was too dark to see her face. Everett had scarcely noticed her, when the switch engine came puffing up from the opposite direction, and the headlight threw a strong glare of light on his face. Suddenly the woman in the phaeton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins. Everett started forward and caught the horse’s head, but the animal only lifted its ears and whisked its tail in impatient surprise. The woman sat perfectly still, her head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed to her face. Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward the phaeton, crying, “Katharine, dear, what is the matter?”
Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then lifted his hat and passed on. He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the most impossible places, especially by women, but this cry out of the night had shaken him.
While Everett was breakfasting the next morning, the headwaiter leaned over his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting to see him in the parlor. Everett finished his coffee and went in the direction indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly pacing the floor. His whole manner betrayed a high degree of agitation, though his physique was not that of a man whose nerves lie near the surface. He was something below medium height, square-shouldered and solidly built. His thick, closely cut hair was beginning to show gray about the ears, and his bronzed face was heavily lined. His square brown hands were locked behind him, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of responsibilities; yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an incongruous diffidence in his address.
“Good morning, Mr. Hilgarde,” he said, extending his hand; “I found your name on the hotel register. My name is Gaylord. I’m afraid my sister startled you at the station last night, Mr. Hilgarde, and I’ve come around to apologize.”
“Ah! The young lady in the phaeton? I’m sure I didn’t know whether I had anything to do with her alarm or not. If I did, it is I who owe the apology.”
The man colored a little under the dark brown of his face.
“Oh, it’s nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand that. You see, my sister used to be a pupil of your brother’s, and it seems you favor him; and when the switch engine threw a light on your face it startled her.”
Everett wheeled about in his chair. “Oh! Katharine Gaylord!
Is it possible! Now it’s you who have given me a turn. Why, I used to know her when I was a boy. What on earth–“
“Is she doing here?” said Gaylord, grimly filling out the pause. “You’ve got at the heart of the matter. You knew my sister had been in bad health for a long time?”
“No, I had never heard a word of that. The last I knew of her she was singing in London. My brother and I correspond infrequently and seldom get beyond family matters. I am deeply sorry to hear this. There are more reasons why I am concerned than I can tell you.”
The lines in Charley Gaylord’s brow relaxed a little.
“What I’m trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see you. I hate to ask you, but she’s so set on it. We live several miles out of town, but my rig’s below, and I can take you out anytime you can go.”
“I can go now, and it will give me real pleasure to do so,” said Everett, quickly. “I’ll get my hat and be with you in a moment.”
When he came downstairs Everett found a cart at the door, and Charley Gaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up the reins and settled back into his own element.
“You see, I think I’d better tell you something about my sister before you see her, and I don’t know just where to begin. She traveled in Europe with your brother and his wife, and sang at a lot of his concerts; but I don’t know just how much you know about her.”
“Very little, except that my brother always thought her the most gifted of his pupils, and that when I knew her she was very young and very beautiful and turned my head sadly for a while.”
Everett saw that Gaylord’s mind was quite engrossed by his grief. He was wrought up to the point where his reserve and sense of proportion had quite left him, and his trouble was the one vital thing in the world. “That’s the whole thing,” he went on, flicking his horses with the whip.
“She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn’t come of a great family. She had to fight her own way from the first. She got to Chicago, and then to New York, and then to Europe, where she went up like lightning, and got a taste for it all; and now she’s dying here like a rat in a hole, out of her own world, and she can’t fall back into ours. We’ve grown apart, some way– miles and miles apart–and I’m afraid she’s fearfully unhappy.”
“It’s a very tragic story that you are telling me, Gaylord,” said Everett. They were well out into the country now, spinning along over the dusty plains of red grass, with the ragged-blue outline of the mountains before them.
“Tragic!” cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, “my God, man, nobody will ever know how tragic. It’s a tragedy I live with and eat with and sleep with, until I’ve lost my grip on everything. You see she had made a good bit of money, but she spent it all going to health resorts. It’s her lungs, you know. I’ve got money enough to send her anywhere, but the doctors all say it’s no use. She hasn’t the ghost of a chance. It’s just getting through the days now. I had no notion she was half so bad before she came to me. She just wrote that she was all run down. Now that she’s here, I think she’d be happier anywhere under the sun, but she won’t leave. She says it’s easier to let go of life here, and that to go East would be dying twice. There was a time when I was a brakeman with a run out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little thing I could carry on my shoulder, when I could get her everything on earth she wanted, and she hadn’t a wish my $80 a month didn’t cover; and now, when I’ve got a little property together, I can’t buy her a night’s sleep!”
Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord’s present status in the world might be, he had brought the brakeman’s heart up the ladder with him, and the brakeman’s frank avowal of sentiment. Presently Gaylord went on:
“You can understand how she has outgrown her family. We’re all a pretty common sort, railroaders from away back. My father was a conductor. He died when we were kids. Maggie, my other sister, who lives with me, was a telegraph operator here while I was getting my grip on things. We had no education to speak of. I have to hire a stenographer because I can’t spell straight–the Almighty couldn’t teach me to spell. The things that make up life to Kate are all Greek to me, and there’s scarcely a point where we touch any more, except in our recollections of the old times when we were all young and happy together, and Kate sang in a church choir in Bird City. But I believe, Mr. Hilgarde, that if she can see just one person like you, who knows about the things and people she’s interested in, it will give her about the only comfort she can have now.”
The reins slackened in Charley Gaylord’s hand as they drew up before a showily painted house with many gables and a round tower. “Here we are,” he said, turning to Everett, “and I guess we understand each other.”
They were met at the door by a thin, colorless woman, whom Gaylord introduced as “my sister, Maggie.” She asked her brother to show Mr. Hilgarde into the music room, where Katharine wished to see him alone.
When Everett entered the music room he gave a little start of surprise, feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some New York studio that he had always known. He wondered which it was of those countless studios, high up under the roofs, over banks and shops and wholesale houses, that this room resembled, and he looked incredulously out of the window at the gray plain that ended in the great upheaval of the Rockies.
The haunting air of familiarity about the room perplexed him. Was it a copy of some particular studio he knew, or was it merely the studio atmosphere that seemed so individual and poignantly reminiscent here in Wyoming? He sat down in a reading chair and looked keenly about him. Suddenly his eye fell upon a large photograph of his brother above the piano. Then it all became clear to him: this was veritably his brother’s room. If it were not an exact copy of one of the many studios that Adriance had fitted up in various parts of the world, wearying of them and leaving almost before the renovator’s varnish had dried, it was at least in the same tone. In every detail Adriance’s taste was so manifest that the room seemed to exhale his personality.
Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord, taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of her eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a tumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree of embarrassment. It was the face of a woman already old in her first youth, thoroughly sophisticated and a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother had called her fight. The camaraderie of her frank, confident eyes was qualified by the deep lines about her mouth and the curve of the lips, which was both sad and cynical. Certainly she had more good will than confidence toward the world, and the bravado of her smile could not conceal the shadow of an unrest that was almost discontent. The chief charm of the woman, as Everett had known her, lay in her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, lifegiving quality like the sunlight; eyes which glowed with a sort of perpetual salutat to the
world. Her head, Everett remembered as peculiarly well-shaped and proudly poised. There had been always a little of the imperatrix about her, and her pose in the photograph revived all his old impressions of her unattachedness, of how absolutely and valiantly she stood alone.
Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him and his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A very tall woman advanced toward him, holding out her hand. As she started to speak, she coughed slightly; then, laughing, said, in a low, rich voice, a trifle husky: “You see I make the traditional Camille entrance–with the cough. How good of you to come, Mr. Hilgarde.”
Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she was not looking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his pleasure in coming, he was glad to have an opportunity to collect himself. He had not reckoned upon the ravages of a long illness. The long, loose folds of her white gown had been especially designed to conceal the sharp outlines of her emaciated body, but the stamp of her disease was there; simple and ugly and obtrusive, a pitiless fact that could not be disguised or evaded. The splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a swaying unevenness in her gait, her arms seemed disproportionately long, and her hands were transparently white and cold to the touch. The changes in her face were less obvious; the proud carriage of the head, the warm, clear eyes, even the delicate flush of color in her cheeks, all defiantly remained, though they were all in a lower key–older, sadder, softer.
She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the pillows. “I know I’m not an inspiring object to look upon, but you must be quite frank and sensible about that and get used to it at once, for we’ve no time to lose. And if I’m a trifle irritable you won’t mind?–for I’m more than usually nervous.”
“Don’t bother with me this morning, if you are tired,” urged Everett. “I can come quite as well tomorrow.”
“Gracious, no!” she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humor that he remembered as a part of her. “It’s solitude that I’m tired to death of–solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the minister, not content with reading the prayers for the sick, called on me this morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and felt it his duty to stop. Of course, he disapproves of my profession, and I think he takes it for granted that I have a dark past. The funniest feature of his conversation is that he is always excusing my own vocation to me–condoning it, you know–and trying to patch up my peace with my conscience by suggesting possible noble uses for what he kindly calls my talent.”
Everett laughed. “Oh! I’m afraid I’m not the person to call after such a serious gentleman–I can’t sustain the situation. At my best I don’t reach higher than low comedy. Have you decided to which one of the noble uses you will devote yourself?”
Katharine lifted her hands in a gesture of renunciation and exclaimed: “I’m not equal to any of them, not even the least noble. I didn’t study that method.”
She laughed and went on nervously: “The parson’s not so bad. His English never offends me, and he has read Gibbon’s Decline
and Fall, all five volumes, and that’s something. Then, he has been to New York, and that’s a great deal. But how we are losing time! Do tell me about New York; Charley says you’re just on from there. How does it look and taste and smell just now? I think a whiff of the Jersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to me. Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what does he or she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes of weather? Who has your brother’s old studio now, and what misguided aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall? What do people go to see at the theaters, and what do they eat and drink there in the world nowadays? You see, I’m homesick for it all, from the Battery to Riverside. Oh, let me die in Harlem!” She was interrupted by a violent attack of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her discomfort, plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met in town during the summer and the musical outlook for the winter. He was diagraming with his pencil, on the back of an old envelope he found in his pocket, some new mechanical device to be used at the Metropolitan in the production of the Rheingold,
when he became conscious that she was looking at him intently, and that he was talking to the four walls.
Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture. He finished his explanation vaguely enough and put the envelope back in his pocket. As he did so she said, quietly: “How wonderfully like Adriance you are!” and he felt as though a crisis of some sort had been met and tided over.
He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his eyes that made them seem quite boyish. “Yes, isn’t it absurd? It’s almost as awkward as looking like Napoleon–but, after all, there are some advantages. It has made some of his friends like me, and I hope it will make you.”
Katharine smiled and gave him a quick, meaning glance from under her lashes. “Oh, it did that long ago. What a haughty, reserved youth you were then, and how you used to stare at people and then blush and look cross if they paid you back in your own coin. Do you remember that night when you took me home from a rehearsal and scarcely spoke a word to me?”
“It was the silence of admiration,” protested Everett, “very crude and boyish, but very sincere and not a little painful. Perhaps you suspected something of the sort? I remember you saw fit to be very grown-up and worldly.
“I believe I suspected a pose; the one that college boys usually affect with singers–‘an earthen vessel in love with a star,’ you know. But it rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a good deal of your brother’s pupils. Or had you an omnivorous capacity, and elasticity that always met the occasion?”
“Don’t ask a man to confess the follies of his youth,” said Everett, smiling a little sadly; “I am sensitive about some of them even now. But I was not so sophisticated as you imagined. I saw my brother’s pupils come and go, but that was about all. Sometimes I was called on to play accompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a carriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part. But they never spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance you speak of.”
“Yes”, observed Katharine, thoughtfully, “I noticed it then, too; but it has grown as you have grown older. That is rather strange, when you have lived such different lives. It’s not merely an ordinary family likeness of feature, you know, but a sort of interchangeable individuality; the suggestion of the other man’s personality in your face like an air transposed to another key. But I’m not attempting to define it; it’s beyond me; something altogether unusual and a trifle–well, uncanny,” she finished, laughing.
“I remember,” Everett said seriously, twirling the pencil between his fingers and looking, as he sat with his head thrown back, out under the red window blind which was raised just a little, and as it swung back and forth in the wind revealed the glaring panorama of the desert–a blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea in dead calm, splotched here and there with deep purple shadows; and, beyond, the ragged-blue outline of the mountains and the peaks of snow, white as the white clouds–“I remember, when I was a little fellow I used to be very sensitive about it. I don’t think it exactly displeased me, or that I would have had it otherwise if I could, but it seemed to me like a birthmark, or something not to be lightly spoken of. People were naturally always fonder of Ad than of me, and I used to feel the chill of reflected light pretty often. It came into even my relations with my mother. Ad went abroad to study when he was absurdly young, you know, and mother was all broken up over it. She did her whole duty by each of us, but it was sort of generally understood among us that she’d have made burnt offerings of us all for Ad any day. I was a little fellow then, and when she sat alone on the porch in the summer dusk she used sometimes to call me to her and turn my face up in the light that streamed out through the shutters and kiss me, and then I always knew she was thinking of Adriance.”
“Poor little chap,” said Katharine, and her tone was a trifle huskier than usual. “How fond people have always been of Adriance! Now tell me the latest news of him. I haven’t heard, except through the press, for a year or more. He was in Algeria then, in the valley of the Chelif, riding horseback night and day in an Arabian costume, and in his usual enthusiastic fashion he had quite made up his mind to adopt the Mohammedan faith and become as nearly an Arab as possible. How many countries and faiths has be adopted, I wonder? Probably he was playing Arab to himself all the time. I remember he was a sixteenth-century duke in Florence once for weeks together.”
“Oh, that’s Adriance,” chuckled Everett. “He is himself barely long enough to write checks and be measured for his clothes. I didn’t hear from him while he was an Arab; I missed that.”
“He was writing an Algerian suite for the piano then; it must be in the publisher’s hands by this time. I have been too ill to answer his letter, and have lost touch with him.”
Everett drew a letter from his pocket. “This came about a month ago. It’s chiefly about his new opera, which is to be brought out in London next winter. Read it at your leisure.”
“I think I shall keep it as a hostage, so that I may be sure you will come again. Now I want you to play for me. Whatever you like; but if there is anything new in the world, in mercy let me hear it. For nine months I have heard nothing but ‘The Baggage Coach Ahead’ and ‘She Is My Baby’s Mother.'”
He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him, absorbed in his remarkable physical likeness to his brother and trying to discover in just what it consisted. She told herself that it was very much as though a sculptor’s finished work had been rudely copied in wood. He was of a larger build than Adriance, and his shoulders were broad and heavy, while those of his brother were slender and rather girlish. His face was of the same oval mold, but it was gray and darkened about the mouth by continual shaving. His eyes were of the same inconstant April color, but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance’s were always points of highlight, and always meaning another thing than the thing they meant yesterday. But it was hard to see why this earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face that was as gay as his was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder, and though his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words. A contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods and of her affections, had once said to him that the shepherd boys who sang in the Vale of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde; and the comparison had been appropriated by a hundred shyer women who preferred to quote.
As Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the InterOcean House that night, he was a victim to random recollections. His infatuation for Katharine Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his boyish love affairs, and had long disturbed his bachelor dreams. He was painfully timid in everything relating to the emotions, and his hurt had withdrawn him from the society of women. The fact that it was all so done and dead and far behind him, and that the woman had lived her life out since then, gave him an oppressive sense of age and loss. He bethought himself of something he had read about “sitting by the hearth and remembering the faces of women without desire,” and felt himself an octogenarian.
He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his stay at his brother’s studio when Katharine Gaylord was working there, and how he had wounded Adriance on the night of his last concert in New York. He had sat there in the box while his brother and Katharine were called back again and again after the last number, watching the roses go up over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano, brooding, in his sullen boy’s heart, upon the pride those two felt in each other’s work–spurring each other to their best and beautifully contending in song. The footlights had seemed a hard, glittering line drawn sharply between their life and his; a circle of flame set about those splendid children of genius. He walked back to his hotel alone and sat in his window staring out on Madison Square until long after midnight, resolving to beat no more at doors that he could never enter and realizing more keenly than ever before how far this glorious world of beautiful creations lay from the paths of men like himself. He told himself that he had in common with this woman only the baser uses of life.
Everett’s week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no prospect of release except through the thing he dreaded. The bright, windy days of the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters and telegrams came urging him to hasten his trip to the coast, but he resolutely postponed his business engagements. The mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord’s ponies, or fishing in the mountains, and in the evenings he sat in his room writing letters or reading. In the afternoon he was usually at his post of duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive notions about the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene changes and the compensation varies, but in the end we usually find that we have played the same class of business from first to last. Everett had been a stopgap all his life. He remembered going through a looking glass labyrinth when he was a boy and trying gallery after gallery, only at every turn to bump his nose against his own face–which, indeed, was not his own, but his brother’s. No matter what his mission, east or west, by land or sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother’s business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shining current of Adriance Hilgarde’s. It was not the first time that his duty had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his brother’s imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten. He made no attempt to analyze the situation or to state it in exact terms; but he felt Katharine Gaylord’s need for him, and he accepted it as a commission from his brother to help this woman to die. Day by day he felt her demands on him grow more imperious, her need for him grow more acute and positive; and day by day he felt that in his peculiar relation to her his own individuality played a smaller and smaller part. His power to minister to her comfort, he saw, lay solely in his link with his brother’s life. He understood all that his physical resemblance meant to her. He knew that she sat by him always watching for some common trick of gesture, some familiar play of expression, some illusion of light and shadow, in which he should seem wholly Adriance. He knew that she lived upon this and that her disease fed upon it; that it sent shudders of remembrance through her and that in the exhaustion which followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she slept deep and sweet and dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old Florentine garden, and not of bitterness and death.
The question which most perplexed him was, “How much shall I know? How much does she wish me to know?” A few days after his first meeting with Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled his brother to write her. He had merely said that she was mortally ill; he could depend on Adriance to say the right thing–that was a part of his gift. Adriance always said not only the right thing, but the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. His phrases took the color of the moment and the then-present condition, so that they never savored of perfunctory compliment or frequent usage. He always caught the lyric essence of the moment, the poetic suggestion of every situation. Moreover, he usually did the right thing, the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing–except, when he did very cruel things–bent upon making people happy when their existence touched his, just as he insisted that his material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon those near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich nature, all the homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer near, forgetting–for that also was a part of Adriance’s gift.
Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made his daily call at the gaily painted ranch house, he found Katharine laughing like a schoolgirl. “Have you ever thought,” she said, as he entered the music room, “how much these seances of ours are like Heine’s ‘Florentine Nights,’ except that I don’t give you an opportunity to monopolize the conversation as Heine did?” She held his hand longer than usual, as she greeted him, and looked searchingly up into his face. “You are the kindest man living; the kindest,” she added, softly.
Everett’s gray face colored faintly as he drew his hand away, for he felt that this time she was looking at him and not at a whimsical caricature of his brother. “Why, what have I done now?” he asked, lamely. “I can’t remember having sent you any stale candy or champagne since yesterday.”
She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between the leaves of a book and held it out, smiling. “You got him to write it. Don’t say you didn’t, for it came direct, you see, and the last address I gave him was a place in Florida. This deed shall be remembered of you when I am with the just in Paradise. But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you didn’t know about it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata, the most ambitious thing he has ever done, and you are to play it for me directly, though it looks horribly intricate. But first for the letter; I think you would better read it aloud to me.”
Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window seat in which she reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He opened the letter, his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that it was a long one–wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance, who was tender with his valet and his stable boy, with his old gondolier and the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him.
The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa. The air was heavy, with the warm fragrance of the South and full of the sound of splashing, running water, as it had been in a certain old garden in Florence, long ago. The sky was one great turquoise, heated until it glowed. The wonderful Moorish arches threw graceful blue shadows all about him. He had sketched an outline of them on the margin of his notepaper. The subtleties of Arabic decoration had cast an unholy spell over him, and the brutal exaggerations of Gothic art were a bad dream, easily forgotten. The Alhambra itself had, from the first, seemed perfectly familiar to him, and he knew that he must have trod that court, sleek and brown and obsequious, centuries before Ferdinand rode into Andalusia. The letter was full of confidences about his work, and delicate allusions to their old happy days of study and comradeship, and of her own work, still so warmly remembered and appreciatively discussed everywhere he went.
