Shortly after Van Twiller's departure the whole thing came out. Whether
Livingstone found the secret too heavy a burden, or whether it
transpired through some indiscretion on the part of Mrs. Vanrensselaer
Vanzandt Van Twiller, I can not say; but one evening the entire story
was in the possession of the club.
Van Twiller had actually been very deeply interested--not in an
actress, for the legitimate drama was not her humble walk in life,
but--in Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski, whose really perilous feats on
the trapeze had astonished New York the year before, though they had
failed to attract Delaney and me the night we wandered into the up-town
theatre on the trail of Van Twiller's mystery.
That a man like Van Twiller should he fascinated even for an instant by
a common circus-girl seems incredible; but it is always the incredible
thing that happens. Besides, Mademoiselle Olympe was not a common
circus-girl; she was a most daring and startling gymnaste, with a
beauty and a grace of movement that gave to her audacious performance
almost an air of prudery. Watching her wondrous dexterity and pliant
strength, both exercised without apparent effort, it seemed the most
natural proceeding in the world that she should do those unpardonable
things. She had a way of melting from one graceful posture into another
like the dissolving figures thrown from a stereopticon. She was a
lithe, radiant shape out of the Grecian mythology, now poised up there
above the gaslights, and now gleaming through the air like a slender
gilt arrow.
I am describing Mademoiselle Olympe as she appeared to Van Twiller on
the first occasion when he strolled into the theatre where she was
performing. To me she was a girl of eighteen or twenty years of age
(maybe she was much older, for pearl powder and distance keep these
people perpetually young), slightly but exquisitely built, with sinews
of silver wire; rather pretty, perhaps, after a manner, but showing
plainly the effects of the exhaustive draughts she was making on her
physical vitality. Now, Van Twiller was an enthusiast on the subject of
calisthenics. "If I had a daughter," Van Twiller used to say, "I
wouldn't send her to a boarding school, or a nunnery; I'd send her to a
gymnasium for the first five years. Our American women have no
physique. They are lilies, pallid, pretty--and perishable. You marry an
American woman, and what do you marry? A headache. Look at English
girls. They are at least roses, and last the season through."
Walking home from the theatre that first night, it flitted through Van
Twiller's mind that if he could give this girl's set of nerves and
muscles to any one of the two hundred high-bred women he knew, he would
marry her on the spot and worship her forever.
The following evening he went to see Mademoiselle Olympe again. "Olympe
Zabriski," he soliloquized as he sauntered through the lobby--"what a
queer name! Olympe is French and Zabriski is Polish. It is her _nom de
guerre_, of course; her real name is probably Sarah Jones. What kind of
creature can she be in private life, I wonder? I wonder if she wears
that costume all the time, and if she springs to her meals from a
horizontal bar. Of course she rocks the baby to sleep on the trapeze."
And Van Twiller went on making comical domestic tableaux of
Mademoiselle Zabriski, like the clever, satirical dog he was, until the
curtain rose.
This was on a Friday. There was a matinee the next day, and he attended
that, though he had secured a seat for the usual evening entertainment.
Then it became a habit of Van Twiller's to drop into the theatre for
half an hour or so every night, to assist at the interlude, in which
she appeared. He cared only for her part of the programme, and timed
his visits accordingly. It was a surprise to himself when he reflected,
one morning, that he had not missed a single performance of
Mademoiselle Olympe for nearly two weeks.
"This will never do," said Van Twiller. "Olympe"--he called her Olympe,
as if she were an old acquaintance, and so she might have been
considered by that time--"is a wonderful creature; but this will never
do. Van, my boy, you must reform this altogether."
But half-past nine that night saw him in his accustomed orchestra
chair, and so on for another week. A habit leads a man so gently in the
beginning that he does not perceive he is led--with what silken threads
and down what pleasant avenues it leads him! By and by the soft silk
threads become iron chains, and the pleasant avenues Avernus!
Quite a new element had lately entered into Van Twiller's enjoyment of
Mademoiselle Olympe's ingenious feats--a vaguely born apprehension that
she might slip from that swinging bar; that one of the thin cords
supporting it might snap, and let her go headlong from the dizzy
height. Now and then, for a terrible instant, he would imagine her
lying a glittering, palpitating heap at the foot-lights, with no color
in her lips! Sometimes it seemed as if the girl were tempting this kind
of fate. It was a hard, bitter life, and nothing but poverty and sordid
misery at home could have driven her to it. What if she should end it
all some night, by just unclasping that little hand? It looked so small
and white from where Van Twiller sat!
