When I sat again on the great divan, I said to myself that, after all,
the alien mind who designed this room had worked with cunning; he must
have seen in his fancy the very picture that was now so delightful to
my eyes--the gray old fireplace with its tall columns wound with vines
whose delicate leaves quivered as the firelight fanned them; before it
Penelope, a slender figure, softly drawn in the evening's shadow, bent
over the low tea-table as she worked with the rebellious lamp; from
above, looking down kindly, half smiling, Reynolds's majestic lady,
frilled and furbelowed; at her feet a giant white bear, its long claws
gripping the polished floor, its jaws distended fiercely as though it
stood guard, ready to spring at him who dared to cross the charmed
circle drawn by the glowing coals. I sat in the half-darkness, for it
was late in the day, and but a single shaded lamp burned in a distant
corner. What was new in the room grew old under the wizard touch of
shadows. The mahogany bookcases stretched away on either hand, and
there were cobwebs on the diamond panes and dust on the ancient tomes.
Penelope was in her home! A hundred years ago that majestic lady in
frills and furbelows sat by this same fireplace, in that same old
carved chair, making tea, and now she smiled with great content as from
her frame she looked down on this child of her blood and bone. And the
ancestor who had gathered those dusty volumes--what of him? Two
hundred years it was, perhaps, since he had burrowed among the cobwebs,
now caressing his rare old Horace, now turning the yellow pages of his
learned treatise on astrology. He was a distinguished figure in his
wig, his velvet coat and smallclothes, and something of his features,
refined by intellectual pursuit, I read in the face that now was turned
to mine. For blood does tell. Father Time is a reckless artist,
clipping and cutting and recasting incessantly, and producing an
appalling number of failures; but now and then it would seem that he
did take some pains and, studying his models, combine the broad, low
brow of this one with another's straight and finely chiselled nose, and
still another's smoothly rounded cheek; and sometimes, in his cynical
way, he will spoil it all with a pair of coarse hands borrowed from one
of his rustic figures or the large, flat feet of some study of peasant
life, which we should have thought cast away and forgotten. In
Penelope we were offended by none of these grotesque fragments. They
must have been long since cleared out of her ancestral line. When she
raised herself after her battle with the rebellious lamp, it was with
the grace of unconscious pride, with the majesty of the lady in the
frame, but finer drawn, thanks to the thin old gentleman of the books,
who had overfed his mind and bequeathed to his descendants a legacy of
nerves.
This Penelope Blight, daintily clothed in soft black webs woven for her
by a hundred toiling human spiders, was not even the Penelope Blight of
my wildest boyish dreams. Our dreams are circumscribed by our
experience, and in those days it had been inconceivable to me that she
should grow more lovely than Miss Mincer, the butcher's daughter, and I
had pictured myself walking proudly through the streets of Malcolmville
at the side of a tall, slender girl, her head crowned by a glazed black
hat, her body incased in a tight-fitting jersey. This Penelope Blight
in the carved chair where generations of her grandmothers had made tea
before her, by the stately fireplace at which her forebears had warmed
their hands and hearts, could have no kin with the barefooted girl who
had stood with me at the edge of the clearing and, pointing over the
weeds to the forlorn cabin, called it home.
Was it a wonder that my tone was formal; that, overcome by a sense of
estrangement, I talked of the weather as I sipped my tea; that I asked
her if she had enjoyed last night's dance, speaking as though dancing
were my own favorite amusement; that when I pronounced her name it was
in a halting, embarrassed undertone? Even speaking, it thus seemed
gross presumption. How unlikely, then, that I should refer to by-gone
days in her presence when it was incredible that there had ever been
days like those! In all probability she would draw herself up and
reply that I must be thinking of some other Penelope Blight, that to
her I was nothing more than a formal creature whom she had met
somewhere, where she could not remember, a man like hundreds of others
whom she knew, lay figures for the tailor's art, who spoke only a
language limited to the last dance and the one to come. Believing
this, I finished my tea, and, putting down my cup, I abandoned my one
resource when conversation lagged. Why had I come at all?
