"'Myself, when young, did eagerly frequentDoctor and saint, and heard great argumentAbout it and about: but evermoreCame out by the same door as in I went."'... Their words to scornAre scattered, and their mouths are stopped with dust.'"
"'Myself, when young, did eagerly frequentDoctor and saint, and heard great argumentAbout it and about: but evermoreCame out by the same door as in I went.
"'Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went.
"'... Their words to scornAre scattered, and their mouths are stopped with dust.'"
"'... Their words to scorn
Are scattered, and their mouths are stopped with dust.'"
Through a young painter from Basle, these two were among the first outside of the German circle to have some realization of the magnitude of Friedrich Nietzsche as a force to be reckoned with. But Gano shrank from the sound and fury of the iconoclast as much as from his more coherently expressed doctrines. It was as abhorrent to his new doubts as it was to his old faiths to hear that Nietzsche had said (speaking of Germany), "Nowhere else has there been so vicious a misuse of the two great European narcotics—alcohol and Christianity." Driscoll, knowing a good deal more about the first than he did about the last, professed his withers to be unwrung. What was there in the utterance that Gano should gibe at?
Almost from the beginning they wore their rue with a difference. Driscoll raged at concrete mistakes and injustices in the scheme of things as presented to Richard Driscoll. The other, seeming to think he had fewer personal wrongs to complain of, capable of too keen a self-criticism to imagine himself a genius to whom the world owed special privileges, was coming rapidly to a more serious indictment of life on the basis of "the dread irrationality of the whole affair."
It is not a happy subject for contemplation, perhaps, but it is possible to ignore too absolutely that this is the attitude of mind of a vast number of the young people of the time. No one with his classics in his mind, no one even who has not forgotten Montaigne and Shakespeare, thinksthat this desperate guessing at "the riddle of the painful earth" is an exercise peculiar to our day. What is perhaps new is the commonness of the interrogation among young men, rich and poor, industrious and idle, who have not genius wherewith to clothe and deck their failure to produce the answer. Such men have not the distractions and rewards of genius to take their minds off the fact of failure.
What does it matter if you, in common with all the laboring earth, are feeling in every fibre the force of the Duke's bitter exhortation to Claudio? what does it matter if you can turn life's discords into music such as this? Even a less lofty strain is reward sufficient for the singer, reason enough to reconcile the monstrous egoism of genius to the presence in the world of great sorrows that can be transmuted into little songs. But to those whose music is shut up within them all their days, what shall help them bear the deafening discord of the jangling on and on of things that hurries them towards silence? There is an answer to this question, but it is not found among those usually given, which are for the most part variations of the philosophy of the ostrich.
Gano used to tell, laughing, of the way a great English lady met her son's shrinking confession of some deep, intellectual difficulty: "Do rouse yourself, St. John. Low spirits are such bad form."
"What was cultivated society?" Gano demanded of the Irishman. "A device for preventing people from serious thinking. Acceptance of this view was implicit in the very roots of language. You had to 'divert,' to 'distract' a man from the peril of looking facts in the face before you could expect him to be moderately happy. Games for grown-up children, the puerilities of country-house parties, what are they? Sage devices for preventing people from thinking, traps to snare and cage the intelligence—civilization's harmless anæsthetics. Oh yes, no mistake about our diversions being more wisely chosen in these 'scientific' times than in the days when the one escape was intothe wine-cup'scul-de-sac. What were they all—drinking, opium-eating, and the rest—but simply forms of that protest most thinking creatures find themselves making at some stage of their too-conscious life?"
Driscoll accepted this view of his excesses with equanimity, reminding Ethan in turn that there are in all ages bystanders at the board while the cup goes round—old ladies of both sexes ready to ask, "What pleasure can men take in making beasts of themselves?" and there is not always a philosopher at the objector's elbow to answer, "He, madam, who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." The great moralist knew from personal experience what he was talking about. He had the sincerity to admit that his own long-abandoned drinking had not at any time been from love of good-fellowship. Away with the genial lie, "I drank to be rid of myself!"
But Gano's point was that these old childish ways of hiding the head under the bedclothes to keep out of the dark no longer comfort so many of the grown-up children of the world. "They are afraid," he said, "not only of the night, but, with a surer wisdom, of the morning. It is not so easy to keep to-morrow at bay. Men need less and less the warning of the taverner's wife: 'They one and all regret it in the morning.'"
Said Gano to himself, summing up his survey: "We should not depend on, but keep in reserve, some draught with no such menace in the dregs. What one surer than that which brings a good-night and no morrow at all forever any more?"
Not, he felt, as a result of his own hard knocks, but out of unbiassed observation of the common lot, again and again, without personal resentment and without passion, he found himself reverting to the thought of the unlivableness of life, unless a man should carry about a conviction of freedom in his soul—a freedom that should be not a phrase but a potent fact, conferring sovereignty over life and death, and so lifting men above the meaner tricks of chance.
If solving the riddle in "high Roman fashion" did not "make Death proud to take us," which he felt to be beside the mark, the more intimate realization that escape is possible seemed to rob life of her more intolerable menace. It was not food for fear or brooding, but for exultation, this recognition that, should other remedies fail, one might still do
"That thing that ends all other deeds,That shackles accidents, and bolts up change."
"That thing that ends all other deeds,That shackles accidents, and bolts up change."
"That thing that ends all other deeds,
That shackles accidents, and bolts up change."
If the sovereign remedy had not been discovered in the past, the Nineteenth Century would have invented it. Never before had life been so hard for the many, never before had its value been so impugned. It might be true that every one should make a good fight. It could not be recommended to any but the craven that he should accept a degrading captivity in addition to defeat. Yet those were the terms upon which more than half the world lived. As for himself, it grew plainer and plainer that he should bear as many buffets as he could take like a man, but no one had a right to ask him to accept the disgraceful terms on which many of the excellent of earth were given their dole of bitter bread. As for the women, the power of human endurance was in them not glorified, as the foolish had thought, but debased, brutalized, a thing for scorn and pointing. It was this side of the subject that ultimately roused him out of the apathy that had threatened him. He had the sense of being secretly a lantern-bearer, of carrying under his coat a wonderful sort of Aladdin's lamp, and feeling it a selfish monopoly not to cry out his discovery in the streets. For this light, that had been so gallantly upborne, so well honored, of old, had been put out in the more effeminate times, and fallen to utter discredit in these new "dark ages." It was degraded to the uses of the vile, instead of shining beacon-like upon the hill of honor, a guide less to the fallen than to those who would keep from falling. Men had so many new inventions to make, they had clean forgotten this. It was oneof the lost arts, and had need of rediscovery and new proclaiming with the accent of our time. A strange ardor of proselytism fell upon him as he looked upon those about him in whom he traced his own old fear of life: delicate women toiling in terror and incommunicable agony of spirit, or those others, more horrible still, accepting dully, or in the devil-may-care French fashion, an existence incredibly vile. Why were they not told
"Ye have no friend,But resolution and the briefest end."
