“I have to thank you for your lead,” said May.
For one moment she turned her large eyes down to him. “You ride well,
sir,” said she.
When the M. D. H. and others of the hunt came up, they found these two
talking on a footing of ancient friendship. The slot was duly cut off
and presented to Mrs. Dehon; and many compliments fell to our hero’s
share, for all of which May gave credit to the beautiful huntress
beside him.
Tom Leigh cocked his eye at this, but did not venture to present him to
her after that twenty-mile run. It were throwing the helve after the
hatchet, to present the man after the heart. And thus it happened that
to her our hero was never introduced.
When Mr. Dehon arrived, some hours later, Tom Leigh led him up. “Mr.
Dehon,” said he, “I think that you should know my particular friend,
Mr. Austin May.” And Tom Leigh cocked his eye again.
May looked at the pursy little old man, and felt that his hatred for
him would only be buried in his enemy’s grave. But his enemy was
magnanimous, and promptly asked them both to dinner, which May did not
scruple to accept.
III.
PERSEUS AND ANDROMEDA.
Austin May fell devoutly in love with Mrs. Dehon. This was without
doubt the _grande passion_ of his life. And it was hopeless.
He was just at the age when such affairs are sternest realities to
modern men. He was beyond the uncertainty of youth, and before the
compromises and practicalities of middle life. And there was something
about Gladys Dehon to make a man who cared for her ride rough-shod,
neck or nothing, over all things else. All the world admired her; would
have loved her had it dared. There was no daring about it in Austin’s
case; his audacity was not self-conscious; he simply followed her as he
had followed her over combe and beacon on that Exmoor day.
People could tell him little about her, save that she had been very
poor and very proud, and was very beautiful. Gladys Darcy--that had
been her name--last of a broken family of Devon and of Ireland. She had
neither sister nor brother, only a broken-down father, long since sold
out of his Household captaincy. She had sold herself to Terwilliger
Dehon, the rich speculator; and she was his, as a cut diamond might
have been his; bought with his money, shining in his house, and he
no more within her secret self than he might have been within the
diamond’s brilliant surface. And two months after the wedding her old
father had died and made the sacrifice in vain. Then she became the
personage that the world knew as the “beautiful Mrs. Dehon.” May used
to dream and ponder about her, long hours of nights and days; and he
fancied that something about her life, her lonely bringing-up, her
father’s precepts, had made her scornfully incredulous of there being
such a thing as the novelist’s love in life. She had been a greater
nature than her father, and all mankind had been nothing to her as
compared with even him. Too early scorn of this world’s life prepares
the soul for evil compromises.
Her character, her nature, she expressed in no way whatever. She had
neither intimate friends, charitable occupations, tastes, follies, nor
faults. She shone with a certain scornful glitter of splendor, but even
of old Dehon’s millions she was not prodigal. She never flirted; she
never looked at one man long enough for that. Her one occupation was
hunting, and she rode to hounds in a way to jar the nerves of every M.
F. H. in England.
Tom Leigh was afraid of her; and when they were asked for a week’s
visit that autumn, in their box in Leicestershire, refused to go. May
went. And if there was a man of whom she was not utterly unconscious,
he surely was the one. Perhaps there was something about his way that
she liked. For, with neither much speech, delay, nor artifice, our
hero made his heart and soul up into a small packet and threw them
into her deep eyes; and when she looked at him, he had them; and when
she looked away, they were gone. And this he did perfectly frankly and
directly, but without spoken words. The world saw it as clearly as did
she, and liked him none the less for it. He was quite incapable of any
effort to conceal it; old Terwilliger might have seen it had he been
so minded. Possibly he did, and the knowledge lent an added value to
his chattel in the old stockbroker’s mind. Mrs. Dehon herself treated
May with perfect simplicity, but with an infinite gentleness, as the
moon-goddess might have looked upon Endymion.
This state of things got to be perfectly well known to the world.
Such things always are well known to the world; nothing is more
striking than the perfect openness with which our heart-histories are
revealed in modern life, except perhaps the ease with which those most
intimately concerned maintain a polite and unembarrassed appearance
of utter ignorance upon the subject. All the world loves a lover,
particularly a hopeless one; and it was quite the _mot d’ordre_ of
society that year for people to ask Mrs. Dehon and the handsome
American to their houses together.
And Mrs. Dehon? Well, before the coming of spring she felt a great
and trustful friendship for this incidental castaway upon the waters
of her troubled life. May afterward remembered that she told him many
things about herself; and she had spoken of herself to no one else
before, her own father included. She even let him see a little of her
heart. And it is an axiom that he who sees ever so little of a woman’s
heart has but to take it. Seeing is possession. This is the wisdom of
the fair Melusine, and other wise old mediæval myths.