I had come to sit with Penelope, just as we were sitting now, in the
shadows, in the firelight. At home we had often sat together on the
back steps, in the shadows of the valley, in the firelight of the
clouds glowing in the last sun flames. Now we should be, as then, good
comrades, and freely as I had talked to her then as from our humble
perch we watched the departing day, so freely could I talk to her now
in the statelier environment. In that short walk uptown I had left a
thousand things unsaid. But one special thing I had left unsaid, one
vital fact in my life unrevealed, that was of paramount importance. In
the excitement of our first meeting my silence had been discretion, but
discretion became deception as time passed, and every day was adding to
its sum. Sometimes I could forget the vital fact. Sometimes at night
in my room, sitting with my book at my side neglected, I would stare
vacantly at the wall and treat myself to a feast of dreams, contentedly
munch the most delicate morsels of the past and present. And by right
of that past and present it was almost fore-ordained that Penelope and
I were to go down the years together. Then I would remember. I would
start from my chair with a despairing laugh and pace up and down my
narrow room, restless and unhappy. I knew that I could not long delay
revealing to Penelope the paramount fact, and in revealing it to her I
seemed to say that after all she was only a casual friend, that all my
life's interest was bound up in Gladys Todd, and my life's ambition
expressed in a room with an easel by the window, a bird's-eye-maple
mantel, and around the walls a rack for odd lots of china and
black-framed prints. It was hard to tell her that, but I knew that I
must, and I said that I should talk freely as in the old days of
brotherly confidence, as though of all others she would be happiest in
hearing of my good fortune. With my mind made up to face boldly this
bad situation, I could not crush the consoling hope that in hearing she
would give some sign of the pain of the wound that I was making. What
a fatuous illusion! In her presence, in an environment which made that
which I planned for myself seem so narrow and commonplace, she became a
spirit thoroughly alien. I could as easily have talked to some foreign
princess of the blood of Mr. Pound or Stacy Shunk. I could as easily
have announced to Mrs. Bannister that I was engaged to Gladys Todd.
And I must have gone away, fled ignominiously after one cup of tea, had
not Penelope, with a sudden impatient movement, turned her chair and
leaned forward with her chin cupped in her hands, as she used to sit in
the old days on the back steps, with her eyes fixed on mine.
"David," she said, "did you really come here to talk to me about the
weather or to tell me things I really want to know--of Mr. Pound, of
Miss Spinner and Stacy Shunk. Who drives the stage now?"
I was on the edge of the divan, my hands playing an imaginary game of
cat's-cradle when she spoke, and now I pushed back into the comfortable
depths and stared at her in surprise. I was amazed at hearing this
princess of the blood descend to an interest in such plebeians. She,
seeing that I was silent, leaned back too, each small hand gripping an
arm of that throne-like chair.
"Well?" she said; and when still I was silent she repeated more
insistently: "Well, David?" Then raising her voice a little to a tone
of command: "I asked you who drives the stage."
I forgot the carved chair and Reynolds's majestic lady. I forgot the
imposing fireplace and the old gentleman in wig and smallclothes. I
laughed with the sheer joy of being with Penelope again. I forgot even
the great divan and made a futile effort to jump it nearer her in my
burst of enthusiasm for our new-born friendship.
"Why, Joe Hicks," I said. "You remember Joe Hicks, Penelope?"
"Joe Hicks," she said, pronouncing the name as though it were that of
some dear friend suddenly dragged out of the by-gone years. "Surely
not the same Joe Hicks who used to let us ride with him sometimes from
Malcolmville out to the farm?"
"The same Joe Hicks," said I, and with a strange disregard for forms
and effects I gave way to a natural desire of hunger and dived at the
curate's delight, forgetting entirely the crumb-begetting habits of
cake. "Try one of those," I went on, indicating the topmost plate, and
to my delight she helped herself, almost with avidity. "You remember,
Penelope, how we used to loiter near the kitchen when we smelled cake
in the oven?"
Then Penelope laughed as though in the sheer joy of casting years away
and living over her childhood.
"Indeed I do," she returned. "But we were speaking of Joe Hicks. You
surprised me. He was an old man when we knew him."
"He was seventy then. He is still seventy," I returned.
"Stage-driving, you know, is conducive----"
"I used to think I'd like to be a stage-driver when I grew up," she
interrupted. "You would see so much of the world with so little
trouble, just holding the reins as the horses ambled along. How our
ideas change, David!"
It was on the old and unchanged ideas that I wanted to dwell. The new
would bring me back all too quickly to ancestral portraits, to imposing
fireplaces and costly bear-skin rugs. I assented readily to her
self-evident proposition and brushed it aside for the most interesting
matter of Joseph Hicks.
