THE WAY OF A MAID WITH A MAN
A FORTNIGHT or such a matter after his rebuff in the presence of
outraged art--typified by the newly finished “Sunset in Platte
Cañon”--and a week after the Draconian episode and Brant’s dismissal
by Mrs. Langford, Antrim took Isabel to the opera, meaning to have his
answer once for all before he slept.
Another man under similar hard conditions might have hesitated to
preface his _coup de grace_ matrimonial with an evening’s amusement;
but Antrim was wise in his generation, and he knew Isabel’s leanings
well enough to be sure that no other preliminary would add more to his
chances of success.
Now _Rigoletto_, well sung, is a treat not to be despised even by a
jaded theatregoer, and the younger Miss Langford was neither jaded nor
lacking the artistic sense which finds its complement in good music.
Wherefore she gave a little sigh of regret when the curtain ran down on
the last act, and stood up mechanically in her place that Antrim might
adjust her wrap.
“Great show, wasn’t it?” he said, making a praise-worthy but purely
manlike effort to strike the proper note of appreciation.
She did not respond, and when they came out in the lighted foyer he saw
the rapt isolation of her mood and resented it.
“Up on top of the mountain as usual, aren’t you? Did you happen to
come down far enough any time during the evening to think of the thing
as a play meant to amuse people?” He tried to say it jestingly, but
the whetstone of sarcasm sharpened the words in spite of the placable
intention.
“Don’t tease me, please, Harry; at least, not now while I’m in the
seventh heaven of the aftermath. I’ll talk practical things with you by
and by, if you like, but just now it would be sacrilege.”
Ordinarily Antrim would have laughed, as he was wont to laugh at her
extravagances. As it was, he sulked and was silent while they were
drifting with the slow-moving human glacier out through the vestibule
and during the long street-car ride over to the Highlands.
Since early morning he had been fighting a desperate battle with the
Apollyon who disputes the way with that man who is foolish enough to
set the day and hour in which a question of moment is to be decided.
No sooner had he written it down that Isabel should that evening be
brought to hear reason, than an imp of disorder came and sat at his
elbow, and after this the business of his office went awry and the day
became a lengthened misery.
He had quarrelled with his stenographer, found fault with the operator,
and made life burdensome for the office boy. Last, and worst of all,
just before the day’s end he had fallen into a wrangle over the wires
with the division train despatcher at Lone Pine Junction, the upshot of
which was to bring the man’s resignation, garnished with a few terse
“wire” oaths, clicking back through the sounder in the superintendent’s
office.
So much for the day’s tribulations. But since he had not taken the
trouble to tell her, Isabel knew naught of these things. Hence it was
not until they had left the car and were nearing the Hollywood gate
that she began to wonder if his silence were altogether of abstraction.
“You are in a sweet temper to-night, aren’t you, Harry?” she said,
merely by way of arousing him to a sense of the social part of his duty.
Antrim helped her across the bank-full irrigation ditch at the curb and
answered not a word.
“I suppose you are just aching to take it out on somebody,” she went
on. “If that is the case, you may begin on me. I’m young and strong,
and not too thin-skinned.”
Still Antrim held his peace, fearing to open his mouth lest a worse
thing should come of it.
“Why don’t you say something? You needn’t go into your shell like a
disappointed turtle just because I wouldn’t let you spoil my negative
of the opera before I could get it developed.”
Still no reply.
“What is the matter with you, Harry, dear? Have you lost your tongue?”
“No; I’ve been waiting till you saw fit to come down out of the clouds;
that’s all.”
“Well, I have arrived. And I am ready to forgive you for being so
sulky. My, oh!”
They had reached the gate, and Antrim tried to open it. The latch
stuck, and straightway the gate flew across the sidewalk bereft of its
hinges. Isabel laughed joyously, and the small explosion served to
clear the moral atmosphere, as other wooden profanities are said to.
“Good as a play, isn’t it?” growled the young man, and he sought to
re-establish the wrecked gate.
“Ever so much better,” was the quick retort. “It was positively the
most human thing I ever saw you do. You are always so self-contained
and precise that you put a quick-tempered mortal like me to shame.”
“Did you ever do anything as senseless as this?”
“Haven’t I? Come into the house and I’ll show you.”
He followed her obediently and stood in the dark hall while she lighted
the lamp in her studio. When he joined her she was running over a stack
of canvases standing in a corner.
“Do you see that?” she asked, slipping out one of the oil studies and
giving it to him.
It was a sketchy little painting of Long’s Peak, and it was punctured
with numberless penknife stabs.
“I did that one day when I was particularly savage,” she confessed;
“just as you were when you smashed the gate. You don’t know how much
good it does me to find out now and then that I haven’t a monopoly of
all the bad temper in the world.”
Antrim grinned. “Don’t lose any sleep on that score; you have lots of
good company. I have been having a tough time of it all day, and the
gate business was only the wind-up.”
“Poor old martyr! And I have been sticking pins into it all evening!
