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Blindfold, by Orrick Johns—A Project Gutenberg eBook
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<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69006 ***</div>
<div class="figcenter hide"><img src="images/coversmall.jpg" width="450" alt="" /></div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<h1>BLINDFOLD</h1>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_title.jpg" alt="" /></div>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="titlepage">
<p><span class="xxxlarge">BLINDFOLD</span></p>
<p><span class="xlarge"><i>By</i><br />
ORRICK JOHNS</span></p>
<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_titlelogo.jpg" alt="" /></div>
<p>NEW YORK<br />
<span class="large">LIEBER & LEWIS</span><br />
1923</p>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center">Copyright, 1923<br />
By <span class="smcap">Lieber</span> & <span class="smcap">Lewis</span></p>
<p class="center">Printed in the U.S.A.</p>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center">
TO MY<br />
FATHER<br />
<span class="large"><span class="smcap">George S. Johns</span>,</span><br />
IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT<br />
OF UNFAILING SYMPATHY<br />
</p>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="ph2">BLINDFOLD</p>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span>
<p class="ph2">BLINDFOLD</p>
<h2 class="nobreak">I</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">Ellen Sydney’s</span> first garden in the Meadowburn’s
new American home had made a fair beginning.
She was at work one afternoon bending
over the bed of sweet peas, hooking the baby
tendrils to the wire mesh of the frame, with an
occasional pat of the soft dark earth beneath—the
earth which Bennet, the youngest of the family,
had brought by the basketful from a distance, to
enrich the yellow clay that filled in the property.</p>
<p>School was just out and as she worked Bennet
banged into the hall, threw down his books
and rushed forth again with a shout to join his
comrades up the street. They were building a
“switch-back railway” from the second story rear
window of a neighbour’s house. She could just
glimpse the murderous rickety scaffolding of it
through the small leaves of the alley poplars.</p>
<p>Fastening up the last of the tendrils to the wire,
Ellen heard Mrs. Osprey’s shrill voice calling from
quite half a block away to one of the Osprey boys.
She could not restrain a smile at the familiar
summons.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[2]</span>“Poor woman,” thought she, “they do worry
her.” But she would no more have thought of
pitying Mrs. Osprey actually, than of feeling sorry
for Her Majesty Queen Alexandra, whom many
years in Canada had taught her to believe next
to the angels themselves.</p>
<p>As she turned from the garden she heard a
still more familiar voice and Potter Osprey came
through the gate.</p>
<p>“Hello, Ellen, mind my coming over?”</p>
<p>“Oh, no! I’ve got to go in, though. Come in
the kitchen, I’m not very busy.” She had in fact
three easy hours before her, with dinner practically
prepared and a little ironing to do before she
put the dishes in the stove. Ironing was quite
pleasant if you had some one to talk to while you
did it.</p>
<p>“Vacation’s only six weeks off now,” Potter
said as they walked up to the house. “Ain’t that
great! I hate school anyway.”</p>
<p>“Ah, Potter, when you are doing so well at it!
Milly told me about the debates. She said you
were fine in them.”</p>
<p>The monthly school debates were a point of
pride with him, and he betrayed a momentary embarrassment.
He had quite lost himself in the
vainglory of winning two of them in succession, or
of being on the winning side both times. He had
regretted that while they were in progress, especially
while he was on his feet, everybody he knew<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[3]</span>
had not been in the audience. So many people
were not. The thing that he feared in talking
about them to Ellen was that he would reveal
his satisfaction. So Milly had been gossiping
about them outside? That pleased him. Milly
was in the class below him, which sat in the same
room.</p>
<p>He recovered his composure and spoke as though
of an ordinary matter.</p>
<p>“Pshaw, the debates ain’t really school.
They’re different.... But look, Ellen, all the lots
around here are almost forests of weeds in the
summer. It’s great! You can hide in them, and
everything. They get over six feet high. And
there’s woods only a mile out west there, to swim
and camp in. If you have time we can walk there
some day.”</p>
<p>Ellen’s face brightened at the prospect.</p>
<p>“But it gets hot here in the summer,” he went
on, “awful hot—not like Winnipeg. You won’t
like that.”</p>
<p>“Oh, I’ve lived in N’Orleans. It’s lots hotter
there.”</p>
<p>“Yes, that’s so. That’s way down south, ain’t
it? I always think of you coming from Winnipeg.
Bennet talks about it all the time. He’s a Britisher
all right.”</p>
<p>Ellen replied warmly.</p>
<p>“Well, he shouldn’t be, even if they were born
in Canada. His father says he’s going to stand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span>
by this country now, because it gives them a good
living and always has. He’s going to make them
all citizens.”</p>
<p>Potter laughed. He was sitting perched up on
the kitchen table, his small feet dangling beneath
it and his cap in his hand.</p>
<p>“I told Bennet we licked England twice and he
got hot under the collar. He’s funny. Did you
like it better up north?”</p>
<p>“Yes, I guess I did. We used to have good times
in Winnipeg. The fellows always in the house,
my! It’ll be the same here after a while. Those
two girls get a crowd coming pretty quick. Only
we’ll never have snow like in Winnipeg. I did
love the snow, such sledding and skating!”</p>
<p>“That’s the ticket!” agreed Potter, and added
with some disgust, “We hardly had one good
skate last winter—soon as it’d freeze it’d thaw!
But you should have seen the first winter we were
here. Almost two months of ice! This house
wasn’t here then—hardly any in this row were,
and gee, the way the wind used to blow! It
changes around here fast. Kirk broke his arm
falling through these joistses.”</p>
<p>Potter swung down from the table and stood in
front of the ironing board, smiling up at the tall
woman, his hands in his pockets.</p>
<p>“Say, Ellen, got something to eat? Just anything,
you know—I’ll tell you why I want it.”</p>
<p>Ellen put down her iron on the metal guard<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span>
and went into the pantry. She returned with three
powdered doughnuts on a plate.</p>
<p>“Here,” she said laughing. “You’re always
eating, Potter Osprey. Your mother told me I
was spoiling your appetite for meals.”</p>
<p>“Thanks,” he said and went on between mouthfuls.
“I’ve been smoking. I thought something
to eat would take my breath away.”</p>
<p>“Well, if that’s what you came here for you can
go right back home. You oughtn’t smoke—so
there!”</p>
<p>Potter, however, did not stir; and for a time
there was no sound except the thumping of
Ellen’s iron on the thickly padded board. She
was thumping harder than need be, because she
was angry. She was often angry with him. Yet
his prolonged visits with her in the kitchen or on
the back stoop of a fine afternoon meant much to
her. The family already teased her, calling young
Osprey “Ellen’s pet.” Then Tom Meadowburn
reminded them that “Ellen always had a pet.
Remember Wolly Judson.” This sally caused an
uproar. Wolly Judson had been a Winnipegian
of sixty-eight, a town character, a tottering flirt,
who had brought the current gossip regularly to
Ellen’s door.</p>
<p>Potter heard none of this chaffing, yet in his
talks with her he betrayed a small opinion of the
Meadowburns, all except his friend Bennet, with
whom he sang in the choir. Once he told her indignantly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span>
that she worked too hard, she was spoiling
the whole family. Why didn’t the others do
more? Ellen laughed heartily. She did not believe
any such thing. It was her lot to work, and
keep at it until things were done.</p>
<p>Ellen was neither by birth nor legal adoption a
member of the Meadowburn household. She lived
there, a fixture; and the principal advantages did
accrue to the family. They obtained a willing,
strong and tireless servant, modest and well-appearing
enough to be treated as a distant relative
(and consequently not paid except when chance
generosity dictated). She had been with the
Meadowburns since she was twelve, learning by
heart their various needs so that she could have
administered to them in her sleep. She was now
twenty-seven, a gaunt figure, black-eyed and above
the middle height. The face would have been
attractive but for the toughened swarthiness it had
acquired, and the cheeks perceptibly sunken by the
absence of jaw teeth.</p>
<p>The Meadowburn children had grown up under
her care, the two eldest girls being little more than
babies at the time the orphan asylum in New Orleans
yielded her young and frightened body into
the hands of Mrs. Meadowburn. Ellen had found
time for those fretful and ill-tempered midgets,
in addition to keeping the house spotless, laundering
for six and cooking the meals. Mrs. Meadowburn
had been left free to nurse a collection of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span>
modern ills, and to dream of her youth as the dark
beauty of a northwestern town. Since those days
a morose gloom had settled upon her handsome,
Indian-like face. Ellen had rarely known her to
laugh at all. Even the smile with which she
greeted her husband’s jokes was wan and half-hearted.</p>
<p>It was to Ellen that Tom Meadowburn looked
for the fullest appreciation of his comic genius and
his masculine importance. Few men were more
conscious of both than he, and even in those
moments when the comic mask fell away completely,
there was something in the solemn air of
pompous judgment and disciplinary wisdom which
to any one but his adoring brood would have
seemed most funny.</p>
<p>For Tom Meadowburn the world, whether of
New Orleans or Winnipeg, or the new city that
had lately taken them in, was a place where he and
the wife and children were “getting on.” The
Meadowburn household was, in his mind, something
very much like heaven, himself presiding.
For Ellen, as he often said, it was a refuge under
his protecting arm, wherein she need never come to
harm nor suffer want. And to her credit she believed
him and worked all the harder to please him.</p>
<p>Physically Meadowburn was a tall stout man
with a heavy, pink, unwhiskered face, the pale eyelashes
and tow hair being lighter than his skin,
and the small, quick eyes a transparent, hardly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>
perceptible blue. As a humourist he was not one
of your torrential and generous laughers. He was
sly and dry, a wrinkle, the flicker of a smile, a
knowing arch of the eyebrows being his favourite
manner of accentuating his point. He was in the
habit of twitting Ellen on the subject of marriage.</p>
<p>“Now then, my girl,” he would say, “what are
you keeping from us? What have you got up
your sleeve? Didn’t I hear you come in a little
late last night? Walking, eh—of course, not
<i>alone</i>? We wouldn’t permit you to walk alone.”</p>
<p>“Ellen went to the drugstore for some medicine
for me, last night, Tom,” interposed his wife.</p>
<p>“Well, well, Ellen,” he went on, “you must
remember you’re perfectly free. We wouldn’t
keep you from marrying when the right man comes
along.”</p>
<p>“Yes, and maybe I will marry, sooner than you
think! You watch out, Mr. Meadowburn!”</p>
<p>The pleasure of this stock joke lay in the fact
that none of the Meadowburns believed there was
danger of Ellen marrying, of any one caring to
marry her, at least, whose social position would
suit her. For she did not have kitchen-maid
standards, as they knew. And she believed there
was no danger either. She felt very old....</p>
<p>It was into this somewhat harsh and lonely
existence that Potter had thrust his genial, boyish
appearance, and by some strange affinity of comradeship,
they had taken to each other at once.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>
He too, as she was soon to learn, was lonely and
cherished his dreams; and it comforted her to
have a champion—even so young and small a
champion as he. Was he so young and small?
There were times when he frightened her with
flashes of grown-up speech. It did not always
seem quite nice, quite appropriate. For example,
one evening when they were talking about perfectly
ordinary matters, he burst out:</p>
<p>“You’re like Christ, Ellen. If He could be on
earth He wouldn’t love Dr. Minor or any of those
people in the church. He’d pick you.”</p>
<p>Her first thought about this was that it was
deliberately bad, as bad as his smoking and his
score of other boy tricks. It was blasphemous and
wildly untrue. She sent him away in disgrace,
much discomfited and hurt. Probably this rudeness
of her own was what brought her so swiftly
around to forgiveness, or it may be that she came
to look kindly on his tribute. In any event, she
gave Bennet a note for him, a queer, misspelled,
dignified note....</p>
<p>When Potter returned she told him that he
“must not think of Jesus as a person but as God,
and that was the end of it.”</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">II</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> next Spring, which followed on the heels
of his fourteenth birthday, held a wonder for
Potter Osprey such as he had not experienced before.
Until now the green buds and soft winds
had meant a time for the surreptitious stripping
off of shoes and stockings after school (and out of
sight of home), the agonizing anticipation of three
long months of holidaying, and the making of
limitless plans for outdoor fun. This year he
welcomed the bright weeks not as a rowdy boy,
but with a conscious relish that came from a
deeper source within him.</p>
<p>The Spring itself, as if it also were filled with
a sense of unusual importance, was precocious.
When Potter, late every afternoon, ambled along
the several blocks of blatantly new sidewalks that
led to the church, the grass hid the softened brown
earth with an abundance of delicate colour
wherever feet had not trod, the robins and
squirrels skipped perilously about the pavements
and lawns oblivious of savage man, and exultant
banks of snowballs escaping over the picturesque
shingle- and iron-railed barriers of the old
Clemons place, were just on the point of changing
from their pale shade of willow bark into<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>
round fluffs of dazzling white as big as a boy’s
head.</p>
<p>These Lenten afternoons were moments of solitary
poetry in his days. The still church, the long
slanting rays which came through the coloured
glass windows to the west; the faint perfumes
that rose into the ogival shadows above the nave,
emanating from the hair and handkerchiefs and
bodices of lady worshippers, who made up the
majority (and the subtle pleasure with which he
felt the eyes of these fine women on his broadening
back as he walked down to the chancel carrying
the offertory); the pervasive, vibrant drone
of the organ, which had always been like a physical
caress to him; and the saintly beaked profile of the
rector, Dr. Minor, with its high, peeled brows, and
black, unruly hair, dominating an almost chinless
jaw; and, finally, between the breathing of the
organ pipes, and the shrill singing of the feminine
congregation, Dr. Minor’s broad Virginia accents
and consoling overtones and melancholy quavers—all
these sensations produced a mingling of
peace and the awareness of sacrifice, which was
like a bath of goodness.</p>
<p>The church itself was charming to look at,
built in the late ’eighties of shingles now coloured
a warm brown by many rains, and properly vine-hung.
The little building with its limited open
meadow and well-grown trees drew him at times
when he had no particular business there. It was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>
a favourite place to read. Often he would arrive
an hour or more before the service and sit huddled
up in one of the corners of the deep verandah,
intent upon his pastime, until the brisk step of
the rector sounded on the boards below; and if
Dr. Minor happened to espy him he would be
conducted cheerily into the study, while the lanky
priest put on his vestments and asked him
questions about his work at school and the health
of his “dear mother,” who, much to the clergyman’s
disappointment, came almost never to the
services.</p>
<p>These innocent confidences sometimes went so
far as a mild spiritual examination which had
more significance than its casualness indicated.
Minor regarded young Osprey as promising
material for the ministry.</p>
<p>“The type for scholarship and consecration,”
he told his wife. “A sensitive boy, thoughtful and
retiring—Oh, manly, manly enough! A little conviction
would turn that into spiritual leadership.
His family could do nothing better than give him
a seminary training. And a part of our duty, my
dear, is to be fishers of men, to look out for new
recruits to bring under His banner.”</p>
<p>Minor loved to roll forth militant symbols in his
reflections upon the mission of the Church. His
early gods had been the deeply pious heroes of
the South. Stonewall Jackson and General Lee
took rank with him very little below the Apostles.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>There was one other who shared this secret
ambition for Potter—Ellen Sydney—until a recent
incident in which he had figured shook her
faith.</p>
<p>This affair produced something of a scandal in
the Osprey family. Searching one day through
the shelves of an old closet for one of his brother
Kirk’s discarded school books which it was now
his turn to use, the boy had come across a half
dozen large, handsomely bound portfolios. He
had drawn one out and leaved it over, fascinated
on the instant. The sheets were of lovely texture,
beautifully printed, and the covers of a flexible,
warm-toned, heavy parchment. He felt a sense of
incomparable luxury in the very touch of the books.</p>
<p>The contents were no less absorbing. Between
the pages of French text were reproductions of
paintings hung in the Paris salons of the mid-’nineties,
the majority of them nudes of that
languishing and silken type beloved by the French
school of that day, the studio renderings of a
flock of anonymous Bouguereaus. Forgetting his
search for the school books, Potter took the volumes
to an attic room where he consulted them
many times in the following weeks, and a collection
of nude sketches came from his pencil, copied
sometimes from the originals and sometimes
attempted from memory.</p>
<p>The upshot of it was that his mother swooped
upon him one day just as he was finishing a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>
particularly elaborate drawing. It was taken from
him and shown in excited secrecy to John Osprey.</p>
<p>Osprey was cut of a different cloth from
Meadowburn. In a ruminant, half-serious talk (a
ray of amusement flickered in his eye on actually
facing the boy alone) he quoted the Scripture according
to St. Paul, and enjoined him to resist
putting away childish things until he was on the
way to become a man. Then he dropped a sly
hint that if the youthful artist really had to draw
improper subjects it would be a good thing to keep
them from his mother. There was other good
advice to the effect that it was both harder and
more practical to draw people the way they were
usually seen in life, but this passed largely over
Potter’s head.</p>
<p>He promptly diagnosed the interview as a vindication
and he saw no harm in telling the adventure
to Ellen, but to his utter surprise she was
inexpressibly shocked; so much so that she left
him on the Meadowburn steps without even a good-night.</p>
<p>As he had related the story, coolly, indeed boastfully
to her, the feeling came over her that the
next time she raised her eyes to observe him she
would see a coarse, swarthy young man with stubble
whiskers whom she ought to be afraid of. The
contrast between this fancy and his actual appearance
was a little laughable—yet the notion of his
interest in a woman’s body, a thing he could not,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>
as she reasoned, naturally have seen or even been
strongly moved to see, was more than she could
grasp.</p>
<p>For many days she watched him passing the
house with other boys, his eyes casting furtive and
unhappy glances at its windows, and hardened
her heart. Then she could bear it no longer, and
once more Potter received a scarcely legible, lady-like
note of prim forgiveness.</p>
<p>To-night he was to see her for the first time
since that event....</p>
<p>In Creve Cœur suburb a clear division existed
between the old and the new, marked by a certain
trolly line. Northward lay the flat, banal commons
in which the Ospreys and the Meadowburns lived,
but to the south were houses mellowed by long
custom, set deep in cool lawns, and facing arched
avenues of maples and elms under which one trod
decaying and rickety pine-board walks or crossed
the tremulous bridges spanning a serpentine creek
that drained the valley.</p>
<p>The quaint modesty of Florissant lane, its uselessness
and hidden charm—the thick maples and
high shrubbery cutting off even the sight of neighbouring
windows—made it a fairy road, a retreat
in which Potter had already learned to spend fine
mornings of October and May when his mother
thought him safely at school. As for Ellen, her
first autumn glimpse of it, nearly a year ago, had
taken her back to greener memories in the north.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>
She could never walk there too often; it was as
near to complete demoralization and unbounded
luxury as anything her starved imagination
could picture.</p>
<p>Ordinarily they sat upon the steep terraced
slope at the end of the lane, whence one could look
down its leaf-fretted vista, or peer over one’s
shoulder into the sombre depths of the rarely-visited
Florissant place, but to-night he was more
venturesome. He led her through the path behind
the wall of Annunciation’s big enclosure, until
they came to the end of the terrace. Beyond was
an open field, once the pasture of the Florissants,
and still a part of the property, empty and unused.
In its centre through the dusk loomed a
dark little hillock clustered with poplars and fir-trees.</p>
<p>It was not hard to believe oneself continents
away from the noise of any familiar street or the
lights of Creve Cœur houses. Directly fronting
them lay the dim mass of Annunciation, its half
dozen French turrets and many spires floating
out of the treetops into crystalline starlight. Potter
had often sat in that very spot and pondered
on the mystery of this religious stillness, on the
utter distance which separated its life from any he
had known, its community of young and vital
beauty sternly and perhaps rebelliously subordinated
to withered holiness. By a paradox of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>
law of boyhood, the girls in the convent—boarders
from comfortable families everywhere in the states—were
the subject of vulgar joking among the
youngsters thereabouts.</p>
<p>To Ellen the convent was not benign; it was a
little terrifying and monstrous. All her life she
had been awestruck by anything that suggested the
gigantic and august power of Rome, and her head
was full of legends concerning that religion and
its devotees. Superstition had required of her that
she regard them—not as individuals but in the
mass—as a sinister species apart from ordinary
people.</p>
<p>Potter remarked that when there was bright
moonlight the steep slate pitches of the convent
roof looked as though they were sheeted in snow.</p>
<p>“There’s lots more of those places in Canada
than here,” said she. “They’re not all that they
should be, either. Think of sending young girls
there!”</p>
<p>“Why not?” he asked.</p>
<p>She now regretted her outburst and was annoyed
at his question. She answered primly:</p>
<p>“Why, I wouldn’t tell you, of course.”</p>
<p>He laughed, unconcerned and superior.</p>
<p>“Pshaw, I know what you mean. I’ve heard
those stories too—about nuns being in love with
priests. But I don’t believe them.”</p>
<p>“Oh, you don’t?” inquired Ellen sarcastically.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>
It was not that she did not think it admirable of
him to dislike believing evil of people, but one need
not go so far as to defend Catholics....</p>
<p>“No,” he said. “You know why?”</p>
<p>“Well, why, smarty?”</p>
<p>“Because even people outside of such places,
convents and the like, even people who are grown
up and free to do as they please—well, they never
do anything they want to do. I mean things that
just pop into their heads to do.”</p>
<p>“Ah, don’t they?” asked Ellen, by this time
amused, “And how are you so sure they don’t?”</p>
<p>“I just know. They’re too dog-goned cowardly.”</p>
<p>“Well!” she exclaimed, “that’s a fine thing to be
calling people who behave themselves!”</p>
<p>“Then they don’t think of anything bad that
they want to do,” he persisted. “You wouldn’t
call that being good, would you, Ellen? Pshaw,
what’s the credit in that?”</p>
<p>“It’s well for them they don’t think of such
things,” she declared. “To hear you, a person
would believe you wanted to be tempted.”</p>
<p>“No, I hate it, honestly,” he replied, and she
felt that he was trying to speak truly of himself.
“I used to say that part of the Lord’s prayer,
about ‘lead us not into temptation,’ over twice.
I did, for a long time. Because, you see, I’m really
tempted—always, every minute.”</p>
<p>He paused after this announcement, which, in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>
spite of his sincerity, had a note of pride, and Ellen
broke in, thinking that the moment had come to
speak of what was most in her mind.</p>
<p>“Potter, you haven’t been making any more of
those pictures, have you?”</p>
<p>She felt him shift quickly to the defensive.</p>
<p>“Yes, I have,” he said. “I’ve finished two
more.”</p>
<p>“Well, I’m ashamed of you.”</p>
<p>“Why do you mind them so much, Ellen?”</p>
<p>“You don’t have to ask me why.”</p>
<p>“But I do, because my father didn’t think
they were bad. He only lectured me for show!”
He chuckled at the recollection.</p>
<p>“Ah, Potter, your father is a grown man! Men
do lots of things that you shouldn’t think about.
You’re just a child. Those pictures! What’s the
good of them anyway? Nice people wouldn’t have
them around.”</p>
<p>“Some people would!” he declared stoutly.
“They’re beautiful, or my father wouldn’t have
kept them ... and the one I’ve just finished is
the best, oh, lots the best I’ve done!”</p>
<p>She sensed a strain of profound unhappiness in
his voice, and all her instincts flew to soothe the
hurt.</p>
<p>“I don’t mean to be hard on you, Potter,” she
said. “You worry me, that’s all. I can’t see why
you bother about these things that other people
never think of.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>“Aw,” he said, “never mind, Ellen. I guess I
don’t know what I want. It’s no fun being a boy
when you’d like to be a man.”</p>
<p>They both fell silent, listening to the trees
chattering overhead like live things. The breeze
that stirred them was growing chill, and Potter,
responding to the kindlier tone of his companion,
moved closer to her. His last words and this unconscious
movement of affection touched her. She
put a rough, friendly hand on his arm, and they
sat there in silence for a time. It was he who broke
it....</p>
<p>Suddenly a strange plea came pouring from his
lips in a torrent of eager words, a plea that she
all at once realized she had many times before
dreaded—and laughed at herself for dreading....
She sat, scarcely breathing, with averted
face. He ended abruptly, frightened at the sound
of his own voice. She said nothing. Surely she
understood him. What was she thinking?</p>
<p>She turned toward him at last, and he found
himself looking into her black eyes that glowed
like coals despite the mantle of dusk. Her parted
lips closed in a tight line.</p>
<p>“Well,” she said, with slow emphasis, “if that’s
what you mean, I’ll tell you this. I will never
do such a thing.”</p>
<p>She was on her feet in an instant, her tall body
like a statue of rebuke crushing him in its shadow.</p>
<p>“Come,” she said coldly.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>“Yes,” he replied. “I’m sorry, I’m awfully
sorry, Ellen.”</p>
<p>At that moment, as they started homeward from
Florissant’s field with the darkness between them,
her swishing, angry stride filling him with a new
knowledge of mystery and awe, there was no doubt
that they both meant what they said. But in
Ellen a certain helplessness and fear were born.
Struggle as she might from now on his very
presence would be a menace, and his presence was
more than ever a necessity. For the cry that he
was uttering was one that her own heart understood.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>So it happened that a few months later when the
Osprey family were at a country hotel for the
summer, he and Ellen met in the empty house and
walked hand in hand through the rooms—her
sworn promise whirling in his brain. She was stiff
and awkward, but he was in high spirits, perhaps
a little hysterical, fondly imagining he was entering
upon a new paradise of experience....</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">III</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">Emmet Roget</span>, twenty, and Potter Osprey, nineteen,
both juniors at the University, were sitting
naked one afternoon on the long parapet which
formed one of the banks of Milton’s abandoned
quarry. Behind them the stone wall fell away a
sheer twenty feet to the gulch below. In front,
licking the tops of the three-foot barrier, lay the
broad sheet of deep, clear water. Their white
bodies dripped opaline flakes in the sunset. From
time to time they shivered in the chilly late September
wind.</p>
<p>A pale, luminous dory of a moon floated low in
the delicately blue and pink expanse of sky that
lay over the town. The surrounding flat country
was infinitely still, infinitely peaceful.</p>
<p>Potter suddenly droned forth in the melancholy
baritone the two affected when reading Swinburne
and other modern poets:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="first">“The wandering moon, an optimistic sprite</div>
<div class="verse">Etched a pale border ’round the face of night....”</div>
</div></div>
<p>Emmet was silent for a moment, and then as
though the sound of the quotation had travelled
to him from a distance, burst out:</p>
<p>“Gosh, man, where did you get that?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>The other reached over boisterously and clapped
his friend’s shoulder.</p>
<p>“A trial of my own! All you need to be a poet
is to suffer from insomnia, the way I did the other
night.”</p>
<p>“Well, you can write.”</p>
<p>“Eh? But I’d so much rather paint.”</p>
<p>“Better look out. You may have more talent
for writing than for painting.” Potter sensed a
criticism in the remark, which he privately resented.</p>
<p>“No, the thing I’ll never be able to do is the
thing I’m going to do.”</p>
<p>Emmet did not reply at once, and his sleepy
blue eyes, long and narrow between the lids, rested
upon an indefinable point of distance. The wind
ruffled his dark curly hair that grew low on the
brow and temples. He was the handsomer of the
two.</p>
<p>“Damn specialists and specialism,” he said.
“I keep thinking about a synthesis of the arts.
Take the theatre, for example. Why not do something
like Wagner did—in a lighter, more lyric
vein? Bring all the arts together and create a
new art? I hate this little business of one man
with a pen, one man with a brush and another
with a piano, none of them understanding each
other.”</p>
<p>“A synthesis of the arts is contradictory,” said
Osprey. “Only Nature can accomplish it, at any<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>
rate, and Nature and art are sworn enemies.
Nature takes a tree and gives it form and colour;
its leaves rustle and its branches are wood-winds.
Then in certain lights the tree will have the elusive,
the startling quality of poetry. There you
have sculpture, painting, music and literature—but
it isn’t art, and, thank God, art never will be
such a pudding.”</p>
<p>“Nevertheless,” replied Roget, without controversy
and as if to himself, “Nevertheless something
can be done that way. What about the
church in Renaissance Italy and elsewhere? That
was a synthesis—a man didn’t paint just to be
painting something of his own. He painted for
God’s sake.”</p>
<p>It was really cold by now, and a moment later
they were hastily dressing. Roget murmured:</p>
<p>“‘The wandering moon, an optimistic sprite,
etched a pale border ’round the face of night.’
<i>Ce n’est pas mal.</i> It’s pictorial and yet it’s literary
too. Perhaps you will use words to fix your
notions for painting. What’s that, in a sense,
but synthesis, old-timer?” he finished jubilantly.</p>
<p>They went home in the dusk. These were the
perfect hours college gave them....</p>
<p>The rural University town of the central states,
in the period when electric lighting and telephones
were young, when the automobile was as yet a
rarity, and the popular senior took his best girl
out riding Sundays behind a smart livery tandem,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>
may have been hideous to modern eyes with its
muddy streets, its wooden dwellings and its old-time
murky brick and brownstone halls, but it
had a mellow and quiet charm that comported well
with the spirit of scholarship.</p>
<p>This charm we may assume has been swept away
forever. Gasoline and commercial growth, endowments,
tudorized architecture, prohibition, short-skirted
and long-headed women, energetic chancellors,
a wealthier class of students, up-to-date
burgher emporiums, moving picture palazzos,
Grecian banks, and other vanities of the wicked
age have hidden that erstwhile scene, with its air
of leisure and moderation, beneath a slick financial
veneer that nothing but the fall of federal empire
and the end of progress will ever wipe off.</p>
<p>When Potter Osprey arrived at the Athens of
his native state it was still a function of one’s
education to sit with the more or less elect twice
a week in one of the three saloons and beer up, to
the point where one navigated with difficulty the
crossings of perilously high stepping stones and
sometimes fell off into honest Athenian mud, which
accumulated in viscid pools a foot deep.</p>
<p>If one was only a freshman one might have to
be contented with the private room of the “Bucket
of Blood”—in a small rear section of which
negroes were allowed to drink. Later on, you
aimed for the private room at Steve Ball’s. The
Y.M.C.A. and the Cadet Corps, the latter also a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>
moral training camp under the guise of military
orders, throve, but only among the groundlings.
Two obscure fraternities out of twelve admitted
members who would stoop to either, unless they
were recommended by extraordinary prowess in
other and more popular directions.</p>
<p>In those days the dirt-stained farmers in jack-boots
came to town Saturday morning with heavy
carts of solid produce and departed at nightfall
with almost equally heavy burdens of liquid joy.
Afternoon strollers got their legs inextricably
mixed with frantic, squealing hogs, and the
smell of fresh manure rose to the fifth story of
the Attic House, the tallest building on the local
Broadway. Nowadays the farmers come snorting
in in Cadillacs as often as they please and go home
sober to tot up the double entry ledger with
“mommer.” It is a changed world and undoubtedly
a more leisurely one for college disciplinary
committees.</p>
<p>Potter’s progress for a year had consisted in
desperate efforts to escape his classes toward the
end of the week, and to regain some hold on them
at the beginning. As often happens, in spite of such
practices, or perhaps because of the extra spurts
of effort which they made necessary, he regularly
stood well in his studies. His second year, however,
from the standpoint of conduct, was an improvement
over the first. Roget put in an appearance,
and Osprey wearied somewhat of smutty<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>
anecdotes, at the telling of which he was never
skilful, and found a genuine interest growing in
him for his language classes, and even for mathematics.</p>
<p>In the entire town, beside the poet, there had
been two people in whom he took an interest. One
was a thin, rather angular but not uncomely instructress
in the art classes, who had come from
New York and the Art Students’ League. Potter
never probed her jolly, untroubled character very
deeply, but she had a firm pencil stroke that he
admired, and after a few talks with her he discovered
that she breathed a freer air than the
folk at Athens. To his fraternity brothers she
was a frump, socially impossible. The feminine
ideal of the day was the type of Miss Carroll of
Carrollton, or Miss Brown from Brownhaven, rich
father, proud virtue, sentimental possibilities and
skill in the small town graces.</p>
<p>His second admiration was a grey-haired, lean
descendant of one of the oldest families in town,
a certain Oliver Pruyd, whose hawk-beaked face
habitually wore an ironic grin. He was supposed
to correspond with the metropolitan newspapers,
and his unofficial scholarship had achieved a certain
subrosa reputation. But his gains in his
vocation were obviously slender and it was not
his scholarship that brought him distinction.
Pruyd was the only known addict to the use of
morphine of whom the community could boast.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>Osprey’s acquaintance with him had been casual.
There was something sinister in Pruyd’s mocking
expression and wrinkled, flavescent skin. Once,
however, the younger man had achieved the brilliance
of seeking him out in his small den over the
pool and billiard hall, an indescribably neat and
carefully arranged place, walled with books and
piles of periodicals. Pruyd proved stimulating
through three drinks, introducing many hints of
literary sources and art lore hitherto strange to
his companion. In the days of his family’s wealth
he had ruined his usefulness by overlong haunting
of the byways of Europe.</p>
<p>Beginning with the fourth bourbon, however,
the conversation descended to common levels, and
the affair ended with their staggering down Broadway
like any two other louts expelled from Steve
Ball’s at the closing hour.</p>
<p>The only other consolation was the college
library. In its actual precincts he was often uncomfortable
because he was critically inspected by
elderly persons at the desk for his curious taste
in books. This alternately intimidated and enraged
him—and almost barred him from the use
of the library. But from it he obtained Pater’s
“Marius” and “Renaissance,” prints of Hogarth
and Daumier and Michelangelo, “Tom Jones”
and Balzac, Rousseau and Voltaire, stray bits of
Wilde and Beardsley, and sprinklings of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>
French symbolists—shuddersome bombs in those
days.</p>
<p>The art class, one of the main objectives of his
course (and the sop which his father had thrown
him in urging him to take a well-rounded education
before he settled down to his choice) was a puerile
and primary bore after the first day, a repetition
of the drawing of casts in charcoal, to which he had
devoted two years at high school—with a prim
sketch hour thrown in twice a week in the evening,
the members of the class serving as models for
fifteen minute studies.</p>
<p>A few weeks after the conversation with Emmet
Roget at Milton’s Pond, Potter was sitting with
a full assemblage of his fraternity brothers at a
breakfast of oatmeal swimming in blue milk, biscuits
and rancid butter—which was all the country
town could furnish for some curious reason—and
pork chops well immersed in grease. The
house manager that season was an economist,
loudly cursed at every meal, but immensely appreciated
at the end of the month when the pro-rated
statements came around.</p>
<p>They were not a well-to-do nor a polished crowd.
Raw-boned, plebeian, familiar—tobacco-chewers
from the agricultural towns getting their first taste
of a dress suit—they nevertheless had their pride
and social standards. Potter, for example, though
he liked them well enough—indeed had been dazzled<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>
by several of their more suave and persuasive
members during the first few weeks after his
matriculation—was now, on account of those
standards, nursing a private feud against the
whole organization. The cause of this feud was
their refusal to invite Emmet Roget to join, a man,
thought he, better bred than any of them. They
had taken in two gawky, mannerless Freshmen
that year, sons of zinc barons from the mining
counties, but they would not have Roget.</p>
<p>Potter understood the reason well enough, but
his resentment was all the more keen on that account.
Roget was rejected for personal characteristics
which he himself would like to have exhibited
oftener. He, also, did not quite belong
in the group, and his influence, which for some
reason was not inconsiderable, would have waned
quickly had he been more frank about his own
tastes. Roget did not lack that frankness. He
was poor, but poverty was no bar in that fraternity.
The trouble was that he was not ashamed of
having won the Whittier prize for verse in his
freshman year. He had needed the money. He
pronounced his name in the French manner and
sat in a corner quietly cynical at dances. He was
pretty generally admired by girls, but that could
be a fault in a person you instinctively disliked;
and he turned up one evening at a smoker wearing
a wrist watch. In the first administration of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>
Roosevelt, a man was either a “good scout” or a
“crumb,” and the best looking and brainiest chap
on earth, if he did these things, was a crumb.</p>
<p>The crowd was beginning to leave the breakfast
table, some of them rushing off to eight o’clock
classes and others moiling onto the porch for the
first Bull Durham “drag” of the day, and bawling
a good-natured “hello, men” to students hurrying
past from other houses.</p>
<p>Potter had an eight o’clock class and was late.
