A group of the townspeople stood on the station siding of a little Kansas
town, awaiting the coming of the night train, which was already twenty
minutes overdue. The snow had fallen thick over everything; in the pale
starlight the line of bluffs across the wide, white meadows south of the
town made soft, smoke-coloured curves against the clear sky. The men
on the siding stood first on one foot and then on the other, their hands
thrust deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats open, their
shoulders screwed up with the cold; and they glanced from time to time
toward the southeast, where the railroad track wound along the river
shore. They conversed in low tones and moved about restlessly,
seeming uncertain as to what was expected of them. There was but one of
the company who looked as if he knew exactly why he was there, and he
kept conspicuously apart; walking to the far end of the platform,
returning to the station door, then pacing up the track again, his chin
sunk in the high collar of his overcoat, his burly shoulders drooping
forward, his gait heavy and dogged. Presently he was approached by a
tall, spare, grizzled man clad in a faded Grand Army suit, who shuffled
out from the group and advanced with a certain deference, craning his
neck forward until his back made the angle of a jack-knife three-quarters
open.
"I reckon she's a-goin' to be pretty late agin to-night, Jim," he
remarked in a squeaky falsetto. "S'pose it's the snow?"
"I don't know," responded the other man with a shade of annoyance,
speaking from out an astonishing cataract of red beard that grew fiercely
and thickly in all directions.
The spare man shifted the quill toothpick he was chewing to the other
side of his mouth. "It ain't likely that anybody from the East will come
with the corpse, I s'pose," he went on reflectively.
"I don't know," responded the other, more curtly than before.
"It's too bad he didn't belong to some lodge or other. I like an order
funeral myself. They seem more appropriate for people of some
repytation," the spare man continued, with an ingratiating concession in
his shrill voice, as he carefully placed his toothpick in his vest
pocket. He always carried the flag at the G.A.R. funerals in the town.
The heavy man turned on his heel, without replying, and walked up the
siding. The spare man rejoined the uneasy group. "Jim's ez full ez a
tick, ez ushel," he commented commiseratingly.
Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a shuffling of feet on
the platform. A number of lanky boys, of all ages, appeared as, suddenly
and slimily as eels wakened by the crack of thunder; some came from the
waiting-room, where they had been warming themselves by the red stove, or
half asleep on the slat benches; others uncoiled themselves from baggage
trucks or slid out of express wagons. Two clambered down from the
driver's seat of a hearse that stood backed up against the siding. They
straightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and a flash
of momentary animation kindled their dull eyes at that cold, vibrant
scream, the worldwide call for men. It stirred them like the note of a
trumpet; just as it had often stirred the man who was coming home
tonight, in his boyhood.
The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward marsh
lands and wound along the river shore under the long lines of shivering
poplars that sentinelled the meadows, the escaping steam hanging in grey
masses against the pale sky and blotting out the Milky Way. In a moment
the red glare from the headlight streamed up the snow-covered track
before the siding and glittered on the wet, black rails. The burly man
with the dishevelled red beard walked swiftly up the platform toward the
approaching train, uncovering his head as he went. The group of men
behind him hesitated, glanced questioningly at one another, and awkwardly
followed his example. The train stopped, and the crowd shuffled up to
the express car just as the door was thrown open, the man in the G.A.R.
suit thrusting his head forward with curiosity. The express messenger
appeared in the doorway, accompanied by a young man in a long ulster and
travelling cap.
"Are Mr. Merrick's friends here?" inquired the young man.
The group on the platform swayed uneasily. Philip Phelps, the banker,
responded with dignity: "We have come to take charge of the body. Mr.
Merrick's father is very feeble and can't be about."
"Send the agent out here," growled the express messenger, "and tell the
operator to lend a hand."
The coffin was got out of its rough-box and down on the snowy platform.
The townspeople drew back enough to make room for it and then formed a
close semicircle about it, looking curiously at the palm leaf which lay
across the black cover. No one said anything. The baggage man stood by
his truck, waiting to get at the trunks. The engine panted heavily, and
the fireman dodged in and out among the wheels with his yellow torch and
long oil-can, snapping the spindle boxes. The young Bostonian, one of the
dead sculptor's pupils who had come with the body, looked about him
helplessly. He turned to the banker, the only one of that black, uneasy,
stoop-shouldered group who seemed enough of an individual to be
addressed.
"None of Mr. Merrick's brothers are here?" he asked uncertainly.
The man with the red beard for the first time stepped up and joined the
others. "No, they have not come yet; the family is scattered. The body
will be taken directly to the house." He stooped and took hold of one of
the handles of the coffin.
"Take the long hill road up, Thompson, it will be easier on the horses,"
called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the door of the hearse
and prepared to mount to the driver's seat.
Laird, the red-bearded lawyer, turned again to the stranger: "We didn't
know whether there would be any one with him or not," he explained. "It's
a long walk, so you'd better go up in the hack." He pointed to a single
battered conveyance, but the young man replied stiffly: "Thank you, but I
think I will go up with the hearse. If you don't object," turning to the
undertaker, "I'll ride with you."
They clambered up over the wheels and drove off in the starlight up the
long, white hill toward the town. The lamps in the still village were
shining from under the low, snow-burdened roofs; and beyond, on every
side, the plains reached out into emptiness, peaceful and wide as the
soft sky itself, and wrapped in a tangible, white silence.
When the hearse backed up to a wooden sidewalk before a naked,
weather-beaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group that
had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate. The front
yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks, extending from the
sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety footbridge. The gate hung on
one hinge, and was opened wide with difficulty. Steavens, the young
stranger, noticed that something black was tied to the knob of the front
door.
The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the hearse,
was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was wrenched
open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into the snow and
flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: "My boy, my boy! And this is
how you've come home to me!"
As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder of unutterable
repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and angular, dressed
entirely in black, darted out of the house and caught Mrs. Merrick by the
shoulders, crying sharply: "Come, come, mother; you mustn't go on like
this!" Her tone changed to one of obsequious solemnity as she turned to
the banker: "The parlour is ready, Mr. Phelps."
The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards, while the
undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They bore it into a large,
unheated room that smelled of dampness and disuse and furniture polish,
and set it down under a hanging lamp ornamented with jingling glass
prisms and before a "Rogers group" of John Alden and Priscilla, wreathed
with smilax. Henry Steavens stared about him with the sickening
conviction that there had been a mistake, and that he had somehow arrived
at the wrong destination. He looked at the clover-green Brussels, the fat
plush upholstery, among the hand-painted china placques and panels and
vases, for some mark of identification,--for something that might once
conceivably have belonged to Harvey Merrick. It was not until he
recognized his friend in the crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts
and curls, hanging above the piano, that he felt willing to let any of
these people approach the coffin.
"Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy's face," wailed the
elder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens looked fearfully,
almost beseechingly into her face, red and swollen under its masses of
strong, black, shiny hair. He flushed, dropped his eyes, and then, almost
incredulously, looked again. There was a kind of power about her face--a
kind of brutal handsomeness, even; but it was scarred and furrowed by
violence, and so coloured and coarsened by fiercer passions that grief
seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long nose was
distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep lines on either
side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her forehead, her
teeth were large and square, and set far apart--teeth that could tear.
She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed about like
twigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himself being drawn into
the whirlpool.
The daughter--the tall, raw-boned woman in crêpe, with a mourning comb in
her hair which curiously lengthened her long face--sat stiffly upon the
sofa, her hands, conspicuous for their large knuckles, folded in her lap,
her mouth and eyes drawn down, solemnly awaiting the opening of the
coffin. Near the door stood a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in the
house, with a timid bearing and an emaciated face pitifully sad and
gentle. She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico apron lifted
to her eyes, occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob. Steavens
walked over and stood beside her.
Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall and frail,
odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept grey hair and a dingy beard,
tobacco stained about the mouth, entered uncertainly. He went slowly up
to the coffin and stood rolling a blue cotton handkerchief between his
hands, seeming so pained and embarrassed by his wife's orgy of grief that
he had no consciousness of anything else.
"There, there, Annie, dear, don't take on so," he quavered timidly,
putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her elbow. She turned
and sank upon his shoulder with such violence that he tottered a little.
He did not even glance toward the coffin, but continued to look at her
with a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the
whip. His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and burned with miserable shame.
When his wife rushed from the room, her daughter strode after her with
set lips. The servant stole up to the coffin, bent over it for a moment,
and then slipped away to the kitchen, leaving Steavens, the lawyer, and
the father to themselves. The old man stood looking down at his dead
son's face. The sculptor's splendid head seemed even more noble in its
rigid stillness than in life. The dark hair had crept down upon the wide
forehead; the face seemed strangely long, but in it there was not that
repose we expect to find in the faces of the dead. The brows were so
drawn that there were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the chin
was thrust forward defiantly. It was as though the strain of life had
been so sharp and bitter that death could not at once relax the tension
and smooth the countenance into perfect peace--as though he were still
guarding something precious, which might even yet be wrested from him.
The old man's lips were working under his stained beard. He turned to the
lawyer with timid deference: "Phelps and the rest are comin' back to set
up with Harve, ain't they?" he asked. "Thank'ee, Jim, thank'ee." He
brushed the hair back gently from his son's forehead. "He was a good boy,
Jim; always a good boy. He was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest of
'em all--only we didn't none of us ever onderstand him." The tears
trickled slowly down his beard and dropped upon the sculptor's coat.
"Martin, Martin! Oh, Martin! come here," his wife wailed from the top of
the stairs. The old man started timorously: "Yes, Annie, I'm coming." He
turned away, hesitated, stood for a moment in miserable indecision; then
reached back and patted the dead man's hair softly, and stumbled from the
room.
"Poor old man, I didn't think he had any tears left. Seems as if his eyes
would have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing cuts very deep,"
remarked the lawyer.
Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the mother had been
in the room, the young man had scarcely seen any one else; but now, from
the moment he first glanced into Jim Laird's florid face and blood-shot
eyes, he knew that he had found what he had been heartsick at not finding
before--the feeling, the understanding, that must exist in some one, even
here.
The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred by
dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face was strained--that
of a man who is controlling himself with difficulty--and he kept plucking
at his beard with a sort of fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by the
window, watched him turn down the glaring lamp, still its jangling
pendants with an angry gesture, and then stand with his hands locked
behind him, staring down into the master's face. He could not help
wondering what link there had been between the porcelain vessel and so
sooty a lump of potter's clay.
From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-room door
opened, the import of it was clear. The mother was abusing the maid for
having forgotten to make the dressing for the chicken salad which had
been prepared for the watchers. Steavens had never heard anything in
the least like it; it was injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and
masterly in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had
been her grief of twenty minutes before. With a shudder of disgust the
lawyer went into the dining-room and closed the door into the kitchen.
"Poor Roxy's getting it now," he remarked when he came back. "The
Merricks took her out of the poor-house years ago; and if her loyalty
would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell tales that would
curdle your blood. She's the mulatto woman who was standing in here a
while ago, with her apron to her eyes. The old woman is a fury; there
never was anybody like her. She made Harvey's life a hell for him when
he lived at home; he was so sick ashamed of it. I never could see how he
kept himself sweet."
"He was wonderful," said Steavens slowly, "wonderful; but until tonight I
have never known how wonderful."
"That is the eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it can come even from
such a dung heap as this," the lawyer cried, with a sweeping gesture
which seemed to indicate much more than the four walls within which they
stood.
"I think I'll see whether I can get a little air. The room is so close I
am beginning to feel rather faint," murmured Steavens, struggling with
one of the windows. The sash was stuck, however, and would not yield, so
he sat down dejectedly and began pulling at his collar. The lawyer came
over, loosened the sash with one blow of his red fist and sent the window
up a few inches. Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had been
gradually climbing into his throat for the last half hour left him with
but one desire--a desperate feeling that he must get away from this place
with what was left of Harvey Merrick. Oh, he comprehended well enough
now the quiet bitterness of the smile that he had seen so often on his
master's lips!
Once when Merrick returned from a visit home, he brought with him a
singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief of a thin, faded old woman,
sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee; while a full-lipped,
full-blooded little urchin, his trousers held up by a single gallows,
stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to call her attention to
a butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed by the tender and delicate
modelling of the thin, tired face, had asked him if it were his mother.
He remembered the dull flush that had burned up in the sculptor's face.
The lawyer was sitting in a rocking-chair beside the coffin, his head
thrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him earnestly,
puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a man should conceal a
feature of such distinction under that disfiguring shock of beard.
Suddenly, as though he felt the young sculptor's keen glance, Jim Laird
opened his eyes.
"Was he always a good deal of an oyster?" he asked abruptly. "He was
terribly shy as a boy."
"Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so," rejoined Stevens. "Although
he could be very fond of people, he always gave one the impression of
being detached. He disliked violent emotion; he was reflective, and
rather distrustful of himself--except, of course, as regarded his work.