"You used to love to drive," I said. "I can see you now wheedling Joe
into letting you have the reins. Don't you remember his telling you
that no self-respecting woman was ever seen driving more than one
horse?"
"How shocked he would be could he see how I handle four," she said.
Should we never get out of the shadow of costly things, out of the
clutch of changed ideas? For a moment I had a picture of Penelope on
the box of a coach, ribbons and whip in hand, with four smart cobs
stepping to the music of jingling harness, with bandy-legged grooms on
the boot, and beside her some perfectly tailored creature in a
glistening top-hat. It was a gallant picture, and one in which there
was no part for me. Metaphorically I hurled at it a missile of the
common clay of which, after all, we were both made. Surely fishing was
a subject on which her ideas could not change.
"Do you remember the great expeditions we used to have along the
creek?" I said.
"Remember them? Why, David, I never could forget such days as those."
She leaned forward, with her hands clasped in her lap, as though to
bring herself into closer touch with the kindred spirit on the divan.
"I often laugh over the time I caught the big turtle on my hook. You
remember--we were on the bridge at the end of the meadow, and I thought
I had captured a whale, and when I saw it I was so astonished that I
went head-first into the water."
"And I dived after you," I cried excitedly, "into two feet of water and
three feet of mud."
"And we both ran home soaking wet and covered with green slime," she
went on rapidly. "Will you ever forget her look when mother----"
"Mother?" There was in my exclamation a note of surprise in which was
almost lost the delight I felt in her use of that word.
She caught the surprise alone, and spoke now as though offended at what
she thought my protest. "Yes, mother. Why, David, don't you remember
I always called her mother? And she was the only mother I ever
knew--even if only for a brief summer."
"I was glad, Penelope," I said. "Yet you surprised me just a little,
because I feared that so much had come into your life you might have
forgotten----"
"Forgotten?" she returned with a gesture of impatience. "You do not
grant me much heart if you think I could ever forget those who took me
in when I was homeless, the mother who tucked me into bed every night,
who taught me the first prayer I ever uttered." She paused for a
moment, and sat with her eyes fixed on her clasped hands. I, too, was
silent. Suddenly she looked up. "You are right, David; I had
forgotten. I was ungrateful, too; but seeing you again and talking
with you has brought those days very near to me. When I have thought
of your father and mother it was as though they lived in another world,
as though, if I would, I could never see them, they were so far away."
She leaned back in her chair and broke into a little laugh. "How
foolish of me! Why, David, we shall go to see them--you and I and
Uncle Rufus. We shall go very soon, David." Her slender figure was
clear-cut in the firelight and a hand was held out to me in invitation.
Had the world been mine to give, how gladly would I have lost it for
the right to answer her as she asked; to go with her and to walk by the
creek to that deep sea of our childhood where she had caught the
turtle; to ride with her again over the mountain road where we had
careered so madly on the white mule; to sit with her on the humble back
steps and watch the sun sink into the mountains, and listen to the
sheep in the meadow, the night-hawk in the sky, the rustle of the wind
in the trees--to the valley's lullaby. From this I was held by the
vital fact still unrevealed. I folded my arms and looked at the floor,
to shut from my eyes the idle vision of the days to which Penelope
would lead me, to shut from them Penelope herself sitting very
straight, with head high, so that I had fancied the blue bow tossing
there.
"We'll go in May," she said with a sweep of a small hand, as though our
great adventure were settled. "We will go when the orchards are in
blossom, David. The valley is loveliest then."
To go in May! To go when the hills were clad in the pink and white!
To sit with her on the grassy barn-bridge in the evening as we had sat
in the old days watching the mountains sink into the night, listening
to the last faint echoes of the valley as she turned to restful sleep.
Had the universe been mine to give, I would have bartered it for the
power to answer her as she asked. Such joys as these I dared not even
dream of now, but still I had not the strength to cut myself forever
from the last faint hope of them. I looked up into her face aglow with
prospect of a return to those simple, kindly days; into her eyes,
kindled with that same light that glowed in them in the old time when
she would slip her hands so trustingly in mine as we trudged together
over the fields. I could say nothing.
"Why, David!" she cried, and again a hand was held out to me in appeal.
"Don't you want to go with us?"
I laughed. And what a struggle I had to force into that laugh a note
of happy gayety! I sat on the edge of the divan, very erect, pulling
at my fingers, for I was no longer David Malcolm, a dreaming boy; I was
a man with a vital fact to meet. Meeting it, I must become to her as
any other man she knew--a formal creature, a lay figure for the
barber's and tailor's art, with a gift of talking inanities.
