Where are the sins of yester-year?
Where are the sins of yester-year?
The grating of the carriage wheels awoke her from the dream which had lightly brushed away the night and the vision of the Arc de Triomphe—looming into the mystery of sky and stars, its monumental flanks sprawling across the Place de l'Étoile. She heard her name called by Mrs. Sheldam as their coachman guided his horses through the gateway of the Princesse de Lancovani's palace.
"Now, Ermentrude! Wake up, dear; we are there," said Mrs. Sheldam, in her kind, drawling tones. Mr. Sheldam sighed and threw away the unlighted cigar he had bitten during the ride along the Champs Élysées. Whatever the evening meant for his wife and niece, he saw little entertainment in store for himself; he did not speak French very well, he disliked music and "tall talk"; all together he wished himself at the Grand Hôtel, where he would be sure to meet some jolly Americans. Their carriage hadhalted in front of a spacious marble stairway, lined on either side with palms, and though it was a June night, the glass doors were closed.
Ermentrude's heart was in her throat, not because of the splendour, to which she was accustomed; but it was to be her first meeting with a noble dame, whose name was historic, at whose feet the poets of the Second Empire had prostrated themselves, passionately plucking their lyres; the friend of Liszt, Wagner, Berlioz, of Manet, Degas, Monet; the new school—this wonderful old woman knew them all, from Goncourt and Flaubert to Daudet and Maupassant. Had she not, Ermentrude remembered as she divested herself of her cloak, sent a famous romancer out of the house because he spoke slightingly of the Pope? Had she not cut the emperor dead when she saw him with a lady not his empress? What a night this would be in the American girl's orderly existence! Andhewas to be there, he had promised the princess.
Her heart was overflowing when she was graciously received by the great lady who stood in the centre of a group at the back of the drawing-room—a lofty apartment in white and gold, the panels painted by Baudry, the furniture purest Empire. She noted the height and majestic bearing of this cousin of kings, noted the aquiline nose drooped over a contracted mouth—which could assume most winning curves, withal shaded by suspicious down, that echoedin hue her inky eyebrows. The eyes of the princess were small and green and her glance penetrating. Her white hair rolled imperially from a high, narrow forehead.
Ermentrude bore herself with the utmost composure. She adored the Old World, adored genius, but after all she was an Adams of New Hampshire, her sister the wife of a former ambassador. It was more curiosity thangaucheriethat prompted her to hold the hand offered her and scrutinize the features as if to evoke from the significant, etched wrinkles the tremendous past of this hostess. The princess was pleased.
"Ah, Miss Adams," she said, in idiomatic English, "you have candid eyes. You make me feel like telling stories when you gaze at me so appealingly. Don't be shocked"—the girl had coloured—"perhaps I shall, after a while."
Mr. Sheldam had slipped into a corner behind a very broad table and under the shaded lamps examined some engravings. Mrs. Sheldam talked in hesitating French to the Marquis de Potachre, an old fellow of venerable and burlesque appearance. His fierce little white mustaches were curled ceilingward, but his voice was as timid as honey. He flourished his wizened hand toward Miss Adams.
"Charming! Delightful! She has something English in herinsouciantpose, and is wholly American in her cerebral quality. Andwhat colouring, what gorgeous brown hair! What a race, madame, is yours!"
Mrs. Sheldam began to explain that the Adams stock was famous, but the marquis did not heed her. He peered at her niece through a gold-rimmed monocle. The princess had left the group near the table and with two young men slowly moved down the salon. Miss Adams was immediately surrounded by some antiquated gentlemen wearing orders, who paid her compliments in the manner of the eighteenth century. She answered them with composure, for she was sure of her French, sure of herself—the princess had not annihilated her. Her aunt, accompanied by the marquis, crossed to her, and the old nobleman amused her with his saturnine remarks.
"Time was," he said, "when one met here the cream of Parisian wit and fashion: the great Flaubert, a noisy fellow at times, I vow; Dumasfils; Cabanel, Gérôme, Duran; ever-winning Carolus—ah, what men! Now we get Polish pianists, crazy Belgians, anarchistic poets, and Neo-impressionists. I have warned the princess again and again."
"Bécasse!" interrupted the lady herself. "Monsieur Rajewski has consented to play a Chopin nocturne. And here are my two painters, Miss Adams—Messieurs Bla and Maugre. They hate each other like the Jesuits and Jansenists of the good old days of Pascal."
