Louise kept wondering, the whole way back, how Maxwell had managed the
recasting of the love-business, and she wished she had stayed with him,
so that he could have appealed to her at any moment on the points that
must have come up all the time. She ought to have coached him more fully
about it, and told him the woman's side of such a situation, as he never
could have imagined how many advances a woman can make with a man in
such an affair and the man never find it out. She had not made any
advances herself when she wished to get him back, but she had wanted to
make them; and she knew he would not have noticed it if she had done the
boldest sort of things to encourage him, to let him know that she liked
him; he was so simple, in his straightforward egotism, beside her
sinuous unselfishness.
She began to think how she was always contriving little sacrifices to
his vanity, his modesty, and he was always accepting them with a serene
ignorance of the fact that they were offered; and at this she strayed
off on a little by-way in her revery, and thought how it was his mind,
always, that charmed her; it was no ignoble fondness she felt; no poor,
grovelling pleasure in his good looks, though she had always seen that
in a refined sort he had a great deal of manly beauty. But she had held
her soul aloof from all that, and could truly say that what she adored
in him was the beauty of his talent, which he seemed no more conscious
of than of his dreamy eyes, the scornful sweetness of his mouth, the
purity of his forehead, his sensitive nostrils, his pretty, ineffective
little chin. She had studied her own looks with reference to his, and
was glad to own them in no wise comparable, though she knew she was more
graceful, and she could not help seeing that she was a little taller;
she kept this fact from herself as much as possible. Her features were
not regular, like his, but she could perceive that they had charm in
their irregularity; she could only wonder whether he thought that line
going under her chin, and suggesting a future double chin in the little
fold it made, was so very ugly. He seemed never to have thought of her
looks, and if he cared for her, it was for some other reason, just as
she cared for him. She did not know what the reason could be, but
perhaps it was her sympathy, her appreciation, her cheerfulness; Louise
believed that she had at least these small merits.
The thought of them brought her back to the play again, and to the
love-business, and she wondered how she could have failed to tell him,
when they were talking about what should bring the lovers together,
after their prefatory quarrel, that simply willing it would do it. She
knew that after she began to wish Maxwell back, she was in such a frenzy
that she believed her volition brought him back; and now she really
believed that you could hypnotize fate in some such way, and that your
longings would fulfil themselves if they were intense enough. If he
could not use that idea in this play, then he ought to use it in some
other, something psychological, symbolistic, Maeterlinckish.
She was full of it when she dismounted from the barge at the hotel and
hurried over to their cottage, and she was intolerably disappointed when
she did not find him at work in the parlor.
"Brice! Brice!" she shouted, in the security of having the whole cottage
to herself. She got no answer, and ran up to their room, overhead. He
was not there, either, and now it seemed but too probable that he had
profited by her absence to go out for a walk alone, after his writing,
and fallen from the rocks, and been killed--he was so absent-minded. She
offered a vow to Heaven that if he were restored to her she would never
leave him again, even for a half-day, as long as either of them lived.
In reward for this she saw him coming from the direction of the beach,
where nothing worse could have befallen him than a chill from the water,
if the wind was off shore and he had been taking a bath.
She had not put off her hat yet, and she went out to meet him; she could
not kiss him at once, if she went to meet him, but she could wait till
she got back to the cottage, and then kiss him. It would be a trial to
wait, but it would be a trial to wait for him to come in, and he might
stroll off somewhere else, unless she went to him. As they approached
each other she studied his face for some sign of satisfaction with his
morning's work. It lighted up at sight of her, but there remained an
inner dark in it to her eye.
"What is the matter?" she asked, as she put her hand through his arm,
and hung forward upon it so that she could look up into his face. "How
did you get on with the love-business?"
"Oh, I think I've got that all right," he answered, with a certain
reservation. "I've merely blocked it out, of course."
"So that you can show it to Godolphin?"
"I guess so."
"I see that you're not sure of it. We must go over it before he comes.
He hasn't been here yet?"