As Everett folded the letter he felt that Adriance had divined the thing needed and had risen to it in his own wonderful way. The letter was consistently egotistical and seemed to him even a trifle patronizing, yet it was just what she had wanted. A strong realization of his brother’s charm and intensity and power came over him; he felt the breath of that whirlwind of flame in which Adriance passed, consuming all in his path, and himself even more resolutely than he consumed others. Then he looked down at this white, burnt-out brand that lay before him. “Like him, isn’t it?” she said, quietly.
“I think I can scarcely answer his letter, but when you see him next you can do that for me. I want you to tell him many things for me, yet they can all be summed up in this: I want him to grow wholly into his best and greatest self, even at the cost of the dear boyishness that is half his charm to you and me. Do you understand me?”
“I know perfectly well what you mean,” answered Everett, thoughtfully. “I have often felt so about him myself. And yet it’s difficult to prescribe for those fellows; so little makes, so little mars.”
Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face flushed with feverish earnestness. “Ah, but it is the waste of himself that I mean; his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until they take him at their own estimate. He can kindle marble, strike fire from putty, but is it worth what it costs him?”
“Come, come,” expostulated Everett, alarmed at her excitement. “Where is the new sonata? Let him speak for himself.”
He sat down at the piano and began playing the first movement, which was indeed the voice of Adriance, his proper speech. The sonata was the most ambitious work he had done up to that time and marked the transition from his purely lyric vein to a deeper and nobler style. Everett played intelligently and with that sympathetic comprehension which seems peculiar to a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anything in particular. When he had finished he turned to Katharine.
“How he has grown!” she cried. “What the three last years have done for him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is the tragedy of the soul, the shadow coexistent with the soul. This is the tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell. This is my tragedy, as I lie here spent by the racecourse, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass me. Ah, God! The swift feet of the runners!”
She turned her face away and covered it with her straining hands. Everett crossed over to her quickly and knelt beside her. In all the days he had known her she had never before, beyond an occasional ironical jest, given voice to the bitterness of her own defeat. Her courage had become a point of pride with him, and to see it going sickened him.
“Don’t do it,” he gasped. “I can’t stand it, I really can’t, I feel it too much. We mustn’t speak of that; it’s too tragic and too vast.”
When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old, brave, cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not shed. “No, I won’t be so ungenerous; I will save that for the watches of the night when I have no better company. Now you may mix me another drink of some sort. Formerly, when it was not if I should ever sing Brunnhilde, but quite simply when I should sing Brunnhilde, I was always starving myself and thinking what I might drink and what I might not. But broken music boxes may drink whatsoever they list, and no one cares whether they lose their figure. Run over that theme at the beginning again. That, at least, is not new. It was running in his head when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his glass at the dinner table. He had just begun to work it out when the late autumn came on, and the paleness of the Adriatic oppressed him, and he decided to go to Florence for the winter, and lost touch with the theme during his illness. Do you remember those frightful days? All the people who have loved him are not strong enough to save him from himself! When I got word from Florence that he had been ill I was in Nice filling a concert engagement. His wife was hurrying to him from Paris, but I reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm. They had taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the library–a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture and bronzes. He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room, looking, oh, so worn and pale!–as he always does when he is ill, you know. Ah, it is so good that you do know! Even
his red smoking jacket lent no color to his face. His first words were not to tell me how ill he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the last strokes to the score of his Souvenirs d’Automne. He was as I most like to remember him: so calm and happy and tired; not gay, as he usually is, but just contented and tired with that heavenly tiredness that comes after a good work done at last. Outside, the rain poured down in torrents, and the wind moaned for the pain of all the world and sobbed in the branches of the shivering olives and about the walls of that desolated old palace. How that night comes back to me! There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire which glowed upon the hard features of the bronze Dante, like the reflection of purgatorial flames, and threw long black shadows about us; beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all, Adriance sat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eves, and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one such life as his. Somehow the wind with all its world-pain had got into the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up in both of us at once–that awful, vague, universal pain, that cold fear of life and death and God and hope–and we were like two clinging together on a spar in midocean after the shipwreck of everything. Then we heard the front door open with a great gust of wind that shook even the walls, and the servants came running with lights, announcing that Madam had returned, ‘and in
the book we read no more that night.’“
She gave the old line with a certain bitter humor, and with the hard, bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in a glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn like a mask through so many years, had gradually changed even the lines of her face completely, and when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observer and satirist of herself. Everett dropped his head upon his hand and sat looking at the rug. “How much you have cared!” he said.
“Ah, yes, I cared,” she replied, closing her eyes with a long-drawn sigh of relief; and lying perfectly still, she went on: “You can’t imagine what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is to be able to tell it to someone. I used to want to shriek it out to the world in the long nights when I could not sleep. It seemed to me that I could not die with it. It demanded some sort of expression. And now that you know, you would scarcely believe how much less sharp the anguish of it is.”
Everett continued to look helplessly at the floor. “I was not sure how much you wanted me to know,” he said.
“Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked into your face, when you came that day with Charley. I flatter myself that I have been able to conceal it when I chose, though I suppose women always think that. The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern. But I wanted you to know; you are so like him that it is almost like telling him himself. At least, I feel now that he will know some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his compassion, for we none of us dare pity the dead. Since it was what my life has chiefly meant, I should like him to know. On the whole I am not ashamed of it. I have fought a good fight.”
“And has he never known at all?” asked Everett, in a thick voice.
“Oh! Never at all in the way that you mean. Of course, he is accustomed to looking into the eyes of women and finding love there; when he doesn’t find it there he thinks he must have been guilty of some discourtesy and is miserable about it. He has a genuine fondness for everyone who is not stupid or gloomy, or old or preternaturally ugly. Granted youth and cheerfulness, and a moderate amount of wit and some tact, and Adriance will always be glad to see you coming around the corner. I shared with the rest; shared the smiles and the gallantries and the droll little sermons. It was quite like a Sunday-school picnic; we wore our best clothes and a smile and took our turns. It was his kindness that was hardest. I have pretty well used my life up at standing punishment.”
“Don’t; you’ll make me hate him,” groaned Everett.
Katharine laughed and began to play nervously with her fan. “It wasn’t in the slightest degree his fault; that is the most grotesque part of it. Why, it had really begun before I ever met him. I fought my way to him, and I drank my doom greedily enough.”
Everett rose and stood hesitating. “I think I must go. You ought to be quiet, and I don’t think I can hear any more just now.”
She put out her hand and took his playfully. “You’ve put in three weeks at this sort of thing, haven’t you? Well, it may never be to your glory in this world, perhaps, but it’s been the mercy of heaven to me, and it ought to square accounts for a much worse life than yours will ever be.”
Everett knelt beside her, saying, brokenly: “I stayed because I wanted to be with you, that’s all. I have never cared about other women since I met you in New York when I was a lad. You are a part of my destiny, and I could not leave you if I would.”
She put her hands on his shoulders and shook her head. “No, no; don’t tell me that. I have seen enough of tragedy, God knows. Don’t show me any more just as the curtain is going down. No, no, it was only a boy’s fancy, and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it for a moment. One does not love the dying, dear friend. If some fancy of that sort had been left over from boyhood, this would rid you of it, and that were well. Now go, and you will come again tomorrow, as long as there are tomorrows, will you not?” She took his hand with a smile that lifted the mask from her soul, that was both courage and despair, and full of infinite loyalty and tenderness, as she said softly:
For ever and for ever, farewell, Cassius; If we do meet again, why, we shall smile; If not, why then, this parting was well made.
The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him as he went out.
On the night of Adriance Hilgarde’s opening concert in Paris Everett sat by the bed in the ranch house in Wyoming, watching over the last battle that we have with the flesh before we are done with it and free of it forever. At times it seemed that the serene soul of her must have left already and found some refuge from the storm, and only the tenacious animal life were left to do battle with death. She labored under a delusion at once pitiful and merciful, thinking that she was in the Pullman on her way to New York, going back to her life and her work. When she aroused from her stupor it was only to ask the porter to waken her half an hour out of Jersey City, or to remonstrate with him about the delays and the roughness of the road. At midnight Everett and the nurse were left alone with her. Poor Charley Gaylord had lain down on a couch outside the door. Everett sat looking at the sputtering night lamp until it made his eyes ache. His head dropped forward on the foot of the bed, and he sank into a heavy, distressful slumber. He was dreaming of Adriance’s concert in Paris, and of Adriance, the troubadour, smiling and debonair, with his boyish face and the touch of silver gray in his hair. He heard the applause and he saw the roses going up over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano, and the petals fell and scattered, making crimson splotches on the floor. Down this crimson pathway came Adriance with his youthful step, leading his prima donna by the hand; a dark woman this time, with Spanish eyes.
The nurse touched him on the shoulder; he started and awoke. She screened the lamp with her hand. Everett saw that Katharine was awake and conscious, and struggling a little. He lifted her gently on his arm and began to fan her. She laid her hands lightly on his hair and looked into his face with eyes that seemed never to have wept or doubted. “Ah, dear Adriance, dear, dear,” she whispered.
Everett went to call her brother, but when they came back the madness of art was over for Katharine.
Two days later Everett was pacing the station siding, waiting for the westbound train. Charley Gaylord walked beside him, but the two men had nothing to say to each other. Everett’s bags were piled on the truck, and his step was hurried and his eyes were full of impatience, as he gazed again and again up the track, watching for the train. Gaylord’s impatience was not less than his own; these two, who had grown so close, had now become painful and impossible to each other, and longed for the wrench of farewell.
As the train pulled in Everett wrung Gaylord’s hand among the crowd of alighting passengers. The people of a German opera company, en route to the coast, rushed by them in frantic haste to snatch their breakfast during the stop. Everett heard an exclamation in a broad German dialect, and a massive woman whose figure persistently escaped from her stays in the most improbable places rushed up to him, her blond hair disordered by the wind, and glowing with joyful surprise she caught his coat sleeve with her tightly gloved hands.
“Herr Gott, Adriance, lieber Freund,” she cried,
emotionally.
Everett quickly withdrew his arm and lifted his hat, blushing. “Pardon me, madam, but I see that you have mistaken me for Adriance Hilgarde. I am his brother,” he said quietly, and turning from the crestfallen singer, he hurried into the car.
