"It will do him no harm, a little of it. He'll know how to look after your money, mother, when I am gone." And he added, "It's making a man of him, you'll see!"
There was another matter, little suspected by the Colonel, that was rapidly to make a man of his engaging young son.
When Vickers Price raised his eyes from his desk and, losing for the moment the clattering note of business that surged all around him, looked through dusky panes into the cloud of mist and smoke, visions rose before him that were strange to the smoky horizon of the river city….
From the little balcony of his room on the Pincio, all Rome lay spread before him,—Rome smiling under the blue heaven of an April morning! The cypresses in the garden pointed to a cloudless sky. Beyond the city roofs, where the domes of churches rose like little islands, was the green band of the Janiculum, and farther southwards the river cut the city and was lost behind the Aventine. And still beyond the Campagna reached to the hills about Albano.
Beneath he could see the Piazza del Popolo, with a line of tiny cabs standing lazily in the sunlight, and just below the balcony was a garden where a fountain poured softly, night and day. Brilliant balls of colored fruit hung from the orange trees, glossy against the yellow walls of the palazzo across the garden. From the steep street on the other side of the wall rose the thin voice of a girl, singing a song of the mountains, with a sad note of ancient woe, and farther away in the city sounded the hoarse call of a pedler…. This was not the Rome of the antiquary, not the tawdry Rome of the tourist. It was the Rome of sunshine and color and music, the Rome of joy, of youth! And the young man, leaning there over the iron railing, his eyes wandering up and down the city at his feet, drank deep of the blessed draught,—the beauty and the joy of it, the spirit of youth and romance in his heart….
From some one of the rooms behind a neighboring balcony floated a woman's voice, swelling into a full contralto note, then sinking low and sweet into brooding contemplation. After a time Vickers went to his work, trying to forget the golden city outside the open window, but when the voice he had heard burst forth joyously outside, he looked up and saw the singer standing on her balcony, shading her eyes with a hand, gazing out over the city, her voice breaking forth again and again in scattered notes, as though compelled by the light and the joy of it all. She was dressed in a loose black morning gown that rippled in the breeze over her figure. She clasped her hands above her bronze-colored hair, the action revealing the pure white tint of neck and arms, the well-knit body of small bones. She stood there singing to herself softly, the note of spring and Rome in her voice. Still singing she turned into her room, and Vickers could hear her, as she moved back and forth, singing to herself. And as he hung brooding over Rome, listening to the gurgle of the fountain in the garden, he often listened to this contralto voice echoing the spirit within him…. Sometimes a little girl came out on the balcony to play.
"Are you English?" she asked the young man one day.
"No, American, like you, eh?" Vickers replied.
They talked, and presently the little girl running back into the room spoke to some one: "There is a nice man out there, mother. He says he's American, too." Vickers could not hear what the woman said in reply….
The child made them friends. Mrs. Conry, Vickers learned, was his neighbor's name, and she was taking lessons in singing, preparing herself, he gathered, for professional work,—a widow, he supposed, until he heard the little girl say one day, "when we go home to father,—we are going home, mother, aren't we? Soon?" And when the mother answered something unintelligible, the little girl with a child's subtle tact was silent….
This woman standing there on the balcony above the city,—all gold and white and black, save for the gray eyes, the curving lines of her supple body,—this was what he saw of Europe,—all outside those vivid Roman weeks that he shared with her fading into a vague background. Together they tasted the city,—its sunny climbing streets, its white squares, and dark churches, the fields beyond the Colosseum, the green Campagna, the vivid mornings, the windless moonlight nights! All without this marvellous circle, this charmed being of Rome, had the formlessness of a distant planet. Here life began and closed, and neither wished to know what the other had been in the world behind.
That she was from some Southern state,—"a little tiny place near the Gulf, far from every civilized thing," Mrs. Conry told him; and it was plain enough that she was meagrely educated,—there had been few advantages in that "tiny place." But her sensuous temperament was now absorbing all that it touched. Rome meant little to her beyond the day's charm, the music it made in her heart; while the man vibrated to every association, every memory of the laden city….
Thus the days and weeks slipped by until the gathering heat warned them of the passing of time. One June day that promised to be fresh and cool they walked through the woods above the lake of Albano. Stacia Conry hummed the words of a song that Vickers had written and set to music, one of a cycle they had planned for her to sing—the Songs of the Cities. This was the song of Rome, and in it Vickers had embedded the sad strain that the girl sang coming up the street,—the cry of the past.
"That is too high for me," she said, breaking off. "And it is melancholy. I hate sad things. It reminds me of that desolate place at the end of the earth where I came from."
"All the purest music has a strain of sadness," Vickers protested.
"No, no; it has longing, passion! … I escaped!" She looked down on the cuplike lake, shimmering in the sun below. "I knew in my heart thatthislived, this world of sunshine and beauty and joy. I thirsted for it. Now I drink it!"
She turned on him her gray eyes, which were cool in spite of her emotion. She had begun again the song in a lower key, when at a turn in the path they came upon a little wooden shrine, one of those wayside altars still left in a land where religion has been life. Before the weather-stained blue-and-red madonna knelt a strangely mediaeval figure,—a man wasted and bare-headed, with long hair falling matted over his eyes. An old sheepskin coat came to his bare knees. Dirty, forlorn, leaning wearily on his pilgrim's staff, the man was praying before the shrine, his lips moving silently.
"What a figure!" Vickers exclaimed in a low voice, taking from his pocket a little camera. As he tiptoed ahead of Mrs. Conry to get his picture before the pilgrim should rise, he saw the intense yearning on the man's face. Beckoning to his companion, Vickers put the camera into his pocket and passed on, Mrs. Conry following, shrinking to the opposite side of the way, a look of aversion on her mobile face.
"Why didn't you take him?" she asked as they turned the corner of the road.
"He was praying,—and he meant it," Vickers answered vaguely.
The woman's lips curved in disgust at the thought of the dirty pilgrim on his knees by the roadside.
"Only the weak pray! I hate that sort of thing,—prayer and penitence."
"Perhaps it is the only real thing in life," Vickers replied from some unknown depth within him.
"No, no! How can you say that? You who know what life can be. Never! That is what they tried to teach me at school. But I did not believe it. I escaped. I wanted to sing. I wanted my own life." She became grave, and added under her breath: "And I shall get it. That is best, best, best!" She broke into a run down the sun-flecked road, and they emerged breathless in an olive orchard beside the lake. Her body panted as she threw herself down on the grass. "Now!" she smiled, her skin all rose; "can you say that?" And her voice chanted, "To live,—my friend,—to LIVE! And you and I are made to live,—isn't it so?"