As he started off, however, he took up a letter addressed
to him, from the table in the hall, and
stopped in his tracks. He stared again at the
superscription and the eight o’clock class dropped
completely from his mind. The letter was in a
hand that he knew well, and the sight of it instantly
smote him with fear. He looked about to
see if any one was watching and turned to flee to
the bathroom upstairs, the only place in the house
where privacy was possible. On second thought
he walked quietly by the group on the porch and
went up the street. A ten minute lope brought
him to the deserted little nine-hole golf course
outside of town. He could not help thinking how
benign, how untroubled the fields were in the
brisk, delicious morning. They calmed his pounding
blood and sent a wave of optimism through
him.</p>
<p>“What a fool I was to miss my class,” he muttered<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>
aloud. “It may not be anything at all.”
He sat down on a sandbox and hurriedly opened
the letter.</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>“Dear Potter,” it ran, “It’s happened as I was
afraid. I’m nearly three months gone. Dr.
Schottman won’t help me. He says he never does
that. I haven’t got much money, and don’t know
what I’m to do.</p>
<p class="right"><span class="indentright">“Yours truly,</span><br />
“<span class="smcap">Ellen</span>.”</p>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">IV</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> blow, which he had many times dreaded,
but which for two long years he had thought of as
blissfully escaped, had fallen. Until the summer
just passed, that length of time had elapsed—the
first two years of his University life—during
which the affair with Ellen had reverted to its
original innocence. Before that they had drifted
on, taking what opportunities they could find.
Potter, sometimes conscious that the thing was
an ordinary slavery, had struggled against it from
time to time, but half-heartedly. Habit and gratification
were too strong. Then, in a blinding flash
of awakened responsibility, he realized that
physical consequences followed such relations,
and under the guise of moral repentance, he went
to her and told her he wished to end it.</p>
<p>Ellen acquiesced simply enough in this, as she
acquiesced, perforce, in everything that concerned
her. She dumbly worshipped him, but she knew
how much that mattered.</p>
<p>Then had come the summer of this year. It was
accident that threw them together one night, one
very magical night, as Potter recalled. Both
were lonely; the Meadowburn family were all
away on an August journey. Their old intimacy,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>
which in reality had been sordid and furtive, took
on a certain beauty—the sentiment of past things.
Under that momentary glamour forgetfulness
took possession of them.</p>
<p>“She said,” recalled Potter, “that was the first
time she had been thoroughly happy and secure.”</p>
<p>He ruminated on, connecting this sudden, vivid
pleasure of hers, this mood of safety and surrender,
with the deadening outcome they now faced.
His own fear had never left him since that night—that
one night, for it had had no sequel. Now
he interpreted the event fatalistically. Nature
had waited for that happy mood of Ellen’s before
making her a mother. Nature was a subtle
monster, a thing of scheming purposes. She let
you go on and on with impunity and then tripped
you when you weren’t thinking, when you felt particularly
strong because you had put up a long
fight against her. She could even, in this awful
moment, make him thrill with the knowledge of
having created life....</p>
<p>Potter had never had a confidant in the affair
with Ellen. So far as he knew the secret was her
own and his, and had been from the beginning.
And it was something of a miracle, considering
their narrow escapes from detection.</p>
<p>But now that he needed support there was no
one to turn to. Roget was the last person in the
world to whom he could take such a tale. He had
an idea that Roget would laugh him to scorn or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>
question his taste in becoming the victim of such
an intimacy. Roget had been raised among
women and had acquired a knowledge of them
that made his relations toward them seem little
short of uncanny to Potter. He gave the impression
of being successful with many and quite uninvolved
with all. To Potter women were the
paralyzing mystery. It was one of the subjects on
which he and Roget did not meet.</p>
<p>Had there been an older man in town with whom
he had developed any sympathy, a faculty member
or a person in authority of any kind, he would
have gone to him. There were many questions;
there was money to be got; there was common-sense
guidance needed as to doctors and other
such matters, instinctively repugnant and dreadful
to him.</p>
<p>Marriage! Sometimes in the dead of night,
lying awake with his fears, anticipating just this
predicament, he had experienced exaltations,
mystic desires for sacrifice and immolation and
simple, laborious living; it was a surviving remnant
of his intense religious life as a very young
boy. In such moments his mind had admitted the
idea of marriage. In broad day, the thought became
abhorrent. And in all the broad days that
had preceded this one, his fears also had melted
with the sun; but now they would not melt....
He knew perfectly well that he would urge marriage
upon Ellen, sincerely in a fashion. He knew<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>
also that she would flatly refuse, and that he
would accept her refusal with relief.</p>
<p>Yet what was she to do? He counted on no
sympathy from the prudish Meadowburns. They
would loudly invoke the names of their young
daughters and fly from the scene. The family
physician, Schottman, a tolerant German-born
physician of real ability, had taken an odd sort of
liking to Ellen and never visited the house without
having a talk with her wherever he happened
to find her at work. He had been their hope in
earlier discussions. With him, there would be no
danger, while with others—Potter writhed before
the spectres of horrible little operating rooms, of
death in agony, of murder and police and squint-eyed
judges with nose-glasses. But Ellen’s letter
had settled Schottman.</p>
<p>It was past noon before he realized it, and the
golf links were becoming populated by a few
straggling faculty men with clubs. He aimed for
an outlying street which led into town and the act
of motion toward a definite objective revived his
spirits, which had been sinking hopelessly into the
quicksand of despair. He went to the bank and
drew out all of his small balance but a dollar.
The previous day his check had come and he had
paid his scot for October at the fraternity house.
It was rare that his remittances from home exceeded
forty dollars a month. He converted the
larger part of the sum he withdrew into a money<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>
order at the Post Office and mailed it to Ellen,
with a short note in which he told her he would
see her somehow before long, and if possible to
do nothing until then.</p>
<p>“Money,” he thought, as he stepped out of the
Post Office, “if one just had enough money one
could fix up anything!”—an idea that had come
to him before in many a tight place and morning
after. He fell to day-dreaming about what he
would do for Ellen if he had money, money in his
hand, money in plenty.</p>
<p>The mailing of the letter had brought a sudden
release to his feelings. It would cheer her up to
hear from him.</p>
<p>In this state he responded more willingly to
passing acquaintances, did not avoid the livery
stable man and the candy man, and the dozen other
town bodies who were always about. Catastrophes,
he reflected, had their good points. They
furnished a reason for cutting classes and loafing
on a beautiful Fall day. He was tempted for a
moment to call on Roget, who lived, as no one but
he would have lived, on the native side of Broadway,
a short distance off. But he decided against
it. He would be pressed to talk about his trouble
and that he had resolved not to do except in the
worst extremity, and certainly not to Roget.</p>
<p>The decision to avoid Emmet left him no alternative,
and he drifted into Steve Ball’s bar.
Those dark, quiet, wet-smelling precincts were deserted<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>
at that hour, so far as his familiars were
concerned. He was glad they were. It would
not have been easy to conceal the turmoil within
him, if forced into an extended conversation. He
would take a drink or two, slowly, he concluded,
go home and try to forget the whole thing, and to-morrow
with a hard head, he would work out a
plan of action.</p>
<p>Frank, the experienced bar man, wiped up the
much scarred and initialled table of the private
room, and hovered in the doorway with a friendly
smile.</p>
<p>“This is the sort of companionship a fellow
needs in my fix,” thought Potter. “Nothing like
it. A good barkeep.”</p>
<p>Frank, however, soon proved too busy to talk,
and Potter was left to his own thoughts. The effect
which liquor usually had on him was to produce
three distinct stages. It plunged him first
into a dreamy and altogether pleasant condition,
in which his lot appeared the rosiest in the world,
and he radiated good will on all sides. This led
to melancholy and a gradual feeling of boredom
with everything, aggravated by a tendency to analyze
his wrongs and conduct long, unspoken conversations
about them with the persons presumed
to be responsible for wronging him. Then followed
a feverish desire for physical motion, and
the making of quick decisions, obeyed on the instant,
however ill-advised.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>The first state of high spirits brought him agreeably
to six o’clock when he left Steve Ball’s for
fear of encountering early drinkers from the
Campus. He was hungry and bolted sandwiches
and coffee in a nameless lunch-wagon around the
corner. He found himself after that in the
“Bucket of Blood.” Night had fallen; the place
was unspeakably sordid with its dim lamps and
shuffling bums, and his problem once more assumed
proportions that harried him. He began to assail
Ellen for ever having permitted the intimacy to
start. Then he quickly reacted from that attack.
A profound, overwhelming wave of self-abasement
engulfed him. If there was suffering to be
done poor Ellen would endure all of it. She had
been his victim and had given him what she had
to give, in all things. Had their ages been precisely
reversed, he could not have been more responsible.</p>
<p>As he ordered another bottle of beer, he became
acutely conscious that his money was disappearing.
There was no more to be had, certainly for
several days. Mails had to take their time, even if
there was anything to hope for from them. This
sense of impecuniousness made his mind veer to
another complicated grievance. In one of the
banks at home, held for his use at majority, lay
what now seemed an incredible sum of money,
from his grandmother’s estate. He had twice entreated
his father to allow him to draw modestly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>
on it. His father had not refused in either case,
but had probed good-naturedly into his reasons
for desiring it. But why, thought the boy, should
his father have to know his private business? How
could his father understand his peculiar needs?
These questions had rankled time and again.</p>
<p>And now, he reflected bitterly, now that the
trust fund might be the means of lightening a
burden that would follow him all his life, it would
be the same old story with his father. He would
have to make a full confession of the case. But he
could not do this. How could he tell his father
such a yarn? Weren’t his whole family concerned
as much as he? Was there not a question of blood
relationship involving them? Common delicacy
and loyal feeling toward them demanded that he
conceal the truth, unless he took the burden upon
himself and parted with them completely. He
had thought all this out before and settled it.
There was nothing he could say to his father.</p>
<p>These reflections, repeated over and over again,
embroidered upon, attacked at every angle,
adorned with many duplications of the same
phrases, led nowhere. The bill at the “Bucket of
Blood” had to be paid, and nothing was left to do
but to get up and go. Well, well, he felt like moving
anyhow. If only there were anything he could
do now, right now, it would be a relief. He started
walking rapidly uptown toward the fraternity<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>
house. Then at the corner where Broadway
turned into his own street he stopped abruptly.</p>
<p>“What a fool!” he muttered aloud. “What a
triple-plated iron-head! Why did I send that
money to Ellen? Why didn’t I go myself?” He
stopped and began to curse his idiocy with all the
eloquence and thoroughness of which he was capable.</p>
<p>Then he reflected, again aloud: “But is it too
late? The jerk-water goes over to Jamestown in
half an hour. I could make it to Jamestown. But
I haven’t enough money to go all the way. Well,
I’ve got enough to go to Jamestown.”</p>
<p>The thought of bluffing his way on the through
train with a promise to pay at the other end
rushed into his mind. His name, his identification
by letters in his pocket, his father’s acquaintance
with railroad officials, these might carry him
through. He turned and started toward the station.</p>
<p>“If I can get home I can raise that money. I
can raise it on a note. I can get some Jew like
Stern to shave the note. Or maybe I can get it
from Colonel Cobb. I’ll bet Colonel Cobb would
let me have it.”</p>
<p>This line of reasoning had to be exhausted with
the usual number of variations and redundancies
as he sat in the little branch train of two cars,
with its dusty, worn plush seats, its threadbare<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>
blue trainmen ambling back and forth, and its
scattering of anonymous, unimportant-looking
passengers. Fortunately nobody was leaving
town that he knew. That was to be expected six
weeks after the opening of term. For the first
time, the thought struck him that he himself was
bolting, perhaps for several days, without the formality
of an excuse from the Dean, without even
notifying the men at the house. Ordinarily this
would have been a serious infraction of the rules,
punishable by suspension.</p>
<p>“I can’t help it,” he thought, “I’ve <i>got</i> to go.
If they knew why I guess they’d think so.”</p>
<p>This, however, upon reflection, sounded illogical
and inadequate. The danger of trouble with the
authorities would not down so easily. There’d
be mystery in his disappearance, a search would
be made for him in the morning, and a wire probably
sent to his folks. A moment later he had the
solution. How easy! He could fix that up by telephoning
the fraternity from Jamestown. It
would cost him a quarter and he’d still have more
than a dollar left. He would get old Ed Taylor to
see the Dean to-morrow. Some lie would do. Ed
could turn the Dean around his finger. Maybe
he could keep the whole thing from his father.
He could, if he slipped back to town on the next
night’s train. If his father got hold of it, he’d
be puzzled, want to know things, and this was no
time to be submitted to questioning of any kind.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>“At the same time,” he pursued, “I’d better
not try the through train. Fellows have been
pinched for it. They might take me off the train
at Fayette, and then, oh, my God....”</p>
<p>A picture rose before him of a night in the
county jail, of wiring home for money to pay his
fine, of his father coming to Fayette, of scandal
untold and unending, and no help to Ellen whatever.
Rather the reverse, because he would be in
disgrace and his hands, therefore, completely tied
for some time to come.</p>
<p>“No, I can’t try the through train. Too big a
chance. I wonder how about the freight. Hell,
plenty of other fellows have done that, with no
worse results than a swipe on the ear or a bawling
out. Besides I’ve got a little money. Brakies are
all right.”</p>
<p>The wind at that moment coming through the
leaky train was devilishly sharp, and he had no
overcoat, nothing but his fall-weight suit. It
would be still colder later, especially on an unprotected
freight car roof, which was the only
place he could think of to ride.</p>
<p>“Can’t help it,” he concluded. “It’s got to be
the freight. I can get a half pint of rot gut at
Jamestown. Keep me warm enough. It’s just a
nice little ride in the open air.”</p>
<p>An hour later, with his hat pulled down over his
eyes, and his bottle in his breast pocket, Potter
stepped from the smoke-draped, kerosene-smelling<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>
barroom of the little junction town. By buying
a round of beer for two loafers he had obtained
the advice and information he wanted. The
freight train now resting on tracks just back of
those on which the through train was soon expected
would pull out for his destination about
ten-thirty. He crept down perhaps a half a dozen
cars from the station and found himself practically
in open country. An overgrown fence lay
twenty feet to the side of one of the big, dirty-looking
red cars. He sat down in the shadow of
the fence to wait, listening to the frogs in the dim,
unwelcoming marshes behind him.</p>
<p>Once as he sat there a man ran along the top
of the train from the caboose far off at the end of
the line of cars and came back. Once just a little
before the scheduled hour, he heard cinders being
crunched under foot in the direction of the engine.
The flashing rays of a lantern, swung from an invisible
shoulder, played under the cars and the
figure carrying it passed by hurriedly on the other
side. At every coupling the lantern was swung
up between the cars. Osprey knew now why the
roustabouts had told him to lie low and keep away
from the train while it was still.</p>
<p>“Wait ’til she gives her first jerk, then grab
her and climb like yer momma was after you.”</p>
<p>Whistles shrieked and soon a long, noisy shiver
travelled down the length of the cars. Potter
jumped for the iron treads closest to him. The<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>
train was moving off and he with it. Once on top
of the car, he laid full length, making himself as
small as possible on the side of the roof farthest
from the station, until it should be passed. Beyond
the little town he breathed freely, took a
comfortable seat on the flat boardway in the
centre with his legs dangling over the car’s end,
and gripped the rusty steel shaft of the brake.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">V</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">At</span> first he did not mind the bumping, nor the
penetrating wind, nor the coldness of the metal on
his palms. The occasional showers of cinders
were annoying, and this grew worse as the train
increased its speed. Nevertheless, he was exhilarated;
the motionless friendly stars overhead, the
sense of succeeding in a wild and unreasonable adventure
gave him courage and high spirits. He
only had to stand it for a few hours and a few
hours of discomfort never had killed anybody.</p>
<p>Misgivings crept over him gradually. His seat
was being severely lambasted by the bumping. It
seemed incredible, in a way, how it kept up and
the violence of it. The steel bar to which he held
grew increasingly cold, yet he realized that come
what may he would have to cling to it or stand a
chance of falling. The wind became more biting
and between it and the bar his fingers were stiffening
fast. The cinders, stinging his face with
only brief cessations, might soon be unendurable.</p>
<p>However, he argued, he could bear all these for
some time, and when he couldn’t bear them any
longer, he could do something else, shift his position.
He deliberately decided to stand his present
one as long as he could, then change and stand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>
the next one as long as he could. In that way each
new position would be so much the greater relief.
He would see the night through. A long pull at
the flask revived him.</p>
<p>“I’ll get my second wind pretty soon,” he
thought, “and it won’t be so bad. That flask was
an inspiration.”</p>
<p>The night wore on and Potter resorted to first
one expedient and then another. He put his right
side to the wind and then his left, thus partly protecting
his face from the cinders. He wrapped
handkerchiefs—fortunately he had two—around
his hands. It was no good trying to get a decent
hold of his board seat. He didn’t feel secure that
way. These makeshifts did not help his sore
buttocks, which were being hammered to insensibility,
nor keep off the cold which was creeping
over his whole body, but they lessened the number
of his pains.</p>
<p>Finally he could endure sitting no longer. He
laid down first on one side, then on the other, on
his belly, and even for a while on his back. He
threw his arms around the brake shaft and doubled
his body into a bouncing, shaken ball, in order
to keep the cold out of his vitals. At the
moment when he thought he was beginning to see
the end of his endurance the train ambled benevolently
to a stop. He breathed a sigh of thanks
and drank.</p>
<p>They were on a siding. As the train continued<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>
still, for five minutes, for ten minutes, a fresh fear
assailed him. He had forgotten about the train
crew. The fellow at Jamestown had told him to
get off and hide whenever the train stopped.</p>
<p>“You got to do that if yer ridin’ in sight,” he
said. Indeed, had the man been a professional
tramp instead of a village lounger, he would have
scouted the whole idea of riding on top.</p>
<p>But by this time Potter was so stiff and sore in
every muscle that he feared being unable to climb
back while the train was in motion. The relief
from the rushing wind and bumping and cinders
was too much. It was too sweet to sit there and
recover some use of his limbs, to feel the warm
blood in him once more for a brief spell. If he
could only smoke or get up and walk about—but
that would be dangerously courting attention.
He had gone this far, and he would finish it;
there was no sense in taking more chances than
were necessary.</p>
<p>It was unearthly still. Not a living thing
seemed to stir for miles about, over the uninterrupted
fields of stubble just visible in the
starlight. Even the frogs were silent. Against
the sky far off he saw the silhouette of a group
of buildings and trees, but they seemed like apparitions
in a dream. On the train he was in a
separate world, cut off from the other, a lonely
world consisting of himself and his thoughts.
The long, tapering string of dark cars ahead<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>
struck him like a procession of elephants asleep.
They were impersonal and cruel, but alive; and
presently would begin to sway and lumber frightfully
through the murk. With their stopping his
life, it seemed, had stopped.</p>
<p>Time went on. They had been there on the
siding for fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes. Suddenly
he was conscious of a low, blurred humming
which rose from the main tracks alongside, and a
succession of whistle blasts at a great distance
broke the monotony. The buzz of the rails grew
louder and the whistles shrieked again. His tussle
with discomfort was about to begin once more,
but he felt infinitely rested and refreshed. He sat
up straight and peered down the tracks for the
sight of a headlight.</p>
<p>“Hullo!”</p>
<p>The head and shoulders of a man appeared
over the top of the car, followed by a short, wiry
body.</p>
<p>“What the hell’s this? How’d you get here?”</p>
<p>“I’ve got to get to Mississippi City, to-night.
I’m from the University up at Athens.”</p>
<p>“Don’t care where yer from. This here ain’t
no place fer you.”</p>
<p>“Say, old man, you’re not goin’ to put me off
now, are you?”</p>
<p>“H’m.” The man leaned over and inspected
him familiarly.</p>
<p>“Yeh, you don’t look much like a bum. University<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>
up at Athens, eh? I’ve heard some about
you God damn loafers, raisin’ hell on trains.
Why the Christ can’t you ride in the cars where
you belong?”</p>
<p>“Didn’t have the price.”</p>
<p>“No. An’ you think this railroad’s a charity institootion?”</p>
<p>“Say,” pleaded Potter, “honest, this is a life
and death matter. It’d be a dirty trick to put a
fellow off. Le’ me go the rest of the way, go on.”</p>
<p>The brakeman was obviously relenting. He
gazed at Potter’s huddled, unhappy looking figure
while the passenger train, like a streak of exploding
lights on a whirling black band, shot deafeningly
by.</p>
<p>“How far are we, anyway?” asked Potter.
“Must be more than half way.”</p>
<p>The brakeman chuckled.</p>
<p>“We ain’t even a third of the way yet. Guess
you’ve been plenty cold up here.”</p>
<p>The first sentence fell heavily upon Potter’s
spirits.</p>
<p>“Gee, seems longer’n that,” he said, as casually
as he could manage.</p>
<p>“Got on at Jamestown, did you?”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“You got any money?”</p>
<p>“A little,” said Potter eagerly. “I’ll give you
all I’ve got.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>He thrust his hand into his pocket and drew it
forth with a collection of small change.</p>
<p>“There,” he said, counting it over. “It’s
seventy-five cents.”</p>
<p>The brakeman took it.</p>
<p>“That all you got, honest to God?”</p>
<p>“Every cent. I can get more at Mississippi
City, though. You going to be there a few
hours?”</p>
<p>“Huh,” replied the other, “guess you’ll need
breakfast by the time you get in. Ain’t much used
to this kind o’ business, eh? Well, here’s coffee
money.” He handed back a dime.</p>
<p>“Have a drink, old man?” asked Potter, almost
jovially, pulling out his bottle with a distinct feeling
of pride.</p>
<p>“Sure.”</p>
<p>The man took a long pull at the depleted flask
and returned it almost empty.</p>
<p>“Ach,” he grunted appreciatively. “That’s
red eye! Bet you were drunk, boy, an’ thought
ridin’ free was a picnic. Well, better come out o’
this and hustle up the track. They’s an empty
box car about halfway up. You’ll see it ’cause
one door’s open. An’ you’re God damn lucky,
son. You’d just naturally a froze a lung off up
here an’ maybe fell off an’ got winged. Shake a
leg. Just time to make it. An’ hop off well outside
the yards when we get to town in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>
mornin’. Understand? If you don’t you may see
the judge.”</p>
<p>Before he had finished speaking Potter was
stumbling frantically along the cinder track-side.
In one end of the empty car was a little dirty straw
and excelsior. Two minutes later he was asleep,
jolting happily along the streets of paradise in a
royal coach. An old man in a brakeman’s cap
whom he took to be the king of the country sat beside
him....</p>
<p>A sudden, wrenching jolt and the screaming of
brakes woke him. Daylight filled the car, and in
a moment he was out on his feet, recognizing the
familiar outskirts of his native city. He plunged
into the park, striding vigorously along over new-fallen
crisp leaves, warming his body, which had
been chilled through during his sleep, even in that
protected corner. The woods were gay with the
last of the autumn colour; the morning was dewy
and mysterious under long corridors of trees.
His day’s job seemed easy before him, such as it
was, and beyond that he was too happy and thankful
to speculate. Quite a trip, he thought, thoroughly
surprised that he had attempted it and
come through all right.</p>
<p>“If I hadn’t got potty, I wouldn’t be here,” he
told himself, justifying thereby volumes of alcoholic
adventures past and to come.</p>
<p>He looked down at his hands, his trousers, his
shirt. He was filthy. It would never do to appear<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>
before Colonel Cobb with the grime of a hundred
and forty miles of rough travel clinging to him.
But this was the home town, good old home town!
and he could get breakfast, new linen and a good
wash without the outlay of a cent. He took the
car downtown and went first to a store, then to a
hotel. By ten o’clock he was breakfasting sumptuously
and appeared fairly respectable.</p>
<p>Heretofore, Colonel Cobb had seemed in Potter’s
mind a sort of complete symbol of good fellowship.
The all-weather friend of his father for
thirty years, Potter had heard everything there
was to know about him that could with discretion
be told. He was the old-fashioned type of publicity
man, doing business largely through the medium
of champagne and dinners. Open-handedness
and good nature were traits which a half
century of tradition had associated with his name.</p>
<p>A much older man than Potter’s father, Cobb
wore a beard which was nearly white, but he was
one of those veterans to whom a beard imparted
an air of boldness and adventure rather than of
piety or age. His costume was youngish, smart-looking,
but deeply wrinkled by lounging ease.
He greeted the young man cordially in his somewhat
unpretentious and disorderly office and indicated
an upholstered arm chair to him. Potter
sank into it and the old man leaned back in his
own to survey him.</p>
<p>“Well,” he said, “Johnny’s boys are growing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>
up. Let’s see, are you the second or the third?”</p>
<p>“Third, Colonel.”</p>
<p>“I know your brother Kirk better’n I do the
rest of you. I see a good deal of him up at the
Mercantile Club. Kirk’s a good boy and looks to
me like he’s goin’ to make his Dad proud. You
ain’t old enough to drink whiskey, are you? I
guess not this time of the morning, anyway. Well,
have a cigar.”</p>
<p>He thrust out a spacious box.</p>
<p>“Colonel,” said Potter, “you may be surprised
at what I’m here for. I’m in a kind of a fix, a bad
fix, to tell the truth, and I need money. I’ve got
twenty-eight hundred in the National Trust but I
can’t draw on it for two years, without my father’s
consent. I want to get two hundred and fifty dollars
on a note for that length of time.”</p>
<p>As he mentioned the amount it seemed so enormous
to Potter that he felt a little absurd. He
had never handled more than fifty dollars at a
time in his life.</p>
<p>“I see. H’m.”</p>
<p>The older man was smoking a well-used meerschaum
and took a few puffs on it in silence, looking
at Potter quickly once or twice with a more
penetrating and appraising glance than at first.
The latter noticed, in spite of the Colonel’s genial
expression, that his eyes, in reflection, became a
very cold and impersonal grey.</p>
<p>“H’m, that’s bad,” said the Colonel. “You see,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>
your pa and me are old pals. Now, why don’t you
go over and tell him what the trouble is? There’s
nothin’ in the world you could tell John Osprey
that he wouldn’t understand. There ain’t a thing,
son.”</p>
<p>“I think there is, Colonel,” said Potter gravely.</p>
<p>“Some girl trouble?”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“Now, I’d say you’re wrong. I’d say he’d be
just the kind of man to take that kind of a story
to. Your old man has got nothing to learn about
human nature, son.”</p>
<p>Potter felt the moment had come for fuller confidence
if he hoped to succeed. He had anticipated
this objection and intended to combat it by laying
stress on his own reasons for not wishing to
tell his father. These he felt would make a good
impression upon any man. He launched into the
broad outlines of his story. Colonel Cobb listened
with seriousness and attention until he had
finished. When Potter mentioned the manner in
which he had come to town that morning his eye
lighted up with a spark of the warmth that had
marked his first reception.</p>
<p>“H’m,” he chuckled. “I like that. Yep, I
used to hop those blamed things myself. Then
they got me to workin’ for ’em, and since then
I’ve had to ride in style—but I don’t enjoy it as
much.”</p>
<p>He ruminated on in silence, puffing at the pipe<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>
held in one hand and combing his beard downward
with the other, at every stroke or so stopping to
scratch the tip of his thrust out chin, and drawing
down his lower lip somewhat in the manner of a
bitted horse. Potter noticed the long, blackened
roots of his teeth, his puffy, reddish skin, and the
tiny network of blood vessels and wrinkles that
crisscrossed his cheeks around the eyes and nose.
He felt a sudden disgust for life, for the rotten
universe and for his own silly predicament. He
grew restless, wishing for a decision one way or
the other, scarcely caring which it should be.</p>
<p>“You’re at college, you said?” asked the
Colonel.</p>
<p>“Yes, State University. Two years.”</p>
<p>“How are you doin’ up there in your studies?”</p>
<p>“Well, a little better than the average, Colonel,
right along,” said Potter, smiling. It was somewhat
less than the truth, yet he regretted the
words immediately, as a boast. But the Colonel
did not mind.</p>
<p>“That’s good,” he said, heartily.</p>
<p>He lurched forward in his big leather swivel
chair and laid down his pipe.</p>
<p>“The way I figure it out is this,” he said. “If
you know that there’s two of us to get into trouble
over this money, instead of one, you maybe will
be more careful not to do the wrong thing with it,
so it will get out. As for what’s the wrong thing
I leave that to you. I’m goin’ to take a chance on<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>
John Osprey’s skinnin’ me alive if he hears about
this transaction, and I guess there ain’t much likelihood
of his hearin’ about it from you or me, is
there?”</p>
<p>He ponderously drew out a long black check-book,
inked the pen and looked at it, inked it again
and wrote. Potter received the slip of paper with
its figures written in a big, round buccaneer’s
Spencerian. His fingers trembled in spite of himself.</p>
<p>“But, Colonel,” he began, suddenly feeling a
sense of guilt.</p>
<p>“I don’t want a note,” interrupted Cobb, lifting
his rotund body by the arms of his chair.
“The check’s enough. If you don’t pay me, I’ll
send it around to you some day, when you’re rich,
and you can light your cigar with it or pay, just
the way you please. It’s made out to cash, so’s
you won’t have any trouble gettin’ the money, but
you just write your name along the back when you
get to the bank. Good luck, son.”</p>
<p>With the money actually in his pocket, Potter’s
despondency abruptly returned. After all, what
had he accomplished? The money was useless so
far as restoring Ellen to her normal self was concerned.
Much more—a simply unrealizable sum—would
be needed to enable her to go away in
peace and have her child with dignity and comfort.
At best, this would only pay the price of a
crime....</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>He found her in much the same mood as his own,
tired and resigned. She did not complain or accuse
any one at all. But she seemed aching with
dull resentment at the inevitable, friendless future,
hating it and fearing it. She told him directly
that she was not to have an operation. Dr.
Schottman had warned that in her case it meant
an exceptional risk. Her health was not good and
having the baby would put her in fine shape....
Potter felt the sting of a lash in every word she
uttered. He burst out at last.</p>
<p>“Ellen, you must marry me. You must.
There’s no other way out.”</p>
<p>She did not laugh at him, but she simply refused
to heed him. If she had consented he would
have felt in that moment infinitely happier; and
for even a ray of light in his present darkness,
he would have abandoned a great many of the future’s
promises.</p>
<p>“But what will you do?”</p>
<p>“Dr. Schottman has arranged everything for
me. He’s to take me to a hospital in a few weeks.
I could wait a month or two longer, I suppose,
without their knowing it, but I might as well go.
At the hospital I’ll have to work, until my time.
Then he’s fixed it with some people for me to stay.
They won’t mind anything. He’s told them all
about me. They’re patients of his, nice people
and well off. The Meadowburns will never know
anything, they’ll never see me again. Not even<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>
the doctor knows about you and nobody will if
you keep still. I’m just to walk out and disappear.”</p>
<p>Potter stumbled down the stairway of the pretentious
new Meadowburn house in a daze of misery
and meanness. Nightfall found him lying face
downward in the dried leaves of the park where
the woods were thickest. He might have built his
house there and never have been discovered for a
generation. He might have become like “Clothes-pole
Tom,” a hermit hero of his childhood, and
sold gopher skins for a living. Some such method
of losing himself would have been sweet....</p>
<p>But youth walks forward even though it harbours
corroding secrets. He could not escape the
vision of Ellen in a hospital uniform, worn and
broken-spirited, carrying heavy buckets of dirty
water and swabbing down floors with a mop. He
went back to college, lifeless and desperate, whipping
himself into work with torturing thoughts.
By January even his family saw something was
wrong, and his father, who saw farthest, told him
to make his own plans, to leave school and go
where he liked. After a week of dismal idleness
at home there followed a telegraphic correspondence
with Roget. The two started off together
to New York. Three years later, crossing the Atlantic
to Paris, Osprey still had not returned to
his native city, and he repeated his oath never to
go back there again if it could be avoided.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">VI</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">What</span> Ellen Sydney had expected to be her trial
by fire proved quite the opposite. It was the beginning
of a new and kinder life. For if she had
been unhappy at the Meadowburns’ it was because
of a deep-seated difference between her own native
impulses and those of her keepers. Long
habit in a narrow rut, listening daily to a cautious
and inglorious philosophy, had fostered in her
the belief that the great world outside was monstrous
and cruel; but she did not find it so. On
the contrary, there were many to appreciate her
cheerful courage and ready laugh, and return it
with affection. Life at the hospital was novel and
filled with congenial activity. Behind its unmoral
walls was an anonymous and practical community
in which her shame quickly melted from her daily
thoughts. After the first few days of strangeness
and mutual curiosity she saw that none cared how
she had come by her situation. Nor were her duties
burdensome; without the normal occupation
they gave her she would have been ill at ease.</p>
<p>The picture of a drab and bitter Ellen, clattering
about a sordid environment with pail and mop—which
gave Potter so many secret twinges in
his New York room—never came true.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>She interested herself in the patients, most of
whom she discovered to her surprise were even
less able to cope with misfortune than she; the
small purse which Dr. Schottman allowed her from
the funds Potter had given her was always half
open. The many varieties of mothers, and the innumerable
enchanting babies fascinated her; but
no more so than the coming of her own. As the
weeks went by her condition, the manifestations
of life within her, gave her increasing importance.
It made her for the first time interesting to herself.
She thought that she grew more attractive.
Her body, long attenuated, took on softer contours
under the wholesome diet and freedom from responsibility;
her breasts were her particular
pride. They changed magically; from stubby protrusions
without any character at all, they grew
round and firm as they had not been since girlhood.</p>
<p>Then there were the visits of Dr. Schottman.
His humorous sallies dispelled in a moment the few
worries that came with the long days of waiting.
He brought scant news of the Meadowburns, not
seeming to care to talk of them. They had been
very eager to find her at first, had made a great
stir and called upon the police. Then, as suddenly
as they took up the search, they had dropped it.</p>
<p>“Ah, they didn’t care much, you may be sure,”
laughed Ellen. It was far from displeasing to her
to know that she need not depend upon them. But<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>
immediately she remembered that it was the doctor
to whom she owed her present good fortune,
not herself; and she felt remorseful.</p>
<p>To Schottman, the hospital seemed to be something
of a continuous comedy, and all these
mothers, many of them abandoned, caught unwillingly
in the grip of natural force, were the victims
of a mild practical joke. How much of this
was a pose which he found useful in dealing with
them, and how much of it a mask to hide a disillusioning
experience nobody knew, but it never
gave offence. His homely grin and bracing philosophy
made him a favourite everywhere.</p>
<p>When she held her child in her arms for the
first time a momentary grief oppressed her that
it should be fatherless. But the child grew far
more pleasing to look at than she had hoped it
would be. Its dark hair and unexpected blue eyes
made it look unlike either herself or Potter at
first. Then a vague resemblance asserted itself,
and more strongly on the mother’s side. This
seemed right to Ellen. The less her daughter resembled
the father she was never to see, the better.</p>
<p>Before long she was allowed to take it out in the
perambulator Schottman had bought for her. The
hospital was located in a bleak, northern section
of town, a region long associated in Ellen’s mind
with the foreign population, principally German,
and much sniffed at by people of the West End<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>
where she had lived. She remembered how depressing
that day had been when they first drove to
the hospital, through wintry streets between endless
rows of low-roofed, packed-in brick houses and
frame cottages. They had a humbler and more
domestic air than she was used to, and gave forth
odors of strong cookery, stale lager and of musty
parlours seldom opened to the air. But the four
months of hospital life in their midst had accustomed
her to these exotic touches, and when the
people began to overflow into the streets at the
first hint of warm weather and to take a kindly
interest in her child, she felt drawn to them. It
amused her to have them think, as they sometimes
did, that she was the nurse or governess.</p>
<p>It was a mistake, perhaps natural, that Dr.
Schottman at least viewed with satisfaction. The
little girl’s charm would serve his purpose with
the Blaydons to whom he was taking them. He
had never entertained any doubt that Ellen
would win them in her own way. Her willingness
and modesty, a form of rough good breeding,
would recommend her well. But if the child
should be really attractive, so much the better
for everybody.</p>
<p>“Come now,” he teased Ellen, “this little chick
has a high tone about her. What you think? Better
let me hunt up the young scapegrace and show
him what a handsome little rascal he’s responsible
for.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span>“How do you know he’s young?” laughed Ellen.
He had never pressed the question of fatherhood,
and she was not afraid that he would ever try to.</p>
<p>“And what will you name it? For it’s mother,
eh?”</p>
<p>Ellen had settled that matter. She had decided
long before on the name of Moira, for Moira McCoy,
the pretty, laughing, assistant head nurse,
who had been the first to befriend her. But concerning
this she also chose to keep her counsel for
the present. Another thing troubled her mightily.</p>
<p>“Are these—these people I’m going to live with
Episcopalians?”</p>
<p>He laughed.</p>
<p>“I believe there’s a division in the family. Ach,
these Christian distinctions! They split God up
into small pieces like a pie, and each one takes a
different slice. They are afraid to get indigestion
from too much goodness, eh? But ‘Aunt Mathilda’—that
is the sister-in-law—is Episcopalian.
