your new position, and it must go more easily, and yet you have less
time to see your friends than you did at first."
Faraday made more excuses, and wondered that she should take a cruel
pleasure in such small teasing.
"I thought p'r'aps," she said, still regarding him with an unflinching
scrutiny, her face grave and almost hard, "that you'd begun to find us
too Western, that the novelty had worn off, that our ways were
too--too--what shall I say?--too wild and woolly."
A flush of anger ran over Faraday's face. "Your suppositions were
neither just nor true," he said, coldly.
"Oh, I don't know," she continued, with a careless movement of her head,
and speaking in the high, indifferent tone that a woman adopts when she
wishes to be exasperating; "you needn't get mad. Lots of Eastern people
feel that way. They come out here and see us constantly, and make
friends with us, and then go back and laugh at us, and tell their
friends what barbarians we are. It's customary, and nothing to be
ashamed of."
"Do you suppose that I am that sort of an Eastern person?" asked
Faraday, quietly.
"I don't know," she said, doubtfully. "I didn't think you were at first,
but now----"
"But now you do. Why?"
"Because you don't come here any more," she said, with a little air of
triumph. "You're tired of us. The novelty is over and so are the
visits."
Faraday arose, too bitterly annoyed for speech. Genevieve, rising too,
and touching her skirts with arranging hand, continued, apparently
unconscious of the storm she was rousing:
"And yet it seems odd that you should find such a difference. Lord
Hastings, now, who's English, and much more conventional, thinks the
people here just as refined and particular as any other Americans."
"It's evident," said Faraday, in a voice roughened with anger, "that
Lord Hastings's appreciation of the refinement of the Americans is only
equaled by your admiration for the talents of the English."
"I do like them," said Genevieve, dubiously, shaking her head, as if she
was admitting a not entirely creditable taste, and looking away from
him.
There was a moment's silence. Faraday fastened his eyes upon her in a
look of passionate confession that in its powerful pleading drew her own
back to his.
"You're as honest as you are cruel," he said, almost in a whisper.
She made no reply, but turned her head sharply away, as if in sudden
embarrassment. Then, in answer to his conventionally murmured good-byes,
she looked back, and he saw her face radiant, alight, with the most
beautiful smile trembling on the lips. The splendor of this look seemed
to him a mute expression of her happiness--of love reciprocated,
ambition realized--and in it he read his own doom. He turned blindly
round to pick up his hat; the door behind him was opened, and there,
handsome, debonair, fresh as a May morning, stood Lord Hastings, hat in
hand.
"I hope you're not vexed, Miss. Ryan," said this young man, "but I'm
very much afraid I'm just a bit late."
After this Faraday thought it quite unnecessary to visit Barney Ryan's
"palatial mansion" for some time. Genevieve's engagement would soon be
announced, and then he would have to go and offer his congratulations.
As to whether he would dance at her wedding with a light heart--that was
another matter. He assured himself that she was making a splendid and
eminently suitable marriage. With her beauty and money and true simple
heart she would deck the fine position which the Englishman could give
her. He wished her every happiness, but that he should stand by and
watch the progress of the courtship seemed to him an unnecessary
twisting of the knife in the wound. Even the endurance of New England
human nature has its limits, and Faraday could stand no more. So he
refused an invitation to a tea from Mrs. Ryan, and one to a dinner and
another to a small musical from Miss. Ryan, and alone in his Pine Street
lodgings, for the first time in his life, read the "social columns" with
a throbbing heart.
One Saturday afternoon, two weeks from the day that he had last seen
Genevieve, he sat in his room trying to read. He had left the office
early, and though it was still some hours before dark, a heavy
unremitting rain had enveloped the afternoon in a premature twilight.
The perpetual run of water from a break in the gutter near his window
sounded drearily through the depressing history of the woes and
disappointments of David Grieve. The gloom of the book and the afternoon
was settling upon Faraday with the creeping stealthiness of a chill,
when a knock sounded upon his door, and one of the servants without
acquainted him with the surprising piece of intelligence that a lady was
waiting to see him in the sitting-room below.