He was sure enough there. He distrusted men pretty thoroughly and women
even more, yet somehow without believing ill of them. He was determined,
indeed, to believe the best; but he seemed afraid to investigate."
"A burnt dog dreads the fire," said the lawyer grimly, and closed his
eyes.
Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable boyhood. All
this raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of the man whose mind was
to become an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions--so sensitive
that the mere shadow of a poplar leaf flickering against a sunny wall
would be etched and held there for ever. Surely, if ever a man had the
magic word in his finger tips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he
revealed its holiest secret; liberated it from enchantment and restored
it to its pristine loveliness. Upon whatever he had come in contact with,
he had left a beautiful record of the experience--a sort of ethereal
signature; a scent, a sound, a colour that was his own.
Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master's life; neither
love nor wine, as many had conjectured; but a blow which had fallen
earlier and cut deeper than anything else could have done--a shame not
his, and yet so unescapably his, to bide in his heart from his very
boyhood. And without--the frontier warfare; the yearning of a boy, cast
ashore upon a desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness, for all that
is chastened and old, and noble with traditions.
At eleven o'clock the tall, flat woman in black announced that the
watchers were arriving, and asked them to "step into the dining-room." As
Steavens rose, the lawyer said dryly: "You go on--it'll be a good
experience for you. I'm not equal to that crowd tonight; I've had twenty
years of them."
As Steavens closed the door after him he glanced back at the lawyer,
sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin resting on his
hand.
The same misty group that had stood before the door of the express car
shuffled into the dining-room. In the light of the kerosene lamp they
separated and became individuals. The minister, a pale, feeble-looking
man with white hair and blond chin-whiskers, took his seat beside a small
side table and placed his Bible upon it. The Grand Army man sat down
behind the stove and tilted his chair back comfortably against the wall,
fishing his quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket. The two bankers,
Phelps and Elder, sat off in a corner behind the dinner-table, where they
could finish their discussion of the new usury law and its effect on
chattel security loans. The real estate agent, an old man with a smiling,
hypocritical face, soon joined them. The coal and lumber dealer and the
cattle shipper sat on opposite sides of the hard coal-burner, their feet
on the nickel-work. Steavens took a book from his pocket and began to
read. The talk around him ranged through various topics of local interest
while the house was quieting down. When it was clear that the members of
the family were in bed, the Grand Army man hitched his shoulders and,
untangling his long legs, caught his heels on the rounds of his chair.
"S'pose there'll be a will, Phelps?" he queried in his weak falsetto.
The banker laughed disagreeably, and began trimming his nails with a
pearl-handled pocket-knife.
"There'll scarcely be any need for one, will there?" he queried in his
turn.
The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again, getting his knees
still nearer his chin. "Why, the ole man says Harve's done right well
lately," he chirped.
The other banker spoke up. "I reckon he means by that Harve ain't asked
him to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could go on with his
education."
"Seems like my mind don't reach back to a time when Harve wasn't bein'
edycated," tittered the Grand Army man.
There was a general chuckle. The minister took out his handkerchief and
blew his nose sonorously. Banker Phelps closed his knife with a snap.
"It's too bad the old man's sons didn't turn out better," he remarked
with reflective authority. "They never hung together. He spent money
enough on Harve to stock a dozen cattle-farms, and he might as well have
poured it into Sand Creek. If Harve had stayed at home and helped nurse
what little they had, and gone into stock on the old man's bottom farm,
they might all have been well fixed. But the old man had to trust
everything to tenants and was cheated right and left."
"Harve never could have handled stock none," interposed the cattleman.
"He hadn't it in him to be sharp. Do you remember when he bought Sander's
mules for eight-year olds, when everybody in town knew that Sander's
father-in-law give 'em to his wife for a wedding present eighteen years
before, an' they was full-grown mules then?"
The company laughed discreetly, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees
with a spasm of childish delight.
"Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore was
never fond of work," began the coal and lumber dealer. "I mind the last
time he was home; the day he left, when the old man was out to the barn
helpin' his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was
patchin' up the fence; Harve, he come out on the step and sings out, in
his lady-like voice: 'Cal Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk.'"
"That's Harve for you," approved the Grand Army man. "I kin hear him
howlin' yet, when he was a big feller in long pants and his mother used
to whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin' the cows git
foundered in the cornfield when he was drivin' 'em home from pasture. He
killed a cow of mine that-a-way onct--a pure Jersey and the best milker I
had, an' the ole man had to put up for her. Harve, he was watchin' the
sun set acrost the marshes when the anamile got away."
"Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East to
school," said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate,
judicial tone. "There was where he got his head full of nonsense. What
Harve needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas
City business college."
The letters were swimming before Steavens's eyes. Was it possible that
these men did not understand, that the palm on the coffin meant nothing
to them? The very name of their town would have remained for ever buried
in the postal guide had it not been now and again mentioned in the world
in connection with Harvey Merrick's. He remembered what his master had
said to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs
had shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked his
pupil to send his body home. "It's not a pleasant place to be lying while
the world is moving and doing and bettering," he had said with a feeble
smile, "but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we
came from, in the end. The townspeople will come in for a look at me; and
after they have had their say, I shan't have much to fear from the
judgment of God!"
The cattleman took up the comment. "Forty's young for a Merrick to cash
in; they usually hang on pretty well. Probably he helped it along with
whisky."
"His mother's people were not long lived, and Harvey never had a robust
constitution," said the minister mildly. He would have liked to say more.
He had been the boy's Sunday-school teacher, and had been fond of him;
but he felt that he was not in a position to speak. His own sons had
turned out badly, and it was not a year since one of them had made his
last trip home in the express car, shot in a gambling-house in the
Black Hills.
"Nevertheless, there is no disputin' that Harve frequently looked upon
the wine when it was red, also variegated, and it shore made an oncommon
fool of him," moralized the cattleman.
Just then the door leading into the parlour rattled loudly and every one
started involuntarily, looking relieved when only Jim Laird came out.
The Grand Army man ducked his head when he saw the spark in his blue,
blood-shot eye. They were all afraid of Jim; he was a drunkard, but he
could twist the law to suit his client's needs as no other man in all
western Kansas could do, and there were many who tried. The lawyer closed
the door behind him, leaned back against it and folded his arms, cocking
his head a little to one side. When he assumed this attitude in the
court-room, ears were always pricked up, as it usually foretold a flood
of withering sarcasm.