The artist in Vickers, the young man of romance, his heart tender with sentiment, responded to the creed. But woven with the threads of this artist temperament were other impulses that stirred. The pilgrim in the act of penitence and ecstatic devotion was beautiful, too, and real,—ah, very real, as he was to know….
They supped that afternoon in a little wine shop looking towards the great dome swimming above Rome. And as the sun shot level and golden over the Campagna, lighting the old, gray tombs, they drove back to the city along the ancient Latin road. The wonderful plain, the most human landscape in the world, began to take twilight shadows. Rome hung, in a mist of sun, like a mirage in the far distance, and between them and the city flowed the massive arches of an aqueduct, and all about were the crumbling tombs, half hidden by the sod. The carriage rolled monotonously onwards. The woman's eyes nearly closed; she looked dreamily out through the white lids, fringed with heavy auburn lashes. She still hummed from time to time the old refrain of Vickers's song. Thus they returned, hearing the voice of the old world in its peculiar hour.
"I am glad that I have had it—that I have lived—a little. This, this!—I can sing to-night! You must come and sit on my balcony and look at the stars while I sing to you—the music of the day."
As the Porta San Paolo drew near, Vickers remarked:—
"I shall write you a song of Venice,—that is the music for you."
"Venice, and Paris, and Vienna, and Rome,—all! I love them all!"
She reached her arms to the great cities of the earth, seeing herself in triumph, singing to multitudes the joy of life…. "Come to-night,—I will sing for you!"…
On the porter's table at the hotel lay a thick letter for Mrs. Conry. It bore the printed business address,—THE CONRY CONSTRUCTION COMPANY. Mrs. Conry took it negligently in her white hand. "You will come later?" she said, smiling back at the young man.
* * * * *
Sitting crowded in front of Arragno's and sipping a liqueur, Fosdick remarked to Vickers: "So you have run across the Conry? Of course I know her. I saw her in Munich the first time. The little girl still with her? Then it was Vienna…. She's got as far as Rome! Been over here two or three years studying music. Pretty-good voice, and a better figure. Oh, Stacia is much of a siren."
Vickers moved uneasily and in reply to a question Fosdick continued:—
"Widow—grass widow—properly linked—who knows? Our pretty country-women have such a habit of trotting around by themselves for their own delectation that you never can tell how to place them. She may be divorced—she may be the other thing! You can't tell. But she is a very handsome woman."…
Mrs. Conry herself told Vickers the facts, as they sat at a little restaurant on the Aventine where they loved to go to watch the night steal across the Palatine.
"… He offered me my education—my chance. I took it. I went to the conservatory at Cincinnati. Then he wanted to marry me, and promised to send me abroad to study more."… Her tone was dry, impartially recounting the fact. Then her eyes dropped, and Vickers's cigarette glowed between them as they leaned across the little iron table…. "I was a child then—did not know anything. I married him. The first years business was poor, and he could not let me have the money. When times got better, he let me come—kept his promise. I have been here nearly three years, back two or three times. And now," her voice dropped, "I must go back for good—soon."
Nothing more. But it seemed to Vickers as if a ghost had risen from the river mist and come to sit between them. That the woman was paying a price for her chance, a heavy price, he could see. They walked back to the city between the deserted vineyards. As they crossed the river, Mrs. Conry stopped, and remarked sombrely, "A bargain is a bargain the world over, is it not?"
Vickers felt the warm breathing woman close to him, felt her brooding eyes."One pays," he murmured, "I suppose!"
She threw up her hand in protest, and they walked on into the lighted city.
* * * * *
Occasionally Fosdick joined their excursions, and after one of them he said to Vickers:—
"My friend, she is wonderful; more so every time I see her. But beneath that soft, rounded body, with its smooth white skin, is something hard. Oh, I know the eyes and the hair and the throat and the voice! I, too, am a man. Paint her, if you like, or set her to music. She is forbel cantoand moonlight and the voice of Rome. But there is a world outside this all, my friend, to which you and I belong, andyourather more than I…. Stacia Conry doesn't belong at all."
"Which means?" demanded Vickers steadily of the burly Fosdick.
"Take care that you don't get stuck in the sea of Sargasso. I think something bitter might rise out of all that loveliness."
Nevertheless, instead of going to the Maloya with Fosdick, Vickers stayed on in Rome, and September found him there and Mrs. Conry, too, having returned to the city from the mountain resort, where she had left the little girl with her governess. They roamed the deserted city, and again began to work on the songs which Mrs. Conry hoped to give in concerts on her return to America. Very foolish of the young man, and the woman, thus to prolong the moment of charm, to linger in the Sargasso Sea! But at least with the man, the feeling that kept him in Rome those summer months was pure and fine, the sweetest and the best that man may know, where he gives of his depths with no thought of reward, willing to accept the coming pain…. Little Delia, who had seen quite as much of Vickers as her mother, said to him the day she left with her governess:—
"We're going home soon—before Thanksgiving. I'm so glad! And you'll be there, too?"
"I suppose not, Delia," the young man replied. But as it happened he was the first to go back….
That late September day they had returned from a ramble in the hills. It was nearly midnight when the cab rattled up the deserted streets to their hotel. As Vickers bade his companion good-night, with some word about a long-projected excursion to Volterra, she said:—
"Come in and I will sing for a while. I don't feel like sleep…. Yes, come! Perhaps it will be the last of all our good times."
In the large dark apartment the night wind was drawing over the roofs of the hill through the open windows, fluttering stray sheets of music along the stone floor. Mrs. Conry lighted a candle on the piano, and throwing aside her hat and veil, dropping her gloves on the floor, struck some heavy chords. She sang the song they had been working over, the song of Venice, with a swaying melody as of floating water-grasses. Then she plunged into a throbbing aria,—singing freely, none too accurately, but with a passion and self-forgetfulness which promised greater things than the concert performer. From this on to other snatches of opera, to songs, wandering as the mood took her, coming finally to the street song that Vickers had woven into his composition for Rome, with its high, sad note. There her voice stopped, died in a cry half stifled in the throat, and leaving the piano she came to the window. A puff of wind blew out the candle. With the curtains swaying in the night wind, they stood side by side looking down into the dark city, dotted irregularly with points of light, and up above the Janiculum to the shining stars.
"Rome, Rome," she murmured, and the words sighed past the young man's ears,—"and life—LIFE!"
It was life that was calling them, close together, looking forth into the night, their hearts beating, the longing to grasp it, to go out alone into the night for it. Freedom, and love, and life,—they beckoned! Vickers saw her eyes turn to him in the dark….
"And now I go," he said softly. He found his way to the door in the dark salon, and as he turned he saw her white figure against the swaying curtain, and felt her eyes following him.