As he entered the room, dim with the heavy somberness of the leaden
atmosphere, he saw his visitor standing looking out of the window--a
tall, broad-shouldered, small-waisted striking figure, with a neat black
turban crowning her closely braided hair. At his step she turned, and
revealed the gravely handsome face of Genevieve Ryan. He made no attempt
to take her hand, but murmured a regulation sentence of greeting; then,
looking into her eyes, saw for the first time that handsome face marked
with strong emotion. Miss. Ryan was shaken from her phlegmatic calm; her
hand trembled on the back of the chair before her; the little knot of
violets in her dress vibrated to the beating of her heart.
"This is not a very conventional thing to do," she said, with her usual
ignoring of all preamble, "but I can't help that. I had something to
talk to you about, Mr. Faraday, and as you would not come to see me, I
had to come to see you."
"What is it that you wanted to see me about?" asked Faraday, standing
motionless, and feeling in the sense of oppression and embarrassment
that seemed to weigh upon them both the premonition of an approaching
crisis.
She made no answer for a moment, but stood looking down, as if in an
effort to choose her words or collect her thoughts, the violets in her
dress rising and falling with her quickened breathing.
"It's rather hard to know how to say--anything," she said at length.
"If I can do anything for you," said the young man, "you know it would
always be a happiness to me to serve you."
"Oh, it's not a message or a favor," she said, hastily. "I only wanted
to say something"--she paused in great embarrassment--"but it's even
more queer more unusual, than my coming here."
Faraday made no response, and for a space both were silent. Then she
said, speaking with a peculiar low distinctness:
"The last time I saw you I seemed very disagreeable. I wanted to make
sure of something. I wanted to make sure that you were fond of me--to
surprise it out of you. Well--I did it. You are fond of me. I made you
show it to me." She raised her eyes, brilliant and dark, and looked into
his. "If you were to swear to me now that I was wrong I would know you
were not telling the truth," she said, with proud defiance. "You love
me."
"Yes," said Faraday, slowly, "I do. What then?"
"What then?" she repeated. "Why do you go away--go away from me?"
"Because," he answered, "I am too much of a man to live within sight of
the woman I love and can never hope for."
"Can never hope for?" she exclaimed, aghast. "Are you--are you married?"
The sudden horror on her face was a strange thing for Faraday to see.
"No," he said, "I am not married."
"Then, did she tell you that you never could hope for her?" said Miss.
Genevieve Ryan, in a tremulous voice.
"No. It was not necessary. I knew myself."
"You did yourself a wrong, and her too," she broke out, passionately.
"You should have told her, and given her a chance to say--to say what
she has a right to say, without making her come to you, with her love in
her hand, to offer it to you as if she was afraid you were going to
throw it back in her face. It's bad enough being a woman anyway, but to
have the feelings of a woman, and then have to say a thing like
this--it's--it's--ghastly."
"Genevieve!" breathed Faraday.
"Why don't you understand?" she continued, desperately. "You won't see
it. You make me come here and tell it to you this way. I may be badly
mannered and unconventional, but I have feelings and pride like other
women. But what else could I do?"
Her voice suddenly broke into soft appeal, and she held out her hands
toward him with a gesture as spontaneous in its pleading tenderness as
though made by a child. Faraday was human. He dashed away the chair that
stood between them and clasped the trembling hands in his.
"Why is it," she asked, looking into his face with shining troubled
eyes--"why is it you acted this way? Was it Lord Hastings? I refused
him two weeks ago. I thought I'd marry him once, but that was before I
knew you. Then I waited for you, and you didn't come, and I wrote to
you, and you wouldn't come. And so I had to come and tell you myself,
and it's been something dreadful."
Faraday made no response, but feeling the smooth hands curled warm
inside his, he stood listening to those soft accents that issued with
the sweetness that love alone lends to women's voices from lips he had
thought as far beyond his reach as the key of the rainbow.
"Do you think it was awful for me to do it?" she queried, in whispering
anxiety.
He shook his head.
"Well," she said, laughing a little and turning her head half away, as
her former embarrassment began to reassert itself over her subsiding
nervousness, "I've often wished I was a man, but if it's always as awful
as that to propose to a person, I'm quite content to be a woman."