It is needless to say that May had absolutely forgotten the Countess
de Valska; more completely than even she had forgotten the Siberian
mausoleum of her Serge. If May thought of her once in that year, it was
to dismiss her memory with a curse for his own folly, and a mental oath
that no Trouvillian countess would part him, should his way ever be
clear to Gladys Darcy. He would not recognize the hated name of Dehon,
even in his thoughts.
In his despair, he confided in Tom Leigh again. Tom saw no reason to
change his previous opinion. The hole seemed if anything deeper, now
that two were in it. “I don’t see but what you’ve got to escape the
countess, bring Serge to life, kill old Terwilliger, and thus give her
two years’ mourning,” said he. “Why the deuce didn’t you find her out
first?” he added, ruefully. “Old Terwilliger only married her eighteen
months ago.”
“I don’t know,” said May. “Why don’t you invent his railway schemes,
and discover his Cornish mines?”
“True,” assented Tom. “Old Dehon always does get in on the ground
floor. However,” he added, brightening up, “if you can marry her,
you’ll get her and his money, too.”
“Damn his money,” said May.
Tom looked shocked, and changed the subject, and May’s heart continued
so to bleed internally that soon Gladys Dehon’s marble brow would
soften to pity as she saw him wane. Meantime Terwilliger’s capon-lined
stomach waxed apace, and even his digestion was to all appearance
unimpaired.
Now, it is probable that ours is the first civilization known to
history where this state of things could exist, be mutually known,
and continue in tranquil permanency. But it does--that is, it nearly
always does--and it is a credit, after all, to our teaching and our
times that it does so. The ancient Perseus cut Andromeda’s chains, and
departed with her by the next P. and O. steamer they could signal; the
modern one sits down on the strand beside her, and he and Andromeda die
to slow music--that is, in case either should chance to die before the
malady is cured. And Andromeda’s master relies on the strength of his
chains and on Perseus’s good bringing-up, and is not wholly displeased
at the situation. Particularly for a sly old stock-broker like
Terwilliger Dehon, whose idea of values is based on the opinion of the
street, a Perseus to his Andromeda is half the fun. The world, on the
whole, approves the situation; but the husband Dehon is not a popular
character, and it likes the Perseus better. Not, of course, that it
is willing to condone anything improper, particularly on the part of
Andromeda.
But Austin May stood the passive rôle for precisely twelve months;
and then he made up his mind that something would have to break. He
hoped it might be the neck of old Terwilliger; but Providence seldom
spoils a dramatic situation by so simple a denouement. And, to tell the
truth, considering the way the three rode to hounds, it was much more
likely to be his own or Gladys’s. One thing was sure: their triangular
relations were too strained to continue. He came to this conclusion
after one precisely similar day upon Exmoor, a year after their first
meeting; except that upon this occasion the deer took to the sea below
Glenthorne and was drowned, and he and Gladys rode homeward side by
side in silence.
Accordingly, that night Austin May wrote a letter; and in the morning
showed Terwilliger a telegram from America, took his departure, shook
hands hard with old Terwilliger, barely touched the slender fingers of
his wife, but, when he did so, left the letter in her hand. May kept no
copy of this letter; but he remembered it very well. It ran as follows:
“GLADYS:
“I must not stay in England any more. I cannot bear it. I know that
you are unhappy, and I must go where, at least, I shall not see it.
Nor can I trust myself with you after our ride of yesterday.
“Remember always that, wherever I am, I am always and only yours.
This is a very strange thing to say; but I think there are times when
men and women should show each other their hearts, however much the
truth may shock the prudes and pedants. And I do very much wish to
say that if ever you are free, I ask you to marry me.
“It is a sad thing that the circumstances of your wedded life are
such that I can say these things to you and not offend you. But you
have shown me enough of your heart for this.
“I go now into Asia. A trivial duty will call me to my family home
for one day, on August 14, 1886. Then, if I do not hear of you there,
I shall disappear again. After that I shall write you once a year.
“Good-by,
“A. M.”
Scene Fourth
THE FINAL ACCOUNTS
I.
ÆNEAS AND CAMILLA.
Poor Austin! A boy’s love feeds on the romance of hopelessness,
flourishes apace in the shadow of despair; it delights in patient
waiting, in faithful fidelity, in lapses of years; but a man’s is
peremptory, immediate, uncompromising. Some secret instinct bids a
Romeo to contemplate a tragedy with cheerfulness; and ten to one that
his years of gloom change, as they fall behind him, to “_un joli
souvenir_.” But a man, middle-aged, knows when he wants his Dulcinea,
and he wants her here and now. No glamour of blighted affections can
make up for the hard facts of life to him.
