_February 28._ Many times in the last three years I have begun a letter
to you, for the thought that you, like the rest of the world, may rank
my father with other embezzlers stings me almost to desperation. Each
time it has been to tear the attempted justification—or I should say,
extenuation—into fragments, long before it was completed. In all my
trials I have come to realize that nothing I can say can stand him in
stead; for whatever I urge is open to suspicion, not merely because it
is my interest to condone his act, but still more because it inevitably
becomes an indirect justification of myself, and therefore, in a sense,
a plea for pardon.
At moments, too, when with you, I have had to exercise the greatest
self-control not to tell you what I feel. If I were only some one else
than Donald Maitland, so that I might say to you:—
“You should know that your guardian was incapable of the lowness the
world imputes to him! I am not trying to belittle the sin, but to
distinguish the motive. His wrong was no mean attempt to enrich himself
at the expense of one he loved, for his nature was wholly unmercenary,
and his transgression originated, not through greed, but through lack
of it. Like all men of true intellect, he was heedless in money
matters, and I am conscious that there was in him, as there is in me,
the certain weakness which is almost inevitable with mind
cultivation,—an engulfing, as it were, of the big principles of right
and wrong in the complexities and the refinements of cultivated
thought. His birthright was scholarship, but in place of the life he
was fitted for he was forced into Wall Street, and toiled there without
sympathy or aptitude for his work. Do you not remember how, aside from
our companionship, his books were his one great pleasure? The wealth of
mind he gave to us tells the story of how he must have neglected his
office in favor of his library. Yet though this preference might have
made him a poor man, I cannot think his studies would ever have led him
into dishonesty. I have never had the heart to trace the history of his
act, but Mr. Blodgett tells me that shortly after his marriage he first
began to speculate, and knowing as I do my mother’s extravagance and my
father’s love for her, I can understand the motive. The inevitable
result came presently, and, as a temporary expedient, a small part of
your property was used. Then a desperate attempt was made to recover
this by the risking of a larger portion, and after that there was
nothing left but confession or flight. I wish he had spoken, but the
weakness that produced the first wrong accounts for the second, and I
believe his chief thought was of me, and how I might be saved from the
consequences of his guilt. Unless you have put him wholly out of your
heart, you must appreciate that it was no sordid scheme to cheat you,
but a surrender to the love strong enough to overcome his honesty. You
must know that he loved you too well to wrong you willingly, and I
think with pain of what I am sure he must have suffered in his shame at
having robbed you. Do you not remember the sadness in his face in those
later years, and his tenderness to both of us? Can you not see that his
kindness, his patience, and his care of us were his endeavored
atonement?”
Oh, Maizie, I ask nothing for myself, but if you could be brought to
think of him, to love him, as you once did, my greatest grief would be
ended.
Bitter as my misery was after Mr. Blodgett’s revelation, there was
still some sweetness to make it bearable. For years I had thought of
you as heartless and forgetful, and even in my love had hated and
despised you at moments, as only love can hate and despise. The world
thinks that animosity is always strongest against enemies, though daily
it sees the intensest feuds between those nations and individuals who
are most closely related, and never learns that the deepest hatred
comes from love. Now I knew that you had cause for slighting my letters
and gift, and the knowledge of my injustice and the thought that you
were more lovable than ever were the silver lining to my cloud of
shame.
My first meeting with you was a pure chance, yet it shaped my life. For
three weeks after my call on Mr. Blodgett I pondered and vacillated
over what I should do, without reaching any decision. At the end of
that time I went to his office again.
“Mr. Blodgett has asked two or three times if you hadn’t called,” the
boy informed me; adding, as he opened the door to the private office,
“He told me, if you ever came again, sir, to show you right in.”
I passed through the doorway, and then faltered, for you were sitting
beside the banker, overlooking a paper that he was commenting upon.
Could I have escaped unnoticed, I should have done so; but you both
glanced up as I entered.
The moment you saw me you rose, with an exclamation of recognition and
surprise, which meant to me that you knew your old friend in spite of
the changes. Do you wonder that, not foreseeing what was to come, I
stood there as if turned to stone? My manner evidently made you
question your own eyes, for you asked, “Is not this Dr. Hartzmann?”
“Of course it is!” cried Mr. Blodgett, with a quickness and heartiness
which proved that your question was almost as great a relief to him as
it was to me.
“I did not think, Miss Walton,” I replied, steadying my voice as best I
could, “that you saw my face clearly enough that evening, to recollect
it?”
“The moonlight was so strong,” you explained, “that I should have known
you anywhere.”