GIDEON'S KNOCK
BY
MARY HALLECK FOOTE
Written for THE SPINNERS' BOOK OF FICTION
_All Rights Reserved_
BY A curious coincidence, whenever George Fleming was translated to a
wider berth, it was my luck to succeed him in the job he had just
quitted. This had happened more than once, in the chances and changes
that befall the younger men in the mining profession, before we began to
jolly each other about it--always at long range.
When I heard he had resigned from the Consolidated Resumption, to
everybody's surprise, at a time of great prosperity to the mine, I
hailed my chance and congratulated myself that I should speedily be
asked to fill his place: and I was!
I wrote him on the spot a playful letter, alluding to my long, stern
chase and begging him to hold on this time till I could shake him by the
hand; I had come to have a personal sentiment toward him apart from the
natural desire to meet face to face the author of my continued
advancement. But to this letter I received no word of reply.
His silence haunted me, rather--I thought about him a good deal while I
was closing up my affairs in other directions before taking over the
Consolidated Resumption. Meanwhile the company's cashier, Joshua Dean,
a man of trust but small initiative, was filling the interregnum.
I found him living alone in the manager's house with the Flemings'
Chinese cook as man of all work. The Resumption has never tolerated a
boarding-house or a village or compound within sight of its official
windows. Its first manager was a son of the chief owner, who built his
house in the style of a gentleman's country-seat, small but exclusive
and quite apart from the work. I liked the somber seclusion of the
place, planted deep with trees of about twenty years' growth, showing
their delicate, changing greens against the darker belt of pines. But
its aspect increased, if anything, that uneasy sensation, like a cold
wind in my back, which I still had in thinking of Fleming.
I had driven out to dine with Dean on the evening of my arrival. It was
the last week in January; there had been much rain already for the
foot-hills. Wet sprays from the untrimmed rose hedges disputed my
passage through the inner gate. Discolored pine-needles lay in sodden
drifts on the neglected grass. The hydrant leaked frozen puddles down
the brick-paved walk. Mounting the veranda steps I laid my hand on the
knocker, when an old Chinese servant popped his head out at a side-door
and violently beckoned me in that way.
Dean, as I knew, had made his home with the Flemings for some time
before their departure. After a few talks with him and a survey of the
house I decided we might venture to continue the arrangement without
getting in each other's way. It was a house peculiarly adapted to a
_solitude à deux_. There was no telephone nearer than the office. I
argued that Fleming was a man who could protect himself from frivolous
intrusions, and his wife could have had but little in common with her
neighbors in the village.
He had resigned on account of her health, I was told. It must have been
a hasty flitting or an inconclusive one. The odd, attractive rooms were
full of their belongings still. We two casual bachelors with our
circumspect habits could make no impression on the all but speaking
silence of those empty rooms. They filled me at times with a curious
emotion of sadness and unrest.
Joshua seldom talked of the Flemings, though I knew he received letters
from them. That he was deeply attached to their memory, hoarded it and
brooded over it, I could not doubt. I even suspected some jealous
sentiment on his part which made it hard for him to see me using their
chairs, planting myself amongst their cushions and investigating their
book-shelves. I thought it strange they had left so many things behind
them of a personal nature. They seemed to have ceased to care for what
most of us rolling stones are wont to cling to. Their departure had
something unspeakable in it--akin to sudden death, or a sickness of the
heart that made life indifferent to them.
"They must have loved this room!" I said to him one evening. It was
during the black rains of February--Dean and I with our chairs to the
fire, waiting for the Eastern mail. The night watchman's orders were to
stop for it if the trains were anywhere near on time. At this storm
season the Westbound was frequently behind and the road to town a
quagmire. We never looked for Fahey--he was the man I found there as
night watchman--before eight o'clock. It had rained and snowed off and
on since the month began. In the dark, low rooms the fire burned all
day. The dining-room, which had blue-green walls in imitation of Flemish
tapestry and weathered-oak furniture, was darkened still more by the
pines that gave a cloistered look to the view from our back windows into
a small, square court, high-walled and spread with pine-needles. The
rooms we used were two small ones united, done in white and yellow and
with slim curtains which we could crush back upon the rods; but even
there one could not see to read by daylight. This continuous, arctic
gloom added, no doubt, to the melancholy spell of the house, which
nevertheless charmed me, and held me almost with a sense of impalpable
presences sharing with Joshua and me our intimate, wistful seclusion. If
I was happy, in a luxuriously mournful sort of way, I knew that he was
not--that he grieved persistently over something that cast a greyness
over his thoughts in keeping with the atmosphere. I knew that he knew
without any names whom I meant whenever I spoke of _they_.