"She likes to display her learning," grumbledthe marquis to Mrs. Sheldam. "That younger man, Bla, swears by divided tones; his neighbour, Maugre, paints in dots. One is always to be recognized a half-mile away by his vibrating waterscapes—he calls them Symphonies of the Wet; the other goes in for turkeys in the grass, fowls that are cobalt-blue daubs, with grass a scarlet. It's awful on the optic nerves.Pointillisme, Maugre names his stuff. Now, give me Corot—"
"Hush, hush!" came in energetic sibilants from the princess, who rapped with her Japanese walking-stick for silence. Mr. Sheldam woke up and fumbled the pictures as Rajewski, slowly bending his gold-dust aureole until it almost grazed the keyboard, began with deliberate accents a nocturne. Miss Adams knew his playing well, but its poetry was not for her this evening; rather did the veiled tones of the instrument form a misty background to the human tableau. So must Chopin have woven his magic last century, and in a salon like this—the wax candles burning with majestic steadiness in the sculptured sconces; the huge fireplace, monumental in design, with its dull brass garnishing; the subdued richness of the decoration into which fitted, as figures in a frame, the various guests. Even the waxed floor seemed to take on new reverberations as the pianoforte sounded the sweet despair of the Pole. To her dismay Ermentrude caught herself drifting away from the moment's hazy charm to thoughts of her poet. It annoyedher, she sharply reminded herself, that she could not absolutely saturate herself with the music and the manifold souvenirs of the old hôtel; perhaps this may have been the spell of Rajewski's playing....
The music ceased. A dry voice whispered in her ear:—
"Great artist, that chap Rajewski. Had to leave Russia once because he wouldn't play the Russian national hymn for the Czar. Bless me, but he was almost sent to Siberia—and in irons too. Told me here in this very room that he was much frightened. They lighted fires in Poland to honour his patriotism. He acknowledged thathewould have played twenty national hymns, but he couldn't remember the Russian one, or never knew it—anyhow, he was christened a patriot, and all by a slip of the memory. Now, that's luck, isn't it?"
She began to dislike this cynical old man with his depreciating tales of genius. She knew that her idols often tottered on clay feet, but she hated to be reminded of that disagreeable reality. She went to Monsieur Rajewski and thanked him prettily in her cool new voice, and again the princess nodded approval.
"She ischic, your little girl," she confided in her deep tones to Mrs. Sheldam, whose tired New England face almost beamed at the compliment.
"We were in Hamburg at the Zoölogical Garden; I always go to see animals," declaimed the princess, in the midst of a thicksilence. "For you know, my friends, one studies humanity there in the raw. Well, I dragged our party to the large monkey cage, and we enjoyed ourselves—immensely! And what do you think we saw! A genuine novelty. Some mischievous sailor had given an overgrown ape a mirror, and the poor wretch spent its time staring at its image, neglecting its food and snarling at its companions. The beast would catch the reflection of another ape in the glass and quickly bound to a more remote perch. The keeper told me that for a week his charge had barely eaten. It slept with the mirror held tightly in its paws. Now, what did the mirror mean to the animal! I believe"—here she became very vivacious—"I really believe that it was developing self-consciousness, and in time it would become human. On our way back from Heligoland, where we were entertained on the emperor's yacht at the naval manœuvres, we paid another visit to our monkey house. The poor, misguided brute had died of starvation. It had become so vain, so egotistical, so superior, that it refused food and wasted away in a corner, gazing at itself, a hairy Narcissus, or rather the perfect type of your modern Superman, who contemplates his ego until his brain sickens and he dies quite mad."
Every one laughed. Mrs. Sheldam wondered what a Superman was, and Ermentrude felt annoyed. Zarathustra was another of her gods, and this brusquely related anecdote did not seemto her very spirituelle. But she had not formulated an answer when she heard a name announced, a name that set her heart beating. At last! The poet had kept his word. She was to meet in the flesh the man whose too few books were her bibles of art, of philosophy, of all that stood for aspiration toward a lovely ideal in a dull, matter-of-fact world.
"Now," said the princess, as if smiling at some hidden joke, "now you will meetmySuperman." And she led the young American girl to Octave Kéroulan and his wife, and, after greeting them in her masculine manner, she burst forth:—
"Dear poet! here is one of your adorers from overseas. Guard your husband well, Madame Lys."
So he was married. Well, that was not such a shocking fact. Nor was Madame Kéroulan either—a very tall, slim, English-looking blonde, who dressed modishly and evidently knew that she was the wife of a famous man. Ermentrude found her insipid; she had studied her face first before comparing the mental photograph of the poet with the original. Nor did she feel, with unconscious sex rivalry, any sense of inferiority to the wife of her admired one. He was nearly forty, but he looked older; gray hairs tinged his finely modelled head. His face was shaven, and with the bulging brow and full jaw he was more of the German or Belgian than French. Black hair thrown off his broad forehead accented this resemblance; a composer rather than a prose-poet and dramatist, was the rapid verdict of Ermentrude. She was not disappointed, though she had expected a more fragile type. The weaver of moonshine, of mystic phrases, of sweet gestures and veiled sonorities should not have worn the guise of one who ate three meals a day and slept soundly after his mellow incantations. Yet she was not—inheriting, as she did, a modicum of sense from her father—disappointed.