“Then your eyes are better than mine,” asserted Mr. Blodgett. “I
accused the doctor of using blondine, to atone for my not recognizing
him, though I must confess he will have to use a good deal more if he
wants to be thought anything but Italian.”
“Then you have met before?” you questioned.
“Yes,” replied Mr. Blodgett. “I was going to tell you when we got
through with that mortgage. I knew you would be interested to hear that
the doctor was in New York. Seems like Tangier, doesn’t it?”
“In reminiscence,” I assented, merely to gain time.
“None of your rickety ruins,” chuckled Mr. Blodgett.
“But more ruin,” you said.
“And more danger,” I added, pointing out of the window at the
passers-by in Wall Street. “Nowhere in my travels, even among races
that have to go armed, have I ever seen so many anxious and careworn
faces.”
“Most of them look worried,” suggested Mr. Blodgett, “only because they
are afraid they’ll take more than three minutes to eat their lunch.”
For a moment you spoke with Mr. Blodgett on business, and then offered
me your hand in farewell, saying, “I am very glad, Dr. Hartzmann, for
this chance reunion. Mr. Blodgett and I have often spoken of the
mysterious Oriental who fell in—and out—of our knowledge so strangely.”
“I have wished to meet you, Miss Walton,” I responded warmly, “to thank
you for your kindness and help to me when”—
“That was nothing, Dr. Hartzmann,” you interrupted, in evident
deprecation of my thanks. “Indeed, I have always felt that we were in a
measure responsible for your accident, and that we made but a poor
return by the little we did. Good-morning.”
Mr. Blodgett took you to your carriage, and when he returned he gave a
whistle. “Well!” he exclaimed. “I haven’t gone through such a
ten-second scare since I proposed to my superior moiety.”
“I ought”—I began.
But he went on: “There’s nothing frightens me so much as a wrought-up
woman. Dynamite or volcanoes aren’t a circumstance to her, because they
have limits; but woman!”
I laughed and said, “The Hindoos have a paradox to the effect that
women fear mice, mice fear men, and men fear women.”
“She got so much better and longer look at you in Tangier than I did
that I don’t wonder she recognized Dr. Hartzmann when I didn’t. But why
did she stop there in her recollections?”
“It appeared incomprehensible to me for a moment, yet, as a fact, her
knowing me as Donald Maitland would have been the greater marvel of the
two. When she knew me, I was an undersized, pallid, stooping lad of
seventeen. In the ten years since, my hair and skin have both darkened
greatly, I have grown a mustache, and my voice has undergone the change
that comes with manhood, as well as that which comes by speaking
foreign tongues. Your very question as to whether I was of Eastern
birth tells the whole story, for such a doubt would seem absurd to one
who remembered the boy of ten years ago. Then, too, Miss Walton, having
recognized me as Dr. Hartzmann, was, as it were, disarmed of all
suspicion by having no question-mark in her mind as to my exact
identity.”
Mr. Blodgett nodded his head in assent. “And you don’t know it all,” he
informed me. “I’m going to be frank, doctor, and acknowledge that I’ve
expressed a pretty low opinion of you to her more than once. If Maizie
were asked what man in this world she’d be least likely to meet in my
office on a friendly footing, she would probably think of you. Your
presence here was equivalent to saying that you weren’t Donald
Maitland, let alone the fact that I greeted you as Dr. Hartzmann, and
that she could never dream of my having a reason to deceive her in your
identity.”
“Such a chain of circumstances almost makes one believe in kismet,” I
sighed. Then I laughed, and added, “How easy it is to show that one
need not be scared—after the danger is all over!”
“That isn’t the only scare I owe to you,” muttered Mr. Blodgett. “I
didn’t take your address because I told you to come again. Why didn’t
you?”
“I am here.”
“Yes. But for three weeks I’ve been worrying over what you were doing
with yourself, and not knowing that you hadn’t cut your throat.”
“I am sorry to have troubled you. I stayed away to save troubling you.”
“You’re as considerate as the Fiji islander was of the missionary, when
he asked him if he had rather be cooked _à la maître d’hôtel_ or _en
papillote_. What have you been doing?”
“Very little to any purpose. I have written to my publisher, offering
to sell my rights in my text-books; to a friend, asking him to learn
for what price he can sell my library; and to my bankers, directing
them to send me the bonds and a draft for my balance. I received the
securities and a bill of exchange yesterday, and am so ignorant of
business methods that I came to you this morning to learn how to turn
them into cash.”