In his room he found the little blue despatch, sent up from his banker, which announced his brother's death, and the next morning he left by the early express for the north to catch the Cherbourg boat. As he passed Mrs. Conry's salon he slipped under the door the despatch with a note, which ended, "I know that we shall see each other again, somewhere, somehow!" and from the piazza he sent back an armful of great whitefleur-de-lys. Later that morning, while Vickers was staring at the vintage in the Umbrian Valley and thinking of the woman all white and bronze with the gray eyes, Mrs. Conry was reading his note. A bitter smile curved her lips, as she gathered up the white flowers and laid them on the piano.
One winter day while Vickers Price was "selling nails," as he still expressed his business career, there came in his mail a queer little scrawl, postmarked Pittsburg. It was from Delia Conry, and it ran:—
"We've been home a month. We live in a hotel. I don't like it. The bird you gave me died. Mother says she'll get me a new one. I wish I could see you. Love from Delia."
But not a word from Mrs. Conry! Fosdick, drifting through Rome on his way to Turkestan, wrote:—
"… What has become of the Conry? She has disappeared from the cities of Europe with her melodious songs and beautiful hair. Are you touring the States with her? Or has she rediscovered Mr. Conry—for a period of seclusion? … To think of you serving hardware to the barbarians across the counter enlivens my dull moments. From the Sargasso Sea to St. Louis,—there is a leap for you, my dear."…
While he "served hardware to the barbarians" and in other respects conformed to the life of a privileged young American gentleman, Vickers Price dreamed of those Roman days, the happiest of his life. If that night they two had taken life in their hands? … Could the old Colonel have read his son's heart,—if from the pinnacle of his years filled with ripe deeds he could have comprehended youth,—he might have been less sure that the hardware business was to be "the making of Vick"!
What had come to her? Had she accepted her lot, once back in the groove of fate, or had she rebelled, striking out for her own vivid desire of joy and song, of fame? Vickers would have liked to hear that she had rebelled, was making her own life,—had taken the other road than the one he had accepted for himself. His tender, idealizing heart could not hold a woman to the sterner courses of conduct.
For, as Fosdick had told him in Rome, the young man was a Sentimentalist with no exact vision of life. His heart was perpetually distorting whatever his mind told him was fact. This woman, with her beauty, her love of music, had touched him at the lyric moment of life, when reality was but the unstable foundation for dream. Life as might be, glowing, colored, and splendid,—life as it was within him, not as this hideous maelstrom all about him reported. And why not the I, the I! cried the spirit of youth, the egotistic spirit of the age. For all reply there was the bent, gray head of the Colonel at his desk in the office beside him. "One sentiment against another," Fosdick might say….
Finally Stacia Conry wrote, a little note: she was to be in St. Louis on the fourteenth for a short time and hoped that he would call on her at the hotel. A perfectly proper, colorless little note, written in an unformed hand, with a word or two misspelled,—the kind of note that gave no indication of the writer, but seemed like the voice of a stranger. However, as Vickers reflected, literary skill, the power to write personal little notes did not go necessarily with a talent for music—or for life. Nannie Lawton wrote intimate notes, and other women, single and married, whom Vickers had come to know these past months. But their cleverest phrases could not stir his pulses as did this crude production.
The woman who was waiting for him in the little hotel parlor, however, gave him a curious shock,—she was so different in her rich street costume from the woman in black and white, whose picture had grown into his memory. She seemed older, he thought, thus accounting for that strange idealizing power of the mind to select from a face what that face has specially given it and create an altogether new being, with its own lineaments graven in place of actual bone and tissue. It takes time to correct this ideal misreport of the soul, to accept the fact! Except for the one glance from the gray eyes which she gave him as they shook hands, Stacia Conry did not stir the past. But she was voluble of the present.
"You did not expect this! You see my husband had some work to attend to near here, and I thought I would come with him…. No, we left Delia in Pittsburg with his mother,—she wanted to see you, but she would be in the way."
They came soon to her singing, and her face clouded.
"I haven't been able to get an opening. I wanted to sing the Cycle with an orchestra. But I haven't succeeded,—our Pittsburg orchestra won't look at any talent purely domestic. It is all pull over here. I haven't any influence…. You must start with some backing,—sing in private houses for great people! We don't know that kind, you see."
"And concerts?" Vickers inquired.
"The same way,—to get good engagements you must have something to show…. I've sung once or twice,—in little places, church affairs and that kind of thing."
Vickers laughed as Mrs. Conry's expressive lips curled.
"They tell you to take everything to begin with. But singing for church sociables in Frankfort and Alleghany,—that doesn't do much! I want to go to New York,—I know people there, but—"
Vickers understood that Mr. Conry objected.
"It must come sometime," she said vehemently; "only waiting is killing. It takes the life out of you, the power, don't you think?"
"Could you sing here?" Vickers asked,—"now, I mean? I might be able to arrange it."
"Oh, if you could!" Mrs. Conry's face glowed, and her fingers played nervously with her long chain. "If I could give the Cycle with your accompaniment, here in St. Louis where you are so well known—"
Vickers smiled at the picture of his debut in St. Louis drawing-rooms.
"I will ask my sister to help," he said. "I should like her to call."
Mrs. Conry became suddenly animated, as if after a period of depressing darkness she saw a large ray of sunshine. She had thought of possibilities when she had persuaded her husband to take her to St. Louis, but had not expected them to develop at once.
"You see," she continued quickly, "if I can get a hearing here, it means that other people may want me,—I'll become known, a little."
"My mother couldn't have it," Vickers explained, "nor my sister, because of our mourning. But Mrs. Lawton,—that would be better any way." He thought of Nannie Lawton's love ofreclame, and he knew that though she would never have considered inviting the unheralded Mrs. Conry to sing in her drawing-room, she would gladly havehimappear there with any one, playing his own music.
"Yes, we'll put it through! The Songs of the Cities." He repeated the words with sentimental visions of the hours of their composition.
"And then I have some more,—Spanish songs. They take, you know! And folk-songs." Mrs. Conry talked on eagerly of her ambitions until Vickers left, having arranged for Isabelle to call the next day. As he took his way to the Lawtons' to use his influence with the volatile Nan in behalf of Mrs. Conry, his memory of their talk was sad. 'America, that's it,' he explained. 'She wants to do something for herself, to get her independence.' And he resolved to leave no stone unturned, no influence unused, to gratify her ambition.
So Isabelle called on Mrs. Conry in company with Nannie Lawton. Vickers little knew what an ordeal the woman he loved was passing through in this simple affair. A woman may present no difficulties to the most fastidiously bred man, and yet be found wanting in a thousand particulars by the women of his social class. As the two emerged from the hotel, Isabelle looked dubiously at Mrs. Lawton.