The Garden Lodge
When Caroline Noble’s friends learned that Raymond d’Esquerre was to spend a month at her place on the Sound before he sailed to fill his engagement for the London opera season, they considered it another striking instance of the perversity of things. That the month was May, and the most mild and florescent of all the blue-and-white Mays the middle coast had known in years, but added to their sense of wrong. D’Esquerre, they learned, was ensconced in the lodge in the apple orchard, just beyond Caroline’s glorious garden, and report went that at almost any hour the sound of the tenor’s voice and of Caroline’s crashing accompaniment could be heard floating through the open windows, out among the snowy apple boughs. The Sound, steel-blue and dotted with white sails, was splendidly seen from the windows of the lodge. The garden to the left and the orchard to the right had never been so riotous with spring, and had burst into impassioned bloom, as if to accommodate Caroline, though she was certainly the last woman to whom the witchery of Freya could be attributed; the last woman, as her friends affirmed, to at all adequately appreciate and make the most of such a setting for the great tenor.
Of course, they admitted, Caroline was musical–well, she ought to be!–but in that, as in everything, she was paramountly cool-headed, slow of impulse, and disgustingly practical; in that, as in everything else, she had herself so provokingly well in hand. Of course, it would be she, always mistress of herself in any situation, she, who would never be lifted one inch from the ground by it, and who would go on superintending her gardeners and workmen as usual–it would be she who got him. Perhaps some of them suspected that this was exactly why she did get him, and it but nettled them the more.
Caroline’s coolness, her capableness, her general success, especially exasperated people because they felt that, for the most part, she had made herself what she was; that she had cold- bloodedly set about complying with the demands of life and making her position comfortable and masterful. That was why, everyone said, she had married Howard Noble. Women who did not get through life so well as Caroline, who could not make such good terms either with fortune or their husbands, who did not find their health so unfailingly good, or hold their looks so well, or manage their children so easily, or give such distinction to all they did, were fond of stamping Caroline as a materialist, and called her hard.
The impression of cold calculation, of having a definite policy, which Caroline gave, was far from a false one; but there was this to be said for her–that there were extenuating circumstances which her friends could not know.
If Caroline held determinedly to the middle course, if she was apt to regard with distrust everything which inclined toward extravagance, it was not because she was unacquainted with other standards than her own, or had never seen another side of life. She had grown up in Brooklyn, in a shabby little house under the vacillating administration of her father, a music teacher who usually neglected his duties to write orchestral compositions for which the world seemed to have no especial need. His spirit was warped by bitter vindictiveness and puerile self-commiseration, and he spent his days in scorn of the labor that brought him bread and in pitiful devotion to the labor that brought him only disappointment, writing interminable scores which demanded of the orchestra everything under heaven except melody.
It was not a cheerful home for a girl to grow up in. The mother, who idolized her husband as the music lord of the future, was left to a lifelong battle with broom and dustpan, to neverending conciliatory overtures to the butcher and grocer, to the making of her own gowns and of Caroline’s, and to the delicate task of mollifying Auguste’s neglected pupils.
The son, Heinrich, a painter, Caroline’s only brother, had inherited all his father’s vindictive sensitiveness without his capacity for slavish application. His little studio on the third floor had been much frequented by young men as unsuccessful as himself, who met there to give themselves over to contemptuous derision of this or that artist whose industry and stupidity had won him recognition. Heinrich, when he worked at all, did newspaper sketches at twenty-five dollars a week. He was too indolent and vacillating to set himself seriously to his art, too irascible and poignantly self-conscious to make a living, too much addicted to lying late in bed, to the incontinent reading of poetry, and to the use of chloral to be anything very positive except painful. At twenty-six he shot himself in a frenzy, and the whole wretched affair had effectually shattered his mother’s health and brought on the decline of which she died. Caroline had been fond of him, but she felt a certain relief when he no longer wandered about the little house, commenting ironically upon its shabbiness, a Turkish cap on his head and a cigarette hanging from between his long, tremulous fingers.
After her mother’s death Caroline assumed the management of that bankrupt establishment. The funeral expenses were unpaid, and Auguste’s pupils had been frightened away by the shock of successive disasters and the general atmosphere of wretchedness that pervaded the house. Auguste himself was writing a symphonic poem, Icarus, dedicated to the memory of his son. Caroline was barely twenty when she was called upon to face this tangle of difficulties, but she reviewed the situation candidly. The house had served its time at the shrine of idealism; vague, distressing, unsatisfied yearnings had brought it low enough. Her mother, thirty years before, had eloped and left Germany with her music teacher, to give herself over to lifelong, drudging bondage at the kitchen range. Ever since Caroline could remember, the law in the house had been a sort of mystic worship of things distant, intangible and unattainable. The family had lived in successive ebullitions of generous enthusiasm, in talk of masters and masterpieces, only to come down to the cold facts in the case; to boiled mutton and to the necessity of turning the dining-room carpet. All these emotional pyrotechnics had ended in petty jealousies, in neglected duties, and in cowardly fear of the little grocer on the corner.
From her childhood she had hated it, that humiliating and uncertain existence, with its glib tongue and empty pockets, its poetic ideals and sordid realities, its indolence and poverty tricked out in paper roses. Even as a little girl, when vague dreams beset her, when she wanted to lie late in bed and commune with visions, or to leap and sing because the sooty little trees along the street were putting out their first pale leaves in the sunshine, she would clench her hands and go to help her mother sponge the spots from her father’s waistcoat or press Heinrich’s trousers. Her mother never permitted the slightest question concerning anything Auguste or Heinrich saw fit to do, but from the time Caroline could reason at all she could not help thinking that many things went wrong at home. She knew, for example, that her father’s pupils ought not to be kept waiting half an hour while he discussed Schopenhauer with some bearded socialist over a dish of herrings and a spotted tablecloth. She knew that Heinrich ought not to give a dinner on Heine’s birthday, when the laundress had not been paid for a month and when he frequently had to ask his mother for carfare. Certainly Caroline had served her apprenticeship to idealism and to all the embarrassing inconsistencies which it sometimes entails, and she decided to deny herself this diffuse, ineffectual answer to the sharp questions of life.
When she came into the control of herself and the house she refused to proceed any further with her musical education. Her father, who had intended to make a concert pianist of her, set this down as another item in his long list of disappointments and his grievances against the world. She was young and pretty, and she had worn turned gowns and soiled gloves and improvised hats all her life. She wanted the luxury of being like other people, of being honest from her hat to her boots, of having nothing to hide, not even in the matter of stockings, and she was willing to work for it. She rented a little studio away from that house of misfortune and began to give lessons. She managed well and was the sort of girl people liked to help. The bills were paid and Auguste went on composing, growing indignant only when she refused to insist that her pupils should study his compositions for the piano. She began to get engagements in New York to play accompaniments at song recitals. She dressed well, made herself agreeable, and gave herself a chance. She never permitted herself to look further than a step ahead, and set herself with all the strength of her will to see things as they are and meet them squarely in the broad day. There were two things she feared even more than poverty: the part of one that sets up an idol and the part of one that bows down and worships it.
When Caroline was twenty-four she married Howard Noble, then a widower of forty, who had been for ten years a power in Wall Street. Then, for the first time, she had paused to take breath. It took a substantialness as unquestionable as his; his money, his position, his energy, the big vigor of his robust person, to satisfy her that she was entirely safe. Then she relaxed a little, feeling that there was a barrier to be counted upon between her and that world of visions and quagmires and failure.
Caroline had been married for six years when Raymond d’Esquerre came to stay with them. He came chiefly because Caroline was what she was; because he, too, felt occasionally the need of getting out of Klingsor’s garden, of dropping down somewhere for a time near a quiet nature, a cool head, a strong hand. The hours he had spent in the garden lodge were hours of such concentrated study as, in his fevered life, he seldom got in anywhere. She had, as he told Noble, a fine appreciation of the seriousness of work.
One evening two weeks after d’Esquerre had sailed, Caroline was in the library giving her husband an account of the work she had laid out for the gardeners. She superintended the care of the grounds herself. Her garden, indeed, had become quite a part of her; a sort of beautiful adjunct, like gowns or jewels. It was a famous spot, and Noble was very proud of it.
“What do you think, Caroline, of having the garden lodge torn down and putting a new summer house there at the end of the arbor; a big rustic affair where you could have tea served in midsummer?” he asked.
“The lodge?” repeated Caroline looking at him quickly. “Why, that seems almost a shame, doesn’t it, after d’Esquerre has used it?”
Noble put down his book with a smile of amusement.
“Are you going to be sentimental about it? Why, I’d sacrifice the whole place to see that come to pass. But I don’t believe you could do it for an hour together.”
“I don’t believe so, either,” said his wife, smiling.
Noble took up his book again and Caroline went into the music room to practice. She was not ready to have the lodge torn down. She had gone there for a quiet hour every day during the two weeks since d’Esquerre had left them. It was the sheerest sentiment she had ever permitted herself. She was ashamed of it, but she was childishly unwilling to let it go.
Caroline went to bed soon after her husband, but she was not able to sleep. The night was close and warm, presaging storm. The wind had fallen, and the water slept, fixed and motionless as the sand. She rose and thrust her feet into slippers and, putting a dressing gown over her shoulders, opened the door of her husband’s room; he was sleeping soundly. She went into the hall and down the stairs; then, leaving the house through a side door, stepped into the vine-covered arbor that led to the garden lodge. The scent of the June roses was heavy in the still air, and the stones that paved the path felt pleasantly cool through the thin soles of her slippers. Heat-lightning flashed continuously from the bank of clouds that had gathered over the sea, but the shore was flooded with moonlight and, beyond, the rim of the Sound lay smooth and shining. Caroline had the key of the lodge, and the door creaked as she opened it. She stepped into the long, low room radiant with the moonlight which streamed through the bow window and lay in a silvery pool along the waxed floor. Even that part of the room which lay in the shadow was vaguely illuminated; the piano, the tall candlesticks, the picture frames and white casts standing out as clearly in the half-light as did the sycamores and black poplars of the garden against the still, expectant night sky. Caroline sat down to think it all over. She had come here to do just that every day of the two weeks since d’Esquerre’s departure, but, far from ever having reached a conclusion, she had succeeded only in losing her way in a maze of memories–sometimes bewilderingly confused, sometimes too acutely distinct–where there was neither path, nor clue, nor any hope of finality. She had, she realized, defeated a lifelong regimen; completely confounded herself by falling unaware and incontinently into that luxury of reverie which, even as a little girl, she had so determinedly denied herself, she had been developing with alarming celerity that part of one which sets up an idol and that part of one which bows down and worships it.
