"Is that all?" asked the Journalist.
"That is all," replied the Trained Nurse.
"By Jove," said the Doctor, "that is a good story. I wish I had told it."
"Thank you, Doctor," laughed the Trained Nurse. "I thought it was a bit in your line."
"But fancy the cleverness of the little thing to do all the details up so nicely," said the Lawyer. "She dovetailed everything so neatly. But what I want to know is whether she planned the baby when she planned the make-believe husband?"
"I fancy not," replied the Nurse. "One thing came along after another in her imagination, quite naturally."
"Poor little Josephine—it seems to me hard luck to have had to imagine such an every day fate," sighed the Divorcée.
"Don't pity her," snapped the Doctor. "Poor little Josephine, indeed! Lucky little Josephine, who arranged her own romance, and risked no disillusion. There have been cases where the joys of the imagination have been more dangerous."
"You are sure she had no disillusion?" asked the Critic.
"I am," said the Nurse.
"And her name was Josephine?" asked the Divorcée.
"It was not, and Utica was not the town," replied the Nurse.
"Perhaps her disillusion is ahead of her," said the Journalist. "'Say no man'—or woman either—'is happy until the day of his death.'"
"Sheisdead," said the Nurse.
"I told you she was lucky little Josephine," ejaculated the Doctor.
"And she died without telling the boy the truth?" asked the Journalist.
"The truth?" repeated the Nurse. "I've told you that she had forgotten it. No woman was ever so loved by a son. No mother ever so grieved for."
"Then the son lives?" asked the Doctor.
The Nurse smiled quietly.
"Good-night," said the Doctor. "I am going to bed to dream of that. It is a pity some of the rest of us childless slackers had not done as well as Josephine. She took her risk. She was lucky."
"She did," replied the Nurse, "but she did not realize anything of that. She was too simple, too unanalytic."
"I wonder?" said the Critic.
"You need not, I know." Her eyes fell on the Lawyer, and she caught a laugh in his eye. "What does that mean?" she asked.
"Well," said the Lawyer, "I was only thinking. She was religious, that dear little Josephine?"
"At least she always went to church."
"I know the type," said the Violinist, gently. "Accepted what she was taught, believed it."
"Exactly," said the Lawyer, "that is what I was getting at. Well then, when her son meets herau dela—he will ask for his father—"
"Or," interrupted the Violinist, "his own mother will claim him."
"Don't worry," laughed the Critic. "It's dollars to doughnuts that she was 'dear little Josephine' to all the Heavenly Host half an hour after she entered the 'gates of pearl.' Don't look shocked. That is not sacrilegious. It is intentions—motives, that are immortal, not facts. Besides—"
"Don't push that idea too far," interrupted the Doctor from the door.
"Don't be alarmed. I was only going to say—there are Ik Marvelsau dela—"
"I knew that idea was in your head. Drop it!" laughed the Doctor.
"Anyway," said the Violinist, "if Life is but a dream, she had a pretty one. Good night." And he went up to bed, and we all soon followed him, and I imagine not one of us, as we looked out into the moonlit air, thought that night of war.
The next day, just as we were sitting down to dinner, the news came that Namur had fallen. The German army had marched singing into the burning town the afternoon before. The Youngster had his head over a map almost all through dinner. The Belgians were practically pushed out of all but Antwerp, and the Germans were rapidly approaching the natural defences of France running from Lille to Verdun, through Valenciennes, Mauberge, Hirson and Mezières.
Things were beginning to look serious, although we still insisted on believing that the Germans could not break through. One result of the march of events was that we none of us had any longer the smallest desire to argue. Theories were giving way to the facts of every day, but in ourminds, I imagine, we were every one of us asking, "How longcanwe stay here? How long will it be wise, even if we are permitted?" But, as if by common consent, no one asked the question, and we were only too glad to sit out in the garden we had all learned to love, and to talk of anything which was not war, until the Critic moved his chair into the middle of the circle, and began his tale.
"Let me see," he remarked. "I need a property or two," and he pulled an envelope out of his pocket and laid it on the table, and, leaning his elbows on it, began:
It was in the Autumn of '81 that I last saw Dillon act.
She had made a great success that winter, yet, in the middle of the season, she had suddenly disappeared.
There were all kinds of newspaper explanations.
Then she was forgotten by the public that had enthusiastically applauded her, and which only sighed sadly, a year later, on hearing of her death, in a far off Italian town,—sighed, talked a little, and forgot again.
It chanced that a few years later I was in Italy, and being not many miles from the town where I heard that she was buried, and a trifle overstrung by a few months delicious, aimless life in that wonderful country, I was taken with a sentimental fancy to visit her grave.
It was a sort of pilgrimage for me, for I had given to Dillon my first boyish devotion.
I thought of her, and to remember her was to recall her rare charm, her beauty, her success, after a long struggle, and the unexpected, inexplicable manner in which she had abandoned it. It was to recall, too, the delightful evenings I had spent under her influence, the pleasure I had had in the passion of her "Juliet," the poetic charm of her "Viola"; the graceful witchery of her "Rosalind"; how I had smiled with her "Portia"; laughed with her "Beatrice"; wept with her "Camille"; in fact how I had yielded myself up to her magnetism with that ecstatic pleasure in which one gets the best joys of every passion, because one does not drain the dregs of any.
I well remembered her last night, how she had disappeared, how she had gone toEurope, how she had died abroad,—all mere facts known in their bareness only to the public.
It was hard to find the place where she was buried. But at last I succeeded.
It was in a humble churchyard. The grave was noticeable because it was well kept, and utterly devoid of the tawdry ornamentation inseparable from such places in Italy. It was marked by a monument distinctly unique in a European country. It was a huge unpolished boulder, over which creeping green vines were growing.
On its rough surface a cross was cut, and underneath were the words:
"Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare,To-morrow's Silence, Triumph or Despair."
"Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare,To-morrow's Silence, Triumph or Despair."
Below that I read with stupefaction,
"Margaret Dillon and child,"
"Margaret Dillon and child,"
and the dates
"January, 1843""July 25, 1882."
"January, 1843""July 25, 1882."
In spite of the doubts and fancies this put into my mind, I no sooner stood beside the spot where the earth had claimed her, than all my old interest in her returned.I lingered about the place, full of romantic fancies, decorating her tomb with flowers, as I had once decorated her triumphs, absorbed in a dreamy adoration of her memory, and singing her praise in verse.
It was then that I learned the true story of her disappearance, guessed at that of her death, as I did at the identity of the young Dominican priest, who sometimes came to her grave, and who finally told me such of the facts as I know. I can best tell the story by picturing two nights in the life of Margaret Dillon, the two following her last appearance on the stage.
The play had been "Much Ado."
Never had she acted with finer humor, or greater gaiety. Yet all the evening she had felt a strange sadness.
When it was all over, and friends had trooped round to the stage to praise her, and trooped away, laughing and happy, she felt a strange, sad, unused reluctance to see them go.
Then she sat down to her dressing table, hurriedly removed her make-up, and allowed herself to be stripped of her stage finery. Her fine spirits seemed to strip off with her character. She shiveredoccasionally with nervousness, or superstition, and she was strangely silent.
All day she had, for some inexplicable reason, been thinking of her girlhood, of what her life might have been if, at a critical moment, she had chosen a woman's ordinary lot instead of work,—or if, at a later day, she had yielded to, instead of resisted, a great temptation. All day, as on many days lately, she had wondered if she regretted it, or if, the days of her great triumph having passed,—as pass they must,—she should regret it later if she did not yet.
It was probably because,—early in the season as it was—she was tired, and the October night oppressed her with the heat of Indian Summer.
Silently she had allowed herself to be undressed, and redressed in great haste. But before she left the theatre she bade every one "good night" with more than her usual kindliness, not because she did not expect to see them all on Monday,—it was a Saturday night,—but because, in her inexplicably sad humour, she felt an irresistible desire to be at peace with the world, and a still deeper desire to feel herself beloved by those about her.
Then she entered her carriage and drove hurriedly home to the tiny apartment where she lived quite alone.
On the supper table lay a note.
She shivered as she took it up. It was a handwriting she had been accustomed to see once a year only, in one simple word of greeting, always the same word, which every year in eighteen had come to her on New Year's wherever she was.
But this was October.
She sat perfectly still for some minutes, and then resolutely opened the letter, and read:
"Madge:—I am so afraid that my voice coming to you, not only across so many years, but from another world, may shock you, that I am strongly tempted not to keep my word to you, yet, judging you by myself, I feel that perhaps this will be less painful than the thought that I had passed forgetful of you, or changed toward you. You were a mere girl when we mutually promised, that though it was Fate that our paths should not be the same, and honorable that we should keep apart, we would not pass out of life, whatever came, without a farewell word,—a second saying 'good-bye.'""It is my fate to say it. It is now God's will. Before it was yours. It is eighteen years since you chose my honor to your happiness and mine. To-day you are a famous woman. Thatis the consolation I have found in your decision. I sometimes wonder if Fame will always make up to you for the rest. A woman's way is peculiar—and right, I suppose. I have never changed. My son has been a second consolation, and that, too, in spite of the fact that, had he never been born, your decision might have been so different. He is a young man now, strangely like what I was, when as a child, you first knew me, and he has always been my confidant. In those first days of my banishment from you I kept from crying my agony from the housetops by whispering it to him. His uncomprehending ears were my sole confessional. His mother cared little for his companionship, and her invalidism threw him continually into my care. I do not know when he began to understand, but from the hour he could speak he whispered your name in his prayers. But it was only lately that, of himself, he discovered your identity. The love I felt for you in my early days has grown with me. It has survived in my heart when all other passions, all prides, all ambitions, long ago died. I leave you, I hope, a good memory of me—a man who loved you more than he loved himself, who for eighteen years has loved you silently, yet never ceased to grieve for you. But I fear that I have bequeathed to my son, with the name and estate of his father, my hopeless love for you. If, by chance, what I fear be true,—if, when bereft of me, he seeks you out, as be sure he will,—deal gently with him for his father's sake."There was an old compact between us, dear. I mention it now only in the hope that you maynot have forgotten—indeed, in the certainty that you have not. I know you so well. Remember it, I beg of you, only to ignore it. It was made, you know, when one of us expected to watch the passing of the other. This is different. If this reminds you of it, it reminds you only to warn you that Time cancels all such compacts. It is my voice that assures you of it.
"Madge:—I am so afraid that my voice coming to you, not only across so many years, but from another world, may shock you, that I am strongly tempted not to keep my word to you, yet, judging you by myself, I feel that perhaps this will be less painful than the thought that I had passed forgetful of you, or changed toward you. You were a mere girl when we mutually promised, that though it was Fate that our paths should not be the same, and honorable that we should keep apart, we would not pass out of life, whatever came, without a farewell word,—a second saying 'good-bye.'"
"It is my fate to say it. It is now God's will. Before it was yours. It is eighteen years since you chose my honor to your happiness and mine. To-day you are a famous woman. Thatis the consolation I have found in your decision. I sometimes wonder if Fame will always make up to you for the rest. A woman's way is peculiar—and right, I suppose. I have never changed. My son has been a second consolation, and that, too, in spite of the fact that, had he never been born, your decision might have been so different. He is a young man now, strangely like what I was, when as a child, you first knew me, and he has always been my confidant. In those first days of my banishment from you I kept from crying my agony from the housetops by whispering it to him. His uncomprehending ears were my sole confessional. His mother cared little for his companionship, and her invalidism threw him continually into my care. I do not know when he began to understand, but from the hour he could speak he whispered your name in his prayers. But it was only lately that, of himself, he discovered your identity. The love I felt for you in my early days has grown with me. It has survived in my heart when all other passions, all prides, all ambitions, long ago died. I leave you, I hope, a good memory of me—a man who loved you more than he loved himself, who for eighteen years has loved you silently, yet never ceased to grieve for you. But I fear that I have bequeathed to my son, with the name and estate of his father, my hopeless love for you. If, by chance, what I fear be true,—if, when bereft of me, he seeks you out, as be sure he will,—deal gently with him for his father's sake.
