XXVI.

My enemies caused it to be widely believed that Wild Week was my deliberate contrivance for the sole purpose of enriching myself. Thus they got me a reputation for almost superhuman daring, for Satanic astuteness at cold-blooded calculation. I do not deserve the admiration and respect which my success-worshiping fellow-countrymen lay at my feet. True, I did greatly enrich myself; but _not until the Monday after Wild Week_.

Not until I had pondered on men and events with the assistance of the newspapers my detective protectors and jailers permitted to be brought aboard--not until the last hope of turning Wild Week to the immediate public advantage had sputtered out like a lost man’s last match, did I think of benefiting myself, of seizing the opportunity to strengthen myself for the future. On Monday morning I said to Sergeant Mulholland: “I want to go ashore and send some telegrams.”

The sergeant is one of the detective bureau’s “dress-suit men.” He is by nature phlegmatic and cynical. His experience has put over that a veneer of weary politeness. We had become great friends during our enforced inseparable companionship. For Joe, who looked on me somewhat as a mother looks on a brilliant but erratic son, had, as I soon discovered, elaborated a wonderful program for me. It included a watch on me day and night, lest, through rage or despondency, I should try to do violence to myself. A fine character, that Joe! But, to return, Mulholland answered my request for shore leave with a soothing smile. “Can’t do it, Mr. Blacklock,” he said. “Our orders are positive. But when we put in at New London and send ashore for further instructions, and for the papers, you can send your telegrams.”

“As you please,” said I. And I gave him a cipher telegram to Joe--an order to invest my store of cash, which meant practically my whole fortune, in the gilt-edged securities that were to be had for cash at a small fraction of their actual value.

This on the Monday after Wild Week, please note. I would have helped the people to deliver themselves from the bondage of the bandits. They would not have it. I would even have sacrificed my all in trying to save them in spite of themselves. But what is one sane man against a stampeded multitude of maniacs? For confirmation of my disinterestedness, I point to all those weeks and months during which I waged costly warfare on “The Seven,” who would gladly have given me more than I now have, could I have been bribed to desist. But when I was compelled to admit that I had overestimated my fellow-men, that the people wear the yoke because they have not yet become intelligent and competent enough to be free, then and not till then did I abandon the hopeless struggle.

And I did not go over to the bandits; I simply resumed my own neglected personal affairs and made Wild Week at least a personal triumph.

There is nothing of the spectacular in my make-up. I have no belief in the value of martyrs and martyrdom. Causes are not won--and in my humble opinion never have been won--in the graveyards. Alive and afoot and armed, and true to my cause, I am the dreaded menace to systematic and respectable robbery. What possible good could have come of mobs killing me and the bandits dividing my estate?

But why should I seek to justify myself? I care not a rap for the opinion of my fellow-men. They sought my life when they should have been hailing me as a deliverer; now they look up to me because they falsely believe me guilty of what I regard as an infamy.

My guards expected to be recalled on Tuesday. But Melville heard what Crawford had done about me, and straightway used his influence to have me detained until the new grip of the old gang was secure. Saturday afternoon we put in at Newport for the daily communication with the shore. When the launch returned, Mulholland brought the papers to me, lounging aft in a mass of cushions under the awning. “We are going ashore,” said he. “The order has come.”

I had a sudden sense of loneliness. “I’ll take you down to New York,” said I. “I must put my guests off where I took them up.”

As we steamed slowly westward I read the papers. The country was rapidly readjusting itself, was returning to the conditions before the upheaval. The “financiers”--the same old gang, except for a few of the weaker brethren ruined and a few strong outsiders who had slipped in during the confusion--were employing all the old, familiar devices for deceiving and robbing the people. The upset milking-stool was righted, and the milker was seated again and busy, the good old cow standing without so much as shake of horn or switch of tail. “Mulholland,” said I, “what do you think of this business of living?”

“I’ll tell you, Mr. Blacklock,” said he. “I used to fuss and fret a good deal about it. But I don’t any more. I’ve got a house up in the Bronx, and a bit of land round it. And there’s Mrs. Mulholland and four little Mulhollands and me--that’s my country and my party and my religion. The rest is off my beat, and I don’t give a damn for it. I don’t care which fakir gets to be President, or which swindler gets to be rich. Everything works out somehow, and the best any man can do is to mind his own business.”

“Mulholland--Mrs. Mulholland--four little Mulhollands,” said I reflectively. “That’s about as much as one man could attend to properly. And--you are ‘on the level,’ aren’t you?”

“Some say honesty’s the best policy,” replied he. “Some say it isn’t. I don’t know, and I don’t care, whether it is or it isn’t. It’s _my_ policy. And we six seem to have got along on it so far.”

I sent my “guests” ashore the next morning. “No, I’ll stay aboard,” said I to Mulholland, as he stood aside for me to precede him down the gangway to the launch. I went into the watch pocket of my trousers and drew out the folded two one-thousand-dollar bills I always carried--it was a habit formed in my youthful, gambling days. I handed him one of the bills. He hesitated.

“For the four little Mulhollands,” I urged.

He put it in his pocket. I watched him and his men depart with a heavy heart. I felt alone, horribly alone, without a tie or an interest. Some of the morning papers spoke respectfully of me as one of the strong men who had ridden the flood and had been landed by it on the heights of wealth and power. Admiration and envy lurked even in sneers at my “unscrupulous plotting.” Since I had wealth, plenty of wealth, I did not need character. Of what use was character in such a world except as a commodity to exchange for wealth?

“Any orders, sir?” interrupted my captain.

I looked round that vast and vivid scene of sea and land activities. I looked along the city’s titanic sky-line--the mighty fortresses of trade and commerce piercing the heavens and flinging to the wind their black banners of defiance. I felt that I was under the walls of hell itself.

“To get away from this,” replied I to the waiting captain. “Go back down the Sound--to Dawn Hill.”

Yes, I would go to the peaceful, soothing country, to my dogs and houses and those faithful servants bound to me by our common love for the same animals. “Men to cross swords with, to amuse oneself with,” I mused. “But dogs and horses to live with.” I pictured myself at the kennels--the joyful uproar the instant instinct warned the dogs of my coming; how they would leap and bark and tremble in a very ecstasy of delight as I stood among them; how jealous all the others would be as I selected one to caress.

“Send her ahead as fast as she’ll go,” I called to the captain.

As the _Albatross_ steamed into the little harbor, I saw Mowbray Langdon’s _Indolence_ at anchor. I glanced toward Steuben Point--where his cousins, the Vivians, live--and thought I recognized his launch at their pier. We saluted the _Indolence_; the _Indolence_ saluted us. My launch was piped away and took me ashore. I strolled along the path that wound round the base of the hill toward the kennels. At the crossing of the path down from the house, I paused and lingered on the glimpse of one of the corner towers of the great showy palace. I was muttering something--I listened to myself. It was: “Mulholland, Mrs. Mulholland and the four little Mulhollands.” And I felt like laughing aloud, such a joke was it that I should be envying a policeman his potato patch and his fat wife and his four brats, and that he should be in a position to pity me.

You may be imagining that, through all, Anita had been dominating my mind. That is the way it is in the romances; but not in life. No doubt there are men who brood upon the impossible, and moon and maunder away their lives over the grave of a dead love; no doubt there are people who will say that, because I did not shoot Langdon or her or myself, or fly to a desert, or pose in the crowded places of the world as the last scene of a tragedy, I therefore cared little about her. I offer them this suggestion: A man strong enough to give a love worth a woman’s while is strong enough to live on without her when he finds he may not live with her.

As I stood there that summer day, looking toward the crest of the hill, at the mocking mausoleum of my dead dream, I realized what the incessant battle of the Street had meant to me. “There is peace for me only in the storm,” said I. “But, thank God, there is peace for me somewhere.”

Through the foliage I had glimpses of some one coming slowly down the zigzag path. Presently, at one of the turnings half-way up the hill, appeared Mowbray Langdon. “What is he doing here?” thought I, scarcely able to believe my eyes. “Here of all places!” And then I forgot the strangeness of his being at Dawn Hill in the strangeness of his expression. For it was apparent, even at the distance which separated us, that he was suffering from some great and recent blow. He looked old and haggard; he walked like a man who neither knows nor cares where he is going.

He had not seen me, and my impulse was to avoid him by continuing on toward the kennels. I had no especial feeling against him; I had not lost Anita because she cared for him or he for her, but because she did not care for me. Simply that to meet would be awkward, disagreeable for us both. At the slight noise of my movement to go on, he halted, glanced round eagerly, as if he hoped the sound had been made by some one he wished to see. His glance fell on me. He stopped short, was for an instant disconcerted; then his face lighted up with devilish joy. “You!” he cried. “Just the man!” And he descended more rapidly.

At first I could make nothing of this remark. But as he drew nearer and nearer, and his ugly mood became more and more apparent, I felt that he was looking forward to provoking me into giving him a distraction from whatever was tormenting him. I waited. A few minutes and we were face to face, I outwardly calm, but my anger slowly lighting up as he deliberately applied to it the torch of his insolent eyes. He was wearing his old familiar air of cynical assurance. Evidently, with his recovered fortune, he had recovered his conviction of his great superiority to the rest of the human race--the child had climbed back on the chair that made it tall and had forgotten its tumble. And I was wondering again that I, so short a time before, had been crude enough to be fascinated and fooled by those tawdry posings and pretenses. For the man, as I now saw him, was obviously shallow and vain, a slave to those poor “man-of-the-world” passions--ostentation, and cynicism, and skill at vices old as mankind and tedious as a treadmill, the commonplace routine of the idle and foolish and purposeless. A clever, handsome fellow, but the more pitiful that he was by nature above the uses to which he prostituted himself.

He fought hard to keep his eyes steadily on mine; but they would waver and shift. Not, however, before I had found deep down in them the beginnings of fear. “You see, you were mistaken,” said I. “You have nothing to say to me--or I to you.”

He knew I had looked straight to the bottom of his real self, had seen the coward that is in every man who has been bred to appearances only. Up rose his vanity, the coward’s substitute for courage. “You think I am afraid of you?” he sneered, bluffing and blustering like the school bully.

“I don’t in the least care whether you are or not,” replied I. “What are you doing here, anyhow?”

It was as if I had thrown off the cover of a furnace. “I came to get the woman I love,” he cried. “You stole her from me. You tricked me. But, by God, Blacklock, I’ll never pause until I get her back and punish you.” He was brave enough now, drunk with the fumes from his brave words. “All my life,” he raged arrogantly on, “I’ve had whatever I wanted. I’ve let nothing interfere--nothing and nobody. I’ve been too forbearing with you--first because I knew she could never care for you, and then because I rather admired your pluck and impudence. I like to see fellows kick their way up among us from the common people.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. No doubt the fiend that rose within me, as from the dead, looked at him from my eyes. He has great physical strength, but he winced under that weight and grip, and across his face flitted the terror which must come to any man at first sense of being in the angry clutch of one stronger than he. I slowly released him--I had tested and realized my physical superiority; to use it would be cheap and cowardly. “You can’t provoke me to descend to your level,” said I, with the easy philosophy of him who clearly has the better of the argument.

He was shaking from head to foot, not with terror, but with impotent rage. How much we owe to accident! The mere accident of my physical superiority had put him at hopeless disadvantage; had made him feel inferior to me as no victory of mental or moral superiority could possibly have done. And I myself felt a greater contempt for him than the discovery of his treachery and his shallowness had together inspired.

“I shan’t indulge in flapdoodle,” I went on. “I’ll be frank. A year ago, if any man had faced me with a claim upon a woman who was married to me, I’d probably have dealt with him as your vanity and what you call ‘honor’ would force you to try to deal with a similar situation. But I live to learn, and I’m, fortunately, not afraid to follow a new light. There is the vanity of so-called honor; there is also the demand of justice--of fair play. As I have told her, so I now tell you--she is free to go. But I shall say one thing to you that I did not say to her. If you do not deal fairly with her, I shall see to it that there are ten thorns to every rose in that bed of roses on which you lie. You are contemptible in many ways--perhaps that’s why women like you. But there must be some good in you, or possibilities of good, or you could not have won and kept _her_ love.”

He was staring at me with a dazed expression. I rather expected him to show some of that amused contempt with which men of his sort always receive a new idea that is beyond the range of their narrow, conventional minds. For I did not expect him to understand why I was not only willing, but even eager, to relinquish a woman whom I could hold only by asserting a property right in her. And I do not think he did understand me, though his manner changed to a sort of grudging respect. He was, I believe, about to make some impulsive, generous speech, when we heard the quick strokes of iron-shod hoofs on the path from the kennels and the stables--is there any sound more arresting? Past us at a gallop swept a horse, on his back--Anita. She was not in riding-habit; the wind fluttered the sleeves of her blouse, blew her uncovered hair this way and that about her beautiful face. She sped on toward the landing, though I fancied she had seen us.

Anita at Dawn Hill; Langdon, in a furious temper, descending from the house toward the landing; Anita presently riding like mad--“to overtake him,” thought I. And I read confirmation in his triumphant eyes. In another mood, I suppose my fury would have been beyond my power to restrain it. Just then--the day grew dark for me, and I wanted to hide away somewhere. Heartsick, I was ashamed for her, hated myself for having blundered into surprising her.

She reappeared at the turn round which she had vanished. I now noted that she was riding without saddle or bridle, with only a halter round the horse’s neck--then she did see us, had stopped and come back as soon as she could. She dropped from the horse, looked swiftly at me, at him, at me again, with intense anxiety. “I saw your yacht in the harbor only a moment ago,” she said to me. She was almost panting. “I feared you might meet him. So I came.”

“As you see, he is quite--intact,” said I. “I must ask that you and he leave the place at once.” And I went rapidly along the path toward the kennels.

An exclamation from Langdon forced me to turn in spite of myself. He was half kneeling, was holding her in his arms. At that sight, the savage in me shook himself free. I dashed toward them with I knew not what curses bursting from me. Langdon, intent upon her, did not realize until I sent him reeling backward to the earth and snatched her up. Her white face, her closed eyes, her limp form made my fury instantly collapse. In my confusion I thought she was dead. I laid her gently on the grass and supported her head, so small, so gloriously crowned, the face so still and sweet and white, like the stainless entrance to a stainless shrine. How that horrible fear changed my whole way of looking at her, at him, at her and him, at everything!

Her eyelids were quivering--her eyes were opening--her bosom was rising and falling slowly as she drew long, uncertain breaths. She shuddered, sat up, started up. “Go! go!” she cried. “Bring him back! Bring him back! Bring him----”

There she recognized me. “Oh!” she said, and gave a great sigh of relief. She leaned against a tree and looked at Langdon. “You are still here? Then tell him.”

Langdon gazed sullenly at the ground. “I can’t,” he answered. “I don’t believe it. Besides--he has given you to me. Let us go. Let me take you to the Vivians’.” He threw out his arms in a wild, passionate gesture; he was utterly unlike himself. His emotion burst through and shattered pose and cynicism and hard crust of selfishness like the exploding powder bursting the shell. “I can’t give you up, Anita!” he exclaimed desperately. “I can’t! I can’t!”

But her gaze was all this time steadily on me, as if she feared I would go, should she look away. “I will tell you myself,” she said rapidly, to me. “We--uncle Howard and I--read in the papers how they had all turned against you, and he brought me over here. He has been telegraphing for you. This morning he went to town to search for you. About an hour ago Langdon came. I refused to see him, as I have ever since the time I told you about at Alva’s. He persisted, until at last I had the servant request him to leave the house.”

“But _now_ there’s no longer any reason for your staying, Anita,” he pleaded. “He has said you are free. Why stay when _you_ would really no more be here than if you were to go, leaving one of your empty dresses?”

She had not for an instant taken her gaze from me; and so strange were her eyes, so compelling, that I seemed unable to move or speak. But now she released me to blaze upon him--and never shall I forget any detail of her face or voice as she said to him: “That is false, Mowbray Langdon. I told you the truth when I told you I loved him!”

So violent was her emotion that she had to pause for self-control. And I? I was overwhelmed, dazed, stunned. When she went on, she was looking at neither of us. “Yes, I loved him almost from the first--from the day he came to the box at the races. I was ashamed, poor creature that my parents had made me! I was ashamed of it. And I tried to hate him, and thought I did. And when he showed me that he no longer cared, my pride goaded me into the folly of trying to listen to you. But I loved him more than ever. And as you and he stand here, I am ashamed again--ashamed that I was ever so blind and ignorant and prejudiced as to compare him with”--she looked at Langdon--“with you. Do you believe me now--now that I humble myself before him in your presence?”

I should have had no heart at all if I had not felt pity for him. His face was gray, and on it were those signs of age that strong emotion brings to the surface after forty. “You could have convinced me in no other way,” he replied, after a silence, and in a voice I should not have recognized.

Silence again. Presently he raised his head, and with something of his old cynicism bowed to her. “You have avenged much and many,” said he. “I have often had a presentiment that my day of wrath would come.” He lifted his hat, bowed to me without looking at me, and, drawing the tatters of his pose still further over his wounds, moved away toward the landing.

I, still in a stupor, watched him until he had disappeared. When I turned to her, she dropped her eyes. “Uncle Howard will be back this afternoon,” said she. “If I may, I’ll stay at the house until he comes to take me.”

A weary, half-suppressed sigh escaped from her. I knew how she must be reading my silence, but I was still unable to speak. She went to the horse, browsing near by; she stroked his muzzle. Lingeringly she twined her fingers in his mane, as if about to spring to his back! That reminded me of a thousand and one changes in her--little changes, each a trifle in itself, yet, taken all together, making a complete transformation.

“Let me help you,” I managed to say. And I bent, and made a step of my hand.

She touched her fingers to my shoulder, set her narrow, graceful foot upon my palm. But she did not rise. I glanced up; she was gazing wistfully down at me. “Women have to learn by experience just as do men,” said she forlornly. “Yet men will not tolerate it.”

I suppose I must suddenly have looked what I was unable to put into words--for her eyes grew very wide, and with a cry that was a sigh and a sob and a laugh and a caress all in one, she slid into my arms and her face was burning against mine.

“Do you remember the night at the theater,” she murmured, “when your lips almost touched my neck?--I loved you then--Black Matt!--_Black Matt!_”

And I found voice; and the horse wandered away.

* * * * *

What more?

How Langdon eased his pain and soothed his vanity? Whenever an old Babylonian nobleman had a misfortune, he used to order all his slaves to be lashed, that their shrieks and moans might join his in appeasing the god who was punishing him. Langdon went back to Wall Street, and for months he made all within his power suffer; in his fury he smashed fortunes, lowered wages, raised prices, reveled in the blasts of a storm of impotent curses. But you do not care to hear about that.

As for myself, what could I tell that you do not know or guess? Now that all men, even the rich, even the parasites of the bandits, groan under their tyranny and their taxes, is it strange that the resentment against me has disappeared, that my warnings are remembered, that I am popular? I might forecast what I purpose to do when the time is ripe. But I am not given to prophecy. I will only say that I think I shall, in due season, go into action again--profiting by my experience in the futility of trying to hasten evolution by revolution. Meanwhile----

As I write, I can look up from the paper, and out upon the lawn, at a woman--what a woman!--teaching a baby to walk. And, assisting her, there is a boy, himself not yet an expert at walking. I doubt if you’d have to glance twice at that boy to know he is my son. Well--I have borrowed a leaf from Mulholland’s philosophy. I commend it to you.

THE END.

[Illustration]

CONVERSATIONS WITH EGERIA

_Woman’s Trump Card?_

By MRS. WILSON WOODROW

[Illustration]

The senator and Egeria sat in the rich man’s tent--a marble palace by the sea--and the little nook in the supper room upon which they had fastened their desire was at last untenanted. Now they slipped into the recently vacated chairs with a smile of content into each other’s eyes across the board.

“A moment ago,” said the senator, unfolding his napkin, “we gazed at those who slowly sipped their coffee and wished that our belief still held its lost Paradise--Hell--that we might mentally consign them thither. A moment since we were the people, hungry, clamorous, watching them ‘spill the bread and spoil the wine.’ In the twinkling of an eye our attitude changed. We now look with indifferent scorn upon the waiting mob, and advise them if they have no bread to eat cake. What a range of experience it gives us! We are one with the labor agitator elevated to the presidency of a trust. We are the men in the saddle--after us, the deluge!”

“We are the conquerors, at any rate,” observed Egeria. “Ours is this delicate _pâté_, this soft, smooth wine. _Vive le_ rich man! May he entertain oftener! It is unsurpassed.”

“Save by Nature,” returned the senator. “You have failed to notice that she too entertains to-night. What a fête! The sea dashing the froth of its ‘night and its might’ against the wall, that arch of honeysuckle, sweeter than a bank of violets, and yonder pale siren, the moon! Fair to-night, I drink to you!”

“After all,” mused Egeria, “the high gods bestowed on Nature a woman’s privilege--the last word. Art may declaim, Science explain, Religion dogmatize; but Nature has the last word.”

“And the last word, the one word, the eternal word, is ‘beauty,’” he amended.

Egeria shrugged her shoulders. “A matter of surfaces. The mask nature wears to hide her hideous processes of decay. As the lovely heroine of a recent novel says, ‘the beauty that rules the world is lodged in the epidermis.’”

“A superficial and essentially feminine point of view,” commented the senator. “Beauty”--with a wave of the hand--“is a matter of the soul. The skin-deep variety is not worth considering.”

“But most women would pay the price of a pound of radium for that infinitesimal depth,” she returned, flippantly.

“Your sex is hardly a judge of what constitutes feminine beauty.” There was condescension in the senator’s tone. “Here, I can prove the point for you. Grant me your indulgence and I will tell you a little story.” The senator rather fancied himself as a _raconteur_.

“There was once a woman who was regarded by all the men of her acquaintance as ugly, stupid and tiresome, and by all the women who knew her as beautiful, brilliant, fascinating and altogether delightful. Their different points of view led to so much discussion and bickering that they finally decided to submit the matter to a referee, a wise old fellow, who, after a very thorough acquaintance with the world and its works, had elected to spend the remainder of his days in seclusion.

“The philosopher kindly consented to decide the matter, and consequently gave the lady in question due study. Ultimately he announced his decision.

“‘Both sides are right,’ he said. ‘She is the ugliest, stupidest, most aggressive creature on earth; but masculine indifference and dislike have thrown such a halo about her that all women see her as beautiful and charming.’”

During the recital of this tale, a flush had risen on Egeria’s cheek, and she tapped her foot with growing impatience upon the floor. Barely had he finished when she cried, explosively:

“I hate men! Your fable proves nothing but the ineffable conceit of your sex!”

The senator pursued his advantage. “I saw a similar remark in a book I was reading the other day”--pleasantly. “‘I hate men,’ said one woman to another; ‘I wish they were all at the bottom of the sea.’

“‘Then,’ replied the woman to whom she spoke, ‘we would all be purchasing diving bells.’

“But”--hastily, as Egeria half rose--“you really don’t consider women judges of what constitutes feminine beauty?”

