XVI
Iamconvinced now. Roger loves her. Until that supper I had ups and downs—times when I felt unsure, hours when I argued myself into the belief that I was mistaken. But when I came down to my rooms that night my uncertainties were ended. As I lay in the dark I saw everything as clear as crystal. It seemed as if I was clairvoyant, caught up above myself, the whole situation visualized before me like a picture.
Since then there’s been only one question—what ought I to do?
Apart from my own feeling for Roger—supposing he was only the friend he used to be—should I let him give his heart and his name to a woman, whom, if he knew the truth, he would put away from him like a leper? Every ideal and instinct that make up the sum of his being would revolt, if he knew about Lizzie and John Masters. I know this, I don’t just think it because I want to. According to his code all women must be chaste and all menhonest, and if they’re not, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with them. It may not be generous, but that’s not to the point. He is so made and so will remain. He has been kinder to me than any one in the world—kind and just, as far as he knew. Should I, who could prevent it, stand by and watch him—the illustration isn’t flattering but it’s apt—rushing toward the precipice like the Gadarene swine?
And then Lizzie is entirely unfitted to be the wife of such a man. She belongs to another world that he doesn’t understand and couldn’t tolerate. He would think the people she foregathers with were savages. He hasn’t seen her with them, he doesn’t know how blind she is to the niceties of manners and breeding that to him are essentials. I try to fit her into his environment, put her up in a niche beside Mrs. Ashworth—Lizzie, with her tempests, her careless insults, her impossible friends! Suppose there had never been any John Masters, that she was as pure as Diana, could she ever be tamed to the Clements’ standard?
Memories of her keep coming up, throwing oranges out of the window, listening hungrily to Mrs. Stregazzi (fancy Mrs. Stregazzi at Mrs. Ashworth’s tea table talking about her corsets and hercigarettes!) facing Masters like an enraged lioness, weeping against his shoulder and pleading with him to come back. Good heavens, if no man had even touched her hand except in the clasp of friendship, she is not the woman for Roger. And she lived, willingly, proudly, without a twinge of conscience, with John Masters!
That’s one side and here’s the other:
Lizzie’s happiness, Lizzie placed beyond all need, Lizzie the wife of a man so high-thinking and right-doing that everything in her that was fine must answer to his call. Under his influence she might change, become what he now imagines her to be. Women have done that often, grown to love the man they marry and molded themselves to his ideal. Have I the right to stand between her and such a future, bar the way to Eden, an angel with a flaming sword?
I can’t.
In utter abandon she told me the story that I can now use against her. She trusted me and I answered her trust with a promise that I would never tell, unless she asked me to. It is true that she said she didn’t care if I did tell. But does it matter what she said? Wouldn’t I, if I used the permission givenin sickness of heart and body, be meaner than the meanest thing that crawls? Am I to buy my happiness at such a price?
I can’t.
If she still had her career it would be different. I could see her going forward in it, certain it was the best thing for her. But her career is over. She is to settle down as a singing teacher, plod on patiently, watch others making for the goal that was once to be hers. She can’t do it any more than she can fly.
If I thought that she was vicious, bad at heart, I would be certain I ought to tell. But with all her faults she is generous, kindly and honest. It’s her chance—the one chance that comes to all of us. Is it my business to take it from her, to interfere, with my flaming sword, and say, “No, this is not for you. You have committed the woman’s unpardonable sin. If you don’t feel the proper remorse it will be my place to punish you, to shut you out from the possibilities of redemption. Whateveryoumay think about it,Ithink that you belong in the corral with the goats and I’m going to do all in my power to keep you there”?
I can’t.
And so I go on, round and round like a squirrel in a cage. I wonder if the squirrel ever feels as I do.
They come in to see me and say I look ill. Roger is particularly solicitous, wants me to go south for a month with Mrs. Ashworth. I could no more leave this place, and the spectacle of his infatuation, than I could tell him what is making me hollow-eyed and wan.