"There was an old compact between us, dear. I mention it now only in the hope that you maynot have forgotten—indeed, in the certainty that you have not. I know you so well. Remember it, I beg of you, only to ignore it. It was made, you know, when one of us expected to watch the passing of the other. This is different. If this reminds you of it, it reminds you only to warn you that Time cancels all such compacts. It is my voice that assures you of it.
"Felix R."
Underneath, written in letters, like, yet so unlike, were the words, "My father died this morning. F. R." and an uncertain mark as though he had begun to add "Jr." to the signature, and realized that there was no need.
The letter fell from her hands.
For a long time she sat silent.
Dead! She had never felt that he could die while she lived. A knowledge that he was living,—loving her, adoring her hopelessly—was necessary to her life. She felt that she could not go on without it. For eighteen years she had compared all other men, all other emotions to him and his love, to find them all wanting.
And he had died.
She looked at the date of the letter. He would be resting in that tomb she remembered so well, before she could reach theplace; that spot before which they had often talked of Death, which had no terrors for either of them.
She rose. She pushed away her untouched supper, hurriedly drank a glass of wine, and, crossing the hall to her bedroom, opened a tiny box that stood locked upon her dressing table. She took from it a picture—a miniature. It was of a young man not over twenty-five. The face was strong and full of virile suggestion, even in a picture. The eyes were brown, the lips under the short mustache were firm, and the thick, short, brown hair fell forward a bit over the left temple. It was a handsome manly face.
The picture was dated eighteen years before. It hardly seemed possible that eighteen years earlier this woman could have been old enough to stir the passionate love of such a man. Her face was still young, her form still slender; her abundant hair shaded deep gray eyes where the spirit of youth still shone. But she belonged, by temperament and profession, to that race of women who guard their youth marvellously.
There were no tears in her eyes as shesat long into the morning, and, with his pictured face before her, reflected until she had decided.
He had kept his word to her. His "good bye" had been loyally said. She would keep hers in turn, and guard his first night's solitude in the tomb with her watchful prayers. She calculated well the time. If she travelled all day Sunday, she would be there sometime before midnight. If she travelled back at once, she could be in town again in season to play Monday; not in the best of conditions, to be sure, for so hard a rôle as "Juliet," but she would have fulfilled a duty that would never come to her again.
It was near midnight, on Sunday.
The light of the big round harvest moon fell through the warm air, which scarcely moved above the graves of the almost forgotten dead in the country churchyard. The low headstones cast long shadows over the long grass that merely trembled as the noiseless wind moved over it.
A tall woman in a riding dress stood beside the rough sexton at the door of the only large tomb in the enclosure.
He had grown into a bent old man sinceshe last saw him, but he had recognized her, and had not hesitated to obey her.
As he unlocked and pushed back the great door which moved easily and noiselessly, he placed his lantern on the steps, and telling her that, according to a family custom, there were lights inside, he turned away, and left her, to keep his watch near by.
No need to tell her the family customs. She knew them but too well.
For a few moments she remained seated on the step where she had rested to await the opening of the door, on the threshold of the tomb of the one man among all the men she had met who had stirred in her heart a great love. How she had loved him! How she had feared that her love would wear his out! How she had suffered when she decided that love was something more than self-gratification, that even though for her he should put aside the woman he had heedlessly married years before, there could never be any happiness in such a union for either of them. How many times in her own heart she had owned that the woman would not have had the courage shown by the girl, for the girl did not realize all she was putting aside.Yet the consciousness of his love, in which she never ceased to believe, had kept her brave and young.
She rose and slowly entered the vault.
The odor of flowers, the odor of death was about it.
She lifted the lantern from the ground, and, with it raised above her head, approached the open coffin that rested on the catafalque in the centre of the tomb and mounted the two steps. She was conscious of no fear, of no dread at the idea of once more, after eighteen years, looking into the face of the man she had loved, who had carried a great love for her into another world. But as she looked, her eyes widened with fright. She bent lower over him. No cry burst from her lips, but the hand holding the lantern lowered slowly, and she tumbled down the two steps, and staggered back against the wall, where, behind lettered slides, the dead Richmonds for six generations slept their long sleep together. Her breast heaved up and down, as if life, like a caged thing, were striving to escape. Yet no sound came from her colorless lips, no tears were in her widened eyes.
The realizing sense of departed yearshad reached her heart at last, and the shock was terrible. With a violent effort she recovered herself. But the firm step, the fearless, hopeful face with which she had approached the coffin of her dead lover were very different from the blind manner in which she stumbled back to his bier, and the hand which a second time raised the lantern trembled so that its wavering light shed an added weirdness on the still face, so strange to her eyes, and stranger still to her heart.
He had been a young man when they parted. To her he had remained young. Now the hair about the brows was thin and white, the drooping mustache that entirely concealed the mouth was grizzled; lines furrowed the forehead, outlined the sunken eyes, and gave an added thinness to the nostrils. She bent once more over the face, to her only a strange cold mask. A painful fascination held her for several minutes, forcing her to mark how love, that had kept her young, proud, content in its very existence, had sapped his life, and doubled his years.
The realization bent her slender figure under a load of self-reproach and self-mistrust. She drooped lower and lowerabove the sad, dead face until she slid to the ground beside him. Heavy tearless sobs shook her slight frame as it stretched its length beside the dead love and the dead dream. The ideal so long treasured in her soul had lost its reality. The present had wiped out the past as a sponge wipes off a slate.
