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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Love, the Fiddler, by Lloyd Osbourne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Love, the Fiddler
+
+Author: Lloyd Osbourne
+
+Posting Date: March 30, 2014 [EBook #4948]
+Release Date: January, 2004
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE, THE FIDDLER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LOVE, THE FIDDLER
+
+BY LLOYD OSBOURNE
+
+TO LEWIS VANUXEM
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE CHIEF ENGINEER,
+
+FFRENCHES FIRST,
+
+THE GOLDEN CASTAWAYS,
+
+THE AWAKENING OF GEORGE RAYMOND,
+
+THE MASCOT OF BATTERY B,
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CHIEF ENGINEER
+
+I
+
+
+Frank Rignold had never been the favoured suitor, not at least so
+far as anything definite was concerned; but he had always been
+welcome at the little house on Commonwealth Street, and amongst
+the neighbours his name and that of Florence Fenacre were coupled
+as a matter of course and every old lady within a radius of three
+miles regarded the match as good as settled. It was not Frank's
+fault that it was not, for he was deeply in love with the widow's
+daughter and looked forward to such an end to their acquaintance
+as the very dearest thing fate could give him. But in these
+affairs it is necessary to carry the lady with you--and the lady,
+though she had never said "no," had not yet been prevailed upon to
+say "yes." In fact she preferred to leave the matter as it was,
+and boldly forestalling a set proposal, had managed to convey to
+Frank Rignold that it was her wish he should not make one.
+
+"Let us be good friends," she would say, "and as for anything
+else, Frank, there's plenty of time to consider that by and by.
+Isn't it enough already that we like each other?"
+
+Frank did not think it was enough, but he was not without
+intuition and willing to accept the little offered him and be
+grateful--rather than risk all, and almost certainly lose all, by
+too exigent a suit. For Florence Fenacre was the acknowledged
+beauty of the town, with a dozen eligible men at her feet, and was
+more courted and sought after than any girl in the place. The
+place, to give it its name, was Bridgeport, one of those dead-
+alive little ports on the Atlantic seaboard, with a dozen
+factories and some decaying wharves and that tranquil air of
+having had a past.
+
+The widow and her pretty daughter lived in a low-roofed, red-brick
+house that faced the street and sheltered a long deep shady garden
+in the rear. Land and house had been bought with whale oil. Their
+little income, derived from the rent of three barren and stony
+farms and amounting to not more than sixty dollars a month,
+represented a capitalisation of whale oil. Even the old grey
+church whither they went twice of a Sunday, was whale oil too, and
+had been built in bygone days by the sturdy captains who now lay
+all around it under slabs of stone. There amongst them was
+Florence's father and her grandfather and her great-grandfather,
+together with the Macys and the Coffins and the Cabotts with whom
+they had sailed and quarrelled and loved and intermarried in the
+years now gone. The wide world had not been too wide for them to
+sail it round and reap the harvests of far-off seas; but in death
+they lay side by side, their voyages done, their bones mingling in
+the New England earth.
+
+Frank Rignold too was a son of Bridgeport, and the sea which ran
+in that blood for generations bade him in manhood to rise and
+follow it. He had gone into the engine-room, and at thirty was the
+chief engineer of a cargo boat running to South American ports. He
+was a fine-looking man with earnest grey eyes; a reader, a
+student, an observer; self-taught in Spanish, Latin, and French; a
+grave, quiet gentlemanly man, whose rare smile seemed to light his
+whole face, and who in his voyages South had caught something of
+Spanish grace and courtliness. He returned as regularly to
+Bridgeport as his ship did to New York; and when he stepped off
+the train his eager steps took him first to the Fenacres' house,
+his hands never empty of some little present for his sweetheart.
+
+On the occasion of our story his step was more buoyant than ever
+and his heart beat high with hope, for she had cried the last time
+he went away, and though no word of love had yet been spoken
+between them, he was conscious of her increasing inclination for
+him and her increasing dependence. Having already won so much it
+seemed as though his passionate devotion could not fail to turn
+the scale and bring her to that admission he felt it was on her
+lips to make. So he strode through the narrow streets, telling
+himself a fairy story of how it all might be, with a little house
+of their own and she waiting for him on the wharf when his ship
+made fast; a story that never grew stale in the repetition, but
+which, please God, would come true in the end, with Florence his
+wife, and all his doubtings and heart-aches over.
+
+Florence opened the door for him herself and gave a little cry of
+surprise and welcome as they shook hands, for in all their
+acquaintance there had never been a kiss between them. It was all
+he could do not to catch her in his arms, for as she smiled up at
+him, so radiant and beautiful and happy, it seemed as if it were
+his right and that he had been a fool to have ever questioned her
+love for him. He followed her into the sitting-room, laughing like
+a child with pleasure and thrilled through and through with the
+sound of her voice and the touch of her hand and the vague, subtle
+perfume of her whole being. His laughter died away, however, as he
+saw what the room contained. Over the chairs, over the sofa, over
+the table, in the stacked and open pasteboard boxes on the floor,
+were dresses and evening gowns outspread with the profusion of a
+splendid shop, and even to his unpractised eyes, costly and
+magnificent beyond anything he had ever seen before. Florence
+swept an opera cloak from a chair and made him sit down, watching
+him the while with a charming gaiety and excitement. At such a
+moment it seemed to him positively heartless.
+
+"Florence," he said, almost with a gasp, "does this mean that you
+are going to be--" He stopped short. He could not say that word.
+
+"I'm never going to marry anybody," she returned.
+
+"But--" he began again.
+
+"Then you haven't heard!" she cried, clasping her hands. "Oh,
+Frank, you haven't heard!"
+
+"I have only just got back," he said.
+
+"I've been left heaps of money," she exclaimed, "from my uncle,
+you know, the one that treated father so badly and tricked him out
+of the old manor farm. I hardly knew he existed till he died. And
+it's not only a lot, Frank, but it's millions!"
+
+He repeated the word with a kind of groan.
+
+"They are probating the will for six," she went on, not noticing
+his agitation, "but I'm sure the lawyers are making it as low as
+they can for the taxes. And it's the most splendid kind of
+property--rows of houses in the heart of New York and big Broadway
+shops and skyscrapers! Frank, do you realise I own two office
+buildings twenty stories high?"
+
+Frank tried to congratulate her on her wonderful good fortune, but
+it was like a voice from the grave and he could not affect to be
+glad at the death-knell of all his hopes.
+
+"That lets me out," he said.
+
+"My poor Frank, you never were in," she said, regarding him with
+great kindness and compassion. "I know you are disappointed, but
+you are too much a man to be unjust to me."
+
+"Oh, I haven't the right to say a word!" he exclaimed quickly. "On
+your side it was friends and nothing more. I always understood
+that, Florence."
+
+He was shocked at her almost imperceptible sigh of relief.
+
+"Of course, this changes everything," she said.
+
+"Yet it would have come if it hadn't been for this," he said. "You
+were getting to like me better and better. You cried when I last
+went away. Yes, it would have come, Florence," he repeated,
+looking at her wistfully.
+
+"I suppose it would, Frank," she said.
+
+"Oh, Florence!" he exclaimed, and could not go on lest his voice
+should betray him.
+
+"And we should have lived in a poky little house," she said, "and
+you would have been to sea three-quarters of the time, leaving me
+to eat my heart out as mother did for father--and it would have
+been a horrible, dreadful, irrevocable mistake."
+
+"I didn't have to go to sea," he said, snatching at this crumb of
+hope. "There are other jobs than ships. Why, only last trip I was
+offered a refrigerating plant in Chicago!"
+
+He did not tell her it bore a salary of four hundred dollars a
+month and that he had meant to lay it at her feet that morning. In
+the light of her millions that sum, so considerable an hour
+before, had suddenly shrunk to nothing. How puny and pitiful it
+seemed in the contrast. He had a sense that everything had shrunk
+to nothing--his life, his hopes, his future.
+
+"I know you think I am cruel," she said, in the same calm,
+considerate tone she had used throughout. "But I never gave you
+any encouragement, Frank--not in the way you wanted or expected.
+You were the only person I knew who was the least bit cultivated
+and nice and travelled and out of the commonplace. I can't tell
+you how much you brightened my life here, or how glad I was when
+you came or how sorry I was when you went away--but it wasn't
+love, Frank--not the love you wished for or the love I feel I have
+the power to give."
+
+"Why did you let me go on then?" he broke out, "I getting deeper
+and deeper into it and you knowing all the time it never could
+come to anything? Just because no words were said, did that make
+you blind? If you were such a friend of mine as you said you were,
+wouldn't it have been kinder to have shown me the door and tell me
+straight out it was hopeless and impossible? Oh, Florence, you
+took my love when you wanted it, like a person getting warm at a
+fire, and now when you don't need it any longer you tell me quite
+unconcernedly that it is all over between us!"
+
+"It would sound so heartless to tell you the real truth, Frank,"
+she said.
+
+"Oh, let me hear it!" he said. "I'm desperate enough for anything
+--even for that, I suppose."
+
+"I knew it would end the way you wanted it, Frank," she said. "You
+were getting to mean more and more to me. I did not love you
+exactly and I did not worry a particle when you were away, but I
+sort of acquiesced in what seemed to be the inevitable. I know I
+am horribly to blame, but I took it for granted we'd drift on and
+on--and this time, if you had asked me, I had made up my mind to
+say 'yes.'"
+
+She said this last word in almost a whisper, frightened at the
+sight of Frank's pale face. She ran over to him, and throwing her
+arms around his neck kissed him again and again.
+
+"We'll always be friends, Frank," she said. "Always, always!"
+
+He made no movement to return her caresses. Her kisses humiliated
+him to the quick. He pushed her away from him, and when he spoke
+it was with dignity and gentleness.
+
+"I was wrong to reproach you," he said. "I can appreciate what a
+difference all this money makes to you. It has lifted you into
+another world--a world where I cannot hope to follow you, but I
+can be man enough to say that I understand--that I acquiesce--
+without bitterness."
+
+"I never liked you so well as I do now, Frank," she said.
+
+"We will say nothing more about it," he said. "I couldn't blame
+you because you don't love me, could I? I ought rather instead to
+thank you--thank you for so much you have given me these two years
+past, your friendship, your intimacy, your trust. That it all came
+to nothing was neither your fault nor mine. It was your uncle's
+for dying and leaving you sky-scrapers!"
+
+They both laughed at this, and Frank, now apparently quite himself
+again, brought forth his presents: a large box of candy, a
+beautifully bound little volume of Pierre Loti, and a lace collar
+he had picked up at Buenos Ayres. This last seemed a trifling
+piece of finery in the midst of all those dresses, though he had
+paid sixteen dollars for it and had counted it cheap at the price.
+Florence received it with exaggerated gratitude, genuine enough in
+one way, for she was touched; but, in spite of herself, her
+altered fortunes and the memory of those great New York shops,
+where she had ordered right and left, made the bit of lace seem
+common and scarce worth possessing. Even as she thanked him she
+was mentally presenting it to one of the poor Miss Browns who sang
+in the church choir.
+
+They spent an hour in talking together, eluding on either side any
+further reference to the subject most in their thoughts and
+finding safety in books and the little gossip of the place and the
+news of the day. It might have been an ordinary call, though
+Frank, as a special favour, was allowed to smoke a cigar, and
+there was a strained look in Florence's face that gave the lie to
+her previous professions of indifference. She knew she was
+violating her own heart, but her character was already corrupting
+under the breath of wealth, and her head was turned with dreams of
+social conquests and of a great and splendid match in the roseate
+future. She kept telling herself how lucky it was that the money
+had not come too late, and wondering at the same time whether she
+would ever again meet a man who had such a compelling charm for
+her as Frank Rignold, and whose mellow voice could move her to the
+depths. At last, after a decent interval, Frank said he would have
+to leave, and she accompanied him to the door, where he begged her
+to remember him to her mother and added something congratulatory
+about the great good fortune that had befallen her.
+
+"And now good-bye," he said.
+
+"But you will come back, Frank?" she exclaimed anxiously.
+
+"Oh, no!" he said. "I couldn't, Florence, I couldn't."
+
+"I cannot let you go like this," she protested. "Really I can't,
+Frank. I won't!"
+
+"I don't see very well how you can help it," he said.
+
+"Surely my wish has still some weight with you," she said.
+
+"Florence," he returned, holding her hand very tight, "you must
+not think it pique on my part or anything so petty and unworthy;
+but I'd rather stop right here than endure the pain of seeing you
+get more and more indifferent to me. It is bound to come, of
+course, and it would be less cruel this way than the other."
+
+"You never can have loved me!" she exclaimed. "Didn't I say I
+wanted to be friends? Didn't I kiss you?"
+
+"Yes," he said slowly, "as you might a child, to comfort him for a
+broken toy. Florence," he went on, "I have wanted you for the last
+two years and now I have lost you. I must face up to that. I must
+meet it with what fortitude I can. But I cannot bear to feel that
+every time I come you will like me less; that others will crowd me
+out and take my place; that the gulf will widen and widen until at
+last it is impassable. I am going while you still love me a little
+and will miss me. Good-bye!"
+
+She leaned her head on his shoulder and sobbed. She had but to say
+one word to keep him, and yet she would not say it. Her heart
+seemed broken in her breast, and yet she let him go, sustained in
+her resolve by the thought of her great fortune and of the
+wonderful days to come.
+
+"Good-bye," she said, and stood looking after him as he walked
+slowly away.
+
+"Oh, that money, I hate it!" she exclaimed to herself as she went
+in. "I wish he had never left it to me. I didn't want it or expect
+it or anything, and I should have been happy, oh, so happy!" Then,
+with a pang, she recalled the refrigerating plant, and the life so
+quiet and poor and simple and sweet that she and Frank would have
+led had not her millions come between them.
+
+"Her millions!"
+
+It was inspiriting to repeat those two words to herself. It
+strengthened her resolve and made her feel how wise she had been
+to break with Frank. Perhaps, after all, it were better for him
+not to come back. He was right about the gulf between them, and
+even since his departure it was widening appreciably.
+
+Then she realised what all rich people realise sooner or later.
+
+"I don't own all that money," she said to herself. "IT OWNS ME!"
+And with that she went indoors and cried part of the forenoon and
+spent the rest of it in trying on her new clothes.
+
+Wealth, if it did not bring happiness, at least brought some
+pleasant distractions.
+
+ II
+
+It was fully a year before Frank saw her again; a long year to
+him, soberly passed in his shipboard duties, with recurring weeks
+ashore at New York and Buenos Ayres. He had grown more reserved
+and silent than before; fonder of his books; keener in his taste
+for abstract science. He avoided his old friends and made no new
+ones. The world seemed to be passing him while he stood still. He
+wondered how others could laugh when his own heart was so heavy,
+and he preferred to go his own way, solitary and unnoticed, taking
+an increasing pleasure in his isolation. He continued to write to
+Bridgeport, for there were a few old friends whom he could not
+disregard altogether, though he made his letters as infrequent as
+he could and as short. In return he was kept informed of
+Florence's movements; of the sensation she made everywhere; of the
+great people who had taken her under their wing; of her rumoured
+engagements; of her triumphs in Paris and London; of her yachts
+and horses and splendour and beauty. His correspondents showed an
+artless pride in the recital. It was becoming their only claim to
+consideration that they knew Florence Fenacre. Her dazzling life
+reflected a sort of glory upon themselves, and their letters ran
+endlessly on the same theme. It was all a modern fairy tale, and
+they fairly bubbled with satisfaction to think that they knew the
+fairy princess!
+
+Frank read it all with exasperation. It tormented him to even hear
+her name; to be reminded of her in any way; to realise that she
+was as much alive as he himself, and not the phantom he would have
+preferred to keep her in his memory. Yet he was inconsistent
+enough to rage when a letter came that brought no news of her. He
+would tear it into pieces and throw it out of his cabin window.
+The fools, why couldn't they tell him what he wanted to know! He
+would carry his ill-humour into the engine-room and revenge
+himself on fate and the loss of the woman he loved by a harsh
+criticism of his subordinates. A defective pump or a troublesome
+valve would set his temper flaming; and then, overcome at his own
+injustice, he would go to the other extreme; and, roundly blaming
+himself, would slap some sullen artificer on the back and tell him
+that it was all a joke. His men, amongst themselves, called him a
+wild cracked devil, and it was the tattle of the ship that he
+drank hard in secret. They knew something was wrong with him, and
+fastened on the likeliest cause. Others said out boldly that the
+chief engineer was going crazy.
+
+One morning as they were running up the Sound, homeward-bound,
+they passed a large steam yacht at anchor. Frank happened to be on
+deck at the time, and he joined with the rest in the little chorus
+of admiration that went up at the sight of her.
+
+"That's the Minnehaha," said the second mate. "She belongs to the
+beautiful heiress, Miss Fenacre!"
+
+"Ready for a Mediterranean cruise," said the purser, who had been
+reading one of the newspapers the pilot had brought aboard.
+
+Frank heard these two remarks in silence. The sun, to him, seemed
+to stop shining. The morning that had been so bright and pleasant
+all at once overcame him with disgust. The might-have-been took
+him by the throat. He descended into the engine-room to hide his
+dejected face in the heated oily atmosphere below; and seating
+himself on a tool-chest he watched, with hardly seeing eyes, the
+ponderous movement of his machinery.
+
+It was the anodyne for his troubles, to feel the vibration of the
+engines and hear the rumble and hiss of the jacketed cylinders. It
+always comforted him; he found companionship in the mighty thing
+he controlled; he looked at the trembling needle in the gauge, and
+instinctively noted the pressure as he thought of the trim smart
+vessel at anchor and of his dear one on the eve of parting. He
+wondered whether they would ever pass again, he and she, in all
+the years to come.
+
+The thought of the yacht haunted him all that day. He took a
+sudden revulsion against the grinding routine of his own life. It
+came over him like a new discovery, that he was tired of South
+America, tired of his ship, tired of everything. He contrasted his
+own voyages in and out, from the same place to the same place, up
+and down, up and down, as regular as the swing of a pendulum with
+that gay wanderer of the raking masts who was free to roam the
+world. It came over him with an insistence that he, too, would
+like to roam the world, and see strange places and old marble
+palaces with steps descending into the blue sea water, and islands
+with precipices and beaches and palm trees.
+
+Almost awed at his own presumption he sat down and wrote to Miss
+Fenacre.
+
+It was a short note, formally addressed, begging her for a
+position in the engine-room staff. He knew, he said, that the
+quota was probably made up, and that he could not hope for an
+important place. But if she would take him as a first-class
+artificer he would be more than grateful, and ventured on the
+little pleasantry that even if he had to be squeezed in as a
+supernumerary he was confident he could save her his pay and keep
+a good many times over.
+
+He got an answer a couple of days later, addressed from a
+fashionable New York hotel and granting him an interview. She
+called him "dear Frank," and signed herself "ever yours," and said
+that of course she would give him anything he wanted, only that
+she would prefer to talk it over first.
+
+He put on his best clothes and went to see her, being shown into a
+large suite on the second floor, where he had to wait an hour in a
+lofty anteroom with no other company but a statue of Pocahontas.
+He was oppressed by the gorgeousness of the surroundings--by the
+frowning pictures, the gilt furniture, the onyx-topped tables, the
+vases, the mirrors, the ornate clocks. He was in a fever of
+expectation, and could not fight down his growing timidity. He had
+not seen Florence for a year, and his heart would have been as
+much in his mouth had the meeting been set in the old brick house
+at Bridgeport. At least he said so to himself, not caring to
+confess that he was daunted by the magnificence of the apartment.
+
+At length the door opened and she came in. She stood for a moment
+with her hand on the knob and looked at him; then she came over to
+him with a little rush and took his outstretched hand. He had
+forgotten how beautiful she was, or probably he had never really
+known, as he had never beheld her before in one of those wonderful
+French creations that cost each one a fortune. He stumbled over
+his words of greeting, and his hand trembled as he held hers.
+
+"Oh, Frank," she said, noticing his agitation. "Are you still
+silly enough to care?"
+
+"I am afraid I do, Florence," he said, blushing like a boy at her
+unexpected question. "What's the good of asking me that?"
+
+"You are looking handsome, Frank," she ran on. "I am proud of you.
+You have the nicest hair of any man I know!"
+
+"I daren't say how stunning you look, Florence," he returned.
+
+"Frank," she said, slowly, fixing her lustrous eyes on his face,
+"you usen't to be so grave. ... I don't think you have smiled much
+lately ... you are changed."
+
+He bore her scrutiny with silence.
+
+"Poor boy!" she exclaimed, impulsively taking his hand. "I'm the
+most heartless creature in the whole world. Do you know, Frank,
+though I look so nice and girlish, I am really a brute; and when I
+die I am sure to go to hell."
+
+"I hope not," he said, smiling.
+
+"Oh, but I know!" she cried. "All I ever do is to make people
+miserable."
+
+"Perhaps it's the people's fault, for--for loving you, Florence,"
+he said.
+
+"It's awfully exciting to see you again," she went on. "You came
+within an ace of being my husband. I might have belonged to you
+and counted your washing. It's queer, isn't it? Thrilling!"
+
+"Why do you bring all that up, Florence?" he said. "It's done.
+It's over. I--I would rather not speak of it."
+
+"But it was such an awfully near thing, Frank," she persisted. "I
+had made up my mind to take you, you know. I had even looked over
+my poor little clothes and had drawn a hundred dollars out of the
+savings bank!"
+
+"You don't take much account of a hundred dollars now," he
+returned, trying to smile.
+
+"I know you don't want to talk about it," she said, "but I do. I
+love to play with emotions. I suppose it's a habit, like any
+other," she continued, "and it grows on one like opium or
+morphine. That's why I'll go to hell, Frank. It wasn't that way at
+all when you used to know me. I think I must have been nice then,
+and really worth loving!"
+
+"Oh, yes!" he returned miserably. "Oh, yes!"
+
+"I have a whole series of the most complicated emotions about
+you," she said, "only a lot of them are unexploded, like fire
+crackers before they are touched off. If I lost all my money I'd
+be in a panic till you came and took me; but as long as I have it
+I don't think of you more than once a week. Yet, do you know,
+Frank, if you got a sweetheart, I believe I'd scratch her eyes
+out. It's rather fine of me to tell you all that," she went on,
+with a smile, "for I'm giving you the key of the combination, and
+you might take advantage of it!"
+
+"Florence," he said, "I thought at first you were just laughing at
+me, but I see that you are right. You are heartless. You oughtn't
+to talk like that."
+
+She looked a shade put out.
+
+"Well, Frank, it's the truth, anyway," she said, "and in the old
+days we were always such sticklers for the truth--for sincerity,
+you know--weren't we?"
+
+"I have no business to correct you," he said humbly. "I resigned
+all my pretensions that morning in the old house."
+
+"Well, so long as you love me still!" she exclaimed, with a little
+mocking laugh. "That's the great thing, isn't it? I mean for me,
+of course. I am greedy for love. It makes me feel so safe and
+comfortable to think there are whole rows of men that love me.
+When you have a great fortune you begin to appreciate the things
+that money cannot buy."
+
+"Oh, your money!" he said. That word in her mouth always stung
+him.
+
+"Well, you ought to hate my money," she remarked cheerfully. "It
+queered you, didn't it? And then all rich people are detestable,
+anyway--selfish to the core, and horrid. Do you know that
+sometimes when I have flirted awfully with a man at a dinner or
+somewhere, and the next day he telephones--and the telephone is in
+the next room--I've just said: 'Oh, bother! tell him I'm out,'
+rather than take the trouble to get up from my chair. And a nice
+man, too!"
+
+"I thought I might be treated the same way," he said.
+
+"Then you thought wrong, Frank," she returned, with a sudden
+change from her tone of flippancy and lightness. "I haven't sunk
+quite as low as that, you know. I meant other people--I didn't
+mean you, Frank, dear."
+
+This was said with such a little ring of kindness that Frank was
+moved.
+
+"Then the old days still count for something?" he said.
+
+"Oh, yes!" she said.
+
+"But not enough to hurt?" he ventured.
+
+"Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't," she returned. "It
+depends on how good a time I'm having. But I hate to think I'm
+weak and selfish and vain, and that the only person I really care
+for is myself. I value my self-esteem, and it often gets an awful
+jar. Sometimes I feel like a girl that has run away from home--
+diamonds and dyed hair, you know--and then wakes up at night and
+cries to think of what a price she has paid for all her fine
+things!" Florence waved her hand towards the alabaster statue of
+Pocahontas, with a little ripple of self-disdain. She was in a
+strange humour, and beneath the surface of her apparent gaiety
+there ran an undercurrent of bitterness and contempt for herself.
+Her eyes were unusually brilliant, and her cheeks were pink enough
+to have been rouged. The sight of her old lover had stirred many
+memories in her bosom.
+
+"And what about my job, Florence?" he said, changing the
+conversation. "I've caught the yachting idea, too. Can it be
+managed?"
+
+"Oh, I want to talk to you about that," she said.
+
+"Well, go on," he said, as she hesitated.
+
+"I am so afraid of hurting your feelings, Frank," she said with a
+singular timidity.
+
+"My feelings are probably tougher than you think," he returned.
+
+"You will think so badly of me," she said. "You will be
+affronted."
+
+"It sounds as though you wanted to engage me for your butler," he
+said. Then, as she still withheld the words on her lips, he went
+on: "Don't be uneasy about saying it, Florence. If it's
+impossible--why, that's the end of it, of course, and no harm
+done."
+
+"I want you to come," she said simply.
+
+"Then, what's the trouble?" he demanded, getting more and more
+mystified. "I don't mind being an artificer the least bit. I like
+to work with my hands. I'm a good mechanic, and I like it."
+
+"I want you for my chief engineer," she said.
+
+This was news, indeed. Frank's face betrayed his keen pleasure. He
+had never soared to the heights of asking or expecting THAT.
+
+"I had to dismiss the last one," she went on. "That's the reason
+why I'm still here, and not two days out, as I had expected. He
+locked himself in his cabin and shot at people through the door,
+and told awful lies to the newspapers."