What has been the trouble? Or is it tellable?”
“Everything and nothing. It has just been an off day with me all
around. I have quarrelled with everybody I could get at, and with
myself more than all. I need a balance-wheel worse than anything,
Isabel, and it’s for you to say whether I shall have it or not.”
He knelt to clear the smouldering fire in the grate, and then got up to
walk back and forth in front of it. Isabel sat down and shaded her eyes
from the light. Levity was on the tip of her tongue, but she felt that
his mood was one in which ridicule would be as the spark to gunpowder.
Therefore she met it fairly and tried to reason with him.
“Must we go all over the old ground again, Harry?” she began. “Can’t I
say something new and fresh--something that will make it clear to you
that the worst possible thing that could happen to either of us would
be this that you have set your heart upon?”
“I don’t think you can,” he objected, pausing in front of the mantel to
adjust a picture which was three hairs’ breadths out of plumb. “But you
may try, if you care to.”
But having leave to try, Isabel found that new sayings on a well-worn
subject do not always suggest themselves on the spur of the moment, and
she was obliged to leave the promise unfulfilled.
“It would only be dressing the old things up in new clothes if I did,”
she confessed, “and that wouldn’t bring us to any better understanding.”
“It isn’t a question of understanding, Isabel; it is your ambition
against my love--against reason, I had pretty nearly said. I don’t
believe you love anybody else; and I--well, I’d be glad enough to take
the chances of winning later on what you say you can’t give me now.
That is the whole thing in a sentence, and it is for you to say whether
I shall go away from here to-night the happiest of men or the most
miserable.”
He said it calmly and with the air of one who has weighed and measured
the possibilities of success or failure. Then it was that Isabel
first began dimly to understand that Harry Antrim, her schoolfellow
and playmate, had somehow come to man’s estate what time she had been
calling him a boy; and while she replied out of an honest heart, the
newborn conviction helped her to choose the words.
“It wouldn’t be right, Harry, even if you are willing to risk it and
take the consequences, good or bad. I want you to believe me when I
say that I don’t seem to know anything about the love that reaches out
toward marriage; and I am afraid I don’t want to. I love my friends,
and you more than any of the others; but I would turn my back on all of
them if the doing of it would bring the answer to the question which is
always and always at the tip end of my paint brushes. It’s unwomanly,
hard-hearted--anything you like to call it--but it is the simple truth.
You don’t want to marry a woman who feels that way, Harry, dear.”
He ignored the argument, if, indeed, he had tried to follow it, and
pressed her to give him his answer.
“Which is it to be, Isabel--Yes, or No?”
She parried the direct demand, not because there was any present
uncertainty in her own mind, but because she discerned that in his eyes
which warned her to deal gently with him.
“I say you wouldn’t want to marry a woman without a heart--a loving,
home-making heart, I mean; and that is what you would do if you took
me. I have my own little battle to fight, and I must fight it alone,
Harry. That is simple justice to you, or to any other good man who
might ask me to marry him.”
Antrim pounced upon the suggested alternative with unreasoning and
vindictive acerbity.
“Any other man, you say. Who is the other man, Isabel?”
The steel of jealousy struck fire at once upon the flint of Isabel’s
quick temper, and her mood changed in a twinkling.
“You intimated, the other day, that it might be Mr. Brant,” she
retorted with malice aforethought.
Antrim set his teeth hard to keep back the bitter sayings that came
uppermost, and when he could trust himself to speak again tried hard
to make her deny his own assertion. “Just tell me there is no one
else, Isabel, and I’ll be satisfied,” he pleaded; but Isabel, caring
at that moment very little for Brant and a great deal for Antrim, yet
stubbornly refused to give her lover even this small crumb of comfort.
“Then--once more, Isabel--give me my answer. Is it to be Yes, or No?”
“Oh, can’t you see? Can’t you understand that it must be No?”
“There is no reservation--no little green twig of hope that you can
hold out to me?”
“Not as I hope to be sincere, Harry.”
“Not if I should wait until you had won or lost the battle?”
The little arrow of self-effacement found its mark, and Isabel
hesitated. With the enthusiasm of a young devotee she had striven
to unsex herself in the singleness of her purpose, but Antrim’s
pleading stirred the woman within her, and in that fleeting instant of
introspection she saw how frail was the barrier defending her ambition
from his love. Honesty, pure and simple--the shame of taking so much
where she could give so little--stepped in to save her.
“No, not even then, Harry. You deserve the full cup, and I couldn’t
be mean enough to offer you the dregs. If I fail, I sha’n’t be worth
anybody’s having; and if I succeed--ah, God knows, but I am afraid I
should be still less the woman you ought to marry.”
“As you will,” he said, and held out his hand. “Let us say ‘Good-bye’
and have it over with.”
She put her hand in his and let him keep it while she said: “It mustn’t
be ‘Good-bye,’ Harry. I can’t afford to lose you as a friend--as a--as
a brother.”