It was a mistake, she felt, ever to have asked d’Esquerre to come at all. She had an angry feeling that she had done it rather in self-defiance, to rid herself finally of that instinctive fear of him which had always troubled and perplexed her. She knew that she had reckoned with herself before he came; but she had been equal to so much that she had never really doubted she would be equal to this. She had come to believe, indeed, almost arrogantly in her own malleability and endurance; she had done so much with herself that she had come to think that there was nothing which she could not do; like swimmers, overbold, who reckon upon their strength and their power to hoard it, forgetting the ever-changing moods of their adversary, the sea.
And d’Esquerre was a man to reckon with. Caroline did not deceive herself now upon that score. She admitted it humbly enough, and since she had said good-by to him she had not been free for a moment from the sense of his formidable power. It formed the undercurrent of her consciousness; whatever she might be doing or thinking, it went on, involuntarily, like her breathing, sometimes welling up until suddenly she found herself suffocating. There was a moment of this tonight, and Caroline rose and stood shuddering, looking about her in the blue duskiness of the silent room. She had not been here at night before, and the spirit of the place seemed more troubled and insistent than ever it had in the quiet of the afternoons. Caroline brushed her hair back from her damp forehead and went over to the bow window. After raising it she sat down upon the low seat. Leaning her head against the sill, and loosening her nightgown at the throat, she half-closed her eyes and looked off into the troubled night, watching the play of the heat-lightning upon the massing clouds between the pointed tops of the poplars.
Yes, she knew, she knew well enough, of what absurdities this spell was woven; she mocked, even while she winced. His power, she knew, lay not so much in anything that he actually had–though he had so much–or in anything that he actually was, but in what he suggested, in what he seemed picturesque enough to have or be and that was just anything that one chose to believe or to desire. His appeal was all the more persuasive and alluring in that it was to the imagination alone, in that it was as indefinite and impersonal as those cults of idealism which so have their way with women. What he had was that, in his mere personality, he quickened and in a measure gratified that something without which–to women–life is no better than sawdust, and to the desire for which most of their mistakes and tragedies and astonishingly poor bargains are due.
D’Esquerre had become the center of a movement, and the Metropolitan had become the temple of a cult. When he could be induced to cross the Atlantic, the opera season in New York was successful; when he could not, the management lost money; so much everyone knew. It was understood, too, that his superb art had disproportionately little to do with his peculiar position. Women swayed the balance this way or that; the opera, the orchestra, even his own glorious art, achieved at such a cost, were but the accessories of himself; like the scenery and costumes and even the soprano, they all went to produce atmosphere, were the mere mechanics of the beautiful illusion.
Caroline understood all this; tonight was not the first time that she had put it to herself so. She had seen the same feeling in other people, watched for it in her friends, studied it in the house night after night when he sang, candidly putting herself among a thousand others.
D’Esquerre’s arrival in the early winter was the signal for a feminine hegira toward New York. On the nights when he sang women flocked to the Metropolitan from mansions and hotels, from typewriter desks, schoolrooms, shops, and fitting rooms. They were of all conditions and complexions. Women of the world who accepted him knowingly as they sometimes took champagne for its agreeable effect; sisters of charity and overworked shopgirls, who received him devoutly; withered women who had taken doctorate degrees and who worshipped furtively through prism spectacles; business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt afar from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses. They all entered into the same romance; dreamed, in terms as various as the hues of fantasy, the same dream; drew the same quick breath when he stepped upon the stage, and, at his exit, felt the same dull pain of shouldering the pack again.
There were the maimed, even; those who came on crutches, who were pitted by smallpox or grotesquely painted by cruel birth stains. These, too, entered with him into enchantment. Stout matrons became slender girls again; worn spinsters felt their cheeks flush with the tenderness of their lost youth. Young and old, however hideous, however fair, they yielded up their heat– whether quick or latent–sat hungering for the mystic bread wherewith he fed them at this eucharist of sentiment.
Sometimes, when the house was crowded from the orchestra to the last row of the gallery, when the air was charged with this ecstasy of fancy, he himself was the victim of the burning reflection of his power. They acted upon him in turn; he felt their fervent and despairing appeal to him; it stirred him as the spring drives the sap up into an old tree; he, too, burst into bloom. For the moment he, too, believed again, desired again, he knew not what, but something.
But it was not in these exalted moments that Caroline had learned to fear him most. It was in the quiet, tired reserve, the dullness, even, that kept him company between these outbursts that she found that exhausting drain upon her sympathies which was the very pith and substance of their alliance. It was the tacit admission of disappointment under all this glamour of success–the helplessness of the enchanter to at all enchant himself–that awoke in her an illogical, womanish desire to in some way compensate, to make it up to him.
She had observed drastically to herself that it was her eighteenth year he awoke in her–those hard years she had spent in turning gowns and placating tradesmen, and which she had never had time to live. After all, she reflected, it was better to allow one’s self a little youth–to dance a little at the carnival and to live these things when they are natural and lovely, not to have them coming back on one and demanding arrears when they are humiliating and impossible. She went over tonight all the catalogue of her self-deprivations; recalled how, in the light of her father’s example, she had even refused to humor her innocent taste for improvising at the piano; how, when she began to teach, after her mother’s death, she had struck out one little indulgence after another, reducing her life to a relentless routine, unvarying as clockwork. It seemed to her that ever since d’Esquerre first came into the house she had been haunted by an imploring little girlish ghost that followed her about, wringing its hands and entreating for an hour of life.
The storm had held off unconscionably long; the air within the lodge was stifling, and without the garden waited, breathless. Everything seemed pervaded by a poignant distress; the hush of feverish, intolerable expectation. The still earth, the heavy flowers, even the growing darkness, breathed the exhaustion of protracted waiting. Caroline felt that she ought to go; that it was wrong to stay; that the hour and the place were as treacherous as her own reflections. She rose and began to pace the floor, stepping softly, as though in fear of awakening someone, her figure, in its thin drapery, diaphanously vague and white. Still unable to shake off the obsession of the intense stillness, she sat down at the piano and began to run over the first act of the Walkure, the last of his roles
they had practiced together; playing listlessly and absently at first, but with gradually increasing seriousness. Perhaps it was the still heat of the summer night, perhaps it was the heavy odors from the garden that came in through the open windows; but as she played there grew and grew the feeling that he was there, beside her, standing in his accustomed place. In the duet at the end of the first act she heard him clearly: “Thou art the Spring for
which I sighed in Winter’s cold embraces.” Once as he sang
it, he had put his arm about her, his one hand under her heart, while with the other he took her right from the keyboard, holding her as he always held Sieglinde when he drew her toward the
window. She had been wonderfully the mistress of herself at the time; neither repellent nor acquiescent. She remembered that she had rather exulted, then, in her self-control–which he had seemed to take for granted, though there was perhaps the whisper of a question from the hand under her heart. “Thou art the Spring
for which I sighed in Winter’s cold embraces.” Caroline lifted
her hands quickly from the keyboard, and she bowed her head in them, sobbing.
The storm broke and the rain beat in, spattering her nightdress until she rose and lowered the windows. She dropped upon the couch and began fighting over again the battles of other days, while the ghosts of the slain rose as from a sowing of dragon’s teeth, The shadows of things, always so scorned and flouted, bore down upon her merciless and triumphant. It was not enough; this happy, useful, well-ordered life was not enough. It did not satisfy, it was not even real. No, the other things, the shadows-they were the realities. Her father, poor Heinrich, even her mother, who had been able to sustain her poor romance and keep her little illusions amid the tasks of a scullion, were nearer happiness than she. Her sure foundation was but made ground, after all, and the people in Klingsor’s garden were more fortunate, however barren the sands from which they conjured their paradise.
The lodge was still and silent; her fit of weeping over, Caroline made no sound, and within the room, as without in the garden, was the blackness of storm. Only now and then a flash of lightning showed a woman’s slender figure rigid on the couch, her face buried in her hands.
Toward morning, when the occasional rumbling of thunder was heard no more and the beat of the raindrops upon the orchard leaves was steadier, she fell asleep and did not waken until the first red streaks of dawn shone through the twisted boughs of the apple trees. There was a moment between world and world, when, neither asleep nor awake, she felt her dream grow thin, melting away from her, felt the warmth under her heart growing cold. Something seemed to slip from the clinging hold of her arms, and she groaned protestingly through her parted lips, following it a little way with fluttering hands. Then her eyes opened wide and she sprang up and sat holding dizzily to the cushions of the couch, staring down at her bare, cold feet, at her laboring breast, rising and falling under her open nightdress.
The dream was gone, but the feverish reality of it still pervaded her and she held it as the vibrating string holds a tone. In the last hour the shadows had had their way with Caroline. They had shown her the nothingness of time and space, of system and discipline, of closed doors and broad waters. Shuddering, she thought of the Arabian fairy tale in which the genie brought the princess of China to the sleeping prince of Damascus and carried her through the air back to her palace at dawn. Caroline closed her eyes and dropped her elbows weakly upon her knees, her shoulders sinking together. The horror was that it had not come from without, but from within. The dream was no blind chance; it was the expression of something she had kept so close a prisoner that she had never seen it herself, it was the wail from the donjon deeps when the watch slept. Only as the outcome of such a night of sorcery could the thing have been loosed to straighten its limbs and measure itself with her; so heavy were the chains upon it, so many a fathom deep, it was crushed down into darkness. The fact that d’Esquerre happened to be on the other side of the world meant nothing; had he been here, beside her, it could scarcely have hurt her self-respect so much. As it was, she was without even the extenuation of an outer impulse, and she could scarcely have despised herself more had she come to him here in the night three weeks ago and thrown herself down upon the stone slab at the door there.
Caroline rose unsteadily and crept guiltily from the lodge and along the path under the arbor, terrified lest the servants should be stirring, trembling with the chill air, while the wet shrubbery, brushing against her, drenched her nightdress until it clung about her limbs.
At breakfast her husband looked across the table at her with concern. “It seems to me that you are looking rather fagged, Caroline. It was a beastly night to sleep. Why don’t you go up to the mountains until this hot weather is over? By the way, were you in earnest about letting the lodge stand?”
