came, she was not there, since the next day they were on their way to
Bremen, summoned by cable to her sister's deathbed. She never heard from
him or of him again. Yet she had left her American address with his aunt
for any letters that might need to be forwarded, and a stiff little
note of thanks and farewell--a perfectly neutral note such as any friend
might give or receive. There followed weeks crowded with sorrow and
business (the sister was a widow without children, and she shared her
estate with her other sister); and Margaret imputed her deep depression
to these natural and sufficient causes. She rated herself for vanity in
reading her own meanings into a courteous young man's looks and his
intelligent interest in national difference of manners. She fostered her
shame with the New Englander's zest for self-torture. But one afternoon,
without warning, there fell upon her a deep and hopeless peace. It was
as if some invisible power controlled and changed all the currents of
her thought. She _knew_ that her friend was not faithless or careless;
he was dead. She began to weep gently, thinking pitifully of his old
father with the loud voice, and his fragile mother and the sister and
brother and the little nephew. "Poor people," she murmured, wishing, for
the first time in her life, to make some sign of her sorrow for them to
them, she who always paid her toll of sympathy, but dreaded it and knew
that she was clumsy. She remembered the day at the castle, and went
over again each word, each look. A sensation that she could not
understand, full of awe and sweetness, possessed her. It was
indescribable, unthinkable, but it was also irresistible. Under its
impulse she went to a trunk in another room, from which she had not yet
removed all the contents, and took out her Heidelberg photographs. She
said to herself that she would look at the scenes of that day. In her
search she came upon a package of her own pictures which had come the
morning of the day that she had gone. She could not remember any details
of receiving them, except that she had been at the photographer's the
day before and paid for them. When they came she was in too great
agitation (they were just packing) to more than fling them into a tray.
She could not tell why she took the _cartes_ out of the envelope and ran
them listlessly through her fingers; but at the last of the package she
uttered a cry. The last _carte_ was a picture of Max, with the
inscription in his own hand, "Thine for ever." It is not exact to say
that with the finding of the picture her doubt of his affection for her
vanished; for in truth, she had no doubts, the possession was too
absolute. But the sight came upon her as the presence of a mortal being,
alive and visible, comes on one when he enters a room. And there is no
question that it was a comfort; if she had really loved Max, at this
time, the knowledge of his death would have been her cruelest shock; for
then she could have no hope to meet him again in the world--no hope of
some explanation and the happiness of life together. But she was not in
love with the young German, she was touched by his admiration, she
admired him tenderly, she felt the moving of a subtle attraction which
she called friendship and which might pass into a keener feeling; but
she did not love him. Not then. Therefore, she felt a sweetness in her
pain; she could respect herself once more; she had a new and mystical
joy; for was she not beloved above women? Had not her lover come to her,
through what strange paths who may know, to comfort her? This is the
story of the picture. She could not tell it. Nor did she; but she hung
Max's portrait on the walls of her little parlor; and she hung opposite
a picture of the castle; and from that day, never a day passed that it
did not influence her. She used to think her thoughts before it. She
came to it with her grief for the loss of kindred and friends, with her
loneliness, with her anxieties, with her aspirations, her plans, her
cares for others, her slowly dawning interests and affections. She was a
reticent woman, who might never have allowed her heart to expand to her
husband himself, beyond a certain limit; but she hid nothing from Max.
In time, she fell into the habit of talking to the picture. She called
him Max. The first time she spoke his name she blushed. She made her
toilets for him more than for the world; but whether Max could admire
them or not, it is certain that the girls knew every change in her
pretty gowns. Her sense of having been loved had its effect on her
manner, and a deeper effect on her heart. At thirty she was a New
England nun; at forty she was the woman who understands. The love which
the shrinking and critical girl repelled at its first step toward her,
without knowing, the woman who pitied and who understood, attracted,
quite as unconsciously.
"It is very queer, Max," she said, "that in my old age men should want
to marry me. But I like you best."