If she had but heeded his warning, and refrained from coming until later, she would have escaped making a stranger of him forever. Now the sad, aged face, the dead, strange face which she had seen but five minutes before, had completely obscured in her memory the long-loved, young face that had been with her all these years. The spirit whose consoling presence she had thought to feel upholding her at this moment made no sign. She was alone in the world, bereft of her one supporting ideal, alone beside the dead body of one who was a stranger alike to her sight and her emotions; alone at night in an isolation as unexpected as it was terrible to her, and which chilled her senses as if it had come to oppress her forever.
The shadows which she had not noticed before, the dark corners of the tomb, the motionless gleam of the moon as it fellthrough the open door, and laid silently on the floor like light stretched dead, the low rustle of the wind as if Nature restlessly moved in her sleep, came suddenly upon her, and brought her—fear. She held her breath as she stilled her sobs to realize that she alone lived in this city of the Dead. The chill of fright crept along the surface of her body, which still vibrated with her storm of grief.
She seemed paralyzed. She dared not move.
Every sense rallied to her ears in dread.
Suddenly she heard her name breathed: "Margaret!"
It was whispered in a voice once so familiar to her ears, a voice that used to say, "Madge."
She raised herself on her elbow.
She dared not answer.
She hardly dared breathe.
She was afraid in every sense, and yet she hungered for another sound of that loved voice. Every hour of its banishment was regretted at that moment. There seemed no future without it.
Every nerve listened.
At first she heard nothing but the restless moving of the air, which merelyemphasized her loneliness, then she caught the pulsation of slow regular breathing.
She started to her feet.
She snatched up the lantern and quickly mounted to the bier. She looked sharply down into the dead face.
Silent, with its white hair, and worn lines, it rested on its white pillows.
No sound came from the cold still lips.
Yet, while her eyes were riveted on them, once more the longed-for voice breathed her name. "Margaret!"
It came from behind her.
She turned quickly.
There in the moonlit doorway, with a sad, compassionate smile on his strong, young face—as if it were yesterday they had parted—stood the man she remembered so well.
Her bewildered eyes turned from the silent, unfamiliar face among the satin cushions, to the living face in the moonlight,—the young, brown eyes, the short, brown hair falling forward over the left temple, the erect, elastic figure, the strong loving hands stretching out to her.
She was so tired, so heart sick, so full of longing for the love she had lost.
"Felix," she sobbed, and, blindly groping to reach what she feared was a hallucination, she stumbled down the steps, and was caught up in the arms flung wide to catch her, and which folded about her as if forever. She sighed his name again, upon the passionate young lips which had inherited the great love she had put aside so long before.
As the last words died away, the Critic drew himself up and laughed.
He had told the story very dramatically, reading the letter from the envelope he had called a "property," and he had told it well.
The laugh broke the spell, and the Doctor echoed it heartily.
"All right, old man," said the Critic, "you owed me that laugh. You're welcome."
"I was only thinking," said the Doctor, his face still on a broad grin, "that we have always thought you ought to have been a novelist, and now we know at last just what kind of a novelist you would have been."
"Don't you believe it," said the Critic, "That was only improvisatore—that's no sample."
"Ho, ho! I'll bet you anything that the manuscript is up in your trunk, and that you have been committing it to memory ever since this idea was proposed," said the Doctor, still laughing.
"No,thatI deny," replied the Critic, "but as I am noposeur, I will own that I wrote it years ago, and rewrote it so often that I never could forget it. I'll confess more than that, the story has been 'declined with thanks' by every decent magazine in the States and in England. Now perhaps some one will tell me why."
"I don't know the answer," said the Youngster, seriously, "unless it is 'why not?'"
"I shouldn't wonder if it were sentimental twaddle," sighed the Journalist, "but I don'tknow."
"I noticed," expostulated the Critic, "that you all listened, enthralled."
"Oh," replied the Doctor, "that was a tribute to your personal charm. You did it very well."
"Exactly," said the Critic, "if editors would let me read them my stories, I could sell them like hot cakes. I never believed that Homer would have lived as long as he has, if he had not made the reputationof his tales by singing them centuries before any one tried to read them. Now no onedaresto say they bore him. The reading public, and the editors who cater to it, are just like some stupid theatrical managers I know of, who will never let an author read a play to them for fear that he may give the play some charm that the fool theatrical man might not have felt from mere type-written words on white or yellow paper. By Jove, I know the case of a manager who once bought the option on a foreign play from a scenario provided by a clever friend of mine—and paid a stiff price for it, too, and when he got the manuscript wrote to the chap who did the scenario—'Play dashety-dashed rot. If it had been as good as your scenario, it would have gone.' And, what is more, he sacrificed the tidy five thousand he had paid, and let his option slide. Now, when the fellow who did the scenario wrote: 'If you found anything in the scenario that you did not discover in the play, it is because I gave you the effect it would have behind the footlights, which you have not the imagination to see in the printed words,' the Manager only replied 'You are a nice chap. I like you very much,but you are a blanketty-blanketty fool.'"
"Which was right?" asked the Journalist.
"The scenario man."
"How do you know?"
"How do I know? Why simply because the play was produced later—ran five years, and drew a couple of million dollars. That's how I know."
"By cricky," exclaimed the Youngster, "I believe he thinks his story could earn a million if it had a chance."
"I don't say 'no,'" said the Critic, yawning, "but it will never get a chance. I burned the manuscript this morning, and now being delivered of it, I have no more interest in it than a sparrow has in her last year's offspring."
"The trouble with you is that you haven't any patience, any staying power. That ought to have been a three volume novel. We would have heard all about their first meeting, their first love, their separation, his marriage, herdébuts, etc., etc.," declared the Journalist.
