My nerves began to feel as if some one were gently sliding his fingers
along their bared length--not a pain, but as fear-inspiring as the sound
of the stealthy creep of the assassin moving up behind to strike a
sudden and mortal blow. I dismissed business and politics and went
cruising on the lakes with restful, non-political Fred Sandys.
After we had been knocking about perhaps a week, we landed one noon at
the private pier of the Liscombes to lunch with them. As Sandys and I
strolled toward the front of the house, several people, also guests for
lunch, were just descending from a long buckboard. At sight of one of
them I stopped short inside, though I mechanically continued to walk
toward her. I recognized her instantly--the curve of her shoulders, the
poise of her head, and her waving jet-black hair to confirm. And without
the slightest warning there came tumbling and roaring up in me a
torrent of longings, regrets; and I suddenly had a clear understanding
of my absorption in this wretched game I had been playing year in and
year out with hardly a glance up from the table. That wretched game with
its counterfeit stakes; and the more a man wins, the poorer he is.
She seemed calm enough as she faced me. Indeed, I was not sure when she
had first caught sight of me, or whether she had recognized me, until
Mrs. Liscombe began to introduce us. "Oh, yes," she then interrupted, "I
remember Senator Sayler very well. We used to live in the same town. We
went to the same school." And with a friendly smile she gave me her
hand.
What did I say? I do not know. But I am sure I gave no sign of the
clamor within. I had not cultivated surface-calm all those years in
vain. I talked, and she talked--but I saw only her face, splendid
fulfilment of the promise of girlhood; I hardly heard her words, so
greatly was her voice moving me. It was an unusually deep voice for a
woman, sweet and with a curious carrying quality that made it seem
stronger than it was. In figure she was delicate, but radiant of life
and health--aglow, not ablaze. She was neither tall nor short, and was
dressed simply, but in the fashion--I heard the other women discussing
her clothes after she left. And she still had the mannerism that was
most fascinating to me--she kept her eyes down while she was talking or
listening, and raised them now and then with a full, slow look at you.
When Mrs. Liscombe asked her to come to dinner the next evening with the
people she was visiting, she said: "Unfortunately, I must start for
Washington in the morning. I am overhauling my school and building an
addition."
It had not occurred to me to think where she had come from or how she
happened to be there, or of anything in the years since I was last with
her. The reminder that she had a school came as a shock--she was so
utterly unlike my notion of the head of a school. I think she saw or
felt what was in my mind, for she went on, to me: "I've had it six years
now--the next will be the seventh."
"Do you like it?" I asked.
"Don't I look like a happy woman?"
"You do," said I, after our eyes had met. "You are."
"There were sixty girls last year--sixty-three," she went on. "Next year
there will be more--about a hundred. It's like a garden, and I'm the
gardener, busy from morning till night, with no time to think of
anything but my plants and flowers."
She had conjured a picture that made my heart ache. I suddenly felt old
and sad and lonely--a forlorn failure. "I too am a gardener," said I.
"But it's a sorry lot of weeds and thistles that keeps me occupied. And
in the midst of the garden is a plum tree--that bears Dead Sea fruit."
She was silent.
"You don't care for politics?" said I.
"No," she replied, and lifted and lowered her eyes in a slow glance that
made me wish I had not asked. "It is, I think, gardening with weeds and
thistles, as you say." Then, after a pause: "Do _you_ like it?"
"Don't ask me," I said with a bitterness that made us both silent
thereafter.
That evening I got Fred to land me at the nearest town. The train she
must have been on had just gone. In the morning I took the express for
the East. Arrived at Washington, I drove straight to her school.
A high iron fence, not obstructing the view from the country road; a
long drive under arching maples and beeches; a rambling, fascinating old
house upon the crest of a hill; many windows, a pillared porch, a low,
very wide doorway. It seemed like her in its dark, cool, odorous beauty.
She herself was in the front hall, directing some workmen. "Why, Senator
Sayler, this _is_ a surprise," she said, advancing to greet me. But
there was no suggestion of surprise in her tone or her look, only a
friendly welcome to an acquaintance.
She led the way into the drawing-room to the left. The furniture and
pictures were in ghostly draperies; everything was in confusion. We went
on to a side veranda, seated ourselves. She looked inquiringly at me.
"I do not know why," was my answer. "I only know--I had to come."
She studied me calmly. I remember her look, everything about her--the
embroidery on the sleeves and bosom of her blouse, the buckles on her
white shoes. I remember also that there was a breeze, and how good it
felt to my hot face, to my eyes burning from lack of sleep. At last she
said: "Well--what do you think of my little kingdom?"
"It is yours--entirely?"
"House, gardens--everything. I paid the last of my debts in June."
"I'm contrasting it with my own," I said.
"But that isn't fair," she protested with a smile. "You must remember,
I'm only a woman."
"With my own," I went on, as if she had not interrupted. "Yours
is--yours, honestly got. It makes you proud, happy. Mine--" I did not
finish.