Caroline laughed quietly. “No, I find I was not very serious. I haven’t sentiment enough to forego a summer house. Will you tell Baker to come tomorrow to talk it over with me? If we are to have a house party, I should like to put him to work on it at once.”
Noble gave her a glance, half-humorous, half-vexed. “Do you know I am rather disappointed?” he said. “I had almost hoped that, just for once, you know, you would be a little bit foolish.”
“Not now that I’ve slept over it,” replied Caroline, and they both rose from the table, laughing.
The Marriage of Phaedra
The sequence of events was such that MacMaster did not make his pilgrimage to Hugh Treffinger’s studio until three years after that painter’s death. MacMaster was himself a painter, an American of the Gallicized type, who spent his winters in New York, his summers in Paris, and no inconsiderable amount of time on the broad waters between. He had often contemplated stopping in London on one of his return trips in the late autumn, but he had always deferred leaving Paris until the prick of necessity drove him home by the quickest and shortest route.
Treffinger was a comparatively young man at the time of his death, and there had seemed no occasion for haste until haste was of no avail. Then, possibly, though there had been some correspondence between them, MacMaster felt certain qualms about meeting in the flesh a man who in the flesh was so diversely reported. His intercourse with Treffinger’s work had been so deep and satisfying, so apart from other appreciations, that he rather dreaded a critical juncture of any sort. He had always felt himself singularly inept in personal relations, and in this case he had avoided the issue until it was no longer to be feared or hoped for. There still remained, however, Treffinger’s great unfinished picture, the Marriage of Phaedra, which had never
left his studio, and of which MacMaster’s friends had now and again brought report that it was the painter’s most characteristic production.
The young man arrived in London in the evening, and the next morning went out to Kensington to find Treffinger’s studio. It lay in one of the perplexing bystreets off Holland Road, and the number he found on a door set in a high garden wall, the top of which was covered with broken green glass and over which a budding lilac bush nodded. Treffinger’s plate was still there, and a card requesting visitors to ring for the attendant. In response to MacMaster’s ring, the door was opened by a cleanly built little man, clad in a shooting jacket and trousers that had been made for an ampler figure. He had a fresh complexion, eyes of that common uncertain shade of gray, and was closely shaven except for the incipient muttonchops on his ruddy cheeks. He bore himself in a manner strikingly capable, and there was a sort of trimness and alertness about him, despite the too-generous shoulders of his coat. In one hand he held a bulldog pipe, and in the other a copy of Sporting Life. While MacMaster was
explaining the purpose of his call he noticed that the man surveyed him critically, though not impertinently. He was admitted into a little tank of a lodge made of whitewashed stone, the back door and windows opening upon a garden. A visitor’s book and a pile of catalogues lay on a deal table, together with a bottle of ink and some rusty pens. The wall was ornamented with photographs and colored prints of racing favorites.
“The studio is h’only open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays,” explained the man–he referred to himself as “Jymes”–“but of course we make exceptions in the case of pynters. Lydy Elling Treffinger ‘erself is on the Continent, but Sir ‘Ugh’s orders was that pynters was to ‘ave the run of the place.” He selected a key from his pocket and threw open the door into the studio which, like the lodge, was built against the wall of the garden.
MacMaster entered a long, narrow room, built of smoothed planks, painted a light green; cold and damp even on that fine May morning. The room was utterly bare of furniture–unless a stepladder, a model throne, and a rack laden with large leather portfolios could be accounted such–and was windowless, without other openings than the door and the skylight, under which hung the unfinished picture itself. MacMaster had never seen so many of Treffinger’s paintings together. He knew the painter had married a woman with money and had been able to keep such of his pictures as he wished. These, with all of 182 his
replicas and studies, he had left as a sort of common legacy to the younger men of the school he had originated.
As soon as he was left alone MacMaster sat down on the edge of the model throne before the unfinished picture. Here indeed was what he had come for; it rather paralyzed his receptivity for the moment, but gradually the thing found its way to him.
At one o’clock he was standing before the collection of studies done for Boccaccio’s Garden when he heard a voice at his
elbow.
“Pardon, sir, but I was just about to lock up and go to lunch. Are you lookin’ for the figure study of Boccaccio ‘imself?” James queried respectfully. “Lydy Elling Treffinger give it to Mr. Rossiter to take down to Oxford for some lectures he’s been agiving there.”
“Did he never paint out his studies, then?” asked MacMaster with perplexity. “Here are two completed ones for this picture. Why did he keep them?”
“I don’t know as I could say as to that, sir,” replied James, smiling indulgently, “but that was ‘is way. That is to say, ‘e pynted out very frequent, but ‘e always made two studies to stand; one in watercolors and one in oils, before ‘e went at the final picture–to say nothink of all the pose studies ‘e made in pencil before he begun on the composition proper at all. He was that particular. You see, ‘e wasn’t so keen for the final effect as for the proper pyntin’ of ‘is pictures. ‘E used to say they ought to be well made, the same as any other h’article of trade. I can lay my ‘and on the pose studies for you, sir.” He rummaged in one of the portfolios and produced half a dozen drawings, “These three,” he continued, “was discarded; these two was the pose he finally accepted; this one without alteration, as it were.
“That’s in Paris, as I remember,” James continued reflectively. “It went with the Saint Cecilia into the Baron H—‘s
collection. Could you tell me, sir, ‘as ‘e it still? I don’t like to lose account of them, but some ‘as changed ‘ands since Sir ‘Ugh’s death.”
“H—‘s collection is still intact, I believe,” replied MacMaster. “You were with Treffinger long?”
“From my boyhood, sir,” replied James with gravity. “I was a stable boy when ‘e took me.”
“You were his man, then?”
“That’s it, sir. Nobody else ever done anything around the studio. I always mixed ‘is colors and ‘e taught me to do a share of the varnishin’; ‘e said as ‘ow there wasn’t a ‘ouse in England as could do it proper. You ayn’t looked at the Marriage yet, sir?”
he asked abruptly, glancing doubtfully at MacMaster, and indicating with his thumb the picture under the north light.
“Not very closely. I prefer to begin with something simpler; that’s rather appalling, at first glance,” replied MacMaster.
“Well may you say that, sir,” said James warmly. “That one regular killed Sir ‘Ugh; it regular broke ‘im up, and nothink will ever convince me as ‘ow it didn’t bring on ‘is second stroke.”
When MacMaster walked back to High Street to take his bus his mind was divided between two exultant convictions. He felt that he had not only found Treffinger’s greatest picture, but that, in James, he had discovered a kind of cryptic index to the painter’s personality–a clue which, if tactfully followed, might lead to much.
Several days after his first visit to the studio, MacMaster wrote to Lady Mary Percy, telling her that he would be in London for some time and asking her if he might call. Lady Mary was an only sister of Lady Ellen Treffinger, the painter’s widow, and MacMaster had known her during one winter he spent at Nice. He had known her, indeed, very well, and Lady Mary, who was astonishingly frank and communicative upon all subjects, had been no less so upon the matter of her sister’s unfortunate marriage.
In her reply to his note Lady Mary named an afternoon when she would be alone. She was as good as her word, and when MacMaster arrived he found the drawing room empty. Lady Mary entered shortly after he was announced. She was a tall woman, thin and stiffly jointed, and her body stood out under the folds of her gown with the rigor of cast iron. This rather metallic suggestion was further carried out in her heavily knuckled hands, her stiff gray hair, and her long, bold-featured face, which was saved from freakishness only by her alert eyes.
“Really,” said Lady Mary, taking a seat beside him and giving him a sort of military inspection through her nose glasses, “really, I had begun to fear that I had lost you altogether. It’s four years since I saw you at Nice, isn’t it? I was in Paris last winter, but I heard nothing from you.”
“I was in New York then.”
“It occurred to me that you might be. And why are you in London?”
“Can you ask?” replied MacMaster gallantly.
Lady Mary smiled ironically. “But for what else, incidentally?”
“Well, incidentally, I came to see Treffinger’s studio and his unfinished picture. Since I’ve been here, I’ve decided to stay the summer. I’m even thinking of attempting to do a biography of him.”
“So that is what brought you to London?”
“Not exactly. I had really no intention of anything so serious when I came. It’s his last picture, I fancy, that has rather thrust it upon me. The notion has settled down on me like a thing destined.”
“You’ll not be offended if I question the clemency of such a destiny,” remarked Lady Mary dryly. “Isn’t there rather a surplus of books on that subject already?”
“Such as they are. Oh, I’ve read them all”–here MacMaster faced Lady Mary triumphantly. “He has quite escaped your amiable critics,” he added, smiling.
“I know well enough what you think, and I daresay we are not much on art,” said Lady Mary with tolerant good humor. “We leave that to peoples who have no physique. Treffinger made a stir for a time, but it seems that we are not capable of a sustained appreciation of such extraordinary methods. In the end we go back to the pictures we find agreeable and unperplexing. He was regarded as an experiment, I fancy; and now it seems that he was rather an unsuccessful one. If you’ve come to us in a missionary spirit, we’ll tolerate you politely, but we’ll laugh in our sleeve, I warn you.”
“That really doesn’t daunt me, Lady Mary,” declared MacMaster blandly. “As I told you, I’m a man with a mission.”
Lady Mary laughed her hoarse, baritone laugh. “Bravo! And you’ve come to me for inspiration for your panegyric?”
MacMaster smiled with some embarrassment. “Not altogether for that purpose. But I want to consult you, Lady Mary, about the advisability of troubling Lady Ellen Treffinger in the matter. It seems scarcely legitimate to go on without asking her to give some sort of grace to my proceedings, yet I feared the whole subject might be painful to her. I shall rely wholly upon your discretion.”
“I think she would prefer to be consulted,” replied Lady Mary judicially. “I can’t understand how she endures to have the wretched affair continually raked up, but she does. She seems to feel a sort of moral responsibility. Ellen has always been singularly conscientious about this matter, insofar as her light goes,–which rather puzzles me, as hers is not exactly a magnanimous nature. She is certainly trying to do what she believes to be the right thing. I shall write to her, and you can see her when she returns from Italy.”
“I want very much to meet her. She is, I hope, quite recovered in every way,” queried MacMaster, hesitatingly.
