Slowly and by almost imperceptible stages, spring had crept into summer
and summer had crawled sluggishly into autumn. Rose color had turned to
green, green to gold, and then all colors had faded to the uniform gray
of November. To Beatrix it seemed that nature's change typified that of
her life; to Thayer and Arlt the rose color and the gold were still
glowing. For the time being, the problems of their professional lives
were absorbing them both, to the exclusion of more human interests. Such
epochs are bound to come to every man. However broad and generous-minded
he may be, there are hours when it seems to him that the rising of the
sun and the going down of the same are functions of nature ordained
merely for the sake of giving chronological record of his own
professional advancement. November brought them both to this mood and,
while it lasted, each found the other his only satisfactory companion.
To Thayer the summer had been a matter of personal mathematics, the
solving of simultaneous personal equations. He had refused the
Lorimers' urgent invitation to join them at Monomoy. He had felt unequal
to prolong the double strain he had endured, those last weeks in town
before society broke up for the summer. It was almost unbearable to him
to be within daily reach of Beatrix, to be forced to face her with the
unvarying conventional smile of mere social acquaintance. It was
infinitely worse to be forced to look on and watch the gradual wrecking
of her hopes, to know that she was unhappy, discouraged and full of fear
for the future, and to realize that another man was carelessly bringing
upon her all this from which he would have given his own life to shield
her. Yet bad and worse were subordinated to worst. The worst, the most
unbearable phase of the whole situation lay in the knowledge, again and
again brought to the proof, that he himself was the only living person
who had the ability to hold Lorimer even approximately steady, that in a
way the thread of his destiny was knotted together with that of Beatrix.
He loved her absolutely, and the only proof of his love for her must lie
in his strange power to make more tolerable for her the galling yoke of
her marriage to another man.
Even in these few short months, it had become evident to the world that
the yoke was a galling one. Beatrix wore it bravely, even haughtily.
Nevertheless, it was chafing her until she was raw. Like a horse
surprised by the discovery of its own power, from occasional friskiness,
Lorimer was settling into a steadily increasing pace. During the months
of probation, he had held himself fairly steady, rather than lose the
chance of winning Beatrix for his wife. Now that she was won, he snapped
the check he had put upon himself, and yielded to the acquired momentum
gained during his self-imposed repression. By the time he came home from
Europe, Bobby and Thayer both realized that something was amiss. By the
first of June, it was an open secret that all was not well with
Lorimer's soul.
Lorimer still loved Beatrix with all the fervor of his nature. To him,
she was the one and only woman in the world, someone to be caressed and
indulged and played with, the comrade of his domestic hours. But, when
the other mood was upon him, he acknowledged no right upon her part to
offer advice or warning. He treated her as one treats a spoiled child,
fondling her until her presence bored him or interfered with his other
plans, then quietly setting her aside and going his own way alone. As
far as any woman could have held him, Beatrix could have done so; but
in Lorimer's life feminine influence was finite. When he was moved to
take the bits in his teeth, only a man, and but one man at that, was
able to check him. That man was Cotton Mather Thayer.
On a few occasions, Beatrix had endeavored to hold her husband, not from
temptation itself, but from the first steps towards it. She might as
well have tried to bar the rising tide with a pint sieve. At such times,
it seemed to her that Lorimer deliberately made up his mind to have a
revel, that he set himself to work to carry out his desires to a
satisfactory conclusion. These periods came at irregular intervals; but,
all in all, the intervals were shortening and the revels were
increasing. Beatrix learned their symptoms far too quickly; she learned
to know the depression and irritability which greeted her every effort
to rouse and to please him. It was at such times that Lorimer made
bitter revolt against what he termed her narrowness and prejudice, or
burst into occasional angry petulance, if she tried to urge him to cut
loose from the club and from the constantly-growing influence of Lloyd
Avalons who was discerning enough to discover that Lorimers appetite was
a possible lever by which he himself might pry himself up into a more
stable position in society. In this matter, however, Lloyd Avalons was
not quite so unprincipled as he seemed. To his mind, there was nothing
so very bad about a little matter of social intoxication. The evil of
drink was an affair bounded by purely geographical lines, and he
encouraged in Lorimer the very thing for which he would have been prompt
to dismiss the man who cleaned the snow off his sidewalk.