The conversation did not move more briskly with the entrance of the Kéroulans. The marquis sullenly gossiped with Mr. Sheldam; the princess withdrew herself to the far end of the room with her two painters. Rajewski was going to asoirée, he informed them, where he would play before a new picture by Carrière, as it was slowly undraped; no one less in rank than a duchess would be present! A little stiffly, Ermentrude Adams assured the Kéroulans of her pleasure in meeting them. The poet took it as a matter of course, simply, without a suspicion of posed grandeur. Ermentrude saw this with satisfaction. If he had clay feet,—and he must have them; all men do,—at least he wore his genius with a sense of its responsibility. She held tightly her hands and leaned back, awaiting the precious moment when the oracle would speak, when this modern magician of art would display his cunning. But he was fatuously commonplace in his remarks.
"I have often told Madame Kéroulan that my successes in Europe do not appeal to me as those in far-away America. Dear America—how it must enjoy a breath of real literature!"
Mrs. Sheldam sat up primly, and Ermentrude was vastly amused. With a flash of fun she replied:—
"Yes, America does, Monsieur Kéroulan. We have so many Europeans over there now that our standard has fallen off from the days of Emerson and Whitman. And didn't America give Europe Poe?" She knew that this boast had the ring of the amateur, but it pleased her to see how it startled him.
"America is the Great Bribe," he pursued. "You have no artists in New York."
"Nor have we New Yorkers," the girl retorted. "The original writing natives live in Europe."
He looked puzzled, but did not stop. "You have depressed literature to the point of publication," he solemnly asserted. This was too much and she laughed in mockery. Husband and wife joined her, while Mrs. Sheldam trembled at the audacity of her niece—whose irony was as much lost on her as it was on the poet.
"Butyoupublish plays and books, do you not?" Ermentrude naïvely asked.
Madame Kéroulan interposed in icy tones:—
"Mademoiselle Adams misunderstands. Monsieur Kéroulan is the Grand Disdainer. Like his bosom friend, Monsieur Mallarmé, he cares little for the Philistine public—"
He interrupted her: "Lys, dear friend, you must not bore Miss Adams with my theories of art and life.Shehas read me—"
Ermentrude gave him a grateful glance. He seemed, despite his self-consciousness, a great man—how great she could not exactly define. His eyes—two black diamonds full of golden reflections, the eyes of a conqueror, a seer—began to burn little bright spots into her consciousness, and, selfishly, she admitted, she wished the two women would go away and leave her to interrogate her idol in peace. There were so many things to ask him, so many difficult passages in The Golden Glaze and Hesitations, above all in that great dramatic poem, The Voices, which she had witnessed in Paris, with its mystic atmosphere of pity and terror. She would never forget her complex feelings, when at a Paris theatre, she saw slowly file before her in a Dream-Masque the wraith-like figures of the poet, their voices their only corporeal gift. Picture had dissolved into picture, and in the vapours of these crooning enchantments she heard voices of various timbres enunciating in monosyllables the wisdom of the ages, the poetry of the future. This play was, for her, and for Paris, too, the last word in dramatic art, the supremenuanceof beauty. Everything had been accomplished: Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen; yet here was a new evocation, a fresh peep at untrodden paths. In bliss that almost dissolved her being, theemotional American girl reached her hotel, where she tried to sleep. When her aunt told her of the invitation tendered by the princess, a rare one socially, she was in the ninth heaven of the Swedenborgians. Any place to meet Octave Kéroulan!
And now he sat near her signalling, she knew, her sympathies, and as the fates would have it two dragons, her aunt and his wife, guarded the gateway to the precious garden of his imagination. She could have cried aloud her chagrin. Such an inestimable treasure was genius that to see it under lock and key invited indignation. The time was running on, and her great man had said nothing. He could, if he wished, give her a million extraordinary glimpses of the earth and the air and the waters below them, for his eyes were mirrors of his marvellous and many-coloured soul; but what chance had he with a conjugal iceberg on one side, a cloud of smoke—poor Aunt Sheldam—on the other! She felt in her fine, rhapsodic way like a young priestess before the altar, ready to touch with a live coal the lips of the gods, but withheld by a malignant power. For the first time in her life Ermentrude Adams, delicately nurtured in a social hothouse, realized in wrath the major tyranny of caste.
The evening wore away. Mrs. Sheldam aroused her husband as she cast a horrified glance at the classic prints he had been studying. The princess dismissed her two impressionists and came over to the poet. She, too plainly, did not care for his wife, and as the party broke up there was a sense of relief, though Ermentrude could not conceal her dissatisfaction. Her joy was sincere when Madame Kéroulan asked Miss Adams and her aunt to call. It was slightly gelid, the invitation, though accepted immediately by Ermentrude. Theconvenancescould look out for themselves; she would not go back to America without an interview. The princess raised her hand mockingly.
"What, I go to one of your conferences! Not I,cher poète. Keep your mysteries for your youthful disciples." She looked at Ermentrude, who did not lower her eyes—she was triumphant now. Perhapshemight say something before they parted. He did not, but the princess did.
"Beware, young America, of my Superman! You remember the story of the ape with the mirror!"