“I’ll do better than that,” volunteered Mr. Blodgett, touching a
button. “Give them to me, and I’ll have it done.” Then, after he had
turned the matter over to a clerk, he asked, “What does your publisher
offer?”
“Thirty-five hundred.”
“And what are your royalties?”
“Last year they were over six hundred dollars.”
“Humph! That’s equivalent to investing money at eighteen per cent. You
ought to get more than that.”
“A little more or less is nothing compared with paying so much on my
debt.”
“What will your library bring?”
“Perhaps four thousand, if I can find some one who wants so technical a
collection.”
“And you can get along without it?”
“I must,” I declared, though wincing a little.
“Rather goes against the grain, eh?” he rejoined kindly.
I tried to laugh, and said, “My books have been such good comrades that
I haven’t quite accustomed myself yet to thinking of them as
merchandise. I feel a little as the bankrupt planter must have felt
when he saw his slave children offered for sale.”
“And what do you plan to do with yourself?”
“I haven’t been able to make up my mind.”
We were interrupted at this point by some business matter, and I took
my leave. The next morning Mr. Blodgett called at my boarding-place on
his way down town.
“I haven’t come to talk business,” he announced. “I told my wife and
daughter, last night, about the fellow from the backwoods of Asia, and
made them so curious that Mrs. Blodgett has given me permission to
furnish him board and lodgings for a week. I’ll promise you a better
room than this,” he added, glancing at the box I had moved into as soon
as I realized how much worse than a pauper I was.
I could hardly express my gratitude as I tried to thank him, but he
pretended not to perceive my emotion, and said briskly: “That’s
settled, then. Send your stuff round any time to-day, and be on deck
for a seven-o’clock dinner.”
You, who know Mrs. Blodgett so much better than I, can understand my
bewilderment during the first day or two of my visit. Her husband had
jokingly pictured me as of an Eastern race, which made the meeting
rather embarrassing; but the moment she comprehended that I did not
habitually sit on the floor, did not carry a scimiter or kris, and was
not unwashed and ferine, but only a dark skinned, dark haired, and very
silent German scholar, she took possession of me as I have seen her do
of others. She preceded me to my room, ringing for a servant on the
way, made me open my trunk, and directed the maid where to put each
article it contained. She told me what time to be ready for dinner,
what to wear for it, and at that meal she had me helped twice to such
dishes as she chose, while refusing to let me have more than one cup of
coffee. To a man who had never had any one to look after him in small
things it was a novel and rather pleasant if surprising experience, and
when I grew accustomed to it I easily understood Mr. Blodgett’s
chuckles of enjoyment when she told him he shouldn’t have a third
cigar, when she decided how close he was to sit to the fire, and
finally when she made all of us—Agnes, Mr. Blodgett, and myself—go to
bed at her own hour for retiring. Best of all I understood Mr.
Blodgett’s familiar name for her, “the boss.” That visit was a perfect
revelation to me of affectionate, thoughtful, and persistently minute
domineering. I do not believe that the man lives, though he be the
veriest woman-hater, who could help loving her after a fortnight of her
tyranny. Certainly I could not.
By Mr. Blodgett’s aid I secured a “paper” cable transfer of the money
realized from the bonds and draft, in order that it might seem to come
from Europe, and sent it to you, writing at his suggestion, “The
inclosed draft on Foster G. Blodgett & Co. for the sum of thirty-three
thousand dollars is part payment of principal and interest due you from
estate of William G. Maitland.” I wonder what your thoughts were as you
read the unsigned and typewritten note?
It was your greeting of me by my alias that led me to accept the
incognito. Perhaps it was cowardly to shirk my shame by such a means,
but it was not done from cowardice; the thought did not even occur to
me until it opened a way to knowing you. And in that hope my very
misery became almost happiness, for its possibilities seemed those of
the Oriental poet who wrote:—
“My love once offered me a bitter draught
From which in cowardice I flinched.
But still she tendered to me;
And bowing to her wish, I then no longer shrank,
But took the cup and put it to my lips.
Oh, marvel! gazing still at her,
The potion turned to sweetness as I drank.”
If your old friend, Donald Maitland, were dead to you, your new lover,
Rudolph Hartzmann, might fill his place. I never stopped to think if
such trickery were right, or rather my love was stronger than my
conscience.
Good-night, my dearest.
X
_March 1._ During my visit I heard much about you from Mrs. Blodgett
and Agnes, for your name was constantly on their lips. From them I
learned that your birth, wealth, and the influence of your uncle had
involved you in a fashionable society for which you cared nothing, and
that, aside from the gayety which that circle forced upon you, your
time was spent in travel, and in reading, music, and charitable work.