Afterwards, when the depression had ended in the revel, when they both
had ended in penitence, Lorimer temporarily came back again to the old
ways. The caressing intonations returned to his voice, as he talked to
Beatrix; his eyes followed her with loving pride, as she moved about the
room; for days at a time he devoted himself to her wishes, serving her
with a tireless chivalry which made her long to forget all that had gone
before. However, Beatrix could not forget certain facts; certain
episodes were so fixed in her memory that they seemed branded upon the
very tissue of her life. In some respects, these intervening days were
the hardest ones she had to bear. Lorimer seemed totally unable to grasp
the fact that any permanent barrier was rising between them, that there
was any real reason why they should not meet on precisely the old
ground. To his mind, half an hour of impulsive penitence could wipe out
half a night of deliberate sin, and Beatrix dared not explain to him
that it was otherwise. Her hold over him, that hold which once she had
deemed so strong, was growing slighter with every passing month. Any
hasty or ill-considered word from her might have the effect of
destroying it altogether. For the present, the most she could do, was to
avoid antagonizing him; and even that was no easy task. She was quite
unable to decide whether it took more self-control to accept in silence
his petulance or his caresses. Meanwhile, she was thankful for the
apparently growing friendship between Thayer and her husband. During
late May and all of June, Thayer was with Lorimer almost daily, and
Lorimer came nearest to his old, winning self on the days when he had
been longest in company with Thayer.
With the general scattering of people which heralds the coming of
summer, it seemed to Thayer that, for the time being, Lorimer's danger
was over, and it was with a sigh of utter relief that he saw Lorimer and
Beatrix starting for Monomoy. Strong as he was, Thayer had felt the
strain of the past six weeks; and it was good to hide himself with Arlt
in a Canadian fishing village, dismiss his responsibilities to his
neighbor, and give himself up to absolute idleness and much good music.
He had planned to spend August and September in Germany; but fate willed
otherwise. Less than a week before he was to sail, he received a laconic
epistle from Bobby Dane, dated at the hotel where he himself had spent
the previous summer.
"DEAR THAYER,--Wish you could come down here for August. Lorimer is
raising the deuce, and I can't do much with him. Besides, I am
ordered back, next week. I suppose the devil needs my
ministrations. I'll see to one, if you'll tackle the other.
Yours,
R. F. DANE."
Thayer hesitated for three minutes. Then he wrote two telegrams. One was
to the office of the steamship company. The other was to the hotel near
Monomoy.
The reaction which followed, was a natural one. Late in September,
Thayer returned to New York, preparatory to a concert tour through New
England. Exhausted by the long strain of mastering both himself and
Lorimer, he threw himself into his work with a feverish intensity which
astounded Arlt and roused his audiences to the highest pitch of
enthusiasm. Thayer took his new honors quietly, however. In his secret
heart, he knew that this had been the simplest way to work off his
stored-up emotions, and he reached New York, early in November, with a
greater reputation and steadier nerves than he had even dared to hope.
The tour had been a prosperous one for Arlt, as well. Upon several
occasions, he had met with marked favor, and the little touch of success
had reacted upon his personality, rendering him more at ease, more
masterful with his audience. To be popular, art must be modest; but woe
betide it, if it be in the least deprecating! However, Arlt was learning
to face his public with a fairly good grace, and his public showed
itself willing to smile back at him in a thoroughly friendly fashion.
Arlt's overture was to have its first hearing, the week before
Thanksgiving. The matter had been arranged through the influence of his
teacher, and Arlt had been invited to conduct the orchestra for the
event. However, in spite of his added ease, Arlt had judged such an
ordeal too great for his courage. Accordingly, the teacher and Thayer
had taken council together, with the result that Thayer was engaged as
soloist for the evening, and that Thayer insisted upon singing one
group of songs with a piano accompaniment. To this minor detail, Arlt
had been forced to submit, although he was shrewd enough to see that it
was merely a ruse on the part of his teacher to bring him in person
before his audience.
The arrangement of these details, the orchestral rehearsals of the
overture and his own rehearsals with Arlt were engrossing Thayer
completely. Heart and soul, he was working for the boy's success, for he
realized that into this simple overture Arlt had put the very best of
himself, that the young composer's happiness was bound up in the success
or failure of his maiden effort. The creative power had come upon him;
he had worked to the utmost limit with the material ready to his brain.
Now he was waiting to have the world pass judgment whether his work was
worth the doing, whether he should keep on, or turn his back upon his
chosen path. Thayer's own plans, too, were maturing. In the watching
them develop, in the helping Arlt to pass the time of waiting, he almost
succeeded in forgetting the Lorimers. Almost; but not quite. The
forgetting was a little too intentional to be entirely complete. He met
them rarely. Society had not yet organized its winter campaign, and it
was still possible for a man to go his own individual way. Just now,
Thayer's own individual way led him almost daily in the direction of
Washington Square.
He was in Arlt's room, one evening, less than a week before the concert.
He had been dining with Miss Gannion; but he had left her early, in
order to impress upon Arlt that he must accept his bidding to the supper
which the Lorimers were to give after the concert. The invitations had
been noncommittal, and Arlt had announced his intention of declining his
own, on the plea of being too tired with his overture to care to do
anything more, that night. Miss Gannion had told Thayer what he already
half suspected, that Beatrix was really giving this supper in Arlt's
honor and that it was to be the first large affair of the season, in the
hope of focussing public attention upon the boy at the very moment of
his having proved his real genius as composer. Thayer appreciated to the
full the gracious kindliness of the plan, and he had excused himself to
Miss Gannion and hurried away in search of Arlt, devoutly praying, as he
went, that the note of regret might not be already on its way.
