A VANISHED HAND
“WHY,�Daymond wrote, “do you imagine that I shall despise you for this confession? None but a whole-souled, high-hearted woman could have made it! You have said you love me, frankly; and I say in return that had the fountains of my heart not been hopelessly dried up at their sources, they must have sprung forth gladly at such words from you. But the passion of love, dear friend, it is for me no more to know; and I hold you in too warm regard to offer you, in exchange for shekels of pure Ophir gold, a defaced and worthless coinage!�
As Daymond penned the closing words of the sentence, the last rays of the smoky-red London sunset were withdrawn. Only a little while ago he had replenished the fire with fresh logs; but they were damp, and charred slowly, giving forth no pleasant flame. He struck a match and lighted a taper that stood upon his writing table. It created a feeble oasis of yellow radiance upon the darkness of the great studio, and the shadow of Daymond’s head and shoulders bending above it, was cast upward in gigantesque caricature upon the skylight, reduced to frosty white opacity by a burden of March snow.
Daymond poised the drying pen in white, well-kept fingers, and read over what he had written. Underlying all the elegance of well-modeled phrases was the sheer brutality of rejection, definitely expressed. His finelystrung mental organization revolted painfully at the imperative necessity of being cruel.
“She asks for bread,� he cried aloud, “and I am giving her a stone!� The lofty walls and domed roof of his workshop gave back the words to him, and his sensitive ear noted the theatrical twang of the echo. Yet the pang of remorse that had moved him to speech was quite genuine.
“You have heard my story,� he wrote on.
A great many people had heard it, and had been bored by it; but, sensitive as Daymond’s perceptions were, he was not alive to this fact.
“Seventeen years ago, while I was still a student dreaming of fame in a draughty Paris studio, I met the woman who was destined—I felt it then as I know it now—to be the one love of my life. She was an American, a little older than myself. She was divinely beautiful to me—I hardly know whether she was really so or not. We gave up all, each for each. She left husband, home, friends, to devote her life to me. I——�
He paused, trying to sum up the list of his own sacrifices, and ultimately left the break, as potent to express much, and went on:
“Guilty as I suppose we were, we were happy together—how happy I dare not even recall. Twenty-four months our life together lasted, and then came the end. It was the cholera year in Paris; the year which brought me my first foretaste of success in Art, robbed me of all joy in life.... She died. Horribly! suddenly! And the best of me lies buried in her grave!�
The muscles of his throat tightened with the rigor that accompanies emotion; his eyelids smarted. He threw back his still handsome head, and a tear fell shining on the delicately scented paper underneath his hand. Helooked at the drop as it spread and soaked into a damp little circle, and made no use of the blotting paper to remove the stain. If any crudely candid observer had told Daymond that he dandled this desolation of his—took an æsthetic delight in his devotion to the coffined handful of dust that had once lived and palpitated at his touch, he would have been honestly outraged and surprised. Yet the thing was true. He had made his sorrow into a hobby-horse during the last fifteen years of honest regret, of absolute faithfulness to the memory of his dead mistress. It gratified him to see the well-trained creature dance and perform the tricks of thehaute école. He was aware that the romance of that past, which he regretted with such real sincerity, added something to the glamour of his achieved reputation, his established fame, in the eyes of the world. The halo which it cast about him had increased his desirability in the eyes of the great lady who, after affording him numberless unutilized opportunities for the declaration of a sentiment which her large handsome person and her large handsome property had inspired in many other men, had written him a frank, womanly letter, placing these unreservedly at his disposal.... And Daymond, in his conscious fidelity and unconscious vanity, must perforce reply wintrily, nipping with the east wind of non-reciprocity the mature passion tendrils which sought to twine themselves about him. It was a painful task, though the obligation of it tickled him agreeably—another proof of the inconsistency of the man, who may be regarded as a type of humanity; for we are all veritable Daymonds, in that the medium which gives us back to our own gloating eyes day by day is never the crystal mirror of Truth, but such a lying glass as the charlatansof centuries agone were wont to make for ancient Kings and withered Queens to mop and mow in.