"Yes, they loved it," he said, answering my exclamation. "They made it,
somehow, as character is said to shape its own set of features."
"Had they lived here long?"
"For a mine house, yes. It was, of course, a home. They had no other."
"A happy one?" I ventured.
"Can any one be called happy who has the gift of strong feeling, and
two children at stake, in this world?" I had never heard him speak with
such bitterness.
"But to have any one to feel for--that is life," I said. "I wish I had
more of it myself."
"Life, then, is not happiness."
I left him the last word, and sitting so, both silent, we heard a
screen-door at the kitchen-end blow to with a bang and a clatter of
tinware that sent the blood to my face in wrath. I said something--about
Jim and his fly-doors (Jim believed that flies or their ghosts besieged
that house all winter)--when the old heathen himself came boiling into
the room like a whole United States mail service delayed.
"Hoo! Heap bad ou'si'! Heap snow!" he panted, wiping drops from the lock
of the mail-pouch with his apron.
My wrath increased, because once more Fahey had got past the front door
with the mail, whereas each night I had promised myself to waylay him
and change his roundabout method of delivery. "If I live till tomorrow,"
I said crossly, "I'll see if he can't climb those steps and hand us the
bag himself."
Jim stood listening. "We might be at dinner," Joshua suggested.
"What's the matter with knocking?--what is the knocker for?" It struck
me, as I spoke, that I had not heard the sound of the knocker since the
day Jim stayed my own hand and shunted me in at the side; it seemed he
must have practised the same vigilance with subsequent comers, for I
could not recall one person who had entered the house announced by the
brass lion's head on the door.
"_He_ no lock!" Jim planted himself in front of me; his voice quavered
nervously. "All time I _un_-lock! Fi' 'tlock whistle blow--I go quick!
Nobody wait. I all time run."
"Why should you run? What is the knocker for?" I repeated. At this I
stepped past him startling him somewhat, and hurled open the front door.
I had heard our coy watchman going down the path.
"Tomorrow night, Fahey," I shouted, "you bring the bag in this way.
Knock, man! There's the knocker--see?"
Jim looked at me with eyes aghast. He gathered himself for speech,
breathing deeply.
"Mis' Oth' (my name is Othet), I tell you: Long time-_long_ time, no man
knock flon' do'. In this house, no good. No good knock. Sometime
some-come-you no man see!" He lowered his voice to a rapid whisper,
spreading his yellow palms tremulously. "You tell man come knock flon'
do'--I go 'way. Too much bad thing!"
Muttering to himself he retreated. "Now what has he got on his mind do
you suppose? Could you make out what he was driving at?"
Dean smiled, a non-committal smile. "It would be rather awkward for us,
wouldn't it, if Jim should leave? We are too far from the coast for city
servants in winter. I doubt if any of the natives could be persuaded to
stay in this house alone."
"You think Jim would leave if I made Fahey knock at that door every
night?"
Joshua answered me obliquely. "If I could ever quote anything straight,
I would remind you of a saying in one of George Eliot's novels that
'we've all got to take a little trouble to keep sane and call things by
the same names as other people.' Perhaps Jim doesn't take quite trouble
enough. I have difficulty sometimes myself to find names for things. I
should like to hear you classify a certain occurrence I have in mind,
not unconnected, I think, with Jim's behavior tonight. I've never
discussed it, of course. In fact, I've never spoken of it before." He
smiled queerly. "It's very astonishing how they know things."
"The menials?"
He nodded. "Jim was in the house at the time. No one knows that he heard
it,--no one ever told him. But he is thinking of it tonight just as I
am. He's never forgotten it for a moment, and never will."
Joshua dragged the charred logs forward and stooped amid their sparks to
lay a fresh one with its back to the chimney. Then he rose and looked
out; as he stood in the door, I could hear the hissing of fine snow
turning to rain and the drenched bamboo whipping the piazza posts; over
all, the larger lament of the pines, and, from the long rows of lights
in the gulch, the diapason of the stamp-heads thundering on through the
night.