"I've been with you gentlemen before," he began in a dry, even tone,
"when you've sat by the coffins of boys born and raised in this town;
and, if I remember rightly, you were never any too well satisfied when
you checked them up. What's the matter, anyhow? Why is it that reputable
young men are as scarce as millionaires in Sand City? It might almost
seem to a stranger that there was some way something the matter with your
progressive town. Why did Ruben Sayer, the brightest young lawyer you
ever turned out, after he had come home from the university as straight
as a die, take to drinking and forge a check and shoot himself? Why did
Bill Merrit's son die of the shakes in a saloon in Omaha? Why was Mr.
Thomas's son, here, shot in a gambling-house? Why did young Adams burn
his mill to beat the insurance companies and go to the pen?"
The lawyer paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched fist quietly
on the table. "I'll tell you why. Because you drummed nothing but money
and knavery into their ears from the time they wore knickerbockers;
because you carped away at them as you've been carping here tonight,
holding our friends Phelps and Elder up to them for their models, as our
grandfathers held up George Washington and John Adams. But the boys were
young, and raw at the business you put them to, and how could they match
coppers with such artists as Phelps and Elder? You wanted them to be
successful rascals; they were only unsuccessful ones--that's all the
difference. There was only one boy ever raised in this borderland between
ruffianism and civilization who didn't come to grief, and you hated
Harvey Merrick more for winning out than you hated all the other boys who
got under the wheels. Lord, Lord, how you did hate him! Phelps, here, is
fond of saying that he could buy and sell us all out any time he's a mind
to; but he knew Harve wouldn't have given a tinker's damn for his bank
and all his cattlefarms put together; and a lack of appreciation, that
way, goes hard with Phelps.
"Old Nimrod thinks Harve drank too much; and this from such as Nimrod and
me!
"Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the old man's money--fell
short in filial consideration, maybe. Well, we can all remember the
very tone in which brother Elder swore his own father was a liar, in the
county court; and we all know that the old man came out of that
partnership with his son as bare as a sheared lamb. But maybe I'm getting
personal, and I'd better be driving ahead at what I want to say."
The lawyer paused a moment, squared his heavy shoulders, and went on:
"Harvey Merrick and I went to school together, back East. We were dead in
earnest, and we wanted you all to be proud of us some day. We meant to be
great men. Even I, and I haven't lost my sense of humour, gentlemen, I
meant to be a great man. I came back here to practise, and I found you
didn't in the least want me to be a great man. You wanted me to be a
shrewd lawyer--oh, yes! Our veteran here wanted me to get him an increase
of pension, because he had dyspepsia; Phelps wanted a new county survey
that would put the widow Wilson's little bottom farm inside his south
line; Elder wanted to lend money at 5 per cent, a month, and get it
collected; and Stark here wanted to wheedle old women up in Vermont into
investing their annuities in real-estate mortgages that are not worth the
paper they are written on. Oh, you needed me hard enough, and you'll go
on needing me!
"Well, I came back here and became the damned shyster you wanted me to
be. You pretend to have some sort of respect for me; and yet you'll stand
up and throw mud at Harvey Merrick, whose soul you couldn't dirty and
whose hands you couldn't tie. Oh, you're a discriminating lot of
Christians! There have been times when the sight of Harvey's name in some
Eastern paper has made me hang my head like a whipped dog; and, again,
times when I liked to think of him off there in the world, away from all
this hog-wallow, climbing the big, clean up-grade he'd set for himself.
"And we? Now that we've fought and lied and sweated and stolen, and hated
as only the disappointed strugglers in a bitter, dead little Western town
know how to do, what have we got to show for it? Harvey Merrick wouldn't
have given one sunset over your marshes for all you've got put together,
and you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of
God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred and
bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that the drivel he's
been hearing here tonight is the only tribute any truly great man could
have from such a lot of sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks
as the here-present financiers of Sand City--upon which town may God have
mercy!"
The lawyer thrust out his hand to Steavens as he passed him, caught up
his overcoat in the hall, and had left the house before the Grand Army
man had had time to lift his ducked head and crane his long neck about at
his fellows.
Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the funeral services.
Steavens called twice at his office, but was compelled to start East
without seeing him. He had a presentiment that he would hear from him
again, and left his address on the lawyer's table; but if Laird found it,
he never acknowledged it. The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had loved
must have gone under ground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it never
spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across the Colorado
mountains to defend one of Phelps's sons who had got into trouble out
there by cutting government timber.
"A Death in the Desert"
Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the aisle
was looking at him intently. He was a large, florid man, wore a
conspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third finger, and Everett judged
him to be a travelling salesman of some sort. He had the air of an
adaptable fellow who had been about the world and who could keep cool and
clean under almost any circumstances.
The "High Line Flyer," as this train was derisively called among railroad
men, was jerking along through the hot afternoon over the monotonous
country between Holdredge and Cheyenne. Besides the blond man and himself
the only occupants of the car were two dusty, bedraggled-looking girls
who had been to the Exposition at Chicago, and who were earnestly
discussing the cost of their first trip out of Colorado. The four
uncomfortable passengers were covered with a sediment of fine, yellow
dust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold powder. It blew up
in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they passed,
until they were one colour with the sage-brush and sand-hills. The grey
and yellow desert was varied only by occasional ruins of deserted towns,
and the little red boxes of station-houses, where the spindling trees
and sickly vines in the blue-grass yards made little green reserves
fenced off in that confusing wilderness of sand.
As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and stronger through the
car-windows, the blond gentleman asked the ladies' permission to remove
his coat, and sat in his lavender striped shirtsleeves, with a black silk
handkerchief tucked about his collar. He had seemed interested in
Everett since they had boarded the train at Holdredge; kept glancing at
him curiously and then looking reflectively out of the window, as though
he were trying to recall something. But wherever Everett went, some one
was almost sure to look at him with that curious interest, and it had
ceased to embarrass or annoy him. Presently the stranger, seeming
satisfied with his observation, leaned back in his seat, half closed his
eyes, and began softly to whistle the Spring Song from _Proserpine_, the
cantata that a dozen years before had made its young composer famous in a
night. Everett had heard that air on guitars in Old Mexico, on mandolins
at college glees, on cottage organs in New England hamlets, and only
two weeks ago he had heard it played on sleigh-bells at a variety theatre
in Denver. There was literally no way of escaping his brother's
precocity. Adriance could live on the other side of the Atlantic, where
his youthful indiscretions were forgotten in his mature achievements, but
his brother had never been able to outrun _Proserpine_,--and here he
found it again, in the Colorado sand-hills. Not that Everett was exactly
ashamed of _Proserpine_; only a man of genius could have written it, but
it was the sort of thing that a man of genius outgrows as soon as he can.