This frightful idea fascinated while it chilled him, and helped to make
it nearly impossible for him to keep away from the theatre. In the
beginning his attendance had not interfered with his social duties or
pleasures; but now he came to find it distasteful after dinner to do
anything but read, or walk the streets aimlessly, until it was time to
go to the play. When that was over, he was in no mood to go anywhere
but to his rooms. So he dropped away by insensible degrees from his
habitual haunts, was missed, and began to be talked about at the club.
Catching some intimation of this, he ventured no more in the orchestra
stalls, but shrouded himself behind the draperies of the private box in
which Delaney and I thought we saw him on one occasion.
Now, I find it very perplexing to explain what Van Twiller was wholly
unable to explain to himself. He was not in love with Mademoiselle
Olympe. He had no wish to speak to her, or to hear her speak. Nothing
could have been easier, and nothing further from his desire, than to
know her personally. A Van Twiller personally acquainted with a
strolling female acrobat! Good heavens! That was something possible
only with the discovery of perpetual motion. Taken from her theatrical
setting, from her lofty perch, so to say, on the trapeze-bar, Olympe
Zabriski would have shocked every aristocratic fibre in Van Twiller's
body. He was simply fascinated by her marvelous grace and _elan_, and
the magnetic recklessness of the girl. It was very young in him and
very weak, and no member of the Sorosis, or all the Sorosisters
together, could have been more severe on Van Twiller than he was on
himself. To be weak, and to know it, is something of a punishment for a
proud man. Van Twiller took his punishment, and went to the theatre,
regularly.
"When her engagement comes to an end," he meditated, "that will finish
the business."
Mademoiselle Olympe's engagement finally did come to an end and she
departed. But her engagement had been highly beneficial to the
treasury-chest of the uptown theatre, and before Van Twiller could get
over missing her she had returned from a short Western tour, and her
immediate reappearance was underlined on the play-bills.
On a dead wall opposite the windows of Van Twiller's sleeping-room
there appeared, as if by necromancy, an aggressive poster with
MADEMOISELLE OLYMPE ZABRISKI on it in letters at least a foot high.
This thing stared him in the face when he woke up one morning. It gave
him a sensation as if she had called on him overnight and left her
card.
From time to time through the day he regarded that poster with a
sardonic eye. He had pitilessly resolved not to repeat the folly of the
previous month. To say that this moral victory cost him nothing would
be to deprive it of merit. It cost him many internal struggles. It is a
fine thing to see a man seizing his temptation by the throat, and
wrestling with it, and trampling it underfoot like St. Anthony. This
was the spectacle Van Twiller was exhibiting to the angels.
The evening Mademoiselle Olympe was to make her reappearance, Van
Twiller, having dined at the club, and feeling more like himself than
he had felt for weeks, returned to his chamber, and, putting on
dressing-gown and slippers, piled up the greater portion of his library
about him, and fell to reading assiduously. There is nothing like a
quiet evening at home with some slight intellectual occupation, after
one's feathers have been stroked the wrong way.
When the lively French clock on the mantelpiece--a base of malachite
surmounted by a flying bronze Mercury with its arms spread gracefully
in the air, and not remotely suggestive of Mademoiselle Olympe in the
act of executing her grand flight from the trapeze--when the clock, I
repeat, struck nine, Van Twiller paid no attention to it. That was
certainly a triumph. I am anxious to render Van Twiller all the justice
I can, at this point of the narrative, inasmuch as when the half hour
sounded musically, like a crystal ball dropping into a silver bowl, he
rose from the chair automatically, thrust his feet into his
walking-shoes, threw his overcoat across his arm, and strode out of the
room.
To be weak and to scorn your weakness, and not to be able to conquer
it, is, as has been said, a hard thing; and I suspect it was not with
unalloyed satisfaction that Van Twiller found himself taking his seat
in the back part of the private box night after night during the second
engagement of Mademoiselle Olympe. It was so easy not to stay away!
