle, and feeling his round beard. “Ichabod! The glory is departed from Paris. The only chaps who can paint nowadays are the Neo-Teutonic school. The Frenchmen are played out—they have even lost their taste. They bought a picture of mine last year, you remember. I palmed off the rottenest thing I’d ever done on ’em. It’s in the Luxembourg—you go and see it, old man, and you tell me if I’m not right. Now, mind you do! Ta, ta, old fellow. Sorry you’re not in the Academy this year—but it’s a good advertisement for you. I think I shall be ill myself next year. But we mustn’t talk shop. Good-bye, old man. Oh, by-the-way, I hear your cousin’s engaged to an heiress. It’s true, is it? Lucky beggar, that Herbert! Better than painting, eh?Ha! ha! ha! But I knew he’d never do anything. Didn’t he win the Gold Medal, eh? Ho! ho! ho! Well, au revoir. Don’t forget the Luxembourg. You don’t want to wait till I’m dead and in the Louvre, what? Thanks for a pleasant chat, and wish you better.”
Matthew shook his hand for the third time with unabated affection. What a clever fellow Cornpepper was, and what a pretty wife he had got!
He went to his hotel to dine. The court-yard was gay with lounging, lolling visitors, the fountain in the centre leaped and sparkled with changing colors, like an effervescence of the city. Far into the night he sat out on the balcony of his gilt-skied, many-mirrored bedroom, gazing at the beautiful Boulevards stretching serenely away in the moonlight between their gigantic edifices.
Howhe lived through the rest of the week he never definitely remembered. He would have willingly given the days away, but, as they had to be filled up somehow, they left confused recollections of theatres and ballets, of rencontres with random acquaintances, of riding on tiny tram-cars to see the Zoological Garden in the Bois de Boulogne, of wandering in a rag-fair, of reading modern French poetry, of visiting the ateliers of French painters whom he knew, and sympathizing with their grumbles against the Institute and the distribution of decorations, while wondering inwardly why these overgrown school-boys languished and died for lack of a bit of ribbon. What could a man want in life but to paint and to love? State recognition? Bah! The artist was always an Anarchist. He stood alone, self-centred.
He hobnobbed with students, too, in his new sympathy with youth and art, and—a distinguished visitor—was taken through the great ateliers with their rainbow-colored dados of palette-scrapingsand the announcements in every European language that new-comers must pay for drinks. He gladly accepted a ticket for a students’ ball on the Saturday night; it had been postponed for a few weeks through the death of a beloved professor. He had heard much of these balls, but had never seen one, and he counted upon it to while away that last intolerable night between him and his happiness.
Several times during the week he had thought of going to see Ruth Hailey in accordance with the duty that on the other side of the Channel had seemed so pressing, but he shrank instinctively from the raking up of memories of the old unhappy days at this joyous crisis; he was not in the mood for extraneous emotion. Nevertheless on the Saturday afternoon, partly for want of anything better to do, partly to keep up to himself the pretence that she was at least one of the motives that brought him to Paris, and partly to ascertain if she had spoken to people in England about his wife, he set out to pay the long-projected visit. He would feel how the ground lay, discover if she had innocently betrayed him to anybody who might touch Mrs. Wyndwood’s circle—which might be awkward if in a possible compromise Eleanor should ever decide to live with him in ostensible marriage.
He had a dim, unformed idea of appealing to Ruth for silence, but he did not really meditate invoking her sympathies; she was on the eve of departing for the Antipodes—was perhaps already gone.
He found her hotel—it was in the Rue de Rivoli. A waiter took up his name and forthwith brought back word that Mademoiselle would see Monsieur Strang.
His heart was throbbing curiously as he mounted the stairs and stood outside her door. The quick, irregular clack, clack of a type-writer responded like an echo. He was ushered into a large plainly-furnished sitting-room. His first vision was of a tall comely lady in a grayish gown, writing at a table opposite the door; but this was effaced by the slimmer figure of a younger woman approaching from the right, with a smile of welcome and an extended hand. A moment later her smile had faded, and her hand was on her heart, soothing its flutter. He wasshaken to his depths; behind all the bodily changes he saw the little girl-friend of his childhood; and, indeed, the purity of her limpid, truthful gaze was undimmed.
“Ruth!” he cried in alarm, moving forward as if to sustain her.
She drew herself up, rigid and frozen; then her face relaxed, suffused by a wan smile and a returning flood of carmine. She held out her hand with a nervous laugh.
“How are you, Mr. Strang? I thought it was Billy, and to see you instead startled me.”
As he took the little hand and looked into her face, maturer than its years, though it had not lost its olden charm, especially in the complexion, which was marvellously pure and soft, registering every slightest change of thought and feeling in dainty flickers of rose across its delicate fairness, his soul was invaded by a rush of tender memories, incongruously jostling in his brain: the thrills and raptures of boyhood, the joys of coasting down the slopes, and snaring rabbits and shooting partridges; the glow of skating; the delicious taste of the home-made cakes; the songs and hymns of childhood, the firelight casting shadows on the dusky walls, while his mother read the Bible; the drone of the fusty-coated preacher in the little wooden meeting-house; the thwacking of the dancers’ feet in the barn, the odors of hay and the lowing of cattle; the gleam of the yellow-tipped mullein by the wayside and the smell of the wild flowers in the woods; the note of the whippoorwill in the forest at twilight; the long cranes floating over the summer marshes; the buzz of fresh young voices in McTavit’s school-room. All these came back—dear and desirable, steeped in tears, softened by distance to a pensive beauty, like bawling choruses heard from afar across still water, inextricably interwoven with all the pieties of childhood, the simple sense of God and truth and honor and righteousness.