"Not yet."
"Why are you so quiet, Brice? Is anything the matter? You look tired."
"I'm not particularly tired."
"Then you are worried. What is it?"
"Oh, you would have to know, sooner or later." He took a letter from his
pocket and gave it to her. "It came just after I had finished my
morning's work."
She pulled it out of the envelope and read:
"MANCHESTER-BY-THE-SEA, Friday.
"DEAR SIR: I beg leave to relinquish any claim that you may
feel I have established to the play you have in hand. As it now stands,
I do not see my part in it, and I can imagine why you should be
reluctant to make further changes in it, in order to meet my
requirements.
"If I can be of any service to you in placing the piece, I shall be glad
to have you make use of me.
"Yours truly,
"LAUNCELOT GODOLPHIN."
"You blame _me_!" she said, after a blinding moment, in which the letter
darkened before her eyes, and she tottered in her walk. She gave it back
to him as she spoke.
"What a passion you have for blaming!" he answered, coldly. "If I fixed
the blame on you it wouldn't help."
"No," Louise meekly assented, and they walked along towards their
cottage. They hardly spoke again before they reached it and went in.
Then she asked, "Did you expect anything like this from the way he
parted with you yesterday?"
Maxwell gave a bitter laugh. "From the way we parted yesterday I was
expecting him early this afternoon, with the world in the palm of his
hand, to lay it at my feet. He all but fell upon my neck when he left
me. I suppose his not actually doing it was an actor's intimation that
we were to see each other no more."
"I wish you had nothing to do with actors!" said Louise.
"_They_ appear to have nothing to do with me," said Maxwell. "It comes
to the same thing."
They reached the cottage, and sat down in the little parlor where she
had left him so hopefully at work in the morning, where they had talked
his play over so jubilantly the night before.
"What are you going to do?" she asked, after an abysmal interval.
"Nothing. What is there to do?"
"You have a right to an explanation; you ought to demand it."
"I don't need any explanation. The case is perfectly clear. Godolphin
doesn't want my play. That is all."
"Oh, Brice!" she lamented. "I am so dreadfully sorry, and I know it was
my fault. Why don't you let me write to him, and explain--"
Maxwell shook his head. "He doesn't want any explanation. He doesn't
want the play, even. We must make up our minds to that, and let him go.
Now we can try it with your managers."
Louise felt keenly the unkindness of his calling them her managers, but
she was glad to have him unkind to her; deep within her Unitarianism she
had the Puritan joy in suffering for a sin; her treatment of
Godolphin's suggestion of a skirt-dance, while very righteous in itself,
was a sin against her husband's interest, and she would rather he were
unkind to her than not. The sooner she was punished for it and done with
it, the better; in her unscientific conception of life, the consequences
of a sin ended with its punishment. If Maxwell had upbraided her with
the bitterness she merited, it would have been to her as if it were all
right again with Godolphin. His failure to do so left the injury
unrepaired, and she would have to do something. "I suppose you don't
care to let me see what you've written to-day?"
"No, not now," said Maxwell, in a tone that said, "I haven't the heart
for it."
They sat awhile without speaking, and then she ventured, "Brice, I have
an idea, but I don't know what you will think of it. Why not take
Godolphin's letter on the face of it, and say that you are very sorry he
must give up the play, and that you will be greatly obliged to him if he
can suggest some other actor? That would be frank, at least."
Maxwell broke into a laugh that had some joy in it. "Do you think so? It
isn't my idea of frankness exactly."
"No, of course not. You always say what you mean, and you don't change.
That is what is so beautiful in you. You can't understand a nature that
is one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow."
"Oh, I think I can," said Maxwell, with a satirical glance.
"Brice!" she softly murmured; and then she said, "Well, I don't care. He
_is_ just like a woman."
"You didn't like my saying so last night."
"That was a different thing. At any rate, it's I that say so now, and I
want you to write that to him. It will bring him back flying. Will you?"