“The only judges. We are not dazzled, hypnotized, by a mere matter of exquisite coloring, the fugitive glance of too expressive eyes. We are able to bring a calm, unbiased scrutiny to bear upon it, to fully analyze it. _We_ do not confuse beauty with charm.”

“Are the two, then, distinct?” he pondered.

“Are they distinct?” repeated Egeria, scornfully. “Are they distinct? Some one--a man, of course--has said that if Cleopatra had been without a front tooth the whole history of the world would have been changed; and Heine, you remember, when asked about Madame de Staël, remarked that, had Helen looked so, Troy would not have known a siege. Absurd! The sirens of this world who have swayed men’s hearts and imaginations have never been dependent on their front teeth or their back hair. If Cleopatra had lost a whole row, Antony and every other man who knew her would have insisted that women in the full possession of their molars were repulsive.”

“Ah!” cried the senator, triumphantly, “your words justify me. Beauty is some subtle essence of the soul, as I said.”

A faint, malicious sparkle brightened Egeria’s eyes. “Really, now, would you call the sirens of this world soulful creatures? They were and are psychologists, intuitive diviners of a man’s moods, capable of meeting him on every side of his nature; but----”

“Do you mean,” interrupted the senator, his eyes reflecting the sparkle of hers, “that their dominion over us is through an intellectual comprehension of our moods?”

“Good heavens, no!” disclaimed Egeria, in shocked tones. “Who said anything about the intellectual faculties of woman? I hear enough of them at my club. What I am trying to get at is that beauty without charm has always received a very frigid appreciation. Men prate of it, adore it, yawn, and--leave it. Of the two, they infinitely prefer charm without beauty. Now, senator, what is it you really admire in women?”

“I will tell you if you tell me first what women really admire in men?”

“Ah!” cried Egeria, with complacency, “there we have the advantage of you. We show twice the solid, substantial reasons for the faith that is in us that you do. Woman admires in man masculinity, virility; then brains, ability, distinction. She may loudly profess her devotion to ‘the carpet knight so trim.’ ‘Such a dear, thoughtful fellow, so sweet and sympathetic!’ But her secret preference is profoundly for the one who is ‘in stern fight a warrior grim, in camp a leader sage.’ She has not altered since the Stone Age, not in the least degree. When she was dragged by the hair from her accustomed cave to make a happy home in a new one, do you fancy she gave a thought to the recent companion of her joys and sorrows who was lying somewhere with his head stove in? Not she. Her pity was swallowed up in admiration for the victor, who, lightly ignoring the marks of her teeth and nails, haled her along to his den. It is to the strong men of this earth that the heart of woman goes out.

“Printed articles on the home,” she went on, with light derision, “are always urging husbands to show the same tender attention and loving courtesies to their wives after marriage as before. In reality, nothing would so bore a woman. Man is an idealist; woman is intensely practical. She would infinitely prefer to have him out winning the bread and butter and jam than sitting at her feet, penning sonnets to her eyebrow. After an experience of the before-wedded, tender courtesies, she would exclaim: ‘John, please don’t be such a fool. I am so sick of this lovey-dovey business, that I would really enjoy a good beating.’

“You see, she knows instinctively that ‘man’s love is of his life, a thing apart,’ and that, if he prefers showing her lover-like attentions to ranging the court, camp, church, the vessel and the mart, she has a freak on her hands. But how I run on; and you haven’t told me yet what it is that men admire in women?”

“Beauty,” still insisted the senator, enthusiastically. “Goodness, truth, constancy, amiability!”

Egeria looked at him with reproach. “Do you really mean it?”--earnestly.

“Of course I do”--surprised at her tone.

“I dare say any man to whom I put the question would answer in the same way.” Her eyebrows expressed resignation. “Stay, I will phrase it differently; why do you think you love a particular woman?”

The senator could not resist the opportunity. “Because she is you!”--gallantly.

“Stop trifling.” Egeria was becoming petulant. “This is a serious matter. Now, answer properly; why do you think you love a particular woman?”

“Because”--emphatically--“I imagine her, rightly or wrongly, to be the possessor of those qualities I have enumerated.”

Egeria sighed. “And you still stick to it?”

“Of course I do,” he responded, with assurance.

She shook her head. “Nonsense! Men are less exacting than you think--and more. They ask neither beauty nor grace nor unselfishness of woman; they demand but one thing--you must charm me. For me you must possess that indefinable quality we call magnetism. Emerson puts it all in a nutshell, voices the essentially masculine point of view:”

I hold it of little matter Whether your jewel be of pure water-- A rose diamond, or a white-- But whether it dazzle me with light.

“But,” combated the senator, “you must admit that Solomon had ample opportunity to make a study of your sex, and he reserved all his praise for the good woman, averring that her price was above rubies.”

Egeria’s smile was faintly cynical. “That was in his capacity as philosopher. As mere man, he gave the rubies and an immortal song to a Shulamite girl who looked at him with youth in her smile and laughter in her eyes.”

“A tribute to beauty,” contested the senator.

“Not at all. Because she fascinated him.”

“And the secret of fascination is beauty,” he triumphed.

She refused to admit it. “The secret of fascination lies with the woman who can convince a man that under no circumstances could she possibly bore him.”

The senator was still argumentative. “I continue to maintain that beauty is some subtle essence of the soul.”

“But the last word, the one word, the eternal word,” quoted Egeria, rising, “is that beauty is----”

“What?” he questioned, eagerly.

“In the eye of the beholder.”

MIS-MATED AMERICANS

_By_ Julien Gordon

(Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger)

[Illustration]

Mr. Henry James is inclined to pity American women, because their men--husbands and lovers--are not up to their level of fastidious refinement.

We are inclined to ask Mr. James to what American women he alludes.

Living in a center which makes history, among men of monumental achievement, of vast intellectual resource, and of comprehensive judgment, I confess that when I first encountered some of these men they seemed to me so lacking in the charms of the drawing room that I asked myself: “How can their women stand them?” When, however, I had made the acquaintance of some of these women, or ladies, the query in my soul became: “How can they stand their women?”

Mating and reproduction are largely animal processes, requiring little play of the imagination. If they did, race suicide would never have been heard of. The heroine of “The Garden of Allah” pins a pale Christ over her bed on her wedding night. It has been a late fashion for English and French writers--Verlaine, Mallock, Oscar Wilde, and even that rare genius Robert Hichens--to intermingle religion and spirituality with the sexual instinct. The fact remains that nothing can be more sane or simple, and it only touches fanatical frenzy in minds which border hysteria and decadence.

We believe that the average American, being absolutely sane, finds his mate. He is even persuaded, when she has invested in a diamond brooch and a brocaded front, that she has become a woman of rare elegance, belonging to that type which energetic newspaper reporters depict as a “leader.” The illusion is no doubt calming. Social ambition is salient among politicians and ambassadors, and a good American who expects Paradise desires his wife and daughters to be “all right.” He is quickly and conveniently persuaded that they are. The enormous egotism of the man of success is large enough to cover, with its gilded wing, family ramifications in its spasms of self-laudation.

It has become a habit to speak of American women as superior to all others, and in Europe the legend is beginning to hold. But in what does this superiority consist? Push, aplomb, finery, what? We cannot concede that it lies in exceptional accomplishments, or in any rare degree of scholarship. American women are not often accomplished, are not frequently even linguists; being usually satisfied with one foreign tongue, and that a very wretched French. We have few amateur musicians; and women artists of the force of Janet Scudder or Mrs. Leslie Cotton can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Our literary women are not ornamental, and are skillfully excluded from drawing rooms. Our feminine poets are usually dishevelled. If we throw out a dozen women in each of our large Eastern cities who have had the advantage of birth, breeding, position and wealth, the rank and file are like the rank and file of any other nation--a little brighter, perhaps; keener, more alert, better groomed, but harder--and often less fascinating. Our women lack the high vitality and repose of the English--weak nerves make for fidgetiness--the subtle seduction of the Austrian, the soft sweetness of the Italian. French women are deteriorating, their present social upheavals being responsible for this change.

Nevertheless, American girls have married well in Europe; principally for their ducats, sometimes for their beauty, only very occasionally for love.

The Latins love readily, particularly when they scent income. The English, more sincere, play their game openly. They demand “dots” at the altar, and--get them. However, as I have said, social ambition is a trait of our new life. It is a wholesome trait and has its use. Only by contact with a high civilization can a new people become civilized. Intermarriage is the easiest method.

We are told that American women who have married foreigners adore their exotic existence and could not be persuaded to return. Is it their husbands whom they adore? Are all their _ménages_ exceptionally happy? What they do like is the graceful ease of an existence which appeals to fancy and a career which women over here do not attain. For, in fact, American women are overshadowed by their men. _La femme politique_ is almost, if not quite, unknown in America, as is _la femme artiste_ or _la femme littéraire_. There are no literary women in the United States who wield any social power whatsoever. In America talent is rather a social handicap to a girl or woman, and an escape into a wider field is tolerated only by our extremely conservative society when balanced by some peculiar prestige of early environment or personal allurement. We have no drawing rooms here like that of Madeleine Lemaire, in Paris, or like that of a certain cosmopolitan, Corinne of Venice, now, alas! closed forever. In the salons of the artist French woman one encounters English women of rank, the “little duchesses,” the big ambassadresses, men of note in every calling, diplomats, statesmen, scientists and writers.

Our great men have usually married, in their youth, their first love, and, be it said to their credit, have remained, if not always true to this village ideal, at least outwardly loyal. They are not ashamed of past virtue. Their wives, thrown suddenly into a world of which they know nothing, should surely be excused some solecisms. Occupied in the cares of rearing children, of providing for large families on small rations, they have hardly had the leisure to cultivate their minds and manners. We will not allude to grammar and intonation. It would be too much to ask!

These women do not demand that a man appeal to the imagination. They have none. The lover is at once sunk into the father. In fact, they address their husbands as “father” or “papa”--sometimes, indeed, as “pa” pronounced paw in moments of caressing emphasis. What would these women do with a handsome, dashing troubadour, who warbled ditties in feathered cap and doublet? They do not want a tenor about the house, they want their bills paid. “Pa” sees to that. She is eminently practical. Her husband talks little to her of his ambitions, schemes or success, but he signs the check. That check is the epitome of his brain’s travail. If in his arid life he sometimes longs for a higher companionship, and is drawn into the net of some cleverer siren, his wife remains ignorant of the fact. She is entirely trusting--a convenient quality and one which men superlatively admire.

No, Mr. James, Americans on the whole are well matched. Look beyond the few dainty women of fashion who have personally petted you--women accustomed to the homage of men of the world, and who have danced at the courts of kings. To these we are willing to add a handful of brilliant young students who obtain degrees from Vassar, Wellesley, Smith and Bryn Mawr, are an ornament to the Normal and Barnard College, and distance male competitors at Cornell University.

May one of these be President some day! We quote the wish of a gallant member of the Cabinet. We hope that they have low voices, speak admirable English, and feel sure they never smoke cigarettes and never say “Damn!”

The camp, however, is very wide. The tents are spread, innumerable, over the hills and valleys of our fair country. Lift their flapping curtains, Mr. James. Peep in and you will find content--enough.

[Illustration]

AFTERMATH

If I should go to you in that old place. (God knows, dear heart, we trod it smooth and straight!) And lifting up to yours a tear-worn face, Should whisper, “Darling, it is not too late, For life and love can soon unbar the gate,” You would say “No,” e’en though your lips were dumb-- Fear not: I shall not come.

If you should gather up the poor, pale shreds Of what is left and bring them here to me, Saying, “Fate tangled. Let us mend the threads And weave a web more beautiful to see,” All weeping, I would cry, “It may not be.” And I would cast it by with hands all numb-- Nay, Sweet; you will not come.

We each have learned the lesson rapt apart, The better task Fate set us ere the noon. The storms of Life have beat across my heart And scourged its madden’d throbbing into tune. Who would have looked for moth and rust so soon? Nay, Patience, Sweet! God will bend down some day And lift your hand to wipe my tears away.

MARGARET HOUSTON.

THE GOLDEN APPLE

BY AGNES and EGERTON CASTLE

[Illustration]

The orchard was on a hill, the farmhouse lay at the foot. There was a long field, in spring a palace of cowslips, between the orchard and the house.

This September dawn Pomona came through it and left a dark track of green along the dew-bepearled grass. Little swaths of mist hung over the cowslip field, but up in the orchard the air was already clear. It was sweet with the scent of the ripe fruit, and the tart, clean autumn pungency left by the light frost.

Pomona shifted the empty basket that she had borne on her head to the ground, and began to fill it with rosy-cheeked apples. Some she shook from the laden boughs, some she picked up from the sward where they had fallen from the tree; but she chose only the best and ripest.

A shaft of sunlight broke over the purple hills. It shone on her ruddy hair and on her smooth cheek. She straightened herself to look out across the valley at the eastern sky; all sights of nature were beautiful to her and gave her a joy that, yet, she had never learned to put into words, hardly into thoughts. Now, as she stood gazing, some one came along the road that skirted the orchard, and, catching sight of her, halted and became lost in contemplation of her, even as she of the sunrise pageant.

As evidently as Pomona, in her homespun skirt and bodice, belonged to the farmhouse, so did he to the great castle near by. The gentleman had made as careful a toilet for his early walk as if he had been bound for St. James. His riding coat was of delicate hue, and laces fluttered at his wrists and throat. His black lovelocks hung carefully combed on either shoulder from under his beplumed hat. A rapier swung at his side, and, as he stood, he flicked at it with the glove in his bare hand. He had a long, pale face and long eyes with drooping lids and haughty eyebrows; a small upturned mustache gave a tilt of mockery to the grave lips. He looked very young, and yet so sedate and self-possessed and scornful that he might have known the emptiness of the world a hundred years.

Pomona turned with a start, feeling herself watched. She gazed for a moment in surprise, and a deep blush rose in her cheeks; then, still staring, she made a slow country courtesy. Off went the befeathered hat; the gentleman returned her salutation by a profound bow. Then he leaped the little ditch into the orchard and threaded his way through the trees toward her. She watched him come; her great eyes were like the eyes of a deer, as shy, as innocent.

“Good-morrow, sir,” said she with another courtesy, and then corrected herself quickly--“good-morrow, my lord.” For, if he came from the castle, he was surely a lord.

“Good-morrow, madam,” returned he, pleasantly. His glance appraised her with open admiration.

What a glorious creature! What proportions; what amber and red on those smooth cheeks, what ruddy radiance in that sun-illumined hair! What a column of a throat, and how white the skin where the coarse kerchief parted above the laced bodice! What lines of bust and hip, of arm and wrist; generous but perfect! A goddess! He glanced at the strong, sunburned hands; they were ringless. Unowned, then, as yet, this superb nymph.

His long eyes moved at their pleasure; and she stood waiting in repose, though the color came and went richly on her cheek. Then he bowed again, the hat clasped to his bosom.

“Thank you,” said he, and replaced his beaver with a turn of the wrist that set all the gray and white plumes rippling round the crown.

“Sir?” she queried, startled, and on her second thought--“my lord?”

At this he broke into a smile. When he smiled, his haughty face gained a rare sweetness.

“Thank you for rising thus early, and coming into the orchard, and standing in the sun rays, and being, my maid, so beautiful. I little thought to find so fair a vision. ’Twill be a sweet one to carry forth with me--if it be the last on earth.”

Her wits were never quick to work. She went her country way, as a rule, as straight and sweetly and unthinkingly as the lilies grow.

To question why a noble visitor at the castle--and a visitor it must be, since his countenance was unfamiliar--should walk forth at the dawn and speak as if this morning saunter were to death, never entered her head.

She stammered: “Oh, sir!” to his compliment, and paused, her lip quivering over the inarticulate sense of her own awkwardness.

“Have you been gathering apples?” quoth he, still smiling on her.

“Ay, sir,” she said; “to make preserve withal;” and faltered yet again, “my lord.”

“Ay,” approved he. “It has a fair sound in your mouth. Would I were your lord! What is your name?”

She told him “Pomona.” Whereat he laughed, and repeated it as if he liked the sound. Then he looked at the east, and behold, the sun had risen, a full ball of crimson in a swimming sea of rose. The light glimmered upon his pale cheek, and on the fine laces of his shirt, redly, as if with stains of new blood.

“I must hence,” he said, and his voice had a stern, far-away sound. “Farewell, Pomona; wilt thou not wish me well?”

“My lord?”

“Wilt thou not?”

“Oh, indeed, my lord, I do.” And she was moved, on a sudden, she knew not why, and the tears gathered like a mist in her eyes. “With all my heart,” she said.

He made her a final bow, bending till his curls fell over his face.

“I thank you.”

She watched him walk away from her in and out the apple trees with his careless stride, and leap the little ditch again; and so on down the road.

And when he was lost to her sight, she still stood looking at the point where the way dipped and vanished and she had seen the last flutter of the gray feathers.

After a while she drew a long sigh and passed her hands over her eyes, as if she were awakening from a dream. Then she began mechanically to fill her basket once more. All the ruddiness faded from the sky. The sun swam up into the blue, and a white brilliance laid hold of the dewy valley. Delicate gossamer threads floated high above the apple trees, against the vault of ever-deeper blue. Somewhere from the hidden folds of the land a church bell began to chime. Then all at once Pomona dropped her basket, and while the apples rolled, yellow, green and red, in all directions, she set off running in the direction the gentleman had taken.

Why she ran, she knew not, but something drove her with a mighty urgency. Her heart beat thickly, and her breath came short, though, as a rule, there was no maid in the countryside that could run as she did. When she came to the foot of the hill she paused, and there, by the bramble brake, where the firwood began, she saw, lying on the lip of the baby stream, a gauntleted gray glove. She turned into the wood.

The pine needles were soft under her feet. The pine stems grew like the pillars of a church aisle, and the air was sweeter with their fragrance than any incense that was ever burned.

And after, but a little way, where the forest aisle widened into a glade, she came on the grand riding coat tossed in a heap; across it was flung an empty scabbard. And beyond, outstretched at the foot of a tree---- Pomona stopped short. Now she knew why she had had to run so fast!

He lay as if asleep, his head pillowed upon a branching root; but it was no slumber that held him. His features, whiter than ivory, were strangely sharpened and aged, blue shadows were about nostrils and mouth, the parted lips under the mocking mustache were set in a terrible gravity; they were purple, like dead red roses. Between the long, half-open lids the eyeballs shone silver. It was not now God’s lovely sunrise that stained the white cambric of his shirt. From where it had escaped from his relaxed hand a long, keen-bladed sword gleamed among the pine needles.

Pomona knelt down. She parted the ruffled shirt with a steady hand; his heart still beat, but below it was a wound that might well cause death. She sat back on her heels and thought. She could not leave him to call for help, for he might die alone; neither could she sit useless beside him and watch him go. She took her resolution quickly. She rose, then bending, she braced herself and gathered him into her arms as if he had been a child. He was no taller than she, and slight and lean of build. She was used to burdens. But she had not thought to find him so heavy. She staggered and shifted him for an easier grip; and then, as his pallid head lay loose and languid against her shoulder, the half-open eyelids fluttered, the upturned eyes rolled and fixed themselves. He looked at her; dark, dark as eternity was his gaze. She bent her head, his lips were moving.

“Pomona!”

It was the merest breath, but she knew it was her name. Nearer she bent to him; a flicker as of a smile came upon those purple-tinted lips.

“Kiss me, Pomona!”

She kissed him, and thought she drew from his cold mouth the last sigh. But now she was strong. She could have gone to the end of the earth with this burden in her arms.

His black hair, dank and all uncurled, fell over her bare arm. With the movement his wound opened afresh, and as she pressed him against her she felt his blood soak through her bodice to the skin. Then her soul yearned over him with an indescribable, inarticulate passion of desire; to help him, to heal him! If she could have given her blood to him she would have given it with the joy with which a mother gives life to the babe at her breast.

Pomona was mistress of herself and of her farm, and lived alone with her servants. Though she was a firm ruler, these latter considered her soft on certain points. They had known her, before this, carry home a calf that had staked itself, a mongrel cur half-drowned. But a murdered gentleman, that was beyond everything!

“Heavens ha’ mercy, mistress,” cried Sue, rising to the occasion, while the others gaped, and clapped their hands, and whispered together. “Shall I fetch old Mall to help you lay him out?”

“Fool,” panted Pomona, “bring me the Nantes brandy!”

* * * * *

Earl Blantyre woke from a succession of dreams, in which he had had most varied and curious experiences; known strange horrors and strange sweetnesses, flown to more aërial heights than any bird, and sunk to deeper depths than the sea could hold; fought unending combats and lain in peace in tender arms.

He woke. His eyelids were heavy. His hand had grown so weighty that it was as much as he could do to lift it. And yet, as he held it up, he hardly knew it for his own; ’twas a skeleton thing. There was a sound in his ears which, dimly he recognized, had woven into most of his dreams these days, a whirring, soothing sound, like the ceaseless beating of moth’s wings. As he breathed deeply and with delicious ease, there was fragrance of herbs in his nostrils. A tag of poetry floated into his mind--

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows.

He turned his head and went to sleep again and dreamed not at all.

Pomona lighted the lamp, and, shading it with her hand, came, with soft tread, into the guest chamber. He was still asleep. She set down the light, mended the fire with another log, peeped into the pan of broth simmering on the hob, and then sat to her spinning wheel once more. Suddenly the wool snapped; she started, to find that he was holding back the curtain with a finger and thumb, and had turned his head on the pillow to watch her; his eyes gleamed in the firelight. She rose and came to him quickly.

“So you were spinning,” he said. His voice was very weak, but how different from those tones of dreadful clearness, of hoarse muttering, with which she had been so sadly familiar.

Pomona knelt beside him and put her hand on his forehead, on his wrist.

“Thank God!” she said.

“By all means,” he answered, peering at her amusedly. “Natheless, why?”

“Nay, you must not speak,” she bade him, and rose to pour the soup into a bowl.

He watched her while she stirred and tasted and added salt. He was smiling. When she lifted him, pillows and all, propped against her strong arm, and held the bowl to his lips at a compelling angle, he laughed outright. It was rather a feeble thing in the way of laughs, but to Pomona it was as wonderful and beautiful an achievement as a child’s first word in the mother’s ear.

“Drink,” she said, firmly, while her heart throbbed in joy.

“Now you must sleep,” she added, as she settled him with extraordinary art. But sleep was far away from those curious wandering eyes.

“Bring the light closer and come to the bed again.”

His voice had gained strength from Pomona’s fine broth, and it rang in command. Without another word she obeyed him. As she sat down on the little oaken stool, where he could see her, the light fell on her face, and from behind her the fire shot ruddily in her crown of hair.

“I remember you now,” said he, lifting himself on his elbow. “You stood in the sunrise gathering apples for preserve; you are the nymph of the orchard.”

He fell back, with a sigh of satisfaction. “And your name is Pomona,” said he.

The girl, her capable, work-marked hands lying folded on her knee, sat in absolute stillness; but her heart was beating stormily under the folds of her kerchief.