"Queer, isn't she?" that frank lady remarked. "Oh, she's one of those stray people you run across in Europe. Perhaps she can sing all right, though I don't care. The men will be crazy after her,—she's the kind,—red hair and soft skin and all that…. Better look out for that young brother of yours, Isabelle. She is just the one to nab our innocent Vickie."
Isabelle's report of her call had some reserves.
"Of course she is very striking, Vick. But, you see,—she—she isn't exactly our kind!"
"That is Nan," the young man retorted impatiently. "I never heard you say that sort of thing before. What on earth is 'our kind'? She is beautiful and has talent, a lot of it,—all she wants is her chance. And why shouldn't she have it?"
Isabelle smiled at his heat, and replied caressingly:—
"She shall have all that Nan and I can do for her here. But don't be foolish about her. I suspect you could be with a woman—because of your dear old heart…. If she can't sing a note, she'll make a hit with her looks, Nan says!"
So the musicale was arranged. There were mostly women in Mrs. Lawton's smart little music room when Mrs. Conry rose to sing a series of introductory songs. She was very striking, as Isabelle and Mrs. Lawton had foreseen that she would be,—rather bizarrely dressed in a white and gold costume that she had designed herself, with a girdle of old stones strung loosely about her waist. She was nervous and sang uncertainly at first so that Vickers had to favor her in his accompaniment. He could see the trembling of her white arm beside him. The Cycle of the Cities came near the end of the programme, and when Vickers took his seat to play the accompaniments, he was aware that a number of men had arrived and were standing in the hall, peering through the doors at the performance. He knew well enough what the men were thinking of him, sitting there playing his own songs,—that it was a queer, monkey performance for the son of Colonel Price! The fine arts are duly recognized in American cities; but the commercial class, as always has been its wont, places them in a category between millinery and theology.
She had chosenParisto open with, and gave the song with assurance, eliciting especially from the men in the hall the first real applause. Then followedVienna, Munich. She was singing well, gaining confidence. When it came toVenice,—Vickers remembered as he followed her swimming voice the twilight over the Campagna, the approaching mass of Rome,—even the women woke to something like enthusiasm. As she uttered the first note ofRome, she glanced down at Vickers, with a little smile, which said:—
"Do you remember? This isours,—I am singing this for you!"
Her face was flushed and happy. She sang the difficult music as she had sung that last night in Rome, and Vickers, listening to the full voice so close to him, heard again the high sad note of the street singer, in the golden spring day, uttering this ancient melody of tears,—only this time it was woven with laughter and joy. When she finished, he sought her eyes; but Mrs. Conry was sweeping the gathering with a restless glance, thinking of her encore….
Afterwards the women said agreeable things about Vickers's music, especially theParisand theVenice. About Mrs. Conry they said that her voice was good, "somewhat uncultivated," "too loud for drawing-room music,"—safe criticisms. The men said little about the music, but they clustered around the singer. Mrs. Lawton looked significantly at Isabelle and winked. One old gentleman, something of a beau as well as a successful lawyer, congratulated Vickers on his "tuneful" music. "It must be a pleasant avocation to write songs," he said….
They dined at the Lawtons', and afterwards Vickers took Mrs. Conry to the hotel. She was gay with the success she had had, the impression she had made on the men.
"Something'll come of this, I am sure. Do you think they liked me?"
"You sang well," Vickers replied evasively, "better than well, theRome."
In the lobby of the hotel she turned as though to dismiss him, but Vickers, who was talking of a change to be made in one of the songs, accompanied her to the parlor above, where they had practised the music in preparation for the concert. Mrs. Conry glanced quickly into the room as they entered, as if expecting to find some one there. Vickers was saying:—
"I think we shall have to add another one to the Cycle,—New Yorkor something to stand for—well, what it is over here,—just living!"
The door of the inner room opened and a man appeared, coatless, with a much-flowered waistcoat.
"So you're back," the man remarked in a heavy voice.
"My husband," Mrs. Conry explained, "Mr. Vickers Price!"
Mr. Conry shuffled heavily into the room. He was a large man with a big grizzled head and very red face, finely chased with purple veins. He gave Vickers a stubby hand.
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Price. Heard about you from Delia. Sit down." Conry himself stood, swaying slightly on his stout legs. After a time he chose a seat with great deliberation and continued to stare at the young man. "Have a cigar?" He took one from his waistcoat pocket and held it towards the young man. "It's a good one,—none of your barroom smokes,—oh, I see you are one of those cigarette fiends, same as Stacia!"
There was a conversational hiatus, and Vickers was thinking of going.
"Well, how was the show?" Conry demanded of his wife. "Did you sing good,—make a hit with the swells? She thinks she wants to sing," he explained with a wink to Vickers, "but I tell her she's after sassiety,—that's what the women want; ain't it so?"
"Mrs. Conry sang very well indeed," Vickers remarked in default of better, and rose to leave.
"Don't go,—what's your hurry? Have something to drink? I got some in there you don't see every day in the week, young man. A racing friend of mine from Kentuck sends it to me. What's yours, Stacy?" …
When the young man departed, Stacia Conry stared at the door through which he had disappeared, with a dead expression that had something disagreeable in it. Conry, who had had his drink, came back to the parlor and began to talk.
"I went to a show myself to-night, seeing you were amusing yourself….There was a girl there who danced and sang,—you'd oughter seen her….Well, what are you sittin' staring at? Ain't you coming to bed?"
His wife rose from her seat, exclaiming harshly, "Let me alone!" And Conry, with a half-sober scrutiny of the woman, who had flung herself face down on the lounge, mumbled:—
"Singing don't seem to agree with you. Well, I kept my word; gave you the money to educate yourself." …
"And I have paid you!" the wife flashed. "God, I have paid!"
The man stumbled off to bed.
* * * * *
Vickers, on leaving the hotel, walked home in the chill night, a sickening sensation in his heart. If he had been a shrewd young man, he might have foreseen the somewhat boozy Mr. Conry, the vulgar setting of the woman he loved. If there had been the least thing base in him, he might have welcomed it, for his own uses. But being a sentimentalist and simple in nature, the few moments of intercourse with Mr. Conry had come like a revelation to him. This was what she had sold herself to for her education. This was what she was tied to! And this what she sought to escape from by her music, to place herself and her child beyond the touch of that man!