“No, I can’t say that she is. She has remained in much the same condition she sank to before his death. He trampled over pretty much whatever there was in her, I fancy. Women don’t recover from wounds of that sort–at least, not women of Ellen’s grain. They go on bleeding inwardly.”
“You, at any rate, have not grown more reconciled,” MacMaster ventured.
“Oh I give him his dues. He was a colorist, I grant you; but that is a vague and unsatisfactory quality to marry to; Lady Ellen Treffinger found it so.”
“But, my dear Lady Mary,” expostulated MacMaster, “and just repress me if I’m becoming too personal–but it must, in the first place, have been a marriage of choice on her part as well as on his.”
Lady Mary poised her glasses on her large forefinger and assumed an attitude suggestive of the clinical lecture room as she replied. “Ellen, my dear boy, is an essentially romantic person. She is quiet about it, but she runs deep. I never knew how deep until I came against her on the issue of that marriage. She was always discontented as a girl; she found things dull and prosaic, and the ardor of his courtship was agreeable to her. He met her during her first season in town. She is handsome, and there were plenty of other men, but I grant you your scowling brigand was the most picturesque of the lot. In his courtship, as in everything else, he was theatrical to the point of being ridiculous, but Ellen’s sense of humor is not her strongest quality. He had the charm of celebrity, the air of a man who could storm his way through anything to get what he wanted. That sort of vehemence is particularly effective with women like Ellen, who can be warmed only by reflected heat, and she couldn’t at all stand out against it. He convinced her of his necessity; and that done, all’s done.”
“I can’t help thinking that, even on such a basis, the marriage should have turned out better,” MacMaster remarked reflectively.
“The marriage,” Lady Mary continued with a shrug, “was made on the basis of a mutual misunderstanding. Ellen, in the nature of the case, believed that she was doing something quite out of the ordinary in accepting him, and expected concessions which, apparently, it never occurred to him to make. After his marriage he relapsed into his old habits of incessant work, broken by violent and often brutal relaxations. He insulted her friends and foisted his own upon her–many of them well calculated to arouse aversion in any well-bred girl. He had Ghillini constantly at the house–a homeless vagabond, whose conversation was impossible. I don’t say, mind you, that he had not grievances on his side. He had probably overrated the girl’s possibilities, and he let her see that he was disappointed in her. Only a large and generous nature could have borne with him, and Ellen’s is not that. She could not at all understand that odious strain of plebeian pride which plumes itself upon not having risen above its sources.
As MacMaster drove back to his hotel he reflected that Lady Mary Percy had probably had good cause for dissatisfaction with her brother-in-law. Treffinger was, indeed, the last man who should have married into the Percy family. The son of a small tobacconist, he had grown up a sign-painter’s apprentice; idle, lawless, and practically letterless until he had drifted into the night classes of the Albert League, where Ghillini sometimes lectured. From the moment he came under the eye and influence of that erratic Italian, then a political exile, his life had swerved sharply from its old channel. This man had been at once incentive and guide, friend and master, to his pupil. He had taken the raw clay out of the London streets and molded it anew. Seemingly he had divined at once where the boy’s possibilities lay, and had thrown aside every canon of orthodox instruction in the training of him. Under him Treffinger acquired his superficial, yet facile, knowledge of the classics; had steeped himself in the monkish Latin and medieval romances which later gave his work so naive and remote a quality. That was the beginning of the wattle fences, the cobble pave, the brown roof beams, the cunningly wrought fabrics that gave to his pictures such a richness of decorative effect.
As he had told Lady Mary Percy, MacMaster had found the imperative inspiration of his purpose in Treffinger’s unfinished picture, the Marriage of Phaedra. He had always believed that the key to Treffinger’s individuality lay in his singular education; in the Roman de la Rose, in Boccaccio, and Amadis, those works which had literally transcribed themselves upon the blank soul of the London street boy, and through which he had been born into the world of spiritual things. Treffinger had been a man who lived after his imagination; and his mind, his ideals and, as MacMaster believed, even his personal ethics, had to the last been colored by the trend of his early training. There was in him alike the freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the religious mysticism, which lay well back of the fifteenth century. In the Marriage of Phaedra MacMaster found the ultimate expression of this spirit, the final word as to Treffinger’s point of view.
As in all Treffinger’s classical subjects, the conception was wholly medieval. This Phaedra, just turning from her husband and maidens to greet her husband’s son, giving him her first fearsome glance from under her half-lifted veil, was no daughter of Minos. The daughter of heathenesse and the
early church she was; doomed to torturing visions and scourgings, and the wrangling of soul with flesh. The venerable Theseus might have been victorious Charlemagne, and Phaedra’s maidens belonged rather in the train of Blanche of Castile than at the Cretan court. In the earlier studies Hippolytus had been done with a more pagan suggestion; but in each successive drawing the glorious figure bad been deflowered of something of its serene unconsciousness, until, in the canvas under the skylight, he appeared a very Christian knight. This male figure, and the face of Phaedra, painted with such magical preservation of tone under the heavy shadow of the veil, were plainly Treffinger’s highest achievements of craftsmanship. By what labor he had reached the seemingly inevitable composition of the picture–with its twenty figures, its plenitude of light and air, its restful distances seen through white porticoes–countless studies bore witness.
From James’s attitude toward the picture MacMaster could well conjecture what the painter’s had been. This picture was always uppermost in James’s mind; its custodianship formed, in his eyes, his occupation. He was manifestly apprehensive when visitors–not many came nowadays–lingered near it. “It was the Marriage as killed ‘im,” he would often say, “and for the matter ‘o that, it did like to ‘av been the death of all of us.”
By the end of his second week in London MacMaster had begun the notes for his study of Hugh Treffinger and his work. When his researches led him occasionally to visit the studios of Treffinger’s friends and erstwhile disciples, he found their Treffinger manner fading as the ring of Treffinger’s personality died out in them. One by one they were stealing back into the fold of national British art; the hand that had wound them up was still. MacMaster despaired of them and confined himself more and more exclusively to the studio, to such of Treffinger’s letters as were available–they were for the most part singularly negative and colorless–and to his interrogation of Treffinger’s man.
He could not himself have traced the successive steps by which he was gradually admitted into James’s confidence. Certainly most of his adroit strategies to that end failed humiliatingly, and whatever it was that built up an understanding between them must have been instinctive and intuitive on both sides. When at last James became anecdotal, personal, there was that in every word he let fall which put breath and blood into MacMaster’s book. James had so long been steeped in that penetrating personality that he fairly exuded it. Many of his very phrases, mannerisms, and opinions were impressions that he had taken on like wet plaster in his daily contact with Treffinger. Inwardly he was lined with cast-off epitheliums, as outwardly he was clad in the painter’s discarded coats. If the painter’s letters were formal and perfunctory, if his expressions to his friends had been extravagant, contradictory, and often apparently insincere–still, MacMaster felt himself not entirely without authentic sources. It was James who possessed Treffinger’s legend; it was with James that he had laid aside his pose. Only in his studio, alone, and face to face with his work, as it seemed, had the man invariably been himself. James had known him in the one attitude in which he was entirely honest; their relation had fallen well within the painter’s only indubitable integrity. James’s report of Treffinger was distorted by no hallucination of artistic insight, colored by no interpretation of his own. He merely held what he had heard and seen; his mind was a sort of camera obscura. His very limitations made him the more literal and minutely accurate.
One morning, when MacMaster was seated before the Marriage
of Phaedra, James entered on his usual round of dusting.
“I’ve ‘eard from Lydy Elling by the post, sir,” he remarked, “an’ she’s give h’orders to ‘ave the ‘ouse put in readiness. I doubt she’ll be ‘ere by Thursday or Friday next.”
“She spends most of her time abroad?” queried MacMaster; on the subject of Lady Treffinger James consistently maintained a very delicate reserve.
“Well, you could ‘ardly say she does that, sir. She finds the ‘ouse a bit dull, I daresay, so durin’ the season she stops mostly with Lydy Mary Percy, at Grosvenor Square. Lydy Mary’s a h’only sister.” After a few moments he continued, speaking in jerks governed by the rigor of his dusting: “H’only this morning I come upon this scarfpin,” exhibiting a very striking instance of that article, “an’ I recalled as ‘ow Sir ‘Ugh give it me when ‘e was acourting of Lydy Elling. Blowed if I ever see a man go in for a ‘oman like ‘im! ‘E was that gone, sir. ‘E never went in on anythink so ‘ard before nor since, till ‘e went in on the Marriage there–though ‘e mostly
went in on things pretty keen; ‘ad the measles when ‘e was thirty, strong as cholera, an’ come close to dyin’ of ’em. ‘E wasn’t strong for Lydy Elling’s set; they was a bit too stiff for ‘im. A free an’ easy gentleman, ‘e was; ‘e liked ‘is dinner with a few friends an’ them jolly, but ‘e wasn’t much on what you might call big affairs. But once ‘e went in for Lydy Elling ‘e broke ‘imself to new paces; He give away ‘is rings an’ pins, an’ the tylor’s man an’ the ‘aberdasher’s man was at ‘is rooms continual. ‘E got ‘imself put up for a club in Piccadilly; ‘e starved ‘imself thin, an’ worrited ‘imself white, an’ ironed ‘imself out, an’ drawed ‘imself tight as a bow string. It was a good job ‘e come a winner, or I don’t know w’at’d ‘a been to pay.”
The next week, in consequence of an invitation from Lady Ellen Treffinger, MacMaster went one afternoon to take tea with her. He was shown into the garden that lay between the residence and the studio, where the tea table was set under a gnarled pear tree. Lady Ellen rose as he approached–he was astonished to note how tall she was-and greeted him graciously, saying that she already knew him through her sister. MacMaster felt a certain satisfaction in her; in her reassuring poise and repose, in the charming modulations of her voice and the indolent reserve of her full, almond eyes. He was even delighted to find her face so inscrutable, though it chilled his own warmth and made the open frankness he had wished to permit himself impossible. It was a long face, narrow at the chin, very delicately featured, yet steeled by an impassive mask of self-control. It was behind just such finely cut, close-sealed faces, MacMaster reflected, that nature sometimes hid astonishing secrets. But in spite of this suggestion of hardness he felt that the unerring taste that Treffinger had always shown in larger matters had not deserted him when he came to the choosing of a wife, and he admitted that he could not himself have selected a woman who looked more as Treffinger’s wife should look.