High church they call it. Oh, very high! It will
suit you that way, I guess. And she is the boss.
You’ll find that out.”</p>
<p>High church. That would do very well. It was
the serious question of her daughter’s christening
that disturbed her.</p>
<p>The day came at last to take their fearsome
step into a new home. Ellen wept a little over her
farewells, but on such a lovely morning she could
not be sad very long. She felt so good, so well,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>
and in the new clothes she had bought for this
event she radiated unaccustomed health.</p>
<p>“Look at you,” said the doctor. “I told you it
would be good medicine. If your old friends
could see you they wouldn’t know it was the same
Ellen.”</p>
<p>She blushed. She had never expected to leave
the hospital so merry. In a few moments they
were driving along in a new-fangled thing called
a taxicab, and she had to hold the baby carefully
to keep it from bumping. It was the first time she
had ever ridden in an automobile, but her thoughts
were too far ahead to concern themselves with the
novelty. A year ago it would have been a great
adventure.</p>
<p>First of all she reflected:</p>
<p>“When Moira is grown up she will love me,
and we will do so many nice things together.”
Then she thought, “Who knows, Moira may have
a father some day, and never be the wiser.”</p>
<p>The doctor had decided that she was to be
known as Mrs. Williams at the Blaydons’. “Aunt
Mathilda” herself had suggested this, and Ellen
was willing enough to consent. But she accepted
with greater reluctance his proposal of a gold
band for her finger. The idea smacked of a deception
that was too bold by far, a deception that
involved higher powers than those of earthly authority,
in her mind. She felt almost a criminal
whenever she looked at it.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>The rattling vehicle swung through an impressive
high gate and they were looking down between
a row of trees. To their left, running
straight through the middle of the thoroughfare
lay a grass grown parkway so dotted with shrubs
that she got only fleeting glimpses of the houses
on the other side. Those on her own side she
gazed at with wonder. They were set far apart,
with generous lawns, and the suggestion of gardens
farther back behind walls and iron grill
work. The big houses revealed their age, not only
by their old-fashioned and heterogeneous architecture,
but by the smoke-grimed look of their
brick and stone.</p>
<p>“How lovely and peaceful,” thought Ellen, fascinated
at the fresh sight of green everywhere
spotted and patched with sunlight. She seemed
to have been wearing dark glasses for months and
months.... She noticed that the driver was
slowing down his vehicle and was craning his neck
for the house numbers.</p>
<p>“My land,” she murmured, “we’re going to
live here.... Look, Moira, look!” she could not
help but cry aloud—and then flushed pink when
she saw the doctor had heard the name.</p>
<p>This was Trezevant Place, its fame already beginning
to dwindle, so that Ellen, acquainted only
with the new city, had heard of it but once or
twice. For two generations the patrician families
had housed there, and a few of the original owners<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[67]</span>
had remained, standing on their dignity, defying
the relentless town, which had long sprawled
up to it, and around it and far beyond, unsightly,
clamorous and vulgar. The snob that is in everybody
claimed Ellen at that moment and she longed
for an audience of Meadowburns and Potters to
watch them disembark.</p>
<p>The cab came to an abrupt stop before the
bronze figure of a barefooted negro boy holding
out an iron ring in one chubby paw. Ellen faced
a front door of many bevelled panes of glass
which reflected the bright sky into her eyes. Her
knees failed her, but with a free hand she grasped
the doctor’s sleeve, finding in the act reassurance
enough to mount the steps between the red stone
pillars. A maid appeared in the doorway.</p>
<p>“Oh, it’s you, doctor,” she said, beaming at
them from under her neat white cap. “Mrs. Seymour
is waiting in the library. Go right in,
please.”</p>
<p>Ellen found herself in a room filled with book-shelves,
and mahogany, and leather-covered
chairs, facing a small lady who did not leave her
straight, uncomfortable seat. The greying hair
was done up in a knot on the top of her head and
behind it was a dark spreading comb. She wore
a light blue silk frock with a white collar of lace
that folded back over her shoulders and left her
neck bare. It was old-fashioned looking, Ellen
thought, yet “nice” as she would have put it,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[68]</span>
meaning smart, and she noticed that the woman’s
throat was smooth and plump. Her graceful
ankles showed, crossed, above a pair of little grey
slippers with very high heels. What a little doll
of a person! she thought.</p>
<p>“Good morning, doctor,” said the lady, shaking
hands with Schottman, while Ellen stood in the
door. Then she turned to her.</p>
<p>“Sit down, Mrs. Williams. You mustn’t feel
strange here, because I am sure we are going to
like each other. The doctor has told me nice
things about you.”</p>
<p>Ellen thought no more of dolls. The assured
voice, and what she could only describe as the
foreign way “Aunt Mathilda” pronounced her
words, awed her. She did not know that this was
what people called cultivated. She obeyed the injunction
to sit down, her eyes glued trustfully but
timidly upon her new mistress.</p>
<p>“I’m not going to keep you long this morning,
because for the next day or two you will have little
to do and will be getting accustomed to the
place. You can take care of the child yourself?”</p>
<p>“Oh, yes, ma’am,” said Ellen, and smiled.
“I’ve taken care of many more than this one, and
done the work besides.”</p>
<p>“I see. That’s splendid. Well, you will have
plenty of time for her. It can be managed very
well. Gina is fond of children and will look after
the baby when you are busy, and then there is my<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[69]</span>
nephews’ nurse, Mrs. Stone. Gina is my personal
maid. The other servants are Marie, who is the
parlour maid and waitress, John, the gardener
and stable man, and the laundress Annie, who
lives out. So the work is pretty well divided.
And then there is Miss Wells, the trained nurse
for Mrs. Blaydon. The doctor may have told you
that Mrs. Blaydon never leaves her room.”</p>
<p>Ellen lost track of this catalogue of servants,
yet she felt a happy sense of importance in listening
to these matter-of-fact and self-respecting details.
It was as though she were being taken into
the confidence of the household. She tried to attend
Mrs. Seymour’s every word with seriousness,
and felt her embarrassment dropping away
from her.</p>
<p>“Dr. Schottman tells me that you have been the
only help in the family. I suppose you have done
only plain cooking?”</p>
<p>“Yes, ma’am.”</p>
<p>“Well, you will have no trouble learning our
likes and dislikes, and the way things must be
served. Miss Wells will prepare most of Mrs.
Blaydon’s meals, which are separate. The present
cook is to stay until the end of the month, and
that will give you plenty of time to catch on. And
you mustn’t be afraid. We expect to make allowances.
Of course, your wages will begin at once,
but I can’t tell just what they should be until we
try you, so we won’t discuss that to-day.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[70]</span>“Oh, not at all, ma’am—” began Ellen, and
stopped suddenly. “Aunt Mathilda” covered her
embarrassment by rising, and Ellen stood also,
with her child in her arms. The act brought
them close enough together for Mrs. Seymour to
see the baby’s face.</p>
<p>“What a sweet little thing,” she said, and
smiled cordially at Ellen. “I hope you are going
to be happy here, Mrs. Williams. Marie will
show you your room and give you everything
you need. Don’t bother about your bags. John
can take them up at once.”</p>
<p>“Oh, thank you,” said Ellen. She stood hesitating,
after saying a halting, awkward good-bye
to the doctor. It was not easy to leave his
friendly presence and impossible to thank him
as she wanted to. But she turned and in the wake
of Marie climbed the broad front steps.</p>
<p>Their carved, heavy banisters and the thick rugs
rebuked her. It was as though she realized that
in this well-ordered house it would be rarely indeed
that she would tread them. Here she was
more definitely placed than she would ever have
been at the Meadowburns’.</p>
<p>As they passed the second story landing two
very small, cleanly dressed boys came out of a big
bedroom, with a matronly hospital nurse between
them.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[71]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">VII</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">Ellen</span> spent her days learning more about the
quaint art of cookery than she ever dreamed there
was to know, and discovering the ways of rich
people which were strange indeed.</p>
<p>One of the first things that impressed her was
the unvarying quiet. Never was a voice raised
that could be heard beyond the room in which it
was spoken, and this applied even to the young
masters, who, if they ever made a regular boy-racket,
must have done so behind the closed doors
of the nursery. Compared to the shouting up
and down stairs, the banging of pianos and doors,
the general uproar of the Meadowburn household,
this was like living in a church. The stately high
ceilings and big stained glass windows intensified
the illusion.</p>
<p>And the armies of tradesmen who came! She
had been accustomed to dealing with one butcher,
one grocer, one baker. Here there were dozens
who handled a farrago of specialties. There
were three or four different dessert-makers, a
pork butcher, a beef butcher, a poultry butcher,
and a fish monger of high degree; there were a
plain grocer, a grocer-importer, a wine-dealer, a
liquor agent, coffee merchants and tea merchants,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[72]</span>
purveyors of spices and sweet-meats, apothecaries
and fruiterers, dealers in milk, eggs and butter,
and a score of others whose business did not happen
to be with Ellen. All day they came and went.
She had thought that supplying a kitchen was a
matter of taking in a certain fixed number of
staples and making the most of them. But here
she found herself in the midst of an immense variety
of esoteric materials whose names suggested
the index of a geography. The kitchen with its
vast conveniences for housing all these things in
their appointed places was not unlike a large
shop itself.</p>
<p>Formal dinner parties there were, but they were
rare during those days, because of the sick woman
in the house. And it was well they were! thought
she, judging by the lavishness of those she helped
to prepare. Mrs. Seymour, however, gave many
luncheons to her friends, and for these Ellen delighted
to outdo herself, since Aunt Mathilda was
not ungenerous with compliments when they were
deserved.</p>
<p>These refinements of luxury affected her unconsciously.
She was soon trying to acquire the
atmosphere of the house, to train her manners
after her mistress, to soften her voice and even
to alter the accent of her speech, which had always,
though she knew it not, been more agreeable
than the average.</p>
<p>This instinct of imitation led her to listen, whenever<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[73]</span>
she could, to the conversations of Blaydon
and his sister. She understood very little of what
they said that did not concern the surface news
of the family. Often they talked of books, and
books were a strange world to Ellen. But one
day the thought struck her that Moira, living her
childhood in such a house would certainly acquire
some of its cultivation, even though no one deliberately
undertook to teach her.</p>
<p>But would Moira’s mother be worthy of such a
companion? Ought she not to make an effort
to improve her mind, so that Moira would be
a little less ashamed of her in that rosy time
ahead when they would understand each other?
To Ellen the difficulties of reading were almost
insurmountable. Nothing terrified her so
much as twenty pages of print. However, once
the thought of her unworthiness in Moira’s eyes
occurred to her, she did not hesitate a moment.
From one of the upstairs book-cases she selected
the largest volume she could find. It proved to be
“Les Misérables,” and there was something she
liked about the title. That night she began bravely
to read.</p>
<p>Hard as it was to make headway in it, she had
chosen the only amusement possible to her. When
she was not busy in the kitchen, mastering the
problems of the stove and the mixing bowl, she sat
beside her daughter. There was no chance to
think of more exciting pleasures, for which, often<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[74]</span>
enough, the youth in her still yearned. Yet these
duties were only confining, never exhausting.
From the sheer drudgery of hard manual labour,
to which she once thought herself condemned until
she dropped, a miracle had suddenly delivered
her. And that miracle was a little child, unlawfully
born. Life held many mysteries for Ellen,
but none of them was as incomprehensible as
this.</p>
<p>The first inkling that they were ever likely to
move from the Trezevant place came to her
through one of those overheard talks between
Sterling Blaydon and his sister. They were sitting
one morning in the brick-walled garden just
off the rear drawing room, a lovely place, as Ellen
knew, to dream and idle in, if it was deserted and
she could have Moira tumbling about on the rugs
at her feet. There were rows of green boxed
plants along the top of the high walls, a striped
awning and the clear sky spread between, like another
mysterious ceiling farther away. There was
comfort and security and the sense of distance too.
It was like many other of the civilized refinements
which Ellen discovered at the Blaydons’, suggestive
of an almost incredible degree of foresight,
of attention to the details of luxury, which the
fortunate of the world had been developing illimitably
since the first man was carried on the
backs of other men. Mr. Blaydon and his sister
often breakfasted in this inner garden on fine<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[75]</span>
mornings, and Ellen sometimes served them herself
in the absence of Marie.</p>
<p>She believed Sterling Blaydon the most romantic
personage she had ever seen. His hair was
almost white, but he was young in body and in
years. His lean, brown face, which she thought
had a tired expression when in repose or when he
was reading, lighted up marvellously when he
smiled. His tall, solid form would have made two
of Aunt Mathilda’s. Ellen loved to peep through
the butler’s pantry doors and see him decant the
special brandy for his friends after dinner, languid
and big-handed and jovial through the smoky
fog.</p>
<p>This morning while he sat in the garden in the
softest of grey tweeds, with his outstretched legs
crossed and resting upon the tiles, she heard his
drawling voice as she placed the coffee service
fastidiously on the big silver tray in the pantry.
Ellen liked to fondle the Blaydon china and silver.
It was spoiling her; she would never want to
touch anything less valuable.</p>
<p>“I dare say it sounds like blasphemy to you,”
Mr. Blaydon was saying, “but I’m sick of this
place after all. I used to think I never should
be.”</p>
<p>“It’s partly Jennie’s long illness. Poor boy,
you’ve had a good deal to contend with.”</p>
<p>“I? Nonsense! But I ought to get her away
from here. She could pull together faster in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[76]</span>
country. That is to say, if she ever has strength
enough to be moved. And there are the boys.
I’m beginning to think this is no locality for them
to grow up in. If I toss a pebble over the wall
there it will land square in the melting pot—perhaps
on some anarchist’s head who will throw a
bomb at me one of these days.”</p>
<p>“It’s extraordinary how well Trezevant has
held its own. There seems to be a spirit in the
place that won’t allow it to be tainted.”</p>
<p>“Tainted enough by coal smoke!” he retorted.
“Spirits won’t stop that. I’d really like to get
out, way out. Not just to follow the crowd, as
they say, but we’ve never had a satisfactory country
place, and I’ve come to think you can’t unless
you make it a life accomplishment.”</p>
<p>“A life is hardly enough, my dear brother,” replied
Mrs. Seymour. “Trezevant is the accomplishment
of three generations.”</p>
<p>“Bah!” he replied, good-humouredly, “we’re
not the slow coaches we used to be. You can get
twice as much done these days in a third of the
time.”</p>
<p>“Well, at any rate, it’s unpractical now,” she
replied, and he recognized the finality of her tone.</p>
<p>Blaydon smoked his cigar in silence, while she
finished her second black coffee and leaned back in
her chair swinging a tiny foot of which she was
proud. In the shimmering, palpable light, shot
with many colours, Mathilda’s face and hair were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[77]</span>
still amazingly pretty. There were many who
would have accepted the kind of slavery that marriage
with her would have entailed, and some
among them who had no need for her money. But
she was not thinking of that. The arts of vanity
had ceased to be a conscious lure; they were the
essentials of well-bred self-cultivation. She had
accepted her widowhood as the final failure of
man, so far as she was concerned. It had been a
romantic love match, ecstatic but unhappy, the
kind that she fancied exhausted the capacity for
passion; and now her thoughts ran upon the future
of her brother’s household. For if Blaydon
entertained any illusions about the possibility of
his wife’s recovery, Mathilda did not.</p>
<p>She had long held certain opinions regarding
Jennie, which were not shared by the outside
world. One of them was that her brother had
never loved her, that he had found this out almost
immediately after marrying, and determined to
live the thing through because of his old-fashioned
loyalty. Mathilda had quite certain knowledge
that in the midst of the honeymoon he had rushed
away and stayed several days. She knew it had
been his hour of terrible trial, his angry realization
of having made the first major mistake of his
life, and made it in full maturity. His sister was
proud of him for remaining a tree of marriage in
a clearing of divorce stumps—for such their social
world was rapidly becoming.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[78]</span>But her theory was that Jennie had never forgiven
him, never in a sense recovered from it.
She had welcomed her children in order the more
to seal up the truth from others; but she had
borne them late, and the birth of the second son,
Robert, had doomed her to physical helplessness.</p>
<p>This theory explained to Mathilda every peculiarity
of Mrs. Blaydon’s character, every inexplicable
episode which had occurred in the house
since she had joined them. Jennie had never
liked her; perhaps suspected that she knew her
secret. Part of Jennie’s satisfaction in having
the children was that they would help her to
dominate her sister-in-law and the household, in
the rôle of mother. As adversaries they had a
healthy respect for each other. But Jennie’s sustained
firmness of will was less effective than Mathilda’s,
because it was less charming and less
hidden. Luck was simply against Jennie. It was
Mathilda who would win and then (though Blaydon
did not know she had thought much about it)
they would go to the country. Naturally this
would be their first move. It was inevitable because
it was the thing that people of their sort
were doing, and because automobiles had made it
feasible.</p>
<p>As though she felt that she might hint some of
this that was in her mind, she broke the silence.</p>
<p>“Speaking of the country, I’ve had my eye for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[79]</span>
a long time on those tracts in the Errant River
hills, where the McNutts have bought.”</p>
<p>Sterling Blaydon slowly took his cigar from his
mouth and smiled. Like all men of means he liked
to have opportunities to display his foresight presented
to him without going out of his way to invite
them.</p>
<p>“Well then, you’ve had your eye on what will
in all probability be your future home. I’ve been
picking up that land right along. I’ve got about
three hundred acres of it. Moreover, though the
Country Club site committee hasn’t decided officially
yet, I know for a fact they are going to take
the contiguous property. It’s cheap enough just
now, and the club isn’t lavish.”</p>
<p>He was fully satisfied with the glance of admiration
Mathilda gave him.</p>
<p>“Why, Sterling,” she said, “how long have you
been at that?”</p>
<p>“Since a little while after Hal was born. I got
to thinking then this wouldn’t do.”</p>
<p>“Well, it never occurred to me until this year.”</p>
<p>He rose, stretching to his full height to shake
the indolence from his body.</p>
<p>“I’ve even got an architect to work. But I dare
say you’re right and we can’t think about it yet.
I certainly can’t drag Jennie through a radical
change like that, and I haven’t even told her for
fear it would fret her. But the moment she’s better—You<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[80]</span>
don’t say whether you would really
like it or not, Mathilda.”</p>
<p>“Certainly I shall like it, dear boy.”</p>
<p>He went off humming to his wife’s room, before
going out. He was, Mathilda thought, more attentive
to her than many an enamoured husband,
and she admired him for it.</p>
<p>The idea of moving to the country at first frightened
Ellen, with that pitiful fear which all dependents
have of impending change. What will
become of them, they ask themselves, in the general
forgetfulness?—and a hundred misgivings
and imagined instances of dissatisfaction on the
part of their masters throng their minds.</p>
<p>But had she felt secure it would have pleased
her. The old house was too formal, too heavy
with the fragrances and lingering stiffness of a
past day. She could never quite grow to like the
eternal quiet. A hearty clattering now and then
would have relieved her pent-up vitality. She
would have liked, just once in a long, long while
to listen to one of Tom Meadowburn’s stories, or
hear Bennet shouting in the back yard.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[81]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">VIII</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">But</span> Mrs. Blaydon grew neither better nor
worse and they remained at Trezevant Place.
And when Moira was a year and a half old a
fresh sorrow visited her mother. So rapid and
unforeseen were the steps by which it came that
Ellen scarcely realized what was happening.</p>
<p>To her, indeed, the child seemed to acquire new
marvels of goodness and beauty every day, but
she imagined it was only her mother’s pride that
made her think so. She was not the sort who
would boast of the deeds of her offspring.</p>
<p>Then she grew aware that others shared her
interest. More and more, in particular, she found
the child, when she came to look for her, in the
company of Aunt Mathilda, even in that lady’s
arms, most happily at home and warmly welcome.</p>
<p>“It is going to be very improving for Moira,”
was her thought, and she realized with a pang
that she had been reading Hugo’s book for more
than a year now, and was not yet halfway through
it.</p>
<p>Mrs. Seymour’s brother was among those who
noticed her partiality for the baby.</p>
<p>“Look,” she said to him one day, with enthusiasm,
holding out one of the child’s tiny pink<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[82]</span>
hands, “how remarkably made they are. She’s
the same all over. I don’t think I’ve ever seen
such a perfect baby.”</p>
<p>Blaydon laughed, thereby eliciting a brilliant
response in kind from Moira. The vibrations of
his big voice had tickled her young flesh.</p>
<p>“Well, Mathilda, the broadest road to your
heart is still a pair of hands. I remember your
telling me that poor old Ned first got you with
his.”</p>
<p>“Hands and feet,” she replied. “I don’t mind
anything else but they ought to be beautiful.”</p>
<p>A few days afterward he came upon her in the
garden, again with Ellen’s daughter.</p>
<p>“Que voulez-vous,” she was saying, “que voulez-vous,
ma p’tite? Voulez-vous maman?”</p>
<p>The soft syllables seemed to please Moira’s
ears, for she was mirthfully bubbling things that
sounded not unlike them. As Blaydon stepped out
he thought his sister a little apologetic, but she
did not put down the child.</p>
<p>“The little thing wandered out here while I
was reading,” she said. “She quite seems to follow
me about.”</p>
<p>“You don’t find it annoying?” he asked.</p>
<p>Her reply served notice upon him that she had
caught his note of irony.</p>
<p>“Oh, no.... I’m not such a busy woman as all
that.”</p>
<p>He glanced at the book she had been reading.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[83]</span>
It lay flung face downward with both backs spread
out on the table, “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard.”
Blaydon recalled the story and somehow
connected it in his mind with his sister’s essential
solitude—her dependence upon his own family for
affection.</p>
<p>“I suppose,” he pursued, the thought forming
suddenly from nowhere, “that you are going to
adopt her?”</p>
<p>Mathilda looked up sharply. She pretended to
detect in his words more of approval than of inquiry
and replied as though he had offered a suggestion.</p>
<p>“You’re not serious, Sterling?”</p>
<p>Blaydon’s intuition surprised him. He had
struck fire, where hardly more than a joke had
been intended.</p>
<p>“Why not?” he asked, with a good-natured
shrug.</p>
<p>“It seems cruel, somehow,” she replied. Her
tone was as detached as though she had said, “it
seems too green,” of a dress-cloth.</p>
<p>“I can’t quite see that. Mothers are proverbially
unselfish—”</p>
<p>“She would have to be brought up with your
boys, Sterling. Have you thought of that?”</p>
<p>He had not thought of that and there was more
to Mathilda’s remark than banter. As if to influence
his reply, the youngest boy, Robert, three
and a half, scampered past them and climbed upon<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[84]</span>
a favourite seat, between two clipped boxwood
trees, chattering to himself and grinning across at
his father as if to say, “I dare you to come and
get me!” But Blaydon ignored him for the
moment. He did not know that Mathilda’s mind
had gone all over this matter of adoption, and that
the question she had just put to him, in spite of
its unconcerned air, was really a crucial one with
her. Upon his feeling about it would depend a
great deal, yet this did not imply that she felt herself
bound to accept his decisions. There were
scores of things that she might do if the whim
possessed her, in spite of him. Blaydon was aware
of this, and though he did not know how much
she had thought about the child, he was inclined
toward caution. She was a good sister—a better
mother, he honestly believed, for his children than
their own.... When he answered it was with a
laugh that had the effect upon Mathilda of some
one opening a door she wanted to go through.</p>
<p>“Well, I don’t know,” he went on, slowly. “I
suppose that Ellen is a fixture anyhow, and young
cubs are more likely to fall in love with a really
beautiful Cinderella than just a handsome cousin.
That is if the child is beautiful. How on earth
can you tell anything about them at that age?”</p>
<p>“You can tell the day after they are born,”
snapped back Mrs. Seymour. “I would venture
to sit down and write the lives of your two sons<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[85]</span>
to-day, and I shouldn’t be far from the truth, barring
death and accidents.”</p>
<p>“So?” he asked, “and have I anything to fear?”</p>
<p>“Oh, no, they’ll come back to the fold, even as
you did!”</p>
<p>Her look was one of benevolent sarcasm and he
grinned. There were many things worse to remember
than the pretty women of his younger
days. But he had come back to the fold ... that
was true, and it was not so pleasant after all.
Change would be kind. He reached over and
touched the blond head of his boy, who was sitting
on the tiles now at his feet.</p>
<p>“Poor old Rob, she’s got you catalogued,” he
said, and the talk of adoption stopped. Neither of
them had taken it seriously—Jennie, unmentioned,
remained insurmountable. But Mathilda had entered
her wedge, without an effort. Being intensely
feminine, circumstances moved toward
her, not she toward them, an achievement that resulted
from indicating definitely first, then vaguely
opposing, everything she wanted.</p>
<p>Blaydon lifted his boy to his shoulder and
walked through the house to the drawing room
windows. He talked little more than monosyllabically
to his children and had a great way of stilling
their excited glee, when he wanted to, by the
tone of his voice. As they stood at the window
he wished that his gaze could go on over rolling<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[86]</span>
hills to the horizon. He wanted these boys to
grow up with horses and vigorous sports; to see
them framed against green earth and wide skies.
He wanted them to draw in their early appreciations
from the bare soil of their own land. Somehow
that now appeared to him a spiritual necessity
of which he had had too little himself, and it
was the leading ambition that possessed him after
a life of sophisticated pleasure.</p>
<p>A week later Mrs. Blaydon died. It was as
though the new direction of their thoughts had
penetrated to her intuitively and left her without
strength to battle further.</p>
<p>It was not long before Blaydon felt free to go
ahead with his plans. But the speed with which
Mathilda proceeded to execute hers surprised and
even shocked him. She did not go directly to
Ellen. Instead she consulted Dr. Schottman, and
readily gained his partisanship. It was from
Schottman that Ellen first heard of Aunt Mathilda’s
intentions toward Moira....</p>
<p>For the life of her she could not tell at first
whether she was happy or miserable at the suggestion.
In one moment she rejoiced over the
good fortune of her daughter; in the next she experienced
a sense of terrible deprivation and loneliness.
She was not so sentimental as to minimize
the extent of her renunciation—to hope that some
crumbs from the table of Moira’s affection would
fall to her. It meant a thorough transfer of parenthood<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[87]</span>
and a ruthless blotting out of the truth.
One of Mrs. Seymour’s reasons for adopting the
child at once, as she explained to Schottman, was
that the boys were young enough to grow up none
the wiser. Ellen did not deceive herself. Moira
would never know her, never think of her except
as a servant.</p>
<p>She recalled sorrowfully the two happy prospects
she had brought with her into that house,
“Moira will love me when she is grown up, and
we will do so many nice things together,” and
“Who knows, some day Moira may have a
father....” But Moira would never have a real
father now through her, and Moira would never
love her in the sense she had meant. A gleam of
comfort crept in the chinks of her hopeless speculation.</p>
<p>“If Moira should learn about this, much, much
later—years later when it could do no harm—about
how I have given her up, she would love me
all the more!”</p>
<p>But the stray gleam crept out at once, leaving
her mind darker than before. Moira would never
know, never understand anything of all she had
gone through. She buried her face in the pillow.
In the middle of the night she suddenly started
up, feeling frantically about the room for she
knew not what. Was it affection, love, just the
touch of something familiar? For Moira, of
course ... but what a fool! Moira was gone,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[88]</span>
even the crib was gone. She was alone, absolutely
alone, for the rest of her life.</p>
<p>As she stumbled back to her bed, her hand encountered
the big volume of “Les Misérables.”
She caught it up and held it to her breast. The
book had grown to be a symbol for her of their
life together in fabulous years to come. Now
those years were dead. The book was no longer
necessary, no longer had any meaning.... Ellen
put it away in one of the drawers of her bureau.
She would never have to read in its pages again.
It would be better if she did not, better that the
gulf between them should widen rather than diminish.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[89]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">IX</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is four o’clock of a September afternoon
and brightly still. Over on the clean rolling golf
course tiny figures in all combinations of white
and grey and brown move like insects soundlessly
from one point to another making odd motions.
Even the jays which have been haggling and
shrieking all day are quiet. An occasional tree-toad
or katydid creaks from the false dusk of the
Eastern woods. Locusts drone, and from a long
way off comes the faint click of a reaping machine
at intervals, but all these sounds only accentuate
the silence. An eternal, slow-breathing calm rests
upon the treetops waiting patiently for the cold
of autumn.</p>
<p>With a murmur that grows into a rumble the
stillness is broken by a monstrous motor truck
which swerves into the driveway from the road a
quarter of a mile away and comes tumbling down
the white track, its racket increasing with its nearness.
The driver noisily shunts his gears at the
kitchen door, and Ellen Sydney comes out to superintend
the unloading and disposition of supplies.
This done and the truckman sent away
with a laugh, she strolls into the garden on that
side of the house and is presently at work with a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[90]</span>
pair of shears snipping asters and marigolds for
the table. There are many of them, so many they
must be gathered in profusion. She has the air of
one who is at home among the beds, who has
worked on them and cherished them with her own
hands.</p>
<p>She is a handsomer woman than before. Her
figure has decidedly taken on dignity, and the
colour of her face is a healthy brown pink. Her
cheeks, thanks to the best skill of the Blaydon
dentist, have lost their sunken hollows and her
eyes have deepened from the effect of well-being
and contented activity. She bears herself with
some authority too, having taken a favoured place
in her division of the housework. Her hair is
greying very slightly over the ears and temples,
but her step is as quick and her back as straight
as a girl’s. She wears a blue uniform with sleeves
rolled up and a white apron.</p>
<p>As she reaches the entrance portico, her arms
overflowing with the yellow and brown and purple
flowers, a little girl of six or so with dark hair
bursts from the screen door.</p>
<p>“Ellney, Ellney. Give me a cookie. I’m hungry.”</p>
<p>“Can’t you wait till dinner, Miss Moira? Your
mother wouldn’t like it.”</p>
<p>“Oh, what’s one cookie? <i>Maman</i> won’t mind
just one.”</p>
<p>“She will if she finds out, and if you don’t eat<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[91]</span>
your dinner. It’s me that will get the lecture,
not you!”—and with a look backward into the
past, Ellen thinks of a boy who was once always
asking for something to eat. The boy’s face has
so dimmed in her mind now that if there is a
resemblance she does not notice it.</p>
<p>“<i>Maman</i> shan’t lecture you, Ellney. I shan’t
ever let her lecture you.”</p>
<p>Ellen laughs, not only at what Moira says, but
at the way she says it. She cannot ever get over
the fact that her own child—who is now no longer
her child—speaks the King’s English quite as
carefully as her well-bred elders, and has adopted
an air of superiority in her own right. But in
Ellen’s laughter there is no ridicule. It is the
sheer pleasure of maternal pride. Does not
Moira, they say, speak French almost as well as
English?</p>
<p>“You little darling,” she cries, stooping and
endeavouring to take the child’s hand in spite of
her overflowing burden, “I’ll give you just one.”</p>
<p>“No, two, Ellney—but one is for Hal, on my
word. Isn’t it funny, he’s afraid to ask!”</p>
<p>Ellen thought there never had been a child whose
laughter was more like everything good and who
laughed more often than Moira....</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>Turning in from the Marquette road to Sterling
Blaydon’s new country house, “Thornhill” as
they called it, a visitor with a sculptor’s eye might<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[92]</span>
describe the formation of the land as the huge
thigh of a woman, resting horizontally on the
earth. The private driveway ran along the crest
which sloped on both sides downward to gentle
valleys, while the whole ridge tapered in width
gradually to a round end or knee on which rested
the house in a semi-circle of green. Beyond the
house lay a few hundred feet of clipped lawn and
well spaced trees, and then the Titan calf plunged
into the earth, its declivitous sides covered with
exposed rock and a thick undergrowth of every
imaginable scrub and bramble, with a plentiful
scattering of dogwood and plumb and thorn. It
was holy with blossoms in the Spring, beginning
with the ghostly shad-bush. The edge of the hill
overlooked a broad meadow fifty yards below, as
flat as a lake.</p>
<p>Spread out in three directions from this crowning
point lay Blaydon’s land, perhaps a third of it
in rocky knolls and wood, and the remainder under
cultivation by tenant farmers. The driveway to
the site led almost due west but the axis of the
house itself, which was narrow and long despite
its irregularities, turned toward the south. It
was built to the shingle eaves of rubble-rock and
dominated at either end by two enormous chimneys
of the same gorgeous, parti-coloured material,
all of which had been found on the place.
Broad verandahs, a wide, tiled terrace reached by
French windows; a quaint Dutch Colonial door<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[93]</span>
and portico facing the road; screened balconies
skilfully masked by the eaves; the great living
and dining rooms and library which took up almost
all of the lower floor; the correspondingly
spacious chambers overhead, attested its inhabitants’
means and love of comfort. The entrance
lawn and slopes to the north were laid out in series
of irregular, charming gardens. On the southeast
the hill descended almost horizontally from
the tiled and parapeted terrace near the house,
so that from the living room windows one looked
through the tops of trees to the Country Club on
another hill less than a mile away.</p>
<p>With greater spaces had come more movement,
more things to be interested in, more excitement
and sound, all of which Ellen had welcomed. She
meddled in everything. She had become a creditable
sub-assistant gardener and something of a
bee-keeper, having watched the professionals at
work. The four dogs were her especial care. Two
were morbidly shy collies called “Count” and
“Countess” by Mathilda, and Ellen won the
privilege of touching their magnificent coats and
standing by while they fed, only after many
months of gentleness and coaxing. They seldom
allowed the other members of the household
to come near them and ran wild in the woods.
On the other hand the beagle and setter were almost
annoyingly chummy. The animals in the
stable had their daily histories also, which concerned<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[94]</span>
her intimately. She was a splendid milker
in emergencies and would have liked to keep
fowls, but this Mathilda, who respected sleep in
the mornings, would not permit.</p>
<p>Of the two boys in the house, Hal, nine and a
half, was the keener-witted and the more attractive.
He was already at home among the horses
and rode bare-back as well as in the saddle. She
often felt sorry for Rob, who was left behind
much of the time by his older brother and the
swift, tiny Moira, but she did not humour him as
much as she did Hal.</p>
<p>It was Hal, however, who had ridden a cow so
successfully one day that Moira pleaded to be
helped up herself, and whether the beast thought
her a less formidable antagonist, or was frightened
by her skirts, the little girl was thrown off and
severely jolted. Hal supported her into the house,
himself more frightened than she, and vowed to
his aunt solemnly that from that day he would
never lead her into danger again, and if she got
into it he would get her out. Yet she and the boy
quarrelled too and sometimes went for days without
speaking. Moira would take up with Rob then,
scheming with all her mind to devise adventures
that would make his brother envious. She often
succeeded in these stratagems, until a time came
when he did not concern himself with her at all,
being grown beyond little girls.</p>
<p>The elaborate arrangements which had been<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[95]</span>
made for Moira from the first, and the increasing
complexity of the child’s education, which had
been undertaken very early by Mrs. Seymour,
made it easier for Ellen to regard her as a member
of the Blaydon family. It was only when
Moira misbehaved within her knowledge or in her
sight, that the true mother felt it hard to play
her neutral rôle. While Moira was good she was
a Seymour, naturally, but when she was bad she
seemed to Ellen to be wholly her own. Ellen’s
impulse then, in spite of the habit of suppression,
was to correct her as a mother would.</p>
<p>When these occasions had passed and she could
reflect back on them, she thought it a blessing
that Moira’s correction was in the hands of others
than herself. One instance of Mrs. Seymour’s
wise manner of dealing with unusual conduct filled
her mind with wonder and created for her almost
a new conception of life.</p>
<p>Aunt Mathilda was consulting with her in the
kitchen when Moira burst in and cried:</p>
<p>“<i>Maman</i>, oh, <i>Maman</i>, the calf came right out of
the cow! I saw it. I did.”</p>
<p>The child’s face was a study. She did not apparently
know whether to be very grave, or a little
frightened or to laugh, and in one who was so
rarely puzzled it would have seemed pathetic
had her sudden announcement been less shocking
than it was. As they learned afterward, she had
witnessed the birth, by sheer accident, while in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[96]</span>
the stables with Harvey. Ellen blushed scarlet
and was on the point of exclaiming indignantly,
but Mrs. Seymour checked her with a gesture
and took the child in her lap. Then she said in a
tone the most natural in the world:</p>
<p>“Why, certainly, my dear. That is what happens
when all animals are born, and people too.