+
+"If it's anything about my qualifications," he said, thinking he
+had found the reason of her backwardness, "I don't fancy I'll have
+any trouble to satisfy you. I don't want to toot my own horn,
+Florence, but really, you know, I am rated a first-class man. I'll
+prove that by my certificates and all that, or give me two weeks'
+trial, and see for yourself."
+
+"Oh, it isn't that," she said.
+
+"Then, what is it?" he broke out. "Only the other day they offered
+me a Western Ocean liner, and, if you like, I'll send you the
+letter. If I am good enough for a big passenger ship, I guess I
+can run the Minnehaha to please you!"
+
+"Frank," she returned, "it is not a question of your competency at
+all. You know very well I'd trust my life to you, blindfold. It's
+--it's the social side, the old affair between us, the first names
+and all that kind of thing."
+
+"Oh, I see!" he said blankly.
+
+"As an officer on my ship," she said, "you could easily put
+yourself and me in a difficult position. In a way, we'll really be
+further apart than if you were in South America and I in Monte
+Carlo, for, though we'd always be good friends, and all that, the
+formalities would have to be observed. Now, I have offended you?"
+she added, putting out her hand appealingly.
+
+"I think you might have known me better, Florence," he returned.
+"I am not offended--what right have I to be offended--only a
+little hurt, perhaps, to think that you could doubt me for a
+single moment in such a matter. I understand very well, and
+appreciate the need for it. Did you expect me to call you Florence
+on the quarterdeck of your own vessel, and presume on our old
+friendship to embarrass you and set people talking? Good Heavens,
+what do you take me for?"
+
+"Don't be angry with me, Frank," she pleaded. "It had to be said,
+you know. I wanted you so much to come; I wanted to share my
+beautiful vessel with you; and yet I dreaded any kind of a false
+position."
+
+"I shall treat you precisely as I would any owner of any ship I
+sailed on," he said. "That is, with respect and always preserving
+my distance. I will never address you first except to say good-
+morning and good-evening, and will show no concern if you do not
+speak to me for days on end."
+
+"Oh, Frank, you are an angel!" she cried.
+
+"No," he returned, "only--as far as I can--a gentleman, Miss
+Fenacre."
+
+"We needn't begin now, Frank," she exclaimed, almost with
+annoyance.
+
+"Am I in your service?" he asked.
+
+"From to-day," she answered, "and I will give you a note to
+Captain Landry."
+
+"Then you will be Miss Fenacre to me from now on," he said.
+
+"You must say good-bye to Florence first," she said, smiling. "You
+may kiss my hand," she said, as she gave it to him. "You used to
+do it so gallantly in the old days--such a Spaniard that you are,
+Frank--and I liked it so much!"
+
+He did so, and for the first time in his life with a kind of
+shame.
+
+"I hope we are not both of us making a terrible mistake,
+Florence," he said.
+
+"Oh, I couldn't want a better chief!" she said, "and, as for you,
+it's the wisest thing you ever did. It's me, after all, who is
+making the sacrifice, for, in a month or two, all the gilt will
+wear off, and you will see me as I really am. You will find it
+very disillusioning to go to sea with your divinity," she added.
+"You will discover she is a very flesh-and-blood affair, after
+all, Frank, and not worth the tip of your little finger."
+
+"I had a good many opportunities of judging before," he replied,
+"and the more I knew her the more I loved her."
+
+"Well, I am changed now," she said. "I suppose all the bad has
+come to the surface since--like the slag when they melt iron and
+skim it off with dippers--only with me there's nobody to dip. If
+_I_ am astounded at the difference, what do you suppose you'll
+be?"
+
+"There never could be any difference to me," he said.
+
+"That's the only kind of love worth talking about," she said,
+going to the window and looking out.
+
+For a while neither of them spoke. Frank rose and stood with his
+hat in his hand, waiting to take his departure. Florence turned,
+and going to an escritoire sat down and wrote a few lines on a
+card.
+
+"Present this to Captain Landry," she said, "and, now, my dear
+chief engineer, I will give you your conge."
+
+He thanked her, and put the card carefully in his pocketbook.
+
+"What a farce it all is, Frank!" she broke out. "There's something
+wrong in a system that gives a girl millions of dollars to do just
+as she likes with. I don't care what they say to the contrary; I
+believe women were meant to belong to men, to live in semi-slavery
+and do what they are told, to bring up children and travel with
+the pots and pans, and find their only reward in pleasing their
+husbands."
+
+"I wouldn't care to pass an opinion," said Frank. "Some of them
+are happy that way, no doubt."
+
+"What does anybody want except to be happy?" she continued, in the
+same strain of resentment. "Isn't that what all are trying for as
+hard as they can? I'd like to go out in the street and stop people
+as they came along and ask them, the one after the other: 'Would
+you tell me if you are happy?' And the one that said 'yes' I'd
+give a hundred dollars to!"
+
+"As like as not it would be some shabby fellow with no overcoat,"
+said Frank.
+
+"Now you can go away!" she exclaimed suddenly. "I don't know
+what's the matter with me, Frank. I think I'm going to cry! Go,
+go!" she cried imperiously, as he still stood there.
+
+Frank bowed and obeyed, and his last glimpse, as he closed the
+door, was of her at the window, looking down disconsolately into
+the street below.
+
+ III
+
+Spring was well begun when the Minnehaha sailed for Europe to take
+her place in the mimic fleets that were already assembling. As
+like seeks like, so the long, swift white steamer headed like a
+bird for her faraway companions, and arrived amongst them with
+colours flying, and her guns roaring out salutes. By herself she
+was greedy for every pound of steam and raced her engines as
+though speed were a matter of life and death; but, once in
+company, she was content to lag with the slowest, and suit her own
+pace to the stately progress of the schooners and cutters that
+moved by the wind alone. She found friends amongst all nations,
+and, in that cosmopolitan society of ships, dipped her flag to
+those of England, France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany.
+
+It was a wonderful life of freedom and gaiety. A great yacht
+carries her own letter of introduction, and is accorded everywhere
+the courtesies of a man-of-war, to whom, in a sense, she is a
+sister. Official visits are paid and returned; naval punctilio
+reigns; invitations are lavished from every side. There is,
+besides, a freemasonry amongst those splendid wanderers of the
+sea, a transcendent Bohemianism, that puts them nearly all upon a
+common footing. A holiday spirit is in the air, and kings and
+princes who at home are hidden within walls of triple brass, here
+unbend like children out of school, and make friends and gossip
+about their neighbours and show off their engine-rooms and their
+ice plant and some new idea in patent boat davits after the manner
+of very ordinary mortals. Not of course that kings and princes
+predominate, but the same spirit prevailed with those who on shore
+held their heads very high and practised a jealous exclusiveness.
+Amongst them all Florence Fenacre was a favourite of favourites.
+Young, beautiful, and the mistress of a noble fortune, there was
+everything to cast a glamour about this charming American who had
+come out of the unknown to take all hearts by storm.
+
+Her haziness about distinctions of rank filled these Europeans
+with an amused amazement. There was to them something quite royal
+in her naivety and lack of awe; in her high spirit, her vivacity,
+and her absolute disregard of those who failed to please her. She
+convulsed one personage by describing another as "that tiresome
+old man who's really too disreputable to have tagging around me
+any longer"; and had a quarrel and a making up with a reigning
+duke about a lighter of coal that their respective crews had come
+to blows over. Everybody adored her, and she seldom put to sea
+without a love-sick yacht in her wake.
+
+Of course, here as elsewhere, every phase of human character was
+displayed, and most conspicuous of all amongst the evil was the
+determination of many to win Florence's millions for themselves.
+Amid that noble concourse of vessels, every one of which stood for
+a princely income, there were adventurers as needy and as hungry
+as any sharper in the streets of New York. There is an
+aristocratic poverty, none the less real because three noughts
+must be added to all the figures, that first surprised and then
+disgusted the pretty American. Her first awakening to the fact was
+when, as a special favour, she sold her best steam launch to a
+French marquise at the price it had cost her. Though that lady was
+very profuse with little pink notes and could purr over Florence
+by the hour, her signature on a cheque was never forthcoming, and
+our heroine had a fit of fury to think of having been so deceived.
+
+"It was a downright confidence trick," she burst out to the comte
+de Souvary, firing up afresh with the memory of her wrongs. "I
+loved my launch. It was a beauty. It never went dotty at the time
+you needed it most and it was a vertical inverted triple-expansion
+direct-acting propeller!' (Florence could always rattle off
+technical details and showed her Americanism in her catalogue-like
+fluency in this respect.) "And I miss it and I want it back, and
+the horrid old woman never means to pay me a penny!"
+
+"Oh, my child!" said the count, "she never pays anybody ze penny.
+She is a stone from which one looks in vain for blood. Your launch
+is--what do you call it in ze Far Vest--a goner!"
+
+"But she's descended from Charlemagne," cried Florence. "She has
+the entree to all the courts. She ought to be exposed for stealing
+my boat!"
+
+"What does anybody do when he is robbed?" said the count
+philosophically. He could afford to be philosophical: it wasn't
+HIS vertical inverted triple-expansion direct-acting propeller.
+"Smile and be more careful ze next time," he went on. "The
+marquise's reputation is international for what is charitably
+called her eccentricity."
+
+"In America they put people in jail for that kind of
+eccentricity!" exclaimed Florence.
+
+"Oh, the best way in Europe is money-with-order," said the count,
+"what I remember once a friend seeing in that great country of
+which you are ze ornament--in God we trust: all others cash!"
+
+"Well, it's a shame," said Florence, "and if I ever get the chance
+of a dark night I'll ram her with the Minnehaha!"
+
+Florence's mother, a dear little old lady who did tatting and read
+the Christian Herald, was always the particular target of the
+fortune-hunters who pursued her daughter. It seemed such a
+brilliant idea to capture the mother first as the preparatory step
+of getting into the good graces of the heiress; and the old lady,
+who was one of the most guileless of her sex, never failed to fall
+into the trap and take the attentions all in earnest. Comte de
+Souvary used to say that if you wished to find the wickedest men
+in Europe you had only to cast your eyes in the direction of
+Florence's mother; and she would be trotted off to church and
+driven in automobiles and lunched in casinos by the most notorious
+and unprincipled scapegraces of the Old World.
+
+Florence, who, like all heiresses, had developed a positive
+instinct for the men who meant her mischief, was always delighted
+at the repeated captures of the old lady; and it was an endless
+entertainment to her when her mother was induced to champion the
+cause of some aristocratic ne'er-do-well.
+
+"But, Mamma," she would say, "I hate to call your friends names,
+but really he's a perfect scamp, and underneath all his fine
+manners he is no better than a wolf ravening for rich young
+lambs!"
+
+"Oh, Florence, how can you be so uncharitable!" her mother would
+retort. "If you could only hear the way he speaks of his mother
+and his ruined life, and how he is trying to be a better man for
+your sake--"
+
+"Always the same old story," said Florence. "It's wonderful the
+good I do just sailing around and radiating moral influence. The
+count says I ought to get a medal from the government with my
+profile on one side and a composite picture of my admirers on the
+other! And if I do, Mamsey, I'll give it to you to keep!"
+
+Frank Rignold was sometimes tempted to curse the day that had ever
+brought him aboard the Minnehaha. To be a silent spectator of
+gaieties and festivities he could not share; to be condemned to
+stand aloof while he saw the woman he loved petted and sought
+after by men of exalted position--what could be imagined more
+detestable to a lover without hope, without the shadow of a claim,
+with nothing to look forward to except the inevitable day when a
+luckier fellow would carry her off before his eyes. He moped in
+secret and often spent hours locked in his cabin, sitting with his
+face in his hands, a prey to the bitterest melancholy and
+dejection. In public, however, he always bore himself
+unflinchingly, and was too proud a man and too innately a
+gentleman to allow his face to be read even by her. It was
+incumbent on him, so long as he drew her pay and wore her uniform,
+to act in all respects the part he was cast to play; and no one
+could have guessed, except perhaps the girl herself, that he had
+any other thought save to do his duty cheerfully and well.
+
+Captain Landry sat in the saloon at the bottom of the table,
+Florence herself taking the head; but the other officers of the
+ship had a cosey messroom of their own, presided over by Frank
+Rignold as the officer second in rank on board. Thus whole days
+might pass with no further exchange between himself and Florence
+than the customary good-morning when they happened to meet on
+deck. Except on the business of the ship it was tacitly understood
+that no officer should speak to her without being first addressed.
+The discipline of a man-of-war prevailed; everything went forward
+with stereotyped precision and formality; the officers were
+supposed to comport themselves with impassivity and self-
+effacement. Florence had no more need of being conscious of their
+presence than if they had been so many automatons.
+
+Her life and theirs offered a strange contrast. She in her little
+court of idlers and merry-makers; they, the grave men who were
+answerable for her safety, the exponents of a rigid routine, to
+whom the clang of the bells brought recurring duties and the
+exercise of their professional knowledge. To her, yachting was a
+play: to them, a business.
+
+"I often remark your chief engineer," said the comte de Souvary to
+Florence. "A handsome man, with an air at once sad and noble--one
+of zoze extraordinary Americans who keep for their machines the
+ardour we Europeans lavish on the women we love--and whose spirits
+when zey die turn without doubt into petrole or electricity."
+
+"I have known Mr. Rignold ever since I was a child," said
+Florence, pleased to hear Frank praised. "I regard him as one of
+my best and dearest friends."
+
+"The more to his credit," said the count, astonished. "Many in
+such a galere would prove themselves presumptuous and
+troublesome."
+
+"He is almost too much the other way," said Florence, with a sigh.
+
+"Ah, that appeals to me!" said the count. "I should be such
+anozzer in his place. Proud, silent, unobtrusive, who gives
+dignity to what otherwise would be a false position."
+
+"I came very near being his wife once," said Florence, impelled,
+she hardly knew why, to make the confession.
+
+The count was thunderstruck.
+
+"His wife!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Before I was rich, you know," explained Florence. "A million
+years ago it seems now, when I lived in a little town and was a
+nobody."
+
+"Anozzer romance of the Far Vest!" cried the count, to whom this
+term embraced the entire continent from Maine to San Francisco.
+
+Florence was curiously capricious in her treatment of Frank
+Rignold. Often she would neglect him for weeks together, and then,
+in a sort of revulsion, would go almost to the other extreme.
+Sometimes at night, when he would be pacing the deck, she would
+come and take his arm and call him Frank under her breath and ask
+him if he still loved her; and in a manner half tender, half
+mocking, would play on his feelings with a deliberate enjoyment of
+the pain she inflicted. Her greatest power of torment was her
+frankness. She would talk over her proposals; weigh one against
+the other; revel in her self-analysis and solemnly ask Frank his
+opinion on this or that part of her character. She talked with
+equal freedom of her regard for himself, and was almost brutal in
+confessing how hard it was to hold herself back.
+
+"I think I must be awfully wicked, Frank," she said to him once.
+"I love you so dearly, and yet I wouldn't marry you for anything!"
+And then she ran on as to whether she ought to take Souvary and
+live in Paris or Lord Comyngs and choose London. "It's so hard to
+decide," she said, "and it's so important, because one couldn't
+change one's mind afterwards."
+
+"Not very well," said Frank.
+
+"You mustn't grind your teeth so loud," she said. "It's
+compromising."
+
+"I wish you would talk about something else or go away," he said,
+goaded out of his usual politeness.
+
+"Oh, I love my little stolen tete-a-tetes with you!" she
+exclaimed. "All those other men are used up, emotionally speaking.
+The count would turn a neat phrase even if he were to blow his
+brains out the next minute. They think they are splendidly cool,
+but it only means that they have exhausted all their powers of
+sensation. You are delightfully primitive and unspoiled, and then
+I suppose it is natural to like a fellow-countryman best, isn't
+it? Now, honest--have you found any girls over here you like as
+well as me?"
+
+"I haven't tried to find any," said Frank.
+
+"You aren't a bit disillusioned, are you?" she said. "You simply
+shut your eyes and go it blind. A woman likes that in a man. It's
+what love ought to be. It's silly of me to throw it away."
+
+"Perhaps it is, Florence," he said. "Who knows but what some day
+you may regret it?"
+
+"I often think of that," she returned. "I am afraid all the good
+part of me loves you, and all the bad loves the counts and dukes
+and earls, you know. And the good is almost drowned in all the
+rest, like vegetables in vegetable soup."
+
+She excelled in giving such little dampers to sentiment, and
+laughed heartily at Frank's discomfiture.
+
+"You can be awfully cruel," he said. "I wonder you can be so
+beautiful when you can think such things and say them. You treat
+hearts like toys and laugh when you break them."
+
+"Well, there's one thing, Frank," she said seriously. "I have
+never pretended to you or tried to appear better than I am; and
+you are the only man I can say that to and not lie!"
+
+ IV
+
+The comte de Souvary, towards whom Florence betrayed an
+inclination that seemed at times to deserve a warmer word, was a
+French gentleman nearing forty. He was a man of distinguished
+appearance, with all the gaiety, grace, and charm that, in spite
+our popular impression to the contrary, are not seldom found
+amongst the nobles of his country. His undoubted wealth and
+position redeemed his suit from any appearance of being inspired
+by a mercenary motive. Indeed, he was accustomed himself to be
+pursued, and Florence and he recognised in each other a fellowship
+of persecution.
+
+"We are ze Pale Faces," he would say, "and ze ozzers zey are
+Indians closing in from every corner of ze Far Vest for our
+scalps!"
+
+He was, in many ways, the most accomplished man that Florence had
+ever known. He was a violinist, a singer, a poet, and yet these
+were but a part of his various gifts; for in everything out of
+doors he was no less a master and took the first place as though
+by right. He was the embodiment of everything daring and manly; it
+seemed natural for him to excel; he simply did not know what fear
+was. He was always ready to smile and turn a little joke, whether
+speeding in his automobile at a breakneck pace or ballooning above
+the clouds in search of what was to him the breath of life: "ze
+sensation." He could never see a new form of "ze sensation"
+without running for it like a child for a new toy. His whole
+attitude towards the world was that of a furious curiosity. He
+could not bear to leave it, he said, until all he had learned how
+all the wheels went round. He had stood on the Matterhorn. He had
+driven the Sud express. He had exhausted lions and tigers. In
+moods of depression he would threaten to follow Andree to the pole
+and figure out his plans on the back of an envelope.
+
+"Magnificent!" he would cry, growing instantly cheerful at the
+prospect. "Think of ze sensation!"
+
+He spoke English fluently, though shaky on the TH and the W, and
+it was first hand and not mentally translated. His pronunciation
+of Far West, two words that were constantly on his lips, was an
+endless entertainment to Florence, and out of a sense of humour
+she forebore to correct him. It was typical, indeed, of his
+ignorance of everything American. Europe was at his fingers' ends;
+there was not a country in it he was not familiar with; intimately
+familiar, knowing much of what went on behind the scenes, and the
+lives and characters of the men, and not less the women, who
+shaped national policies and held the steering-wheels of state.
+
+"Muravief would never do that," he would say. "He is
+constitutionally inert, and his imagination has carried him
+through too many unfought wars for him to throw down the gage now.
+He smokes cigarettes and dreams of endless peace. I had many talks
+with him last year and found him impatient of any subject but the
+redemption of the paper rouble!"
+
+But his mind had never crossed the Atlantic Ocean. He still
+thought that the Civil War had been between North and South
+America. To him the United States was a vague region peopled with
+miners, pork-packers, and Indians; a jumble of factories, forests,
+and red-shirted men digging for gold, all of it fantastically seen
+through the medium of Buffalo Bill's show. It was a constant
+wonder to him that such conditions had been able to produce a
+woman like Florence Fenacre.
+
+"You are the flower of ze prairie," he would say, "an atavism of
+type, harking back a dozen generations to aristocratic
+progenitors, having nothing in common with the Pathfinder your
+Papa!"
+
+"He wasn't a pathfinder," said Florence, "he was a whaler
+captain."
+
+But this to the count seemed only the more remarkable. He raised
+the fabric of a fresh romance on the instant, especially (on
+Florence telling him more about her forebears) when he began to
+mix up the Pilgrim Fathers, the Revolutionary War, and the Alabama
+in one brisk panorama of his ever dear "Far Vest"!
+
+Florence's acquaintance with the comte de Souvary went back to
+Majorca, where, in the course of one of those sudden blows, so
+common on the Mediterranean, their respective yachts had fled for
+shelter. His own was a large auxiliary schooner called the
+Paquita, a lofty, showy vessel which he sailed himself with his
+usual courage and audacity. He had the reputation of scaring his
+unhappy guests--when any were bold enough to accept his
+invitations--to within the proverbial inch of their lives; and
+they usually changed "ze sensation" for the nearest mail-boat
+home. Florence and he had struck up a warm friendship from the
+start, and for the whole summer their vessels were inseparable,
+sailing everywhere in company and anchoring side by side.
+
+The count had a way of courtship peculiarly his own. He made it
+apparent from the first how deeply he had been stirred by
+Florence's beauty and how ready he was to offer her his hand; but
+as a matter of fact he never did so in set terms, and treated her
+more as a comrade than a divinity. He talked of his own devotion
+to her as something detached and impersonal, willing as much as
+she to laugh over it and treat it lightly. He was never jealous,
+never exacting, and seemed to be as happy to share her with others
+as when he had her all alone in one of their tete-a-tetes. What he
+coveted most of all was her intimacy, her confidence, the frank
+expression of her own true self; and in this exchange he was
+willing to give as much as he received and often more. Sometimes
+she was piqued at his apparent indifference--at his lack of any
+stronger feeling for her--seeming to detect in him something of
+her own insouciance and coldness.
+
+"You really don't care for me a bit," she said once. "I am only
+another form of 'ze sensation'--like going up in a balloon or
+riding on the cow-catcher."
+
+"I keep myself well in hand," he returned. "I am not approaching
+the terrible age of forty without knowing a little at least about
+women and their ways."
+
+"A little!" she exclaimed ironically. "You know enough to write a
+book!"
+
+"Zat book has taught me to go very slow," he said. "Were I in my
+young manhood I'd come zoop, like that, and carry you off in ze
+Far Vest style. But I can never hope to be that again with any
+woman; my decreasing hair forbids, if nozing else--but my way is
+to make myself indispensable--ze old dog, ze old standby, as you
+Americans say--the good old harbour to which you will come at last
+when tired of ze storms outside!"
+
+"Your humility is a new trait," said Florence.
+
+"It's none ze less real because it is often hid," said the count.
+"I watch you very closely, more closely than perhaps you even
+think. You have all the heartlessness of youth and health and
+beauty. I would be wrong to put my one little piece of money on
+the table and lose all; and so I save and save, and play ze only
+game that offers me the least chance--ze waiting game!"
+
+"I believe that's true," said Florence.
+
+"Were I to act ze distracted lover, you would laugh in my face,"
+he went on earnestly. "Were I to propose and be refused, my pride
+would not let me--my instinct as gentleman would not let me--go
+trailing after you with my long face. The idyll would be over. I
+would go!"
+
+"There are times when I think a heap of you," said Florence
+encouragingly.
+
+"Oh, I know so well how it would be," he continued. "A week of
+doubt--of fever; a rain of little notes; and then with your good
+clear honest Far Vest sense you would say: No, mon cher, it is
+eempossible!"
+
+"Yes, I suppose I would," said Florence.
+
+"I would rather be your friend all my life," said the count, "than
+to be merely one of the rejected. I have no ambition to place my
+name on that already great list. I have never yet asked a woman to
+marry me, and when I do I care not for the expectation of being
+refused!"
+
+"You are like all Europeans," said Florence, "you believe in a
+sure thing."
+
+"My heart is not on my sleeve," he returned, "and I value it too
+highly to lose it without compensation."
+
+"It is interesting to hear all your views," said Florence. "I am
+sure I appreciate the compliment highly. It's a new idea, this of
+the wolf making a confidant of the lamb."
+
+"Oh, my dear!" he broke out, "I am only a poor devil holding back
+from committing a great stupidity."
+
+"Is that how you describe marrying me?" she said lightly.
+
+"Ze day will come," he said, disregarding her question, "I think
+it will--I hope it will--when you will say to me: My dear fellow,
+I am tired of all this fictitious gaiety; of all this rush and
+bustle and flirtation; of this life of fever and emptiness. I long
+for peace and do not know where to find it. I am like a piece of
+music to whom one waits in vain for the return to the keynote.
+Tell me where to find it or else I die!"
+
+"Rather forward of me to say all that, Count," observed the girl.
+"But suppose I did--what then?"
+
+The count opened wide his arms.
+
+"I would answer: here!" he said.
+
+V
+
+Thus the bright days passed, amid animating scenes, with memories
+of sky and cloud and noble headlands and stately, beautiful ships.
+Like two ocean sweethearts the Minnehaha and the Paquita took
+their restless way together, side by side in port, inseparable at
+sea. At night the one lit the other's road with a string of ruby
+lanterns and kept the pair in company across the dark and silent
+water. Their respective crews, not behindhand in this splendid
+camaraderie of ships, fraternised in wine-shops and strolled
+through the crooked foreign streets arm in arm. Breton and
+American, red cap and blue, sixty of the one and eighty of the
+other--they were brothers all and cemented their friendship in
+blood and gunpowder, in tattooed names, flags and mottoes, after
+the time-honoured and artless manner of the sea.
+
+In the drama of life it is often the least important actors who
+are happiest, and the stars themselves are not always to be the
+most envied. Florence, torn between her ambition and her love,
+knew what it was to toss all night on her sleepless bed and wet
+the pillow with her tears. De Souvary, who found himself every day
+deeper in the toils of his ravishing American, chafed and
+struggled with unavailing pangs; and as for Frank Rignold, he
+endured long periods of black depression as he watched from afar
+the steady progress of his rival's suit; and his moody face grew
+moodier and exasperation rose within him to the rebellion point.