"Oh, thunder," said the Doctor. "I think there was quite enough of it. Don't throw anything at me—I liked it—I liked it! Only I'm sorry she died."
"So am I," said the Critic. "That really hurt me."
"Because," said the Doctor, shying away toward the door, "I should have liked to know if the child turned out to be a genius. That kind do sometimes," and he disappeared into the doorway.
"Anyhow," said the Critic, "I am going to wear laurels until some one tells a better—and I'd like to know why the Journalist looks so pensively thoughtful?"
"I am trying to recall who she was—Margaret Dillon."
"Don't fret—she may be a 'poor thing,' but she is all 'mine own'—a genuine creation, Mr. Journalist. I am no reporter."
"Ah? Then you are more of a sentimentalist than I even dared to dream."
"Don't deny it," said the Critic, as he rose and yawned. "So I am going to bed to sleep on my laurels while I may. Good night."
"Well," called the Sculptor after him, as he sauntered away, "as one of our mutual friends used to say 'The Indian Summer of Passion scorches.'"
"But, alas!" added the other, "it does notalwayskill."
"Witness—" began the Journalist, but the Critic cut him short.
"As you love me—not that famous list of yours including so many of the actresses we all know. I can't bearthatto-night. After all the French have a better phrase for it—'La Crise de quarante ans.'"
The Nurse and Divorcée had been very quiet, but here they locked hands, and the former remarked that they prepared to withdraw:
"That is our cue to disappear—and you, too, Youngster. These men are far too wise."
So we of the discussed sex made a circle with our clasped hand about the Youngster and danced him into the house. The last I saw of the garden that night, as I looked out of my window toward the northeast, with "Namur" beating in my head, the five men had their heads still together, but whether "the other sex" was getting scientifically torn to bits, or they, too, had Namur in their minds I never knew.
The next day was very peaceful. We were becoming habituated to the situation. It was a Sunday, and the weather was warm. There had been no real news so far as we knew, except that Japan had lined up with the Allies. The Youngster had come near to striking fire by wondering how the United States, with her dislike for Japan, would view the entering into line of the yellow man, but the spark flickered out, and I imagine we settled down for the story with more eagerness than on the previous evening, especially when the Doctor thrust his hands into his pockets and lifted his chin into the air, as if he were in the tribune. More than one of us smiled at his resemblance to Pierre Janet entering the tribune at theCollège de France, and the Youngster said, under his breath, "AClinique, I suppose."
The Doctor's ears were sharp. "Not a bit," he answered, running his keen brown eyes over us to be sure we were listening before he began:
In the days when it was thought that the South End was to be the smart part of Boston, and when streets were laid out along wide tree shaded malls, with a square in the centre, in imitation of some quarters of London,—for Boston was in those days much more English in appearance than it is now,—there was in one of those squares a famous private school. In those days it was rather smart to go to a private school. It was in the days before Boston had much of an immigrant quarter, when some smart families still lived in the old Colonial houses at the North End, and ministers and lawyers and all professional men sent their sons and their daughters to the public schools, at that time probably the best in the world.
At this private school, there was, at the time of which I speak, what one might almost call a "principal girl."
She was the daughter of a rich banker—his only daughter. The gods all seemed to have been very good to her. She was not only a really beautiful girl, she was, for her age, a distinguished girl,—one of the sort who seemed to do everything better than any one else, and with a lack of self-consciousness or pretension. Every one admired her. Some of her comrades would have loved her if she had given them the chance. But no one could ever get intimate with her. She came and went from school quite alone, in the habit of the American girl of those days before the chaperon became the correct thing. She was charming to every one, but she kept every one a little at arm's length. Of course such a girl would be much talked over by the other type of girl to whom confidences were necessary.
As always happens in any school there was a popular teacher. She taught history and literature, and I imagine girls get more intimate with such a teacher than they ever do with the mathematics.
Also, as always happens, there was a "teacher's pet," one of those girls that has to adore something, and the literatureteacher, as she was smart and good looking, was as convenient to adore as anything else,—and more adjacent.
Of course "teacher's pet" never has any secrets from the teacher, and does not mean to be a sneak either. Just can't help turning herself inside out for her idol, and when the heart of a girl of seventeen turns itself inside out, almost always something comes out that is not her business. That was how it happened that one day the literature teacher was told that the "Principal Girl" was receiving wonderful boxes of violets at the school door, and "Don't you knowone dayshe was seen by a group of pupils who happened to be going home, and were just behind her, getting into a closed carriage and driving away from the corner of the street!"
Now the literature teacher did not, as a rule, encourage such confidences, but this time it seemed useful. She liked the Principal Girl—admired her, in fact. She was terribly shocked. She warned her pet to talk to no one else, and then she went at once to the clergyman who was at the head of the school. She knew that he felt responsible for his pupils, and this had an unpleasant look. He took the painsto verify the two statements. Then there was but one thing to do—to lay the matter before the parents of the girl.
Now, as so often happens in American families, the banker and his wife stood in some awe of their daughter. There was not that confidence between them which one traditionally supposes to exist between parents and children. I imagine that there is no doubt that the adolescent finds it much easier to confide in some one other than the parents who would seem to be her proper confidants.
At any rate the banker and his wife were simply staggered. They dared not broach the subject to the Principal Girl, and in their distress turned to the family lawyer. As they were too cowardly to take his first advice—perhaps they were afraid the daughter would lie, they sometimes do in the best regulated families,—it was decided to put a discreet person "on the job," and discover first of all what was really going on.
The result of the investigation was at first consoling, and then amazing.