In this second edition of Van Twiller's fatuity, his case was even
worse than before. He not only thought of Olympe quite a number of
times between breakfast and dinner, he not only attended the interlude
regularly, but he began, in spite of himself, to occupy his leisure
hours at night by dreaming of her. This was too much of a good thing,
and Van Twiller regarded it so. Besides, the dream was always the
same--a harrowing dream, a dream singularly adapted to shattering the
nerves of a man like Van Twiller. He would imagine himself seated at
the theatre (with all the members of Our Club in the parquette),
watching Mademoiselle Olympe as usual, when suddenly that young lady
would launch herself desperately from the trapeze, and come flying
through the air like a firebrand hurled at his private box. Then the
unfortunate man would wake up with cold drops standing on his forehead.
There is one redeeming feature in this infatuation of Van Twiller's
which the sober moralist will love to look upon--the serene
unconsciousness of the person who caused it. She went through her
_role_ with admirable aplomb, drew her salary, it may be assumed,
punctually, and appears from first to last to have been ignorant that
there was a miserable slave wearing her chains nightly in the left-hand
proscenium box.
That Van Twiller, haunting the theatre with the persistency of an
ex-actor, conducted himself so discreetly as not to draw the fire of
Mademoiselle Olympe's blue eyes shows that Van Twiller, however deeply
under a spell, was not in love. I say this, though I think if Van
Twiller had not been Van Twiller, if he had been a man of no family and
no position and no money, if New York had been Paris and Thirty-fourth
Street a street in the Latin Quarter--but it is useless to speculate on
what might have happened. What did happen is sufficient.
It happened, then, in the second week of Queen Olympe's second
unconscious reign, that an appalling Whisper floated up the Hudson,
effected a landing at a point between Spuyten Duyvil Creek and Cold
Spring, and sought out a stately mansion of Dutch architecture standing
on the bank of the river. The Whisper straightway informed the lady
dwelling in this mansion that all was not well with the last of the Van
Twillers; that he was gradually estranging himself from his peers, and
wasting his nights in a playhouse watching a misguided young woman
turning unmaidenly somersaults on a piece of wood attached to two
ropes.
Mrs. Vanrensselaer Vanzandt Van Twiller came down to town by the next
train to look into this little matter.
She found the flower of the family taking an early breakfast at
11 A. M., in his cosey apartments on Thirty-fourth Street. With the
least possible circumlocution she confronted him with what rumor had
reported of his pursuits, and was pleased, but not too much pleased,
when he gave her an exact account of his relations with Mademoiselle
Zabriski, neither concealing nor qualifying anything. As a confession,
it was unique, and might have been a great deal less entertaining. Two
or three times in the course of the narrative, the matron had some
difficulty in preserving the gravity of her countenance. After
meditating a few minutes, she tapped Van Twiller softly on the arm with
the tip of her parasol, and invited him to return with her the next day
up the Hudson and make a brief visit at the home of his ancestors. He
accepted the invitation with outward alacrity and inward disgust.
When this was settled, and the worthy lady had withdrawn, Van Twiller
went directly to the establishment of Messrs. Ball, Black, and Company,
and selected, with unerring taste, the finest diamond bracelet
procurable. For his mother? Dear me, no! She had the family jewels.
I would not like to state the enormous sum Van Twiller paid for this
bracelet. It was such a clasp of diamonds as would have hastened the
pulsation of a patrician wrist. It was such a bracelet as Prince
Camaralzaman might have sent to the Princess Badoura, and the Princess
Badoura--might have been very glad to get.
In the fragrant Levant morocco case, where these happy jewels lived
when they were at home, Van Twiller thoughtfully placed his card, on
the back of which he had written a line begging Mademoiselle Olympe
Zabriski to accept the accompanying trifle from one who had witnessed
her graceful performances with interest and pleasure. This was not done
inconsiderately. "Of course, I must inclose my card, as I would to any
lady," Van Twiller had said to himself. "A Van Twiller can neither
write an anonymous letter nor make an anonymous present." Blood entails
its duties as well as its privileges.
The casket despatched to its destination, Van Twiller felt easier in
his mind. He was under obligations to the girl for many an agreeable
hour that might otherwise have passed heavily. He had paid the debt,
and he had paid it _en prince_, as became a Van Twiller. He spent the
rest of the day in looking at some pictures at Goupil's, and at the
club, and in making a few purchases for his trip up the Hudson. A
consciousness that this trip up the Hudson was a disorderly retreat
came over him unpleasantly at intervals.
When he returned to his rooms late at night, he found a note lying on
the writing-table. He started as his eyes caught the words "------
Theatre" stamped in carmine letters on one corner of the envelope. Van
Twiller broke the seal with trembling fingers.