"It's not because I don't want to go," I said. I was glad that I was
in the shadow, for though my voice was steady I felt the blood leave my
face. "But you see--there is something I have been wanting to tell
you. I'm to be married."
"Oh!" she exclaimed.
If I had hoped to hear more of a cry of pain than that one exclamation
of surprise, I must have been disappointed. But I cherished no such
hope now. I was utterly miserable. I was awkward and ill at ease.
The Penelope Blight I had known lived in another world, and this
Penelope Blight who was regarding me so quietly, meeting my covert
glance with a friendly smile, could, after all, never be more than a
casual acquaintance.
"How splendid!" she said. Mrs. Bannister, I think, would have spoken
in that same way, as though the news were quite the most delightful
that she had ever heard. "Who to? Quick--I must hear all about it."
"To a Miss Todd," I answered, and, though I struggled against it, I
cleared my throat dryly. "A Miss Gladys Todd."
The name sounded harshly in my ears. I was conscious that I had used
it in the manner of the select circles of Harlansburg, and I was angry
that, though knowing better, I had let myself lapse into the ways of a
manikin. When I had spoken of Joe Hicks it was from my heart; I had
forgotten my hands, and Penelope and I had laughed together. When I
spoke of Gladys Todd my voice was tainted with apology. Inwardly I was
calling myself a cad, for it mattered little whether or not I loved
her. I had won her trust, and my first duty was to speak her name with
pride. But I had had that brief glimpse of Penelope Blight, the
companion of my boyhood; I had walked with her, grown lovelier than my
dreams, through visionary woods and fields. She was before me, a
dainty woman of the world; behind her the firelight fanned the leaves
carved for her long ago by the old Italian artist; from above
Reynolds's majestic lady looked down at her kindly, at me with a
haughty stare, as if she read presumption in my mind. Never could I
imagine her photographed on a camel's back by the side of ex-Judge
Bundy. For this alone, it seemed to me as though I were unfolding to
her the love story of a Darby and Joan, adorned with a chaos of easels
and camels, bird's-eye-maple mantels and gayly painted plaques; as
though I had come to tell the great lady of it, because she had always
taken a kindly interest in my affairs.
Against this absurd humiliation I was fighting when again I coughed
dryly and said: "She is the daughter of Doctor Todd, the president of
McGraw."
"Oh, I see," returned Penelope brightly. "She must be very learned,
David. But of course I knew that you would marry a clever woman." To
this gentle flattery I raised my hand and shook my head in protest.
"And I see, too, how it all came about--at college. How romantic!
Just like you, David. And yet I can hardly think of you as a married
man. It was only yesterday that I pulled you out of the creek;
to-morrow you are to marry a charming woman--an accomplished woman, I
know. She must sing and play the piano and do all kinds of things like
that. How proud you should be!"
"I am," said I in a sepulchral tone, much as I might have answered to
my name at roll-call.
"When she comes to town you must let me know--I shall call on her."
There was no note but one of kindliness in Penelope's easily modulated
voice, nothing but friendliness in the smile which parted her lips. As
she leaned forward again, grasping the carved arms of her chair, she
was speaking with queenly condescension, and it nettled me to find
myself reduced to the level of the herd.
So there was in my voice a faint ring of pride when I said: "Gladys is
abroad now." At least in this august presence a fiancée abroad sounded
more impressive than a fiancée in Harlansburg, and I wanted it known
that mine was a woman of the world and not simply the accomplished
daughter of a small country town.
I think that the point struck home, for a hopeful "Oh!" escaped from
Penelope's lips, as though she were giving vent to bottled-up doubts as
to whether or not she could ever more than call on Gladys Todd. I
think that she divined what I wanted her to understand--that though
Gladys Todd had painted tulips on black plaques, she had acquired the
dignity that comes with travel and the grace of a widened view.
"You must both come and dine with me when she gets home," Penelope
said, with a manner of increased interest. "I suppose she is studying,
David, music or painting."
"Travelling," I answered, encouraged to nonchalance by the impression I
was making, for to travel merely sounded much more prosperous than to
be working at the rudiments of an art. "She has been over since last
May--just travelling around."
"And gathering together a trousseau--how delightful! You must be
counting the days till she comes home, David?"