Only the day before, she had said that; and she had said, "I am happy,
Max. Isn't it strange! But I am." Only yesterday--and now there was
nothing. The Max that she had grown to love, with the gradual,
imperceptible advance of affection, sweet to her shy nature--that Max
had never been. No doubt all the while, over in Germany, a stout and
phlegmatic German landlord had been caring for his vineyards and playing
the war lord in the landwehr and living very comfortably with the
doughfaced German girl whose hair was lighter than her complexion, whom
the countess wanted him to marry; a man as unlike the high-souled knight
of her fancy as--as she, herself, was unlike the girl's image! Worst of
all was her own weak, false behavior. "No," she cried, in an access of
bitterness, "the worst is that I can't feel _that_ the worst; I can only
feel I have lost him, for ever! I don't seem to mind that I have lost
myself!"
Now she began to pace the room, trying to think clearly. Was it her duty
to tell Florence the story and let her tell the girls? The red-hot agony
of the idea seemed to her excited conscience an intimation that it _was_
her duty from which she shrank because she was a selfish, hysterical,
dishonorable coward. Horrible as such abasement would be, if it were her
duty, she could do it; what she could not, what she _would_ not do, was
to tear the veil from that pure and mystical passion which had been the
flower of her heart. "Not if it cost me my soul," she said, with the
frozen quiet of despair; "it is awful, but I can't do it!" One thing did
remain; she could remove the picture. That false witness of what had
never been should go. No eyes should ever fall on it again. It should
never deceive more. She walked toward it firmly. She lifted her
hand--and it fell. "I can't!" she moaned. "I'll do it to-morrow." She
could not remember, in years, so weak a compromise offered her
conscience.
But she felt a sense of respite, almost relief, once having decided, and
she recovered her composure enough to go to her chamber and bathe her
eyes. While she was thus engaged she heard a knock. "It is he," she said
quietly; "well, the sooner the better."
It was he; he had come earlier than he expected, he explained; he was
most grateful for Miss Wing's kind message. He looked like his uncle, as
the members of a family will look alike. He was not so tall; he was not
so handsome. Perhaps most people would call him more graceful. And his
English was faultless; he must have spoken it from his childhood. In the
midst of his first sentences, before they had permitted him to take a
chair, his eyes traveled past Miss Wing's face. She perceived that he
saw the picture; she knew that she grew pale; but, to her amazement, a
calm like the calm which had wrapped her senses on the day of her
finding the picture, closed about her again. "I beg pardon?" said he.
"Yes, that is Count von Butler's portrait," said she, in a clear voice,
without emotion. He was not so composed. "Then it _was_ you," he said.
Following her example, he took a chair and looked earnestly at the
pictured face. "When Miss Raimund spoke of you so warmly, I noticed that
the name was the same, and I determined to inquire, but it seemed to me
unlikely. Yet it is. Miss Wing, I have a message to you, from my uncle."
She noticed that there were gold motes in the air; and his pleasant,
blond face seemed to wander through them; the room was full of sunlight.
"I was with him when he died."
That was a strange thing to hear when the message of his uncle's death
had come to him in another country; she hoped that her brain was not
going to play her false.
"It was fifteen years ago last July, you know. I never knew how many
details you received, or only the bare fact in the papers."
Fifteen years! fifteen years! What was that date he was giving? That was
the day on which she sailed for America, the day after--what was that
story he was telling of a visit and a fire and a child rescued and an
accident? But still she listened with the same iron composure. The next
words she heard distinctly.
"It was like him to lose his life that way; and he did not grudge it.
