They occurred very much at the same hour and together, the two main
things that--exclusive of the death of his mother, recent and deeply
felt by him--had yet befallen Ralph Pendrel, who, at thirty, had known
fewer turns of fortune than many men of his age. But as these matters
were quite distinct I take them for clearness in their order. He had up
to this time perforce encountered life mainly in the form of loss and of
sacrifice--inevitabilities these, however, such as scarce represented a
chequered career. He had been left without his father in childhood; he
had then seen two sisters die; he had in his twentieth year parted by
the same law with his elder and only brother; and he had finally known
the rupture of the strongest tie of all, an affection for which, as a
living claim, he had had to give up much else. Among these latter
things, none the less, he had not as yet had to reckon Mrs. Stent Coyne,
and this even though the thought of such a peril was on the eve of his
crisis fairly present to him. The peril hung before him in fact, though
the first note of the crisis had by that time already sounded, from a
different quarter, in the guise of a positive stroke of luck. It
appeared that what destiny might call on him for this time would not be
just another relinquishment. A letter from a friend in England, a
fellow-country-man spending a few months in London and having friends of
his own there--had mentioned to him the rumoured grave illness and
imminent extinction, at a great age, of the last person in that country
bearing Ralph's family name, a person of a distant cousinship with whom
he had been indifferently aware. His indifference was not a little
enlivened by a remark of his correspondent. "Surely when he does die
you'll come in for something!"
"Surely" was a good deal to say and the whole hint fantastic--it took so
much for granted; yet the words had an effect. This effect was that
Ralph determined to mention the matter on the same occasion as something
else the revolving months had charged him with, something he had at last
really straightened himself to say to the woman he loved. He had had his
fears, and in addition to other hindrances, infelicities of
circumstance, imperfections of opportunity, had long deterred him, and
he was now disposed to throw himself upon anything that could figure as
a help. It might support him to be able to tell her there was a chance
for him of a property--probably of some wonderful old house--in England:
though less, properly speaking, as an improvement to his state of
fortune, which might sufficiently pass, than as a bribe to her sense of
the romantic. That faculty had originally been strong in her and what
could be more depended on at any time in New York, in Park Avenue, to
show as inordinate, as fetching, by the vulgar term, than so possibly to
"come in" for something strange and storied, ancient and alien? Aurora
Coyne was magnificent; that was where his interest in her and her effect
upon him were strongest. Beautiful, different, proud, she had a
congruity with things that were not as the things surrounding her, and
these usual objects, in whatever abundance, were not the bribe to offer.
He was glad, at this hour, that his name, by common consent--above all,
always, it was true, in Park Avenue--cast a fine sharp traceable shadow,
or in other words that his race had something of a backward, as well as
of a not too sprawling lateral reach. He knew how little his possession
of more mere money would help him, and also that it would have been in
his interest to be personally quite of another type; but that his
cleverness could on occasion please her he struck himself as in a
position to remember, and he at present, turning the whole case over,
found aid in the faith that she might at the worst marry him for
curiosity. He was for that matter himself just now inflamed with a
curiosity that might prove communicable.
The element of uncertainty at all events, such as it was, came largely
from the late changes in her own condition; so far as it was not
likewise distinguishably riper fruit of the impression in him, rather
heavy from the first, of something that he could only call to himself
her greater knowledge of life. He had already more than once had to take
into account that of the two she had seen, as people said, much the most
of the world; and she had not at present seen less of it for returning
to America, after her husband's death in the south of Europe and on the
admonition of still other circumstances that he divined as beyond his
measure, with something of the large air of a public policy. Her
departures, absences, returns, returns as for the purpose of
intensifying fresh disappearances, these things were what had somehow
caused her to glare at him, to dazzle and almost to blind him, as by a
wider initiation. He had seen her thus only at certain points of her
sustained revolution; had been ignorant of many things with which the
cup of her own knowledge overflowed; had been in short indebted for the
extent of his privilege to the mere drops and lapses in the general
time, as he termed it, that she so insolently kept. Sharing continuously
as a child, and then as a growing girl, the life led by her parents in
other countries, she had had behind her, at their first meeting, on
their twentieth birthday--for in respect of age they marched well enough
together--if not fifty years of Europe at least something that already
caused him to view his untravelled state as a cycle of Cathay. The time
immediately following had been her longest period at home, as well as
that of his happiest opportunity--an opportunity not so enjoyed,
however, as to have forestalled her marriage with so different a person
and so selected a suitor as Townsend Coyne, which event had in its turn
been rich in consequences.