Except for themselves, they averred, you had no intimate friends, and
their explanation of this fact proved to me that you had taken our
separation as seriously as had I.
“After Mr. Walton brought her to America she spent the first few months
with us,” Mrs. Blodgett told me, “and was the loneliest child I ever
saw. Her big eyes used to look so wistfully at times that I could
hardly bear it, yet not a word did she ever speak of her sorrow. And
all on account of that wretch and his son! I think the worse men are,
the more a good woman loves them! When Maizie was old enough to
understand, and Mr. Walton told her how she had been robbed, she
wouldn’t believe him till Mr. Blodgett confirmed the story. She used to
be always talking of the two, but she has never spoken of them since
that night.”
Even more cruel to me was something Agnes related. She worshiped you
with the love and admiration a girl of eighteen sometimes feels for a
girl of twenty-three, and in singing your praises,—to a most willing
listener,—one day, she exclaimed, “Oh, I wish I were a man, so that I
could be her lover! I’d make her believe in love.” Then seeing my
questioning look, Agnes continued: “What with her selfish old uncle,
and the men who want to marry her for her money, and those hateful
Maitlands, she has been made to distrust all love and friendship. She
has the idea that she isn’t lovable,—that people don’t like her for
herself; and I really think she will never marry, just because of it.”
Better far than this knowledge of you at second-hand was Mr. Blodgett’s
telling me that you were to dine with them during my visit. It may seem
absurd, but not the least part of my eagerness that night was to see
you in evening dress. If I had not loved you already, I should have
done so from that meeting; and although you are dear to me for many
things besides your beauty, I understand why men love you so deeply who
know nothing of your nature. That all men should not love you is my
only marvel whenever I recall that first glimpse of you as you entered
the Blodgetts’ drawing-room.
Before we had finished our greetings Mr. Whitely entered, and though I
little realized how vital a part he was to be of my life, I yet
regarded him with instant interest, for something in his manner towards
you suggested to me that he coveted the hand you offered him.
A lover does not view a rival kindly, but I am compelled to own that he
is handsome. If I had the right to cavil, I could criticise only his
mouth, which it seems to me has slyness with a certain cruel firmness;
but I did not notice this until I knew him better, and perhaps it is
only my imagination, born of later knowledge. I am not so blinded by my
jealousy as to deny his perfect manner, for one feels the polished
surface, touch the outside where one will.
Your demeanor towards him was friendly, yet with all its graciousness
it seemed to me to have a quality not so much of aloofness as of limit;
conveying in an indefinable way the fact that such relations as then
existed between you were the only possible ones. It was a shading so
imperceptible that I do not think the Blodgetts realized it, and I
should have questioned if Mr. Whitely himself were conscious of it, but
for one or two things he said in the course of the evening, which had
to me, under the veil of a general topic, individual suggestion.
We were discussing that well-worn question of woman’s education, Mrs.
Blodgett having introduced the apple of discord by a sweeping
disapproval of college education for women, on the ground that it
prevented their marrying.
“They get to know too much, eh?” laughed Mr. Blodgett.
“No,” cried Mrs. Blodgett, “they get to know too little! While they
ought to be out in the world studying life and men, so as to choose
wisely, they’re shut up in dormitories filling their brains with Greek
and mathematics.”
“You would limit a woman’s arithmetic to the solution of how to make
one and one, one?” I asked, smiling.
“Surely, Mrs. Blodgett, you do not mean that an uncultivated woman
makes the best wife?” inquired Mr. Whitely.
“I mean,” rejoined Mrs. Blodgett, “that women who know much of books
know little of men. That’s why over-intellectual women always marry
fools.”
“How many intellectual wives there must be!” you said.
“I shouldn’t mind if they only married fools,” continued Mrs. Blodgett,
“but half the time they don’t marry at all.”
“Does that prove or disprove their intellect?” you asked.
“It means,” replied Mrs. Blodgett, “that they are so puffed up with
their imaginary knowledge that they think no man good enough for them.”
“I’ve known one or two college boys graduate with the same large
ideas,” remarked Mr. Blodgett.
“But a man gets over it after a few years,” urged Mrs. Blodgett, “and
is none the worse off; but by the time a girl overcomes the idea, she’s
so old that no man worth having will look at her.”
“I rather think, Mrs. Blodgett,” said Mr. Whitely, in that charmingly
deferential manner he has with women, “that some men do not try to win
highly educated women because they are abashed by a sense of their own
inferiority.”