The sick man’s beard had grown close and fine round chin and cheeks during these long dreams of his. His hair lay in a mass on one shoulder; it had been carefully tied back with a riband, and in all that black setting the pallor of his countenance seemed deathlike. Yet she knew that he was saved. He lay a while, gazing at the beflowered ceiling of the great four-post bed, and by and by his voice came sighing.

“And after that, what hap befell me? Help me to remember.”

“I found you in the wood,” said she, slowly. “You were lying wounded.”

He interrupted her with a sharp cry.

“Enough! I mind me now. Was I alone?”

“Quite alone, my lord.”

“And my sword?”

There was a current of evil eagerness running through the feeble voice.

“Your sword, my lord?”

“Pshaw! was it clean, child? Bore it no sign upon the blade?”

“There was blood on it,” said Pomona, gravely, “to a third of the length.”

The duelist gave a sigh.

“That is well,” said he, and fell once more into silence, striving to knit present and past in his mind.

After a while he shifted himself on his pillows so that he again looked on her.

Then his eyes wandered round the dark paneling, on the polished surface of which the firelight gleamed like rosy flowers. He touched the coarse sheet, the patchwork quilt, then lifted the sleeve of the homespun shirt that covered his thin arm, and gazed inquiringly from it to the quiet woman.

“How do I come here? Where am I?” queried he, imperiously.

“I brought you; you are in my house,” she answered him.

“You brought me?”

“Ay, my lord.”

“You found me wounded,” he puzzled, drawing his haughty brows together, “and you brought me here to your house? How?”

“I carried you,” said Pomona.

“You carried me!”

The statement was so amazing and Lord Blantyre’s wits were still so weakened that he turned giddy and was fain to close his eyes and allow the old vagueness to cradle him again for a few minutes.

Pomona prayed that he might be sleeping, but as she was stealthily rising from his bedside he opened his eyes and held her with them.

“You carried me, you brought me to your own house? Why?”

“I wanted to nurse you,” said poor Pomona.

She knew no artifice whereby she could answer, yet conceal the truth. But it was as if her heart were being torn from her bit by bit.

His eyes, hard and curious, softened; so did the imperious voice.

“How did you keep them out?”

“Keep them out?”

She was beautiful, but she was dull.

“My kinsfolk, from the castle.”

Pomona stood like a child caught in grave fault.

“They do not know,” she answered, at last.

It was his turn to ejaculate in amazement. “Not know!”

“I did not want them,” said she, then, doggedly. “I did not want any fine ladies about, nor physicians with their lancets. When my father was cut with the scythe, they sent a leech from the castle, who blooded him, and he died. I did not want you to die.”

She spoke the last words almost in a whisper, then she waited breathlessly. There came a low sound from the pillows. His laugh that had been music to her a minute ago now stabbed her to the heart. She turned, the blood flashing into her cheeks; yet his face grew quickly grave; he spoke, his voice was kind.

“Stay. I want to understand. You carried me, all by yourself, from the wood; is it so?”

“Ay.”

“And no one knows where I am, or that you found me?”

“No. I went down to the wood again and brought back your coat and your sword and scabbard and your gloves. I forbade my people to speak. None of the great folk know you are here.”

“And you nursed me?”

“Ay.”

“Was I long ill?”

“Fourteen days.”

“I have been near death, have I not?”

“You have, indeed.”

“And you nursed me!” he repeated again. “How did you learn such science?”

“My lord, I have loved and cared for the dumb things all my life. There was the calf that was staked----” She stopped; that laugh was torture.

“Go on, Pomona!”

“I bathed your wound in cold water over and over till the bleeding stopped, and then, when the fever came, I knew what brew of herbs would help you. One night I thought that you would die----”

“Go on, Pomona!”

“You could not breathe, no matter how high I laid you on the pillows----”

“Ay! Why dost thou halt again? What didst thou then?”

“I held you in my arms,” she said. “You seemed to get your breath better that way, and then you slept at last.”

“While you held me?” he proceeded. “How long did you hold me in your arms, Pomona?”

“My lord,” she said, “the whole night.”

Upon this he kept silence quite a long time, and she sat down on her stool again and waited. She had nursed him and saved him, and now he would soon be well; she ought surely to rejoice, but, she knew not why, her heart was like lead. Presently he called her; he would be lifted, shifted, his pillows were hot, his bedclothes pressed on him. As she bent over him, the fretful expression suddenly was smoothed from his features.

“I remember now,” he said, with a singular gleam in his eyes. “I remember, Pomona; you kissed me.”

* * * * *

My Lord Blantyre began now to have more consecutive recollections of that time of dreams; and when the night came he felt mightily injured, mightily affronted, to find that the shadow of the watcher in the rushlight against the wall belonged to a bent and aged figure, was a grotesque profile, instead of the mild gray angel that had soothed him hitherto. So deep seemed the injury, so cruel the neglect, that the ill-used patient could not find it in him to consent to sleep, but tossed till his bed grew unbearable, pettishly refused to drink from Mall’s withered hand, was quite positive that the pain in his side was very bad again, and that his angry heart beats were due to fever.

It drew toward midnight. Again Mall brought the cooling drink and offered it patiently. Like an old owl she stood and blinked. Her toothless jaws worked.

He made an angry gesture of refusal; the cup was dashed from her hand and fell clattering on the boards. She cried out in dismay, and he in fury.

“Out of my sight, you Hecate!”

Then suddenly Pomona stood beside them. So soft her tread that neither had heard her come.

“Lord, be good to us! The poor gentleman’s mad again,” whimpered Mall, as she went down on her knees to mop.

Pomona was in a white wrapper, well starched; the wide sleeves spread out like wings. Her hair hung in one loose plait to her knees.

“You look like a monstrous, beautiful great angel,” cried he. Her hand was on his pulse. He was as pleased and soothed as a naughty infant when it is lifted from its cradle and nursed.

She stood, and seemed encircled by the fragrance of the sacrificed cup, lavender and thyme and other sweet and wholesome herbs.

She thought he wandered, yet his pulse was steadying down under her finger into a very reasonable pace for a convalescent. She looked down at him with puzzled eyes.

“What is it, my lord?”

“Prithee,” said he, “though you live so quiet here, my maid, and keep your secrets so well, you would have known, would you not, had there been a death at the castle?”

“Surely, my lord,” she said, and bent closer to comfort him. “Nay, it must be that you have the fever again, I fear. Nay, all is well with your kinsfolk. Mall, haste thee with another cup of the drink. Is the wound painful, my good lord, and how goes it with the breathing?”

As he bent he caught her great plait in both his hands and held it so that she could not straighten herself.

“It would go vastly better,” cried he, “I should breathe with infinite more ease, my sweet nurse, and forget that I had ever had a gaping hole to burn the side of me, could you but tell me that there had been even a trifle of sickness at the house beyond. Come, my sword was red, you know! It was not red for nothing! Was not Master Leech sent for in haste to draw more blood? The excellent physician, thou mindest, who helped thy worthy father so pleasantly from this world.”

She would have drawn from him in soft sorrow and shame, for she understood now, but that his weak fingers plucked her back. Truly there seemed to be a devil in his eyes. Yet she was too tender of him not to humor him, as the mother her spoiled child.

“Hast heard, Mall, of aught amiss at the castle?” quoth she, turning her head to address the old woman at the fire.

“There was a gentleman out hunting with the Lady Julia o’ Thursday,” answered the crone, “as carried his arm in a sling, I heard tell; though he rode with the best of them.”

“Faugh!”

Lord Blantyre loosed Pomona’s tress and lay back sullenly. He drank the cup when she held it to his lips, in the same sullen silence; but when she shook his pillows and smoothed his sheet and cooed to him in the dear voice of his dream: “Now, sleep,” he murmured, complainingly: “Not if you leave me!”

Pomona’s heart gave a great leap, and a rose flush grew on her face, lovelier than ever sunrise or fireglow had called there.

“I will not leave you, my lord,” she replied. Her voice filled the whole room with deep harmony.

He woke in the gray dawn, and there sat Pomona, her eyes dreaming, her hands clasped, her face a little stern in its serene, patient weariness. He cried to her sharply, because of the sharpness with which his heart smote him:

“Hast sat thus the whole night long?”

“Surely!” said she.

“Well, to bed with you, then,” he bade her, impatiently. “Nay, I want nought. Send one of your wenches to my bell, some Sue or Pattie, so it be a young one. And you--to bed, to bed!”

But she would not leave him till she had tested how it stood with him, according to her simple skill. As her hand rested on his brow, “Why Pomona?” queried he.

“My lord?”

“Pomona. ’Tis a marvelous fine name, and marvelous fitting to a nymph of the orchard. Pomona!”

“Indeed,” she answered him, in her grave way, “Sue or Pattie would better become me. But my mother was book-learned, sir, and town-bred, and had her fancies. She sat much in the orchard the spring that I was born.”

“Ay,” he mused. “So thy mother was book-learned and fanciful!” Then briskly he asked her: “Wouldst thou not like to know my name, Pomona? Unless, indeed, you know it already?”

She shook her head.

“Why, what a woman are you! In spite of apples, no daughter of Eve at all?”

She still shook her head, and, smiling faintly, “To me it could make no difference,” she said.

“Well, now you shall know,” he said, “and take it to your maiden dreams. I am Rupert, Earl of Blantyre.”

“What,” she cried, quickly, “the----” she broke off and hesitated. “The great Earl of Blantyre,” she pursued, then, dropping her eyes: “The king’s friend!”

His laugh rang out somewhat harsh.

“What, so solitary a nymph, so country hidden, and yet so learned of the gossip of the great world?”

“People talk,” she murmured, crimsoning as in the deepest shame.

“And you know what they call me? No! Not the Great Earl, hypocrite, the Wicked Earl! You knew it?”

She bent her head.

He laughed again. “Why, now, what a nightmare for you! Here he lies, and, oh! Pomona, you have prolonged his infamous career!”

* * * * *

The Wicked Earl was an angelic patient for two days. On the third he was promoted to the oak settle, wrapped in a garment of the late farmer’s, of which he made much kindly mirth. It was a golden day of joy in the lonely farmhouse.

On the fourth morning, however, he wakened to a mood of seriousness, not to say ill-temper. His first words were to request writing paper and a quill, ink and the great seal that hung on his watch chain.

Pomona stood by while he wrote; helped him with paper and wax. She saw into how deep a frown his brows were contracted, and her heart seemed altogether to fail her. She expected the end; it was coming swiftly, and not as she expected it.

“May I trespass on your kindness so far as to send a horseman with this letter to the castle?” said he, very formally.

She took it from him with her country courtesy.

“You will be leaving us, my lord?”

He glanced at her through his drooping lids.

“Can I trespass forever on your hospitality?”

She went forth with the letter quickly, without another word.

It was but little after noon when there came a great clatter into the simple farmyard that was wont to echo to no louder sounds than the lumbering progress of the teamsters and their wagon, or the patient steps of Pomona’s dairy cows. A great coach with four horses and running footmen had drawn up before the farm porch. A man in dark livery, with a sleek, secret face, slipped down from the rumble, reached for a valise and disappeared round the house. The coach door opened, and the Lady Julia Majendie descended, followed by no less a person than my Lord Majendie himself, who was seldom known to leave his library, much less to accompany his daughter out driving. His presence marked a great occasion. And with them was a very fine lady, a stranger to any of the farm, a little lady with dark hair in ringlets and high plumes to a great hat, and a dress that shone with as many pale colors as a pigeon’s breast. She sniffed, and “Oh!” cried she in very high, loud tones, pressing a vinaigrette to her nose, “can my poor brother be in such a place, and yet alive?”

“Hush, madam,” said Lord Majendie, somewhat testily, for Pomona stood in the door. “I am sure we owe nought but gratitude to this young woman.”

He was a gaunt, snuffy, untidy old man, in a dilapidated wig, but his eyes were shrewd and kindly behind the large, gold-rimmed spectacles. He peered at Pomona, pale and beautiful.

Lady Julia had evidently inherited her father’s short sight, for she, too, was staring through an eyeglass. She carried it on a gold chain, and when she lifted it to one eye her small fair face took an air of indescribable impertinence.

She interrupted father and friend, coming to the front with a scarcely perceptible movement of pointed elbows:

“Bring us instantly to Lord Blantyre.”

“This way an it please you,” said Pomona.

She led them in, and there in the great kitchen, well within the glow from the deep hearth, propped on patchwork cushions, wrapped in blue homespun, lay the invalid.

The ladies were picking their steps across the flags with a great parade of lifting silken skirts; the worthy old scholar, Lord Majendie, was following, with an expression of benign, childlike interest, but all three seemed struck by the same amazement, almost amounting to consternation. Lord Blantyre lifted his pallid, black-bearded countenance and looked at them with a gaze of uncompromising ill-humor.

“Good Lord, brother!” exclaimed the little lady with the ringlets, at last. She made a faint lurch against Lady Julia.

“If your sisterly feelings are too much for you, and you are contemplating a swoon, pray be kind enough to accomplish it elsewhere, Alethea,” said Lord Blantyre.

“Oh, my excellent young friend! Oh, my dear lord! Tut! tut! tut! I should hardly have known you,” ejaculated the old man. “You must tell us how this has come about; we must get you home. Tush! you must not speak. I see you are yet but weakly. My good young woman, this has been a terrible business--nay, I have no doubt he does your nursing infinite credit, but why not have let us know? Tut! tut!”

Before Pomona could speak, and, indeed, as she had no excuse to offer, the words were slow in coming, her patient intervened, curtly.

“I would not permit her to tell you,” quoth he.

She glanced at him, startled; his eyes were averted.

“Oh, my lord, this is cruel hearing for us,” minced Julia.

She might have spoken to the wall for all the effect her smile and ogle produced on him. She turned her glass upon Pomona, and ran it up and down her till the poor girl felt herself so coarse, so common, so ugly, that she could have wished herself dead.

“Pray, Lord Majendie,” said Blantyre, “is Colonel Craven yet with you?”

Lady Alethea tossed her head, flushed and shot a look, half defiance, half fear, at her brother.

He propped himself up on his elbow, turned and surveyed her with a sneering smile.

“How pale and wasted art thou, my fair Alethea! Hast been nursing the wounded hero, and pining with his pangs? Or is’t, perchance, all fond fraternal anguish concerning my unworthy self? Oh, see you, I know what an uproar you made about me all over the countryside, what a hue and cry for the lost brother.”

“A plague on it, Julia,” said Lord Majendie, scratching his wig perplexedly and addressing his daughter in a loud whisper, “what ails the fellow? Does he wander, think you?”

But Lady Alethea seemed to find a meaning in the sick man’s words, for she tossed her head once more, and answered sharply:

“No, brother, I made no hue and cry for you, for ’tis not the first time it has been your pleasure to play truant and leave your loving friends all without news. How was I to know that you were more sorely hurt than Colonel Craven? He left you, he told us, standing by a tree, laughing at his pierced arm. You are not wont to come out of these affairs so ill.”

That they were of the same blood could not be doubted, for it was the very same sneer that sat on both their mouths.

“And pray, since we must bandy words,” she went on, gaining yet more boldness, “why did you thus keep me willfully in suspense?”

“Because,” said he, sweetly, “I was too ill for thy nursing, my Alethea.”

“I presume,” said she, “you had a nurse to your fancy?”

Her black eyes rolled flashing on Pomona. The earl made no reply.

“Let me assure your lordship,” put in his would-be host here, quickly, “that Colonel Craven is gone.”

”’Tis well, then,” replied Blantyre, ceremoniously, “and I will, with your permission, this very night avail myself of your offer of hospitality for a few days, but you will, I fear, have to send a litter for me. To sit in a coach is yet beyond me.”

And while the good-natured nobleman instantly promised compliance, Lord Blantyre, waving away further discourse with a gesture, went on wearily:

“Let me beg of you not to remain or keep these ladies in surroundings so little suited to their gentility. And the sooner, my good lord, you can dispatch that litter, the sooner shall you have the joy of my company. Farewell, Julia, for but a brief space. I trust that you and Colonel Craven enjoyed the chase the other day. We shall meet soon again, sister; pray you bear up against our present parting.”

Both the ladies swept him such very fine courtesies that the homely kitchen seemed full of the rustle of silk. Lady Julia Majendie had a little fixed smile on her lips.

The farm servants were all watching at the windows to see the great ladies get into their coach, to see it wheel about with the four horses clattering and curvetting. Pomona and Lord Blantyre were alone. She stood, her back against the wall, her head held high, not in pride, for Pomona knew no pride, but with the natural carriage of her perfect strength and balance. Her eyes looked forth, grieving yet untearful, her mouth was set into lines of patient endurance. He regarded her darkly.

“I go this evening, Pomona.”

“Ay, my lord.”

The tall wooden clock ticked off a heavy minute.

“Is my man here?” asked Lord Blantyre. “Bid him come to me, then, to help me to my room.”

His lordship’s toilet was a lengthy proceeding, for neither his strength nor his temper was equal to the strain. But it was at length accomplished, and, perfumed, shaven, clothed once again in fine linen and silk damask, wrapped in a great furred cloak, Lord Blantyre sat in the wooden armchair and drank the cordial that Pomona had prepared him.

He was panting with his exertions, his heart was fluttering, but Pomona’s recipes were cunning; in a little while he felt his pulses calm down and a glow of power return to him, and with the help of his cane and his servant he was able to advance toward the door.

“The young woman is outside, waiting to take leave of your lordship,” volunteered the sleek Craik.

His master halted, and fixed him with an arrogant eye.

“The young woman of the farm,” explained the valet, glibly, “and, knowing your lordship likes me to see to these details, I have brought a purse of gold--twenty pieces, my lord.”

He stretched out his hand and chinked the silken bag as he spoke.

“For whom is that?” asked Lord Blantyre.

The man stared.

“For the young woman, my lord.”

Lord Blantyre steadied himself with the hand that gripped the speaker’s arm; then, lifting the cane with the other, struck the fellow across the knuckles so sharply that with a howl he let the purse fall.

“Pick it up,” said the Wicked Earl. “Put it into your pocket, and remember, for the future, that the servant who presumes to know his master’s business least understands his own.”

The litter was brought to the door of his chamber, and they carried him out through the kitchen to the porch; and there, where Pomona stood waiting, he bade them halt and set it down. She leaned toward him to look on him, she told herself, for the last time. Her heart contracted to see him so wan and exhausted.

“Good-by, Pomona,” said he, gazing up into her sorrowful eyes, distended in the evening dimness. He had seen a deer look at him thus, in the dusk, out of a thicket.

“Good-by, my lord,” said she.

“Ah, Pomona,” said he, “I made a sweeter journey the day I came here!”

And without another word to her he signed to the men, and they buckled to their task again.

Her heart shuddered as she watched the slow procession pass into the shadows. They might have been bearing a coffin. With the instinct of her inarticulate grief, she went to seek the last memory of him in his room. By the light of a flaring tallow candle, she found Lord Blantyre’s man repacking his master’s valise. He looked offensively at her as she entered.

“Young woman,” said he, shaking his head, “you have taken a very great liberty.”

Then, picking up the coarse white shift and surveying it with an air of intense disgust, ”’Tis a wonder,” quoth he, “his lordship didn’t die of this.”

* * * * *

“I fear, my fair Julia, that fondly as I should love it, I shall never call you sister.”

Julia turned at the fleer and flung a glance of acute anger at her friend.

“If you had not been yourself so determined to have the nursing of Colonel Craven’s wound, my dearest Alethea,” responded she, sweetly, “the friendly desire of your heart might be in a better way of accomplishment. And, oh!”--she fanned herself and tittered--“I pity you, my poor Alethea, I do, indeed, when I think of those wasted attentions.”

Lady Alethea had her feelings less under control than her cool-blooded friend. Her dark cheek empurpled, her full lips trembled.

“My woman tells me,” proceeded Julia, “that the creature Craik, your brother’s man, hath no doubt of my lord Blantyre’s infatuation. ‘Pomona!’ he will call in his sleep. Pomona! ’Tis the wench’s name. I wish you joy of your sister-in-law, indeed.”

Lady Alethea wheeled upon her with an eye of fire.

“Need my brother wed the woman because he calls upon her name?” she mocked.

“If I know my lord your brother, he might well wed her even because he need not,” smiled the other. “Now you are warned. ’Tis none of my concern, I thank my Providence! You will be saved a dairymaid at least.”

Alethea’s wavering color, her flurried breath, bore witness to discomposure.

“My Lord Blantyre,” pursued Lady Julia Majendie, relentlessly, “has ever taken pleasure in astonishing the world.”

Lady Alethea clinched her hands.

“Your father rules here; let him transport the slut!”

“Nay,” said Julia. She placed her hand upon the heaving shoulder, and looked at her friend with a singular light in her pale yet brilliant eyes. “Do you think to break a man of a fancy by such measures? ’Twould be as good as forging the ring. Nay, my sweet, I can better help thee; ay, and give thee an hour’s sport besides.”

And, as Alethea raised questioning eyes, Julia Majendie shook her silver-fair ringlets and laughed again.

“Leave it to me,” quoth she.

* * * * *

“Will Mistress Pomona favor the Lady Julia Majendie with her company at the castle?”

This was the message carried to the farmhouse by a mounted servant. He had a pillion behind him on the stout palfrey, and his orders were, he said, to bring Mistress Pomona back with him.

Pomona came running out, with the harvest sunshine on her copper hair; her cheek was drained of blood.

“Is my lord ill again?” she queried, breathlessly.

The man shook his head; either he was dull or well drilled.

Pomona mounted behind him without a second’s more delay, just as she was, bareheaded, her apron stained with apple juice, and her sleeves rolled up above her elbows. She had no thought for herself, and only spoke to bid the servant hurry.

For a fortnight she had heard no word of her patient. In her simple heart she could conceive no other reason for being summoned now than because he needed her nursing.

But when she reached the castle and was passed with mocking ceremony from servant to servant, the anxious questions died on her lips; and when she was ushered, at length, into a vast bedchamber, hung with green silk, gold fringed, and was greeted by Lady Julia, all in green herself, like a mermaid, smiling sweetly at her from between her pale ringlets, she was so bewildered that she forgot even to courtesy. She never heeded how the tire-woman, who had last received her, tittered as she closed the door.

“A fair morning to you, mistress,” said Lady Julia. “I am sensible of your kindness in coming to my hasty invitation.”

“Madam,” faltered Pomona, and remembered her _révérence_; “I am ever at your service, honorable madam. I hope my lord is not sick again.”

“My father?” mocked the mermaid, running her white hand through her curls. But Pomona neither understood nor practiced the wiles of women.

“I meant my Lord Blantyre,” said she.

“Oh, the lord earl, your patient; nay, it goes better with him. Oh, he has been sadly, sadly. We have had a sore and anxious time; such a wound as his, neglected----” she shook her ringlets.

Pomona’s lip suddenly trembled, she caught it between her teeth to steady it.

“Ah,” said Julia, interrupting herself and turning on her chair, “here comes the Lady Alethea.”