Now, this note some time afterward fell into the hands of Livingstone,
who showed it to Stuyvesant, who showed it to Delaney, who showed it to
me, and I copied it as a literary curiosity. The note ran as follows:
MR VAN TWILLER DEAR SIR--i am verry greatfull to you for that
Bracelett. it come just in the nic of time for me. The Mademoiselle
Zabriski dodg is about Plaid out. my beard is getting to much for me. i
shall have to grow a mustash and take to some other line of busyness, i
dont no what now, but will let you no. You wont feel bad if i sell that
Bracelett. i have seen Abrahams Moss and he says he will do the square
thing. Pleas accep my thanks for youre Beautifull and Unexpected
present. Youre respectfull servent,
CHARLES MONTMORENCI WALTERS.
The next day Van Twiller neither expressed nor felt any unwillingness
to spend a few weeks with his mother at the old homestead.
And then he went abroad.
BROTHER SEBASTIAN'S FRIENDSHIP
------------------------------
BY HAROLD FREDERIC
_Harold Frederic (born at Utica, N. Y., August 19, 1856; died in 1898)
was a novelist whose every book exceeded its predecessor in conception,
general construction, and technique of detail. His death at the
maturity of his powers was therefore a great loss to American
literature. His posthumous novel, "The Market Place" indicates that
Frederic, had he lived, might have outshone even Balzac in the fiction
of business life. "Brother Sebastian's Friendship" is a clever short
story of the days of his literary 'prenticeship. It was his
introduction to the "Utica Observer," where he worked for several
years._
BROTHER SEBASTIAN'S FRIENDSHIP
BY HAROLD FREDERIC
[Footnote: By permission of the "Utica Observer."]
I who tell this story am called Brother Sebastian. This name was given
me more than forty years ago, while Louis Philippe was still king. My
other name has been buried so long that I have nearly forgotten it. I
think that my people are dead. At least I have heard nothing from them
in many years. My reputation has always been that of a misanthrope--if
not that, then of a dreamer. In the seminary I had no intimates. In the
order, for I am a Brother of the Christian Schools, my associates are
polite--nothing more. I seem to be outside their social circles, their
plans, their enjoyments. True, I am an old man now. But in other years
it was the same. All my life I have been in solitude.
To this there is a single exception--one star shining in the blackness.
And my career has been so bleak that, although it ended in deeper
sadness than I had known before, I look back to the epsiode with
gratitude. The bank of clouds which shut out this sole light of my life
quickened its brilliancy before they submerged it.
After the terrible siege of '71, when the last German was gone, and our
houses had breasted the ordeal of the Commune, I was sent to the South.
The Superior thought my cheeks were ominously hollow, and suspected
threats of consumption in my cough. So I was to go to the
Mediterranean, and try its milder air. I liked the change. Paris, with
its gloss of noisy gayety and its substance of sceptical heartlessness,
was repugnant to me. Perhaps it was because of this that Brother
Sebastian had been mured up in the capital two-thirds of his life. If
our surroundings are too congenial we neglect the work set before us.
But no matter; to the coast I went.
My new home was a long-established house, spacious, venerable, and
dreary. It was on the outskirts of an ancient town, which was of far
more importance before our Lord was born than it has ever been since.
We had little to do. There were nine brothers, a handful of resident
orphans, and some threescore pupils. Ragged, stupid, big-eyed urchins
they were, altogether different from the keen Paris boys. For that
matter, every feature of my new home was odd. The heat of the summer
was scorching in its intensity. The peasants were much more respectful
to our cloth, and, as to appearance, looked like figures from Murillo's
canvases. The foliage, the wine, the language, the manners of the
people--everything was changed. This interested me, and my morbidness
vanished. The Director was delighted with my improved condition. Poor
man! he was positive that my cheeks had puffed out perceptibly after
the first two months. So the winter came--a mild, wet, muggy winter,
wholly unlike my favorite sharp season in the North.
We were killing time in the library one afternoon, the Director and a
Swiss Brother sitting by the lamp reading, I standing at one of the
tall, narrow windows, drumming on the panes and dreaming. The view was
not an inspiring one. There was a long horizontal line of pale yellow
sky and another of flat, black land, out of Avhich an occasional poplar
raised itself solemnly. The great mass below the stripes was brown;
above, gloomy gray. Close under the window two boys were playing in the
garden of the house. I recall distinctly that they threw armfuls of wet
fallen leaves at each other with a great shouting. While I stood thus,
the Brother Servitor, Abonus, came in and whispered to the Director. He
always whispered. It was not fraternal, but I did not like this Abonus.