Vickers in his disgust overlooked the fact that little Delia seemed to love her father, and that though Conry might not be to his taste, he might also be a perfectly worthy citizen, given occasionally to liquor. But love and youth and the idealizing temperament make few allowances. To give her that freedom which her beauty and her nature craved, he would do what he could, and he searched his memory for names and persons of influence in the professional world of music. He had the fragments of a score for an opera that he had scarce looked at since he had begun "to sell nails"; but to-night he took it from the drawer and ran it over,—"Love Among the Ruins,"—and as he went to sleep he saw Stacia Conry singing as she had sung that last night in Rome, singing the music of his opera, success and fame at her feet….
The something that Mrs. Conry hoped for did come from that introduction at the Lawtons'. The wife of one of those men she had charmed called on her and invited her to sing "those pleasant little songs Mr. Price wrote for you" (with Mr. Price's appearance, of course!). And several women, who were anxious to be counted as of the Lawton set, hastened to engage Mrs. Conry to sing at their houses, with the same condition. Vickers understood the meaning of this condition and disliked the position, but consented in his desire to give Mrs. Conry every chance in his power. Others understood the situation, and disliked it,—among them Isabelle. Nannie Lawton threw at her across a dinner-table the remark: "When is Vick going to offer his 'Love Among the Ruins'? Mrs. Conry is the 'ruins,' I suppose!"
And the musicales, in spite of all that Vickers could do, were only moderately successful. In any community, the people who hunt the latest novelty are limited in number, and that spring there arrived a Swedish portrait painter and an Antarctic traveller to push the beautiful singer from the centre of attention. So after the first weeks the engagements became farther spaced and less desirable, less influential. Mrs. Conry still stayed at the hotel, though her husband had been called to another city on a contract he had undertaken. She realized that her debut had not been brilliant, but she clung to the opportunity, in the hope that something would come of it. And naturally enough Vickers saw a good deal of her; not merely the days they appeared together, but almost every day he found an excuse for dropping in at the hotel, to play over some music, to take her to ride in his new motor, which he ran himself, or to dine with her. Mrs. Conry was lonely. After Isabelle went to California for her health, she saw almost no one. The women she met at her engagements found her "not our kind," and Nan Lawton's witticism about "the ruins" and Vickers did not help matters. Vickers saw the situation and resented it. This loneliness and disappointment were bad for her. She worked at her music in a desultory fashion, dawdled over novels, and smoked too many cigarettes for the good of her voice. She seemed listless and discouraged. Vickers redoubled his efforts to have her sing before a celebrated manager, who was coming presently to the city with an opera company.
'She sees no way, no escape,' he said to himself. 'One ray of hope, and she would wake to what she was in Europe!'
In his blind, sentimental devotion, he blamed the accidents of life for her disappointment, not the woman herself. When he came, she awoke, and it was an unconscious joy to him, this power he had to rouse her from her apathy, to make her become for the time the woman he always saw just beneath the surface, eager to emerge if life would but grant her the chance.
His own situation had changed with the growing year. The Colonel, closely watching "the boy," was coming gradually to comprehend the sacrifice that he had accepted, all the more as Vickers never murmured but kept steadily at his work. Before Isabelle left for California, she spoke plainly to her father:—
"What's the use, Colonel! No matter how he tries, Vick can never be like you,—and why should he be any way?"
"It won't have done any harm," the old man replied dubiously. "We'll see!"
First he made his son independent of salary or allowance by giving him a small fortune in stocks and bonds. Then one day, while Mrs. Conry was still in the city, he suggested that Vickers might expect a considerable vacation in the summer. "You can go to Europe and write something," he remarked, in his simple faith that art could be laid down or resumed at will. Vickers smiled, but did not grasp the opportunity eagerly. When he told Mrs. Conry that afternoon of the proposed "vacation," she exclaimed enviously:—
"I knew you would go back!"
"I am not sure that I shall go."
She said perfunctorily: "Of course you must go—will you go back to Rome? I shall be so glad to think you are doing what you want to do."
He turned the matter off with a laugh:—
"The dear old boy thinks two months out of a year is long enough to give to composing an opera. It's like fishing,—a few weeks now and then if you can afford it!"
"But you wouldn't have to stay here at all, if you made up your mind not to," she remarked with a touch of hardness. "They'll give you what you want."
"I am not sure that I want it," he replied slowly, "at the price."
She looked at him uncomprehendingly, then perceiving another meaning in his words, lowered her eyes. She was thinking swiftly, 'If we could both go!' But he was reflecting rather bitterly on that new wealth which his father had given him, the dollars piling up to his credit, not one of which he might use as he most dearly desired to use them—for her! With all this power within his easy reach he could not stretch forth his hand to save a human soul. For thus he conceived the woman's need.
It came to Mrs. Conry's last engagement,—the last possible excuse for her lingering in the city. It was a suburban affair, and the place was difficult to reach. Vickers had invited the Falkners to go with them, to prevent gossip, and Bessie willingly accepted as a spree, though she had confided to Isabelle that "Mrs. Conry was dreadful ordinary," "not half good enough for our adorable Vickers toafficherhimself with." Nevertheless, she was very sweet to the beautiful Mrs. Conry, as was Bessie's wont to be with pretty nearly all the world. It was late on their return, and the Falkners left them at the station. With the sense that to-night they must part, they walked slowly towards the hotel, then stopped at a little German restaurant for supper. They looked at each other across the marble-top table without speaking. The evening had been a depressing conclusion to the concert season they had had together. And that morning Vickers had found it impossible to arrange a meeting for Mrs. Conry with the director of a famous orchestra, who happened to be in the city.
"You must go to-morrow?" Vickers asked at last. "I may get a reply fromMoller any day."
Mrs. Conry looked at him out of her gray eyes, as if she were thinking many things that a woman might think but could not say, before she replied slowly:—
"My husband's coming back to-morrow—to get me." As Vickers said nothing, she continued, slowly shaking the yellow wine in her glass until it circled,—"And it's no use—I'm not good enough for Moller—and you know it. I must have more training, more experience."
Vickers did know it, but had not let himself believe it.
"My little struggle does not matter,—I'm only a woman—and must do as most women do…. Perhaps, who knows! the combination may change some day, and—" she glanced fearlessly at him—"we shall all do as we want in another world!"
Then she looked at her watch. It was very late, and the tired waiters stood leaning listlessly against their tables.
"I am tired," she said at last. "Will you call a cab, please?"
They drove silently down the empty boulevard. A mist came through the cab window, touching her hair with fine points. Her hand lay close to his.
"How happy we were in Rome! Rome!" she looked out into the dark night, and there were tears in her eyes. "You have been very good to me, dear friend. Sometime I shall sing to you again, to you alone. Now good-by." …
His hand held hers, while his heart beat and words rose clamorously to his lips,—the words of rebellion, of protest and love, the words of youth. But he said nothing,—it was better that they should part without a spoken word,—better for her and better for him. His feeling for her, compact of tenderness, pity, and belief, had never been tested by any clear light. She was not his; and beyond that fact he had never looked.