Yet it was hard that I should be the only one of his blood with him. He
could speak with difficulty when he told me to take a lock of hair and
his signet ring to you. He dictated the address, himself, to me. 'You
must be sure and take it,' he said. 'It is to the lady that I hoped
would be my betrothed; you must tell grandmamma about it, too. She has
my picture and she knows--but tell her'--and then, I think his mind must
have wandered a little, for he smiled brightly at me, saying, '_I'll_
tell her, myself,' and then the doctors came. He said nothing more,
only once, they told me, he murmured something about his betrothed. But
I had the ring; he took it off his finger and kissed it and gave it to
me. Child as I was, I knew that it was sacred. I wrapped it in the
paper, and afterward I put the lock of hair beside it. So soon as I
could, I went to Heidelberg, to the pension. You had gone and there was
no address, no trace--"
"I left my address with the countess--"
"My aunt is dead," said the young German gravely. "I would not criticize
her, but she had her own choice of a wife for my uncle; I do not think
one could trust her with addresses."
"We all gave ours to her to give to Frau Mueller."
"That is why, then, I could not find you. My grandmother also tried. But
you were gone. I thought of the banks, long after, but I found nothing.
Often it has seemed dreadful that you should learn of this only through
the papers. But I could not tell whether--_anything_. When I came to
America, I confess it was always in my mind. I always carried my uncle's
little packet with me. I will have it sent to you."
"Excuse me," said Miss Wing gently. "Will you please bring me the glass
of water--I--am afraid--I can't walk to it."
But she would not let him pour the water on his handkerchief to bathe
her head. She sipped the water, and very pale, but quite herself,
brought him back to his own matters. She found that it was a cousin,
miscalled an uncle, in the German manner, who had died. It did not seem
to her that Max's nephew could be unworthy of any girl; yet she
conscientiously questioned him regarding his worldly affairs, for
Florence was an only daughter whose father had great possessions and a
distrust of adventurers, and at last she sent him forth to walk in the
grove with his sweetheart. "And speak to her," she said, with a look
that sank into his heart; "it is the American way; don't wait to write,
the American way is best."
So, at last, she was alone. Alone with her lover who had always been
true; whose love many waters could not quench, and it was stronger than
death. She often pondered, afterward, whether there had not been some
note written to her and sent with the photographs; whether the countess
might not have tampered with the package, taking the note, but not
suspecting the picture. But none of these puzzles troubled her to-day.
She stood in front of the picture. All the years, an obscure and
virginal shyness had withheld her from ever overstepping her first
attitude. She told him every thought of her heart in regard to others
and herself. He was her dearest friend. She called him "Max" and "my
friend." Recalling the French use of the latter term, she used it
sometimes with a little flutter of the heart. But those innocent
endearments that a woman keeps for her lover's portrait--to make amends
for not proffering them of free will to the poor fellow himself--these
it would have shocked her to imagine. She never touched the picture,
save reverently to dust it, to take it down when she went away, to
replace it in its station when she returned. But now, trembling, yet not
blushing, she took the picture into her hands. She looked long into its
eyes; she kissed it with a light and timid kiss, and swiftly hid the
smiling face against her heart, pressing the frame in both hands, and
touching it with her cheek bent over it, while she whispered: "You _did_
tell me. You came back and told me. I love you. Max, my knight--my
husband!"
THE STOUT MISS HOPKINS' BICYCLE
There was a skeleton in Mrs. Margaret Ellis' closet; the same skeleton
abode also in the closet of Miss Lorania Hopkins.
The skeleton--which really does not seem a proper word--was the dread of
growing stout. They were more afraid of flesh than of sin. Yet they were
both good women. Mrs. Ellis regularly attended church, and could always
be depended on to show hospitality to convention delegates, whether
clerical or lay; she was a liberal subscriber to every good work; she
was almost the only woman in the church aid society that never lost her
temper at the soul-vexing time of the church fair; and she had a larger
clientele of regular pensioners than any one in town, unless it were her
friend, Miss Hopkins, who was "so good to the poor" that never a tramp
slighted her kitchen. Miss Hopkins was as amiable as Mrs. Ellis, and
always put her name under that of Mrs. Ellis, with exactly the same
amount, on the subscription papers. She could have given more, for she
had the larger income; but she had no desire to outshine her friend,
whom she admired as the most charming of women.