Ermentrude flushed with mortification. This princess was decidedly rude at times. But she kept her temper and thanked the lady for a unique evening. Her exquisite youth and grace pleased the terrible old woman, who then varied her warning.
"Beware," she called out in comical accents as they slowly descended the naked marble staircase, "of the Sleeping Princess!"
The American girl looked over her shoulder.
"I don't think your Superman has a mirror at all."
"Yes, but his princess holds one for him!" was the jesting reply.
The carriage door slammed. They rolled homeward, and Ermentrude suffered from a desperate sense of the unachieved. The princess had been impertinent, the Kéroulans rather banal. Mrs. Sheldam watched her charge's face in the intermittent lights of the Rue de Rivoli.
"I think your poet a bore," she essayed. Then she shook her husband—they had reached their hôtel.
It was the garden of a poet, she declared, as, with the Kéroulans and her aunt, Ermentrude sat and slowly fanned herself, watching the Bois de Boulogne, which foamed like a cascade of green opposite this pretty little house in Neuilly. The day was warm and the drive, despite the shaded, watered avenues, a dusty, fatiguing one. Mrs. Sheldam had, doubtfully, it is true, suggested the bourgeois comfort of the Métropolitain, but she was frowned on by her enthusiastic niece. What! ride underground in such weather? So they arrived at the poet's not in the best of humour, for Mrs. Sheldam had quietly chidden her charge on the score of her "flightiness." These foreign celebrities were well enough in their way, but—!And now Ermentrude, instead of looking Octave Kéroulan in the face, preferred the vista of the pale blue sky, awash with a scattered, fleecy white cloud, the rolling edges of which echoed the dazzling sunshine. The garden was not large, its few trees were of ample girth, and their shadows most satisfying to eyes weary of the city's bright, hard surfaces. There were no sentimental plaster casts to disturb the soft harmonies of this walled-in retreat, and if Ermentrude preferred to regard with obstinacy unusual in her mobile temperament the picture of Paris below them, it was because she felt that Kéroulan was literally staring at her.
A few moments after their arrival and with the advent of tea, he had accomplished what she had fervently wished for the night she had met him—he succeeded, by several easy moves, in isolating her from her aunt, and, notwithstanding her admiration, her desire to tap with her knuckles the metal of her idol and listen for a ring of hollowness, she was alarmed. Yet, perversely, she knew that he would not exhibit his paces before his wife—naturally a disinterested spectator—or before her aunt, who was hardly "intimate" enough. The long-desired hour found her disquieted. She did not have many moments to analyze these mixed emotions, for he spoke, and his voice was agreeably modulated.
"You, indeed, honour the poor poet's abode with your youth and your responsive soul, MissAdams. I thank you, though my gratitude will seem as poor as my hospitality." She looked at him now, a little fluttered. "You bring to me across seas the homage of a fresh nation, a fresh nature." She beat a mental retreat at these calm, confident phrases; what could he know of her homage? "And if Amiel has said, 'Un paysage est un état de l'âme,' I may amend it by callingmysoul a state of landscape, since it has been visited by your image." This was more reassuring, if exuberant.
"Man is mere inert matter when born, but his soul is his own work. Hence, I assert: the Creator of man is—man."Nowshe felt at ease. This wisdom, hewn from the vast quarry of his genius, she had encountered before in his Golden Glaze, that book which had built temples of worship in America wherein men and women sought and found the pabulum for living beautifully. He was "talking" his book. Why not? It was certainly delightful plagiarism!
"You know, dear young lady," he continued, and his eyes, with their contracting and expanding disks, held her attention like a clear flame, "do you know that my plays, my books, are but the drama of my conscience exteriorized? Out of the reservoirs of my soul I draw my inspiration. I have an æsthetic horror of evidence; like Renan, I loathe the deadly heresy of affirmation; I have the certitude of doubt, for are we poets not the lovers of the truth decorated?When I built my lordly palace of art, it was not with the ugly durability of marble. No; like the Mohammedan who constructed his mosque and mingled with the cement sweet-smelling musk, so I dreamed my mosque into existence with music wedded to philosophy. Music and philosophy are the twin edges of my sword. Ah! you smile and ask, Where is Woman in this sanctuary? She is not barred, I assure you. My music—is Woman. Beauty is a promise of happiness, Stendhal says. I go further: Life—the woman one has; Art—the woman one loves!"
She was startled. Her aunt and Madame Kéroulan had retired to the end of the garden, and only a big bee, brumming overhead, was near. He had arisen with the pontifical air of a man who has a weighty gospel to expound. He encircled with his potent personality the imagination of his listener; the hypnotic quality of his written word was carried leagues farther in effect by his trained, soothing voice. Flattered, no longer frightened, her nerves deliciously assaulted by this coloured rhetoric, Ermentrude yielded her intellectual assent. She did not comprehend. She felt only the rhythms of his speech, as sound swallowed sense. He held her captive with a pause, and his eloquent eyes—they were of an extraordinary lustre—completed the subjugation of her will.
