Part II

[Illustration: Front Cover]

THE FOLLOWING IS A LIST OF TWELVE AMERICAN NOVELS PUBLISHED BY HARPER &

BROTHERS DURING 1901, WRITTEN FOR THE MOST PART BY NEW AMERICAN WRITERS,

AND DEALING WITH DIFFERENT PHASES OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LIFE.

"EASTOVER COURT HOUSE." By HENRY BURNHAM BOONE and KENNETH BROWN.

"THE SENTIMENTALISTS." By Arthur Stanwood Pier.

"MARTIN BROOK." By MORGAN BATES.

"A VICTIM OF CIRCUMSTANCES." By GERALDINE ANTHONY.

"DAYS LIKE THESE." By EDWARD W. TOWNSEND.

"WESTERFELT." By WILL N. HARBEN.

"THE MANAGER OF THE B & A." By VAUGHAN KESTER.

"THE SUPREME SURRENDER." By A. MAURICE LOW.

"THE STRENGTH OF THE HILLS." By FLORENCE WILKINSON.

"LET NOT MAN PUT ASUNDER." By BASIL KING.

"WHEN LOVE IS YOUNG." By Roy ROLFE GILSON.

"THE DEBATABLE LAND." By ARTHUR COLTON.

"THE

DEBATABLE

LAND"

A Novel

_By

Arthur Colton_

[Illustration]

New York and London

Harper & Brothers Publishers

1901

Copyright, 1901, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._

TO

R.H. LOINES

"For the Debatable Land, being that portion of ground which, lying

between two countries, belongeth to neither, does of all regions abound

most in disturbance, adventures, even legends, and, as men say, in

warlocks and witches. Thus the astute German, Hermantius, significantly

calleth the region of youth a debatable land, and seeketh to illustrate

time by space."--_The Dictionary of Devices_.

Contents

PART I

CHAPTER PAGE

I. "_Hinter die Kirche blühe die blaue Blume

der Zufriedenheit_" 3

II. _Of Thaddeus Bourn and his Purposes_ 11

III. _Of Morgan Map and his Purposes_ 24

IV. _In which Thaddeus uses the term "Moral

Justification"_ 32

V. _Introducing Hamilton and Saint Mary's

Organ_ 41

VI. _Introducing Gard Windham and the Brotherhood

of Consolation_ 56

VII. _Introducing Moselle and Mavering_ 71

VIII. _Of Mrs. Mavering, and of the Philosophy of

the Individual_ 85

IX. _Of Estates in Happiness_ 99

X. _Of Spring in Hamilton--Of Thaddeus's

Opportunity to be Candid_ 118

XI. _The Whirlpool--Mr. Paulus's Reminiscences

of Women_ 135

PART II

XII. _Antietam_ 149

XIII. _In which Appears a General of Division,

and one of "the Brethren"_ 164

XIV. _In which Mavering Concludes that Cavalry

Officers as a Class are Eccentric and

Deep_ 181

XV. _Treats of the Distribution of Tracts in the

Valley of the Shenandoah_ 192

XVI. _Which Discloses one Daddy Joe, and Disposes

of an Evangelist_ 207

XVII. _On the Question of the Exact Location of

the Divinity which is Ultimately Called

Worth While_ 223

XVIII. _In which there is Discovered a Compunction_ 235

XIX. _In which Windham Drops Out of the Fight--and

Mavering Remarks on Human

Adaptability_ 253

XX. _Treats of Further Incidents in the House

with the White Door_ 264

XXI. _In which We Go Down the River and Return_ 274

XXII. _Of Mavering, who Disappears--Of the

Gray Poet--Of Morgan, Who Appears

Once More_ 286

XXIII. _The End_ 307

Part I

"The Debatable Land"

Chapter I

"Hinter die Kirche blühe die blaue Blume der

Zufriedenheit."--MEISTER ECKHART.

Widow Bourn's house stood behind the church, and blue flowers grew

contentedly on the sloping green, shy fancies of a maiden spring that

never lasted out a summer's experience. New England churches have not

that air of nestling comfort which seemed to Meister Eckhart so sweet a

symbol. They crown the hills with square frames and sharpened steeples,

churches militant, plate-mailed in clapboards, with weather-vane aimed

defiantly into the wind. Their doors are closed, their windows shuttered

against all days of the week saving one. But Widow Bourn found the

proximity comfortable. The church militant faced the issues of the

spirit for her, and subdued them. She plodded through her Bible, drawing

contentment from texts that meant no such matter, seeing in the

ecclesiast's despondency only reflections connected here and there with

sermons. "It is a pleasant thing to stand on the shore when other people

are in the floods," the melancholy Roman poet remarked, meaning that it

_would be_, because it was something his ever-journeying spirit in the

waste seas of thought rendered impracticable for himself.

A gate opened from the widow's garden on the sloping green.

Heavy-scented lilacs, purple and white, hung over it, and followed the

fence at fragrant intervals. Lilacs crowded along the garden walls,

pushed against green pillars of the porch and drooped luxurious heads at

the windows. Lilacs are tropical and anti-puritan; they belong with the

chuckle of lutes over low casements, and liquid voices speaking a

vowelled tongue. Widow Bourn was pleasant-tempered, placid, possessed of

a stillness, a certain dignity, and a frame not overpadded, but

comfortable.

The Bourns were early settlers in Hagar. The settlers were still feeling

their way in the wilderness beyond the Connecticut, sensible farmers who

bargained for whole mountain ranges and valleys of the magnificent

savage, and recorded the transaction in minutes of the town-meeting.

The magnificent savage commonly declared that his heart was great; he

would sell the lands from the crooked lake to the joining of swift

rivers to his white brothers, who marked the boundaries inferred from

the sachem's oratory, and omitted to comment on the humor of it in

minutes of the town-meeting. When the first Simon Bourn piled hewn beams

for his cabin and ran his plough around stumps of trees that had

furnished the beams there were few cabins in the neighborhood, and the

town-meeting was held fifteen miles away. The last Simon Bourn ran his

plough along the same hill-side, not dodging the same stumps, but the

hill-side still drew up stones out of its inner perversity to check his

plough. He found the slope of his life, like the slope of his ancestral

fields, unfertile, shallow-soiled. The five generations of Bourns had

accumulated and transmitted this opinion of their lives and hilly

fields, that on the whole they were not justified.

Simon died in the early fifties and was buried in Hagar's hemlocked

graveyard. Oddly enough, he seemed to regret it. Widow Bourn associated

herself with this regret, but regret has commonly an element of

interrupted possibilities in it, and these must have lain the rather in

Nellie, a yellow-headed, long-limbed, swift-footed maiden whose level

gray eyes had in them a certain challenge and accusation, and whose

years were ten.

"Don't let Nellie forget me," he said, and the graver carved on his

tombstone, "Remember Me." Simon perhaps intended it only for Nellie, but

that did not prevent its forcing the passer to "remember" him, who never

knew him and did not care about it. "Simon Bourn--Born ----, Died ----.

Remember," in raised letters on a white tombstone, stared out of the

green gloom of the hemlocks. So the Elder Hamlet desired, "Remember Me."

"Remember thee, poor ghost?" Why remember? Go your ways, Simon Bourn,

and trouble us not. It might have struck the public as egotistic, which

was only a pathetic impulse pointing to Nellie, if the public had not

been in the habit of accepting epitaphs of all kinds with a tolerance

born of experience.

One could understand the exception Simon made in favor of Helen from his

opinion and feeling about the world he left--that it was not on the

whole justified--could understand it in this way, that there was

something in her young gravity and impetuous faith which seemed to

isolate whatever she looked at. To be considered and remembered by her

seemed important. It lifted one out of triviality. In Hagar she was a

pronounced, a separate person. Hagar itself was compact of varieties,

but Helen was intense in conception and direct in action to surprise

Hagar. She ran away with Morgan Map to the Hamilton County Fair, and

came back in the gray dawn, white-lipped with weariness. A neighbor or

two had sat up with Widow Bourn to prevent her worrying. It was a

gratifying success. The widow slept by the fire. Morgan was eighteen

then, but the Maps were somewhat out of the reach of Hagar's opinion.

She smote Mr. Paulus with a paint-brush across the face for interfering

with her painting designs on cows and cats. They were not his cows and

cats. That question in ethics threw Hagar into excited division, and it

was not remembered whose cows and cats they were. She was sent to Miss

Savage's School in Wimberton; muttering rumors of her crossed the Cattle

Ridge. At sixteen she was thrown by one of the Sanderson horses, a

red-eyed, ugly breed of racers; and Joe Sanderson, then aged nine, ran

at the horse and shot a barbed arrow into its hide, out of his bitter

wrath and love of Nellie; and Nellie lay a twelvemonth and more on her

back to cure her spine. These are but instances of enterprise. Whatever

stood the challenge or test of worth and reality in her eyes was apt to

be a cause of sudden valor or unreckoned devotion.

The accident was in 1858, the year after Squire Map's wife died, whose

name was once Edith Lorn. There was a great funeral in Hagar, and

carriages from down the Wyantenaug Valley as far as Hamilton. There was

an explosion then, too, in the Map family regarding property. Gerald and

Morgan were supposed to have announced their independence on the

strength of their majority and inheritance. The squire took to himself a

grudge against the world where sons are unfilial, friends betray, and

love falls from negation to negation, and began that lonely life which

lasted twenty years, shut in and brooding in the square house on the

hill half a mile out on the Cattle Ridge road. Gerald Map came no more

to Hagar, but Morgan was seen at times. He rode up from Hamilton the

day after Helen's fall, talked with the doctor, went up-stairs and

kissed her cheek, and departed, silent to Widow Bourn's murmured

remonstrance. "He shouldn't do that!"

Helen said: "Oh, that's all right," indifferently, and Widow Bourn fell

to extracting comfort from the situation. If a honey-bee extracts

anything from anywhere, it is honey; she may not extract anything. There

was a comfort in knowing where Helen was the day long; not that the

widow's comfort had ever been seriously long disturbed, but Helen

quiescent was more comfortable than Helen active, in process of silent

loading or sudden discharge. One could consider her clothes at leisure,

not in heated endeavor to have one dress for Sunday without a lateral or

perpendicular rip. Everything in the balm of the widow's temperament

took the soft flow of slow waters, as Simon's plaintive discontent had

long before to her ears come to resemble Ecclesiastes. Helen was more

difficult to adapt herself to, because Helen grew and changed. Now, the

growth and change seemed for the time to have ceased. She was no less

mysterious; but a mystery which is constant and presents the same

inscrutable face, and not always another and another, is more

comfortable. Helen's life, after cataracts and restless seeking, seemed

to have flowed into a dark pool, and lay there reflecting clouds,

patches of stars, and the edges of dim forests.

The similitudes of young maidens and varied flowers, the happy

possibilities in that comparison, were discovered of earliest poets. Out

of the best of intentions there has come to us so far only the

conviction that Helen did not resemble the blue violets growing behind

the church in Hagar. As for Simon's epitaph, it outlasts the story and

is still to be read. One may lean over the wall of the cemetery, say, at

twilight, when the shadow of Windless Mountain is wide over Hagar, and

read it to-day, note its stiff insistence, and suit one's self with

reflections on man and nature and the purport of things. An issue will

be observed to lie between Simon's epitaph and the solemn, fading

mountain, an issue distinct and inclusive.

Chapter II

Of Thaddeus Bourn and his Purposes

There was given to the Bourns, then, of old, natures sloping to the

Northern side, or they had taken that tendency from experience. Thaddeus

Bourn, that elder brother of Simon, who left Hagar so long ago as when

Quincy Adams was President, and became a civil flower of society in the

city of Hamilton, was a spontaneous variation or reaction from the type.

One heard that he had made a fortune airily, and lost it. He surely

married another, lost part of that, and his wife of a year or two, who

died and surprised him into regretting her with some sincerity. He

became an official of the Hamilton County Bank, and floated on in middle

life, buoyant, carrying an aroma of old fashions, a flower in his

buttonhole, a tall hat, a silver-headed cane. His eyes had wrinkles

about them, his cheeks were thin, his foot light. All these were evident

elements in the total of Thaddeus, but the total itself was not a sum,

but a harmony. To keep the seamy side of life turned down, and its sheen

always in the sun, not only was Thaddeus's practice and theory, but he

belonged to a distinct school in the practice of the art, which might be

called the pseudo-classic.

He sat by Helen's bed half a day, and talked to her as to a grown lady,

and was gracious and fluent. He brought the best flowers of his

worldliness, and jingled all his silver bells to please her.

"Not a finer pair of eyes in Hamilton!" he said to the widow.

"Positively she must not have a crick in her back. On my word,

impossible."

"We are taught to submit," said the widow, perhaps placidly, at any rate

patiently. Thaddeus mounted the stairs with a wrinkled smile.

"Sheep! That woman is a sheep! Helen, my dear, your back will be as

straight as my cane, I give you my word."

Nellie's lean hands, on the coverlet, and face, with its bacchante

spread of hair above her head on the pillow, were losing their brown tan

in the passage of slow weeks. The delicate creeping pallor and

helplessness beckoned Thaddeus to something tender, but he took council

with wisdom.

"Uncle Tad," she said, "why do you about always feel good?"

"Well, well, I haven't cracked my spine. Never cracked anything but my

heart and reputation--a--both of them like old varnish, on my word. Very

good, varnish them again. I have"--Thaddeus used his gold eye-glasses

gracefully to punctuate, emphasize, distinguish, for illustration, for

ornament--"I have the opinion that to feel agreeable and to be agreeable

are two habits that one cultivates like a garden. The first is a

vegetable, the second a flower. You see? Exactly. In point of fact they

are the fruit and flower of the same plant. A--a figure of speech,

Nellie. If you kindly wouldn't look at me like the Angel of Judgment.

A--look at the ceiling. Thank you."

Thaddeus delicately unfolded his theory of the conduct of life, Nellie's

grave eyes now and then confusing him with mute challenge.

To his experience, then, there were two classes of people--those who

were more or less pleased with the world, and those who more or less

were not. Both personally and morally it was better to be in the former

class. Personally, for instance, one lived longer; morally, one, for

instance, in point of fact, kept in better relations with Providence.

Now this satisfaction was to be compassed partly by a certain inward

insistence on feeling agreeable--"When I buy a pair of glasses of a

seller of glasses, personally, I buy a pair that--a--slightly

idealize"--partly by surrounding one's self by, in point of fact, a

judicious selection of circumstances. Circumstances were, in the main,

people. One surrounded one's self with--that is, one sought and lived

among--agreeable people, and these were found commonly among such as had

circumstances already agreeable. Selfishness was a word to keep on good

terms with by understanding its nature, and making one's own share of it

intelligent. Enlightened selfishness was the root of society. Good

society really consisted of people who had the time and took the pains

to be pleasant and entertaining, in order to have pleasure and

entertainment about them. This was the sensible and experienced thing in

the matter of the pursuit of happiness.

"Nellie"--Thaddeus's voice took a note of gravity--"you'll let me have

an interest in your pursuit. Some time"--the wrinkles of his smile shot

out around his eyes--"I'll explain to you how it is a case of

enlightened selfishness. Between you and me, I'm growing old, but

ordinarily I deny it."

It is possible that Nellie understood very little of Thaddeus's

doctrine, saw no distinct consequences whatever, and was only caught by

little gleaming points of illustration. The charm of Thaddeus's talk lay

in its opalescent effect, and this had much to do with gesture and

expression; so that "good society" may have been to her a phrase of the

haziest quality, except as it might mean a pair of slightly idealized

eye-glasses, rimmed with gold, and pointed at one in a manner to absorb

attention; "happiness," a certain wrinkled smile; and the "pursuit" of

it an endeavor to smile in that way. Thaddeus thought his doctrine

likely to suffer much translation. He could not follow its vanishing nor

guess what would happen to it.

It was a period of brooding and slow change for Helen. At such times,

one remembers, the soul was a highway for processional shadows. They

have no names in language. Only here and there one finds a thing said

of them that is touched with recollection; their voices are heard at

times in blown drifts of music; hints are given that it is not a

solitary experience.

Monthly or even more often thereafter Thaddeus left his club and

familiar pavements behind him, and travelled up the Wyantenaug Valley in

a dull, noisy train, even through that winter when the cold wind swept

down from Windless Mountain under the pines and piled drifts more than

commonly along the Windless Mountain road. "Personally" he took no

interest in the columned avenues of pines, the deep white ravine, the

black, tinkling stream, the groined architecture of ice. He liked well

enough the scents and balm of the country spring, the lilacs and the

hill winds in summer, but he liked better his pavements and club. It

argued a highly enlightened selfishness, a refined nicety of

calculation, such pains to be agreeable. If we charge him with

calculation, it is only to admire the refinement of it, and refer the

charge to his doctrine. For if the confession that he was secretly

growing old meant that he foresaw life would come presently to seem a

little vacant, without the intimate interest it once had, and his house

on Shannon Street be visited perhaps by ghosts that would not always

take pains to be agreeable, it would seem to show a skill in the pursuit

of happiness, an eye for a blind trail, not unworthy of the doctrine. To

foresee coming changes, what provision the soul would need in a year or

two more when middle life was past and the strong pull of the ebbing

tide beginning to be felt, to disguise from it the consequences of sixty

years, and so to persuade it gently, without force or argument, to

continue to idealize and feel agreeable, were a fine bit of diplomacy.