First we are carried in our mothers. Then we
walk by ourselves, just as the calf will in a day or
two. Now you won’t ever forget that, will you?”</p>
<p>Beginning the middle of September and for
eight months each year, Miss Cheyney, the governess,
came every morning at nine, and quiet
reigned while she went over the lessons with the
three children shut up in the library. After
luncheon, Eberhard, the man, took her back by
motor to the train as he had brought her.</p>
<p>Ellen was always glad to see her visits begin,
not only because Miss Cheyney was very democratic
and “nice” to her, and proud of Moira’s
progress, but because they ushered in the Fall.
She loved the glorious colours that spread out in
widening and deepening hues over the wooded
hills, until all the world seemed to have put on a
flaming cloak. She and the children would fill the
house with sumach and maple branches then.
And when the men began bringing up the heavy
logs that had lain drying in the woods all summer
and sawing and splitting them for the fireplaces
in the house, she could see in anticipation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[97]</span>
the flames leaping in the chimney and hear the
crackling of the wood in the fierce heat, and watch
the glow of dancing light on the children’s faces.
She had not seen open fireplaces since the New
Orleans days, when they were lighted only for a
few weeks in the year; and never had she seen
anything to compare with the one in the Blaydon
living room which was so high a woman could
stand in it while she cleaned.</p>
<p>And then the parties began. There were nearly
always two big ones each Winter, and between
them a constant stream of dinners and late motor
parties, and informal crowds who tramped over
from the Club to dance. Ellen loved to hear the
music going at full tilt, the new jazz music that
was just coming in. She didn’t mind, as much as
she should have, the young men getting tipsy.
She was thrilled to watch the couples disappear
down through the trees, laughing and chatting,
eager to escape the floods of light that poured from
every window in the house; or slip into their motors
for a drive along the dark roads.</p>
<p>She had always thought of Sterling Blaydon as
a reserved and serious man, and she wondered
how he stood so much excitement. Then she realized
that she was dealing with a new Sterling
Blaydon, who not only stood it but encouraged it.
His pride in the place and his love of filling it with
people was like a boy’s.</p>
<p>A great part of the pleasure she took in these<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[98]</span>
affairs arose from the fact that her daughter was
a favourite. Tall, important men and dazzling
young women were attentive to Moira and Moira
enjoyed it as much as they did. She was growing
extraordinarily self-possessed, particularly with
her elders. Often enough the frank equality she
adopted toward them made Ellen gasp.</p>
<p>Only in the dead of winter, when the snow piled
up a foot or two everywhere and the drifts sometimes
were up to a man’s middle, would they be
without company for many days at a time. During
this brief closed season—for it did not last
long at the worst—Mr. Blaydon usually lived in
town, and sometimes Mrs. Seymour would join
him there, when engagements came in bunches or
the theatres were particularly interesting. And
the children, freed from their teacher, would be
idle.</p>
<p>Coming upon Moira alone at such times, with
her constituted guardians away and out of mind,
Ellen experienced her moments of gravest temptation.
How she longed then to take the youngster
in her arms and pour out the floods of love
pent up within her. These yearnings were made
all the more unbearable by the simple affection
with which she was nearly always greeted by her
daughter; yet at the same time the child’s own attitude
strengthened her resistance. For Ellen
stood in awe of her. The force of training, the
sedulously cultivated point of view, the entirely<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[99]</span>
different environment had already stamped her
with the mark of another caste. Ellen could not
look upon her for more than an instant as simply
the object of possessive human feeling. It would
sweep over her at some childlike expression, some
quaint, serious look. It would be checked by some
unlooked for sophistication of gesture or remark.</p>
<p>Moira familiarly uttered the names of grown
young men who to Ellen were no more than shadows
from an upper world, coldly courteous ghosts
who did not see her even when they looked at her.
Every season the little girl extended her interests
and knowledge into a wider world and grew more
alien. And gradually as the years flew by even
the servants who had been in the old Trezevant
place when they came there, and who somehow
seemed to preserve for her, by their presence, the
actuality of her motherhood, passed, until there
was not one left. Gina, whose sympathy she had
felt most keenly, though the sprightly Italian said
nothing, was the last. And Gina went away to be
married....</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[100]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">X</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">To</span> be nearly sixteen; to have a great room all
to oneself, with high windows that looked upon
surfs of close, glittering, talkative leaves, and hills
far off between them; to have a small library of
one’s favourite books, and a whole corner of the
room devoted to the paraphernalia of one’s dearest
hobby, which was painting; to have a square
high bed, covered with a tester, and a wonderful,
many-shelved Sheraton table beside it, and candles
in old green brass candlesticks; to have a row
of white, built-in armoires full of pretty dresses
and cloaks and shoes; to have all this and to know
one has helped to create it, was to possess a shrine
where the thoughts of girlhood might safely let
themselves go to all the four winds of the imagination,
like many-coloured birds set free, unmindful
of the traps and huntsmen scouring the world
beyond.</p>
<p>But Moira’s real favourite was not the lovely
golden brown tapestry, nor the stained little bas
relief of the Child, nor even the drawings of
Michelangelo and Rembrandt, but a painting
hung on the wall facing the foot of her bed, where
she could look at it the first thing in the morning
as she rose, and the last thing at night as she retired.
It was a portrait of Mathilda’s grandmother<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[101]</span>
at eighteen, painted in Virginia, a year
before she crossed the plains with her young husband.
The smooth, dark red hair was parted and
drawn about the head above the ears like a cap, its
gleam of colour apparent only in the gloss of the
high lights. The blue eyes and fresh complexion
and fine, regular features were done with infinite
tenderness. She sat in a black gown, opening
wide at the neck, against a red background
formed by a cloak thrown over the chair. Moira
knew it was good painting, of an exquisite older
style, though the name of the painter was unsigned
and had long been forgotten. She amused herself
making little verses about it.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="first">“My young great grandmother sits in her frame</div>
<div class="verse">And the red of her cloak burns warm as a flame....”</div>
</div></div>
<p>Many a time she sat up in her bed pretending
to have conversations about the stirring adventures
of her grandmother’s early days, for she
had heard the whole story of the young woman’s
arduous journey and home-building—and also
about the young men who came to Thornhill, discussing
their characters without reserve. One
could do this in perfect propriety with a dead
great grandmother.</p>
<p>“Tommy McNutt wants to come over every day
and ride with me, Grandmother. But he squints
out of doors, and he always wants to help you on<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[102]</span>
a horse and he talks like a newspaper piece. I’d
rather have somebody to talk to like old George
Moore, wouldn’t you, dear? It’s a pity you were
born too early to read George Moore. I know
you would like him”—and she broke off for rhyme
again:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="first">“The courtly old painter I am sure wore lace</div>
<div class="verse">And the things he said brought a flush to her face.”</div>
</div></div>
<p>“But if I should like Tommy I’d have a whole
house as big as this one all my own. And if I
should like Mark Sturm, the young brewer, I’d
have two.... I don’t care, <i>Maman</i> will give me
a house.”</p>
<p>“Then there’s Selden Van Nostrand. He’s
tremendously popular because he makes up verses
about ‘Aphrodite in a nightie,’ but he sometimes
does better than that. The other day he said his
heart was a leaf devoured by the worm of Egotism,
shrivelled in the fire of Sex, and trampled
by the feet of Virtue. I see you like that one,
Grandma. Beautiful Grandma, I have your
eyes—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="first">“Her wide blue eyes have a trace of play</div>
<div class="verse">And the day she sat was a fine bright day!”</div>
</div></div>
<p>Moira finished her morning cup of tea on the
stand beside the bed and recalled suddenly that
this fine, bright day was one of special significance,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[103]</span>
for Hal was coming home from his last year
at prep school. Hal was the one young man she
never talked to her great grandmother about, because,
as she explained to herself, she was his
great grandmother also and would be prejudiced.
She stood in the sunlight pouring through the
window, watching it gleam upon her firm shoulders
and flanks. She had not decided whether she
would go to the station with her mother and Uncle
Sterling or not.</p>
<p>Hal had treated her pretty badly the summer
before and been very satirical, and the worst of it
was she had found it hard to resent because he
had seemed suddenly to be much older and to have
some right to authority. He had been nicer at
Christmas, taking her to two parties and giving
her a set of Verlaine bound in tooled leather, but
even when he tried to be nice to her he had somehow
seemed condescending.</p>
<p>She was in great doubt. Nobody, of course,
would attach any significance to it, whichever she
did, not even Hal, probably. It was only important
to herself. She knew something had happened
to her during the past year that was comparable
to the change in Hal the year before.
She had evidence now under her hands and in her
eyes as she stood undressed, evidence that did not
wholly please her, for she had lately taken a fancy
to dislike women. More satisfactory evidence was
a sense of mental growth.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[104]</span>She had just returned from a long Spring vacation
in New York with Mathilda, not her first
visit but her most exciting one, and her thoughts
were awhirl with Pavlova and Rachmaninoff and
the Washington Square Players, bobbed hair and
the operas at the Metropolitan, and a dozen startling,
vivifying, even violent art exhibitions. She
felt that she was probably much more splashed
by the currents than Hal himself, for certainly
one did not really learn anything at a boy’s school.
Such places could only be high class stables for
thoroughbred colts to pass the awkward stage in,
under trainers far less capable than those they
would have had if they were horses.</p>
<p>And now the question was whether to test the
glamour of these mental and physical acquisitions
upon Hal by waiting to meet him alone, or to go
like a good fellow and see him with the family.
There was, of course, nothing personal about it;
Hal was no more than an opportune judge. He
represented the best criticism the East had to
send back to them.</p>
<p>After her bath she decided for action. She
would go with the others and meet him. “Anyway,
why attach so much importance to Hal?
He’s quite capable of attaching enough to himself.”</p>
<p>There was the possibility, too, of dramatic interest
in his arrival. The year before, on his return,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[105]</span>
at eighteen, he had boldly announced to his
father he was going to war. There wasn’t to be
a day lost, he wanted to go at once. Every man
in his class was going somehow or other. Sterling
Blaydon opposed it, the argument dragged out for
days, and finally the family won. But it was only
with the understanding that if Hal would finish
his last year at school he might make his own decision.
The country’s participation in the war
was now over a year old and the outlook was dismal,
one German advance after another having
succeeded. There were plenty of youngsters of
nineteen and twenty in it, and Hal would insist
upon enlisting. He had, as a matter of fact, and
as his letters showed, done almost no schooling at
Fanstock that year. The entire institution had
been made over into a training camp.</p>
<p>Moira remembered how her cousin had chafed
the summer before, hating his idleness and the
wretched fate of being in excessive demand to entertain
girls. Her sympathy with his groans had
gone a long way to help her forgive his ill treatment.</p>
<p>And yet she had never been worked up to a
pitch of great excitement about the war.</p>
<p>One failing had troubled her ever since she
could remember—the tendency to disagree with
opinions as soon as an overwhelming majority
held them.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[106]</span>It was partly due to the example of Mathilda’s
own fastidiousness and independence of judgment,
but she went farther than Mathilda, and
supposed that she must have inherited this inconvenient
trait from that mythical father of whom
she had been told so little and longed to know so
much. At all events, she arrived at certain conclusions,
by herself, about the war: for example,
that perhaps Germany was not entirely the instigator,
that cruelties were probably practised
on both sides—war’s horrors produced them—and
that after all it did seem as though the whole
world was furiously pitted against two or three
caged-in nations.</p>
<p>She did not entirely like herself for these
heresies and kept silent upon them. But she
promised herself the fun of an argument with Hal.
How it would irritate him!</p>
<p>“He’ll think I’ve lost my mind. Perhaps he’ll
surrender me to the authorities. How wonderful—I
wish he would!”</p>
<p>She took one final glimpse of herself and walked
slowly out of the room to face a hard day. She
felt she would prove a formidable antagonist for
Hal.</p>
<p>But downstairs a surprise was waiting. She
found Mathilda, suppressing a few tears, and her
Uncle sitting in a profound study. Their disappointment
communicated itself to her at once.
Something had happened about Hal.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[107]</span>Mrs. Seymour indicated the yellow night-letter
on the table.</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>“Dear Father and Aunt [it read]: Offered
chance to join aviation training corps,
Long Island, at once. No time to come home.
Wish me luck enough to get over soon. Love.
Hal.”</p>
</div>
<p>Well, that was sensation enough for her. He
had acted with divine independence.</p>
<p>The months that followed until the Armistice
were dull and tragic. She would a hundred times
rather have gone over herself, though it be as a
rank flag-waver. It was all stupid, cunning, criminal,
got up by old men to kill young ones. It
would be stupid enough to take Hal, her playmate.
Night after night she saw him, mutilated or dead;
she got so she could picture exactly the way a
small hole looked in a man’s forehead, just the
degree of red and blue about its tiny rim, and the
relaxed, livid expression of a face that had been
dead several hours. These pictures haunted her
wakeful nights in many different guises, but always
with Hal’s features. She learned in imagination
how flesh looked when it was laid open
or gangrened, and the appearance of the end of
a limb that had been taken off. And she grew so
bitter that she found she could not pray, though
she had always experienced a soothing pleasure<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[108]</span>
from the language of the Book of Common Prayer.
She never said those pieces again. She would sit
up suddenly in bed, as though she had been wakened
by a barrage, and talk by fitful candlelight
to her portrait.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[109]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XI</h2>
</div>
<p>“<span class="smcap">And</span> you aren’t really sorry you didn’t get
over?”</p>
<p>“Sorry? Wouldn’t you be?”</p>
<p>“Well, I don’t know. Considering the hordes
of disillusioned veterans I’ve met this winter—”</p>
<p>“At least they had a chance to get disillusioned
in action. Something for their money. With me
it’s just two years—practically three years—gone
to pot, and a sort of feeling it isn’t worth while
to go back at all. To college, I mean.”</p>
<p>“You couldn’t start this time of year, could
you?”</p>
<p>“I suppose I could do something.”</p>
<p>“It would be fun having you around until Fall—like
old times.”</p>
<p>Hal laughed shortly.</p>
<p>“You’d care?”</p>
<p>“I’ve had a good long spell of Thornhill alone,
you know. Next year I shan’t mind, because I’ll
be away at school myself.”</p>
<p>“My Lord, Moira, have you anything more to
learn?”</p>
<p>“Oh, yes, I could learn to be useful, for instance.”</p>
<p>“You manage to be most anything, if the notion
strikes you.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[110]</span>“I’m not so crazy to go,” she mused. “I imagine
it’ll be rather awful. Formalities, lady lecturers,
highbrow girls with shell-rimmed glasses.
They’ve been cramming education down the
throats of the fashionable young for a generation
and what’s the result? Country clubs, prohibition,
and a beastly war.”</p>
<p>“Cynical, eh?”</p>
<p>“No more than you would be, if you’d done
nothing but read newspapers these last two years.
I suppose now they’ll all combine and squeeze
everything out of Germany that she has left—just
as the Persians and the Greeks did, and the
kings in the Bible. And there’ll be a lot of
moralizing—more than ever. Of course, you’ll
be glad. The victor is always spoiled.”</p>
<p>“Pooh,” he laughed. “You’ve got me wrong.
I don’t give a damn what they do. Say, the only
principles I have left are principles of horsemanship.
I’m highly interested in the way you sit
Elfin.”</p>
<p>“Isn’t she a beauty!”</p>
<p>“She’s a pretty horse. But I wasn’t referring
entirely to the equine part of the combination.”</p>
<p>It was the first real day they had had together
since Hal’s discharge from camp the week before.
The weather was like an Indian summer afternoon,
one of those exceedingly mild days of February
between spells of stiff cold. They had been
galloping along the high road, when Moira suddenly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[111]</span>
pulled up and turned her horse into a
meandering lane, so narrow that the stripped
branches met in sharply accentuated patterns overhead
against the sky. The fields were a monotonous,
hard stubbly brown, except where pockets of
soiled snow lay in the holes and under the protecting
sides of hillocks.</p>
<p>“Is Selden Van Nostrand coming out to-morrow?”
asked Hal, after they had ridden a hundred
yards in silence.</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“Does he come out often?”</p>
<p>“Yes ... let’s go as far as Corey’s Inn for a
bite. I’m famishing, aren’t you?”</p>
<p>“I don’t like him. I suppose you know that.”</p>
<p>“You’re not going to be like the rest of the patriots,
are you? Get so you despise anybody with
a critical mind?”</p>
<p>“I admire people who say what they mean as
much as anybody. But I do object to Van Nostrand,
because he’s faintly rotten, and even his
wit is literary. He always seems to be rehearsed.
Anybody can do that Wilde thing if they study up
on it long enough. The point is, is it worth
while?”</p>
<p>She laughed with a touch of malice.</p>
<p>“You sound like a book review, Hal. His line
is pretty easy, but it’s a line. Nobody ever even
tries to be amusing here, and he not only tries but
I think he succeeds.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[112]</span>“It’s from him, I suppose, you got this fellow-feeling
for the Germans. Well, he had plenty of
opportunity to cultivate it, staying at home.”</p>
<p>Moira gave him a glance of friendliness.</p>
<p>“Oh, it’s such fun to have you back, I don’t
care what you say. If you knew all the dreams
I’ve had, terrifying dreams, seeing you—hurt and
cut up and dead. I’d wake up mad enough to kill
Germans myself.”</p>
<p>“Did you really dream about me, Moira?” He
pulled his horse closer to hers, leaning as far as
he could. The girl’s mount, disliking to be
crowded, pranced out of control, and Hal had to
swerve away, but he kept his eyes on the straight,
slim figure.</p>
<p>“God, Moira, what a beauty you’ve grown!”</p>
<p>She began to murmur aloud:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="first">“When I was one and twenty</div>
<div class="indent">I heard a wise man say</div>
<div class="verse">Give crowns and pounds and guineas</div>
<div class="indent">But not your heart away,</div>
<div class="verse">Give gold away and rubies</div>
<div class="indent">But keep your fancy free,</div>
<div class="verse">But I was one and twenty,</div>
<div class="indent">No use to talk to me.”</div>
</div></div>
<p>“Moira!” he cried, but she was gone, at full
gallop down the lane.</p>
<p>“Hurry!” she called back, “I’m nearly dead
with hunger.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[113]</span>And from there to the inn was a race.</p>
<p>When they returned it was dark, and both were
eager to reach the stables, but as they wheeled
into the little pasture road which led through the
tenant’s land and past Hermann Dietz’ house, a
curious scene halted them.</p>
<p>The house was a very old-fashioned small
wooden dwelling, with a high stone foundation,
built by the past generation of Dietzes twenty-five
or thirty years before. The barn, larger than the
house, was some twenty yards from the kitchen
door, across a squalid cow yard. A dim lamp or
two was burning in the house, but this was completely
deserted, the doors hanging open and giving
it a half-witted grimace. The centre of attraction
was a big double barn door. Around this, in
a lighted semi-circle stood the Dietz family, consisting
of the bony, tall, salmon-faced father, the
emaciated, dreadfully stooped mother, and four
children of varying ages. A curious murmur
arose from the group, and riding closer, Moira
and Hal saw that they were weeping. Beyond,
they could catch a glimpse of the body of a horse,
swaying slightly from side to side in its last agony,
and casting monstrous shadows on the high cobwebbed
walls behind, thrown by the lantern which
stood on the ground at Hermann’s feet.</p>
<p>Moira dismounted and signalled to Hal to follow
her.</p>
<p>“They’ve been grieving this way since yesterday,”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[114]</span>
she whispered, “and to-day the veterinary
told them he couldn’t save the horse.”</p>
<p>The sobs arising from the pitiful group, two of
the smallest of whom clung to their mother’s
skirts and hid their faces, more frightened at the
commotion than troubled about the horse, rose
and fell with the spasms of suffering that swept
over the dying beast. Moira heard Ellen’s reassuring
voice and saw her face for the first time
in the lantern light at the far end of the group.</p>
<p>“Ah, Mrs. Dietz, let them put the poor animal
out of its pain,” she was saying in a loud whisper
to the mother. “It can’t live.”</p>
<p>Moira turned to Hal and took his arm. He had
been smiling grimly at the scene, but as her hand
fell upon his sleeve he covered it with his own.
The horse, the drama of primitive sorrow, everything
was forgotten, except her features and hair,
and gipsy loveliness in the wavering light.</p>
<p>“They’re Ellen’s children, these people,” she
said. “She’s wonderful to them. She told me
yesterday ‘that horse is like a member of their
family, Miss Moira. It’ll be terrible when it dies.’
Isn’t she fine to come down here and comfort
them?”</p>
<p>They turned at the sound of foot-steps crossing
the hard earth and stubble, and two stocky figures
passed them.</p>
<p>“Hullo,” said one, with a grin. It was Rob
Blaydon, carrying in his hand something from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[115]</span>
which they caught a quick gleam as he passed.
The veterinary was with him. Both went up to
Hermann and held a hurried consultation, and
during this the family fell silent. Presently the
three men parted. Hermann spoke up in a high,
quavering voice.</p>
<p>“Well, Momma, they say it’s jest got to be done.
We jest got to give her up, and put her out of her
misery. I don’t know where we’re a-goin’ to git
another one like her. I don’t know—that I don’t.
Poor old Molly. She’s been with us now longer
than my boy there, pretty near as long as Lilly
here. It breaks me up to lose her. Yes, sir, it
goes hard, but there ain’t no helping it.”</p>
<p>“That’s the way to look at it, Hermann,” said
Rob, with gruff good nature.</p>
<p>Hal raised his voice from where he stood with
Moira at some distance.</p>
<p>“I’ll give you another horse, Dietz,” he said.
Moira squeezed his arm.</p>
<p>“Thank you, thank you, Mr. Hal,” the farmer
responded, obsequiously, peering for him in the
weak light. “Now, Momma, ain’t that fine! Well,
children, I guess we better be movin’ in. Poor
Molly—I’d rather not see you do it, gentlemen,
if you don’t mind.”</p>
<p>The family turned to obey, exhibiting a variety
of expressions, from fright to the deepest woe,
but Moira observed that there was one who had
not shared the general grief—the short, mature,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[116]</span>
straw-haired girl of sixteen or seventeen, whose
face bore a stolid, disdainful look. She followed
toward the kitchen after Ellen and one of the
small children, but as she reached the porch she
turned and gazed at Rob Blaydon, fascinated by
the revolver in his hand. In the weird light, which
cast a romantic glow over her figure and uncouth
clothing, Moira thought the girl had a touch of
beauty, fresh and coarse and natural as earth.</p>
<p>“Poor Hermann,” she said, “he’s a rustic Pierrot,
Hal.”</p>
<p>Just as they topped the ridge they heard the
harsh double-fire of Rob Blaydon’s revolver. She
was glad to see the lights of Thornhill.</p>
<p>“Well,” said Hal, “Rob had a good hunch to-night—even
if it was fun for him. Just the sort
of thing he’d love. There’s the boy who needed
to go to France. As it is he’ll get over that raw
streak very slowly.”</p>
<p>“Rob’s a dear,” she broke in, earnestly. “I’m
not one of those who worry about him. He’s a
good animal—without a shred of theory in him.
I let him get me most beautifully pickled twice
last Fall.”</p>
<p>“The devil you did!” exclaimed Hal.</p>
<p>“Why not? He knows everybody everywhere
and they like him. And he drives like a wild man—when
he’s had a few. Now you wouldn’t be
such a good fellow, would you, Hal? You’d be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[117]</span>
cautious and look after my morals, and count my
drinks and take me home early.”</p>
<p>“Yes, I’m afraid I would,” he said. “And I
suppose you wouldn’t like it.”</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[118]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XII</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was Ellen’s night off and after the dispatching
of the horse, she stayed with Mrs. Dietz
to cheer her up and help put the two youngest
children to bed. She had been so long a constant
visitor and benefactor that they had ceased to regard
her as an emissary from the big house and
talked of their troubles freely before her.</p>
<p>The five of them sat about the lamp in the comfortless
but warm living room of the farmhouse,
listening to a monologue by Hermann Dietz on the
virtues of the dead horse. Although he had been
born within a hundred feet of that spot, and his
father had come to America as a boy, Dietz’ accent,
like many of his kind bred to the farms thereabouts,
still bore traces of the German. They
were a squatter-like tribe, never prosperous.</p>
<p>“Poor old Molly, she was not so old, yet, but it
seemed like we had had her always, Mrs. Williams.
She did her share, Molly.”</p>
<p>“What did Mr. Robert do to Molly?” asked the
boy, plaintively. “Did he shoot her? Can I go
see?”</p>
<p>“No, no, you wait until morning. Don’t you
mind about Molly. She was sufferin’ terrible, and
she’s better where she is. But we’ll miss her.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[119]</span>
Yes, Johnnie, when you was a little bit of a feller,
two, three years old, Poppa used to put you on
Molly’s back and hold you, and you’d laugh and
holler and she’d walk so easy just as if she knew
you was a baby.”</p>
<p>“Things was different in them days,” piped his
wife. “Them automobile horns, now. We didn’t
never used to hear them. But nowadays it’s half
the night, Mrs. Williams. I can’t get used to ’em.
They keep me awake so.”</p>
<p>“Ah, they wouldn’t be so bad,” put in the girl
Lilly, “if we could ride in ’em now an’ then, the
way others do. Johann Hunker’s got a m’chine.”</p>
<p>“Ach, you are always bellerin’ about a
m’chine,” her father burst out. “When you got
one you got a hole to throw money in. Listen to
them rich people even, talkin’ about how much
they cost. What have I got to do with a m’chine?
An’ whose goin’ to run it, your Momma? I ain’t
goin’ to take no risks with ’em, not since I got
that sunstroke last August anyways. I git so
dizzy sometimes I think I can’t get home to the
house.”</p>
<p>“I could run it,” grumbled Lilly.</p>
<p>“You now, Lilly! You’ve got plenty to do without
that. You don’t tend to your work the way it
is.”</p>
<p>“She’s gettin’ so lazy she’s got no head to remember
anything,” put in her mother. “I don’t
dare leave the children with her.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[120]</span>“M’chine!” Dietz quavered on, “I ain’t got no
money for ’em if I wanted one.”</p>
<p>“You’ve got the money, I guess,” said Mrs.
Dietz querulously, “the same as Johann Hunker,
if you wanted to spend it.”</p>
<p>“Now, Momma, I told you twenty times already
I’m takin’ care of your money. Who’s goin’ to
keep it safe for a rainy day, if it ain’t me?”</p>
<p>“Well, we don’t see anything of it, Hermann,
not since you got hold of it ... sellin’ off the
farms, an’ leavin’ us with hardly a place to put
foot to the ground.”</p>
<p>“Yes, Momma,” rejoined her husband earnestly.
“I did sell off the farms. But you know
what Mr. McNutt said. He said if I didn’t want
to take that two hundred dollars an acre Mr.
Blaydon offered, they’d all go somewheres else
an’ build, and our land never would git a high
price. You couldn’t git a hundred for it in them
days.”</p>
<p>“There’s some of them waited longer an’ got
more. Johann Hunker did.”</p>
<p>“Johann Hunker may be a slick feller, but if I
hadn’t sold when I did they mightn’t have come
here at all, an’ then where would Johann Hunker
be? Never you mind about that money. It’s
a-drawin’ good interest.”</p>
<p>Dietz lifted his tall, bent form from his chair
and shuffled over to the stove to dump his pipe.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[121]</span>
Then he turned again to his wife, a sudden grin
spreading over his cheeks.</p>
<p>“Well, Momma, what about a little wine? Seeing
Mrs. Williams is here, eh? A little home-made
wine and coffee cake. We’ll give the childern
some wine to-night, eh? Lilly, bring up the chairs
to the table.”</p>
<p>The girl rose languidly to obey and Mrs. Dietz
departed for the bedroom, returning a moment
later with a long bottle. Lilly brought glasses
and placed them on the red-figured table cover.</p>
<p>“Get the coffee cake, Lilly,” her mother ordered.</p>
<p>Dietz toyed affectionately with the stem of his
glass filled with bright red liquid.</p>
<p>“Ach, the home-made wine—that is good!
Well, it is like old times, Momma—when the older
children, Lena and Fred was here, and Lilly was
a little girl about Johnnie’s size. Yes, it was fine
then. None of these rich people with big houses
and all that. We was the bosses then.”</p>
<p>“We had all the land,” put in Mrs. Dietz gloomily.
“We could get enough off of it to sell a good
crop every year and plenty of vegetables to the
commission men, and you always had money, if
you needed it for anything, like Molly dying.
Now it’s in the bank and we can’t spend nothing.
No, the land was better than the money.”</p>
<p>“Mr. Blaydon, he gives me sixty dollars a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[122]</span>
month, and all the feed for the stock, and half the
money from the truck. That is something, sixty
dollars sure every month.”</p>
<p>“But you’ve got to work for Mr. Blaydon, and
I do, and even the childern. It ain’t the same as
when we worked for ourselves.”</p>
<p>“Poppa,” broke in Lilly, as she cut the long
flat sections of coffee cake, “Mary Hunker was
selling some of Johann’s wine over at Corey’s last
week. She got a big price, enough to buy a new
dress. Can I sell some of Momma’s wine? We
can’t ever drink up what we got every year.”</p>
<p>“Ach Himmel!” Dietz cried, bringing his glass
down with a rattle upon the table. “There is
that girl. We have the land and sell that. We
have the wine and we got to sell that too. Ain’t
there nothing we can call our own? No, Lilly,
you let the wine be.”</p>
<p>“I never get clothes at all like the Hunker
girls,” she replied sullenly. “I saw a green dress,
a pretty one, over at town that was only thirteen
dollars and fifty cents.”</p>
<p>“But, Lilly, your sister Lena never bought no
dresses for thirteen dollars and fifty cents. And
Lena always looked nice. She married a man
with a fine bakery business on Oak Street. He
took Lena already because she was a neat, sensible
girl and wouldn’t throw away his money for him.
I don’t know what to think of you, Lilly. A honest,
Christian girl, the way you’ve been brought<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[123]</span>
up. You ain’t like your sister, is she, Momma?”</p>
<p>“You wouldn’t expect all girls would be alike,
Hermann,” said her mother. “Lilly is a good
girl, but times have changed since Lena was her
age. You give me the money, now, and I’ll go
with her to look at the dress.”</p>
<p>“Well, well, I guess so,” replied Hermann, mollified
by his wife’s firmness. “That is a lot of
money, but Lilly is a pretty girl, eh? I’ll give you
the money to-morrow and maybe you can buy the
dress before Sunday. Then them Hunker girls
won’t be so fresh up at church.”</p>
<p>“Pour some more wine for Mrs. Williams,
Lilly,” said Mrs. Dietz.</p>
<p>“No,” said Ellen, “I must be going.”</p>
<p>“Yes, a night cap, Mrs. Williams,” said Dietz,
in his best manner. “A little more wine for all
of us, and then we’ll go to bed. I got to get
Meyer, if I can, or Ed Becker, to help me bury
poor Molly to-morrow. You got to dig a big hole
for a horse.”</p>
<p>As Ellen left the cottage and started homeward
she did not know whether to laugh or cry. It was
always the same story, poverty and hard work,
and the vanity of the young girl tempted as she
had been most of her life by the strange, glamorous
panorama of the rich at her very doorstep.
And she had not the sense of pride the older folks
had enjoyed, the knowledge of having been masters
of the neighbourhood. Mrs. Dietz’ remark<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[124]</span>
haunted her mind. “The land was better than
the money.” For such as these people, it was. It
had given them all they had, all they could possibly
have, to live for.</p>
<p>The shortest path up the hill to the Blaydon
house was rocky and steep, and a third the way
up Ellen stopped for breath and regretted she
had not walked around the longer way. It was
dark under the trees and hard to stick to the path.
She sat down to remove a pebble from her low
shoe. As she stood up again facing the foot of
the hill, she could see a broad patch of Dietz’
field through an opening in the branches. At
that moment a figure stepped out from the trees
into the open space and came to a stop as if waiting.
It was a man undoubtedly, she thought, but
she was curious to make sure. So few prowlers
ever disturbed the peace of the place. She crept
down the path, holding on to the shrubs and tree-trunks
and making as little noise as possible.
She decided she would wait until the man moved
on and go around by the road after all. Reaching
the bottom she found herself within a few yards
of Rob Blaydon. A moment later, nearer the already
dark and silent Dietz house, she saw another
figure stirring. What could Rob be up to
and who was his confederate? Then swiftly, Lilly
darted from the shadow of the house and joined
him. The two disappeared, exchanging whispers,
around the side of the hill.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[125]</span>Ellen started impulsively, as though she would
stop them, but she did not go far. What could
she do? She knew Rob Blaydon too well to think
that he would take any interference from her or
from any inferior. He was not a mean boy, but he
was headstrong. He would tell her that he thought
her a busybody and a nuisance. And supposing
she went to Lilly? Lilly would be frightened and
cowed for the moment. But Ellen realized, far
more sharply than the girl’s family, how deep her
rebellion lay. In the end she would throw advice
to the winds.</p>
<p>There was left the alternative of warning Mathilda
or Sterling Blaydon. If she did so what
could she prove? Rob was bold enough to make
the thing appear in any light he desired, some
boyish escapade in which he had inveigled the girl
to join. To excite the Dietz family about the girl’s
danger was as useless. They could not control
her in any case, and it might fire her to desperate
measures. Ellen could do nothing that would result
in any good, nothing except create a scandal.</p>
<p>She sat down and wondered if she cared. She
certainly cared about the child’s welfare, but now
that she felt it was impossible to prevent what
was happening, she could reason about it calmly.
Life was a dreadfully sad thing any way you took
it. But could this love affair do the girl more
harm than she was sure to meet with in any event—perhaps
at the hands of worse men? Might it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[126]</span>
not come to mean something to her she would
cherish despite its cost? Ellen’s only answer to
these questions was her own experience. Perhaps
it had been worth while. Her daughter was
happy, with an unclouded future, and she was contented.
Knowledge of herself had suddenly
shaken her faith in the creed that one must inevitably
suffer pain because of sin.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[127]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XIII</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">From</span> the house far above them came the indistinct
sound of Mathilda at the piano. Was it
“<i>Reflets dans l’eau</i>” she was playing? As the
music stopped the chaotic noises of life took up
their endless staccato rhythm—cows lowing in the
pasture, a workman calling to another, the beat of
a hammer in some farmhouse, the restless twitter
and trilling of birds, the snapping and stirring of
branches, a motorhorn sounding a thousand miles
away, it seemed—the music of the universe that
was flowing through her now in a full stream.
Moira opened her book at random:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="first">“Leave go my hands, let me catch breath and see;</div>
<div class="verse">Let the dew-fall drench either side of me;</div>
<div class="indent">Clear apple leaves are soft upon that moon</div>
<div class="verse">Seen side-wise like a blossom in the tree;</div>
<div class="indent">Ah God, ah God, that day should come so soon....”</div>
</div></div>
<p>She stopped and looked off through the leaves
to the wide fields where the sun lay.</p>
<p>“Don’t you love it, Hal,” she said, “just the
sound of it, the perverse beauty of it? Is there
anything more wonderful?”</p>
<p>Hal rolled over upon the flat of his back staring
thoughtfully up from the shady chamber of green,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[128]</span>
the tiny grotto at the cliff-foot, up at the grey old
overhanging boulders, like moles and maculations
on the brow of an ancient crone, the massy
tangle of branches and leaves bursting from
among them and cutting off half his vision of the
glittering blue heaven, wherein floated great
flocks of clouds as artificial in their sheer whiteness
and hard outlines as puff-balls on a pool. His
muscular brown arms and neck were bare to the
white bathing shirt. His bright blonde hair was
tousled over his face, which was mature and
strong. The girl’s voice made little ripples of
pleasure run over his limbs; it gave the words a
significance which would never have reached him
without her—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="first">“The grass is thick and cool, it lets us lie,</div>
<div class="verse">Kissed upon either cheek and either eye.</div>
<div class="indent">I turn to thee as some green afternoon</div>
<div class="indent">Turns toward sunset and is loth to die;</div>
<div class="indent">Ah God, ah God, that day should come so soon.”</div>
</div></div>
<p>That certainly he could feel supremely, experience
in himself. He let his gaze rest upon her.