So the carriage rolled on while the two sat silent with beating hearts, and as it approached the hotel he quickly bent his head and kissed the hand that was in his.
"Come to-morrow," she whispered, "in the morning,—once more."
"No," he said simply; "I can't. You know why."
As Vickers stepped out of the cab he recognized Conry. The contractor had been looking up and down the street, and had started to walk away, but turned at the sound of the carriage wheels and came over towards them. Something in his appearance, the slouch hat pulled forward over his face, the quick jerky step, suggested that he had been drinking. Vickers with a sensation of disgust foresaw a scene there on the pavement, and he could feel the shrinking of the woman by his side.
"Good evening, Mr. Conry," Vickers said coolly, turning to give Mrs. Conry his hand. A glance into Conry's eyes had convinced him that the man was in a drunken temper, and his one thought was to save her from a public brawl. Already a couple of people sauntering past had paused to look at them. Conry grasped the young man by the arm and flung him to one side, and thrusting his other hand into the cab jerked his wife out of it.
"Come here!" he roared. "I'll show you—you—"
Mrs. Conry, trembling and white, tried to free her arm and cross the pavement. The driver, arranging himself on the seat, looked down at Vickers, winked, and waited. Conry still dragged his wife by the arm, and as she tried to free herself he raised his other hand and slapped her across the face as he would cuff a struggling dog, then struck her again. She groaned and half sank to the pavement. The curious bystanders said nothing, made no move to interfere. Here was a domestic difference, about a woman apparently; and the husband was exerting his ancient, impregnable rights of domination over the woman, who was his….
All these months Vickers had never even in imagination crossed the barrier of Fact. Now without a moment's wavering he raised his hand and struck Conry full in the face, and as the man staggered from the unexpected blow he struck him again, knocking him to the ground. Then, swiftly disentangling the woman's hand from her husband's grasp, he motioned to the cab driver to pull up at the curb and carried her into the cab. When Vickers closed the door, the driver without further orders whipped up his horse and drove into a side street, leaving the group on the pavement staring at them and at Conry, who was staggering to his feet….
Within the cab Mrs. Conry moaned inarticulately. Vickers held her in his arms, and slowly bending his head to hers he kissed her upon the lips. Her lips were cold, but after a time to the touch of his lips hers responded with a trembling, yielding kiss.
Thus they drove on, without words, away from the city.
It had all happened in a brief moment of time,—the blow, the rescue, the kiss. But it had changed the face of the world for Vickers. What hitherto had been clouded in dream, a mingling of sentiment, pity, tender yearning, became at once reality. With that blow, that kiss, his soul had opened to a new conception of life….
They drove to the Lanes' house. Isabelle had returned that day from California, and her husband was away on business. Vickers, who had a latch-key, let himself into the house and tapped at his sister's door. When she saw him, she cried out, frightened by his white face:—
"Vick! What has happened?"
"Mrs. Conry is downstairs, Isabelle. I want her to stay here with you to-night!"
"Vick! What is it?" Isabelle demanded with staring eyes.
"I will tell you to-morrow."
"No—now!" She clutched her wrap about her shiveringly and drew him within the room.
"It's—I am going away, Isabelle, at once—with Mrs. Conry. There has been trouble—her husband struck her on the street, when she was with me. I took her from him."
"Vick!" Her voice trembled as she cried, "No,—it wasn't that!"
"No," he said gravely. "There was no cause, none at all. He was drunk. But I don't know that it would have made any difference. The man is a low brute, and her life is killing her. I love her—well, that is all!"
"Vick!" she cried; "I knew you would do some—" she hesitated before his glittering eyes—"something very risky," she faltered at last.
He waved this aside impatiently.
"What will you do now?" she asked hesitantly.
"I don't know,—we shall go away," he replied vaguely; "but she is waiting, needs me. Will you help her,—helpus?" he demanded, turning to the door, "or shall we have to go to-night?"
"Wait," she said, putting her hands on his arms; "you can't do that! Just think what it will mean to father and mother, to everybody…. Let me dress and take her back!" she suggested half heartedly.
"Isabelle!" he cried. "She shall never go back to that brute."
"You love her so much?"
"Enough for anything," he answered gravely, turning to the door.
In the face of his set look, his short words, all the protesting considerations on the tip of her tongue seemed futile. To a man in a mood like his they would but drive him to further folly. And admiration rose unexpectedly in her heart for the man who could hold his fate in his hands like this and unshakenly cast it on the ground. The very madness of it all awed her. She threw her arms about him, murmuring:—
"Oh, Vick—for you—it seems so horrid, so—"
"Itismean," he admitted through his compressed lips. "For that very reason, don't you see, I will take her beyond where it can touch her, at once, this very night,—if you will not help us!"
And all that she could do was to kiss him, the tears falling from her eyes.
"I will, Vick, dear…. It makes no difference to me what happens,—if you are only happy!"
* * * * *
As he drove to his father's house in the damp April night, he tried to think of the steps he must take on the morrow. He had acted irresistibly, out of the depths of his nature, unconcerned that he was about to tear in pieces the fabric of his life. It was not until he had let himself into the silent house and noiselessly passed his mother's door that he realized in sudden pain what it must mean to others.
He lay awake thinking, thinking. First of all she must telegraph for Delia to meet them somewhere,—she must have the child with her at once; and they must leave the city before Conry could find her and make trouble…. And he must tell the Colonel….
The next morning when Vickers entered his sister's library, Stacia Conry rose from the lounge where she had been lying reading a newspaper, and waited hesitantly while he came forward. She was very pretty this morning, with a faint touch of rose beneath her pale skin, her long lashes falling over fresh, shy eyes. In spite of it all she had slept, while the sleepless hours he had spent showed in his worn, white face. He put out his arms, and she clung to him.
"We must decide what to do," he said.
"You will not leave me?" she whispered, her head lying passive against his breast. Suddenly raising her head, she clasped her arms about his neck, drawing him passionately to her, crying, "I love you—love you,—you will never leave me?"
And the man looking down into her eyes answered from his heart in all truth:—
"Never, never so long as I live!" The words muttered in his broken voice had all the solemnity of a marriage oath; and he kissed her, sealing the promise, while she lay passive in his arms.
Holding her thus to him, her head against his beating heart, he felt the helplessness, the dependence of the woman, and it filled him with a subdued, sad joy. His part was to protect her, to defend her always, and his grip tightened about her yielding form. Their lips met again, and this time the sensuous appeal of the woman entered his senses, clouding for the time his delicate vision, submerging that nobler feeling which hitherto alone she had roused. She was a woman,—his to desire, to have!