"Ye have no friend,But resolution and the briefest end."
"Ye have no friend,
But resolution and the briefest end."
It would be absurd to say not one would listen. He couldn't take up a paper without seeing that some desperate soul had made the discovery alone, unprompted, and with all the weight of Society, Law, the Church, and ignorant human shrinking against the anarchy of the act. It should be made less horribly hard, more admittedly honorable. Illogically enough, perhaps, these were not thoughts he felt it possible to share with a man in Driscoll's state of rapidly failing health. Gano would drop any questions in their later discussions that tended too much that way, and the conversation showed in this a curious alacrity. If Driscoll pursued the matter, Gano would even go the length of cutting the interview short. The intellectual barrier thus raised was the first check to the deepening friendship. For himself, from the day that Gano realized that life was voluntary, it became sweet. He found himself growing more light-hearted than he had thought it lay in him to be. He worked with a new zest. Poverty, hunger, they couldn't cow him now. He had the whip-hand of them. "I haven't forgotten," he said to himself, "what it's like to be well housed, and fed, and friended, and to listen without misgiving to the world's fairy-tales; but, remembering the gladdest day the old life had to give, I know it never brought me such a surging, God-like joy as the burst of that revelation,We are free!If we endure the worst evils in this life, it is because we are willing to. Even the meanest of mankind are notcaught like vermin in a trap. Man's best boast and inalienable patent of nobility is that he holds in his hand a key to all the prisons of the earth. He may open the door of escape for himself. How curious to feel anew the solace of the old Roman boast: In this the gods are less to be envied than the beggar or the slave; the high gods must live on, but man may die if he will. Oh, glad tidings of great joy! oh, the sweet, fresh air of liberty, the sense of power, the exaltation of the crushed and stifled spirit!" In his bare, ill-lighted room the man who had so long been the spoiled favorite of material good fortune, now with empty pockets, dinnerless, nearly friendless, would, nevertheless, lift up hopeful young hands in a defiant gladness, whispering to himself: "They taught me many things in many schools for many years, but no man ever whispered I was free! I had to find that out for myself."
In these latter days, when he went up-stairs to sit with Driscoll, he sometimes found a woman moving quietly about the room. When she had gone, there was always something there for the invalid's supper, and Gano would suppress the fact that he had brought a double provision in his pocket for an impromptu meal.
The woman wore one of those feature-destroying veils that made it impossible to judge much of her appearance, but Gano had a vague impression of slim middle age and unimpressive looks, soft ways, and a sort of "mother-tenderness" about her. But she was so colorless, so much more an influence than a person, that he did not realize he had never heard, or at least never noticed, her voice, till one evening she saidBong soirin an amazing accent.
"English!" commented Ethan, involuntarily, as the door closed.
"Australian," corrected the sick man.
"She's rather neglected you lately," remarked Gano, as a kind of apology for the unmistakable bulginess of his pockets.
He unloaded on the rickety table.
"I say, why do you bring all that truck in here?" Driscoll demanded, ungraciously.
"You keep quiet! You've got to have somebody to do your marketing for you, I suppose. I thought your Australian friend had thrown up the post."
"So she had," grumbled the invalid. "Women are damned selfish."
"Well, they repent sometimes; there's that in their favor."
Gano set about making coffee.
"She didn't repent," mumbled Driscoll.
"Oh, is this the last of her?"
"No; I only meant I had to send for her." And then they talked of other things.
The next time Gano saw the woman was after Driscoll got worse. He went up one night, and found him pallid, speechless, wrestling with one of his worst attacks of pain. The woman was bending over him.
"Please go and get that filled." She held out an empty bottle, hardly looking at Gano.
He hurried obediently down-stairs. Behind his anxiety for the man he had come to feel so much liking for, was a sense of surprise that the Australian was not so middle aged as he had thought. "She's not thirty-five," he speculated in between his wondering how Driscoll could get on without a night-nurse; "and she's not bad looking." He was back again, two steps at a time, with the medicine. Driscoll was quieter. The woman motioned the bottle away. She was taking his temperature.
"Hospital nurse," was Gano's mental comment upon the air of usage and competence. He sat there awhile, and then whispered:
"I'm in the room on the left at the bottom of the first flight, if you want me."
She nodded, and he went down to his work.
When he looked up from his writing it was a quarter to one. Had the woman gone and he not heard her pass? How was Driscoll? It was awfully quiet overhead. Witha tightening of the nerves he took his lamp and hurried up-stairs. He knocked softly. No answer. Noiselessly, so that the invalid should not be wakened, if indeed he were not ... he opened the door. Driscoll was asleep, and breathing audibly. The woman was asleep too, sitting on the floor, her head leaning against the side of the bed, Driscoll's hand in one of hers. She looked still younger in the peace of sleep, though obviously older than Driscoll, softened out of her customary wooden immobility. Gano felt that he was seeing her real face for the first time: the mask had fallen. She could never have been pretty, but there was something in her face of nobility that prevented a man from coming to an easy conclusion about her. Her black hair was sharply silhouetted against the white sheet. The hand that held Driscoll's wore a plain gold marriage-ring. She seemed to feel the light or the scrutiny of a strange glance, for she stirred and opened her gray eyes. Gano was momentarily embarrassed—she not in the least. She turned quickly to look at the sleeper.
"Wait!" she whispered, as Gano seemed to be turning away.
She put her finger on the sick man's pulse, and, still kneeling there, counted the beats with absorbed, unselfconscious face. Gano was struck again with the "mother" quality in the woman. It gave all she did a definite modesty. She was getting up.
"Can you spare the light?" she whispered. "I forgot to bring—"
"Of course," interrupted Gano.
He set the lamp down, and turned to the door.
"Wait a moment."
She hung theFigaroover the back of the chair between the sleeper and the light, then, quietly and without haste, she took her brown cape and hat off the peg and put them on. She leaned a moment over the sleeper, and then, "Come!" she signed rather then said, and they went softly out. At the foot of the stairs she stopped.
"Can you get a candle and a piece of paper?"
"Yes; this is my room," said Gano, opening his door.
The moonlight came palely in at the single window. Without hesitation she had followed him. He lit the candle by his bed.
"I want to leave you my address," she said. "I think he'll be all right now, but if he should be worse don't leave him; send some one to this address—send afiacre."
She scribbled on the piece of paper, and laid it by the candle.
"Do you think I ought to sit up with him?" Gano asked, watching her intently.