“Where do those men hide themselves, Whitely?” interrogated Mr.
Blodgett.
“I’ll not question the reason,” retorted Mrs. Blodgett. “The fact that
over-educated girls think themselves above men is all I claim.”
“I don’t think, Mrs. Blodgett,” you corrected, “it is so much a feeling
of superiority as it is a change in the aims of marriage. Formerly,
woman married to gain a protector, and man to gain a housewife. Now,
matrimony is sought far less for service, and far more for
companionship.”
“But, Miss Walton,” questioned Mr. Whitely, “does not the woman ask too
much nowadays? She has the leisure to read and study, but a business
man cannot spare the time. Is it fair, then, to expect that he shall be
as cultivated as she can make herself?”
“That is, I think, the real cause for complaint,” you answered. “The
business man is so absorbed in money-making that he sacrifices his
whole time to it. I can understand a woman falling in love with a lance
or a sword, dull companions though they must have been, but it seems to
me impossible for any woman to love a minting-machine, even though she
might be driven to marry it for its product.”
“That’s rough on us, Whitely,” laughed Mr. Blodgett good-naturedly; but
Mr. Whitely reddened, and you, as if to divert the subject from this
personal tendency, turned and surmised to me:—
“I suppose that as a German, Dr. Hartzmann, you think a woman should be
nothing more than a housekeeper?”
“Why not suggest, Miss Walton,” I replied, smiling, “that as an
Orientalist I must think the seraglio woman’s proper sphere?”
“But, Miss Walton,” persisted Mr. Whitely, not accepting your
diversion, “a man, to be successful nowadays, must give all his
attention to his business.
“I presume that is so,” you acceded; “but could he not be content with
a little less success in money-making, and strive to acquire a few more
amenities?”
“Maizie wants us all to be painters and poets and musicians,” asserted
Mr. Blodgett.
“Not at all,” you denied.
“Oh, Maizie!” cried Agnes. “You know you said the other day that you
hoped I wouldn’t marry a business man.”
“I said ‘_only_ a business man,’ Agnes,” you replied, without a trace
of the embarrassment so many women would have shown. “Because men
cannot all be clergymen is no reason for their knowing nothing of
religion. There would be no painters, poets, or musicians if there were
no dilettanti.”
“Yet I think,” argued Mr. Whitely, still as if he were trying to
convince you of something, “that the successful business man has as
much brain as most writers or artists.”
“I have no doubt that is true,” you assented. “So, too, a day laborer
may have a good mind. But of what avail is a brain if it has never been
trained, or has been trained to know only one thing?”
“But authors and painters are only specialists,” urged Mr. Whitely.
“They are specialists of a very different type,” you responded, “from
the man whose daily thoughts are engrossed with the prices of pig-iron
or cotton sheetings. I think one reason why American girls frequently
marry Europeans is that the foreign man is so apt to be more broadly
cultivated.”
“That’s what I mean by saying that books unfit women to marry wisely,”
interjected Mrs. Blodgett. “They marry foreigners because they are more
cultivated, without a thought of character.”
“Indeed, Mrs. Blodgett,” you observed, “has not the day gone by for
thinking dullness a sign of honesty? And certainly a business career is
far more likely to corrupt and harden men’s natures than the higher
professions, for its temptations and strifes are so much greater.”
Your opinion was so in accord with what my father had often preached
that I could not but wonder if his teachings still colored your
thoughts. To test this idea as well as to learn your present view, I
recurred to another theory of his by saying, “Does not the broader and
more sensitive nature of the scholar or artist involve defects fully as
serious as the hardness and narrowness of the business man? Some one
has said that ‘to marry a literary man is to domesticate a bundle of
nerves.’”
“A nervous irritability,” you replied, “which came from fine mental
exertion, would be as nothing compared to my own fretting over enforced
companionship with an unsympathetic or sordid nature.” Then you
laughed, and added, “I must have a very bad temper, for it is the only
one which ever really annoys me.”
That last speech told me how thoroughly the woman of twenty-three was a
development of the child of fourteen, for I remembered how little my
mother’s anger used to disturb you, but how deeply and strongly your
emotions affected you. I suppose it was absurd, but I felt happy to
think that you had changed so little in character from the time when I
knew you so well. And from that evening I never for an instant believed
that you would marry Mr. Whitely, for I was sure that you could never
love him. How could I dream that you, with beauty, social position, and
wealth, would make a loveless marriage?
Good-night, my love.