that made him shake his head, as he drove over the rough paving-stones,
through the dirty, ignoble streets, to his hotel. It struck him as more
depressing still, when he emerged from the sordid tangle of the lower
town into the smug rectangularity of the upper. He was sure that Pauline
would be glad enough to exchange it all for the airy perspectives, the
cleanliness, the gay colours, the variety of Paris. Of course he would
have to give up his bachelor chambers overlooking the Luxembourg.
He would rent, or buy, or even build, a proper house for her, in the
quarter of the Etoile, or near the Parc Monceau.
He turned over the pages of the Directory that the hotel-clerk
condescendingly pointed out to him, and found that Mr. Morrow’s
address had been twenty-something in a street that had no name, but only
a number and a point of the compass to serve for one; and that seemed to
him in thorough keeping with the unimaginative, business-like character
of the deceased cotton-broker. Pauline, in her widowhood, would very
likely have moved away. It was too late to make a call to-day, being
nearly dinner-time (he had forgotten that in New York it is not
forbidden to call after dinner), but he would write her a little note,
informing her of his arrival, and proposing to come to-morrow in
the forenoon. On the corner of the envelope he would put “Please
forward,” to anticipate the event of her having moved. Then he could
leave it to destiny and the post-office authorities to do the rest. III
THE Fifth Avenue reached out in an endless straight line before him, the
prose of its architecture being obscured by the gathering twilight, and
punctuated monotonously by the street-lamps. Attached to one of these
he found a letter-box presently, and into it he dropped the note that
he had written. “Does Mrs. Merrow—Pauline Lake that was—remember
Henry Aigrefield? And if so, may he call upon her to-morrow at
eleven?” That was how, after destroying a dozen sheets of paper, he
had at last contrived to phrase his message.
He walked slowly up the long Avenue, cut at right angles, and at fixed
intervals of two hundred feet, by streets that looked enough like one
another to suggest the notion that they had all been cast in the same
dreary mould, and furnished to the municipality ready-made; past the
innumerable coffee-coloured houses, with their damnable iteration of
rigid little doorsteps; and he wondered at the purblind complacency of a
people who could honestly regard this as among the finest thoroughfares
of the world. The region he was traversing reminded him of certain
melancholy acres in the south of London, where the city-clerk has his
humble, cheerless home: it was such a neighbourhood grown rich and
pretentious, but in nowise mellowed or beautified.
Would she live in one of these insignificant boxes of brown stone?
“26, E. 51,” the address he had read in the Directory, sounded
sufficiently unpromising. It had been Mr. Merrow’s house, and Mr.
Morrow had been a practical New Yorker. But the interior? He pictured
the interior as entirely lovely and delightful, for, in the nature of
things, the interior would owe its character to Mr. Merrow’s wife.
A good distemper on the walls, something light in key, yet
warm—brick-dust, or a pearly, rosy gray; simple, graceful chairs and
tables; a few good pictures, numberless good books in good bindings:
over all the soft glow of candlelight; and in the midst of all, giving
unity and meaning to it all, a lady, a tall slender lady, in a black
gown, with a pale serious face, dark eyes full of sleeping fire, and
above her white brow a rich shadow of brown hair. She was reading, her
head bent a little, her feet resting on a small tabouret of some dull
red stuff that lent depth to the bottom of the picture, while the
candlelight playing upon her hair, upon her cheek and throat, upon the
ivory page of her book and the hand that held it, made the upper and
middle portions radiant. After twenty years how little changed she was!
Her face had lost nothing of its girlish delicacy, its maiden innocence,
it had only gained a quality of firmness, of seriousness and strength.
He found a woman where he had left a child, but the woman was only the
child ripened and ennobled. As the door opened to admit him, she
raised her eyes, puzzled for a moment, not seeing who he was; but then,
suddenly, she stood up and moved towards him, calling his name, very
low, very low, so that it fell upon his ears like a note of music. And
his heart pounded suffocatingly, and he trembled deliciously in all his
limbs.
Why, he began to ask himself now, why, after all, should he put off till
to-morrow the realisation of this great joy? If it was unconventional
to pay a call in the evening, she, who had never been a stickler for the
conventionalities, would forgive it to the ardour and the impatience of
his passion, He had waited for her twenty years; that was long enough,
without adding to it another interminable period of twelve hours.