"No need to sit up; you can sleep on the sofa, can't you, or—"
"Or on the floor?" he asked, smiling a little at her matter-of-factness.
"Or on the floor," she repeated quietly. "Good-night."
She went out.
"Sha'n't I get you a cab?"
"No; I shall walk. Good-night;" and she was gone.
On the paper was written:
"Mrs. Mary Burne,21 Rue Blanche."
Driscoll was better next morning, and able to eat breakfast. Gano had got into the habit of making coffee in the invalid's room in the morning as well as at night. Driscoll had waked with an appetite.
"Ha! cream! Did Mary bring that?"
"Mary?"
"Yes; Mrs. Burne."
"No; I got it. I thought we deserved cream to-day."
"How long was Mary here?"
"Oh, pretty late, I should say."
"H'm! That woman's had a damned hard time," Driscoll said, ruminating between his sips of coffee; "does those colored things for theSemaine Illustrée. She's drawn ever since she was a baby. Never had a lesson in her life till two years ago. I met her at Julien's. She was working like the devil."
"Making up for lost time?"
"Yes, poor girl! Married a brute of a Melbourne ship-builder when she was seventeen. Stood him till three years ago, and then—Lord! the audacity of these women—came to Paris to study art, if you please. Thirty, and never had a lesson in her life!"
He laughed, and held out his coffee-cup.
"Ship-builder dead?" asked Gano, filling it up.
"Dead! No! alive and kicking, or I'd have made her marry me."
"Lord! the audacity of these men," laughed his friend.
When Driscoll got definitely worse, Mrs. Burne stayed with him through the day, and Gano sat up with him at night.
"If youcando it, it's best so," she said, simply.
"Of course—of course," agreed Gano, hastily, his Puritan mind involuntarily considering the proprieties, even in these haunts.
"You see, while you sleep I can look after him, and do my work too if I have daylight. You can write by lamplight."
And the practical sense of the arrangement shamed his first interpretation of her plan. He found himself during their brief meetings, morning and evening, watching the woman with a deepened interest.
"AmIin love with her, too?" he wondered, as he caught himself following with something like envy her ministering to his friend.
But all she did was strangely lacking in any hint of the supposed relation between Driscoll and herself. There was infinite gentleness in her, but no happy confusion. Gano never saw in her quiet eyes that look he was always dreading to surprise.
"She doesn't care about him in the way he thinks, poor devil!" he said, at last, to himself.
The only time he ever ventured to speak of her goodness to the sick man, "Oh, Mr. Driscoll has been kind tome," she said. "He got me my place on theSemaine Illustrée."
Why, it was a sheer case of extravagant gratitude! Gano was conscious this explanation pleased him.
"How's the club getting on?" Driscoll asked her one evening, as she was leaving.
Gano was spreading out his writing materials on the rickety table.
"Oh, all right," she said, pinning her brown hat firmly on her coil of black hair.
"Youhaven't had the honor of being admitted to the club," said Driscoll, laughing and nodding over at Gano. "Youaren't considered worthy."
"Youweren't considered worthy," said Mrs. Burne, smiling faintly, "but you would come."
"And if I adopted the same tactics," suggested Gano.
"No, no," she said, hastily; "it's really only for women."
She hunted about for her gloves. It was the first time Gano had ever seen a look of embarrassment on the calm face.
"What kind of a club?" he asked.
"A—debating club," she answered. "Good-night."
"Ha, ha, ha! I like that."
But she was gone with a look of pleading cast on Driscoll as she went—a look that was like a prayer.
Gano felt absurdly piqued to know more, not of the foolish club, but of this fellow-being.
"You say you've been?"
He fitted a new pen in the holder.
"Oh yes; but they didn't do anything very remarkable the night I was there. They meet in Mary's lodging. There were only three then. She says there are sixteen now, two or three of 'em men, in spite of it's being 'only for women.' Can't think where she puts 'em."
"What did they debate?"
"Oh, some rot about social duties. They really go to sit by a fire and get a cup of hot tea. But it's a very good thing," he added, with a sudden rush of loyalty. "It's grown out of Mary's keeping one or two women from going the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire."
His desire to "guy" the club seemed to have gone out with the founder's going. The same thing had happened before.
"Lots of English and Americans let loose here, you know, without anotion—"
He made an expressive movement of his big hands.
"I see. The club's a rescue party."
"Something of the sort. She doesn't say much about it."
"Funny place, Paris."
"Yes; all kinds here."
Gano knew to the hour when the tide of his ill-luck and apathy had changed. His new interest in Mary Burne didnot blind him to the fact that life had suddenly grown endurable, even attractive,decentin his eyes, from the moment he had fully realized and fully accepted the fact that he was under no nightmare of obligation to go on with it. It was as if the noisome prison-house of his soul were flung open once and forever to the blessed life-giving air. No more misgiving, no more shrinking from the deep insecurity of things. He began to write with a new vigor and resiliency. There came into his work not only buoyancy, but a fine temper it had lacked before. The love of literature took hold on him again as it had done in those first years of awakening abroad. He came to care again about his own little performances, and by degrees did more and more work for the paper. The editor had several times complimented him warmly. Presently he was offered a regular position on the staff. He paid back Henri de Poincy in full, and would have moved into better quarters but for—but for—Driscoll, he would have said. Driscoll was still very ill—worse, indeed, than ever.
"Never could do anything well in a hurry," he repeated his dreary old quip. "Have patience, and I'll make a thorough job of this."
Gano felt more and more that whatever had been their relation in the past, Mary Burne was absorbed now, not by Driscoll, but by Driscoll's illness and dire need of her ministry. If she had not exactly encouraged, she certainly had not repelled, Gano's growing devotion. Her demeanor was perfect, he said to himself. How could she give her new lover a sign by the death-bed of the man who had adored her for years, who had befriended her, and who was in such need himself of befriending? Gano schooled himself to keep the growing assurance and victory out of his face and manner. He would follow Mary's lead, and when in the gray unpromising life of the sick-room they found some dumb way of communicating, some unasked aid to give, some slight unnoticed contact in the common service rendered, Gano would school his thrilling nerves to keep the secret of his gladness as calmly as Mary Burne kept hers.
As he grew worse, Driscoll grew more exacting, and more variable in temper. He had less and less compassion on his friends, and demanded Herculean labors of wakefulness—watching, reading aloud, etc. No invalid had ever a more comfortable confidence in the boundless strength and amiability of those who are well. Gano tried with scant success to save Mary from bearing the brunt of the sick man's exactions.
He hurried up-stairs to relieve the watch a little earlier than usual one evening.
