Mrs. Callendar stayed two months longer than usual in New York. She was

kept by the only things which could have kept her away from the sunshine

of her adored Cannes; that is to say, difficulties over stocks and

bonds, adjustments of the Callendar fortune. She saw to it that there

were no slips and no losses. Indeed, by missing the season at Cannes she

turned a profit of several hundred thousand dollars which might have

been lost in the hands of one in whose veins there flowed less Levantine

blood.

Richard, of course, remained with her, though he exhibited a curious

indifference toward the affairs which made upon his mother claims so

passionate. When she reproached him, as she frequently did, he turned to

her sometimes in the dark library of the house on Murray Hill and said,

“My God! I’m too rich now. What should I do with any more money? Why

should I worry?”

It was an attitude in which there was nothing of softness, nothing of

degeneracy; it was not even the case of a son pampered by riches. His

mother must have known that, better than any one, because she had

encountered in him a will not unlike her own ... a will troubled in his

case by a strange restlessness born perhaps of the bizarre mixture of

blood. If he was possessed of any passions they were for women, and for

music, which had an effect that was amazing; it was the one thing which

held the power of quieting him. There were times when he would sit

motionless in the presence of music as if enchanted by it. Its effect

upon him was primitive and barbaric like the hypnotism which a tom-tom

exerts upon a savage.

There came a night when, as they sat alone over their coffee, estranged

and a little silent after her reproaches, she turned to him and without

warning said, “What about this _jeune prodige_ ... Miss Tolliver. I hear

you’ve been lunching with her.”

At this direct sally, a smile appeared slowly on the dark face of the

son. It began gently at first on the sensual red lips, and then spread

itself until the effect was utterly disarming. He had a way of smiling

thus, after a fashion that was disconcerting because its implications

were so profound, so subtle, and so filled with disillusionment. It was

a smile in which the gray eyes, lighting suddenly, played a tantalizing

rôle--a smile which seemed to envelop its subject and, clinging there

for a time, to destroy all power of deceit by its very friendliness. It

said, gently and warmly, “Come now, let’s be honest and generous with

each other.” The red lips curved ever so gently beneath the dark

mustache. It was the smile of a man born knowing much that others seldom

ever learn.

He smiled at her and said, “Ah! Who could have told you that?... Who but

Sabine ... who knows everything?”

The very tone of his voice appeared to caress and yet mock his mother.

(Sabine ... indeed all women.) Before such an assault even Thérèse

Callendar had no resistance. Shifting her plump body so that the heavy

bangles on her wrists jangled and clattered, she waited a moment before

answering. Then a faint blush, which appeared to arise from a real sense

of guilt, spread slowly up to the edges of her bright small eyes.

“It _was_ Sabine who told me,” she said. “You can’t blame her for that.”

“No ... she always knows everything.” He laughed abruptly. “Sometimes I

think she must be in communication with the birds ... or the mice.”

“You know what I think.... I think that it’s time you married. It’s a

responsibility ... the money.... There ought to be heirs. We can’t give

all that money to charity or some drafty museum.” While she knocked off

the ashes from her cigarette, he watched her silently with the same

caressing, mocking smile. “You’re past twenty-five, you know.... I want

my grandchildren to be the children of young parents. I believe in it.”

Then suddenly, he pierced straight into the thing which she had avoided

mentioning. “I shan’t marry Sabine,” he said. “I’ll find some one. I

haven’t found her yet.”

“Sabine is excellent. She is well brought up.... She is rich. She is one

of the few American women we know who is _mondaine_. I want you to marry

an American. We need new blood. She knows her way about. She dresses

superbly.... She will make an excellent hostess. She will be at home

everywhere.”

“But I am not in love with her,” he said smiling.

For an instant a glint of hard anger appeared in her eyes. “You are old

enough ... or at least wise enough not to be romantic.”

“It is not a question of romance, Mama.... It is more a question of

necessity. I should prefer to be faithful to my wife.”

At this speech, she clucked her tongue, and crushed out the end of her

cigarette. “_Ça ne marche pas_,” she observed coldly. “You can’t expect

me to believe such nonsense.”

* * * * *

Thérèse was by no means innocent. She had lived in the world, always.

She knew what things went on about her and, being Levantine and French,

she expected even less than most women of experience. She understood

that there were such things as mistresses and that most men of her world

were not unacquainted with them; so she could not for a moment have

supposed that her son, smiling at her in his knowing fashion, possessed

a purity that was virginal. Indeed, it might be said that she knew more

of his adventures than he ever supposed. Once she had scandalized Mrs.

Champion by saying, “My son has an intrigue with the wife of one of my

best friends in Paris. It puts me in a most uncomfortable position.”

Nevertheless she had said this in a tone that implied satisfaction; the

mistress of her son was, at least, a lady and not a woman of the

streets. There was only one thing (she was accustomed to say) that she

regarded as unforgivable; it was that he should make a fool of himself

or waste great sums of money on any woman. And this, she must have

known, was extremely unlikely.

After their disagreement they sat for a time in the sort of strained

silence that envelops a conflict between two people of extraordinary

will. It was Thérèse who, with a sudden embarrassed cough, interrupted

the stillness.

“This girl ...” she said. “I hope you’re not entangling yourself with

her.”

Again he smiled and replied, “No, I haven’t entangled myself.”

“Because, it is dangerous with a girl of that sort.... She’s an

American, you know, and not the sort one finds among musicians in

Paris.... _Autres choses_.... She’s well brought up ... _bourgeoisie_, I

should say, of the provinces.”

This time Richard laughed. “Not so _bourgeoise_ as you might think.”

She leaned forward a little. “That’s just it!” she said. “She’s not easy

to win.... She’s not the ordinary sort. She’s a woman of character ...

of will.” Then she moved back, folding the chubby hands, glittering with

rings, on the brief expanse of her black satin lap. “No, you’d best keep

clear of her.... Whatever happens is without my approval.”

“She is interesting,” the son replied. “I’ve never seen a woman quite

like her.”

This, it appeared, was the cause for new alarm. After regarding him for

a time curiously, she murmured, “You can’t marry her, of course. She’s

too inexperienced.... Sometimes, she’s _gauche_. But that’s not the

chief thing.... If you married her, I don’t think I should object ...

not very greatly.... It’s new blood ... healthy blood. But I advise you

against thinking of such a thing. Wherever she goes, trouble will

follow. She’s born, like most people with a touch of genius, under a

curse.” He would have interrupted her here, but she checked him with a

gesture of her fat hand. “She is certain to affect the lives of every

one about her ... because, well, because the threads of our lives are

hopelessly tangled. Oh, don’t think I’m talking nonsense or saying this

to discourage you.... I know it.... I’m sure of it.... Marry her if you

will, but don’t expect happiness to come of it. She would doubtless

bear you a son ... a fine strong son because she is a fine cold animal.

But don’t expect any satisfaction from her. She knows too well exactly

where she is bound.”

During this long speech the son stood smoking silently with a shadow of

the mocking smile on his lips. When she had finished he did not answer

her but sat, with a thoughtful air, looking out into the garden which

Thérèse this year had not bothered to have planted.

After a time she spoke again to say, “Surely you don’t fancy you could

ever control her.... She’s a wild young filly.... No man will ever

control her ... not for long.”

“I’ve never thought of marrying her,” he replied quietly. “Why, she has

a lover already.”

At this Mrs. Callendar’s countenance assumed an expression of passionate

interest. “But she is not that sort ... not a _demi-mondaine_. She is an

honest woman ... a cold woman. One can see that.”

He smiled, this time even more softly and mockingly and into the gray

eyes there came a gleam of ironical humor. “It was Sabine who said she

had a lover,” he said. “You remember, Miss Tolliver told us nothing of

what has happened to her since she came here.... Besides, cold women are

the most successful. They do not lose their heads.”

31

If Ellen had ever had any use for such a creature as a confidante, she

would have told her no doubt that life, at this moment, was an

exasperating puzzle. Between the manners of Herman Biggs and Clarence

and the manners of such a man as Richard Callendar, there lay a vast

gulf, a sort of blank page in the book of her experience, an hiatus that

left her uneasy and disturbed.

Clarence and Herman Biggs, she understood, represented to a great degree

the husband and lover of her own country. They were the ones who came

seeking, the ones who idolized the object of their affections. They

were, if not fascinating, affectionate and docile. They were perhaps,

even convenient, so long as they did not get under foot. There was in

them a certain childlike innocence, complicated alone by a Quixotic code

of chivalry and honor which allowed them to be despoiled. Either they

overlooked or were innocent of the ways of the world and so clung to the

sentimental image of women as pure, devoted creatures who were always

good and generous. There were, of course, such things as “bad women” but

these did not concern them; such women were of a class apart, without

any real relation to good women, a third sex one might have said, with

its own uses. The women of their world had changed abruptly, swiftly, in

a generation or two, from helpmates on a rude frontier adventure into

creatures of luxury; and men like Herman and Clarence had not kept pace.

These were the men whom Ellen had always known. There had never been any

one like Richard Callendar.

In the absence of Clarence among the factories of the middle west Ellen

lunched, not once, but several times with Callendar. Out of the money

she had earned by her playing she was able now to dress herself in a

fashion which, if not smart, was at least simple and charming. With the

approach of the warm days, they lunched at Sherry’s (for he made no

effort to conceal his attentions) in an open window which gave out upon

the Avenue and the stream of carriages, disordered now by increasing

inroads of noisy automobiles. She must have understood, out of the

depths of her mother’s teachings, that what she did was an improper and

even a dangerous thing. It was, at least, a misstep, taken through lack

of experience ... a step which later on she might not have risked.

There was Callendar himself to be considered. It was clear that, despite

all her coolness, he had an effect upon her. There were times when she

would blush as if suddenly overcome by a sense of his presence, for he

was charming to her--gentle, understanding, full of a fire which leapt

up in sudden gusts to join the flame of her own triumph and zest in

living. In the window overlooking Fifth Avenue there were moments when

she must have forgotten everything save the future, hours when they

talked of Europe, when he described to her with something very close to

passion the brilliance of Paris or the smoky glow of London. Both were

naïve, Ellen in the fashion of the inexperienced and Callendar, so dark,

so charming, so utterly new, in the fashion of a man whose directness of

action had nothing to do with the question of conventions. It was

impossible for either to have understood the emotion that drew them

together, for it was a romantic thing to which both were then

insensible, the one because life had taught her not to expect such a

thing as romance, the other because he had never believed in its

existence.

One bright afternoon in May they walked all the way from Sherry’s

through the park to the Babylon Arms. It was a soft day when the park

appeared veritably to reflect its greenness upon the air itself, a day

when the willows were softened by a haze of new leaves, and the rare

clusters of cherry trees appeared in faint blurs of delicate pink. Along

the edges of the lake, freed now of its burden of ice and not yet

burdened anew with the old newspapers of sweltering August, the

nursemaids divided the iron benches with vagabonds and old ladies who

had come there simply to rest, to sit relaxed, silent, as if they were

sustained somehow without effort by the very softness of the air. The

quality of this pervading gentleness appeared to have its effect upon

the two; for a time they were enveloped by a languor which drugged the

intelligence and warmed the senses. They walked lazily, side by side,

Ellen in a tight gray suit and a large picture hat, Callendar looking at

her now and then out of his gray eyes and poking the fresh green grass

with his malacca stick. At times they stopped and laughed, for Callendar

was in a charming mood when he became a _blagueur_, irresistible and

caressing. Under the influence of the day even the hardness of Ellen,

which could be at times almost pitiful, appeared to melt away. She

laughed at him. She even watched him slyly from the corner of her eyes,

but not in the old hostile fashion. It was more the way one would watch

a charming little boy, fearful lest his knowledge of the admiration

might give him an advantage.

It could not have been the weather alone which so changed her. There

were other things, among them beyond all doubt Callendar himself and the

friendship which he had given her, the same friendship which his mother

and even Sabine in her brusque, shy way had offered. They were friends

in a way no one, save Lily, had ever been before. It is possible that

there came to her on this soft warm day a knowledge of her kinship with

these people, of a bond which if undefinable was none the less certain

and secure. They had nothing to gain from her and they were not

concerned with subduing her; they did not seek to change her in any way

at all. They were like her old Aunt Julia and the mysterious Lily, who

had warned her not to let people make her fit a pattern, not to let them

drag her down to the level of their own mediocrity; she understood now

what Lily meant. These were people who, by some quality of honesty that

was almost a physical thing, had attained an aristocracy of their own, a

state which had its foundations in that very honesty. There was, too, a

distinction about them of a sort beyond such individuals as the genteel,

decayed Mr. Wyck, May Seton and her giggles, Mr. Bunce who was so robust

and kind, and (this thought must have occurred to her) even Clarence

whose kindly humbleness barred him forever. They were not muddled; they

stood outlined, for all their strangeness, with a sharp clarity.