When a middle-aged man can’t get the woman he wants, there are three
recognized and respectable courses open to him. He works a little
harder, plays a good deal harder, or he marries someone else. The last
was out of the question for a man so consumed by the fires of passion
as Austin May, but the fuel of his heart was transformed into nervous
energy of the entire system. He plunged again, like a rocket, into
a rapid and circuitous course of travel and adventure; and, after a
brilliant career through the remote East, descended, like a burned-out
stick, some fifteen months later, in San Francisco. Thence he went home.
The fact was, he wanted rest. His heart was tired of throbbing, his
head weary with thinking. And all his mad adventure had only tired the
body, had made him sleep at night, nothing more. He had been through
the world again, but Gladys Dehon was all of it to him. He thought of
her now with a certain dull pain--less madly, more hopelessly, than in
England the two years before.
He could not bear to go back to his home. He went to Boston, and he
saw his lawyers; but he did not go out to Brookline. This he vowed he
would not do until that day when he had promised Gladys he would be
there. He did not forget that he had promised the countess, too; but
he was no longer so much troubled by the countess. He would kill her,
if necessary.
Meantime, he went to pass the winter in New York. He had himself
elected a member of two fashionable clubs. He followed the hounds in
Long Island and in Jersey. He went to dinners and he danced at Germans,
albeit with an aching heart. He renaturalized himself; he made friends
with his countrymen, and he studied his countrywomen. He got himself
once more _désorienté_ in American society. He observed what respect
was everywhere shown to the VanDees, and how little, comparatively,
one thought of the McDums. He found that civilization was pitched on
a higher scale, financially, than he had supposed. Thirty thousand
a year was none too much for a man to marry on. Now, Austin had not
over twenty thousand, even if he fulfilled the hard conditions of his
uncle’s will.
He took an interest in yachting, and gave orders for a cutter that was
to beat the prevailing style of sloop. He also imported a horse or
two, and entered one of them at Sheepshead Bay. He had a luxuriously
furnished flat, near Madison Square. He went to St. Augustine in the
spring, with the VanDees, and while there was introduced to Georgiana
Rutherford. He saw her afterward in New York, and early in June he
asked her to marry him.
Miss Rutherford was a young lady of supreme social position, great
wealth, and beauty. She had for two years been the leading newspaper
belle of New York society. Her movements, her looks, her dresses, the
state of her health, the probable state of her affections--everything
about her, to the very dimples in her white shoulders--had been
chronicled with crude precision in the various metropolitan journals
having pretensions to _haut ton_ (for high tone is not a good
translation), and had thence been eagerly copied throughout the
provincial weeklies of the land. Miss Rutherford was absolutely a
person to be desired.
It would not be fair to May to say that he was false to Gladys Dehon.
His passion for her, too vehement, had fairly burned itself out. In the
two years since he had left her, May’s heart had, as it were, banked
its volcanic fires. However fissured were its ravined depths, the
surface was at rest, and the lava-flood that concealed it was already
cool. And a beautiful huntswoman who had ridden out of sight of her
first husband, as had Gladys Dehon, was not at all the sort of person
for middle-aged Austin May to marry and bring to Boston. These things
he felt for some weeks before he proposed to Miss Rutherford, and she
was precisely the sort of girl he saw was best. If old Uncle Austin
had selected her himself, he could not have made a better choice. And
well, thought May, he saw the motives of his kind old uncle’s will,
and the wisdom born of much experience, and long consideration and a
knowledge of Eclipse claret that had prompted it. A young man, if left
to himself, would choose him a different wife for each three years of
his life. It is only after he has run the gamut of all impossibilities
that he settles down upon the proper thing. And this, at last, May felt
assured that he had done.
May did not pretend to himself that he loved Georgiana Rutherford as
he had loved Gladys Dehon. Even now, he was not blind to that. But he
thought that she was pretty, and well-placed, and good style; and she
had a large fortune, and a still larger family connection, all of the
very best securities.
In fact, May, at least so far as he admitted to himself, did not do
justice to the qualities of Miss Rutherford. Miss Rutherford was a very
charming girl; much cleverer and much better educated, to say nothing
of her style and beauty, than any embryo Gladys Dehon that May had
ever seen. She was perfectly mistress of her own heart, as she was of
her own fortune, and it was dangerous to present to her foreigners,
lest they afterward shot themselves. They always went wild about her;
much to Miss Rutherford’s discomfort. Some would besiege her; others
would curse her; others, still, say evil things about her in the true
Parisian manner. Miss Rutherford remained “more than usual calm”
through it all.
She had the reputation of being a flirt, but it was not so. She tried
her adorers, Portia-like, successively; the moment that they failed
to reach a certain standard, it was entirely right and fair for her
to drop them. Some of them would cry that they were hurt, and these
she contemned from her very soul. She did not regard such matters as
subjects for tears. Marriage was a step in life, like any other, and
only deserved more serious consideration because it was final.
