emotion; his eyelids smarted. He threw back his still handsome head,
and a tear fell shining on the delicately scented paper underneath
his hand. He looked at the drop as it spread and soaked into a damp
little circle, and made no use of the blotting paper to remove the
stain. If any crudely candid observer had told Daymond that he dandled
this desolation of his--took an æsthetic delight in his devotion to
the coffined handful of dust that had once lived and palpitated at his
touch, he would have been honestly outraged and surprised. Yet the
thing was true. He had made his sorrow into a hobby-horse during the
last fifteen years of honest regret, of absolute faithfulness to the
memory of his dead mistress. It gratified him to see the well-trained
creature dance and perform the tricks of the _haute école_. He was
aware that the romance of that past, which he regretted with such real
sincerity, added something to the glamour of his achieved reputation,
his established fame, in the eyes of the world. The halo which it cast
about him had increased his desirability in the eyes of the great lady
who, after affording him numberless unutilized opportunities for the
declaration of a sentiment which her large handsome person and her
large handsome property had inspired in many other men, had written him
a frank, womanly letter, placing these unreservedly at his disposal....
And Daymond, in his conscious fidelity and unconscious vanity, must
perforce reply wintrily, nipping with the east wind of non-reciprocity
the mature passion tendrils which sought to twine themselves about
him. It was a painful task, though the obligation of it tickled him
agreeably--another proof of the inconsistency of the man, who may be
regarded as a type of humanity; for we are all veritable Daymonds, in
that the medium which gives us back to our own gloating eyes day by day
is never the crystal mirror of Truth, but such a lying glass as the
charlatans of centuries agone were wont to make for ancient Kings and
withered Queens to mop and mow in.
Daymond pushed back his chair, and got up, and began to pace from end
to end of the studio. The costly Moorish carpets muffled the falling of
his footsteps, which intermittently sounded on the polished interspaces
of the parqueted floor, and then were lost again in velvet silence.
In the same way, his tall figure, with its thoughtfully bending head
and hands clasped behind it, would be swallowed up among the looming
shadows of tall easels or faintly glimmering suggestions of sculptured
figures which here and there thrust portions of limbs, or angles of
faces, out of the dusk--to appear again with the twilit north window
for its background, or emerge once more upon the borders of the
little island of tapershine. So he moved amid the works of his genius
restlessly and wearily to and fro; and the incoherent mutterings which
broke from him showed that his thoughts were running in the beaten
track of years.
“If I could see her again--if our eyes and lips and hands and hearts
might meet for even the fraction of a minute, as they used to do, it
would be enough. I could wait then patiently through the slow decay
of the cycles for the turning of the key in the rusty wards, and the
clanking of my broken fetters on the echoing stone, and the burst of
light that shall herald my deliverance from prison!...” He lifted his
arms above his head. “Oh, my dead love, my dear love! if you are near,
as I have sometimes fancied you were, speak to me, touch me--once,
only once!...” He waited a moment with closed eyelids and outstretched
hands, and then, with a dry sob of baffled longing, stumbled back to
his writing table, where the little taper was flickering its last, and
dropped into his armchair.
“And other women talk of love to me. What wonder I am cold as ice to
them, remembering her!”
It was a scene he had gone through scores upon scores of times--words
and gestures varying according to the pathetic inspiration of the
moment. He knew that he was pale, and that his eyes were bleared with
weeping, and he had a kind of triumph in the knowledge that the pain
of retrospective longing and of present loneliness was so poignantly
real and keen. Out of the blackness behind his chair at that moment
came a slight stir and rustle--not the sough of a vagrant draught
stirring among folds of tapestry, but an undeniably human sound. But
half displeased with the suspicion that there had been a witness to his
agony, he turned--turned and saw Her, the well-beloved of the old, old
time, standing very near him.
Beyond a vivid sensation of astonishment, he felt little. He did not
tremble with fear--what was there in that perfectly familiar face to
fear? He did not fall, stammering with incoherent rapture, at her feet.