He stood holding her hand, oblivious of the present, in a whirling chaos of ancient images that melted his soul to childish tenderness, and brought back to it the child’s clear, unquestioning perception of spiritual ideas which had grown shadowy in the atmosphere of salons and studios and fashionable churches, that stereoscopic vision of the saint and the childwhich sees the spiritual solid. But Ruth disengaged her fingers at last, blushing under the kindly smile of the comely lady.
“This is Mr. Matthew Strang, Linda,” she said. “Mr. Strang, let me introduce you to Mrs. Verder.”
He bowed: “Oh, I have heard of Linda Verder,” he said, smiling.
“And I have heard more of Matthew Strang,” she replied, beamingly.
“That is scarcely possible,” he murmured.
She laughed with a bird-like trill. “Oh, I wasn’t alluding merely to your public career, though our sweet Ruth has gotten a whole album full of newspaper-cuttings about that. But it is of you yourself and your childhood that I have heard so much. So you see Ihavethe advantage of you. But you will excuse me, I know; I have to go out. You needn’t bother about those letters, dear. We’re nearly through with them.” And with an affectionate nod to Ruth and a beneficent smile to Matthew, she left the room. He was reddening: he was beginning to feel uncomfortable under Mrs. Verder’s smiles, which in their insinuation of old sweetheartship made it certain that Ruth had never mentioned his marriage to her friend even; to hear that the forgotten Ruth had been following his career all those years gave him an odd pathetic shiver. She and Billy—and Heaven knew what others—were sunning themselves in the mere reflected rays of that fame which had left him cold.
She stood away from him, shy and equally embarrassed, the blood ebbing and flowing in the pure, soft cheek.
“Won’t you sit down?” she said at last.
“Oh, thank you!” he replied, and took a distant chair.
She sat down behind her type-writer, facing him. There was a silence. She was the first to break it.
“I was so sorry to read you were ill.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” he murmured.
“I am so pleased we hadn’t left—we are sailing next Tuesday. It is so good of you to come and see me, with the many claims that you must have on your time.”
“It is a pleasure to be reminded of old times. I was sorry I missed you the time you called at my house,” he said, awkwardly.
“I was very sorry, too.”
“But you know I work at my studio,” he explained, trying not to flush. “There is no room at home.”
“Yes, I know. But I didn’t care to call there and interrupt your work. Billy showed me the little room where you used to work in the olden days. I thought it real nice of you to turn it into a study for him, and to take care of him as you are doing. He sent me a story of his. No; it wasn’t very good, poor fellow!” she added, seeing the question in his face. “Rather too full of passionate love-making.”
“Not published?”
“No—in manuscript. I returned it to him type-written. He was enraptured. He said it was like seeing himself in print.”
“Ah! we are not so used to the type-writer as you Americans.”
“It is coming in fast, though; even into your slow, old country, if you consider it yours,” she added, slyly. “I am delighted to see how many offices the new-fangled machine has crept into; in two years it will be in every business office.”
“Why delighted? Have you or Mrs. Verder shares in the patent?”
“No, no,” she said, gently. “Don’t you see it is a new occupation for women?”
He smiled.
“Ah, I remember. That’s your hobby.”
“Oh, not hobby, Mr. Strang, not hobby. It is my life-work. But I can’t expect you to sympathize with these sordid, practical things,” she said, smiling. “Your life is devoted to the gospel of the Beautiful.”
“Oh, but I do sympathize,” he cried, remorsefully. “I think it is very fine of you.”
She shook her head, her smile fading.
“You don’t—you can’t. You are outside the circle of the material worries of the poor; or, what is worse, the genteel. And nobody but a woman can know the tragic pettiness of the life-struggle for single girls—the stifled aspirations, the abortive longings, the tears in the night. Christ would have understood. But He was not a man.”
He saw the blur of emotion veil her eyes ere she turned her head hastily away. He felt his own sight growing dim; an understratum of his consciousness admired the flow of her language, and divined platform experiences. He had never before thought of her as clever.
She recovered herself in a moment, and resumed, playfully:
“No, if you were a black-and-white artist you would have sketched Mrs. Verder with corkscrew ringlets and crying for trousers. We do want the Franchise and the right to dress as we please, but these are only incidental aspects of the movement for the independence of women, though they lend themselves most readily to caricature. The woman of the future is simply the working woman. All we really want is to make girls economically independent of marriage; able to choose their mates from love instead of selling themselves for a home.”
He could not meet her frank eyes; he was suddenly reminded of his own marriage. What would this stainless soul think of him if she knew he had sold himself, or—worse—if she knew why he had come to her this afternoon? He murmured, surveying the carpet, that he knew life was hard for girls, but that he hoped she at least had not been unhappy.
“I? Oh! I’ve been as happy as the next girl, though I’ve had my trials,” she said, cheerily, between smiles and tears. “But I am grateful to God for them, else I should never have learned to sympathize as I do, and I should not have served the Master. My life might have been wasted in mere happiness.”
Mere happiness! The phrase went through him like a sword.