While he was explaining the purpose of his frequent visits to the studio she heard him with courteous interest. “I have read, I think, everything that has been published on Sir Hugh Treffinger’s work, and it seems to me that there is much left to be said,” he concluded.
“I believe they are rather inadequate,” she remarked vaguely. She hesitated a moment, absently fingering the ribbons of her gown, then continued, without raising her eyes; “I hope you will not think me too exacting if I ask to see the proofs of such chapters of your work as have to do with Sir Hugh’s personal life. I have always asked that privilege.”
MacMaster hastily assured her as to this, adding, “I mean to touch on only such facts in his personal life as have to do directly with his work–such as his monkish education under Ghillini.”
“I see your meaning, I think,” said Lady Ellen, looking at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes.
When MacMaster stopped at the studio on leaving the house he stood for some time before Treffinger’s one portrait of himself, that brigand of a picture, with its full throat and square head; the short upper lip blackened by the close-clipped mustache, the wiry hair tossed down over the forehead, the strong white teeth set hard on a short pipestem. He could well understand what manifold tortures the mere grain of the man’s strong red and brown flesh might have inflicted upon a woman like Lady Ellen. He could conjecture, too, Treffinger’s impotent revolt against that very repose which had so dazzled him when it first defied his daring; and how once possessed of it, his first instinct had been to crush it, since he could not melt it.
Toward the close of the season Lady Ellen Treffinger left town. MacMaster’s work was progressing rapidly, and he and James wore away the days in their peculiar relation, which by this time had much of friendliness. Excepting for the regular visits of a Jewish picture dealer, there were few intrusions upon their solitude. Occasionally a party of Americans rang at the little door in the garden wall, but usually they departed speedily for the Moorish hall and tinkling fountain of the great show studio of London, not far away.
This Jew, an Austrian by birth, who had a large business in Melbourne, Australia, was a man of considerable discrimination, and at once selected the Marriage of Phaedra as the object
of his especial interest. When, upon his first visit, Lichtenstein had declared the picture one of the things done for time, MacMaster had rather warmed toward him and had talked to him very freely. Later, however, the man’s repulsive personality and innate vulgarity so wore upon him that, the more genuine the Jew’s appreciation, the more he resented it and the more base he somehow felt it to be. It annoyed him to see Lichtenstein walking up and down before the picture, shaking his head and blinking his watery eyes over his nose glasses, ejaculating: “Dot is a chem, a chem! It is wordt to gome den dousant miles for such a bainting, eh? To make Eurobe abbreciate such a work of ardt it is necessary to take it away while she is napping. She has never abbreciated until she has lost, but,” knowingly, “she will buy back.”
James had, from the first, felt such a distrust of the man that he would never leave him alone in the studio for a moment. When Lichtenstein insisted upon having Lady Ellen Treffinger’s address James rose to the point of insolence. “It ayn’t no use to give it, noway. Lydy Treffinger never has nothink to do with dealers.” MacMaster quietly repented his rash confidences, fearing that he might indirectly cause Lady Ellen annoyance from this merciless speculator, and he recalled with chagrin that Lichtenstein had extorted from him, little by little, pretty much the entire plan of his book, and especially the place in it which the Marriage of Phaedra was to occupy.
By this time the first chapters of MacMaster’s book were in the hands of his publisher, and his visits to the studio were necessarily less frequent. The greater part of his time was now employed with the engravers who were to reproduce such of Treffinger’s pictures as he intended to use as illustrations.
He returned to his hotel late one evening after a long and vexing day at the engravers to find James in his room, seated on his steamer trunk by the window, with the outline of a great square draped in sheets resting against his knee.
“Why, James, what’s up?” he cried in astonishment, glancing inquiringly at the sheeted object.
“Ayn’t you seen the pypers, sir?” jerked out the man.
“No, now I think of it, I haven’t even looked at a paper. I’ve been at the engravers’ plant all day. I haven’t seen anything.”
James drew a copy of the Times from his pocket and handed it
to him, pointing with a tragic finger to a paragraph in the social column. It was merely the announcement of Lady Ellen Treffinger’s engagement to Captain Alexander Gresham.
“Well, what of it, my man? That surely is her privilege.”
James took the paper, turned to another page, and silently pointed to a paragraph in the art notes which stated that Lady Treffinger had presented to the X–gallery the entire collection of paintings and sketches now in her late husband’s studio, with the exception of his unfinished picture, the Marriage Of Phaedra, which
she had sold for a large sum to an Australian dealer who had come to London purposely to secure some of Treffinger’s paintings.
MacMaster pursed up his lips and sat down, his overcoat still on. “Well, James, this is something of a–something of a jolt, eh? It never occurred to me she’d really do it.”
“Lord, you don’t know ‘er, sir,” said James bitterly, still staring at the floor in an attitude of abandoned dejection.
MacMaster started up in a flash of enlightenment, “What on earth have you got there, James? It’s not-surely it’s not–“
Yes, it is, sir,” broke in the man excitedly. “It’s the Marriage itself. It ayn’t agoing to H’Australia, no’ow!”
“But man, what are you going to do with it? It’s Lichtenstein’s property now, as it seems.”
It ayn’t, sir, that it ayn’t. No, by Gawd, it ayn’t!” shouted James, breaking into a choking fury. He controlled himself with an effort and added supplicatingly: “Oh, sir, you ayn’t agoing to see it go to H’Australia, w’ere they send convic’s?” He unpinned and flung aside the sheets as though to let Phaedra plead for herself.
MacMaster sat down again and looked sadly at the doomed masterpiece. The notion of James having carried it across London that night rather appealed to his fancy. There was certainly a flavor about such a highhanded proceeding. “However did you get it here?” he queried.
“I got a four-wheeler and come over direct, sir. Good job I ‘appened to ‘ave the chaynge about me.”
“You came up High Street, up Piccadilly, through the Haymarket and Trafalgar Square, and into the Strand?” queried MacMaster with a relish.
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir, ” assented James with surprise.
MacMaster laughed delightedly. “It was a beautiful idea, James, but I’m afraid we can’t carry it any further.”
“I was thinkin’ as ‘ow it would be a rare chance to get you to take the Marriage over to Paris for a year or two, sir, until the thing blows over?” suggested James blandly.
“I’m afraid that’s out of the question, James. I haven’t the right stuff in me for a pirate, or even a vulgar smuggler, I’m afraid.” MacMaster found it surprisingly difficult to say this, and he busied himself with the lamp as he said it. He heard James’s hand fall heavily on the trunk top, and he discovered that he very much disliked sinking in the man’s estimation.
“Well, sir,” remarked James in a more formal tone, after a protracted silence; “then there’s nothink for it but as ‘ow I’ll ‘ave to make way with it myself.”
“And how about your character, James? The evidence would be heavy against you, and even if Lady Treffinger didn’t prosecute you’d be done for.”
“Blow my character!–your pardon, sir,” cried James, starting to his feet. “W’at do I want of a character? I’ll chuck the ‘ole thing, and damned lively, too. The shop’s to be sold out, an’ my place is gone any’ow. I’m agoing to enlist, or try the gold fields. I’ve lived too long with h’artists; I’d never give satisfaction in livery now. You know ‘ow it is yourself, sir; there ayn’t no life like it, no’ow.”
For a moment MacMaster was almost equal to abetting James in his theft. He reflected that pictures had been whitewashed, or hidden in the crypts of churches, or under the floors of palaces from meaner motives, and to save them from a fate less ignominious. But presently, with a sigh, he shook his head.
“No, James, it won’t do at all. It has been tried over and over again, ever since the world has been agoing and pictures amaking. It was tried in Florence and in Venice, but the pictures were always carried away in the end. You see, the difficulty is that although Treffinger told you what was not to be done with the picture, he did not say definitely what was to be done with it. Do you think Lady Treffinger really understands that he did not want it to be sold?”
“Well, sir, it was like this, sir,” said James, resuming his seat on the trunk and again resting the picture against his knee. “My memory is as clear as glass about it. After Sir ‘Ugh got up from ‘is first stroke, ‘e took a fresh start at the Marriage.
Before that ‘e ‘ad been working at it only at night for a while back; the Legend was the big picture then, an’ was under the north light w’ere ‘e worked of a morning. But one day ‘e bid me take the Legend down an’ put the Marriage in its
place, an’ ‘e says, dashin’ on ‘is jacket, ‘Jymes, this is a start for the finish, this time.’
“From that on ‘e worked at the night picture in the mornin’–a thing contrary to ‘is custom. The Marriage went wrong, and
wrong–an’ Sir ‘Ugh agettin’ seedier an’ seedier every day. ‘E tried models an’ models, an’ smudged an’ pynted out on account of ‘er face goin’ wrong in the shadow. Sometimes ‘e layed it on the colors, an’ swore at me an’ things in general. He got that discouraged about ‘imself that on ‘is low days ‘e used to say to me: ‘Jymes, remember one thing; if anythink ‘appens to me, the Marriage is not to go out of ‘ere unfinished. It’s worth the lot of ’em, my boy, an’ it’s not agoing to go shabby for lack of pains.’ ‘E said things to that effect repeated.
“He was workin’ at the picture the last day, before ‘e went to ‘is club. ‘E kept the carriage waitin’ near an hour while ‘e put on a stroke an’ then drawed back for to look at it, an’ then put on another, careful like. After ‘e ‘ad ‘is gloves on, ‘e come back an’ took away the brushes I was startin’ to clean, an’ put in another touch or two. ‘It’s acomin’, Jymes,’ ‘e says, ‘by gad if it ayn’t.’ An’ with that ‘e goes out. It was cruel sudden, w’at come after.
“That night I was lookin’ to ‘is clothes at the ‘ouse when they brought ‘im ‘ome. He was conscious, but w’en I ran downstairs for to ‘elp lift ‘im up, I knowed ‘e was a finished man. After we got ‘im into bed ‘e kept lookin’ restless at me and then at Lydy Elling and ajerkin’ of ‘is ‘and. Finally ‘e quite raised it an’ shot ‘is thumb out toward the wall. ‘He wants water; ring, Jymes,’ says Lydy Elling, placid. But I knowed ‘e was pointin’ to the shop.
“‘Lydy Treffinger,’ says I, bold, ‘he’s pointin’ to the studio. He