"Send him up here," said the Director. Then I remembered that I had
heard the roll of a carriage and the bell ring a few moments before.
Abonus came in again. Behind him there was some one else, whose
footsteps had the hesitating sound of a stranger's. Then I heard the
Director's voice:
"You are from Algiers?"--"I am, Brother."
"Your name?"
"Edouard, Brother."
"Well, tell me more."
"I was under orders to be in Paris in January, Brother. As my health
was poor, I received permission to come back to France this autumn. At
Marseilles I was instructed to come here. So I am here. I have these
papers from the Mother house, and from Etienne, Director, of Algiers."
Something in the voice seemed peculiar to me. I turned and examined the
new-comer. He stood behind and to one side of the Director, who was
laboriously deciphering some papers through his big horn spectacles.
The light was not very bright, but there was enough to see a
wonderfully handsome face, framed in dazzling black curls. Perhaps it
looked the more beautiful because contrasted with the shaven gray poll
and surly features of grim Abonus, But to me it was a dream of St. John
the Evangel. The eyes of the face were lowered upon the Director, so I
could only guess their brilliancy. The features were those of an
extreme youth--round, soft, and delicate. The expression was one of
utter fatigue, almost pain. It bore out the statement of ill-health.
The Director had finished his reading. He lifted his head now and
surveyed the stranger in turn. Finally, stretching out his fat hand, he
said:
"You are welcome, Brother Edouard. I see the letter says you have had
no experience except with the youngest children. Brother Photius does
that now. We will have you rest for a time. Then we will see about it.
Meanwhile I will turn you over to the care of good Abonus, who will
give you one of the north rooms."
So the two went out, Abonus shuffling his feet disagreeably. It was
strange that he could do nothing to please me.
"Brother Sebastian," said the Director, as the door closed, "it is
curious that they should have sent me a tenth man. Why, I lie awake now
to invent pretences of work for those I have already. I will give up
all show of teaching presently, and give out that I keep a hospital--a
retreat for ailing brothers. Still, this Edouard is a pretty boy."
"Very."
"Etienne's letter says he is twenty and a Savoyard. He speaks like a
Parisian."
"Very likely he is seminary bred," put in the Swiss.
"Whatever he is, I like his looks," said our Superior. This good man
liked every one. His was the placid, easy Alsatian nature, prone to
find goodness in all things--even crabbed Abonus. The Director, or, as
he was known, Brother Elysee, was a stout, round little man, with a
fine face and imperturbable good spirits. He was adored by all his
subordinates. But I fancy he did not advance in favor at Paris very
rapidly.
I liked Edouard from the first. The day after he came we were together
much, and, when we parted after vespers, I was conscious of a vast
respect for this new-comer. He was bright, ready spoken, and almost a
man of the world. Compared with my dull career, his short life had been
one of positive gayety. He had seen Frederic le Maitre at the Comedie
Francaise. He had been at Court and spoken with the Prince Imperial. He
was on terms of intimacy with Monsignori, and had been a protege of the
sainted Darboy. It was a rare pleasure to hear him talk of these
things.
Before this, the ceaseless shifting of brothers from one house to
another had been indifferent to me. For the hundreds of strangers who
came and went in the Paris house on Oudinot Street I cared absolutely
nothing. I did not suffer their entrance nor their exit to excite me.
This was so much the case that they called me a machine. But with
Edouard this was different. I grew to love the boy from the first
evening, when, as he left my room, I caught myself saying, "I shall be
sorry when he goes." He seemed to be fond of me, too. For that matter
most of the brothers petted him, Elysee especially. But I was flattered
that he chose me as his particular friend. For the first time my heart
had opened.
We were alone one evening after the holidays. It was cold without, but
in my room it was warm and bright. The fire crackled merrily, and the
candles gave out a mellow and pleasant light. The Director had gone up
to Paris, and his mantle had fallen on me. Edouard sat with his feet
stretched to the fender, his curly head buried in the great curved back
of my invalid chair, the red fire-light reflected on his childish
features. I took pleasure in looking at him. He looked at the coals and
knit his brows as if in a puzzle. I often fancied that something
weightier than the usual troubles of life weighed upon him. At last he
spoke, just as I was about to question him:
"Are you afraid to die, Sebastian?"