Mrs. Ellis, indeed, was agreeable as well as good, and a pretty woman to
the bargain, if she did not choose to be weighed before people. Miss
Hopkins often told her that she was not really stout; she merely was a
plump, trim little figure. Miss Hopkins, alas! was really stout. The two
waged a warfare against the flesh equal to the apostle's in vigor,
although so much less deserving of praise.
Mrs. Ellis drove her cook to distraction with divers dieting systems,
from Banting's and Doctor Salisbury's to the latest exhortations of some
unknown newspaper prophet. She bought elaborate gymnastic appliances,
and swung dumbbells and rode imaginary horses and propelled imaginary
boats. She ran races with a professional trainer, and she studied the
principles of Delsarte, and solemnly whirled on one foot and swayed her
body and rolled her head and hopped and kicked and genuflected in
company with eleven other stout and earnest matrons and one slim and
giggling girl who almost choked at every lesson. In all these exercises
Miss Hopkins faithfully kept her company, which was the easier, as Miss
Hopkins lived in the next house, a conscientious Colonial mansion with
all the modern conveniences hidden beneath the old-fashioned pomp.
And yet, despite these struggles and self-denials, it must be told that
Margaret Ellis and Lorania Hopkins were little thinner for their
warfare. Still, as Shuey Cardigan, the trainer, told Mrs. Ellis, there
was no knowing what they might have weighed had they not struggled.
"It ain't only the fat that's _on_ ye, moind ye," says Shuey, with a
confidential sympathy of mien; '"it's what ye'd naturally be getting in
addition. And first ye've got to peel off that, and then ye come down to
the other."
Shuey was so much the most successful of Mrs. Ellis' reducers that his
words were weighty. And when at last Shuey said, "I got what you need,"
Mrs. Ellis listened. "You need a bike, no less," says Shuey.
"But I never could ride one!" said Margaret, opening her pretty brown
eyes and wrinkling her Grecian forehead.
"You'd ride in six lessons," pronounced Shuey.
"But how would I _look_, Cardigan?"
"You'd look noble, ma'am!"
"What do you consider the best wheel, Cardigan?"
Fear of being accused of advertising prevents my giving Cardigan's
answer; it is enough that the wheel glittered at Mrs. Ellis' door the
very next day, and that a large pasteboard box was delivered by the
expressman the very next week. He went on to Miss Hopkins', and
delivered the twin of the box, with a similar yellow printed card
bearing the impress of the same great firm on the inside of the box
cover. For Margaret had hied her to Lorania Hopkins the instant Shuey
was gone. She presented herself breathless, a little to the
embarrassment of Lorania, who was sitting with her niece before a large
box of cracker-jack.
"It's a new kind of candy; I was just _tasting_ it, Maggie," faltered
she, while the niece, a girl of nineteen, with the inhuman spirits of
her age, laughed aloud.
"You needn't mind me," said Mrs. Ellis cheerfully; "I'm eating potatoes
now!"
"Oh, Maggie!" Miss Hopkins breathed the words between envy and
disapproval.
Mrs. Ellis tossed her brown head airily, not a whit abashed. "And I had
beer for luncheon, and I'm going to have champagne for dinner."
"Maggie, how do you dare? Did they--did they taste good?"
"They tasted _heavenly_, Lorania. Pass me the candy. I am going to try
something new--the thinningest thing there is. I read in the paper of
one woman who lost forty pounds in three months, and is losing still!"
"If it is obesity pills, I--"
"It isn't; it's a bicycle. Lorania, you and I must ride! Sibyl Hopkins,
you heartless child, what are you laughing at?"
Lorania rose; in the glass over the mantel her figure returned her gaze.
There was no mistake (except that, as is often the case with stout
people, _that_ glass always increased her size), she was a stout lady.
She was taller than the average of women, and well proportioned, and
still light on her feet; but she could not blink away the records; she
was heavy on the scales. Did she stand looking at herself squarely, her
form was shapely enough, although larger than she could wish; but the
full force of the revelation fell when she allowed herself a profile
view, she having what is called "a round waist," and being almost as
large one way as another. Yet Lorania was only thirty-three years old,
and was of no mind to retire from society, and have a special phaeton
built for her use, and hear from her mother's friends how much her
mother weighed before her death.