She must have seen or felt how profoundly I was moved, for I presently
saw her looking at me with an expression I might have resented for its
pity from any other than her. "Why do you tell _me_ this?" she asked.
"There is always for every one," was my answer, "some person to whom he
shows himself as he is. You are that person for me because--I'm
surrounded by people who care for me for what I can give. Even my
children care to a great extent for that reason. It's the penalty for
having the power to give the material things all human beings crave.
Only two persons ever cared--cared much for me just because I was
myself. They were my mother--and you."
She laughed in quiet raillery. "Two have cared for you, but you have
cared for only one. And what devotion you have given him!"
"I have cared for my mother--for my children--"
"Yes--your children. I forgot them."
"And--for you."
She made what I thought a movement of impatience.
"For you," I repeated. Then: "Elizabeth, you were right when you wrote
that I was a coward."
She rose and stood--near enough to me for me to catch her faint, elusive
perfume--and gazed out into the distance.
"In St. Louis the other day," I went on, "I saw a man who has risen to
power greater than I can ever hope to have. And he got it by marching
erect in the open."
"Yet you have everything you used to want," she said dreamily.
"Yes--everything. Only to learn how worthless what I wanted was. And for
this trash, this dirt, I have given--all I had that was of value."
"All?"
"All," I replied. "Your love and my own self-respect."
"Why do you think you've not been brave?" she asked after a while.
"Because I've won by playing on the weaknesses and fears of men which my
own weaknesses and fears enabled me to understand."
"You have done wrong--deliberately?"
"Deliberately."
"But that good might come?"
"So I told myself."
"And good has come? I have heard that figs do grow on thistles."
"Good has come. But, I think, in spite of me, not through me."
"But now that you see," she said, turning her eyes to mine with appeal
in them, and something more, I thought, "you will--you will not go on?"
"I don't know. Is there such a thing as remorse without regret?" And
then my self-control went and I let her see what I had commanded myself
to keep hid: "I only know clearly one thing, Elizabeth--only one thing
matters. _You_ are the whole world to me. You and I could--what could we
not do together!"
Her color slowly rose, slowly vanished. "Was _that_ what you came to
tell me?" she asked.
"Yes," I answered, not flinching.
"_That_ is the climax of your moralizings?"
"Yes," I answered. "And of my cowardice."
A little icy smile just changed the curve of her lips. "When I was a
girl, you won my love--or took it when I gave it to you, if you prefer.
And then--you threw it away. For an ambition you weren't brave enough to
pursue honorably, you broke my heart."
"Yes," I answered. "But--I loved you."
"And now," she went on, "after your years of self-indulgence, of
getting what you wanted, no matter about the cost, you see me again. You
find I have mended my heart, have coaxed a few flowers of happiness to
bloom. You find there was something you did not destroy, something you
think it will make you happier to destroy."
"Yes," I answered, "I came to try to make you as unhappy as I am. For I
love you."
She drew a long breath. "Well," she said evenly, "for the first time in
your life you are defeated. I learned the lesson you so thoroughly
taught me. And I built the wall round my garden high and strong. You--"
she smiled, a little raillery, a little scorn--"you can't break in,
Harvey--nor slip in."
"No need," I said. "For I _am_ in--I've always been in."
Her bosom rose and fell quickly, and her eyes shifted. But that was for
an instant only. "If you were as brave as you are bold!" she scoffed.
"If I were as brave without you as I should be with you!" I replied.
Then: "But you love as a woman loves--herself first, the man afterward."
"Harvey Sayler denouncing selfishness!"
"Do not sneer," I said. "For--I love you as a man loves. A poor, pale
shadow of ideal love, no doubt, but a man's best, Elizabeth."
I saw that she was shaken; but even as I began to thrill with a hope so
high that it was giddy with fear, she was once more straight and strong
and calm.
"You have come. You have tried. You have failed," she went on after a
long pause. And in spite of her efforts, that deep voice of hers was
gentle and wonderfully sweet. "Now--you will return to your life, I to
mine." And she moved toward the entrance to the drawing-room, I
following her. We stood in silence at the front doorway waiting for my
carriage to come up. I watched her--maddeningly mistress of herself.
"How can you be so cold!" I cried. "Don't you see, don't you feel, how
I, who love you, suffer?"
Without a word she stretched out her beautiful, white hands, long and
narrow and capable. In each of the upturned palms were four deep and
bloody prints where her nails had been crushing into them.
Before I could lift my eyes to her face she was turning to rejoin her
workmen. As I stood uncertain, dazed, she glanced at me with a bright
smile. "Good-by again," she called. "A pleasant journey!"
"Thank you," I replied. "Good-by."
Driving toward the road gates, I looked at the house many times, from
window to window, everywhere. Not a glimpse of her until I was almost at
the road again. Then I saw her back--the graceful white dress, the knot
of blue-black hair, the big white hat, and she directing her workmen
with her closed white parasol.