“Butyouhad no need to work for a living,” he said, dubiously.
“Indeed I had! I had nothing.”
“You had a father.”
“Of a kind. But I quarrelled with him. You heard that, of course.”
He had heard of it, of course, but her affairs had made trivial dints upon his consciousness.
“Why did you quarrel with him?” he asked.
Her face became a crimson mask. She lowered her head.
“Oh—I beg your pardon,” he stammered in distress. “Of course I had no right to ask.”
She was silent, her fingers nervously picking out letters on the type-writer. Then her eyes met his unflinchingly again.
“No, in a way you have a right to ask,” she said, uneasily. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you—it’s so long ago. You know I became the Deacon’s book-keeper?”
He nodded, wondering.
“He made me keep all his accounts. I learned all about his affairs. Well, one day, looking over the books, I made a discovery.”
“Yes?”
She hesitated. Her face was still fiery. The image of the mumbling, quid-chewing Deacon, with the roundabout methods of arriving at his point, rose vivid to his memory. He remembered his childish strain to understand “Ole Hey’s” good advice. Pop! Pop! Pop! It was like the clack, clack, clack of the type-writer under Ruth’s nervous, unconscious fingers. But what was this she was saying to the accompaniment of the erratic automatic music?
“I discovered that he was cheating you, or rather your sister and Abner Preep, that he had always bamboozled your father, that the mortgage was more than paid off long before, aside from the work he had gotten out of your brothers and sisters.” She paused, then hastened on with a lighter tone. “So, of course, being a foolish, hot-headed girl, I wouldn’t stay any longer in his house unless he repaid you, and equally of course he refused, knowing I wouldn’t make a scandal, and so I went off to the only relative I had in the world—my mother’s sister in Portland, Maine. She was too poor to give me more than food and shelter. But my knowledge of book-keeping soon got me a place in a store. And ever since I have earned my own bread, Heaven be thanked.”
She was not looking at him now; her fingers were still lightly tapping the letters into combinations that spelled only embarrassment. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have told you—but you won’t take action now, will you?”
“No, seeing that the money has been paid!” he cried, hoarsely, with a sudden intuition. He sprang up agitatedly. “You sent us all that money anonymously—from Maine!”
Her head drooped lower. “Oh, I felt I oughtn’t to say anything,” she cried in vexation.
“But you did, didn’t you?”
“It was such a trifle, anyhow,” she said, deprecatingly.
“It was a fortune then—five hundred dollars!”
“I could do no less. There was no other call for the money I earned in those first few years, while my aunt still lived. And I thought that perhaps—” He came towards her. “That perhaps—that perhaps it might help you in your career—my aunt corresponded with my poor mother’s friends in Cobequid Village—I knew how you were slaving and sending money to your folks.”
“God bless you, Ruth.”
“I hope it was a little help to you, Matt.” He thrilled under the name, spoken for the first time. “I have often liked to think it was—that I had a wee finger in the making of a great artist.”
Her words cut him to the heart. How could he tell her that her money had come too late? He was about to murmur something, but she stopped him.
“No, don’t answer me for fear you should dispel my illusion. It has been such a joy to me when I read about your rapid rise to say to myself: ‘Ah, perhapsweknow something.’ But half the joy was in the secrecy; now you have found me out, don’t take away the relics of my pleasure.”
“But why should you bother to read things about me?” he murmured, only half sincerely, for another and more agitating suspicion was fast germinating in his breast.
She flashed a quick glance up at him as he stood over her, then looked down again indifferently, her sweet mouth quivering. “Oh, why should I not be proud of knowing, if only in boyhood, the only great man our township ever produced?”
But he had now been trained in woman’s looks. Rosina and Eleanor had taught him much, and the thought that was borne in upon him now—the conviction that Ruth, too, loved him, that she had always cherished her childish affection, though his own had been swamped by his craving for Art—was not the complacent conviction of a coxcomb. It was a chilling agony.It pierced his breast like a jagged icicle. He had an appalling sense as of responsibility for a ruined life. The image of “Aunt Clara” flashed suddenly before him—careworn, faded, broken-down, unlovely. Was that to be the end of Ruth—the sweet playmate, the great soul?
“And you, too, have done something in life,” he said, as if to reassure himself, trying to curve his trembling lips to a smile.
She looked up frankly at him. “In so far as I have been able to help Linda to help other girls.”
“And do you meditate—helping Linda all your life?”
“With God’s help.”
“Even,” he essayed to smile again, “even if you marry?”
“Oh, but I won’t marry,” she said, quickly, and kept her face bravely raised to his, though the tell-tale rose was coming and going on her transparent skin.
“Not even”—his smile was a ghastly caricature—”to spite the caricaturists?”
She smiled a faint response. “Not even for that. Has not Linda sacrificed herself on that altar? It’s true she’s a widow, but still—”
He could not help asking the question: “But why won’t you marry?”
“Because I don’t want to. Is that a woman’s reason?” And she smiled again.
“Ruth!” he cried, frenziedly, in a strange mixture of emotions. “I am not worthy to kneel to you!”
She opened her eyes, wondering: “Because I prefer celibacy? Because my life is happy enough as it is; because, thanks to Mrs. Verder, it is sufficiently filled with activity and movement?”
“Oh, if it is, if it is!” he cried, almost hysterically.