"Only kissed hands are white," he murmured,and suddenly she felt a velvety kiss on her left hand. Ermentrude did not pretend to follow the words of her aunt and Madame Kéroulan as they stopped before a bed of June roses. Nor did she remember how she reached the pair. The one vivid reality of her life was the cruel act of her idol. She was not conscious of blushing, nor did she feel that she had grown pale. His wife treated her with impartial indifference, at times a smile crossing her face, with its implication—to Ermentrude—of selfish reserves. But this hateful smile cut her to the soul—one more prisoner at his chariot wheels, it proclaimed! Kéroulan was as unconcerned as if he had written a poetic line. He had expected more of an outburst, more of a rebuff; the absolute snapping of the web he had spun surprised him. His choicest music had been spread for the eternal banquet, but the invited one tarried. Very well! If not to-day, to-morrow! He repeated a verse of Verlaine, and with his wife dutifully at his side bowed to the two Americans and told them of the pleasure experienced. Ermentrude, her candid eyes now reproachful and suspicious, did not flinch as she took his hand—it seemed to melt in hers—but her farewell was conventional. In the street, before they seated themselves in their carriage, Mrs. Sheldam shook her head.
"Oh, my dear! What a woman! What a man! I havesucha story to tell you. No wonder you admire these people. The wife isa genius—isn't she handsome?—but the man—he is an angel!"
"I didn't see his wings, auntie," was the curt reply.
The Sheldams always stayed at the same hôtel during their annual visits to Paris. It was an old-fashioned house with an entrance in the Rue Saint-Honoré and another in the Rue de Rivoli. The girl sat on a small balcony from which she could view the Tuileries Gardens without turning her head; while looking farther westward she saw the Place de la Concorde, its windy spaces a chessboard for rapid vehicles, whose wheels, wet from the watered streets, ground out silvery fire in the sun-rays of this gay June afternoon. Where the Avenue des Champs Élysées began, a powdery haze enveloped the equipages, overblown with their summer toilets, all speeding to Longchamps. It was racing day, and Ermentrude, feigning a headache, had insisted that her uncle and aunt go to the meeting. It would amuse them, she knew, and she wished to be alone. Nearly a week had passed since the visit to Neuilly, and she had been afraid to ask her aunt what Madame Kéroulan had imparted to her—afraid and also too proud. Her sensibility had been grievously wounded by the plainly expressed feelings of Octave Kéroulan. She had reviewed without prejudice his behaviour, and she could not set down to mere Latin gallantry either his words or his action. No, there was too much intensity in both,—ah, how she rebelled at the brutal disillusionment!—and there were, she argued, method and sequence in his approach and attack. If she had been the average coquetting creature, the offence might not have been so mortal. But, so she told herself again and again,—as if to frighten away lurking darker thoughts, ready to spring out and devour her good resolutions,—she had worshipped her idol with reservations. His poetry, his philosophy, were so inextricably blended that they smote her nerves like the impact of some bright perfume, some sharp chord of modern music. Dangerously she had filed at her emotions in the service of culture and she was now paying the penalty for her ardent confidence. His ideas, vocal with golden meanings, were never meant to be translated into the vernacular of life, never to be transposed from higher to lower levels; this base betrayal of his ideals she felt Kéroulan had committed. Had he not said that love should be like "un baiser sur un miroir"? Was he, after all, what the princess had called him? And was he only a mock sun swimming in a firmament of glories which he could have outshone?
A servant knocked and, not receiving a response, entered with a letter. The superscription was strange. She opened and read:—
Dear and Tender Child: I know you were angry with me when we parted. I am awaiting here below your answer to come to you and bare my heart. Say yes!
Dear and Tender Child: I know you were angry with me when we parted. I am awaiting here below your answer to come to you and bare my heart. Say yes!
"Is the gentleman downstairs?" she asked. The servant bowed. The blood in her head buzzing, she nodded, and the man disappeared. Standing there in the bright summer light, Ermentrude Adams saw her face in the oval glass, above the fireplace, saw its pallor, the strained expression of the eyes, and like a drowning person she made a swift inventory of her life, and, with the insane hope of one about to be swallowed up by the waters, she grasped at a solitary straw. Let him come; she would have an explanation from him! The torture of doubt might then be brought to an end....
Some one glided into the apartment. Turning quickly, Ermentrude recognized Madame Kéroulan. Before she could orient herself that lady took her by both hands, and uttering apologetic words, forced the amazed girl into a chair.
"Don't be frightened, dear young lady. I am not here to judge, but to explain. Yes, I know my husband loves you. But do not believe in him. He is aterrificman." This word she emphasized as if doubtful of its meaning. "Ah, if you but knew the inferno of my existence! There are so many like you—stop, do not leave! You are not to blame. I, Lillias Kéroulan, do not censure your action. My husband is an evil man and a charlatan. Hear me out! He has only the gift of words. He steals all his profundities of art from dead philosophers. He is not a genuine poet. He is not a dramatist. I swear to you that he is now the butt of artistic Paris. The Princesse de Lancovani made him—she is another of his sort. Hewasthe mode; now he is desperate because his day has passed. He knows you are rich. He desires your money, notyou. I discovered that he was coming here this day. Oh, I am cleverer than he. I followed. Here I am to save you from him—and from yourself—he is not now below in the salon."