"I'll think about it," said Maxwell; "I'm not sure that I want Godolphin
back, or not at once. It's a great relief to be rid of him, in a certain
way, though a manager might be worse slavery. Still, I think I would
like to try a manager. I have never shown this play to one, and I know
the Odeon people in Boston, and, perhaps--"
"You are saying that to comfort me."
"I wouldn't comfort you for worlds, my dear. I am saying this to
distress you. But since I have worked that love-business over, it seems
to me much less a one-part play, and if I could get a manager to take a
fancy to it I could have my own way with it much better; at least, he
wouldn't want me to take all the good things out of the other
characters' mouths and stuff them into Haxard's."
"Do you really think so?"
"I really thought so before I got Godolphin's letter. That made him seem
the one and only man for me."
"Yes," Louise assented, with a sad intelligence.
Maxwell seemed to have got some strength from confronting his calamity.
At any rate, he said, almost cheerfully, "I'll read you what I wrote
this morning," and she had to let him, though she felt that it was
taking her at a moment when her wish to console him was so great that
she would not be able to criticise him. But she found that he had done
it so well there was no need of criticism.
"You are wonderful, Brice!" she said, in a transport of adoration, which
she indulged as simply his due. "You are miraculous! Well, this is the
greatest triumph yet, even of _your_ genius. How you have seized the
whole idea! And so subtly, so delicately! And so completely disguised!
The girl acts just as a girl _would_ have acted. How could you know it?"
"Perhaps I've seen it," he suggested, demurely.
"No, no, you _didn't_ see it! That is the amusing part of it. You were
as blind as a bat all the time, and you never had the least suspicion;
you've told me so."
"Well, then, I've seen it retrospectively."
"Perhaps that way. But I don't believe you've seen it at all. You've
divined it; and that's where your genius is worth all the experience in
the world. The girl is twice as good as the man, and you never
experienced a girl's feelings or motives. You divined them. It's pure
inspiration. It's the prophet in you!"
"You'll be stoning me next," said Maxwell. "I don't think the man is so
very bad, even if I didn't divine him."
"Yes, for a poor creature of experience and knowledge, he will do very
well. But he doesn't compare with the girl."
"I hadn't so good a model."
She hugged him for saying that. "You pay the prettiest compliments in
the world, even if you don't pick up handkerchiefs."
Their joy in the triumph of his art was unalloyed by the hope of
anything outside of it, of any sort of honor or profit from it, though
they could not keep the thought of these out very long.
"Yes," she said, after one of the delicious silences that divided their
moments of exaltation. "There won't be any trouble about getting your
play taken, _now_."
After supper they strolled down for the sunset and twilight on the
rocks. There, as the dusk deepened, she put her wrap over his shoulders
as well as her own, and pulled it together in front of them both. "I am
not going to have you taking cold, now, when you need all your health
for your work more than ever. That love-business seems to me perfect
just as it is, but I know you won't be satisfied till you have put the
very last touch on it."
"Yes, I see all sorts of things I can do to it. Louise!"
"Well, what?"
"Don't you see that the love-business is the play now? I have got to
throw away all the sin-interest, all the Haxard situation, or keep them
together as they are, and write a new play altogether, with the light,
semi-comic motive of the love-business for the motive of the whole. It's
out of tone with Haxard's tragedy, and it can't be brought into keeping
with it. The sin-interest will kill the love-business, or the
love-business will kill the sin-interest. Don't you see?"
"Why, of course! You must make this light affair now, and when it's
opened the way for you with the public you can bring out the old play,"
she assented, and it instantly became the old play in both their minds;
it became almost the superannuated play. They talked it over in this new
aspect, and then they went back to the cottage, to look at the new play
as it shadowed itself forth in the sketch Maxwell had made. He read the
sketch to her again, and they saw how it could be easily expanded to
three or four acts, and made to fill the stage and the evening.
"And it will be the most original thing that ever was!" she exulted.
"I don't think there's been anything exactly like it before," he
allowed.