"How should _I_ look on a wheel?" she asked, even as Mrs. Ellis had
asked before; and Mrs. Ellis stoutly answered, "You'd look _noble_!"
"Shuey will teach us," she went on, "and we can have a track made in
your pasture, where nobody can see us learning. Lorania, there's nothing
like it. Let me bring you the bicycle edition of _Harper's Bazar_."
Miss Hopkins capitulated at once, and sat down to order her costume,
while Sibyl, the niece, revelled silently in visions of a new bicycle
which should presently revert to her. "For it's ridiculous, auntie's
thinking of riding!" Miss Sibyl considered. "She would be a figure of
fun on a wheel; besides, she can never learn in this world!"
Yet Sibyl was attached to her aunt, and enjoyed visiting Hopkins Manor,
as Lorania had named her new house, into which she moved on the same day
that she joined the Colonial Dames, by right of her ancestor the great
and good divine commemorated by Mrs. Stowe. Lorania's friends were all
fond of her, she was so good-natured and tolerant, with a touch of dry
humor in her vision of things, and not the least a Puritan in her frank
enjoyment of ease and luxury. Nevertheless, Lorania had a good,
able-bodied New England conscience, capable of staying awake nights
without flinching; and perhaps from her stanch old Puritan forefathers
she inherited her simple integrity, so that she neither lied nor
cheated--even in the small whitewashed manner of her sex--and valued
loyalty above most of the virtues. She had an innocent pride in her
godly and martial ancestry, which was quite on the surface, and led
people who did not know her to consider her haughty.
For fifteen years she had been an orphan, the mistress of a very large
estate. No doubt she had been sought often in marriage, but never until
lately had Lorania seriously thought of marrying. Sibyl said that she
was too unsentimental to marry. Really she was too romantic. She had a
longing to be loved, not in the quiet, matter-of-fact manner of her
suitors, but with the passion of the poets. Therefore the presence of
another skeleton in Mrs. Ellis' closet, because she knew about a certain
handsome Italian marquis who at this period was conducting an
impassioned wooing by mail. Margaret did not fancy the marquis. He was
not an American. He would take Lorania away. She thought his very virtue
florid, and suspected that he had learned his love-making in a bad
school. She dropped dark hints that frightened Lorania, who would
sometimes piteously demand, "Don't you think he _could_ care for
me--for--for myself?" Margaret knew that she had an overweening distrust
of her own appearance. How many tears she had shed first and last over
her unhappy plumpness it would be hard to reckon. She made no account of
her satin skin, or her glossy black hair, or her lustrous violet eyes
with their long black lashes, or her flashing white teeth; she glanced
dismally at her shape and scornfully at her features, good, honest,
irregular American features, that might not satisfy a Greek critic, but
suited each other and pleased her countrymen. And then she would sigh
heavily over her figure. Her friend had not the heart to impute the
marquis' beautiful, artless compliments to mercenary motives. After all,
the Italian was a good fellow, according to the point of view of his own
race, if he did intend to live on his wife's money, and had a very
varied assortment of memories of women.
But Margaret dreaded and disliked him all the more for his good
qualities. To-day this secret apprehension flung a cloud over the
bicycle enthusiasm. She could not help wondering whether at this moment
Lorania was not thinking of the marquis, who rode a wheel and a horse
admirably.
"Aunt Lorania," said Sibyl, "there comes Mr. Winslow. Shall I run out
and ask him about those cloth-of-gold roses? The aphides are eating them
all up."
"Yes, to be sure, dear; but don't let Ferguson suspect what you are
talking of; he might feel hurt."