Some of these, like the immediate migration to Europe of the happy
couple, as the pair were prefigured, had been of the sort essentially
indicated; such others as Coyne's early failure of health during a
journey to the East had been unexpected and lamentable. He had
reappeared with his wife, after a year or two, in America, where the air
of home so reinforced him at first as to make the presumption of their
settling for some stay natural; and then, disappointed and threatened
afresh, had a second time taken flight with her to spend another term,
wearily enough, in consultations and climates. The issue at last, indeed
too promptly, had been Coyne's death, foreseen for some months, at Pisa,
a place he liked and had been removed to from Florence, choosing it, as
he said, in view of the end. Stricken and childless, his young widow had
once more crossed the sea and, announcing her purpose of an indefinite
rest, had spent in New York another winter, in the course of which Ralph
Pendrel, held fast there by his close care of his mother, at this time
more of a charge than ever and steadily failing, had repeatedly seen
her; all of which, none the less, had not prevented, on Mrs. Coyne's
part, the perversity of yet another departure, a step sudden and
inconsequent, surprising and even disconcerting to our young man,
possessed as he definitely was by that time of the length he would have
gone had he been able a little longer to avert it. He had felt a
delicacy about proposing marriage to a woman supposedly in grief,
certainly in the deepest mourning, so that in again spreading her wings
she struck him as having profited a little unfairly by his scruple. It
was in fact as if she had gone because knowing what would happen if she
didn't; but it was also precisely because she had described herself as
now nevermore going that he had, in his delay, taken counsel of the
decency with which he supposed she would credit him. Some such credit
she had in fact doubtless given to him, but what was the use in New York
of an advantage that could be enjoyed--really to call enjoyed--but, for
example, in Rome? There were moments in which indeed for that matter he
scarce quite knew what he had done for himself--measuring it as so
distinct a quantity to have introduced confusion into his friend's
sequences. Perhaps after all she had retreated only to mark the more
sharply the act of waiting. Wasn't it at any rate something for him to
have caused her to give up a plan? The appearance was composed of two
elements and might become clearer could these elements somehow be
reconciled. He and her plan were not, after all, quantities that should
absolutely refuse to mingle, and on the question of the particular
something that might be given up for something else the
combinations--between two persons not wholly unintelligent--were
practically infinite. There might always be something to be gained so
long as anything to be renounced was left. And finally in fact when poor
Mrs. Pendrel did pass away it was quite as if Aurora had acted in
obedience to some such view. She disembarked yet again from the frequent
Cunarder, and this time, as appeared and as I have hinted, with a mind
fully made up. She at once took possession of the ample house her
husband had left her.
She had never been more splendid, it may at once be said, than in the
light of the reception she gave him on the morrow of these events: she
fed with so free a hand his fancy--all uninstructed as he ruefully
confessed it--of her resemblance to some great portrait of the
Renaissance. That was the analogy he had, at favouring times, in the
approaches to Park Avenue, or perhaps still more in the retreats from
it, fondly and consistently found for her: she was an Italian princess
of the _cinque-cento_, and Titian or the grand Veronese might, as the
phrase was, have signed her image. She had a wondrous old-time bloom and
an air of noble security. The roots of her flowering were watered by
Wall Street, where old Mr. Coyne and her maternal grandsire, both still
in the field and almost equally proud of her, conspired to direct the
golden stream; though the plant itself seemed to spring from a soil in
which upheavals--when upheavals occurred--offered to panic at least a
deeper ground than a fall in stocks. Large calm beauty, low square
dresses, crude and multiplied jewels, the habit of watching strife from
a height and yet of looking at danger with a practised bravery, were
some of the impressions that consorted with her presence. When therefore
she had, with whatever kindness, shaken her slow head at Ralph three
times, there came to him a sad sense of his having staked his cast,
after all, but on the sensibility of a painted picture. She had touched
him at other times with a high hardness, whereas at present, clearly,
she would have given anything to seem mild; only it was at the end of
ten minutes of such mildness as if he stood under her closed window in
darkness and sleet. This brought the truth home to him as it had not yet
come: he had nothing in common with her apprehension--so particular, so
private as that would be--of the kind of personal force, of action on
her nerves and her senses, that might win from her a second surrender.