+
+By September the two yachts were lying in Cowes, and already there
+was some talk of winter plans and a possible voyage to India. The
+count was enthusiastic about the project, as he was about anything
+that could keep him and Florence together, and he had ordered a
+stack of books and spent hours at a time with the mistress of the
+Minnehaha reading over Indian Ocean directories and plotting
+imaginary courses on the chart.
+
+With the prospect of so extended a trip before him, Frank found
+much to be done in the engine-room, for their suggested cruise
+would be likely to carry them far out of the beaten track, and he
+had to be prepared for all contingencies. A marine engine requires
+to be perpetually tinkered, and an engineer's duty is not only to
+run it, but to make good the little defects and breakdowns that
+are constantly occurring. Frank was a daily visitor at the local
+machine-shop, and his business engagements with Mr. Derwent, the
+proprietor, led insensibly to others of the social kind.
+
+Derwent's house was close by his works, and Frank's trips ashore
+soon began to take in both. Derwent had a daughter, a black-
+haired, black-eyed, pink-cheeked girl, named Cassie, one of those
+vigorous young English beauties that men would call stunning and
+women bold. She did not wait for any preliminaries, but
+straightway fell in love with the handsome American engineer that
+her father brought home. She made her regard so plain that Frank
+was embarrassed, and was not a bit put off at his reluctance to
+play the part she assigned to him.
+
+"That's always my luck," she remarked with disarming candour, "a
+poor silly fool who always likes them that don't like me and
+spurns them that do!" And then she added, with a laugh, that he
+ought to be tied up, "for you are a cruel handsome man, Frank, and
+my heart goes pitapat at the very sight of you!"
+
+She called him Frank at the second visit; and at the third seated
+herself on the arm of his chair and took his hand and held it.
+
+"Can't you ever forget that girl in Yankee-land?" she said. "She
+ain't here, is she, and why shouldn't you steal a little harmless
+fun? There's men who'd give their little finger to win a kiss from
+me--and you sit there so glum and solemn, who could have a bushel
+for the asking!"
+
+For all Frank's devotion to Florence he could not but be flattered
+at being wooed in this headlong fashion. He was only a man after
+all, and she was the prettiest girl in port. He did not resist
+when she suddenly put her arms around him and pressed his head
+against her bosom, calling him her boy and her darling; but
+remained passive in her embrace, pleased and yet ashamed, and
+touched to the quick with self-contempt.
+
+"You mustn't," he said, freeing himself. "Cassie, it's wrong--it's
+dreadful. You mustn't think I love you, because I don't."
+
+"Yes, but I am going to make you," she said with splendid
+effrontery, looking at herself in the glass and patting her
+rumpled hair. "See what you have done to me, you bad boy!"
+
+Had she been older or more sophisticated, Frank would have been
+shocked at this reversal of the sexes. But in her self-avowed and
+unashamed love for him she was more like a child than a woman; and
+her good-humour and laughter besides seemed somehow to belittle
+her words and redeem the affair from any seriousness. Frank tried
+to stay away, for his conscience pricked him and he did not care
+to drift into such an unusual and ambiguous relation with
+Derwent's handsome daughter. But Cassie was always on the watch
+for him and he could not escape from the machine-works without
+falling into one of her ambushes. She would carry him off to tea,
+and he never left without finding himself pledged to return in the
+evening. In his loneliness, hopelessness, and desolation he found
+it dangerously sweet to be thus petted and sought after. Cassie
+made no demands of him and acquiesced with apparent cheerfulness
+in the implication that he loved another woman. She humbly
+accepted the little that was left over, and, though she wept many
+hot tears in secret, outwardly at least she never rebelled or
+reproached him. She knew that to do either would be to lose him.
+In fact she made it very easy for him to come, and gave up her
+girlish treasure of affection without any hope of reward. Frank,
+by degrees, discovered a wonderful comfort in being with her. It
+was balm to his wounds and bruises; and, like someone who had long
+been out in the cold, he warmed himself, so to speak, before that
+bright fire, and found himself growing drowsy and contented.
+
+It must not be supposed that all this went on unremarked, or that
+in the gossip of the yacht Frank and Cassie Derwent did not come
+in for a considerable share of attention. It passed from the
+officers' mess to the saloon, and Florence bit her lip with anger
+and jealousy when the joke went round of the chief engineer's
+"infatuation." In revenge she treated Frank more coldly than ever,
+and went out of her way to be agreeable to de Souvary, especially
+when the former was at hand and could be made a spectator of her
+lover-like glances and a warmth that seemed to transcend the
+limits of ordinary friendship. She made herself utterly unhappy
+and Frank as well. The only one of the trio to be pleased was the
+count.
+
+She made no objection when Frank asked her permission to show the
+ship to Derwent and his daughter.
+
+"You must be sure and introduce me," she said, with a sparkle of
+her eyes that Frank was too unpresumptuous to understand. "They
+say that she is a raving little beauty and that you are the happy
+man!"
+
+Frank hurriedly disclaimed the honour.
+
+"Oh, no!" he said. "But she is really very sweet and nice, and I
+think we owe a little attention to her father."
+
+"Oh, her FATHER!" said Florence, sarcastically emphasising the
+word.
+
+"I hope you don't think there is anything in it," he exclaimed
+very anxiously. "I suppose there has been some tittle-tattle--I
+can read it in your face--but there's not a word of truth in it,
+not a word, I assure you."
+
+"I don't care the one way or other, Frank," she said. "You needn't
+explain so hard. What does it matter to me, anyway?" and with that
+she turned away to cordially greet the count as he came aboard.
+
+The two women met in the saloon. Florence at once assumed the
+great lady, the heiress, the condescending patrician; Cassie
+flushed and trembled; and in a buzz of commonplaces the stewards
+served tea while the two women covertly took each other's measure.
+Florence grew ashamed of her own behavior, and, unbending a
+little, tried to put her guests at ease and led Cassie on to talk.
+Then it came out about the dance that Derwent and his daughter
+were to give the following night.
+
+"Frank and me have been arranging the cotillon," said Cassie, and
+then she turned pink to her ears at having called him by his first
+name before all those people. "I mean Mr. Rignold," she added,
+amid everyone's laughter and her own desperate confusion.
+Florence's laughter rang out as gaily as anyone's, and apparently
+as unaffectedly, and she rallied Cassie with much good humour on
+her slip.
+
+"So it's Frank already!" she exclaimed. "Oh, Miss Derwent! don't
+you trust this wicked chief of mine. He is a regular heart-
+breaker!"
+
+Cassie cried when Frank and she returned home and sat together on
+the porch.
+
+"She's a proud, haughty minx," she burst out, "and you love her--
+and as for me I might as well drown myself."
+
+Frank attempted to comfort her.
+
+"Oh, you needn't try to blind me," she said bitterly. "I--I
+thought it was a girl in America, Frank, a girl like me--just
+common and poor and perhaps not as nice as I am. And you know she
+wouldn't wipe her feet on you," she went on viciously--"she so
+grand with her yachts and her counts and 'Oh, I think I'll run
+over to Injya for the winter, or maybe it's Cairo or the Nile,'
+says she! What kind of a chance have you got there, Frank, you in
+your greasy over-alls and working for her wages? Won't you break
+your heart just like I am breaking mine, I that would sell the
+clothes off my back for you and follow you all over the world!"
+
+Frank protested that she was mistaken; that it wasn't Miss Fenacre
+at all; that it was absurd to even think of such a thing.
+
+"Oh, Frank, it's bad enough as it is without your lying to me,"
+she said, quite unconvinced. "You've set your eyes too high, and
+unhappiness is all that you'll ever get from the likes of her.
+You're a fool in your way and I'm a fool in mine, and maybe when
+she's married to the count and done for, you'll mind the little
+girl that's waiting for you in Cowes!" She took his hand and
+kissed it, telling him with a sob that she would ever remain
+single for his sake.
+
+"But I don't want you to, Cassie," he said. "You're talking like a
+baby. What's the good of waiting when I am never coming back?"
+
+"You say that now," she exclaimed, "but my words will come back to
+you in Injya when you grow tired of her ladyship's coldness and
+disdain; and I'm silly enough to think you'll find them a comfort
+to you out there, with nothing to do but to think and think, and
+be miserable."
+
+VI
+
+The next day he found Cassie in a more cheerful humour and excited
+about the dance. The house was all upset and she was busy with a
+dozen of her girl friends in decorating the hall and drawing-room,
+taking up the carpets, arranging for the supper and the
+cloakrooms, and immersed generally in the thousand and one tasks
+that fall on a hostess-to-be. Frank put himself at her orders and
+spent the better part of the afternoon in running errands and
+tacking up flags and branches; and after an hilarious tea, in the
+midst of all the litter and confusion, he went back to the ship
+somewhat after five o'clock. As he was pulled out in a shore boat
+he was surprised to pass a couple of coal lighters coming from the
+Minnehaha, and to see her winches busily hoisting in stores from a
+large launch alongside. He ran up the ladder, and seeing the
+captain asked him what was up.
+
+"Sailing orders, Chief," said Captain Landry, enjoying his
+amazement. "We'll be off the ground in half an hour, eastward
+bound!" "But I wasn't told anything," cried Frank. "I never got
+any orders."
+
+"The little lady said you wasn't to be disturbed," said the
+captain, "and she took it on herself to order your staff to go
+ahead. I guess you'll find a pretty good head of steam already!"
+
+Frank ran to the side and called back his boat, giving the man
+five shillings to take a note at once to Cassie. He had no time
+for more than a few lines, but he could not go to sea without at
+least one word of farewell. They were cutting the anchor and were
+already under steerage way when Cassie came off herself in a
+launch and passed up a letter directed to the chief engineer. It
+reached him in the engine-room, where he, not knowing that she was
+but a few feet distant, was spared the sight of her pale and
+despairing face.
+
+The letter itself was almost incoherent. She knew, she said, whom
+she had to thank for his departure. That vixen, that hussy, that
+stuck-up minx, who treated him like a dog and yet grudged him to
+another, who, God help her, loved him too well for her own good--
+it was her ladyship she had to thank for spoiling everything and
+carrying him away. Was he not man enough to assert himself and
+leave a ship where he was put upon so awful? Let him ask her
+mightiness in two words, yes or no; and then when he had come down
+from the clouds and had learned the truth, poor silly fool--then
+let him come back to his Cassie, who loved him so dear, and who
+(if she did say it herself) had a heart worth fifty of his
+mistress and didn't need no powder to set off her complexion. It
+ended with a piteous appeal to his compassion and besought him to
+write to her from the nearest port.
+
+Frank sighed as he read it. Everything in the world seemed wrong
+and at cross-purposes. Those who had one thing invariably longed
+for something else, and there was no content or happiness or
+satisfaction anywhere. The better off were the acquiescent, who
+took the good and the bad with the same composure and found their
+only pleasure in their work. Best off of all were the dead whose
+sufferings were over. But after all it was sweet to be loved, even
+if one did not love back, and Frank was very tender with the
+little letter and put it carefully in his pocket-book. Yes, it was
+sweet to be loved. He said this over and over to himself, and
+wondered whether Florence felt the same to him as he did to
+Cassie. It seemed to explain so much. It seemed the key to her
+strange regard for him. He asked himself whether it could be true
+that she had wilfully ordered the ship to sea in order to prevent
+him going to the dance. The thought stirred him inexpressibly.
+What other explanation was there if this was not the one? And she
+had deserted the count, who was away in London on a day's
+business; deserted the Paquita at anchor in the roads! He was
+frightened at his own exultation. Suppose he were wrong in this
+surmise! Suppose it were just another of her unaccountable
+caprices!
+
+They ran down Channel at full speed and at night were abreast of
+the Scilly lights, driving towards the Bay of Biscay in the teeth
+of an Equinoctial gale. At the behest of one girl eighty men had
+to endure the discomfort of a storm at sea, and a great steel
+ship, straining and quivering, was flung into the perilous night.
+It seemed a misuse of power that, at a woman's whim, so many lives
+and so noble and costly a fabric could be risked--and risked for
+nothing. From the captain on the bridge, dripping in his oil-
+skins, to the coal-passers and firemen below who fed the mighty
+furnaces, to the cooks in the galley, the engineers, the
+electrician on duty, the lookout man in the bow clinging to the
+life-line when the Minnehaha buried her nose out of sight--all
+these perforce had to endure and suffer at Florence's bidding
+without question or revolt.
+
+Frank's elation passed and left him in a bitter humour towards
+her. It was not right, he said to himself, not right at all. She
+ought to show a little consideration for the men who had served
+her so well and faithfully. Besides, it was unworthy of her to
+betray such pettiness and spoil Cassie's dance. He felt for the
+girl's humiliation, and, though not in love with her, he was
+conscious of a sentiment that hated to see her hurt. He would not
+accept Florence's invitation to dine in the saloon, sending word
+that he had a headache and begged to be excused; and after dinner,
+when she sought him out on deck and tried to make herself very
+sweet to him, he was purposely reserved and distant, and look the
+first opportunity to move away. He was angry, disheartened, and
+resentful, all in one.
+
+Towards eleven o'clock at night as Frank was in the engine-room,
+moodily turning over these reflections in his mind and listening
+to the race of the screws as again and again they were lifted out
+of the water and strained the shafts and engines to the utmost, he
+was surprised to see Florence herself descending the steel ladder
+into that close atmosphere of oil and steam. He ran to help her
+down, and taking her arm led her to one side, where they might be
+out of the way. Here, in the glare of the lanterns, he looked down
+into her face and thought again how beautiful she was. Her cheek
+was wet with spray, and her hair was tangled and glistening
+beneath her little yachting cap. She seemed to exhale a breath of
+the storm above and bring down with her something of the gale
+itself. She held fast to Frank as the ship laboured and plunged,
+smiling as their eyes met.
+
+"You are the last person I expected down here," said Frank.
+
+"I was beginning to get afraid," she returned. "It's blowing
+terribly, Frank--and I thought, if anything happened, I'd like to
+be with you!"
+
+"Oh, we are all right!" said Frank, his professional spirit
+aroused. "With twin screws, twin engines, and plenty of sea-room--
+why, let it blow."
+
+His confidence reassured her. He never appeared to her so strong,
+so self-reliant and calm as at that moment of her incipient fear.
+Amongst his engines Frank always wore a masterful air, for he had
+that instinct for machinery peculiarly American, and was competent
+almost to the point of genius.
+
+"Besides, I wanted to ask you a question," said Florence. "I had
+to ask it. I couldn't sleep without asking it, Frank."
+
+"I would have come, if you had sent for me," he said.
+
+"I couldn't wait for that," she returned. "I knew it might be hard
+for you to leave--or impossible."
+
+"What is it, Florence?" he asked. The name slipped out in spite of
+him.
+
+She looked at him strangely, her lustrous eyes wide open and
+bright with her unsaid thoughts.
+
+"Are you very fond of her, Frank?" she asked.
+
+"Her? Who?" he exclaimed. "You don't mean Cassie Derwent?"
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+"Of course I'm fond of her," he said.
+
+"More than you are of me, Frank?" she persisted.
+
+"Oh, it isn't the same sort of thing, Florence," he said. "I never
+even thought of comparing you and her together. Surely you know
+that? Surely you understand that?"
+
+"You used to--to love me once, Frank," she said, with a stifled
+sob. "Has she made it any less? Has she robbed me, Frank? Have I
+lost you without knowing it?"
+
+"No," he said, "no, a thousand times, no!"
+
+"Tell me that you love me, Frank," she burst out. "Tell me, tell
+me!" Then, as he did not answer, she went on passionately: "That's
+why I went to sea, Frank. I was mad with jealousy. I couldn't give
+you up to her. I couldn't let her have you!"
+
+She pressed closer against him, and tiptoeing so as to raise her
+mouth to his ear, she whispered: "I always liked you better than
+anybody else in the world, Frank. I love you! I love you!"
+
+For the moment he could not realise his own good fortune. He could
+do nothing but look into her eyes. It was her reproach for years
+afterwards that she had to kiss him first.
+
+"I suppose it had to come, Frank," she said. "I fought all I
+could, but it didn't seem any use!"
+
+"It was inevitable," he returned solemnly. "God made you for me,
+and me for you!"
+
+"Amen," she said, and in an ecstasy of abandonment whispered
+again: "I love you, Frank. I love you!"
+
+
+
+
+
+FFRENCHES FIRST
+
+
+I suppose if I had been a hero of romance, instead of an ordinary
+kind of chap, I would have steamed in with the Tallahassee, fired
+a gun, and landed in state, instead of putting on my old clothes
+and sneaking into the county on an automobile. However, I did my
+little best, so far as making a date with Babcock was concerned,
+and as it turned out in the end I dare say the hero of romance
+wouldn't have managed it much better himself. It was late when I
+got into Forty Fyles (as the village was called), and put up at
+one of those quaint, low-raftered, bulging old inns which still
+remain, thank Heaven, here and there, in the less travelled parts
+of England. If I were dusty and dirty when I arrived, you ought to
+have seen me the next day after a two-hours' job with the
+differential gears. By the time I had got the trouble to rights,
+and had puffed up and down the main street to make assurance sure
+and astonish the natives (who came out two hundred strong and
+cheered), I was as frowsy, unkempt, and dilapidated an American as
+ever drove a twelve H.P. Panhard through the rural lanes of
+Britain. Indeed, I was so shocked at my own appearance when I
+looked at myself in the glass (such a wiggly old glass that showed
+one in streaks like bacon) that I went down to the draper's and
+tried to buy a new set out. But as they had nothing except cheap
+tripper suits for pigmies (I stood six feet in my stockings and
+had played full back at college) and fishermen's clothes of an
+ancient Dutch design, I forebore to waste my good dollars in
+making a guy of myself, and decided to remain as I was.
+
+Then, as I was sitting in the bar and asking the potman the best
+way to get to Castle Fyles, it suddenly came over me that it was
+the Fourth of July, and that, recreant as I was, I had come near
+forgetting the event altogether. I started off again down the main
+street to discover some means of raising a noise, and after a good
+deal of searching I managed to procure several handfuls of strange
+whitey fire-crackers the size of cigars and a peculiar red package
+that the shopkeeper called a "Haetna Volcano." He said that for
+four and eightpence one couldn't find its match in Lunnon itself,
+and obligingly took off twopence when I pointed out Vesuvius
+hadn't a fuse. With the crackers in my pocket and the volcano
+under my arm I set forth in the pleasant summer morning to walk to
+Castle Fyles, having an idea to rest by the way and celebrate the
+Fourth in the very heart of the hereditary enemy.
+
+The road, as is so often the case in England, ran between high
+stone walls and restrained the wayfarer from straying into the
+gentlemen's parks on either hand. The sun shone overhead with the
+fierce heat of a British July; and to make matters worse in my
+case, I seemed to be the loadstone of what traffic was in progress
+on the highway. A load of hay stuck to me with obstinate
+determination; if I walked slowly, the hay lagged beside me; if I
+quickened my pace, the hay whipped up his horses; when I rested
+and mopped my brow, the hay rested and mopped ITS brow. Then there
+were tramps of various kinds: a Punch and Judy show on the march;
+swift silent bicyclists who sped past in a flurry of dust; local
+gentry riding cock-horses (no doubt to Banbury Crosses); local
+gentry in dogcarts; local gentry in closed carriages going to a
+funeral, and apparently (as seen through the windows) very hot and
+mournful and perspiring; an antique clergyman in an antique gig
+who gave me a tract and warned me against drink; a char-a-bancs
+filled to bursting with the True Blue Constitutional Club of East
+Pigley--such at least was the inscription on a streaming banner--
+who swung past waving their hats and singing "Our Boarder's such a
+Nice Young Man"; then some pale aristocratic children in a sort of
+perambulating clothes-basket drawn by a hairy mite of a pony, who
+looked at me disapprovingly, as though I hadn't honestly come by
+the volcano; then--but why go on with the never-ending procession
+of British pilgrims who straggled out at just sufficient intervals
+to keep between them a perpetual eye on my movements and prevent
+me from celebrating the birth of freedom in any kind of privacy.
+At last, getting desperate at this espionage and thinking besides
+I could make a shorter cut towards Castle Fyles, I clambered over
+an easy place in the left-hand wall and dropped into the shade of
+a magnificent park. Here, at least, whatever the risk of an
+outraged law (which I had been patronisingly told was even
+stricter than that of the Medes and Persians), I seemed free to
+wander unseen and undetected, and accordingly struck a course
+under the oaks that promised in time to bring me out somewhere
+near the sea.
+
+Dipping into a little dell, where in the perfection of its English
+woodland one might have thought to meet Robin Hood himself, or
+startle Little John beside a fallen deer, I looked carefully
+about, got out my pale crackers, and wondered whether I dared
+begin. It is always an eerie sensation to be alone in the forest,
+what with the whispering leaves overhead, the stir and hum of
+insects, the rustle of ghostly foot-falls, and (in my case) the
+uneasy sense of green-liveried keepers sneaking up at one through
+the clumps of gorse. However, I was not the man to belie the blood
+of Revolutionary heroes and meanly carry my unexploded crackers
+beyond the scene of danger, so I remembered the brave days of old
+and touched a whitey off. It burst with the roar of a cannon and
+reverberated through the glades like the broadside of a man-of-
+war. It took me a good five minutes before I had the courage to
+detonate another, which, for better security, I did this time
+under my hat. I am not saying it did the hat any good, but it
+seemed safer and less deafening, and I accordingly went on in this
+manner until there were only about three whiteys left between me
+and Vesuvius, which I kept back, in accordance with tradition, for
+one big triumphant bang at the end.
+
+I was in the act of touching my cigar to whitey number three,--on
+my knees, I remember; and trying to arrange my hat so as to get
+the most muffling for the least outlay of burned felt, when the
+branches in front of me parted and I looked up to see--well,
+simply the most beautiful woman in the world, regarding me with
+astonishment and anger. She was about twenty, somewhat above the
+medium height, and her eyes were of a lovely flashing blue that
+seemed in the intensity of her indignation to positively emit
+sparks--altogether the most exquisitely radiant and glorious
+creature that man was ever privileged to gaze upon.
+
+"How dare you let off fireworks in this park?" she said, in a
+voice like clotted cream.
+
+I rose in some confusion.
+
+"Go directly," she said, "or I'll report you and have you
+summonsed!"
+
+"I have only two more crackers and this volcano," I said
+protestingly. "Surely you would not mind----"
+
+"Don't be insolent," she said, "or I shall have no compunction in
+setting my dog on you."
+
+I looked down, and there, sure enough, rolling a yellow eye and
+showing his fangs at me, was a sort of Uncle Tom's Cabin
+bloodhound only waiting to begin.
+
+"The fact is," I said, speaking slowly, so as to emphasise the
+fact that I was a gentleman, "I am an American; to-day is our
+national holiday; and we make it everywhere our practice to
+celebrate it with fireworks. I would have done so in the road, but
+the island seemed so crowded this morning I couldn't find an
+undisturbed place outside the park."
+
+Beauty was obviously mollified by my tone and respectful address.
+
+"Please leave the park directly," she said.
+
+I put the crackers in my pocket, took up my hat, placed the Haetna
+Volcano under my arm, and stood there, ready to go.
+
+"Accept my apologies," I said. "Whatever my fault, at least no
+discourtesy was intended."
+
+We looked at each other, and Beauty's face relaxed into something
+like a smile.
+
+"Just give me one more minute for my volcano," I pleaded.
+
+"You seem very polite," she returned. "Yes, you can set it off, if
+that will be any satisfaction to you."
+
+"It'll be a whole lot," I said, "and since you're so kind perhaps
+you'll let me include the crackers as well?"
+
+Then she began to laugh, and the sweetest thing about it was that
+she didn't want to laugh a bit and blushed the most lovely pink,
+as she broke out again and again until the woods fairly rang. And
+as I laughed too--for really it was most absurd--it was as good as
+a scene in a play. And so, while she held Legree's dog, whom the
+sound inflamed to frenzy, I popped off the crackers and dropped my
+cigar into Vesuvius. I tell you he was worth four and eightpence,
+and the man was right when he said there wasn't his match in
+London. I doubt if there was his match anywhere for being plumb-
+full of red balls and green balls and blue balls and crimson stars
+and fizzlegigs and whole torrents of tiny crackers and chase-me-
+quicks, and when you about thought he was never going to stop he
+shot up a silver spray and a gold spray and wound up with a very
+considerable decent-sized bust.
+
+"I must thank you for your good nature," I said to the young lady.
+
+"Are you a typical American?" she asked. "Oh, so-so," I returned.
+"There are heaps like me in New York."
+
+"And do they all do this on the Fourth of July?" she asked.
+
+"Every last one!" I said.
+
+"Fancy!" she said.
+
+"In America," I said, "when a man has received one favour he is
+certain to make it the stepping-stone for another. Won't you
+permit me to walk across the park to Castle Fyles?"
+
+"Castle Fyles?" she repeated, with a little note of curiosity in
+her girlish voice. "Then don't you know that this is Fyles Park?"
+
+"Can't say I did," I returned. "But I am delighted to hear it."
+
+"Why are you delighted to hear it?" she asked, making me feel more
+than ever like an escaped lunatic.
+
+"This is the home of my ancestors," I said, "and it makes me glad
+to think they amount to something--own real estate--and keep their
+venerable heads above water."
+
+"So this is the home of your ancestors," she said.
+
+"It's holy ground to me," I said.
+
+"Fancy!" she exclaimed.
+
+"At least I think it is," I went on, "though we haven't any proofs
+beyond the fact that Fyles has always been a family name with us
+back to the Colonial days. I'm named Fyles myself--Fyles ffrench--
+and we, like the Castle people--have managed to retain our little
+f throughout the ages."
+
+She looked at me so incredulously that I handed her my card.
+
+Mr. Fyles ffrench,
+
+Knickerbocker Club.
+
+She turned it over in her fingers, regarding me at the same time
+with flattering curiosity.
+
+"How do you do, kinsman?" she said, holding out her hand. "Welcome
+to old England!"
+
+I took her little hand and pressed it.