“Certainly it is. You men are all so mistaken about women. Marriage may be a necessity for some women, but not for all—oh, thank God! not for all. It may be harder for Linda, who has known a husband’s love—but for me? Oh, I am perfectly happy.” She rose and moved away from him, and began to walk restlessly up and down, talking rapidly. “It is perfectlyabsurd, this making marriage and happiness synonyms. Novels end with marriage, and that is called a happy ending. Good heavens! It is quite as often an unhappy beginning! If you had seen the things I have seen, heard the tales women have told me! Even the women you would imagine the most enviable are full of worries. Why, look at your own wife, Mr. Strang, who has everything to make her happy.” And her lips parted in a faint smile.
He turned his face away. “Did she also tell you tales of woe?” he said, with a forced laugh.
“Well, not precisely woe, but plenty of anxiety about the children, and about the dishonesty of her helps, and she seemed rather poorly, too. I hope you left her strong and well.”
“Thank you,” he murmured, flushing.
“How proud she is of you,” Ruth went on. “I was so glad to find that she really appreciated you. I had often wondered. And it isn’t only on account of your importance, Matthew Strang! She told me you were goodness itself, which, of course, I knew, and that you had long wished her to move to a better neighborhood, only she was afraid to put you to expense. What a good woman she must be! And so pretty too!”
“Do you think so?” he muttered. His face was still averted.
“Yes, and I seem to remember her in your earliest pictures. She’s the woman in ‘Motherhood,’ isn’t she?”
“I think she sat for the figure,” he said, hesitatingly. “I couldn’t afford models then. I wish you weren’t going so soon. I should so like to do a sketch of you—something to remember you by.”
She shook her head. “We have so much to do this week. I shouldn’t have time.”
“I am sorry. Perhaps we shall never meet again,” he said in low tones. “I never even had a photograph of you—I could do a sketch from that.”
“I don’t think I have any. You did a sketch of me once,” she reminded him, “but I’m not going to give you that. That’s precious—an example of your first manner.” The gay note in her voice sounded rather strained. “Don’t you remember? You sent it me when you first went to Halifax, please don’t remember how many years ago.”
But he did remember. And he remembered, too, how he had sent it her as a slight return for theArabian Nights. He had lost her gift (through the carelessness of Jack Floss) very soon after, but she cherished his still.
He moved to her side, watching her rummage among heaps of papers. He saw the backs of two photographs, and picked them up. One was a portrait of Linda Verder, the other of himself.
“Both public celebrities,” she said, with a little confused laugh. “I’ve never attained to the shop-windows, so naturally I am scarcer.” She continued her search, and at last turned up something. “Ah, there’s an old one—or rather a young one. Me at sixteen! Goodness, to think I’ve still got that!”
His flaccid nerves sent fresh moisture to his eyes as he gazed at the simple picture of the sweet, delicate, girlish face, with large eyes luminous with dreams, looking out shyly upon life in a sort of wistful wonder and expectation, unconscious, unprophetic of the blank years when eyes grow dim with sudden unsought tears.
His voice was broken as he said: “Thank you. This is the picture I would most have wished to have. Henceforward I shall think of you, earnest, truthful, aspiring ... as you have thought of me all these years. And now I suppose I must not keep you any longer from your duties.”
“Oh, they are nothing. It is your time that is precious, I know. I am rejoiced to have had this glimpse of you in your fame and happiness. I shall always remember this afternoon. Good-bye, Mr. Strang.” She held out her hand.
He put his, with the portrait, behind his back. “No, I won’t,” he said, petulantly. “Not if you call me that.”
She dropped her hand with a sad smile.
“You see I belong to the rejected, Matt.”
He quivered as at a thrust.
“No, you are of the elect, of the saints of this earth.”
Her smile took on the wistfulness of her early portrait. They stood looking at each other in a tender embarrassment.
“Oh, by-the-way, Matt, you will not mind my speaking of her ... she belongs to me a little as well as to you, you know ... I went to see your poor mother before I left for Europe.”
He shuddered.
“Did she recognize you?” he said, in a half-whisper.
She shook her head. Her face was drawn with the pain of the memory. “But she is quite gentle, except when she quotes texts. They give her simple housework to do—it provides a vent for her activity ... marriages are not always happy, you see.” A wan smile flitted across her features. “I shall go to see her again. Poor creature! I forgot her when I called you happy. The thought of her must always sadden you.”
He would not trust his voice to reply. He transferred the photograph to his left hand, and held out the right in silence. She put her hand into his.
“Good-bye, Matt; perhaps forever.”
He struggled to speak.
“Good-bye, Ruth.” He bent nearer. “May I not kiss you ... for auld lang syne?”
She withdrew her hand. Her voice was tremulous and low. “We are not playmates now, Matt.”
He held up the photograph.
“Then I will kiss the girl I used to know.”
He pressed his lips reverentially to it.
She smiled sadly.
“Good-bye again, dear Matt. God bless you.”
He hurried from the room, overwhelmed with emotion. The door closed upon him, and he leaned against the balustrade for a moment to recover himself.
Clack! clack! clack! clack! clack!
It was the steady, business-like clatter of determined work. She had taken up the burden of Duty again.
Hehalf groped his way down the stairs. In this mist of tears all things were obscured, even the image of Eleanor Wyndwood.
No, one thing was clear—the figure of the sweet Puritan woman with her simple righteousness.