Everett unbent a trifle, and smiled at his neighbour across the aisle.
Immediately the large man rose and coming over dropped into the seat
facing Hilgarde, extending his card.
"Dusty ride, isn't it? I don't mind it myself; I'm used to it. Born and
bred in de briar patch, like Br'er Rabbit. I've been trying to place you
for a long time; I think I must have met you before."
"Thank you," said Everett, taking the card; "my name is Hilgarde. You've
probably met my brother, Adriance; people often mistake me for him."
The travelling-man brought his hand down upon his knee with such
vehemence that the solitaire blazed.
"So I was right after all, and if you're not Adriance Hilgarde you're his
double. I thought I couldn't be mistaken. Seen him? Well, I guess! I
never missed one of his recitals at the Auditorium, and he played the
piano score of _Proserpine_ through to us once at the Chicago Press Club.
I used to be on the _Commercial_ there before I began to travel for the
publishing department of the concern. So you're Hilgarde's brother, and
here I've run into you at the jumping-off place. Sounds like a newspaper
yarn, doesn't it?"
The travelling-man laughed and offering Everett a cigar plied him with
questions on the only subject that people ever seemed to care to talk
to him about. At length the salesman and the two girls alighted at a
Colorado way station, and Everett went on to Cheyenne alone.
The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o'clock, late by a matter of four
hours or so; but no one seemed particularly concerned at its tardiness
except the station agent, who grumbled at being kept in the office over
time on a summer night. When Everett alighted from the train he walked
down the platform and stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as to what
direction he should take to reach a hotel. A phaeton stood near the
crossing and a woman held the reins. She was dressed in white, and her
figure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it was too
dark to see her face. Everett had scarcely noticed her, when the
switch-engine came puffing up from the opposite direction, and the
head-light threw a strong glare of light on his face. The woman in the
phaeton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins. Everett started forward
and caught the horse's head, but the animal only lifted its ears and
whisked its tail in impatient surprise. The woman sat perfectly still,
her head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed to her
face. Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward the phaeton,
crying, "Katharine, dear, what is the matter?"
Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then lifted his hat
and passed on. He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the most
impossible places, especially from women.
While he was breakfasting the next morning, the head waiter leaned over
his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting to see him in the
parlour. Everett finished his coffee, and went in the direction
indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly pacing the floor. His
whole manner betrayed a high degree of agitation, though his physique was
not that of a man whose nerves lie near the surface. He was something
below medium height, square-shouldered and solidly built. His thick,
closely cut hair was beginning to show grey about the ears, and his
bronzed face was heavily lined. His square brown hands were locked behind
him, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of responsibilities,
yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an incongruous diffidence
in his address.
"Good-morning, Mr. Hilgarde," he said, extending his hand; "I found your
name on the hotel register. My name is Gaylord. I'm afraid my sister
startled you at the station last night, and I've come around to explain."
"Ah! the young lady in the phaeton? I'm sure I didn't know whether I had
anything to do with her alarm or not. If I did, it is I who owe an
apology."
The man coloured a little under the dark brown of his face.
"Oh, it's nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand that. You see,
my sister used to be a pupil of your brother's, and it seems you favour
him; when the switch-engine threw a light on your face, it startled her."
Everett wheeled about in his chair. "Oh! _Katharine_ Gaylord! Is it
possible! Why, I used to know her when I was a boy. What on
earth--"
"Is she doing here?" Gaylord grimly filled out the pause. "You've got at
the heart of the matter. You know my sister had been in bad health for a
long time?"
"No. The last I knew of her she was singing in London. My brother and I
correspond infrequently, and seldom get beyond family matters. I am
deeply sorry to hear this."
The lines in Charley Gaylord's brow relaxed a little.
"What I'm trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see you.
She's set on it. We live several miles out of town, but my rig's below,
and I can take you out any time you can go."
"At once, then. I'll get my hat and be with you in a moment."
When he came downstairs Everett found a cart at the door, and Charley
Gaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up the reins and
settled back into his own element.
"I think I'd better tell you something about my sister before you see
her, and I don't know just where to begin. She travelled in Europe with
your brother and his wife, and sang at a lot of his concerts; but I don't
know just how much you know about her."
"Very little, except that my brother always thought her the most gifted
of his pupils. When I knew her she was very young and very beautiful,
and quite turned my head for a while."
Everett saw that Gaylord's mind was entirely taken up by his grief.
"That's the whole thing," he went on, flecking his horses with the whip.
"She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn't come of a great
family. She had to fight her own way from the first. She got to Chicago,
and then to New York, and then to Europe, and got a taste for it all; and
now she's dying here like a rat in a hole, out of her own world, and she
can't fall back into ours. We've grown apart, some way--miles and miles
apart--and I'm afraid she's fearfully unhappy."
"It's a tragic story you're telling me, Gaylord," said Everett. They were
well out into the country now, spinning along over the dusty plains of
red grass, with the ragged blue outline of the mountains before them.
"Tragic!" cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, "my God, nobody will
ever know how tragic! It's a tragedy I live with and eat with and sleep
with, until I've lost my grip on everything. You see she had made a good
bit of money, but she spent it all going to health resorts. It's her
lungs. I've got money enough to send her anywhere, but the doctors all
say it's no use. She hasn't the ghost of a chance. It's just getting
through the days now. I had no notion she was half so bad before she came
to me. She just wrote that she was run down. Now that she's here, I think
she'd be happier anywhere under the sun, but she won't leave. She says
it's easier to let go of life here. There was a time when I
was a brakeman with a run out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little
thing I could carry on my shoulder, when I could get her everything on
earth she wanted, and she hadn't a wish my $80 a month didn't cover; and
now, when I've got a little property together, I can't buy her a night's
sleep!"
Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord's present status in the world
might be, he had brought the brakeman's heart up the ladder with him.
The reins slackened in Gaylord's hand as they drew up before a showily
painted house with many gables and a round tower. "Here we are," he said,
turning to Everett, "and I guess we understand each other."
They were met at the door by a thin, colourless woman, whom Gaylord
introduced as "My sister, Maggie." She asked her brother to show Mr.
Hilgarde into the music-room, where Katharine would join him.
When Everett entered the music-room he gave a little start of surprise,
feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some
New York studio that he had always known. He looked incredulously out of
the window at the grey plain that ended in the great upheaval of the
Rockies.