It was an understanding that had come to her over a long time dimly as

through a mist. To-day she knew it. She began to understand why there

were some people whom she admired and some for whom she could have in

her heart contempt or at best an emptiness that bordered upon pity.

So she walked very happily with the fascinating, dark young man, content

perhaps that she might go on thus forever, that she might always have

him and Sabine and Thérèse quite as they were, without any change. And

in the depths of her heart it would have given her a sharp, leaping

pleasure to have encountered suddenly on one of those asphalt paths May

Seton and others of her townspeople. It would have pleased her to have

had them witness her triumph. For she had not yet escaped the Town.

* * * * *

Into the midst of this a new knowledge came, sharp and unforeseen.

Under the shadow of Daniel Webster in the bronze attitude of a pouter

pigeon, Callendar halted sharply and turned toward her with a swift

directness, looking at her so closely that for an instant she blushed.

“Might I come in with you this afternoon?” he asked. “Will you be

alone?”

Faced by the disarming gaze of the gray eyes, she forgot for a moment

her game of watching. She answered, “Why, yes. I’ll be alone.” And then,

as if she could not control herself, she looked away and started walking

once more.

He did not speak again until they had reached the outer barrier of the

park when he said,

“I’d like to have you play for me ... alone. I’ve never heard you save

in a crowd. I fancy you would play best for an audience of one.”

They turned presently between the Syrian Lions of the Babylon Arms and,

after being borne silently aloft in the swaying elevator, they climbed

the two flights of stairs to the door of the tiny apartment which Ellen

opened with her key. The room was in darkness until she lifted the

shades which (on the advice of that passionate housekeeper, her mother)

were drawn to protect the cheap, bright carpet from the sharp rays of

the spring sun, and then the light revealed a shabby little room stuffed

with the things which Clarence had bought her. There were chairs and

sofas and pillows, pictures, ornaments and little tables. In one corner

the grand piano stood somewhat apart in a little bay cleared of

furniture. Richard, leaning on his stick and viewing the confusion

gravely, must have thought her lover a poor sort, who could offer her

only a great profusion of things in the poorest of taste. Yet he did not

smile, perhaps because he was not greatly interested in the room. In the

midst of all the stuff, Ellen, taking off her picture hat and blushing

still with a hazy sense of confusion, possessed an air of aloofness, of

being detached from all the shabby things. She rose above them as once

before she had risen above the furniture in the Setons’ dismal parlor.

The gaiety that had flourished in the bright park became dampened now by

a queer sense of strain, an awkwardness which made itself apparent in

the silence of both. They were no longer in the bright open park: the

walls which shut them in had changed everything, sharpened in some

indefinable way the power of their senses. For an instant they stood

regarding each other shyly, and presently Ellen said, “Do sit down

there.... And I’ll play for you. What do you want to hear?”

Richard told her that the choice must be hers, and then he seated

himself in Clarence’s leather arm chair and lighted a cigarette with the

matches from Clarence’s smoking table in the Mission style. Without

speaking again she began to play. It was as if she had said, “I will

talk to you in this fashion,” and after the first few chords had fallen

the sense of strain and conflict disappeared, swallowed up again, this

time in the man’s attitude of passionate listening.

She played for him, first of all, some Schumann which was so like the

shadowy, soft consciousness of this new feeling born with such

abruptness there in the park; and then she played some of his beloved

Chopin and turned at last into the Sonata Appassionata. She played as

she played only for Fergus who listened in the same fashion, slumped

down in his chair, his eyes half closed, his curling, golden hair all

rumpled, with the air of one intoxicated by sound. It must have occurred

to her, for the first time, that there was between her brother and this

stranger a certain likeness, a capacity for wild abandonment that was

terrifying. To-day all the things which for so long a time had been

shut up within the walls of her bitter secrecy poured forth and

overflowed into the music; and with this there was united a new fire, a

sudden warmth that was strange to her. She knew a strange desire to

share all that she possessed, a curious, aching desire close to the

border of tears. It was so, perhaps, because love would always be to her

like this ... a wild and passionate heightening of the senses which

found its manifestation in an unearthly unity of spirit. For a time she

carried Richard with her into the ecstasy she was able to invoke.

And when at length the last chords drifted slowly away, they permitted

the silence to remain unbroken for a long time while he sat, still

slumped in his chair, his eyes half closed, watching her with the air of

one on whom a spell has been cast.

He sat there in Clarence’s chair in Clarence’s place, magnificent like

herself in all that desert of commonplace things. There was a sense of

unreality about the whole scene. She must have known, deep within that

hard intelligence of hers, that what she saw was at best an illusion

since between them both there lay differences, circumstances, facts that

were not to be overcome.

He went presently, after they had exchanged a few stupid phrases drawn

by sheer force from the depths of an emotion which neither was willing

to betray save by their silence. They did not even speak of another

meeting; nothing happened; upon the surface their parting was strangely

empty and bare. And when the door had closed behind him, Richard halted

for a moment in the dark hallway and leaned against the wall. Perhaps he

remembered what his mother, so old in her wisdom and so shrewd, had told

him. _She’s not the ordinary sort.... You’d best keep clear of her._

The mocking look had gone out of his eyes. Something had happened to

him, an experience that was altogether new in a life by no means limited

in such matters ... a thing which opened the fancy to a new

magnificence, a new rapture, a new intoxication. It was a vision which

he may have doubted because he had never believed in its existence. But

between him and this wild adventure there stood a barrier against which

he could make no progress. It was an invisible wall of a sort he had

never encountered in any woman, not even in the terrible serenity of

Sabine. Hard it was, and clear like crystal, protecting something which

he might see but never touch. _She’s not the ordinary sort.... You’d

best keep clear of her._

* * * * *

On the opposite side of the door Ellen flung herself down on the ugly

divan and wept, silently and horribly, as she had wept once before in

the dark solitude of her own virginal room, while the autumn rain

drenched the garden outside. And again she could not have told why she

wept. It was a passionate sensuous weeping which exhausted itself

presently and left her weary and quiet until long after the lights had

begun to twinkle through the smoke along the river.

Yet nothing had happened--nothing at all of which she could say, “It is

this or that.”

32

Meanwhile from the Town there came to Ellen in the weekly letters of her

mother bits of news which sometimes interested her but more often did

not. There was the news of May Seton’s marriage to Herman Biggs, an

evening wedding in the Methodist church with a supper afterwards at

which Skinflint Seton, in a gesture of triumph and vindication, had

flung loose the purse strings and gone so far as to provide an orchestra

which played behind a screen of smilax and carnations.

“Herman,” wrote Hattie Tolliver, “looked a gawk, with his freckles, and

May was too fat for her dress. It was cut princess fashion and trimmed

with duchess lace. She carried a shower bouquet of white roses and sweet

peas. Herman’s trousers bagged at the knees. At least this is what

Cousin Eva Barr, who went to the wedding, told me. I wasn’t invited.

They say that the Setons have been living on cold hash ever since.

“They went to French Lick Springs on their honeymoon and now Herman is

back at the factory learning the corset business.”

Miss Ogilvie had not been well lately and Aunt Julia was becoming more

and more eccentric. She had shut up all but one great room at Shane’s

Castle and would see no one but the Doctor and Hattie Tolliver. “I go to

see her three times a week. She needs some one to take hold of that

great house. There’s no one else, so I do it. Miss Ogilvie comes in to

sit with Pa while I’m gone. She’s given up some of her pupils. She says

she finds she can’t do as much as she once could.

“Your father is doing well at the bank and I’ve managed to lay aside

quite a sum after the debts were paid. We’ll need it to send Fergus to

school. I’ve sold the rings that Aunt Julia gave me and we’re now on the

prosperous side of things once more. If your father had only listened to

me, we’d have been rich to-day, but he always said he knew best, and he

trusted people too much. Before long we’ll have enough to come East. I

want to be with my children.”

Then there were inquiries after her health and Clarence’s welfare and

endless cautions and advice concerning the management of the flat, for

distance made little difference to Hattie Tolliver when it concerned the

interests of some one she loved. It was as if she ran Ellen’s household

as well. In one letter she was even bold enough to ask whether there was

any hope of her becoming a grandmother.

Each of these letters, though it bore a great similarity to all the

others, was in a sense an epic. They recorded in sentences vigorously

written and crowded with a host of details, the daily history of a

community. They were fiercely personal and colored by the prejudices of

Hattie Tolliver. In her enemies there was nothing good and in those she

loved best nothing bad. Her world was one of a savage intensity,

painted like Skinflint Seton’s entirely in blacks and whites.

She inquired frequently whether Clarence would be coming West, insisting

that he must stop and see them in the Town and tell them all the news.

And the credulous woman was put off with the story that Clarence had

given up traveling and would not be in the West again for a long time.

It was a lie that Ellen invented to protect him, since he was too timid

ever to risk meeting any one who might recognize him as spiritual

ravisher of Mrs. Herman Biggs (née May Seton).

And at length there came a letter containing the news that Grandpa Barr

had died.

“He passed away,” wrote Mrs. Tolliver, “quietly. I was in the room and

he was just lying there looking at the ceiling and singing an old song

that he used to sing when Ma was still alive and I was a little girl.

They used to sing it as a duet. ‘I will find my rest in the eagle’s

nest,’ it was called, and they sang it in the long summer evenings when

all the chores were done and they sat out under the trees. I can

remember it well. He was humming this when suddenly he tried to sit up,

and said, ‘Why, Ma.... There you are, come to meet me.... I’m coming to

you.... In just a minute, as soon as I get the little red cow in from

the field by the cairn.’ And then he lay back and died without another

word. (It was indeed a long way from Grandpa Barr, dead now, with his

memories of the frontier, to Thérèse Callendar and her carved emerald

saved from the sack of Constantinople.)

“It was a good thing because he wanted to die for so long. It was hard

on a man like that who had always been so active. He was like a little

child. For a long time he hadn’t said anything sensible. I did

everything for him and I don’t regret it. It was hard sometimes with so

much else to worry me and take up my time.

“Aunt Julia is getting worse and worse. She can’t leave her bed now and

can only eat things without sugar. I make her cakes every week and

custards, the kind she likes. I can’t even have a holiday, because she

grows restless and worse when I’m away.”

And then there was a significant paragraph, brightened by a certain

spice of resentment. “Gramp remains just the same ... not a day older

and just as strong as ever. It looks to me as if he’d live forever. _I

don’t see what I’ve done to bear such a cross!_”

* * * * *

The letters from Ellen grew steadily fewer and more unsatisfactory. With

her old instinct, she wrote only of those things which were of no

importance, bits of news concerning the health of Clarence and herself,

comments on the heat, even stories which she had read in the newspapers.

Of her unhappiness she said nothing, though it was at the moment the one

thing which dominated all her existence.

After the stifled farewell on the afternoon in May Callendar appeared to

vanish. Clarence returned and they gave their party for the Bunces--a

party to which Mr. Wyck, somewhat uppish and deeply wretched, brought a

spinister heiress from Brooklyn. They played pinochle and drank beer

which the radiant Clarence brought in from a delicatessen store. Ellen,

it must be said, behaved beautifully and played for them to dance until

the tenant from the floor below, a retired actress with yellow hair and

a white poodle, made a profane protest to the janitor. She was kind to

Clarence and even affectionate, as if in some way the tenderness brought

her peace.

Only once was there an unpleasantness and this occurred when Mr. Wyck,

finding her alone in a corner looked at her out of his green eyes and

observed, “I understand you’re growing famous. I hear that you play a

great deal in public ... at fashionable parties.”

For an instant, Ellen looked at him sharply and then, believing perhaps

that he knew nothing, replied, “Not often ... now and then.... It is

profitable.”

He did not address her again but sat meditating in a sour fashion,

absorbed apparently in the color of the beer he held in his long soft

hands, and presently, with the air of emerging from a fog of thought, he

observed, “It’s too bad Clarence can’t enjoy the parties too.”

“He would hate them,” said Ellen abruptly.

This observation Wyck turned over in his mind and when he spoke again,

it was with an air of confidence, of making a concession.