He emerged into the Rue de Rivoli with its pretentious architecture, its glittering shop windows, its bustle of life; across the road the gardens of the Tuileries stretched away in the sunshine; but the gentle figure stood between him and Paris. He tried to shake her off, to think of the transcendent raptures that awaited him on the morrow; he tried to see Eleanor’s face steadily, but it was all wavering lines like a reflection in storm-shaken water. He bethought himself of selecting the secluded restaurant and hiring the private room for the dinner, but the figure of Ruth resurged, blotting Eleanor’s out. He took out her photograph and kissed it again. “She’s a little angel,” he cried, aloud. And then, from that chaos of ancient memories, freshly stirred up, came like an echo Mad Peggy’s cry, “She’s a little angel....” A girl passing him laughed in his face, and he put away the portrait, flushing and chilled to the marrow.
He told himself he must soak himself in Paris and forget her. He walked towards the Grand Boulevards, trying vainly to absorb and assimilate the gayety of the streets. He returned to his hotel and dressed, and dined with dainty dishes and sparkling wines, such as Herbert himself would have recommended. But the quivering roots of his being had been laid bare; his soul vibrated with intangible memories, and the image of Ruth still possessed his imagination—the candid eyes, the pure skin. As ever his soul was touched through the concrete.
After dinner he wandered about the gay city, adding the red of his cigar-tip to the feverish dusk athrob with a myriad stars above and a myriad lights below; the soft spring air was charged with the pleasurable hum of ceaseless pedestrians; the theatres and music-halls and dancing places blazoned themselves upon the night; the great restaurants flared within and without, their pavement tables thronged with light-hearted men and pretty women, gossiping, laughing, clinking glasses. Women, everywhere women. They looked out even from the illustrated papers of the illumined kiosks. The shining city seemed to waft an incense of pleasure up to the stars; to breathe out an aroma of sinless voluptuousness that rose like a thank-offering for life. His heart expanded to all this happiness; he felt himself being caught up by the great joyous wave, and Eleanor Wyndwood’s face came back, radiant and seductive. But Ruth Hailey was still at his side, and ever and anon he saw her as in her later guise—stern, sorrowful, negativing; she stood out against the whole city.
He seated himself before one of the innumerable little marbleguéridons. He was at the cross-roads of the great arteries dominated by the fulgent façade of the Opera House, where he could watch the perpetual currents of gladsome life. He observed the countless couples with emotion, striving to concentrate himself on the thought of his imminent happiness, when the love that sustained the world and made it sustainable should be his at last; when he should become as other men, living the natural life of the race and the sexes in sympathetic fusion. But the figure of Ruth Hailey stood firm amid the swirling crowds, and her pure eyes shamed his thought, and filled his breast with an aching tenderness for the poor human atoms he had deserted—for Rosina, for Billy, for “Aunt Clara”—for whom there was no happiness and no natural life. He fought against this obsession of Ruth’s spirit, he struggled to fix his vision on the glitter and the gayety, but he had to see her standing like a rock or a tower, four-square against smiling, treacherous seas.
But if he went back to Rosina in honorable acknowledged union, then farewell to Society! To take her about with himwas out of the question; she would be more unhappy than he in those high glacial latitudes of humanity. Well, what was Society to him? He could shake it off as easily as the Micmac of his childhood shook off the clothes of Christendom. To be shut out from Society were no privation for him. He had the advantage of his fellow-artists, who sacrificed at its shrine and were sacrificed to it. He could couch on fir boughs, he had lived on bread and water. This constant concern with wines and cookery, with couches and carriages; this gorging and gormandizing and self-pampering—did it add dignity to life? Was it worth the hecatomb of hearts and souls offered up for it—this low luxury of the higher classes? Was not simplicity the note of greatness—in life as in Art? And howsoever simple the complex comfort of their lives might seem to those born to it, was it for artists to imitate this lowest side of the upper classes, especially if it frittered away their Art? Was it for Bohemia to ape Philistia, and for Art—the last of the rebels against the platitudinization of life—to bow the knee and swear allegiance to the vulgar ideals of fashion? They had drawn him even from boyhood, these showy ideals; from the days when he had peered wistfully into the cricket-ground at Halifax. But he was done with boyhood now.
Ah, but if he went back to Rosina—and the new thought struck a chill as of graveyard damps—it was all over with his Art. That, just beginning to revive under the inspiration of Eleanor Wyndwood, would be a sheer impossibility under the daily oppression of Rosina with her kitchen horizon. His imagination would be clogged with the vapors of cabbage. And of the old bad work he had had enough. He would retire from Art as from Society, and the Exhibitions should know him no more. He would go out of the business; that was all it was, he told himself with a bitter smile. His fame was a bauble, a bagatelle. For all it mattered to him it might have been his dead uncle, Matthew Strang, whose name was on the lips of strangers. There was still work in the world for an honest man to do; he remembered again that his hands could wield more than the brush; besides, he had a little capital now, Rosina had still her income. Perhaps they would go back to Nova Scotiaand buy a farm. They would sow and reap, far from the glare of cities, and the sweet, simple sun and rain would bless the work of their hands. His life would be joyless, but perchance his soul would be at peace.
Yes, but to give up Art! Art, which was the meaning of his life! Rosina’s life stood for nothing. It was out of all proportion to give up his for hers. Had he not suffered enough? Had he not already expiated his marriage, the hapless union he had entered into when distracted by illness and disgrace and hunger, when perhaps his whole future had hinged—such were the tragi-whimsical turns of life—on his reluctance to change his last two dollars?