+
+"I am the daughter of the house," she explained, "and I'm named
+Fyles too, though they usually call me Verna."
+
+"And the little f, of course," I said.
+
+"Just like yours," she returned. "There may be some capital F's in
+the family, but we wouldn't acknowledge them!"
+
+"What a fellow-feeling that gives one!" I said. "At school, at
+college, in business, in the war with Spain when I served on the
+Dixie, my life has been one long struggle to preserve that little
+f against a capital F world. I remember saying that to a chum the
+day we sank Cervera, 'If I am killed, Bill,' I said, 'see that
+they don't capital F me on the scroll of fame!'"
+
+"A true ffrench!" exclaimed Beauty with approval.
+
+"As true as yourself," I said.
+
+"Do you know that I'm the last of them?" she said.
+
+"You!" I exclaimed. "The last!"
+
+"Yes," she said, "when my father dies the estates will pass to my
+second cousin, Lord George Willoughby, and our branch of the
+family will become extinct."
+
+"You fill me with despair," I said.
+
+"My father never can forgive me for being a girl," she said.
+
+"I can," I remarked, "even at the risk of appearing disloyal to
+the race."
+
+"Fyles," she said, addressing me straight out by my first name,
+and with a little air that told me plainly I had made good my
+footing in the fold, "Fyles, what a pity you aren't the rightful
+heir, come from overseas with parchments and parish registers, to
+make good your claim before the House of Lords."
+
+"Wouldn't that be rather hard on you?" I asked.
+
+"I'd rather give up everything than see the old place pass to
+strangers," she said.
+
+"But I'm a stranger," I said.
+
+"You're Fyles ffrench," she exclaimed, "and a man, and you'd hand
+the old name down and keep the estate together."
+
+"And guard the little f with the last drop of my blood," I said.
+
+"Ah, well!" she said, with a little sigh, "the world's a
+disappointing place at best, and I suppose it serves us right for
+centuries of conceit about ourselves."
+
+"That at least will never die," I observed. "The American branch
+will see to that part of it."
+
+"It's a pity, though, isn't it?" she said.
+
+"Well," I said, "when a family has been carrying so much dog for a
+thousand years, I suppose in common fairness it's time to give way
+for another."
+
+"What is carrying dog?" she said.
+
+"It's American," I returned, "for thinking yourself better than
+anybody else!"
+
+"Fancy!" she said, and then with a beautiful smile she took my
+hand and rubbed it against the hound's muzzle.
+
+"You mustn't growl at him, Olaf," she said. "He's a ffrench; he's
+one of us; and he has come from over the sea to make friends."
+
+"You can't turn me out of the park after that," I said, in spite
+of a very dubious lick from the noble animal, who, possibly
+because he couldn't read and hadn't seen my card, was still a prey
+to suspicion.
+
+"I am going to take you back to the castle myself," she said, "and
+we'll spend the day going all over it, and I shall introduce you
+to my father--Sir Fyles--when he returns at five from Ascot."
+
+"I could ask for nothing better," I said, "though I don't want to
+make myself a burden to you. And then," I went on, a little
+uncertain how best to express myself, "you are so queer in England
+about--about----"
+
+"Proprieties," she said, giving the word which I hesitated to use.
+"Oh, yes! I suppose I oughtn't to; indeed, it's awful, and
+there'll be lunch too, Fyles, which makes it twice as bad. But to-
+day I'm going to be American and do just what I like."
+
+"I thought I ought to mention it," I said.
+
+"Objection overruled," she returned. "That's what they used to say
+in court when my father had his famous right-of-way case with Lord
+Piffle of Doom; and from what I remember there didn't seem any
+repartee to it."
+
+"There certainly isn't one from me," I said.
+
+"Let's go," she said.
+
+There didn't seem any end to that park, and we walked and walked
+and rested once or twice under the deep shade, and took in a
+mouldy pavilion in white marble with broken windows, and a Temple
+of Love that dated back to the sixteenth century, and rowed on an
+ornamental water in a real gondola that leaked like sixty, and
+landed on a rushy island where there was a sun-dial and a stone
+seat that the Druids or somebody had considerately placed there in
+the year one, and talked of course, and grew confidential, until
+finally I was calling her Verna (which was her pet name) and
+telling her how the other fellow had married my best girl, while
+she spoke most beautifully and sensibly about love, and the way
+the old families were dying out because they had set greater store
+on their lands than on their hearts, and altogether with what she
+said and what I said, and what was understood, we passed from
+acquaintance to friendship, and from friendship to the verge of
+something even nearer. Even the Uncle Tom hound fell under the
+spell of our new-found intimacy and condescended to lick my hand
+of his own volition, which Verna said he had never done before
+except to the butcher, and winked a bloodshot eye when I remarked
+he was too big for the island and ought to go back with me to a
+country nearer his size.
+
+By the time we had reached the cliffs and began to perceive the
+high grey walls of the castle in the distance, Verna and I were
+faster friends than ever, and anyone seeing us together would have
+thought we had known each other all our lives. I felt more and
+more happy to think I had met her first in this unconventional
+way, for as the castle loomed up closer and we passed gardeners
+and keepers and jockeys with a string of race-horses out for
+exercise, I felt that my pretty companion was constrained by the
+sight of these obsequious faces and changing by gradations into
+what she really was, the daughter of the castle and by right of
+blood one of the great ladies of the countryside.
+
+The castle itself was a tremendous old pile, built on a rocky
+peninsula and surrounded on three sides by the waters of Appledore
+Harbour. It lay so as to face the entrance, which Verna told me
+was commanded--or rather had been in years past--by the guns of a
+half-moon battery that stood planted on a sort of third-story
+terrace. It was all towers and donjons and ramparts, and might, in
+its mediaeval perfection, have been taken bodily out of one of Sir
+Walter Scott's novels. Verna and I had lunch together in a
+perfectly gorgeous old hall, with beams and carved panelling and
+antlers, and a fireplace you could have roasted an ox in, and rows
+of glistening suits of armour which the original ffrenches had
+worn when they had first started the family in life--and all this,
+if you please, tete-a-tete with a woman who seemed to get more
+beautiful every minute I gazed at her, and who smiled back at me
+and called me Fyles, to the stupefaction of three noiseless six-
+footers in silk stockings. Disapproving six-footers, too, whose
+gimlet eyes seemed to pierce my back as they sized up my clothes,
+which, as I said before, had suffered not a little by my trip, and
+my collar, which I'll admit straight out wasn't up to a castle
+standard, and the undeniable stain of machine-oil on my cuffs
+which I had got that morning in putting the machine to rights. You
+ought to have seen the man that took my hat, which he did with the
+air of a person receiving pearls and diamonds on a golden platter,
+and smudged his lordly fingers with the grime of my Fourth of
+July. And that darling of a girl, who never noticed my
+discomfiture, but whose eyes sparkled at times with a hidden
+merriment--shall I ever forget her as she sat there and helped me
+to mutton-chops from simply priceless old Charles the First plate!
+
+We had black coffee together in a window-seat overlooking the
+harbour and the ships, and she asked me a lot of questions about
+the war with Spain and my service in the Dixie. She never moved a
+muscle when it came out I had been a quartermaster, though I could
+feel she was astounded at my being but a shade above a common
+seaman, and not, as she had taken it for granted, a commissioned
+officer. I was too proud to explain over-much, or to tell her I
+had gone in, as so many of my friends had done, from a strong
+sense of duty and patriotism at the time of my country's need, and
+consequently allowed her to get a very wrong idea, I suppose,
+about my state in life and position in the world. Indeed, I was
+just childish enough to get a trifle wounded, and let her add
+misconception to misconception out of a silly obstinacy.
+
+"But what do you do," she asked, "now that the war is over and
+you've taken away everything from the poor Spaniards and left the
+Navy?"
+
+"Work," I said.
+
+"What kind of work?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, in an office!" I said. (I didn't tell her I was the Third
+Vice President of the Amalgamated Copper Company, with a twenty-
+story building on lower Broadway. Wild horses couldn't have wrung
+it out of me then.)
+
+"You're too nice for an office," she said, looking at me so
+sweetly and sadly. "You ought to be a gentleman!"
+
+"Oh, dear!" I exclaimed, "I hope I am that, even if I do grub
+along in an office." I wish my partners could have heard me say
+that. Why, I have a private elevator of my own and a squash-court
+on the roof!
+
+"Of course, I don't mean that," she went on quickly, "but like us,
+I mean, with a castle and a place in society----"
+
+"I have a sort of little picayune place in New York," I
+interrupted. "I don't SLEEP in the office, you know. At night I go
+out and see my friends and sometimes they invite me to dinner."
+
+She looked at me more sadly than ever. I don't believe humour was
+Verna's strong suit anyway,--not American humour, at least,--for
+she not only believed what I said, but more too.
+
+"I must speak to Papa about you," she said.
+
+"What will he do?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, help you along, you know," she said; "ffrenches always stand
+together; it's a family trait, though it's dying out now for lack
+of ffrenches. You know our family motto?" she went on.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't," I said.
+
+"'Ffrenches first!'" she returned.
+
+I had to laugh.
+
+"We've lived up to it in America," I said.
+
+"Papa is quite a power in the City," she said.
+
+"I thought he was a gentleman," I replied.
+
+"Everybody dabbles in business nowadays," she returned, not
+perceiving the innuendo. "I am sure Papa ought to know all about
+it from the amount of money he has lost."
+
+"Perhaps his was a case of ffrenches last!" I said.
+
+"Still, he knows all the influential people," she continued, "and
+it would be so easy for him to get you a position over here."
+
+"That would be charming," I said.
+
+"And then I might see you occasionally," she said, with such a
+little ring of kindness in her voice that for a minute I felt a
+perfect brute for deceiving her. "You could run down here from
+Saturday to Monday, you know, and on Bank Holidays, and in the
+season you would have the entree to our London house and the
+chance of meeting nice people!"
+
+"How jolly!" I said.
+
+"I can't bear you to go back to America," she said. "Now that I've
+found you, I'm going to keep you."
+
+"I hate the thought of going back myself," I said, and so I did--
+at the thought of leaving that angel!
+
+"Then, you know," she went on, somewhat shyly and hesitatingly,
+"you have such good manners and such a good air, and you're so----
+"
+
+"Don't mind saying handsome," I remarked.
+
+"You really are very nice-looking," she said, with a seriousness
+that made me acutely uncomfortable, "and what with our friendship
+and our house open to you and the people you could invite down
+here, because I know Papa is going to go out of his mind about
+you--he and I are always crazy about the same people, you know--
+not to speak of the little f, there is no reason, Fyles, why in
+the end you shouldn't marry an awfully rich girl and set up for
+yourself!"
+
+"Thank you," I said, "but if it's all the same to you I don't
+think I'd care to."
+
+"I know awfully rich girls who are pretty too," she said, as
+though forestalling an objection.
+
+"I do too," I said, looking at her so earnestly that she coloured
+up to the eyes.
+
+"Oh, I am poor!" she said. "It's all we can do to keep the place
+up. Besides--besides----" And then she stopped and looked out of
+the window. I saw I had been a fool to be so personal, and I was
+soon punished for my presumption, for she rose to her feet and
+said in an altered voice that she would now show me the castle.
+
+As I said before, it was a tremendous old place. It was a two-
+hours' job to go through it even as we did, and then Verna said we
+had skipped a whole raft of things she would let me see some other
+time. There was a private theatre, a chapel with effigies of
+cross-legged Crusaders, an armoury with a thousand stand of flint-
+locks, a library, magnificent state apartments with wonderful
+tapestries, a suite of rooms where they had confined a mad ffrench
+in the fifteenth century, with the actual bloodstains on the floor
+where he had dashed out his poor silly brains against the wall; a
+magazine with a lot of empty powder-casks Cromwell had left there;
+a vaulted chamber for the men of the half-moon battery; a well
+which was said to have no bottom and which had remained unused for
+a hundred years, because a wicked uncle had thrown the rightful
+heir into it; and slimy, creepy-crawly dungeons with chains for
+your hands and feet; and cachettes where they spilled you through
+a hole in the floor, and let it go at that; and--but what wasn't
+there, indeed, in that extraordinary old feudal citadel, which had
+been in continuous human possession since the era of Hardicanute.
+There seemed to be only one thing missing in the whole castle, and
+that was a bath--though I dare say there was one in the private
+apartments not shown to me. It was a regular dive into the last
+five hundred years, and the fact that it wasn't a museum nor
+exploited by a sing-song cicerone, helped to make it for me a
+memorable and really thrilling experience. I conjured up my
+forebears and could see them playing as children, growing to
+manhood, passing into old age, and finally dying in the shadow of
+those same massive walls. Verna said I was quite pale when we
+emerged at last into the open air on the summit of the high square
+tower; and no wonder that I was, for in a kind of way I had been
+deeply impressed, and it seemed a solemn thing that I, like her,
+should be a child of this castle, with roots deep cast in far-off
+ages.
+
+"Wouldn't it be horrible," I said, "if I found out I wasn't a
+ffrench at all--but had really sprung from a low-down, capital F
+family in the next county or somewhere!"
+
+"Oh, but you are a real ffrench," said Verna.
+
+"How do you know?" I asked.
+
+"I can FEEL it," she said. "I never felt that kind of sensation
+before towards anybody except my father!"
+
+I hardly knew whether to be pleased or not. And besides, it didn't
+seem to me conclusive.
+
+Then she touched a button (for the castle was thoroughly wired and
+there was even a miniature telephone system) and servants brought
+us up afternoon tea, and a couple of chairs to sit on, and a
+folding table set out with flowers, and the best toast and the
+best tea and the best strawberry jam and the best chocolate cake
+and the best butter that I had as yet tasted in the whole island.
+The view itself was good enough to eat, for we were high above
+everything and saw the harbour and the country stretched out on
+all sides like a map.
+
+"This is where I come for my day-dreams," said Verna. "I usually
+have it all to myself, for people hate the stairs so much and the
+ladies twitter about the dust and the cobwebs and the shakiness of
+the last ladder, and the silly things get dizzy and have to be
+held."
+
+"You don't seem to be afraid," I said.
+
+"This has been my favourite spot all my life," she returned. "I
+can remember Papa holding me up when I wasn't five years old and
+telling me about the Lady Grizzle that threw herself off the
+parapet rather than marry somebody she had to and wouldn't!"
+
+"Tell me about your day-dreams, Verna," I said.
+
+"Just a girl's fancies," she returned, smiling. "I dare say men
+have them too. Fairy princes, you know, and what he'd say and what
+I'd say, and how much I'd love him, and how much he'd love me!"
+
+"I can understand the last part of it," I observed.
+
+"You are really very nice," she returned, "and when Papa has got
+you that place in the City, I am going to allow you to come up
+here and dream too. And you'll tell me about the Sleeping Beauty
+and I'll unbosom myself about the Beast, and we'll exchange heart-
+aches and be, oh, so happy together."
+
+"I am that now," I said.
+
+"You're awfully easily pleased, Fyles," she said. "Most of the men
+I know I have to rack my head to entertain; talk exploring, you
+know, to explorers, and horses to Derby winners, and what it feels
+like to be shot--to soldiers--but you entertain ME, and that is
+so much pleasanter."
+
+"I wish I dared ask you some questions," I said.
+
+"Oh, but you mustn't!" she broke out, with a quick intuition of
+what I meant.
+
+"Why mustn't?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, because--because----" she returned. "I wouldn't like to fib
+to you, and I wouldn't like to tell you the truth--and it would
+make me feel hot and uncomfortable----"
+
+"What would?" I asked.
+
+"You see, if I really cared for him, it would be different," she
+said. "But I don't--and that's all."
+
+"Lady Grizzle over again?" I ventured.
+
+"Not altogether," she said, "you see she was perfectly mad about
+somebody else--which really was hard lines for her, poor thing--
+while I----"
+
+"Oh, please go on!" I said, as she hesitated.
+
+"Fyles," she said, with the ghost of a sigh, "this isn't day-
+dreaming at all, and I'm going to give you another cup of tea and
+change the subject."
+
+"What would you prefer, then?" I asked. "No! No more chocolate
+cake, thank you."
+
+"Let's have a fairy story all of our own," she said.
+
+"Well, you begin," I said.
+
+"Once upon a time," she began, "there was a poor young man in New
+York--an American, though of course he couldn't help that--and he
+came over to England and discovered the home of his ancestors, and
+he liked them, and they liked him--ever so much, you know--and he
+found that the old place was destined to pass to strangers, and so
+he worked and worked in a dark old office, and stayed up at night
+working some more, and never accepted any invitations or took a
+holiday except at week-ends to the family castle--until finally he
+amassed an immense fortune. Then he got into a fairy chariot,
+together with a bag of gold and the family lawyer, and ordered the
+coachman to drive him to Lord George Willoughby's in Curzon
+Street. Then they sent out in hot haste for Sir George's son, an
+awfully fast young man in the Guards, and the family lawyer
+haggled and haggled, and Lord George hemmed and hawed, and the
+Guardsman's eyes sparkled with greed at the sight of the bag of
+gold, and finally for two hundred thousand pounds (Papa says he
+often thinks he could pull it off for a hundred and ten thousand)
+the entail is broken and everybody signs his name to the papers
+and the poor young man buys the succession of Fyles and comes down
+here, regardless of expense, in a splendid gilt special train, and
+is received with open arms by his kinsmen at the castle."
+
+"The open arms appeal to me," I said.
+
+"He was nearly hugged to death," said Verna, "for they were so
+pleased the old name was not to die out and be forgotten. And then
+the poor young man married a ravishing beauty and had troops of
+sunny-haired children, and the daughter of the castle (who by this
+time was an old maid and quite plain, though everybody said she
+had a heart like hidden treasure) devoted herself to the little
+darlings and taught them music-lessons and manners and how to
+spell their names with a little f, and as a great treat would
+sometimes bring them up here and tell them how she had first met
+the poor young man in the 'diamond mornings of long ago'!"
+
+"That's a good fairy story," I said, "but you are all out about
+the end!"
+
+"You said you liked it," she protested.
+
+"Yes, where they hugged the poor young man," I returned, "but
+after that, Verna, it went off the track altogether."
+
+"Perhaps you'll put it back again," she said.
+
+"I want to correct all that about the daughter of the castle," I
+said. "She never became an old maid at all, for, of course, the
+poor young man loved her to distraction and married her right off,
+and they lived happily together ever afterwards!"
+
+"I believe that is nicer," she said thoughtfully, as though
+considering the matter.
+
+"Truer, too," I said, "because really the poor young man adored
+her from the first minute of their meeting!"
+
+"I wonder how long it will take him to make his fortune," she
+said, which, under the circumstances, struck me as a cruel thing
+to say.
+
+"Possibly he has made it already," I said. "How do you know he
+hasn't?"
+
+"By his looks for one thing," she said, regarding the machine oil
+on my cuff out of the corner of her eye. "Besides, he hasn't any
+of the arrogance of a parvenu, and is much too----"
+
+"Too what?" I asked.
+
+"Well bred," she replied simply.
+
+"No doubt that's the ffrench in him," I said, which I think was
+rather a neat return.
+
+She didn't answer, but looked absently across to the harbour
+mouth.
+
+"I believe there is a steamer coming in," she said. "Yes, a
+steamer."
+
+"A yacht, I think," I said, for, sure enough, it was Babcock true
+to the minute, heading the Tallahassee straight in. I could have
+given him a hundred dollars on the spot I was so delighted, for he
+couldn't have timed it better, nor at a moment when it could have
+pleased me more. She ran in under easy steam, making a splendid
+appearance with her raking masts and razor bow, under which the
+water spurted on either side like dividing silver. Except a
+beautiful woman, I don't know that there's a sweeter sight than a
+powerful, sea-going steam yacht, with the sun glinting on her
+bright brass-work, and a uniformed crew jumping to the sound of
+the boatswain's whistle.
+
+"The poor young man's ship's come home," I said.
+
+"It must be Lady Gaunt's Sapphire," said Verna.
+
+"With the American colours astern?" I said.
+
+"Why, how strange," she said, "it really is American. And then I
+believe it's larger than the Sapphire!"
+
+"Fifteen hundred and four tons register," I said.
+
+"How do you know that?" she demanded, with a shade of surprise in
+her voice.
+
+"Because, my dear, it's mine!" I said.
+
+"Yours!" she cried out in astonishment.
+
+"If you doubt me," I said, "I shall tell you what she is going to
+do next. She is about to steam in here and lower a boat to take me
+aboard."
+
+"She's heading for Dartmouth," said Verna incredulously, and the
+words were hardly out of her pretty mouth when Babcock swung round
+and pointed the Tallahassee's nose straight at us.
+
+For a moment Verna was too overcome to speak.
+
+"Fyles," she said at last, "you told me you worked in an office!"
+
+"So I do," I said.
+
+"And own a vessel like that!" she exclaimed. "A yacht the size of
+a man-of-war!"
+
+"It was you that said I was a poor young man," I observed. "I was
+so pleased at being called young that I let the poor pass."
+
+"Fancy!" she exclaimed, looking at me with eyes like stars. And
+then, recovering herself, she added in another tone: "Now don't
+you think it was very forward to rendezvous at a private castle?"
+
+"Oh, I thought I could make myself solid before she arrived," I
+said.
+
+"Fyles," she said, "I am beginning to have a different opinion of
+you. You are not as straightforward as a ffrench ought to be--and,
+though I'm ashamed to say it of you--but you are positively
+conceited."
+
+"Unsay, take back, those angry words," I said; and even as I did
+so the anchor went splash and I could hear the telegraph jingle in
+the engine-room.
+
+"And so you're rich," said Verna, "awfully, immensely,
+disgustingly rich, and you've been masquerading all this afternoon
+as a charming pauper!"
+
+"I don't think I said charming," I remarked.
+
+"But I say it," said Verna, "because, really you know, you're
+awfully nice, and I like you, and I'm glad from the bottom of my
+heart that you are rich!"
+
+"Thank you," I said, "I'm glad, too."
+
+"Now we must go down and meet your boat," said Verna. "See, there
+it is, coming in--though I still think it was cheeky of you to
+tell them to land uninvited."
+
+"Oh, let them wait!" I said.
+
+"No, no, we must go and meet them," said Verna, "and I'm going to
+ask that glorious old fox with the yellow beard whether it's all
+true or not!"
+
+"You can't believe it yet?" I said.
+
+"You've only yourself to thank for it," she said. "I got used to
+you as one thing--and here you are, under my eyes, turning out
+another."
+
+I could not resist saying "Fancy!" though she did not seem to
+perceive any humour in my exclamation of it, and took it as a
+matter of course. Besides, she had risen now, and bade me follow
+her down the stairs.
+
+It was really fine to see the men salute me as we walked down to
+the boat, and the darkies' teeth shining at the sight of me (for
+I'm a believer in the coloured sailor) and old Neilsen grinning
+respectfully in the stern-sheets.
+
+"Neilsen," I said, "tell this young lady my name!"
+
+"Mr. ffrench, sir," he answered, considerably astonished at the
+question.
+
+"Little f or big F, Neilsen?"
+
+"Little f, sir," said Neilsen.
+
+"There, doubter!" I said to Verna.
+
+She had her hand on my arm and was smiling down at the men from
+the little stone pier on which we stood.
+
+"Fyles," she said, "you must land and dine with us to-night, not
+only because I want you to, but because you ought to meet my
+father."
+
+"About when?" I asked.
+
+"Seven-thirty," she answered; and then, in a lower voice, so that
+the men below might not hear: "Our fairy tale is coming true,
+isn't it, Fyles?"
+
+"Right to the end," I said.
+
+"There were two ends," she said. "Mine and yours."
+
+"Oh, mine," I said; "that is, if you'll live up to your part of
+it!"
+
+"What do you want me to do?" she asked.
+
+"Throw over the Beast and be my Princess," I said, trying to talk
+lightly, though my voice betrayed me.
+
+"Perhaps I will," she answered.
+
+"Perhaps!" I repeated. "That isn't any answer at all."
+
+"Yes, then!" she said quickly, and, disengaging her hand from my
+arm, ran back a few steps.
+
+"I hear Papa's wheels," she cried over her shoulder, "and, don't
+forget, Fyles, dinner at seven-thirty!"
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GOLDEN CASTAWAYS
+
+
+All I did was to pull him out by the seat of the trousers. The fat
+old thing had gone out in the dark to the end of the yacht's boat-
+boom, and was trying to worry in the dinghy with his toe, when
+plump he dropped into a six-knot ebb tide. Of course, if I hadn't
+happened along in a launch, he might have drowned, but, as for
+anything heroic on my part--why, the very notion is preposterous.
+The whole affair only lasted half a minute, and in five he was
+aboard his yacht and drinking hot Scotch in a plush dressing-gown.
+It was natural that his wife and daughter should be frightened,
+and natural, too, I suppose, that when they had finished crying
+over him they should cry over me. He had taken a chance with the
+East River, and it had been the turn of a hair whether he floated
+down the current a dead grocer full of brine, or stood in that
+cabin, a live one full of grog. Oh, no! I am not saying a word
+against THEM. But as for Grossensteck himself, he ought really to
+have known better, and it makes me flush even now to recall his
+monstrous perversion of the truth. He called me a hero to my face.
+He invented details to which my dry clothes gave the lie direct.
+He threw fits of gratitude. His family were theatrically commanded
+to regard me well, so that my countenance might be forever
+imprinted on their hearts; and they, poor devils, in a seventh
+heaven to have him back safe and sound in their midst, regarded
+and regarded, and imprinted and imprinted, till I felt like a
+perfect ass masquerading as a Hobson.