Strange he had always thought it that her first had been, against all
the likelihoods, Townsend Coyne, so queer though so clever, so damaged,
to the extent even of considerably looking it, yet somehow so little
touching in proportion, and so suggestive of experience, or at least of
overstrained and ambiguous knowledges, by the large expense of it all,
as who should say, rather than by equivalents accruing in the way of
wisdom or grace. Ralph reflected as to this, at the same time, that in
the case of a relation of that intimacy, really of that obscurity,
nothing was appreciable from outside; this was the commonest wisdom of
life--little indeed as it governed the general pretence of observation
that no one but the given man and the given woman could possibly know
the truth, or indeed any of the conditions, of the state of their being
so closely bound. It didn't matter now therefore that the conditions of
the Coynes had put him a question impossible to answer; the answer was
Aurora's own, for whatever future application, whatever determination of
her further conduct: she had been admirable and inscrutable--that was
the only clearness; though indeed with it one might at a stretch
inwardly remark that if the future _did_ owe her amends she probably saw
them as numerous.
Could she have shown him, at any rate, in a burst of confidence, this
compensating vision, he would have liked exceedingly to see it, even at
whatever cost to his own pride; but she nursed it now, at least to begin
with, in silence, only signing faintly, to his embarrassment, with her
grand thick-braided head. What this most suggested to him was that if at
twenty-two she had married a condemned consumptive she wouldn't now, at
thirty, marry a mere thinker--which was what Ralph amusedly knew himself
to pass for in New York, where the character indeed is held almost as
much in honour as that of the dervish in the East and where once, at his
door, it had been all but set down to him as professional by the man
calling about the Census or the Directory. Aurora Coyne's backers, her
ancestor and her late husband's, as Park Avenue so often termed
grandparents and parents, were members of the local Chamber of Commerce,
but he himself should more fitly have been a Malatesta or a Sforza: then
she might have been contracted to a despot or a condottiere. Within the
quarter of an hour he had completely lowered his crest. "I see, I see,"
he said, "I'm even less possible to you than I feared; and heaven knows
I hadn't sinned by presumption." She continued to say little in
reply--so little that, to ease positively for herself the awkwardness of
so few attenuations, he risked expressing her view, risked even, for
charity, making her contradict him. He imputed to her not quite a wish
to dismiss him wounded, yet making her care enough to contradict him
would a little diminish his defeat. "The one kind of man you could
really fancy would be some big adventurer. You'll marry the day you meet
one of your own proportions and general grand style, a filibuster or a
buccaneer. You might do with a great soldier--all the more that there
are some such about; yet even that is not the exact note. You won't of
course confess to it, but he should have a shade of the ruffian. It's a
pity there are no more pirates--you'd have doted on Paul Jones. The
adventurer isn't enough--your ideal's the desperado. I too, however, in
my way, am desperate. But I'm too intellectual."
"You know," she presently replied, "how clever I've always thought you."
"Well then you see how clever I am. I've put my finger straight on the
place. You can't deny it. I see you as you are, and you don't see me; so
that after all I've in a manner the advantage."
She spoke always but after little intervals; yet not as if to show she
had taken one's words in, for his at least were never directly met. "I
haven't waited till now to feel that you'd never be happy with me. I'm
quite too stupid."
"That's but a way of saying that I'm quite too small. What need have I,
all the same, of anyone else's wit?"
"I like men of action," she at last returned. "Men who've been through
something."
"And I've been through nothing--I see--but the long discipline of my
choked passion for you."
She kept answering--her bold grave eyes fixed on him, counting with
nothing, evading nothing--as if she had not heard him. "If it could be a
man of your kind at all it would be you. There are things in you I like
so. But that you should give up anything for me--that I should find
quite horrible. You must become great. Intellectually," she explained as
if she quoted it out of a book.
"Yes," Ralph laughed even while he sighed--"dry up to it, shrivel down
to it! You _must_ despise me to say such a thing as that to me! Why not
tell me at once that you hope you may never see me again?"
"You're beautiful," she remarked without pity.
"A beautiful worm?" he asked; "a delicate classified insect? a
slow-crawling library beetle, slightly iridescent, warranted
compressible--that is resisting the squash--when the book is closed to
on him?"