They discovered that the bunches of violets were ordered at a smart down town florist by the girl herself, and by her orderdelivered at the school door by a liveried messenger boy, who, by her orders, awaited her arrival. As for the closed carriage, that she also bespoke herself at a smart livery stable where she was known. When she entered it, she was at once driven to the Park Street station, where she bought a round trip ticket to Waltham. There she walked to the river, hired a boat, rowed herself up stream, tied her boat at a wooden bank, climbed the slope, and sat there all the afternoon, sometimes reading, and sometimes merely staring out at the river, or up at the sky. At sunset she rowed back to the town, returned to the city, and walked from the station to her home.
This all seemed simple enough, but it puzzled the father, it made him unquiet in his mind. Why all this mystery? Why—well, why a great many things, for of course the Principal Girl had to prepare for these absences, and, although the little fibs she told were harmless enough—well, why? The literature teacher, who had been watching her carefully, had her theory. She knew a lot about girls. Wasn't she once one herself? So it was by her advice that the family doctor was taken into the family confidence, chiefly because neither father nor mother had the pluck to tackle the matter—they were ashamed to have their daughter know that she had been caught in even a small deception—it seemed so like intruding into her intimate life.
There are parents like that, you know.
The doctor had known the girl since he ushered her into the world. If there were any one with whom she had shown the slightest sign of intimacy, it was with him. Like all doctors whose associations are so largely with women, and who are moderately intelligent and temperamental, he knew a great deal about the dangers of the imagination. No one ever heard just what passed between the two. One thing is pretty sure, he made no secrets regarding the affair, and at the end of the interview he advised the parents to take the girl out of school, take her abroad, keep her active, present her at courts, show her the world, keep her occupied, interest her, keep her among people whether she liked it or not.
The literature teacher counted for something in the affair, and I imagine that it was never talked over between the parentsand daughter, who soon after left town for Europe, and for three years were not seen in Boston.
When theydidreturn, it was to announce the marriage of the Principal Girl to the son of the family lawyer, a clever man, and a rising politician.
Relations between the literature teacher and the Principal Girl had never wholly broken off, so ten years after the school adventure it happened one beautiful day in early September that the teacher was a guest at the North Shore summer home of the Principal Girl, now the mother of two handsome boys.
That afternoon at tea, sitting on the verandah, watching the white sails as the yachts made for Marblehead harbor, and the long line of surf beating against the rugged rocks beyond the wide pebbly beach on which the dragging stones made weird music, the literature teacher, supposing the old story to be so much ancient history that it could, as can so many of the incidents of one's teens, be referred to lightly, had the misfortune to mention it. To her horror, the Principal Girl gave her one startled look, and then rolled over among the cushions of the hammockin which she was swinging, and burst into a torrent of tears.
When the paroxysm had passed, she sat up, wiped her eyes in which, however, there was no laughter, and said passionately:
"I suppose you think me the most ungrateful woman in the world. I know only too well that to many women my position has always appeared enviable. Poor things, if they only knew! Of course, my husband is a good man. In all ways I do him perfect justice. He is everything that is kind and generous—only, alas, he is not the lover of my dreams. My children are nice handsome boys, but they are the every day children of every day life. I dreamed another and a different life in which my children were oh, so different, and beside which the life I try to lead with all the strength I have is no more like the life I dreamed than my boys are like my dream children. If you think it has not taken courage to play the part I have played, I am sorry for your lack of insight."
And she got up, and walked away.
It was as well, for, as the literature teacher told the doctor afterward, it wasone notch above her experience, and she absolutely could have found no word to say. When the Wife came back to the hammock, ten minutes later, the cloud was gone from her face, and she never mentioned the subject again. And you may be sure that the literature teacher never did. She always looked upon the incident as her worst moment of tactlessness.
"Bully, bully!" exclaimed the Lawyer, "Take off your laurels, Critic, and crown the Doctor!"
"For that little tale," shouted the Critic. "Never! That has not a bit of literary merit. It has not one rounded period."
"The Lawyer is a realist," said the Sculptor. "Of course that appeals to him."
"If you want my opinion, I consider that there is just as much imagination in that story as in the morbid rigmarole you threw at us last night," persisted the Lawyer.
"Why," declared the Critic, "I call mine a healthy story compared with this one. It is a shocking tale for the operating room—I mean the insane asylum."
"All right," laughed the Doctor, "then we had all better go inside the sanitarium walls at once."
"Do you presume," said the Journalist, "to pretend that this is a normal incident?"
"I am not going into that. I only claim that more people know the condition than dare to confess it. It is after all only symbolic of the duality of the soul—or call it what you like. It is the embodiment of a truth which no one thinks of denying—that the spirit has its secrets. Imagination plays a great part in most of our lives—it is the glory that gilds our facts—it is the brilliant barrier which separates us from the beasts, and the only real thing that divides us into classes, though, of course, it does not run through the world like straight lines of latitude and longitude, but like the lines of mean temperature."
"The truth is," said the Lawyer, "if the Principal Girl had been obliged to struggle for her living, the fact that her imagination did not run at any point into her world of realities would not have been dangerous."
"Naturally not," said the Doctor, "forshe would have been a great novelist, or a poor one, and all would have been well, or not, according to circumstances."
"All the same," persisted the Critic, "I think it a horrid story and—"
"I think," interrupted the Doctor, "that you have a vicious mind, and—" Here the Doctor cast a quick look in the direction of the Youngster, who was stretched out in a steamer chair and had not said a word.
"All right," said the Trained Nurse, "he is fast asleep." And so he was.
"Just as well," said the Doctor, "though it does not speak so well for the story as it might."
"Well," laughed the Journalist, "you have had a double success, Doctor. You have been spontaneously applauded by the man of law, and sent the man of the air tofaire dodo. I reckon you get the laurels."
"Don't you be in such a hurry to award the palm," protested the Sculptor. "There are some of us who have not spoken yet. I am going to put some brilliant touches on mine before I give my star performance."
"What's that about stars?" yawned the Youngster, waking up slowly.
"Nothing except that you have given a very distinguished and unexpected star performance as a sleeper," said the Doctor.