+
+It was all I could do to tear myself away. Grossensteck clung to
+me. Mrs. Grossensteck clung to me. Teresa--that was the daughter--
+Teresa, too, clung to me. I had to give my address. I had to take
+theirs. Medals were spoken of; gold watches with inscriptions; a
+common purse, on which I was requested to confer the favour of
+drawing for the term of my natural life. I departed in a blaze of
+glory, and though I could not but see the ridiculous side of the
+affair (I mean as far as I was concerned), I was moved by so
+affecting a family scene, and glad, indeed, to think that the old
+fellow had been spared to his wife and daughter. I had even a pang
+of envy, for I could not but contrast myself with Grossensteck,
+and wondered if there were two human beings in the world who would
+have cared a snap whether I lived or died. Of course, that was
+just a passing mood, for, as a matter of fact, I am a man with
+many friends, and I knew some would feel rather miserable were I
+to make a hole in saltwater. But, you see, I had just had a story
+refused by Schoonmaker's Magazine, a good story, too, and that
+always gives me a sinking feeling--to think that after all these
+years I am still on the borderland of failure, and can never be
+sure of acceptance, even by the second-class periodicals for which
+I write. However, in a day or two, I managed to unload "The Case
+against Phillpots" on somebody else, and off I started for the New
+Jersey coast with a hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket, and no
+end of plans for a long autumn holiday.
+
+I never gave another thought to Grossensteck until one morning, as
+I was sitting on the veranda of my boarding-house, the postman
+appeared and requested me to sign for a registered package. I
+opened it with some trepidation, for I had caught that fateful
+name written crosswise in the corner and began at once to
+apprehend the worst. I think I have as much assurance as any man,
+but it took all I had and more, too, when I unwrapped a gold medal
+the thickness and shape of an enormous checker, and deciphered the
+following inscription:
+
+    Presented to Hugo Dundonald Esquire for having
+    With signal heroism, gallantry and presence of mind
+    rescued On the night of June third, 1900
+    the life of Hermann Grossensteck from
+    The dark and treacherous waters of the East River.
+
+The thing was as thick as two silver dollars, laid the one on the
+other, and gold--solid, ringing, massy gold--all the way through;
+and it was associated with a blue satin ribbon, besides, which was
+to serve for sporting it on my manly bosom. I set it on the rail
+and laughed--laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks--while
+the other boarders crowded about me; handed it from hand to hand;
+grew excited to think that they had a hero in their midst; and put
+down my explanation to the proverbial modesty of the brave.
+Blended with my amusement were some qualms at the intrinsic value
+of the medal, for it could scarcely have cost less than three or
+four hundred dollars, and it worried me to think that Grossensteck
+must have drawn so lavishly on his savings. It had not occurred to
+me, either before or then, that he was rich; somehow, in the bare
+cabin of the schooner, I had received no such impression of his
+means. I had not even realised that the vessel was his own, taking
+it for granted that it had been hired, all standing, for a week or
+two with the put-by economies of a year. His home address ought to
+have set me right, but I had not taken the trouble to read it,
+slipping it into my pocket-book more to oblige him than with any
+idea of following up the acquaintance. It was one of the boarders
+that enlightened me.
+
+"Grossensteck!" he exclaimed; "why, that's the great cheap grocer
+of New York, the Park & Tilford of the lower orders! There are
+greenbacks in his rotten tea, you know, and places to leave your
+baby while you buy his sanded sugar, and if you save eighty tags
+of his syrup you get a silver spoon you wouldn't be found dead
+with! Oh, everybody knows Grossensteck!"
+
+"Well, I pulled the great cheap grocer out of the East River," I
+said. "There was certainly a greenback in that tea," and I took
+another look at my medal, and began to laugh all over again.
+
+"There's no reason why you should ever have another grocery bill,"
+said the boarder. "That is, if flavour cuts no figure with you,
+and you'd rather eat condemned army stores than not!"
+
+I sat down and wrote a letter of thanks. It was rather a nice
+letter, for I could not but feel pleased at the old fellow's
+gratitude, even if it were a trifle overdone, and, when all's
+said, it was undoubtedly a fault on the right side. I disclaimed
+the heroism, and bantered him good-naturedly about the medal,
+which, of course, I said I would value tremendously and wear on
+appropriate occasions. I wondered at the time what occasion could
+be appropriate to decorate one's self with a gold saucer covered
+with lies--but, naturally, I didn't go into that to HIM. When you
+accept a solid chunk of gold you might as well be handsome about
+it, and I piled it on about his being long spared to his family
+and to a world that wouldn't know how to get along without him.
+Yes, it was a stunning letter, and I've often had the pleasure of
+reading it since in a splendid frame below my photograph.
+
+I had been a month or more in New York, and December was already
+well advanced before I looked up my Grossenstecks, which I did one
+late afternoon as I happened to be passing in their direction. It
+was a house of forbidding splendour, on the Fifth Avenue side of
+Central Park, and, as I trod its marble halls, I could not but
+repeat to myself: "Behold, the grocer's dream!" But I could make
+no criticism of my reception by Mrs. Grossensteck and Teresa, whom
+I found at home and delighted to see me. Mrs. Grossensteck was a
+stout, jolly, motherly woman, common, of course,--but, if you can
+understand what I mean,--common in a nice way, and honest and
+unpretentious and likable. Teresa, whom I had scarcely noticed on
+the night of the accident, was a charmingly pretty girl of
+eighteen, very chic and gay, with pleasant manners and a
+contagious laugh. She had arrived at obviously the turn of the
+Grossensteck fortunes, and might, in refinement and everything
+else, have belonged to another clay. How often one sees that in
+America, the land above others of social contrast, where, in the
+same family, there are often three separate degrees of caste.
+
+Well, to get along with my visit. I liked them and they liked me,
+and I returned later the same evening to dine and meet papa. I
+found him as impassionedly grateful as before, and with a tale
+that trespassed even further on the incredible, and after dinner
+we all sat around a log fire and talked ourselves into a sort of
+intimacy. They were wonderfully good people, and though we hadn't
+a word in common, nor an idea, we somehow managed to hit it off,
+as one often can with those who are unaffectedly frank and simple.
+I had to cry over the death of little Hermann in the steerage
+(when they had first come to America twenty years ago), and how
+Grossensteck had sneaked gingersnaps from the slop-baskets of the
+saloon.
+
+"The little teffil never knew where they come from," said
+Grossensteck, "and so what matters it?"
+
+"That's Papa's name in the slums," said Teresa. "Uncle
+Gingersnaps, because at all his stores they give away so many for
+nothing."
+
+"By Jove!" I said, "there are some nick-names that are patents of
+nobility."
+
+What impressed me as much as anything with these people was their
+loneliness. Parvenus are not always pushing and self-seeking, nor
+do they invariably throw down the ladder by which they have
+climbed. The Grossenstecks would have been so well content to keep
+their old friends, but poverty hides its head from the glare of
+wealth and takes fright at altered conditions.
+
+"They come--yes," said Mrs. Grossensteck, "but they are scared of
+the fine house, of the high-toned help, of everything being gold,
+you know, and fashionable. And when Papa sends their son to
+college, or gives the girl a little stocking against her marriage
+day, they slink away ashamed. Oh, Mr. Dundonald, but it's hard to
+thank and be thanked, especially when the favours are all of one
+side!"
+
+"The rich have efferyting," said Grossensteck, "but friends--
+Nein!"
+
+New ones had apparently never come to take the places of the old;
+and the old had melted away. Theirs was a life of solitary
+grandeur, varied with dinner parties to their managers and
+salesmen. Socially speaking, their house was a desert island, and
+they themselves three castaways on a golden rock, scanning the
+empty seas for a sail. To carry on a metaphor, I might say I was
+the sail and welcomed accordingly. I was everything that they were
+not; I was poor; I mixed with people whose names filled them with
+awe; my own was often given at first nights and things of that
+sort. In New York, the least snobbish of great cities, a man need
+have but a dress suit and car-fare--if he be the right kind of a
+man, of course--to go anywhere and hold up his head with the best.
+In a place so universally rich, there is even a certain piquancy
+in being a pauper. The Grossenstecks were overcome to think I
+shined my own shoes, and had to calculate my shirts, and the fact
+that I was no longer young (that's the modern formula for forty),
+and next-door to a failure in the art I had followed for so many
+years, served to whet their pity and their regard. My little
+trashy love-stories seemed to them the fruits of genius, and they
+were convinced, the poor simpletons, that the big magazines were
+banded in a conspiracy to block my way to fame.
+
+"My dear poy," said Grossensteck, "you know as much of peeziness
+as a child unporne, and I tell you it's the same efferywhere--in
+groceries, in hardware, in the alkali trade, in effery branch of
+industry, the pig operators stand shoulder to shoulder to
+spiflicate the little fellers like you. You must combine with the
+other producers; you must line up and break through the ring; you
+must scare them out of their poots, and, by Gott, I'll help you do
+it!"
+
+In their naive interest in my fortunes, the Grossenstecks rejoiced
+at an acceptance, and were correspondingly depressed at my
+failures. A fifteen-dollar poem would make them happy for a week;
+and when some of my editors were slow to pay-on the literary
+frontiers there is a great deal of this sort of procrastination--
+Uncle Gingersnaps was always hot to put the matter into the hands
+of his collectors, and commence legal proceedings in default.
+
+Little by little I drifted into a curious intimacy with the
+Grossenstecks. Their house by degrees became my refuge. I was
+given my own suite of rooms, my own latch-key; I came and went
+unremarked; and what I valued most of all was that my privacy was
+respected, and no one thought to intrude upon me when I closed my
+door. In time I managed to alter the whole house to my liking, and
+spent their money like water in the process. Gorgeousness gave way
+to taste; I won't be so fatuous as to say my taste; but mine was
+in conjunction with the best decorators in New York. One was no
+longer blinded by magnificence, but found rest and peace and
+beauty. Teresa and I bought the pictures. She was a wonderfully
+clever girl, full of latent appreciation and understanding which
+until then had lain dormant in her breast. I quickened those
+unsuspected fires, and, though I do not vaunt my own judgment as
+anything extraordinary, it represented at least the conventional
+standard and was founded on years of observation and training. We
+let the old masters go as something too smudgy and recondite for
+any but experts, learning our lesson over one Correggio which
+nearly carried us into the courts, and bought modern American
+instead, amongst them some fine examples of our best men. We had a
+glorious time doing it, too, and showered the studios with golden
+rain--in some where it was evidently enough needed.
+
+There was something childlike in the Grossenstecks' confidence in
+me; I mean the old people; for it was otherwise with Teresa, with
+whom I often quarrelled over my artistic reforms, and who took any
+conflict in taste to heart. There were whole days when she would
+not speak to me at all, while I, on my side, was equally
+obstinate, and all this, if you please, about some miserable
+tapestry or a Louise Seize chair or the right light for a picture
+of Will Low's. But she was such a sweet girl and so pretty that
+one could not be angry with her long, and what with our fights and
+our makings up I dare say we made it more interesting to each
+other than if we had always agreed. It was only once that our
+friendship was put in real jeopardy, and that was when her parents
+decided they could not die happy unless we made a match of it.
+This was embarrassing for both of us, and for a while she treated
+me very coldly. But we had it out together one evening in the
+library and decided to let the matter make no difference to us,
+going on as before the best of friends. I was the last person to
+expect a girl of eighteen to care for a man of forty, particularly
+one like myself, ugly and grey-haired, who had long before outworn
+the love of women. In fact I had to laugh, one of those sad laughs
+that come to us with the years, at the thought of anything so
+absurd; and I soon got her to give up her tragic pose and see the
+humour of it all as I did. So we treated it as a joke, rallied the
+old folks on their sentimental folly, and let it pass.
+
+It set me thinking, however, a great deal about the girl and her
+future, and I managed to make interest with several of my friends
+and get her invited to some good houses. Of course it was
+impossible to carry the old people into this galere. They were
+frankly impossible, but fortunately so meek and humble that it
+never occurred to them to assert themselves or resent their
+daughter going to places where they would have been refused. Uncle
+Gingersnaps would have paid money to stay at home, and Mrs.
+Grossensteck had too much homely pride to put herself in a false
+position. They saw indeed only another reason to be grateful to
+me, and another example of my surpassing kindness. Pretty, by no
+means a fool, and gowned by the best coutourieres of Paris, Teresa
+made quite a hit, and blossomed as girls do in the social
+sunshine. The following year, in the whirl of a gay New York
+winter, one would scarcely have recognised her as the same person.
+She had "made good," as boys say, and had used my stepping-stones
+to carry her far beyond my ken. In her widening interests, broader
+range, and increased worldly knowledge we became naturally better
+friends than ever and met on the common ground of those who led
+similar lives. What man would not value the intimacy of a young,
+beautiful, and clever woman? in some ways it is better than love
+itself, for love is a duel, with wounds given and taken, and its
+pleasures dearly paid for. Between Teresa and myself there was no
+such disturbing bond, and we were at liberty to be altogether
+frank in our intercourse.
+
+One evening when I happened to be dining at the house, the absence
+of her father and the indisposition of her mother left us tete-a-
+tete in the smoking-room, whither she came to keep me company with
+my cigar. I saw that she was restless and with something on her
+mind to tell me, but I was too old a stager to force a confidence,
+least of all a woman's, and so I waited, said nothing, and blew
+smoke rings.
+
+"Hugo," she said, "there is something I wish to speak to you
+about."
+
+"I've known that for the last hour, Teresa," I said.
+
+"This is something serious," she said, looking at me strangely.
+
+"Blaze away," I said.
+
+"Hugo," she broke out, "you have been borrowing money from my
+father."
+
+I nodded.
+
+"A great deal of money," she went on.
+
+"For him--no," I said. "For me--well, yes."
+
+"Eight or nine hundred dollars," she said.
+
+"Those are about the figures," I returned. "Call it nine hundred."
+
+"Oh, how could you! How could you!" she exclaimed.
+
+I remained silent. In fact I did not know what to say.
+
+"Don't you see the position you're putting yourself in?" she said.
+
+"Position?" I repeated. "What position?"
+
+"It's horrible, it's ignoble," she broke out. "I have always
+admired you for the way you kept yourself clear of such an
+ambiguous relation--you've known to the fraction of an inch what
+to take, what to refuse--to preserve your self-respect--my
+respect--unimpaired. And here I see you slipping into degradation.
+Oh, Hugo! I can't bear it."
+
+"Is it such a crime to borrow a little money?" I asked.
+
+"Not if you pay it back," she returned. "Not if you mean to pay it
+back. But you know you can't. You know you won't!"
+
+"You think it's the thin edge of the wedge?" I said. "The
+beginning of the end and all that kind of thing?"
+
+"You will go on," she cried. "You will become a dependent in this
+house, a hanger-on, a sponger. I will hate you. You will hate
+yourself. It went through me like a knife when I found it out."
+
+I smoked my cigar in silence. I suppose she was quite right--
+horribly right, though I didn't like her any better for being so
+plain-spoken about it. I felt myself turning red under her gaze.
+
+"What do you want me to do?" I said at length.
+
+"Pay it back," she said.
+
+"I wish to God I could," I said. "But you know how I live, Teresa,
+hanging on by the skin of my teeth--hardly able to keep my head
+above water, let alone having a dollar to spare."
+
+"Then you can't pay," she said.
+
+"I don't think I can," I returned.
+
+"Then you ought to leave this house," she said.
+
+"You have certainly made it impossible for me to stay, Teresa," I
+said.
+
+"I want to make it impossible," she cried. "You--you don't
+understand--you think I'm cruel--it's because I like you, Hugo--
+it's because you're the one man I admire above anybody in the
+world. I'd rather see you starving than dishonoured."
+
+"Thank you for your kind interest," I said ironically. "Under the
+circumstances I am almost tempted to wish you admired me less."
+
+"Am I not right?" she demanded.
+
+"Perfectly right," I returned. "Oh, yes! Perfectly right."
+
+"And you'll go," she said.
+
+"Yes, I'll go," I said.
+
+"And earn the money and pay father?" she went on.
+
+"And earn the money and pay father," I repeated.
+
+"And then come back?" she added.
+
+"Never, never, never!" I cried out.
+
+I could see her pale under the lights.
+
+"Oh, Hugo! don't be so ungenerous," she said. "Don't be so--so----"
+She hesitated, apparently unable to continue.
+
+"Ungenerous or not," I said, "damn the words, Teresa, this isn't a
+time to weigh words. It isn't in flesh and blood to come back. I
+can't come back. Put yourself in my place."
+
+"Some day you'll thank me," she said.
+
+"Very possibly," I returned. "Nobody knows what may not happen.
+It's conceivable, of course, I might go down on my bended knees,
+but really, from the way I feel at this moment, I do not think
+it's likely."
+
+"You want to punish me for liking you," she said.
+
+"Teresa," I said, "I have told you already that you are right. You
+insist on saving me from a humiliating position. I respect your
+courage and your straightforwardness. You remind me of an ancient
+Spartan having it out with a silly ass of a stranger who took
+advantage of her parents' good-nature. I am as little vain, I
+think, as any man, and as free from pettiness and idiotic pride--
+but you mustn't ask the impossible. You mustn't expect the whipped
+dog to come back. When I go it will be for ever."
+
+"Then go," she said, and looked me straight in the eyes.
+
+"I have only one thing to ask," I said. "Smooth it over to your
+father and mother. I am very fond of your father and mother,
+Teresa; I don't want them to think I've acted badly, or that I
+have ceased to care for them. Tell them the necessary lies, you
+know."
+
+"I will tell them," she said.
+
+"Then good-bye," I said, rising. "I suppose I am acting like a
+baby to feel so sore. But I am hurt."
+
+"Good-bye, Hugo," she said.
+
+I went to the door and down the stairs. She followed and stood
+looking after me the length of the hall as I slowly put on my hat
+and coat. That was the last I saw of her, in the shadow of a palm,
+her girlish figure outlined against the black behind. I walked
+into the street with a heart like lead, and for the first time in
+my life I began to feel I was growing old.
+
+I have been from my youth up an easy-going man, a drifter, a
+dawdler, always willing to put off work for play. But for once I
+pulled myself together, looked things in the face, and put my back
+to the wheel. I was determined to repay that nine hundred dollars,
+if I had to cut every dinner-party for the rest of the season. I
+was determined to repay it, if I had to work as I had never worked
+before. My first move was to change my address. I didn't want
+Uncle Gingersnaps ferreting me out, and Mrs. Grossensteck weeping
+on my shoulder. My next was to cancel my whole engagement book. My
+third, to turn over my wares and to rack my head for new ideas.
+
+I had had a long-standing order from Granger's Weekly for a
+novelette. I had always hated novelettes, as one had to wait so
+long for one's money and then get so little; but in the humour I
+then found myself I plunged into the fray, if not with enthusiasm,
+at least with a dogged perseverance that was almost as good.
+Granger's Weekly liked triviality and dialogue, a lot of fuss
+about nothing and a happy ending. I gave it to them in a heaping
+measure. Dixie's Monthly, from which I had a short-story order,
+set dialect above rubies. I didn't know any dialect, but I
+borrowed a year's file and learned it like a lesson. They wrote
+and asked me for another on the strength of "The Courting of
+Amandar Jane." The Permeator was keen on Kipling and water, and I
+gave it to them--especially the water. Like all Southern families
+the Dundonalds had once had their day. I had travelled everywhere
+when I was a boy, and so I accordingly refreshed my dim memories
+with some modern travellers and wrote a short series for The
+Little Gentleman; "The Boy in the Carpathians," "The Boy in Old
+Louisiana," "A Boy in the Tyrol," "A Boy in London," "A Boy in
+Paris," "A Boy at the Louvre," "A Boy in Corsica," "A Boy in the
+Reconstruction." I reeled off about twenty of them and sold them
+to advantage.
+
+It was a terribly dreary task, and I had moments of revolt when I
+stamped up and down my little flat and felt like throwing my
+resolution to the winds. But I stuck tight to the ink-bottle and
+fought the thing through. My novelette, strange to say, was good.
+Written against time and against inclination, it has always been
+regarded since as the best thing I ever did, and when published in
+book form outran three editions.
+
+I made a thundering lot of money--for me, I mean, and in
+comparison to my usual income--seldom under five hundred dollars a
+month and often more. In eleven weeks I had repaid Grossensteck
+and had a credit in the bank. Nine hundred dollars has always
+remained to me as a unit of value, a sum of agonising significance
+not lightly to be spoken of, the fruits of hellish industry and
+self-denial. All this while I had had never a word from the
+Grossenstecks. At least they wrote to me often--telephoned--
+telegraphed--and my box at the club was choked with their letters.
+But I did not open a single one of them, though I found a pleasure
+in turning them over and over, and wondering as to what was within
+them. There were several in Teresa's fine hand, and these
+interested me most of all and tantalised me unspeakably. There was
+one of hers, cunningly addressed to me in a stranger's writing
+that I opened inadvertently; but I at once perceived the trick and
+had the strength of mind to throw it in the fire unread.
+
+Perhaps you will wonder at my childishness. Sometimes I wondered
+at it myself. But the wound still smarted, and something stronger
+than I seemed to withhold me from again breaking the ice. Besides,
+those long lonely days, and those nights, almost as long in the
+retrospect, when I lay sleepless on my bed, had shown me I had
+been drifting into another peril no less dangerous than
+dependence. I had been thinking too much of the girl for my own
+good, and our separation had brought me to a sudden realisation of
+how deeply I was beginning to care for her. I hated her, too, the
+pitiless wretch, so there was a double reason for me not to go
+back.
+
+One night as I had dressed to dine out and stepped into the
+street, looking up at the snow that hid the stars and silenced
+one's footsteps on the pavement, a woman emerged from the gloom,
+and before I knew what she was doing, had caught my arm. I shook
+her off, thinking her a beggar or something worse, and would have
+passed on my way had she not again struggled to detain me. I
+stopped, and was on the point of roughly ordering her to let me
+go, when I looked down into her veiled face and saw that it was
+Teresa Grossensteck.
+
+"Hugo!" she said. "Hugo!"
+
+I could only repeat her name and regard her helplessly.
+
+"Hugo," she said, "I am cold. Take me upstairs. I am chilled
+through and through."
+
+"Oh, but Teresa," I expostulated, "it wouldn't be right. You know
+it wouldn't be right. You might be seen."
+
+She laid her hand, her ungloved, icy hand, against my cheek.
+
+"I have been here an hour," she said. "Take me to your rooms. I am
+freezing."
+
+I led her up the stairs and to my little apartment. I seated her
+before the fire, turned up the lights, and stood and looked at
+her.
+
+"What have you come here for?" I said. "I've paid your father--
+paid him a month ago."
+
+She made no answer, but spread her hands before the fire and
+shivered in the glow. She kept her eyes fixed on the coals in
+front of her and put out the tips of her little slippered feet.
+Then I perceived that she was in a ball gown and that her arms
+were bare under her opera cloak.
+
+At last she broke the silence.
+
+"How cheerless your room is," she said, looking about. "Oh, how
+cheerless!"
+
+"Did you come here to tell me that?" I said.
+
+"No," she said. "I don't know why I came. Because I was a fool, I
+suppose--a fool to think you'd want to see me. Take me home,
+Hugo." She rose as she said this and looked towards the door. I
+pressed her to take a little whiskey, for she was still as cold as
+death and as white as the snow queen in Hans Andersen's tale, but
+she refused to let me give her any.
+
+"Take me home, please," she repeated.
+
+Her carriage was waiting a block away. Hendricks, the footman,
+received my order with impassivity and shut us in together with
+the unconcern of a good servant. It was dark in the carriage, and
+neither of us spoke as we whirled through the snowy streets. Once
+the lights of a passing hansom illumined my companion's face and I
+saw that she was crying. It pleased me to see her suffer; she had
+cost me eleven weeks of misery; why should she escape scot-free!
+
+"Hugo," she said, "are you coming back to us, Hugo?"
+
+"I don't know," I said.
+
+"Why don't you know?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, because!" I said.
+
+"That's no answer," she said.
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"I was beginning to care too much about you," I said. "I think I
+was beginning to fall in love with you. I've got out of one false
+position. Why should I blunder into another?"
+
+"Would it be a false position to love me?" she said.
+
+"Of course that would a good deal depend on you," I said.
+
+"Suppose I wanted you to," she said.
+
+"Oh, but you couldn't!" I said.
+
+"Why couldn't I?" she said.
+
+"But forty," I objected; "nobody loves anybody who's forty, you
+know."
+
+"I do," she said, "though, come to think of it, you were thirty-
+nine--when--when it first happened, Hugo."
+
+I put out my arms in the dark and caught her to me. I could not
+believe my own good fortune as I felt her trembling and crying
+against my breast. I was humbled and ashamed. It was like a dream.
+An old fellow like me--forty, you know.
+
+"It was a mighty near thing, Teresa," I said.
+
+"I guess it was--for me!" she said.
+
+"I meant myself, sweetheart," I said.
+
+"For both of us then," she said, in a voice between laughter and
+tears, and impulsively put her arms round my neck.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE AWAKENING OF GEORGE RAYMOND
+
+I
+
+
+George Raymond's father had been a rich man, rich in those days
+before the word millionaire had been invented, and when a modest
+hundred thousand, lent out at an interest varying from ten to
+fifteen per cent, brought in an income that placed its possessor
+on the lower steps of affluence. He was the banker of a small New
+Jersey town, a man of portentous respectability, who proffered two
+fingers to his poorer clients and spoke about the weather as
+though it belonged to him. When the school-children read of
+Croesus in their mythology, it was Jacob Raymond they saw in their
+mind's eye; such expressions as "rich beyond the dreams of
+avarice" suggested him as inevitably as pumpkin did pie; they
+wondered doubtfully about him in church when that unfortunate
+matter of the camel was brought up with its attendant difficulties
+for the wealthy. Even Captain Kidd's treasure, in those times so
+actively sought for along the whole stretch of the New England
+coast, conjured up a small brick building with "Jacob Raymond,
+Banker" in gilt letters above the lintel of the door.
+
+But there came a day when that door stayed locked and a hundred
+white faces gathered about it, blocking the village street and
+talking in whispers though the noonday sun was shining. Raymond's
+bank was insolvent, and the banker himself, a fugitive in tarry
+sea clothes, was hauling ropes on a vessel outward bound for
+Callao. He might have stayed in Middleborough and braved it out,
+for he had robbed no man and his personal honour was untarnished,
+having succumbed without dishonesty to primitive methods and lack
+of capital. But he chose instead the meaner course of flight. Of
+all the reproachful faces he left behind him his wife's was the
+one he felt himself the least able to confront; and thus,
+abandoning everything, with hardly a dozen dollars in his pocket,
+he slipped away to sea, never to be seen or heard of again.