For it was not merely a matter of carrying Helen away to Shannon Street

to start there a fresh stream of interest, but Helen must take an

interest in him; they were to find each other lovable, if the choicest

result were to come; and Helen was here somewhat difficult. The stream

of interest was started for him. He felt it strongly when the first year

was gone and Hamilton was at its wintry busiest. But it was difficult to

be seen that she would pursue happiness with consistency.

It was the spring of the year '60 when she saw the green world once

more, and summer before she walked free of the garden. The lilacs hung

heavily and seemed almost to drip with thick perfume. Thrush, oriole,

and bobolink were pursuing happiness and warbling their success.

Thaddeus was there, and chirped in rivalry.

"But your mother would rather have something to submit to."

"Oh no, Thaddeus," protested the widow, mildly.

"You like the Lord to do you an injury. It makes a pretty item on the

balance-sheet."

"How can you say so?"

"My good sister!" Thaddeus raised despairing hands. "You consist

entirely of negatives. There is no positive opinion that can be

attributed to you. I give you a character and you deny it. You escape

definition. Personally, I doubt your existence. I believe you're a

myth."

Still the widow murmured, peacefully, "Oh no, Thaddeus," knitting and

rocking.

Thaddeus watched Nellie's face for signs of happiness, and the widow

denied with safety and assurance. It was no trouble, except to fit her

denials to the form of the attack. Thaddeus saw the loss of his rapier

thrusts of fine casuistry sometimes with passing irritation.

He went down to the post-office after supper, to Mr. Paulus, the

postmaster, one with whom he had gone forth on such balmy evenings, more

than forty years past, and done things from which their elders had

inferred disastrous careers. The postmaster was stout now, with grizzled

hair cut Quakerly, ponderously grave, except that his left eyelid

drooped and twitched. It was the one place on his wide face where the

old spirit of demonry hinted of itself, and spoke of the days of the

consulship of Tad and Pete. Without doubt the world was degenerate, and

had lost its breed of noble bloods. Alas, Tad and Pete, once sworn and

faithful, of one ideal together; now each in the eyes of the other was

an exquisite absurdity, and all the young were degenerate, except

Nellie. "Pete, she's doing well, poor little ghost, on my word."

"She'll bust out pretty soon then. Been loadin' up now goin' on two

year."

"I shall take her to Hamilton. She's a racer, boy. Smacked you with a

paint-brush! God bless her! I should think she did. In point of fact, it

served you right. You roasted Starr Atherton's litter of pigs yourself,

I recollect distinctly, and turned out a postmaster. Respectable

profession. I've nothing against it."

"I didn't mean to."

"Didn't mean to which? Fatheaded thing to try to do anyhow. I told

you--I precisely stated the probable result. I said, any pig of that

size would squeal loud enough to wake a congregation. And Starr Atherton

was out in the yard before he saw the fire, with a picture in his mind

already of himself pursuing Peter Paulus, pig-stealer."

Mr. Paulus twitched his eyelid and reverted to the other subject.

"Hamilton! Well--maybe she won't. She might remember your position in

society now. She might gunpowder the mayor an' let it go at that. What's

in will out, that's what I say--what's in will out. Now, as to paintin'

cats--"

"I beg your pardon! It is even said they were not your cats."

"As to smackin' faces with paint-brushes--anybody say it wasn't my

face?"

Thaddeus leaned forward eagerly.

"What was the color?"

"Well--the paint was green, but there must've been some white on the

brush. It appeared to be streaked."

Thaddeus settled his glasses, rested his chin on his cane, and studied

the postmaster's face. There were vast vacant spaces on it, where, it

seemed, one could keep on smacking green paint a long while and not lose

interest.

"What's in will out," repeated Mr. Paulus, heavily. "What's in will

out."

Up the hill as far as the church Thaddeus thought of the post-office as

compared to the Wyantenaug Club, in what respects the post-office had

good points; from the church across the sloping green, where in the dusk

the pale flowers glimmered against the grass, he thought of Mr. Paulus's

face smitten with paint; and so of Nellie, a slim, white ghost, with

eyes that sometimes looked wistfulness after nameless things, and

sometimes seemed to watch only the slow march of dreams. At the lilac

gate he stopped. Some one stood a moment squarely in the little doorway,

filling it with his shoulders, then turned half back and leaned against

the jamb.

"Morgan Map, by--a-mm." The light shone across the profile in the door.

The Maps were men of shoulders and stature, Morgan the largest of the

three; hair and brows of a Celtic yellow with a glint of red in them, a

face of cliffs and caverns, bones of length and massiveness. "Picts,

Scots, Caractacus. Vercingetorix," Thaddeus murmured. "My education was

faulty. It seems to me he should be painted blue and carry a club."

He plucked a lilac and sniffed it, leaning on the gate, looking at

Morgan contemplatively and at the placid knitting widow beyond.

"If I let that damned brute jockey me, it's funny."

The militant church with its starward steeple and weather-vane telling

confidently to all men which way the night winds of heaven blew, the

shining windows and doorways, the scent of lilacs and the glimmer of

white flowers on the grass, the rounded billows of the hills, Windless

Mountain and the Cattle Ridge dark against southern and northern skies,

the Four Roads, the meadows east where one knew the Mill Stream was

crooning to itself--Hagar, by dusk at least, was much the same as in the

consulship of Tad and Pete, now forty years later when Tad and Pete had

come to consider each other exquisite absurdities. Even after another

forty years, is there any change in Hagar at dusk? You cannot see how

the charcoal-burners have cut along the Cattle Ridge. Tad and Pete have

gone where one hopes for their sakes everything is not a solemnity. But

we were speaking of Hagar when the night drops low, when the hills seem

to draw near and listen, and something is said to the stars, which they

admit, about past and future being foolish endeavors of language to say

"now." There seems to be a background and foreground everywhere. And in

the foreground things appear to be hourly critical and important.

Morgan turned into the room and shut the door. Thaddeus dropped the

lilac promptly and opened the gate.

"I seem to object to his shutting that door." He walked up the garden

path, tapping the ground briskly with his cane, seeming to have in mind

things critical and important.

Chapter III

Of Morgan Map and his Purposes

Early frosts in October turned the maples into pillars of fire; followed

a long Indian summer, hazy, even-footed, thoughtful days; as if after

making ready this ceremonial purple and red and gold, gold brown of the

meadows, blue and gold of aster and golden-rod by roadsides and meadow

edges, veiled purple of the sweet fern in high pastures, the year

remembered that it was not a pageantry of entry and advance, but of

departure, and walked after the banners in recessional mood. In November

red and yellow leaves had flickered past the windows and were raked into

heaps on the village green.

Helen kicked through the leaves, scattering them with a dry rustle. "I'm

as fit as can be, Morgan."

"Don't jump the fence."

"I hadn't thought of it. It's the very thing."

"Wait."

She stopped and looked at him.

"Better not," said Morgan, dryly. Helen made a face, put one foot on the

low rail of the picket fence, jumped and plunged through the lilacs,

picked up her hat and swung into the path. Morgan stood still outside

the gate. "Then you'll have to come out again and go through."

His yellow eyebrows met over his eyes. Helen flushed, hesitated--"Don't

be an idiot," and then laughed. "I'll come if you don't mind my thinking

you're an idiot."

"I don't mind your saying you think so."

She came outside the gate, looking interested. Morgan leaned his back to

its post and smiled approval on Windless Mountain.

"Why not?"

"Oh, because you don't think so. You think I want you to do what I tell

you. That's very true; I do. Why shouldn't you?"

The question involved a series of other questions, linked and secret.

Helen fell to looking, too, at Windless Mountain, which seemed to be

brooding as well over its constitutional phenomena, whose causes were

ages ago and deep in the earth, its relations with other creatures such

as winds, clouds, the regular and the drifting stars.

She did do as Morgan said, whenever he said anything; at least, she had

almost always. When one was Morgan and not a girl, and seven years

older, and able to dare all things and do them--(to carry a person on

his shoulder miles, for instance, across the Cattle Ridge, together with

the game-bag, when a person was tired, and begging not to be disgraced

for a baby, and would not have shed a tear for a gold crown and a bushel

of diamonds)--of course it was right and necessary that such a one

should be worshipped and obeyed. Morgan broke into her thoughts.

"Is it fixed when you go to Hamilton?"

"After Christmas. Do you know, I believe uncle doesn't like you."

"Oh, well, that's all right. I'll forgive him till he feels better."

To fear nothing, to count no costs, to be unlimited! The two years

seemed as long as lifetimes, since that summer when things happened; and

Morgan was still Morgan. He had never cared who was angry with him, or

who liked or disliked him. Helen had longed not to care and been

bitterly driven to do so always. She struggled to imitate him. In the

face of sudden danger, attack of angry game-preserver or owner of posted

stream, or any crisis of the woods when the partridge whirred or the fox

broke into the open, Morgan's face would not flush nor his hand tremble;

but he only seemed to gather his brows and centre himself on the

subject, while little Nellie wondered and worshipped. So he stood for an

ideal of effectiveness and freedom from the tyranny of circumstances,

which to her small experience and large deduction seemed visibly to bend

aside before and around him, from the tyranny of other people's

opinions, which he cared so little about that they turned into harmless

murmurs behind him instead of planting themselves monumentally in front.

For at times this world appeared to exist for opposition only, in iron

battle order, bristling with spears, stolid, reasonless, forbidding. It

was a caste system, a privileged aristocracy of one's elders, the

dead-line of an old régime. Morgan walked through it promptly. "People,"

he said, "pretend a lot more than they are, most of 'em. My dad doesn't

so much."

But freedom seems not to be an end in itself, only an opportunity to do

things differently. It has its own régime, its tyranny of devotions,

heroisms, and heroes, military, imperial.

That Morgan proposed a Napoleonic career for himself--reasonably such,

for he was no dreamer--that he proposed to dominate, to break through

limits and oppositions, to drive a path through the jam of men wide

enough for his shoulder muscles to work in, was merely his own candid

statement. And regarding Thaddeus, his expression sprang equally from

candor. A man's dislike for him was a poor reason for disliking that

man. To carry malice was to carry a load. A man was an engine for

covering ground and arriving at ends, and malice was burned-out slack.

Resentments of old hostilities and memories of old loves were slack,

likes and dislikes mostly whims. Mankind was various and whimsical, and

few were such as discarded futilities and went on, which was lucky for

the few.

"You're very sure of yourself, Morgan."

"Aren't you as sure of me, Nellie? You used to be. Well," he said,

slowly, "you see, if Thaddeus Bourn tried to take a fall out of me, he'd

want to be subtle, and then it would be all up with him, for I shouldn't

understand it."

"Why should he want to take a fall out of you?"

"If he doesn't, why should I mind his disliking me?"

"Wouldn't you mind being disliked by anybody, until they did something,

really?"

"Not much."

"Oh! Not by me?"

"I'd rather be disliked by the United States. Besides, that's foolish."

"Oh, I don't know. It's funny, I have an opinion of you that's miles

long. It isn't exactly an opinion, either."

Morgan smiled again with approval on Windless Mountain.

"If you're going to be subtle I sha'n't understand it," meaning possibly

it was the privilege of girls to have half-grown ideas that they could

not describe. A man had business with only such as he could handle, put

to the use of resolve, statement, or persuasion. If he was unable to

express his mind completely, it was because there was rubbish in his

mind. But between himself and Windless Mountain, he did not object to

Helen's having an opinion of him that was not exactly an opinion.

Any one could have an understanding with Windless, that eclectic

philosopher, with his feet deep in the earth, fertile loins, jovial

belly, the chest of a wrestler, and the gray, scarred head of a prophet.

On his flanks were chuckling little rivulets, nesting birds, and all

kinds of flitting incident. From a distance you might see his forehead

lifted to abstractions, pale-blue, spiritual things. Whatever you said

to him, he had an answer to your liking. Whatever your philosophy,

somewhere about him he felt much the same. If you hated an enemy, there

was a trifle of ice, a certain ambient glacier that once ground him

badly, of whom he had no loving remembrance and the grooves whereof were

on his bones. He was no moralist. The liar and the thief could find

companionship there, the outcast existences more deserted, the murderer

note the hawk risen red and screaming from the thicket, and admit a

spirit that bettered his own. Only if you were not content in finding a

likeness in detail, and wished to look straight to his scarred forehead,

you would probably do well to be candid and take your time. What you got

from him would be no special advice, but an assurance that he understood

you, and there would be something in his manner of understanding that

would meet the case and be enough. If it was a moral influence, it lay

in bringing you to see the relations of things in size and quality, and

in making your own directions more evident.

* * * * *

"I like Windless best," said Helen, dreamily. "He's the nicest person

there is."

"It would be no joke to have him in your way."

They turned into the garden and up the path between brown, withered

flower-beds.

"I jumped the fence, anyway, Morgan. It would be idiotic to hurt myself.

I won't do it again."

"The point was, you didn't mind the colonel."

"I'm on a furlough. Take me up Windless again."

"Not if you're on a furlough."

Chapter IV

In which Thaddeus uses the term "Moral Justification"

In the early days of Squire Map's seclusion he had not yet made the

hermit of himself that Hagar was familiar with later. Men have said that

he never went outside the village after the fall of '58, at least never

to Hamilton. The grooves where his bitterness ran plainly deepened as

the stream wore them year by year; possibly the gradual noting how his

withdrawal made no empty place among busy men, how feigning friends who

had turned enemies and rebellious sons went their way and prospered,

helped to widen and darken the shadow of his misanthropy. He had been a

lawyer, a politician, and made his stir in his day. In 1860 he was a

gray, grim gentleman in a long coat and tall, black hat, with a

caverned, bony face and large frame, whom it was not considered wisdom

to address without good reason, but who was seen often enough about the

village.

And it was not so strange as to startle Widow Bourn in her halcyon calm

when he knocked at her door one afternoon, and entered, doffing his tall

hat.

"I hope I don't disturb you, Mrs. Bourn." The widow signified her

unruffled comfort and hoped he would sit down.

"With your permission, I will do so."

Followed a pause while the widow pursued her knitting, and the squire's

reddish, bushy eyebrows drooped and gathered, while he studied a patch

of sunlight on the floor.

"I recollect that my son Morgan and your daughter Nellie were once quite

inseparable, a companionship regarded as singular, considering the

difference in ages, not common between a young man, approximately, and a

child. It was, however, I believe, a fact."

"Morgan was always fond of Nellie."

The widow hoped secretly that, whatever he intended to say, he would

continue to put it in the form of statements with which it was no

trouble to agree.

"I am told he has been here of late--in fact, frequently."

That also was true. The widow wondered why people were afraid of Squire

Map. He was a very comfortable person to talk with.

"Sickness or misfortune is not, if I understand his character, a thing

that ordinarily interests my son Morgan. I need not point out to you

that young people of a certain age are apt to give much attention to the

subject of marriage."

The widow felt a twinge of discomfort. It was but slight. She objected

that Nellie was young, hardly more than a child.

"In apprehension of the future, then, Mrs. Bourn, I have to say that I

doubt whether any young woman will find the happiness that is due her in

such an intimate relation with my son Morgan. I more than doubt it."

The widow dropped her knitting and stared helplessly.

"That is perhaps all I have to say, Mrs. Bourn. I apprehend something of

the character of your daughter Nellie. Her good looks are remarkable,

her disposition and intelligence even more interesting. That may not be

my only motive in coming here. Whatever the motive, I beg you to believe

the warning is entirely candid."

The widow felt herself in the shadow of a vague distress, painfully

called upon to say something appropriate. She murmured that Nellie was

going to live with her uncle that winter. The squire raised his hedge of

eyebrows suddenly.

"In Hamilton?"

With her uncle Thaddeus, the elder brother of Simon. He had taken so

much interest in Nellie.

The squire mused. Yes. Could Mrs. Bourn, if Mr. Thaddeus Bourn again

visited Hagar, contrive to suggest to him personally that his former

friend, Gerald Map, remembered him with pleasure and would be under

obligation to Mr. Bourn if he, Mr. Thaddeus Bourn, would call upon him,

Gerald Map?

The squire then took his leave. He came upon Morgan himself crossing the

green with his gun and hunting-dog. They faced each other and stopped.

Mr. Paulus from the post-office below the hill observed them.

"Resemblin'," he remarked, "two rams that's goin' to butt lightnin' out

of themselves in a minute."

"You still visit Hagar, then?" said the squire, his voice muttering

thunder.

"Quite often."

The trick of the gathered eyebrows was curiously common to both. The

squire took his time.

"You intend to marry Miss Helen Bourn?"

"I've been figuring on that for seven years. You haven't found me

changing my mind. I intend to do it."

"I intend to prevent it, Morgan."

"In Nellie's interest, sir?"

"I regard it as in her interest."

"I mean, is that your interest in it?"

"I shall not say."

"I didn't feel encouraged to think it was an interest in me. But it's

natural to ask."

"Quite natural."

The squire walked a few steps, stopped and looked back, his eyebrows

drooping over their melancholy caves. "I take no interest in your

success in any direction. I shall be measurably interested in your

failures. Whenever you have a failure to report, and are inclined to

report it personally, I shall be glad to see you."