Daymond pushed back his chair, and got up, and began to pace from end to end of the studio. The costly Moorish carpets muffled the falling of his footsteps, which intermittently sounded on the polished interspaces of the parqueted floor, and then were lost again in velvet silence. In the same way, his tall figure, with its thoughtfully bending head and hands clasped behind it, would be swallowed up among the looming shadows of tall easels or faintly glimmering suggestions of sculptured figures which here and there thrust portions of limbs, or angles of faces, out of the dusk—to appear again with the twilit north window for its background, or emerge once more upon the borders of the little island of tapershine. So he moved amid the works of his genius restlessly and wearily to and fro; and the incoherent mutterings which broke from him showed that his thoughts were running in the beaten track of years.
“If I could see her again—if our eyes and lips and hands and hearts might meet for even the fraction of a minute, as they used to do, it would be enough. I could wait then patiently through the slow decay of the cycles for the turning of the key in the rusty wards, and the clanking of my broken fetters on the echoing stone, and the burst of light that shall herald my deliverance from prison!...� He lifted his arms above his head. “Oh, my dead love, my dear love! if you are near, as I have sometimes fancied you were, speak to me, touch me—once, only once!...� He waited a moment with closed eyelids and outstretched hands, and then, with a dry sob of baffled longing, stumbled back to his writing table, where the little taper was flickering its last, and dropped into his armchair.
“And other women talk of love to me. What wonder I am cold as ice to them, remembering her!�
It was a scene he had gone through scores upon scores of times—words and gestures varying according to the pathetic inspiration of the moment. He knew that he was pale, and that his eyes were bleared with weeping, and he had a kind of triumph in the knowledge that the pain of retrospective longing and of present loneliness was so poignantly real and keen. Out of the blackness behind his chair at that moment came a slight stir and rustle—not the sough of a vagrant draught stirring among folds of tapestry, but an undeniably human sound. But half displeased with the suspicion that there had been a witness to his agony, he turned—turned and saw Her, the well-beloved of the old, old time, standing very near him.
Beyond a vivid sensation of astonishment, he felt little. He did not tremble with fear—what was there in that perfectly familiar face to fear? He did not fall, stammering with incoherent rapture, at her feet. And yet, a few moments ago, he had felt that for one such sight of her, returned from the Unknowable to comfort him—dragged back from the mysterious Beyond by his strong yearnings—he would have bartered fame, honor, and wealth—submitted his body to unheard-of tortures—shed his blood to the last heart’s drop. He had prayed that a miracle might be performed—and the prayer had been granted. He had longed—desperately longed—to look on her once more—and the longing was satisfied. And he could only stare wide-eyed, and gape with dropped jaw, and say stupidly:
“You?�
For answer she turned her face—in hue, and line, and feature, no one whit altered—so that the light mightillumine it fully, and stood so regarding him in silence. Every pore of her seemed to drink in the sight of him;—her lips were parted in breathless expectancy. Every hair of the dark head—dressed in the fashion of fifteen years ago; every fold of the loose dress she wore—a garment he knew again; every lift and fall of her bosom seemed to cry out dumbly to him. There was a half-quenched spark glimmering in each of her deep eyes, that might have wanted only one breath from his mouth to break out into flame. Her hands hung clasped before her. It seemed as if they were only waiting for the signal to unclasp—for the outspread arms to summon him to her heart again. But the signal did not come. He caught a breath, and repeated, dully:
“You! It is you?�
She returned:
“It is I!�
The well-known tones! Recollection upsprang in his heart like a gush of icy waters. For a moment he was thrilled to the center of his being. But the smitten nerve chords ceased to vibrate in another moment, and he rose to offer her a chair.