+
+Mrs. Raymond was a woman of forty-five, a New Englander to her
+finger-tips, proud, arrogant, and fiercely honest; a woman who
+never forgot, never forgave, and who practised her narrow
+Christianity with the unrelentingness of an Indian. She lived up
+to an austere standard herself, and woe betide those who fell one
+whit behind her. She was one of those just persons who would have
+cast the first stone at the dictates of conscience and with a sort
+of holy joy in her own fitness to do so. For years she had been
+the richest woman in Middleborough, the head of everything
+charitable and religious, the mainstay of ministers, the court of
+final appeal in the case of sinners and backsliders. Now, in a
+moment, through no fault of her own, the whole fabric of her life
+had crumbled. Again had the mighty fallen.
+
+She had not a spark of pity for her husband. To owe what you could
+not pay was to her the height of dishonour. It was theft, and she
+had no compunction in giving it the name, however it might be
+disguised or palliated. She could see no mitigating circumstances
+in Raymond's disgrace, and the fact that she was innocently
+involved in his downfall filled her with exasperation. The big old
+corner house was her own. She had been born in it. It had been her
+marriage portion from her father. She put it straightway under the
+hammer; her canal stock with it; her furniture and linen; a row of
+five little cottages on the outskirts of the town where five poor
+families had found not only that their bodies, but the welfare of
+their souls, had been confided to her grim keeping. She stripped
+herself of everything, and when all had been made over to the
+creditors there still remained a deficit of seventeen hundred
+dollars. This debt which was not a debt, for she was under no
+legal compulsion to pay a penny of it, would willingly have been
+condoned by men already grateful for her generosity; but she would
+hear of no such compromise, not even that her notes be free of
+interest, and she gave them at five per cent, resolute that in
+time she would redeem them to the uttermost farthing.
+
+Under these sudden changes of fortune it is seldom that the
+sufferer remains amid the ruins of past prosperity. The human
+instinct is to fly and hide. The wound heals more readily amongst
+strangers. The material evils of life are never so intolerable as
+the public loss of caste. It may be said that it is people, not
+things, which cause most of the world's unhappiness. Mrs. Raymond
+came to New York, where she had not a friend except the son she
+brought with her, there to set herself with an undaunted heart to
+earn the seventeen hundred dollars she had voluntarily taken on
+her shoulders to repay.
+
+George Raymond, her son, was then a boy of fifteen. High-strung,
+high-spirited, with all the seriousness of a youngster who had
+prematurely learned to think for himself, he had arrived at the
+age when ineffaceable impressions are made and the tendencies of a
+lifetime decided. Passionately attached to his father, he had lost
+him in a way that would have made death seem preferable. He saw
+his mother, so shortly before the great lady of a little town,
+working out like a servant in other people's houses. The tragedy
+of it all ate into his soul and overcame him with a sense of
+hopelessness and despair. It would not have been so hard could he
+have helped, even in a small way, towards the recovery of their
+fortunes; but his mother, faithful even in direst poverty to her
+New England blood, sent him to school, determined that at any
+sacrifice he should finish his education. But by degrees Mrs.
+Raymond drifted into another class of work. She became a nurse,
+and, in a situation where her conscientiousness was invaluable,
+slowly established a connection that in time kept her constantly
+busy. She won the regard of an important physician, and not only
+won it but kept it, and thus little by little found her way into
+good houses, where she was highly paid and treated with
+consideration.
+
+Had it not been for the seventeen hundred dollars and the five per
+cent interest upon it, she could have earned enough to keep
+herself and her son very comfortable in the three rooms they
+occupied on Seventh Street. But this debt, ever present in the
+minds of both mother and son, hung over them like a cloud and took
+every penny there was to spare. Those two years from fifteen to
+seventeen were the most terrible in Raymond's life. At an age when
+he possessed neither philosophy nor knowledge and yet the fullest
+capacity to suffer, he had to bear, with what courage he could
+muster, the crudest buffets of an adverse fate.
+
+Raymond drudged at his books, passed from class to class and
+returned at night to the empty rooms he called home, where he
+cooked his own meals and sat solitary beside the candle until it
+was the hour for bed. His mother was seldom there to greet him. As
+a nurse she was kept prisoner, for weeks at a time, in the houses
+where she was engaged. It meant much to the boy to find a note
+from her lying on the table when he returned at night; more still
+to wait at street corners in his shabby overcoat for those
+appointments she often made with him. When she took infectious
+cases and dared neither write nor speak to him, they had an hour
+planned beforehand when she would smile at him from an open window
+and wave her hand.
+
+But she was not invariably busy. There were intervals between her
+engagements when she remained at home; when those rooms,
+ordinarily so lonely and still, took on a wonderful brightness
+with her presence; when Raymond, coming back from school late in
+the afternoon, ran along the streets singing, as he thought of his
+mother awaiting him. This stern woman, the harsh daughter of a
+harsh race, had but a single streak of tenderness in her withered
+heart. To her son she gave transcendent love, and the whole of her
+starved nature went out to him in immeasurable devotion. Their
+poverty, the absence of all friends, the burden of debt, the
+unacknowledged disgrace, and (harder still to bear) the long and
+enforced separations from each other, all served to draw the pair
+into the closest intimacy. Raymond grew towards manhood without
+ever having met a girl of his own age; without ever having had a
+chum; without knowing the least thing of youth save much of its
+green-sickness and longing.
+
+When the great debt had been paid off and the last of the notes
+cancelled there came no corresponding alleviation of their
+straitened circumstances. Raymond had graduated from the High
+School and was taking the medical course at Columbia University.
+Every penny was put by for the unavoidable expenses of his
+tuition. The mother, shrewd, ambitious, and far-seeing, was
+staking everything against the future, and was wise enough to
+sacrifice the present in order to launch her son into a
+profession. In those days fresh air had not been discovered.
+Athletics, then in their infancy, were regarded much as we now do
+prize-fighting. The ideal student was a pale individual who wore
+out the night with cold towels around his head, and who had a
+bigger appetite for books than for meat. Docile, unquestioning,
+knowing no law but his mother's wish; eager to earn her
+commendation and to repay with usury the immense sacrifices she
+had made for him, Raymond worked himself to a shadow with study,
+and at nineteen was a tall, thin, narrow-shouldered young man with
+sunken cheeks and a preternatural whiteness of complexion.
+
+He was far from being a bad-looking fellow, however. He had
+beautiful blue eyes, more like a girl's than a man's, and there
+was something earnest and winning in his face that often got him a
+shy glance on the street from passing women. His acquaintance in
+this direction went no further. Many times when a college
+acquaintance would have included him in some little party, his
+mother had peremptorily refused to let him go. Her face would
+darken with jealousy and anger, nor was she backward with a string
+of reasons for her refusal. It would unsettle him; he had no money
+to waste on girls; he would be shamed by his shabby clothes and
+ungloved hands; they would laugh at him behind his back; was he
+tired, then, of his old mother who had worked so hard to bring him
+up decently? And so on and so on, until, without knowing exactly
+why, Raymond would feel himself terribly in the wrong, and was
+glad enough at last to be forgiven on the understanding that he
+would never propose such a reprehensible thing again.
+
+In any other young man, brought up in the ordinary way, with the
+ordinary advantages, such submission would have seemed mean-
+spirited; but the bond between these two was riveted with memories
+of penury and privation; any appeal to those black days brought
+Raymond on his knees; it was intolerable to him that he should
+ever cause a pang in his dear mother's breast. Thus, at the age
+when the heart is hungriest for companionship; when for the first
+time a young man seems to discover the existence of a hitherto
+unknown and unimportant sex; when an inner voice urges him to take
+his place in the ranks and keep step with the mighty army of his
+generation, Raymond was doomed to walk alone, a wistful outcast,
+regarding his enviable companions from afar.
+
+He was in his second year at college when his studies were broken
+off by his mother's illness. He was suddenly called home to find
+her delirious in bed, struck down in the full tide of strength by
+the disease she had taken from a patient. It was scarlet fever,
+and when it had run its course the doctor took him to one side and
+told him that his mother's nursing days were over. During her
+tedious convalescence, as Raymond would sit beside her bed and
+read aloud to her, their eyes were constantly meeting in unspoken
+apprehension. They saw the ground, so solid a month before, now
+crumbling beneath their feet; their struggles, their makeshifts,
+their starved and meagre life had all been in vain. Their little
+savings were gone; the breadwinner, tempting fate once too often,
+had received what was to her worse than a mortal wound, for the
+means of livelihood had been taken from her.
+
+"Could I have but died," she repeated to herself. "Oh, could I
+have but died!"
+
+Raymond laid his head against the coverlet and sobbed. He needed
+no words to tell him what was in her mind; that her illness had
+used up the little money there was to spare; that she, so long the
+support of both, was now a helpless burden on his hands. Pity for
+her outweighed every other consideration. His own loss seemed but
+little in comparison to hers. It was the concluding tragedy of
+those five tragic years. The battle, through no fault of theirs,
+had gone against them. The dream of a professional career was
+over.
+
+His mother grew better. The doctor ceased his visits. She was able
+to get on her feet again. She took over their pinched
+housekeeping. But her step was heavy; the gaunt, grim straight-
+backed woman, with her thin grey hair and set mouth, was no more
+than a spectre of her former self. The doctor was right. There was
+nothing before her but lifelong invalidism.
+
+Raymond found work; a place in the auditing department of a
+railroad, with a salary to begin with of sixty dollars a month; in
+ten years he might hope to get a hundred. But he was one of those
+whose back bent easily to misfortune. Heaven knew, he had been
+schooled long enough to take its blows with fortitude. His mother
+and he could manage comfortably on sixty dollars a month; and when
+he laid his first earnings in her hand he even smiled with
+satisfaction. She took the money in silence, her heart too full to
+ask him whence it came. She had hoped against hope until that
+moment; and the bills, as she looked at them, seemed to sting her
+shrivelled hand.
+
+One day, as she was cleaning her son's room, she opened a box that
+stood in the corner, and was surprised to find it contain a
+package done up in wrapping paper. She opened it with curiosity
+and the tears sprang to her eyes as she saw the second-hand
+medical books George had used at college. Here they were, in neat
+wrappers, laid by for ever. Too precious to throw away, too
+articulate of unfulfilled ambitions to stand exposed on shelves,
+they had been laid away in the grave of her son's hopes. She did
+them up again with trembling fingers, and that night when George
+returned to supper, he found his mother in the dark, crying.
+
+II
+
+In the years from nineteen to forty-two most men have fulfilled
+their destiny; those who have had within them the ability to rise
+have risen; the weak, the wastrels, the mediocrities have shaken
+down into their appointed places. Even the bummer has his own
+particular bit of wall in front of the saloon and his own
+particular chair within. Those who have something to do are busy
+doing it, whatever it may be. In the human comedy everyone in time
+finds his role and must play it to the end, happy indeed if he be
+cast in a part that at all suits him.
+
+George Raymond at forty-two was still in the auditor's department
+of the New York Central. Time had wrinkled his cheek, had turned
+his brown hair to a crisp grey, had bowed his shoulders to the
+desk he had used for twenty-two years. His eyes alone retained
+their boyish brightness, and a sort of appealing look as of one
+who his whole life long had been a dependent on other people. As
+an automaton, a mere cog in a vast machine, he had won the praise
+of his superiors by his complete self-effacement. He was never
+ill, never absent, never had trouble with his subordinates, never
+talked back, never made complaints, and, in the flattering
+language of the superintendent, "he knew what he knew!"
+
+In the office, as in every other aggregation of human beings,
+there were coteries, cliques, friendships and hatreds, jealousies,
+heart-burnings and vendettas. There was scarcely a man there
+without friends or foes. Raymond alone had neither. To the others
+he was a strange, silent, unknown creature whose very address was
+a matter of conjecture; a man who did not drink, did not smoke,
+did not talk; who ate four bananas for his lunch and invariably
+carried a book in the pocket of his shabby coat. It was said of
+him that once, during a terrible blizzard, he had been the only
+clerk to reach the office; that he had worked there stark alone
+until one o'clock, when at the stroke of the hour he had taken out
+his four bananas and his book! There were other stories about him
+of the same kind, not all of them true to fate, but essentially
+true of the man's nature and of his rigid adherence to routine. He
+had risen, place by place, to a position that gave him a hundred
+and fifty dollars a month, and one so responsible that his death
+or absence would have dislocated the office for half a day.
+
+"A first-class man and an authority on pro ratas!"
+
+Such might have been the inscription on George Raymond's tomb!
+
+His mother was still alive. She had never entirely regained her
+health or her strength, and it took all the little she had of
+either to do the necessary housekeeping for herself and her son.
+Thin to emaciation, sharp-tongued, a tyrant to her finger-tips,
+her indomitable spirit remained as uncowed as ever and she ruled
+her son with a rod of iron. To her, Georgie, as she always called
+him, was still a child. As far as she was concerned he had never
+grown up. She took his month's salary, told him when to buy new
+shirts, ordered his clothes herself, doled out warningly the few
+dollars for his necessaries, and saved, saved, continually saved.
+The old woman dreaded poverty with a horror not to be expressed in
+words. It had ruined her own life; it had crushed her son under
+its merciless wheels; in the words of the proverb, she was the
+coward who died a thousand deaths in the agonies of apprehension.
+She was one of those not uncommon misers, who hoard, not for love
+of money, but through fear. She had managed, with penurious thrift
+and a self-denial almost sublime in its austerity, to set aside
+eight thousand dollars. Eight thousand dollars from an income that
+began at sixty and rose to a little under three times that amount!
+Eight thousand dollars, wrung from their lives at the price of
+every joy, every alleviation, everything that could make the world
+barely tolerable.
+
+Every summer Raymond had a two-weeks' holiday, which he spent at
+Middleborough with some relatives of his father's. He had the
+pronounced love of the sea that is usual with those born and bred
+in seaport towns. His earliest memories went back to great deep-
+water ships, their jib-booms poking into the second-story windows
+of the city front, their decks hoarsely melodious with the yo-
+heave-yo of straining seamen. The smell of tar, the sight of
+enormous anchors impending above the narrow street, the lofty
+masts piercing the sky in a tangle of ropes and blocks, the exotic
+cargoes mountains high--all moved him like a poem. He knew no
+pleasure like that of sailing his cousin's sloop; he loved every
+plank of her dainty hull; it was to him a privilege to lay his
+hand to any task appertaining to her, however humble or hard. To
+calk, to paint, to polish brasswork; to pump out bilge; to set up
+the rigging; to sit cross-legged and patch sails; and, best of
+all, to put her lee rail under in a spanking breeze and race her
+seaward against the mimic fleet--Ah, how swiftly those bright
+days passed, how bitter was the parting and the return, all too
+soon, to the dingy offices of the railroad.
+
+It never occurred to him to think his own lot hard, or to contrast
+himself with other men of his age, who at forty-two were mostly
+substantial members of society, with interests, obligations,
+responsibilities, to which he himself was an utter stranger. Under
+the iron bondage of his mother he had remained a child. To
+displease her seemed the worst thing that could befall him; to win
+her commendation filled him with content. But there were times,
+guiltily remembered and put by with shame, when he longed for
+something more from life; when the sight of a beautiful woman on
+the street reminded him of his own loneliness and isolation; when
+he was overcome with a sudden surging sense that he was an
+outsider in the midst of these teeming thousands, unloved and old,
+without friends or hope or future to look forward to. He would
+reproach himself for such lawless repining, for such disloyalty to
+his mother. Was not her case worse than his? Did she not lecture
+him on the duty of cheerfulness, she the invalid, racked with
+pains, with nerves, who practised so pitifully what she preached?
+The tears would come to his eyes. No, he would not ask the
+impossible; he would go his way, brave and uncomplaining, and let
+the empty years roll over his head without a murmur against fate.
+
+But the years, apparently so void, were screening a strange and
+undreamed-of part for him to play. The Spaniards, a vague, almost
+legendary people, as remote from Raymond's life as the Assamese or
+the cliff-dwellers of New Mexico, began to take on a concrete
+character, and were suddenly discovered to be the enemies of the
+human race. Raymond grew accustomed to the sight of Cuban flags,
+at first so unfamiliar, and then, later, so touching in their
+significance. Newspaper pictures of Gomez and Garcia were tacked
+on the homely walls of barber-shops, in railroad shops, in grubby
+offices and cargo elevators, and with them savage caricatures of a
+person called Weyler, and referring bitterly to other persons (who
+seemed in a bad way) called the reconcentrados. Raymond wondered
+what it was all about; bought books to elucidate the matter; took
+fire with indignation and resentment. Then came the Maine affair;
+the suspense of seventy million people eager to avenge their dead;
+the decision of the court of inquiry; the emergency vote; the
+preparation for war. Raymond watched it all with a curious
+detachment. He never realised that it could have anything
+personally to do with him. The long days in the auditor's
+department went on undisturbed for all that the country was arming
+and the State governors were calling out their quotas of men. Two
+of his associates quitted their desks and changed their black
+coats for army blue. Raymond admired them; envied them; but it
+never occurred to him to ask why they should go and he should
+stay. It was natural for him to stay; it was inevitable; he was as
+much a part of the office as the office floor.
+
+One afternoon, going home on the Elevated, he overheard two men
+talking.
+
+"I don't know what we'll do," said one.
+
+"Oh, there are lots of men," said the other.
+
+"Men, yes--but no sailors," said the first.
+
+"That's right," said the other.
+
+"We are at our wits' end to man the new ships," said the first.
+
+"What did you total up to-day?" said the other.
+
+His companion shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Eighty applicants, and seven taken," he said.
+
+"And those foreigners?"
+
+"All but two!"
+
+"There's danger in that kind of thing!"
+
+"Yes, indeed, but what can you do?"
+
+The words rang in Raymond's head. That night he hardly slept. He
+was in the throes of making a tremendous resolution, he who, for
+forty years, had been tied to his mother's apron string. Making it
+of his own volition, unprompted, at the behest of no one save,
+perhaps, the man in the car, asserting at last his manhood in
+defiance of the subjection that had never come home to him until
+that moment. He rose in the morning, pale and determined. He felt
+a hypocrite through and through as his mother commented on his
+looks and grew anxious as he pushed away his untasted breakfast.
+It came over him afresh how good she was, how tender. He did not
+love her less because his great purpose had been taken. He knew
+how she would suffer, and the thought of it racked his heart; he
+was tempted to take her into his confidence, but dared not,
+distrusting his own powers of resistance were she to say no. So he
+kissed her instead, with greater warmth than usual, and left the
+house with misty eyes.
+
+He got an extension of the noon hour and hurried down to the naval
+recruiting office. It was doing a brisk business in turning away
+applicants, and from the bottom of the line Raymond was not kept
+waiting long before he attained the top; and from thence in his
+turn was led into an inner office. He was briefly examined as to
+his sea experience. Could he box the compass? He could. Could he
+make a long splice? He could. What was meant by the monkey-gaff of
+a full-rigged ship? He told them. What was his reason in wanting
+to join the Navy? Because he thought he'd like to do something for
+his country. Very good; turn him over to the doctor; next! Then
+the doctor weighed him, looked at his teeth, hit him in the chest,
+listened to his heart, thumped and questioned him, and then passed
+him on to a third person to be enrolled.
+
+When George Raymond emerged into the open air it was as a full A B
+in the service of the United States
+
+This announcement at the office made an extraordinary sensation.
+Men he hardly knew shook hands with him and clapped him on the
+back. He was taken upstairs to be impressively informed that his
+position would be held open for him. On every side he saw kindling
+faces, smiling glances of approbation, the quick passing of the
+news in whispers. He had suddenly risen from obscurity to become
+part of the War; the heir of a wonderful and possibly tragic
+future; a patriot; a hero! It was a bewildering experience and not
+without its charm. He was surprised to find himself still the same
+man.
+
+The scene at home was less enthusiastic. It was even mortifying,
+and Georgie, as his mother invariably called him, had to endure a
+storm of sarcasm and reproaches. The old woman's ardent patriotism
+stopped short at giving up her son. It was the duty of others to
+fight, Georgie's to stay at home with his mother. He let her talk
+herself out, saying little, but regarding her with a grave, kind
+obstinacy. Then she broke down, weeping and clinging to him.
+Somehow, though he could hardly explain it to himself, the
+relation between the two underwent a change. He left that house
+the unquestioned master of himself, the acknowledged head of that
+tiny household; he had won, and his victory instead of abating by
+a hair's-breadth his mother's love for him had drawn the pair
+closer to each other than ever before. Though she had no
+articulate conception of it Georgie had risen enormously in his
+mother's respect. The woman had given way to the man, and the
+eternal fitness of things had been vindicated.
+
+Her tenderness and devotion were redoubled. Never had there been
+such a son in the history of the world. She relaxed her economies
+in order to buy him little delicacies, such as sardines and
+pickles; and when soon after his enlistment his uniform came home
+she spread it on her bed and cried, and then sank on her knees,
+passionately kissing the coarse serge. In the limitation of her
+horizon she could see but a single figure. It was Georgie's
+country, Georgie's President, Georgie's fleet, Georgie's righteous
+quarrel in the cause of stifled freedom. To her, it was Georgie's
+war with Spain.
+
+He was drafted aboard the Dixie, where, within a week of his
+joining, he was promoted to be one of the four quartermasters. So
+much older than the majority of his comrades, quick, alert,
+obedient, and responsible, he was naturally amongst the first
+chosen for what are called leading seamen. Never was a man more in
+his element than George Raymond. He shook down into naval life
+like one born to it. The sea was in his blood, and his translation
+from the auditor's department to the deck of a fighting ship
+seemed to him like one of those happy dreams when one pinches
+himself to try and confirm the impossible. Metaphorically
+speaking, he was always pinching himself and contrasting the
+monotonous past with the glorious and animated present. The change
+told in his manner, in the tilt of his head, in his fearless eyes
+and straighter back. It comes natural to heroes to protrude their
+chests and walk upon air; and it is pardonable, indeed, in war
+time, when each feels himself responsible for a fraction of his
+country's honour.
+
+"Georgie, you are positively becoming handsome," said his mother.
+
+Amongst Raymond's comrades on the Dixie was a youngster of twenty-
+one, named Howard Quintan. Something attracted him in the boy, and
+he went out of his way to make things smooth for him aboard. The
+liking was no less cordially returned, and the two became fast
+friends. One day, when they were both given liberty together,
+Howard insisted on taking him to his own home.
+
+"The folks want to know you," he said. "They naturally think a
+heap of you because I do, and I've told them how good you've been
+and all that."
+
+"Oh, rubbish!" said Raymond, though he was inwardly pleased. At
+the time they were walking up Fifth Avenue, both in uniform, with
+their caps on one side, sailor fashion, and their wide trousers
+flapping about their ankles. People looked at them kindly as they
+passed, for the shadow of the war lay on everyone and all hearts
+went out to the men who were to uphold the flag. Raymond was
+flattered and yet somewhat overcome by the attention his companion
+and he excited.
+
+"Let's get out of this, Quint," he said. "I can't walk straight
+when people look at me like that. Don't you feel kind of givey-
+givey at the knees with all those pretty girls loving us in
+advance?"
+
+"Oh, that's what I like!" said Quintan. "I never got a glance when
+I used to sport a silk hat. Besides, here we are at the old
+stand!"
+
+Raymond regarded him with blank surprise as they turned aside and
+up the steps of one of the houses.
+
+"Land's sake!" he exclaimed; "you don't mean to say you live in a
+place like this? Here?" he added, with an intonation that caused
+Howard to burst out laughing.
+
+The young fellow pushed by the footman that admitted them and ran
+up the stairs three steps at a time. Raymond followed more slowly,
+dazed by the splendour he saw about him, and feeling horribly
+embarrassed and deserted. He halted on the stairs as he saw
+Quintan throw his arms about a tall, stately, magnificently
+dressed woman and kiss her boisterously; and he was in two minds
+whether or not to slink down again and disappear, when his
+companion called out to him to hurry up.
+
+"Mother, this is Mr. Raymond," he said. "He's the best friend I
+have on the Dixie, and you're to be awfully good to him!"
+
+Mrs. Quintan graciously gave him her hand and said something about
+his kindness to her boy. Raymond was too stricken to speak and was
+thankful for the semi-darkness that hid his face. Mrs. Quintan
+continued softly, in the same sweet and overpowering manner, to
+purr her gratitude and try to put him at his ease. Raymond would
+have been a happy man could he have sunk though the parquetry
+floor. He trembled as he was led into the drawing-room, where
+another gracious and overpowering creature rose to receive them.
+
+"My aunt, Miss Christine Latimer," said Howard.
+
+She was younger than Mrs. Quintan; a tall, fair woman of middle
+age, with a fine figure, hair streaked with grey, and the remains
+of what had once been extreme beauty. Her voice was the sweetest
+Raymond had ever listened to, and his shyness and agitation wore
+off as she began to speak to him. He was left a long while alone
+with her, for Howard and his mother withdrew, excusing themselves
+on the score of private matters. Christine Latimer was touched by
+the forlorn quartermaster, who, in his nervousness, gripped his
+chair with clenched hands and started when he was asked a
+question. She soon got him past this stage of their acquaintance,
+and, leading him on by gentle gradations to talk about himself,
+even learned his whole story, and that in so unobtrusive a fashion
+that he was hardly aware of his having told it to her.
+
+"I am speaking to you as though I had known you all my life," he
+said in an artless compliment. "I hope it is not very forward of
+me. It is your fault for being so kind and good."
+
+He was ecstatic when he left the house with Quintan.
+
+"I didn't know there were such women in the world," he said. "So
+noble, so winning and high-bred. It makes you understand history
+to meet people like that. Mary Queen of Scots, Marie Antoinette
+and all those, you know--they must have been like that. I--I could
+understand a man dying for Miss Latimer!"