The fine black hair, bobbed at last in spite of
Aunt Mathilda’s anxious objections, made a quaint
pattern on the face. Against it the glow of her
skin and lips was the more brilliant by contrast,
and beneath the white angle of brow, the eyes,
looking suddenly at him from the page, were as
clear, cool, vivid blue as violets in a snowbank.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[129]</span>There was in that face the necessary balance
between strength and frailty, self-possession and
emotion, at least, so he thought, the features not
quite absolutely regular. He preferred that touch
of oddness; it was the stamp of her will, her curious
insights, her traits of unusual justice. It mitigated
too much beauty. Greek models were all
very well in statues, but in a woman one wanted
a lively difference.... Moira’s book suddenly
snapped shut, as though his slowly relished inspection
were too much for her. Her short laugh
came like a chain of melody from her whole
body.</p>
<p>“Poor Hal,” she cried, “aren’t you sorry you
will have to listen to Swinburne all your life?”</p>
<p>He reached out an Indian forearm and drew
her to him. They were silent for a long time.
Then she sat back, her eyes admiring the relaxed
strength of his body.</p>
<p>“God!” he muttered, “and I once thought because
we were cousins this could never happen—I
should never be allowed to speak.”</p>
<p>“Such a good little boy,” she said. “You
would have waited to be allowed.”</p>
<p>“It’s odd how I’ve never been able to think
of you as Aunt’s daughter.”</p>
<p>“Neither have I,” she replied. “But it is easy
to explain. It takes a man—a father—about the
house to establish parentage. Mother is a dilettante
on her job, anyway. But I have some qualities<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[130]</span>
from her, I know.... What <i>was</i> father
like?”</p>
<p>“I wasn’t exactly his playmate, you know!” he
laughed. “I don’t remember him any more than
you do. But he must have been a regular, from
all I’ve heard. He was your father, all right.”</p>
<p>“H’m.... Ned Seymour <i>sounds</i> like a man
who might be my father. And names are wonderful—better
than portraits—to read people by. I
can’t tell much by father’s looks. Poor Daddy,
Maman stood by him, I’m glad of that. She’s always
been a heretic among her own. But if Daddy
was so ambitious, so indifferent to the world and
all that, why didn’t he leave me a sign, why didn’t
he leave glorious works? He should have.”</p>
<p>“He left you,” laughed Hal.</p>
<p>“The work of an idle moment.”</p>
<p>“Aren’t they the best? But I rather like that
about your father, the fact that he was a spectator
rather than a spouter. So many darned people
aren’t content with their limitations. They have
to puddle about with paint and ink.”</p>
<p>“As I do.”</p>
<p>“It’s yours by right, I suppose. At least, you
really like it.”</p>
<p>“I have invented a litany, Hal. Will you listen
to it? I invented it for the saddest people in the
world. It goes like this: O God, be merciful to
those who are free and must live with the fettered;
to the scornful laughers who are bound to the humourless;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[131]</span>
to the swift who walk by the slow; and
the idle who are bondsmen to the busy—and especially,
O God, be merciful to all those whose
spirits were young and whose generation denied
them youth’s chance, amen. There must have
been many like Daddy in his day.”</p>
<p>Through the trees the half moon glowed like the
polished end of a woman’s nail against a pink and
sapphire West. It was an infinitely tender moment,
the end of a week of betrothal, the eve of
his departure for a trip North.</p>
<p>“Let me, please, once more,” whispered Moira,
“one I love.” And she quoted:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="first">“La lune blanche</div>
<div class="verse">Luit dans les bois,</div>
<div class="verse">De chaque branche</div>
<div class="verse">Parte une voix,</div>
<div class="verse">Sous la ramée,</div>
<div class="verse">Oh, bien-aimée.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="first">“Une vaste et tendre</div>
<div class="verse">Apaisement</div>
<div class="verse">Semble descendre</div>
<div class="verse">Du firmament</div>
<div class="verse">Que l’astre irise....</div>
<div class="verse">C’est l’heure exquise!”</div>
</div></div></div>
<p>“You gave me those,” she said. “They were
a peace offering one Christmas, one year you had
treated me very badly. I love them because they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[132]</span>
are all young, all fresh, ageless. Let’s you and I,
dear, resolve to be young forever. Let’s make a
bond of youth, cherish it, study to keep it, never
let it go.”</p>
<p>“Moira, you will never be older than this day.”</p>
<p>“I think it is easy to stay young if one keeps
one’s unreasonable likes. One should always like
things that are a little twisted and strange, in
spite of what people think. One must like Verlaine’s
absinthe as well as Verlaine, Swinburne
and Swinburne’s perversity also, Rob and his
wickedness—the wickedness he doesn’t understand.
You know, Hal, I didn’t go to college after
all, because I was afraid it would make me old, it
would give me ‘interests.’ I hate the word. As
if everything wasn’t an interest!”</p>
<p>They walked around by the flat, broad meadow,
hushed in the dusk. The first whip-poor-will was
calling. She clung to his arm, enjoying the sensation
of firm muscles flexing under her hand.</p>
<p>“I don’t care,” she cried. “I’m not afraid of
anything. I would as soon give myself to you, all
of me, now, to-night. The rest, all the fuss, does
not count. What is there to fear in this glorious
wide world, Hal?”</p>
<p>“Nothing—but fear, I suppose,” he replied.</p>
<p>Two white figures swaying together across the
dusty furrows, they merged into the darkness like
birds fluttering out of sight in the clouds.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[133]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XIV</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">Moira</span> had considered Mathilda not at all in the
swift, sudden, almost cyclonic romance with Hal
Blaydon, no more indeed than in any of her flirtations.
There had been many others, of all ages,
from her own up to fifty, and she had vaguely realized
that when her choice was made, if she made
a choice, her mother would have to be counted in.
At times during the past week of incredible magic,
she had feared the possibility of a clash between
them, owing to the good Episcopalian views, to
which Mathilda still clung, despite the advanced
and advancing habits of thought that surrounded
her. But the logic with which the girl faced this
possibility was serene: harmony had always prevailed
between them, too much harmony perhaps,
and some conflict was inevitable sooner or later.
It had better occur over this biggest and most
important choice of her youth.</p>
<p>She had begun to wonder, of late, just how she
felt toward her mother. Certainly she was very
fond of her, but it seemed hardly a filial fondness.
She admired Mathilda’s little fantasticalities; it
was clear that she had in her time been something
of an idol-breaker; but it was equally clear that
her cherished image of herself as a person of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[134]</span>
great independence of mind was somewhat out-worn.
The daughter had gone far beyond the
older woman, or so she thought, and there lurked
small matters on which they concealed their opinions
from each other. Moreover, Moira had loved
her most for the brightness and charm of her
manner and these were becoming clouded by a
new development that touched her closely—a
secret in her brother’s life. Mathilda had discovered
the truth with amazement, but to all appearances
had reconciled herself to it. So long,
she argued, as the apartment he kept in town
remained only a rendezvous for discreet meetings,
she did not greatly care. But more and more this
other establishment was taking Blaydon away
from them. Could her brother possibly bring
himself to marry the woman—not now perhaps—but
when age had weakened his resistance and laid
him open to appeals to sentiment and protection?
He was already far from a young man.... It
was a situation that had a profound effect upon
her accustomed poise, because it was one which
she could not influence nor even speak of in his
presence.</p>
<p>After Hal had left on his trip that night, Moira
put up her car—she had driven him to the station
herself—and walked into the library. She found
Mathilda embroidering, a pastime in which she
was skilful, and took a frank pride. It was her
substitute for artistic expression, as she said, a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[135]</span>
gift she had always honestly envied. Everybody
they knew, Moira thought, longed for artistic expression—and
Hal had been right to scorn it.
There were Mary Cawthorn and Tempe Riddle—as
soon as people like that had taken up writing
verse, she herself had dropped it. She had turned
exclusively to her painting. That, at least, you
couldn’t do at all, without some foreground, some
knowledge and practice. She was happy that
her youth had been industrious enough to bring
her a measure of these. And she did not take it
seriously.</p>
<p>“Well,” said Mathilda, “you’ve seen your
darling off?”</p>
<p>The girl did not attempt to conceal her surprise.
Then she laughed.</p>
<p>“I suppose nobody could really have failed
to know, who had been around the house these
last few days. Still, we thought we were so
clever.”</p>
<p>“There’s such a thing as being too clever.
When you and Hal began to be stiff toward each
other, I knew what was happening.”</p>
<p>“We must have been a fine pair of actors.”</p>
<p>“But I’ve seen it coming all along. Before
either of you did, I believe.”</p>
<p>Moira flopped upon the cricket at her mother’s
feet, and looked into her face affectionately.</p>
<p>“And that means, darling, that you don’t object?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[136]</span>Mathilda ran her slim hand through the short,
dark curls leaning against her knee.</p>
<p>“Of course not, my child. It’s the most perfect
thing that could have happened.”</p>
<p>“Mother,” asked the girl, looking up at her
whimsically, “when are we ever going to quarrel,
you and I?”</p>
<p>“Never, I hope.”</p>
<p>“Isn’t it rather unhealthy never to quarrel?
Hal and I do, frequently, and I’m glad of it.”</p>
<p>“You won’t think that way when you are my
age.”</p>
<p>“<i>Maman</i>, are you very miserable about Uncle
Sterling?”</p>
<p>Mathilda’s reply was preceded by a short pause
and a quick glance.</p>
<p>“How did you know that?” she asked.</p>
<p>“I have ears and eyes—and can put things together,
you know,” laughed Moira. Then she
added, more gravely, “I really don’t think many
people know. When Selden hinted about it I denied
the story flatly—for his benefit.”</p>
<p>“Why deny the truth?” It was one of Mathilda’s
traits to be able to say things the implications
of which were unpleasant to her.</p>
<p>“Oh, one must to busybodies. Only I do wish
you wouldn’t be unhappy about it.”</p>
<p>“I’m not,” said the other, “so long as matters
remain as they are.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[137]</span>“I see what you mean, dear. People who have
professionally renounced marriage ought to have
some pride. They ought to observe the ethics of
their profession.”</p>
<p>Mathilda smiled.</p>
<p>“I’m afraid my attitude is not so impersonal.
Isn’t that somewhere in Shaw?”</p>
<p>“It must be,” replied the girl. “But I’m quite
thrilled over the whole thing. Please forgive me
for saying so. To think of Uncle Sterling being
so delightfully biblical!”</p>
<p>She went to the table and brought the cigarettes.
The older woman took one from her and laid
aside her embroidery. “You’ll do something for
me, you two?” she asked.</p>
<p>“What?”</p>
<p>“Get married as soon as possible.”</p>
<p>“Oh, my dear! I’m only nineteen.”</p>
<p>“Do you think you would ever change?”</p>
<p>“No, I don’t think that.”</p>
<p>“Then why not marry? I can’t understand the
modern idea of waiting until life is over to marry.
It’s good for people to have their youth together—when
they can.”</p>
<p>“Well, Hal has done all the planning, and I
think it is very sensible. In the first place, he’s
going on with his chemistry. He doesn’t want to
go into the brokerage office, and you mustn’t tell
Uncle yet.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[138]</span>“I approve of that. Brokerage will do for
Robert.”</p>
<p>“It means two more years for him at college.
The first of them I shall spend in New York studying.
The next I want to spend in Paris, and I
want you to come with me, dear. How about it?
And then—married in Paris, and the Sorbonne
or some German University for Hal. Isn’t that
a glorious programme? He really didn’t plan all
of it.”</p>
<p>“No, I imagine not,” laughed Mathilda. “He
would probably have planned it as I would, by beginning
with the end. But I shan’t oppose you.
I’ve never opposed you much, Moira, not even
when I might have done so with justice. And the
reason is that I have always wanted to live to see
one completely happy person. I hope you are
going to be the one.”</p>
<p>Mathilda concluded with a wistful note.</p>
<p>“Darling,” cried the girl. “How good you
have been to me. And I wonder if I am going to
be completely happy. I’ll try, and I shan’t be
ashamed or modest about it, either. Is that—egotistical?”</p>
<p>A few minutes later as she passed Hal Blaydon’s
door on the way to her own, she could not
resist the temptation to go in. She had never
done that before deliberately, and she felt a little
like an intruder. She had a great distaste for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[139]</span>
the practice of assuming privileges with those one
cared for, but she knew he would be pleased if he
saw her patting his bed affectionately and looking
around at his belongings. As she stopped in front
of the untidy book-shelves, she smiled at their incongruous
juxtaposition of textbooks, modern
novels and classic survivals of adolescence—“This
Side of Paradise” between a Latin grammar and
a Dictionary of Physics; “Cytherea,” which reminded
her just then of many men she knew,
alongside of “Plutarch’s Lives.” She reflected
that she would probably not sleep very early to-night
and had no fresh reading in her bedroom.
She quickly pulled out a volume and went to her
room.</p>
<p>With her clothes off and three pillows behind
her back, and a cigarette between her lips, she
picked up the book she had borrowed. There had
been a certain degree of method in her selection.
It was an old, loose-backed, green-covered copy
of “Les Misérables,” one of her long and growing
list of “duty books,” that is to say, books she
ought to have read years ago and had not. This
happened also to belong to the classification of
“school-piece” books. An English reader had
contained a selection from it, and she had once resolved,
in a fit of rebellion against the academic,
never to read any books that yielded school pieces
for the boredom of the young. Later the conscience<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[140]</span>
of a cultivated adult had forced her to recant,
and her <i>index librorum prohibitorum</i> had
become an index obligatory.</p>
<p>The book in her hand was a long one. She
would just about finish it by the time Hal came
back, and that would be killing two birds with one
stone.</p>
<p>She opened it at random and as she removed
her thumbs the pages leaped back to a marked
place, occupied by a letter. She picked it up. It
was an old and faded letter, addressed to “Mrs.
Ellen Williams, 21 Trezevant Place.” That was
Ellen, the cook, of course. She smiled a little at
the thought of Ellen reading a monstrous book
like this. She had never seen Ellen read anything
except a recipe or a label. But, of course,
humble people did like Hugo. She had read
“Notre Dame” and “Ninety-Three.”</p>
<p>Moira would have put the letter aside at once
to hand it to the servant in the morning had she
not noticed two markings on the envelope that
strangely interested her. One was the date, just
a month after she was born. The other was the
inscription on the flap in back, which read as follows:</p>
<p class="center">from Miss Moira McCoy,        <br />
Lutheran Maternity Hospital,<br />
2243 Bismarck Street.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[141]</span>Her own name, on a letter almost as old as she
was! She laid it down. She ought not to read it,
of course. But it certainly was hard to resist
knowing what some little Irish girl in the hospital
(who made her capital “m’s” with three vertical
lines and a horizontal bar across the top) was
thinking and doing a month after she was born.
Wasn’t there a “statute of limitations” on letters?
No letter nearly twenty years old could be
private. The lure of romance that lurked in the
envelope was too strong. She hastily drew out
the folded sheet and read:</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p><span class="smcap">My Dear Mrs. Williams</span>:</p>
<p>Just a note to tell you how honoured and
tickled I am that you are going to name your
little daughter after me.</p>
<p>I hope to see her sometime soon, and you
also. I am so busy now, but in two or three
weeks I could call on my day off, Thursday, if
it could be arranged.</p>
<p>So you love your new place? I’m so glad.
We all miss you and—my pretty little namesake.
How proud it makes me.</p>
<p class="right"><span class="indentright">Sincerely your friend,</span><br />
<span class="smcap">Moira McCoy</span>.</p>
</div>
<p>She had never heard of Ellen’s having a baby,
and if she had just been naming it when this letter<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[142]</span>
was written it should have been about the same
age as herself. How curious it was that she and
Ellen’s baby should have had the same name.
Perhaps her mother had liked the name and borrowed
it from Ellen, for Mathilda would take what
she wanted; but it did seem unlikely she would
take the name of the cook’s baby for her own.
And what had become of Ellen’s Moira? She
would ask Ellen about it in the morning. Never
had her curiosity been so oddly and intensely
aroused.</p>
<p>She cast the letter from her and opened Hugo,
but her eyes were heavy and her mind weary with
the thoughts and excitements of that day. In a
few moments she was asleep.</p>
<p>When she awoke in the morning the first thing
she thought of was the letter, and she reread it.
The mystery had clearly taken a strong hold upon
her mind. While dressing she decided to postpone
seeing Ellen, and every time she went to her
room during the day she read the letter again
and asked herself more and more puzzling questions
about it. Why, for example, had Ellen never
spoken of her child, particularly if it had the
same name as herself? Was there something distasteful
in the recollection either to Ellen or to
her mistress?</p>
<p>Moira could not get into the Hugo book at all.
Instead she took a long drive in her car and, finding
that a bore, she tried riding which proved no<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[143]</span>
better. She was tempted to hunt up Rob or telephone
for Selden and go somewhere for a cocktail
and a dance. Failing to reach either of them
or to decide on anything definite to do, she began
to find Ellen a source of enormous interest.
Hardly realizing it, she spied upon her all afternoon,
and searched her smiling, unconcerned features
whenever she appeared. It was hard to
think of Ellen ever having had a baby. She
stopped herself from pursuing this obsession a
half a dozen times, but the spell of curiosity lingered.
And still she could not bring herself to
speak to the woman. By nightfall she was scattered
and depressed, with the feeling of having
spent a wasted day.</p>
<p>She went to bed early and tried again to read
Hugo, but instead, she found herself rereading
the McCoy letter. It drew her like a sinister
charm. She threw on a dressing gown and began
walking in the room. For the first time in her
whole life her fingers shook as she started to take
a cigarette from her box, and actually muffed it.
This made her angry, and she lit the cigarette
swiftly and fiercely and clattered the box down on
the table. Then she was able to laugh and upbraid
herself.</p>
<p>“Good Lord!” she cried. “What has the cook
and her offspring to do with me? Why am I so
excited?”</p>
<p>But even as the words died on her lips her reassurance<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[144]</span>
departed. She would never get control
of herself until she investigated. Why hadn’t she
talked to Ellen that day and got this foolish
curiosity off her mind? The woman would think
it strange if she called on her at this late hour to
return a twenty-year-old letter, even though it
contained sacred memories. Yet why should Ellen
think that? She would simply slip down and hand
her the letter with some gay nonsense about it
being better twenty years late than never, and if
Ellen wasn’t tired and seemed talkative she would
ask her about the coincidence of names. It was
certainly no new thing in that house for Moira to
do whimsical and unexpected things. She could
come back and sleep and dream of her blessed
Hal—poor Hal, he had hardly had a thought from
her all day.</p>
<p>The regular servants’ rooms were at the top of
the house, but Ellen lived alone in the little wing
off the kitchen. She had chosen this ground floor
room because it was closer to the affairs that directly
concerned her, outside and in, and because
she was a privileged person, the dean of the servants.
Moira’s visit then would disturb nobody.
She drew her pretty gown about her and walked
boldly downstairs, knocked, made a laughing request
to be admitted and waited for the startled
woman to put something around her and unlock
the door.</p>
<p>“Is this your letter, Ellen?” she asked. “I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[145]</span>
found it last night and meant to give it to you to-day,
but forgot it. I thought you’d be so glad to
get it back, I’d just come down and give it to you
before I went to sleep. You see ... I read it—the
date was so near my birthday.”</p>
<p>Ellen opened the letter and read it through with
apparent awkwardness and difficulty.</p>
<p>“Why, Miss Moira, where did you get this?
It’s been lost for years. I didn’t know it was in
existence.”</p>
<p>“I found it in a book upstairs.”</p>
<p>“My land! How did it get there, I wonder?”</p>
<p>“It was an old volume of Hugo’s—‘Les
Misérables.’”</p>
<p>The girl winced a little as Ellen repeated the
name after her and mispronounced it schoolboy
fashion.</p>
<p>“Oh, yes, yes, I remember. That’s so many
years ago. To think this letter has been there all
that time!”</p>
<p>“I didn’t know you had ever had a baby, Ellen.
Tell me about it. Are you too sleepy?”</p>
<p>“No, I’m not sleepy, Miss Moira—” Ellen’s
politeness prompted the words, yet the girl caught
a hint that she would have liked to end the conversation.
“You—you startled me so,” she went on.
“But—there isn’t anything to tell.”</p>
<p>“Did she die?”</p>
<p>“Yes, Miss Moira.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[146]</span>The fidgety excitement which seized the grey-haired
woman was understandable on the ground
of old memories being suddenly aroused. Moira’s
voice expressed the tenderest sympathy.</p>
<p>“How sad. She would have been such a comfort
to you now.”</p>
<p>“Yes. But that’s all so long ago, ma’am. It’s
the way things happen in this world for some of
us.”</p>
<p>“And your husband? Is he dead, too?”</p>
<p>The questioning was becoming more and more
difficult for Ellen. When she answered it was
with a touch of impatience.</p>
<p>“I don’t know. I don’t know where he is.”</p>
<p>“He deserted you?”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>Moira felt the need of some apology, induced
by Ellen’s uneasiness, but the very fact that the
information was unsatisfactory made her perversely
eager to stay, although the little room
oppressed her.</p>
<p>“I suppose you think I’m awfully curious, Ellen,”
she said, with a short laugh. “And very inconsiderate
to come and talk to you about these
things at this time of night. But it seems so
strange that you’ve been here ever since I can
remember, and I’ve never heard about them—I
suppose I thought you didn’t have an early life.
You’re so cheerful, one doesn’t imagine you’ve
had sorrows.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[147]</span>“People forget, ma’am. You can’t stay sad
always.”</p>
<p>“Isn’t it funny,” Moira broke in, “that I’ve
got the same name your daughter had?”</p>
<p>“Ye-es—I guess it is.”</p>
<p>Ellen’s forced laugh and strained expression,
and the tongue-tied moment that followed, were
as hard for Moira as for the speaker. The
silence lengthened. The older woman twisted
in her uncomfortable seat on the bed. She obviously
did not want to be looked at nor to look
at the girl. Why, thought Moira, should she
make all this fuss over old memories? What
harm was in them? Ellen was not naturally shy—she
could be voluble enough at times, and quite
intelligent.</p>
<p>“And we were just about the same age, weren’t
we?”</p>
<p>“No, oh, no,” burst out the other, and stopped
suddenly.</p>
<p>“But the letter is dated so near my birthday,”
said Moira, a little brusquely, “and speaks of your
baby’s christening. We’d have to be.”</p>
<p>“Bu-but—my little girl was christened very
late.”</p>
<p>“She was christened about the time I was, by
the same name, and in the same house? Why, it’s
really a romantic idea, isn’t it?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” said Ellen, “that was how it was. Your—your
mother liked the name too.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[148]</span>Moira felt a wave of compassion for the lonely
old woman. There seemed to be nothing left to
do but to go. She rose as if to do so, and then
that impulse of sympathy caused her to sit down
beside the other on the bed. She spoke very
gently.</p>
<p>“Ellen, I’m sorry, I’ve been opening an old
wound, haven’t I? I can see that it hurts you.
You understand why I am so interested—because
of the name? That’s natural, isn’t it? But I’m
glad to have learned about it. I shall think of you
so differently from now on.”</p>
<p>“Yes, Miss Moira, thank you.” The girl’s
closeness to her and sympathy made Ellen’s voice
tremble. She looked down at the letter which she
had been rolling and twisting in her fingers, and
following her glance, Moira realized that her own
curiosity was not appeased at all. The mystery
was as much a mystery as ever.</p>
<p>“Why, you’re destroying your letter,” she said
with a laugh, and took it from her and straightened
it out. “You must have been fond of Miss
McCoy,” she added gently. “Was she your
friend?”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“Was she sick, in the hospital?”</p>
<p>“No, she—she was a nurse.”</p>
<p>“Oh, of course. She speaks of being so busy
and of missing you. And you had your baby
there?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[149]</span>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“That old hospital is still there, Ellen. I’ve
driven by it a dozen times going to town. It
doesn’t look like a very cheerful place to have a
baby, but I guess it was nicer in those days.”</p>
<p>“It was all right,” said Ellen. Moira impulsively
reached an arm about her waist.</p>
<p>“Well, I’m going now. You don’t want to talk
any more about it, do you, dear? I’ll ask mother
to tell me the story. Can I—can I keep this letter,
just to show her? I’ll tell her the odd way I
came across it.”</p>
<p>Ellen’s hand flew in terror to the crumpled letter.</p>
<p>“No—no, please, Miss Moira. Give it to me,”
she begged.</p>
<p>The violence of her action, its commanding tone,
brought a flush of anger to Moira’s face. She relinquished
the letter.</p>
<p>“Oh,” she said, in a changed voice. “I suppose
I should apologize—that is, no doubt you are
angry that I read it.”</p>
<p>“Yes, you shouldn’t have done that.”</p>
<p>The servant spoke for the first time naturally,
sincerely and vigorously, and by contrast it made
all her previous answers seem to Moira like a
patch-work of unreality and embarrassed evasion.
Moreover, the accusing tone of the remark
added fuel to her resentment. She arose and
drew her dressing gown about her with a gesture<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[150]</span>
of dignity. This time she certainly must go. And
yet she was hurt and offended. Her only intent
had been one of genuine interest and sympathy,
and it had been badly received. As she stood in
the floor in this puzzled, dissatisfied state, she
caught sight of Ellen’s face appealing to her pathetically.</p>
<p>“Please, Miss Moira,” the woman whispered
hoarsely, “don’t tell Mrs. Seymour, don’t tell her
about this letter, or that you were here, or anything.”</p>
<p>The girl answered with an abrupt gesture of
impatience.</p>
<p>“Ellen, I don’t understand. What is all this
secrecy, this mystery for? I found your letter, I
came to give it back to you and asked a simple
question—and you treat me as though I had done
something criminal. It’s foolish. I don’t see why
I shouldn’t ask mother.”</p>
<p>A blank panic seemed to have seized Ellen. She
snatched the girl’s hand and went on in the same
hoarse voice:</p>
<p>“I can’t explain, but only don’t, don’t say anything
to her. For her sake, for everybody’s sake,
please!”</p>
<p>Moira experienced a momentary insane illumination.
It made her heart stop and then flutter
and then stop again. Twice in her life she had
felt herself near death—once in an accident with
her car, and once when her horse had thrown her.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[151]</span>
She felt now the same sensation she had felt then.
The questions that came to her lips would have
seemed to her idiotic a moment before. Yet they
came irresistibly.</p>
<p>“Ellen,” she cried, “what does all this mean?
Have I got anything to do with it?”</p>
<p>“You? Oh, no, no,” cried Ellen. “No, you
mustn’t think that!”</p>
<p>“Was that baby me?”</p>
<p>“Oh, Miss Moira, how can you—how can you
dream—?”</p>
<p>“Are you my mother, Ellen? Tell me the truth.
I’ll never leave here until I hear the truth. I’ll
search this room, every inch of it.”</p>
<p>But she did not need her answer in words. Ellen’s
strength was gone. Her mouth gibbered and
her face ran tears. The girl sat down heavily, as
though she were facing a job that had to be got
over with. She never doubted the truth after that
first glimpse of it, never tried to find a loophole.
There were simply details to be heard, the future
to be considered. She must get the whole story
from Ellen, talk it over, make some decision. It
would be half the night before she was through
with it, and she hated it....</p>
<p>The sun had, in fact, appeared when she
emerged from the little room, with a strange tale
in her possession, pieced together from the incoherent
reminiscences of Ellen. She had forgiven
Mrs. Seymour, forgiven her real mother, forgiven<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[152]</span>
all of them for the deception. It was only herself
that she could not forgive, herself, humiliated by
the degrading masquerade of twenty years.</p>
<p>The knowledge that gave her most courage was
her illegitimacy—which was clear from Ellen’s
reticence. Better that a thousand times, better a
complete outcast, than a respectable nobody. She
would go, of course, go in secret, that day. She
could take the fewest possible things, put them in
her car when no one was looking, and drive to
town. What money she needed to get established
elsewhere she would have to take from her own
account at the bank, as a loan. Ellen had been
sworn to say nothing of the discovery.</p>
<p>She stood at her window watching the first sun
gild the tops of the knolls, drive the low-lying
mists slowly before it. This great knee of a hill,
this Penthesilea’s knee, had been a mother’s knee
to her, more truly than any human one. There
were no relationships in Nature, and this, the
memory of her youth, could not be taken from
her.... But it would be long before she would
see the morning rise from that window again, and
she lingered over it; not sentimentally. Why
couldn’t she feel sad? Why was she so hard—why
had she been so cruel to Ellen? She could
hear her now pleading that she had given up
Moira for her good, pleading the advantages that
had come to them by the sacrifice. Empty advantages,
thought their possessor, immorally got and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[153]</span>
useless to her now, just so many more things to
bid good-bye to. The only thing that counted was
Hal; if she was bitter it was because she feared
yielding to that. Fate had thrown her to Hal
and snatched her away in the moment of realization....</p>
<p>She turned from the full day flooding the
window and went to her desk. She wanted to write
to him now, while she was strongest.</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>Dear [she wrote]: I know what you
would say. You would say that it made no
difference, and it would not now. But some
day it would, it would grow upon us and
smother us. It would be ‘my past,’ and the
time would come when your pride might make
you hate me, for I would hate myself. I can
face this now. I don’t know whether I could
face it later. I must go away and do something
to absolve myself in my own eyes. And
you must not interfere—you cannot. It will
be years before I can see you again. I shall
never forget these short days, too precious to
describe. It is almost enough, that memory,
without anything more. Good-bye.</p>
</div>
<p>She could write no more, explain no more,
though she wanted to. She suddenly reflected on
the injustice of having to carry all the responsibility
herself. She would have to repulse every<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[154]</span>
advance, however much she might long to accept
it.</p>
<p>She laid down her pen—a gold one that matched
the other little tools on her writing table—with a
gesture that signified she was laying down everything
else in the room, the thousand things she
had used and loved, the horses, the trees, the long,
dear roads, the very air of Thornhill.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[155]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XV</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> only things she saw at first were as dreary
and tragic as herself. It began the moment she
left Thornhill, with her last vision of Ellen’s
agonizing, tear-stained face hiding at her window
on the circular drive. Then came the ride alone,
through hot rows of dusty, dull brick houses; the
terror-inspiring sight of lives straitened and stagnant
through poverty; the abysmal reek of the
neighbourhood, near a glue factory, where she left
her car in the garage, with instructions to return
it on the morrow, and engaged an express man to
take her trunk; the long file of weary, hopeful
people with little green bills in their hands at the
bank—worshippers in the modern temple; the immigrants
at Union Station, sprawling on the circular
benches about the pillars, hemmed in by
their squalid baggage and children; the herding
of exhausted, stupid families from the country
trains to the street-cars and from the street-cars
to the trains; the smoke-patined inferno of the
city sweating in the heat after the clean beauty of
her home....</p>
<p>She had been unable to get away in time to buy
a berth in the fast train. In order to leave that
day, which was imperative, she was forced to take<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[156]</span>
the “two-day” train, and tried to console herself
with the thought that its second-rateness would
more effectually cover her flight. But the endless
trip in coaches that contained unprepossessing
persons from the lower social chaos added to the
weight that lay on her spirit.</p>
<p>The first night on the train she slept early and
long, fatigued by a day full of tasks, but the second
she lay staring at the polished red back of the
berth above, her shade drawn up, her smarting
eyes conscious of the jabbing flashes of light as
they passed through sleeping towns, or straining
out over dark, shuddering mysteries of country;
planning, wondering, trying to anticipate
what life would be like one year, two years, five
years from to-night. Where should she be; whom
should she know? Should she be alive? Yes, she
promised herself, she would be that. The one
thing she could not admit was that life might end
before she had fought it out.</p>
<p>Once she asked herself what Mathilda was doing,
for by this time her flight was an old story,
the worst of the scene between Ellen and Mathilda
was over. But they would be dreadfully unhappy
nevertheless, and the pity she could spare to them
softened her own sense of wrong. She flashed on
the electric light in the berth and looked at her
watch. In six hours, had it not been for Victor
Hugo, for a little scrawled note written a fifth of
a century ago, she would have been meeting Hal<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[157]</span>
Blaydon at the Blythedale platform. And who
could say—if she had married Hal and learned the
truth afterward—would it have made any difference
after all?</p>
<p>It was morning when they got beyond Pittsburgh
and, sleepless and discouraged, the grey
day greeted her dismally. All she was able to see
beyond the window were little grimy houses belonging
to coal miners—they painted them a deep
red or black in those parts, she supposed because
all life was accursed. For long distances nothing
caught her eye but these colours of Hell borrowed
for earthly use. On a high slope, dingy
with slag and coal screenings and dust, there was
a black, sorry-looking house, where two children
were swinging across the cheap frame porch far
above the train. They were singing, and it struck
her as the oddest thing she had ever witnessed.
There were many houses like it on that coal bank.
Where there wasn’t coal there was yellow mud.
Where there were not either there were piles of
rusty iron. She might come to this herself, to
ugliness and hunger. She shuddered and darkened
the berth, hiding her face from the vision as
though it would sear her beauty and put an end to
her youth. Hardly a moment later, it seemed, the
porter awakened her from a deep sleep. They
were in the Pennsylvania station.</p>
<p>Moira’s mood changed the moment she stood in
the rotunda. The powerful magic of the city<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[158]</span>
stirred her. Had it been raining as only it can
rain in New York, had the streets been ice-bound
or blistering in mid-summer heat, she would have
felt that great surge unabated.</p>
<p>But to-day the city was in one of its magnificent
sunny moods, laughing at its own comic and gracile
charms, whimsical with unreliable winds, one
of those startling, extravagant days when a walk
in any street has the effect of champagne. On a
sudden impulse she ordered the cab to the Ritz.
She would enjoy one day, one supreme spell of indifference
and the sense of power, one hour at
court when the regal town must treat her with its
finest smiles and courtesies. She wrote boldly on
the register “Mary Smith,” and the simple dignity
of the name made it distinguished in that
long list of high-sounding titles.</p>
<p>She breakfasted in state in her bedroom, looking
over Park Avenue toward the great railroad
terminus, the innumerable roofs, which stretched
like irregular stepping stones to the river, the
gracious bridge uptown. She drove in a barouche
to the Metropolitan Museum and then down the
Avenue, scenting its fine airs, and lingering on its
elegant details in the slow-moving vehicle; the
gay pile of the Plaza, like a monument erected to
an Empress’ holiday; the pearly home of the
Vander-somethings, with its birdlike little statue
of the architect in a Rembrandt cap, perched
among the décor of its roof; the quaintly painted<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[159]</span>
florist’s building in the forties; broad, gleaming
windows wherein the comfort of grizzled millionaires
was framed for the public’s delectation; the
sleek cathedrals, English and Roman, agreeably
sunning themselves—almost tête-à-tête, with an
air of after-dinner ease; the occasional brown, old-fashioned
banks, which one took at first glance to
be dwellings; the Library, squat with sedentary
scholarship and stained by too much knowledge
of good and evil; the mosque-like corner of the
Waldorf; and far down where the Avenue narrowed,
pleasant-memoried houses of the older
time, and a freshly be-painted little French hotel,
bright and impudent as a hat box from the Rue
de La Paix.</p>
<p>This last looked so suitable to her state of high
spirits that she called to the driver to stop there.
Strangely enough she had never been in the Brevoort.
She slipped down into the basement café
and was soon looking at the multiplied images of
people in the mirrors that panelled the walls;
among them stocky, dapper bachelors, arty,
bearded men, a tall tan young fellow in a Norfolk,
seemingly much fascinated with his companion, a
much older woman with a weathered elegant face.
She liked these. This, she supposed, had something
to do with Greenwich Village, though except
through picture and story, she knew nothing of
it. But as she poured her tea for herself, she felt
suddenly it was not the place to be alone. How<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[160]</span>
easy it would be to go upstairs now, to send a
telegram to Hal. The unholy notion made her
finish her luncheon and leave.</p>
<p>She went back by bus and walked about through
half a dozen shops, then to a round of galleries,
and finally, tired out, to the hotel. The thrill was
over as she watched the day die on the house-tops
of the East Side, and she almost wished she did
not have to spend the night there. She wanted to
be at work, after all, the sooner the better; nothing
else could save her from boredom and despair.
To-morrow she would launch herself on the unknown
stream.</p>
<p>She bought a ticket to a Russian variety show,
which was just then having a vogue on Broadway,
and found forgetfulness between its exotic charm
and the night-view from the theatre roof, of the
yellow-dappled park, its motors skimming and
swerving upon curved ribbons of road. As she
turned for a last look at it, standing apart from
the crowd filing out, her solitary figure attracted
the glances of a score of prosperous-looking men.