She moved across and took it, as he placed it by the angle of the wide hearth; and lifted her skirts aside with a movement that came back to him from a long way off, like her tone in speaking—and, shading her deep gray eyes from the dull red heat with her white left hand, looked at him intently. He, having pushed his own seat back into the borders of the shadowland beyond the taper’s gleam and the hearth glow, looked back at her. That hand of hers bore no ring. When he had broken the plain gold link that had fettered it in time past, he had set in its place a ruby that had belonged to his mother. The ruby was on his finger now. He hid itout of sight in the pocket of his velvet painting coat, not knowing why he did so. And at that moment she broke the silence with:
“You see I have come to you at last!�
He replied, with conscious heaviness:
“Yes—I see!�
“Has the time seemed long?... We have no time, you know, where.... Is it many days since?...�
“Many days!�
“My poor Robert!... Weeks?... Months?... Not years?...�
“Fifteen years....�
“Fifteen years! And you have suffered all that time. Oh, cruel! cruel! If there was more light here, I might see your face more plainly. Dear face! I shall not love it less if there are lines and marks of grief upon it—it will not seem less handsome to me at forty than it did at twenty-five! Ah, I wish there was more light!� The old pettishly coaxing tones! “But yet I do not wish for it, lest it should show you any change inme!�
“You are not changed in the least.� He drew breath hard. “It might be yesterday——,� he said, and left the sentence unfinished.
“I am glad,� said the voice that he had been wont to recall to memory as wooingly sweet. “They have been kinder than I knew.... Oh! it has always been so painful to recall,� she went on, with the old little half shrug, half shudder, “that I died anuglydeath—that I was not pretty to look at as I lay in my coffin!...�
Daymond recoiled inwardly. That vanity, in a woman, should not be eradicated by the fact of her having simply ceased to exist, was an hypothesis never before administered for his mental digestion.
“How curiously it all happened,� she said, her fulltones trembling a little. “It was autumn—do you remember?—and the trees in the Bois and the gardens of the Luxembourg were getting yellowy brown. There were well-dressed crowds walking on the Boulevards, and sitting round the little tables outside the restaurants. One could smell chloride of lime and carbolic acid crossing the gutters, and see the braziers burning at the corners of infected streets, and long strings of hearses going by; but nothing seemed so unlikely as that either of us should be taken ill and die. We were too wicked, you said, and too happy! ... only the good, miserable people were carried off, because any other world would be more suitable to them than this.... It was nonsense, of course, but it served us to laugh at. Then, because you could not sell your great Salon picture, and we could not afford the expense, you gave a supper at theCafé des Trois Oiseaux(Cabinet particulier No. 6)—and Valéry and the others joined us. I was so happy that night ... my new dress became me ... I wore yellow roses—your favorite Maréchal Niel’s. When I was putting them in my bosom and my hair you came behind and kissed me on the shoulder. O,mon Dieu! mon Dieu!I can feel it now! We went to the Variétés, and then to supper. I had never felt so gay. People are like that, I remember having heard, just when they are going to die. Valéry gaped—I believe he was half in love with me—and I teased him because I knew you would be jealous. In those days you would have been jealous of the studioécorché. Ha! ha! ha!�
Daymond shuddered. The recurrent French phrases jarred on him; something in her voice and manner scarified inexpressibly his sensitive perceptions. He wondered, dumbly, whether she had always been like this? She went on:
“And then, suddenly, in the midst of the laughter, the champagne, the good dishes—the pains of hell!� She shuddered. “And then a blank, and waking up in bed at the hospital, still in those tortures—and getting worse and seeing in your white face that I was going to die! Drip-drip! I could feel your tears falling upon my face, upon my hand; but I was even impatient of you in my pain. Once I fancied that I heard myself saying that I hated you. Did I really?�
“I think—I believe you did! But, of course——� Daymond stopped, and shuddered to the marrow as she leaned across to him caressingly, so near that her draperies brushed his knee and her breath fanned upon his face.
“Imagine it!� she cried, “that Ihatedyou!Youto whom I had given myself—you for whom I left my——�
He interrupted, speaking in an odd, strained voice: “Never mind that now.�
“I had always wished to die first,� she resumed, “but not in that way; not without leaving you a legacy of kind words and kisses. Ah!� (her voice stole to his ears most pleadingly), “do you know that I have been here, I cannot tell how long, and you have not kissed me once, darling?�
She rose up in her place—she would have come to him, but he sprang to his feet, and thrust out both hands to keep her off, crying:
“No! no!�
She sank back into her seat, looking at him wide-eyed and wonderingly. “Is he afraid of me?� she whispered to herself.