"That's an odd offer, sir." Morgan swung his gun over his shoulder. "I

never saw any real need of a row, and I don't yet. And I don't pretend

to understand the mixture now."

The squire went his way without answering. Morgan looked after him, then

at his hunting-dog sniffing among the heaps of fallen leaves, at

Windless Mountain, and found nothing suggestive. He walked slowly

towards the Bourn house.

Ordinarily a man spent his time better in understanding his own purposes

than the purposes of other men. On the whole, they were more easily

thrust aside than understood. That was Morgan's settled conviction or

characteristic. He did not mean to make an exception in favor of the

squire. At the same time, "take an interest in your failures" had an odd

sound, and inviting him to come and report them was a bit cool, if he

only wanted to gloat over them. Hardly in "dad's" style, anyway.

"Gloating" was a futile occupation. The way the squire had taken that

row had been futile enough. But the question was whether he could really

do anything to make a nuisance of himself. It not appearing how he

could, Morgan concluded to shake off the subject, quickened his pace,

and whistled to his dog.

Mr. Paulus remarked, despondently, from his philosophic distance, "I

most thought they'd do some buttin'."

His despondency led to reminiscence. "Seems to me folks ain't so lively

as when I was a boy. The town's runnin' down."

He stood in his shirt-sleeves, though there was a bleakness in the wind

that hinted of December. The bare branches of the maples creaked, and

the dead leaves fled up the road in a whirl of dust.

* * * * *

It was late in December when Thaddeus came to Hagar again, a Hagar of

gray, frozen roads, little patches of dry, drifted snow, and nights

falling early. Mr. Paulus sat by a lamp in the rear of the half-lit

store, out of sorts with rheumatism and by reason of human nature. It

was five o'clock. Thaddeus entered with an air of happy secrecy, planted

himself, white-skinned, wrinkled, smiling, before Mr. Paulus's

red-and-round-faced gloom.

"Pete, I've been to see Gerald Map. Upon my word! Singular interview,

which I shall not tell you anything about."

"Ain't no need," grumbled Mr. Paulus. "Been agreein' on your epitaphs,

an' it's about time. Like to make epitaphs for all the danged fools in

town myself, an' fit the corpses to the dates."

Thaddeus sat down carefully, and wiped his glasses with snowy

handkerchief, leaning forward to the light; adjusted them, leaned back,

and rubbed his hands softly.

"Pete, when you've made up your mind about something, it's a

satisfaction to happen on--a--unexpectedly--a moral justification of it.

It really is."

"Don't want one. Wouldn't have no use for it. After those folks'd seen

their epitaphs I'd writ 'em, if they didn't do what was decent--"

"A--I was referring," Thaddeus insinuated, "to myself."

"You were!" Mr. Paulus reflected, dropped his eyelid, and grew a shade

more cheerful. "Moral justification! Well--I caught Cummings's boy

stealin' plug tobacco th' other day. An' he said he wanted it for

Halligan. Guess he did. Likely Halligan give him three cents for a

five-cent plug. He looked the picture of virtue, anyhow; said he never

chawed: he wa'n't up to no such viciousness. Moral justification! It's a

good thing."

Thaddeus smiled absently, pursed his lips, and was silent.

"Pete," he said at last, "how does green paint feel?"

Mr. Paulus's gloom faded away, and his interest, his love of life, came

gently back.

"Wet," he said, thoughtfully. "Gets stiff after dryin'."

"Ah," murmured Thaddeus, "exactly."

* * * * *

A few days later Helen and Thaddeus took their way down the Wyantenaug

Valley to Hamilton, and left Hagar to the wintry hills and Widow Bourn

to her own manner of content.

Chapter V

Introducing Hamilton and Saint Mary's Organ

Hamilton took its name from a little English hamlet. The statesman was a

coincidence. It lies in a bend of the Wyantenaug River, which hardly

ripples on the piers of its docks, ten miles from the sea and at the

head-water of the river's navigation. Its colonial memories gather about

the Common where the first settlers built their church and cluster of

shingled houses, and about the docks where ships from the South Seas

used to come in at flood-tide, from the capes and the Indian Ocean, from

the West Indies and from England, whalers, too, and many fishing-smacks.

The Common is half a mile from the docks. The old church stands in the

centre of it. Century elms and oaks are scattered about, not planted in

regular rows; but wherever it had seemed to be a good place for a tree,

there the tree had grown. On the south side, or Main Street, are the

courthouse and city hall; on the east side, or Charles Street, are the

Constitution and Wyantenaug clubs and a church with twin steeples; on

the north side, or James Street, square brick and stuccoed residences,

with lawns, and sometimes a silent fountain or solitary marble statue,

such as that dancing faun which appears to dislike its occupation; on

the west side, or Academy Street, there are stores and a hotel, but

farther up Academy Street are the law-school buildings, farther still

the academy itself, founded in the reign of William and Mary, where from

of old the Latin declensions were learned with the aid of a ferule and

curiously called "humane letters."

All the flat, green meadows that once stretched west and south from near

by the Common as far as the river are filled with brick blocks and

industry now--stores, factories, and tenements. Two railroads run in

subways to the station and bridge at the bend in the river. Jamaica,

India, and Academy streets follow the old meadow roads, along which

merchants in tie-wigs used to drive leisurely to the docks, where a

leisurely ship or two would be lying, and there examine their

consignments. North and east of the Common in the angle between Main and

Academy streets lies the section in which those for the most part used

to live who maintained mahogany tables and were able to exercise choice

as to where they would live. Shannon Street runs from the northwest

corner of the Common diagonally northeastward, crossing three irregular

openings, miscalled squares, where muddles of streets came together, and

monuments have been erected to commemorate two wars and a distinguished

judge. It ends in Temple Square, which marks its exclusiveness, and at

the same time admits the aristocracy of Shannon Street by having no

other entrance than Shannon Street. The houses about the square are much

alike, stuccoed, severe, with small porches, pillars, and iron fences

close to the sidewalk. The centre of the square has a high iron fence

about it, gates with scrollwork, which are commonly shut.

* * * * *

The house of Thaddeus faced on Philip's Road and Shannon Street, not far

from the monument to the War of 1812, the two streets meeting at dull

angles in front. There was more of it on Philip's Road, but it was

numbered with Shannon Street, because to live on Shannon Street was a

better principle. The street signs of Philip's Road at different times

had been changed to "Pequot Avenue," with a view to euphony and a

securer social position, but the commissioners were not persistent

enough, and nature was against them. The name hinted it once to have

been an Indian trail, or at least that some person had said so; and

whether this person was truthful and informed was forgotten, too. The

chronicles but mentioned the tradition. The road showed a certain

furtive vagrancy, running from the theatre at the corner of the fair

grounds barbarously and disorderly through two blocks, otherwise of a

shape without reproach, and shying away from the law school--an instinct

of untamed nature. It approached Shannon Street gradually with sullen

suspicion, caught sight of the monument of 1812, plunged suddenly

across, ran riot through a number of blocks, and escaped into the open

country. So that Thaddeus's house was numbered on Shannon Street.

Charles Street ran by it on the west, and so past Saint Mary's Church

directly to the Common. Helen looked first from the west window of her

room on Charles Street and saw bare boughs of maple-trees shining in the

cold moonlight, and across the way a long row of glimmering vestibules

and curtains; then from the south window, and saw a house with a large,

glowing window beyond a vacant space of lawn, over it the apse at the

rear of a church, with two small steeples, and farther on and up the big

steeple and gilded cross glittering in the mist of the moon. A lady

walked past and past the glowing window. The room within looked warm,

mellow, peaceful, but she seemed restless. Once she stopped and even

seemed to gaze up at Helen, but her face was in shadow. Helen thought

she was tall and had thick hair.

Some one was playing the organ in Saint Mary's, a sombre mutter and deep

breathing underneath, wild voices calling and crying above. More voices

gathered; they struggled, strained, shrieked reproach, and wailed for

pity, till one by one they were hushed and only the measured breathing

went on.

In the morning Thaddeus said: "You've done very well. I've heard that

the two things most worth while in Hamilton now are to see Mrs. Mavering

and hear Gard Windham's playing. Personally--" Thaddeus poised his

coffee-cup, "as regards Mrs. Mavering, I believe that to be correct. As

regards the other, it has sometimes seemed to me that it was not

exactly--a--civilized; that, in point of fact, it appeared to be at

times--it might be said to be at times--a kind of description of society

among the fallen angels--an objectionable subject for comment so public,

I should say, distinctly. It appears, I might say, to lack

restraint--a--good taste. I seem to see a person in impossible garments

dancing on the roof of Saint Mary's with great impatience, and stating

his distress in strong language. Personally, therefore, I wish Gard

Windham would keep his spectres out of my back yard, and--my dear Helen!

I beg of you, don't look at me in such a--a--vast manner. Mr. Windham is

considered a remarkable musician."

"I saw him too, Uncle Tad."

"On my word! Where?"

"On the roof. He was acting that way you said."

"Well, bless my soul!"

Thaddeus walked down-town thoughtfully. "She'll run off after one of

Gard Windham's ghosts the next thing. No more than likely. She has an

imagination that's as honest as the bank and the finest pair of eyes,

my word, in Hamilton."

In the afternoon Morgan came with his trotting stallion, Consul, and

drove her by Philip's Road to the fair grounds to show his paces on the

track. The day was cold, dry, blue, and still, but on the track the

speed made a rush of air against her face. The fair grounds were empty,

the track with a patch of snow here and there, the stands staring from

thousands of empty seats.

The great horse lengthened his stride. He was all power and ease. Such

controlled crescendo of speed seemed to mean deep reserves. There was a

thrill in the sense of those reserves.

"Do you like it, Nellie?"

"It's glorious!"

"Of course you like it. Hold hard."

"You're the right stuff, Nell," he said at Thaddeus's door.

Morgan's commendations of her had always been rare enough to be

thrilling. Her head sang with "Morgan, Morgan," the victorious, the

controlling. The sound of Consul's hoofs, the rush of wind in her face,

the flying objects, had been only expressions of the beat and rush of

his will. The sense of him was overwhelming. It surprised her to find

that Thaddeus appeared smaller than ordinary, more frail and artificial.

He seemed to be chattering things without significance. It was the

contrast with Morgan's immense genuineness and direct speech, and

because to have one's mind filled with Morgan was to be forced

imperiously to look at things in Morgan's way, which was an absolute

way. It brought one to despise decorations, mannerisms, whatever did not

come to the point and justify itself; to summon all vague emotion and

half-formed ideas of one's own to pay their way or admit bankruptcy and

disappear; to expect other people to meet one with the same solidity of

surface. Conversation, according to Morgan, which consisted of an

exchange of intuitions, was a kind of inflated currency; the bulk of it

was irredeemable; there might be a bullion fact or two behind, but to

try to do business on the basis of it was futile. A man might either pay

good coin or counterfeit for purposes of his own, but why play ducks and

drakes with himself? Thaddeus Bourn, by an odd inconsistency, was a

business man of some acumen, who outside of that chose to pretend to be

a child with strings of beads, and had nothing visible to gain by it. A

sentimentalist was the most irritating of men, who wasted his time

pretending to be more of a fool than he was.

So that Helen became engaged in judging Thaddeus severely, silently,

under Morgan's principles.

"Helen," said Thaddeus, using an interpretative eye-glass, "permit me to

say you're exceedingly young, delightfully young. I am pleased that you

enjoyed your drive. Our friend Morgan is an interesting barbarian. In

course of time, no doubt, you will see the advantages of civilization."

"What do you mean, Uncle Tad?" she said, pursuing cash values.

"There is a kind of barbarism," continued Thaddeus, "which refuses to be

civilized, and, in point of fact, eats the missionary. It finds the

missionary in that capacity good, and goes its way with--with

congratulation. It is striking; really, there is an impressive

simplicity about it; but, dear me, you know it will never do. It's a

little--isn't it a little obtuse? At least, my dear--at least, one might

be allowed to doubt whether--it does not seem so, personally, to the

missionary."

Thaddeus could hardly have hoped to dissipate any dominant sense of

Morgan from Helen's mind with such fugitive sayings. He was probably

testing, considering. "We are all egoists, my dear, except a few women.

Morgan is the primitive and aboriginal egoist. He is--a--aggressive,

carnivorous. I am a social egoist; your father, who wished, with

emphasis, to be remembered, was, pardon me, a regretful egoist; your

mother is a contented and unaggressive egoist. And so every one has, so

to speak, a class. It is no reproach; it is nature, my dear--law. Why

pretend to escape? But," he concluded, with grace and precision, "there

is a choice, and in matters of choice I always take pleasure in pointing

out to you the advantages of civilization."

Morgan still headed the march of Helen's dreams. The same moon, a little

fuller than the night before, laying a thicker wash of silver, hung over

the apse of Saint Mary's. She looked from her window at the roofs where

the organ player's spectre had seemed to be dancing then, mistily,

wildly, to the storm of sound below. The friendly window was dim, which

the lady had walked past and past, restless, tall, thick-haired.

How strong and wonderful was Morgan! What more could there be under the

moon and stars than the will to dare and the power to do? Helen had no

name for the spell. Only of late had she thought of it in detail. In old

times the word "Morgan" itself expressed the whole subject. It described

the beginning and the end of things.

The organ began to breathe somewhere behind the stained windows that

were just glimmering. It seemed to be laying the foundations of its

temple of sound on the undermost bed-rock. Now it was lifting the walls,

and one gathered and knew gradually how vast was the weight of the

masonry; how the power beneath that raised it foot by foot was vaster

still; how sure of itself was the power beneath, for certainly it only

used one hand to force that steady climb of masonry; the other ran

along, chiselling designs, gargoyles, pale statues in niches, sweeping a

series of half-circles and filling them with deep-sea and warmest sunset

color till, lo! it was a rose window.

Helen breathed fast, pressing her face to the cold pane. Something here,

too, was strong!

She snatched a cloak, sped through halls, down stairs, through more

halls and a back door, out into the moonlit yard. There was only a low

iron fence to jump, and she was under the curve of the apse. A door

stood half open in the corner where it joined the main building, and

within was a swing-door which yielded noiselessly. It was quite dark

there under the gallery, but a few gas-lights flickered in the chancel

and shone on lower ranges of gilded organ-pipes, banked away beyond in a

kind of transept, and on a choir screen that hid the organist. A few

dusky figures could be made out sitting in pews here and there in the

nave. Helen crept into a seat next a stone pillar that felt rugged and

cool, and was pushed forward partly into the pew.

The building of the temple had ceased, its visionary masonry, carvings,

and rose window vanished at a touch withdrawn. The organ was murmuring

down among the old foundations of the world, communing with the

beginnings of time, meditating to rise out of the deep with a new

creation. Otherwise the church was so still that the air seemed heavy

with the stillness.

A multitude of fleeting, flickering sounds broke out, like a burst of

fireworks, the air full of shooting-stars, blown bubbles, and tinsel.

There was a piping and dancing in the sunlight on delicate meadow grass,

by pipers and dancers who could not conceivably grow old. Then a voice

spoke suddenly among them. One could not tell where it came from or what

it said. It was cold, sombre, indifferent. But it ceased and the dancing

went on, more bacchanal now. There were perfumes, garlands on hot

foreheads, shrieking and whirring of stringed instruments, high

laughter, and swinging in circles. The loud, cold voice spoke again, and

left no echoes or after-murmurs. Something more quiet followed, as if

the memory of fear could not be quite put away, or remained in the form

of an altered mood. People walked hand-in-hand. There was warm twilight

and the ripple of a flowing river. After all, life was sweeter for

seriousness, love best in the stillness and twilight. The cold,

insistent voice rose, a stone pillar of sound, and all these things

became complaining ghosts before its weightier reality. So that at

length and in the end it remained alone, except for the mutter in the

pit below, and there was no triumph in its victory, but it continued

cold, sombre, indifferent, monotonous, heavy.

Some one beyond the pillar sighed in the darkness, and a hand fell on

Helen's hand which gripped the edge of the seat. Helen started and

whispered, "Oh, that was hateful!"

"I beg your pardon."

"He plays like anything, but--" She came out of her absorption to know

that she had been whispering her thoughts into the darkness, and that

the darkness had given forth an apology. A shadow the other side of the

little stone pillar seemed to be leaning forward now and looking at her.

A dress rustled.

"The music was sad, was it not?" and Helen whispered again:

"They tried all sorts of ways, and tried and tried, but it never was any

use, and they gave up and died."

"Did it seem so clear? He's beginning again."

It was a kind of nocturne or slumber song, a rocking movement with a

flute tone moving through a dimmer mist of harmonies, soothing here and

there a restless chord. "Has He not made the night for your slumber, and

darkened the earth for your sleep, and lit the earth softly with stars,

and moved it among them as a child's cradle is rocked? Wake, then, if

you may not sleep, but only to watch the moon rising and hear the croon

of the sea. Murmur and motion, motion and murmur; but remember wonder,

remember beauty, and let not anything persuade you from them. A moon and

a sea be in your heart, a hush of an inner place. _Ora pro nobis_, and

for the growth of flowers on ancient graves. _Requiescant in pace_,

souls stately and dead. If the truth is a dream, then the dream is true,

and therefore He made the night for your slumber, and darkened and lit

the earth and moved it softly among stars, and gave to the moon its

rising and to the sea its motion and murmur."