Anyhow, there could be no harm in his ringing the bell of No. 26, E. 51,
and inquiring whether she still lived there, and, if not, whither she
had gone. Thereby a further saving of precious hours might be effected;
and—and he would do it.
The house, indeed, appeared in no particular different to the multitude
that he had left behind him; but he could have embraced the Irish
maid-servant who opened the door for him, because to both of his
questions she answered yes. Yes, Mrs. Merrow lived here; and yes, she
was at home. Would he walk into the parlour, please, and what name
should she say? Lest the name should get perverted in its transmission,
he equipped her with his card. Then he sat down in the “parlour” to
await his fate.
It was a bare room, and, by the glare of the gas that lighted it, he saw
that the influence of Mr. Merrow had penetrated at least thus far beyond
his threshold. The floor was covered by a carpet in the flowery taste
of 1860. The chairs were upholstered in thick, hot-hued plush, with a
geometric pattern embossed upon it. A vast procession of little vases
and things in porcelain, multiplied by the mantel-mirror and the
pier-glass, shed an added forlornness on the spaces they were meant to
decorate, but only cluttered up, Pauline’s domain, he concluded, would
be above stairs.
The door swung open after a few minutes, and he rose, with a
sudden heart-leap, to greet her. But no—it was only a fat,
uninteresting-looking woman (a visitor, a sister-in-law, he reasoned
swiftly) come to make Pauline’s excuses, probably, if she kept
him waiting. He noticed that the fat lady was in mourning; and that
confirmed his guess that she would prove to be a relative of the
late Mr. Merrow. She wore her hair in a series of stiff ringlets
(“bandelettes” I believe they are technically called) over a high,
sloping forehead; the hair was thin and stringy, so that, he told
himself, her brother had no doubt been bald. Two untransparent eyes
gazed placidly out of the white expanses of her face; and he thought,
as he took her in, that she might serve as an incarnation of all the
dulness and platitude that he had felt in the air about him from the
hour of his landing in New York.
However, he stood there, silent, making a sort of interrogative bow, and
waiting for her to state her business.
She had seemed to be studying him with some curiosity, of a mild,
phlegmatic kind, from which he argued that perhaps she was not wholly
unenlightened about his former relation to her brother’s widow. But
now he experienced a distinct spasm of horror, as she threw her head to
one side, and, opening her lips, remarked lymphatically, in a resigned,
unresonant voice, “Well, I declare! Is that you, Harry Aigrefield?
Why, you’re as gray as a rat!”
He sank back into his chair, overwhelmed by the abrupt disenchantment;
and he understood that it was reciprocal. IV
He sat, inert, amid the pieces of his broken idol, for perhaps a half
hour, and chatted with Mrs. Merrow of various things. She asked him if
he was still as crazy about painting pictures as he used to be: to which
he answered, with a hollow laugh, that he feared he was. Well, she said,
playfully, she presumed there always had to be some harum-scarum people
in the world; and added that “Sam” had “simply coined money” as
a cotton-broker, and left her very well off. He had died of pneumonia,
following an attack of the “grip.”
“I suppose it seems kind of funny to you, getting back to America
after so many years?” she queried, languidly “Things are
considerably changed.”
He admitted that this was true, and bade her good-night. She went with
him to the door, where she gave him an inelastic handshake, accompanied
by an invitation to call again.
In his bedroom at the hotel he sat before his window till late into the
night, smoking cigarettes, and trying to pull himself together. The last
lingering afterglow of his youth had been put out; and therewith the
whole colour of the universe was altered. He felt that he had reversed
the case of the bourgeois gentilhomme, and been dealing in bad poetry
for twenty years,—in other words, making a sentimental ass of himself;
and his chagrin at this was as sharp as his grief over his recent
disillusion.
Samuel Merrow was dead, but so was Pauline Lake; or perhaps Pauline
Lake, as he had loved her, had never existed outside of his own
imagination. At any rate, Henry Aigrefield was dead, dead as the leaves
of last autumn; and this was another man, who wore his clothes and bore
his name.
He glanced at his looking-glass, and he saw indeed, as he had lately
been reminded, that this new, respectable-appearing, middle-aged
personage was “as gray as a rat,”—though he did not like the
figure better for its truth. It required several hours of hard mental
labour to get the necessary readjustment of his faculties so much as
started. The past had ceased to be the most important fraction of time
for him; the present and the future had become of moment.