One of the bitterest of my thoughts is that I know—an instinct tells me—he is really still fondest of me. I am and always will be the better woman for him, the one that in the storm and stress of a life’s companionship, is his true mate. His feeling for Lizzie is a temporary aberration. He has been bewitched—La Belle Dame Sans Merci has him in thrall. Some day he will wake from the dream—and then? He will find Lizzie beside him, La Belle Dame Sans Merci directing the domestic régime, tactfully accommodating herself to his moods, taking the place of the undistinguished wife of a distinguished husband.
Oh—why do I write like this! It’s low, contemptible, vile. I’m going to stop. I’m going to bow my head and say it’s done and give up.
I wrote that two days ago, pressed the blotter over it and said to myself, “The squirrel has had enough. It’s going to lie down in its cage.”
To-night—it’s past midnight and a big moon is shining on the back walls—I begin with a new pen on a fresh sheet to show how the squirrel didn’t stop. Poor ridiculous, demented squirrel!
There is a sort of grotesque humor about it, I can stand off and laugh at myself.
This afternoon the count came in to see me with news. His people have sent for him to go back to Rome.
“Have you already learned the banking business as conducted in America?” I inquired. I’m not so sympathetic as I used to be but the count doesn’t seem to notice it.
He took a cigarette and answered with deliberation:
“I have now, for four months, pasted letters in a book. It seems that I am to go on forever pasting letters in a book. I wrote it to my father and he sends me an answer saying, ‘My son, you can paste letters in a book as well in Rome as in New York. Come back at once. I find this pasting too expensive!’”
I expressed fitting regrets at this paternal interference.
“It is with great sorrow that I leave,” said the count sadly, “I have made many charming friends here.”
He removed his cigarette and bowed to me. I inclined my head. Our mutual lack of spirits did not prevent us from being extremely polite.
“You, dear madame, have been sweetly kind to the exile. I don’t know what I should have done without your ever beautiful sympathy.”
I made deprecating murmurs.
“A young man like myself, a romantic, must have a confidante, one who feels and understands, one who has lived.” I bowed again in melancholy admission of the fact. “It will be hard to go.”
He looked really troubled. His handsome warmly-tinted face wore an expression of gravity that made him seem much older. His eyes, usually alert and full of laughter, were wistfully dejected.
“I have loved her,” he said quietly.
For the first time in our acquaintance it seemed to me that the count was speaking from that center of feeling that we call the heart. He appeared nolonger an irresponsible, almost elfish youth, but a man who, as he himself expressed it, had lived. I was impressed.
“Have you told her?” I asked.
He shook his head murmuring:
“I decide to and I put it off. It is too hard. I fear what I may say.”
A sudden idea took possession of me. Writing it down in cold blood it sounds like the deranged fancy of a lunatic. At the moment when it came, I regarded it not only as a possible solution of all our difficulties, but as an inspiration. My only excuse is that self-preservation is the law of nature. I was drowning and I caught at a straw.
“Do you really love Lizzie Harris?” I asked in a voice tense to the trembling point.
“Very really.”
“More than that other lady, the thin one who wore the fur dress?”
“Much more.”
“More than any woman you have ever known?”
“A hundred times more.”
We must have presented an absurdly solemn appearance, I planting my questions like a detectiveadministering the third degree, the count nodding automatically as he jerked out his answers, his eyes fixed on me with an almost fierce stare.
“Why don’t you marry her?”
That was my inspiration. It seems to me the most inexplicable aberration that ever seized a sane woman—only for the moment I wasn’t sane. One of the curious points about it was that I never thought of Lizzie at all, whether she would want him or not. All I saw was the count transformed into a genie, unexpectedly come to my aid. I make no doubt if she had shown reluctance I would have counseled him to kidnap her as his ancestors kidnaped the Sabine women.
His expression brought me back to sense. He was looking at me with a blank unbelieving surprise as if I had suggested something beyond the limits of human endeavor. If I had urged him to inaugurate a conspiracy against his king or an exploring party to the moon, he could not have appeared more astonished.
“Marry her!” he ejaculated.
“Yes, marry her. You love her, you’ve just said so.”
“Most assuredly I do, to distraction.”
“Then why do you look so surprised?”
“But marriage—me?” He laid a finger on his breast and tapped on the top button of his waistcoat, regarding me from beneath raised brows. His expression was that of an intelligent person who can not believe that he has heard aright. It made me angry.