"'Identities of sensation,'" said Joshua, quoting again as he shut the
door, "are strong with persons who live in lonely places! Jim and I have
lived here too long."
"Well, I hope you won't live here another moment till you have told me
that story," I urged, and we drew again to the fire.
"There was a watchman here before Fahey," he began, "an old plainsman,
with a Bible name, Gideon. He looked like the pictures of old
Ossawattamie Brown, and he had for the Flemings a most unusual regard.
It was as strong as his love for his family. It was because of what
Fleming did for his son, young Gid, when they caught him stealing
specimens with a gang of old offenders. Gid was nineteen, and a pretty
good boy, we thought. Such things happen between men of the right sort
every day, I suppose,--Fleming would say so. But it was his opportunity
to do it for a man who could feel and remember, and he made a friend for
life right there. It is too long a story to tell, but young Gid's all
right--working in the city, married and happy,--trusted like any other
man. It wasn't in the blood, you see.
"Before his boy got into trouble, Fleming used to call the old man
'Gideon,' talked to him any old way; but after his pride fell down it
was always 'Mr. Gideon,' and a few words when he brought the mail, about
the weather or the conduct of the trains. The old man appeared to stand
taller in those moments at the door, when he brought to the house the
very food of its existence. They lived upon their letters, for both the
children were away. The army boy in the Philippines; it was during the
Mindanao campaign; and Constance (Joshua, I noticed, took a deep breath
before the name), the daughter, was at school in the East. Gideon could
gauge the spirits of the two, waiting here for what he brought them. He
kept tally of the soldier's letters, the thin blue ones that came
strolling in by the transport lines. But hers--her letters were his
pride.
"'It's there all right,' he would say--'she never misses a Monday mail,
the little one!' or, as the winter months wore on--'you'll be counting
the weeks now, madam. Six more letters and then the telegram from Ogden,
and I hope it's my privilege to bring it, madam.' For as Fleming gave
him his title, the old man passed it back with a glow of emphasis,
putting devotion into the 'madam' and life service into the 'Mr.
Fleming, sir.'
"Then she came home--Constance--she was no longer the little one. Taller
than her mother, and rather silent, but her looks were a language, and
her motions about the house--I suppose no words could measure their
pride in her, or their shrinking when they thought of her in contact
with the world. People laughed a little, looking at her, when her mother
talked of the years they were going to have together. And she would
rebuke the laugh and say, 'We do not marry early in my family, nor the
Flemings either.' When the August heat came on, they thought she was too
pale--they spared her for a visit to some friends who had a houseboat
off Belvedere, or some such place. It was an ambush of fate. She came
home, thin, brown, from living on the water,--happy! too happy for
safety. She brought her fate with her, the last man you'd suppose could
ever cross her path. He was from Hawaii, an Englishman--not all English,
some of us thought. Handsome as a snake; a face that kept no marks. Eyes
all black--nothing of the pupil showing. They say such eyes are not to
be trusted. I never liked him. I'd better not try to describe him.
"It seemed madness to me, but I suppose they were no more helpless than
other fathers and mothers. He had plenty to say for himself, and
introductions--all sorts of credentials, except a pair of eyes. They had
to let it go on; and he took her away from them six months after she saw
him first. That's happiness, if you call it so!"
Again I added, "It is life."
"There was not much left of it in this house after she went," Joshua
mused. "It was then they asked me to come up and stay with them. A
silence of three does not press quite so close as a silence of two. And
we talked sometimes. The mine had taken a great jump; it was almost a
mockery the way things boomed. The letters, I noticed, were not what the
schoolgirl letters had been to her mother. They came all right, they
were punctual, but something I felt sure was wrong. Mrs. Fleming would
not have missed a mail for anything in the world--every hour's delay
wore upon her. She would play her game of solitaire, long after bedtime,
at that desk by the drop-light. It seemed she could not read; nothing
held her. She was irritable with Fleming, and then she would pet him
piteously to make up. He was always gentle. He would watch her over his
book as she walked up and down in the back room in the light between the
dining-room curtains. If he saw I noticed, he'd look away and begin to
talk.