Alethea entered, mincing on high-heeled shoes, her cherry lips pursed, her dark eyes dancing, as if a pair of mischievous sprites had taken lodging there. She gazed at Pomona, so large, so work-stained, so incongruous a figure in the bright, luxurious room. Her nostrils dilated. She looked as wicked as a kid.

“My brother,” said she, addressing her friend, though she kept staring at Pomona, “has heard of this wench’s arrival. He would speak with her.”

“I will go with you, even now,” said Pomona.

Both the ladies shrieked; so did the maid who had followed Lady Alethea into the room.

“My good creature! In that attire?”

“My brother, so fastidious, so suffering!”

“And she,” cried the tire-woman, taking up the note, “still with the stench of the saucepan about her! Positively, madam, the room reeks.”

If Pomona carried any savors beyond those of lavender and the herbs she loved, it was of good sweet apples and fragrant burnt sugar. But she stood in her humiliation, and felt herself more unfit for all the high company than the beasts of her farmyard.

“You must not take it unkindly, child,” said Lady Julia, with her cruel little laugh and her soft voice, “but my Lord Blantyre, you see, hath ever a great distaste of all that is homely and uncomely. He hath suffered extraordinarily in that respect of late. We must humor him.”

Truly Pomona was punished. She marveled now at herself, remembering what her presumption had been.

“I will go home, madam, if you permit me.”

Again the ladies cried out. To thwart the invalid--’twas impossible. Was the girl mad? Nay, she would do as they bid? ’Twas well, then. Lady Julia, so kind was she, would help to clothe her in some better apparel and make her fit to present herself. The while the Lady Alethea would return to her post of assiduous nurse, and inform his lordship of Pomona’s speedy attendance.

Pomona gave herself into their hands.

Lord Blantyre lay on a couch in the sunshine. A fountain played merrily to his right; to his left his sister sat demurely at embroidery. In spite of her ladyship’s melancholy account, the patient seemed to have gained marvelously in strength. But he was in no better humor with the world than on the last day of his stay at the farm.

He tossed and fretted among his rich cushions.

“She tarries,” he said, irritably, for the twentieth time. “You are all in league to plague me. Why did you tell me she was coming?”

“My good brother,” answered the fair embroideress, tilting her head to fling him the family sneer, “I pray you curb your impatience, for yonder comes your siren.”

Here was Julia, indeed, undulating toward them, and, after her, Pomona!

Lord Blantyre sat up suddenly and stared. Then he fell back on his cushions and shot a look at Alethea, before which she quailed.

Stumbling in high heels that tripped her at every step, she who had been wont to move free as a goddess; scarce able to breathe in the laced bodice that pressed her form out of all its natural shapeliness, and left so much of her throat bare that the white skin was all crimson in shame down to the borrowed kerchief; her artless, bewildered face raddled with white and red, her noble head scarcely recognizable through the bunching curls that sat so strangely each side of it--what Pomona was this?

“Here is your kind nurse,” fluted Lady Julia. “She had a fancy to bedizen herself for your eyes. I thought ’twould please you, my lord, if I humored the creature.”

“Everyone is to be humored here,” thought poor Pomona, vaguely.

“Come to his lordship, child,” bade Julia, her tones tripped up with laughter.

Pomona tottered yet a pace or two, and then halted. Taller even than the tall Lady Julia, the lines of her generous womanhood took up the silken skirt to absurd brevity, exposing the awkward-twisting feet. Nymph no longer was she, but a huge painted puppet. Only the eyes were unchanged, Pomona’s roe-deer eyes, grieving and wondering, shifting from side to side in dumb pleading. Truly this was an excellent jest of Lady Julia Majendie’s!

It was strange that Lady Alethea, bending closer and closer over her work, should have no laughter left after that single glance from her brother’s eyes; and that Lord Blantyre himself should show such lack of humorous appreciation. There was a heavy silence. Pomona tried to draw a breath to relieve her bursting anguish, but in vain--she was held as in a vise. Her heart fluttered; she felt as if she must die.

“Pomona,” said Lord Blantyre, suddenly, “come closer.”

He reached and caught up his sister’s scissors from her knee, and, leaning forward, snipped the laces that strained across the fine scarlet satin of Pomona’s cruel bodice.

“Now breathe,” ordered he.

And while the other two were staring, unable to credit their eyes, Pomona’s prison fell apart, and over her heaving bosom her thick white shift took its own noble folds.

Then the woman in her awoke and revolted. She flung from her feet the high-heeled shoes, and with frenzied hands tearing down her mockery of a headdress, she ran to the fountain and began to dash the paint off her face. The tears streamed down her cheeks as she laved them.

“Sweet and gentle ladies,” said the Wicked Earl--his tones cut the air like a fine blade--“I thank you for a most excellent demonstration of the superiority of high breeding. May I beg you both to retire upon your triumph, and leave me to deal with this poor, inferior wretch, since you have now most certainly convinced me she can never aspire to such gentility as yours?”

Alethea rose, and, scattering her silks on one side, her embroidery on the other, walked straight away down the terrace, without casting a look behind her. Julia ran after her with skipping step, caught her under the arm, and the laughter of her malice rang out long after she had herself disappeared.

“Pomona,” said Lord Blantyre.

Often he had called to her, in feverish complaint, or anger, or pettishly, like a child, but never in such a tone as this. She came to him, as she had always come; and then she stood in shame before him, her long hair streaming, the tears rolling down her cheeks, her hands folded at her throat, her shapely feet gripping the ground in Julia Majendie’s green silk stockings. Slowly his gaze enveloped her. All at once he smiled, and then, meeting her grieving eyes, he grew grave again, and suddenly his haughty face was broken up by tenderness. He caught one dripping twist of hair, and pulled her toward him, after his gentle-cruel fashion. She fell on her knees beside him and hid her face in his cushions.

“Kiss me, Pomona,” said he.

“Oh, my lord,” she sobbed, “spare me; I am only a poor girl.”

Many a time she had dreamed, since the morning in the orchard, that she was carrying that bleeding body, her lips on the dying roses of his lips, but never, in her humility, had she, even in her sleep, thought of herself as in his arms. This was no dream, and yet so he clasped her.

He bent his dark head over her radiant hair, his voice dropped words sweeter than honey, more healing than balm, into her heart, that was still so bruised that it could scarce beat to joy.

“When I first beheld you in the orchard, I was sorry that I might have to die, Pomona, because you were in life. You carried me in your arms and kept my soul from passing, by the touch of your lips. When the fever burned me you brought me coolness--you lifted me and gave me breath. All night you held me. Patient, strong Pomona! You bore with all my humors. You came to me in the night from your sleep, all in white, like an angel, your bare feet on the boards. Oh, my gentle nurse, my humble love, my mate, my wife!”

She raised her head to gaze at him. Yet she took the wonder like a child, not disclaiming, not questioning.

“Oh!” she said, with a deep, soft sigh.

He fondly pushed the tangled hair from her brow.

“And shall a man make shift with sham and hollow artifice when he can possess truth itself? They put paint on your cheeks, my Pomona, and tricked you out in gauds, and behold, I saw how great was the true woman beside the painted doll!”

He kissed her lips, and then he cried:

“Oh, golden apple, how is the taste of thee sweet and pure!”

And, after a silence, he said to her, faintly, for he was still weak for such rapture:

“Lift me, my love, and let me lie a while against your woman’s heart, for never have I drawn such sweet breath as in your arms.”

THE MASTER OF THE DIDO

BY ELIZABETH DUER

[Illustration]

A certain great corporation was digging up New York and setting microbes loose in quarters too aristocratic to suffer inconvenience with patience, and so there were a general boarding up of front doors and windows, a rush to Europe or to watering places; and my elders, who were just recovering from the grip, decided that Southstrand in the month of May was preferable to pneumonia in town. Therefore I--Kate Russell--was sent on ahead to open my mother’s cottage at that gay little resort, in spite of my uncle Barton Hay’s warnings against such an unchaperoned proceeding, and mamma’s distrust of my housekeeping powers. She was not strong enough to undertake it herself, but to intrust the sacred rites of cleaning and unpacking to the supervision of a girl of twenty seemed to her abnormal; while uncle Barton felt that no unmarried woman should be given such liberty.

My uncle had condescended to live with us since my father’s death, and, while he was too set in his ways to do anything for anybody, we were much attached to him, and let him bully us, as most women do the one man in the house.

“Julia,” he said, addressing my mother, “you are surely not going to send Kate off alone to that jumping-off place, Southstrand! If some young fellow elopes with her, you’ll have yourself to thank.”

“This is the twentieth century, Barton,” said mamma, laughing; “young women do not elope nowadays. They may defy parents and divorce husbands, but they don’t elope.”

“Don’t they?” snorted uncle Barton. “I say they do! When I was at Nassau this winter, a young Englishman, without two cents to jingle on a tombstone, eloped with old Stanbury Steel’s daughter. They borrowed his friend Lord Battleford’s steam yacht--you must remember about Battleford--started round the world a poor lieutenant on some English man-of-war, and came back to find half a dozen relations dead, and a title and fortune waiting for him. Well, as I was saying, they got him to lend them his yacht, touched at Miami to get married, and were off before old Steel could catch ’em. Mark my words, Julia, girls are not to be trusted.”

This last remark switched them back to the starting point, and they finally agreed to let me go.

The swallow that does not make summer came to us disguised as one warm day, and mamma dispatched me on my mission, although before I could pack and get off the weather had turned chilly, with a wind from the east.

I was allowed a bodyguard of two servants--the most incompetent in the house, and therefore the most easily spared: old Murphy, a preserved supernumerary, who, having been my father’s valet, was kept on through sentiment, and Bridget, the housemaid, also elderly and very irritable.

We reached our little, airy, seaside home at sundown--only there wasn’t any sun--and found the fires, lighted by the women who had been cleaning, most agreeable after a chilly drive from the station. The wind was howling and rattling through the cracks of the window frames, and actually made its way between the boards of the floor. There was nothing to oppose its fury; it could sweep up uninterruptedly from the Antilles or across from Europe, and that night it seemed to come from both directions at once, and make whirling eddies on our south piazza.

Murphy served me a nice little repast on a tray, so that I did not have to leave the library fire, and I amused myself with my novel till half-past nine, and then rang the bell.

“I am going to bed, Murphy,” I said. “You may lock up.”

“Me and Bridget’s going ourselves, ma’am,” he answered.

“See that all the shutters are securely fastened,” I added. “The cleaners left some of them open, but they should be closed such a night as this.”

“Make yourself easy, Miss Kate,” he said, patronizingly. “Me and Bridget knows the ways of them _weemen_.”

And so, drowsy with the narcotic of sea air, my household went to bed.

As I undressed, I heard the first splash of rain. It didn’t come pattering like a shower, but in a wild dash against the side of the house, as if the wind had caught the crests of all the waves and was hurling them landward.

A line of a hymn I used to repeat to mamma in my childish days came back to me as I laid my head on the pillow:

Guard the sailors tossing on the deep blue sea.

Truly they would need guarding that night, I reflected; but as sentiment rarely interferes with inclination, my sympathy for the tempest-tossed sailors did not prevent my going to sleep promptly and remaining in that state of oblivion for hours.

About three o’clock--possibly a little earlier--I waked up with a beating heart; some unusual noise had disturbed me, and I raised myself on my elbow to listen. It came again--my shutter, banging like a sledge hammer. If anyone thinks it is pleasant to get out of a warm bed to wrestle with a recalcitrant shutter in the teeth of an Atlantic gale, they don’t know the south shore of Long Island--that is all! I waited for a moment, selfishly hoping Bridget might hear and come to my aid, but Bridget was no such goose--and I got up to help myself.

As is often the case on the coast, the rain was fitful; sometimes it came in torrents, and then for half an hour it would cease. Just now the wind was the only aggressor, and as I stood shivering and looking out through my shutterless window toward the sea, up through the blackness ran a tiny trail of fire that burst into a star and fell.

Amazement was my first sensation, and then terror! A ship was drifting on the bar and signaling for help, and perhaps I was the only living soul who had seen it! I knew the life-saving crew were close at hand--their station stood across the road opposite to our cottage--but with the exception of the two men on duty, making their dreary patrol of the beach, they were probably asleep in their beds, and those two might be several miles to the east or the west, at the end of their beat, while the helpless creatures on the bar sent their flashing prayer for aid.

Hastily lighting my reading lamp, I set it in my window; that much of comfort should be theirs--they should know that one landlubber was up and stirring in their behalf. Next I ran to Bridget’s room and shook her till she waked. Her irritation yielded to the excitement of the moment, and she undertook to get Murphy up and to join me as soon as possible.

I had come up to Southstrand well provided with warm, rough clothing, and I dressed as rapidly and suitably as I could to go out in the storm. Bridget, in spite of a sharp tongue, had the kind-heartedness of her nation, and needed no second bidding to make up the kitchen fire and unpack the blankets.

“Sure they’ll need something to warm their drownded bodies if they come ashore,” she declared. “So have the whisky handy, Miss Kate, for belike they’ll want it.”

I had pushed my curly mane into a tam, and buttoned a waterproof coat over my short skirts, and I now opened the back door and went out before Bridget realized what I meant to do. She came roaring after me, horrified at my venturing alone into the night, but I was beyond recall, halfway over to the life-saving station.

Trust our coast crews for good service. Except for one solitary Triton in his sou’wester, every man of the crew was already on the beach, and this one was only making the place snug before rushing after them. He started when I addressed him, for I came upon him softly.

“So you knew about the vessel!” I exclaimed, standing in the doorway of the great barn of a place where the apparatus for rescue is kept--the boat and the life car and mortar, the breeches buoy and the life belts--most of which was now on the beach.

The man looked at me with ill-disguised impatience.

“I want to shut that door, lady,” he said.

Evidently I had to make my choice between being squeezed flat or getting out of the way.

In a moment he emerged through a smaller door, and began striding toward the beach, and I, nothing daunted by his surliness, ran beside him. We passed through a cleft between the sand dunes and over the heavy sands of the upper beach, and as we ran my indifference to the storm seemed to win me a reluctant esteem, for he condescended to answer some of my questions.

He said they judged the vessel to be a small one, that she would probably drift over the bar with the tide that had just turned to come in, and would go to pieces near shore; that they would try to launch the lifeboat, but he didn’t believe they would succeed in such a surf, and he guessed they would have to shoot a line over her and use the breeches.

I could only hear about half his words, for they were carried away by the wind, which tore across the beach so laden with loose sand that it lashed our faces like a whip. I thanked him for his information, and asked his name, and then I told him mine, and tried to prove the sincerity of my wish to help.

“I am Miss Russell, and this is my house,” I said, pointing to the lighted windows of the cottage a few hundred feet away. “You may call on me for blankets or bedding, or refreshment of any kind--good luck to you, Mr. Herrick. I shall stand here and watch.”

“We’ll do all we can,” he said, shaking his head, “but the chances to save them folks out there looks pretty poor to me.”

Here he left me, and directed his steps toward the swinging lanterns that marked the spot where his companions were busy. They had run their large surf boat to the edge of the waves, and were making strenuous efforts to launch it, but in the darkness and in such a sea it was little short of madness. Every time there was a momentary lull, the men, with their hands grasping the gunwales, rushed waist-deep into the water, but before they could scramble into the boat, a great roller would drive it and them back on the beach, and they were beginning to lose heart.

Half an hour had passed since the stranded vessel had signaled, and I began to fear that all was over, when close--quite close--a blue light burned, and we saw her plainly only a few hundred yards from the shore. I was standing as near the tide line as I dared, and in my excitement was frequently caught by the invading waves and wet to my knees--but what do such things matter in the presence of a tragedy?

While I looked I became conscious that the figures of the life-saving crew were dimly visible, and far across the sea a gray light crept into the sky; the day was breaking, and one element of terror was gone.

Our men abandoned the idea of using their boat, and they drew it out of reach of the waves, and dragged their mortar into position. By this time it was light enough for us to see the vessel, and a sorry sight she was. She was pointing up the coast, her bowsprit gone and her forward mast broken about halfway down; she listed terribly to leeward, and every third or fourth wave washed entirely over her deck. Her crew were in the rigging of the mainmast; we thought we could make out six. She was a little craft to have ventured upon a voyage, for no pleasure boat would be off Southstrand at that season of the spring unless returning from southern or European waters, and there was something in her appearance that pronounced her a yacht even to my inexperienced eyes.

Bang went the mortar! But in the uncertain light the aim must have missed, for I saw the men hauling back the line and coiling it with lightning speed. My heart beat to suffocation; I felt as if it were tied to the end of that slender cord, and was now being dragged through the fury of the sea.

Once more they sighted and fired, and as they stood grouped, watching the effect, I ventured to join them. My friend Herrick had a glass, and was reporting his observations. Out of the rigging a man swung down to the deck--the line had evidently crossed the ship! Now came a moment of intense excitement--would he get it before a monster wave washed it away, or would both he and the life line be swept off before the eyes of his comrades in the rigging? Whatever happened, he had written himself a hero in one woman’s heart.

“He’s got it!” I heard Herrick shout, and in confirmation we could see him climbing back on the mast, while another man seemed to be aiding him in making the line fast. We could distinguish even distant objects now; the day was coming on apace.

At that moment a mountainous wave struck the yacht, making her careen so violently that the mast seemed to touch the sea, and when she righted herself the lowest man was gone!

Without knowing it, I must have sobbed aloud, for Herrick laid a rough hand on my shoulder.

“This ain’t no place for women,” he said, though not unkindly. “You had better go home, Miss Russell.”

“I’ll not go home,” I answered, angrily, and then I, in my turn, grasped his arm.

“What is that in that wave?” I almost screamed, and he answered, with an oath I dare not set down:

“It’s a man!”

Most of the life-saving men were busy paying out the heavy line that was to support the breeches buoy to and from the sinking ship, but one young fellow heard Herrick’s shout, and followed him to the edge of the waves. They were already in their cork belts, and Herrick now fastened a rope round his waist and gave the coil to his companion as he waited for the incoming surge. The two stood like a pair of leashed greyhounds prepared to spring.

On came the roller--not a wall of water, like many that had preceded it, but low, swift and sweeping, with a nasty side twist--and in its foam, sometimes tossed high, sometimes hidden in the spray, came its human burden.

Herrick ran forward to meet the wave, and plunged under as it broke, while we on shore watched with throbbing hearts his game with death. It seemed an even chance whether he would snatch his prey from the sea, or be trampled himself in its cruel pounding. The agony of the moment made it seem interminable, and I think I must have lost consciousness, for I found myself on the sands with my head against the lifeboat, and, a hundred feet away, Herrick and the man he had saved were stretched side by side.

I never saw anything as humanly perfect as that sailor. He was a young man--decidedly under thirty--with the regularity of feature we usually consider Greek, and a look of repose beautiful to behold. Dignity, tenderness and a soft languor all mingled in the expression of his face.

I could not believe that he was dead, such a little time had elapsed since he had been swept from the vessel, and I knelt beside him and began to rub his cold hands between my own.

The hands were good--too good for a seafaring man, and with feminine precipitance I jumped to the conclusion that this beautiful, fair-haired Viking was the owner of the yacht, and no sooner had this idea entered my mind than romance was busy weaving a web round my heart. The lower part of his face was bronzed by exposure, but the forehead was white as a child’s, and above it the short hair grew low, and ruffled itself in little rings as the water dripped from it. I knew if ever the eyes met mine they would be blue, and I gazed as if the force of my will could compel them to disclose their secret to me. Perhaps it did--for suddenly the lids trembled, then opened, and a pair of blue-gray eyes looked sternly in my face. The expression was defiant, as if the spirit had been braced to meet danger, but in a second the hard look vanished, and the eyes seemed to smile before they slowly shut, as if the effort had cost all remaining vitality.

Herrick’s companion was just starting to run for help when that redoubtable person sat up and then staggered to his feet. He had only had the wind knocked out of him, and was his own sturdy self in a few minutes, with a wealth of invectives that broke rudely upon my exalted mood. He called to his companion to get to work if he didn’t want the man to die on their hands, and added, crossly:

“We can’t do anything here with a woman lookin’ on. Just carry him over to the station, and we’ll cut these wet clothes off him and give him a show at the fire, and I guess he’ll pull round all right.”

They hoisted him over the shoulder of the younger man, and bore him off, leaving me humiliated by my disabilities for usefulness. I stood rooted to the spot where I had knelt beside the sailor, a flood of pity and admiration filling my heart, and a passionate wondering whether life or death were to be the portion of the man whose beauty and courage had so moved me. Herrick’s rough kindness seemed to me sacrilege.

In the meantime the breeches buoy had made one trip and landed its first passenger, a monkey-like old sailor with gold earrings and black whiskers surrounding his flat face. He spat the salt water from his mouth, and with as little concern as if he were furling a sail he lent a hand to the coast crew in their work of rescue.

I approached the group to repeat the offer I had already made to Herrick of fire and refreshment at my cottage, and overheard the old fellow’s replies to certain questions our men put to him concerning the yacht and the man who had been washed overboard.

“That was our captain,” he said. “I’ve sailed with worse--durned sight worse! Got him, did you? Name is Holford--yacht _Dido_--coming from Nassau by way of Bermuda--here she comes!”

This last was in reference to the breeches, which was freighted for the second time.

The wind was going down as the day advanced, and the waves seemed less vicious. To my shame, I found my interest in the rescue of my fellow creatures had dwindled since the Viking had been borne off, and I became keenly aware of my bodily discomfort. I was wet to the skin and exhausted to the last degree, and hardly had the strength to drag myself home. Before going to my room, however, I dispatched Murphy over to the station with blankets and hot coffee, together with a bottle of whisky, and I charged Bridget to let me know his report of Captain Holford.

It was a long time before she brought me any news, and then it was interspersed with characteristic scoldings.

“Why didn’t I come before? Glory be to goodness, this day and this night, child. How can I be everywhere at once? People running in for hot drinks, and half-drowned creatures sopping the kitchen with sea water; it’s half dead I am! The captain of the ship? Well, Murphy says he’s alive, but he guesses he’s hurt internal, and the doctor’s been and taken him over to that little house across the field, where he can be more quiet and have a room to himself. You drink this hot tea, Miss Kate, and get into your bed, if you don’t want to be sick after this night’s work.”

She set down the tea and walked off, disapprobation expressed in every line of her retreating figure. When she reached the stairs I heard her mutter:

“Young ladies running out with the men in the middle of the night. ’Tain’t my idea of manners, and I guess it won’t be Mrs. Russell’s either, when I tell her what Miss Kate’s been up to.”

If I had been a boy I should have said something forcible to Bridget.

* * * * *

A severe cold kept me in my room for two days, and made me humble enough to swallow Bridget’s nostrums as well as her reproaches, for the dread that she might send for my mother and put an end to future free

## action on my part held me enslaved.

The gale blew itself out, and nature remembered that the month was May. May at Southstrand meant buttercups as large as daisies, and, in the woods, clustering masses of pink azaleas. The beach grass on the dunes waved silver in the south wind, the fields and meadows intensified their spring freshness by a cunning shading of velvet greens, and the blue of the sky melted into the sea.

