_March 10._ For the remainder of my visit, it seemed as if your
prophecy of friendship were to be fulfilled. From the moment of my
confidence to you, all the reserves that had been raised by my
slighting of your invitations disappeared, perhaps because the secret I
had shared with you served to make my past conduct less unreasonable;
still more, I believe, because of the faith in you it evidenced in me.
Certain I am that in the following week I felt able to be my true self
when with you, for the first time since we were boy and girl together.
The difference was so marked that you commented on the change.
“Do you remember,” you asked me, “our conversation in Mr. Whitely’s
study, when I spoke of how little people really knew one another? Here
we have been meeting for over three years, and yet I find that I
haven’t in the least known you.”
It is a pleasure to me to recall that whole conversation, for it was by
far the most intimate that we ever had,—so personal that I think I
should but have had to question to learn what I long to know. In
response to my slight assistance, to the sympathy I had shown, you
opened for the moment your heart; willing, apparently, that I should
fathom your true nature.
We had gone to dinner at the Grangers’ merely to please Mrs. Blodgett,
for we mutually agreed that in the country formal dinners were a
weariness of the flesh; and I presume that with you, as with me, this
general objection of ours was greatly strengthened when we found Mrs.
Polhemus among the guests. It is always painful to me to be near her,
and her dislike of you is obvious enough to make me sure that her
presence is equally disagreeable to you. It is a strange warp and woof
life weaves, that I owe to one for whom we both feel such repulsion the
most sympathetic, the tenderest conversation I have ever had with you.
I was talking with Miss Granger, and thus did not hear the beginning of
my mother’s girds at you; but Agnes, who sat on my left, told me later
that, as usual, Mrs. Polhemus set out to bait you by remarks
superficially inoffensive, but covertly planned to embarrass or sting.
The first thing which attracted my notice was her voice distinctly
raised, as if she wished the whole table to listen, and in fact loud
enough to make Miss Granger stop in the middle of a sentence and draw
our attention to the speaker.
“—sound very well,” Mrs. Polhemus was saying, “and are to be expected
from any one who strives to be thought romantically sentimental.”
“I did not know,” you replied in a low voice, “that a ‘romantically
sentimental’ nature was needed to produce belief in honesty.”
“It is easy enough to talk the high morals of honesty,” retorted your
assailant, “and I suppose, Miss Walton, that for you it is not
difficult to live up to your conversational ideals. But we unfortunate
earthly creatures, who cannot achieve so rarefied a life, dare not make
a parade of our ethical natures. The saintly woman is an enormously
difficult rôle to play since miracles went out of style.”
“Oh, leave us an occasional ideal, Mrs. Polhemus,” laughed a guest. “I
for one wish that fairy rings and genii were still the vogue.”
“But we have some kinds of miracles,” asserted Mrs. Granger. “Remember
the distich,—
‘God still works wonders now and then:
Behold! two lawyers, honest men!’”
“With all due deference to Miss Walton’s championing of absolute
perfection,” continued my mother, with a cleverly detached manner, to
veil what lay back of the sneer, “I find it much easier to accept the
miracle of an honest lawyer than that of an absolutely uncattish
woman,”—a speech which, like most of those of Mrs. Polhemus, drew a
laugh from the men.
“That’s because you don’t know Miss Walton!” exclaimed Agnes warmly,
evidently fretted by such conduct towards you.
“On the contrary,” answered my mother, speaking coolly and evenly, “I
presume I have known Miss Walton longer and better than any one else in
this room; and I remember when her views of honesty were such that her
ideal was personified by a pair of embezzlers.”
You had been meeting her gaze across the table as she spoke, but now
you dropped your lids, hiding your eyes behind their long lashes; and
nothing but the color receding from your cheeks, leaving them as white
as your throat and brow, told of what you felt.
“Oh, say something,” appealed Agnes to me in a whisper. “Anything to
divert the”—
“And I really think,” went on Mrs. Polhemus, smiling sweetly, with her
eyes on you, “that if you were as thoroughly honest with us as, a
moment ago, you were insistent on the world’s being, you would confess
to a _tendresse_ still felt for that particular form of obliquity.”
I shall recall the moment which followed that speech if it shall ever
fall to me to sit in the jury-box and pass judgment on a murderer, for
I know that had I been armed, and my mother a man, I should have killed
her; and it taught me that murder is in every man’s heart. Yet I was
not out of my head, but was curiously clear-minded. Though allusion to
my shame had hitherto always made me dumb, I was able to speak now
without the slightest difficulty; I imagine because the thought of your
pain made me forget my own.