“No,” he said, “I understand that. He wouldn’t feel at home. He’d be the

most miserable person there.”

But the look in his eye, the soft insinuation of his voice said, without

saying it, “No, you and I are different. We were made for the

fashionable world.”

Ellen laughed, but there was in the laugh a little sudden choke of

bitterness. She came to her husband’s defense. “I don’t think he’d like

it, but it wouldn’t be on that account.”

It was the most friendly conversation they had ever had, and although he

did not address her again during the remainder of the evening, she was

aware at odd moments that he was watching her. The sight disturbed her,

perhaps because she understood vaguely that the anemic little man

possessed an amazing sense of intuition. She understood too that, under

the air of condescension which he observed toward the other guests,

there was at work all the old hostility, heightened now by a new

knowledge that had come to him from some mysterious source. It was as if

she were in combat with a woman, sharp-witted and feline, over the

possession of a man whom she had no desire to own. Absurdity enveloped

the idea of any one fighting for possession of Clarence. He was so easy

to possess.

* * * * *

Not even when she went to the Callendars’ to play did she have a glimpse

of Richard. The group had dwindled now as one by one the friends of Mrs.

Callendar betook themselves into the country. There remained during the

hot months only the good-natured hostess and occasionally Sabine who

was staying in town until Mrs. Callendar sailed. They made excuses for

Richard; they told her when she noted his absence that he was at

Newport, or in Philadelphia, or vaguely that he was in the country; they

kept up a little game in which Mrs. Callendar and Sabine told lies and

Ellen accepted them, and both sides knew that the other had no belief in

the deceit. Beyond the shrewd probing which the plump Greek woman

practised on the evenings when Ellen came to dine with her alone there

was no sign on either side. Yet a grayness enveloped them all, altering

in its descent the whole tone of their days.

Sabine gave least evidence of the change, but with her it was impossible

from her behavior ever to discover the faintest knowledge of her heart,

impossible to know anything that lay behind the shield of her terrible

self-possession. She had betrayed herself only once, for an instant.

Beyond that one could only judge that she was waiting ... waiting ...

waiting ... with an overpowering patience, as if she knew the rules of

the world in which she lived would give her the prize in the end. There

was magnificence in the sight of her, sitting there in the evenings,

marvelously dressed, not beautiful but fantastically attractive,

listening quietly to the music made by a woman whom she had every reason

to hate.

They all talked of the same things, in the same fashion, refusing to

admit that anything had happened to change the pleasant, even way of

their existence; and each knew that the other knew exactly what she

knew. There were times, after dinner in the dark library, when there

would be long silences broken only by the faint click of a tiny coffee

cup against a saucer. Each of them watched the others, and in those long

evenings the two who were so old, so wise in experience, came to respect

the newcomer who played the game quite as well as themselves.

* * * * *

A night or two before Thérèse Callendar sailed, Ellen came to dine with

her alone. Throughout the long dinner, which the Greek woman had served

in the library at a small table, they kept up the game. It was not

until the cigarettes and coffee were brought in that Thérèse as the

servant closed the door behind him, said abruptly, “I want to talk to

you about my son.”

It came so suddenly, after so much waiting, that Ellen said nothing. She

blushed and the tears came into her eyes. She kept silent.

“I think I know what has happened,” said Mrs. Callendar. She did not

speak now in her old cynical fashion, slipping quickly from one thing to

another. All the evening she had been grave and now, mingled with the

gravity, there was a curious warmth, a sympathy which reached out and

touched Ellen. She understood, it seemed, that the matter had arrived at

the point where it was necessary to go beneath the thin surface of their

pretense, when she must delve under all those polished little speeches

that made life move along an easy path and deal, directly, with a thing

that was stronger than any of them.

“We all know,” she continued softly. “We played the game very nicely,

but now something must be done about it. Sabine knows it too. She’s

known all along and it hurts her perhaps more than any of us because she

understands that in my son there are things which are beyond her

control....” She coughed. “For that, my dear, you are much better

equipped. I hope you respect Sabine for an extraordinary woman ...

civilized. I think you might put her to torture and never succeed in

making her cry out.”

Ellen, sitting now with her head bowed as if she had been accused, said,

“I know.... I know that.”

“I know my own son ...” repeated Mrs. Callendar gravely. “I know him

well. We are very different in some ways ... but I know him.” Here she

paused for a moment and stirred her coffee with the tiny silver spoon.

“I’ve seen him when he fancied he was in love with a woman.” She raised

one plump hand and the soiled diamonds glittered darkly. “Oh, this has

not been the first time. It has happened before. But this time there is

a difference.” She coughed and added, “This time instead of pursuing

the object, he has run away from her.... That makes it serious.”

Ellen, mute and frightened by the frankness of the older woman, sat

awkwardly, like a little girl, regarding her. Surely she had never heard

any one talk in quite this fashion ... so honestly and yet so calmly. In

a moment like this she had expected anger, even denunciation; she had

prepared herself for it.

“I don’t know what is to be done about it ...” continued Mrs. Callendar,

“because I don’t know everything.... In a case like this, one must know

everything in order to make sense. You have done something to him. I

don’t blame you.... It is simply one of those things which happens.... I

fancy if you had not met each other as you did, you would have met in

some other fashion....” Her green eyes narrowed and her lips contracted

so that all her plumpness appeared to shrivel and vanish. She seemed

suddenly to become vastly old and wizened. “Yes, I am sure you would

have met. Nothing could have kept you apart.” And then, plump and kindly

once more, she said, “I don’t know what it is you have done to him. I

don’t fancy he knows himself, but he’s miserable.... You see, the

trouble is that he is really romantic ... just as I am romantic ... and

he’s always pretended he was an experienced, cynical _homme du

monde_.... In that one thing he is dishonest.”

She reached over and in an unexpected gesture touched the hand of the

girl so that Ellen, taken unaware by this movement of sympathy, began to

cry softly.

“I _am_ romantic,” said Mrs. Callendar softly, “though you might not

believe it. Listen!” She leaned forward. “Listen! I’ll tell you a story

about myself and you’ll see. You’ll understand then perhaps that I have

sympathy enough to be of use in this matter ... because in a time of

this sort, it’s sympathy that’s needed more than anything else.”

And then she settled back and between puffs on her cigarette related bit

by bit, from the very beginning, the romantic story of her elopement

with Richard Callendar’s father. She told the story with an Oriental

sense of color, and slowly before the eyes of the girl she recreated the

color of Constantinople in her youth, all the magic of the summer palace

and the Bosphorus by moonlight, all the desolation of the Greek aunts,

all the crafty manner of the rich old Dikran Leopopulos, and above all

the somber glow of the love she had known for the blond and handsome

young American. Under the spell of her own tale she began to speak half

in French, half in English, but Ellen, listening, became so caught up in

the magic of the story that she understood it all, even those things

which Thérèse Callendar related in an alien tongue. The tale set fire to

a vein of warmth in the girl which until now had gone undiscovered, save

only at times when, lost in her music, it had emerged translated into a

beauty of sound. For the moment even the plump Greek woman herself

appeared no longer to be old and ugly and covered with diamonds in need

of cleaning. In the fervor of her story, she attained for a passing

instant the quality of youth and of a fleeting beauty out of the Levant.

And when she had finished, she leaned back and said, with a wicked

chuckle, “_Voyez_. I am ugly now and fat. But I was not then.” Then she

sighed quickly and looked down at her rings. “You see the thing is that

he died ... he was drowned before we had been married two years.”

* * * * *

Again Ellen kept silent. There was nothing for her to say that would not

have been trivial and idiotic. She waited and presently Thérèse said,

“You see, I can understand.... I wanted you to know that.... One would

have said that he and I were separated by a thousand things. None of

them made the least difference.”

* * * * *

It was Ellen who in the end interrupted the strange, breathless silence

which enveloped them at the conclusion of Thérèse’s story. She murmured,

“It was nothing that I meant to do.... It happened.... I don’t know

how.... It happened without either of us saying anything. It was,” (she

groped for the words and collapsed into banality), “It was like a flash

of lightning.”

“It would be,” said Thérèse, “with him. I don’t believe he understands

what it is.”

“And I haven’t seen him since.”

“He has never spoken a word of it.... Always he tells me.”

Something of the girl’s awkwardness had vanished now, and between them

there was a sense of a sympathy that had not before existed. It was the

manner now of two women who were confidants.

“There is nothing I can do,” said Ellen, “nothing. It is hopeless.”

“You were a brave girl to go on coming here.”

A flash of Ellen’s old spirit returned as she said, “What could I do?

Running away helped nothing.... It’s hard because I have had no one to

speak to ... no one I could talk it over with.... You see, I am really

alone.... It never mattered before.... I mean ... the loneliness.”

* * * * *

They faced each other, two women, each possessed of intelligence and

honesty, striving to discover some way out of the tangle in which they

were caught. Being wise, they knew perhaps the uselessness of violence.

They waited, each knowing well enough that there was much more concerned

than simple romance. Thérèse knew, no doubt, that the young woman who,

stripped now of her fierce secrecy, sat opposite her, frightened and

tearful, was not simply an adventuress seeking to gain a husband and a

vast fortune. She knew, too, how much these things would have meant to

the girl, and she understood well enough that Ellen, face to face with

an unaccustomed tangle, lacked the experience which could have helped

her.

On Ellen’s side, she must have been conscious of facing a mystery. The

plump woman, covered with dirty diamonds, was her friend, yet, despite

her kindliness, she was remote, separated from her by differences of

blood, of tradition, of a million things. She was as remote, as beyond

comprehension in the subtlety of her wise, old mind as her dark son,

even in the moments when he was most disarming. Her own people Ellen

might battle and overthrow, but these were different. She could not even

fathom the woman’s friendliness.

“I am not a cheap adventuress,” she repeated. “Don’t believe that.”

“My dear girl, I am not such a fool.... I was not born yesterday.... I

have dealt with women of that sort.”

“You see,” said Ellen, folding and refolding her handkerchief like a

little girl, “I am quite alone.... I looked on him as a friend ... as I

might look on my own brother.... I never thought of such a thing.”

At this Mrs. Callendar made a clucking noise and bowed her head for a

time in thought. At last she said, “Ah, but that is where the trouble

lay! That is where you were wrong!... Such a thing is not possible with

him.... There is acquaintance and the next step is the other thing. He

is not, after all, like your American men.”

Ellen looked up now and ceased to plait the handkerchief. “I can see

that ...” she said. “I’ve learned a great deal. I’ve thought of nothing

else for weeks.... It frightens me because I can’t stop thinking of it

when I want to ... not even at night. There’s never been anything like

it before.” She looked directly at Mrs. Callendar. “Could I talk to you

...? Could I tell you the truth?”

“My dear, it is the only way we shall arrive anywhere.”

“I’ve got to tell some one.... I’ve thought and thought about the whole

thing. I don’t know what it is he wants of me. He has never said

anything.... We have never even mentioned it.” She smiled faintly.

“Perhaps I am a fool and silly. We’ve never mentioned it in any way....”

Mrs. Callendar interrupted her. “Ah, but that’s it. That’s what makes it

serious....”

“Perhaps I’m talking of something that doesn’t exist.”

“Oh, it exists all right.” Thérèse knocked the ash from her cigarette.

“You would know it if you had seen him.” She turned sharply to Ellen.

“Why do you think he is avoiding you? It’s not because he regards you as

a virgin not to be defiled. It’s himself he’s thinking of too.”

“But there is nothing to be done.... Nothing can be done.”

“Do you love him?”

Ellen smiled again. “How should I know that? I’ve not been in love a

hundred times. I had never met anything like this. I had my whole life

planned, perfectly, to the very end. I don’t know what’s to happen now.”

Before she answered Mrs. Callendar sighed. “If there is enough of love,

anything is possible.” She raised her plump hand. “Oh, I’m not being a

romantic fool. I only mean that if there is enough of passion.... If you

believe that it is the greatest thing of all, worth all else in the

world, then take what life can give you. Let nothing stop you. It will

come to an end soon enough and you will be unhappy, but you must

understand that in the beginning. If you are to have remorse, have it

before you act and be done with it.... That is the only rule for

intelligent people, and they are after all the only ones who dare know

such a rule.”