"Once more Iappealto you," he heard Driscoll saying, with raised voice, before the door was opened. The turning of the knob had either drowned or prevented the reply. Driscoll lay breathing heavily, and Mary, with impassive face, was drawing on her gloves. She looked up and nodded to Gano.
"Good-bye," she said, after a moment. But on the threshold she stopped. "Dick," she said, without turning to face Driscoll, "I think I won't come to-morrow."
"Yes, you will," he shouted. She turned and looked at him.
"Good-bye," was all she said.
"Damned selfish women are!" Driscoll growled as the sound of her steps died.
"I shouldn't call her exactly a case in point," observed his friend.
"Well, she is. She sees how hopeless this is, and how damnably I'm suffering, and she won't help me to get out of this cursed hole.Youwon't either," he added, defiantly, and yet with a gleam of hope, almost lunatic in its cunning and its greed.
"I won't what?" said Gano.
"Get me some morphine, or fetch me a pistol, or light some charcoal."
"Lord, no! You'll be better yet, old man."
"Rot! and you know it; and so does she. Butshepretends to care, and yet she won't help me. Damned selfish—damned selfish!" He turned over in bed, and went on cursing under the bedclothes.
Gano wondered how long the idea had been in his head, and how long Driscoll had worn a beard, and whether there was a razor in the dressing-case. He shuddered as he glanced surreptitiously about. Wasn't it a little odd that he should find the notion so ghastly? Ah yes, the ugly violence of it! When the sick man got to sleep his friend rummaged his room from end to end, finding nothing to confiscate; and, after all, Driscoll had a fair night. The morning was gray. A fine drizzle shot spitefully down out of a leaden sky. Mary did not appear at the usual hour. Towards noon Gano went down to his own room, worn out, and flung himself on his bed without undressing. He was waked by the noise of a dull fall overhead. He sprang up in a horror of apprehension, broad awake on the instant. He rushed up-stairs and burst in on Driscoll, to find him angrily pushing books off the table on to the floor, as a summons to his friend below.
"You sleep like the dead," was his greeting. "Where's Mary?"
"Great Cæsar! I don't know."
"My watch has run down," Driscoll went on, querulously.
Gano set it by his. It was five o'clock.
"Don't go to sleep again; let's have some coffee."
"All right," answered Gano, yawning. "I believe I'm hungry. I'll go and forage."
When he came back with the provisions he brought up some letters and papers. He tumbled everything down on the table. There was nothing for him but some proof from the office, and two letters from America, sent on by Monroe & Co.
"Birthday greetings from New Plymouth," he said to himself, as he recognized the familiar old-fashioned hand, the violet ink, and the brown five-cent stamp that had grown to seem foreign to him. He hadn't the curiosity to read birthday commonplaces till the impromptu meal was finished, and Driscoll had become a bore, asking him to look out and see if Mary wasn't coming, the only variation being, "Hark! isn't she on the stairs?"
It was only then that, turning the letters over, it occurred to him to doubt if the second was a cousinly salutation.
"No, by Jove! Boston postmark!"
He tore it open. A brief note from the legal firm of Bostwick & Allen, announcing the death of their client, Aaron Tallmadge, and the bare fact that his entire estate was left to his sole surviving heir and grandson, whose instructions they awaited. The letter had been to Nice and back. It was nearly two weeks old.
"By Jove!" Gano dropped the letter on the table among the coffee-cups and bits ofbrioche.
"What! is she here?" Driscoll sat up in bed.
"No, no; I don't know. Listen to this." He read the letter aloud.
"That'sall right!Mille félicitations!Look out, like a good fellow, and see if she isn't coming across the court."
Gano went over to the window and looked out with an ironic consciousness that, even in the face of such news, he was scarcely less concerned than Driscoll for the coming of that enigmatic woman across the lamplit, reeking court. The drizzle had turned into long gray rods of rain; they streaked the gaslight and pricked the shallow pools unceasingly. And he had all that money! and it was just as he had always known it would be. The essentials of existence were unchanged. Was she never coming? It's the child surviving somewhere in most men, he argued with himself, that gives a woman like that a charm beyond beauty. But she's beautiful, too, he protested silently. Aloud he said:
"No, I don't see her."
"Look here, Gano; do me a favor, old man! Go and fetch her."
"Oh, I hardly think—"
"I tell you I must see her! Only for five minutes. Tell her that. If I don't see her, I'll have a hell of a night. I'd do as much for you, Gano."
"Oh, all right." He turned on his heel.
"Hold on! you don't know where she lives."
Gano knew perfectly, but he said, "Oh-h."
"Going off like that without—you're full of your millions! Small blame—small blame!" Driscoll wrote down the address and handed it to his friend. "Bring her back with you, if you can; but it'll do if she's here by ten."
Outside the court Gano hailed afiacreand drove barely five minutes before he was set down at a door in a tenement not conspicuously different from his own. A shabby man with long hair, wearing a velveteen jacket, had just stopped, closed his dripping umbrella, and rung.
When the door opened he passed in without question.
"Madame Burne?" asked Gano.
"Au quatrième. Encore de la boue dans mon escalier!" muttered theconcierge. "Faudra qu'elle s'en aille à la fin."
Gano ran up two flights, passing three girls in the dim light, who were coming down. He almost overtook the shabby man, who seemed in feverish haste. Gano slackened his pace at the foot of the third flight. The shabby man hurried up without looking back, fled round the passage to the left, and knocked at a door facing the banisters. Without pausing for permission, he turned the knob and went in, letting out a gush of light and the confused sound of voices. Gano was conscious of a glow of comfort in the assurance of his heart that the room entered by such a creature, with ceremony so scant, was certainly not Mary Burne's. The shabby fellow had flung the door to, but the worn-out fastening didn't catch. The door rebounded and stood partly open. Two-thirds of the way up this last flight Gano turned his head in the direction of the voices, and saw through the banisters and the open door Mary Burne shaking hands with the man who had just entered. Gano stopped dead. He didn't hear anything she said; he wasn't conscious of trying to do so. He stood staring, incredulous. Presently she passed out of his range of vision. He could see some of the others now, and caught here and there a single unenlightening word. He wondered vaguely at hearing a room full of persons speaking English again. Shouldhe go in, or should he go back? He felt an indescribable shrinking from meeting Mary among that shady lot. Men, too—more than one! What was a woman like Mary Burne doing with such disreputable-looking— He had lately been killing time for Driscoll by reading aloud that original story,Beggars All. It came to him like a form of nightmare that their Madonna Mary was a confidence woman. This gathering was a grim kind of thieves' tea-party, but they had left the door open! As he gave up straining to catch a glimpse of Mary, and looked closer at those nearest the door, he saw there were one or two women he would not have thought suspicious under other circumstances. Then one of these moved away, and revealed a creature with raddled cheeks and pencilled eyes, wearing her dingy finery with a clumsiness not French, and speaking now to Mary Burne, who had come to her side—speaking with a cockney tongue, and eying her hostess with mixed suspicion and curiosity. A man, as obviously American, looking like a broken-down billiard-marker, stood behind, and sitting by the door was a well-dressed gray-haired woman, with frightened, shifty eyes. Obvious tramps and beggars would have fitted better into any preconceived scheme of benevolence. But these were people of some former decency, some present alertness of intelligence, like the dregs of the foreigner class in any land, lower than the outcast born, because these aliens had once ambition, had initiative enough to venture forth to better their estate, and had not fallen so low without desperate clutching at foul means to keep afloat. On each face that undefinable stamp of failure. What is it? Where is it? Not always in the eyes or on the lips, not always expressed in dress or even bearing—in no one thing that one may lay a finger on and say, "I know him by this mark!" There is no name for that elusive, eloquent, yet indelible sign life sets upon the faces of the lost. Yet all men know it when they see it, and instinctively turn away their eyes.