* * * * *

They went out by the swing-door together, passed from the shadow of the

apse to the level yard, and stopped.

"I think your name is Helen Bourn," said the other. "Mine is Rachel

Mavering. You will come to see me often. We are so near."

Chapter VI

Introducing Gard Windham and the Brotherhood of Consolation

One warm, rainy evening in the year '44, and in the great city that is

flanked on either side by a river and a strait, Father Andrew plodded

along an avenue of small shops, whose windows rested their chins on the

wet sidewalk and blinked through steaming panes. His dingy umbrella

dripped in the rain, and the skirts of his robe flapped against his

white stockings. He had in his mind no more than presently the opening

of the door in the brick wall of a cloister court, the sleepy roll of

the vesper service, refection, complines, a little private,

companionable prayer, such as ever seems to be heard kindly if one is

trustful, and then the sleep which comes to tired saint and sinner alike

with singular tolerance. Alas! one's fat legs became tired enough with

climbing stairways, and the soul sore with its strained sympathies.

A lean, wet-haired boy, plodding past him, glanced up with large,

drowsy-lidded eyes, and slid under his broad umbrella, making no

comment. Father Andrew chuckled and sighed. Giving and taking were a

simple incident, if giving were merely to carry an umbrella for two,

taking merely to step under it, and charity were not charity but

companionship.

"Where are you going?"

"I guess I'll go with you," after hesitating.

"But where did you come from?"

"Lappo's."

"And where's Lappo?"

"I don' know. He's dead."

Father Andrew chuckled and sighed again. Very likely he could not have

decided himself, from any earthly information, where Lappo was. "Was it

Lappo the fruit-seller? Yes, yes. And what is your name?"

"Gard Windham."

"Good--Well, well! A--mm--And Lappo wasn't your father? Who was?"

"I don' know."

"Anybody know?"

"I guess they don't."

"Well, what--that is, dear me! You don't say so! I mean, where'd he get

you?"

"Got me to the Foundlings. Lappo"--speaking in the way of quiet

conversation--"Lappo had fits."

"Yes, yes. Ga--"

"Gard Windham."

Father Andrew fell to patting one fat hand on the back of the other,

which gripped the umbrella. It was his habit to pat one hand softly over

the other whenever he was giving himself advice, or found himself driven

to some conclusion which could not be soothed or softened by any more

logical method. "Yes, yes. Dear me!" A life probably of unsanctioned

origin. It was apt to be the reason for the closed door and the lost

key.

They came to the door in the brick wall, and went from the street that

murmured sadly with the rain, into the little paved court that murmured

sadly with the rain.

Then Father Andrew sat down before the Father Superior, whose black eyes

glowed and dreamed, and felt himself like a small particle of dust,

happy in its humility.

"It is as you say," said the Superior. "A door is closed behind it.

Consecration is sometimes the more complete."

Father Andrew murmured that it was, and thought of the refectory and a

salad he knew of with peppers in it. He was used to thinking of salads

when he should not be thinking of them. He was sorry for it, and knew

that he had no claim to anything but humility.

"The face promises and threatens," mused the Superior. "How often is it

that the highest that is spiritual is based on the strongest that is

worldly."

The Superior was a man of symbols and analogies, swarthy of skin and

large of frame, one whose conceptions came red from their furnace.

Father Andrew's mind was nestled the rather in a certain padded

placidity. Moreover, there was the salad, with its peppers. No doubt, if

the Superior saw promises of a more than common consecration, and

threatenings of peculiar importance in this young person without origin,

it was a thing to be expected of the Superior's holy and profound

discernment. The Superior's spiritual enterprise was ever extraordinary.

He was of such as had from the beginning fought in the vanguard of the

Church, and been her glory and adornment. For himself, Father Andrew

discerned little further than to feel that his duty of distributing the

brotherhood's charities would be easier if every one had the young

person's native assurance. He felt that Providence, clearly with a

purpose, had bestowed upon himself such limited insight wherewith to be

content. It enabled him at least to admire the Superior without limit.

He went his way to the salad and the peppers, and Gard remained in the

house of the Brotherhood of Consolation.

* * * * *

It was a Catholic order, somewhat quiet in its ways. Not many of the

brothers were like the Superior, whose faith was a yearning in the blood

as fiery as young love, and for whom night-long struggles of prayer

appeared to be a normal way of living. For the most part they seemed to

be elderly men, keeping the rule without any apparent effort, but rather

as something it would be an effort to vary from. Probably they were

happier than most, in the shuffle of fate, manage to be. It would be

difficult to show they were not. The monastery bell clinked at small

intervals of the day and night, and slippered feet were ever going

whispering down the corridors on the heels of the sliding moment, to

place some office of performance or prayer accurately in its little

division of time. And this method and regulation of hours, so old, so

grown from measureless experience and minute knowledge of humanity,

seemed to be a kind of setting or framework to keep in place, till their

times came, the souls for whom atonement was accomplished; or for the

others, to keep the saving of their souls in orderly process of

accomplishment. The faces of all except the Superior looked something

alike. They broke easily into smiles, but laughter seldom went beyond a

happy chuckle.

The window of Gard's little cell looked over the court against the face

of a dead wall that ended a block of uniform houses. The cloister

covered two of the remaining sides, a brick wall ten feet high the

fourth, and a thick wooden door led through this into the street. The

court was asphalted, except for a strip under the dead wall, where one

Brother Francis planted things hopefully every spring, and found

entertainment all summer in the ill-advised efforts they made to grow.

It was Francis who taught Gard his Latin accidents, and later the

writings of those dignified heathen, Cæsar and Tullius Cicero; later

still his Greek, in which language appeared the writings of one

Herodotus, and of others called "Fathers of the Church," of whom he

might disbelieve Herodotus if he chose--an unnecessary distinction; he

believed them all fervently. One of his vivid memories was the

delivering before brothers Francis and Andrew, with violence and tears,

the oration, "Tandem aliquando, Quirites," with indignation because both

chuckled without intermission, and would not see the importance of

condemning Catiline. Francis had general charge of the monastery school,

which was filled and emptied daily through a special door on the avenue.

But the scholars seldom went further than reading and writing, sums and

fractions, and the lives of those saints who had had the more

interesting adventures; so that, under the Superior's permission, to

lead Gard into these high places of learning was a pleasure to which

Francis surrendered himself, he feared, with sinful abandonment.

Music, Gard studied with one Brother Johannes, who played the little

organ in the whitewashed chapel, all white except by the altar, where

there was a distinction of gilded woodwork, silver candlesticks, and

purple cloths, and so cold in winter that one's fingers were numb on

the keys. He was an old, bowed-over man, Johannes, with frail, waxen

hands, absent-minded, apt to forget his rule and be late, and not

understand why the Superior persisted in modifying his discipline. He

feared the Superior estimated his sins too lightly, and died in the year

'52, when Gard was seventeen. Gard had to play the organ at offices

after that, and to go daily three blocks up the avenue to the church of

the Sacred Trinity, and take his lesson from Fritz Moselle, a mighty

German from Strassburg, near the Rhine. He learned many things besides

harmony and counterpoint of Fritz, who was a cosmopolitan, and believed

not in the faith of man or woman; but he believed that art was the one

country of the soul, and that in conduct it was the duty of every one to

"do as he _verdammt_ please."

"Look you, _kleiner_! In de mass--yes. Some monk he haf art in

him--Gott, yes! He found a place for his soul to live in. He know diese

vorldt was a circus, und he vas a lil' boy und can't go. He mus' stay to

home. Ach! he feel sad. Und by-and-by he compose music to a circus in

hefen, vich vas de mass you play yesterday. Aber you mus' play de Bach

fugue severe. Maybe you make a good monk, but you haf too much luxury

in your bones to play de Bach fugue, _hein_? No? Play den, p'tit

anchorite, und let each of your fingers be von of de Ten Commandments,

or Gott! you don' play him not any." The organ at Trinity was quite

another matter than the little one which wheezed plaintively in the

brotherhood's whitewashed chapel.

Once a week he had to go to the Superior and be examined, and probably

read a chapter of St. Augustine. It was a ceremony of indefinite length,

for the Superior sometimes fell into a monologue, fervid as St.

Augustine's, while walking to and fro; and Gard used to imagine the room

full of spirits and misty angels, listening--all of them--breathless,

astonished, and a little frightened; for there could not be any one who

was not afraid of the Superior, unless it were the _bonus Deus_, and

even He must be astonished. At length the great, swarthy man would lay

his hand on Gard's head--a large hand, lean and strong, and vibrating

with the throb and blast of the furnace that was in him.

"Oh, Infinite and Tender, if it is needed for the saving of this young

soul, send him sorrow and pain, and let his grief be deep." And Gard

would come away tingling like the bells of Trinity, which had a chime of

twenty, and it made the bell-tower rock to play them hard. He never

after lost the impression that those interviews, of all kinds of human

experience, probably most resembled death and resurrection, and things

likely to happen at the gate of the celestial city. He grew to something

over a medium, slim height at this time, had drowsy eyelids, and wakeful

gray eyes under them. He laughed with a bass voice, liked brothers

Francis and Andrews, and Fritz Moselle, and worshipped the Superior, but

preferred to dodge him. The preference was probably a sin, one which

Brother Francis claimed to have prayed for in himself some twenty years

without effecting. He discovered that the Superior, Francis, and Fritz

Moselle had each severally a distinct point of view, and that you could

tell beforehand in what direction their interpretations of anything

would point. He found that he liked the organ in Trinity better than

Cicero, and watching the throng of men and women, with bright colors in

their hats, as he went to and from the brotherhood and Trinity, if not

better, at least differently, than either. And in the year '55 he

discovered that he was expected presently to take the vows, and awoke

to the further fact that the idea filled him with melancholy. It

resembled to him a sandy desert, with not an oasis in sight, not a

palm-tree against the sky.

The children who followed the piper of Hamelin, the mariners of Odysseus

who cocked their ears to the sirens, and other harkers to such

instrumental enchantment, have reported experiences that are much alike.

They heard, it seems, a high, thin fluting, ineffably sweet, which

seemed to imply that just beyond those blue hills, or those white

breakers, or a few turns of the next street, there lay an extraordinary

region overrun with smiling probabilities; for there, whatever one

dreamed of most was more than likely to be found, whether it was

sugar-plums, or a girl in the brake with sunny hair, or a sword and

shield, and a banner to follow withal.

But when Gard told Father Andrew that he would not take the vows, Father

Andrew acted as if it were a new thing, and lifted his fat hands

helplessly.

"Good--A--Dear me! That is, I mean why not?"

Then he patted Gard's hand with his soft palm, and chuckled and sighed.

"But it's true," Gard said. "I'll tell you why."

"The blessed--I mean, don't! Tell the Superior." And he scuttled away in

alarm, murmuring, "I wish that boy didn't surprise me so."

It had not occurred to Gard, but evidently he must tell the Superior;

and how could the Superior be made to understand about the high fluting,

and that it said "Follow, follow," so that one needs must go; and all

about the sugar-plums and the girl in the brake, and the banner and

sword and shield? And, if not, what was there to tell the Superior, more

than to make a bare statement of his rooted ingratitude, his

incorrigibly evil nature, and his resolve to go? Probably there was not

another such case in the history of orders, and he would be

excommunicated. He knew the Superior had meant him to be peculiarly

consecrated, and, because he had no origin back of the Foundlings'

Hospital, had thought him a soul only the better fitted to be seized and

sent heavenward powerfully. What right had he to interfere with the

Superior's great purpose? Nevertheless, he set his mouth and knocked on

the familiar door.

The Superior was pacing the room, as his habit was. It was a long,

gray-walled room, containing a few chairs, a picture of the

Annunciation, a writing-table with a crucifix over it, a bookcase with,

by Gard's frequent counting, one hundred and twelve books, leaving out

the controversial pamphlets. It was flooded with light from three large

windows. The floor was uncarpeted.

Gard entered on the subject promptly.

"I've found I can't take the vows, father. I'm afraid you'll never

forgive me."

The Superior stopped short; a spasm of pain crossed his face. Gard

thought, "Now it's coming."

"Do I seem to you unforgiving?" he said, sadly. "Do you know, that sin

of mine was pointed out to me thirty years ago, when I was your age. I

imagined it was conquered. I'm afraid I have not watched for it of late

years."

Gard was dumb with surprise. The Superior resumed his pacing.

"I have been hoping that you would come to me in this way of your own

will. You will think it best, then, to leave the brotherhood--at least

for a time? Have you any plans?"

"I would play in some church, father. There is Fritz Moselle."

"Moselle? Yes, your teacher. A curious instance. I remember him. Made up

of a thousand fragments, shivered pieces of glass, from what have been

faiths and systems of philosophy, and have had, perhaps, in their time a

certain fragile beauty. He probably uses such terms as 'art' and

'cosmopolitanism' in connection with it. A curious, modern type. You

will learn by observing such." There was a pause. Gard began to collect

himself.

"When I said for a time," went on the Superior. "I meant that my hopes

and your issues are in His hands, where they belong. You will write to

me if you are in need."

He stood still a moment.

"There is one result of experience for one soul and another for another.

'As often as I have gone forth among men I have returned home less a

man,' saith St. Thomas à Kempis; but the spirit of our time does not

speak in this way. I suppose"--smiling--"it is only the young men who

really hear what the spirit of the time says."

He put his hands on Gard's bowed head, and there was a long silence.

Then Gard stammered something, and presently--somehow--got away and

stood in the corridor alone. His eyes were full of blinding tears, and

yet there was a sense of wild relief. The interview was over, and he had

never seen the Superior so mild, so politely talkative.

The parting with the rest of the brotherhood was more of an ordeal.

Brothers Andrew and Francis kissed his cheek and turned away. It seemed

to him they looked suddenly old, and gray, and broken.

The cold, white corridor was full of ghosts of his own past hours and

days staring reproachfully. He passed out through the cloister court,

carrying his little bundle under his arm. The asphalt was wet with the

mist. Francis's flower-bed had only a few crooked, brown,

uncannily-shaped stalks, like dry mummies' hands thrust through the

mould and clutching blindly. He opened the door in the brick wall of the

court. The hinge was worn and the gate had been sagging lately. It

grated as he closed it behind him.

Chapter VII

Introducing Moselle and Mavering

It was yet early in the afternoon. There was a hint of the sun overhead,

a semi-luminous space in the thin mist, though the pavements were still

wet. The two opposite currents of flowing humanity on the avenue mingled

and jostled and dodged, with haste and with leisure, with good-humor and

petulance.

The avenue as far as Trinity, and Gard in his black robe, knew each

other very well. The policeman had nodded to him kindly for years, and

of late had taken to touching his helmet. The avenue did not appear to

see anything peculiar about him now, but it came to him with a shock, so

that he knew of a certainty that the relations between them were quite

changed. The policeman touched his helmet, the man at the newspaper

booth his hat, but that was a mistake. Properly, he ought to stop and

tell them it was a mistake, that he had put off consecration, declined

reverence, and cast his lot with them and the avenue's democracy.

The sexton of Trinity was sweeping the steps. He took off his cap when

Gard stopped to ask him where Moselle lived. "Two streets up,

riverence," he said, "an' turn to your left; number sixty-siven, on'y

it's rubbed out, riverence. Is it a bit o' music you're carryin', sor?"

Gard found where sixty-seven was rubbed out on a street door, and under

direction climbed three narrow flights, to a narrow, top-story hall,

with a skylight overhead and several doors, one with the grimy card of

Fritz Moselle tacked upon it. He knocked. "_Herein!_ Come! Veil, _du

lieber Himmel_! It's de lil' anchorite!"

The room which Moselle came storming across seemed to have been

originally three rooms, but the partitions had been mainly cut away.

There were two pianos, and two grates for coal fires. Floor and chairs

and tables were a welter of sheet-music, beer-bottles, steins, books,

flower-pots, cats, pipes, newspapers, and rumpled rugs. Moselle came

through it like a loose meteor, bent on breaking chaos into smaller

fragments; hair brushed back and yellowish, dingy with age, eyebrows

and mustache that swelled and dropped like cataracts, weight to threaten

floors, huge, fat fist, and porcelain pipe in mouth. He hugged Gard to

his mighty belly, muttered and puffed hoarsely, and pulled him across

the room to where a man in black had risen from his chair, who had a

long jaw and aggressive chin, shaven bluish, a slouched hat on his head,

a frock-coat, and was tall, gaunt and bony. He held out his hand.

"I'm glad to know you, Mr. Windham," he said, in a deep, drawling voice,

with a certain winningness of smile.

"'Tis Shack Mavering. He knows about you, _kleiner_," cried Moselle,

boisterous, explanatory. "'Tis a friend of Mephisto, der Faust-devil,

und of me. Ha! Sit down. Vat iss dat?" pointing to Gard's bundle.

Gard dropped his bundle beside his chair. At the brotherhood was orderly

calm, thoughtful silence, cool, clear walls, and whispering sound of

slippered feet. Moselle at organ lessons in Trinity had never seemed so

loose and free, broad, joyous, unlimited. Somehow Gard felt as if vacant

spaces about his soul were growing warm and inhabited. He laughed, and

knew no reason for it.