* * * * *

For a time Ellen sat quietly regarding the floor, lost in consideration

of all her companion had said. It was a bewildering speech and

colossally unmoral. She must have thought, then or later, of the vast

distance which separated the girl who sat in Mrs. Callendar’s

drawing-room from the girl who sat on Hattie Tolliver’s knee the night

that Jimmy Seton rang the bell and brought Clarence into her life; yet

she had only gone a little way. Turning the speech of Mrs. Callendar

over and over in her mind, she became aware that it savored curiously of

Lily. It was a consciousness always present, an awareness of Lily’s

charm, her beauty, her curious soft independence, the beauty, the talk,

the scandal that centered about her.... If Hattie Tolliver could have

known it, the influence of wicked Lily was stronger at that moment than

it had ever been. Out of all the talk, the experience, the sorrow, Lily

was emerging slowly from the well of mystery that engulfed her.

“It is impossible,” said Ellen slowly, “because I could not marry him.”

She hesitated for a moment and then added in a whisper, “I have a

husband already.... I’ve never told any one.”

She began to weep once more, gently and wearily, while Mrs. Callendar,

poised and remote in black satin and diamonds, regarded her with an

expression of astonishment.

At last the older woman said, “You should have told me this. It changes

everything. Sabine told me that you had a lover ... that she had seen

him at your flat.”

“That was my husband.”

“You never spoke of him, so we had nothing else to believe.” She smiled

suddenly and touched Ellen’s hand once more. “I was right then. I did

not believe it possible.”

Ellen looked at her silently, in amazement. “But you had me to your

house, as a friend. How could you have done that when you thought me a

woman of that sort?”

Across the gulf that separated them, Mrs. Callendar laughed and said,

“But that would have made no difference. I learned long ago not to be

concerned with the morals of my friends. You are what you are and I like

you, my dear, whether you had one lover or fifty, except that if you had

had fifty I should have known you to be a woman of no taste.” She paused

and lighted another cigarette out of the box she had sent her from

Constantinople. “I had no idea,” she continued thoughtfully, “how wide

the difference was.... Besides, you are a musician ... an artist. One

does not require of an artist the morals of the _bourgeoisie_. One

expects such things. It is so because it is so, and there’s an end to

it.” She puffed for a time, slowly, lost in thought, and then added in a

kind of postscript. “My poor girl! What a lot you have not learned! You

will not be free until you do what you see fit ... regardless of any

one.”

And now Ellen found herself once more where she had begun. In all their

talk they had arrived after all nowhere, because they had been talking

all the while of two different things. Mrs. Callendar, conscious perhaps

of the hopelessness of the muddle, rose and began to walk slowly up and

down the room, an absurd and untragic figure, plump and much laced but

energetic and clever. After a time she came and stood by Ellen’s chair.

“I take it then,” she said, “that you do not love your husband.”

“I don’t know,” Ellen replied dully, “I don’t know. It is nothing like

this new thing ... nothing at all. I am sorry for him. Perhaps that is

it.”

“It is a match then that your parents made?”

“No.... It is not that.... It’s quite different....” She hesitated for a

moment and then said in a low voice, “I ran away with him.... I eloped.

It was not because I loved him. It was because I had to escape. I wanted

to be a musician.... I wanted to be great. Lately I have thought

sometimes I was only a fool ... that I have only confused and ruined

everything.”

This Mrs. Callendar pondered for a time, returning to her chair and

lighting another cigarette before she spoke. “And why do you pity him?”

she asked presently.

“It is because he is so good and so humble. I am afraid of hurting him.

He has been good to me and generous. It is almost worse than if I had

loved him.... Don’t you see?”

“You would not divorce him?” asked Mrs. Callendar.

“No,” Ellen cried suddenly. “No, I could not do that.... I couldn’t....”

“And you would not run away from him?”

“It is the same thing in the end.... It would hurt him. It might kill

him.... He’s such a good man ... so kind, so helpless. He wants me to

love him always.... He’s done everything he could for me ... everything

and more than he is able to do. You see. I told you there was nothing to

be done.”

“No,” said Mrs. Callendar slowly, “I’m afraid there is nothing to be

done....” Again she rose from her chair and walked over to the window.

“You had best think it over.” She turned and faced Ellen. “I will talk

to Richard. I will not sail to-morrow. I will stay. It must be settled

somehow, for the sake of all of us.... I have not forgotten Sabine. She

must be considered.”

33

It was long after midnight when Ellen, entering the cabriolet at last,

was driven off by the impatient Wilkes to the Babylon Arms. When she

arrived, she found Clarence in the lower hall pacing up and down with a

pitiful air of anxiety.

“I should have telephoned,” she said, “but I forgot. I did not know how

late it was. You see we talked for a long time afterward.”

And then she kissed him gently, swept again by the old sense of pity.

During all the drive home, in the long moments when she had been alone

in the dark cabriolet, she had struggled, bitterly, with the puzzle that

confronted her, knowing always in the back of her mind that whatever

happened she could never run away with Richard Callendar. She might fall

ill, she might die, she might go mad, but there were some things which

she could not do. Deep down in her heart there was a force that was

quite beyond her, a power that was an instinct, as much a physical thing

as her very arms and hands. It was the part of her that was Hattie

Tolliver.

There had been the other way out, but when she kissed Clarence she knew

that it too was impossible. When she saw him waiting, his eyes wild with

anxiety, his whole face suddenly lighted up with joy and adoration at

sight of her, she knew too that she could never divorce him. His very

weakness destroyed her, for she knew that if she had asked him he would

have freed her. There was nothing that he would deny her ... nothing

that he was able to give; and what she wanted from him, he would never

be able to give because he was, after all, only a poor thing.

* * * * *

But the hardest part of the ordeal lay before her. It was the meeting

with Callendar when, for the first time, they would both be forced to

recognize the truth and deny it, forever. She understood this well

enough; she was in a way even eager to have it occur at once so that she

might put the memory of it behind her, so that she might stamp out the

incident forever and go on her triumphant way. It came at last when

Callendar, in a brief note, asked if he might call upon her. The letter,

in a headlong handwriting so unlike the mocking cynicism which he

cultivated, gave no hint of what was in his mind. It asked merely that

she set a time and place.

She bade him come to the apartment in the Babylon Arms and he came,

strangely sobered and quiet, with a chastened look in his gray eyes. At

sight of him he appeared to her, as it seemed long afterward, for the

first time in any semblance of reality; he existed with a new clarity, a

new distinctness of outline. It was as if she had never seen him rightly

before, as if until now he had been to her some one whom she accepted

vaguely without questioning. Only one quality carried over completely

into the new Callendar; it was the old sense of conflict, of will

against will, of a pleasurable, almost perverse sensation of struggle.

The new Callendar was an older man in a fashion she could not altogether

define, save that the impression was related to the effect which his

mother had upon her, of weakening and diminishing all reliance in

herself.

The first thing she said to him was, “I am frightened.”

He took off his hat and laid it quietly on the divan by the side of his

stick and then he turned and looking at her with his strange gray eyes,

replied, “I too am frightened.”

Among the cheap furniture that crowded the room the old sense of his

superiority returned to her, mingled this time with a new consciousness

that he was utterly alien, stranger than she had ever imagined until

now. She sat down quietly while he drew a chair to her side.

“I’ve talked to my mother,” he said. “Or rather she talked to me. She’s

told me everything.”

Under the gaze of the gray eyes, Ellen turned aside, discomfited,

wretched. “I wasn’t honest,” she murmured. “I’m sorry, but I hadn’t

meant to be dishonest. I never thought it would make the least

difference to any one.”

“It has made a difference though ... a great difference. It’s changed

everything.” He reached over with a tenderness that suddenly weakened

her and took one of her hands in his. She knew his hands; she knew them

as she had known Clarence’s on the night in the Setons’ parlor when she

had judged him nice enough but a bit of a prig. Callendar’s hands were

slender, dark and strong, beautifully shaped in a way that made her fear

them. When they approached her, she became weak; she felt that she was

losing herself. She could not have explained the feeling save by a sense

she had of their power. He was talking again, softly in the low voice

with the thin trace of an accent, like Lily’s.

“I was foolish,” he was saying. “I should have known that the thing

which made me afraid of you was the thing that would have kept you from

taking a lover. I’d never encountered anything quite like it before.” He

smiled and touched his mustache gently. “I was a fool. I should have

known better. I thought perhaps you would love me some time ... not

without a struggle. No, I never expected that. I thought we might

understand each other....” For an instant the incredible happened.

Callendar was blushing. It was a thing which she had not seen happen

before. “I thought that one day we should come together.... I thought

you were an artist, living as artists I have known do live. I was

idiotic. I should have known better. You’ll forgive me that ... won’t

you?”

For a moment she did not answer. The sound of his soft voice, the touch

of the dark hands, had taken possession of her. Dimly she knew that she

should have been insulted, yet she had no feeling at all, no sense of

indignation; there was only a curious faintness that made her afraid.

Somehow she understood that all this in reality had nothing to do with

insults, with conventions, even with laws. It was something which might

never again come her way and yet something which was to be feared,

because it might destroy her forever. At last she said, “Why should I

forgive you? It would make no difference now....”

“It would make a difference.... It would make a difference,” he said

quickly. “I want you to marry me.... We can arrange everything. It makes

no difference how.” And then after a sharp silence, he added in a low

voice, “There is a magnificence about you, ... a bravery....” And the

rest of the sentence trailed away so that she did not hear it.

Out of a great depth as if by a great physical effort she returned into

the daylight. She found her lips moving. She found herself saying over

and over again, “I must remember.... I must remember.... I must not ruin

everything.” He had never even asked whether she loved him. He had

accepted it as a fact. He had asked her nothing. He had come simply to

take her.

Then she withdrew her hand slowly and sat staring at it with an air of

looking at some object unfamiliar to her. “I can’t marry you,” she said

slowly. “I can’t.... I can’t.... There is nothing to be done.... There

is nothing to be done.” And she began to cry silently, so that the tears

fell down upon her hands.

The speech appeared to astonish him, for he made no effort to regain her

hand but sat staring at her as at a stranger. When at last he spoke it

was in a voice that was low and caressing, but the tenderness had

slipped away and in its place there was a hardness, as of steel; it was

like a sudden glimpse of claws emerging from a soft and furry paw.

“Is it because you won’t give him up,” he asked, “as you told my

mother?”

“It is because I cannot give him up.... I cannot treat him that way....

I cannot ... cannot.”

The steel in the voice emerged a little more sharply. There was an edge

to it now, sarcastic, cutting. “Is it because he is so fine ... so

handsome ... so magnificent ... so dazzling?”

He repeated thus all the things that Clarence was not, and so he gave

her the last bit of strength that she required, for the sound of his

voice, the sharp edge of the sarcasm, filled her with a sudden anger and

a wild desire to protect Clarence as something which was her own. She

found herself fighting for a man who was none of these things against a

man who to her was all of them. It struck somehow at her sense of

gallantry ... that Callendar who had everything should sneer at poor

Clarence who had nothing.

She said, “It has nothing to do with that.... There are some things that

one cannot do.... This I will not do.” She dried her eyes and sat more

erectly. “There is no use.... There was no use in your coming here....

My mind was made up ... long before you came.”

At this he turned angry. “You are like all your women.... Love to you is

nothing.... It is something to be controlled. You don’t know what love

is.... You would exploit it.... You are like all your women.”

So he talked thus for a time in a childish vein strange and new while

she sat impassive, conscious all the while of the power he could exert

over her, a power that had to do with the beauty of his hands, with the

strange quality of his eyes, with the sound of his voice, with the soft

catlike way in which he moved; yet she remained in some mysterious way

safe from that power. It was, perhaps, her intelligence which saved her,

for as she watched him she gained slowly a curious intuition of what he

might do to her if she yielded. The old sense of conflict was fanned

into a new life, more intense than it had ever been. He sought to

overpower her will. She knew all at once that this was the very essence

of his confused, unreasonable emotion.

And as she listened to him her woman’s instinct for the dramatic came

to her aid. She saw herself sitting there calm and a little cold, slowly

but surely winning in the battle. She listened to his abuse. It did not

enrage her. It did not even make her weep. It seemed rather to increase

her coldness, her very strength. She felt him beating against the wall

of her serenity and a kind of fierce triumph flowed through her body.

For a time she possessed truly a great magnificence. At a little

distance, she stood outside herself and watched the spectacle. She saw

him standing by her, white with anger.

“You have lied to me ...” he was saying. “You have never cared at

all....” And again the reproach. “You are like all your women ... cold

... magnificent ... not worthy of love.” He came nearer to her. “I will

love you.... I will teach you what love can be.... What does he know of

love ...? Nothing.... I will give you a happiness such as you never

dreamed of.... I ... I am a lover.... I know these things.”