In the group that closed about Mary, some one was protesting about something.
"Perhaps Jean Latreille was right," said a man Gano couldn't see.
"Of course he was.Youneed not to blame him."
Some one was speaking with a strong French accent.
"Well, well," said the woman with the gray hair. "I don't feel sure it ought to be encouragedopenly."
"Zen, ought you not to belong to zis club?"
The woman turned up an anxious face.
"I've sent the girls away, Mrs. Pitman," said Mary, gently. "I think those of us that are left here, even the new members, have borne so much that they are able to bear the truth." There was a rustle and a noise of sitting down. "M. Pernet is right, I think, although I'm sorry Jean should have deserted his wife and child. It would have been manlier not to buy his liberty at the price of others' suffering."
"That's whatIsay."
The gray-haired woman nodded at some one out of sight.
"But who can decide the problems of another soul?" Mary Burne's white face grew weary. "We have enough with our own."
"Parfaitement."
"You may be sure," she went on, nodding gravely at her dingy audience, "a young man in vigorous health doesn't wrench himself out of the world without good cause. It's grown too common to be any longer a distinction"—she smiled bitterly—"and yet it's not common enough to be any easier, or any less reviled." Her eyes travelled from one forlorn face to the other with a kindling compassion. "But let us take courage, friends; we who have done without bread can do without approval—except of one kind." She paused an instant; a look of fanaticism leaped into the white face. "No matter what we have done in the past, we will not live, from this time on, without self-respect. Two or three of us have talked a good deal here about our duties to each other. Let us think to-night of the ultimate duty we owe ourselves. You know already how some of us cannot find courage to live till wehave first assured ourselves of courage to die, if need be. I've told you, one or two of you, that it was like that with me; that when hideous things drove me away from home, things I'd borne for years, and should never have borne a moment"—she flung up her head with swelling nostrils—"when my awakening came, I said to myself, 'I'll go away and work; I'll go to Paris; and if I can't live there decently, I shall die there.' All through the long voyage I kept thinking that I was probably going, as fast as the ship could carry me, towards my grave. When one has lived days like that, life doesn't daunt one any more, nor death either."
"No, no!" murmured a voice behind the door.
"How shall any of us justify the desperate clinging to life for the mere sake of living?" She asked the question as if she were addressing a drawing-room full of prosperous people who had the merest speculative interest in the inquiry. "How many instances do we see of men and women who have outlived not only their usefulness, but their satisfactions? And yet they drag along their gray existence, a dreary penance to themselves, and a menace to those who still can hope. There are those who cling to the pleasant fiction that every one is of some good use in the world. If that is so, it is equally true that every one doessomeill, stands in somebody's light, and bars his way to progress. But it is not with the real or imaginary 'helpers' we have to deal, but with those who through misfortune have lost their grip on circumstance, and whose whole remaining energy is absorbed in an animal-like clinging to existence. Many of the world's sick and wounded are capable of feeling the attraction of the idea of suicide, and are held back from freedom by two superstitions. One was made current by the people who lacked the courage to 'go and do likewise,' and who, therefore, have branded all suicides 'lunatics' or 'cowards.' The other superstition was given the world by the priests, who would have been less zealous and less astute than history shows them if they'd not barred this escape with mighty threats and penalties."
"Bah!" "Priests!" "Oh yes!"
A little undercurrent from the crowd crept through her words.
"Many a gentle soul in the past," she went on, "has endured years of needless agony rather than buy release at the price of public execration—being denied decent burial, and flung into a ditch at the cross-ways with a stake driven through the body. We don't treat these refugees quite that way now, but in being less violent we are not less cruel. When we hear of a suicide, the first insult we offer him is to ask, 'Were his accounts right?' Next, 'Was he a victim to bad habits?'"
"Exactly!" cried the voice, in broken English. "What Babin said of Jean—"
"Sh! sh!"
"If it is found the dead man was a defaulter or an opium-eater, the most aimless cumberer of the earth experiences a certain sense of justification. If a man is a villain, he mustwantto get out of the world; but for honest folk life cannot be too long. Consequently, to support existence (or let some one else do it) seems in some way a tribute to a man's personal worth or mental poise. If it is found that the suicide had the audacity to leave the world without the urging of some vulgar misdeed to account for his unpleasant independence, then up goes the universal cry, 'He was insane!' Without doubt! The world is good enough for his betters, why not for him? 'Oh, the fellow was crazy!' And that settles it. As a proofweare mentally sound, we will live on at any cost, be it our own souls or our brothers'. No, no. I tell you this thirst for life cannot be proved so worthy an instinct as some have hoped to show. It is the instinct that makes the brute world one vast slaughter-house. 'One must live' would be the motto of the shark, if he had one. 'One must live' is in the roar of the Bengal tiger, and the jackal's cry. I do not see but the greed of life is the strongest survival in man of primitive animal instinct. But it is not the noblest of our legacies. Over many an unworthy page of human history is that legend, 'One must live.'" She stretched out herhands, crying, "It is not true!One must liveworthily, or one can die! I feel a passionate sense of the wrong and ruin wrought by the general view. I feel it"—she dropped her eyes—"when I hear that a man steals to keep from starving, when"—her voice was heavy with shame—"when I see wide thoroughfares full at night of young girls and brazen women 'who must live.' 'Why don't they see there is an escape?' I think." She threw back her head with a quick movement, and just as suddenly the look of courage dimmed. "Then I realize that some of them, even if they could rise above the animal instinct to prolong life at any price, would remember priestly warnings, and fancy their chances in the hereafter brighter if they lived on—vile scavengers on the highways of the world!—than if they were brave enough to disdain an evil heritage, and wise enough not to fear death. Those who are so lustful of life"—far beyond the little company she gazed, as one gathering in a survey all the peoples of the earth—"they are like beggars at a feast. They glut themselves indiscriminately, afraid to let a single dish go by. They sit stupid and gorged, still mechanically taking of everything passed them, with dulled taste and jaded appetite, eating and drinking, with sense left to think only, 'Who knows? we may never be at such a feast again.' I tell you"—she was back now with her dingy guests—"it is the beast in us that clings so fiercely to life. In the case of the unfortunate, the hard-pressed, the ancient instinct often outlives hope, principle, innocence—all that's best in humanity."