"I've left the brotherhood. I'm going to be--"

"Gott! Vat you going to be?"

Gard laughed again.

"I thought you might know, and if you did you'd be sure to tell me."

"So!" Moselle's face, when it dropped vivacity and took on gravity, fell

into rugged, powerful lines. "Got no money?"

"No."

"Nor clothes of a human too much, nor plans, nor friends but old Fritz,

nor knowledge of perversity? Good! All good! You will stay mit old Fritz

some veek or more, und I vill get you a church-organ to play somevere.

Good! _Hein?_ Shplendid! Shack!"--gesticulating over Gard--"look you at

his head, his eyelid, his shape of der hair-line. Vat? It is

super-sensuous Florentine, und de back of his head is Yankee, und so

hard you not break him mit an axe. I say in all human variety is law,

und device, und chain of causes, und you are mitout science to know not

music itself haf more severe und mathematic system. Dat boy is at de end

of his shtring of causes--at de end of his shtring. Ha!"

"End of his rope is the idiom," said Mavering, in solemn bass. "It

means he's down on his uppers. You'd better attend to me and learn pure

English. Your English is composite, mistaken, and slangy, and you are,

in body and mind, an epitome of gross fatness, whom no science of human

variety could classify."

The depth and solemnity of his voice, the funereal gravity of his long

face, seemed burlesquely classical. His speech was flowing, and composed

of structural sentences. Moselle waved his pipe joyously.

"_Continuez_, Shack! Heet her up! Advance! Boy, I gif you a lil' pipe

and a lil' beer, but not much, um so you be not sick. My friend Shack is

eloquent und foolish. Und ve tree vill talk now till to-morrow is gray."

The talk ran on. Already Gard seemed to himself not merely an hour, but

days, weeks--a period which the clock could not understand or

measure--away from the brotherhood. The country of ideas into which he

had come was a loose republic, where no man knew the limits of his

personality or his daring. He might loosen his belt and shout, if he

chose. Here conversation was erratic and glancing, not necessarily an

exchange of what one really thought; and yet, however obliquely from

his meaning one spoke, there seemed to be less misunderstanding than

among the brothers, with whom the guiding of the tongue to simple truth

was a matter of searching conscience. And again, at times, both Moselle

and Mavering would say things that seemed to Gard to meet the fact or

question before them with a sharper recognition, a more instant candor.

He admired and laughed in pure joy of the brave, new world that had such

creatures in it, with unstraightened ideas that were free to dance in

the sunbeam or dig in the mine, and forget whether they had or had not

any connection with the soul's salvation. It was a kind of renaissance

for him, a discovery of humanism and the pagan pleasure of mere living

with vivacity of body and mind. Here on the threshold of his new life

were two to greet him who were witty, kind, ironical, experienced, and

seemed to be without care or fear. If, as Moselle had implied, there

were something hard and critical in the back of his head, some reserve

of judgment, something not plastic and receptive, but resistent and

decisive, it did not trouble him now with criticisms or decisions, but

let him bask and admire.

"Dey want an organist in Hamilton. It is Saint Mary's, a church

Protestant Episcopal, called High Church, _videlicet_, protesting mit

apologies, und cultured to beat de band, vich is an idiom obscure, my

friend Shack. Vat band?"

"Brass band."

"Ach so! Vell, vat did I mean?"

"Your German mind was headed right, but went astray on a by-path of

idiom. Saint Mary's culture is not in competition with a brass band in

blue uniform, but aims at the highest orchestral and surpliced effects."

"Vell, a choir committee wrote me, anyhow, und I loss de letter.

_Helas!_ I loss everyt'ing--my reputation, my bes' friends! I put 'em

somevere und forget 'em. Vat did I do mit my letter?"

"I suppose it's in your pocket."

"Gott! So it is! Vell, dey vant an organist, und Saint Mary's--"

"Has a three-banked organ, and Hamilton is a sleepy place, good for your

neophyte to sit down in and learn the alphabet of humanity. I know Saint

Mary's."

"Ach! Plazes! So you do!" Moselle stopped short and looked at Mavering

under overhanging, yellowish eyebrows. "Am I intruding--roping in your

domestic circle, Shack?"

"I think likely. It's no circle. It's an incommensurable ratio. You know

that."

"I know no more than you like, Shack," said Moselle, gently. "You haf no

objections?"

"None at all."

"Vell," said Moselle, after a pause, "so it is."

"Mr. Windham," said Mavering, flowingly, "nature cast me for the part of

the villain. She gave me the countenance of one reflecting darkness, a

voice unfit for lighter remarks than 'I will be revenged!'--made me a

lean and hungry Cassius, and bid me assassinate and betray. The inspired

text has it that 'All the world's a stage.' It follows that every man is

cast for a rôle, and if he tries to introduce anything not in character

he appears to make a mess of it, the management docks his salary, and

the public blights his career. I once tried to play a hero and a lover,

and invited the conjunction of happy stars. It was no good. The notion

of it, as you see, is causing this German monster to make a braying ass

of himself."

"Ho! Ho!" Moselle chuckled, and puffed. "Der _kleiner_ don' know your

stage und your Shakespeare. He shtare like a house afire."

"Oh, that's it."

"Vat is dat, Shack, a house afire? An idiom extravagant, confusing."

"It means he stares with breathless expectancy, with bewilderment and

fear. I don't recommend the figure to your use. The conception of red

conflagration and fire-bells is a Shakespearean flight, and you can't

handle combination figures. You stick to a simple retail line of

business for cash or you'll bust. You can't take risks and thirty days'

credit for a meaning. The English language has no confidence in you. You

aren't sound for the market. Mr. Windham, you will probably meet in

Hamilton a Mrs. Mavering, who lives close by Saint Mary's, and who will

say nothing whatever of me. If I were you I would cultivate her

acquaintance, but imitate that particular reserve."

"Vell," said Moselle, gently, "das iss good, but don't fill de _kleiner_

mit bevilderment. He don' understand, und he take indigestion. Go buy de

grocery und de beer, Shack, und ve make a dinner here, und to-morrow de

_kleiner_ shall haf human clothes, und go to the theatre und see friend

Shack arrested for his vickedness in de fif' act."

After a while the dusk began falling. When Mavering came back with

bundles and a basket containing a hot shoulder of meat from the baker's,

the long room was lit glimmeringly by a lamp or two. And Moselle

declared finally, and referred especially to the beer and seasoned

cheese, that he was in favor of the animal half of man.

"He develope his soul too fast. Let him vait, let him vait. For his

shtomach und feet haf stood by him, his friends from old, so old, und

maybe his soul don' do so. She act frisky, _hein_?"

Mavering said, "I'm something of a conservative myself. Man ate before

he prayed and loved the way he ate, but we live in a radical age."

Then Moselle played dream music, with fluffy, floating things in it, on

one of the pianos, as though he never ate anything heavier than lettuce,

and was, in the verity of music, a fair maiden who walked in a

green-and-white garden and was pure and slim as the lilies; a woodthrush

in the distance sang a love song that was like a hymn, but never came

into the garden, and finally each lily became the spirit of a lily, the

woodthrush the memory of a song, and garden, maiden and all went up a

silver moonbeam to the moon.

Moselle played on through the evening, and towards twelve Mavering rose

and left. Half an hour later Moselle swung around on his piano-stool.

"Shack gone? _Kleiner, kleiner!_ your eyes are full mit damp shleep;"

and he looked at Gard with his own eyes, grave and old and calm. "I

denke you are more lofable als lofing, _kleiner_, an' for an artist de

first's nodding, de last is all. '_Geliebt und gelebet_.' Aber one must

_lieben_ in order to _leben_. '_Geliebt und gelebet_.' Ach! I haf so."

Gard slept in a room at the end of the hall, woke in the dawn, and lay

waiting for the bell before matins. Then he remembered, and laughed

aloud. But a throng of memories rose reproachfully. The chapel organ

would be played badly now; Francis would drone all day in the

schoolroom, but there would be no one for him to talk with about

Cicero's beautiful adjectives; Brother Andrew would pat himself on the

back of the hand, look wistfully down the corridor, trot away to the

refectory, and find the salad uninteresting.

* * * * *

So Gard became organist at Saint Mary's in Hamilton, in the fall of '55,

and in time a noted young person. In the immediate years that followed,

the old life came to seem hardly more than a vivid dream, or a story

told him by another man who had never left the brothers, but was still

playing for offices and hurrying along white corridors. He had time on

his hands, and read eagerly, and his rooms grew littered like Fritz

Moselle's. He hardly knew what he was himself, except a kind of highway,

along which the thoughts of other men, and emotions that he might claim

his own since they came from nowhere in particular, travelled hastily.

It was something additional to that sense common to humanity of

existence as a hurried journey from the unknown to the unknown, his

ignorance of his antecedents back of the Foundlings' Hospital. Yet he

seemed to feel no curiosity about them. They had no claim upon him,

those antecedents, and he had none to them that he cared to put forward.

The past might bury its wrecks if it could. His name might be a clue, or

it might be the effort of an inventive or reminiscent nurse. He never

inquired and never knew, then or thereafter, but was content to have and

possess it, as something that had floated ashore with him and served

well the purposes of a name. After all, the mortal millions have their

severance from each other ruled with not so great a difference in point

of isolation, and with the same "salt, estranging sea." Each is for

himself the centre of things; the currents of the deep swing round him;

he is alone with his main issues.

Gard saw a place and repute slowly forming for him, and had almost come

to see himself a citizen of Hamilton, the straight road of a quiet life

stretching before him under a cool gray sky. Moselle, whom he went down

into the greater city to see now and then, doubted that outcome.

One night in January he came down Charles Street towards the church. He

had fallen into the habit of playing an hour or two in the latter part

of the evening, and people in the neighborhood had accepted the custom.

Some formed habits of their own to meet it, and went to their windows

regularly about nine to hark whether he played that night. It was not

an agreement, but the silent adaptation in close communities of habit

to habit.

The snow was falling, blown by a keen wind, and the great side window of

Mrs. Mavering's house glowed warmly through the sharp, slanting lines of

the snow. It occurred to him that he would rather talk to Mrs. Mavering

that night than summon only spectral visitations from Saint Mary's

organ. At that moment Helen clung with warm fingers to Mrs. Mavering's

hand, saying, "I shall call you Lady Rachel, because you're beautiful."

Chapter VIII

Of Mrs. Mavering, and of the Philosophy of the Individual

Helen put her forehead against the cold window.

"It's snowing. Do you think he'll play to-night? But he would if he knew

we wanted to hear him, wouldn't he?"

"If he knew that we knew he knew it, he probably would."

The fire glowed and snapped, and reflected its varying mood on the

andirons and the red-and-white tiles of the fireplace. Mrs. Mavering,

garmented in black and dusky red, lay back in a deep chair, and the

firelight played across her face and dress in a more subdued manner than

on the tiles and andirons, as if it felt that was not the right place to

be familiar and reckless.

"Why?"

"Men take great pains to be nice to us if they see their sacrifice is in

the way to be appreciated. They would rather have the sacrifice

appreciated than the service. Oh, it isn't like that, dear eyes!--not

nearly so solemn!" Helen had come and curled herself at Mrs. Mavering's

feet to consider this proposition. "If you always look at me so you'll

frighten me out of all my little cynicisms, and I think them pretty."

Mrs. Mavering reminded one of something costly, like a vase upon which

some master-workman had spent himself, careless of time, considering

only line and curve, and how it might be made to glow from within and be

more than worthy of the palace of the king; and as if afterwards, when

the palace had been sacked, and fallen with ruin and wailing, and the

vase had somehow escaped destruction, it had come to stand in the

guarded corner of a museum. In this meaning Thaddeus had spoken of her

as something to be seen rather than some one to know. Thaddeus's social

instinct was quick, and sometimes accurate. He need not have been so

mistaken, understood as implying the general facts of a period in Mrs.

Mavering's life.

Helen demanded personality even of things. She inveterately accused

persons of being persons, and brought them to her judgment bar to

account for themselves. Thaddeus thought Mrs. Mavering should be looked

at for art's sake, for the improvement of the tone of society; that an

official sign, so to speak, was somewhere at hand, warning that no one

was permitted to touch her humanly.

Helen had not seen the sign. They had met first in the dark and had been

introduced by a sigh, and she had never been aware of the barrier with

which Mrs. Mavering was observed to be surrounded. Only Mrs. Mavering

was given to riddling. She acknowledged herself a person to Helen,

stormed by her headlong admiration, but she never accounted for herself

at the bar, or, as Helen stated it. "Whenever you say something, and I

ask what you mean, you always act as if you didn't like what you meant,

but you never say what it was." So far as our sayings come out of

ourselves and ourselves out of our experience, if part of the experience

were such that we wished to fly from that part of ourselves and could

only flutter the more about it, supposing this to be Mrs. Mavering's

case, her impulse to dodge Helen's bar of equity might be

understood--and the fact, too, that she found herself ever provoking an

arraignment. Helen had to dismiss case after case for lack of evidence,

and because the defendant wanted to play something else. So that she

only wondered now what Mrs. Mavering meant by "Men would rather have the

sacrifice appreciated than the service," and whether one would naturally

become difficult by being ten years older.

"I shall call you Lady Rachel, because you're beautiful," she said, and

the organist of Saint Mary's stood outside the while and thought he

would rather talk to Mrs. Mavering than call spectres from the peaks of

his gilded organ-pipes that blown, desolate night.

Of course, one could not become beautiful like Mrs. Mavering--not in a

hundred years. One's nose would not become straight, one's hair black

and heapy, nor eyes change from gray to amber and brown; and in order to

become as difficult it would be necessary to be married and have one's

husband become unapparent without becoming dead. Mrs. Mavering was an

arduous ideal. Helen doubted that she would ever achieve it.

"Then I must call you Sir Helen, because you're such a valiant knight,

and always charging something, and driving a spear into the middle of

an idea, as if it were a dragon. But my ideas are not honest, so they

have no middles, and it only makes them look mussy."

"Then," said Helen, quickly, "if I'm a knight I choose to be in love

with you. You're locked in a tower and I'm after an ogre, only I don't

make out very well what he's doing. Of course, he growls and rages."

"I dare say he does."

"Well, then, Saint Denis Montjoie! It is a beautiful fight."

Gard was announced and presently came in. Mrs. Mavering said:

"Can you play a game? You haven't met Miss Bourn? She is pursuing an

ogre around a tower. I am locked in the tower. She doesn't care whether

I like being rescued or not. She isn't sure yet about the ogre, but

thinks she needs one."

"I am a humble person; so is an ogre, isn't he?" said Gard. "Maybe I'd

do. An ogre ought not to be proud."

"But he always is," said Helen, eagerly. "He keeps a tower to be proud

in."

"Where is my tower, then?"

Helen hesitated. She had never seen him near before. He looked a little

singular, not quite like other people, a little weary and very

white-faced, a little impenetrable. She remembered all he had said to

her through Saint Mary's organ, things sensitive and intimate.

The process of putting together two groups of impressions to make one

personality is difficult, and one ought to have time. But he insisted on

knowing where the tower was. "I don't know how to be an ogre without

it," so that she said, hastily, "You must have one in the organ-loft,"

and was not at all sure that it meant anything, if it were not an entire

mistake, and was glad when they sat down without calling for more

explanations. She slid down to her old place by Mrs. Mavering and half

listened to them, and half studied a problem, to see what was honestly

true about it, or whether it had any middle.

When Helen was little, she used to compose parables and sermons, and

sometimes wept to think how beautiful they were, and declaimed them to

her mother, who had only one comment to make. It was, "Why, Helen!" Such

was the parable of the Perfect Cat, who lived a life of absolute

sinlessness. There was a sermon on David and Absalom--"Oh, Absalom, my

son!" It was tearful at that point. But the moral was that Absalom was

hung by his hair--a sorrowful incident. People should not make their

children have long hair. "And I have asked you three times to-day,

'Mother, please, may I cut it off?' and you just said, 'Why, Helen!' and

I'm not going to ask again. I'm going to put you in the closing prayer."

So that now she put her conclusion into a sermon, to the effect that

every one had a tower in which part of himself or herself was a proud

ogre, and another part was a valiant knight who ought to eventually

thrust a lance into the middle of the ogre to make him humble and

social, or else dead, so that both together might become a perfect

character before the benediction. Because a proper sermon was like a

story, inasmuch as in the first part you made things look as badly as

possible and talked about wickedness, so that everybody might become

interested; and in the last part you talked about goodness and made

goodness succeed after difficulty, so that everybody might become calm;

and in the benediction you told everybody to be happy ever after.

"Do you read Emerson," Gard was saying to Mrs. Mavering--"the

Massachusetts lecturer? He says, 'The Eden of God is bare and grand';

but I don't see anything more than a personal fancy in that. Anyway, the

poets would be wrong in putting music in such an Eden. An organ is full

of sin and sorrow. The pipes always seem to me to hold so many human

emotions compressed and stowed away, like the genius in Solomon's

bottle. Say one of them is a pure aspiration and one of them a snarling

desire. You set the snarling desire chasing the pure aspiration, and you

have one of the simple formulæ for expressing humanity. It isn't Eden."