And yet, a few moments ago, he had felt that for one such sight of her,
returned from the Unknowable to comfort him--dragged back from the
mysterious Beyond by his strong yearnings--he would have bartered fame,
honor, and wealth--submitted his body to unheard-of tortures--shed his
blood to the last heart’s drop. He had prayed that a miracle might be
performed--and the prayer had been granted. He had longed--desperately
longed--to look on her once more--and the longing was satisfied. And he
could only stare wide-eyed, and gape with dropped jaw, and say stupidly:
“_You?_”
For answer she turned her face--in hue, and line, and feature, no one
whit altered--so that the light might illumine it fully, and stood
so regarding him in silence. Every pore of her seemed to drink in the
sight of him;--her lips were parted in breathless expectancy. Every
hair of the dark head--dressed in the fashion of fifteen years ago;
every fold of the loose dress she wore--a garment he knew again; every
lift and fall of her bosom seemed to cry out dumbly to him. There was
a half-quenched spark glimmering in each of her deep eyes, that might
have wanted only one breath from his mouth to break out into flame. Her
hands hung clasped before her. It seemed as if they were only waiting
for the signal to unclasp--for the outspread arms to summon him to
her heart again. But the signal did not come. He caught a breath, and
repeated, dully:
“You! It is you?”
She returned:
“It is I!”
The well-known tones! Recollection upsprang in his heart like a gush of
icy waters. For a moment he was thrilled to the center of his being.
But the smitten nerve chords ceased to vibrate in another moment, and
he rose to offer her a chair.
She moved across and took it, as he placed it by the angle of the wide
hearth; and lifted her skirts aside with a movement that came back
to him from a long way off, like her tone in speaking--and, shading
her deep gray eyes from the dull red heat with her white left hand,
looked at him intently. He, having pushed his own seat back into the
borders of the shadowland beyond the taper’s gleam and the hearth
glow, looked back at her. That hand of hers bore no ring. When he had
broken the plain gold link that had fettered it in time past, he had
set in its place a ruby that had belonged to his mother. The ruby was
on his finger now. He hid it out of sight in the pocket of his velvet
painting coat, not knowing why he did so. And at that moment she broke
the silence with:
“You see I have come to you at last!”
He replied, with conscious heaviness:
“Yes--I see!”
“Has the time seemed long?... We have no time, you know, where.... Is
it many days since?...”
“Many days!”
“My poor Robert!... Weeks?... Months?... Not years?...”
“Fifteen years....”
“Fifteen years! And you have suffered all that time. Oh, cruel! cruel!
If there was more light here, I might see your face more plainly. Dear
face! I shall not love it less if there are lines and marks of grief
upon it--it will not seem less handsome to me at forty than it did
at twenty-five! Ah, I wish there was more light!” The old pettishly
coaxing tones! “But yet I do not wish for it, lest it should show you
any change in _me_!”
“You are not changed in the least.” He drew breath hard. “It might be
yesterday----,” he said, and left the sentence unfinished.
“I am glad,” said the voice that he had been wont to recall to memory
as wooingly sweet. “They have been kinder than I knew.... Oh! it has
always been so painful to recall,” she went on, with the old little
half shrug, half shudder, “that I died an _ugly_ death--that I was not
pretty to look at as I lay in my coffin!...”
Daymond recoiled inwardly. That vanity, in a woman, should not be
eradicated by the fact of her having simply ceased to exist, was an
hypothesis never before administered for his mental digestion.
“How curiously it all happened,” she said, her full tones trembling a
little. “It was autumn--do you remember?--and the trees in the Bois and
the gardens of the Luxembourg were getting yellowy brown. There were
well-dressed crowds walking on the Boulevards, and sitting round the
little tables outside the restaurants. One could smell chloride of lime
and carbolic acid crossing the gutters, and see the braziers burning
at the corners of infected streets, and long strings of hearses going
by; but nothing seemed so unlikely as that either of us should be taken
ill and die. We were too wicked, you said, and too happy! ... only the
good, miserable people were carried off, because any other world would
be more suitable to them than this.... It was nonsense, of course, but
it served us to laugh at. Then, because you could not sell your great
Salon picture, and we could not afford the expense, you gave a supper
at the _Café des Trois Oiseaux_ (_Cabinet particulier No. 6_)--and
Valéry and the others joined us. I was so happy that night ... my new
dress became me ... I wore yellow roses--your favorite Maréchal Niel’s.
When I was putting them in my bosom and my hair you came behind and
kissed me on the shoulder. O, _mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ I can feel it now!
We went to the Variétés, and then to supper. I had never felt so gay.
People are like that, I remember having heard, just when they are going
to die. Valéry gaped--I believe he was half in love with me--and I
teased him because I knew you would be jealous. In those days you would
have been jealous of the studio _écorché_. Ha! ha! ha!”