"But there are a good many—" interrupted the gray-haired woman, feebly.
"Yes, yes, thank Heaven!" Mary Burne agreed, in the old gentle voice. "For those happy ones who have found, or think they have found, a chance of doing some service, or to those who for any reason find the world or themselves an interesting and compensating study, there are only congratulations, and a plea for fairer judgment of less fortunate, maybe not less sane or noble, men."
"Like ze poor Jean Latreille," lamented the Frenchman behind the door. "No work; only me for friend."
"Yes, yes," assented Mary Burne, as if she knew the story, and others to cap it. "No one who is in sympathetic touch with his kind can honestly affirm that every man and woman has something worth living for, and can, if he and she choose, make an honest livelihood. It is frankly untrue! Life is becoming more and more difficult to the majority; worldly success is more and more bought at the price of personal dignity. Mere existence for the million is secured only by a warfare in which he who does not slay is slain. But it is idle to enlarge upon the results of our civilization; every one with eyes sees how the conflict rages, and how the weak and often finer-natured go to the wall. It is not for me to urge that it is sad, or wasteful, but only that itis. My plea, as some of you know, is that more should realize there is honorable retreat this side moral overthrow."
The gray-haired woman moved uneasily. The speaker, glancing at her, seemed to answer an unuttered protest:
"Let no one say God would have a man yield bit by bit his faith and charity, accepting any terms, so that he may be allowed to draw his coward breath a little span the more. There is a kind of spiritual cannibalism among us, more appalling than the simpler sort we shudder to think is practised in Darkest Africa, or the islands of the South Sea. It flourishes on our fairest hopes, and fills its witch's caldron with the consciences of men and the honor of our women. 'We must live!' the victims cry, and give up all that makes life worth the living. Maimed, stripped of grace and dignity, they wander forth into the world, to deaden the public sense of moral decency by the spectacle of their shame. The people who are shocked that one should think of suicide permit themselves a mild enthusiasm that long ago a blind King of Bohemia could care so much for his cause that he gathered a sheaf of his enemies' spears in his breast rather than face defeat. We are told there was once a Brutus, too, and many another in the brave old time, whoshowed there was a refuge this side dishonor. But the world has forgotten, and ancient valor is renamed modern cowardice."
Her scorn-filled eyes dropped an instant on the gray-haired woman's fingers fumbling feebly under her mantle. Below it the end of a rosary could be seen twitching against her gown. Mary Burne lifted quiet eyes from the dangling crucifix.
"Looking at the question from the religious standpoint," she said, "it is impious to suppose we can take the Creator by surprise or defeat His ends. If He sent us into the world, He knew just what weapons He put into our hands, where the weak spots in our armor were, and what foes would meet us. In the case of the suicide, He knew just how many hard blows he could meet like a soldier and a man, as well as He knew there would some day come a stroke that would cut him down. Does God sleep while the battle rages?" she cried, with swelling but uneven cadence—"while the wounded man drags himself away from the dying, pursued by visions of captivity and the loss of all he fought for?" She shook her head with slow, pitying solemnity. "Believers must think the eye of God is on this child of His, as he creeps wearily out of the strife and turns into a dark by-way, groping along to the little gate at the end. The fugitive looks back an instant"—into her own clear eyes came a curious filminess—"he is too calm to seem heroic, and the pain is fading out of his face. 'Good-bye, my enemies'"—she made the faintest little gesture of farewell to some world without her walls—"'good-bye, my friends'"—she nodded to the dingy crew within, and lifted haggard eyes above their heads—"'temptations, ghosts of failure and of grief, good-bye!' Silently turning, he passes out through the little gate and shuts it fast behind him. Wherever he goes, no believer can suppose he has defeated God, or strayed outside the limits of His mercy."
As she ended she came forward. Gano, forgetting the dusk of the staircase, and thinking on the spur of themoment that she had caught sight of him, turned and made his way noiselessly down the three flights. He reached the street before he realized that Mary's motion forward had been to the gray-haired woman with the crucifix. But why had he been so afraid she should speak to him? He leaned against the lintel of the open door watching the rain. What strange thing had befallen his tender interest in this woman? It was gone. Simply wiped out. In its place a shrinking of his very soul. He had thought her so "womanly," full of protecting tenderness and steadfast cheer; and, behold! this abyss of hopelessness, this dark, iron resolution, this unshrinking acceptance of the tragedy of life.
The opinions she had given out, to be sure he shared them more or less; but it hurt him to think women shared them, above all the woman he— A woman without hope—better she were without heart! Away, away with this unfeminine acceptance of the worst. It made the underlying horror of things more real, more unescapable! Away with such views, except for the occasional philosophic mood of man. Who wanted to have them daily, hourly brought to mind? He knew he should never see Mary Burne again without seeing that dingy circle of the lost, and the look of unshrinking despair that hardened and whitened in her face.
Her old sheltering mother-gentleness, where was it?Hisold tenderness for the tenderness in her, where was that? Gone, gone, and in its place this staggering dislike! He tried to think that, unselfconscious as she had been in manner, she had been theatrical in thought; he recalled some of her sentences—she was a phrase-maker! She liked standing up there, even before such an audience, listening to the sound of her own voice, and airing views that she no doubt thought original and bold. He did not for a moment realize that just because he in the main agreed with her "beyond refuge," he shrank from hearing himself echoed back to himself from the imagined haven of a woman's heart. It was a situation meet for wry,ironic laughter that the woman he had been drawn to for her supposed embodiment of man's soothing ultra-feminine ideal should be caught playing the part of a dingy nineteenth-century Joan of Arc, urging men to battle and to death.
Theconciergeappeared, angry and shivery, and bade him either come in or go out. He was in the act of doing the latter when he remembered Driscoll. He turned back and faced the angry woman.
"Go up to Madame Burne," he said, giving the woman a franc, "and tell her—wait!" He searched his pockets, and finally drew the envelope off Mrs. Gano's birthday letter, and wrote on the back:
"Driscoll unable to sleep without some word from you. Please send down a message for him."
"Driscoll unable to sleep without some word from you. Please send down a message for him."