In the dust and confusion of his wreck, only one thing was entirely
clear: he couldn’t stand New York. But the question where to go was as
large as the circumference of the earth. Straight back to Paris? Or
what of that other region he had heard so much about during the past few
days, the West? By and by the form of Miss Lillian Goddard began to move
refreshingly in and out among his musings; he pictured the smile with
which she would welcome him, if, by chance, he should turn his steps
towards Minneapolis. It was a smile that seemed to promise a hundred
undefined pleasantnesses, and it warmed his heart. “If I should go to
Minneapolis——” he began; then he sat stockstill in his chair for
twenty minutes; and then he got up with the air of a man who has taken a
vigorous resolve.
As he undressed, he hummed softly to himself a line or two of his
favourite poet,—
“That shall be to-morrow,
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight.”
A LIGHT SOVEREIGN. I.
THE cause of the uproar proved to be simple enough.
Emerging into the Bischofsplatz, from the street that I had followed, I
found a great crowd gathered before the Marmorhof, shouting, “Death
to Conrad!” and “Where is Mathilde?” with all the force of its
collective lungs. The Marmorhof was the residence of Prince Conrad,
brother to the reigning Grand Duke Otto—reigning, indeed, but now very
old and ill, and like to die. The legitimate successor to the throne
would have been Otto’s grand-daughter, Mathilde, the only surviving
child of his eldest son, Franz-Victor, who had been dead these ten
years. But the Grand Duke’s brother, Conrad, was covetous of her
rights; covetous, and, as her friends alleged, unscrupulous. For a long
while, it was said, Mathilde had been in terror of her life. Conrad was
unscrupulous, and, were she but out of the way, Conrad would come to
reign. Rumour, indeed, whispered that he had made three actual attempts
to compass her death: two by poison, one by the dagger, each, thanks
to some miracle, unsuccessful. But, a fortnight since, upon the first
supervention of fatal symptoms in the malady of poor old Otto, Mathilde
had mysteriously disappeared. Her whereabouts unknown, all X———was
in commotion.
“She has fled and is in hiding,” surmised some people, “to escape
the designs of her wicked uncle.”
“No,” retorted others, “but he, the wicked uncle himself, has
kidnapped and sequestered her, perhaps even made away with her. Who can
tell?”
As an inquiring stranger, the situation interested me, and, from the top
of a convenient doorstep, I gazed now upon this deep-voiced Teutonic mob
with a good deal of curiosity.
It must have numbered upwards of a thousand individuals, compact in its
centre and near the palace, but scattering towards its edges; a sea of
faces, of pale, frowning faces; a surging, troubled sea. Young men’s
faces for the most part; many of them beardless. “Students from the
University,” I guessed.
My own station was at the outskirts of the assemblage, the station of
a casual spectator. Sharing my door-step with me were a couple of
sharp-faced priests, two or three prettyish young girls—bareheaded,
presumably escaped from some of the neighbouring shops—and a young man
with a pointed black beard, rather long black hair, and a broad-brimmed,
soft felt hat, who somehow looked as if he might be a member of that
guild to which I myself belonged, the ancient and questionable company
of artists.
To him I addressed myself for information.... “Students, I suppose?”
“Yes, their leaders are students. The students and the artisans of
the town are of the princess’s party. The army, the clergy, and the
country folk are for the prince.” He had discerned from my accent that
I was a foreigner: whence, doubtless, the fulness of his answer.
“It seems a harmless mob enough,” I suggested. “They make a lot of
noise, to be sure; but that breaks no bones.”
“There’s just the point,” said he. “The princess’s friends
fight only with their throats. Otherwise the present complication might
never have arisen.”
Meanwhile the multitude continued to shout its loudest; and for Conrad,
on the whole, the quarter-hour must have been a bad one.
Presently, however, the call of a bugle wound in the distance, and
drew nearer and nearer, till the bugler in person appeared, gorgeous
in uniform, mounted upon a white horse, advancing slowly up the
Bischofsplatz, towards the crowd, trumpeting with all his might.
“What is the meaning of that?” I asked.
“A signal to disperse,” answered my companion. “He looks like a
major-general, doesn’t he? But he’s only a trumpet-sergeant, and
he’s followed at a hundred yards by a battalion of infantry. His
trumpet-blast is by way of warning. Disperse! Or, if you tarry, beware
the soldiery!”
“His warning does not seem to pass unheeded,” I remarked.