"Please go away!" indignantly answered Ermentrude. She was furious at this horrible, plain-spoken, jealous creature. Save her from herself—as if ever she had wavered! The disinterested adoration she had entertained for the great artist—what a hideous ending was this! The tall, blond woman with the narrow, light blue eyes watched the girl. How could any one call her handsome, Ermentrude wondered! Then her visitor noticed the crumpled letter on the table. With a gesture of triumph she secured it and smiling her superior smile she left, closing the door softly behind her.
Only kissed hands are white! Ermentrude threw herself on the couch, her cheeks burning, her heart tugging in her bosom like a ship impatient at its anchorage. And was this the sordid end of a beautiful dream?...
"Do you know, dearest, we have had such news!" exclaimed Mrs. Sheldam as she entered, and so charged with her happiness that she did not notice the drawn features of her niece. "Charlie, Charlie will be here some time next week. He arrives at Havre. He has just cabled his father. Let us go down to meet the boy." Charlie was the only son of the Sheldams and fonder of his cousin than she dare tell herself. She burst into tears, which greatly pleased her aunt.
In the train, eight days later, Ermentrude sat speechless in company with her aunt and uncle. But as the train approached Havre she remembered something.
"Aunt Clara," she bravely asked, "do you recall the afternoon we spent at the Kéroulans'? What did Madame Kéroulan tell you then? Is it a secret?" She held tightly clenched in her hand the arm-rest at the side of the compartment.
"Oh, dear, no! The madame was very chatty, very communicative. It's funny I've not told you before. She confessed that she was the happiest woman on earth; not only was she married to a grand genius,—for the life of me I can't see wherethatcomes in!—but he was a good man into the bargain. It appears that his life is made weary by women who pester him with their attentions. Even our princess—yes,theprincess; isn't it shocking?—was a perfect nuisance until Mr. Kéroulan assured her that, though he owedmuch of his success in the world to her, yet he would never betray the trust reposed in him by his wife. What's the matter, dear, does the motion of the car affect you? Itdoesrock! Andheshows her all the letters he gets from silly women admirers—oh, these foreign women and their queer ways! And he tells her the way they make up to him when he meets them in society."
Ermentrude shivered. The princess also! And with all her warning about the Superman! Now she understood. Then she took the hand of Mrs. Sheldam, and, stroking it, whispered:—
"Auntie, I'm so glad I am going to Havre, going to see Charlie soon." The lids of her eyes were wet. Mrs. Sheldam had never been so motherly.
"Youarea darling!" she answered, as she squeezed Ermentrude's arm. "But there is some one who doesn't seem to care much for Havre." She pointed out Mr. Sheldam, who, oblivious of picturesque Normandy through which the train was speeding, slept serenely. Ermentrude envied him his repose. He had never stared into the maddening mirror which turned poets into Supermen and—sometimes monsters. Had she herself not gazed into this distorting glass? The tune of her life had never sounded so discouragingly faint and inutile. Perhaps she did not posses the higher qualities that could extort from a nature so rich andvarious as Octave Kéroulan's its noblest music! Perhaps his wife had told the truth to Mrs. Sheldam and had lied to her! And then, through a merciful mist of tears, Ermentrude saw Havre, saw her future.
To wring from man's tongue the denial of his existence is proof of Satan's greatest power.—Père Ravignan.
To wring from man's tongue the denial of his existence is proof of Satan's greatest power.—Père Ravignan.
The most learned man and the most lovable it has been my good fortune to know is Monsignor Anatole O'Bourke—alas! I should write, was, for his noble soul is gathered to God. I met him in Paris, when I was a music student. He sat next to me at a Pasdeloup concert in the Cirque d'Hiver, how many years ago I do not care to say. A casual exclamation betrayed my nationality, and during the intermission we drifted into easy conversation. Within five minutes he held me enthralled, did this big-souled, large-brained Irishman from the County Tipperary. We discussed the programme—a new symphonic poem by Rimski-Korsakoff, Sadko, had been alternately hissed and cheered—and I soon learned that my companion mourned a French mother and rejoiced in the loving presence of a very Celtic father. From the former he must have inherited his vigorous, logical intellect; the latter had evidently endowed him with a robust, jovial temperament, coupled with a wonderful perception of things mystical.
After the concert we walked slowly along the line of the boulevards. It was early May, and the wheel of green which we traversed, together with the brilliant picture made by the crowds, put us both in a happy temper. It was not long before Monsignor heard the confession of my ideals. He smiled quickly when I raved of music, but the moment I drifted into the theme of mysticism—the transposition is ever an easy one—I saw his interest leap to meet mine.
"So, you have read St. John of the Cross?" I nodded my head.