He rose and walked about restlessly through the glistening streets. Everywhere restaurants, open-air tables, men, women. He wandered to Montmartre. More restaurants, more couples, cafés, cabarets, queer entertainments:Le Chat Noir, Le Rat Mort, the red sails of the famous Mill turning tirelessly, lights, gayety, women, always women, of all shades of prettiness and piquancy, with rosy cheeks and lips not always painted, and eyes that could shine without bismuth. He walked back through the Grand Boulevards—they were one flush of life.
But the reasoning was inexorable. He had sacrificed Rosina to his Art; Art had slipped through his fingers, but Rosina remained none the less sacrificed. Now his Art must be sacrificed to Rosina—the atonement was logical. That was not a surrender, he told himself angrily, to Ruth Hailey’s view of life—a view whose narrowness he and everybody around him had outgrown. He refused to recognize, in the face of this radiant Paris, that each human soul came into the world to sacrifice its happiness to other human souls. That seemed to him a preposterous paradox rather than a solution; a world of reciprocal whipping-boys was an absurdity, and, at any rate, if such were the scheme of creation, it did not work at all with the gross run of mankind, to say nothing of animals. The only reason for going back to Rosina must be honestly to fulfil his side of the bargain. She had done her part, he must do his. That his return to her meant the ruin of his life and his life-work was not her concern; these larger issues were too wide for her comprehension;she loved her husband and she desired him. That was enough. He owed himself to her, and to shirk his obligation was as dishonorable as to disown a debt. He had paid off the Stasborough store-keeper, although absolved by bankruptcy; he must be equally honorable with Rosina, though his life had been bankrupted. Practically his Art had always been sacrificed to her; it was her pettiness that had driven him to produce in haste for the market, so as to escape indebtedness to her; well, let the sacrifice be consummated.
He had come to the Place de la Concorde—it seemed a fairy-land of romantic lights, a dance of fire-flies; it wooed him towards the calm and solitude of the river. He leaned on the parapet and saw the sombre, fire-shot water stretching away in marvellously solemn beauty, hushed and lonely, its many-twinkling perspective of green and red and yellow gleams palpitating in the air dim with a yearning poetry. He felt the presence of Ruth Hailey at his side; she looked like the photograph now; he held her little hand and gazed into her candid eyes. Good God! This girl had loved him all those long years, and would be hopelessly faithful even unto death.
But if he went back to Rosina, what of Eleanor Wyndwood? Would he spoil her life, too? and more culpably than he had spoiled Ruth Hailey’s? He sighed wearily; it was impossible to do wrong and have the result simple. Life was so intercomplicated. But he had been honest with Eleanor, thank heaven; she knew the truth about his life; he would be honest with her to the end. He would tell her the truth now. The same noble, uncalculating simplicity that had accorded him friendship, that had been ready to give him love, would bear her triumphantly through the new trial. He remembered her brave words: “If I did not suffer I should think I had not grown.” Perhaps there would be consolation for both in the thought that she remained unsullied before the world.
He crossed the river, and his mood changed. He got towards the Latin Quarter, and wandered into the “Boule Miche” amid the students’ restaurants, where young humanity sat in its couples again, amorous and gay; every place was full within and without, and there was the gurgle of liquids withthe sounds of singing and laughter; he was back again amid the blithe, insouciant, easy-going life of the eternal undergraduate, with the local variation of bocks; rakish young men danced through the restaurants arm in arm in tipsy merriment; poets with lack-lustre visages and tumbled hair imbibed vermouth, clinking glasses with their mistresses; the smoky air vibrated with irresponsible gayety; it was full of invitations to careless happiness, joyous levity, forgetfulness of an austere view of life. Puritanism seemed a form of dementia, asceticism a sunless folly. The atmosphere gained upon him. He tossed off a bock, then walked recklessly past Mrs. Wyndwood’s studio. The whole court-yard was in darkness, but he thought of to-morrow night, and it glowed as with bonfires of joy. He resolved to sup famously. He jumped into a victoria and drove to a fashionable restaurant. It was near midnight; the theatres had emptied, but the streets were only the fuller. He passed through rooms full of dazzling women in gorgeous evening costumes, sipping champagne; women, always women: the city blossomed with them like roses. He ordered some oysters and chablis, and forgot to eat; opposite him a self-conscious celebrity of the footlights, blazing with diamonds, held her court, surrounded by a bevy of dandies; behind him a black-eyeddemi-mondainein red playfully rapped her cavalier’s knuckles; at the next table the exuberant liveliness of a supper party diverted him; he drank, drank, listening greedily to the gay repartees. Life should be joy, joy, joy, he thought. That was what modern life lacked, gray with problems, wrinkled with thought. These people lived—lived in splendid insolence under the midnight sun. There was a touch of bigness that appealed to him in their arrogant vitality. Society was an organized insipidity, afraid of life.
The figure of Ruth Hailey rose rebuking; he paid the bill and went out.
But his heart cried, ached for happiness. Ah, no! He could not give up so young; go into a living grave. He roved the Boulevards again. The beautiful city solicited him, rouged and perfumed, clad in shining garments, with star-gemmed hair. But the virginal figure of Ruth Hailey, with sweetshy eyes, stood against the city. Paris seemed garish beside her.
