In America, life soon settled into form about the daily duties of
Elmore's place, and the daily pleasures and cares which his wife assumed
as a leader in Patmos society. Their sojourn abroad conferred its
distinction; the day came when they regarded it as a brilliant episode,
and it was only by fitful glimpses that they recognized its essential
dulness. After they had been home a year or two, Elmore published his
Story of Venice in the Lives of her Heroes, which fell into a ready
oblivion; he paid all the expenses of the book, and was puzzled that, in
spite of this, the final settlement should still bring him in debt to
his publishers. He did not understand, but he submitted; and he accepted
the failure of his book very meekly. If he could have chosen, he would
have preferred that the Saturday Review, which alone noticed it in
London with three lines of exquisite slight, should have passed it in
silence. But after all, he felt that the book deserved no better fate.
He always spoke of it as unphilosophized and incomplete, without any
just claim to being.
Lily had returned to her sister's household, but though she came home in
the heyday of her young beauty, she failed somehow to take up the story
of her life just where she had left it in Patmos. On the way home she
had refused an offer in London, and shortly after her arrival in America
she received a letter from a young gentleman whom she had casually seen
in Geneva, and who had found exile insupportable since parting with her,
and was ready to return to his native land at her bidding; but she said
nothing of these proposals till long afterwards to Professor Elmore,
who, she said, had suffered enough from her offers. She went to all the
parties and picnics, and had abundant opportunities of flirtation and
marriage; but she neither flirted nor married. She seemed to have
greatly sobered; and the sound sense which she had always shown became
more and more qualified with a thoughtful sweetness. At first, the
relation between her and the Elmores lost something of its intimacy; but
when, after several years, her health gave way, a familiarity, even
kinder than before, grew up. She used to like to come to them, and talk
and laugh fondly over their old Venetian days. But often she sat
pensive and absent, in the midst of these memories, and looked at Elmore
with a regard which he found hard to bear: a gentle, unconscious wonder
it seemed, in which he imagined a shade of tender reproach.
When she recovered her health, after a journey to the West one winter,
they saw that, by some subtile and indefinable difference, she was no
longer a young girl. Perhaps it was because they had not met her for
half a year. But perhaps it was age,--she was now thirty. However it
was, Elmore recognized with a pang that the first youth at least had
gone out of her voice and eyes. She only returned to arrange for a long
sojourn in the West. She liked the climate and the people, she said; and
she seemed well and happy. She had planned starting a Kindergarten
school in Omaha with another young lady; she said that she wanted
something to do. "She will end by marrying one of those Western
widowers," said Mrs. Elmore.
"I wonder she didn't take poor old Hoskins," mused Elmore aloud.
"No, you don't, dear," said his wife, who had not grown less direct in
dealing with him. "You know it would have been ridiculous; besides, she
never cared anything for him,--she couldn't. You might as well wonder
why she didn't take Captain Ehrhardt after you dismissed him."
"_I_ dismissed him?"
"You wrote to him, didn't you?"
"Celia," cried Elmore, "this I _cannot_ bear. Did I take a single step
in that business without her request and your full approval? Didn't you
both ask me to write?"
"Yes, I suppose we did."
"Suppose?"
"Well, we _did_,--if you want me to say it. And I'm not accusing you of
anything. I know you acted for the best. But you can see yourself, can't
you, that it was rather sudden to have it end so quickly--"
She did not finish her sentence, or he did not hear the close in the
miserable absence into which he lapsed. "Celia," he asked at last, "do
you think she--she had any feeling about him?"
"Oh," cried his wife restively, "how should _I_ know?"
"I didn't suppose you _knew_," he pleaded. "I asked if you thought so."
"What would be the use of thinking anything about it? The matter can't
be helped now. If you inferred from anything she said to you--"
"She told me repeatedly, in answer to questions as explicit as I could
make them, that she wished him dismissed."
"Well, then, very likely she did."
"Very likely, Celia?"
"Yes. At any rate, it's too late now."
"Yes, it's too late now." He was silent again, and he began to walk the
floor, after his old habit, without speaking. He was always mute when he
was in pain, and he startled her with the anguish in which he now broke
forth. "I give it up! I give it up! Celia, Celia, I'm afraid I did
wrong! Yes, I'm afraid that I spoiled two lives. I ventured to lay my
sacrilegious hands upon two hearts that a divine force was drawing
together, and put them asunder. It was a lamentable blunder,--it was a
crime!"
"Why, Owen, how strangely you talk! How could you have done any
differently under the circumstances?"
"Oh, I could have done very differently. I might have seen him, and
talked with him brotherly, face to face. He was a fearless and generous
soul! And I was meanly scared for my wretched little decorums, for my
responsibility to her friends, and I gave him no chance."