"What shall we do?" she asked, sitting down, still holding his hand.
"First we must get Delia. We had better telegraph your mother at once to meet us somewhere."
"Oh!"
"You must have Delia, of course. He will probably make trouble, try to get hold of the child, and so we must leave here as soon as possible, to-day if we can."
"Where shall we go?" she asked, bewildered.
"Somewhere—out of the country," he replied slowly, looking at her significantly. "Of course it would be better to wait and have the divorce; but he might fight that, and make a mess,—try to keep the child, you understand."
She was silent, and he thought she objected to his summary plan. But it was on her lips to say, 'Why not leave Delia with him until it can all be arranged?' Something in the young man's stern face restrained her; she was afraid of outraging instincts, delicacies that were strange to her.
"Should you mind," he asked pleadingly, "going without the divorce? Of course to me it is the same thing. You are mine now, as I look at it,—any marriage would mean little to either of us after—the past! Somehow to hang about here, with the danger of trouble to you, waiting for a divorce, with the row and all,—I can't see you going through it. I think the—other way—is better."
She did not fully understand his feeling about it, which was that with the soiled experience of her marriage another ceremony with him would be a mere legal farce. To the pure idealism of his nature it seemed cleaner, nobler for them to take this step without any attempt to regularize it in the eyes of Society. To him she was justified in doing what she had done, in leaving her husband for him, and that would have to be enough for them both. He despised half measures, compromises. He was ready to cast all into his defiance of law. Meanwhile she pondered the matter with lowered eyes and presently she asked:—
"How long would it take to get a divorce?"
"If he fought it, a year perhaps, or longer."
"And I should have to stay here in the city?"
"Or go somewhere else to get a residence."
"And we—" she hesitated to complete the thought.
He drew her to him and kissed her.
"I think we shall be enough for each other," he said.
"I will do whatever you wish," she murmured, thus softly putting on his shoulders the burden of the step.
He was the man, the strong protector that had come to her in her distress, to whom she fled as naturally as a hunted animal flies to a hole, as a crippled bird to the deep underbrush. Her beauty, her sex, herself, had somehow attracted to her this male arm, and the right to take it never occurred to her. He loved her, of course, and she would make him love her more, and all would be well. If he had been penniless, unable to give her the full protection that she needed, then they would have been obliged to consider this step more carefully, and doubts might have forced themselves upon her. But as it was she clung to him, trusting to the power of her sex to hold him constant, to shield her….
"Now I must go down to the office to see my father," Vickers said finally."I'll be back early in the afternoon, and then—we will make our plans."
"Will you tell him, your father?" Mrs. Conry asked tensely.
"He will have to know, of course." As he spoke a wave of pain shot over the young man's face. He stepped to the door and then turned:—
"You will telegraph about Delia,—she might meet us in New York—in two days."
"Very well," Mrs. Conry murmured submissively.
* * * * *
The Colonel was sitting in his little corner office before the old-fashioned dingy desk, where he had transacted so many affairs of one sort or another for nearly thirty years. He was not even reading his mail this morning, but musing, as he often was when the clerks thought that he was more busily employed. Isabelle and her child had returned from California, the day before. She had not recovered from bearing the child, and the St. Louis doctors who had been consulted had not helped her. It might be well to see some one in New York…. But the Colonel was thinking most of all this morning of his son. The tenacious old merchant was wondering whether he had done right in accepting the young man's sacrifice. In his disgust for the do-nothing, parasitic offspring about him, perhaps he had taken a delicate instrument and blunted it by setting it at coarse work. Well, it was not too late to change that.
'The boy didn't start right,' the Colonel mused sadly. 'He didn't start selling hardware on the road. He's done his best, and he's no such duffer as Parrott's boy anyhow. But he would make only a front office kind of business man. The business must get on by itself pretty soon. Perhaps that idea for a selling company would not be a bad thing. And that would be the end of Parrott and Price.'
Nevertheless, the old man's heart having come slowly to this generous decision was not light,—if the other boy had lived, if Belle had married some one who could have gone into the business. The bricks and mortar of the building were part of his own being, and he longed to live out these last few years in the shadow of his great enterprise….
"Father, can I see you about something important?"
The Colonel, startled from his revery, looked up at his son with his sweet smile.
"Why, yes, my boy,—I wasn't doing much, and I had something to say to you.Sit down. You got away from home early this morning."
He glanced inquiringly at his son's white, set face and tense lips. Playing with his eye-glasses, he began to talk lightly of other matters, as was his wont when he felt the coming of a storm.
Vickers listened patiently, staring straight across his father to the wall, and when the Colonel came to a full pause,
"Father, you said you were ready for me to take a vacation. I must go at once, to-day if possible. And, father, I can't come back."
The old man moved slightly in his chair. It was his intention to offer the young man his freedom, but it hurt him to have it taken for granted in this light manner. He waited.
"Something has happened," Vickers continued in a low voice, "something which will alter my whole life."
The Colonel still waited.
"I love a woman, and I must take her away from here at once."
"Who is she?" the old man asked gently.
"Mrs. Conry—"
"But she's a married woman, isn't she, Vick?"
"She has a dirty brute of a husband—she's left him forever!"
The Colonel's blue eyes opened in speechless surprise, as his son went on to tell rapidly what had happened the previous night. Before he had finished the old man interrupted by a low exclamation:—
"But she is a married woman, Vickers!"
"Her marriage was a mistake, and she's paid for it, poor woman,—paid with soul and body! She will not pay any longer."
"But what are you going to do, my boy?"
"I love her, father. I mean to take her away, at once, take her and her child."
"Run away with a married woman?" The Colonel's pale face flushed slightly, less in anger than in shame, and his eyes fell from his son's face.
"I wish with all my heart it wasn't so, of course; that she wasn't married, or that she had left him long ago. But that can't be helped. And I don't see how a divorce could make any difference, and it would take a long time, and cause a dirty mess. He's the kind who would fight it for spite, or blackmail. Perhaps later it will come. Now she must not suffer any more. I love her all the deeper for what she has been through. I want to make her life happy, make it up to her somehow, if I can."
The Colonel rose and with an old man's slow step went over to the office door and locked it.
"Vickers," he said as he turned around from the door, still averting his shamed face, "you must be crazy, out of your mind, my son!"
"No, father," the young man replied calmly; "I was never surer of anything in my life! I knew it would hurt you and mother,—you can't understand. But you must trust me in this. It has to be."
"Why does it have to be?"
"Because I love her!" he burst out. "Because I want to save her from that man, from the degradation she's lived in. With me she will have some joy, at last,—her life, her soul,—oh, father, you can't say these things to any one! You can't give good reasons."