“Which is better, Mrs. Polhemus,” I asked, with a calmness I marveled
at afterwards, “to love dishonesty or to dishonestly love?”
“Is this a riddle?” she said, though not removing her eyes from you.
“I suppose, since right and wrong are evolutionary,” I rejoined, “that
every ethical question is more or less of a conundrum. But the thought
in my mind was that there is only nobility in a love so great that it
can outlast even wrongdoing.” Then, in my controlled passion, I stabbed
her as deeply as I could make words stab. “Compare such a love, for
instance, with another of which I have heard,—that of a woman who so
valued the world’s opinion that she would not get a divorce from an
embezzling husband, because of the social stigma it involved, yet who
remarried within a week of hearing of her first husband’s death,
because she thought that fact could not be known. Which love is the
higher?”
The color blazed up in my mother’s cheeks, as she turned from you to
look at me, with eyes that would have killed if they could; and it was
her manner, far more than even the implication of my words, which told
the rest of the table that my nominally impersonal case was truly a
thrust of the knife. A moment’s appalling pause followed, and then,
though the fruit was being passed, the hostess broke the terrible spell
by rising, as if the time had come for the ladies to withdraw.
When, later, the men followed them, Agnes intercepted me at the door,
and whispered, “Oh, doctor, it was magnificent! I was so afraid Maizie
would break down if—I never dreamed you could do it so splendidly.
You’re almost as much of a love as papa! It will teach the cat to let
Maizie alone! Now, do you want to be extra good?”
“So long as you don’t want any more vitriol-throwing,” I assented,
smiling. “Remember that a hostess deserves some consideration.”
“I told Mrs. Granger that you did it at my request, and there wasn’t a
woman in the room who didn’t want to cheer. We all love Maizie, and
hate Mrs. Polhemus; and it isn’t a bit because you geese of men think
she’s handsome and clever, either. Poor Maizie wanted to be by herself,
and went out on the veranda. I think she’s had time enough, and that
it’s best for some one to go to her. Won’t you slip out quietly?”
I nodded, and instantly she spoke aloud of the moon, and we went to the
French window on the pretense of looking at it, where, after a moment,
I left her. At first I could not discover you, the vines so shadowed
your retreat; and when I did, it was to find you with bowed head buried
in your arms as they rested on the veranda rail. The whole attitude was
so suggestive of grief that I did not dare to speak, and moved to go
away. Just as I turned, however, you looked up, as if suddenly
conscious of some presence.
“I did not intend to intrude, Miss Walton, and don’t let me disturb
you. I will rejoin”—
“If you came out for the moonlight and quiet, sit down here,” you said,
making room for me.
I seated myself beside you, but made no reply, thinking your allusion
to quiet perhaps voiced your own preference.
“It seems needless,” you began, after a slight pause, “to ignore your
kindness, even though it was veiled. I never felt so completely in
another’s power, and though I tried to—to say something—to strike
back—I couldn’t. Did my face so betray me that you knew I needed help?”
“Your face told nothing, it seemed to me.”
“But that makes it positively uncanny. Over and over again you appear
to divine my thoughts or moods. Do you?”
“Little more than any one can of a person in whom one is interested
enough to notice keenly.”
“Yet no one else does it with me. And several times, when we have
caught each other’s eyes, we have—at least I have felt sure that you
were laughing with me, though your face was grave.”
“Who was uncannily mind-reading then?”
“An adequate _tu quoque_,” you said, laughing; then you went on
seriously; “Still, to be frank, as now I think we can be, I have never
made any pretense that I wasn’t very much interested in you—while
you—well—till very lately, I haven’t been able to make up my mind that
you did not actually—no, not dislike—for I knew that you—I could not be
unconscious of the genuine esteem you have made so evident—yet there
has always been, until the last two weeks, an indefinable barrier, of
your making, as it appeared to me, and from that I could only infer
some—I can give it no name.”
“Were there no natural barriers to a friendship between a struggling
writer and Miss Walton?”
“Surely you are above that!” you exclaimed. “You have not let such a
distinction—Oh no, for it has not stood in the way of friendship with
the Blodgetts.”
A moment’s silence ensued, and then you spoke again: “Perhaps there was
a motive that explains it. Please don’t reply, if it is a question I
ought not to put, but after your confidence of last week I feel as if
you had given me the privilege to ask it. I have always thought—or
rather hoped—that you cared for Agnes? If”—
“And so you married me to her in the novel,” I interrupted, in an
effort to change the subject, dreading to what it might lead.