During the hours of my imprisonment I had thought but one thought, seen but one vision--the face of my sailor captain as he lay on the beach, and I asked myself how I dared to thus idealize a stranger. Not for a second did I doubt his place in life. Class prejudice was mine to an overmastering extent, but I told myself that such beauty of body could only be the home of what I was pleased to call _the soul of a gentleman_. For narrowness of vision commend me to that which has only seen life through plate-glass windows and lace curtains. Thanks to a new influence, mine broadened and matured with the ripening summer.

The morning of the third day I ventured out, and naturally directed my steps to the life-saving station to ask news of the yacht’s crew. Herrick was just outside with his bicycle, prepared to skim off to the village to spend his leisure hours with his family, but he courteously waited to greet me and answer my questions.

The rescued men had been sent to New York. The captain had attended to that, for, while he was unable to be moved just yet owing to injuries he had received, he was able to give his orders and see that they were carried out.

“Doesn’t he mourn the wreck of his yacht?” I asked, and Herrick answered:

“Lor’, miss! ’Tain’t nothin’ to him; he’s only the sailing master. The _Dido’s_ owned by a rich man, who is off on his wedding trip, and sent the yacht home from Nassau with this young fellow.”

Only the sailing master! My lips kept whispering it, and my brain would not take it in. It meant that I--Katherine Russell, the fastidious daughter of tradition, of all exclusiveness--had fallen in love with a sailing master, and, what was far worse, I had fallen in love unsolicited. What would my mother say--and uncle Barton? Uncle Barton, who was always rolling that magic word, “gentleman,” under his tongue, and despising others. Of course they need never know, but my secret hurt me.

Desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and as I walked along the lanes in a passion of rage at my own weakness, I determined to see this man and let him destroy his own image in my heart. I was in love with a creature of my own creation--I knew neither his mind nor his speech--perhaps his first words would dispel the illusion and set me free.

Across the field was the little house that harbored him, open doored and cheerful in the sunshine, and I boldly turned my face thither. As I approached, the farmer’s wife came out of her henhouse with her apron full of fresh eggs, and I affected to wish to buy some for my housekeeping, and strolled with her to the porch.

“I’ll put them in a basket for you, Miss Russell,” she said, pausing. “I am sorry I cannot ask you inside to wait, but my parlor is let to the captain of that wrecked vessel, and he’s still too sick to leave his bed.”

As she spoke a towering figure filled the doorway and a deep voice said:

“Oh, no, he isn’t, Mrs. Price, for here he is, and hungry enough to beg for one of those eggs for a second breakfast.”

He was dressed in a blue flannel shirt, such as the village shops furnished, a pair of dark trousers, also village made, and a coat which must have been lent to him by the farmer: and he wore them with an air that was regal.

Now that I was face to face with my folly, I recovered my senses, and, while I felt puzzled by the contradictions he presented, I was brave enough to take advantage of opportunity.

“You must allow me to congratulate you upon your rescue and that of your crew, Mr. Holford,” I said. “You had a narrow escape.”

“The congratulations are due to the gallantry of your coast guards,” he answered, with enthusiasm.

“I am sorry about the yacht,” I continued; “she is still holding together, for one mast thrusts itself out of the water at low tide and looks so pathetic.”

“A monument to bad seamanship,” he said, impatiently. “It is the last boat I shall ever attempt to sail.”

“But isn’t sailing your occupation?” I asked, aghast at his easy way of laying down his livelihood. “There must be plenty of gentlemen needing sailing masters, even if this one especial yacht has gone to the bottom.”

He stared at me blankly, and then a quizzical look came into his eyes, as he answered:

“Few gentlemen care to employ an unsuccessful sailing master; indeed, I am not sure but that my license will be revoked. No, no, the ocean has thrown me upon the land, and I mean to take the hint.”

“It seems hard to begin life all over again,” I said, sympathetically.

He impressed me as a man gently nurtured, who had adopted a profession for which he was not originally intended.

“You mustn’t waste too much compassion on me,” he replied. “I have no one dependent upon me, and, besides, I am not at the end of my resources. I possess a few acres of farm land. There is nothing to prevent my turning myself into a son of the soil.”

At this juncture Mrs. Price came back with the eggs, and I turned to go, feeling the conversation was becoming almost too personal.

“Good-by,” I said. “I am glad you are better. Is there anything I can do for you?”

He came painfully after me down the path; the muscles of his back had been hurt and he moved stiffly.

“Two things if you will,” he said, with rather a saucy smile: “tell me where I have seen you before, and lend me some books.”

This was getting on a little too fast. If he had been my social equal, if we had possessed friends in common, he could not have been more assured in his manner.

“I have never spoken to you before in my life,” I said, coldly. “I will send you some books, Mr. Holford.”

Again the merriment flashed into his eyes, and he stood in my path.

“You would prefer me with manners cold as my hands were the other day when you chafed them for me on the beach. You see, I remember--and I prefer you with a red Tam o’ Shanter on your curly locks. Oh, don’t be vexed!” he added, with entreaty in his voice. “I do not mean to be impertinent, but I have been haunted by a vision, and the impression is intensified by reality.” He drew aside to let me pass, and I hurried down the path, more in love with this impudent, outrageous stranger than before.

I sent Murphy with the books; a choice collection of direct narratives--Conan Doyle, Clark Russell stories, that I considered suited to a taste more practical than scholarly--but as an afterthought I added a novel I had just read, a psychological problem as to one’s right to dispose of life in the manner to give the richest fulfillment to present desires at the expense of future wreck or death.

I was thoroughly disingenuous with myself, for my only object in sending that book was to mark its effect, to welcome its discussion, and yet I pretended I never wished to see Mr. Holford again.

* * * * *

Perhaps it was not altogether my fault that we met every day, and sometimes twice a day, in that week allotted to his recovery. If I strolled up the beach when my house duties were over, I was sure to be waylaid by Mr. Holford on my return, and he leaned so heavily on his cane, and entreated me so earnestly to sit down for a moment and rest, that common humanity made me accede to his request.

I had a shrewd suspicion that Bridget was always dogging my footsteps, and once or twice I surprised a flitting figure disappearing round the piazza when Captain Holford walked home with me, but as she never ventured to remonstrate openly, I did not suppose she would presume to write about me to mamma.

This went on for six glorious days, and we talked of everything on earth, and even exchanged views of the trans-celestial, and the rest of the time we talked of ourselves, and again of ourselves. He drew from me my thoughts and hopes, the monotonous story of a sheltered girl’s life, and the shrinking and longing--so oddly mixed--with which she viewed the impending future; and in return he talked much of his feelings, but little of his past, though vaguely I guessed that a great financial change had come to him not very long ago, and I understood how painful explanations might be, and admired his uncomplaining courage.

At our last meeting, for he was going away the next day, we discussed that burning question of what an enlightened conscience owes to others--to prejudice and class distinction as against its larger usefulness and happiness.

We were seated near the top of a sand dune with the Atlantic murmuring at our feet, and behind us the merry little village settling down to rest after the labors of the day. Mr. Holford had been talking of youth, its sensuous keenness to pain or pleasure, and saying that worldly prudence meant sacrificing life at its flood of physical development to the dreary protection of its decay.

“We must go hungry,” he concluded, disdainfully, “while we have the teeth to eat, in order that our mumbling old age may be regaled with banquets it is past enjoying.”

His reasoning seemed to me fallacious.

“If youth is restrained,” I said, “it is only in the cause of self-respect. What civilized being wishes to be a burden to others?”

“Civilization means hardened selfishness,” he said. “It conjugates all its tenses with _to have_, seldom with _to be_.”

I asked myself whether this bitterness was a protest against the social barrier between us, and I said, reproachfully:

“I don’t like you in this mood. You are hard.”

“The sordid side of life has been thrust upon me,” he said, sadly. “I have known poverty and riches, and I have suffered almost as much from one as the other, till I hate such influences. Why, even you--a girl of twenty--would deny your best impulses if you fell in love with a man below you in position. Look into my eyes and tell me if I have guessed the truth?”

I looked into his eyes and saw something that made the color mount to my cheeks and set my heart thumping.

“A girl doesn’t own her own life, Mr. Holford,” I managed to answer. “She only owns a little part of herself called her heart, and that seems of small consequence to her elders.”

“Her elders!” he repeated, scornfully. “There spoke the conventional girl. We will not talk in quibbles any longer. I love you. I am an honorable man, and therefore worthy of the woman I love. I can support you in decent comfort. Will you marry me?”

He held out that handsome brown hand to me, and I put mine in it.

“I will love you,” I said, “because I cannot help myself, but I will not marry you without my mother’s consent, because it would make me miserable. You have loved me in spite of my classbound education, now win me openly and honorably or go your way.”

I sprang to my feet, meaning to leave him, but he caught my frock like a naughty child, and held me while he scrambled painfully to his feet.

“God bless you, Kate,” he said, “you are right, as usual. As long as you love me for my very self, it makes little difference that your mother may probably accept me for a different reason. Tell me once more that you love the poor sailing master of the _Dido_--that if left to yourself, you would share his fortunes, no matter how humble--and then I will tell you the truth.”

And I told him; indeed, it was sweet to make the confession, with no one to share it but the crickets in the beach grass, and a belated bird calling to her mate, and when I had satisfied his craving to be loved, I claimed his promise.

“Now what have you to tell me?” I demanded, for he had stung my woman’s curiosity.

“Only that Holford is no longer my name,” he said, smiling; “at least only a part of it. Several years ago, by a strange turn of fortune, I----”

He stopped abruptly, for mamma appeared on the top of the sand hill and fluttered down upon us like an avenging angel.

“Kate!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here? And who is this person with whom you are on such intimate terms that he holds your hands while he talks to you? My daughter seems unable to answer me,” she continued, turning to my lover; “perhaps you will favor me with some account of yourself?”

“With pleasure,” he said, his eyes dancing wickedly. “Miss Russell could not tell you my name because she doesn’t know it herself. I am----”

And here he was again interrupted by uncle Barton sliding down the sand hill and landing heavily.

“Great Scott!” he grumbled, “I’ve a ton of sand in each shoe! I hope I did not hurt you, sir--why, can it be? What the devil are you doing here, Battleford? Do you know my sister, Mrs. Russell? This is Lord Battleford, Julia, whom I met at Nassau.”

At this point his wits revealed to him that Lord Battleford was the castaway sailor whose attentions to me had alarmed Bridget into writing to my mother for help, and he turned upon the young gentleman with rancor.

“You don’t seem to need any introduction to my niece, Lord Battleford,” he said, loftily, while his face flushed with turkey-cock rage, “and I beg to inform you that I think it a deuced ungentlemanlike thing on your part to compromise a girl with clandestine meetings and flirtations in the absence of her family, and I tell you plainly the whole thing has got to stop.”

“Not so fast, if you please, Mr. Hay,” said my sailor, laughing. “I have won a wife who likes me for what I _am_ irrespective of what I _have_, and I hope you and Mrs. Russell are not going to spoil our romance by refusing your consent. Speak up, Kate,” he said, turning to me; “tell these discreet people that I am something better than a title--a man you have learned to love.”

And so I had to make a second confession of the state of my heart, and mamma succumbed in two minutes to Battleford’s charms--or those of his title--but I heard Uncle Barton still scolding as he helped her up the sand dune.

“Oh, yes, he’ll make a she-earl of Kate--countess, I mean--but he’ll take her away from us, and I fancy you will yet regret the day you trusted her out of your sight, when the ocean lies between us and our little girl.”

But she didn’t! For in giving me to Battleford she not only had me often with her, but gained the dearest of sons.

MRS. EVREMOND

By

Mrs. John Van Vorst

& Marie Van Vorst

[Illustration]

When Mrs. Evremond found herself actually in her carriage it seemed to her that it would never go fast enough, although Heaven knows she was indifferent to the speed of her vehicles as a rule, there being no reason why she should hasten--no place she especially cared to arrive at, no excitement or element of it in her quiet life. But this afternoon she was conscious of every rotation of the wheels.

When the Arc de Triomphe had been passed and in and out among automobiles and tramways her little yellow-wheeled brougham crossed the Etoile and began the descent, suddenly, with the inconsequence marking a woman’s emotions as clearly as it stamps her reasonings, Mrs. Evremond decided the coachman was driving at a ridiculous rate. After all, she hoped never to reach the Place de la Concorde--never to traverse the Pont Royal and leave for the Latin Quarter and the other side of the river--the _insouciant_ world of the Bois and American Paris. She had no desire to find the obscure street in which her husband had his studio--which street was, however, the direction she had given her footman, and it was toward No. 15 bis, Passage du Maine, that with such useless speed she was being driven.

They reached and passed the Elysée Palace Hotel. Mrs. Evremond blew through the tube at her side, the brougham drew up to the curb, stopped and she got out.

“You may go home. I shall not need you again to-day,” she directed, and, turning to the avenue, she began to walk down the Champs Elysées. She might at least be mistress of her own gait; walk with short, feverish little steps or retard her pace to keep harmony with her alternate rapid or halting reflections, for her mind, as she walked, went back over the past six months of her married life with a persistence, a clearness, that denoted how important were the details, how ineffaceable were the marks her experiences had made upon her, how intensely she felt what she had lived, how seriously she had taken life, how absorbed she was in the man to whom she had attached herself--how desperately she loved her husband. The vividness with which she thought of him had the precision of a fresh image. The impulsive rush of herself toward the harbor her conception of him made proved, by its very force and freshness, that thinking of him like this was a new thing. She had lived with him, existed by his side, for six years, and had never thought about him, around him, as she did to-day.

She gasped. “Perhaps if I had thought about him a little more and loved him a little less, _this_ might not have happened!”

The happening, so distressing to her, which had caused her, at an unusual hour, to ring for her carriage, dress and fly from the house on an expedition she knew to be close to ill-breeding in its likeness to melodrama and its distinct opposition to codes of expedient, had been finding a letter--the world-worn story that comes to each woman with a new pang.

As Mrs. Evremond reached the Rond Point, she asked herself: “What am I really going to do? What do I expect to see and find, and how shall I act when I find it?”

Women constantly commit the platitude--if such an expression can be used--of thinking they are acting on certain occasions contrary to their characters, out of gear with their codes. Mrs. Evremond was not an impulsive temperament. Unaccustomed to crises or events that called for the quick decision of more brilliant and self-sufficient minds, she had found herself face to face with a problem, and was acting with a precipitation that made her dizzy, and a promptitude that suggested she had been brought into contact with just such difficulties many times before.

The well-bred gentlewoman had seized, without second thought, the letter lying open at her feet, read it, gasped over it, paled over it, hated and disbelieved it--crushed it in her hand, and, with the now crumpled sheet between glove and palm, she was on her way to verify its purport; to make sure of the fact which women, if they would but know it, are many times happier in ignoring; to prove to herself what? That her husband was unfaithful to her; that she must either “cease to love him”--by the operation of one of those unbalancing _coups de foudre_ which, we are told, turn honey to gall and love to hate in the human breast at one revolution--or that with the discovery she must also acknowledge, no matter _what_ he did, she would love him still, and would, therefore, curse an enlightenment which should only give her a useless bitter grief to suffer for the rest of her life.

She stopped still at the Place de la Concorde. She never walked alone in the streets of Paris at this hour, and the aspect of the city was new to her. In the early winter twilight the Place shone through the mingled mists of evening, and the golden hazy scintillations haloing the yellow lamps. The sunset had left the sky over the Tuileries still red, and above the river the heavens darkened and grew cold, but the bridge lights beckoned. Her hands were in her muff, her cheeks red with exercise, and her eyes, which had wept more tears in the last few hours than they would acknowledge to have seen for many months, stung in the sharp air. She stood irresolute. Behind her the Champs Elysées stretched to the apex at the Arc. It would be a quiet, restful walk home. Should she not take it, return and force herself to learn the lesson--that it is folly to be too wise? As she clasped her hands together in her muff the letter crushed upon her palm; she set her lips, drew a sharp breath, and resumed her walk, turning across to the Pont de la Concorde, traversing it quickly, a graceful, agile pedestrian among the many foot passengers, unobserving of the admiring eyes of those whose chase is beauty.

After a very long walk, Mrs. Evremond gained the boulevard she sought, turned into a dark little street, into a still darker alley.

The old _concierge_ met her at the _loge_, a peasant _gardienne_, blear-eyed and wearing the white cap of her province. She blinked at madame, and under the thick lace veil Mrs. Evremond had worn to shield her emotion from the curious, the old woman did not recognize her tenant’s wife.

“Monsieur told me that he is expecting madame,” she said, familiarly. “He will not be long. Madame will go in----”

Without reply, she passed the woman and went up to her husband’s room.

Expecting her? No, that she knew was not the case--he was expecting another; even the old _portière_ was in his wretched secret, while she alone, perhaps, of all Paris had been ignorant.

As she crossed the threshold of the studio she seemed to enter the apartment of a perfect stranger, so far away from her the last few hours had served to put him. The room was cold. She opened the door of the little stove, and, finding the fire laid, put a match to the kindling; in a moment the sharp crackling of the wood met her ears with a friendly domestic voice whose language was to her ears cruelly that of the hearth and home. If what the missive implied were true, her husband had loved another woman for many months. He had met her here in this place which the wife looked upon as sacred to his art; whose precincts she had respected with fidelity, believing them devoted to his work, and fearing to be obtrusive.

The studio had indeed been sacred, but to an unlawful love.

Her first impulse was to throw her muff down, unwind the fur from her neck and make herself as comfortable as she could in the gloom of the spacious room; but instead she walked restlessly about, taking in the details of decoration, the attractive disorder, with unseeing eyes. Behind that large screen Maurice’s models dressed and undressed--women of the people, women of the streets, of course, of the lowest, most degrading type; face to face with them, alone with them, he had passed hours of his life with them for years. She had never been jealous of them, she had never thought of them; she had regarded them in the same light with easels, and paint, and studio equipment.

Why had she not been jealous of them? They were women, and if Maurice was so unattached that he was either a prey or a victim, or a seeker of such affairs as this which she now believed she had discovered, why should she not take it for granted that there were many and varied experiences of which she had been the unconscious dupe? She shuddered--anger and distrust whispered her to hate her husband, to despise his weakness and never to forgive him.

In her lonely promenade she peopled the room with incidents and scenes which did her wrong, and proved to what extent she had unnerved herself, what rein she gave to jealousy and fear. She had lighted a lamp, and in its light took out the crumpled piece of paper from her glove and re-read it again. It was a love letter, the warm and confident letter of a woman who loves to the man who loves her. At its close it gave him rendezvous for half-past five o’clock at 11 bis, Passage du Maine.

As Mrs. Evremond’s eyes followed the lines among the wrinkles of the crumpled page, her eyes brimmed over again with tears, her knees trembled, she felt herself actually ready to fall. With the return of her tears came a softening of her anger--a relief of her unnerved state, of her suffering--for a second she wept silently. At the moment when her control was beyond her power she thought she heard a sound on the stairway, and her heart stopped beating very nearly--the blood flew to her face.

A sense of shame overcame her--shame for herself, for him and for the other woman. What a horrible thing to follow and spy upon her husband! What scene did she meditate? What tirade should spring to her lips? It showed, indeed--the fact of her presence--how degrading was the whole matter, if it could bring her to this. And the woman who bravely had come all the way from her home to find out what she dreaded, now that enlightenment was at hand, longed to run from it, and wished herself a thousand miles away. _If it were true, she would rather die than know._ If it were not true, how she would loathe herself for her presence here!

The steps ceased, and in the consoling silence Mrs. Evremond regained her natural balance--and swung true. She turned from the table near which she had been standing, and more hurriedly than she had entered left the studio--almost ran past the _loge_ of the old _concierge_, and unseen by her slipped out of the open gate, called a passing cab and crept into it, guiltily, closing the door upon what she felt was her dishonor.

* * * * *

Whereas Mrs. Evremond’s life was made up of monologue reflection, of days of solitude and lately of lonely evenings, Mr. Evremond was seldom alone. Weariness and ennui possessed him as soon as he was face to face with his thoughts in solitude, and he, therefore, arranged his life, in as much as possible, to avoid his ego, which, for some reason or other, he cared never to entertain _en tête-à-tête_!

He gave rendezvous for the morning hours to his men friends, so that even while he painted he was attended by one or another of a dozen intimates, who amused and diverted him. When these failed, he would even call in the curtain hanger or a carpenter for some impromptu task, and the necessity of sharing the burden of his personality he attributed to his sociability. It was innocent enough that the mere noise of a carpenter’s plane, the tap, tap, of an upholsterer’s hammer, should be company to him, yet this need of another’s presence had been the demoralization of his character. So long as there was somebody with him, he put off the moment of reckoning with himself, the salutary confession productive of the efforts which count in a man’s life. And so the inward voice of conscience had been drowned by the voice of human companions.

Evremond was pleased with the world and disgusted with himself. Good health and a love of beauty caused him perpetual enjoyment, whereas his moral insensibility, the deadening of his ego, deprived him of all happiness. He had too long stifled his yawns with a smile to be capable now of tears or laughter, and his attitude was a menace to his wife’s contentment. In the best hours of Mrs. Evremond’s married life, she had felt between her husband and herself that breach of solitude which, no matter by whom, _must be filled_.

She was six years younger than her husband, whom, without knowing, she loved passionately and timidly. Silent as he was, indifferent, as a rule, and always preoccupied, nevertheless he depended upon her. She was the blank page at the end of a book, the instant’s repose for the emotions--she was a habit--she was his wife.

Evremond was at the close of an affair; on his part, an affair not of business, but of the heart. For the past three months he had made desperate love to a woman not his wife. She had denied him nothing. And now it was over. Their meetings had taken place at her house and his own studio, he had seen her in her own boudoir, he had driven with her in the broad light of day through hidden alleys in the Bois. They had made sentimental journeys to the Louvre. Together they had sat in the public gardens of the Tuileries. For three long months they had amused themselves and each other. And now the affair was ended. Evremond was ready to yawn upon it already. Already the memory was becoming indistinct, blent with memories of other adventures so like to this one that it would require a useless effort to distinguish it. But this time there was something different in the ending of the romance, the happy ending reserved for sensitive readers.

This afternoon at five they had met and parted in his studio, a sundering of friendship by mutual consent, with adieux into which both had tried to put feeling enough to justify the hours they had consecrated to each other.

After she had gone he lingered in the familiar room. A long glass screen reflected the dying embers that had fallen red against the iron hearth of the stove. A certain perfume brought with a rush to his mind moments that now became intolerable to him. As he impatiently put the scenes from him, between the stove and the mirror, the mirror in which Evremond could not, try as he would, imagine himself alone, he saw a small gray spot on the polished floor. A handkerchief--no, a glove! He stooped, picked it up, and, as though in defiance of the bolder odors of heavier scent that hung in the air, a faint breath like an appeal came from the bit of _suède_ which held still the imprint of a woman’s hand. His heart seemed to stop as he turned the object over in his hand. It was a small gray glove, distinctly not the property of the woman to whom he had said good-by.