The old merchant's face became stern as he replied:—
"You wish to do all this for her, and yet you do not mean to marry her."
"I can't marry her! I would to-day if I could. Some day perhaps we can,—for the sake of the child it would be better. But that makes no difference to me. It is the same as marriage for us—"
"'Doesn't make any difference'—'the same as marriage'—what are you talking about?"
The young man tried to find words which would fully express his feeling. He had come a long way these last hours in his ideas of life; he saw things naked and clear cut, without dubious shades. But he had to realize now that whathissoul accepted as incontrovertible logic was meaningless to others.
"I mean," he said at last slowly, "that this woman is the woman I love. I care more for her happiness, for her well-being than for anything else in life. And so no matter how we arrange to live, she is all that a woman can be to a man, married or not as it may happen."
"To take another man's wife and live with her!" the Colonel summed up bitterly. "No, Vick, you don't mean that. You can't do a dirty thing like that. Think it over!"
So they argued a little while longer, and finally the old man pleaded with his son for time, offering to see Mrs. Conry, to help her get a separation from her husband, to send her abroad with her child,—to all of which Vickers replied steadily:—
"But I love her, father—you forget that! And she needs me now!"
"Love her!" the old man cried. "Don't call that love!"
Vickers shut his lips and rose, very white.
"I must go now. Let's not say any more. We've never had any bitter words between us, father. You don't understand this—do you think I would hurt you and mother, if it didn't have to be? I gave up my own life, when it was only myself at stake; but I cannot give her up—and everything it will mean to her."
The Colonel turned away his face and refused to see his son's outstretched hand. He could not think without a blush that his son should be able to contemplate this thing. Vickers, as he turned the handle of the door, recollected something and came back.
"Oh, you must cancel that stock agreement. I shouldn't want to own it now that I have quit. The other things, the money, I shall keep. You would like me to have it, father, and it will be quite enough."
The old man made a gesture as if to wave aside the money matter.
"Good-by, father!" he said slowly, tenderly.
"You'll see your mother?"
"Yes—I'm going there now."
Thus father and son parted.
* * * * *
Nothing, it seemed to Vickers, after this painful half hour, could be as miserable as what he had been through, and as a matter of fact his interview with his mother was comparatively easy.
To Mrs. Price her son's determination was merely an unexpected outburst of wild folly, such as happened in other families,—coming rather late in Vick's life, but by no means irremediable. Vickers had fallen into the hands of a designing woman, who intended to capture a rich man's son. Her first thought was that the Colonel would have to buy Mrs. Conry off, as Mr. Stewart had done in a similar accident that befell Ted Stewart, and when Vickers finally made it plain to her that his was not that kind of case, she fell to berating him for the scandal he would create by "trapesing off to Europe with a singer." Oddly enough that delicate modesty, like a woman's, which had made it almost impossible for the Colonel to mention the affair, did not seem to trouble her. To live with another man's wife was in the Colonel's eyes a sin little short of incest, and more shocking than many kinds of murder. But his wife, with a deeper comprehension of the powers of her sex, of the appeal of woman to man, saw in it merely a weakness that threatened to become a family disgrace. When she found after an hour's talk that her arguments made no impression, while Vickers sat, harassed and silent, his head resting on his hands, she burst into tears.
"It's just like those things you read of in the papers," she sobbed, "those queer Pittsburg people, who are always doing some nasty thing, and no decent folks will associate with them."
"It's not the thing you do, mother; it's the way you do it, the purpose, the feeling," the young man protested. "And there won't be a scandal, if that's what's troubling you. You can tell your friends that I have gone abroad suddenly for my health."
"Who would believe that? Do you think her husband's going to keep quiet?"Mrs. Price sniffled, with considerable worldly wisdom.
"Well, let them believe what they like. They'll forget me in a week."
"Where are you going?"
"To Europe, somewhere,—I haven't thought about the place. I'll let you know."
"And how about her child?"
"We shall take her with us."
"She wants her along, does she?"
"Of course!"
Vickers rose impatiently.
"Good-by, mother."
She let him kiss her.
"I shall come to see you sometimes, if you want me to."
"Oh, you'll be coming back fast enough," she retorted quickly.
And then she straightened the sofa pillows where he had been sitting and picked up a book she had been reading. As Vickers went to his room to get a bag, Isabelle opened the door of her mother's room, where she had been waiting for him. She put her arms about his neck, as she had that night of her marriage on the station platform at Grafton, and pressed him tightly to her.
"Vick! Vick!" she cried. "That it had to be like this, your love! Like this!"
"It had to be, Belle," he answered with a smile. "It comes to us in different ways, old girl."
"But you! You!" She led him by the hand to the sofa, where she threw herself, a white exhausted look coming into her face. He stroked her hair with the ends of his fingers. Suddenly she half turned, grasping his hand with both of hers.
"Can you be happy—really happy?"
"I think so; but even that makes no difference, perhaps. I should do it all the same, if I knew it meant no happiness for me."
She looked at him searchingly, trying to read his heart in his eyes. After the year of her marriage, knowing now the mystery of human relations, she wondered whether he might not be right. That precious something, pain or joy, which was wanting in her union he might find in this forbidden by-path, in this woman who seemed to her so immeasurably beneath her brother. She kissed him, and he went away.
When the hall door clicked, she rose from the lounge and dragged herself to the window to watch him, holding her breath, her heart beating rapidly, almost glad that he was strong enough to take his fate in his hands, to test life, to break the rules, to defy reason! "Vick, dear Vick," she murmured.
In the room below Mrs. Price, also, was looking out of the bay window, watching her son disappear down the avenue. She had not been reading, and she had heard him come down into the hall, but let him go without another word. He walked slowly, erect as the Colonel used to walk. Tears dropped from her eyes,—tears of mortification. For in her heart she knew that he would come back some day, this woman who had lured him having fallen from him like a dead leaf. She sat on at the window until the Colonel's figure appeared in the distance coming up the avenue. His head was bent; he looked neither to the right nor to the left; and he walked very slowly, like an old man, dragging his feet after him. He was crushed. It would not have been thus if he had lost his fortune, the work of all his years. Such a fate he would have looked in the eye, with raised head….
That night Vickers and Stacia Conry left for New York, and a few days later Mrs. Price read their names in a list of outgoing passengers for Genoa. She did not show the list to the Colonel, and their son's name was never mentioned in the house.
When the people who knew the Prices intimately began to whisper, then chatter, they said many hard things of Vickers, chiefly that he was a Fool, a judgment that could not be gainsaid. Nevertheless the heart of a Fool may be pure.