“Oh, they’re a chicken-hearted lot, these friends of the
princess,” he assented contemptuously.
Already the mob had begun to melt. In a few minutes only a few
stragglers in knots here and there were left, amongst them my
acquaintance and myself.
He was a handsome young fellow, with a thin dark face, bright brown
eyes, and a voice so soft that if I had heard without seeing him, I
should almost have supposed the speaker to be a woman.
“We, too, had better be off,” said he.
“And prove ourselves also chicken-hearted?” queried I.
“Oh, discretion is the better part of valour,” he returned.
“But I should like to see the arrival of the military,” I submitted.
“Ha! Like or not, I’m afraid you’ll have to now,” he cried.
“Here they come.”
With a murmurous tramp, tramp, they were pouring into the Bischofsplatz
from the side streets leading to it.
“We must take to our heels, said my young man.
“We were merely on-lookers,” said I.
“Conscious innocence,” laughed he. “Nevertheless, we had better
run for it.”
And, with our fellow loiterers, we began ignominiously to run away. But
before we had run far we were stopped by the voice of an officer.
“Halt! Halt! Halt, or we fire!”
As one man we halted. The officer rode up to us, and, with true military
taciturnity, vouchsafed not a word either in question or explanation,
but formed us in ranks of four abreast, and surrounded us with his men.
Then he gave the command to march. We were, perhaps, two dozen captives,
all told, and a good quarter of our number were women.
“What are we in for now?” I wondered aloud.
“Disgrace, decapitation, deprivation of civil rights, or, say, a night
in the Castle of St. Michael, at the very least,” replied my friend,
shrugging his shoulders.
“Ah, that will be romantic,” said I, feeling like one launched upon
a life of adventure. II
He was right We were marched across the town and into the courtyard of
the Castle of St Michael. By the time we got there, and the heavy oaken
gates were shut behind us, it was nearly dark.
“Here you pass the night,” announced our officer. “In the
morning—humph, we will see.”
“Do you mean to say they are going to afford us no better
accommodation than this?” I demanded.
“So it seems,” replied the dark young man. “Fortunately, however,
the night is warm, the skies are clear, and to commune with the stars is
reputed to be elevating for the spirit.”
Our officer had vanished into the castle, leaving us a corporal and
three privates as a guard of honour. We, the prisoners, gathered
together in the middle of the courtyard, and held a sort of impromptu
indignation meeting. The women were especially eloquent in their
complaints. Two of these I recognized as having been among my neighbours
of the door-step, and we exchanged compassionate glances. The other four
were oldish women, who wore caps and aprons, and looked like servants.
“Cooks,” whispered my comrade. “Some good burghers will be kept
waiting for their suppers. Oh, what a lark!”
Our convention finally broke up with a resolution to the effect that,
though we had been most shabbily treated, there was nothing to be done.
“We must suffer and be still. Let us make ourselves as comfortable as
we can, and seek distraction in an interchange of ideas,” proposed my
mate. He seated himself upon a barrel that lay lengthwise against the
castle wall, and motioned to me to place myself beside him.
“You are English?” he inquired, in an abrupt German way.
“No, I am American.”
“Ah, it is the same thing. A tourist?”
“You think it is the same thing?” I questioned sadly. “You little
know. But——yes, I am a tourist.”
“Have you been long in X———?”
“Three days.”
“For heaven’s sake, what have you found to keep you here three
days?”
“I am a painter. The town is paintable.”
“Still life! Nature morte!” he cried. “It is the dullest
little town in Christendom. But I’m glad you are a painter. I am a
musician—a fiddler.”
“I suspected we were of the same ilk,” said I.
“Did you, though? That was shrewd. But I, too, seemed to scent a
kindred soul.”
“Here is my card. If we’re not beheaded in the morning, I hope we
may see more of each other,” I went on, warming up.
He took my card, and, by the light of a match struck for the occasion,
read aloud, “Mr. Arthur Wainwright,” pronouncing the English name
without difficulty. “I have no card, but my name is Sebastian Roch.”
“You speak English?” was my inference. “Oh, yes, I speak a kind of
English,” he confessed, using the tongue in question. He had scarcely
a trace of a foreign accent.
“You speak it uncommonly well.”
“Oh, I learned it as a child, and then I have relatives in England.”
“Do you suppose there would be any objection to our smoking?” I
asked.
“Oh, no! let us smoke by all means.”