“Yes, you. I could hardly be alluding to anybody else after what you’ve just said.”
“But, my dear lady—” he sent a roving glance round the room as if hunting for some one who would explain, then came back to me. As he met my eyes he smiled, deprecatingly, almost tenderly, the smile with which maturity greets the preposterous antics of a child. “Is it a joke you make?”
“No, it is not,” I answered, “and I don’t see why you should think it was. When you love a person you marry them, don’t you?”
“Alas, not always. I could never marry Miss Harris. She is not of my order.”
“Order?” I was the one who ejaculated now.
“Exactly. Whomever I may love I only marry in my order.”
My inspiration collapsed, pierced by this unexpected and unfamiliar word. For a moment we satregarding each other. I don’t know how I looked but I don’t think it could have been as abject as I felt or the count, who is one of the most amiable of youths, would have wanted to know what was the matter. If I had had my wits about me I should have pretended it was a joke but I was too ashamed and crushed to pretend anything. In the embarrassing pause I tried to smile, a feeble propitiatory smile, which he answered in kind, brightly and reassuringly. I saw he expected me to go on, and I didn’t know how to go on except to argue it out with him.
“What does your order matter if you love a person?”
“But everything. It is, as you say here, what we’re there for.”
“But you do marry out of your class. Italian nobles have married American women who were without family.”
He gave a gay smile, jerking his head with a little agreeing movement toward his shoulder:
“Ah, truly, yes, but with fortunes—large fortunes. We need them, we have not got the huge moneys in Italy that you have here. But the adorable Miss Harris has nothing. Figure to yourself,Mrs. Drake; she must work for her living. If I come home to my father with a story like that, what happens? He is enraged, he turns me out—and thenIhave to work formyliving.” He gave a delightful boyish laugh. “At what?—pasting letters in a book? That is all I know.”
“Foreigners are very hard for Americans to understand,” I muttered, wondering if any foreigner of any race would ever have understood why a respectable American widow should offer her friend in marriage to an unwilling Italian count.
He leaned from his chair, pointing the smoking cigarette at me. His melancholy had vanished. He was a boy again, a light-hearted Latin boy, intrigued and amused at the sentimental point of view obtaining under the stars and stripes.
“It is you who are hard for us to understand—so loving money and so loving love. And which you like the best we can’t find out. For us one is here and one is there.” He pointed with the cigarette to two opposite corners of the room. “Miss Harris I adore but I do not marry her.” He planted his romance in the left-hand corner with a jab of his cigarette. “And I marry a lady whom I may not love, but who has fortune and who is of my class.”He planted her in the opposite corner with a second jab. “They are so far apart.” And he waved the cigarette between the two, with a sweep wide enough to indicate the distance that severed sentiment from obligation.
That was the end of it. I pulled myself together and led the conversation into a comparison of national characteristics. I don’t know what he thought of me, probably that I was a horrible example of what can be produced by a romance-ridden country.
When I think of it now (if I cared a farthing what happened to me) I would be quite scared. I wonder if I’ve inherited a queer strain from any of my forebears. They don’t look like it, but you can’t tell from portraits and miniatures. In their days it was the fashion to paint out all discreditable characteristics as, in ours, it is the highest merit to paint them in. Could it be possible that one of those pop-eyed, tight-mouthed women ever swerved from “a sweet reasonableness” and bequeathed the tendency to me? I’ve read somewhere that while the inclination to wrong-doing may not be transmitted, the weakened will can pass on. Is my lunacy of to-day, my distracted waverings, my temptations to disloyalty, the result of some one else’s lapse from thenormal? (The lamp’s going out. With the room getting dim I can see the moonlight in a clear wash of silver on the windows.) It wasn’t the little Huguenot lady. But her husband opposite, the formidable Puritan in the wig, was one of the jury who condemned the witches. That may be it. His cruelty is coming back to be paid for by his descendant—the poor old witches are getting even at last. Perhaps my descendants will some day writhe in atonement for my faults. But I have no descendants! I never will have.
It’s the lamp’s last sputter—going out as I’m going out. In a minute it will be dark, with the moonlight filling the gulfs of the backyards and I, alone in the night, listening to the stillness, wondering if I was only created to be an expiatory offering.