"And St. Teresa, that marvellous woman? The Americans puzzle me," he continued. "You are the most practical people on the globe and yet the most idealistic. When I hear of a new religion, I am morally certain that it is evolved in America."
"A new religion!" I started. This phrase had often assailed me, both in print and in the depths of my imagination. He divined my thought—ah! he was a wonder-worker in the way he noted a passingnuance.
"When we wear out the old one, it will be time for a new religion," he blandly announced; "you Americans, because of your new mechanical inventions, fancy you have free entry into the domain of the spiritual. But come, my dear young friend. Here is my hôtel. Can't I invite you to dinner?" We had reached the Boulevard Malsherbe and, as I was miles out of my course, I consented. The priest fascinated mewith his erudition, which swam lightly on the crest of his talk. He was, so I discovered during the evening, particularly well versed in the mystical writers, in the writings of the Kabbalists and the books of the inspired Northman, Swedenborg. As we sat drinking our coffee at one of the little tables in the spacious courtyard, I revived the motive of a new religion.
"Monsignor, have you ever speculated on the possible appearance of a second Mahomet, a second Buddha? What if, from some Asiatic jungle, there sallied out upon Europe a terrible ape-god, a Mongolian with exotic eyes and the magnetism of a religious madman—"
"You are speaking of Antichrist?" he calmly questioned.
"Antichrist! Do you really believe in the Devil's Messiah?"
"Believe, man! why, I haveseenhim."
I leaned back in my chair, wondering whether I should laugh or look solemn. He noted my indecision, and his eyes twinkled—they were the blue-gray of the Irish, the eyes of a seer or an amiable ironist.
"Listen! but first let us get some strong cigars. Garçon!" As we smoked our panatelas he related this history:—
"You ask me if I believe in an Antichrist, thereby betraying your slender knowledge of the Scriptures—you will pardon the liberty! I may refer you not only to John's Epistles, tothe revelations of the dreamer of Patmos, but to so many learned doctors of the faith that it would take a week merely to enumerate the titles of their works all bearing on the mysterious subject. Our Holy Mother the Church has held aloof from any doctrinal pronouncements. The Antichrist has been predicted for the past thousand years. I recall as a boy poring over the map of the world which a friend of my mother had left with her. This lady my father called 'the angel with the moulting wings,' because she was always in an ecstatic tremor over the second coming of the Messiah. She would go to the housetop at least once every six months, and there, with a band of pious deluded geese dressed in white flowing robes, would inspect the firmament for favourable signs. Nothing ever happened, as we know, yet the predictions sown about the borders of that strange-looking chart have in a measure come true.
"There were the grimmest and most resounding quotations from the Apocalypse. 'Babylon is fallen, is fallen!' hummed in my ears for many a day. And the pale horse also haunted me. What would I have given to hear the music of that 'voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of great thunder.' I mean the 'harpers harping with their harps' the 'new song before the throne, before the four beasts and the elders.' It is recorded that 'no man could learn that song but the hundred and fortyandfour thousand, which wereredeemed from the earth.' That is a goodly multitude. Let us hope we shall be of it. Learned Sir Thomas Browne asked what songs the sirens sang. I prefer to hear that wonderful 'harpèd' song.
"But I wander. The fault lies in that wondrous map of the world, with its pictured hordes of Russians sweeping down upon Europe and America like a plague of locusts, the wicked unbaptized Antichrist at the head of them, waving a cross held in reversed fashion. Don't ask me the meaning of this crazy symbolism. The sect to which my mother's friend belonged—God bless her, for she was a dear weak-minded lady—must have set great store by these signs. I admit that as a boy they scared me. Sitting here now, after forty years, I can still see those cryptograms. However, to my tale. About ten years ago I was in Paris, and in my capacity as Monsignor I had to attend a significant gathering at the embassy of the Russian ambassador in this city of light." He waved his left hand, from which I caught the purple fire of amethyst.
"It was a notable affair, and I don't mind telling you now that it was largely political. I had just returned from a secret mission at Rome, and I was forced to mingle with diplomatic people. Prince Wronsky was the representative of the Czar at that time in France, a charming man with a flavour ofdiableriein his speech. He was a fervent Greek Catholic, like most of his countrymen, and it pleased him to fence mischievously with me on the various dogmas of our respective faiths. He called himselftheCatholic; I was only a Roman Catholic. I told him I was satisfied.
"On this particular night he was rather agitated when I made my salutations. He whispered to me that madame the princess had that very day presented him with a son and heir. Naturally I congratulated him. His restlessness increased as the evening wore on. At last he beckoned to me—we were very old friends—to follow him into his library. There he hesitated.
"'I want you to do me a favour, an odd one; but as you are known to me so long I venture to ask it. Do go upstairs and see my boy—' His tone was that of entreaty. I smiled.
"'Dear prince, I am, as a priest, hardly a judge of children. But if you wish it—is there anything wrong with the little chap's health?'