The haunting air of familiarity perplexed him. Suddenly his eye fell upon
a large photograph of his brother above the piano. Then it all became
clear enough: this was veritably his brother's room. If it were not an
exact copy of one of the many studios that Adriance had fitted up in
various parts of the world, wearying of them and leaving almost before
the renovator's varnish had dried, it was at least in the same tone. In
every detail Adriance's taste was so manifest that the room seemed to
exhale his personality.
Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord,
taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of her
eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a
tumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree of
embarrassment. It was the face of a woman already old in her first youth,
a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother had called her fight. The
_camaraderie_ of her frank, confident eyes was qualified by the deep
lines about her mouth and the curve of the lips, which was both sad and
cynical. Certainly she had more good-will than confidence toward the
world. The chief charm of the woman, as Everett had known her, lay in
her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, life-giving
quality like the sunlight; eyes which glowed with a perpetual _salutat_
to the world.
Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him and
his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A tall woman advanced
toward him, holding out her hand. As she started to speak she coughed
slightly, then, laughing, said, in a low, rich voice, a trifle husky:
"You see I make the traditional Camille entrance. How good of you to
come, Mr. Hilgarde."
Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she was not
looking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his pleasure in coming,
he was glad to have an opportunity to collect himself. He had not
reckoned upon the ravages of a long illness. The long, loose folds of her
white gown had been especially designed to conceal the sharp outlines of
her body, but the stamp of her disease was there; simple and ugly and
obtrusive, a pitiless fact that could not be disguised or evaded. The
splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a swaying unevenness in her
gait, her arms seemed disproportionately long, and her hands were
transparently white, and cold to the touch. The changes in her face were
less obvious; the proud carriage of the head, the warm, clear eyes, even
the delicate flush of colour in her cheeks, all defiantly remained,
though they were all in a lower key--older, sadder, softer.
She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the pillows.
"Of course I'm ill, and I look it, but you must be quite frank and
sensible about that and get used to it at once, for we've no time to
lose. And if I'm a trifle irritable you won't mind?--for I'm more than
usually nervous."
"Don't bother with me this morning, if you are tired," urged Everett. "I
can come quite as well tomorrow."
"Gracious, no!" she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humour
that he remembered as a part of her. "It's solitude that I'm tired to
death of--solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the minister
called on me this morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and
felt it his duty to stop. The funniest feature of his conversation is
that he is always excusing my own profession to me. But how we are losing
time! Do tell me about New York; Charley says you're just on from there.
How does it look and taste and smell just now? I think a whiff of the
Jersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to me. Are the trees
still green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? Does
the chaste Diana still keep her vows through all the exasperating changes
of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguided
aspirants practise their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall?
What do people go to see at the theatres, and what do they eat and drink
in the world nowadays? Oh, let me die in Harlem!" she was interrupted by
a violent attack of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her discomfort,
plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met in town
during the summer, and the musical outlook for the winter. He was
diagramming with his pencil some new mechanical device to be used at the
Metropolitan in the production of the _Rheingold_, when he became
conscious that she was looking at him intently, and that he was talking
to the four walls.
Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through
half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture. He finished his
explanation vaguely enough and put the pencil back in his pocket. As he
did so, she said, quietly: "How wonderfully like Adriance you are!"
He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his eyes that made
them seem quite boyish. "Yes, isn't it absurd? It's almost as awkward
as looking like Napoleon--But, after all, there are some advantages. It
has made some of his friends like me, and I hope it will make you."
Katharine gave him a quick, meaning glance from under her lashes. "Oh, it
did that long ago. What a haughty, reserved youth you were then, and how
you used to stare at people, and then blush and look cross. Do you
remember that night you took me home from a rehearsal, and scarcely spoke
a word to me?"
"It was the silence of admiration," protested Everett, "very crude and
boyish, but certainly sincere. Perhaps you suspected something of the
sort?"
"I believe I suspected a pose; the one that boys often affect with
singers. But it rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a good
deal of your brother's pupils." Everett shook his head. "I saw my
brother's pupils come and go. Sometimes I was called on to play
accompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a
carriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part. But they
never spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance
you speak of."
"Yes," observed Katharine, thoughtfully, "I noticed it then, too; but it
has grown as you have grown older. That is rather strange, when you have
lived such different lives. It's not merely an ordinary family likeness
of features, you know, but the suggestion of the other man's personality
in your face--like an air transposed to another key. But I'm not
attempting to define it; it's beyond me; something altogether unusual and
a trifle--well, uncanny," she finished, laughing.
Everett sat looking out under the red window-blind which was raised just
a little. As it swung back and forth in the wind it revealed the glaring
panorama of the desert--a blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea in
dead calm, splotched here and there with deep purple shadows; and,
beyond, the ragged blue outline of the mountains and the peaks of snow,
white as the white clouds. "I remember, when I was a child I used to be
very sensitive about it. I don't think it exactly displeased me, or that
I would have had it otherwise, but it seemed like a birthmark, or
something not to be lightly spoken of. It came into even my relations
with my mother. Ad went abroad to study when he was very young, and
mother was all broken up over it. She did her whole duty by each of
us, but it was generally understood among us that she'd have made
burnt-offerings of us all for him any day. I was a little fellow then,
and when she sat alone on the porch on summer evenings, she used
sometimes to call me to her and turn my face up in the light that
streamed out through the shutters and kiss me, and then I always knew she
was thinking of Adriance."
"Poor little chap," said Katharine, in her husky voice. "How fond people
have always been of Adriance! Tell me the latest news of him. I haven't
heard, except through the press, for a year or more. He was in Algiers
then, in the valley of the Chelif, riding horseback, and he had quite
made up his mind to adopt the Mahometan faith and become an Arab. How
many countries and faiths has he adopted, I wonder?"
"Oh, that's Adriance," chuckled Everett. "He is himself barely long
enough to write checks and be measured for his clothes. I didn't hear
from him while he was an Arab; I missed that."
"He was writing an Algerian _suite_ for the piano then; it must be in the
publisher's hands by this time. I have been too ill to answer his letter,
and have lost touch with him."
Everett drew an envelope from his pocket. "This came a month ago. Read it
at your leisure."
"Thanks. I shall keep it as a hostage. Now I want you to play for me.
Whatever you like; but if there is anything new in the world, in mercy
let me hear it."