"Oh, that's like my knight and ogre!" cried Helen. "Do you do sermons

and parables? But you have the wrong one running away."

Gard looked surprised, and then laughed. "It was all going on round and

round a tower, wasn't it? And if the tower were small you couldn't tell

which was running away."

"But _they_ would know!" said Helen, triumphantly.

"But they might differ, or they might forget, on account of going so

fast. Then they'd have to stop and ask the lady in the tower to

straighten them out."

Helen looked puzzled, felt that the parable was too mixed to mean

anything now, and suspected Gard of mixing it frivolously.

"The lady in the tower is too dizzy, you both run about so fast," said

Mrs. Mavering. "But she thinks Helen would never run away."

"There's no chance for me to be proud in this tower," said Gard, and

Helen murmured:

"It's all mixed up."

"Music, after all," said Gard, breaking a few moments' silence, "leaves

you unsatisfied at your strongest. It is misty emotion. It has wings,

but no feet. You seem to want something that has more grip and bite."

"That is heresy from you," said Mrs. Mavering.

"I've made a creed of heresy, you know. That Massachusetts lecturer

preaches the creed, 'Every man his own issue, for conformity is death.'

But I don't know whether he has said that conformity to the forms you

have made yourself is as much death as conformity to those made by other

men. I call myself a musician, and something keeps asking me, 'Is that

all?' It seems to think it time I called myself something else."

"Then why not call yourself a still better musician?"

"Of course, one needn't stand still altogether. You become more skilful

with your fingers and feet, and learn better how to render and interpret

the emotions, musical ideas, more or less eccentric crotchets, of other

men, the best of them dead. Their emotions are not so important, are

they? Haven't we eyes of our own to see that grass is green? Oh yes, we

compose. Have you seen my new book? It consists of a prelude, that is

very bad, and highly praised by competent critics in journals; an

offertory, in which Charity appears as despondent of the results of the

collection--I'm conceited about that piece--and a symphony in five

movements, which is a padded invalid. Room enough for improvement, you

see. I might learn to symbolize a mood more accurately. It wouldn't make

the mood any less futile. The point is really that it doesn't get you

out of a rut, if you make the rut even a very good rut of its kind. The

more you dig at it the deeper it grows. There is too much that you never

see and never know. You take the shape of your mould. Do you know Dr.

Holmes' 'Chambered Nautilus'? The nautilus made a larger shell for

himself every time he changed, but the poet didn't comment on his

making each shell of the same shape as the last. He was a stale

conformer after all, that nautilus."

"Do you think he would have done better if he had tried to make a shell

for himself like an oyster's or a crab's?"

"He wouldn't have done better in the matter of shells. But personally he

would have gone up the scale of intelligence."

"He would have been very uncomfortable."

"Oh, it wasn't claimed that conformity was not comfortable. It was only

said to be death."

"Didn't the nautilus have a very beautiful shell?" Mrs. Mavering spoke

in a low voice. "If you ask me, I don't think human life is better than

music. I think music is the better of the two." Gard seemed mutely to

understand her, and was silent a moment as if to let the shadow pass,

then said:

"Music is a little like the nautilus-shell, isn't it?--the venturous

bark that flings its purple wings in gulfs enchanted, and all that. But

isn't 'all that' rather a foolish thing to do forever? Purple wings in

enchanted gulfs--it's a narrow experience when you come to think of it."

Gard rose to go, but stood a moment looking at the two, as if he wanted

to fix the picture of them and carry it away; of the woman with heavy

hair, in a black-and-red dress, who gave the impression of wearing

jewelry and really wore none, and the girl in white with a blue band at

her throat, slim hands that somehow looked so strong, and gray eyes that

demanded candor and offered imaginations. The firelight played over them

as if it were trying to illustrate the subject, saying, "This is worth

while to understand."

"Do you know there's a war coming?" said Gard. "Trumpets and drums are

in the air."

After that he went away, and through the blowing storm along Philip's

road to his rooms, which looked out on the law school square. The front

room was full of the traces and tokens of the six years past, indicating

what the mental life then had been, but not very clearly what result had

come out of it all. There were books in number and confusion, as if he

did not care for them in a bookish way, but only as mines, clefts, or

fissures where metals are sometimes to be found--and if found and dug

out, the source has no more personal value. There were some

lounging-chairs, a desk with a litter of sheet-music and scored

manuscript.

Gard's face was whiter and thinner than of old. It was noticeably white,

with heavy eyelids, and the peculiar curve of hair-line that Moselle

once noticed. One might fancy a trace of the cloister in it, not in

anything that could be called clerical, but in something that could be

called isolated. If there is manifestation in all faces of the spirit

within, it would have seemed to manifest a certain separateness; as if,

having learned in the cloister, at the age when one takes fundamental

impressions, that a man is nothing else noticeable than a soul alone,

with the eternities watching and the one issue of its salvation before

it, he had never been rid of that sense of things, but had only altered

his conception of the issue, and so the terms of description and the

method of pursuit. This sense of things, of life as a kind of personal

adventure, a kind of fortune-hunting after an ideal of self-culture, an

ambition for a mental career rather than one apparent outwardly to men,

may have sprung from far back in his nature and been of precloistral

origin, come slowly of late years to a theory. The peculiarity of his

coming, as one dropped out of a darker cloud than most men come from

into the light of consciousness, may have added to this dim sense of

isolation, of adventure, of destiny experimenting more definitely with

him, of eternities more watchful. Not that he compared himself in that

way with other men. The comparison, if it had occurred to him, would not

have seemed interesting, or bearing on the issue. To each belonged his

independent adventure; each was at the same time an end to himself and a

means to other people.

Such progress and pilgrimage had its own perils, excitements, and new

landscapes opening unexpectedly.

The picture that remained in Gard's mind of Mrs. Mavering and Helen

seemed to him significant of something--Helen looking up with question

and appeal to the older woman, the coloring, the firelight. She had

brave eyes, that girl. One ought to see more of women. Mrs. Mavering

looked like a kind of imperial exile. He sat down at the piano and

touched a key thoughtfully. They signified something, surely, if one

could put it into form. He wondered what had become of Mavering. Fritz

Moselle was growing apoplectic, and people were talking about war. If

old orders were changing, it was probably time they changed.

Chapter IX

Of Estates in Happiness

"In point of fact," said Thaddeus, "I am proposing a partnership, to be

entitled 'The Helen Banking and Brokerage Company,' organized to do

business for a commission."

"I don't know that I understand," said Mrs. Mavering, slowly.

"We make investments at interest, speculate in futures, examine

securities." He paused, seeking precision of phrase. "It is in terms of

happiness. One pursues it--happiness. One sees fortunes in it lost and

fortunes won. I find I have spent my own capital. I have to be content

with a commission."

But then it was not evident that Mrs. Mavering need be in the same case.

It would be poor taste to seem to assume it. "In point of fact," she

suggested a hoarded wealth, an unknown, mysterious sum in reserve,

rather than even poverty in respect to a future. But she might be

allowed to express for herself the terms of her profit.

"I think I understand now," she said.

Her veil had little beads of moisture on it from the damp March wind

that blew down Shannon Street in their faces. The gutters were slushy

running streams, the elms shook their branches restlessly, as if full of

the sweet pains of stirring sap and the coming birth of leaves.

"Acting," continued Thaddeus, "in behalf of the Helen estate, which I

believe, I trust, will prove large, but is, I think, I fear--"

"You think uncertain?"

"Doubtless uncertain. There are elements of uncertainty. And in this

matter I must confess myself only a man, a sad limitation. Mrs.

Mavering; somewhat elderly, too; and so, one who feels he must husband

his slender resources. I fear I depend very much on that commission. I

fear the bankruptcy of that estate would be disastrous for me."

Mrs. Mavering drew her veil closer, and they walked on a few moments in

silence. Then she ventured:

"Uncertain, of course; but you spoke of elements."

"I might mention, in regard to the nature of it at present, a certain

impetuosity, a determination, a loyalty perhaps a little too inflexible.

Flexibility is, so to speak, to have a good portion of one's capital

near by for emergencies. I might mention, to speak technically, as a

liability, a certain Morgan Map."

"But that," said she, hurriedly--"I mean. I know him only slightly, but

Helen said--"

"You would wish me to convince you that he is liability rather than an

asset."

"Why not convince her?"

"Ah, but there! Might it not--I have tested, I fear it would, I ask your

better intuition--might not the attempt, if made seriously, defeat its

end by rousing that loyalty, giving perhaps direction and opportunity to

that--that inflexibility?"

"It might."

Thaddeus lifted a neatly gloved hand, and cane swinging between the

fingers.

"To be flexible, to adapt oneself. There are so many doors, it is well

not to be too absolutely one kind of key. I have heard a phrase, which

appears to be a recent discovery--this phrase, 'The survival of the

fittest.' It was explained to me, who am not profound, I confess. Dear

me, no; nor a reader of new books. But I understood it to mean the

survival of that which fits, the introduction of order by the

elimination of the disorderly, of the--a--antagonistic, and so the final

result of a race and a world to fit each other like hand and glove. A

happy consummation."

"But Helen--"

"Exactly. Helen's ancestors--my own, too; how singular! They cultivated

a characteristic--a tendency to martyrdom. I believe a certain Bourn was

put to death in the sixteenth century for obdurate persistence in a

proscribed opinion. Probably later, in New England, some of them were by

their neighbors said to be 'sot.' My brother was an obdurately unhappy

person."

"But this Morgan Map?"

"An aboriginal, an anachronism. He belongs in the primeval wilderness

with other--pardon me--brutes. His father had a singular opinion of

him--a--that reminds me; he had a very singular opinion, very singular."

Thaddeus mused a moment.

"Mrs. Mavering, will you dine with us on Wednesday?"

They came to the corner of Charles Street, and parted at Mrs. Mavering's

door.

To obtain a small measure of happiness as a commission for managing

another person's estate in the same kind of property! She wondered if

Thaddeus were not really a wise man, who made a pretext of frivolity. He

seemed to have definite theories of things. It might be his rapid and

light manner was part of his wisdom and his theory, as if he had found

it the part of wisdom not to look gravely and long at any phase of human

life. Who knows what might be disclosed, for all depths are black and

threatening. One should touch surfaces and slip away before the depths

boil up. If Thaddeus had really attained skill and success, it was

something to admire. For herself, she seemed to have failed. She had

stirred the depths and had not found them on the whole pleasant.

Thaddeus's house was four-square, of a yellowish stucco, with a raised

entrance and a windowed cupola. They built so, and so decorated within,

when they endeavored to build decoratively, a half century or more ago;

they impressed a generation following with a hunted, persistent sense

that in some manner a marble mantel, a plaster ornament on the ceiling,

an ormolu clock, a flowered carpet, and china figurines with neat

stockings, were the types and accepted symbols of earthly splendor.

Plush upholstery was a proper thing in Thaddeus's day, and Thaddeus had

it. He desired the presence of that which was fit, accepted, not

provocative of dispute.

And so his little dinner of five passed fitly. He manipulated Gard to

the piano, Helen near by, Morgan in position to observe her, and Mrs.

Mavering in position to observe all. He drew his chair near Mrs.

Mavering and smiled a wrinkled smile of content. He felt creative with

respect to the situation, a strategist who had securely arranged how the

enemy should act.

"He will growl," he said to Mrs. Mavering, softly; "the bristles will

rise on his spine. My dear Mrs. Mavering, a primary egotist is an

impossible person out of the jungle."

Mrs. Mavering thought she could see why Morgan suggested to Thaddeus

such terms as "primitive," "aboriginal." There was something rugged and

rough-hewn evident in the first place, a massiveness of antediluvian

bone, such as they dig from the clay banks of rivers. "We are all

egotists," was Thaddeus's theory, "but the primary won't do." He is

savage and solitary, too direct, too elemental. He jumps to his aim. He

does not care, so he gets it, what happens in between. He does not care

for minor points. But civilization is a system of minor points. He has

no sympathy, cannot move from his footing an inch to take another point

of view. Doubtless he will lie and betray, for they are minor points of

method, and faith and truth are social products. At least, he will not

notice what he may happen incidentally to step on, or what becomes of an

opposition after it is sufficiently smashed. "Why," he asked,

primitively, "why should I?"

But Mrs. Mavering thought all this seemed an airy structure, built on a

theory which was very likely a prejudice.

Gard was playing something martial, with the shrilling of fifes, the

mutter of drums in it, and the measured tramp of feet. He was looking at

Helen to see if she knew what he meant, because one liked to look at

her, no doubt; it seemed to justify itself; but more particularly

because he had fancied of late that her face was a kind of magic mirror,

such as enchanters used to raise upon by incantation their pictured

prophecies, and that he was become able to summon to it the shadows and

counterparts of his moods, and watch the brightening and darkening of

himself in reflection.

When he would come from the organ-loft, find her with Mrs. Mavering in

the dark under the gallery by the stone pillar, and the three go out

across the yard to Mrs. Mavering's house, he always found that Helen's

interpretations, however wide they might be from his own in point of

verbal symbols and form of allegory, followed the mood with accurate

detail. Only the mirror tended to add moral judgments, or to substitute

the terms, right and wrong, for beautiful and ugly, for harmony and

discord, and in that respect appeared to be inaccurate. Still, it

enabled him to realize himself with curious vividness.

Helen's face was flushed. Presently Gard became absorbed and looked at

it no longer. He was trying to get not merely the sound of the marching,

the ripple of the flags, and the elation of the crowds, but something

about devotion and the spirit of the nation shining like the sun on the

faces of its soldiers. Mrs. Mavering, too, turned from Helen, and

noticed how thickly Morgan's yellow eyebrows were knit above his eyes,

which seemed to have a kind of green glare in them. They were fixed on

Helen. A sudden memory shot through Mrs. Mavering's mind like a sharp

pain--she shivered. Thaddeus noted it.

"Exactly," he murmured to her; "quite so."

Gard found his theme and began weaving it in among the drums and fifes,

increasing it until drums, fifes, and flags seemed only like the surface

ripple of a deep stream, so grave it was, so large and resolute, so

brimmed with its purpose. Helen saw the success and bent forward. Morgan

made a slight choking noise in his throat.

"Exactly," murmured Thaddeus; "quite so."

Gard finished abruptly and turned to Helen. "I don't suppose it's half

true." He appeared to be continuing the subject, secure of her

understanding it up to that point.

"Oh, why not?"

"It doesn't read like it in the newspapers," he said, and rose presently

to go. Thaddeus, too, must run down to his club; would Mrs. Mavering

forgive him and stay with Helen till he came back? Morgan took his leave

with conventional phrases. And the three having each taken himself and

his egoism away, Helen and Mrs. Mavering were left with Thaddeus's trim

sea-coal fire, marble mantle, china figurines of the neat ankles, gilt

chandeliers, and flowered carpet.

Helen took her favorite place at Mrs. Mavering's feet, and said, "Uncle

Tad's fires always have company manners."

As for Morgan, Mrs. Mavering thought, he did not like to see that Helen

could be moved by powers that he could not himself attain; perhaps

neither knew nor cared what those powers were, only knew that he could

not attain them. But Thaddeus's airy structure, his theory of the

primitive, did not follow necessarily. Yet she felt that a certain

atmosphere of animosity surrounded Morgan; he was either aggressively or

indifferently hostile; or else it was because one felt his intention to

dominate, and indifference whether the dominance were admitted with

peace or in process of war.

"Don't you want to confess, Helen?"

"I'm always confessing, Lady Rachel."

"But about Morgan Map?"

"Oh, why, Morgan is--just Morgan, don't you see?"

"That sounds like a whole dictionary, but the words don't seem to be

arranged."

"It's arranged by the alphabet," Helen laughed. "It begins with A, when

I was born."

"I was wondering if it went through to Z."

"Oh! But, Lady Rachel, I don't think I know what you mean."

"Has he asked you to marry him?"

"Not that, of course not. But he said he was going to marry me."

"When? How long ago?"

"Oh, I don't remember."

"But what did you think about it?"

"Well, you see, Lady Rachel, I suppose I thought it was too good of him

to believe, and I suppose I wondered if he wouldn't forget about it

by-and-by. And do you know, he didn't--that is, I don't think so."

"But, you funny child, you don't tell me at all. Did you promise to

marry him?"

"Promise! He never asked me to do that."

"Do you love him, dear?"

"Never asked me to do that, either."

"But, Helen, you dodge like a wild thing. If you don't love him and he

expects you to marry him, you must tell him you won't."

"Why?" Helen rumpled her hair with swift hand. "There'd be a frightful

fight. You see, Lady Rachel"--plaintively--"whenever I fight with

Morgan I get so--so smashed. Don't you know, it makes your bones sore,

and gives you a headache. Besides, Morgan always does what he means to

do, and he knows all sorts of things, and if he means to marry me I

suppose he will, and I suppose he knows--well, whether I love him or

not. 'My word!' says Uncle Tad, 'I don't.'"

"Don't what?"