He picked it up and smoothed it out; there was something in it--a bit of crumpled paper over whose ruffled surface ran the words of love and the appeal which had brought him to his last rendezvous. He could not believe his eyes! This was his wife’s glove! It meant, then, that she had found the letter which he had evidently carelessly let fall, and she had read the ridiculous sheet of paper whose words and expressions gave him now a sort of wearied nausea. She had come to the studio to confirm her doubts, she had seen them enter together, of course. She knew everything, then, everything--everything except that it was over--all that should never have been was ended. But that would not clear him in her eyes.

Much disturbed and sick at heart, he went out into the streets and walked slowly along, somewhat like a man in a dream, lighting one cigarette after another, following, as it were, the leading of the tiny light that faded and glowed at the end of the paper cylinder. He walked on until the small house in which he lived near the Avenue du Bois was not more than fifteen minutes distant, then he wandered away from it, his thoughts following an irregular route.

* * * * *

As Mrs. Evremond got into her cab without giving an address, the coachman waited for a second, then leaned down from his box and asked her where he should drive her.

Home--she had none! Why, the term was a farce! It had meant a place shared by her husband and herself--he had dishonored it, blighted it forever in her eyes. She would go at once to her mother’s, and from there write him her conditions--they were hers to make, she knew--he would not put forth any plea; she would never see him again.

She gave the coachman an address in Passy, and the speaking of the number and street out into the dark put finality to what she did. He received it with a “_Bien, madame_,” as casual and cheerful as if she had given him a point of happy meeting instead of neutral ground on which to decide for misery. She sank back in the _fiacre_, white and shaking, and watched the lights of the interminable streets mark her as she passed, and the unconcerned passersby, whom she envied in their apparent freedom from an hour of agony.

She had been betrayed; horribly, cruelly, disloyally left for another woman. At first the jealous bitterness of it obscured all other feeling. She was only conscious of a desire to escape--to put miles between herself and her husband and to be free. He had then not loved her for long, and she had believed herself cherished. Now she believed she had only been uneasily watched. No doubt, even the few occasions on which he had showed her marked affection--notably after some unintended indifference on her part--were to be attributed to his uneasiness, to the assuaging of his conscience. That to such caresses she had been dupe was a fatal obstacle to any reconciliation.

It was her hour to choose between her rights as a wife and her divine right as a woman, and as she mused, hidden in the corner of the little, rattling carriage, Mrs. Evremond saw only the first. The reality from which she was fleeing brought its flood of indignant shame to her face, and she began to despise the ignorance which had placed her in the way of being so easily deceived. She scorned her trust in her husband, and the beautiful qualities of confidence and belief grew to appear as the most pitiable dupes--a rage of humiliation filled her as she realized her blindness during the most poignant moments of her husband’s treachery. Her constancy, her very loyal love, made her pitifully ridiculous in her own eyes.

That a man’s betrayal has power to waken such heat of passion and base humiliation as this in a gentle breast is too unfortunately the case. Evremond’s excuses for tardy entrances, his evading of little attentions to herself which would have involved the devotion of several hours, how puerile and trifling they seemed!--how bald and flagrant they appeared to her illumined understanding! Worst of all it was to feel that whatever love she had innocently shown her husband during these few months had for him no value; had only served to assure him that his wife was suspicionless--at ease; that she was successfully duped, and he might more fearlessly continue on his way. She would set him free--leave him to love whatever woman he chose without the sin of a dishonored vow. He would be at liberty--there would be no trace of her left in his life. And for herself? What would it mean for her? She must well think of it now.

With the completeness a supreme moment of grief alone is capable to accomplish, she saw in a flash her past filled with Maurice and her future without him. With an audible cry, quickly stifled, she leaned forward in the little vehicle, and stretched her hands before her as if she would seize the first, then shrank back, covering her face as if she would shut out the latter.

“I don’t believe he loves her more than me!” she cried, to her wounded soul. “I don’t _believe_ it; there is something in me still that tells me he cares for me--and there is _nothing_ in me to tell me that I do not love my husband--nothing to help me to take the stand of pride and jealousy. I love him--and I always shall.”

Ah, she loved him! There was no doubt about that. And how deeply inevitably it shamed her now to acknowledge it. Her history is the repetition of many a woman’s, and of women less one-minded, less unselfish, more warped by petty jealousies, whose frequency has become habit. But this, the first jealous hour of Mrs. Evremond’s life, was met by a storm of love, in which it was beaten down to the ground as, with a rush, came over her the accumulated tenderness of years, never checked, spontaneously allowed to live in her heart, if never shown to her husband. Instantly purged by its holiness--spiritualized by its unselfishness--she began to wonder if the fault did not lie with herself.

“It is never one-sided,” she thought. “He really loved me very much once--why should he stop loving me? If I have not been able to keep my husband’s love, part, at least, of the fault must be mine?”

It is rare that when a height is reached, after a painful climb, that the vision is dimmed; the reward of the struggle is sight. Whether or not she fatuously blamed herself, whether or not a stronger-minded woman, zealous for her rights and keen to the sense of hurt honor, would be able to detect _any_ fault in the years of the gentle life, the wife, examining herself, believed she saw clear.

She had too readily accepted as a matter of course the idea that devotion promised at the altar is a commodity given over in sacred form and secure from all assaults; hers without future effort. She had slipped into married life too easily, too calmly, and now she thought stupidly, without varying, or seeking to amuse, distract or entertain--without eternally charming the man whom she had once charmed. For her restless and vacillating husband--he was this in her eyes as she mused--she had discovered nothing new in six years. She was a fixture to him--an article of furniture, one with the home, indispensable perhaps as the home itself, but only because, like inanimate things, she had been useful and had made no claim. If she now sought him in judicial manner and demanded confession, renunciation, and all the rest of it, what power remained with her still? Having brought her this far in her musings, the _fiacre_ drove up and stopped. Looking out she saw the _grille_ and the iron lamps hanging lit on either side the posts of the gate, and back of it the garden and her mother’s home. But the sight of this destination brought only a chill to her and no comfort. It was no welcome asylum; she had no desire to fly to her mother’s arms, to weep and pour out her grief. She felt no need of a confidant. She wanted to find some basis of her unchanged loyalty to rest upon--a natural resting place--some strength to take her to her own door.

Her grief, her contemplation of the disaster to her faith in her husband, had left her shaken in all but her love. She loved him, and any life without him was intolerable for her to face. “But,” she reflected, “however much I may prefer a future with him to no matter what life without him, it does not follow that he would decide in the same way.” Yet for some intangible reason she believed it.

She had arrived at the hour which presents itself sooner or later in the life of every married woman, the hour of combat whose issue decides the limit for all future relations.

If she should go to him to-night--wounded vanity recalcitrant--she might stipulate conditions that should forever sunder their lives. Sunder their lives she believed for a passing fantasy, for a weakness, for a caprice on his part. If, on the contrary, she went to him with forgiveness, the very fact that there _was_ such need, that he was forced to receive it, would leave a scar. It requires more grace to forget forgiveness than to forgive. She knew her husband’s nature--it would rankle and corrode. She shrank from the ordeal of an explanation, of any rôle that would link her with this _liaison_.

At all events, descent here at the friendly home was impossible. She gave her own address, Rue Leonard de Vinci, and directed a return through the Bois de Boulogne. The coachman, thinking he was driving a disappointed lady from a _rendezvous manqué_, said: “_Très bien, madame!_” with less cheerfulness than he had shown at the first instructions. Turning briskly through Passy to La Muette, and entering the Bois at that gate, he drove her along at a jogging pace toward home. Home--it had become this once again; not as yet destroyed and marred by torturing questions and recriminations--never, please God, so to be by her! If it had any sacredness, she would try to save it still; if the link were not too fragile, she would mend it; if there were a hearthstone left she would, if she might, kindle some warmth upon it still.

“Perhaps,” she mused, “happiness is ended for my husband and me; at all events, I will not seek its destruction. Perhaps he wants to leave me and be free. He must prove it to me. He has not proved it yet. Perhaps I can learn to be to him more than any other woman can ever be--can charm him to me again as I did when I was a girl. I can try with all my heart.”

She let down the glass of the little window and leaned out. The air was sweet with the smell of the damp winter woods--the trees clustered like phantoms close to the road--there had been an ice storm, and the glistening tops of the pines shone in the night like fairy trees in crystal urns. A few stars were out, big and bright in a sky faintly blue; as Mrs. Evremond lifted her face to them they seemed to shine on her as never before. She looked up into the heavens with a childlike sweetness, and perhaps, in her hope and her goodness, with as pure a faith as prayer ever carried. She was possibly deserted definitely by the man she loved. She had been betrayed by him. She had never suffered in her life as to-day. She could never so suffer again.

We all possess the power to make those who love us suffer just so far. Evremond had come all at once to the high-tide mark of his limit. He could never cause her such keen pain again, and he paid the penalty. She loved him not less but differently, with a tenderness that comes only when we have ceased to lean--to repose; with a protection that only comes when we are conscious of weakness; with renunciation that only comes when we see and accept the destruction of the ideal, the death of illusion, and take up with courage the reality and embrace it instead.

“He shall never know that I know,” she murmured, “unless he wishes to. He has a right to his life; he has a right to love where he likes, not by law, but because of his nature. If he loves me still, if he wants to go on as we are, he will make me feel it to-night. I shall know to-night, and for all our future he shall decide.”

* * * * *

Mrs. Evremond was a methodical woman of reasonable habits, and not given to tardy wanderings about shops or prolonged absences from her home. She was on this night very late indeed. The long time Evremond waited for her confirmed his most unpleasant fears. He had come in about six and gone to the salon to wait her probably speedy entrance. Then, with the nervous impatience of a person who had every reason to dread, and every reason to hope for, the arrival of the expected, he watched the clock mercilessly mark hour after hour. At eight--never had she been out so late before--he said, definitely:

“She has left me--there is no doubt about it. She knows everything, and she never wants to see me again.”

Such a fact as the termination of their married relations, in the most extreme moments of his interest in another, he had never thought of--he had never wished for. He had always considered his wife suited to him, understanding his idiosyncrasies, patient and a pleasant background, but never had he supposed that the naked truth of the loss of her--or the risk of the loss of her--would fill him with dismay.

Not caring to suggest significance in her absence by questioning the servants, he waited in the salon without giving orders to retard the dinner. Every passing cab that showed evidence of drawing up to the curbstone made him go to the window, only to see the vehicle roll unconcernedly past. His wife had left the house at five o’clock in her carriage, which had been sent back from the Champs Elysées; this was all he knew save that she had been to his studio half an hour before his rendezvous, and had there dropped her glove with the compromising letter. The end, then, of his conventional commonplace married life was to be a kind of tragedy; the public were to have their taste offended by his delinquencies--or to remain indifferent to the subject.

At all events, the poignancy of the affair was reserved for himself alone. Consistent with his self-absorbed nature, he pictured but one sufferer. He allotted to his wife righteous anger, disgust and a jealous pride--which, nevertheless, he justified--and nothing else. With surprise and vexation he discovered that he was suffering, and, unused to pain of any kind, annoyed and ill at ease with his conscience and his fate, he could have snapped at his irritation like an animal at a tantalizing wound.

If she were, indeed, gone, then his home was wrecked in consequence of his passing passion for a woman he had always thought in no wise equal to the wife whom he had dishonored, whom he, nevertheless, discovered he treasured and valued and could not lightly lose. What folly--what poor logic--what false judgment! Neither logic nor judgment entered into the case, and he knew it, nor did an overwhelming temptation of a grand passion justify even remotely his behavior in his eyes; he admitted his weakness, his facile drifting, when he took no means to stem the tide, his half-cynical pastime. It looked to have cost him dear.

As sentiments whose characters have changed in the unalterable and fickle moment of time, when love is love no more and desire non-existent, become as unpleasant and safe as they were secret and dangerous, so he thought of his late friendship with anger and held it cheap, a priceless imitation for which perhaps he had given a pure jewel in stupid exchange.

If she did not come in by nine o’clock he would go to her, to her mother’s, where she had undoubtedly taken refuge in the sudden storm that had driven her from her own doors. Once there, facing her, what should he say? She was so simple, so direct, so honest, so unworldly. He was too intelligent not to comprehend all that occasion would require of his duplicity, subtleties, to dupe her, to make her believe--what? He could _not_ make her now believe anything but the truth. Her entire confidence had spared him hitherto the necessity of lying to her. He owed her that.

As he said this to himself, the debt of everything that he owed came very practically to his mind. All the peace he had known; agreeable and courteous companionship whenever he had sought it; the grace and comfort of a well-ordered household; and, if anything further, he had for a long time been too careless to foster it, unheedful of its value. If she were only a habit, she was a fixed one, more steadfast than any other hitherto formed. What should he say to her? Since he could not trick her to regard the situation with anything but disgust and anger, he would tell her the truth and plead weakness without love and beg her forgiveness. His nature twinged at this, a burning flush made him hot all over. A distaste of the cowardice in such confessions nauseated him. If she forgave him, if he made a clean breast of it in loyalty to her and disloyalty to the other, things would never be the same again. Between them there would always be his weakness and her nobility. Before humiliations such as these some natures do not shrink. Evremond shivered at it with all his sensibility and pride.

“Not,” he acknowledged, “that I am too beastly proud to own up, but that I dread the result to us both. _Que faire?_”

At nine o’clock, his nerves on the rack, his control gone, he telephoned to the little hotel, 75 Rue Docteur Blanche.

“Mrs. Evremond has not been at her mother’s for several days--who wished to know? Was there anything wrong?”

“Nothing.”

He put up the receiver--a new thought seized him horribly. Why had he supposed this the one and only solution--the quiet solution to his wife’s problem, the sequence to her discovery? What if she had suddenly, surprisingly, taken it to heart, and it had unnerved her? He had not thought of her or her feelings. She loved him--she had loved him, he knew it well--dearly.

“What if she had----” he exclaimed, aloud, white with emotion. Then: “Nonsense,” he exclaimed, “she is not hysterical--she is control itself.”

What was she? Really, what did he know of her accurately; when had he seen her obliged to face any crisis in her quiet life?

He rang violently, and when the man came in, asked:

“When did madame go out, did you tell me? Tell me again.”

“At five. Charles drove madame a little way on the Champs Elysées, and was then dismissed.”

She had been gone then five hours. There was no house of an intimate friend to which she could have gone for advice or even familiar confidence. She had no _intimes_, no enthusiasms; she lived, and he knew it, for him and her home absolutely. She had built a simple, healthful existence around him.

In this, his first solitude, his first long soliloquy, the state of Evremond’s mind altered as did his countenance. He grew stilled, almost appalled, at what might come to his knowledge now, at any moment, and facts magnified by his vivid imagination became ghosts to him--every one.

He went from the salon to her rooms--the pretty rooms of the woman of wealth and good taste, where every article of toilet and furniture spoke charmingly of the mistress. Mrs. Evremond’s dinner dress lay out on the bed; her maid stood in the window looking out. With a word about madame’s being very late to-night, she left the room discreetly.

Neither dressing table nor bureau nor secretary had any letter for him. There was no evidence of a hasty departure, no melodramatic chaos in the tranquil rooms that, with bright wood fires and shut-in invitingness, waited her return. She had gone out, as usual, but not as usual had she returned.

These rooms, to whose voices he had been for months deaf and indifferent, spoke to him now so insistingly that he turned away from them, not able to bear their appeal.

Back in the salon the clock marked the quarter after nine--at half-past he would go out to the prefecture of the police--and what then? Did this mean that he discarded the idea of a voluntary flight from him? No--she was, of course, safe. She had simply left him without a word or sign. He could do nothing--but suffer and wait.

In her withdrawal, in his certainty of loss of her, she grew infinitely precious in his eyes and, above all the rest of the world, for the first in a long time she took her rightful place. If anything sinister had occurred he knew the whole face of life would be altered for him forever. If she had left him, he determined to move heaven and earth to win her back to him--and just here he turned sharply at the opening of the salon door.

He sprang toward her--his white and drawn face wore a look of fear and suffering that at the sight of her altered to a welcome and relief, and with a tenderness such as had never greeted Emily Evremond in her life before, he cried her name:

“_Emily!_” He stammered it and stopped. The face of his wife was so different to what he would have looked for it to be, her coming was so little what he had planned for, that he had no words at command.

“I am late. I am awfully late--I did not realize it was half-past nine. Have you dined, Maurice?”

She laid her muff and furs down. She had only one glove on--a gray _suède_ glove; she drew it slowly off, her other hand was bare.

“_Dined!_” echoed her husband. “Why, I’ve been waiting for you here since six o’clock. I’ve been horribly anxious. Emily, where on earth have you been?” He might have said, “Where in heaven?” for her face was heavenly. He knew her for a pretty woman, a graceful woman, but the face of his wife, as she stood looking at him, quiet, unemotional, was of a divinity that made him marvel. He felt more infinitely far away from her than if she had not returned to him.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I had some things to do, and I did not realize the time. You must be starved, Maurice.”

What things--what had she done and planned further to do? That tears and reproaches and accusations were not in the rôle she had given herself, he saw. Any opening of the subject by him he felt would be a grave mistake. If she said nothing he would ignore that she knew. She did not, of course, know yet that he had found her glove, even if she had purposely left it--how could she be sure that he would return? Perhaps she did not know that she had lost it, or where. His heart leaped at the respite--the little respite it was--his color came back, and the possibility of a natural attitude.

She had gone over to the mirror and was taking off her hat tranquilly, instead of going to her own room. She arranged her hair deftly and lightly with a touch here and there. Maurice watched her, and the light on her hands and on the jewels of her engagement ring and the plain round of her wedding ring. Her hands were small; on one hand all day she had worn a gray glove, and between it and her palm had lain the letter with its cruel flaunting to her of his treachery and his sin. And she returned to him like this--gentle, controlled!

He drew a deep breath. “What pluck!” he thought. “What a woman!” He adored her, and all that her unspoken forgiveness meant, all that her grace conceded, worked in him a change--a conversion. Maurice Evremond was a different man to the one who had left her that very morning--she had won her husband.

And she, for her part, was under the spell of his greeting. She wanted never to forget his face until its pallor and its transfiguration, until its significance, were fixed upon her heart. He had believed her gone--and he cared. He answered her question unconsciously without speaking a word. If he loved her ever so little, she would win the rest. She would supersede any other woman in the world with him. She turned with a smile to find his eyes fixed on her.

“Let’s go in to dinner as we are, Maurice, it’s so late.”

Evremond came to her, put his arms around her; for the thousandth part of a second he felt her shrink. He drew her close. Under his touch her face suffused like a bride’s. He saw now, as he held her, the marks of tears on her eyes; the illuminating of her spirit had concealed them until now, but the human touch brought her to life.

The sharp drawing of the cord, as the curtains were pulled back between salon and dining room, made them start apart as the _maitre d’hôtel_ summoned them to a repast already two hours late.

“_Madame est servie._”

[Illustration]

The DOG STAR

By Joseph C. Lincoln

[Illustration]

It commenced the day after we took old man Stumpton out codfishin’. Me and Cap’n Jonadab both told Peter T. Brown that the cod wa’n’t bitin’ much at that season, but he said cod be jiggered. “What’s troublin’ me jest now is landin’ suckers,” he says.

So the four of us got into the _Patience M._--she’s Jonadab’s catboat--and sot sail for the Crab Ledge. And we hadn’t more’n got our lines over the side than we struck into a school of dogfish. Now, if you know anything about fishin’ you know that when the dogfish strike on it’s “good-by, cod!” So when Stumpton hauled a big fat one over the rail I could tell that Jonadab was jest ready to swear. But do you think it disturbed your old friend, Peter Brown? No, sir! He never winked an eye.

“By Jove!” he sings out, starin’ at that blamed dogfish as if ’twas a gold dollar. “By Jove!” says he, “that’s the finest specimen of a Labrador mack’rel ever I see. Bait up, Stump, and go at ’em again.”

So Stumpton, havin’ lived in Montana ever sence he was five years old, and not havin’ sighted salt water in all that time, he don’t know but what there is sech critters as “Labrador mack’rel,” and he does go at ’em, hammer and tongs. When we come ashore we had eighteen dogfish, four sculpin and a skate, and Stumpton was the happiest loon in Ostable County. It was all we could do to keep him from cookin’ one of them “mack’rel” with his own hands. If Jonadab hadn’t steered him out of the way while I sneaked down to the Port and bought a bass, we’d have had to eat dogfish--we would, as sure as I’m a foot high.

Stumpton and his daughter, Maudina, was at the Old Home House, at Wellmouth Port. ’Twas late in September, and the boarders had cleared out. Old Dillaway--Ebenezer Dillaway, Peter’s father-in-law--had decoyed the pair on from Montana because him and some Wall Street sharks were figgerin’ on buyin’ some copper country out that way that Stumpton owned. Then Dillaway was too sick, and Peter, who was jest back from his weddin’ tower, brought the Montana victims down to the Cape with the excuse to give ’em a good time alongshore, but really to keep ’em safe and out of the way till Ebenezer got well enough to finish robbin’ ’em. Belle--Peter’s wife--stayed behind to look after papa.

Stumpton was a great tall man, narrer in the beam, and with a figgerhead like a henhawk. He jest enjoyed himself here at the Cape. He fished, and loafed, and shot at a mark. He sartinly could shoot. The only thing he was wishin’ for was somethin’ alive to shoot at, and Brown had promised to take him out duck shootin’. ’Twas too early for ducks, but that didn’t worry Peter any; he’d a-had ducks to shoot at if he bought all the poultry in the township.

Maudina was like her name, pretty but sort of soft and mushy. She had big blue eyes and a baby face, and her principal cargo was poetry. She had a deckload of it, and she’d heave it overboard every time the wind changed. She was forever orderin’ the ocean to “roll on,” but she didn’t mean it; I had her out sailin’ once when the bay was a little mite rugged, and I know. She was jest out of a convent school, and you could see she wasn’t used to most things--includin’ men.

The fust week slipped along, and everything was serene. Bulletins from Ebenezer more encouragin’ every day, and no squalls in sight. But ’twas almost too slick. I was afraid the calm was a weather breeder, and sure enough, the hurricane struck us the day after that fishin’ trip.

Peter had gone drivin’ with Maudina and her dad, and me and Cap’n Jonadab was smokin’ on the front piazza. I was pullin’ at a pipe, but the cap’n had the home end of one of Stumpton’s cigars harpooned on the little blade of his jackknife, and was busy pumpin’ the last drop of comfort out of it. I never see a man who wanted to git his money’s wuth more’n Jonadab. I give you my word, I expected to see him swaller that cigar remnant every minute.

And all to once he gives a gurgle in his throat.

“Take a drink of water,” says I, scared like.

“Well, by time!” says he, p’intin’.