"You're beautiful," she simply repeated.
He appeared at this to take something of it in, or at any rate to make
something of it out. "Why won't it just do then that one is a
gentleman--and for all that not a fool?"
"Oh it does do--for being glad I know you and that you're just as you
are. It's good to know there are people like you--though I assure you I
don't dream there are many. You're beautiful," she observed once more.
"Thank you very much!" he observed with frank irritation. "I had rather
you found me ugly enough to think of. If I could make out what it is you
want one to have done I promise you it wouldn't leave me gaping. What is
it, what is it?" he pressed. "There's something you've a fancy for that
we're not in the way of--any of us: devilish poor lot as we are! I've at
least this superiority, you see, that I want to know it. Name it--come,
name it; and no matter how dreadful or how criminal it may be I won't
flinch from it."
Still with her eyes on him, and even, as it might have seemed, with the
oddest perversity of admiration, she waited after her wont. But when she
spoke it was terrible. "Just pursue your studies."
It positively affected him for an instant as a blow across the face,
putting a quick flush there and a tear in each eye. "How you must really
hate me!" And then as she herself changed colour: "And all because I've
written a book!"
Though she changed colour indeed she granted nothing: "Which I've read,"
she only replied, "with the greatest interest--even if I don't pretend
to have understood it all. I hope you'll write many more."
"'Many more'!"--he laughed out. "Charming," he scoffed without seeing
where he went, "charming the way you appear to imagine one throws such
things off! The idea people have of 'books'----!" He had gone too far
before he saw it--had gone so far that the next instant, at the sight of
something in her face, there was nothing but to pull up. She really
cared, and he had been calling her 'people,' had been grotesquely
tilting before her at a shapeless object stuck up by himself, and stuck
up crooked. She really cared, yes; yet what was it withal she cared for?
He took a different tone in a moment to ask her, and in another she had
begun in her own way to tell him.
"I've had in my mind--in connection with my ever marrying again--a
condition; but it's a matter I meant to speak of only when driven to the
wall, as I'm bound to say I think you've driven me." With which she went
on as if it explained everything. "I've come home, you know, to stay."
For Ralph it explained too little; yet as there was something in her
look that amplified it he saw more or less what was coming and he smiled
without pleasure. "You said that--don't you remember?--the last time."
"Yes, I said it the last time, and you've every right to laugh at it and
to doubt it. No one but myself can know that I'm serious, or why, and I
can't give my reasons and I dare say I must accept being ridiculous. At
any rate," she added with a kind of beautiful grimness, "I shan't parade
my ridicule about the world. I shall have it out _here._" The force of
her emphasis affected him indeed as strange, but she pursued before he
had time to take it up. "I shall never--oh but _never_--go back."
It struck of a sudden a fuller light, and he seemed to understand. There
was something she wouldn't, she couldn't name, but her accent alone
sufficiently betrayed it. She had had "somewhere abroad," as poor Ralph
used so often to put it, an encounter, an adventure, an agitation, that,
filling her with rage or shame, leaving behind it a wound or a horror,
had ended by prescribing to her, as a balm or vengeance, the abjuration
of the general world that had made it possible. What such an accident
could have been--to such a woman--was ground for wonder; but Ralph felt
easily enough that it was yet none of his affair and that he should even
perhaps at no price ever learn it. It had poisoned for her a continent,
a hemisphere, and such a hush for the moment fell upon him that he might
verily have been in presence of it. While they kept in communication
during these instants he at any rate put things together. "The condition
you speak of is then that one shall never ask you again to leave this
country?"
She shook her head as for pity of his poor vision, though he pretended
so to vision. "No. It's worse than that."
Then it was really that he guessed, though there was something in him
that couldn't make him eagerly jump to it. "Of course," he vaguely
observed, "your having had your fill----!"
"Yes," she sighed with all the meaning his drop didn't grasp, "I've had
my fill!"--and she turned away as if he might already now see too much.
The next minute, however, she was upon him again with what had to serve
for the time as the rest of the story. "It's too monstrous a thing to
ask, and I don't ask it. It makes everything so impossible that I should
have liked a thousand times better your not speaking to me. It can do,
you see, neither of us any good; for it only offers me as rather
crazy--as heartlessly perverse if you like--and yet gives you no hope of
curing or redeeming me. I should have to ask, you know," she now fully
explained, "for a vow."