"I say!" he exclaimed, sitting up. "By Jove, is the story of the Principal Girl all told? That's a shame. What became of her?"
"You'll never know now," said the Doctor.
"Besides," said the Critic, "you would not understand. You are too young."
"Well, I like your cheek."
"After all," said the Journalist, "it is only another phase of the Dear Little Josephine, and I still think that is the banner story."
"Me, too," said the Doctor, as we went into the house.
And I thought to myself, "I can tell a third phase—the tragic—when my turn comes," and I was the only one who knew that my story would come last.
It was on August 26th that we were first sure that the Allied forces and the German army had actually come in contact. It seemed impossible for us to realize it, but, in the afternoon the Doctor, the Lawyer, and the Youngster took one of the cars, and made a run to the northeast. The news they brought back did not at all coincide with the hopeful tone of the morning papers. In fact it was not only evident that the fall of Namur had been followed almost immediately by that of Mons and Charleroi, but that the German hordes were well over the French frontier, and advancing rapidly, and the Allied armies simply flying before them.
The odd part was, that though the Youngster said that they had only run outfifty miles, they had heard the guns, and "the Doctor thinks," he added, under his breath, "that we may be able to stick it out to the last day of the month. Anyway, I advise you girls to look over your kits. We may fly in a hurry—such of us as must fly."
However, we managed to get through dinner quite gaily. We simply could not realize the menace, and the Doctor evidently meant that we should not. He was in gayer spirits than he had been since the days of the great discussions, and after the few facts he had brought back were given us, he kept the talk on other matters, until the Sculptor, who had been lying back in his chair, blowing smoke rings in the air, stretched himself into his most graceful position, and called attention even to his pose, before he threw his cigarette far from him with a fine gesture, settled his handsome head into his clasped hands, and began:
I had been ten years abroad.
In all that time I had been idle, prosperous, and wretched.
Every time Fate wrenched my heart with one of her long thin pitiless hands,she recompensed me with what the world calls "good luck." Every hope I had cherished failed me. Every faith I had harbored deserted me. Every venture in which neither heart nor soul was concerned flourished and flaunted its success in the face of the world, where I was considered a very fortunate man.
In the ten years of my exile I had travelled much, had been in contact with all kinds of people, had served some, and tried in vain to be concerned for them while I served. If it had been my fate to make no friends, it was within my choice to be never alone.
I had that in my memory which I hoarded, and yet with which I would not allow myself to be deliberately alone. The most terrible hours of my life were those when, toward morning, the rest of the world—all the world save me—having no past to escape, no enticing phantom to flee, went peacefully off to bed, and I was left alone in the night to drug memory, fight off thought, outwit imagination by any means that I might—and some of them were desperate enough.
Ten years had passed thus.
Another tenth of August had come round!
Only a man who has but one anniversary in his life, the backward and forward shadows of which make an unbroken circle over the whole year, can appreciate my existence. One cannot escape such a date. You may never speak of it. You may forswear calendars, abjure newspapers, refuse to date a letter; you may even lose days in a drunken stupor. Still there is that in your heart and your brain which keeps the reckoning. The hour will strike, in spite of you, when the day comes round on the dial of the year.
I had been living for some time in a city far distant from my native land. Half the world stretched on either side between me and the spot I tried to forget, and which floated forever, like a vision, between me and reality.
I had remained longer than usual in this city, for the simple reason that it was the hot season, and while the natives could stand it by day, visitors, unused to the heat, were forced to sleep by day and wander abroad by night, a condition that made it possible for me to feel my fellowmenabout me nearly the entire twenty-four hours.
It was night.
I was sitting alone on the balcony of my room, looking down on to the crowded bridges of the city where throngs were passing, and filled my eyes and mind.
It was the very hour at which I had last seen her. There was no clock in sight—I always guarded against that in selecting my room. I had long ceased to carry a watch.
Yet I knew the hour.
I had been sitting there for hours watching the crowd. I had not been drinking. I had long ago abandoned that. No stimulant could blur the fixed regret, no narcotic numb my full sense of it. Sleep, whether I rose to it, or fell to it—only brought me dreams of her. Desperate nourishing of a great misery, in a nature that resented it, even while cherishing it, had made me a conscious monomaniac. Fate had thwarted me, and distorted me. I had become jealous and morbid, bitterly reviling my hurt, but violently preventing its healing.
There was a moon—just as there had been that night, only now it fell on a manybridged river across which were ghostly cypress trees, rising along the hillside to a strangely outlined church behind ruined fortifications. I was wondering, against my will, at what hour that moon rose over the distant New England village, which came before me in a vision that wiped out the wooded heights of reality.
Suddenly all the pain dropped away from me.
I drew a long breath in amazement.
Where was the weight under which I had staggered, mentally, all these years? Whence came the peace that had so suddenly descended upon me? In an instant it had passed, and I could only remember my bitter mood of ten years as if it had been a dream that I had lived so long unconsoled by that great healer, Time.
As the torturing jealousy dropped from me, a gentle sadness took its place. In an instant my mind was made up. I would go back.
This idea, which had never come to me in ten years, seemed now perfectly natural. I would return at once to that far off village where, for a brief hour, I had dwelt in a "Fool's Paradise," through which my way had lain but a brief span,and where I had passed, like the fabled bird, that "floats through Heaven, but cannot light."
I remember but little of the journey home, save that it was long, and that I slept much. But whether it was months or years I never knew. I seemed to be making up what I had lost in ten years. Time occupied itself in restoring the balance I had taken so much pains to upset.
It was night when I reached the place at last.
I found it as I had left it. Had a magic sleep settled there it could not have been less changed.
I was recognized in the small bare office of the one tavern. I felt that my sudden appearance surprised no one. But I did not wonder why.
Oddly enough, I never asked a question. I had not even questioned myself as to what I expected to find. Years afterward I was convinced, in reviewing the matter, that my soul had known from the first.