"Don't know, Lady Rachel. Suppose I said 'Morgan Map, I don't love you,

there!' then he'd say, 'You do, too,' or else, 'That's my lookout,' or

something, and what would I do then? Oh, yes, I'd say, 'Well, then, I

won't marry you,' and he'd say, 'Much you know about it,' or if he was

cross there'd be a fight, and I never get anything out of that. Isn't it

funny, Uncle Tad doesn't like Morgan at all."

"I don't think," said Mrs. Mavering, slowly, "that I do, either, but it

looks as if I ought not to say so. Do you mind?"

"Of course not. Morgan doesn't care who dislikes him, except me; and if

I did, don't you see, it would be only one of the words in the

dictionary."

"I think I begin to see. But I'm still wondering if there isn't one word

left out."

"Why--But I don't know what you mean. What makes you so solemn, Lady

Rachel? You bother and bother about Morgan, and he's not so worth while,

not so--around in the dark as Gard Windham, who says things out of the

middle of himself without talking at all, and you understand him, you

don't know how, and it makes your hair tingle. Lady Rachel, listen!

Let's go to the war."

"The war!"

"Didn't you know there is to be one? And Morgan's going to be a captain,

or colonel, or something. He wouldn't let me, but we'd wait till he was

gone, and then I'd only have to fight with Uncle Tad, and I wouldn't

mind that."

Mrs. Mavering fell to wondering if there had ever been a time when she

was like this herself, as bright and fearless; as little conscious or

afraid of looming shadows. She thought she had not been quite like this.

There must have been less will and more desire of ease. She thought she

had loved a better man than Morgan Map, at least one more varied and

peculiar, if not so poised and secure of himself; a strange man,

restless and reckless. The two did not look alike; Jack was dark,

long-jawed, and lean; but when she had noted Morgan knitting his yellow

brows, and imagined there was an odd glint in his eyes, she had thought

of one of Jack's moods, and shivered. Jack was never jealous. But there

was some mark, something common to them both, that sent a searching

chill, that seemed like a denial of all close comforts and small loving

things. Or was it only her own weakness and fanciful fears, born of

those past times when she had learned to be afraid of the next day?

Thaddeus was an airy theorist. Besides, he seemed to be mainly

interested in his commission, which perhaps would not accrue if Helen

went off with her capital of happiness independently. Searching through

her experience, she was not sure how much that she found bore on the

subject. It had not seemed a question of courage when she had first

girded up her garments and followed where she was led. It had seemed

inevitable. Jack's name was the whole dictionary, and there appeared to

be no word entirely outside of it. And then the awakening; a series of

chasms opening, the bright world breaking up, and sections of it

tumbling down the black chasms. She seemed to see his face, with its

large, mobile mouth, painted against Thaddeus's fireplace, as he had

looked when he had left her that last day in the early morning; heard

his laugh, and the echo in the empty hall of the door that had closed

behind him.

"I'm afraid I have had almost enough of adventures. When I came back to

live here I was very tired."

"Are you going to tell me?" said Helen, in an awed tone.

"Perhaps not everything. But you know I was born here, and my name was

Ulic, and all that, till I was married. Mr. Mavering came to Hamilton

when I was about your age, and I think he was looking for anything that

would interest him, but not expecting it would interest him very long.

He had a great deal of money then, but he has done all sorts of things

with it, and I don't know that he has any now. I suppose he was engaged

in what your uncle calls 'the pursuit of happiness,' and he seemed to be

successful. He got so much amusement wherever he went, and his way of

doing it was--some of it--expensive. But perhaps it cost me more than

any one else, unless--but I don't know about that. He was very clever,

and I thought him wonderful. I think he must have been a little

extraordinary. I thought no one else had a lover who paid such

compliments. He used to say, 'Life is a joke between God and the devil.

You are a bright remark by the former, Rachel, and I am the latter's

repartee.' He never tried to conceal anything about himself. Then we

went adventuring. You see, my story turns on Jack's being so queer--at

least, his coming to seems so to me. I couldn't like things and people

that were evil and coarse, or like being always dragged into the danger

of some kind of disgrace. You can't, if you have been taught to be

scrupulous. But he did not seem to see differences between good and bad,

and refined and coarse, or else he thought them petty differences. He

liked almost anything except being dull. We went from place to place,

and across the sea and back again. He was restless--and reckless. I

think he was too reckless of me. Once we had a house at New Orleans,

where the planters used to come and play cards, and there were queer

women with very dark eyes, and some of the planters were quite old men.

But one night one of the women killed a planter with a knife, on the

stairs. Then we got out of a window on a back roof, and through alleys

to the levee, and went up the river in the morning on a steamer. I don't

know what it was all about--quite. But there were things that happened

which I minded more than that. I used to be so tired, so afraid. Then I

grew to be afraid of Jack, because I couldn't understand him, because

whenever things were very black and horrible, or seemed so to me, he

acted more amused and queer, as if it were all a kind of play in the

theatre. And he did not grow worse through all this; he did not change

at all; but I grew worse. I tried to be like him, but I couldn't. Of

course, we knew a great many people, and sometimes were fashionable.

Once in London we went to great balls and receptions. But Jack saw some

Hindoo snake-charmers, and wanted to be one, and travel about in turbans

and yellow cloth. I don't know why we didn't do that, but we came home

soon after. And we quarrelled very miserably--that is, I did. Then the

Ulics became excited about it. One night, or early in the morning, I

woke up and heard some one very angry in the next room. Jack never

became angry. It was another man. I don't know who it was. There was a

struggle. I suppose Jack struck him, and he fell. I crept and opened

the door. The window was open and Jack was dropping the man out of it

into the area. Then he laughed to himself, and turned around and saw

me." Mrs. Mavering's voice faltered, and she paused.

"It wasn't so much of an incident, only it was the last. After he left I

began to shiver and sob, and I crept to the window and closed it. I

thought he had killed him, but of course he hadn't. It was winter, and

the snow was deep in the area. He dragged the man up the steps, held him

by the collar against the railing, and brushed him and laughed. Then he

took him away, holding him up by the arm. It was characteristic, for he

never bore any person a grudge for any harm he may have done that

person. Most people do. He doesn't bear me any grudge. I came back to

Hamilton then.

"Forgive me for telling you my poor story. I thought when I began there

might be something in it to tell you particularly, but I see there

wasn't. And really it isn't much of a story, only a quantity of details.

"I suppose," she continued, slowly, after another pause, "that your

uncle would class Jack with the half civilized, or belonging really to

a past time, when everything was unsettled and everybody was

adventurous. He calls Morgan Map a primary, or aboriginal. I suppose he

would call Jack a secondary, or nomadic, and perhaps," with a little

laugh, "he calls himself a tertiary. I wonder if there are any more

degrees."

Helen sat very quietly, drooping her head, and did not smile. Without

understanding, she felt as if a hand in the darkness had struck her, as

if a vista had opened, and all along it were crouching melancholy shapes

and strange fears with faces hidden.

When Thaddeus came back he stood a moment in the doorway, and smiled

with wrinkled cheeks.

"You look," he said, "like Israel by the waters of Babylon."

Chapter X

Of Spring in Hamilton--Of Thaddeus's Opportunity to be Candid

In the open country the seasons are free, and work their will with

spacious confidence. There is room between heaven and earth. Spring runs

down the back of the mountain forest, and races the river; the heat of

summer has reason, leisure, and is motherly of green things; autumn has

its cornfields, leagues of yellow landscape, and the progress in cool

order of harvest and death; winter its distances and long-drawn breath

from the pole. Their functions there are customary, familiar, old. They

can swing at large. They need not hesitate. But in city streets they go

timidly, as if they fancied something in man and his civil doings not in

the original regulations. They are conservative. An innovation was made,

not so long ago, in their ancient memories; a creature containing an

unknown chemical was developed and introduced. They seem to remember

that objections were made at the time. It was said, "You never can tell

what will come of it." And you never could. They never became used to or

at ease with it. The innovation was even dissatisfied with nature, the

ground-plan and mother of them all. He laid out cities to contradict

her. He questioned, too, the wisdom of his creation, noted his own

discordance, and went on to call his discontent divine.

And spring entered Hamilton. One felt something moist, warm, and sticky

in the air, and knew what she was about, trying to make civil kisses out

of her fructifying young enthusiasm, her tidal tenderness, and feeling

embarrassed so that she made something moist, warm, and sticky. Baby

green leaves were on the maples of Shannon Street and on the elms of the

Common; rain was on the roofs at dawn, and the gutters flowed all day;

busy citizen birds were notable on lawns, strayed songsters gurgling

with happiness, or voicing spring longing in plaintive "pee-wees."

And Hamilton cared little about it. The Third Volunteers and a troop of

militia cavalry were camped in the Fair grounds by the end of May, and

people sat in the grand stands to see them drill. There were rows of

neat, new tents, lines of men trying to keep step to a drum, bugle

calls, cavalry charges, and turf cut to mud or dust. A blue sky was

overhead whose peace was too deep and distant to be known, but one could

infer it from the nearer peace of the white, drifting clouds. There was

Lieutenant Map, with straps, visored cap, and sword, which Thaddeus

thought should have been a club or javelin. "He'll not be suitably

dressed till he's tattooed." Thaddeus even pursued and caught happiness

in the situation, the changing pulse of the times. There were advantages

to society in this panoply and thrill of war, which filled the eye and

ear, entertained the thoughts, stirred the feelings to an interested

activity. Society became more united, the units more sympathetic with

each other. It was not good for banking; but for society, really, to sit

in a grand-stand and watch extraordinary affairs go on in which society

had such share and interest, was for society in the highest degree, in

point of fact, inspiring. How brutal, how degrading, how primitive the

Roman arenas! But here the higher feelings were enlisted. One saw

battle-grounds imaginatively--their blood and dust idealized, made

symbolic.

Rachel and Helen agreed with him without difficulty. It seemed to Helen

quite splendid and natural for Morgan to go to the war. And both thought

the cavalry and the bugles made everything real. It was not so long

before that one heard there was such a place as Sumter, and even yet the

objections made to anybody's firing at it seemed a little difficult to

grasp with sympathy. Was not a fort made to be fired at? A little while

before they had been told to dislike abolitionists, and had done so. Now

they were told to dislike secessionists, and did so; but both were

abstract. But here, on the familiar Fair grounds, were visible men in

earnest, who were to be shot at and possibly hit by individuals. It was

another matter than abstract secessionists shooting at a fort that was

not interesting in itself. So that Rachel and Helen waved their

handkerchiefs, and Thaddeus rapped with his cane, while the dark-blue

lines broke and reformed, the bugles sounded, drums beat, troops of

horsemen swept by, and overhead the sky possessed another blue and the

drifting clouds a different movement.

They came home by Philip's road. The maples on Philip's road spread

leaves that had passed from babyhood into youth in the sunlight and

soft, damp air. They found Gard sitting disconsolately on Mrs.

Mavering's steps, in blue uniform. Thaddeus said, "There's another

patriot whose clothes don't fit."

"I was afraid I'd have to leave before you came," Gard explained. "I've

had a rapid day. Decided at one o'clock to enlist; enlisted at two; told

the rector at three I wouldn't play his old organ a day longer; drew

this outfit at four. It's five now. But the rector was game. He said if

he was twenty years younger he wouldn't preach in his old pulpit any

more. May I come in half an hour, Mrs. Mavering?"

Thaddeus settled his glasses. "Young man. I should have said you were

too wise for a warrior. Are you aware that cold lead, taken suddenly in

any quantity, is injurious to the system?"

"What system?"

"The physical system of the--a--person taking it."

"Is it?" said Gard. "But it might be a mental tonic."

They all went in except Thaddeus, who walked down the street, scenting

the air with delicate nostril.

"I don't--that one--I don't seem to make him out."

"You see, Mrs. Mavering," said Gard, "there are only a few people I want

to tell about anything I do--you and Helen, and Fritz Moselle, and some

of the brothers. Now, Fritz Moselle will say, 'Vat for a fool of a

musician! Aber, you nefer get so fat as me if you don' be contented.'

Brother Francis will quote the Anabasis, and Andrew will give it up, and

the Superior act like the Apocalypse. Now, what do you say?"

"I don't know. Every one else is thinking about one thing now. I should

have said you would think about something different."

Gard kindled with the eagerness peculiar to him when on the track of an

idea, or trying to state one that was clear to him but seemed to

struggle against statement--a kind of tension and nervous thrill, like

that of a hunting dog when the trail is hot.

"But going with the crowd is all right if it's going the way you want to

go. And the more undistinguished from the mass you appear to be, the

more you can keep a unit to yourself. I shouldn't like to be an officer,

for then I'd be responsible for other men. But a private marches where

he's ordered, and shoots according to prescription. So he can watch the

big phenomenon all around him and feel it racing through his blood.

Can't he? I can feel it already. Can't you? Of course. But I want to

look it in the face. If a man had a chance to be a crusader in his time

he'd be foolish to miss it. He'd miss the flavor of his time. I'd sooner

decline the acquaintance of a Shakespeare."

He looked at Helen eagerly. She stood among the potted plants in the bay

window, looking out. He had thought she would seem more interested. She

must be interested. Any one who had seen her eyes light up suddenly and

often would know that. He wondered what clue to some unexpected

significance she was following now, that she seemed absent-minded among

the potted plants. Every one had his or her personal solitary adventure.

Helen, of course, had hers. One had to remember that.

"I play to-night the last time. Will you be under the gallery?"

Then he went away. And Helen, among the potted plants, followed a clue

to this unexpected significance, that it did not seem to her splendid

and natural for Gard, too, to go to the war. It seemed like the hand in

the darkness from Rachel's story, the vista where melancholy shapes and

fears crouched and hid their faces. She watched him go down Queen Mary

Street towards the Common. Morgan Map, striding down from Philip's road,

saw him come out, said to himself, referring to the uniform. "It's that

organ player! Who next?"--looked up and saw Helen's profile above the

plants in the window, and stopped. A moment later he turned and walked

back.

In Saint Mary's, that night, the music did not seem to Helen to come

down from choir loft as usual, and talk to her familiarly. She could not

make it say anything. It stayed up among the organ-pipes; and below,

among the pillars and aisles instead, the wind of a coming storm blowing

in through the vestibule doors, half open--for the night was heavy and

close--took its place, whispered, moaned, and wailed: "You've no idea

how black it's growing. Shut the doors and hide." At least, she was only

able to make the music say something about going away, and that "if

people never meet again, never is a long, long time." She was glad when

it was over, and Gard came around and under the gallery. They walked

across the yard silently. The night had grown black, the branches

tossed, and the leaves fluttered audibly in the darkness over them. They

found Morgan walking to and fro in the edge of the light from Mrs.

Mavering's window.

"Why, Morgan!"

And Gard saluted, "Lieutenant."

"I want to see you, Nellie. Are you going home?" Then to Gard and his

uniform. "Isn't that rather sudden?"

"It's the latest fashion. I report at nine, they say. Good-night."

And Mrs. Mavering, mounting her steps, turned to watch Morgan and Helen,

and noted that they, too, walked quite silently still, till they turned

the corner in front of Thaddeus's house and disappeared.

Thaddeus sat in the little room behind the drawing-room. At the sound of

the rising wind he went to the window, looked out uneasily, and

listened. The wind was too loud for him to hear the organ, even if it

still were going. But he heard the hall-door open, and so went back

contentedly to his newspaper, in which it was stated that a certain

officer, in bringing a Confederate flag from a hotel roof in

Alexandria, was shot by the hotel-keeper, who in turn was shot by a

person accompanying the said officer. Really, people acted with singular

earnestness and energy nowadays. He laid down the paper. On the wall

opposite, in the gilded oval frame, was the picture of Mrs. Thaddeus

Bourn, not in reality a mythical person at all, and yet there was a

certain indistinctness in Thaddeus's memory of her--a certain absence of

salient points. She had not, perhaps, been characterized by earnestness

and energy. But nowadays--

"Don't bother me, Morgan," said Helen, impatiently. They were in the

drawing-room, not far from the curtained door.

"But we start next week--"

"That," murmured Thaddeus, "is not, in point of fact, such a bad idea."

"And now, Nellie, I think it would be better if every one knew what you

are to me before I left. I'll tell you why I didn't want it before--"

"It's funny, but you never take the trouble to ask what you are to me."

There was a silence that suggested threats. As far as Thaddeus could

make out she had seemed to speak quite coolly. "She won't lose her

head. God bless her!" he thought; "but--a--I think I'll step into this."

"If you're going to be subtle," said Morgan, at last, with a new

harshness and blare in his voice, "I sha'n't understand it. It's

perfectly simple. I want you to tell your uncle--Well, then, I will."

Thaddeus pulled the curtain and went through.

"I beg pardon. I seem to be referred to."

Morgan turned where he stood. Helen sat in a low chair before the

sea-coal fire, and did not look up or turn her head.

"I should have--if I had supposed the conversation was to be of such a

private nature--I should have--a--signified my presence before. As it

is, I take the opportunity to observe that your--a--importunity appears

to be unpleasant to Helen, to request that you--a--leave her alone, and

to state that--a--no engagement between you will ever exist with my

consent or her mother's."

"It does exist."

"I doubt it. Have you, then, ever promised to marry him, Helen?"

"I don't remember I was ever asked to."

Something like a flame went across Morgan's face, left red spots on it,

and a glare in his eyes.