Daymond shuddered. The recurrent French phrases jarred on him;
something in her voice and manner scarified inexpressibly his sensitive
perceptions. He wondered, dumbly, whether she had always been like
this? She went on:
“And then, suddenly, in the midst of the laughter, the champagne, the
good dishes--the pains of hell!” She shuddered. “And then a blank, and
waking up in bed at the hospital, still in those tortures--and getting
worse and seeing in your white face that I was going to die! Drip-drip!
I could feel your tears falling upon my face, upon my hand; but I was
even impatient of you in my pain. Once I fancied that I heard myself
saying that I hated you. Did I really?”
“I think--I believe you did! But, of course----” Daymond stopped, and
shuddered to the marrow as she leaned across to him caressingly, so
near that her draperies brushed his knee and her breath fanned upon his
face.
“Imagine it!” she cried, “that I _hated_ you! _You_ to whom I had given
myself--you for whom I left my----”
He interrupted, speaking in an odd, strained voice: “Never mind that
now.”
“I had always wished to die first,” she resumed, “but not in that way;
not without leaving you a legacy of kind words and kisses. Ah!” (her
voice stole to his ears most pleadingly), “do you know that I have been
here, I cannot tell how long, and you have not kissed me once, darling?”
She rose up in her place--she would have come to him, but he sprang to
his feet, and thrust out both hands to keep her off, crying:
“No! no!”
She sank back into her seat, looking at him wide-eyed and wonderingly.
“Is he afraid of me?” she whispered to herself.
“I am not afraid of you,” Daymond returned almost roughly. “But
you must make allowances for me at first. Your sudden coming--the
surprise----”
“Ah yes! the surprise--and the joy----?”
He cleared his throat and looked another way. He was shamedly conscious
that the emotion that stiffened his tongue and hampered his gestures
was something widely different from joy. He spoke again, confusedly.
“This seems like old times--before----”
“Before I died,” she said, “without bidding good-bye to you. Dear! if
you guessed how I have longed to know what you said and did when it was
all over, you would not mind telling me.... ‘_Are they grieving--those
whom I have left behind?_’ is a question that is often asked in the
place I come from. You were sorry? You cried? Ah! I know you must have
cried!”
“I believe,” Daymond returned, moving restlessly in his chair, “that I
did. And I--I kissed you, though the doctors told me not to. I wanted
to catch the cholera and die, too, I believe!...”
“Yes?”
“And when the people came with--the coffin, I”--he bit his lip--“I
would not let them touch you!...”
“My poor boy!”
He winced from the tenderness. He felt with indescribable sensations
the light pressure of that well-known once well-loved touch upon his
arm.
“And then--after the funeral, I believe I had a brain fever.” He
passed his hand through his waving, slightly grizzled hair, as if to
assist his lagging memory--really, as an excuse for shaking off that
intolerable burden of her hand. “And when I recovered I found there was
no way to forgetfulness”--he heard her sigh faintly--“except through
work. I worked then--I am working still.”
“Always alone?”
“Generally alone. I have never married.”
“Of course not!”
A faint dissent began to stir in him at this matter-of-fact
acquiescence in his widowed turtle-like celibacy. “It may interest you
to know,” he observed, with a touch of the pompous manner which had
grown upon him with the growth of his reputation, “that my career has
been successful in the strongest sense of the word. I have become, I
may say, one of the leaders of the world of Art. Upon the decease or
resignation of the President of the ----, it is more than probable that
I shall be invited to occupy his vacant place. And an intimation has
reached me, from certain eminent quarters”--he paused weightily--“that
a baronetcy will be conferred upon me, in that event!”
“Yes?”
The tone betrayed an absolute lack of attention. She had once been used
to take a keen interest in his occupations; to be cast down by his
failures and elated by his successes. Had that enthusiasm constituted
the greater part of her charm? In its absence Daymond began to find
her--must it be confessed?--but indifferent company.
In the embarrassment that momentarily stiffened him, an old habit
came to his rescue. Before he knew it, he had taken a cigar from a
silver box upon the writing table, and was saying, with the politely
apologetic accent of the would-be smoker:
“May I? You used not to mind!”
She made a gesture of assent. As the first rings of bluish vapor
mounted into the air, Daymond found her watching him with those intent,
expectant eyes.
Feeling himself bound to make some observation, he said: “It is very
wonderful to me to see you here! It was very good of you to come!”
She returned: “They had to let me come, I think! I begged so--I prayed
so, that at last----” She paused. Daymond was not listening. He was
looking at her steadfastly and pondering....