But she did not see them. She thought:</p>
<p>“This is so vast, what can it matter who
one is? The Moira of yesterday is just as small
compared to it, as this one here. Why should
I care?”</p>
<p>She laughed at this bit of philosophy. It was
not particularly comforting, but it helped her to
believe that she had given up the past.... In<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[161]</span>
her dreams the visions of the day mingled kaleidoscopically.</p>
<p>Moira knew nothing about New York in a practical
way. Her path had always been the narrow
round tripped by the fashionable visitor. Therefore,
as she sat at breakfast with the “classified”
columns of the <i>Times</i> before her she had no idea
where she wanted to live. It happened that the
first addresses that she jotted down in her notebook
were far downtown and to these she went
looking for the cheapest single room she could
find.</p>
<p>The sights that met her eye filled her with half-humorous,
half-tragic emotions. The landladies
who greeted her were in the main revolting; she
was taken into rooms that smelled, rooms that had
cheap iron beds with battered brass knobs, that
had carpets with holes in them and frayed lace
curtains, grey with dirt, and hideous oak furnishings
and coloured calendars on the walls. Three-fourths
of them were not cleaned oftener than
once a month, she was certain, and she determined
to have cleanliness though every other comfort
failed.</p>
<p>She found it at last. On the west side of the
Village she was attracted by a neat card bearing
the words “furnished rooms” on the door of a
brick house that looked many degrees better kept
than its neighbours. A shy grey-haired woman
admitted her. There were several rooms, all spotless,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[162]</span>
and she selected one reasonably priced, with
white painted woodwork and plain furniture that
she thought she might manage to live with. When
she asked for the telephone to send for her luggage
from the hotel, she was shown into the daughter’s
room. In one corner of this pure haven was a
small, square stand covered with chintz and
draped with flowered cretonne. Upon it stood a
discarded perfume bottle filled with holy water, a
prayer-book and catechism, and a tall white statuette
of the Virgin and child, with the monogram
M. A. on the rococo base. On the wall above the
stand was a black crucifix with the Christ in gilt.
Behind the Christ was thrust a little palm cross.
Still higher than the crucifix hung a photo-engraving
of the Madonna and child from some Italian
master, in a gilded frame. The homely simplicity
of the scene brought tears to the girl’s eyes....</p>
<p>But she felt a little less benevolent the next day
when she asked Mrs. McCabe why there were no
mirrors in the bathroom. That lady gazed at her
with the sad severity of the timid and replied:</p>
<p>“I don’t know. There just ain’t, and there
won’t be.”</p>
<p>In this atmosphere of staggering piety began
the career of “Mary Smith.”</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[163]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XVI</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">By</span> the end of two years Moira had repaid the
last of the five hundred with which she had possessed
herself on leaving Thornhill; and accumulated
a surplus of her own. From the day she
quitted the Munson School of Stenography and
Typewriting she had never experienced difficulty
in securing a job and in making an excellent impression.
The two changes which she had made
were of her own volition. For more than six
months now she had been secretary to the executive
vice-president of a soap company and had become
something of an executive herself, on a salary
that still had a good margin in which to grow.</p>
<p>This man was typical of the average young organizing
and selling marvel of the day, but he had
a quality of intelligence in matters outside of
business—limited, yet enough to be refreshing
after the others she had encountered. Moira did
not feel, as she had in other places, that she must
suppress all the evidences of her breeding and
education. This she had actually attempted to
do hitherto; diplomatically ignoring awkward and
ungrammatical English, adopting as much slang
as she could retain without practice on the outside,
and generally pretending to be quite as much<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[164]</span>
the low brow as most of the other girls whose
chatter bewildered her in the washroom.</p>
<p>With Barcroft, for the first time, she could permit
herself to be natural, and this sense of ease
increased her value enormously in “meeting the
trade” and handling difficult people in his absence.
She checked him up on his errors of dictation
without shame, but she had the rare good
sense to know just when he was wiser in being
wrong. She grew to respect, rather than disdain,
the qualities that made men successful in business.
They were qualities that did not interest her essentially,
yet Barcroft’s mind had mysterious
powers of insight that often called for silent applause.</p>
<p>Their relations developed into friendliness, and
she felt his honest admiration without the fear
that it would lead to complications. She had
never yet herself encountered the boss-turned-lover—and
the case was reputed to be so common
that she felt far from flattered. She tried to account
for it on the score of her natural dignity,
her quiet mode of dressing, her application to
work, and her reticence; but these did not explain.
She was not conspicuously dignified—when it
seemed to her good to laugh she did so. Nor did
she dress unattractively, much as she respected
her budget. And her efficiency was not nearly so
obtrusive as some brands of it she had observed.
Moreover these qualities, she believed, in a young<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[165]</span>
and good-looking woman, would only make her
more pleasing to men. She mocked at the whole
business; it was another of those favourite American
panics, like the white slave traffic, the German
spy-hunt, and the innumerable other horrors that
supported the newspapers and bred the violence
of mobs.</p>
<p>She congratulated herself, nevertheless, that in
spite of Barcroft’s understanding and deference,
nothing of that sort was remotely likely to happen.
She had found a good post, agreeably
within her powers and therefore easy, and she
would be able to keep it indefinitely, with the
hope of a steadily mounting salary. Then one
evening they fell into a conversation after office
hours. It ranged everywhere from the staging of
Arthur Hopkins to the value of rotogravure as an
advertising medium, from the proper length of
skirts to the latest novel, and Barcroft broke into
the discussion suddenly by making love to her.
He too was a victim, as it appeared, of the quarrelsome
and haphazard home.</p>
<p>She had often asked herself, with some bitterness,
what advantage her early life gave her in
such a career as she now had to follow. She found
it in this instance the most useful equipment she
could have. Another girl would have thrown up
the job. She managed adroitly to save it. She
was not at all shocked by Barcroft’s love-making.
She felt sorry for him; she talked to him sympathetically<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[166]</span>
about his troubles, and in the end they
were better friends than ever. Moreover, he was
not long afterward grateful to her ... the wife
had come out victor over her lord ... the yoke
was again pleasing to his neck.</p>
<p>Her life outside of the office was so devoid of
romance that this brush with it at the soap company
was not unpleasant. She had occupied more
than one furnished room since the start at Mrs.
McCabe’s, and in her wanderings she had come
necessarily in contact with the Village life, but
she did not adopt its easy associations. She discovered
very early that the Village was the gossip
shop of the country. National—and international—news
travelled fast there from tongue to tongue,
concerning people even slightly known or connected
with the known. You could not say when
you would walk into one of its restaurants and
find at the next table a prominent matron of your
city. A half a dozen times she had dodged or
stared down old acquaintances on the upper Avenue.</p>
<p>There were girls she met from day to day, willing
to become her friends—attractive girls who
were doing interesting things. A few good
cronies of this sort would have lightened her solitary
evenings and perhaps helped her to find
work more congenial than business. But friendships,
to be worth while, had to be frank. She
knew she would be tempted defiantly to tell all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[167]</span>
about herself, and she shrank from doing so. Native
resourcefulness made it easy to draw the line
of separation, but pride made it hard. She realized
that her aloofness was causing criticism. In
the two restaurants where she took most of her
evening meals—because they were cheap and
clean—the talk was not sympathetic. If one was
free to have lovers <i>ad lib.</i> in the Village one was
obviously not free to dispense with friends entirely.
She seemed a snob.</p>
<p>There were times when she gave herself up to
storms of grief. It grew to be an act of self-preservation,
a part of her philosophy of endurance.
Long spells of weeping, or of a weary,
helpless state of the spirit that was more thoroughly
a surrender and resignation than tears.
Again and again she would cry through the darkness
for Hal with the plaintive voice of a sick
child—and even for the kind ghost of Mathilda
Seymour. If she felt ashamed of these indulgences,
she argued that there could be no harm in
them. Her old friends could not hear her. She
was alone in all those little rooms, completely cut
off from anything familiar, from all but the fluttering,
unreal, poignant memories of her beautiful
childhood. Waves of passionate self-pity
swept over her; she rebelled aloud against the bitter
meanness of her betrayal; the awful burden of
carrying her secret alone.</p>
<p>In the end it was wise that she did not deny<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[168]</span>
these moods when they came to her and did not
try to control them. From them she rose calm
and clear-headed, charged with newly stored
courage. They were spiritual baths, which cleaned
her, a sort of self-asserting prayer. When they
had gone not a vestige of rebellion was left in
her; she felt grown in stature, ready to carry her
fate like a flag. For a day or two afterward she
would be sentimental and overfull of feeling. She
would go out of her way to help beggars and walk
a block to give dimes to the hurdy-gurdy man;
and comfort the little girls in the filing room if
they weren’t feeling well, or had just been called
down by the head clerk.</p>
<p>One thing that these rituals of solitary suffering
gave her was the buoyant, happy consciousness
of artistic power, and she longed to return to
painting. Until now it had seemed impossible.
She could not command the space, the office robbed
her of daylight, materials were too costly. Now
she began to dream of creating a studio—the opportunity
to work might be managed somehow,
once she had acquired the facilities. She saved
more sedulously, giving up a part of her pleasures,
an occasional new book and a theatre now
and then, furbishing clothes for herself despite
her hatred of the needle.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[169]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XVII</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> floors were done and dry. Elsie Jennings,
who had come in to help, was putting the third
coat of black upon the new book-shelves, and
Moira was waiting for the delivery of her three
last pieces of furniture, which completed the picture,
for a time at least. Whether they came as
they had been promised or not, the house-warming
party was to be held that evening, with Elsie,
Jade Sommers, and Arthur, her husband.</p>
<p>Arthur Sommers she had met as a printing
salesman, visiting her office, and later had run
across with Jade in a restaurant. He was a good
sort, in his early thirties, jovial and proud of his
plain citizenship, inclined to stoutness and much
in love with his wife, the story writer. Elsie ran
a shop in which she sold hand-made novelties and
small house furnishings, that caught the sightseers
from the States and uptown with their
faintly futurist air. It was a Saturday in the
Spring, and had the party been postponed two
days it might have celebrated Moira’s birthday.
But she did not divulge that fact.</p>
<p>“There,” said Elsie, “it’s done. And I think
three coats will be enough.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[170]</span>“Not so bad,” replied Moira. She stood making
an inspection of her nearly finished home.
The apartment itself was a discovery—quite a
bargain—one huge room with tall windows, and
a tiny bedroom and bath and kitchen closet, in an
old five-story house, occupied by a small army of
nondescript tenants.</p>
<p>“How good you look to me, old barn!” was her
fervent thought, which Elsie, watching her, divined.
“If those chairs don’t come pretty soon,”
she went on aloud, “they won’t come at all, and
somebody will have to sit on the floor. I’m going
out to shop for food.”</p>
<p>“Yes, go ahead,” said Elsie. “This box of
china has got to be unpacked and washed. I’ll do
that in the meantime.”</p>
<p>Moira had been in and out of the building on
many occasions during the past week, but her
curiosity had been slight regarding her neighbours.
She couldn’t afford to be particular about
them, so it seemed to her pointless to be curious.
As she went downstairs, however, on the way to
the grocery, a name on the door to a small room
caught her attention.</p>
<p>“Miles Harlindew!” she said, and found her
memory flying to years before at Thornhill, and
her lips repeating some lines about:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="first">“All shining parallels of track,</div>
<div class="indent">All brown roads leading up.”</div>
</div></div>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[171]</span>She had begun to see the man’s verses in the
literary magazines when she couldn’t have been
more than sixteen or seventeen, and many of
them had sung themselves into her memory. One
or two had given her an experience of discovery.
But for the last few years she had found no more
of his work. She had imagined him for some
reason, as people are likely to think of anybody at
all who gets things published, as successful, comfortable,
arrived.</p>
<p>“He must be getting along in years,” she
thought. “Poor fellow!” For she knew that
room corresponded to her bedroom above, a mere
cubby-hole, so small that she had to sit on her
bed to look in the dressing table mirror.</p>
<p>It was her first party in years, and she did not
need the cocktails—which Arthur Sommers had
brought in a silver flask—to give her a thrill. She
fell in love with her guests and charmed them
into something like wonder. So this was the unapproachable
Mary Smith!</p>
<p>“Oh, I’ve got distinguished literary neighbours,”
she announced. “Miles Harlindew is on
the floor below.”</p>
<p>A ripple of amusement greeted her remark.</p>
<p>“But I remember some stunning poems of his,”
she went on.</p>
<p>“Oh, yes,” put in Jade, “but nobody knows
he’s alive these days. He doesn’t even know it
himself.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[172]</span>“Come off,” said her husband. “I see him often,
very much alive. Any man who does his
duty violating the Eighteenth Amendment as regularly
as Miles, has my vote. What do you say if
I get him.”</p>
<p>“If he’s sober,” put in Jade.</p>
<p>Sommers glanced at Moira for consent, and she
gave it with a brisk nod. These people knew more
about the man than she and no doubt were justified
in what they said; nevertheless she felt a
vague resentment. What would they say if they
knew all there was to be known about herself?
Experience had already taught her that beneath
the literal and semi-bohemian veneer of her
friends there was a stern core of respectability.</p>
<p>Harlindew came and was sober. He was painfully
and tiresomely sober, and she heartily
wished they had saved some of Arthur’s cocktails.
He sat down stiffly and ventured commonplaces
when spoken to. She found him a satisfactory
physical specimen, showing more years
than she expected, in premature lines. He was
neither tall nor short, of the type that never acquires
flesh, somewhat shaggy behind the ears,
with a lop-sided face. One jaw was stronger than
the other, one eye keener than the other, one brow
more pleasing in conformation than the other—and
these inequalities were not all on the same
side of his face.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[173]</span>When she recited his verses, he was not pleased.
He depreciated them vigorously and was very
uncomfortable. He called them the errors of his
youth. The one thing that he took extraordinary
interest in was a talk with Sommers about business.
She then watched his gestures and animation
with pleasure. They made a change in the
man’s whole appearance.</p>
<p>“I’m thinking seriously of going into business,”
he announced in a grave voice, and seemed a little
disappointed that this statement was not received
with greater acclaim. The evening ended, dampened,
on the whole, by his presence.</p>
<p>“How fiercely shy he is about his work,” said
Moira to the others, as they stood at the door
ready to go.</p>
<p>“Big night last night,” said Arthur, in a stage
whisper. “Feeling rocky.”</p>
<p>“I hope you don’t meet him somewhere at three
in the morning,” added Elsie. “He’ll reel it off
to you then until you’ll be sorry.”</p>
<p>Yet she thought more about what she saw of
Harlindew, during his short stay in her rooms,
than of anything else that had happened that
night. He was the only young man she had met
in New York whom she wanted to talk to. It was,
possibly, a childish delusion, a fancy arising out
of the fact that both of them were miserable about
something, obviously about something it was impossible
to discuss.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[174]</span>A few days later she met him on the stairs,
and he blushed and stammered:</p>
<p>“I believe you are the only person alive who
still cares anything for my poetry.”</p>
<p>He was gone too quickly for her to answer. She
did not see him again for a week, and when she
did she invited him to tea. In an hour he was as
much at his ease as though he had known her forever,
and stayed so long he expressed the fear of
having bored her. Soon after that she was seeing
him two or three times a week.</p>
<p>He came because she listened to his monologues.
Moira found that this was the man’s characteristic.
Shy to the point of morbidness in company,
she no sooner began to encourage him alone than
he talked without end. His ideas were neither
very well thought out nor very clearly expressed,
but they stimulated her. He poured forth the
most curious tag-ends of experience, made extraordinary
confessions with few traces of shame,
chattered cynically, humorously, passionately and
autocratically by turns about writing and all the
arts, and then stopped suddenly in the midst of
things, frightened to silence by the realization of
her presence and the boldness of his own tongue.
Only one thing could have enabled him to indulge
this luxury and keep coming—a knowledge of her
interest, and she gave it honestly. She saw that
the inner life of this young man and her own had
been similar. He soon passed from Miss Smith<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[175]</span>
to Mary, and from Mary to Madonna, and finding
that the last was to his taste, he held to it. Before
long he was giving full rein to a natural streak
of fantastic high spirits and messing about her
place like a privileged person.</p>
<p>She was, for some reason, wholly delighted by
all this. The crushed spirit he had shown at their
first meeting had seemed tragically inappropriate
and she was glad to be drawing anybody out who
needed it. The man, set beside most of the people
she had known, was a freak, certainly, but he was
not an impossible freak. And he differed from
such people as Selden Van Nostrand in depth,
breadth and sensitive contact with life. With a
perfectly conventional background, he had simply,
she thought, allowed his spiritual life to express
itself in his physical life from an early age. His
courtesy was innate and usually unfailing, on
some occasions oppressive—but it was a quality
she would not have liked to find lacking. His flattery
she had to accept as simply as she could; he
exhausted his vocabulary in finding terms for her
beauty. It seemed an ever-renewed miracle to
him, which he had to talk about to enjoy.</p>
<p>“Madonna,” he said one day, “you should be
some queen like Margaret of Navarre. I should
like to be one of the story tellers of your court. It
is a commentary on our beastly times that such a
one as you is a stenographer.”</p>
<p>“If I had the courage—as you have—I wouldn’t<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[176]</span>
be,” she laughed, “but it scares me to think of
going my own way.”</p>
<p>“Ah, that is one thing I came to ask you about.
I must have told you that I intend going into
business.”</p>
<p>“But why?” she asked, “why should you, after
all?”</p>
<p>“Well, when we are young we expect all things
to come to us. We don’t want them just to-day,
but to-morrow?—we’ll whistle and down they will
come from the sky. That’s what we think. In my
case, however, they haven’t come. Ergo, I have
lived disgracefully. Now I must begin to die
gracefully by turning to work. Yet isn’t it possible
to look upon the grotesque preoccupation of
the American male as a trade, a form of artisan-ship,
a deed of the left hand? I know a man who
sells advertising, and who has more confidence
in me than I should dare to have in myself. He
is decent enough to think that I can supply what
he wants. Why not try it?”</p>
<p>“Aren’t you writing anything nowadays,
Miles?”</p>
<p>“Nothing,” he said, with a shrug. “Book reviews!
What are book reviews? Every time I
have to go to see an editor and ask for a book, it
makes me feel as though selling hairpins from
house to house is more respectable. Besides, the
literary world has forgotten me. I only fill up
space.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[177]</span>“Nonsense,” said she vehemently. “And you’re
wrong about business. Business is pretty awful.
I suppose you’ll have to find that out for yourself.”</p>
<p>“There <i>are</i> more delightful occupations, true.
I have always had an ambition to be a cab-driver.
It is the sole profession in which one becomes a
licensed eavesdropper. Excellent for the literary
man. You know people mind the cabby no more
than if he were the horse. I mean a horse-cab, of
course ... only in such leisurely vehicles do people
expose their souls, their most intimate secrets.
But I haven’t the cabby’s training. From things
you have said, I fancied you knew horses.”</p>
<p>“A little. When I was a young girl I had some
playmates who owned them.”</p>
<p>“Noble beasts. I’m sure they would break the
neck of any poor fool who had condescended to
Pegasus.”</p>
<p>“The trouble with you, Miles, is that you don’t
condescend often enough, nor persistently enough.
You ought to be writing poems at this moment.
You should have been doing it these last five
years.”</p>
<p>“The impulse to creation begins with a peculiar
tickling of the tummy that I haven’t felt for ages.”</p>
<p>Her eagerness to start him writing usually
came to nothing in some such joke. At other times
he would grow more serious.</p>
<p>“No, Madonna, I cannot. The blossom of life<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[178]</span>
is gone—only the bare stalk is left. It may flower
again, but it must be watered and fed. My affair
with poetry has ended like so many marriages—in
disillusion. That is rough, when one realizes
that poetry demands the hardest labour for the
smallest return of any occupation on earth. It
takes all one’s youth, at the expense of practical
things—and one is left with a handful of frail results
that are hardly more substantial than
memories. But the greater the early love, the
more complete must be the separation, and one
must recognize it when it comes. One must renounce;
in that lies the only hope of renewal.
People are mistaken about life being a steady
progress from youth to age, anyway. It’s a constant
shuttling from age to youth and back again.
We all grow senile about every seven years, and
then young again. I am in a senile period. Why
should I do poetry the dishonour of pursuing her
in such a state? Bah, it is better to do anything
else. You mustn’t be impatient with me. I do
not flower very often—but neither does the century
plant. And it is counted among the world’s
wonders.”</p>
<p>“Well,” she said consolingly, “perhaps you are
right. Better a little that is good than a lot that
is indifferent. All I know is that there are reputations
built on no more talent than yours.”</p>
<p>“If I could believe that,” he said thoughtfully,
“I should not surrender. But I can’t believe it.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[179]</span>
I shall have to squeeze business for a time, as one
squeezes an orange—for the golden juice. I shall
hoard it, as if every ounce meant a golden hour.
Then we shall see. My God! Madonna,” he burst
forth. “Fifty dollars a week—there in my hand,
<i>every week</i>. Think of it. All my life fifty dollars
has seemed like the other side of the moon.”</p>
<p>The next day he began the work of which he
had talked so much. She had known him a month.
Now for some time, she was to see little of him.
He left early and returned late, and with the long
summer evenings at hand, she began to paint.</p>
<p>It was very hard to drive herself to work. Her
hands were stiff; her senses were clumsy, and her
first efforts resulted in little more than a waste of
valuable materials. She needed everything—models,
encouragement, criticism. These even
Elsie or Miles could have furnished after a fashion,
but she dared not ask them—she was not
ready for that. She contented herself with trials
at still life, with experiments, with attempts at
self-portraiture.</p>
<p>Then slowly the love of simply applying the
brush, the fever of trying and trying again for
the effects she wanted, the joy of feeling momentary
hints of power, and of succeeding now and
then with some little thing, quickened her interest,
until the time came when she found herself standing
up to her canvas until it had grown almost
dark.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[180]</span>She went with Elsie one night to the theatre and
when they returned to Elsie’s rooms, Moira confessed
that she had begun to work. They talked
until three in the morning. She came away elated,
and still sleepless, not the least bit tired. The
mere divulging of her modest ambitions had
started her blood bounding, and she swung buoyantly
down the street.</p>
<p>A block or two from her house she heard voices,
and against the glow of a lamp she saw the figure
of a policeman leaning over a man who lay on the
pavement luxuriously supporting his head from
the flagging with folded arms.</p>
<p>“Come on, now, get up,” said the officer. “I’ve
fooled long enough. If you don’t get up I’ll take
you where you’ll have a long rest.”</p>
<p>The voice that replied was unmistakably Miles
Harlindew’s. “Preposterous,” he said, running
his consonants together. “I am lying on m’own
prop’ty. It was legally d’vised to me by God the
Father. Six feet by three of solid earth. That’s
my allotment. You’ve spoiled it by putting concrete
on it, but I’ll be a good fellow. Won’t complain.
It’s all right. Just go away.”</p>
<p>“Get up, I tell ya.”</p>
<p>“What! Can’t a man lie on his own pat-patrimony,
you blamed ass? It’s goin’ to be mine f’r
eternity, and I choose to use it now!”</p>
<p>“We’ll see who’s a blamed ass, young feller.
Come on!”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[181]</span>Moira interrupted as the patrolman was about
to grasp Harlindew’s shoulder.</p>
<p>“Officer,” she said hurriedly, “I know this man.
He lives in the same house I am in. I think I can
get him to go with me, if you won’t take him.”</p>
<p>“Sure. That’s all right. I don’t want him if
he’ll get out of here. I’ve had this bird before,
and it might go hard with him.”</p>
<p>“Thank you,” she said fervently. Miles was
on his feet in a second, a little unsteady but
effusively polite, repeating the words “divine Madonna”
in a voice that must have carried to many
windows.</p>
<p>“Officer,” he said, “meet Madonna—no, meet
Ariadne. Ariadne, the night is a labyrinth—you
bring me a thread.”</p>
<p>At his door he insisted upon going up with her—“just
for a second”—and she could not refuse
him. He sat on the couch, pursuing a strange,
disjointed tale of the day’s adventures. He told
twice about a steel-worker he had met in a bootlegger’s
house, who once had worked on the Woolworth,
forty stories up. “Said he never went up
on the steel in the morning without three whiskies—if
he had he’d a fallen off,” said Miles. “That’s
good—if he had he’d a fallen off.” The idea
seemed to fill him with extraordinary delight.
But other things were on his mind also. Some
one he called “the damn buzzard at the office”
came in for a large share of abuse.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[182]</span>“If you want to see the damned buzzard to-morrow,
you’d better go downstairs and sleep,”
she suggested. “You won’t feel much like work.”</p>
<p>“Work? Never mind work.... Valuable
man.... Know my own value.... Not at all
sleepy, anyway....” A moment later while she
was out of the room he stretched full length on
the couch and fell asleep.</p>
<p>She did not have the heart to wake him in the
morning. If her own racket, as she flew about
preparing to leave, had no effect upon his deep
unconsciousness, it would probably take too much
effort anyway. At noon, however, she found him
just beginning to stir about, making coffee in her
little kitchen, for which he apologized, but with
no sheepishness. He seemed, on the contrary, to
find excessive enjoyment in having awakened in
a strange place, invaded by a lovely hostess. She
took the rôle of cook out of his hands.</p>
<p>“Well,” he said when they were seated, “I suppose
I am in a pickle. Must say something to
Jones. Wonder what it’ll be. All’s fair, I imagine,
in war and business. Any old alibi goes.”</p>
<p>“But you’re a valuable man, Miles, you know,”
she mocked, “as you said several times last
night.”</p>
<p>His smile was a trifle wan. It was too soon by
all means to bid good-bye to the other side of the
moon—that regular fifty a week.</p>
<p>“You know, I’ve never had to be anywhere I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[183]</span>
didn’t want to be, in ... in God knows when,” he
declared. “Not easy to get the habit. But I’m
doing well down there. Honest, I’m sort of proud
about it.”</p>
<p>Moira thought that he seemed to be worrying
very little about his remissness, not even very
actively at work on the problem of finding an excuse.
And it was late, even for that. She almost
hated to undeceive him, it concerned him so
slightly. Finally she said:</p>
<p>“I telephoned your Jones. I told him you were
too ill to come down. Was that right?”</p>
<p>But obviously this service was in his eyes incalculably
great. The look he gave her made her
want to laugh. She had not thought it possible
for a man to be so pathetically helpless, so
profoundly grateful for an act of friendly foresight.</p>
<p>“How did it happen, Miles?”</p>
<p>“Oh, I think the monotony got on my nerves.
Then yesterday everything went wrong; and I
thought five o’clock would never come. Eight
hours! By Jove, it sometimes seems like eight
years.”</p>
<p>“Yes, it does,” she replied, remembering her
first months of it.</p>
<p>“Do you get used to it?” he asked anxiously.</p>
<p>“Oh, yes, it comes to be a good deal like breathing.”</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[184]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XVIII</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">They</span> started out without objective, left the
train at a little station far down the southern part
of Long Island and walked miles through a flat
country of stunted woods and sandy, almost deserted
roads.</p>
<p>It was toward the end of a coppery afternoon,
the hazy air aflame with the sun taking on the
colour of the burnished trees. To Moira, it
had been an unreal day too, for her thoughts were
running upon revolutionary impulses, plans that
would have seemed impossibly romantic a few
months before. Was it only because of this suddenly
important comradeship with Miles Harlindew
that she had quite painfully realized a sense
of loss? She needed much more than life was
giving her, much more than her mere comfort
and independence, even than her painting. Their
half year together had been full of a strangely
wide sympathy. But it had also been casual, without
purpose and without end. The first tang and
odour of Autumn cold always brought a stirring
of unreasonable energy in her, a sense of dissatisfaction
... a prophecy of change. But now it was
like nothing she had ever known before, a stifling
in the midst of limitless air to breathe.</p>
<p>“Seasons must be responsible for a great deal<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[185]</span>
in life,” she said. “I wonder if anything would
get itself done at all, if it were not for them, for
the urging they give us to act.”</p>
<p>“I have thought that too,” replied Miles. “You
could almost live, simply by letting the time of the
year do what it will with you. I shouldn’t be
shocked if some one told me I had lived that way
myself, most of my life.”</p>
<p>He drew out a pipe, filled and lighted it, and
the fragrant smell was pleasing to her nostrils.
She liked his agreeable, easy ways. He needed
little to be happy, his thoughts, his books, tobacco,
clothes that seemed to have grown older
with him. Since that diffused night he had spent
in her rooms in June, his life had run along in a
quiet groove, free from excitement or discontent—a
period during which, as he told her, weeks
seemed so much longer because they were filled
with so many more and varied impressions, and
these impressions were caught and relished and
fixed as they passed. Excitement and sprees were
monotonous, not varied, and one lost almost all of
one’s impressions.... She had shared this slow
magic with him, and she understood what he
meant. Suddenly she found herself asking him to
marry her.</p>
<p>“But, child,” he said, with amusement in his
face and voice, “you couldn’t do that.”</p>
<p>“I’m not a child,” she replied, with unmistakable
seriousness, “and I could. I love you.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[186]</span>He stopped walking and faced her, holding his
pipe halfway to his mouth and looking at her in
blank amazement.</p>
<p>“My dear Mary!” he exclaimed.</p>
<p>“My name isn’t Mary,” she broke in. “It’s
Moira. Do you like it?”</p>
<p>“Moira? Why haven’t you told me that?”</p>
<p>“There’s even more to tell, Miles.”</p>
<p>“But what do you mean?”</p>
<p>“I suppose you won’t answer my question, until
you hear the rest?”</p>
<p>“I shall be glad to hear anything you want to
tell,” he replied slowly. “But first, my dear girl,
do you know you are the stars in the sky? Do
you know you are a prize for sultans, for emperors,
for decent people, for people infinitely better
than I am? I’m a stopping place in your
passage. Not that.... I’m as worthless as a
man can very well be. I think, in short, something
has made you a little mad.”</p>
<p>“You’re <i>not</i> worthless,” she replied vehemently.
“I’m tired of hearing you say you are....
If all this means you don’t love me and don’t
want me, there’s nothing more to be said. If it
means that you think you are not good enough
for me, that’s foolish. And in that case—there <i>is</i>—more
to be said.”</p>
<p>She trembled a little. Both were under the
stress of a new and powerful feeling.... She
wanted more than anything else in the world to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[187]</span>
take hold of him, to shake him, to keep on shaking
him, because he had not been equal to asking of
her what she had just now asked of him. She
wanted to love him as nobody had ever loved him;
to love him until he respected himself. It needed
no more than a spur, something to make him so
proud that he could scarcely believe in his happiness.
She could do that for him, she was equal to
it, because she did love him and she was beautiful
and desirable. She thought of herself, in that instant,
as Moira Seymour of Thornhill. But in the
next she did not. It was so terribly hard to say
what she had to tell him.</p>
<p>Moira’s persistence in her reckless proposal had
given rise to a tempest of forces in Miles Harlindew.
The notion of marrying her had never even
formed in his dispirited brain. Now it swept
through him like a cleansing and strengthening
hope. He faced her with the uncertainty of a man
who is still afraid to trust his own understanding.</p>
<p>“Wait, Miles!” she said, “I’ve something more
to tell you.” She began hurriedly, like a guilty
child, but as she went on her voice became firm.
“I don’t know who my father was. I was told his
name was Williams, but I don’t know whether he
is alive or dead. I’m the child of a servant who
was never married. You see if you married me,
it might be said that I wanted the protection of
your name. I’ve none of my own.”</p>
<p>It was his turn to be impatient, and he had an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[188]</span>
impulse now to laugh and take her in his arms.
But he held back.</p>
<p>“Mary,” he said seriously, “in the first place
what has all that to do with it?”</p>
<p>“But it’s true. And you’ve forgotten my name
is Moira.”</p>
<p>“I don’t care. It’s all beside the point. I’ve
never been strong for relatives, my own kin into
the bargain. I might not enjoy yours. But do
you suppose it makes any difference to any one
who your father is? Your father and mother are
your face, your beautiful, glorious face. Your
birthright is yourself, your incredible perfection.
Don’t you see, it isn’t your father or your mother
you’re giving up, but yourself, all this miracle?
You can’t give all that to me. I’m not worth it.
I can’t count on myself. How can I ask you to
count on me?”</p>
<p>“You don’t know yourself. You never have.”</p>
<p>“Mary!” he cried, and she let him continue
using the old name which came so naturally. She
felt his intense desire to be honest, while it angered
and annoyed her. Why should he decide
these things for her? But he went on, “Don’t you
see? This is just a—a sentiment, a ridiculous illusion
about your birth.”</p>
<p>“It’s <i>true</i>,” she replied. “I must know that
you believe it’s true—or nothing can go on.”</p>
<p>“If it were a thousand times true it wouldn’t
make me good enough for you.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[189]</span>She sat down beside the road. Tears were coming
to her eyes, and she hated to have him see
them.</p>
<p>“Miles,” she said, “I thought once I couldn’t
love again, but you’ve seemed like something
lost to me and come back. It’s the same thing in
my heart, only older and more real. If you don’t
mind my being what I am, if you want me, please
come and take me. Only don’t argue.”</p>
<p>His close embrace was like the end of a journey
she had been travelling all these last weeks quite
unconsciously. His passion, the fierce, sudden,
exacting eagerness of the luckless taken unaware
by great good fortune, could not hurt her too
much.</p>
<p>“You must forgive me if I am quite mad,” he
stammered. “Look at me. Am I sane, Madonna
beloved?”</p>
<p>She did look at him, but she saw, beyond the
cadaverous face and humble eyes, a man who
carried, she hoped, the power of change within
him. She was completely happy to have that job
for her own. Yesterday she had had loneliness,
a heavy secret, futility. Now she had everything
that she had ever lost; and more, the knowledge
of her own strength. What if it did fail, it would
be this while it lasted....</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[190]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XIX</h2>
</div>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="first">“Oh, when I was in love with you</div>
<div class="indent">Then I was clean and brave,</div>
<div class="verse">And miles around the wonder grew</div>
<div class="indent">How well did I behave....”</div>
</div></div>
<p>“<span class="smcap">It’s</span> old Housman all over again,” cried Harlindew,
in high glee. “Since I married you, I’ve
become a respected citizen. People stop me on
the street and want to talk who haven’t deigned
to give me a wink in years.”</p>
<p>“Don’t forget there is a second verse,” said
Moira.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="first">“But now the fancy passes by</div>
<div class="indent">And nothing will remain</div>
<div class="verse">And miles around they’ll say that I</div>
<div class="indent">Am quite myself again.”</div>
</div></div>
<p>“Yes, but he had to add that to make it a well-rounded
thought. The first is the only one that
counts. Well-rounded thoughts are an abomination.
Or else he had to live up to the well known
Housman cynicism. But isn’t this enough for one
sitting? I’m hungry.”</p>
<p>“Just five minutes more. There’s something I
don’t want to miss about that light. I can’t ever
get you into the same position twice. You’re
changeable enough—physically!” she concluded.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[191]</span>He strolled over to the portrait when she had
released him and criticized it outrageously. The
face was all wrong, the colour of the hair absurd,
the brow too handsome. It was a good picture
perhaps, but a poor portrait. Her sketches of him
were better. She had a nice loose line in sketching
and didn’t flatter so much. Women ought
never to paint men, at least never their sweethearts.
They weren’t honest enough. They were
too romantic. But this was all delivered in the utmost
good nature and she did not resent it. She
thought he was quite a good critic of painting.
He liked things of very crude strength, directness.
Her work, she herself was inclined to admit, indulged
in glamour—it was the hardest thing to
avoid. But she hoped that in ten or twenty years
she would do something good; that was time
enough.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, Miles Harlindew thought
his wife’s work remarkably fine and had often
said so. Then, discovering she was so modest
about it that praise was downright displeasing to
her, he adopted the bantering tone. He catered to
her modesty by giving her all the severe criticism
he dared to. And on the whole it resulted in a
better understanding.</p>
<p>Standing in the doorway, he watched her with
some impatience, while she put on a hat, powdered
her nose, dabbed at her nails and stood in front
of the mirror gazing at herself in satisfied animation.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[192]</span>
She liked to make him wait. Then they
slipped down the narrow carpeted stairs and into
the brilliant afternoon, breathless and laughing.
It was not surprising that people looked twice at
the pair. She wondered if there were any two
lovers who enjoyed their holidays together as
much as they. There were so many things to do
and it needed so little to make them memorable.
A walk through Italian streets, flooded with little
bodies and loud with cries, to some unknown restaurant;
or up the Avenue in the dusk to the
Park; or a long ride in front of the bus—whatever
met their eyes on these jaunts was fresh and
new though they had seen it a hundred times before.
There was no place for a honeymoon like
New York: it meant that the honeymoon never
ended.</p>
<p>Marriage had hardly changed an outward detail
of their lives. She had refused to give up
her job, which he somehow expected she could do.