"We wouldn't let you give him any," interrupted his wife.
"Don't try to deceive yourself, don't try to deceive _me_, Celia! I know
well enough that you would have been glad to have me show mercy; and I
would not even show him the poor grace of passing his offer in silence,
if I must refuse it. I couldn't spare him even so much as that!"
"We decided--we both decided--that it would be better to cut off all
hope at once," urged his wife.
"Ah, it was I who decided that--decided everything. Leave me to deal
honestly with myself at last, Celia! I have tried long enough to believe
that it was not I who did it!" The pent-up doubt of years, the
long-silenced self-accusal, burst forth in his words. "Oh, I have
suffered for it! I thought he must come back, somehow, as long as we
stayed in Venice. When we left Peschiera without a glimpse of him--I
wonder I outlived it. But even if I had seen him there, what use would
it have been? Would I have tried to repair the wrong done? What did I do
but impute unmanly and impudent motives to him when he seized his chance
to see her once more at that masquerade--"
"No, no, Owen! He was not the one. Lily was satisfied of that long ago.
It was nothing but a chance, a coincidence. Perhaps it was some one he
had told about the affair--"
"No matter! no matter! If I thought it was he, my blame is the same. And
she, poor girl,--in my lying compassion for him, I used to accuse her of
cold-heartedness, of indifference! I wonder she did not abhor the sight
of me. How has she ever tolerated the presence, the friendship, of a man
who did her this irreparable wrong? Yes, it has spoiled her life, and it
was my work. No, no, Celia! you and she had nothing to do with it,
except as I forced your consent--it was my work; and, however I have
tried openly and secretly to shirk it, I must bear this fearful
responsibility."
He dropped into a chair, and hid his face in his hands, while his wife
soothed him with loving excuses for what he had done, with tender
protests against the exaggerations of his remorse. She said that he had
done the only thing he could do; that Lily wished it, and that she never
had blamed him. "Why, I don't believe she would ever have married
Captain Ehrhardt, anyhow. She was full of that silly fancy of hers about
Dick Burton, all the time,--you know how she used always to be talking
about him; and when she came home and found she had outgrown him, she
had to refuse him, and I suppose it's that that's made her rather
melancholy." She explained that Major Burton had become extremely fat,
that his moustache was too big and black, and his laugh too loud; there
was nothing left of him, in fact, but his empty sleeve, and Lily was too
conscientious to marry him merely for that.
In fact, Elmore's regret did reflect a monstrous and distorted image of
his conduct. He had really acted the part of a prudent and conscientious
man; he was perfectly justifiable at every step: but in the retrospect
those steps which we can perfectly justify sometimes seem to have cost
so terribly that we look back even upon our sinful stumblings with
better heart. Heaven knows how such things will be at the last day; but
at that moment there was no wrong, no folly of his youth, of which
Elmore did not think with more comfort than of this passage in which he
had been so wise and right.
Of course the time came when he saw it all differently again; when his
wife persuaded him that he had done the best that any one could do with
the responsibilities that ought never to have been laid on a man of his
temperament and habits; when he even came to see that Lily's feeling was
a matter of pure conjecture with him, and that so far as he knew she had
never cared anything for Ehrhardt. Yet he was glad to have her away; he
did not like to talk of her with his wife; he did not think of her if he
could help it.
They heard from time to time through her sister that her little
enterprise in Omaha was prospering, and that she was very contented out
West; at last they heard directly from her that she was going to be
married. Till then, Elmore had been dumbly tormented in his sombre moods
with the solution of a problem at which his imagination vainly
toiled,--the problem of how some day she and Ehrhardt should meet again
and retrieve the error of the past for him. He contrived this encounter
in a thousand different ways by a thousand different chances; what he so
passionately and sorrowfully longed for accomplished itself continually
in his dreams, but only in his dreams.
In due course Lily married, and from all they could understand, very
happily. Her husband was a clergyman, and she took particular interest
in his parochial work, which her good heart and clear head especially
qualified her to share with him. To connect her fate any longer with
that of Ehrhardt was now not only absurd, it was improper; yet Elmore
sometimes found his fancy forgetfully at work as before. He could not at
once realize that the tragedy of this romance, such as it was, remained
to him alone, except perhaps as Ehrhardt shared it. With him, indeed,
Elmore still sought to fret his remorse and keep it poignant, and his
final failure to do so made him ashamed. But what lasting sorrow can one
have from the disappointment of a man whom one has never seen? If Lily
could console herself, it seemed probable that Ehrhardt too had "got
along."