The blow was not softened to Cornelia by her having prophesied to
Charmian as well as to herself, that she knew her picture would be
refused. Now she was aware that at the bottom of her heart she had
always hoped and believed it would be accepted. She had kept it all
from her mother, but she had her fond, proud visions of how her mother
would look when she got her letter saying that she had a picture in the
Exhibition, and how she would throw on her sacque and bonnet, and run
up to Mrs. Burton for an explanation and full sense of the honor. In
these fancies Cornelia even had them come to New York, to see her
picture in position; it was not on the line, of course, and yet it was
not skyed.
Her pride was not involved, and she suffered no sting of wounded vanity
from its rejection: her hurt was in a tenderer place. She would not
have cared how many people knew of her failure, if her mother and Mrs.
Burton need not have known; but she wrote faithfully home of it, and
tried to make neither much nor little of it. She forbade Charmian the
indignation which she would have liked to vent, but she let her cry
over the event with her. No one else knew that it had actually happened
except Wetmore and Ludlow; she was angry with them at first for
encouraging her to offer the picture, but Wetmore came and was so
mystified and humbled by its refusal, that she forgave him and even
comforted him for his part in the affair.
"She acted like a little man about it," he reported to Ludlow. "She'll
do. When a girl can take a blow like that the way she does, she makes
you wish that more fellows were girls. When I had my first picture
refused, it laid me up. But I'm not going to let this thing rest. I'm
going to see if that picture can't be got into the American Artists'."
"Better not," said Ludlow so vaguely that Wetmore thought he must mean
something.
"Why?"
"Oh--I don't believe she'd like it."
"What makes you think so? Have you seen her?"
"No----"
"You haven't? Well, Ludlow, _I_ didn't lose any time. Perhaps you think
there was no one else to blame for the mortification of that poor
child."
"No, I don't. I am to blame, too. I encouraged her to try--I urged
her."
"Then I should think you would go and tell her so."
"Ah, I think she knows it. If I told her anything, I should tell her no
one was to blame but myself."
"Well, that wouldn't be a bad idea." Wetmore lighted his pipe.
"Confound those fellows! I should like to knock their heads together.
If there is anything like the self-righteousness of a committee when
it's wrong---but there isn't, fortunately."
It was not the first time that Ludlow had faltered in the notion of
going to Cornelia and claiming to be wholly at fault. In thought he was
always doing it, and there were times when he almost did it in reality,
but he let these times pass effectless, hoping for some better time
when the thing would do itself, waiting for the miracle which love
expects, when it is itself the miracle that brings all its desires to
fulfilment. He certainly had some excuses for preferring a passive part
in what he would have been so glad to have happen. Cornelia had
confessed that she had once cared for him, but at the same time she had
implied that she cared for him no longer, and she had practically
forbidden him to see her again. Much study of her words could make
nothing else of them, and it was not until Ludlow saw his way to going
impersonally in his quality of mistaken adviser, from whom explanation
and atonement were due, that he went to Cornelia. Even then he did not
quite believe that she would see him, and he gladly lost the bet he
made himself, at the sound of a descending step on the stairs, that it
was the Irish girl coming back to say that Miss Saunders was not at
home.
They met very awkwardly, and Ludlow had such an official tone in
claiming responsibility for having got Cornelia to offer her picture,
and so have it rejected, that he hardly knew who was talking. "That is
all," he said, stiffly; and he rose and stood looking into his hat. "It
seemed to me that I couldn't do less than come and say this, and I hope
you don't feel that I'm--I'm unwarranted in coming."
"Oh, no," cried Cornelia, "it's very kind of you, and no one's to blame
but me. I don't suppose I should care; only"--she bit her lips hard,
and added deep in her throat--"I hated to have my mother---- But I am
rightfully punished."