It had been his whim, in the first poignancy of bereavement, to destroy
all portraits of her, so that with the lapse of years no faulty touch
should bewray the memory of her vanished beauty. It struck him now for
the first time that his brush had played the courtier, and flattered
her, for the most part, unblushingly. He found himself criticizing
unfavorably the turn of her throat and the swell of her bosom, and
the dark voluptuous languishment of her look. The faint perfume of
heliotrope that was shaken forth now, as of old time, from her hair and
her garments no longer intoxicated, but sickened him. This, then, was
the woman he had mourned for fifteen years! He began to feel that he
had murmured unwisely at the dispensation of Providence. He began to
revolt at this recrudescence of an outworn passion--to realize that at
twenty-five he had taken a commonplace woman for a divinity--a woman
whom, if she had not died when she did, he would have wearied of--ended
perhaps in hating. He found himself in danger of hating her now.
“At last they let me come. They said I should repent it--as if I
could!” Her eyes rested on him lingeringly; her hand stilled the
eager trembling of her lips. “Never! Of course, you seemed a little
strange at first. You are not quite--not quite yourself now; it is
natural--after fifteen years. And presently, when I tell you---- Oh!
what will you say when I tell you all?”
She left her chair and came toward him, so swiftly that he had not time
to avoid her. She laid her hand on his shoulder and bent her mouth to
his ear. One of her peculiarities had been that her lips were always
cold, even when her passion burned most fiercely. The nearness of
those lips, once so maddeningly desirable and sweet, made Daymond’s
flesh creep horribly. He breathed with difficulty, and the great drops
of agony stood thickly on his forehead--not with weak, superstitious
terror of the ghost; with unutterable loathing of the woman.
“Listen!” she said. “They are wise in the place I came from; they know
things that are not known here.... You have heard it said that once in
the life of every human being living upon earth comes a time when the
utterance of a wish will be followed by its fulfilment. The poor might
be made rich, the sick well, the sad merry, the loveless beloved--in
one moment--if they could only know when that moment comes! But not
once in a million million lifetimes do they hit upon it; and so they
live penniless and in pain, and sorrowful and lonely, all their lives.
I let my chance go by, like many others, long before I died; but yours
is yet to come.” Her voice thrilled with a note of wild triumph; the
clasp of her arm tightened on his neck. “Oh, love!” she cried; “the
wonderful moment is close at hand! It is midnight now”--she pointed
to the great north window, through which the frosty silver face of
the moon was staring in relief against a framed-in square of velvet
blackness, studded with twinkling star-points--“but with the first
signs of the dawn that you and I have greeted together, heart of my
heart!--how many times in the days that may come again!--with the
graying of the East and the paling of the stars comes the Opportunity
for you. Now, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
He understood and quailed before her. But she was blindly confident in
his truth, stupidly reliant on his constancy.
“When it comes, beloved, you shall take me in your arms--breathe your
wish upon these lips of mine, in a kiss. Say, while God’s ear is open,
‘Father, give her back to me, living and loving, as of old!’ and I
shall be given--I shall be given!”
She threw both arms about him and leaned to him, and sobbed and laughed
with the rapture of her revelation and the anticipation of the joy that
was to come.
“Remember, you must not hesitate, or the golden chance will pass beyond
recall, and I shall go back whence I came, never more to return--never
more to clasp you, dearest one, until you die too, and come to me (are
you cold, that you shudder so?)--and be with me for always. Listen,
listen!”
As she lifted her hand the greatest of all the great clock voices of
London spoke out the midnight hour. As other voices answered from far
and near Daymond shuddered, and put his dead love from him, and rose up
trembling and ghastly pale.
They moved together to the window, and stood looking out. The weather
was about to change; the snow was melting, the thaw drip plashed
heavily from roof gutters and balconies, cornices and window ledges. As
she laid her hand once more upon his shoulder the stars began to fade
out one by one, and in a little while from then the eastward horizon
quivered with the first faint throes of dawn.
“Wish!” she cried. “Now! now! before it is too late!” She moved as if
to throw herself again upon his breast; but he thrust her from him with
resolute hands that trembled no more.
“I wish,” he said very distinctly, “to be Sir Robert Daymond, Baronet,
and President of the ---- before the year is out!”
She fell away from him, and waned, and became unsubstantial and shadowy
like the ghost she was, and unlike the thing of flesh and blood she had
seemed before. Nothing remained to her of lifelikeness but the scorn
and anger, the anguish and reproach of her great eyes.
“Only the dead are faithful to Love--because they are dead,” she said.