And then he went down suddenly upon his knees, the steel gone swiftly

from his voice; the warmth and tenderness flowing back. “You will not

refuse me.” He leaned forward and pressed his head against her. “You

cannot.... I will give you everything ... all the things which he cannot

give you....” And again he took her hands and this time kissed them

passionately in a fashion that frightened her and filled her with the

old weakness.

The spectacle of his humility, of this sudden collapse of what to her

was his dignity, his will, his strength, astonished and embarrassed her.

In her coldness it seemed to her incredible that any woman, least of all

herself, should possess such power over any man. It was all unreal,

beyond belief, and yet it fed her pride and gave her strength with

which, one might have said, to destroy her own happiness, to resist the

force of circumstances, even of nature, as she had defied it once before

in marrying Clarence.

At last he rested his head against her knee and she bent over him,

touching his dark hair with gentle fingers.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t.... Please don’t.... It is no good. I know

better than you.... I should always be thinking of him.... I should

never be happy, so neither of us could be happy. There are some things

which I cannot do ... and this is one. It is impossible.”

They said nothing more. Richard remained kneeling with his head against

her knees and slowly the old peace which she had not known in months

took possession of her, heightened now by a new knowledge of her

completeness and power. It was a kind of satisfaction which was new to

her, an emotion which was heady and intoxicating. She was uplifted, free

now of Callendar, free of Clarence, free of everything in all the world

... alone, liberated, triumphant. She had defeated them all. And when he

turned toward her for the last time there was a look in her eyes which

said, “It is no use. You need have no hope. It can never be.”

On leaving, he kissed her hand, gently this time as if the passion had

gone out of him. All he said was, “I shall do then what they expect of

me. Some day you may wish for what you have thrown away.... I don’t

imagine a thing like this happens every day.”

He was polite but, like herself, he was unbroken. He appeared to have

regained possession of himself, to have become cold and calm and even a

trifle indifferent. That was all he said and when he had gone the sight

of his back, so slim, so strong, so inscrutable, filled her with a

sudden weakness, for she knew that she had closed the door not alone

upon Callendar but upon his mother, upon Sabine, upon the big house on

Murray Hill, upon all that she had built up with such terrible patience.

* * * * *

He did what was expected of him. In a fortnight there appeared in the

newspapers an announcement of the engagement of Richard Callendar to

Sabine Cane. It described the great fortune of the prospective

bridegroom and enlarged upon the social position of the happy couple. On

the same day there was a paragraph apprising the world of the fact that

Thérèse Callendar had sailed as usual to spend the remainder of the year

abroad. But there was nothing said of the girl whom the world had seen

lunching with Richard Callendar in Sherry’s. She was talked of, to be

sure, in the circles in which Mrs. Champion and the Virgins, Mrs.

Mallinson and the Apostle to the Genteel, were shining lights. They

agreed that it must have been the clever Thérèse who disposed of the

girl (perhaps paid her well) and made the match she desired; and they

predicted with some satisfaction an unhappy life for Sabine. But Sabine

in the end had won her game of patience, though she never knew the

reason.

34

It was in the weeks which followed the final meeting that Ellen came

really to suffer. Together there in the shabby little room she had been

sustained by the very struggle between them, by all the excitement that

warmed and strengthened her. Now that he was gone forever, he kept

returning to her in a fashion more terrifying than he had ever been in

the flesh. Even at night when she lay in the apple green bed, so near

and yet remote from Clarence, trying always to conceal from him the

faintest suspicion, she could not free her memory from the sound of his

voice and the persuasion of his hands. The memory of him haunted her, so

that she grew pale and thin and Clarence, filled as always with nervous

anxiety, urged her to go away into the country. In moments of depression

she even reproached herself with being a fool for having thrown away

what Callendar could have given her ... his wealth, which she needed,

the place which he could have given her in the world. Indeed when life

seemed altogether hopeless, she went so far as to contemplate a return

to the Town, a thing she had sworn never to do save in triumph.

Clarence, understanding dimly that she was unhappy, sought to help her

with a kindness that hurt her more deeply than any cruelty could have

done. There were nights when he lay awake listening until the gray light

appeared over the river and the sound of her regular breathing told him

that at last she was asleep. Beneath the strain he too became pale and

thin. His nose grew more pointed and his little round shoulders more and

more stooped. In the mornings when Ellen, busy over his breakfast,

caught rare glimpses of him, as he patiently did his exercises on the

floor of the bath room, she was smitten with the old sense of pity at

the thinness of his poor body. It hurt her in a fierce way because it

was so different from the catlike suppleness of the man who was gone now

forever. It was the valiant quality in Clarence, the struggle to be

worthy of her, to make her always love him that made her helpless. Until

now she had never clearly understood the power he had over her. It was

the terrible power which the weak have over the strong.

* * * * *

It proved a hot, breathless summer when the asphalt turned spongy and

the carriage wheels left great ruts and ridges. Even on the top floor of

the Babylon Arms there was no coolness save on the rare nights when the

wind, blowing up the river from the free and open sea, penetrated the

high windows. It became more and more difficult too when Clarence came

to her one evening and said, “I’m sorry dear, but we must economize. I

find that we have been living beyond our income.”

He said it so meekly, so apologetically and he looked so weary that she

kissed him and replied, “I have money saved ... money that I earned this

winter. We can use that if we’re in a tight place.”

But he refused it. He assured her that there was no such deep necessity.

He would not, he said, take anything she earned. He must support them

always. And when she told him that this was absurd, he straightened

himself and grew indignant.

“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “If you’ll give me time, we’ll be rich

one day.... I’m getting ahead. It’s not easy. There’s so much

competition. Don’t think I’m a failure.” He took her hand and pressed

it savagely. “You won’t think that ... will you?... Just be patient and

give me time. I’ll be rich some day.”

Time! Time! She knew then what she had always known--that time would

make no difference with Clarence. There was no way out. Whatever was to

be done, she must do it herself. The old passion swept her. She would

not sink. She would not yield to circumstance. She would die rather than

fail!

35

When Fergus came in early September to make his home in the little flat

atop the Babylon Arms, the strain, the weariness, the very heat itself

appeared for a time to dissipate. He was, of course, a novelty. Into an

existence which had become flat and stale through the long routine of

petty things, into a monotony which even the energy of Ellen was unable

to dissipate, the brother carried a sense of excitement. At seventeen he

bore a resemblance to his father, but only in a physical sense, for

there was more dash, more vitality in him than there had ever been in

Charles Tolliver. Tall, with wide shoulders and blue eyes that looked

out from beneath sensuous drooping lids, he possessed the same blond

charm which in Charles Tolliver’s youth had made the vigorous Hattie

Barr his slave. In the son there was even the same echo of that quality

which the world, in its stupidity, called weakness and which was not

weakness at all. The boy as yet was too young to understand what it was;

the father, long past middle age, knew that it was a precious gift, a

quality which protected him against the pettiness of the same stupid

world. It was a disarming tolerance and geniality that made him friend

alike to every one, beggar or prince, who passed his way. Father or son

would have been at home in any part of the world; they would have found

friends among the Lapps as easily as among the farmers of their own

county; the Moros would have received them as honored comrades. It was

a quality that transcended limitations of family, of nationality, of

race; it was a simple friendliness. And in their way they loved life as

passionately as Ellen and Hattie Tolliver; the difference lay in the

fact that their joy was a warm, glowing, steady emotion less spectacular

and vivid.

* * * * *

It was Clarence who suffered the first onslaught of the brother’s charm,

for Fergus arrived to find his brother-in-law lying in one of the green

beds, alone in the flat. Carrying bundles of luggage carefully prepared

by the hand of Hattie, he burst into the room and came suddenly upon

Clarence, asleep beneath the blankets, his mouth open a little way, his

face a shade near to the green of the painted beds. Asleep and off his

guard, Clarence was not a spirited picture. Fergus could not have

remembered him distinctly, for he had seen him but twice and then long

ago in the days when he was courting May Seton. More than three years

had passed and Fergus, standing now at the foot of the bed, big and

placid and blond, regarded his brother-in-law with the air of a

stranger. Clarence slept quietly; his narrow nose appeared more pinched

than it had been; the brown tousled hair had thinned until at the back

of his head there appeared a tiny island that was entirely bald. The

nervous, knotty hands lay outside the cover, pale and covered with

pallid skin that was transparent and showed beneath it a network of tiny

blue veins.

If Ellen had come in that moment, her brother, in his naïve honesty,

might have turned to her and asked, “What have you done to him?” But she

did not come and, as he turned to leave the room, Clarence stirred and

opened his eyes. Out of the depths of his sleep he emerged painfully,

leaning for an instant on one elbow and staring silently in reply to the

cheery “Hello” of Fergus.

“It’s me--Fergus,” said the boy. “I just came in.”

Again Clarence stared for a time and then murmured slowly. “Oh! yes.

It’s you!... I didn’t recognize you at first.... I was having a dream

... a bad dream. Won’t you sit down?”

It was a stiff greeting, somewhat awkward, not because the boy was

unwelcome but because Clarence, who would have welcomed the devil

himself for the sake of his wife, was ill at ease. It may have been the

dream that disturbed him.

Fergus pulled up a chair beside the bed, and asked if his brother-in-law

were ill.

“It’s nothing,” was the answer. “It’s just a bilious attack. I have them

every now and then.... I’ll be over it in a day or two.”

Then he lay back once more, wearily, and asked Fergus about his trip and

about his mother and father and the people in the Town--all save the

Setons. They made polite conversation to each other and Clarence,

beneath the spell of the boy’s friendliness, melted a little so that the

stiffness presently slipped away. But after a time the conversation for

want of interest died back into silence and Fergus went to the window to

feast his young eyes on the panorama of the river and the great city

into which he had escaped. The boy was happy with an animal sort of joy

which showed itself in the very lines of his tall body, in the

brightness of his blue eyes. He too was free now, a rover, attached to

nothing.

“It’s a great place,” he said presently, and turning from the window,

added, “I think I’ll get settled.... Where do I hang out?”

He had picked up his hat before Clarence said, “Wait.... There’s

something I want to talk to you about.... Just a minute.” And then

humbly after a pause: “It won’t be long.”

* * * * *

So the boy seated himself again and waited while Clarence sat up in bed,

looking thin and worried in his mauve pajamas, and, after coughing

nervously, said, “It’s about Ellen.... You know her better than I do....

I’ve lived with her for three years but she’s more like you.... She’s

not like me, at all.”

Fergus stirred nervously and blushed a little, perhaps in doubt of what

Clarence was to say.

“It’s about Ellen,” Clarence repeated, looking down at the quilt. “I

don’t think she’s happy and I don’t know what to do about it.”

The boy laughed. “Oh, she’s always like that.... It doesn’t mean

anything. She used to be cross with us at home most of the time.” He

knew Ellen well enough. She was a cross, bad-tempered girl whom you

could control if you understood the method.

“I don’t mean that.... I’ve known her when she’s like that.... This is

different.” He halted for a moment and fell to tracing the design on the

quilt with his thin finger. He was thinking, thinking, trying to

explain. “No, it’s not like that,” he said presently. “It’s worse than

that. She never complains.... She never says anything. Only it doesn’t

go away.... It hangs ... like a cloud. I’m not meaning to complain about

her.... It’s my fault if it’s any one’s.... But she’s sad now ... in

spite of anything I can do.” And then he added painfully, “She’s

unhappy.”

Fergus waited. He sat with the air of a man desiring to escape, as if he

would in some way repel these confidences and force Clarence into

silence. He hated confidences, sorrow, trouble, of any sort. But

Clarence was not to be silenced. He even grew a little excited.

“You see, the trouble goes back farther than that.... I can’t explain

it.... I don’t know how.... Only she’s never belonged to me at all.

She’s always escaping me.... And I try and try.”

“It’s her music,” repeated Fergus. “She’s crazy about it.... She always

has been.” Sitting there he seemed the symbol of a youth which could

have no belief in disaster. He would never be hurt as Clarence was being

hurt.

Clarence, ignoring the interruption, continued. “I married her and she’s

my wife.... She’s a good wife and she does everything for me.... She

never refuses me anything....” He coughed and, looking down, added, “Not

even herself.”

The color in Fergus’ cheeks flamed out now. He too became ill at ease.

“Don’t think,” said Clarence, “that I mean to complain. It’s all my

fault. A man ought to be able to make his wife happy.... I’ve tried

hard. I’ve tried to make money. I’m good to her ... but....” He trailed

into silence for a time and when he returned it was easy to say, “But

somehow she escapes me always.... There’s something in her that doesn’t

belong to me. I don’t know what it is because I’ve never been able to

discover it.... And you can’t talk to her about such things.... I’ve

tried. Once I got almost to the point and she said, ‘Don’t worry,

Clarence. You mustn’t take things so seriously.... I’m all right. Don’t

think about me.’ But I can’t help thinking, because when she’s unhappy I

am too, because I love her so much. I’d do anything for her.”

He lay back and fell to regarding the ceiling. Fergus, in silence,

watched him now with a look of intense curiosity. Perhaps he guessed

what it was Ellen had done to him. Perhaps he realized that, without

knowing it, he had himself come to look upon Clarence in the same

fashion that his sister regarded him ... as a nice, kind, good man whom

one tolerated. He was older and paler and more insignificant than he had

been in the days when he courted May Seton. What the man needed perhaps

was some one--a wife--who would lean upon him, who would think him a

wonderful creature. And instead of that he had Ellen. Clarence rose on

one elbow and said slowly, “But don’t tell her.... Don’t say I spoke of

it.”

It was the end of their talk. They never mentioned the thing again, but

in some way the conversation appeared to bring Clarence a kind of dumb

relief.

Of course, there were things that Fergus could not have known. He could

not have known--Fergus, who took life so lightly--that the little man’s

only experience with love had been Ellen. He could not have known that

Clarence was the victim of a sensual nature placed by some ironic trick

of fate in the body of a prig. He could not have known that the man was

the victim of that little vein, so amusing to Lily, which with the march

of the years beat less and less passionately. He could not have known

that Clarence had discovered love in the body of Ellen and was now

love’s victim--that he was being destroyed because he had never known,

even now, what love might be.

Of this secret Fergus said nothing to Ellen, perhaps because Clarence

had asked him to keep silence and perhaps because he came to understand

in the succeeding days that in her present mood, it would serve only to

increase the strain. It was not until years afterward that he broke his

silence and wrote her that he had known from the first day how matters

stood. In his good-natured way, he sought rather to drive away the mood

entirely. During the remainder of the week, while Clarence lay in bed,

the brother and sister made excursions together into various parts of

the city and Ellen, for a little time, grew again eager and filled with

the old restless energy. They understood each other, this pair, in a

miraculous fashion, though they were in many ways so different. They

looked upon the world in the same way, as a great pie from which plums

are to be wrested. They knew the same delights of being free and alone,

the strange joy of being a part of a vast spectacle from which they

were, at the same time, curiously aloof. For neither of them did the

past exist. They lived wholly in the future. If there was a difference

it lay in this--that Fergus looked upon the future as a land filled with

a host of careless delights; to Ellen the future was a country in which

lay the rewards of fame, of wealth, of vindication. She would force

those who had mocked to bend their knees. As for these, Fergus never

even thought of them. The world to him was a friendly place.

* * * * *

He began presently to attend his classes. Clarence recovered and

returned to the offices of the Superba Electrical Company, and Ellen,

pondering secret plans for the expedition to Paris and Lily, returned to

her endless practising. In the evenings she played magnificently, for

she had now a superb audience in the person of Fergus who, sprawling on

the divan with his eyes closed, listened to her in a sensual

abandonment. There were times when it must have seemed to her that

Callendar had returned and listened. The old likeness, so elusive, so

indefinable, came to live again in the long evenings. She could not say

what it was, save that they both possessed a wildness not to be hindered

by ambition or restraint or even laws. They were both among those who

were born free.

But as the month of October advanced, a depression appeared slowly to

envelope her. To Fergus the change became apparent and to Clarence it

was acute. She betrayed herself by no single thought or action; it was

far less simple and direct. Outwardly she went through the old motions

of living. Sometimes in the autumn evenings when the husband and the

brother sat listening to her music, Clarence would turn his pale eyes

toward Fergus with a look which said, “You see what I mean? What am I to

do?” The grayness trapped them all, even the genial, careless boy.

In the hours when she was alone, she did things which might have

betrayed her, had they been known. Instead of spending the long hours at

her piano she walked for miles, sometimes along the river, sometimes in

the park. And she developed a new interest in newspapers, an interest

which centered itself upon the columns setting forth the doings in the

world of the rich and fashionable. From these she learned that Thérèse

Callendar and her son had returned from abroad, bringing with them

Sabine and a trousseau which cost fabulous sums. She discovered that the

wedding party was not to be in Sabine’s narrow house (it was too small)

but in the solid brownstone house of the Callendars. The wedding, said

the columns, was to be not in the flamboyant new St. Jude’s on the

Avenue but in St. Bart’s two blocks away, a small church of dark brown

stone, rather shabby but really distinguished. Knowledge of this sort

she had picked up in the course of her brief adventure into the world.

She understood the difference between St. Jude’s which was the richest

church and St. Bart’s which was the most fashionable. These things were

put away in the little pigeonholes of her observing brain (so like the

pigeonholes in Gramp Tolliver’s walnut desk).

She learned all this and never once did she betray any sign of her

knowledge or her interest. Clarence would have known nothing of the

wedding save that Mr. Wyck, over one of their greasy lunches far down

town, mentioned it to him with the sly suggestion that his wife might be

interested and would no doubt be invited. Wyck appeared to know most of

the details, for in the secrecy of his bleak room he read the society

columns, and there was always the backstairs gossip which came to him

through the two aunts in Yonkers. Over the apple-sauce, and under the

eye of the peroxide blonde cashier, he insinuated other things,

suggestions that Ellen might even be more interested than her husband

imagined, but Clarence either was too stupid to understand these hints

or in his loyalty saw fit to ignore them.

But when he returned to the flat he did say to Ellen, “I see your friend

Mrs. Callendar’s son is being married. I suppose you’ll be invited to

the wedding.”

Ellen glanced at him sharply and then returned to her work. “No,” she

said calmly. “I don’t think I’ll be invited. Why should I be?”

“I didn’t know,” he replied awkwardly. “I thought they were friends of

yours.”

“No. I worked for them.... A thing like that means nothing.”

After that he was silent and for a time wore an air of disappointment.

She knew, beyond all doubt, that it would have pleased him to know that

his wife had been invited to a fashionable wedding. The old ambitions,

less vigorous now, stirred more and more rarely. To-night, for a moment

they had been kindled, but it was the last time they ever raised their

dangerous heads. Clarence read his newspaper and did not speak again of

the event.

On the afternoon of the wedding the temptation was not to be overcome.

For a long time she fought it and at last, putting on a large hat and a

veil she descended from the Babylon Arms and made her way by tram car to

the neighborhood of St. Bart’s. Before the church there was a great

crowd (a fact for which she was doubtless thankful) which pressed close

against the awnings and peered at the carriages that were beginning

already to arrive. There was, she felt, something at once comic and

pitiful in the spectacle of men and women crowding and pushing into the

gutters for a glimpse of the fashionable people who descended and swept

across the red carpet into the church. Among the arrivals there were

dowagers who strained through the doors of tiny cabriolets, cow-eyed

young girls, elderly bachelors dressed with the stiffness of starch,

whole armies of relatives and friends, moving forward with a

concentrated air of indifference to the stares, jostled fairly by men

with cameras who climbed about on the steps and even as high as the

façade of the church in order to capture brief glimpses of such people

as the Apostle to the Genteel, Mrs. Champion and her Virgins, the

questionable Mrs. Sigourney (who was always news), and the dewlapped

Mrs. Mallinson.

With the arrival of the bridegroom’s mother the jam became terrifying.

Women fought with one another to catch a glimpse of a fat little woman

clad in purple satin with a bird’s nest on which a few violets had been

carelessly planted, perched high on her head. Ellen, taller than most of

the crowd, was able to see without being seen. She caught a swift

glimpse of Thérèse as she emerged from the door of the cabriolet, only

to see her swallowed up at once in the press of the onlookers. She

appeared calm and had the air of a woman well satisfied. After all, she

had succeeded in uniting two great fortunes. The bride was all that she

should have been. The future was assured.

Of Richard Callendar himself, Ellen caught only a swift glimpse--a

flash, no more, of a dark handsome face paler than she had ever seen it.

A moment later the bride arrived, but of Sabine nothing was visible;

her face was covered by a long veil of lace. The mob of democratic

citizens rocked and quarreled and pushed; dowdy women from the suburbs

elbowed their way through stenographers and errand girls; clerks and fat

old men trod on the toes of angry females; and Sabine was swallowed up.

Ellen leaned against the stone of the church as if she had become

suddenly faint. Here the sounds of the music came to her, distant and

triumphant, now swelling, now diminishing, until at length it died away

altogether to make silence for the ceremony.

* * * * *

It was not until the bridal party, still jostled by the crowd, came out

of the church and descended the steps that she saw them fully. Standing

now on a jutting piece of stone she saw Callendar and Sabine move toward

the waiting carriage. They smiled as if that were what the world

expected of them and once Ellen fancied that the bridegroom looked

toward her. Of this she was not certain and she was sure that he could

not have recognized her through the veil, but she slipped from her

eminence and dropped to the sidewalk where she vanished in the pressing

mob. Nevertheless she was suddenly happy and strong, for in the one

swift glimpse of the two faces she had divined her victory. The face of

Callendar, for all its fixed smile, was pale and a little drawn, and in

the eyes of the bride there was a bright fixed look of unhappiness.

Sabine, so intelligent, so grotesquely clever, must have known what

Ellen knew--that although she had married Callendar she was not the one

who possessed him. In the end she might perhaps lose her game of

patience because, after all, it was not a simple game; there were in it

elements beyond the control even of so shrewd a pair as herself and

Thérèse Callendar.

* * * * *

All the way back to the Babylon Arms, Ellen hurried with an hysterical

air of triumph. It may have been that she knew a profound feminine

satisfaction in the sense of vanity gratified. She hurried too because

Clarence would be waiting for her, tired and pathetic and hungry. It

would please him to find her so happy, so excited. In this strange

confusion of moods she passed between the lions of the Babylon Arms and

made her way up to the tiny flat. She was neither happy nor unhappy; it

was emotion beyond either thing, entangled somehow with the old sense of

triumph.

The dark hallway with the red walls was the same; the red carpeted

stairway, its splendor gone now and the cordage showing through, was

unchanged, as it had always been. It was only when she ascended the very

last step that she discovered anything unusual. The door of the

apartment stood open a little way so that she was able to look through

the room into the distant stretches that lay beyond the river. For an

instant she halted, looking about her. The key was in the lock. On the

smoking table there lay the remnants of the cigar which Clarence always

smoked on his way home from the office. His coat and waistcoat, which he

was accustomed to hang neatly in the closet, lay on the divan. They had

been thrown down carelessly. The red sunset above the river illuminated

the shabby room in a fiery glow.

Standing quite still in the center of the floor she waited, listening

for some familiar sound; and presently when there was no interruption of

the stillness, she called “Clarence! Clarence!” in a voice that sounded

queer and strange to her. The excitement had gone from her now, drained

away by a curious sense of foreboding. In that narrow life where every

day each small act followed exactly the same plan, the sight of a coat

flung down carelessly terrified her.

She called again presently and, receiving no answer, she opened the door

of their bedroom. It was empty. The room in which Fergus slept was

likewise undisturbed. In the kitchen there was no one. Then slowly she

made her way to the door of the bath-room. It stood open a little way as

if inviting her, maliciously; yet it was not open wide enough for her to

see what lay beyond. Gently she pushed it back until it struck some

object that blocked its motion. Again she pushed, this time more firmly,

and the obstacle gave way, moving a little to one side so that a foot

became visible. It was then in a single, unreal moment, that she

divined what had happened. She pushed harder and the door flew back.

Behind it on the rug where he had done his exercises so patiently lay

Clarence, face down, motionless. He had fallen forward and from beneath

him there flowed a thin, dark stream. It had touched the white of his

shirt and discolored it.

There was no doubt that he was dead. There was no doubt as to how he had

died. The pistol, which had always been in the drawer of the bedroom

table, lay beside him on the white floor. In the gathering darkness she

knelt down at his side and began to weep, wildly, hysterically, like a

savage. The darkness and the silence engulfed her.

It was thus that Fergus found her when he came in at last.

* * * * *

A doctor came and after him a policeman, but there was nothing to be

done. The man was dead, and, as they observed to Fergus, you could see

how he came to die. There would have to be the nasty business of an

inquest. The news filtered through the apartment and the elevator man

and the defunct actress with the white poodle in her arms came and stood

at the doorway, whispering together and offering sympathy. It was Fergus

who, with all the efficiency of Hattie Tolliver herself, “took hold” and

managed things.

As for Ellen, she shut herself away, with a knowledge that roused in her

a new agony infinitely more profound and terrible than the first brief

outburst. In the darkness of her room she lay, alone now, on one of the

apple green beds, silent and quite beyond so paltry a manifestation as

tears. In one hand she held a note, crumpled and damp, which had been

read again and again.

It was brief although the dead man, in his agitation, had written some

things over and over again. It was simple, humble, inarticulate, more

real, more vivid than he had ever been in all his mild existence. It was

as if all the mysterious substance that was his soul had been poured out

in that last moment upon the crumpled bit of paper. He had written it in

a great speed; it seemed that, under the stress of fate, he had

suddenly gone mad, flamed for an instant into a pitiful kind of heroism

and then gone out forever. He had been almost poetic.

“Forgive me, beloved, for what I am doing. It was all that remained. It

is better ... everything is better now, and you will be free again as

you once were.

“I must tell you what you will soon learn. No one can keep it from you.

I am a thief. I have stolen money and now there is no way to escape. If

I ran away, it would be the same as what I am doing.... It would be the

end. I would never dare ask to see you again. I would never tell you

where I had gone. What I am doing is the only way out.”

(Here he had, in his agitation, written the same sentence twice as if he

begged her not to hate him because he had been the cause of so much

trouble. He had almost said, “Forgive me for being a bother to you.”)

Then it continued, “It was wrong from the beginning. I should never have

asked you to run away with me, because I was not good enough. I tried to

be and failed. I was a poor thing. So now, after I am gone again, there

will be nothing to hold you ... not even from the man you really loved

... if it is not too late. You see, I know the truth! I know the truth!

I discovered it in time. Forgive me, dearest. I love you always.”

* * * * *

Slowly during the long hours of the interminable night, the whole

tragedy assumed a clarity of form. While she lay on the green bed, in a

silence penetrated only by the faint nocturnal sounds that rose from the

distant street, the little pieces fitted together ... bits of the past

and the present, sudden stabbing memories and poignant flashes of

intuition, odd scraps of old emotions vanished now forever ... the

little pieces fitted together until, like a picture puzzle, they assumed

a swift and startling completeness. She saw the answer in a quick bright

flash; it was that she had destroyed him; she it was who had driven him

into the abyss. The bitterness lay in the fact that all the while she

had tried to save him, to make him happy.

If he had stolen money it could have been for one purpose alone--to give

her more than he had been able to give her, to make her believe that he

was far greater than he could ever have been. She understood that he had

fought for her sake to create an illusion of grandeur, to raise before

her eyes the figure of a man, successful and clever, who was not

Clarence at all but a creature who existed only in the troubled flights

of his ambition. And it was this very figure which, toppling from its

pedestal, had destroyed him. She had known all along that there was no

such creature. She could have told him....

His humbleness pained her. Even in the end he had chosen to destroy

himself in a corner where it would make the least trouble.

There was, too, the vague confused affair of Callendar. The note said so

little; it left the fear so incomplete. _There will be nothing to hold

you, not even from the man whom you really loved._ He must have known

that he had not freed her, even by his death, for he knew that in almost

the same hour Callendar had himself ceased to be free. All that was gone

now, lost forever, and a little time before it had been so near, quite

within her grasp. In trying to have everything she had lost all save her

soul and the fire which burned there.... _If it is not too late_....

But the thing which hurt her most was the memory of two words which he

had used. They were, strangely enough, words of endearment, of

affection, even perhaps of something so strong as passion. He had dared

in his note to say “dearest” and “beloved.” He was gone now; he would

not have to face her, knowing that because his love had fallen upon

barren ground he was ridiculous. In life these were two words which he

had never dared to use. They burned now like scars that would never

heal.

She could not talk to him now; she could no longer still his uneasiness

with empty words and a kiss which cost her nothing. He lay near her,

just beyond her door, upon the shabby divan, but she could not reach

him. To the dead there was nothing she could say, nothing which she

could explain. In death he had come to possess her, for it was she who

was humbled now.

* * * * *

She did not hide herself away. When morning came she appeared, calm and

cold, to aid a strangely subdued Fergus in all the bitter tasks of

caring for the dead. She arranged the telegrams and even chose the

wording for the one that went to his sister in Ogdensburg. In all of

them she said merely that Clarence had died suddenly. The truth she

withheld. (There was always his weak heart to lend credence to such a

tale.) In the newspapers there appeared only a brief line or two

recording the fact of one more suicide in a great city and this, of

course, was never read in the Town or by the people who had known

Clarence as a boy. So in the end, his mother was the only one who knew

the truth and even of the truth there was a portion which she never

learned; it was that her son was a thief.

Out of all the tragic confusion only one thing remained to puzzle her;

it was how Clarence had come to know of Richard Callendar. The answer,

never entirely clear, came to her from a source she had never

considered, from a man whom she treated, when she bothered to think of

him at all, as beneath her contempt.

In the midst of that first gray morning the door opened and Mr. Wyck

came in, shabby and downcast, to pay his condolences. He returned to the

flat where he had known the only happiness which had ever come his way,

but he returned, clearly, under circumstances he had never foreseen in

the most gloomy and portentous of his bitter imaginings. At the sight of

Ellen, cold and capable, in the midst of her grief (for she did grieve

in a fashion she would not have done for a man whom she had loved), his

green eyes turned toward the tips of his boots and he murmured, “Ah,

this is terrible ... terrible,” in the professional manner of an

undertaker.

In his heart, he may have thought, “It was you who ruined him, you, who

came here into this very flat, a nobody, to use him for what he was

worth ... to turn me out into the streets.” But he kept silent, perhaps

because she had always terrified him, filling him with a sense of one

standing upon the rim of a volcano. He was afraid of scenes, Mr. Wyck,

and so his hate found its way into the open through devious, hidden

channels. He had not the courage, it seemed, even to look at her now.

They stood for a time in silence by the divan, symbols of that queer,

distorted figure of which the dead Clarence formed the third angle--a

figure all awry, perverted out of all drawing--Clarence, so white and

still, gone now beyond the reach of either of them.

Mr. Wyck muttered oily and incoherent consolations.... “It is a bitter

blow.... One must be brave.... He was a good man....” All the old

banalities which somehow took on a bitter, ironical ring. And presently

he snuffled and wiped his eyes, as much in pity for himself who had lost

the one thing for which he had gambled, as for the man who lay quiet and

still upon the divan.

Ellen, watching him, was filled with a slow, burning anger. She wanted

suddenly to crush him as she had once wanted to crush poor May Seton,

because he was sentimental, and silly and without strength. And suddenly

it occurred to her to say abruptly, “It was not a case of suicide. It

was not Clarence who killed himself.... It was others who killed him.”

She had spoken in a sudden moment of humility, acknowledging her own

guilt, and the speech, so abrupt, so unexpected, produced upon Mr. Wyck

the strangest effect. He looked at her sharply, for the first time, and

then averted his eyes; but in the brief glance she discovered the answer

to the mystery. It was Mr. Wyck who had betrayed her secret. It was Mr.

Wyck who had told the story of Callendar, distended no doubt, and

perverted by his malice. She knew it by the look of terror in the shifty

eyes. He had used this secret as his last stake.... And he had lost,

forever, beyond all hope.

Almost at once he turned away from the morbid fascination of the divan,

bade her good-by and hurried out of the door; and Ellen, watching his

narrow back with the weak, sloping shoulders, knew that she would never

see him again. She was sure now that it was this poor, furtive creature,

with his strange, perverted love, who had given the dead man his final

push over the abyss into eternity. For even the theft would not have

driven Clarence from her; it could have been only the knowledge that she

was lost to him forever.

So it was a man whom she had scorned, a creature whom she ignored and

who hated her, who in his poor fumbling way had set her free.

36

She went to his own town for the funeral and there met for the first

time his mother, a grim, tragic sort of woman with sharp, searching eyes

and straight black hair pulled into a tight knot at the back of her

neck. It was this woman with whom she shared the secret; none of the

others knew, not even his sister (the one he had said played the piano),

a mild, weary woman rather like Clarence, who was the mother of five

children and went about throughout the visit weak and red-eyed with

weeping. The neighbors flocked into the house, mostly middle-aged women

and spinsters, black and crow-like, moving about in melancholy clusters

with the air of vultures. They came and went, speaking always in

whispers, saying the same things, wearing the same mournful

countenances, talking always of their own losses and calamities,

speculating always upon the deaths of certain well-established invalids

in the community. Always they reached in time the same refrain. It was

this--“If he’d been an old man it would have been different, but he was

so young and so clever. He was such a brilliant fellow and doing so well

in the city. He’d have been a big man some day. We were all proud of him

here in Ogdensburg.”

And Ellen, handsome and pale in her mourning, sat by quietly, listening

while they surveyed her with a distant air of disapproval. She kept

silent. Perhaps to these crow-like women, Clarence had been a brilliant

and powerful figure.

* * * * *

In the Babylon Arms there was little to be done. Ellen paid a visit for

the first time to the offices of the Superba Electrical Company and

there learned that Clarence had stolen money which he collected and

failed to deliver. The amount was something over fifteen hundred

dollars. When she heard it she murmured, “It was so little too! Why, I

could have paid it if he had told me. To have killed himself for so

little!”

But she knew, of course, that if he had confessed he would have

destroyed that splendid creature which he fancied he had created in her

eyes. He had preferred himself to be destroyed. In death it would not

matter that she discovered the fraud: he would not have to face her.

She paid the money, out of her savings and out of the amount brought by

the sale of the furniture. She sold even the piano he had bought her as

a wedding gift. And when she had finished there remained but little more

than a hundred dollars.

On the very day the furniture was being taken from the flat she told

Fergus the whole truth concerning her plans. They sat together amid the

wreckage, brother and sister, both understanding for perhaps the first

time that they were faced by the new problem of Hattie Tolliver. Both

knew that she had set her mind upon coming to them, and having tasted

freedom, neither was willing now to turn back.

“There is Ma,” said Ellen. “I don’t know what’s to be done about her.

She’ll be coming here to live before long and I won’t be here. She’s

worked all these years to come where she can be near us and now I’ve got

to go away. I’m going to Paris.... It’s the only thing left.”

Fergus looked at her. “But you don’t know French,” he said, “and you

haven’t any money.”

“I can’t turn back now. If I went back to Ma, it would be the end of me.

I know that. I couldn’t.... I couldn’t ever begin again. I’ve enough

money to take me there.... I’ll manage after that.... Besides, there is

Lily.... She promised to help me when the time came.... The time has

come.... I can’t turn back.”

Fergus listened in silence, moved perhaps by the new dignity that had

come to her, a dignity touched with bitterness. She was beautiful too in

a new fashion, more placid, more serene.

“You must be good to Ma,” she continued. “She’ll hate my running away,

but I’ve got to go. She’s a wonderful woman. She’s the one who has

sacrificed everything. She’s always done it ... for all of us. I

couldn’t go if I didn’t know that you’re the one she loves best of all.

You’re the one she worships. She loved you enough to let you go. I had

to run away. You know it, Fergus, as well as I. You must be good to her.

If anything happened to you, it would kill her. You mustn’t disappoint

her. One day we must all make her proud of us. I mean to do it, and then

when I’m rich, when I’m successful, I can reward her.” She paused for a

moment and then added. “You see, she loves you best because you’re so

like Pa. You’re the way he used to be when she fell in love with him.”

The boy’s face took on an unaccustomed gravity. He rose and looked out

of the window over the beloved and magical city. “I’ll do my best,” he

said presently. “I’ll do my best.... She’s a wonderful woman.” (Yet

neither of them would turn back now.)

In the room there was no sound for a long time save the ticking of the

clock, wrapped now in paper to be carted away. At last he turned and

said, “But you’re going to Lily.... Ma will hate that.”

“I know she will.... She’s always been afraid of Lily. She needn’t worry

though. I can take care of myself. I imagine nothing very serious can

ever happen to me again.”

It was Lily again, always Lily who was concerned in the whole course of

Ellen’s destiny. Yet Ellen never knew how great a part she had played

for she never knew, of course, that if chance had not thrown her

glamorous cousin into the path of Clarence on a wintry night years

before, he might have been alive and happy now, the husband of a stupid

woman who would have thought him as wonderful as the figure he had given

his life to create. He had looked for an instant at the sun and been

blinded.

So perhaps, in the end, Skinflint Seton had been right. _Women like that

can ruin men ... just by talking to them._

37

The world of Lily had its center in a house which stood in that part of

Paris beyond the Trocadero in the direction of Auteuil and the Bois.

Here she had lived for years, since the moment when she had found it

agreeably necessary to live abroad. For her purposes the house possessed

every advantage; it resembled, after a curious fashion, those convents

of the eighteenth century to which ladies of fashion retired at the

moments when they desired solitude and rest and yet wished not to be cut

off entirely from the gaiety of the world. As the Baron had once

observed, Lily herself belonged to the eighteenth century; there was

about her always so much of luxury and indolence, so much of charm and

unmorality.

The house stood in the Rue Raynouard a short distance from the place

where it rushes down a slope to join a half dozen other streets in a

whirlpool known as the Place Passy surrounded by magasins, cafés, and

tobacconists’ shops. It was, in all truth, an eighteenth century house,

built in the beginning as a château in the open country on the outskirts

of Paris between the city and the Grand Trianon of Versailles. Here in

the open fields the Marquise de Sevillac, an ugly, clever and eccentric

woman, held a court of her own, a court indeed which in some respects

outshone the splendor of Versailles. In her house were to be found the

poets, the wits and the philosophers of the day. She corresponded with

Voltaire, and the Encyclopedists came frequently to work in the rooms

which overlooked the little park and the sheep pastures beyond. Indeed

the Sage of Ferney on his triumphant return to Paris had planned a visit

to the Marquise and was only prevented by the fatal illness which

overtook so swiftly his skinny old body.

The Marquise had been the last of her family. There is a Marquis de

Sevillac living to-day but the title is Bonapartist and has nothing to

do with the ancient splendor of the true family. As an old woman, the

Marquise clung to her house even with the approach of the revolution.

During that cataclysm, which she faced in a bold and cynical fashion,

she was allowed to survive because the people remembered her as the

friend of the radicals and the philosophers who plagued their stupid

King. She allied herself with the Girondists and took Madame Roland

perilously to her bosom, and when the débâcle came at length her bony

old body would have been dragged off to the guillotine along with the

others save that she was so old and that Danton and Terezia Tallien

intervened. So she died at last in her bed and the château became the

property of the Directory.

Since her death it has known many occupants. For a time it served as a

museum; it housed the American ambassador Benjamin Franklin, who gave

his name to a street nearby; it passed through a period of neglect and

emptiness and at last fell into the possession of a wealthy manufacturer

of soap and chocolate. It was during his day and the day of his son that

the château came to be pressed upon by other houses and by apartments in

the florid German style, until there was left at length only the house

itself and the little park designed by Le Nôtre which still remained the

largest private garden in all the city of Paris.

The house turns to the world a deceptive face, for on the side facing

the Rue Raynouard it is but one story high with a commonplace door and a

single row of shuttered windows. It is this side which in the days of

the Marquise faced the stables and dovecote; so the house now turns its

back upon the world and preserves for its friends the glory of its three

story façade of Caen stone. The façade, broken by rows of tall windows,

looks upon a high terrace lined with crumbling urns carved in the

classic Greek manner and a garden with a reticulation of paths laid out

by Le Nôtre to center upon the pastry-cake pavilion erected to the God

of Love. Inside the high wall which shuts out the noise and dust of the

Rue de Passy there are great plane trees with trunks mottled like the

backs of salamanders, and laburnums that cluster close about the Temple

of Eros.

One could live forever within the boundaries of the ancient house and

garden, surrounded by luxury and beauty, receiving one’s friends, seldom

going into the world. It was an admirable house in which to live

discreetly, almost secretly, and it was an admirable house for one of so

indolent a nature as Lily’s. For Lily had succeeded the chocolate

manufacturer, and the château of the Marquise de Sevillac with its

ghosts of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, the wanton Terezia Tallien

and the clever Madame Roland, was tenanted now by a rich American out of

a country which in the days of the Marquise had been no more than a

howling wilderness--a woman the world knew as a widow, beautiful,

charming, discreet and indolent, living under the guardianship of the

most respectable and stuffy of Bonapartists, the ancient Madame Gigon.

* * * * *

On a dripping morning of December, of the sort which makes Paris a

wretched city in midwinter, a carriage drew up before the door of this

house and out of it stepped Ellen Tolliver, pale from traveling but

unusually handsome in the black of her widowhood. There was with her a

small thin young woman, trimly dressed rather in the practical style of

a professional traveler, with red hair and pretty bright eyes which had

a way of observing the slightest things which occurred in her vicinity.

The stranger (after haggling with the driver over the fare) paid him

and then, changing her mind, bade him wait for her. She pulled the bell

with a swift, energetic jerk.

“It is a modest house,” she observed to Ellen in short, ironic syllables

colored by an accent that was indefinable. “A modest house for a rich

American. Usually they are more flamboyant.”

Impatiently she pulled the bell a second time and presently the

commonplace door was opened by a Breton maid in a white cap who bade

them enter. Inside, away from the dripping cobblestones of the Rue

Raynouard, it was clear that the stranger succumbed to the magic of the

house. For an instant, she remained silent, staring in astonishment at

the long sweep of stairs and the array of glittering crystal. Then she

made a grunting noise and addressed the maid in French.

“Madame Shane.... Is she in?”

“No,” replied the girl. “She is at Nice.... She has been gone since two

weeks.”

The stranger translated the speech and for a moment there was a silence

in which the face of Ellen, pale and handsome in her mourning, was

shadowed by a sudden look of terror. It vanished quickly and she said to

her companion, “Ask for Madame Gigon.”

Madame Gigon was in. She never went out any more. At the moment she was

in the drawing room. Should she ask if Madame Gigon would see them?

“This,” observed the bright ferret, to the maid, “is Madame Shane’s

cousin. She has come to pay her a visit.”

The stairway before them led downwards in the most unexpected fashion.

Between panels of satinwood adorned with plaques of gilt and rock

crystal and filled with candles, it swept down for the depth of two

stories, past a gallery which led away on both sides, into a dim vista

of polished floor at the end of which there was a high window with small

panes of glass that gave out upon a garden. At the sight, a faint touch

of color appeared on the cheeks of Ellen and her eyes grew bright with

interest. It was all far grander than she had ever imagined, more

magnificent than she had hoped. In such a house she might stay quietly,

interfering with no one. It was possible to remain hidden in its depths

for weeks at a time.

“Shall I stay?” asked her companion.

“I can manage.... It’s my affair. There’s no use troubling you any

further. It was good of you to have bothered.”

“But what about speaking French?”

“Madame Gigon speaks English. She once had a school for English and

American girls.... My great-aunt went to it.”

Up the long stairs, remotely, the maid was returning now.

“Bien,” she said. “Madame Gigon will see you.”

“Au revoir,” murmured the stranger. “If you want me, I shall be at the

Ritz until the end of the month.... Miss Rebecca Schönberg.... You have

my card....”

And with that she vanished through the rain into the waiting cab.

* * * * *

At the foot of the long stairs Ellen found herself suddenly in the great

drawing-room. Beyond, through the tall window draped in blue brocade,

she had a vista of dripping trees and a wet garden dominated by a white

pavilion that resembled a pastry. The room was long and rectangular, for

all the world like the drawing room at Shane’s Castle, save that it was

not, even on this wet winter day, a gloomy room. There was in it far too

much color. Even the satinwood paneling appeared warm and soft. At the

far end before a neat fire of cannel coal she discerned among the

shadows the figures of a tiny old woman and a small boy, sturdy,

handsome and red haired. He sat at the feet of the crone, reading aloud

to her in English and nearby lay two fat and elderly dogs, an Aberdeen

and a West Highland. It was not until she had come quite close to them

that they realized she had entered the room. The boy stood up and the

old woman turned toward her with a curious dazed look in her eyes.

It was the old woman who spoke first. She peered, apparently without

seeing her, in the general direction of Ellen and asked, “Are you Mees

Tolliver?”

The boy regarded her, frankly, with a pleasant friendliness.

“Yes,” replied Ellen, “I am Madame Shane’s cousin.”

In an instant, as she watched the child and faced the sharp old woman,

she grasped the identity of the boy. It came to her quickly, as a

revelation out of all the mystery of the past. Of course she knew all

about Madame Gigon; it was the boy for whom she was not prepared. About

him there could no longer be any doubt. He was Lily’s child and the old

story was true. It gave her a quick, inexplicable feeling of relief, as

if after so many years she stood in the open, knowing at last the truth.

It did not produce any shock, perhaps because she had been for so long

prepared for the knowledge. So she had said without hesitation _Madame_

Shane, just as a little while before in order to take no chance in

protecting Lily, she had said _Madame_ Shane to Miss Rebecca Schönberg.

The old woman coughed and said slowly, “I don’t speak English very well

any more. I’m so old.... I almost forget.... Est-ce que vous parlez

français?” And then, “Asseyez vous.”

Ellen simply stared at her, and in the emergency the boy, polite and

eager, said in a piping voice, “She wants to know if you speak

French.... She wants you to sit down.” His English was colored by an

accent which struck Ellen with a remote sense of unreality. Lily’s

child! Her own cousin! Speaking English as if it were a foreign tongue!

“I don’t,” said Ellen. “Will you tell her that I know no French?”

It was the old woman who answered in labored English. “Oh, I

understand.... I know what you say.... I can no longer _speak_

English.... Asseyez vous.... Sit down.”

It was only then that Ellen understood the peering look in the eyes of

the old woman. She had been sitting down, all the while. The old woman,

who peered at her so earnestly, was blind.

“Did Madame Shane know you were coming?” asked Madame Gigon.

“No, I had no time.... I left America in haste.” She held back the

truth. She did not say that she had come, deliberately and without

warning, because she could take no chances on being refused. Sitting

there, with only a few francs in the world, she felt secure. She was in

Paris now in a house that was big and beautiful. The rest could be

managed.

“She did not tell me.... She would have been here,” continued Madame

Gigon. Then, as if her brain were fatigued by the strain of speaking

English, the old woman addressed a torrent of French to the little boy.

When she had finished he advanced to Ellen, shyly, and held out his

hand.

“She says,” he repeated in the same piping voice, “that I must welcome

you as master of the house. She says you are my cousin.” He smiled

gravely. “I never had a cousin before. And,” he continued, “she says

that if Maman had known she would have been here.”

He stood regarding her with a look of fascination as though so strange

and exotic a thing as a cousin was too thrilling to be passed over

lightly. Touched by the simplicity of the child, Ellen drew him near to

her and, addressing both him and Madame Gigon, said, “You are good to

believe that I am Madame Shane’s cousin. How could you know?”

Madame Gigon smiled shrewdly. She was withered and had a little black

mustache. Again the boy translated her speech. “She says,” he repeated,

“that you have ... une voix honnête.” He hesitated.... “An honest voice

... and that she knows the voice because she taught my mother in school

and before her my grandmère. She says it is like my grandmère’s voice.”

As he spoke the old woman smiled again and wagged her head with

extraordinary vigor. “Je connais la voix.... Je la connais bien.”

Then she addressed the boy again and he translated her speech. “She says

she is blind and will you come near so that she may touch your face?”

Ellen drew her chair closer so that it disturbed the fatter of the two

dogs and allowed Madam Gigon to pass her thin hands in a fluttering

gesture over her handsome throat and the fine arch of her nose.

“Ah,” said the old woman triumphantly. “Le nez ... the nose.... C’est le

nez de vôtre tante ... le même nez ... précisement. C’est un nez fier

... distingué.”

“It is a proud nose,” echoed the interpreter gravely.... “A high

distinguished nose.... A nose like your aunt’s.”

And the old woman, wagging her head, fell suddenly into a silent train

of old memories.

“My name is Jean,” said the boy shyly. “I am ten years old. Would you

like to see my book? It is in English. I can read English just as well

as French.” And he brought her Tom Brown’s School Days and showed her

the picture of the boys climbing the tree to rob the rook’s nest. Ellen,

leaning over his shoulder, was softened and showed a warm enthusiasm

over the other illustrations. She even listened while he told the long

story of Tom Brown.