Perhaps she could paint and try to sell her work.
It appeared to him so much more fitting. But
Moira did not wish to sell her paintings, even if
she had thought them worth any money. All that
could wait. Wasn’t his work waiting too? Poor
boy! How could any one expect him to write with
his time all taken up?</p>
<p>“But,” he objected, “I may have to take care
of more than you one of these days. Hadn’t I
better get used to it?”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[193]</span>“Nonsense,” she replied. “That’s all the more
reason why I should be earning now.”</p>
<p>Miles had retained his room downstairs, much
as it was, except that she saw it was kept in some
sort of order for him. Her own tiny living quarters
were not enough comfortably for two, and she
had foreseen that he would have many a spell
when he wanted to be quite alone. To her mind
he was very chivalrous in hiding his low-spirited
moments from her. When he left her early after
dinner to spend the evening and the night in his
room, she knew that it was a signal for one of
these. He was working off some disappointment,
some mood of defeat. These troubles had generally
fled by morning. He would be in her bedroom,
before she woke up, noisy and hungry, and
full of jokes.</p>
<p>“You’re making me too happy to write,” he
told her on one such occasion, as he sat on her
bedside and put her hand to his lips. “You
remember Rossetti says:</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="first">“By thine own tears thy song must tears beget</div>
<div class="indent">O Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none</div>
<div class="indent">Except thy manifest heart and save thine own</div>
<div class="verse">Anguish or ardour, else no amulet.”</div>
</div></div>
<p>He had the old-fashioned way of reading poetry,
intoning it without much shading or expression—and
he threw himself into it. She thought nobody<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[194]</span>
was just like him when he did that entirely for
his own pleasure.</p>
<p>“But he speaks of ardour as well as anguish,”
she objected.</p>
<p>“Yes, I suppose poetry itself does not have to
be sad. But it comes out of something like sadness.
Rossetti was right. It is as foolish to write
poetry in the midst of happiness as to try to find
words for what you look like now—when I can
be looking at you instead. How beautiful you are
when you wake.”</p>
<p>It occurred to Moira that she might be a little
distressed over all this. She wanted him to be
happy, but she also wanted him to write—and become
famous or at least deserve it in her eyes.
But her good sense brushed his idle words aside.
Why encourage harbouring such notions? She
had never known any one who spoke his mind
aloud so continuously as he did, and she knew
that many of the things he said simply passed
through it aimlessly. They were without significance
except the significance of always tossing up
other thoughts, and still others, until the right
one came. This thinking aloud had a ruthless
quality that would have hurt a more sensitive
wife. It did not trouble her.</p>
<p>She decided there was no hurry about his getting
to work. She did not want him to do it until
he could do his best. Nothing less than that she
wished to foster. They were living their lives to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[195]</span>
the full, now, through each other. In good time
they would branch out and live in wider circles.
Miles was storing up treasures that would find
utterance one of these days. Indeed he was writing—slight,
experimental things which she did not
like, it was true, but which would help to open up
the dried springs of his invention. This period
of his life was certainly not less promising than
the five years before she had met him, arid years
of picking up a mere living by critical trifles.</p>
<p>An event that she did not foresee, however,
happened shortly afterward. A week came when
Harlindew spent almost no time with her. He
disappeared into his room early; at breakfast he
seemed to have slept little, and he was distracted
and irritable. When the time came to go downtown,
she felt that he resented it. He would
dawdle and temporize and start off anywhere
from a quarter to a half hour late. The secrecy
of his movements were a trial to her, and she
could not get anything out of him by casual questioning.
His answers were indirect, hinting at
work. Then her questioning stopped. She realized
that she was growing angry; malicious impulses
came to her, a desire for petty revenge,
and all this warned her that she was vainer than
she had believed. She depended upon his attentions,
his love-making, his continual amusing flattery.
That was the unfairness of marriage, she
argued. It taught you to expect certain things<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[196]</span>
you had got on very well without before. But if
your single mate withheld them, you could
not go elsewhere to supply them.... After six
days of this, Moira began to believe herself a
philosopher, and something of a cynic as well.
She had kept her temper, but she had also been
experimenting with the green serpent of disillusionment.</p>
<p>The thing ended with a visit to her bedroom at
two in the morning. He was a little excited by
liquor, a most unusual thing since their marriage,
yet she was sure he had not been away. Most of
this excitement came from another cause. He
held in his hand a half a dozen sheets of paper
and began without preliminaries to read them to
her. They were new poems, of course—how
stupid she had been not to suspect it! When
he had finished reading them she snatched them
from him with cries of delight and read them herself.</p>
<p>“I have to see the words—the blessed words!”
she declared.</p>
<p>He walked out of the room, leaving the crinkly
papers with her, walked on air yet timorously,
jumping half out of his boots at every slight noise
she made with the sheets. When he came back
he found tear-drops clinging to her lashes. She
was still reading the poems as though to fix
them then and there in her mind. She laid back
on the pillows and asked him to read them all over<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[197]</span>
himself aloud, and “very slowly.” It was a long
moment after he had ended that she spoke.</p>
<p>“They’re better than anything you’ve done,”
she said, with a contentment that filled him with
torturing pangs of delight. “As good and better
than the best in your book. It’s come back to you,
Miles, I always knew it would. Oh, isn’t it wonderful!”</p>
<p>He sat down, suddenly downcast and sheepish
in the midst of his elation.</p>
<p>“But if this is going to happen to me often,
what am I going to do?” he said. “I’ve lived
those things. It’s been hell and heaven, Moira. I
took two afternoons off from the office. I had to.
It was all but impossible to go.”</p>
<p>She sat up in bed and gazed at him in profound
reflection. She felt she knew what he meant. It
was not childish, not perverse. How could such
things be mixed up in the same day, this fine fervour
of creation, and that mechanical, wretched
work? What she most desired him to be he was
now, and that he must continue to be at the cost
of everything else. She suddenly saw life rosy
and fresh ahead of them, untrammelled by anything
base, full of brave expression.</p>
<p>“Never mind, never mind!” she cried excitedly.
“Listen, you can hold on two months longer somehow.
In two months my lease will be up. We’ve
got eighteen hundred dollars between us now, and
by that time we ought to have two thousand.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[198]</span>
We’ll just quit cold, Miles, drop everything.
Somewhere in Europe we can live for nothing, live
forever on that. Who knows what can happen
before it is gone? We might never have to come
back—never until we wanted to. You can go on
writing and writing these gorgeous things!”</p>
<p>“My God,” he murmured, “it would be marvellous.
It could be done.... O Magician!”</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[199]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XX</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> experience of that night was one of those
moments on the Olympus of extravagant hope, before
which it is merciful to draw the veil. In one
hour they seemed to have attained all that life
held for the most fortunate—freedom, work, love.</p>
<p>Therefore, had they stepped from the tropical
belt to the Arctic circle; had they plunged from
the top of a sunlit tower to the depths of a coal
shaft, the change which came during the next
month could not have been greater. Moira had
never anticipated resenting her first baby. Preparations
for the trip, expenditures for the trip,
had first been slackened up in mid-career, as they
waited apprehensively and then had been abandoned
with the abruptness that only comes when
death enters a house. There lay the paraphernalia
of travel, new and useless. They had drifted
into a state of divine negligence. Jobs and all
practical affairs went along any old way; they
were matters soon to be jettisoned like an old
coat. Then came this reality as if the four walls
of a prison had been dropped about them in a day.</p>
<p>It was not so bad as that of course, when the
first rude awakening had passed. Life substitutes
one enthusiasm for another. Miles recovered admirably<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[200]</span>
at once; he spent his eloquence reassuring
her that this was the best thing that could have
happened to them. He had all the normal delight
in the prospect of fatherhood.</p>
<p>But Moira was not so easily reconciled. She
would always look upon that baby as something a
little too unreasonably expensive. She was not
ready for it, and had the plan of going abroad
been broached earlier she would never have had
it. She would have been more pleased had Miles
not tried so hard to make her see it in a better
light. She did not doubt his sincerity, nor that
he would be one whose joy in children of his own
would be unbounded. But she hated to think of
his taking one burden after another from her
shoulders until he would be carrying them all,
while she waited helplessly. She had never
thought him, as yet, strong enough without her.</p>
<p>So she did not relinquish her burdens until she
had to. She worked on, until the last day she could
without embarrassment. After a season of careful
figuring she estimated that what they had
saved, with Miles’ salary (which had been slightly
increased not long before) would enable them to
maintain their present comforts until she got back
to earning. She hoped that could be managed
somehow within two years.</p>
<p>But if the idea of having a child was an adventure,
they both had to admit that the conditions
it called for were somewhat depressing.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[201]</span>
For one thing, they had to have more space.
The first work she did after leaving Barcroft’s
establishment was to move to a flat in the eighties
on the west side. In every particular this place
lacked the charm of her studio, nor could anything
they did to it or put into it make it seem the same.
The little kennel-like separations called rooms
were diabolically invented for people who had to
have children, and so constructed as to make them
hate the fact that they had them.</p>
<p>At the earliest hint of the baby’s coming she
noticed changes in Miles. He had never been very
regular or responsible about office hours. Now it
worried him if he was a half minute late in getting
started. He talked less, he exaggerated less.
He seemed to be unwilling to discuss books, or
any of the old subjects that had enthralled him.
He spoke much of there being a future “in the
firm,” for a chap who “really buckled down and
dug up results.” She realized that he was beginning
to regard his job as a permanent support.</p>
<p>He came home sometimes with bundles of
papers filled with figures and sat in the little
study at night, writing what he called “plans”
and “copy” and making “market analyses.” It
was the same sort of jargon that Barcroft talked
incessantly—“sales and distribution,” “consumer
demand,” and “dealer helps.” It had sounded
all right from Barcroft; but from Miles....<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[202]</span>
She found among his papers rough drafts in his
own hand of advertisements extolling the value
of hog foods, lice powder, piston rings—and one
long story about “How I raised my salary from
fifty to two hundred dollars a week in six months.”
When she read these she went into her room
and cried. They had meant nothing to her so
long as he took them lightly; now that he applied
his whole mind to them and sat absently dreaming
of them, they seemed blasphemous. But she
dared not complain; she had no remedy to offer.</p>
<p>In a little while—after the baby was a few
months old—he began to bring home news of certain
results from all this energy and absorption.
His salary took a sudden jump. He was “meeting
clients” continually, doing executive work.
Soon, he told her, he would have a small office to
himself. She simulated pleasure at these announcements,
but she felt none. Every triumph
of that sort meant a surrender of himself. She
even resented the care he had begun to take in
his clothes and his hair-cuts, the change in his
style of dress.</p>
<p>The ugliness of the little apartment in a building
which held perhaps fifty tiresome families,
the dreary parade of bourgeois virtues, and fourth
or fifth rate finery, the strident female voices in
the street and halls, the newness of everything one
touched and looked at, the lack of shadows and
mystery and ease, the pervasive, obvious travail<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[203]</span>
for money—all these things were to Moira an
education in American life which her youth had
escaped. She disliked them, but she regarded
them, because they were strange to her, with a detached,
half-amused curiosity.</p>
<p>To Miles, however, they were a return to the
hated past—from just such a street in Cincinnati
he had fled in horror years before. She saw that
it really involved him; that daily, as it were, he
had to brush its overwhelming effect from his
clothes and from his mind. It was she who was
putting him through all this.... And it was only
an added irony that Miles, junior, turned out
such a satisfactory child, normal and vigorous
and good-tempered. It did not improve matters
any that he deserved this sacrifice, for with every
new fascination he exerted, every delightful characteristic
he exhibited, the subjection of all their
hopes to his demands became more complete....</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>Three years passed this way, and though the
affairs of the Harlindew family went on quite as
ever in outward appearance, much had happened
underneath to both.</p>
<p>In the first place she had learned that a child
was not a temporary encumbrance, one that she
could throw off in a year or two for outside work.
If certain of its wants diminished with its growth,
others increased, and the habit of being an attendant
mother became fixed. She had had to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[204]</span>
abandon her plan of returning to offices. Cheap
servant girls and the risk run in trusting them
worried her too much as it was. She became as
helpless a house-person as the scores of other
young mothers in her teeming block.</p>
<p>With the relinquishment of this notion came
the gradual realization that they might never be
able to take up again that shoulder to shoulder independence
which had seemed so fine while it
lasted. Miles from now on was the provider—she
and her child the dependents. She discovered
that he had seen this more clearly than she
from the beginning.</p>
<p>He ceased to take an interest in himself at all.
His mind settled into a hopeless groove of dogged,
disinterested work. To see him pick up a book
and lay it aside was a gesture that came to hold
a veritable sense of tragedy for her. To watch
the effect of a fine play upon him was pathetic.
While its beauty filled him with happiness, he
dared not allow himself to be lifted too far into
that rarified atmosphere. He ventured no opinions
about any of the hundreds of stimulating personalities
who were coming up on the horizon of
culture everywhere. Poetry he spoke of with
whimsical condescension, even with contempt. It
seemed to him an impudent excrescence, a meaningless
dream that had no right to existence in a
life of reality.</p>
<p>All this came more swiftly than she knew, occupied<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[205]</span>
as she was with the absorbing bit of life
under her care. In three years she thought she
scarcely knew Miles. The poems he had shown
her that night before the baby’s coming were
often in her hands, though she dared not mention
them to him. They were as fine as they had been
then. Could this plodding man—who loved her
still with a desperate, clinging love, a love, as it
seemed, that was the breath of his life—be the
same man who had written them? And was it
possible that he must stop that divine occupation
for no other reason than that three people had
to live? The future seems short when life is
meaningless and tiresome, and we become seized
with a fierce impatience. Moira fought against a
feeling that they were old and life was declining
to its end....</p>
<p>An ominous fact was apparent. In spite of
Harlindew’s devotion to work at the office he was
achieving very little. He had reached a certain
point and come to a standstill. His salary, large
according to the ideas with which he had begun,
was a dwindling insufficiency when it came to paying
their bills. He was beginning to be afraid
that he might never go farther. She remembered
now a saying that Barcroft had repeated to her:
“Push may start behind, but it’s got brains beat
all hollow in the end.” He was referring to the
kind of brains Miles had, theoretic and literary.
Miles himself tried to explain his predicament in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[206]</span>
words of much the same import. There was a
“point of saturation,” he said, in salaries and
advancement, unless you “got outside and went
after the business.” Apparently that was what
he could not do.</p>
<p>At the same time, an incredible number of new
expenses, roundly chargeable to the item named
“baby” had absorbed all their early savings except
a few hundred dollars, which she jealously
kept—not so much in fear of an emergency, as
with the hope that it might be the magic key to
open the door to some way out of their life. But
she went into this treasure to buy Miles decent
business suits. They were both behind in similar
comforts and vanities.</p>
<p>Harlindew seemed to resent any invasion of his
evenings, to prefer to sit with her and his
thoughts. Yet in reality he was full of an enormous
restlessness to which he dared not surrender.
The office needed all his energy; he could not
spend it. So he thought.... Moira would take
the bored man out whenever her maid would stay,
trying to revive the spirit of their old comradeship.
It came to life only in rare flashes.</p>
<p>Her twenty-eighth year passed. She found herself
with more freedom on her hands now, and
she obtained work from Elsie Jennings which
brought in a few dollars a week. She was not
sure which feeling was uppermost in Miles, his
pleasure at seeing the money or his disgust<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[207]</span>
at finding her painting silly gift cards. Her painting,
the fact that she had always kept it up to
some extent, was his consolation, a vicarious substitute
for his own emptiness.... But the money
made them more comfortable.</p>
<p>Then she discovered that she was going to have
another baby. He took the announcement casually,
even with a joke.</p>
<p>“By Jove, my dear,” he said, “I’m succeeding
in something, anyway.”</p>
<p>He sat down and chuckled to himself. Three
things had struck him as very funny. One was
that he had never in his life pictured himself as a
prolific father—like his own father; another was
that he would be thirty-seven that week—and the
third that he had come home to tell Moira his salary
had been cut.</p>
<p>She dropped quickly, beseechingly beside him,
disliking the sound of his laugh.</p>
<p>“What’s the matter, darling, is it too much?”</p>
<p>He put his arms across her shoulders in an accustomed
gesture.</p>
<p>“No, no, dear. How absurd. I’m as glad as I
can be.”</p>
<p>He laughed again, attempting naturalness, and
ruffled his hair with a sudden motion of his hand.
But she felt the husband slipping from her grasp,
turning defiantly before her eyes into the vagrant
poet....</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[208]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XXI</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">They</span> moved again, the landlord uptown having
raised the rent at the expiration of their lease.
The new place was in two large, bare rooms four
stories up, lighted by gas, and without any kitchen
except a small gas stove in a corner and some
shelves concealed by a wall-board screen. There
was a dilapidated bathroom, and a roof above
where she could take the children in good weather.
The place was in the Italian quarter and was
cheap. The move seemed a logical one to Moira,
for it brought them down in the social scale. If
they were to be poor, it was better to live with
the poor than with the pretentious. And the Italian
section was in the Village, of which they had
both become incurably fond, and where for many
reasons they felt most comfortable.</p>
<p>The house was managed by an Italian woman
named Respetti, who had once done odd jobs of
sewing for Moira and for whom she felt a strong
liking. Mrs. Respetti had appeared to be quite
overjoyed to see her again, delighted to hear of
her marriage and her children, and had offered to
help her look after them when she could. Her
willingness in this regard was the deciding factor
in Moira’s choice of the house.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[209]</span>She had not been installed there more than a
few weeks when Miles finally lost his job outright,
an event she had anticipated almost any day since
before the birth of her little girl. He made efforts
to obtain work of the same kind, but unsuccessfully.
He got books for review. He did whatever
came along. One day he brought her a check
signed by his father. He began shortly afterwards
to be somewhat worse than idle, and sought
forgetfulness of his troubles in a way to increase
them....</p>
<p>Moira had lived to see three men in him: the
skylarking poet, the dogged misfit in business, and
finally the self-drugged and nearly self-convinced
failure. And still the vision of the first one
haunted her and she hoped to bring it back to life.</p>
<p>Left to herself, she made friendships in the Village
and built up her own income to fairly respectable
proportions. She was, at least, preserved
from downright anxiety about the children.
In her youth at Thornhill, had she witnessed the
privations and makeshifts which now made up
her life she would have thought them a chapter out
of some incredible tale of human misfortune.</p>
<p>One night when she had waited late for Miles
and he had not come, she went to Sophie’s
Kitchen.</p>
<p>This was a dimly lighted little restaurant, with
two rows of board tables down each wall, and an
exotically foreign air, where the food was well-flavoured<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[210]</span>
and not so expensive as in most of the
show places of the section. She was very fond
of Sophie, the proprietress, a whole-souled
woman, discriminating in her intimates, with a
soft, pleasing voice, and remarkably long, narrow
hazel eyes.</p>
<p>As Moira seated herself at one of the tables she
was conscious of a fashionable party across the
room. Such people were not unusual in Sophie’s
and she paid little attention to them. She saw
the handsome proprietress in the open pantry at
the back of the room and waved to her with a cry
of greeting. Sophie replied by calling her name.
Immediately afterward, Moira looked up to see
a man coming toward her from the group she had
spotted upon entering. He reached her table and
thrust out his hand.</p>
<p>“Well, Rob Blaydon!” she cried.</p>
<p>“Moira.”</p>
<p>She had recognized him at once, but she looked
him over more carefully as he sat down opposite
her. He was stouter. She found herself experiencing
a sensation she had never known before,
that of meeting a youthful companion grown mature
in her absence, one she was fond of. It wasn’t
such an extraordinary sensation. It might have
been only a few days ago when she was seeing
Rob constantly. Nothing happened to people at
all. Perhaps his face had changed a little, but
whatever change there was she would have expected.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[211]</span>
Yes, she felt he was an even more wicked
and human Rob than before.</p>
<p>“I’ll tell you what, Moira,” he went on at once.
“I don’t care what you’ve got on hand to-night,
you’ve got to spend the evening with me. If you
will wait just a minute I’ll get away from these
people on some pretext. I’ve simply got to talk
to you, Moira. What do you say?”</p>
<p>“Go ahead, Rob, if you want to. I’d love it,”
she replied with unaffected pleasure.</p>
<p>He came back in a few moments.</p>
<p>“Evidently they are used to your whims,” she
said. “They don’t seem to mind.”</p>
<p>“Forget ’em,” he replied, with a clipped ruthlessness
she remembered well.</p>
<p>The two women had in fact glanced at her
curiously and critically, but she did not care.
They were certainly a very smart party. She
wondered what they would think if they knew that
she, too, not so many years ago, had worn the
clothes they were wearing and cultivated their
dry, sophisticated smiles. It appeared to her now
a diluted and uninteresting sophistication....</p>
<p>“Moira,” he was saying, “I’ve got to know all
about you. I’m hungry for information. You
don’t look any younger. But you don’t look any
the worse, either. What wouldn’t they give back
home to be with me now!”</p>
<p>“Rob, it’s good to see you!”</p>
<p>“Honest? Well, I’m certainly glad you feel<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[212]</span>
that way. Still, I always knew you’d be just the
same. Why did you do it, Moira? Why in the
devil did you do it?”</p>
<p>“Do what?”</p>
<p>“Oh, all that—rot. It was silly, Moira. You’re
one of us, to this day. Always will be, you know.
Who cared?”</p>
<p>She laughed a few notes of warm laughter that
was still a clear stream free from the sediment of
bitterness.</p>
<p>“I never think of that any more. Perhaps it
was silly. But I’ve been happier.”</p>
<p>“H’m.” She was conscious that his eyes
searched her face, and rather proud that what he
found there would make it impossible to pity her.
“H’m,” he repeated, “well, maybe you have. I
guess you know a lot.”</p>
<p>“How are they, Rob? I’d like to see them all.
I really would. Goodness, it’s been ten years!
How’s Hal?”</p>
<p>There was no challenge in the tone—it was just
a natural question.</p>
<p>“You haven’t heard about Hal? Well, Hal is
in China. Been there for six years and I reckon
he won’t come home. You know he looked high
and low for you—thought he was going out of his
mind. There were difficulties, you understand,
or perhaps you counted on them. Fear of publicity—truth
leaking out—abduction—shouting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[213]</span>
your name from the house-tops. But he wore
himself out. Then one night he came home, and
broke down. Well, he told me he guessed it was
better the way it turned out—that he admired
you and knew you’d never be moved. Thought
after what happened you’d never feel right. My
God, you high and mighty idealists!”</p>
<p>“Is he happy?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know. Hal and I were always so confounded
different, it’s hard for me to get him. He
wasn’t cut out to be happy or the opposite. He’s
turned out one of those quiet, square-jawed
gumps, Moira. I met him in Paris two years ago,
and we had a rotten dull time of it. I suppose
he’ll mope around the Orient the rest of his life,
working for corporations, get richer and richer
and marry somebody’s sister equally rich. Now,
I’m another breed of coyote. I’m always satisfied
when I have a clean shirt on. It’s the thoughtless
life I like.”</p>
<p>“I’m sorry Hal isn’t happy,” said Moira ruefully.</p>
<p>“I wouldn’t be sorry about him!” snapped Rob.
“Damn it, Moira, I don’t say you weren’t clever
as the devil. But if Hal had been me I’d have
found you.”</p>
<p>“You’re the same Rob!” she laughed. “You
know, of course, you’re the only one of them I
could have run into this way and talked to comfortably.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[214]</span>
And the others—how are they? Your
father I”—she dropped her voice—“read about
in the papers.”</p>
<p>“Poor Dad. He must have felt he was buncoed
sometime or other in his life. He tried to overcrowd
the last few years. I think Aunt Mathilda
felt he went off about in time.... Those two old
women—I mean your mother, Moira, and my aunt.
It’s a curious friendship that’s grown up between
them. They keep that big house together and
think mostly about cows and flowers—and old
times.”</p>
<p>She did not reply to that nor look at him directly.
She was glad when he burst out in a more
immediate vein.</p>
<p>“Well, what do you say to a night of it? I find
it’s a dull world, Moira. You may have more
money than I have, and it may bore you to do the
bright lights ... but that’s my form of entertainment.
However, I’m only going to do what
you say. It’s your night. But I don’t imagine
you want me to take you to church!”</p>
<p>“I haven’t money,” she answered, smiling. “I
never have a night of it, Rob. I’d love one.”</p>
<p>“Good! Come on.”</p>
<p>“No. I want you to wait here while I change.
These clothes won’t do.”</p>
<p>“Just as you say. But can’t I take you—wherever
it is you go to change your clothes?”</p>
<p>“What’s the use?” she queried, tentatively, as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[215]</span>
much to herself as to him. “No, I’d rather you
wouldn’t.”</p>
<p>“Just as you say.”</p>
<p>“Rob, you’re a dear. In fifteen minutes I’ll be
back. Meantime you talk to Sophie. Oh, Sophie,”
she called, and while she waited for Sophie to
come, she added, “Sophie will like you fine. She
might even put you on the poor list.”</p>
<p>“What’s that?”</p>
<p>“Sophie has a sliding scale of prices. But
that’s a secret.”</p>
<p>Moira’s one black evening gown was rather old,
but she felt extraordinarily happy as she stepped
out of the restaurant a little later on his arm.
The sweet, leathery smell of the taxicab’s interior
held almost a new shiver for her. How long it
had been since she had smelled that with a good
conscience and seen the lights of the little squares
and the upper Avenue slip by like a single glittering
chain, to the slinky whirr of wheels. She
looked forward to the evening for itself—its adventure
in colours—and for Rob. She begged
him not to ask her questions, not until they had
had a few dances and found a quiet corner after
the fun.</p>
<p>“I see,” he said. “You’re starved for a fling—even
if you won’t let on.”</p>
<p>“I am—with you.”</p>
<p>“No kidding? But I guess you always did like
me pretty well. You used to be my only champion.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[216]</span>
And I needed one often. Well, I’m an unrepentant
sinner.”</p>
<p>After dining they took in a part of the Follies
and then went to dance. It was the same, she
found, here as it had been at home. Whenever
they stopped, at the Tom-Tom and La Fleur de
Nuit, he was known and served like the old-timers.
She begged him to go on drinking while she
skipped, and he did so without apology, explaining
that it was his forte. She wondered at his
power of absorbing continuously without the
trembling of an eyelash. It pleased her to meet
admiring eyes, and be asked to dance by his
friends.</p>
<p>He steered her afterward to a place furnished
like a very intimate club, where they sat in deep
armchairs under dim lights and had scrambled
eggs and bacon on little French stands. There
she took a long Scotch highball and told him something
of herself.</p>
<p>“Moira,” he said. “It’s a weird sensation to
listen to such a tale from you. You belong in this
sort of thing.” He indicated the too elegant
room.</p>
<p>She rose to go.</p>
<p>“It’s better fun to feel you belong in the whole
crazy world. I wonder if you do?”</p>
<p>She laughed and then added with a sudden
burst of bravado: “Rob, I’d like to take you home<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[217]</span>
and let you see my kids. I’d like to to-night.
Could you come?”</p>
<p>“Yep. I get a train out of here at nine in the
morning and there’s more than six hours to make
it.”</p>
<p>She felt it was an odd experience for him climbing
up the dark, gas-lit stairs. She led him back
to the cribs with candelabra in her hand, and
he looked longest at the blond-haired little Joanna,
seeing in her broad, upturned, warm face
some misty resemblance to his earliest vision of
her mother.</p>
<p>“They’re great kids, Moira. But I won’t bluff—I
like ’em all best when they’re asleep.”</p>
<p>They came out into the shadowy, haphazard
studio, and she knew he felt uneasy and shocked
at her surroundings.</p>
<p>“Well,” he said coolly, “of course you’re going
to let me help you. I’ve got plenty—more than
is good for me—and nobody has more right to it
than you. If you say so, I’ll ditch that train to-morrow
and have you out of here by noon with
the children, into a comfortable place.”</p>
<p>“No, sir,” she laughed.</p>
<p>“But, my God!” he protested, and then added
severely. “Moira, I told you early in the evening
you looked none the worse for everything....
But you do—you look peaked. You’re fagged.”</p>
<p>“Who wouldn’t be, after a night of it with you!<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[218]</span>
No, no, you dear boy. But we’ll have a night of it
again.”</p>
<p>“Thanks for that.”</p>
<p>“And only with you, Rob,” she continued, with
emphasis. He caught the hint that he was to keep
the secret of her whereabouts.</p>
<p>“Just as you say. I shan’t talk. But I’m going
to get you out of this, somehow, sometime. I
can’t tell you where to reach me, to-night, except
that Thornhill does, in a roundabout way. I’m
going to locate in the East in a few days and you’ll
hear from me. I’m going now. There’s no use
talking, Moira, this pulls me down”—he made a
gesture with his hand about the room and then
added apologetically—“Don’t be offended. It’s
just because it happens to be you.”</p>
<p>As he stood awkwardly, with hat and stick under
one arm, he took out a long box of cigarettes and
threw it on the table.</p>
<p>“At least let me give you those,” he said with
a sheepish grin.</p>
<p>“Rob, please don’t worry about me,” she
pleaded. She stepped toward the table to take a
cigarette from the box he had thrown down, but
his outstretched arm stopped her.</p>
<p>“Here,” he said, offering his opened case,
“take one of these.... Moira, you’re the woman
who makes all my conceptions about the sex go
blooey. Damn it, I wish I were Harold. I wish
I had some prior rights in the matter.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[219]</span>“You’ve more rights this minute than Hal,”
she said firmly.</p>
<p>After he had gone she sat puffing smoke into
the dim upper reaches of the room, and watching
the petals of candlelight waver and dip. What
fun it had been! Life held strange meetings.
Perhaps it held many more for her. She was a
little unhappy, dissatisfied ... the place did look
dismal, unclean, comfortless.</p>
<p>In the morning she found Miles pacing the
studio waiting for her to rise. He was nervous
and evasive, but in better shape than she had expected
to see him. Obviously, he had done his
recovering elsewhere, and bathed while she slept.
She kissed him, her quarrel with him lost in
pleasant afterthoughts of the night before, but he
seemed troubled and strange. At breakfast, he
suddenly asked:</p>
<p>“What the devil is this?”</p>
<p>“What?”</p>
<p>He tossed a Pall Mall cigarette box across the
table and she opened it. The silver paper was
folded carefully over the top. Between it and the
bottom layer of cigarettes lay five one hundred
dollar bills.</p>
<p>“It’s a long story,” she said, recovering from
her surprise. Then she told him about Rob. He
stood up to go after she had finished.</p>
<p>“Well,” he said, with some embarrassment,
“I do hope you feel it’s a perfectly natural thing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[220]</span>
for a fellow to open a box of cigarettes lying
around on a table. I mean to say—”</p>
<p>“Nonsense. I should have done it myself.”</p>
<p>Miles left her, to go to his accumulated work,
bitterly, she knew, and more completely convinced
of his uselessness. She sat down to try to think
out what was to be done. The owner of the
five hundred had taken his train long ago. She
did not know where to reach him, and if she
did, it would be downright mean to send the money
back. She remembered how he had prevented
her from opening the box before he had left
her. The money was not there by accident. Rob
was her schoolboy friend. Perhaps she was only
giving herself an excuse, but what good would
her self-righteousness do to temper the hurt she
knew he would feel? She would accept his gift
simply and with thanks. Besides, she had a plan.
On the children’s account, on Miles’, on her own,
she had long been wanting to put it into execution.
This money would enable her to do so,
beautifully and without a hitch.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[221]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XXII</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the open country near a southern village of
Connecticut, not over a brisk morning’s walk to
the Sound, sat a smallish farmhouse which was
probably a century old. It was an innocent and
ordinary enough looking house from the road. It
topped a swell of land that was somewhat higher
than its immediate surroundings and bare of large
trees except for a single magnificent elm halfway
between the house and the road. The lawn was
allowed to grow wild, but nearer the house and
covering the approach to its graceful old doorway
were several shrubs in more or less cultivated
condition placed on a few feet of clipped sod. In
the spring the lawn and the fields which rolled
out downward from the house were thickly starred
with buttercups whose tiny yellow bowls glistened
like lacquered buttons in the sun. Later the
same meadows turned to a waving lake of red
clover.</p>
<p>Potter Osprey, when upbraided by his friends
for not making more of his handful of acres, declared
he was no gardener. He could neither
adorn nature nor gain his feed from her by his
own hands, for she was a wild beast whose moods
and colours and contours he had struggled with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[222]</span>
all his life, and there was no quarter between
them. To all offers to prettify her in his immediate
neighbourhood he was politely deaf. He
wanted her rugged and plain as his plastic, solid
canvases liked to interpret her, and that way he
could love her as one loves a worthy foe.</p>
<p>On the house itself he had lavished more care.
Eight years of his own proprietorship had made
it, without any great loss of its ancient character,
a place of personal charm inside. In the rear the
hill fell sharply from the foundation, and here he
had built up a broad concrete terrace, looking
northward to an unbroken view of horizon and
low hills. Above the terrace for ten or twelve
feet in height and almost as wide, rose a vertical
sheet of heavy, transparent glass in narrow
panels, and this gave light to a large room, which
had been made by knocking out walls and upper
flooring so that half of it was two stories high.
The house practically consisted of this room, a
cellar under it, and some small bedrooms above.
Outhouse and kitchen stepped away to the west.</p>
<p>From Osprey’s north terrace could be seen a
smaller house on the eastern slope, nestling in a
very old, gnarled and worn-out orchard. Some of
its trees reminded one of those anatomical designs
in physiological books; they were half bare-branched
skeleton and half green, waving body.</p>
<p>To the larger house Moira Harlindew came one
morning in answer to an advertisement in a New<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[223]</span>
York paper, describing a “small, furnished house
in the country with conveniences.”</p>
<p>She was admitted by the painter himself, a man
of medium height, who showed his fifty years
more in his figure, his careless gait, and the way
he wore his old clothes, than in the face, which
was of no definite age, so Moira thought. What
lines had been worn upon it made the man seem
more youthful. The eyes were candid and reposeful,
but extremely responsive to passing
moods. This she detected in his look of anxiety
as he first opened the door for her, and in the evident
relief that followed his swift inspection. The
mouth, under a gray wisp of moustache that
tended to turn upwards at the ends, slanted a bit
so that more than half of the smile was on one
side. There was a suggestion of the satirical in
it. Yet Moira found the face, on the whole, a
pleasant one to look at, especially when he had
recovered his composure and was welcoming her.</p>
<p>“Come in,” he said. “What can I do for
you?”</p>
<p>“I’ve come to see the house for rent.”</p>
<p>“Good. You’re early. I hardly expected any
answers to-day before noon. It’s quite a little
way to come from the city, you know. By the
way, I’m at my breakfast. Suppose you come
along and sit down while I finish. Do you mind?”</p>
<p>He led her into the studio and she sank into a
large chair, a little tired after the long, warm walk<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[224]</span>
from the station. She felt instantly and completely
happy. The big room, with its cool, even
light, its smell of wood and paint, and its thousand
and one objects familiar and dear to her
trade, drove everything else from her mind, even
the anxiety she had felt lest the place be taken—for
it was Monday morning and all day Sunday
had elapsed since she had seen the advertisement.
He noticed her fatigue and glanced at her dusty
shoes.</p>
<p>“You’ve walked up,” he exclaimed, surprised.
“Well, perhaps you will join me.” He sat down
before a low table which gleamed with silver and
yellow china. “Coffee? My morning tipple is
tea, but Nana always has some coffee because she
loves it herself.”</p>
<p>“If you really have it,” said Moira, “I’d like
some coffee.”</p>
<p>A large, impassive negress soon served her.</p>
<p>“It isn’t much of a house you’re going to see,”
he went on. “I call it the orchard bungalow and
it is nearly as decrepit as the orchard itself. But
it will shed the rain.”</p>
<p>“And it’s not taken?” asked Moira warmly.</p>
<p>“Well, no—not exactly. But I’m afraid it’s
too—well, unpretentious for you.”</p>
<p>“It couldn’t be that,” she laughed. As he finished
his toast her gaze went on embracing the
room with frank pleasure, and she was aware he
took sly glances at her.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[225]</span>“Do you paint?” he asked suddenly.</p>
<p>Moira had been afraid of the question. Though
her host had only given his last name she
had read it on pictures in the studio, and knew
now that he was an American painter of reputation
whose work she had worried over at various
exhibitions. She felt extremely humble, but her
fear arose from the suspicion that a successful
painter might object to having irresponsible and
immature dabblers running about in his near
neighbourhood. She could not hide in the immediate
safety of a lie. Eventually that would be
found out, though it tempted her.</p>
<p>“I’m just a student,” she replied, and went on
quickly, “but the real reason I want a country
place is because I’ve two young children. Do you
mind that? I’m sure they will not bother you.”</p>
<p>“Not at all,” he said cordially. “On the contrary....