"Give her that and bring me the answer."
The woman shuffled up-stairs. He stood there in the dingy passage, waiting, cogitating. Suppose Mary were to send word that after all she would come when that infernal club broke up, what should he do? He would certainly have to protect poor old Driscoll against her pitiless fanaticism. That much was clear. It took her a long time to scribble a line. He paced back and forth from the foot of the mud-tracked stair to the open door, where the rain fell ceaselessly. With a sudden elation he thought of the change in his fortunes, and how soon he should have turned his back upon all this squalor. A millionaire! Yes, it had a good ring. It took the sound of Mary Burne's voice out of his tortured ears.
Suddenly he paused, hearing with relief the shambling footsteps of the returningconcierge, a relief rudely dashed with fear of the message she might be bringing.
A quicker figure slipped before the square, slow-movingwoman; it was Mary Burne, running down the stairs, dressed to go out.
"I am sorry to have kept you," she said. If she noticed Gano's changed manner, she put it down to anxiety for his friend. "Come, I've brought an umbrella," she said, almost sharply, as Gano stood an instant looking out for afiacre; "it's nearly as quick to walk, and I—I—"
He took the umbrella from her silently, and they hurried on side by side in the rain. Gano, with growing agitation, searched for some way of letting her know that he was in possession of the situation, and meant to remain in possession.
As they turned into the Rue de Provence she stopped, breathless.
"Are you quite sure he wants to see me only for a minute?"
"So he says."
"He understands that just at present I can't sit up with him any more?"
"He doesn't expect you to stay to-night, at any rate," Gano answered, in a determined voice. He began to walk on.
"Mr. Gano." She laid an arresting hand on his arm. He looked down coldly at the white face. "You've shown too plainly in these last weeks to what lengths your friendship for Dick can go. I don't pretend to apologize for asking if you can spare the time to take him away for a few weeks as soon as he gets a little better."
The man hesitated. She misunderstood.
"I've just got some money from theSemaine," she went on, "and I can anticipate my next payment. I've told you how I owe it to Mr. Driscoll that I have the money at all. It's his in a sense, anyhow."
"You want to get him out of Paris?"
"Yes,anywherefor a change."
"I might do that if he can be moved."
"Oh, thank you, thank you. Dick can't say he hasn't got friends. Youaregood about it." They splashed ona few steps in the downpour, and she slackened her pace again. "But since you are going away alone with him—and, anyhow, I ought to tell you. He's developing a kind of monomania. He doesn't want to live—wants—" Her voice choked.
"I know," said Gano.
"You know! He's ventured to say it to you?"
"Yes."
"Then, you see, it's serious." She was clinging to him again. Gano nodded. Before he could help himself he was trying her.
"You see, he'll never get well."
"How can you say that? and say it so—so—"
Indignant tears stood in her upturned eyes, and she took her hands off his arm.
"Surely you know it's true."
"I only know that he's still alive, and that I love him."
They walked on—they were nearly at the door.
"You know how he suffers," began Gano.
"Everybody suffers," she interrupted. "He knows nothing about the worst pain. And he has his art; he has you to care about him, and—he has me. Oh, Mr. Gano"—she turned on him suddenly—"help me to take care of him—help me, for God's sake—help me to keep him in the world!"
"Yes, yes; I give you my word."
A great weight was lifted off them both. They went up-stairs together, but Gano left Mary at Driscoll's door. He wrote some letters in his own room, then he went softly up-stairs, heard the low, pleasant sound of voices, and came down without interrupting them. He went to bed, and slept soundly till the morning.
"I shall cable Bostwick & Allen first thing after breakfast," he said to himself.
When he was dressed, he went up-stairs as usual to Driscoll, knocked lightly, and, without waiting, went in. Mary Burne was still there, kneeling by the bedside. It flashed over Gano that it had been something like this very picturethat had first set him thinking about Mary Burne. But the spell had lost its potency; something had happened; some chord of sympathy had snapped. He could think of his friend whole-heartedly now, without a woman's thrusting her face between them. Driscoll was asleep this morning, just as he had been that other time when Gano had found Mary Burne worn out with watching by the bedside; but his face was hidden. Mary stirred and turned round. Gano started. No sleep weighed down her eyelids; her eyes were wide and quick-glancing, but seemed unseeing; the agonized face was pinched and gray-white, like chalk.
"What is it? What—"
Gano sprang forward to the bed. Driscoll's face was no longer in the shadow now.
"He's gone," said Mary.
"Not dead?"
"Yes, dead."
She got up slowly, staggering a little. Her cloak was round her. She went unsteadily to the opposite side of the room and picked up her hat. She seemed to forget to put it on, and stood with it aimlessly in her hands, those strained, bright-glancing eyes moving uncannily in the drawn white mask of a face. Gano had flung himself down by the bed. He laid his hand over Driscoll's. It was cold.
"When did it happen?" Gano asked; and as the word "happen" left his lips, he started up and stared at the woman.
"About four o'clock," she said, going in that blind way to the table.
He had the impulse to rush forward and seize her by the shoulders. He would force those restless eyes to meet his steadily for once, and give up their secret; but she was counting some gold pieces out of her purse, doing it by the instinct of touch, while her roving, animal-like glance seemed to dash itself against window, wall, and door, seeking an escape.
"How did it come?" Gano demanded.
"Quite quietly; no pain—no pain at the last."
Her muffled voice seemed to reach him from far off.
"Why didn't you call me?"
"No good," she said, tonelessly; "and besides, he held fast to my hand. I am leaving some money here." She motioned to the little pile of ten and twenty franc pieces on the table, and moved towards the door. "You'll see to what's necessary." And, without waiting for his assurance, "I've enough to pay for everything," she said, and went out.
Gano found his first impressions weakened by Mary Burne's clear and convincing official account of the death. The doctor accepted it without misgiving. Why should a layman have a doubt?
Driscoll was buried, and his few effects were bought in by Mary Burne at the sale. When Gano went to say good-bye to her the next day he was told she had given up her old lodging, and left no address behind.
Gano's original reluctance to return home had not been so very serious. Had his grandfather been a little forbearing, he could have had the young man back in Boston in six months; but now, too much had been sacrificed on the altar of an impetuous resolve for Gano to consider kindly going to America at once. There was plenty of time for that. He had sent instructions to Messrs. Bostwick & Allen, and he allowed the "great political organ" to remain in the experienced hands that had done so well by it in Aaron Tallmadge's declining years.