"'God forbid!' he ejaculated and piously crossed himself. We went to the firstétageof his palace—he was gorgeously housed—and there he said:—
"'Madame is in another wing of our apartments—go in here—the child is attended by the nurse.' With that he pushed me through a swinging door and left me standing in a semi-lighted chamber. I was very near ill temper, I assure you, for my position was embarrassing. The room was large and heavily hung with tapestries. A nurse, a hag, a witch, a dark oldgypsy creature, came over to me and asked me, in Russian:—
"'Do you wish to see his Royal Highness the King of Earth and Heaven?' Thinking she was some stupidmoujik'swife, I nodded my head seriously, though amused by the exalted titles. She put up a thin hand and I tiptoed to a cradle of gold and ivory—it certainly seemed so to my inexperienced eyes—the nurse parted the curtains, and there I saw—I saw—but my son, you will think I exaggerate—I saw the most exquisite baby in the universe. You laugh at an old bachelor's rhapsody! In reality I don't care much for children. But that child, that supreme morsel of humanity, was too much for me. I stood and stared and stood and stared, and all the while the tiny angel was smiling in my eyes, oh! such a celestial smile. From his large blue eyes, like flowers, he smiled into my very soul. I was chained to the floor as if by lead. Every fibre of my soul, heart, and brain went out to that little wanderer from the infinite. It was a pathetic face, full of suppressed sorrow—Dieu! but he was older than his father. I found my mind beginning to wander as if hypnotized. I tried to divert my gaze, but in vain. Some subtle emanation from this extraordinary child entered my being, and then, as if a curtain were being slowly lowered, a mist encompassed my soul; I was ceding, I felt, the immortal part of me to another, and all the time I was smiling at the baby and the babysmiling back. I remember his long blond hair, parted in the middle and falling over his shoulders; but even that remarkable trait for an infant a few hours old did not puzzle me, for my sanity was surely being undermined by the persistent gaze of the boy. I vaguely recall passing my hand across my breast as if to stop the crevice through which my personality was filtering; I was certain that my soul was about to be stolen by that damnable child. Then the nurse dropped something, and my thoughts came back,—they were surely on the road to hell, for they were red and flaming when I got hold of them,—and the spell, or whatever it was, snapped.
"I looked up and noticed the woman maliciously smiling—if it had been in the days of the inquisition, I would have sent her to the faggots, for she was a hell-hag. The child had fallen back in his cradle as if the effort of holding my attention had exhausted him. Then it struck me that there was something unholy about this affair, and I resolutely strode to the crib and seized the baby.
"'What changeling is this?' I demanded in a loud voice, for the being that twisted in my grip was two or two hundred years old.
"'Lay him down, you monster!' clamoured the nurse, as I held the squirming bundle by both hands. It was a task—and I'm very strong. A superhuman strength waged against my muscles; but I was an old football half-back at the university, so I conquered the poor little devil.It moaned like a querulous old man; the nurse, throwing her weight upon me, forced me to let go my hold. As I did so the baby turned on its face, its dainty robe split wide open, and to my horror I saw on its back, between its angelically white shoulders, burnt in as if by branding irons, the crucifix—andupside down!"
I shuddered. I knew. He lowered his voice and spoke in detached phrases.
"It was—oh! that I live to say it—it was the dreaded Antichrist—yes, this Russian baby—it was predicted that he would be born in Russia—I trembled so that my robes waved in an invisible wind. The reversed cross—the mark of the beast—the sign by which we are to know the Human Satan—the last opponent of Christianity. I confess that I was discomposed at the sight of this little fiend, for it meant that the red star, the baleful star of the north, would rise in the black heavens and bloody war spread among the nations of the earth. It also meant that doomsday was not far off, and, good Christian as I believe myself to be, a shiver ran down my spine at the idea of Gabriel's trump and the resurrection of the dead. Yes, I shan't deny it—so material are the sons of men, I among them! And the very thought of Judgment Day and its blasting horrors withered my heart. Still something had to be done, prophecy or no prophecy. To fulfil the letter of the law this infernal visitor was let loose from hell. There was one way, so I grasped—"
"Great God, Monsignor, you didn't strangle the demon?" I cried.
"No, no—something better. I rushed over to a marble wash-basin and seized a ewer of water, and, going back to the crib, despite the frantic remonstrances of the old sorceress, I baptized the Antichrist in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Before my eyes I saw the inverted cross vanish. Then I soundly spanked the presumptuous youngster and, running down the staircase, I sought the prince and said to him:—
"'Your boy is now a Roman, not a Greek Catholic. We are quits!'"
The idea of a spanked Antichrist disconsolately roaming the earth, unwilling to return to his fiery home for fear of a scolding, his guns of evil spiked, his virus innocuous, his mission of spiritual destruction a failure—for what could a baptized devil's child do but pray and repent?—all this dawned upon me, and I burst into laughter, the worthy Monsignor discreetly participating. His bizarre recital proved to me that, despite his Gallic first name, Monsignor Anatole O'Bourke hailed from the County Tipperary.