"Helen!" The chandelier shook with his voice and step. Helen did not

move or look at him. Thaddeus raised a deprecating hand. "I must beg you

not to shout in my house." Morgan paused and concentrated. The natural

thing to do, the simple instinct, would be, with one hand to crumple up

this grinning old idiot--tall stock and curled hair and all--stuff him

away somewhere, and carry off Helen into the windy night, with her white

dress and blue ribbon around the throat. It seemed impossible, even in

an artificial age, that slim creatures should dare to balk him. She

stood up quickly, and he caught her closely about the shoulders with his

arm.

"It's absolute nonsense--"

"Please let me go, Morgan. I don't want to fight."

"Tell your uncle you belong to me."

"No!"

"Helen, do as I say!"

"No!"

Thaddeus pointed at Morgan's arm.

"Will you kindly--thank you."

Helen fled, through hall and up the stairs, a shimmer of white skirts

past the hall lamp; and in her room she leaned from the window and let

the rain drive against her face. Mrs. Mavering's window threw a great

bar into the night. Morgan's voice below seemed to fill the

drawing-room, the hall, and came rolling up the stair after her, in

muttering pursuit. She gave a half sob, listened a moment, and began to

laugh.

"I'm glad Uncle Tad has that row."

"I remember," said Thaddeus, amiably, "I remember being--a--rejected

once myself. It was unpleasant, very unpleasant."

"Do you think a thing of seven years is going to be thrown out like

this? Do you think I'm a man to put up with this kind of business? Do

you think I don't know Helen?"

"I think," said Thaddeus, "that you don't. My dear fellow, you have made

a curious mistake, and yet--and yet quite logical. I am charmed to say,

quite such as I should have predicted. You have treated a woman with a

certain contempt. You couldn't help it. It expressed, if I may say so,

the degree of your culture. Nevertheless, a mistake. Deference,

deference--they like it. It belongs to them. It is--a--their accumulated

inheritance. Seven years--at thirteen--but, my dear fellow, a child!

You announce your intention to a growing girl, by whose--a--admiring

worship it is received with awe. You suppose she continues to worship

you in the same primitive manner. You suppose your ownership and

property established, that it merely remains to dictate and receive. How

simple, how--pardon me--characteristic! By the way, your father. I

recollect, had a singular opinion of you. I am candid, you see. It

appears to be your faculty--remarkably so--to invite candor. If I

recollect, he thought, supposing you were in some way blown up or ground

up into small fragments--some accident, some catastrophe--and then

fitted together carefully--supposing, if I understood him, this process

repeated sufficiently--you might--but I doubt it--a--paternal

weakness. But as to the situation at present, I cannot conceal

my--a--satisfaction."

Morgan glowered under reddish-yellow brows, and Thaddeus talked on with

persistent amiability. So grim and forcible looked Morgan, so likely to

be summary or primitive inaction, that it seemed to argue for Thaddeus a

fine trust in the strength of social restraint, his continuing that

airy, provocative speech.

"A distinction arises--a child, a woman. It arose in Helen, no doubt,

during her sickness. You observed the distinction, I presume, but only

from its effect on you. But, really, you know, it must have affected

her. I have, in my time, studied the sex--a subject of delightful

interest."

"I don't pretend to take interest in your delights." Morgan had grown

cool.

"Quite so," murmured Thaddeus.

"Go ahead, and enjoy them. I suggest you don't interfere with me. I want

Helen and will have her. There is a bond--"

"Allow me. Has been, perhaps, an understanding assumed."

"I'm not going to quibble with words."

"Exactly. Whatever there has been, or been assumed to be, quite clear,

no longer is--is no longer assumed. I believe I speak with authority."

"I'm not going to quibble about your authority, either. You can flutter

it as much as you please. I'll see Helen alone."

"Not to-night. A--a little flutter of authority. You leave next week? I

shall not, perhaps, take the trouble to prevent your seeing Helen. I

shall take the trouble to see that nothing comes of it. My dear boy,

I'm extremely sorry. I don't like you. Your invitation to candor is

irresistible."

Morgan laughed shortly, turned, and went into the hall. Thaddeus

followed.

"Really, it's raining. Let me lend you--but a soldier, of course--what a

blessing is youth! Exit!"--to the now closed outer door--"exit the

primitive."

And so spring came to an end, with a warm rain murmuring on the roofs

all night, soaking down the roots of the maples, driving part of the

Third Regiment to sleep in the grand-stands. As in sleeping Hamilton no

one knew another's dream, so almost as little by lamp-light or at dawn

did any watcher truly imagine another's thought. Who shall escape the

dungeon of himself? The policeman on the corner of Shannon Street and

Philip's road, when Morgan rushed by him, sympathized with an apparent

hurry to get out of the comfortless rain. Thaddeus, before his sea-coal

fire, plotted such happy paths for Helen to walk in as an enlightened

egoism showed would be best for Thaddeus. Helen let the rain drive in

her face, and thought that, "if people never meet again, never will be a

long, long time." Gard stood in the middle of his study, looked around

him, whistled "The Campbells Are Coming," and called it clearing up.

Books, music, piano, chairs, and memories of meditations--he thought he

did not care much what became of them. There was a new time coming, and

time it came. "This is no world to play with mammets and to tilt with

lips. We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns." "The Campbells are

coming--trala! trala!" Mrs. Mavering drew the rope of her long black

hair over her shoulder, smoothed it on her knee, and thought of the

terms "commission" and "estates in happiness." The braid was thick and

glossy. It seemed hard if her own play were quite ended and story told.

What, nothing more! Restlessness must come from overbrooding, or the new

stir of the times. A woman's story ended too soon. What a melancholy

noise the rain made!

Who shall escape the dungeon of himself, or look from its clouded

windows through the clouded windows even of that one which lies nearest,

where another prisoner strains to see?

Chapter XI

The Whirlpool.--Mr. Paulus's Reminiscences of Women.

The Third Regiment went its way. Visibly, it resembled swarms of bees

when last seen clinging to the freight cars, or an excited picnic with

ornamental bayonets, but to a larger contemplation rather a stream of

sea-drift drawn into the suck and roar of a growing whirlpool. Men are

noisy and cheerful, and seldom know their own pathos. But the streets of

Hamilton seemed empty, though hardly fewer people went to and fro; in

the faces of women here and there, there was a certain premonitory

desolation.

Helen felt the emptiness to be extraordinary--unexpected; an emptiness

between her and the sky; rooms mysteriously disfurnished; things that

people said sounding hollow, as if the meaning of words had fallen away

from beneath them; Saint Mary's at night became silent and dark, except

for now and then a droning service without palaces or towers of sound.

"To what end," reflected Thaddeus, "am I a student of human nature in

the subtle sex? If she doesn't miss that antediluvian brute. I'm an

addled egg."

"We're dreadfully dull, Lady Rachel, aren't we?" said Helen. "Let's be

Knights Hospitallers."

"What do you mean?"

"All the rest do is to scrape lint and read newspapers and potter. Why

couldn't we enlist and be nurses?"

"I dare say we could."

"With white caps and big cuffs? Could we?"

Mrs. Mavering wondered at Helen's influence over her. She had watched it

grow, with a half-amused curiosity. She had thought to be the girl's

guide and helper, and that this new interest would be her reward upon

Thaddeus's theory of commissions. But she had seemed more and more to be

following, not leading; as if, in the actual onward game of life,

experience, instead of a lamp before, were a lamp behind, darkening the

path with the shadow of ourselves. To remember only made one irresolute.

It was necessary to be young, or else to forget--at any rate, to be

valiant. But had she not had enough of excitement, adventure, the

ragged seams of things, variety and burlesque, and been soul-sick

through it all, and fled at last from its noise and passions? She shook

her head, not so much at Helen as at the other side of her own inner

argument.

"Collars and cuffs, Lady Rachel! But you'd look beautiful!"

"That isn't what people want in nurses."

"It isn't? But it is! Why, if I were a man, and had you around looking

like a remorseful queen who had just hung up her robe and crown on the

hat-rack, and was trying to be humble with collars and cuffs, and all

that, I'd get well if I were shot criss-cross. I'd say, 'This world is

too fine to leave.'"

"How should you know what you would do?"

"Oh!" She hesitated, and drooped a little. "I think it was Gard said

that." Then, with returned animation: "He was so funny, Lady Rachel. I

asked him if he didn't think you were all that, and he only said, 'This

world is too fine to leave; I think I'll stay quite a while.'"

It did not all seem to Mrs. Mavering a direct argument to go

hospitalling; only it seemed to fall in line with other questionings

about the fallen curtain, and whether it might not again be raised. One

might be content with a minor part.

They went up to Hagar at the end of June, and spent the blue-and-green

summer together in the widow's house behind the militant church.

Thaddeus came every Saturday, invented new paradoxes, to watch them fall

helplessly on the widow's comprehension, and went down the hill after

tea in the wide sunset--an immaculate gentleman, with eye-glass, cane,

and smooth-shouldered coat--to talk with Mr. Paulus.

"Ain't goin' to get married again, are ye?"

"To whom, Peter? To whom?"

"Mrs. M--Mav--the one that looks like she cost a dollar an inch."

"Mrs. Mavering is, unfortunately, not as yet a widow."

"He gone to the war? 'Tain't any more'n reasonable she might get to be.

Fine-lookin' woman--looks expensive. Well, I done it three times, an'

then guessed I'd quit. I got too fat--don't figure as well at weddin's

as I once did. But--Well, I don' no'--the women's got in the habit of

marryin' me."

"Pete," said Thaddeus, softly, "was not the first time, in fact, the

best? When one is young!"

"Umm--She was--well, I'll tell ye. Old Parson Gerry was here then, an'

the candidest man in Hamilton County, an' I went to him. 'Who is she?'

says he. I says, 'Hilda Armitage.' 'Shucks!' says he, 'she won't have

you.' 'She will, too,' says I, pretty mad. 'Well, well, I'll marry you,

but she ought've done a sight better'n that.' But by-and-by the parson

and me was both widowers, an' I went to him again. 'Who is she?' says

he. 'Esther Allen.' 'Good land alive!' says he, 'I was going to ask her

myself next week!' An' he appeared to think Essie's bad luck was

odd--remarkable odd."

"I was asking, Peter, for reminiscences of your young romance, tending

on to your--a--doctrine of practical matrimony, and so to your theory

of--of woman. We were at the point of young romance. May I suggest--the

clergyman appears to take up too much room. Hilda Armitage--"

"Well, she was roomy, too. She began to lay on flesh after we was

married on credit of a hundred acres of Wyantenaug Valley land, came to

her from Patton Armitage, till she took a six-by-four coffin, she did,

by--"

"Pass on, Pete, pass on. Esther Allen--a--the minister's preference

would seem to have argued in her a certain superior attractiveness, a

certain--"

"Jus' so. She argued it that way. She'd never believe but what I knew

the week the parson had his eye on, an' sort of hurried up and got in

underhand. 'Twan't so," said Mr. Paulus, earnestly. "'Twan't so. Didn't

know a thing about it till he--"

Thaddeus raised a white hand.

"I beg of you, no more."

In the matter of light on the "subtle sex," what opportunities for study

had not Pete Paulus thrown away! Mr. Paulus's drooping left eyelid

drooped lower. He heaved with a rumbling chuckle.

* * * * *

It would be not so evil a fate to come to Hagar for the first time,

bringing inward wounds to its peculiar balsams. The blue flowers on the

green, the lilacs in Widow Bourn's garden. Windless Mountain, that

eclectic philosopher, the deep wood avenues, the league length of the

Cattle Ridge, the eastern hills where the church spire of Salem village

might be seen--one runs easily into cataloguing details, but how

convince the inexperienced of their significance, their speech, their

daily conversations? Could the children of Hagar tell a stranger the

meaning of the mill stream, or ever really explain the moral of the Four

Roads? They were not mere objects. They were tangled with living years.

One must have seen visions and heard messages. One must have dropped a

salt tear by the road-side and sailed that stream to the Celestial City.

And yet it was Mrs. Mavering who seemed to hear the conversations, the

meanings, the messages, and not Thaddeus or Helen. Thaddeus was never an

instance in point, and Helen was restless. Thaddeus speculated and

commented on that restlessness to Mrs. Mavering, who offered few

opinions. The impulse and daring which Mrs. Mavering knew as

characteristic of Helen's speech seemed to have turned from mental to

physical energy, to climbing cliffs instead of merely precipitous ideas.

It was as if speech were no longer expressive of facts; as if both were

learning an unsyllabled language which the other knew before--Mrs.

Mavering learning the language of the rocks and the soil, of growing

and flowing things, and Helen the language of human living at a point in

its syntax which deals with the more searching idioms, the peculiar

question at which point is not merely, "What does this obscure passage

mean?" but, "What does it mean to me?" The summer days went like

water-drops from the eaves after a rain, that gather and shine and fall

swiftly, incessantly. September came, where the green garment of the

season runs into embroidery of purple and gold.

The wood-path that runs west from the Cattle Ridge road beyond Job

Mather's mill goes by a damp hollow where spotted fungi grow, climbs

past bramble patches, clearings, and a bold strip or two of cliff, turns

south around a lonely pine-tree, the last of its fellows, down through

woods noted for lady-slippers in June, and comes out on the hill meadows

along the Red Rock road. You can look south from this wood's edge past

the west shoulder of Windless down the Wyantenaug, and to the east see

the range of the Great South woods, and near by the spire of the

militant church. But Helen and Rachel came there, as a rule, for the

sake of the dominance and conversations of Windless.

Helen lay on her back, with her hands under her head and knees in the

air. Mrs. Mavering's book was thrown aside.

"Do you really want to go?"

"Yes."

"I don't know but I do. What will your mother say?"

"'Why, Helen!'"

"And Mr. Bourn?"

"Oh, he'll sputter some. I don't mind."

Windless lay in the sunlight, genial, wise, sincere, with the girth of

high living and the forehead of high thought. One did not have to

specify in the presence of Windless. Everything was understood. Yet Mrs.

Mavering asked. "I suppose it isn't Morgan Map at all?"

Helen answered "No," promptly enough, and fell into sombre silence. The

eastern slope of Windless darkened in the shadow of the lessening

afternoon, while the western only seemed to glimmer the more genially;

there was that advantage in being large. "You see," she went on, "it

suits Morgan, fighting and ordering and doing things. Nothing ever hurts

him. I don't see why I should bother about him when he's having a good

time."

"It's enough if you don't."

"Well, Lady Rachel, then that's it. I don't."

"Then we won't say what it is?"

"No, please."

"But I suppose we can know?"

Helen rolled over with a laugh, and hid her mouth a moment in the stubby

grass.

"Let's go home."

Widow Bourn said, "Why, Helen!" immediately. Thaddeus went with Rachel

into the garden, and walked beside her up and down the path between the

porch and the lilac gate.

"It isn't Morgan Map. She doesn't bother about him at all."

"She doesn't? Dear me!"

"But I think it might be better, after all."

"What is it, then? Why can't she be contented? My dear lady, my poor

intelligence struggles with the subject, but you and Helen--hospitals,

drudgery, dirt, pah! vermin. I knew she had the notion. I labelled it

properly, 'Notion.' I was aware the Helen estate was not returning

the--a--interest it should. I admit my commission from it has in

consequence this summer been very meagre--most irregular. I believe I

appreciate, I strive to understand, your difficult sex--my lifelong

endeavor--but at present, so to speak, if I may say so, it 'gets me.'"

"Helen has perhaps more nervous energy than is common."

"Nervous! But might we not almost say, of late, feverish?"

"Perhaps we might."

"Then what--or rather, why?"

"If Helen had her secrets it would not follow that she would confess

them to me, and surely you would know as quickly as I if she had any.

But if I have any intimation you must let me keep it, and only say that,

perhaps, it would be good for her."

Thaddeus shrugged his shoulders, and went down, immaculately, to the

post-office to consult.

"Pete, the opportunities you've lost to study women! But you might,

possibly, say something at random. What's all this for?"

Mr. Paulus's face was like the Sphinx's for extent massiveness and lack

of expression, but his left eyelid was variable. He pondered some

moments. "What did you an' me steal pigs for? Did we want the pigs? No.

Did we want to see Starr Atherton in his nightshirt? Some--not much.

Well, it was a way we had of puttin' what was in our minds. What's in

will out. That girl'd bust out somewhere. If it ain't measles, it's

boils. That's what I say. What's in will out."

* * * * *

Whatsoever supplication or remonstrance Thaddeus may have sent up by

himself, he took council of some inward monitor, and did not "sputter."

He had his reward from Helen, who fell into a mood of tentative

caressing.

In October they went to Washington. Thaddeus sniffed a few weeks about

the streets of the capital, and returned to Hamilton, his bank and club

and lonely house, in a state of mind to be expressed by a shrug and the

lifting of a white hand in deprecation. In his pursuit of happiness the

scent seemed to be lost, the hunt all astray. He realized more than ever

how much of his fortune in that commodity he had staked on one issue. He

doubted, after all, the wisdom of it, but could not find a way, nor in

himself any impulse, to draw back. "The new generation, these new times!

They are strenuous, and one grows old." The air was full of the war; the

suck of the whirlpool was felt in every corner.

Part II