A feller had jest turned the corner of the house and was headin’ up in our direction. He was a thin, lengthy craft, with more’n the average amount of wrists stickin’ out of his sleeves, and with long black hair trimmed aft behind his ears and curlin’ on the back of his neck. He had high cheek bones and kind of sunk-in black eyes, and altogether he looked like “Dr. Macgoozleum, the Celebrated Blackfoot Medicine Man.” If he’d hollered: “Sagwa Bitters, only one dollar a bottle!” I wouldn’t have been surprised.

But his clothes--don’t say a word! His coat was long and buttoned up tight, so’s you couldn’t tell whether he had a vest on or not--though ’twas a safe bet he hadn’t--and it and his pants was made of the loudest kind of black-and-white checks. No nice quiet pepper-and-salt, you understand, but the checkerboard kind, the oilcloth kind, the kind that looks like the marble floor in the Boston post office. They was pretty tolerable seedy, and so was his hat. Oh, he was a last year’s bird’s nest _now_, but when them clothes was fresh--whew! the northern lights and a rainbow mixed wouldn’t have been more’n a cloudy day ’longside of him.

He run up to the piazza like a clipper comin’ into port, and he sweeps off that rusty hat and hails us grand and easy.

“Good-mornin’, gentlemen,” says he.

“We don’t want none,” says Jonadab, decided.

The feller looked surprised. “I beg your pardon,” says he. “You don’t want any--what?”

“We don’t want any ‘Life of King Solomon’ nor ‘The World’s Big Classifyers.’ And we don’t want to buy any patent paint, nor sewin’ machines, nor clothes washers, nor climbin’ evergreen roses, nor rheumatiz salve. And we don’t want our pictures painted, neither.”

Jonadab was gittin’ excited. Nothin’ riles him wuss than a peddler, unless it’s a woman sellin’ tickets to a church fair. The feller swelled up until I thought the top button on that thunderstorm coat would drag anchor, sure.

“You are mistaken,” says he. “I have called to see Mr. Peter Brown; he is--er--a relative of mine.”

Well, you could have blown me and Jonadab over with a cat’s-paw. We went on our beam ends, so’s to speak. A relation of Peter T.’s; why, if he’d been twice the panorama he was we’d have let him in when he said that. Loud clothes, we figgered, must run in the family. We remembered how Peter was dressed the fust time we met him.

“You don’t say!” says I. “Come right up and set down, Mr--Mr.----”

“Montague,” says the feller. “Booth Montague. Permit me to present my card.”

He dove into the hatches of his checkerboards and rummaged around, but he didn’t find nothin’ but holes, I jedge, because he looked dreadful put out, and begged our pardons five or six times.

“Dear me!” says he. “This is embarrassin’. I’ve forgot my cardcase.”

We told him never mind the card; any of Peter’s folks was more’n welcome. So he come up the steps and set down in a piazza chair like King Edward perchin’ on his throne. Then he hove out some remarks about its bein’ a nice morning’, all in a condescendin’ sort of way, as if he usually attended to the weather himself, but had been sort of busy lately, and had handed the job over to one of the crew. We told him all about Peter, and Belle, and Ebenezer, and about Stumpton and Maudina. He was a good deal interested, and asked consider’ble many questions. Pretty soon we heard a carriage rattlin’ up the road.

“Hello!” says I. “I guess that’s Peter and the rest comin’ now.”

Mr. Montague got off his throne kind of sudden.

“Ahem!” says he. “Is there a room here where I may--er--receive Mr. Brown in a less public manner? It will be rather a--er--surprise for him, and----”

Well, there was a good deal of sense in that. I know ’twould surprise _me_ to have such an image as he was sprung on me without any notice. We steered him into the gents’ parlor, and shut the door. In a minute the horse and wagon come into the yard. Maudina said she’d had a “heavenly” drive, and unloaded some poetry concernin’ the music of billows, and pine trees, and sech. She and her father went up to their rooms, and when the decks was clear Jonadab and me tackled Peter T.

“Peter,” says Jonadab, “we’ve got a surprise for you. One of your relations has come.”

Brown, he did looked surprised, but he didn’t act as he was any too joyful.

“Relation of _mine_?” says he. “Come off! What’s his name?”

We told him Montague, Booth Montague. He laffed.

“Wake up and turn over,” he says. “They never had anything like that in my fam’ly. Booth Montague! Sure ’twa’n’t Algernon Coughdrops?”

We said no, ’twas Booth Montague, and that he was waitin’ in the gents’ parlor. So he laffed again, and said somethin’ about sendin’ for Laura Lean Jibbey, and then we started.

The checkerboard feller was standin’ up when we opened the door. “Hello, Petey!” says he, cool as a cucumber, and stickin’ out a foot and a ha’f of wrist with a hand at the end of it.

Now, it takes consider’ble to upset Peter Theodosius Brown. Up to that time and hour I’d have bet on him against anything short of an earthquake. But Booth Montague done it--knocked him plumb out of water. Peter actually turned white.

“Great----” he began, and then stopped and swallered. “_Hank!_” he says, and set down in a chair.

“The same,” says Montague, wavin’ the starboard extension of the checkerboard. “Petey, it does me good to set my lamps on you. Especially now, when you’re the reel thing.”

Brown never answered for a minute. Then he canted over to port and reached down into his pocket. “Well,” says he, “how much?”

But Hank, or Booth, or Montague--whatever his name was--he waved his flipper disdainful. “Nun-nun-nun-no, Petey, my son,” he says, smilin’. “It ain’t ’how much?’ this time. When I heard how you’d rung the bell the first shot out the box and was rollin’ in coin, I said to myself: ‘Here’s where the prod comes back to his own.’ I’ve come to live with you, Petey, and you pay the freight.”

Peter jumped out of the chair. “_Live_ with me!” he says. “You Friday evenin’ amateur night! It’s back to ‘Ten Nights in a Barroom’ for yours!” he says.

“Oh, no, it ain’t!” says Hank, cheerful. “It’ll be back to Popper Dillaway and Belle. When I tell ’em I’m your little cousin Henry and how you and me worked the territories together--why--well, I guess there’ll be gladness round the dear home nest; hey?”

Peter didn’t say nothin’. Then he fetched a long breath and motioned with his head to Cap’n Jonadab and me. We see we weren’t invited to the family reunion, so we went out and shut the door. But we did pity Peter; I snum if we didn’t!

It was ’most an hour afore Brown come out of that room. When he did he took Jonadab and me by the arm and led us out back of the barn.

“Fellers,” he says, sad and mournful, “that--that plaster cast in a crazy-quilt,” he says, referrin’ to Montague, “is a cousin of mine. That’s the livin’ truth,” says he, “and the only excuse I can make is that ’tain’t my fault. He’s my cousin, all right, and his name’s Hank Schmults, but the sooner you box that fact up in your forgetory, the smoother ’twill be for yours drearily, Peter T. Brown. He’s to be Mr. Booth Montague, the celebrated English poet, so long’s he hangs out at the Old Home; and he’s to hang out here until--well, until I can dope out a way to get rid of him.”

We didn’t say nothin’ for a minute--jest thought. Then Jonadab says, kind of puzzled: “What makes you call him a poet?” he says.

Peter answered pretty snappy: ”’Cause there’s only two or three jobs that a long-haired image like him could hold down,” he says. “I’d call him a musician if he could play ’Bedelia’ on a jews’-harp; but he can’t, so’s he’s got to be a poet.”

And a poet he was for the next week or so. Peter drove down to Wellmouth that night and bought some respectable black clothes, and the follerin’ mornin’, when the celebrated Booth Montague come sailin’ into the dinin’ room, with his curls brushed back from his forehead, and his new cutaway on, and his wrists covered up with clean cuffs, blessed if he didn’t look distinguished--at least, that’s the only word I can think of that fills the bill. And he talked beautiful language, not like the slang he hove at Brown and us in the gents’ parlor.

Peter done the honors, introducin’ him to us and the Stumptons as a friend who’d come from England unexpected, and Hank he bowed and scraped, and looked absent-minded and crazy--like a poet ought to. Oh, he done well at it! You could see that ’twas jest pie for him.

And ’twas pie for Maudina, too. Bein’, as I said, kind of green concernin’ men folks, and likewise takin’ to poetry like a cat to fish, she jest fairly gushed over this fraud. She’d reel off a couple of fathom of verses from fellers named Spencer or Waller, or sech like, and he’d never turn a hair, but back he’d come and say they was good, but he preferred Confucius, or Methuselah, or somebody so antique that she nor nobody else ever heard of ’em. Oh, he run a safe course, and he had _her_ in tow afore they turned the fust mark.

Jonadab and me got worried. We see how things was goin’, and we didn’t like it. Stumpton was havin’ too good a time to notice, goin’ after “Labrador mack’rel” and so on, and Peter T. was too busy steerin’ the cruises to pay any attention. But one afternoon I come by the summerhouse unexpected, and there sat Booth Montague and Maudina, him with a clove hitch round her waist, and she lookin’ up into his eyes like they were peekholes in the fence ’round paradise. That was enough. It jest simply _couldn’t_ go any further, so that night me and Jonadab had a confab up in my room.

“Barzilla,” says the cap’n, “if we tell Peter that that relation of his is figgerin’ to marry Maudina Stumpton for her money, and that he’s more’n likely to elope with her, ’twill pretty nigh kill Pete, won’t it? No, sir; it’s up to you and me. We’ve got to figger out some way to git rid of the critter ourselves.”

“It’s a wonder to me,” I says, “that Peter puts up with him. Why don’t he order him to clear out, and tell Belle if he wants to? She can’t blame Peter ’cause his uncle was father to an outrage like that.”

Jonadab looks at me scornful. “Can’t, hey?” he says. “And her high-toned and chummin’ in with the bigbugs? It’s easy to see you never was married,” says he.

Well, I never was, so I shet up.

We set there and thought and thought, and by and by I commenced to sight an idee in the offin’. ’Twas hull down at fust, but pretty soon I got it into speakin’ distance, and then I broke it gentle to Jonadab. He grabbed at it like the “Labrador mack’rel” grabbed Stumpton’s hook. We set up and planned until pretty nigh three o’clock, and all the next day we put in our spare time loadin’ provisions and water aboard the _Patience M._ We put grub enough aboard to last a month.

Just at daylight the mornin’ after that we knocked at the door of Montague’s bedroom. When he woke up enough to open the door--it took some time, ’cause eatin’ and sleepin’ was his mainstay--we told him that we was plannin’ an early-mornin’ fishin’ trip, and if he wanted to go with the folks he must come down to the landin’ quick. He promised to hurry, and I stayed by the door to see that he didn’t git away. In about ten minutes we had him in the skiff rowin’ off to the _Patience M._

“Where’s the rest of the crowd?” says he, when he stepped aboard.

“They’ll be along when we’re ready for ’em,” says I. “You go below there, will you, and stow away the coats and things.”

So he crawled into the cabin, and I helped Jonadab git up sail. We intended towin’ the skiff, so I made her fast astern. In ha’f a shake we was under way and headed out of the cove. When that British poet stuck his nose out of the companion we was abreast the p’int.

“Hi!” says he, scramblin’ into the cockpit. “What’s this mean?”

I was steerin’ and feelin’ toler’ble happy over the way things had worked out.

“Nice sailin’ breeze, ain’t it?” says I, smilin’.

“Where’s Mau--Miss Stumpton?” he says, wild like.

“She’s abed, I cal’late,” says I, “gittin’ her beauty sleep. Why don’t _you_ turn in? Or are you pretty enough now?”

He looked fust at me and then at Jonadab, and his face turned a little yellower than usual.

“What kind of a game is this?” he asks, brisk. “Where are you goin’?”

’Twas Jonadab that answered. “We’re bound,” says he, “for the Bermudas. It’s a lovely place to spend the winter, they tell me,” he says.

That poet never made no remarks. He jumped to the stern and caught hold of the skiff’s pointer. I shoved him out of the way and picked up the boat hook. Jonadab rolled up his shirt sleeves and laid hands on the centerboard stick.

“I wouldn’t, if I was you,” says the cap’n.

Jonadab weighs pretty close to two hundred, and most of it’s gristle. I’m not quite so much, fur’s tonnage goes, but I ain’t exactly a canary bird. Montague seemed to size things up in a jiffy. He looked at us, then at the sail, and then at the shore out over the stern.

“Done!” says he. “Done! And by a couple of ‘come-ons’!”

And down he sets on the thwart.

“Is there anything to drink aboard this liner?” asks Booth Hank Montague.

* * * * *

Well, we sailed all that day and all that night. Course we didn’t reelly intend to make the Bermudas. What we intended to do was to cruise around alongshore for a couple of weeks, long enough for the Stumptons to git back to Dillaway’s, settle the copper bus’ness and break for Montana. Then we was goin’ home again and turn Brown’s relation over to him to take care of. We knew Peter’d have some plan thought out by that time. We’d left a note tellin’ him what we’d done, and sayin’ that we trusted to him to explain matters to Maudina and her dad. We knew that explainin’ was Peter’s main holt.

The poet was pretty chipper for a spell. He set on the thwart and bragged about what he’d do when he got back to “Petey” again. He said we couldn’t git rid of him so easy. Then he spun yarns about what him and Brown did when they was out West together. They was interestin’ yarns, but we could see why Peter wa’n’t anxious to introduce Cousin Henry to Belle. Then the _Patience M._ got out where ’twas pretty rugged, and she rolled consider’ble, and after that we didn’t hear much more from friend Booth--he was too busy to talk.

That night me and Jonadab took watch and watch. In the mornin’ it thickened up and looked squally. I got kind of worried. By nine o’clock there was every sign of a no’theaster, and we see we’d have to put in somewheres and ride it out. So we headed for a place we’ll call Baytown, though that wa’n’t the name of it. It’s a queer, old-fashioned town, and it’s on an island; maybe you can guess it from that.

Well, we run into the harbor and let go anchor. Jonadab crawled into the cabin to git some terbacker, and I was for’ard coilin’ the throat halyard. All to once I heard oars rattlin’, and I turned my head; what I see made me let out a yell like a siren whistle.

There was that everlastin’ poet in the skiff--you remember we’d been towin’ it astern--and he was jest cuttin’ the painter with his jackknife. Next minute he’d picked up the oars and was headin’ for the wharf, doublin’ up and stretchin’ out like a frog swimmin’, and with his curls streamin’ in the wind like a rooster’s tail in a hurricane. He had a long start ’fore Jonadab and me woke up enough to think of chasin’ him.

But we woke up fin’lly, and the way we flew round that catboat was a caution. I laid into them halyards, and I had the gaff up to the peak afore Jonadab got the anchor clear of the bottom. Then I jumped to the tiller, and the _Patience M._ took after that skiff like a pup after a tomcat. We run alongside the wharf jest as Booth Hank climbed over the stringpiece.

“Git after him, Barzilla!” hollers Cap’n Jonadab. “I’ll make her fast.”

Well, I hadn’t took more’n three steps when I see ’twas goin’ to be a long chase. Montague unfurled them thin legs of his and got over the ground somethin’ wonderful. All you could see was a pile of dust and coat tails flappin’.

Up on the wharf we went and round the corner into a straggly kind of road with old-fashioned houses on both sides of it. Nobody in the yards, nobody at the windows; quiet as could be, except that off ahead, somewheres, there was music playin’.

That road was a quarter of a mile long, but we galloped through it so fast that the scenery was nothin’ but a blur. Booth was gainin’ all the time, but I stuck to it like a good one. We took a short cut through a yard, piled over a fence and come out into another road, and up at the head of it was a crowd of folks--men and women and children and dogs.

“Stop thief!” I hollers, and ’way astern I heard Jonadab bellerin’: “Stop thief!”

Montague dives headfust for the crowd. He fell over a baby carriage, and I gained a tack ’fore he got up. He wa’n’t more’n ten yards ahead when I come bustin’ through, upsettin’ children and old women, and landed in what I guess was the main street of the place and right abreast of a parade that was marchin’ down the middle of it.

Fust there was the band, four fellers tootin’ and bangin’ like fo’mast hands on a fishin’ smack in a fog. Then there was a big darky totin’ a banner with “Jenkins’ Unparalleled Double Uncle Tom’s Cabin Company, Number 2,” on it in big letters. Behind him was a boy leadin’ two great, savage-lookin’ dogs--bloodhounds, I found out afterward--by chains. Then come a pony cart with Little Eva and Eliza’s child in it; Eva was all gold hair and beautifulness. And astern of her was Marks, the Lawyer, on his donkey. There was lots more behind him, but these was all I had time to see jest then.

Now, there was but one way for Booth Hank to git acrost that street, and that was to bust through the procession. And, as luck would have it, the place he picked out to cross was jest ahead of the bloodhounds. And the fust thing I knew, them dogs stretched out their noses and took a long sniff, and then bu’st out howlin’ like all possessed. The boy, he tried to hold ’em, but ’twas no go. They yanked the chains out of his hands and took after that poet as if he owed ’em somethin’. And every one of the four million other dogs that was in the crowd on the sidewalks fell into line, and such howlin’ and yappin’ and scamperin’ and screamin’ you never heard.

Well, ’twas a mixed-up mess. That was the end of the parade. Next minute I was racin’ across country with the whole town and the Uncle Tommers astern of me, and a string of dogs stretched out ahead fur’s you could see. ’Way up in the lead was Booth Montague and the bloodhounds, and away aft I could hear Jonadab yellin’: “Stop thief!”

’Twas lively while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. There was a little hill at the end of the field, and where the poet dove over t’other side of it the bloodhounds all but had him. Afore I got to the top of the rise I heard the awfullest powwow goin’ on in the holler, and thinks I: “They’re eatin’ him alive!”

But they wa’n’t. When I hove in sight Montague was settin’ up on the ground at the foot of the sand bank he’d fell into, and the two hounds was rollin’ over him, lappin’ his face and goin’ on as if he was their grandpa jest home from sea with his wages in his pocket. And round them, in a double ring, was all the town dogs, crazy mad, and barkin’ and snarlin’, but scared to go any closer.

In a minute more the folks begun to arrive; boys first, then girls and men, and then the women. Marks come trottin’ up, poundin’ the donkey with his umbrella.

“Here, Lion! Here, Tige!” he yells. “Quit it! Let him alone!” Then he looks at Montague, and his jaw kind of drops.

“Why--why, _Hank_!” he says.

A tall, lean critter, in a black tail coat and a yaller vest and lavender pants, comes puffin’ up. He was the manager, we found out afterward.

“Have they bit him?” says he. Then he done jest the same as Marks; his mouth opened and his eyes stuck out. “_Hank Schmults_, by the livin’ jingo!” says he.

Booth Montague looks at the two of ’em kind of sick and lonesome. “Hello, Barney! How are you, Sullivan?” he says.

I thought ’twas about time for me to git prominent. I stepped up, and was jest goin’ to say somethin’ when somebody cuts in ahead of me.

“Hum!” says a voice, a woman’s voice, and toler’ble crisp and vinegary. “Hum! it’s you, is it? I’ve been lookin’ for _you_!”

’Twas Little Eva in the pony cart. Her lovely posy hat was hangin’ on the back of her neck, her gold hair had slipped back so’s you could see the black under it, and her beautiful red cheeks was kind of streaky. She looked some older and likewise mad.

“Hum!” says she, gittin’ out of the cart. “It’s you, is it, Hank Schmults? Well, p’r’aps you’ll tell me where you’ve been for the last two weeks? What do you mean by runnin’ away and leavin’ your----”

Montague interrupted her. “Hold on, Maggie, hold on!” he begs. “_Don’t_ make a row here. It’s all a mistake; I’ll explain it to you all right. Now, please----”

“Explain!” hollers Eva, kind of curlin’ up her fingers and movin’ toward him. “Explain, will you? Why, you miser’ble, low-down----”

But the manager took hold of her arm. He’d been lookin’ at the crowd, and I cal’late he saw that here was the chance for the best kind of an advertisement. He whispered in her ear. Next thing I knew she clasped her hands together, let out a scream and runs up and grabs the celebrated British poet round the neck.

“Booth!” says she. “My husband! Saved! Saved!”

And she went all to pieces and cried all over his necktie.

And then Marks trots up the child, and that young one hollers: “Papa! papa!” and tackles Hank around the legs. And I’m blessed if Montague don’t slap his hand to his forehead, and toss back his curls, and look up at the sky, and sing out: “My wife and babe! Restored to me after all these years! The heavens be thanked!”

Well, ’twas a sacred sort of time. The town folks tiptoed away, the men lookin’ solemn but glad, and the women swabbin’ their deadlights and sayin’ how affectin’ ’twas, and so on. Oh, you could see that show would do bus’ness _that_ night, if it never did afore.

The manager got after Jonadab and me later on, and did his best to pump us, but he didn’t find out much. He told us that Montague b’longed to the Uncle Tom’s Cabin Company, and that he’d disappeared a fortni’t or so afore, when they were playin’ at Hyannis. Eva was his wife, and the child was their little boy. The bloodhounds knew him, and that’s why they chased him so.

“What was you two yellin’ ‘Stop thief!’ after him for?” says he. “Has he stole anything?”

We says: “No.”

“Then what did you want to get him for?” he says.

“We didn’t,” says Jonadab. “We wanted to git rid of him. We don’t want to see him no more.”

You could tell that the manager was puzzled, but he laffed.

“All right,” says he. “If I know anything about Maggie--that’s Mrs. Schmults--he won’t git loose ag’in.”

We only saw Montague to talk to but once that day. Then he peeked out from under the winder shade at the hotel and asked us if we’d told anybody where’d he been. When he found we hadn’t, he was thankful.

“You tell Petey,” says he, “that he’s won the whole pot, kitty and all. I don’t think I’ll visit him again, nor Belle, neither.”

“I wouldn’t,” says I. “They might write to Maudina that you was a married man. And old Stumpton’s been prayin’ for somethin’ alive to shoot at,” I says.

The manager give Jonadab and me a couple of tickets, and we went to the show that night. And when we saw Booth Hank Montague paradin’ about the stage and defyin’ the slave hunters, and tellin’ ’em he was a free man, standin’ on the Lord’s free soil, and so on, we realized ’twould have been a crime to let him do anything else.

“As an imitation poet,” says Jonadab, “he was a kind of mildewed article, but as a play actor--well, there may be some that can beat him, but _I_ never see ’em!”

[Illustration]

AS IT ENDED

God planned me for a butterfly, But I was marred i’ the making; What is it that old Omar says Of the Potter’s hand a-shaking? Ah, no, not that, the colors ran, The form turned out awry, And so I’m what they call a man Who’d be a butterfly.

FARRINGDON DAVIS.

_The TEARS of UNDINE_

By

Edith Macvane

[Illustration]

In the morning young Glyn lost his steamer, so he was forced to spend the whole day at Pemaquid; in the afternoon he lost his heart, so he was forced to stay there for his entire vacation.

This is the way it happened.