He was fluctuating again. It seemed as if the simple girl would draw him away from all the joys of life. Was there no means of ridding himself of her haunting presence? A grotesque mask looked out of a cab. Ah! the fancy ball! He had forgotten. That would lay the ghost of his disordered imagination. He felt in his pocket and found the ticket; he hastened to the scene of revelry. A clatter of cabs and a blaze of lights—he had arrived.
The first glimpse within was exhilarating, provoking, dazzling, overwhelming; he had a confused sense of a hall of a thousand lights and mirrors, reeking with scent and heat, reverberant with music and shrieks and laughter, white with the whirling gleam of semi-nude women, and motley with the rainbow hues and multiplied reflections of male masqueraders; a mad, joyous orgy, the diabolical medley of a glittering, tinselled pantomime and an opium-eater’s nightmare. Ah, here was oblivion of Ruth Hailey at last, and he eagerly took up a position on a raised platform that ran along the side of the gigantic ball-room, trying to catch the contagion of the scene, and ready to rush into the heart of the devil-may-care jollity. The gleeful, palpitating pageant—a twisted, tangled kaleidoscopic rally of riotous color and flesh tones—tore past him, dancing, leaping, shrieking, wantoning, clowning, kissing, uncouth as the gargoyles of Notre Dame and brilliant as the midnight Boulevard: Japanese figures and demons, gladiators in cuirasses and bathing drawers, Gallic warriors in skins, brawny barbarians in blankets, Amazons with brass breasts, a savage in a girdle of fig-leaves, a real Samoan girl with coal-black hair in the convoy of her Russian lover in a tall white hat, a boy as a German girl, and an elderly woman as a gendarme with orange blossoms in her hair; one man with a helmet crowned by a black cat, and another with a mock broken head, reddened bandages, and a hideous stream of blood on his shirt-front. And women—always women; a few masked, but most bare-faced, shining with flowers and flesh; models of all sorts and conditions, some with artistic dresses designed by their favoritestudents, some with tarnished gaudery; blondes, brunettes of every nationality—French, English, Greek, Italian, Creoles, Negresses, diversely dowered; frail anæmic women, fervid gypsy-like women, saucily splendid women, soft sleepy women with languorous black eyes, sweet lily-like women, big blowzy women, tall febrile women, little demoniac women, all content to take life as a flash of leaping flame flickering out to an early darkness. And as they danced and laughed and romped and shouted, the fun rose to hysterical frenzy; four masked men bore the queen of the models, sinuous in complete fleshings, niched in an outspread gigantic fan; before it a Druid and a Bacchante danced backward; behind it seethed a vast picturesque procession of women mounted on their cavaliers’ shoulders, smoking cigarettes and waving lighted red and green lanterns; at its sides girls pirouetted frantically, foot in mouth; the brazen orchestra clanged—the procession defiled, frolicking, round and round the hall, roaring a students’ marching chorus; a wave of hysteria ran through the assembly, mighty, magnetic, compulsive; and Matthew Strang waved his arms and shouted and sang with the best. Joy, joy, joy, this was your true artistic interpretation of life. Away with this modern morbidity! He was one in soul with all the great artists, all the Masters who had had their royal way in life. O royal Eleanor! O rare Eleanor! fit mate for a mighty artist! Then supper came, and he fought for some in the balconies, amid the roar of voices, and the rattle of knives, and the shouts for the maddened waiters, and the indescribable exhalations of food and wine and smoke and hot air and scented flesh. The half-deserted dancing floor was littered with champagne capsules, bits of lanterns, ends of cigarettes, fragments of dresses, spangles, morsels of fur. After supper the frolic grew more intoxicating, the gayety more reckless; sweet demure-looking girls gave themselves to high-kicking and lascivious movement; they obliged with thedanse du ventre; in a corner a woman turned somersaults from sheer light-heeledness, a bashi-bazouk trundled a hoop through the centre of the room, a band of fifty dancers with joined hands ran amuck among the yelling crowd. Matthew Strang’s senses ached with the riot ofcolor and the rollick of figures and the efflorescence of femininity, and the tohu-bohu of this witches’ sabbath. And then a strange ancient thought struck him afresh—the same grotesque thought that after his father’s death had weighed upon his childhood: very soon all these scintillating, whirling figures would lie still and cold, frozen in death. They suddenly became nothing but marionettes in a clock-work mechanism destined to run down. And then the girlish form that had hovered mistily in his neighborhood throughout all the tumultuous hours grew clear again, and against this pandemoniac background the inexorable figure of Ruth Hailey rose, simple and virginal, with sweet shy eyes.
When he came back to consciousness of the revellers, they had formed a human amphitheatre, an inner circle lying on the ground, and the next squatting, and the next kneeling, and the next half standing, and the last but one erect, and the last of all surmounted by shouldered girls, and in the centre of this human amphitheatre a beautiful young nude model with ruddy brown hair struck graceful attitudes. The cold blue light of dawn fell through a semicircular window overhead and mingled weirdly with the yellowish electric light, lending a strange, wan, unearthly hue to all these painted, perspiring faces.