“I am not afraid of you,� Daymond returned almost roughly. “But you must make allowances for me at first. Your sudden coming—the surprise——�
“Ah yes! the surprise—and the joy——?�
He cleared his throat and looked another way. He was shamedly conscious that the emotion that stiffened his tongue and hampered his gestures was something widely different from joy. He spoke again, confusedly. “This seems like old times—before——�
“Before I died,� she said, “without bidding good-bye to you. Dear! if you guessed how I have longed to know what you said and did when it was all over, you would not mind telling me.... ‘Are they grieving—those whom I have left behind?’ is a question that is often asked in the place I come from. You were sorry? You cried? Ah! I know you must have cried!�
“I believe,� Daymond returned, moving restlessly in his chair, “that I did. And I—I kissed you, though the doctors told me not to. I wanted to catch the cholera and die, too, I believe!...�
“Yes?�
“And when the people came with—the coffin, I�—he bit his lip—“I would not let them touch you!...�
“My poor boy!�
He winced from the tenderness. He felt with indescribable sensations the light pressure of that well-known once well-loved touch upon his arm.
“And then—after the funeral, I believe I had a brain fever.� He passed his hand through his waving, slightly grizzled hair, as if to assist his lagging memory—really, as an excuse for shaking off that intolerable burden of her hand. “And when I recovered I found there was no way to forgetfulness�—he heard her sigh faintly—“except through work. I worked then—I am working still.�
“Always alone?�
“Generally alone. I have never married.�
“Of course not!�
A faint dissent began to stir in him at this matter-of-fact acquiescence in his widowed turtle-like celibacy. “It may interest you to know,� he observed, with a touch of the pompous manner which had grown upon him with the growth of his reputation, “that my career has been successful in the strongest sense of the word. I have become, I may say, one of the leaders of the world of Art. Upon the decease or resignation of the President of the ——, it is more than probable that I shall be invited to occupy his vacant place. And an intimation has reached me, from certain eminent quarters�—he paused weightily—“that a baronetcy will be conferred upon me, in that event!�
“Yes?�
The tone betrayed an absolute lack of attention. She had once been used to take a keen interest in his occupations; to be cast down by his failures and elated by his successes. Had that enthusiasm constituted the greater part of her charm? In its absence Daymond began to find her—must it be confessed?—but indifferent company.
In the embarrassment that momentarily stiffened him, an old habit came to his rescue. Before he knew it, he had taken a cigar from a silver box upon the writing table, and was saying, with the politely apologetic accent of the would-be smoker:
“May I? You used not to mind!�
She made a gesture of assent. As the first rings of bluish vapor mounted into the air, Daymond found her watching him with those intent, expectant eyes.
Feeling himself bound to make some observation, he said: “It is very wonderful to me to see you here! It was very good of you to come!�
She returned: “They had to let me come, I think! Ibegged so—I prayed so, that at last——� She paused. Daymond was not listening. He was looking at her steadfastly and pondering....
It had been his whim, in the first poignancy of bereavement, to destroy all portraits of her, so that with the lapse of years no faulty touch should bewray the memory of her vanished beauty. It struck him now for the first time that his brush had played the courtier, and flattered her, for the most part, unblushingly. He found himself criticizing unfavorably the turn of her throat and the swell of her bosom, and the dark voluptuous languishment of her look. The faint perfume of heliotrope that was shaken forth now, as of old time, from her hair and her garments no longer intoxicated, but sickened him. This, then, was the woman he had mourned for fifteen years! He began to feel that he had murmured unwisely at the dispensation of Providence. He began to revolt at this recrudescence of an outworn passion—to realize that at twenty-five he had taken a commonplace woman for a divinity—a woman whom, if she had not died when she did, he would have wearied of—ended perhaps in hating. He found himself in danger of hating her now.
“At last they let me come. They said I should repent it—as if I could!� Her eyes rested on him lingeringly; her hand stilled the eager trembling of her lips. “Never! Of course, you seemed a little strange at first. You are not quite—not quite yourself now; it is natural—after fifteen years. And presently, when I tell you—— Oh! what will you say when I tell you all?�
She left her chair and came toward him, so swiftly that he had not time to avoid her. She laid her hand on his shoulder and bent her mouth to his ear. One of her peculiarities had been that her lips were always cold,even when her passion burned most fiercely. The nearness of those lips, once so maddeningly desirable and sweet, made Daymond’s flesh creep horribly. He breathed with difficulty, and the great drops of agony stood thickly on his forehead—not with weak, superstitious terror of the ghost; with unutterable loathing of the woman.