After luncheon he went out to sit all by himself on the end of the pier, with a book on “Recent Developments in Dairy Machinery”; for Glyn was a young patent lawyer, a very rising one, in the city of New York; and, as he had failed to find one familiar face in this far-away Maine resort, it seemed to him that he could do nothing better with his time of waiting than devote it to his business. So he sat deep in study, lifting an eye occasionally to the granite cliffs, the dark, ancient fir trees, and the bay with its distant rim of purple-shadowed hills; while the old fisherman beside him smoked his pipe placidly, and the noisy crowd of bathers in by the shore splashed one another with screams of mirth. The student sighed occasionally, for, though a lawyer and a good one, he was still young; then he reproved himself for his sighing, for he aimed to be rather superior, and was also, as a matter of fact, rather shy.

Suddenly a shower of scattering drops fell cold upon his neck and glittered upon the page before him. He started and looked up; the sky was blue and cloudless, his ancient neighbor as placid as the day itself. Then it seemed to him that he heard a laugh, the merest tinkle of a laugh, from somewhere below the wharf; and, starting to his feet and looking downward, he beheld a mermaid floating in the water beneath him.

She lay slim and green upon the gentle harbor swell, her white arms outstretched, her eyelids closed, her wet, upturned face framed by the floating wreaths of dark hair that coiled and rippled in the water about her. Suddenly she threw up her hands and sank slowly, vanishing with a cloud of little bubbles. Glyn started back, horror-smitten. He was not much of a swimmer, even in the warm waters of the Sound; and this North Atlantic water chilled his very eyes with its icy-green transparency.

Nevertheless, under the racial impulse of the life-saver, he threw off his coat and swung his arms preparatory to a jump. Suddenly the hoary and languid old sea dog by his side reached out a slow, restraining hand.

“Don’t go wettin’ yourself for nothing young fellah! That girl, she’s a fish. Watch and see her come up again.”

In a cold perspiration of anxiety the young man waited for a fulfillment of these words. The suspense seemed endless, till suddenly, and at an amazing distance, the waters heaved and parted, and the swimmer’s sleek dark head emerged like a seal’s. Back she came to the wharf, swimming with strokes like those of an oarsman--easy, long and sure. At the end of the pier she paused and clung to the foot of the slippery green steps that ran down the side of the piles, and, resting her chin upon her clasped arms, she glanced up at the two men above her like a severe and dripping cherub. The old fisherman returned to his line, but the student, flinging away his book, ran down the oozy staircase to meet her.

“May I--may I be of any assistance to you?” he inquired, with eager politeness.

She continued to look up at him with the same disapproving air. “You didn’t jump in after me, did you?” she observed, suddenly.

“Well, no,” returned Glyn, somewhat dazed at this greeting. “You see, I was told that you could swim.”

She glared up at the unobserving fisherman. “That was Ben--old tattle-tale!” she hissed; then, turning back to the young man, she inquired, with sudden pathos: “And how should you have felt if I had never come up again?”

“Like a murderer,” replied Stephen Glyn, solemnly. The answer seemed to please her, for she relaxed her frown. “Oh, well, you are all right, anyway,” she was good enough to observe, as she loosed her hold upon the step and swam slowly away to the shore.

So when the afternoon steamer left Pemaquid, one hour later, it left without Stephen Glyn.

He told himself that the air of this sea-girt promontory was just the thing for him: good chance to learn to swim; quiet place, capital chance to study and get at the bottom of those dairy implements. As for the girl--she was pretty to look at, to be sure, with her big green eyes and the glancing motions of her long white hands beneath the water. But still what did the prettiness of a passing girl matter to a prosaic fellow like him? “Besides,” as Stephen added, wisely, to himself, “I’m too old for nonsense, and too young for business--so what’s the use?”

And so, being in this indifferent frame of mind, he spent an hour in putting on his newest English flannels and the very latest thing in pale green shirts, and then, upon descending to the dining room, he bribed the waiter to give him a seat at the next table to his casual acquaintance of the pier; merely, as he told himself, out of curiosity to see how she looked with her hair dry.

In spite of all this indifference, there was a distinct sinking at Glyn’s heart when at last she came, passed by him, seated herself at her table without even a glance in his direction. She seemed in high spirits, she ate with a remarkable appetite, and she talked and laughed incessantly with the large, pink-faced lady on her right and the jolly youth in a blue necktie on her left. All Glyn’s honest Harvard blood rose and boiled within him at the sight of that blue necktie--merely, he assured himself, at the thought of recent football scores. As for the girl, what did it matter to him if she let a dozen Yale men tell her jokes and crack her lobster claws for her?

It must be confessed, however, even by the most disapproving and indifferent critic, that she was charming to look upon, with her thick hair--yellow with greenish lights--and her warm, white skin, tanned by the sun to the pale brown of coffee with cream in it. So after dinner, when a half dozen other youths had dispossessed the Yale man of his monopoly, Glyn strolled up to him and inquired whether he had not seen him at New London the month before.

The Yale man replied to these overtures of friendship with the offer of his cigarette case, his name and the secrets of his heart. “I’m Martin, ’05,” he confided. “Ever been in New Haven? Best place on earth! I say, how do you like Pemaquid--how long are you going to stay? There are some ripping girls here. At least, there’s Elfie May, that girl I sat next to at the table. Notice her? A queen, isn’t she? And you just ought to see her swim! But she throws a fellow down so. I guess I’ll go home to-morrow.” The blithe face drew down into sudden sadness--ah, poor little Yale man!

“The girl that sat next to you at dinner,” mused Glyn. “Ah, yes. I think I noticed her--rather good-looking, yes. New York girl?”

“No, Boston. Want me to introduce you?”

“If you will be so kind,” returned Glyn, with elation, and a sudden softening of his heart toward the blue. Martin went over to the far end of the piazza, where Miss May sat trailing her indifferent gaze across her little court of admirers, and laughing lazily at their witticisms and their compliments. As the Yale man spoke to her, Glyn saw her glance flash for a brief instant in his direction, and he started forward to meet his new friend halfway upon his return. But oh, disappointment! “I’m so sorry,” said the pleasant little chap from New Haven, “but she says no! I don’t know why, but she said it, just like that--no!”

“It doesn’t matter in the least,” returned Glyn. “And thank you so much for taking all that trouble.” He spoke gayly, but his hand trembled as he tried to strike a light upon the side of his match case. “Here, let me give you some fire, old chap,” cried his new acquaintance, genially.

That night Glyn did not sleep very well. Not that he cared one scrap for a snub from a disagreeable, spoiled child! But deep down he recognized what it was--the regretful ache, the yearning, baffled tenderness that had newly filled his heart. He writhed in recollection of the repulse he had received, and then forgot the pain in delight as that glance came back to him, those eyes raised to him from the water, eyes so thickly fringed, with dark irids rimmed in clear sea green.

Dawn broke early and brilliant; after that there was no sleep for the restless newcomer, and suddenly it occurred to him that the best plan--the most enjoyable and the most independent--would be to hire a craft and go out for a day’s deep sea fishing, far from the jars and distractions of the hotel. For though, like many sailors, he had but little skill in swimming, he was excellent at managing a boat, and fishing was one of his favorite sports. A descent to the pier, in the long-shadowed quiet of the early morning, proved this plan easy of fulfillment. Old Ben, the fisherman of the day before, was there clearing out his tiny sloop, the _Fried Cod_. For a mildly exorbitant sum he agreed to let the boat to the New York man for the day, provide tackle, throw in bait, and give all necessary directions to the fishing grounds.

So Glyn had a day of long-shore sport, of long waiting, of rolling in a hot and oily sea, finally of hauling in fat, plobby fish--cod and hake, which lacked blood to make even a decent fighting struggle for their lives. Then in the calm of the sunset the _Fried Cod_ drifted back with the tide into the little harbor on the nose of the rocky promontory. Her skipper worked lazily at the sweeps, keeping a dazzled eye out ahead over the glassy reflection of the golden west which fronted him. Suddenly, as he floated in between the breakwaters, it seemed to him that he saw the head of a swimmer silhouetted blackly against the sunlit water, approaching him from the shore in a wake of fire.

“Sloop ahoy!” called a slow, soft voice. Glyn jumped up, his heart beating, and with a few more vigorous side strokes the swimmer shot to the side of the little craft and blinked two clear wet eyes up at its skipper.

“Please, may I come aboard for a moment?”

Glyn forgot all past injuries as he bent over the side of the boat, beaming upon the face upturned to him from its aureole of ripples.

“Oh, I can climb up all right,” she cried, in answer to his offers of aid, and with a quick, vaulting motion she swung herself up over the gunwale of the little sloop. Seating herself upon the thwart, she threw back her long, wet locks from her face, and shot a glance, half serious and wholly sweet, at the young man before her.

“I’ve been waiting for you all day,” she said, plaintively. “Why didn’t you come in sooner?”

Glyn regarded her in amazement.

“Well, you could hardly expect me to believe that I was wanted,” he retorted, in a slightly aggrieved tone, remembering his wrongs of last night.

She began to laugh softly--a long, noiseless chuckle that moved even Glyn’s watchful dignity to a smile. “Oh, you mean last night.” Glyn noticed that her voice was deep and smooth, with just the faintest suspicion of hoarseness, and deep, mellow tones and overtones that vibrated richly through its inflections. “Last night, you see, is just what I want to explain,” she went on. “You see, that little Martin thing has such a funny way of dropping his jaw when one says no to him, that I just couldn’t resist. And, besides, you see, I didn’t want to have him introducing us--little calf! So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just introduce myself: Elfrida May, that’s my name.”

Glyn looked at her seriously as he set his tiller for a course to the anchorage near the pier. “Thanks very much,” he returned, “but, if you don’t mind, I should rather make believe it was Undine.”

“Undine!” she cried. “Who was Undine?”

“You don’t know about poor little Undine? Very well, then, I’ll tell you her story some time. Now you must let me introduce myself, too.”

“Oh, I know your name, Mr. Glyn,” she cried, artlessly, and, extending her wet hand, she gave him a hearty grip, like a man’s.

Suddenly her eye roved to the floor of the little cockpit, and her face took on suddenly its severe lines of the day before. “Ah, they are dead!” she whispered, in a kind of horrified way; then stooping, she picked up one of the fish--a small cod, curved in a rigid bow from nose to tail. She stroked its slippery back tenderly. “Poor little thing!” she mourned.

Glyn stared at her bewildered. “Don’t you approve of fishing?” he asked.

“No, I don’t!” she replied, with vehemence. “I won’t eat them, even canned! I’d feel like a cannibal! Poor things! To drown in the lovely green water--that wouldn’t be bad. But to be pulled out of the sea, and drown in the air, think how horridly unpleasant! Do you mind if I put them back again, please?” she asked, anxiously.

“Certainly not,” replied Glyn, though, as a matter of fact, he was

## particularly fond of fresh boiled cod, and also proud of his morning’s

catch.

One by one the tender-hearted pirate dropped the motionless things softly into the sea; they sank heavily, and then rose, floating with white bellies upturned. Her eyes, as she regarded them, were surprisingly soft and tender. “Poor things,” she murmured, “they can’t swim any more, but I am sure that they must rest easier so. Thank you, Mr. Glyn, for giving them back to me.”

And so their friendship began, in bewilderment and mutual good will.

Now, much can happen in a month, and as July drew near to a close Stephen no longer tried to disguise from himself the change that had come into his life. The question that unceasingly knocked at his brain was no longer “Do I care for her?” but “Does she, oh, can she possibly, care for me!” The very intensity with which he put this question to himself made him delay, from day to day, the crucial test of putting it to the only person that could decide it for him. So he relieved his feelings by sending every week to Maillard’s for a huge box wrapped in silver paper; and every morning he waited with impatient heart upon the pier for the coming of that slim and dancing figure with the long green silk legs, the cream-white arms and the flying strands of pale yellow hair, that fell to the hem of the short green petticoat.

Her skill in the water was to him a constant wonder, a constant delight. His own attempts at diving and swimming he soon gave up, finding this northern water too cold for him; and so, in spite of Elfrida’s gibes, he sat on the dock and watched her as she took backward somersaults and dead-man dives and went down below in search of sinking clam shells. Her high jump from the piles, holding up her little skirt with a dainty hand, and winking blithely as she descended, was a thing long to be remembered for sheer mirth, for frank, childish joy. Yet it was then that Stephen sighed as he regarded her. After all, was it a woman he loved, with a warm human heart to respond to his own; or a careless mermaid, a cold creature, whose sole joy was thus dancing, plunging, flashing through the foam of the white, curling waves?

So far as he could judge, there was no real affection in her heart except this for her friend, the sea. Toward her mother, a heavy, placid woman with literary pretensions, Elfrida was kind in an impersonal, far-off sort of way; to the other girls in the hotel--who respected her for her high dives and hated her for her monopoly of the few men at Pemaquid--she seemed indifferent, with a kind of mocking politeness; while toward her little court of admirers she showed a capricious tyranny, at times almost savage. To these things even the adoring eyes of Stephen Glyn could not be blind; and one day when, owing to a severe headache of her mother’s, she was obliged to forego her swim, and appeared at dinner a muttering thundercloud, it was impossible for even the most ardent of adorers to pass by these signs without a sigh.

True, she had shown a tender heart toward the lifeless cod and hake; and sometimes, as she looked at the sea, in the uproar of a summer squall or in the silvery silence of a fog, Glyn would be startled by the look that suddenly crept into her eyes.

“Ah!” she breathed one evening, as they sat together watching the sunset from the pier. “Ah, it wouldn’t be hard to die, would it, if one could lie at the bottom of the sea?” Glyn grunted uncomfortably in answer, and tried to look as though he agreed with this sentiment.

The next day, when they were out canoeing together, Elfrida surprised him by reverting suddenly to one of the first conversations of their acquaintance. “You said you were going to tell me about Undine,” she said, “but you haven’t--not a word.”

Glyn sighed as he regarded her. She had been unusually tantalizing, not to say aggravating, that afternoon, and his honest heart was sore within him. But what better mood, what better occasion, for relating the story of the unfortunate water nymph, from the time she first appeared in the hut of the old fisherman, a light-hearted, soulless child, to the unhappy hour when, abandoned by the man she loved, she vanished silently into her native element--“a woman gifted with a soul, filled with love and heir to suffering.”

It was but recently that Stephen had read the story, and he told it well, for, though a lawyer, he was in love, and he had a poetical soul. Elfrida listened in silence, her face turned away, her hand trailing in the still water beside her. After the story-teller had finished, there was a pause.

“Well,” said Stephen, disappointed, “didn’t you like it?”

Elfrida glanced up at him--a quick, irresolute glance, quite unlike her usual frank gaze. She seemed about to speak, but to Glyn’s disappointment she turned away her head again, so that her face was hidden from him. With her trailing hand she drew a long, dripping spray of brown seaweed from the water.

“What did Undine gain, after all,” she said, “by leaving the sea?”

“She learned how to love, and she won a soul,” responded Stephen, leaning toward her. “Don’t you think that she was the gainer, after all?”

She suddenly flung away the seaweed. “No, I don’t!” she cried, passionately. “In the sea she had freedom and happiness! But love--what did she find it, after all, but a miserable slavery? And she got her heart broken in the end. No, indeed, you can’t make me pity her--she was just silly, your Undine!”

Nothing more was spoken as they paddled to the shore. Glyn was hurt, disappointed; and Elfrida kept her face still turned away.

The next morning, however, Glyn was more disappointed than ever; for when he came down to breakfast he failed to find the one face that he desired to see. From Mrs. May he learned that Elfrida had gone out for a day’s sail with young Martin and two or three others. So he moped about all day, smoking and trying to read his “Dairy Machinery,” now sadly rusty. And from time to time he was drawn unwillingly into the universal discussion on costumes for the coming dance and masquerade.

Toward evening Elfrida and her companions returned. In spite of her day’s amusement, her face wore its severe expression, and she glanced at him without a smile as she passed him on the piazza.

“You’ve been here all day, I suppose,” she said, with an inflection of resentment in her tone. “Just think, a great big man like you afraid to go into the sea!”

Before Glyn could open his mouth to defend himself she was gone. But after dinner she came to him with a shy, suspicious air, and a touch of mystery that was explained by her first words.

“See here,” she said, softly, “this masquerade. I’ve been thinking it over, and I think if I can manage it, I want to go as Undine, you know.”

Stephen was filled with delight. “And you’ll let me help plan your dress?” he cried.

Elfie nodded, and offered her ideas on the subject to the approval of his authority. The young man listened, offered suggestions here and there, and then, with a sudden backward thought, he remembered a trinket in his possession--a little pearl bracelet, a trifle, but beyond anything appropriate to the costume in hand. Within himself he resolved to send home immediately for it, and to present it to Elfrida on the night of the dance.

In the days that followed it seemed to him that he saw strangely little of her, and the little that he did see was less than satisfactory. Her absence from the piazza, and her refusals to go paddling with him, she excused on the plea of being busy with her new costume. But even on the pier at the bathing hour she seemed to shun him, or noticed him only with jeers and gibes at what she called his laziness.

“Ah, can anybody have a soul that is afraid of the sea?” she cried. “Come, Mr. Martin, let us race over to the monument!” With a splash and a flounce the two set out together, the green bathing dress and the triumphant blue; while Glyn sat alone on the wharf with a leaden heart and rage at his soul.

This state of affairs had very little altered when at last the day of the dance arrived. A hundred times in the interim had Stephen resolved to give up the whole affair and go home; but then he decided to wait and see this new Undine in the flesh. To his anxiety, the bracelet had not yet arrived; nor did it come until the last post on the evening of the dance, after everybody had gone upstairs to dress. In joyful relief, Stephen slipped the little box in the pocket of his improvised admiral’s costume, and ran downstairs to the hall to wait for the coming of his Undine.

Elfrida did not appear till late, when the room was filled with whirling harlequins and Pompadours and Swiss peasant maidens. The admiral stood by the door, waiting for her, his little box in his hand and his heart in his mouth. Finally, as though she had been on the watch to avoid him, he saw her enter the hall by one of the long windows opening from the veranda without. In spite of his vexation, he could not but smile with sheer pleasure at the sight of her, as her eyes and her white teeth flashed a smile upon the room. In her pale, sea-green draperies, dragging heavily at the hem with a fragile border of urchin shells, her creamy neck and shoulders bare, her flowing yellow hair bound and wreathed with strands of dark, wet seaweed--oh, she was pretty, indeed! Stephen sprang forward.

“Good-evening, Undine! Here--I have something for you, will you let me give it to you? A little ornament to complete your costume.”

“You may give it to me later,” she replied, with an indifference that chilled and baffled him; and he watched her miserably as she swung off into the two-step with a tall, sunburned youth from Boston--a conceited-looking pup, Glyn told himself, in a vain attempt at consolation.

The evening was half over before he managed to get near her again. “Our dance, Mr. Glyn,” she cried, taking his arm and smiling up at him. Her eyebrows, which, in spite of her fair hair, were black and thickly ridged, were arched high in the mocking expression that he hated to see upon her face. She was in wild spirits, gay with the evening’s success, fluttered with a reckless and inconsequent laughter that set the fibers of her lover’s heart quivering painfully.

“Let’s go down on the breakwater,” she said, “instead of dancing. It’s so hot here.” Bewildered and obedient, Stephen followed her, and a few moments later they were sitting side by side at the end of the moonlit pier.

“Doesn’t the water look nice?” cried Elfie, bending over it lovingly. “For two cents, I’d jump into it this very moment.”

“Please don’t!” expostulated Stephen, in alarm. She turned her bright eyes toward him.

“What did you say you had for me?” she said.

Half shamefacedly, Stephen drew from his pocket the little box that he had received a few hours before. “Just a trifle,” he said, “that I picked up in Swabia a few years ago. See!” He opened the cover and took out a slender string of fresh-water pearls set in silver, some milk-white, some shimmering prismatically in the moonlight.

“Oh, how lovely!” cried Elfie, with artless delight. “And they’re for me?”

“If you’ll take them,” replied Stephen, hurriedly. “You see, they are perfectly valueless little things--but the reason I wanted you to wear them was because, you see, they really belong to you. These pearls are found in one of the headwaters of the Danube, in Undine’s own country. The peasants say they are the drops that Undine wept after she had returned heartbroken to her water world. And so they call these pearls the tears of Undine. Will you have them, Undine?”

He bent toward her tenderly, and she held out her hand with a constrained gesture. “This Undine doesn’t intend to shed any tears of her own,” she answered, “and so, I suppose, that these drops will save her a lot of trouble. Thanks! Yes, do clasp it on. Thank you very much.” She tried to pull her hand away, but Stephen retained it in his own.

“I love you. Don’t you care a bit for me, Elfie?” he blurted, desperately. “Elfie, will you be my wife?”

She snatched her hand away this time, and scrambled to her feet. “Oh,” she cried, “_don’t_ be silly, _don’t_ be sentimental--here by the lovely, sensible sea, too!” Stephen rose and stood staring at her, and she went on with a hurried laugh: “Thank you very much, Mr. Glyn, and now that I have had a proposal, I shall always be a bachelor-lady, and shan’t ever have to worry about being an old maid. And the pearls are lovely, but I never intend to marry anyone--and now, oh, _do_ let’s go into that dear black water.”

She stood, a lovely, pale figure in the moonlight, embarrassed, half-laughing, while her green eyes shot out and streamed a reckless gleam at the young man standing dejected before her. “Do you dare me?” she cried.

Stephen saw that in her present daredevil mood she was equal to anything. “No, please don’t!” he cried. “This time of night, in all those long draperies, it wouldn’t be safe--please don’t!”

“Not safe for Undine?” she laughed, defiantly. “Pooh, who’s afraid?” Stephen put out his hand to restrain her, but she laughed again--one of her long, silent chuckles. “Such a grand chance to show off. I’m not going to miss it!” she cried, and, eluding Stephen’s touch, she sprang like a long, silvery streak over the edge of the breakwater into the phosphorescent blackness beneath. In wrath and anxiety, the young man waited until her head emerged in a whirlpool of silvery fire.

“You are quite safe, Elfie?” he called, anxiously.

Her wild, careless laughter answered him. “Come in, the water’s fine. Come in; oh, come in! I dare you! I dare you!”

She swam off toward the moonlight with powerful side strokes, hardly diminished by her encumbering drapery. “I dare you!” she cried again.

No flesh and blood, not even of the most prudent young lawyer in New York, could withstand such a challenge. Heedless of consequences, Stephen flung himself over into the dark. The water was cold, his clothes were heavy; but he struck out valiantly. “Come on, oh, come on!” called the voice, far away on the surface of the water, and he strained every tendon to follow. A canoe drifted out slowly from somewhere--he didn’t know where--then it seemed to draw nearer, or else to disappear--he didn’t know which. The water was icy cold, his breath drew thick, his limbs, unaccustomed either to the cold or to the unwonted strain, were wrenched with a sudden muscular agony, and seemed to pass from his ownership and his control. Still, in the white moonlight before him, the black streak that he was following moved steadily along. He cursed himself as an effeminate monkey--“beaten by a girl!”

Then girls and Undines, farming implements and crystal palaces, whirled and shimmered dimly before his eyes. All he wanted was to rest--just a chance to rest! And, throwing out both arms, he gave himself up helplessly to the water.