He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him, absorbed in his
remarkable physical likeness to his brother, and trying to discover in
just what it consisted. He was of a larger build than Adriance, and much
heavier. His face was of the same oval mould, but it was grey, and
darkened about the mouth by continual shaving. His eyes were of the same
inconstant April colour, but they were reflective and rather dull; while
Adriance's were always points of high light, and always meaning another
thing than the thing they meant yesterday. It was hard to see why this
earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face, as
gay as his was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder,
and though his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of
twenty, so mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into
words. A contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods and
of her affections, once said that the shepherd-boys who sang in the Vale
of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde.
Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that night,
the victim of mournful recollections. His infatuation for Katharine
Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his boyish
love-affairs. The fact that it was all so done and dead and far behind
him, and that the woman had lived her life out since then, gave him an
oppressive sense of age and loss.
He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his stay at his
brother's studio when Katharine Gaylord was working there, and how he had
wounded Adriance on the night of his last concert in New York. He had sat
there in the box--while his brother and Katherine were called back again
and again, and the flowers went up over the footlights until they were
stacked half as high as the piano--brooding in his sullen boy's heart
upon the pride those two felt in each other's work--spurring each other
to their best and beautifully contending in song. The footlights had
seemed a hard, glittering line drawn sharply between their life and his.
He walked back to his hotel alone, and sat in his window staring out on
Madison Square until long after midnight, resolved to beat no more at
doors that he could never enter.
* * * * *
Everett's week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no prospect of
release except through the thing he dreaded. The bright, windy days of
the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters and telegrams came urging him
to hasten his trip to the coast, but he resolutely postponed his business
engagements. The mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord's ponies, or
fishing in the mountains. In the afternoon he was usually at his post of
duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive notions about
the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene changes and the
compensation varies, but in the end we usually find that we have played
the same class of business from first to last. Everett had been a
stop-gap all his life. He remembered going through a looking-glass
labyrinth when he was a boy, and trying gallery after gallery, only at
every turn to bump his nose against his own face--which, indeed, was not
his own, but his brother's. No matter what his mission, east or west, by
land or sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother's
business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shining
current of Adriance Hilgarde's. It was not the first time that his duty
had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his
brother's imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten. He made no
attempt to analyse the situation or to state it in exact terms; but he
accepted it as a commission from his brother to help this woman to die.
Day by day he felt her need for him grow more acute and positive; and day
by day he felt that in his peculiar relation to her, his own
individuality played a smaller part. His power to minister to her comfort
lay solely in his link with his brother's life. He knew that she sat by
him always watching for some trick of gesture, some familiar play of
expression, some illusion of light and shadow, in which he should seem
wholly Adriance. He knew that she lived upon this, and that in the
exhaustion which followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she slept
deep and sweet, and dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old
Florentine garden, and not of bitterness and death.
A few days after his first meeting with Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled
his brother to write her. He merely said that she was mortally ill;
he could depend on Adriance to say the right thing--that was a part of
his gift. Adriance always said not only the right thing, but the
opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. He caught the lyric essence of the
moment, the poetic suggestion of every situation. Moreover, he usually
did the right thing,--except, when he did very cruel things--bent upon
making people happy when their existence touched his, just as he insisted
that his material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon those
near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich nature, all the homage
of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer near,
forgetting--for that also was a part of Adriance's gift.
Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made his daily call
at the gaily painted ranch-house, he found Katharine laughing like a
girl. "Have you ever thought," she said, as he entered the music-room,
"how much these séances of ours are like Heine's 'Florentine Nights,'
except that I don't give you an opportunity to monopolize the
conversation?" She held his hand longer than usual as she greeted him.
"You are the kindest man living, the kindest," she added, softly.
Everett's grey face coloured faintly as he drew his hand away, for he
felt that this time she was looking at him, and not at a whimsical
caricature of his brother.
She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between the leaves of a
book and held it out, smiling. "You got him to write it. Don't say you
didn't, for it came direct, you see, and the last address I gave him was
a place in Florida. This deed shall be remembered of you when I am with
the just in Paradise. But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you
didn't know about it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata, and
you are to play it for me directly. But first for the letter; I think you
would better read it aloud to me."
Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window-seat in which she
reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He opened the letter,
his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that
it was a long one; wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance, who
was tender with his valet and his stable-boy, with his old gondolier and
the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him.
The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the
fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa. The air was heavy with the warm
fragrance of the South and full of the sound of splashing, running water,
as it had been in a certain old garden in Florence, long ago. The sky
was one great turquoise, heated until it glowed. The wonderful Moorish
arches threw graceful blue shadows all about him. He had sketched an
outline of them on the margin of his note-paper. The letter was full of
confidences about his work, and delicate allusions to their old happy
days of study and comradeship.
As Everett folded it he felt that Adriance had divined the thing needed
and had risen to it in his own wonderful way. The letter was consistently
egotistical, and seemed to him even a trifle patronizing, yet it was just
what she had wanted. A strong realization of his brother's charm and
intensity and power came over him; he felt the breath of that whirlwind
of flame in which Adriance passed, consuming all in his path, and himself
even more resolutely than he consumed others. Then he looked down at this
white, burnt-out brand that lay before him.
"Like him, isn't it?" she said, quietly. "I think I can scarcely answer
his letter, but when you see him next you can do that for me. I want
you to tell him many things for me, yet they can all be summed up in
this: I want him to grow wholly into his best and greatest self, even at
the cost of what is half his charm to you and me. Do you understand me?"
"I know perfectly well what you mean," answered Everett, thoughtfully.
"And yet it's difficult to prescribe for those fellows; so little makes,
so little mars."
Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face flushed with
feverish earnestness. "Ah, but it is the waste of himself that I mean;
his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until they
take him at their own estimate."
"Come, come," expostulated Everett, now alarmed at her excitement. "Where
is the new sonata? Let him speak for himself."
He sat down at the piano and began playing the first movement, which was
indeed the voice of Adriance, his proper speech. The sonata was the most
ambitious work he had done up to that time, and marked the transition
from his early lyric vein to a deeper and nobler style. Everett played
intelligently and with that sympathetic comprehension which seems
peculiar to a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anything
in particular. When he had finished he turned to Katharine.
"How he has grown!" she cried. "What the three last years have done for
him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is the
tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell. This is my
tragedy, as I lie here, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass
me--ah, God! the swift feet of the runners!"
She turned her face away and covered it with her hands. Everett crossed
over to her and knelt beside her. In all the days he had known her she
had never before, beyond an occasional ironical jest, given voice to the
bitterness of her own defeat. Her courage had become a point of pride
with him.
"Don't do it," he gasped. "I can't stand it, I really can't, I feel it
too much."
When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old, brave,
cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not shed. "No,
I won't; I will save that for the night, when I have no better company.