“The living live on--and forget! They may remember sometimes to regret
us--beat their breasts and call upon our names--but they shudder if we
answer back across the distance; and if we should offer to come back,
‘Return!’ they say! ‘go and lie down in the comfortable graves we have
made you; there is no room for you in your old places any more!’ They
told me I should be sorry for coming; but I would not listen, I had
such confidence. I am wiser now! Good-bye!”
A long sigh fluttered by him in the semi-obscurity, like a bird with
a broken wing. There was a rattling of curtain rings, the dull sough
of falling tapestry, and the opening and closing of a door. She was
gone! And Daymond, waking from strangely dreamful slumbers to the
cheerlessness of dying embers and burned-out candle, rang the bell for
his servant, and ordered lights. A few minutes later saw him, perfectly
dressed, stepping into his cab.
“Chesterfield Gardens, Mayfair,” he said, giving the direction to his
valet for transference to the groom.
“Beg pardon, sir, but Lady Mary Fraber’s servant is still waiting!” The
man pointed back to the house.
“Ah!” said Daymond, who had had a passing glimpse of alien cord gaiters
reposing before his hall-fire. “Tell him I have taken the answer to his
mistress myself.”
And as he spoke he scattered a handful of torn-up squares of paper--the
fragments of a letter--in largesse to the night and the gusty weather.
AN ORDEAL BY FIRE
Mr. Lanter was bookkeeping clerk in a New York dry-goods store. For
his services he was remunerated at the rate of fifteen dollars per
week. His bedroom at the boarding house with daily breakfast and three
meals on the Sunday, cost him ten dollars; the remaining five supplied
all other necessities--fed him at cheap restaurants, dressed him from
cheap clothing stores, and allowed him to send a cash bill now and
then to his mother, who lived in a New Hampshire village on tea, bread
and sauce, wore her hair in looped bell-ropes on either side of her
forehead and a rosette behind, and thought her son the most splendid
man in the world. But despite heroic efforts, Mr. Lanter had not
succeeded in putting by anything against a rainy day. As to marriage,
it was not to be dreamt of, which is probably the reason why Mr.
Lanter dreamed of it so frequently. But the feminine form that figured
in those dreams was not that of a typist, or a sales-lady, or even a
chorus-girl or variety artist. Mr. Lanter was a young man with a turn
for reading, who regularly spent his Sundays at the Cooper Institute,
and he did not feel that he could undertake to do his duty as a husband
by anything short of a heroine of romantic classical fiction. He had
had imaginary love passages with several of these, both ancient and
modern. _The Faëry Queen_ had given him Britomart, and the _Volsunga
Saga_ had supplied him with Brunhild. Hypatia’s erudition made her
a little alarming, but the affair was pleasant while it lasted; and
Iseult was too dark for Mr. Lanter’s taste, but he changed the color
of her locks as expeditiously as a French hairdresser, and roamed the
forest ways with her more appreciatively than Prosper. Theaters Mr.
Lanter did not frequent, because Mrs. Lanter regarded such places as
pitfalls dug by the devil for the capture of unwary young America, and
he had promised his mother he would not visit them. Indeed, had he
been inclined to go back on his word, he could not have afforded to do
so. But neither concert-halls, museums, nor circuses figured on Mrs.
Lanter’s black list, because she had forgotten to specify them; and one
half-holiday Mr. Lanter found himself entering Kneeman’s Star Musée
with an order.
The Kneeman Musée is a big, opulent building, with a central dome of
colored glass, a gorgeous façade ornamented with groups of sculptured
figures and a gilded vestibule where are displayed an array of
life-sized photographs and gigantic colored posters illustrating
the wonders to be seen within; promising upon this occasion, among
other exquisite novelties, the unique whistling entertainment of
Madame Smithers, the Kentucky Mocking Bird; the Celebrated Centaur
Family, in their feats of Equitation; the Balancing Bonellis, in their
electrifying plank-and-ladder interlude; Madame la Comtesse Püspök
Ladany, the Beautiful Hungarian (heroine of one of the most sensational
European elopements) in her Elegant Effects of Equestrianism upon the
highly-trained Arab Maimoun, assisted by Rurik the Gitano, who had
the honor, upon the sensational occasion above alluded to, of eloping
with Madame la Comtesse. Then came the Mermaids in a Tank Act, and
three-inch notes of exclamation clamorously invited attention to the
American Girl Giantess, Mademoiselle Minota, nineteen years of age,
nine feet in height, weighing four hundred and twenty-six pounds, able
to lift a weight of one hundred and forty pounds with one hand....
The remainder of the bill was filled with dwarfs, performing lions,
snake-charmers, and ventriloquists.