Ferguson was the gardener. Miss Hopkins left her note to go to the
window. Below she saw a mettled horse, with tossing head and silken
skin, restlessly fretting on his bit and pawing the dust in front of the
fence, while his rider, hat in hand, talked with the young girl. He was
a little man, a very little man, in a gray business suit of the best cut
and material. An air of careful and dainty neatness was diffused about
both horse and rider. He bent toward Miss Sibyl's charming person a
thin, alert, fair face. His head was finely shaped, the brown hair worn
away a little on the temples. He smiled gravely at intervals; the smile
told that he had a dimple in his cheek.
"I wonder," said Mrs. Ellis, "whether Mr. Winslow can have a penchant
for Sibyl?"
Lorania opened her eyes. At this moment Mr. Winslow had caught sight of
her at the window, and he bowed almost to his saddle-bow; Sibyl was
saying something at which she laughed, and he visibly reddened. It was a
peculiarity of his that his color turned easily. In a second his hat was
on his head and his horse bounded half across the road.
"Hardly, I think," said Lorania. "How well he rides! I never knew any
one ride better--in this country."
"I suppose Sibyl would ridicule such a thing," said Mrs. Ellis,
continuing her own train of thought, and yet vaguely disturbed by the
last sentence.
"Why should she?"
"Well, he is so little, for one thing, and she is so tall. And then
Sibyl thinks a great deal of social position."
"He is a Winslow," said Lorania, arching her neck unconsciously--"a
lineal descendant from Kenelm Winslow, who came over in the _May_--"
"But his mother--"
"I don't know anything about his mother before she came here. Oh, of
course I know the gossip that she was a niece of the overseer at a
village poorhouse, and that her husband quarrelled with all his family
and married her in the poorhouse, and I know that when he died here she
would not take a cent from the Winslows, nor let them have the boy. She
is the meekest-looking little woman, but she must have an iron streak in
her somewhere, for she was left without enough money to pay the funeral
expenses, and she educated the boy and accumulated enough money to pay
for this place they have.
"She used to run a laundry, and made money; but when Cyril got a place
in the bank she sold out the laundry and went into chickens and
vegetables; she told somebody that it wasn't so profitable as the
laundry, but it was more genteel, and Cyril being now in a position of
trust at the bank, she must consider _him_. Cyril swept out the bank.
People laughed about it, but, do you know, I rather liked Mrs. Winslow
for it. She isn't in the least an assertive woman. How long have we been
up here, Maggie? Isn't it four years? And they have been our next-door
neighbors, and she has never been inside the house. Nor he either, for
that matter, except once when it took fire, you know, and he came in
with that funny little chemical engine tucked under his arm, and took
off his hat in the same prim, polite way that he takes it off when he
talks to Sibyl, and said, 'If you'll excuse me offering advice, Miss
Hopkins, it is not necessary to move anything; it mars furniture very
much to move it at a fire. I think, if you will allow me, I can
extinguish this.' And he did, too, didn't he, as neatly and as coolly as
if it were only adding up a column of figures. And offered me the engine
as a souvenir of the occasion afterward."
"Lorania, you never told me that!"
"It seemed like making fun of him, when he had been so kind. I declined
as civilly as I could. I hope I didn't hurt his feelings. I meant to pay
a visit to his mother and ask them to dinner, but you know I went to
England that week, and somehow when I came back it was difficult. It
seems a little odd we never have seen more of the Winslows, but I fancy
they don't want either to intrude or to be intruded on. But he is
certainly very obliging about the garden. Think of all the slips and
flowers he has given us, and the advice--"
"All passed over the fence. It is funny our neighborly good offices
which we render at arm's-length. How long have you known him?"
"Oh, a long time. He is cashier of my bank, you know. First he was
teller, then assistant cashier, and now for five years he has been
cashier. The president wants to resign and let him be president, but he
hardly has enough stock for that. But Oliver says" (Oliver was Miss
Hopkins' brother) "that there isn't a shrewder or straighter banker in
the state. Oliver likes him. He says he is a sandy little fellow."
"Well, he is," assented Mrs. Ellis. "It isn't many cashiers would let
robbers stab them and shoot them and leave them for dead rather than
give up the combination of the safe!"