I offered him my cigarette case. Our cigarettes afire, we resumed our
talk.
“Tell me, what in your opinion is the truth about Mathilde?” I
began. “Is she in voluntary hiding, or is her uncle at the bottom of
it?”
“Ah, that is too hard a riddle,” he protested. “I know nothing
about it, and I have scarcely an opinion. But I may say very frankly
that I am not of her partisans. She has no worse enemy than I.”
“What! Really? I’m surprised at that. I thought all the youth of
X——— were devoted to her.”
“She’s a harmless enough person in her way, perhaps, and I have
nothing positive to charge against her; only I don’t think she’s
made of the stuff for a reigning monarch. She’s too giddy, too
light-headed; she thinks too little of her dignity. Court ceremonial is
infinitely tiresome to her; and the slow, dead life of X——— she
fairly hates. Harmless, necessary X——— she has been known to call
it. She was never meant to be the captain of this tiny ship of State;
and with such a crew! You should see the ministers and courtiers! Dry
bones and parchment, puffed up with tedious German eddigette! She was
born a Bohemian, an artist, like you or me. I pity her, poor
thing—I pity everyone whose destiny it is to inhabit this dreary
Principality—but I can’t approve of her. She, too, by-the-by, plays
the violin. My own thought is, beware of fiddling monarchs!”
“You hint a Nero.”
“Pay a Nero crossed with a Haroun-al-Raschid. I fear her reign would
be diversified by many a midnight escapade, like the merry Caliph’s,
only without his intermixture of wrong-righting. She’d seek her own
amusement solely; though to seek that in X———! you might as well
seek for blood in a broomstick. Oh, she’d make no end of mischief. The
devil hath no agent like a woman bored.”
“That’s rather true.” I agreed, laughing, “And Conrad? What of
him?”
“Oh, Conrad’s a beast; a squint-eyed, calculating beast. But a beast
might make a good enough Grand Duke; and anyhow, a beast is all that a
beastly little Grand Duchy like this deserves. However, to tell you my
secret feeling, I don’t believe he’ll have the chance to prove it.
Mathilde, for all her ennui, is described as tenacious of her
rights, and as a cleverish little body, too, down at bottom.. That is
inconsistent, but there’s the woman of it. I can’t help suspecting,
somehow, that unless he has really killed and buried her, she will
contrive by hook or crook to come to her throne.”
That night was long, though we accomplished a lot of talking: cold it
seemed, too, though we were in midsummer. I dozed a little, with the
stone wall of the castle for my pillow, half-conscious all the while
that Sebastian Roch was carrying on a bantering flirtation with the two
young girls. At daybreak our guard was changed. At six o’clock we were
visited by a dapper little lieutenant, who looked us over, asked our
names and other personal questions, scratched his chin for a moment
reflectively, and finally, with an air of inspiration, bade us begone.
The gates were thrown open and we issued from our prison, free.
“It’s been almost a sensation,” said Sebastian Roch. “So one can
experience almost a sensation, even in X———! Live and learn.”
“You are not a patriot,” said I.
“My dear sir, I am patriotism incarnate. Only I find my country dull.
If that be treason, make the most of it. I could not love thee, dear, so
well, loved I not dulness less. It is not every night of my life that I
am arrested, and sit on a barrel smoking cigarettes with an enlightened
foreigner. The English are not generally accounted a lively race, but
by comparison with the inhabitants of X———they shine like
diamonds.”
“I dare say,” I acquiesced. “But I’m not English—I’m
American.”
“So I perceive from your accent,” answered he impertinently. “But
as I told you once before, it amounts to the same thing. You wear your
rue with a difference, that is all.”
“Speaking of sensations,” said I, “I would sell my birthright for
a cup of coffee.”
“You’ll find no coffee-house awake at this hour,” said Sebastian.
“Then I’ll wake one up.”
“What! and provoke a violation of the law. By law they’re not
allowed to open till seven o’clock.”
“Oh, laws be hanged! I must have a cup of coffee.”
“Really, you are delightful,” asserted Sebastian, putting his arm
through mine.
Presently we came to a beer hall, at whose door I began to bang.
My friend stood by, shaking with laughter, Which seemed to me
disproportionate to the humour of the event.
“You are easily amused,” said I.
“Oh, no, far from it. But this is such a lark you know,” said he.
By and by, we were seated opposite each other at a table, sipping hot
coffee.