+
+"Oh, she's all right, my aunt!" said Quintan. "She was a
+tremendous beauty once, and even now she's what I'd call a
+devilish handsome woman. And the grand manner, it isn't everybody
+that likes it, but I do. It's a little old-fashioned nowadays,
+but, by Jove, it still tells."
+
+"I wonder that such a splendid woman should have remained
+unmarried," said Raymond. He stuck an instant on the word
+unmarried. It seemed almost common to apply to such a princess.
+
+"She had an early love affair that turned out badly," said
+Quintan. "I don't know what went wrong, but anyway it didn't work.
+Then, when my father died, she came to live with us and help bring
+us up--you see there are two more of us in the family--and I am
+told she refused some good matches just on account of us kids. It
+makes me feel guilty sometimes to think of it."
+
+"Why guilty?" asked Raymond.
+
+"Because none of us were worth it, old chap," said Quintan.
+
+"I'm sure she never thought so," observed Raymond.
+
+"My aunt's rather an unusual woman," said Quintan. "She has
+voluntarily played second fiddle all her life; and, between you
+and me, you know, my mother's a bit of a tyrant, and not always
+easy to get along with--so it wasn't so simple a game as it looks."
+
+Raymond was shocked at this way of putting the matter.
+
+"You mean she sacrificed the best years of her life for you," he
+said stiffly.
+
+"Women are like that--good women," said Quintan. "Catch a man being
+such a fool--looking at it generally, you know--me apart. She had
+a tidy little fortune from her father, and might have had a yard
+of her own to play in, but our little baby hands held her tight."
+
+Raymond regarded his companion's hands. They were large and red,
+and rough with the hard work on board the Dixie; regarded them
+respectfully, almost with awe, for had they not restrained that
+glorious being in the full tide of her youth and beauty!
+
+"Now it's too late," said Quintan.
+
+"What do you mean by too late?" asked the quartermaster.
+
+"Well, she's passed forty," said Quintan. "The babies have grown
+up, and the selfish beasts are striking out for themselves. Her
+occupation's gone, and she's left plante la. Worse than that, my
+mother, who never bothered two cents about us then, now loves us
+to distraction. And, when all's said, you know, it's natural to
+like your mother best!"
+
+"Too bad!" ejaculated Raymond.
+
+"I call it deuced hard luck," said Quintan. "My mother really
+neglected us shamefully, and it was Aunt Christine who brought us
+up and blew our noses and rubbed us with goose-grease when we had
+croup, and all that kind of thing. Then, when we grew up, my
+mother suddenly discovered her long-lost children and began to
+think a heap of us--after having scamped the whole business for
+fifteen years--and my aunt, who was the real nigger in the hedge,
+got kind of let out, you see."
+
+Raymond did not see, and he was indignant, besides, at the
+coarseness of his companion's expressions. So he walked along and
+said nothing.
+
+"And, as I said before, it's now too late," said Quintan.
+
+"Too late for what?" demanded Raymond, who was deeply interested.
+
+"For her to take up with anybody else," said Quintan. "To marry,
+you know. She sacrificed all her opportunities for us; and now, in
+the inevitable course of things, we are kind of abandoning her
+when she is old and faded and lonely."
+
+"I consider your aunt one of the most beautiful women in the
+world," protested Raymond.
+
+"But you can't put back the clock, old fellow," said Quintan.
+"What has the world to offer to an old maid of forty-two? There
+she is in the empty nest, and not her own nest at that, with all
+her little nestlings flying over the hills and far away, and the
+genuine mother-bird varying the monotony by occasionally pecking
+her eyes out."
+
+Raymond did not know what to answer. He could not be so rude as to
+make any reflection on Mrs. Quintan, though he was stirred with
+resentment against her. This noble, angelic, saintly woman, who in
+every gesture reminded him of dead queens and historic personages!
+It went to his heart to think of her, bereft and lonely, in that
+splendid house he had so lately quitted. He recognised, in the
+unmistakable accord between him and her, the fellowship of a pair
+who, in different ways and in different stations, had yet fought
+and suffered and endured for what they judged their duty. Forty-
+two years old! Singular coincidence, in itself almost a bond
+between them, that he, too, was of an identical age. Forty-two!
+Why, it was called the prime of life. He inhaled a deep breath of
+air; it was the prime of life; until then no one had really begun
+to live!
+
+"Why don't you say something?" said Quintan.
+
+"I was just thinking how mistaken you were," returned Raymond.
+"There must be hundreds of men who would be proud to win her
+slightest regard; who, instead of considering her faded or old,
+would choose her out of a thousand of younger women and would be
+happy for ever if she would take--" He was going to say them, but
+that sounded improper, and he changed it, at the cost of grammar,
+to "him."
+
+Quintan laughed at his companion's vehemence, and the subject
+passed and gave way to another about shrapnel. But he did not
+fail, later on, to carry a humorous report of the conversation to
+his aunt.
+
+"What have you been doing to my old quartermaster?" he said.
+"Hasn't the poor fellow enough troubles as it is, without falling
+in love with you! He can't talk of anything else, and blushes like
+a girl when he mentions your name. He told me yesterday he was
+willing to die for a woman like you."
+
+"I think he's a dear, nice fellow," said Miss Latimer, "and if he
+wants to love me he can. It will keep him out of mischief!"
+
+Raymond saw a great deal of Miss Latimer in the month before they
+sailed south. Quintan took him constantly to the house, where, in
+his capacity of humble and devoted comrade, the tall quartermaster
+was always welcome and made much of. Mrs. Quintan was alive to the
+value of this attached follower, who might be trusted to guard her
+son in the perils that lay before him. She treated him as a sort
+of combination of valet, nurse, and poor relation, asking him all
+sorts of intimate questions about Howard's socks and
+underclothing, and holding him altogether responsible for the
+boy's welfare. Her tone was one of anxious patronage, touching at
+times on a deeper emotion when she often broke down and cried. The
+quartermaster was greatly moved by her trust in him. The tears
+would come to his own eyes, and he would try in his clumsy way to
+comfort her, promising that, so far as it lay with him, Howard
+should return safe and sound. In his self-abnegation it never
+occurred to him that his own life was as valuable as Howard
+Quintan's. He acquiesced in the understanding that it was his
+business to get Howard through the war unscratched, at whatever
+risk or jeopardy to himself.
+
+Those were wonderful days for him. To be an intimate of that
+splendid household, to drive behind spanking bays with Miss
+Latimer by his side, to take tea at the Waldorf with her and other
+semi-divine beings--what a dazzling experience for the ex-clerk,
+whose lines so recently had lain in such different places.
+Innately a gentleman, he bore himself with dignity in this new
+position, with a fine simplicity and self-effacement that was not
+lost on some of his friends. His respect for them all was
+unbounded. For the mother, so majestic, so awe-inspiring; for
+Howard, that handsome boy whose exuberant Americanism was
+untouched by any feeling of caste; for Melton and Hubert Henry,
+his brothers, those lordly striplings of a lordly race; for Miss
+Latimer, who in his heart of hearts he dared not call Christine,
+and who to him was the embodiment of everything adorable in women.
+Yes, he loved her; confessed to himself that he loved her; humbly
+and without hope, with no anticipation of anything more between
+them, overcome indeed that his presumption should go thus far.
+
+He did not attempt to hide his feelings for her, and though too
+shy for any expression of it, and withheld besides by the utter
+impossibility of such a suit, he betrayed himself to her in a
+thousand artless ways. He asked for no higher happiness than to
+sit by her side, looking into her face and listening to her mellow
+voice. He was thrice happy were he privileged to touch her hand in
+passing a teacup. Her gentleness and courtesy, her evident
+consideration, the little peeps she gave him into a nature
+gracious and refined beyond anything he had ever known, all
+transported him with unreasoning delight. She, on her part, so
+accustomed to play a minor role herself in her sister's
+household, was yet too much a woman not to like an admirer of her
+own. She took more pains with her dress, looked at herself more
+often in the glass than she had done in years. It was laughable;
+it was absurd; and she joined as readily as anyone in the mirth
+that Raymond's devotion excited in the family, but, deep down
+within her, she was pleased. At the least it showed she had not
+grown too old to make men love her; it was the vindication of the
+mounting years; the time, then, had not yet come when she had
+ceased altogether to count. She had lost her nephews, who were
+growing to be men; the love she put by so readily when it was in
+her reach seemed now more precious as she beheld her faded and
+diminished beauty, the crow's-feet about her eyes, her hair
+turning from brown to grey. A smothered voice within her said:
+"Why not?"
+
+She analysed Raymond narrowly in the long tete-a-tetes they had
+together. She drew him out, encouraging and pressing him to tell
+her everything about himself. She was always apprehending a
+jarring note, the inevitable sign of the man's coarser clay, of
+his commoner upbringing, the clash of his caste on hers. But she
+was struck instead by his inherent refinement, by his unformulated
+instincts of well-doing and honour. He was hazy about the use of
+oyster-forks, had never seen a finger-bowl, committed to her eyes
+a dozen little solecisms which he hastened to correct by frankly
+asking her assistance; but in the true essentials she never had to
+feel any shame for him. Clumsy, grotesquely ignorant of the social
+amenities, he was yet a gentleman.
+
+The night before they were to sail, he came to say good-bye. The
+war had at last begun in earnest; men were falling, and the
+Spaniards were expected to make a desperate and bloody resistance.
+It was a sobering moment for everyone, and, in all voices, however
+hard they tried to make them brave and gay, there ran an
+undercurrent of solemnity. Howard and Raymond were to be actors in
+that terrible drama not yet played; stripped and powder-blackened
+at their guns, they were perhaps doomed to go down with their ship
+and find their graves in the Caribbean. Before them lay untold
+possibilities of wounds and mutilation, of disease, suffering, and
+horror. What woman that knew them could look on unmoved at the
+sight of these men, so grave and earnest, so quietly resolute, so
+deprecatory of anything like braggadocio or over-confidence? It
+filled Christine Latimer with a fierce pride in herself and them;
+in a race that could breed men so gentle and so brave; in a
+country that was founded so surely on the devoted hearts of its
+citizens.
+
+She was crying as Raymond came to her later on the same evening,
+and found her sitting in the far end of the drawing-room with the
+lights turned low. They were alone together, for the quartermaster
+had left Howard with his mother and his brothers gathered in a
+farewell group about the library fire. Miss Latimer took both of
+Raymond's hands, and, with no attempt to disguise her sorrow, drew
+him close beside her on the divan. She was overflowing with pity
+for this poor fellow, whose life had been so hard, in which until
+now there had neither been love nor friends, whose only human tie
+was to his mother and to her. Had he known it, he might have put
+his arms about her and kissed her tear-swollen eyes and drawn her
+head against his breast. She was filled with a pent-up tenderness
+for him; a word, and she would have discovered what was until then
+inarticulate in her bosom. But the tall quartermaster was withheld
+from such incredible presumption. Her beautiful gown against his
+common serge typified, as it were, the gulf between them. Her
+distress, her agitation, were in his mind due to her concern for
+Howard Quintan; and he told her again and again, with manly
+sincerity, that he would take good care of her boy.
+
+She knew he loved her. It had been plain to her for weeks past.
+She knew every thought in his head as he sat there beside her,
+thrilled with the touch of her hands, and in the throes of a
+respectful rapture. Again and again the avowal was on his lips; he
+longed to tell her how dear she was to him; it would be hard to
+die with that unsaid, were he to be amongst those who never
+returned. It never occurred to him that she might return his love.
+A woman like her! A queen!
+
+She could easily have helped him out. More than once she was on
+the point of doing so. But the woman in her rebelled at the
+thought of taking what was the man's place. She had something of
+the exaggerated delicacy of an old maid. It was for him to ask,
+for her to answer; and the precious moments slipped away. At last,
+greatly daring, he managed to blurt out the fact that he wanted to
+ask a favour.
+
+"A favour?" she said.
+
+"Won't you give me something," he said timidly, "some little thing
+to take with me to remember you by?"
+
+She replied she would with pleasure. She wanted him to remember
+her. What was it that he would like?
+
+"There is nothing I could refuse you," she said, smiling.
+
+Raymond was overcome with embarrassment. She saw him looking at
+her hair; her hair which was her greatest beauty, and which when
+undone was luxuriant enough to reach below her waist. He had often
+expressed his admiration for it.
+
+"What would you like?" she asked again.
+
+"Oh, anything," he faltered. "A--a book!"
+
+She could not restrain her laughter. A book! She laughed and
+laughed. She seemed carried away by an extraordinary merriment.
+Raymond thought he had never heard a woman laugh like that before.
+It made him feel very badly. He wondered what it was that had made
+his request so ridiculous. He thanked his stars that he had held
+his tongue about the other thing. Ah, what a fool he had been! He
+could not have borne it, had the other been received with the same
+derision.
+
+"I shall give you my prayer-book," she said at last, wiping her
+eyes and looking less amused than he had expected. "I've had it
+many years and value it dearly. It is prettily bound in Russia,
+and if you carry it on the proper place romance will see that it
+stops a bullet--though a Bible, I believe, is the more correct."
+
+Somehow her tone sounded less cordial. She had withdrawn her
+hands, and her humour, at such a moment, jarred on him. In spite
+of his good resolutions he had managed to put his foot into it
+after all. Perhaps she had begun to suspect his secret and was
+displeased. He departed feeling utterly wretched and out of heart,
+and got very scant comfort from his book, for it only reminded him
+of how seriously he had compromised himself. He was in two minds
+whether or not to send it back, but decided not to do so in fear
+lest he might give fresh offence. The next day at dawn the Dixie
+sailed for the scene of war.
+
+III
+
+Then followed the historic days of the blockade; the first landing
+on Cuba; the suspense and triumph attending Cervera's capture; El
+Caney; San Juan Hill; Santiago; and the end of the war. Howard
+Quintan fell ill with fever and was early invalided home; but
+Raymond stayed to the finish, an obscure spectator, often an
+obscure actor, in that world-drama of fleets and armies. Tried in
+the fire, his character underwent some noted changes. He developed
+unexpected aptitudes, became a marksman of big guns, showed
+resource and skill in boat-work, earned the repeated commendations
+of his superiors. He put his resolutions to the test, and emerged,
+surprised, thankful, and satisfied, to find that he was a brave
+man. He rose in his own esteem; it was borne in on him that he had
+qualities that others often lacked; it was inspiriting to win a
+reputation for daring, fearlessness, and responsibility.
+
+He wrote when he could to his mother and Miss Latimer, and at rare
+intervals was sometimes fortunate enough to hear in turn from
+them. His mother was ill; the strain of his absence and danger was
+telling on her enfeebled constitution; she said she could not have
+got along at all had it not been for Miss Latimer's great
+kindness. It seemed that the old maid was her constant visitor,
+bringing her flowers, taking her drives, comforting her in the
+dark hours when her courage was nigh spent. "A good and noble
+woman," wrote the old lady, "and very much in love with my boy."
+
+That line rang in Raymond's head long afterwards. He read it
+again and again, bewildered, tempted and yet afraid to believe it
+true, moved to the depths of his nature, at once happy and unhappy
+in the gamut of his doubts. It could not be possible. No, it could
+not be possible. Standing at the breech of his gun, his eyes on a
+Spanish gunboat they had driven under the shelter of a fort, he
+found himself repeating: "And very much in love with my boy. And
+very much in love with my boy." And then, suddenly becoming intent
+again on the matter in hand, he slammed the breech-mechanism shut
+and gave the enemy a six-inch shell.
+
+Then there came the news of his mother's death. As much a victim
+of the war as any stricken soldier or sailor at the front, she was
+numbered on the roll of the fallen. The war had killed her as
+certainly, as surely, as any Mauser bullet sped from a tropic
+thicket. Raymond had only the consolation of knowing that Miss
+Latimer had been with her at the last and that she had followed
+his mother to the grave. Her letter, tender and pitiful, filled
+him with an inexpressible emotion. His little world now held but
+her.
+
+This was the last letter he was destined to receive from her. The
+others, if there were others, all went astray in the chaotic
+confusion attendant on active service. The poor quartermaster,
+when the ship was so lucky as to take a mail aboard, grew
+accustomed to be told that there was nothing for him. He lost
+heart and stopped writing himself. What was the use, he asked
+himself? Had she not abandoned him? The critical days of the war
+were over; peace was assured; the victory won, the country was
+already growing forgetful of the victors. Such were his moody
+reflections as he paced the deck, hungry for the word that never
+came. Yes, he was forgotten. There could be no other explanation
+of that long silence. He was forgotten!
+
+He returned in due course to New York and was paid off and
+mustered out of the service. It was dusk when he boarded an uptown
+car and stood holding to a strap, jostled and pushed about by the
+unheeding crowd. Already jealous of his uniform, he felt a little
+bitterness to see it regarded with such scant respect. He looked
+out of the windows at the lighted streets and wondered whether any
+of those hurrying thousands cared a jot for the men that had
+fought and died for them. The air, so sharp and chill after the
+tropics, served still further to dispirit him and add the
+concluding note of depression to his home-coming. He got off the
+car and walked down to Fifth Avenue, holding his breath as he drew
+near the Quintans' house. He rang the bell: waited and rang again.
+Then at last the door was unlocked and opened by an old woman.
+
+"Is Miss--Mrs. Quintan at home?" he asked.
+
+"Gone to Europe," said the old woman.
+
+"But Miss Latimer?" he persisted.
+
+"Gone to Europe," said the old woman.
+
+"Mr. Howard Quintan?"
+
+"Gone to Europe!"
+
+He walked slowly down the steps, not even waiting to ask for their
+address abroad nor when they might be expected to return. They had
+faded into the immeasurable distance. What more was there to be
+said or hoped, and his dejected heart gave back the answer:
+nothing. He slept that night in a cheap hotel. The next day he
+bought a suit of civilian clothes and sought the office of the
+auditor's department. Here he received something more like a
+welcome. Many of the clerks, with whom he had scarcely been on
+nodding terms, now came up and shook him warmly by the hand. The
+superintendent sent for him and told him that his place had been
+held open, hinting, in the exuberance of the moment, at a slight
+increase of salary. The assistant superintendent made much of him
+and invited him out to lunch. The old darkey door-keeper greeted
+him like a long-lost parent. Raymond went back to his desk, and
+resumed with a sort of melancholy satisfaction the interrupted
+routine of twenty years. In a week he could hardly believe he had
+ever quitted his desk. He would shut his eyes and wonder whether
+the war had not been all a dream. He looked at his hands and asked
+himself whether they indeed had pulled the lanyards of cannon,
+lifted loaded projectiles, had held the spokes of the leaping
+wheel. His eyes, now intent on figures, had they in truth ever
+searched the manned decks of the enemy or trained the sights that
+had blown Spanish blockhouses to the four winds of heaven? Had it
+been he or his ghost who had stood behind the Nordenfeldt shields
+with the bullets pattering against the steel and stinging the air
+overhead? He or his ghost, barefoot in the sand that sopped the
+blood of fallen comrades, the ship shaking with the detonation of
+her guns, the hoarse cheering of her crew re-echoing in his half-
+deafened ears? A dream, yes; tragic and wonderful in the
+retrospect, filled with wild, bright pictures; incredible, yet
+true!
+
+He was restless and lonely. He dreaded his evenings, which he knew
+not how to spend; dreaded the recurring Sunday, interminable in
+duration, whose leaden hours seemed never to reach their end. His
+only solace was in his work, which took him out of himself and
+prevented him from thinking. He made a weekly pilgrimage past the
+Quintans' house. The blinds were always drawn. It was as dead as
+one of those Cuban mills, standing in the desolation of burned
+fields. Once, greatly daring, and impelled by a sudden impulse, he
+went to the door and requested the address of his vanished
+friends:
+
+"Grand Hotel, Vevey, Switzerland." He repeated the words to
+himself as he went back to his boarding-house, repeated them again
+and again like a child going on an errand, "Grand Hotel, Vevey,
+Switzerland," in a sort of panic lest he might forget them. He
+tossed that night in his bed in a torment of indecision. Ought he
+to write? Ought he to take the risk of a reply, courteous and
+cold, that he felt himself without the courage to endure? Or was
+it not better to put an end to it altogether and accept like a man
+the inevitable "no" of her decision.
+
+He rose at dawn, and, lighting the gas, went back to bed with what
+paper he could lay his hands on. He had no pen, no ink, only the
+stub of a pencil he carried in his pocket. How it flew over the
+ragged sheets under the fierce spell of his determination! All the
+misery and longing of months went out in that letter. Inarticulate
+no longer, he found the expression of a passionate and despairing
+eloquence. He could not live without her; he loved her; he had
+always loved her; before he had been daunted by the inequality
+between them, but now he must speak or die. At the end he asked
+her, in set old-fashioned terms, whether or not she would marry
+him.
+
+He mailed it as it was, in odd sheets and under the cover of an
+official envelope of the railroad company. He dropped it into the
+box and walked away, wondering whether he wasn't the biggest fool
+on earth and the most audacious, and yet stirred and trembling
+with a strange satisfaction. After all he was a man; he had lived
+as a man should, honorably and straightforwardly; he had the
+right to ask such a question of any woman and the right to an
+honest and considerate answer. Be it yes or no, he could reproach
+himself no longer with perhaps having let his happiness slip past
+him. The matter would be put beyond a doubt for ever, and if it
+went against him, as in the bottom of his heart he felt assured it
+would, he would try to bear it with what fortitude he might. She
+would know that he loved her. There was always that to comfort
+him. She would know that he loved her.
+
+He got a postal guide and studied out the mails. He learned the
+names of the various steamers, the date of their sailing and
+arriving, the distance of Vevey from the sea. Were she to write on
+the same day she received his letter, he might hear from her by
+the Touraine. Were she to wait a day, her answer would be delayed
+for the Normandie. All this, if the schedule was followed to the
+letter and bad weather or accident did not intervene. The shipping
+page of the New York Herald became the only part of it he read. He
+scanned it daily with anxiety. Did it not tell him of his letter
+speeding over seas? For him no news was good news, telling him
+that all was well. He kept himself informed of the temperature of
+Paris, the temperature of Nice, and worried over the floods in
+Belgium. From the gloomy offices of the railroad he held all
+Europe under the closest scrutiny.
+
+Then came the time when his letter was calculated to arrive. In
+his mind's eye he saw the Grand Hotel at Vevey, a Waldorf-Astoria
+set in snowy mountains with attendant Swiss yodelling on
+inaccessible summits, or getting marvels of melody out of little
+hand-bells, or making cuckoo clocks in top-swollen chalets. The
+letter would be brought to her on a silver salver, exciting
+perhaps the stately curiosity of Mrs. Quintan and questions
+embarrassing to answer. It was a pity he used that railroad
+envelope! Or would it lie beside her plate at breakfast, as clumsy
+and unrefined as himself, amid a heap of scented notes from
+members of the nobility? Ah, if he could but see her face and read
+his fate in her blue eyes!
+
+When he returned home that night there was a singular-looking
+telegram awaiting him on the hall table. His hands shook as he
+took it up for it suddenly came over him that it was a cable. It
+had never occurred to him that she might do that; that there was
+anything more expeditious than the mail.
+
+"Sailing by Touraine arriving sixth Christine Latimer."
+
+He read and re-read it until the type grew blurred. What did it
+mean? He asked himself that a thousand times. What did it mean? He
+sought his room and locked the door, striding up and down with
+agitation, the cablegram clenched in his hand. He was beside
+himself, triumphant and yet in a fever of misgiving. Was it not
+perhaps a coincidence--not an answer to his own letter, but one of
+those extraordinary instances of what is called telepathy? Her
+words would bear either interpretation. Possibly the whole family
+was returning with her. Possibly she had never seen his letter at
+all. Possibly it was following her back to America, unopened and
+undelivered.
+
+"Sailing by Touraine arriving sixth." Was that an answer? Perhaps
+indeed it was. Perhaps it was a woman's way of saying "yes"; it
+might even be, in her surpassing kindness, that she was coming to
+break her refusal as gently as she might, too considerate of his
+feelings to write it baldly on paper. At least, amid all these
+doubts, it assured him of one thing, her regard; that he was not
+forgotten; that he had been mistaken in thinking himself ignored.
+
+He spent the next eight days in a cruel and heart-breaking
+suspense. He could hardly eat or sleep. He grew thin and started
+at a sound. He paid a dollar to have the Touraine's arrival
+telegraphed to the office; another dollar to have it telegraphed
+to the boarding-house; he was fearful that one or the other might
+miscarry, and repeatedly warned the landlady of a possible message
+for him in the middle of the night.
+
+"It means a great deal to me," he said. "It means everything to
+me. I don't know what I'd do if I missed the Touraine!"
+
+Of course he did not miss the Touraine. He was on the wharf hours
+before her coming. He exasperated everyone with his questions. He
+was turned out of all kinds of barriers; he earned the distrust of
+the detectives; he became a marked man. He was certainly there for
+no good, that tall guy in the slouch hat, his lean hands fidgeting
+for a surreptitious pearl-necklace or an innocent-looking
+umbrella full of diamonds--one who, in their language, was a guy
+that would bear watching.
+
+The steamer came alongside, and Raymond gazed up at the tier upon
+tier of faces. At length, with a catch in his heart, he caught
+sight of Miss Latimer, who smiled and waved her hand to him. He
+scanned her narrowly for an answer to his doubts; and these
+increased the more he gazed at her. It seemed a bad sign to see
+her so calm, so composed; worse still to see her occasionally in
+animated conversation with some of her fellow-passengers. He
+thought her smiles had even a perfunctory friendliness, and he had
+to share them besides with others. It was plain she had never
+received his letter. No woman could bear herself like that who had
+received such a letter. Then too she appeared so handsome, so
+high-bred, so charming and noticeable a figure in the little
+company about her that Raymond felt a peremptory sense of his own
+humbleness and of the impassable void between them. How had he
+ever dared aspire to this beautiful woman, and the thought of his
+effrontery took him by the throat.