I nodded. I tried my best to look as though at that very moment I was
busy with the fond calculation.
"And who is with her--some friend?" Penelope asked.
"Her father and mother," I answered. That sounded still more
prosperous: the family of three--the learned doctor, his wife and
accomplished daughter--wandering where they willed about the world. I
should have stopped there, but I am one of those unfortunate persons
who in telling anything must tell it all. My better judgment made me
hesitate. My habit carried me on. "And Judge Bundy," I added.
"Judge who?" she exclaimed.
I fancied that I detected a strange note in her voice.
"Bundy--Judge Bundy," I replied, my own voice rising to a pitch of
irritation.
Would she go on and make me spell the name that sounded so strangely
when spoken in her presence? I was angry. It was at myself for my
uncalled-for frankness. For one brief moment I had almost raised
myself again to the level of the dainty creature in the old carved
chair, to the approval even of the majestic lady above the great
fireplace; speaking so nonchalantly of my friends who could wander
where they willed over the face of the globe, I had almost made myself
one with those for whom Italian sculptors drove the chisel and Reynolds
plied his brush. But that name, so unwisely given, called to my mind
the figure on the camel, and I was sure that by some strange freak of
conjury Penelope must see it too; and worse, that other, the girl in
the pugree, and behind them, discreetly placed, Doctor Todd,
uncomfortably balancing on his giant beast, and Mrs. Todd taken
inopportunely as she was mopping her brow. Well might Penelope look at
me with quizzical eyes. I had tumbled again among the common herd. In
my desperation I might have gone on to the whole truth recklessly; told
her what an absurd man Judge Bundy really was, and how the Todds were
being dragged over Europe on a glorified Cook's tour, captives at the
wheels of his chariot; told her how I appreciated her sweet
condescension in offering to call on the woman I loved. The woman I
loved? For that moment I think I did love Gladys Todd, for I was
standing to her defence against the crushing weight of millions of
money and the bluest of blood. Yes, I am sure that I should have gone
on and told her all, but Fate, wiser than I, intervened, and the butler
announced Mr. Talcott.
As usual, Mr. Talcott did not wish tea--he had just come from the club,
but he could not see why we were sitting in utter darkness. With
Penelope's assent, he turned a button, showing thereby an exasperating
familiarity with the room, and, seating himself comfortably before her,
expressed his wonder that he had not seen her last night; he had hunted
for her everywhere to join his party at supper. And now the lights
were on and I a mere spectator at the play; I was having a glimpse of
the stage on which I could never move. The lights burned high; they
swept the dust and cobwebs from the diamond panes; they drove the
flames to hiding in the ashes; their touch turned the leaves of the
fireplace to dead stone. But Penelope they could not change. In the
soft black webs, woven for her by a hundred toiling human spiders, she
held still the heritage of the proud woman in frills and furbelows and
the fine old man in wig and smallclothes. She was more radiant, as
though her blood ran quicker in the joy of the part she played. Enter
the butler. Enter Mr. Grant, a tall young man in business clothes, a
good-natured fellow who laughed joyously at nothing. He had just
dropped in on his way home after a beastly day downtown--a horrible
day--a new attack on the trusts and a smash in the market. He fixed
himself close to the curate's delight and beginning at the bottom
worked upward, fortifying himself, as he explained, for a late dinner.
Talcott thought that he had heard Grant say that he was going to the
opera. Grant had never said any such thing. Didn't Mr. Malcolm agree
with him that more than one act of opera was a bore? Mr. Malcolm quite
agreed. Mr. Talcott wondered if Miss Blight had heard that Jerry White
was engaged. Miss Blight was at once dying to know to whom. Mr.
Talcott admonished her to think. Mr. Grant wanted to know if Mr.
Malcolm had heard. But Mr. Malcolm had a strange unappreciation of
important news. He moved in another world than this and he wanted to
flee from it. He was homesick for familiar scenes and faces, for Miss
Minion's and the long table in the basement to which the wizened old
women would soon be crawling down for their evening nourishment, for
Miss Tucker and his neighbor, Mr. Bunce, who by day made tooth-powder
and by night talked Pater. He rose and held out his hand to the
princess of the blood. Graciously she rose from her throne.
Graciously she said: "Good-by, David. It was good of you to drop in."
And graciously she added, as he backed awkwardly away: "Remember, you
must let me know when Miss Todd comes. I shall call."