You laughed merrily as you said, “Oh, I’m so glad you spoke of that. I
have often wondered if you recognized the attempted portrait,—which now
I know is not a bit of a likeness,—and have longed to ask you. I never
should have dared to sketch it, but I thought my pen name would conceal
my criminality; and then what a fatality for you to read it! I never
suspected you were the publisher’s reader. What have you thought of
me?”
“That you drew a very pleasant picture of my supposed mental and moral
attainments, at the expense of my ambition and will. My true sympathy,
however, went out to the girl whom you offered up as a heart-restorer
for my earlier attachment.”
“I’m thankful we are in the shadow,” you laughed, “so that my red
cheeks don’t show. You are taking a most thoroughgoing revenge.”
“That was the last thought in my mind.”
“Then, my woman’s curiosity having been appeased, be doubly generous
and spare my absurd blushes. I don’t know when I have been made to feel
so young and foolish.”
“Clearly you are no hardened criminal, Miss Walton. Usually matchmakers
glory in their shame.”
“Perhaps I should if I had not been detected, or if I had succeeded
better.”
“You took, I fear, a difficult subject for what may truly be called
your maiden experiment.”
“Did I not? And yet—You see I recognized potentialities for loving in
you. You can—Ah, you have suggested to me a revenge for your jokes. Did
you—were you the man who coined the phrase that my eyes were too dressy
for the daytime?”
“Yes,” I confessed guiltily, “but”—
“No, don’t dare to try to explain it away,” you ordered. “How could you
say it? We can never be friends, after all.”
Though you spoke in evident gayety, I answered gravely: “You will
forgive me when I tell you that it was to parry a thrust of Mrs.
Polhemus’s at you, and I made a joke of it only because I did not
choose to treat her gibe seriously. I hoped it would not come back to
you.”
“Every friend I have has quoted it, not once, but a dozen times, in my
presence. If you knew how I have been persecuted and teased with that
remark! You are twice the criminal that I have been, for at least my
libel was never published. Yet you are unblushing.”
We both sat silent for a little while, and then you began: “You
interrupted a question of mine just now. Was it a chance or a purposed
diversion? You see,” you added hastily, “I am presuming that henceforth
we are to be candid.”
“I confess to an intention in the dodging, not because I feared the
question, for a simple negative was all it needed, but I was afraid of
what might follow.”
“I hoped, after the trust of the other day—You do not want to tell me
your story?”
“Are there not some things that cannot be put into words, Miss Walton?
Could you tell me your story?”
“But mine is no mystery,” you replied. “It has been the world’s
property for years. Why, your very help to-night proves that it is
known to you,—that you know, indeed, facts that were unknown to me.”
“Facts, yes; feelings, no.”
“Do you appreciate the subtilty of the compliment? You really care for
such valueless and indefinable things as feelings?”
“Yes.”
“A bargain, then, while you are in this mood of giving something for
nothing. Question for question, if you choose.”
“You can tell your secrets?”
“To you, yes, for you have told me your greatest.”
“Then, with the privilege of silence for both, begin.”
“Ah, you begin already to fear the gimlet! Yes. Nothing is to be told
that—There again we lack a definition, do we not? Never mind. We shall
understand. You knew her in Germany?”
“Yes.”
“And she—You wear a mask, at moments even merry-faced, but now and
again I have surprised a look of such sadness in your eyes that—Is that
why you came to America? She”—
“No. She was, and is, in so different a class, that I never”—
“You should not allow that to be a bar! Any woman”—
“But even more, there are other claims upon me, which make marriage out
of the question.”
“And this is why you have resigned reputation for money-making? Is
there no escape? Oh, it seems too cruel to be!”
“You draw it worse than it is, Miss Walton, forgetting that I told you
of my happiness in loving.”
“You make me proud to feel that we are friends, Dr. Hartzmann,” you
said gently. “I hope she is worthy of such a love?”
I merely nodded; and after a slight pause you remarked, “Now it is only
fair to give you a turn.”
I had been pondering, after my first impulsive assent, over my right to
win your confidence, with the one inevitable conclusion that was so
clear, and I answered, “I have no questions to ask, Miss Walton.”
“Then I can ask no more, of course,” you replied quietly, and at once
turned the conversation into less personal subjects, until the time
came for our return to My Fancy.
When we parted in the upper hall, that evening, you said to me, “I
always value your opinion, and it usually influences me. Do you, as
your speech to-night implied, think it right to go on loving baseness?”
“It is not a question of right and wrong, but only whether the love
remains.”
“Then you don’t think it a duty to crush it out?”
“No. All love is noble that is distinct from self.”
You held out your hand. “I am so glad you think so, and that you spoke
your thought. You have done me a great kindness,—greater far than you
can ever know. Thank you, and good-night.”
Good-night, Maizie.