I dined alone, quite calmly, after which I stepped out into the starlight. I turned up the hill, and struck into the familiar road I had so often travelled in the olddays. It led toward the river, and along the steep bank of the rapid noisy stream. The chill wind of an early autumn night moaned sadly in the tall trees, and the dead leaves under my feet rustled a sad accompaniment to my thoughts, which at last, unhooded, flew back to the past.
Below rushed the river, whose torrent had ever been an accompaniment to all my recollections of her—as inseparable from them as the color of her eyes, or the tones of her voice.
I could not but contrast my present calm with the mad humor in which I had last rushed down the slope I was so quietly climbing. As I went forward, I began to ask myself, "Why?" I could not answer that, but I began to hurry.
Suddenly I stopped.
The moon had emerged above the trees on the opposite side of the river. It struck and illumined something white above me. I was standing exactly where I had stood on that fatal tenth of August, so many years before.
I came to my senses as if by an electric shock.
At last everything was clear to me. At last I understood whence had gone all myvanity and jealousy. At last I understood the spell of peace that had settled on me in that moonlit tenth of August, in that far off city.
My burden had passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death with her—for I was standing at the door of her tomb!
I did not question. I knew, I comprehended.
In no other way could I have found such calm.
Though I flung myself on the shining marble steps that led in the moonlight up to the top of the knoll where the tomb stood, I had no tears to shed.
The present floated still further away.
Even the rush of the torrent died out of my ears.
Once more it seemed to me that lovely day in May when we three had marched, shoulder to shoulder, down the city street—that spring day in the early sixties, when the North was sending her flower to fight for a united country.
Again I felt the warm sunshine on my head.
Once more I heard the ringing cheers, saw the floating flags, and the faces ofwomen who wept as well as women who smiled in the throngs that lined the street.
Just as in all my life it had been his emotions and his enthusiasms that led me, it was his excitement that impelled me forward at this moment. His was the hand that in my school days, at college, in our Bohemian days abroad, had swept my responsive nature as a master hand strikes a harp, and made harmonies or discords at his will—or, I should say, according to his mood.
I used to think in those days that he never willfully wronged any one, but I had to own also that he never deliberately sacrificed himself for any one. And, if I were the victim of his temperament, he was no less so. But he was an artist. I was not. All things either good or bad were merely material to him. With me it was different.
He and I were alone in the world. But beside us marched, that May morning, with the glory of youth on his handsome but weak face, one whose "baptism of fire" was to make him a hero, who had else been remembered a coward.
The story of the girl he had wronged, and fear of whom had even reconciled hisfamily to his enlisting, was common property, and had been for several seasons. There was a child, too, a little daughter, fondly loved, but unacknowledged, the fame of whose childish beauty many a heedless voice had already sung.
He, poor youngster, looked on his all that morning.
Once more I saw the flag draped house where his mother waved a brave farewell to him.
But there was another later picture in my mind. Again I heard the blare of the band before us as it flung its satire of "The Girl I Left Behind Me," into the spring air. I saw once more in my mind the child, with her floating red gold curls, raised above the crowd on the shoulders of tall men. Her eyes were too young for tears—and for that matter, tears came to her but seldom in later years—and the lips that shouted "bood-bye" smiled, unconscious of bravery, as she swung her hat with its symbolic colors above her shining head.
That was the picture that three of us carried to the front.
We left him—all his errors redeemedby a noble death—with his face turned up to the stars, as silent, as mysterious as they, after our first battle.
From the horrors of that night we two came away bound by an oath to care for that child.
Again my memory shifted to the days that found her a woman. Fair, beautiful, dainty, her father's daughter in looks, but inheriting from a rare mother a peculiar strength of character, a moral force rarely found with such a temperament and such beauty.
We had aided to raise her as became the child of her father, whose story she knew as soon as she was able to understand, but she knew it from the lips of the brave mother, who cherished his memory. Until she was a woman grown it was I, however, who, of her two self-appointed guardians, had watched over her. Children did not interest him.
He had married some years before that time, married well with an eye to a calm comfortable future, as became an artist who could not be hampered by the need of money.
Indeed, it was not until he knew that I was to marry her that he really looked at her.
And I, with all my experience of him, simply because I was never able to understand the dual nature, failed at that fatal hour when we stood together beside our protégée to apply to the situation the knowledge that years of experience should have taught me.
I was so bound up in my own feelings that I failed to remember that, until then, I had never had a great emotion that his nature had not acted as a lens in the kindling.
Then, too, there was a dense sense of the conventional—a logical enough birthright—in my make-up. I, who had known him so long, so well, seemed, nevertheless, when he married, to have fancied there was some hocus-pocus in the ceremony, which should make a definite change in a man's character, as well as a presumable change in his way of life.
It must have been that there, in the open, at the foot of the knoll, I slept, as one does the first night after a long awaited death, when the relief that pain is passed, and suspense ended, deadens grief.She was no longer in this world of torture. That helped me.
The next I knew, it was the sun, and not the moon which was shining on me.
The wind had stilled its sobbing in the trees.
Only the rushing of the river sounded in my ears.
I rose slowly, and mounted the steps.
A tiny white marble mosque of wonderful beauty—for he who erected it was one of the world's great artists, whose works will live to glorify his name and his art when all his follies shall have been forgotten—stood in a court paved with marble.
It was encircled with a low coping of the whitest of stone. Over this low wall vines were already growing, and the woodbine that was mingled with it was stained with those glorious tints in which Nature says to life, "Even death is beautiful."
The wide bronze doors on either side were open.
I accepted the fact without even wondering why—or asking myself who, in opening them, had discovered my presence!
I entered.
For a brief time I stood once more within the room where she lay.
An awful peace fell on my soul, as if her soul had whispered in the words we had so often read together: