On that Thursday evening Millard dined at his club. Instead of signing a
joint order with a friend for a partnership dinner, he ordered and ate
alone. He chose a table in a deep window from which he could look out on
the passers-by. A rain had set in, and he watched the dripping umbrellas
that glistened in the lamplight as they moved under the windows, and
took note of the swift emergence of approaching vehicles and then of
their disappearance. His interest in the familiar street-world was
insipid enough, but even an insipid interest in external affairs he
found better than giving his mind up wholly to the internal drizzle of
melancholy thoughts.
Presently Millard became dimly conscious of a familiar voice in
conversation at the table in the next window. Though familiar, the voice
was not associated with the club-restaurant; it must be that of some
non-member brought in as the dinner-guest of a member. He could not make
out at first whose it was without changing his position, which he
disliked to do, the more that the voice excited disagreeable feelings,
and by some association not sufficiently distinct to enable him to make
out the person. But when the visitor, instead of leaving the direction
of the meal to his host, called out an exasperatingly imperative,
"Hist! waitah!" Millard was able to recognize his invisible neighbor.
Why should any member of a club so proper as the Terrapin ask Meadows?
But there he was with his inborn relish for bulldozing whatever
bulldozable creature came in his way. Once he had made him out, Millard
engaged in a tolerably successful effort to ignore his conversation,
returning again to his poor diversion of studying the people plashing
disconsolately along the wet street. It was only when he heard Meadows
say, "You know I am a director of that bank," that his attention was
sharply arrested.
"Farnsworth is cashier," continued Meadows. "He ought to have resigned
long ago, but he isn't that sort of a man. So he's at last taken to bed,
has he? Some complication of the heart, I believe. Won't live long,
and--well, I'll have on hand a hard fight about the filling of his
place. But I didn't hear of that faith-doctor plan before."
"I don't believe they've carried it out," said the club man who had
invited Meadows and who was a stranger to Millard. "Farnsworth wouldn't
agree. I used to dine with Farnsworth often, and my sister knows Mrs.
Farnsworth; they go to the same church. Mrs. Farnsworth has heard of a
Miss Callender that can pray a person up out of the grave almost, and
she's nearly persuaded Farnsworth to send for her. His mind is weakening
a little, and I shouldn't wonder if he did consent to have her pray over
him. The doctors have given him up, and--"
"Who is this Miss Callender?" interrupted Meadows; and though Millard
could not see him he knew that in the very nature of things Meadows's
pugnacious chin must be shoved forward as he asked this.
"She's a young woman that won't take any money for her services. That's
the greatest miracle of all," said the other. "If anything could make me
believe her mission supernatural, it would be that."
"Don't you believe it," said Meadows; "don't you believe a word of it.
The dead may be raised, but not for nothing. There's money below it all.
Money makes the mare go"; and Meadows laughed complacently at the
proverb, giving himself credit for it with a notion that adopted wit was
as good as the native born.
"No; she won't have it. I heard that Mrs. Maginnis sent her a check for
curing her little girl, and that she sent it back."
"Wasn't enough," sneered Meadows.
"Well, I believe they tried a larger check with the same result. She
doesn't seem to be an impostor; only a crank."
"These people that refuse money when it's pushed under their noses are
the worst knaves of all," said Meadows. "She knows that Maginnis is very
rich. She's laying for something bigger. She'll get into Mrs. Maginnis
for something handsome. More fool if she doesn't, I say"; and Meadows
laughed in an unscrupulous, under-breath fashion, as of a man who
thought a well-played trick essentially meritorious.
Millard was debating. Should he protest against these words? Or should
he knock Meadows down? That is not just the form it took in his mind.
Any rowdy or a policeman may knock a man down. Your man of fashion, when
he wishes to punish an enemy or have an affray with a friend, only
"punches his head." It is a more precise phrase, and has no boast in it.
No one knows which may go down, but the aggressor feels sure that he can
begin by punching his enemy's head. Millard was on the point of rising
and punching Meadows's head in the most gentlemanly fashion. But he
reflected that a head-punching affray with Meadows in the club-room
would make Phillida and her cures the talk of the town, and in
imagination he saw a horrible vision of a group of newspaper reporters
hovering about Mrs. Callender's house, and trying to gain some
information about the family from the servant girl and the butcher boy.
To protest, to argue, to say anything at all, would be but an awful
aggravation. Having concluded not to punch the head of a bank director,
he rose from the table himself, and, avoiding Meadows's notice, beckoned
the waiter to serve his coffee in the reading-room. When he had
swallowed the coffee he rose and went out. As he stood in the door of
the club-house and buttoned up his coat, a cabman from the street
called, "Kerrige, sir?" but not knowing where he should go, Millard
raised his umbrella and walked. Mechanically he went toward Mrs.
Callender's. He had formed no deliberate resolution, but he became aware
that a certain purpose had taken possession of him all uninvited and
without any approval of its wisdom on his part. Right or wrong, wise or
unwise, there was that which impelled him to lay the condition of
things before Phillida in all its repulsiveness and have it out with
her. He could not think but that she would recoil if she knew how her
course was regarded. He fancied that his own influence with her would be
dominant if the matter were brought to an issue. But these
considerations aside, there was that which impelled him to the step he
was about to take. In crises of long suppressed excitement the sanest
man sometimes finds himself bereft of the power of choosing his line of
action; the directing will seems to lie outside of him. It is not
strange that a Greek, not being a psychologist, should say that a Fate
was driving him to his destiny, or that his Daemon had taken the helm and
was directing affairs as a sort of _alter ego_.
When at length Millard found himself in front of Mrs. Callender's, and
saw by the light that the family were sitting together in the front
basement, his heart failed him, and he walked past the house and as far
as the next corner, where his Fate, his Daemon, his blind impulsion,
turned him back, and he did not falter again until he had rung the
door-bell; and then it was too late to withdraw.
"You are wet, Charley; sit nearer the register," said Phillida, when she
saw how the rain had beaten upon his trousers and how recklessly he had
plunged his patent-leather shoes into the street puddles. This little
attention to his comfort softened Millard's mood, but it was impossible
long to keep back the torrent of feeling. Phillida was alarmed at his
ominous abstraction.
"I don't care for the rain," he said.
"But you know there is a good deal of pneumonia about."
"I--I am not afraid of pneumonia," he said. "I might as well die as to
suffer what I do."
"What is the matter, Charley?" demanded Phillida, alarmed.
"Matter? Why, I have to sit in the club and hear you called a crank and
an impostor."
Phillida turned pale.
"Vulgar cads like Meadows," he gasped, "not fit for association with
gentlemen, call you a quack seeking after money, and will not be set
right. I came awfully near to punching his head."
"Why, Charley!"
"I should have done it, only I reflected that such an affray might drag
you into the newspapers. I tell you, Phillida, it is unendurable that
you should go on in this way."
Phillida's face was pale as death. She had been praying all the
afternoon that the bitterness of this cup might not be pressed to her
lips. She now saw that the issue was joined. She had vowed that not even
her love for the man dearest to her should swerve her from her course.
The abyss was under her feet, and she longed to draw back. She heard the
voice of duty in the tones of Mrs. Frankland saying: "If any man come to
me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and
brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he can not be my
disciple." It was a cruel alternative that was set before her, and she
trembled visibly.
"I--I can't neglect what I believe to be duty," she said. She wished
that, by some circumlocution or some tenderness in the tone, she could
have softened the words that she spoke, but all her forces had to be
rallied to utter the decision, and there was no power left to qualify
the bare words which sounded to Millard hard and cruel. A suspicion
crossed his mind that Phillida wished to be released from the
engagement.
"You do not consider that you owe any duty to me at all," he said in a
voice smothered by feeling.
Phillida tried to reply, but she could not speak.
Millard was now pacing the floor. "It is all that Mrs. Frankland's work.
She isn't worthy to tie your shoes. She never fed the hungry, or clothed
the naked, or visited the sick. It's all talk, talk, talk, with her. She
talks beautifully, and she knows it. She loves to talk and to have
people crowd around her and tell her how much good she is doing. She
denies herself nothing; she feeds her vanity on the flattery she gets,
and then thinks herself a saint besides. She exhorts people to a
self-sacrifice she wouldn't practise for the world. She's making more
money out of her piety than her husband can out of law. And now she
comes with her foolish talk and breaks up the happiness you and I have
had." This was spoken with bitterness. "We can not go on in this way,"
he said, sitting down exhausted, and looking at her.
Phillida had listened in silence and anguish to his words, spoken
hurriedly but not loudly. What he said had an effect the opposite of
what he had expected. The first impression produced by his words was
that the engagement had become a source of misery to Millard; the second
thought was that, considering only her duty to him, she ought to release
him from bonds that had proved so painful. His last words seemed to
indicate that he wished the engagement broken, and after what he had
said it was evident that she must break with him or swerve from the duty
she had vowed never to desert. Taking up the word where he had left off,
she said in a low, faltering voice:
"We certainly can not go on in this way."
Then, rising, she turned to the antique desk in the corner of the
parlor. With a key from her pocket she unlocked a drawer, and from it
took hurriedly every keepsake she had had from her lover, not allowing
herself to contemplate them, but laying them all at last on the ancient
center-table in the middle of the room. With a twinge of regret, visible
to Millard, she drew her engagement ring from her finger, and with an
unsteady hand laid it softly down with the rest.
Millard was too much startled at first to know what to say. Had she
misunderstood the intent of his last remark? Or did she wish to be
released?
"It is all over, Mr. Millard. Take them, please."
"I--I have not--asked you to release me, Phillida."
"You have said that we can not go on in this way. I say the same. It--"
she could not speak for a quarter of a minute; then she slowly finished
her sentence with an effort of desperation and without raising her eyes
to his--"it is better that it is over."
"Is it over?" he asked, stunned. "Think what you say."
"We have agreed that we can not go on," she answered. "You must take
these. I can not keep them."
"Don't make me take them. Why not keep them?"
"I will send them to-morrow. I can not retain them."
Millard could not take them. He would have felt much as he might in
rifling a grave of its treasures had he lifted those tokens from the
table. But he saw, or thought he saw, that remonstrances might make
Phillida more unhappy, but that it would be perfectly useless. It was
better to accept his fate, and forbear. He tried to say something to
soften the harshness of parting, but his powers of thought and speech
deserted him, and he knew that whatever he would say must be put into
one or two words. He looked up, hesitatingly stretched out his hand, and
asked huskily:
"Part friends?"
Phillida, pale and speechless, took his hand a moment, and then he went
out. She leaned her head against the window-jamb, lifted the shade, and
watched his form retreating through the drizzly night until he
disappeared from view, and then she turned out the lights. But instead
of returning to her mother and Agatha in the basement, she threw herself
on the floor, resting her arms on the sofa while she sobbed in utter
wretchedness. All her courage was spent; all her faith had fled;
helpless, wounded, wretched as a soul in bottomless perdition, she could
see neither life nor hope in any future before her. She had believed
herself able to go on alone and to bear any sacrifice. But in losing him
she had lost even the power to pray.
About an hour after Millard's departure, Mrs. Callender came up the
stairs and called gently:
"Phillida!"
Then she entered the parlor. The shutters were not closed, and the room
was faintly lighted by rays that came through the shades from the lamp
on the other side of the street.
"I'm here, mother," said Phillida, rising and coming toward her. Then,
embracing her mother, she said, "And I'm so unhappy, mother, so utterly
wretched."
Such an appeal for sympathy on the part of the daughter was an
occurrence almost unknown. She had been the self-reliant head of the
family, but now she leaned helplessly upon her mother and whispered,
"It's all over between Charley and me."