The atmosphere seemed unbearably mephitic. He sallied shamefacedly into the street. It was Sunday morning, stainless and fresh and blue. The sunrise brooded over the sleeping gray-etched city in sacred splendor. The sun was like a gigantic bowl of pure gold with a refracted cover separated from it by a rift of cloud. Around it the sky was dappled with lines and splashes and a ring or two of pale sulphur, ending to the south in a narrow gulf of green. And all this loveliness of color was spread on two amorphous islands of amber-gray in an ocean of pale-blue sky, across which a few fleecy clouds sailed swan-like.
He had a perception of the divine, speaking through the silence of beauty. And the world was asleep or at riot.
Ah! this should have been the message of his Art. Each morn the sunrise spoke its flaming word unheard; it was the artist’s function to stir the world to the perception of the sublimityand poetry that lay all around unheeded; to uplift its eyes to the loveliness of realities, realities solid as rocks, yet beautiful as dreams; visionary and tangible; the great verities of sun and sea and forest, of righteousness and high thinking; beautiful and elemental.
Too late! Too late! Art was over now. Not to his hand had the mission been given; once he had thought to feel the sacred fire in his bosom; but he knew now that the mission was not for him. He had failed.
The great streets stretched under the blue dawn bathed in sacred freshness. The stir of night was passing into the stir of morning. The sleepy yawn of returning revellers was met by the sleepy yawn of early-risen artisans. Two horrible hags of rag-pickers, first astir of Parisians, were resting their baskets on a bench; he heard them rapturously recalling the excellence of the soup they had made from the bones, picked clean by dogs, that they had gathered from the citizens’ ash-pans.
Ah, not all the world was gay. He had been surveying only the sparkling bubbles and froth of Paris. Below flowed the sober, orderly, industrious civic life, with its bottom dregs of misery. All the great cities were full of dolorous figures, every by-way and alley swarmed with sickly faces, pale fruits of a congested civilization. He had always kept his eye on those happier than he; now he was reminded of how much more than the man in the street he had drawn in the lottery of the fates. He remembered the saying of a street scavenger he had come across in his days of destitution. “I’m neither hungry nor dry, so what have I to grumble about, mate?” What, indeed, had he, Matthew Strang, to grumble about? There did not seem to be enough happiness to go round. Who was he, to be selected for a special helping? Who was he more than his mate the scavenger, more than any other of the human souls he had met in his diversified career, more than his fellow-lodgers in the slums of Holborn or Halifax, or his fellow-passengers on boardThe Enterprise, or the blind woman who caned chairs in the basement of the house of the Rotherhithe bird-stuffer? Why should he be happy?
It was like a new thought, luminous and arrestive. And then it flashed upon him that all this glitter of gayety that had dazzled his covetous eyes, even if it were not half an illusion, was infinitely subdivided; each person could only have a minute share in the overwhelming total, and even this quantum of joy must be alloyed with the inevitable miseries of the human lot. This was the fallacy that in London, too, had added the sting of envy to his unhappiness; he had lumped together all the pleasure and splendor and happiness of the capital, forgetting that though it could all be lacked by one man, it could not be possessed by one. And to look at life from the outside was childish—it was like reading paragraphs about people in the newspapers. How happy he himself loomed in biographical summaries! Poor Rosina! Poor Aunt Clara! Poor Billy! What happiness for these?
They were foolish, fretful creatures, all of them; in the jargon of the drawing-rooms, bourgeois, vulgar, impossible, too low even for the stigma of “suburban”; but their lives were as important to them as his life to him. Each soul was the centre of its own world. If he could understand them, and they could not understand him, the gain was to him. He was strong, therefore he must supplement their weakness; not because of any ethics or theology, simply because he was stronger. For sheer pity he must give up his life to theirs; sacrifice his Art to their happiness. He must adapt himself to their points of view, since they could not adapt themselves to his; if for Rosina the world turned on the price of beef, he must teach himself to be interested in the price of beef. He had found it easy enough on the day when they had gone a-marketing together at Halifax. He saw her as then, buoyant, youthful, gay, even pretty; was it not he who had made her shrewish, sorrowful, unlovely? How nobly reticent she had been about his neglect of her! Coble had died thinking her ideally happy, boastfully proud of his son-in-law. And after all, there was an excellent side to her economical instincts; she did not long for diamonds and dinner-parties like the wives of other artists; nay, wiser, perhaps, than he, she had known how to content herself with her own station. Even Tarmigan must have approved of her as an artist’s wife. Yes, hemust go back to her and his children, not out of any deference to the marriage-tie, but as individual to individuals.
He arrived at his hotel. To his astonishment it was in full illumination; he heard the strains of dance-music from within. He peeped into the magnificent dining-room; it was become a ball-room, and sober couples were waltzing. Women, always women; irreproachable this time; elegant in shimmering silks. The world of fashion was dancing there—dancing on behalf of a charity.
He wavered again; this was the world he was leaving forever, the world of soft things, the world of thought and pleasant speech, the world of art and books and music, the caressing world that praised pictures, and the makers thereof: the world of Eleanor Wyndwood. But the fight was over; in every sense, he told himself, the fight was over. He must go to Eleanor and tell her that happiness was not for either; she would be strong and fine, she would strengthen him in his obedience to the higher voice. But oh—and her face swam up vivid again—would not the very sight of her weaken him, shatter his resolve? And perhaps, too, the sight of him would weaken even her. No, they must never meet again; that was the simplest, the least painful for both.
He gave instructions that he was to leave by the first morning train; he mounted to his room and packed up; then he wrote to Eleanor.