“Listen!� she said. “They are wise in the place I came from; they know things that are not known here.... You have heard it said that once in the life of every human being living upon earth comes a time when the utterance of a wish will be followed by its fulfilment. The poor might be made rich, the sick well, the sad merry, the loveless beloved—in one moment—if they could only know when that moment comes! But not once in a million million lifetimes do they hit upon it; and so they live penniless and in pain, and sorrowful and lonely, all their lives. I let my chance go by, like many others, long before I died; but yours is yet to come.� Her voice thrilled with a note of wild triumph; the clasp of her arm tightened on his neck. “Oh, love!� she cried; “the wonderful moment is close at hand! It is midnight now�—she pointed to the great north window, through which the frosty silver face of the moon was staring in relief against a framed-in square of velvet blackness, studded with twinkling star-points—“but with the first signs of the dawn that you and I have greeted together, heart of my heart!—how many times in the days that may come again!—with the graying of the East and the paling of the stars comes the Opportunity for you. Now,DO YOU UNDERSTAND?�
He understood and quailed before her. But she was blindly confident in his truth, stupidly reliant on his constancy.
“When it comes, beloved, you shall take me in your arms—breathe your wish upon these lips of mine, in a kiss. Say, while God’s ear is open, ‘Father, give her back to me, living and loving, as of old!’ and I shall be given—I shall be given!�
She threw both arms about him and leaned to him, and sobbed and laughed with the rapture of her revelation and the anticipation of the joy that was to come.
“Remember, you must not hesitate, or the golden chance will pass beyond recall, and I shall go back whence I came, never more to return—never more to clasp you, dearest one, until you die too, and come to me (are you cold, that you shudder so?)—and be with me for always. Listen, listen!�
As she lifted her hand the greatest of all the great clock voices of London spoke out the midnight hour. As other voices answered from far and near Daymond shuddered, and put his dead love from him, and rose up trembling and ghastly pale.
They moved together to the window, and stood looking out. The weather was about to change; the snow was melting, the thaw drip plashed heavily from roof gutters and balconies, cornices and window ledges. As she laid her hand once more upon his shoulder the stars began to fade out one by one, and in a little while from then the eastward horizon quivered with the first faint throes of dawn.
“Wish!� she cried. “Now! now! before it is too late!� She moved as if to throw herself again upon his breast; but he thrust her from him with resolute hands that trembled no more.
“I wish,� he said very distinctly, “to be Sir Robert Daymond, Baronet, and President of the —— before the year is out!�
She fell away from him, and waned, and became unsubstantial and shadowy like the ghost she was, and unlike the thing of flesh and blood she had seemed before. Nothing remained to her of lifelikeness but the scorn and anger, the anguish and reproach of her great eyes.
“Only the dead are faithful to Love—because they are dead,� she said. “The living live on—and forget! They may remember sometimes to regret us—beat their breasts and call upon our names—but they shudder if we answer back across the distance; and if we should offer to come back, ‘Return!’ they say! ‘go and lie down in the comfortable graves we have made you; there is no room for you in your old places any more!’ They told me I should be sorry for coming; but I would not listen, I had such confidence. I am wiser now! Good-bye!�
A long sigh fluttered by him in the semi-obscurity, like a bird with a broken wing. There was a rattling of curtain rings, the dull sough of falling tapestry, and the opening and closing of a door. She was gone! And Daymond, waking from strangely dreamful slumbers to the cheerlessness of dying embers and burned-out candle, rang the bell for his servant, and ordered lights. A few minutes later saw him, perfectly dressed, stepping into his cab.
“Chesterfield Gardens, Mayfair,� he said, giving the direction to his valet for transference to the groom.
“Beg pardon, sir, but Lady Mary Fraber’s servant is still waiting!� The man pointed back to the house.
“Ah!� said Daymond, who had had a passing glimpse of alien cord gaiters reposing before his hall-fire. “Tell him I have taken the answer to his mistress myself.�
And as he spoke he scattered a handful of torn-up squares of paper—the fragments of a letter—in largesse to the night and the gusty weather.