+
+He stood by the gangway as the passengers came off, an
+interminable throng, slow moving, teetering on the slats, a gush
+of funnelled humanity, hampered with bags, hat-boxes, rolls of
+rugs, dressing-cases, golf-sticks, and children. At last Miss
+Latimer was carried into the eddy, her maid behind her carrying
+her things, lost to view save by the bright feather in her
+travelling bonnet. The seconds were like hours as Raymond waited.
+He had a peep of her, smiling and patient, talking over her
+shoulder to a big Englishman behind her. Then, as the slow stream
+brought her down, she stepped lightly on the wharf, turned to
+Raymond, and, before he could so much as stammer out a word, flung
+her arms round his neck and kissed him.
+
+"Did you really want me?" she said; and then, "You gave me but two
+hours to catch the old Touraine!"
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MASCOT OF BATTERY B
+
+
+Battery A had a mascot goat, and Battery C a Filipino kid, and
+Battery D a parrot that could swear in five languages, but I guess
+we were the only battery in the brigade that carried an old lady!
+Filipino, nothing! But white as yourself and from Oakland,
+California, and I don't suppose I'd be here talking to you now, if
+it hadn't been for her.
+
+I had known Benny a long time--Benny was her son, you know, the
+only one she had--and when I enlisted at the beginning of the war
+Benny wished to do it, too, only he was scared to death, not of
+the Spaniards, but his old Ma! So he hung off and on, while I
+drilled at the Presidio and rode free on the street cars, and did
+the little hero act, and ate pie the whole day long. My! How they
+used to bring us pies in them times and boxes of see-gars--and
+flowers! Flowers to burn! Well I remember a Wisconsin regiment
+marching along Market Street, big splendid men from the up-North
+woods, every one of them with a Calla lily stuck in his gun! Oh,
+it was fine, with the troops pouring in, and the whole city afire
+to receive them, and the girls almost cutting the clothes off your
+back for souvenirs--and it made Benny sick to see it all, him
+clerking in a hardware store and eating his heart out to go with
+the boys. He hung back as long as he could, but at last he
+couldn't stand it no longer, and the day before we sailed he went
+and enlisted in my battery.
+
+He knew there was going to be a rumpus at home and I suppose that
+was why he put it off to the very end, not wanting to be plagued
+to death or cried over. But when he got into his uniform and had
+done a spell of goose-step with the first sergeant, he was so
+blamed rattled about going home that he had to take me along too.
+He lived away off somewheres in a poorish sort of neighbourhood,
+all little frame houses and little front yards about that big,
+where you could see commuters watering Calla lilies in their city
+clothes. Benny's house seemed the smallest and poorest of the lot,
+though it had Calla lilies too and other sorts of flowers, and a
+mat with "welcome" on it, and some kind of a dog that licked our
+hands as we walked up the front steps and answered to the name of
+Dook.
+
+Benny pushed open the door and went in, me at his heels, and both
+of us nervous as cats. His mother was sitting in a rocker, reading
+the evening paper with gold spectacles, and I never saw such a
+straight-backed old lady in my life, nor any so tall and thin and
+commanding. She looked up at us, kind of startled to see two
+soldiers walking into her kitchen, and Benny smiled a silly smile
+and said:
+
+"Mommer, I'm off to help Dooey in the Fillypines!"
+
+I guess he thought she'd jump at him or something, for he had
+always been a mother's boy and minded everything she said, though
+he was twenty-eight years old and rising-nine--but all she did was
+to draw in her breath sharp and sudden, so you could hear the
+whistle of it, and then two big tears rolled out under her specs.
+
+"Don't feel bad about it, Mommer," said Benny in a snuffly voice.
+
+She never said a word, but got up from the chair and came over to
+where Benny was, very white and trembly, and looking at his army
+coat like it was a shroud.
+
+"Oh, my son, my son!" she said, kind of choking over the words.
+
+"I couldn't stay behind when all the boys was going," he said.
+
+I saw he was holding back all he could to keep from crying, and I
+didn't blame him either, as we was to sail the next day and the
+old lady was his Ma. It's them good-byes that break a soldier all
+up. So I lit out and played with the dog and made him jump through
+my hands and fetch sticks and give his paw (he was quite a
+RE-markable dog, that dog, though his breeding wasn't much), while I
+could hear them inside, talking and talking, and the old lady's
+voice running on about the danger of drink and how he mustn't
+sleep in wet clothes or give back-talk to his officers--it was
+wonderful the horse-sense that old lady had--and how he must
+respeck the uniform he wore and be cheerful and willing and brave,
+like his sainted father who was dead--all that mothers say and
+sometimes what soldiers do--and through it all there was a pleasant
+rattle of dishes and the sound of the fire being poked up, and
+Benny asking where's the table-cloth, and was there another pie?
+By and by I was called in, and there, sure enough, the table was
+spread, and we were both made to sit down while the old lady
+skirmished around and wiped her eyes when we weren't looking.
+
+We had beefsteak, warmed-over pigs' feet, coffee, potato cakes,
+fresh lettuce, Graham gems, and two kinds of pie, and the next day
+we sailed for Manila.
+
+Them early days in the Fillypines was the toughest proposition I
+was ever up against. Things hadn't settled down as they did
+afterward, nobody knowing where he was at, and all of us shoved up
+to the front higgeldy-piggeldy; and, being Regulars, they gave us
+the heavy end of it, having to do all the fighting while the
+Volunteers was being taught the difference between a Krag-
+Jorgensen and a Moro Castle. It was all front in them days--for
+the Regulars! But we were lucky in our commissary sergeant, a
+splendid young man named Orr, and we lived well from the start and
+never came down to rations. The battery got quite a name for
+having griddle-cakes for breakfast and carrying a lot of dog
+generally in the eating line, and someone wrote a song, to the
+toon of Chickamauga, called "The Fried Chicken of Battery B." But
+I tell you, it wasn't all fried chicken either, for the fighting
+was heavy and hot, and a good many of the boys pegged out. If ever
+there was a battery that looked for trouble and got it--it was
+Battery B! But we took good care of our commissary sergeant--did I
+mention he was a splendid young man named Orr?--and though we
+dropped a good many numbers, wounded, dead, sick, and missing--we
+kep' up the good name of the battery and had canned butter and
+pop-overs nearly every day.
+
+Benny and I were chums, but nobody knows what that word means till
+you've kept warm under the same blanket and kneeled side by side
+in the firing-line. It brings men together like nothing else in
+the world, and it's queer the unlikely sorts that take to one
+another. I was so common and uneddicated that I wonder what Benny
+ever saw to like in me, for, as I said, he was a regular Mommer's
+boy and splendidly brought up and an electrician. Religious, too,
+and a church member! But he was powerful fond of me, and never
+went into action but what he'd let off a little prayer to himself
+that I might come out all right and go to heaven if bolo-ed. Pity
+he hadn't taken as much trouble for himself, for one day while we
+were lying in a trench, and firing for all we were worth, I
+suddenly saw that look in his face that a soldier gets to know so
+well.
+
+"Benny, you're shot!" I yelled out, dropping my Krag and all
+struck of a heap.
+
+"Shot, nothing!" he answered, and then he keeled over in the dirt
+and his legs began to kick.
+
+He took a powerful long time to die, and there was even some talk
+of sending him down to the base hospital, the field one being that
+full and constantly needed at our heels. But he pleaded with the
+doctors and was allowed as a favour to stay on and die where he
+was minded--with the battery. I was with him all I could, and I'll
+never forget how good that commissary sergeant was, a splendid
+young man named Orr, who always had a little pot of chicken broth
+for Benny and cornstarch, and what he fancied most of all--a sort
+of thick dough cakes we called sinkers. As luck would have it I
+got into trouble about this time--a little matter of two silver
+candle-sticks and a Virgin's crown--and Benny sent for Captain
+Howard (it was him that commanded the battery), and weak as he
+was, dying, he begged me off, and the captain swore awful to hide
+how bad he felt, and struck my name off the sheet to please him.
+There was little enough to do in this line, for it was plain as
+day where Benny was bound for, and he knew himself he would never
+see that little home in Oakland again.
+
+Well, he got worse and worse, and sometimes when I went there he
+didn't know me, being out of his head or kind of dopy with the
+doctor's stuff, the shadow being over him, as Irish people say.
+One night he was that low that I got scared, and I waylaid the
+contract surgeon as he came out.
+
+"Doctor," I said, "it's all up with Benny, ain't it?"
+
+"He'll never hear reveille no more," he says.
+
+I got my blanket and lay outside the door, it being against
+regulations for any of us to be in the field-hospital after taps.
+But the orderly said he'd call me if Benny was to wake up before
+the end, and the doctor promised me I might go in. Sure enough, I
+was called somewheres along of four o'clock and the orderly led me
+inside the tent to Benny's cot. There was no light but a candle in
+a bottle, and I held it in my hand and bent over and looked in
+Benny's face. He was himself all right, and he put his cold,
+sweaty hand in mine and pressed it.
+
+"Do you know me, old man?" I said. "Do you know me?"
+
+"Good-bye, Bill," he said, and then, as I leaned over him, his
+voice being that low and faint--he whispered: "Billy, I guess
+you'll have to rustle for another chum!"
+
+Them was his last words and he said them with a kind of a smile,
+like he was happy and didn't give a damn to live. Then the little
+life he had left went out. The orderly looked at his watch, and
+then wrote the time on a slate after Benny's regimental number and
+the word: "died." This was about all the epitaph he got, though we
+buried him properly in the morning and gave him the usual send-
+off. Then his effects was auctioned off in front of the captain's
+tent, a nickel for this, ten cents for that--a soldier hasn't much
+at any time, you know, and on the march less than a little--and
+five-sixty about covered the lot. There was quite a rush for the
+picture of his best girl, but I bought it in, along with one of
+his Ma and a one-pound Hotchkiss shell and the hilt of a Spanish
+officer's sword; and when I had laid them away in my haversack and
+had borrowed a sheet of paper and an envelope from the commissary
+sergeant to write to Benny's mother, it came over me what a little
+place a man fills in the world and how things go on much the same
+without him.
+
+I was setting down to write that letter and was about midway
+through, having got to "the pride of the battery and regretted by
+all who noo him," when I looked up, and what in thunder do you
+suppose I saw? The old lady herself, by God! walking into camp
+with an umberella and a valise, and looking like she always did--
+powerful grim and commanding. Someone must have told her the news
+and which was my tent, for she walked straight up to where I was
+and said: "William, William!" like that. She didn't cry or
+nothing, and anybody at a distance might have thought she was just
+talking to a stranger; but there was a whole funeral march in the
+sound of her voice, and you could read Benny's death like print in
+her wrinkled old face. I took her out to where we had buried him,
+and she plumped down on her knees and prayed, with the umberella
+and the valise beside her, while I held my hat in one hand and my
+pistol in the other, ready for any bolo business that might come
+out of the high grass.
+
+Then we went back to the field-hospital and had a look in, she
+explaining on the way how she had mortgaged her home, so as to
+come and look after Benny. I guess the hospital must have appeared
+kind of cheerless, for lots of the wounded were lying on the bare
+ground, and it was a caution the way some of them groaned and
+groaned. You see Battery K had just come in, having had an
+engagement by the way at Dagupan, and Wilson's cavalry, besides,
+had dumped a sight of their men on us.
+
+"And it was in a place like this that my boy died?" said the old
+lady, her mouth quivering and then closing on the words like a
+steel trap.
+
+"There's the very cot, Ma'am," I said.
+
+She said something like "Oh, oh, oh!" under her breath, and,
+taking out her handkerchief, wiped the face and lips of the man in
+the cot, who was lying there with his uniform still on him. I
+suppose he had got it because he was a bad case,--the cot, I
+mean,--and certainly he was far from spry.
+
+"He's dead!" said the old lady, shuddering. "He's dead!"
+
+"Orderly," I said, "number fifty-six is dead!"
+
+The orderly bent over to make sure and then ran for his slate--the
+same old slate--and began to write down the same old thing. I
+suppose there was some sense to that slate racket, for with a
+little spit one slate would do for a brigade, but it seemed a
+cheap way to die. Then, as we stood there, another orderly came
+gallumphing in with something steaming in a tin can. The old lady
+took it out of his hand and smelled it, supercilious.
+
+"What do you call this?" she said.
+
+"It's chicken broth, Ma'am," he said. "That's what it is, Ma'am."
+
+"Faugh!" said the old lady, "faugh!" and handed it back to him,
+like she was going to throw it away, but didn't. Then we watched
+him dip it out in tin cups and carry it around, while some other
+fellers came in and carried out the body of the man in the cot, a
+trooper by his legs. We went out with them, and, I tell you, it
+was good to stand in the open air again and breathe. The old lady
+took a little spell of rest on a packing-case; then she gave me
+her umberella and valise to take back to quarters, and, rolling up
+her sleeves, made like she was going into the hospital again.
+
+I didn't know what to say, but I guess I looked it.
+
+"William," she said, with a glitter of her gold specs.
+
+"Ma'am," said I.
+
+"Those boys aren't getting proper CON-sideration," she said. "If
+it was dogs," she said, "they couldn't be treated worse. William,
+I'm going to see what one old woman can do."
+
+"You ought to ask Captain Howard first," I said. "You don't belong
+to the Army Medical Corps."
+
+"It's them that let Benny die," she said, with her eyes snapping,
+"and, as for asking, they'd say 'No,' for they don't allow any
+women except at the base hospitals."
+
+I knew this for a fack, but I'd rather she'd find it out from the
+captain than from me. I didn't want to seem to make trouble for
+her. So, while I was wondering what to do about it, she headed
+right in, leaving me with the valise and the umberella, and a kind
+of qualmy feeling that the old lady might strike a snag.
+
+I didn't have no chance to come back till along sundown, but, my
+stars! even in that time there had been a change. Benny's mother
+had been getting in her deadly work, and the orderlies were
+bursting mad, not that any of them dared say anything outright or
+show it except in their faces, which were that long; for, you see,
+the contract surgeon had taken her side, and had backed her up.
+But they moved around like mules with their ears down, powerful
+unwilling, and yet scared to say a word. The hospital had been
+made a new place, with another tent up that had been laid away and
+forgotten (you wouldn't think it possible, but it was), and the
+sick and wounded had been sorted over and washed and made
+comfortable; and, where before there was no room to turn around,
+you could walk through wide lanes and wonder what had become of
+the crowd. She had peeked into the cooking, too, and had found out
+more things going wrong in five hours than the contract surgeon
+had in five months. Blest if there wasn't a court-martial laying
+for every one of the orderlies if they said "boo!" for the swine
+had been making away scandalous with butter and chocolate and
+beef--tea and canned table peaches and sparrow-grass and sardines,
+and all the like of that, belly-robbing the boys right and left
+perfectly awful.
+
+It was a mighty good account of the contract surgeon that he took
+it all so well, and was willing to admit how badly he had been
+done. But he was a splendid young fellow, named Marcus, and what
+the old lady said, went! He was right sorry he couldn't put her on
+the strength of the battery, but the regulations kept women nurses
+at the base-hospitals, and anyway (for we broke everything them
+days, and there wasn't enough red-tape left to play cat-and-my-
+cradle with) Captain Howard hated the sight of a petticoat, and
+was dead set against women anywheres. I don't know what they had
+ever done to him, but I'm just saying it for a fack. But, however
+it was, Marcus said the old lady had to be kept out of sight, or
+else the captain would surely send her to the rear under arrest.
+
+Now, this made it a pretty hard game for the old lady to play, and
+you can reckon how much dodging she had to do to keep out of the
+captain's sight. It was hard about her sleeping, too, for she had
+to do that where she could, not to speak of the pay she might have
+drawn and didn't, and which, sakes alive! she earned twenty times
+over. By and by everybody got onto it except the captain, but
+there wasn't such a skunk in the battery as to tell him, partly
+because of the joke, but, most of all, on account of the
+convalescents, who naturally thought a heap of her. Then it got
+whispered around that she was our mascot, and carried the luck of
+the battery; and it was certainly RE-markable how it began to
+change, getting fresh beef quite regular and maple syrup to burn,
+and nine kegs of Navy pickles by mistake.
+
+You would have thought she was too old to stand it, for we was
+always on the move, and I have seen her sleeping on what was
+nothing else but mud, with the rain coming down tremenjous. But
+she was a tough old customer, and always came to time, outlasting
+men that could have tossed her in the air, or run with her a block
+and never taken breath. But, of course, it couldn't be kept up for
+ever--I mean about the captain--and, sure enough, one day he
+caught her riding on a gun-carriage, while he was passing along
+the line on a Filipino pony.
+
+"Good God!" he said, like that, reining in his horse and looking
+at her campaign hat and the old gingham dress she wore. I wonder
+she didn't correct him for his profanity, but I allow for once she
+was scared stiff, and hadn't no answer ready. My! But she kind of
+shrunk in and looked a million years old.
+
+"Madam," said he, "do you belong to this column?"
+
+"Unofficially, I do," she said, perking up a little.
+
+"Might I inquire where you came from?" said he, doing the ironical
+perlite.
+
+"Oakland, California," said she.
+
+"And is this your usual mode of locomotion?" said he. "Riding on a
+gun?" said he. "Like the Goddess of War," said he. "Perching on
+the belcherous cannon's back," said he.
+
+The old lady, now as bold as brass, allowed that it was.
+
+"Scandalous!" roared the captain. "Scandalous!"
+
+The old lady always had a kind of nattified air, and even on a
+gun-carriage she sported that look of dropping in on the
+neighbours for a visit. She ran up her little parasol, settled her
+feet, give a tilt to her specs, and looked the captain in the eye.
+
+"Yes," she said, "I do belong to this column, and I guess it would
+be a smaller column by a dozen, if it hadn't been for me in your
+field-hospital. Or twenty," said she. "Or maybe more," said she.
+
+This kind of staggered the captain. It was plain he didn't know
+just what to do. We were hundreds of miles from anywheres, and
+there were Aguinaldoes all around us. He was as good as married to
+that old lady, for any means he had of getting rid of her. He
+began to look quite old himself, as he stared and stared at the
+mascot of Battery B, the cannon lumping along, and the old lady
+bouncing up and down, as the wheels sank to the axles in the rutty
+road.
+
+"When we strike the railroad, home you go," said he.
+
+"We'll see about that," said the old lady.
+
+"It's disgraceful," said he. "Pigging with a whole battery," said
+he. "Oh, the shame of it!" said he.
+
+"Shoulder-straps don't always make a gentleman," said she.
+
+"Holy Smoke!" said he, galloping off very fierce and grand on his
+little horse, to haul Dr. Marcus over the coals. They say the
+contract surgeon got it in the neck, but we were short-handed in
+that department already, Dr. Fenelly having been killed in action,
+so the captain could do nothing worse nor reprimand him. It was
+bad enough as it was--for Marcus--for HE wasn't no old lady, and
+the captain could let himself rip. And, I tell you, it was a
+caution any time to be up against Captain Howard, for, though he
+could be nice as pie and perlite to beat the band, it only needed
+the occasion for him to unloose on you like a thirteen-inch gun.
+
+Well, it was perfectly lovely what happened next, for, with all
+her sassiness, the old lady felt pretty blue, and talked about
+Benny for hours, like she always did when she was down-hearted;
+and, by this time, you know, she had got to love Battery B, and
+every boy in it; and it naturally went against her to think of
+starting out all over again with strangers, and them maybe
+Volunteers. So you can guess what her feelings was that night when
+the captain went down with fever. It was like getting money from
+home!
+
+The captain had never been sick in his life, and he took it hard
+to be laid by and keep off the flies, while another feller ran the
+battery and jumped his place. I guess it came over him that he
+wasn't the main guy after all, and that it wouldn't matter a hill
+of beans whether he lived or quit. Them's one of the things you
+learn in hospital, and the most are the better for it; but the
+captain, you see, was getting his lesson a bit late. So he was
+layed off, with amigos to carry him or bolo him (like what amigos
+are when they get a chance), and the old lady give a whoop and
+took him in charge. My! If she wasn't good to that man. and, as
+for coals of fire, she regularly slung them at him! The doctor,
+too, got his little axe in, and was everlastingly praising the old
+lady, and telling the captain he would have been a goner, if it
+hadn't been for her! And, when the captain grew better--which he
+did after a few days--he was that meek he'd eat out of your hand.
+The old lady was not only a champion nurse, but she was a buster
+to cook. Give her a ham-bone and a box of matches and she could
+turn out a French dinner of five courses, with oofs-sur-le-plate,
+and veal-cutlets in paper pants! It was then, I reckon, she
+settled the captain for good; and, when he picked up and was able
+to walk about camp, leaning pretty heavy on her arm, she called
+him "George" and "My boy"--like that--and you might have taken him
+for Benny and she his Ma.
+
+There was nothing too good for the old lady after that, and the
+captain wouldn't hear of her living anywheres but at the officers'
+mess, where she sat at his right hand, and always spoke first. The
+Queen of England couldn't have been treated with more respeck, and
+the captain put her on the strength of the battery, and she drew
+back-pay from the day she first blew into camp. My, but it was
+changed times! and you ought to have seen the way the old lady
+cocked her head in the air and made a splendid black silk dress of
+loot, which she wore every evening with the officers and rattled
+all over with jet. But it didn't turn her head the least bit, like
+for a time the boys feared it might, and she was twice as good to
+us as she had been before. We had a pull at headquarters now, and
+she had a heart that big that it could hold the officers and us,
+too--and more in the draw.
+
+The tide had turned her way when she needed it most, for, tough as
+she was, she could not have long gone on like she had been. She
+had worn down very thin, and was like a shadow of the old lady I
+remembered in Oakland, California, and kind of sunk in around the
+eyes, and I don't believe Benny would have known her, had he risen
+from the grave; and, when anybody joked with her about it, and
+said: "Take it easy, Ma'am, you owe it to the battery to be
+keerful," she'd answer she had enlisted for the term of the war,
+and looked to peg out the day peace was proclaimed.
+
+"Then I'll be off to join Benny," she'd say, "and the rest of the
+battery, in heaven!"
+
+There was getting to be a good deal of a crowd up there--that is,
+if the other place hadn't yanked them in--and some of the boys
+found a lot of comfort in her way of thinking.
+
+"A boy as dies for his country isn't going to be bothered about
+passing in," she would say, with a click of her teeth and that
+sure way of hers like she KNEW. And I, reckon perhaps she DID.
+
+One afternoon she was suddenly taken very bad; and, instead of
+better, she grew worse and worse, being tied to the bed and
+raving; and the captain, who wouldn't hear of her being sent to
+hospital, give up his own quarters to her and almost went crazy,
+he was that frightened she was dying.
+
+"It's just grit that's kep' her alive," I heard the doctor saying
+to him.
+
+"You must save her, Marcus," said the captain, holding to him,
+like he was pleading with the doctor for her life. "You must save
+her, Marcus. You must do everything in the world you can, Marcus."
+
+The contract surgeon looked mighty glum. "She's like a ship that's
+been burning up her fittings for lack of coal," said he. "There
+ain't nothing left," he said. "Not a damn thing," said he, and then
+he piled in a lot of medical words that seemed to settle the
+matter.
+
+As for the captain, he sat down and regularly cried. I'm sorry now
+I said anything against the captain, for he was a splendid man,
+and the pride of the battery. And, I tell you, he wasn't the only
+one that cried neither, for the boys idolised the old lady, and
+there wasn't no singing that night or cards or anything. I was on
+picket, and it was a heavy heart I took with me into the dark;
+and, when they left me laying in the grass, and nobody nearer nor
+a hundred yards and that behind me, I felt mortal blue and
+lonesome and homesick, and like I didn't care whether I was killed
+or not. It was midnight when I went out,--mind, I say MIDNIGHT--
+and I don't know what ailed me that night, for, after thinking of
+the old lady and Benny and my own mother that was dead, and all
+the rest of the boys that had marched out so fine and ended so
+miserable--I couldn't keep the sleep away; and I'd go off and off,
+though I tried my damnedest not to; and my eyes would shut in
+spite of me and just glue together; and I would kind of drown,
+drown, drown in sleep. If ever a man knew what he was doing, and
+the risk, and what I owed to the boys, and me a Regular, and all
+that--it was ME; yet--yet--And you must remember it had been a hard
+day, and the guns had stuck again and again in the mud, and it was
+pull, mule, pull, soldier, till you thought you'd drop in your
+tracks. Oh, I am not excusing myself! I've seen men shot for
+sleeping on guard, and I know it's right; and, even in my dreams,
+I seemed to be reproaching myself and calling myself a stinker.
+
+Then, just as I was no better nor a log, laying there with my head
+on my arm, a coward and a traitor, and a black disgrace to the
+uniform I wore, I suddenly waked up with somebody shaking me hard,
+real rough, like that--and I jumped perfectly terrible to think it
+might be the captain on his rounds. Oh, the relief when I saw it
+was nothing else than the old lady, she kneeling beside me all
+alone, and her specs shining in the starlight.
+
+"William, William!" she said, sorrowful and warning, her voice
+kind of strange, like she didn't want to say out loud that I had
+been asleep at my post; and, as she drew away her hand, it touched
+mine, and it was ice-cold. And, just as I was going to tell her to
+lope back and be keerful of herself, the grass rustled in front of
+me, and I saw, rising like a wall, rows on rows of Filipino heads!
+My, but didn't I shoot and didn't I run, and the bugles rang out
+and the whole line was rushed, me pelting in and the column
+spitting fire along a length of three miles! We stood them off all
+right, and my name was mentioned in orders, and I was promoted
+sergeant, the brigadier shaking my hand and telling the boys I was
+a pattern to go by and everything a Regular ought to be. But it
+wasn't THAT I was going to tell. It was about the old lady, though
+I didn't learn it till the next day.
+
+She had died at a quarter of midnight, and had lain all night on
+the captain's bed with a towel over her poor old face.
+
+Now, what do you make of that?
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Love, the Fiddler, by Lloyd Osbourne
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