He smiled reproachfully. “And you said you would try to say something
new!” Then the little upflash of pleasantry died out, and he spoke
as one who leaves hope behind. “No, Isabel; I meant it literally. It
must be ‘Good-bye,’ so far as I am concerned. I couldn’t go on as
we’ve been going on all these years; I should go mad, some day when
the right man turns up, and do that which would make you hate me. No,
I shouldn’t”--the denial came quickly in response to the distress
that crept into her eyes--“no, I shouldn’t do that, for your sake;
but I should be sore and miserable, and that would hurt you, too. You
wouldn’t want that, would you?”
She shook her head, and he stood irresolute for a moment. Then he said:
“Won’t you kiss me, Isabel? You haven’t, you know, since we used to
play boy and girl games in the old, old days.”
She withdrew her hand quickly. “You mustn’t ask that. It would--it
would----”
How was he to know that she was trying to tell him that it would undo
all that had gone before; that it would break down the frail barrier
she had been at such pains to uprear? How was he to guess that he stood
at last before the open door of the woman’s heart of her; that he had
but to take her in his arms to possess her?
Not by anything that she said or did, truly; and yet at that moment
her love for him sprang full-armed into being, filling her with joy
unspeakable, and promising thenceforth to dominate ambition and all
else. But her lover knew it not, and he turned away to grope in thick
darkness for the door because the vertigo of failure was blinding him.
On the threshold he stopped, and when sight returned looked back at her
as she stood under the light of the high easel lamp.
He made sure that the picture and its setting would be a lasting
memory, and the sight of it brought back a swelling wave of
recollection that went nigh to submerging him. There was the piano,
where he had so often stood beside her, turning the leaves of her music
while she played for him. In the corner, where the cross light from
the windows could be shaded and controlled from her chair, stood her
easel--the workbench before which she had spent so many patient hours.
On the wall opposite, hanging just where she could see it while she
worked, was the little Vedder--his one valuable gift; and beside the
fire, which was now burning brightly, stood the easy-chair which had
come to be called his, so often had he claimed it.
Some such background he had always imagined for his own home--the home
wherein he could escape from the growing responsibilities of his work;
the home which Isabel was to make for him. But she had said it could
never be, and she was sending him away without hope, and with nothing
but the remembrance of her pity to fill the place she had made for
herself in his life. She might have kissed him once, he thought, and
the thought set itself in words before he could check it.
“It couldn’t have made much difference to you, Isabel; a kiss is only
a little thing. And yet I had an idea that if you gave me one the
remembrance of it would tide me over some of the hard places. That was
all.”
Her eyes met his when he began to say it, but she neither saw nor heard
him when he went away. When she looked up and found him gone she ran to
the door to call him back, but she was not quick enough. The night had
swallowed him, and when she made sure of it she went back to the studio
to bury her face in the lounge pillows and to cry bitterly--for what,
she knew not, save that her world seemed suddenly to have fallen out of
its orbit.
Thus the maid. And the man? As Brant had left the same house a few
nights earlier with the devil beckoning him, so went Antrim, stumbling
over the curb at the crossing and splashing through the pools made
by the overflowing irrigation ditches without once realizing the
discomfort. It was mirth for the gods, doubtless. His trouble was
only a microscopic bit of side play in the great human comedy. But it
was tragic enough to the young man, and many a spoiled life answers to
promptings no more insistent than those which gather, buzzardlike, to
pick the bones of a starved passion.
In the ruck of it Antrim tramped wearily back to the city, unmindful
of all the familiarities until some one spoke to him at the corner of
Sixteenth and Larimer Streets. It was Grotter, the division engineer,
and he linked arms with the chief clerk and caught step.
“Chilly night, isn’t it, Harry?” he said, shouldering his companion
diagonally across the street toward a stained-glass transparency
marking the entrance to a saloon. “I should think you’d freeze in that
light overcoat. Let’s go in here and have a nip to go to bed on--what
do you say?”
Now, no anchoret of the Libyan Desert was ever less a tippler than was
Antrim. But the thought of his great disappointment came and grappled
with him, and the devil, to whom some very worthy people are yet
willing to accord a personality, tempted him with a specious promise of
comfort. So he did no more than hang upon the doorstep while Grotter
overpersuaded him.
This was at midnight, and therein lay one of life’s little ironies.
At the very moment when Isabel, kneeling at her bedside, was trying
with innocent cheeks aflame to frame the first halting petition for
her acknowledged lover, Antrim was entering the house of temptation
with the engineer. And presently he joined Grotter in a cup of some
insidious mixture in which beaten eggs and liquid fire seemed to be
the chief ingredients, sipping it slowly while he listened to the
engineer’s stories of his perils by fire, flood, and unruly grade
labourers in the mountains.
That was the beginning. In the end the devil’s promise was kept after
a fashion, inasmuch as Antrim stumbled up the steps of Mrs. Seeley’s
boarding house some two hours later in a frame of mind which, whatever
may have been its lacks or its havings, was at least bullet-proof on
the side of sorrow.