However,” he added, rising, “I think
we had better look at this humble dwelling before
you grow too enthusiastic, my dear young
lady.”</p>
<p>As Moira had entered the place, her mind’s eye
had pictured the four-year-old Miles playing
among those buttercups, and learning things he
might never get to know if he grew much older
in the city. Now every step confirmed her in the
desire to live here at any cost. The nostalgia for
Thornhill which she had felt in many a solitary
hour during these last ten years, together with a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[226]</span>
flood of early memories, swept over her. The
orchard, upon which a few apple blossoms lingered,
was enchantingly old and weird. Standing
in the high grass beneath it one could see a pattern
of winding stone fences crisscrossing the
fields, and up a near-by hill danced three pale
birches like a trio of white-legged girls with green
veils trailing about them. Even a bit of decayed
brown board by the path made her sentimental.
She wanted to run after a butterfly or to lie full
length in the grass of the meadow, letting the sun
drink her up....</p>
<p>The house was small, but a moment’s speculation
and mental rearrangement convinced her
that it was adequate. She and the genial owner
found themselves making plans together for the
comfort of the Harlindew family.</p>
<p>“I don’t see what you are going to do with your
maid,” said he, “unless she sleeps on the couch
out here in the sitting room.”</p>
<p>“I shan’t have a maid,” Moira replied, and he
looked at her with another of his glances of wondering
curiosity.</p>
<p>“But,” he began, and then stopped, thinking
better of what he had intended to say. “Well,
there’s my Nana. She often has time lying heavy
on her hands and she doesn’t object to an occasional
extra fee. No doubt she can help you.”</p>
<p>“Oh, that will be splendid,” she cried. The
suggestion did solve a minor problem in her mind,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[227]</span>
but she had no patience just now with minor problems.
“I love the old furniture you have in here.”</p>
<p>“Most of it was here when I came, in the house
up above. I made one room out of three when I
built the studio, and these are the handful of
pieces I could not use. If you haven’t enough,
there are a few more odds and ends stored away.”</p>
<p>“You’re going to let me take it, then?” asked
Moira breathlessly.</p>
<p>He seemed surprised at the question, as though
the matter had been settled between them, and
then laughed.</p>
<p>“I’ll tell you the truth now, Mrs. Harlindew.
There have been several other applicants but I
put them off somehow—I didn’t like any of them....
But!” he exclaimed suddenly—“but my dear
girl! Well, well!”</p>
<p>She was crying after all, as she had feared she
would in the orchard, ten minutes before. Tears
that she could not keep back rolled down her
smiling cheeks....</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[228]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XXIII</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">Moira’s</span> hope had been that their move to the
country would bring Miles to his senses. With
nothing to do but rest and lose himself in the
beauty and peace of outdoors, with not even the
responsibility, for some months at least, to earn
any money, she confidently believed he would drop
the habits which had regained their hold upon him
of late, get possession of his impulse to work, and
begin to write the things of which she dreamed he
was capable. And in the beginning each day after
they arrived confirmed her hope. He seemed to
cast heavy burdens from his shoulders and his
mind, to love spending hours with the children,
romping and making the place merry with their
laughter and his. From time to time he wandered
off alone with his pockets stuffed with paper,
boyishly promising great results, or stayed up
with the lamp at night. When they had been
there no more than ten days it seemed already a
long time ago that their lives had changed and
taken a turn for the better. She was for that ten
days serenely happy.</p>
<p>Then the country began to pall on Miles. He
grew restless and evasive; at breakfast he would
hint at various reasons for going to New York.
When their second week end came around he managed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[229]</span>
a convincing excuse and disappeared with
a small handbag full of over-night clothing.</p>
<p>Moira’s heart sank at this unexpected turn of
affairs, and she spent the days in his absence giving
way to more real despair than she had ever
known with him. This time she had done her
best, done what a little while ago she would have
thought impossible, and she had failed....</p>
<p>He seemed to come back passionately eager to
see her, and so long as he did that she could only
surrender to him and see in him still her lover
and her first lover, her lover for all time. But
these waves of passion died away; her presence
and the children’s began to irk him in a day or
two, sometimes in a few hours, and it soon appeared
to her that he regarded a week as an interminable
visit.</p>
<p>She set herself to observing him, to studying
his chance remarks, and for the first time a genuine
doubt of his fidelity oppressed her. There
was nothing tangible, except his trips to the city,
to justify this suspicion, and these would have
been inadequate despite his evasions. She could
quite naturally think of him as being restless, as
wanting to go away, without dreaming that he
would belie her faith in him. The suspicion of
infidelity came before the evidence, but once the
suspicion was lodged in her mind, the evidence, all
unconsciously furnished by Miles, piled up by
little and little.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[230]</span>She saw that this warmth of love-making with
which he returned to her did not last an hour.
Bitter thoughts assailed her. Evidently he was
not always successful with his hypothetical sweetheart
or sweethearts and was driven back to his
wife. She could not keep fantastic exaggerations
out of her head, though in her sober moments she
told herself that the truth, if probably serious,
was far less florid than she imagined.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, there grew upon her an increasing
repugnance toward his advances. She made
no issue of it. She did not want conflict. He
was very appealing, very hard on her sympathies,
very skilful in inventions. She could
not quickly forget that he had suffered and struggled
while he still loved her. But her inescapable
conclusion, reached in hours of cold reflection,
was that they were parting; that sooner or later
an end would come. She determined not to invite
it so long as her pride was not sacrificed; to wait
for it sensibly and coolly.</p>
<p>Another explanation of Miles’ conduct brought
a curious sort of consolation and corrective. This
was that he simply wanted to be free—but did
not have the strength. The opportunity had been
placed in his way to leave, and, feeling himself
ultimately unequal to marriage and its burdens
and limitations, he believed he ought to take it.
His love still held him tenuously to her and the
children, his sentiment for their past together,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[231]</span>
his need for a woman’s support—whatever it was—and
he could not find the courage to make the
break. He had probably been strengthened in
entertaining this purpose by the knowledge that
somebody had turned up from Thornhill, and she
would be taken care of. Much as that base notion
offended her, this last theory was frankly pleasing.
It was better than the thought of betrayal
with another woman.</p>
<p>By the time she had reached this state of enlightenment
she was so skilled in reading poor
Miles’ motives that she felt as though she had
acquired supernatural powers of clairvoyance.
The summer was more than half gone.</p>
<p>But she had not thought exclusively of Miles.
She had the children to care for and teach a whole
new set of fascinating things, and she had her
painting. The opportunity presented by these
untrammelled days was not to be lost over heart-burnings,
and a new power and certainty had come
to her. She wasted less time carrying her attempts
to the last degree of finish. She was trying
by experiment after experiment to get the feel
and solidity of the earth and to express her warm
daily contact with it.</p>
<p>She had been very timid toward Osprey where
painting was concerned. She had resolved never
to speak to him about it and to keep out of his
way while she was at it. One ought not to expect
to rent the cottage of a famous painter and have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[232]</span>
advice thrown in. But it was he who sought her
in the orchard one morning and made comments
for which she was grateful, because she understood
them and could profit by them, and also because
they were not uncomplimentary.</p>
<p>“Most of us,” he said, “gamble frightfully in
choosing art as a career. That’s why there are so
many hopeless artists. We mistake an urge for a
talent, and the devil of it is there is no sure way
of knowing whether we’re on the right road or
not. But I think you are. In the first place you
have the steady enthusiasm and not just mere
plugging industry. In the second place you are a
self-teacher. Everybody worth a hang is that.”</p>
<p>They were the first really golden words she had
ever heard, and she was certain afterward that
simply hearing them had improved her work
miraculously—made her surer of the knowledge
she had gained and helped her to discard excrescences.</p>
<p>Osprey had few visitors. Perhaps twice a year
a gathering of extraordinary individuals with
whom he had consorted at various periods and in
many parts of the world crowded into the house,
took possession of it, kept up a racket until morning
and departed, leaving him with a few more
intimate cronies, some to recover from the effects
and others simply to prolong the reunion. These
entertainments occurred usually in the early
spring or fall, the seasons of change when people<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[233]</span>
come together most spontaneously. And they
were spontaneous. He had no use for set affairs.</p>
<p>On rare occasions women drove out to see him,
for luncheon or tea; and he himself went to town
about once a month, seldom remaining longer
than over night. He seemed to have cultivated
not only the love of solitude, but the power to enjoy
it for long periods.</p>
<p>There was one visitor, however, who arrived
often. Moira saw his heavy blue roadster drawn
up beside the lawn three times during the first
month of her stay, and she wondered who the impressive
man was, with short grey curly hair, and
the easy bearing of accomplishment. She was not
surprised to learn later that he was somebody—no
less a person, in fact, than Emmet Roget, the
producer, a man who was both a power in the business
phase of the theatre and an artistic radical
in his own right.</p>
<p>The friendship between these two men appeared
to be less extraordinary now than it had been in
past years, but it was still a friendship in which a
certain inequality was apparent. The rôle of
Roget toward Osprey, during three-fourths of their
adult lives, had been that of a detached but watchful
guardian. A dozen years ago Osprey had
been something of a riderless horse, a centre of
explosions, the victim of unexpected mishaps and
misunderstandings, constantly involved with a
woman, and taking his affairs with desperate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[234]</span>
seriousness, careless of his talent and his time.
Much of this relationship he skilfully suggested
to her himself, in his humorously philosophic moments.</p>
<p>As he put it, he was born somewhere between
his thirty-eighth and his fortieth year, and began
to live his life in a sense backward; for though
he went on having experiences it was always something
in his life before his thirty-eighth year that
he seemed to be living over in these experiences,
and relishing where he previously had suffered.
The actual occasion of the change had been a
painful separation from the last of his devastating
loves, and more or less complete celibacy since.
The result was a fresh joy in work, a really enormous
volume of production ... peace and contentment
and plenty.</p>
<p>The life of Emmet Roget had been exactly the
antithesis. He was penniless in his youth. No
sooner had he reached New York—to which
initial step Osprey had assisted him—than he began
to have means for his needs. At twenty-nine
he left Europe, after having immersed himself in
as much of French culture as an able young foreigner
can obtain with diligence and enthusiasm,
and studied the beginnings of the German theatre
movement. A season was spent directing a Denver
“little theatre,” but the provinces offered too
little future and freedom. Once more in New
York, Roget was designing sets and directing productions.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[235]</span>
In his late thirties he was instituting
new methods into the theatre which were hailed
and copied abroad.</p>
<p>Many regarded Emmet Roget as primarily a
“man for the future,” yet to him the present
seemed invariably kind. Unlike his friend, nothing
touched him; but whatever he touched gained
from his personality, took on fascination and
beauty. Hard at the core, immovable and unimpressionable,
he was yet acutely sensitive, capable
of profound appreciations, for music, for
colour, for a scene, a woman—and surprisingly
human in his contacts. No doubt it was this intuitive
appreciation, coupled with early friendship,
which had made him cling to Osprey through
many hopeless seasons and experiments.</p>
<p>The first two or three times that Roget visited
him that summer, Osprey did not refer to his new
tenants except casually. Later, however, when
he had had a half dozen talks with Moira, he introduced
the subject to his friend at the dinner
table.</p>
<p>“That’s rather a remarkable young woman I’ve
got down there in the orchard,” he said. “Did I
tell you that she painted?”</p>
<p>“I believe so—something of the kind,” replied
Roget. He had met with his share of disillusionment
among his own protégés, and he was not
given to more than passing interest in the mere
fact that a young woman painted.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[236]</span>“Well,” pursued Osprey, “I’ve got something
to show you after dinner.”</p>
<p>When they had finished he led the producer to
a picture on the studio wall and switched on a
light he had put up to illuminate it.</p>
<p>“That’s one of hers,” he said. “I think there
are extraordinarily good things in it as well as
bad. At all events, I liked it so well I bought
it.”</p>
<p>Roget studied the picture for a moment, but
without enthusiasm.</p>
<p>“Yes,” he said. “Obviously you’ve influenced
her already, or she’s known your work for some
time.”</p>
<p>“I don’t think it’s so obvious,” protested the
other. “There’s personal insight in that modelling,
and it has a back to it. Anyway, she’s
young. Fact is, there’s something really unusual
about the girl. I fancy she had things her own
way at one time. The marks are there, overlaid
by experience since.”</p>
<p>“Of course,” laughed Roget quietly, “it makes
a difference if you know the young lady.”</p>
<p>“Hang it, my dear fellow, the girl is poor. Has
two children, and a husband who may be talented
and may be a fool. But he’s certainly no support.”</p>
<p>“Charity and art do not mix, old man.”</p>
<p>“The hell they don’t,” replied Osprey testily.
“But as you say, one must see for oneself. You<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[237]</span>
are going to make Mrs. Harlindew’s acquaintance,
and whatever you think of charity, you will buy a
picture from her as a favour to me. Not too soon,
you understand, and not too obtrusively. She
shied at me frightfully when I bought this one.
I had to tell her that I had made quite a collection
of the work of promising beginners for reasons of
my own.”</p>
<p>Roget found his friend nearly always transparent.
Ten years ago he would have said there
was considerably more than the mere fervour of
the artist in this championship. But he had since
become acquainted with a wholly new side of the
man, and it was difficult to believe him capable
of losing his head over a pretty bride who happened
to rent his house.</p>
<p>“You say she is married?” he contented himself
with asking, dryly.</p>
<p>A flicker of humorous comprehension passed
over the other’s face.</p>
<p>“Yes,” he replied shortly, “but the fellow neglects
her.”</p>
<p>Roget’s manner became once more indulgent.</p>
<p>“Well, I shall try to buy this picture. I don’t
know what to do with it after I get it. There are
mighty few pictures worth buying. Perhaps not
more than twenty in the world.”</p>
<p>He dismissed the subject and sat down at Osprey’s
piano. His study of the instrument had
come late, in young manhood. Lacking any great<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[238]</span>
musical scholarship or conventional training, he
nevertheless played whatever he had heard that
pleased him, with extraordinary tenderness and
effect.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[239]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XXIV</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">For</span> Moira the summer grew increasingly fruitful,
and, in a reflective way, full of satisfactions,
despite the continued absences of Miles. A profound
sympathy came over her, which she did not
remember to have experienced before, for the
average discontented wife, who had to endure this
sort of thing with empty hands and no refuge of
the spirit in which to lose herself.... That could
never be the case with her.</p>
<p>It is true that she would have been less serene
were it not for the fact that she had found companionship
that answered a real want. Osprey
had none of the qualifications of the teacher, and
his criticisms struck deep. If she had been
younger and greener they might only have puzzled
and not helped her, but now she welcomed
surgery and destruction. Her own hard years of
unaided application rendered her capable of understanding
his language remarkably well, and
she was ready to discard and forget everything
she had ever known.</p>
<p>Their discussions were often continued after
brushes were laid aside. She accepted invitations
to tea in the studio or sat on his terrace on warm
nights after the children were asleep. The long<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[240]</span>
drawn out culmination of her relationship to
Miles had given her the habit of self-analysis,
and she laughed somewhat over the appeal that
Osprey made to her as a man. She could not
deny that it was the same that originally had
drawn her to her husband. She dealt here with
a greater Miles, wiser and more experienced.
Nevertheless, she sensed in him the type that was
not self-sufficient, that required sympathy of a
subtle kind, and required it, when found, with
an intensity that in this case was beginning
to prove hypnotic to her. Unquestionably Potter
Osprey was gradually becoming a necessary part
of her life, and this was not her fault but his. She
had hinted at, more than revealed, the state of
affairs between herself and Miles. It was impossible
not to do so, appearances being what they
were; and the older man’s complete understanding
coupled with hesitation to advise, was a soothing
remedy to her hurts.</p>
<p>The attraction which was growing between herself
and Osprey was totally different from her
feeling for his friend, Roget, with whom she had
become acquainted. The distinguished producer
treated her with bantering equality from the start.
It was as if they recognized a likeness to each
other in essential strength, and the hesitation,
almost anxiety, which Roget had felt over the
painter’s passionate adoption of Moira’s cause
disappeared on knowing her. He began to think<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[241]</span>
of the whole affair as a pleasant and lasting alliance
for his friend, of some sort, and he little
doubted of what sort it would be. Obstacles there
were, which he did not concern himself with.
Once a possibility took life in Roget’s brain, obstacles
did not exist. He had seen too many large
ones swept aside.</p>
<p>To Moira, the obstacles were more significant,
and yet they had diminished amazingly in the last
three months. The prospect that Osprey would
take their friendship seriously did have about it a
quality of dark adventure which made even her
steady pulses jump uncomfortably. But to the
young woman who sees her marriage being slowly
broken up before her eyes, while she is helpless
to restore it, everything is touched by the shimmer
of madness. And she asked herself what could
have been more mad, more out of all normal reason,
than her whole life? Moreover, she had a
firm support now, one that gave her the strength
to adventure—her art. The intimation had visited
her at last that she might triumph in it; and,
having reached that certainty, she felt it a more
present help than coffers heaped with gold....
The picture which Roget had tried to buy she
laughingly refused to sell him, but he had countered
with a problem in stage design which he
promised to accept if it offered a suggestion to
work on. Here was a beginning, at least.</p>
<p>Her children ... it was strange how she felt<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[242]</span>
toward them, how little she feared for them. Certainly
they were to be shielded, but also they were
not to be deceived about the life into which they
had been brought. The truth would not hurt them.</p>
<p>It was late in September that Moira received
the letter from Miles saying that he had left and
would not return. The letter was a mixture of
unhappy self-accusation, and charges against her
for various shortcomings, chief of which appeared
to be that she had become self-sufficient
and had accepted assistance from others. She
thought he might have spared her that, as well as
the taunt about her preoccupation with Osprey....
She had expected a parting shot of some kind,
yet when it came it was a painful blow, and she
spent a week brooding over it and wholly beside
herself.</p>
<p>During this week Osprey saw nothing of her,
and when she came up the hill one evening to join
him, he revealed in his eagerness what the deprivation
had meant. He led her to a seat, fussed
about her comfort and lighted her cigarette.</p>
<p>“I’ve been ill,” she said. “I go off and hide
when that happens, like an animal. Now I’m
well.”</p>
<p>“Ill?” he asked, disturbed. He reflected that
he should have been less squeamish and forced a
visit upon her. He had never done just that. Invitations,
dropped at chance meetings or at the
end of discussions while they worked had been<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[243]</span>
enough. This time he had gone a little further,
approached her door on an impulse twice, but
stopped before making his presence known.
“But,” he resumed, “Nana didn’t tell me about
your being ill. Did she take care of you?”</p>
<p>Moira knew what was in his mind. While she
had been ill, her husband had not been at home.</p>
<p>“Well,” she confessed lightly, “ill is not
strictly true. I’ve been just out of sorts. I had
some news, but it doesn’t matter.”</p>
<p>“Good. I’m glad you’re feeling better. Particularly,
as Nana tells me, you’re expecting a
guest to-morrow.”</p>
<p>“Yes, an old friend, a Mr. Blaydon. An old
schoolmate, really, who has been very kind to
us.”</p>
<p>“I wonder if you wouldn’t bring him and Mr.
Harlindew to dinner to-morrow night? I shall be
delighted to have you all; and as for Nana, she
suggested it herself.”</p>
<p>Miles had always been included in Osprey’s formal
invitations, whether present or not, and had,
in fact, attended once and contributed not unpleasantly
to the evening.</p>
<p>“I’m afraid I can’t promise for my husband,”
said Moira slowly.</p>
<p>“H’m. That’s too bad. But I can count on you
and your friend, Mr. Blaydon, anyway?”</p>
<p>“I should love to bring him,” she replied and
paused.... It was better, she thought, to have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[244]</span>
matters understood.... “My husband ...
won’t come back here,” she went on. “He has
left me.”</p>
<p>“It was that,” he asked kindly, “the news you
had?”</p>
<p>“Yes, he wrote me a letter.”</p>
<p>Osprey spoke quietly but she was conscious of
the emotion in his voice.</p>
<p>“And you will accept that? You will not seek
him, try to bring him back?”</p>
<p>“No,” she replied. “Too much has happened
before this. It is over.”</p>
<p>“You poor girl. You’ve suffered over it.”</p>
<p>“I put a good deal into it.... But this had to
happen. Miles must have no ties.”</p>
<p>Osprey’s animation returned and he spoke in
a more impersonal tone.</p>
<p>“Perhaps you’re right. I think the young man
has not grown up in spite of his years. But he
may find himself. They have a kind of strength,
fellows like that, a kind of terrible strength that
no one suspects. I’ve seen his type before.
The fact is,” he added, with a half-serious smile,
“I’ve been something of the sort myself. It’s
often hard to locate the origin of a fool’s folly,
but I think in my case it was an experience I had
when I was a boy. It wasn’t a peccadillo with me.
It haunted me for years, so much that I can’t
talk freely about it to this day. It made life a
desperate adventure; it was at the back of most<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[245]</span>
of my troubles....” He laughed. “I seem like
an old fool to be telling you all this. And truly
my nightmares appear absurd to me now.”</p>
<p>Moira laughed a little bitterly. “Something
happened to me too when I was young.... But
I am free.... I tore myself free from it.”</p>
<p>“I thought so,” he said gently. “There is a
great difference in our ages, but if I may say so,
we seem to have—well, had something alike to
face in life. No, I do not mean just that—it’s presumptuous.
I have never, I think, before met any
woman quite like you. Strength and the genius
for insight, such as yours, rarely meet in the same
body.”</p>
<p>A hungry intensity in his words escaped him
unawares. Though he had spoken nothing of significance,
the feeling that shook him reached her
through the dusk with sinister force. She had
felt the same thing before and had had a momentary
impulse to run, to break free from it. She
did not want to be subjected to another tyranny
of her emotions.... Yet she had reasoned with
herself. Here was a future that could in every
sense be ideal, a man with whom she had everything
in common and whom she knew she could
trust....</p>
<p>A moment later he changed the subject and she
was glad.</p>
<p>“By the way,” he said, “why not have your
guest stay over, if he will? You know I’ve extra<span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[246]</span>
bedrooms, and there is no reason why he should
not occupy one as long as he likes.”</p>
<p>It was a point that had worried and embarrassed
her, and she was inexpressibly pleased that
he had thought of it.</p>
<p>“You’re too good,” she said fervently, “and I
would love to keep him.”</p>
<p>They chatted on over impersonal shallows until
the time came for her to return to the cottage.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[247]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XXV</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">As</span> she left him that night she wondered if
her conscience troubled her. She was certainly
encouraging Osprey. Standing in her own sitting
room, she recalled vividly how, when he took her
hand in good-night, she had felt the fierce stream
that poured through him, and her very silence had
given him permission to unburden himself. She
was thankful for his restraint. Moreover her
silence had been the result of pleasure, and not
mere lack of words. How little she had known
of anything quite so contained and yet so overpowering
in Miles.... She could respond to
that, she knew: she had only to yield a little and
she could respond.</p>
<p>The thought of Osprey in this personal sense,
of some one beside her husband in a personal
sense, caused her to realize how much importance
she had gone on attaching to Miles. How ridiculous
and womanly of her! she reflected. Miles had
taken his departure, and yet she had not until
now seemed quite to believe in it. Perhaps even
yet she did not believe in it. She had told Osprey
that it was over; she kept repeating to herself that
it was over. Everything pointed to it, Harlindew’s
own unequivocal statement and her angry<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[248]</span>
resentment of the manner of his desertion, particularly
his letter. But in her real consciousness
she had continued to expect his return ... during
the whole of her talk with Osprey, Miles had
been present as a reality—a definite bar—in her
thought.</p>
<p>But now a new thing happened to her. She
suddenly faced her whole life spread out before
her as on a single canvas, or rather as a continuing
panorama—and not just one small segment of
it. Miles had not been her whole life; he had been
but a part. He might have continued to be that
part indefinitely and still not become her whole
life. She had been magnifying him until she had
lost sight of the rest, all that other strange web
of adventure and catastrophe which had included
her birth, her childhood, her love for Hal, her
tragic discovery, her runaway, her struggle to
help herself.... That would go on, no matter
what happened, whether Miles returned or stayed
away, and it would go on according to her own
terms.</p>
<p>The notion of herself as an entity, surviving,
growing, separate and alone, filled her for the first
time with a curious excitement. It released so
many fresh and irresistible currents within her.
She began to think more consciously of other men,
of Potter Osprey in particular. She rose and
went out into the orchard. The painter had had
constructed a table and seats for them earlier in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[249]</span>
the summer, and she sat down in one of the gaily
painted stationary benches which gave the children
so much pleasure. They recalled to her his
scores of other attentions; the flowers and delicacies
of one sort or another which he had sent
down regularly by Nana, his numerous subterfuges
to help her with money, the little comforts
that he had added to the house, his presents
to young Miles and Joanna. These things, of
which her husband—most younger men indeed—would
never have thought, were dear to her. And
once he had hinted, in a joking manner, of “leaving
her the cottage” in his will.</p>
<p>“You can’t tell—I may be knocked off some
day,” he had said. “I’ve become such an absentminded
countryman that I’m always a little surprised
to find myself alive after crossing a New
York street.”</p>
<p>She had turned such overtures off with pleasantries,
which they deserved, and yet she had entertained
them; they had wooed her and become a
part of her dilatory dreaming. As she sat there
in the caressingly cool night she felt this keenly;
she felt a sense of permanency and peace under
the protecting boughs of the orchard. She could
not remember such a feeling since long ago at
Thornhill.</p>
<p>She rose reluctantly and went into the house.
Unquestionably she had reached a point where
she could regard Osprey’s passion without disturbance;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">[250]</span>
and yet she longed for a temporary
refuge from it, knowing that at any moment they
might be brought together by some turn of the
conversation such as that to-night and his reserve
would give way. She wanted to escape that contingency
for a long time, to think out her relationship
to the future. But she had no reasonable
means or excuse to flee. Her plans had not been
made for the winter, and according to their informal
agreement she was to remain in the cottage
another month.</p>
<p>Robert Blaydon’s visit furnished a safe diversion
for three days. She was able to keep him
that long through the insistent hospitality of Osprey,
and the fact that the two took a strong
liking to each other. They sat up late together
in the studio one night over a fine brand of Scotch
whisky which Blaydon had brought with him, and
the younger man submitted amiably to a questioning
about Moira which disclosed little more than
that he had been her boyhood companion at one
time, and her circumstances had once been opulent.
He told Osprey, however, that he had heard
his own name often.</p>
<p>“Yes?” inquired his host. “Well, perhaps
that’s natural, as you say we have been fellow
townsmen.”</p>
<p>“Fact is,” replied Blaydon, “I’ve an aunt out
there who has become vastly interested in painters,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[251]</span>
in her old age, and I’ve heard her speak of
you. A Mrs. Seymour.”</p>
<p>“Don’t ask me to remember names back home,”
laughed Osprey. “You would think me a pretty
determined exile if I told you how long it had
been since I was there.”</p>
<p>“In any case, she’ll be much excited when I tell
her that I have met you,” said the other, reflecting
on the humour and difficulty of his situation,
in which discretion constrained him with Osprey
from telling Moira’s connection to his aunt, and
with his aunt from telling Moira’s connection
with Osprey.</p>
<p>“Mysteries are a damned nuisance among such
likeable people,” he concluded to himself. “I
hope this one gets cleared up some day.” And
his conviction was that it would.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[252]</span>
<h2 class="nobreak">XXVI</h2>
</div>
<p><span class="smcap">Moira</span> awoke late, long after Potter Osprey had
departed for the city, where he was to meet Roget
and return with him in the car sometime that
night.</p>
<p>It was her last week in the cottage. A few days
after the departure of Rob Blaydon for the west,
Elsie Jennings had paid her a visit and talked.
Miles Harlindew was living with a young woman
in the Village. There was a rumour of their going
to Europe together.... Moira suppressed a
twinge at this, in which at first there was more
of sardonic humour than of pain. The pain came
sharply afterward, but it did not remain long this
time, and it left her at last aloof. She no longer
felt the vestige of an obstacle to following her
own inclinations, and she also had no further defence
against Osprey’s attentions.</p>
<p>The growth of understanding between them
was almost wordless, monosyllabic. It made her
intensely happy to discover in his eyes how much
she was bringing to him. A long time would have
to elapse before she could give a worthy response
to that emotion, but she felt that it would
come....</p>
<p>The troublesome details of her future were
therefore on this morning a matter of no concern<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[253]</span>
to her at all. What filled her with delight was the
immediate present. Never had she seen such
weather as that October day, or if she had, never
before had she been alive to its innumerable aspects
at once. After the dubiousness and suffering
of the past few weeks she felt both older and
younger, both cleansed by experience and ready
for more to come. Her whole womanly being was
gathering itself for something new, and she meant
to grasp it to the full. The ship’s engines were
throbbing in her blood and the open sea lay beyond,
but her hand was firm on the wheel....</p>
<p>It was a day to idle, one of those days when the
children were positively in the way and work impossible.
It was a day of heady egoism, of reveling
in her securely felt advantages, and a certain
sense of having won the spurs of lawlessness.
She would be restless until to-morrow when the
men came. What fine friends they were!</p>
<p>It was eleven o’clock, and, following her usual
custom, she walked down to the grey metal box in
which both her own mail and that of the Osprey
house was deposited. She half expected to hear
from Rob Blaydon who had promised to write
her from Thornhill.</p>
<p>She ran through the letters quickly. There
were none for her, but she went back to look again
at a large envelope addressed to Osprey. She
supposed she had done this simply because it was
larger than the others and extended out around<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[254]</span>
them while she held them in her hand. But there
had been another reason, as she discovered on
second examination. The handwriting was familiar....</p>
<p>She realized in fact that she was looking at the
handwriting of Mathilda Seymour. She could not
have mistaken it, even with nothing else to guide
her, but there was the postmark of her city.
She turned the envelope over, only to find confirmation
in the return address.</p>
<p>She caught herself almost in the gesture of
tearing it open. Her first thought had been that
it was her letter, no matter whom it was addressed
to. But she stopped herself in time. She could
not open Potter Osprey’s letter. She wondered
that she could have had the impulse to do so. Yet,
as if she feared the temptation would be too
strong, she kept repeating to herself, “I must not
open it, I must not open it....” The temptation
passed and did not return, but her disturbance
and her curiosity were more stubborn.</p>
<p>It was almost uncanny that Mathilda should be
writing to Potter Osprey....</p>
<p>But was it? Now she remembered he had told
her the place of his birth—a mere conversational
allusion, which she had passed over quickly, not
wishing to discuss the city. It had surprised her
mildly; then she had recalled in passing that
years ago there had been some people named Osprey
whom she never knew. Could Mathilda have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[255]</span>
known them? Could she have known the painter,
perhaps in his youth? It was unlikely; she had
never mentioned the name in Moira’s hearing.</p>
<p>There was nothing to be gained on that tack,
and soon she was off on a more fruitful one. Rob
Blaydon had told her about Mathilda’s new hobbies,
one of them helping young artists, another
buying pictures for the city museum. She had
drifted out of social life and interested herself in
a little club, not very prosperous, where the artists
of the city met.</p>
<p>Here was a possible even a probable, explanation.
Osprey was a native painter, who had
gained reputation elsewhere. He had been a
struggling boy at home, and what could be
more natural than that Mathilda should decide
the city must be enriched by one of his works? Or
if this was not exactly the case, there were a dozen
other reasons why, on behalf of the club of which
Rob had spoken, she might be communicating with
him.</p>
<p>The reason was enough for Moira, or at least
she made it suffice. She would find out the truth
before long, and in any case it could not concern
herself. For it was incredible to her that Rob, in
the face of their definite understanding, had mentioned
her at home. “At home!” How naturally
she used the phrase. Well, there was much to be
cleared up—both there and here. She troubled
herself no more about the letter. She laid it with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[256]</span>
the others on Osprey’s table, took the children up
to Nana to look after, and went off for a long
walk. By ten o’clock that night she was in bed
asleep.</p>
<hr class="tb" />
<p>The two men drove up to the farmhouse, in accordance
with their plan, at about two o’clock in
the morning in Roget’s car. They lingered in the
hall and studio for a few moments and went upstairs,
the painter taking his mail with him.</p>
<p>Some hours later the same sound woke not only
Roget, but Moira, down in the cottage. It was a
sharp report, and her first clear thought was that
a passing automobile had back-fired, perhaps
Emmet Roget’s, just arriving. She sat up for a
time listening and then prepared to sleep again.
Some one knocked on the outside door.</p>
<p>It was the producer, looking ominous as he
stood in the half darkness, in a long black dressing
gown.</p>
<p>“Mrs. Harlindew, an accident has happened,”
he said gravely. “I think, perhaps, I had better
ask you to step up to the house with me.”</p>
<p>She went with him up the steep bank, thoroughly
unnerved. His hold on her arm was firm
and decidedly helpful on the rough path. They
passed through the lower part of the house and
upstairs without a word. She knew before she
arrived what had happened and dared not ask
the question on her lips.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[257]</span>Osprey lay on his bed dressed, with a small,
old-fashioned revolver in his hand. He was not
breathing. The round, bleeding wound was near
one temple. On the table beside him lay a photograph
of herself, face up, the face of a half-smiling
girl of eighteen. Beside it was Mathilda’s
letter. Moira snatched the letter and read, at
first rapidly, then very attentively and slowly.
“My dear Mr. Osprey,” it began:</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>You will not remember an old woman of
your native city, but I used to meet your
father at the Round Robin Club long ago and
admired his wit and character. I was even
introduced to you once, when you were a very
little boy. You had been left there one night
to be taken home. Since then, of course, I
have followed, though at a distance, your
progress in the world as an artist. But it
is not merely to presume on this slender acquaintance
that I write to you.</p>
<p>I have a strange story to tell. There has
lived in this house for thirty years, ostensibly
as a servant but in fact more a companion
and friend to me, a woman named Ellen Sydney.
She came to my house as Mrs. Ellen
Williams and brought with her a baby daughter,
whom she called Moira. I adopted this
child and raised her and loved her as though
she had been my own. She believed she was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[258]</span>
my own until her nineteenth year, when she
discovered the truth. She proved to be as
high-spirited as she was adorable, for although
her life here offered every advantage,
and was, I know, one long unclouded happiness,
she gave it up in a day on learning her
true parentage. I can understand that spirit
and yet I have suffered cruelly because of her
act. She left without a word, effacing every
trace of herself, and from that day to this I
have never been able to find her, though I
have made repeated efforts. I had little hope,
it is true, of persuading her to return even if
I did so, knowing her nature and her capacity
to carry out her own decisions.</p>
<p>I am convinced she has spent a large part of
her life in New York, for at first, certain
communications came from her there. Furthermore
she loved the study of art and could
only have followed it to her taste in that city.
She may still be there. For that reason I
write, thinking it possible if you have not met
her you will, and she will then have a friend
who has good reason to protect her. I am
sending the latest photograph I possess of
her.</p>
<p>You will ask why I have never addressed
you before. It is because I have always hesitated
to ask Ellen the name of her child’s
father. Moira, herself, is in ignorance of it.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[259]</span>
Only a month ago Ellen was persuaded, by
the arguments I have used above, to tell her
story to me in confidence, and now I write
with her consent. To complete the coincidence,
my nephew, Robert Blaydon, having
met you, has given me your address.</p>
<p>You may be sure that should you ever meet
with your daughter or be able to send us
word of her, two lonely old women will be
grateful.</p>
<p>I have considered that you may not be the
kind of man who will care to receive this letter,
but I do not believe that is possible. The
passage of time softens our errors and may
even turn them into blessings.</p>
<p class="right"><span class="indentright">Yours very sincerely,</span><br />
<span class="smcap">Mathilda Seymour</span>.</p>
</div>
<p>Moira put down the letter and sank beside the
bed. She threw her arms over the figure that lay
there.</p>
<p>“But, father,” she cried softly, “I could have
loved you as my father, too....”</p>
<p>The tall figure of Roget was standing beside
her, with bent head, his penetrating glance,
full of profound compassion, searching the face
of his friend.</p>
<p>“Perhaps he could not, Mrs. Harlindew,” he
said, as if thinking aloud.</p>
<p class="center">THE END</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<div class="transnote">
<p class="ph1">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:</p>
<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.</p>
<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.</p>
<p>Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.</p>
</div></div>
<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69006 ***</div>
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