He was but just in time. The sealed note lay on the table, and Arlt was
shrugging himself into his overcoat, when Thayer entered the room. Ten
minutes later, they were still arguing the matter, when they heard an
unfamiliar step coming up the stairs.
"Mr. Arlt?" A strange voice followed the knock.
Arlt opened the door hospitably. The dim light in the hallway showed him
a figure known to every opera singer in America and half of Europe.
"Will you come in?" he asked, in some surprise.
"Is Mr. Thayer here?"
"I am." Thayer stepped into the lighted doorway. "You wished me?"
"Yes. What is more, I need you. We know each other well by sight, so I
suppose there is no call for us to waste time on introductions. Mr.
Thayer, Principali, one of my best baritones, is ill and is forced to
cancel his engagements. Will you take his place?"
Thayer meditated swiftly, during a moment of silence.
"What are the operas?"
"Wagner, _Faust_ of course, and--oh, the usual run of extras."
"What reason have you to think that I am fitted for your vacancy?"
Thayer asked directly.
The impresario smiled.
"Your old master in Berlin is one of my most intimate friends. He gave
you a letter of introduction to me, I think?" The accent was
interrogative, although it was plain that only one answer was expected.
"He did," Thayer assented quietly.
"Yes, and I have been waiting for more than a year in the hope that you
would present it. Since you will not come to me, I am at last driven to
go in search of you."
Thayer bowed gravely in recognition of the implied compliment. He
realized that he was suddenly facing a question which might affect his
whole after life, and he was too much in earnest to waste words on mere
conventional phrases. He liked the old man, and he felt a swift, burning
longing to accept his offer. It had come unsought, unexpected. Was not
fate in it; and was not a man always justified in following out his
fate? To accept it would be in a great measure to cut himself off from
his present social life. An operatic engagement would engross him
completely. All in all, it might be better so. And yet, there was
something to be said upon the other side. Was he justified in working
out his own professional salvation at the certain cost of the damnation
of another soul? That was what it amounted to in the long run. If he
went into opera, he must separate himself from all connection with
Sidney Lorimer. He could not take the time to visit Lorimer's world; it
would be sure and swift destruction to Lorimer, if he were to set foot
within the new world which Thayer was preparing to enter. Thayer
realized that the horns of his dilemma were long and curving. The offer
tempted him sorely; yet, for some unaccountable reason, he shrank from
turning his back upon Lorimer. And, besides, if Beatrix--
"How long would you need me?"
"The entire season."
"How soon?"
"In _Faust_, on the tenth of next month."
"In _Faust_?"
The impresario saw that Thayer was hesitating. The idea of Faust plainly
attracted him, and the impresario hastily followed up the advantage.
"Yes, we want you for _Valentine_."
"My favorite part," Thayer said, half to himself.
The impresario smiled serenely. He felt no question now as to the
outcome of his errand.
"Calve will sing _Marguerite_; it will be a good cast. After that, we
shall need you, two or three times a week, and the salary--"
Impatiently Thayer brushed his words aside.
"How soon must you have my answer?"
"To-night."
"Very well. Then, no."
The impresario straightened up in his chair.
"Mr. Thayer!" he remonstrated.
"It is impossible for me to bind myself for an entire season, without
more time to think the matter over," Thayer said quietly.
"But it is important that I should know, in order to make my other
arrangements."
"Then you would better consider it settled in the negative," Thayer
returned.
The impresario wavered.
"How much time do you need?" he asked a little impatiently.
"I must have a week."
"Impossible."
"Very well, then. But I thank you for the honor you have done me in
asking me to fill the place."
Thayer rose with an air of decision, and the impresario could do nothing
else than follow his example. At the door, he turned back.
"Mr. Thayer, there is no use in my trying to conceal the fact that I
want you badly. If I will wait until a week from to-night, will you give
me your answer then?"
"I will," Thayer replied imperturbably.
"And sign the contracts on the spot?"
"I will," Thayer repeated; "but remember this: in the meantime, I am
binding myself to nothing. Good-night."
He went down the stairs with the impresario. When he returned to Arlt's
room, a moment later, he took up the conversation at the precise point
where they had dropped it; but, even in the dusky room, Arlt could see
that Thayer's eyes were blazing as he had never seen them till then. Not
long afterwards, Thayer glanced down at his own strong, slim hand that
rested on the table beside him. The fingers were moving restlessly and,
on the back, the cords twitched a little now and then. Thayer watched it
curiously for a moment. Then he clasped his hands on his knee and held
them there, motionless.