She meant for the Dickerson business, but Ludlow thought she meant for
her presumption, and his heart smote him in tender indignation as her
head sank and her face averted itself. It touched him keenly that she
should speak to him in that way of her mother, as if from an
instinctive sense of his loving and faithful sympathy; and then,
somehow he had her in his arms, there in Mrs. Montgomery's dim parlor;
he noted, as in a dream, that his hat had fallen and was rolling half
the length of it.
"Oh, wait!" cried the girl. "What are you doing---- You don't know.
There is something I must tell you--that will make you hate me----" She
struggled to begin somehow, but she did not know where.
"No," he said. "You needn't tell me anything. There isn't anything in
the world that could change me to you--nothing that you could tell me!
Sometime, if you must--if you wish; but not now. I've been too
miserable, and now I'm so happy."
"But it's very foolish, it's silly! I tell you----"
"Not now, not now!" He insisted. He made her cry, he made her laugh;
but he would not listen to her. She knew it was all wrong, that it was
romantic and fantastic, and she was afraid of it; but she was so happy
too, that she could not will it for the moment to be otherwise. She put
off the time that must come, or let him put it off for her, and gladly
lost herself in the bliss of the present. The fear, growing more and
more vague and formless, haunted her rapture, but even this ceased
before they parted, and left her at perfect peace in his love--their
love.
He told her how much she could be to him, how she could supplement him
in every way where he was faltering and deficient, and he poured out
his heart in praises of her that made her brain reel. They talked of a
thousand things, touching them, and leaving them, and coming back, but
always keeping within the circle of their relation to themselves. They
flattered one another with the tireless and credulous egotism of love;
they tried to tell what they had thought of each other from the first
moment they met, and tried to make out that they neither had ever since
had a thought that was not the other's; they believed this. The
commonplaces of the passion ever since it began to refine itself from
the earliest savage impulse, seemed to have occurred to them for the
first time in the history of the race; they accused themselves each of
not being worthy of the other; they desired to be very good, and to
live for the highest things.
They began this life by spending the whole afternoon together. When
some other people came into the parlor, they went out to walk. They
walked so long and far, that they came at last to the Park without
meaning to, and sat on a bench by a rock. Other people were doing the
same: nurses with baby-carriages before them; men smoking and reading;
elderly husbands with their elderly wives beside them, whom they
scarcely spoke to; it must have been a very common, idle thing, but to
them it had the importance, the distinction of something signal, done
for the first time. They staid there till it was almost dark, and then
they went and had tea together in the restaurant of one of the vast
hotels at the entrance of the Park. It was a very Philistine place,
with rich-looking, dull-looking people, travellers and sojourners,
dining about in its spacious splendor; but they got a table in a corner
and were as much alone there as in the Park; their happiness seemed to
push the world away from them wherever they were, and to leave them
free within a wide circle of their own. She poured the tea for them
both from the pot which the waiter set at her side; he looked on in
joyful wonder and content. "How natural it all is," he sighed. "I
should think you had always been doing that for me. But I suppose it is
only from the beginning of time!"
She let him talk the most, because she was too glad to speak, and
because they had both the same thoughts, and it did not need two to
utter them. Now and then, he made her speak; he made her answer some
question; but it was like some question that she had asked herself.
From time to time they spoke of others besides themselves; of her
mother and the Burtons, of Charmian, of Mrs. Westley, of Wetmore; but
it was in relation to themselves; without this relation, nothing had
any meaning.
When they parted after an evening prolonged till midnight in Mrs.
Montgomery's parlor, that which had been quiescent in Cornelia's soul,
stirred again, and she knew that she was wrong to let Ludlow go without
telling him of Dickerson. It was the folly of that agreement of theirs
about painting Charmian repeating itself in slightly different terms,
and with vastly deeper meaning, but to a like end of passive deceit, of
tacit untruth; his wish did not change it. She thought afterwards she
could not have let him go without telling him, if she had not believed
somehow that the parallel would complete itself, and that he would come
back, as he had done before, and help her undo what was false between
them; but perhaps this was not so; perhaps if she had been sure he
would not come back she would not have spoken; at any rate he did not
come back.