From time to time they spoke to each other in the night, and she asked
if he were asleep, and he if she were asleep, and then they began to
talk of the play again. Towards morning they drowsed a little, but at
their time of life the loss of a night's sleep means nothing, and they
rose as glad as they had lain down.
"I'll tell you, Brice," she said, the first thing, "you must have it
that they have been engaged, and you can call the play 'The Second
Chapter,' or something more alliterative. Don't you think that would be
a good name?"
"It would make the fortune of any play," he answered, "let alone a play
of such merit as this."
"Well, then, sha'n't you always say that I did something towards it?"
"I shall say you did everything towards it. You originated the idea, and
named it, and I simply acted as your amanuensis, as it were, and wrote
it out mostly from your dictation. It shall go on the bills, 'The Second
Chapter,' a demi-semi-serious comedy by Mrs. Louise Hilary Maxwell--in
letters half a foot high--and by B. Maxwell--in very small lower case,
that can't be read without the aid of a microscope."
"Oh, Brice! If you make him talk that way to her, it will be perfectly
killing."
"I dare say the audience will find it so."
They were so late at breakfast, and sat there so long talking, for
Maxwell said he did not feel like going to work quite so promptly as
usual, that it was quite ten o'clock when they came out of the
dining-room, and then they stayed awhile gossiping with people on the
piazza of the hotel before they went back to their cottage. When they
came round the corner in sight of it they saw the figure of a man pacing
back and forth on the veranda, with his head dropped forward, and
swinging a stick thoughtfully behind him. Louise pulled Maxwell
convulsively to a halt, for the man was Godolphin.
"What do you suppose it means?" she gasped.
"I suppose he will tell us," said Maxwell, dryly. "Don't stop and stare
at him. He has got eyes all over him, and he's clothed with
self-consciousness as with a garment, and I don't choose to let him
think that his being here is the least important or surprising."
"No, of course not. That would be ridiculous," and she would have liked
to pause for a moment's worship of her husband's sense, which appeared
to her almost as great as his genius. But it seemed to her an
inordinately long time before they reached the cottage-gate, and
Godolphin came half-way down the walk to meet them.
He bowed seriously to her, and then said, with dignity, to her husband,
"Mr. Maxwell, I feel that I owe you an apology--or an explanation,
rather--for the abrupt note I sent you yesterday. I wish to assure you
that I had no feeling in the matter, and that I am quite sincere in my
offer of my services."
"Why, you're very good, Mr. Godolphin," said Maxwell. "I knew that I
could fully rely on your kind offer. Won't you come in?" He offered the
actor his hand, and they moved together towards the cottage; Louise had
at once gone before, but not so far as to be out of hearing.
"Why, thank you, I _will_ sit down a moment. I found the walk over
rather fatiguing. It's going to be a hot day." He passed his
handkerchief across his forehead, and insisted upon placing a chair for
Mrs. Maxwell before he could be made to sit down, though she said that
she was going indoors, and would not sit. "You understand, of course,
Mr. Maxwell, that I should still like to have your play, if it could be
made what I want?"
Maxwell would not meet his wife's eye in answering. "Oh, yes; the only
question with me is, whether I can make it what you want. That has been
the trouble all along. I know that the love-business in the play, as it
stood, was inadequate. But yesterday, just before I got your note, I had
been working it over in a perfectly new shape. I wish, if you have a
quarter of an hour to throw away, you'd let me show you what I've
written. Perhaps you can advise me."
"Why, I shall be delighted to be of any sort of use, Mr. Maxwell," said
Godolphin, with softened state; and he threw himself back in his chair
with an air of eager readiness.
"I will get your manuscript, Brice," said Louise, at a motion her
husband made to rise. She ran in and brought it out, and then went away
again. She wished to remain somewhere within earshot, but, upon the
whole, she decided against it, and went upstairs, where she kept herself
from eavesdropping by talking with the chambermaid, who had come over
from the hotel.