Run over that theme at the beginning again, will you? It was running in
his head when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his
glass at the dinner-table. He had just begun to work it out when the late
autumn came on, and he decided to go to Florence for the winter. He lost
touch with his idea, I suppose, during his illness. Do you remember those
frightful days? All the people who have loved him are not strong enough
to save him from himself! When I got word from Florence that he had been
ill, I was singing at Monte Carlo. His wife was hurrying to him from
Paris, but I reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm.
They had taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the
library--a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture
and bronzes. He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room,
looking, oh, so worn and pale!--as he always does when he is ill, you
know. Ah, it is so good that you _do_ know! Even his red smoking-jacket
lent no colour to his face. His first words were not to tell me how ill
he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the
last strokes to the score of his _'Souvenirs d' Automne,'_ and he was as
I most like to remember him; calm and happy, and tired with that heavenly
tiredness that comes after a good work done at last. Outside, the rain
poured down in torrents, and the wind moaned and sobbed in the garden
and about the walls of that desolated old palace. How that night comes
back to me! There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire. It
glowed on the black walls and floor like the reflection of purgatorial
flame. Beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all. Adriance
sat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eyes,
and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one
such life as his. Somehow the wind with all its world-pain had got into
the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up in both
of us at once--that awful vague, universal pain, that cold fear of life
and death and God and hope--and we were like two clinging together on a
spar in mid-ocean after the shipwreck of everything. Then we heard the
front door open with a great gust of wind that shook even the walls, and
the servants came running with lights, announcing that Madame had
returned, '_and in the book we read no more that night_.'"
She gave the old line with a certain bitter humour, and with the hard,
bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in a
glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn through so many years, had
gradually changed the lines of her face, and when she looked in the
mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observer
and satirist of herself.
Everett dropped his head upon his hand. "How much you have cared!" he
said.
"Ah, yes, I cared," she replied, closing her eyes. "You can't imagine
what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is to
be able to tell it to some one."
Everett continued to look helplessly at the floor. "I was not sure how
much you wanted me to know," he said.
"Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked into your
face, when you came that day with Charley. You are so like him, that it
is almost like telling him himself. At least, I feel now that he will
know some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his compassion."
"And has he never known at all?" asked Everett, in a thick voice.
"Oh! never at all in the way that you mean. Of course, he is accustomed
to looking into the eyes of women and finding love there; when he doesn't
find it there he thinks he must have been guilty of some discourtesy. He
has a genuine fondness for every woman who is not stupid or gloomy, or
old or preternaturally ugly. I shared with the rest; shared the smiles
and the gallantries and the droll little sermons. It was quite like a
Sunday-school picnic; we wore our best clothes and a smile and took our
turns. It was his kindness that was hardest."
"Don't; you'll make me hate him," groaned Everett.
Katherine laughed and began to play nervously with her fan. "It wasn't in
the slightest degree his fault; that is the most grotesque part of it.
Why, it had really begun before I ever met him. I fought my way to him,
and I drank my doom greedily enough."
Everett rose and stood hesitating. "I think I must go. You ought to be
quiet, and I don't think I can hear any more just now."
She put out her hand and took his playfully.
"You've put in three weeks at this sort of thing, haven't you? Well, it
ought to square accounts for a much worse life than yours will ever be."
He knelt beside her, saying, brokenly: "I stayed because I wanted to be
with you, that's all. I have never cared about other women since I
knew you in New York when I was a lad. You are a part of my destiny, and
I could not leave you if I would."
She put her hands on his shoulders and shook her head. "No, no; don't
tell me that. I have seen enough tragedy. It was only a boy's fancy,
and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it for a
moment. One does not love the dying, dear friend. Now go, and you will
come again tomorrow, as long as there are tomorrows." She took his hand
with a smile that was both courage and despair, and full of infinite
loyalty and tenderness, as she said softly:
_"For ever and for ever, farewell, Cassius;
If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
If not, why then, this parting was well made."_
The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him as he
went out.
On the night of Adriance Hilgarde's opening concert in Paris, Everett sat
by the bed in the ranch-house in Wyoming, watching over the last battle
that we have with the flesh before we are done with it and free of it for
ever. At times it seemed that the serene soul of her must have left
already and found some refuge from the storm, and only the tenacious
animal life were left to do battle with death. She laboured under a
delusion at once pitiful and merciful, thinking that she was in the
Pullman on her way to New York, going back to her life and her work. When
she roused from her stupor, it was only to ask the porter to waken her
half an hour out of Jersey City, or to remonstrate about the delays and
the roughness of the road. At midnight Everett and the nurse were left
alone with her. Poor Charley Gaylord had lain down on a couch outside the
door. Everett sat looking at the sputtering night-lamp until it made his
eyes ache. His head dropped forward, and he sank into heavy, distressful
slumber. He was dreaming of Adriance's concert in Paris, and of
Adriance, the troubadour. He heard the applause and he saw the flowers
going up over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the
piano, and the petals fell and scattered, making crimson splotches on the
floor. Down this crimson pathway came Adriance with his youthful step,
leading his singer by the hand; a dark woman this time, with Spanish
eyes.
The nurse touched him on the shoulder, he started and awoke. She screened
the lamp with her hand. Everett saw that Katharine was awake and
conscious, and struggling a little. He lifted her gently on his arm and
began to fan her. She looked into his face with eyes that seemed never to
have wept or doubted. "Ah, dear Adriance, dear, dear!" she whispered.
Everett went to call her brother, but when they came back the madness of
art was over for Katharine.
Two days later Everett was pacing the station siding, waiting for the
west-bound train. Charley Gaylord walked beside him, but the two men had
nothing to say to each other. Everett's bags were piled on the truck, and
his step was hurried and his eyes were full of impatience, as he gazed
again and again up the track, watching for the train. Gaylord's
impatience was not less than his own; these two, who had grown so close,
had now become painful and impossible to each other, and longed for the
wrench of farewell.
As the train pulled in, Everett wrung Gaylord's hand among the crowd of
alighting passengers. The people of a German opera company, _en route_
for the coast, rushed by them in frantic haste to snatch their breakfast
during the stop. Everett heard an exclamation, and a stout woman rushed
up to him, glowing with joyful surprise and caught his coat-sleeve with
her tightly gloved hands.
"_Herr Gott_, Adriance, _lieber Freund_," she cried.
Everett lifted his hat, blushing. "Pardon me, madame, I see that you have
mistaken me for Adriance Hilgarde. I am his brother." Turning from the
crestfallen singer he hurried into the car.