He went to Nice, and brought the De Poincys back with him to Paris, where he had taken a house. Henri de Poincy, even when little by little he learned something of those years of struggle, could not see that his friend was essentially changed by their rough lessoning. Ethan had never, even in the ignorant and care-free days, been either very outgoing or very light of heart. De Poincy, as the elder, had long ago recognized his friend as one of those unexpected, but not uncommon, products of luxurious modernlife—a young man whose vivid perception of the underlying tragedy of the common lot had seemed out of all proportion to his possible experience. If any difference appeared in him now, it was that his old easy faith in concrete human nature, as opposed to his deep mistrust of life in the abstract, had been somewhat corrected—and that was well, Henri de Poincy thought. The young diplomat did not discover that, of all the faith-destroying spectacles his friend had looked upon, not the least, to just his cast of mind, was the hot haste made, in that same city where he had walked wanting bread, to court and fête the new millionaire. But Gano had left this phase of life so far behind him, he had got so out of touch with it, that he was obliged to learn over and over again that inevitable lesson taught affluent young America by the sage Old World—that money-bags are less easily and quickly filled in Europe, and the man who carries one that overflows will lack little that the craftier civilization can lay at his feet. Gano's particular kind of self-love revolted at some of his experiences at the hands of certain elegant and well-born adventurers, male and female, who, the American had fancied, liked him and sought him for himself. He was very young in many ways, for all his hardships and his twenty-six years. Still, he was not so much of a fool but that in time he learned his lesson. His fault lay in taking it too seriously. So it was that, despite his renewed literary activities and successes, and the need impressed on him of studyingles mœurs, he yielded more and more to his fondness for camping out, for fishing, and for cruising about the Mediterranean with Henri de Poincy.
"I never knew a fellow," that amiable young Frenchman would say—"never knew a fellow so much at his ease in the world, who seemed so anxious to be rid of people as you are."
"I'm not at my ease in the world."
"Ah, I should have said in drawing-rooms."
"Another matter. The drawing-room is the best place I know to avoid knowing people. I should like to spendall my days that aren't spent with a rod on a river-bank, or lying in a boat with you, in drawing-rooms. I'd like"—he stared up into the high-piled clouds sailing across the intense blue—"I'd like the big Engine-driver up yonder to look down through the white steam-puffs, and say: 'My boy, I give you my word of honor that I'll never run you into any closer quarters with life than you are in now.'"
"I see," laughed De Poincy, "lovely woman has pursued you till you fight shy. But don't lay it all to your looks and your winning ways, my friend; you're known to have dollars."
"Yes." His dark face flushed under some quick wave of feeling. "The most surprising thing I've found in Europe is the dominance of the money motive, that quality that they had told me distinguished the American."
He laughed a little bitterly.
"Well," said De Poincy, "you know you do hear more in America about money than you do anywhere."
"Exactly. Money's talked about with childlike and damnable iteration; but, by all the gods! if decent people with us want it, they work for it; they don't cringe and angle for it; they offer labor in exchange, notthemselves. They don't, as a nation, make it the basis of friendship, of marriage."
"If you don't, it's because American women are too self-willed to hear prudence."
"Yes, thank God! And yet we have the intelligent foreigner saying the climate makes our women sexless." He stopped and laughed. "I admit les Américaines don't so universally look on love and marriage as a profession, their only means of settlement in life. But I'll tell you what it is, my friend: the American, with all his outward frankness andnaïveté, cares more, like men of other nations, for the thing he doesn't talk about than for things he's always flinging in your face. With people on this side, it's money which is too sacred to be mentioned except on solemn occasions"—he made the slightest possible grimace—"but which is the supreme consideration. With us, the thingwe don't talk about, and yet care for the more, is the relation between the sexes, the ideal of a chivalry that the elder world has lost, or, more truly, never had, I think."
"The truth is, you've been long enough away from America to begin to idealize it. By the way, I thought you were of theéliteasked to the Château d'Avranchéville this autumn."
"This is better than Normandy," he said, shortly.
"Ah, but think of the dear creatures gathered there?"
"I'd rather think about 'em."
"Mademoiselle Lucie this time,hein?"
"Oh no—only that I don't love my kind."
De Poincy shook his head.
"That you don't lovethatkind shows you're gettingblasé."
Gano sat up, and fixed his dark eyes on his friend's face.
"You know you're talking nonsense. You'll allow I met her under peculiar circumstances."
"After helping you to fish her out of an Italian lake, I will allow the circumstances were romantic."
"I thought she—"
"Of course, love at first sight. Just the thing to fetch you."
"I thought she liked me as a girl at home might have liked me, who hadn't heard that my grandfather—"
He thumped out an oath as he thrust his hands deep down in his yachtman's jacket.
De Poincy smiled.
"She's so young," Gano went on—"probably less sophisticated, I thought, than our American girls."
"To be sure, a ravishingingénue."
"And here she was, ready to throw over poor Parthenay like that"—he tossed his cigarette overboard—"caring for him all the time, as Parthenay showed me. Then thisingénue, after turning the Tallmadge dollars into francs in her pretty baby head, was calmly arranging to help me to spend them here in France. How the devil they knew on suchshort acquaintance—before the settlement question came up—"
"Oh, her brother asked me that first day."
"What?"
De Poincy nodded.
"And when I thought they didn't so much as know that I was American!" He laughed with that excessive bitterness of youth perturbed, and pretended to speak apologetically. "You see, I've plumed myself on my French since I was seven, and my name tells nothing."
"Your French is all right, but you don't imagine people like that would put themselves out for thepremier venuas they did for you from the start."
Gano shrugged.
"My mistake was that, even without my banker's reference, I didn't look upon myself as thepremier venu."
"I must say I admired the charming way they conveyed the idea to you that Mademoiselle Lucie—"
"Shut up."
"My dear fellow, you would never have dreamed of Mademoiselle Lucie, enchanting as she is, if it hadn't been for their tact in pointing out that—"
"And you looked on!"
"To be sure, and envied you your damned good luck. She's an adorable creature, and would spend your money with distinction."
"Thanks. I needn't have come so far to find a woman who could manage that."
"I'm in the enemy's camp," De Poincy went on. "I want you to settle in France."
"And I—I want—"
Gano looked out over the dancing waves, face to face on a sudden with something so new and unexpected as to be almost incredible.
"What do you want?" asked De Poincy.
"I want to go back to America by the first boat."
"You're joking."
"I'm in dead earnest. It sounds sudden, but it isn't.Something's been the matter with me for a deuce of a long time. I haven't known what it was. I do now. I'm homesick."
"Doesn't it strike you you've postponed it a bit?"
"Dare say. We're offered every inducement to postpone it. We Americans are as pleased with Europe as children at a fair. We run up and down your marts with our purses out, delighted, astonished at your wares, at your ways; we want a souvenir from every booth, we want a peep at every side-show, we think it impossible ever to tire of the merry-go-round." His voice dropped. "When the night comes we're ready to go home."