This was the woman whose love was to make heart-haven for Austin May;
the serious, sober choice of his manhood, after all his boyish follies
were past. He had told her very seriously and politely of his desire
to marry her, one Sunday evening, on the piazza of a house at Newport.
It was necessary for him to speak in a low tone, as the people of the
house were not far off. She was silent for some seconds, and then he
had kissed her.
But here came in the first really difficult thing to do in the whole
proceeding. Not, indeed, the kissing her. But how was he to tell her
of the countess and Gladys Dehon? And yet he must tell her, if only to
explain the necessary delay in announcing their engagement. He looked
at her in the light that came from the late sunset; how perfectly
of the great world she was! He could not bear to lose her now; she
was just such a wife as he would invent for himself, had she not
existed. She was sitting silently, in a pose that was full of grace and
training; much too finely bred to be blushing because he had kissed
her. No man had ever kissed her before; and yet, when she deemed that
the occasion had come when she could fitly let one do it, she no more
blushed because she had so resolved than she would blush at entering a
ball-room.
Then he pulled himself together, and told her very calmly the history
of his life. She was greatly interested, and listened with attention
and sympathy.
“Of course, you must be there--on August 14th, I mean.”
“And keep my word?”
“That,” said Miss Rutherford, “I must leave to you. You can’t keep your
word with both of them.”
“After all,” said May, hopefully, “they may not come.”
“You surely do not expect them to cross the Atlantic in person to meet
you?”
“Oh, no!” said May. “They won’t do that--but they may write or
telegraph.” But May did not feel sure what Mme. Polacca de Valska might
or might not do.
“At all events,” said she, “I think our engagement had better not come
out until after the 14th of August.” And May felt constrained to admit
that this was best.
“And I do not think that you had better see me until then.”
“What?” cried Austin.
But Miss Rutherford was firm. She would not have him with her every day
unless she could tell people that they were engaged. What was she to
say to the world if, after that 14th of August, he were to be engaged
to Mrs. Dehon, for instance? This she delicately hinted; but, moreover,
she told him she had promised to visit the Larneds, at Pomfret, and
the Charles Mt. Vernons, at Beverly, and to spend three weeks with the
Breezes, at Mount Desert, in August. He could not trail about after
her; and it was only three months, after all. So May had consented,
with an ill grace; and when she left, two days later, he found nothing
better than to join VanKnyper on a yachting cruise. Then he had gone up
on the Restigouche, salmon-fishing; and on the 12th of August he was in
the Maine woods.
II.
THE IDYL OF ANTEROS.
In the leisure of the forest, Austin May reflected--for the first time
comprehensively--upon his conduct of life. It seemed to him that the
only sensible action of many wasted years was his getting engaged to
Georgiana Rutherford; and yet, for the moment, it rather added to his
perplexities. He felt convinced that Tom Leigh would say it put him in
a greater hole than ever. Here was he engaged to three women at once,
and all the engagements matured upon the fourteenth day of August
proximo. Why is it that there is not such a thing as the making an
assignment for the benefit of one’s heart’s creditors? He might then
place himself in the hands of some respectable chaperone as assignee,
and pay each of the contracting parties thirty-three per cent. Or he
might even get a composition, or an extension at long time. Possibly
the other two would assign their claims to Georgiana. If she were
the sole creditor, he fancied that they might effect an arrangement.
She certainly had the only lien on the few remaining assets of his
hard-worked ventricles.
Georgiana Rutherford! What a perfectly civilized creature she was.
How well she would look at the end of the state dining-table in the
Brookline house, with the épergne in front of her. Then how gracefully
she would sweep out, at the head of the procession of ladies--Brookline
ladies, with a guest or two from Boston or Jamaica Plains--and leave
him and his friends to their bachelor-talk and cigars. But first, after
being married, he had promised to take her up the Nile. May had already
been up the Nile.
May slipped off the rock into the rushing river. He had got to
thinking, in the absence of salmon, and forgotten his whereabouts.
It was clumsy of him, he reflected, as his boots queaked soddenly
campward. He was getting heavy, and slow, and middle-aged. And suddenly
he felt a yearning for the wilds, for wilder wilds even than Aroostook
County. He had been now for six years in high civilizations--Japan,
India, England, or, at worst, the States. There were several dreams of
his scheming-time not yet effected. Among others, a trip from Hudson’s
Bay, in canoes, through the Great Slave lake to the Pacific. He was
almost on the ground, with good guides and an outfit; why not start at
once? But there was the fourteenth of August next to come, he reflected.
A strange wagon was in the camp when he got back; a single buckboard
from the nearest settlement, and it bore a pretty girl. May had
conversation with her. A veritable Lady of the Aroostook was she; not
over-idealized, like the heroine of Mr. Howells. Really, she had a
certain rudimentary charm. Suppose, thought May, I were to make her my
dusky bride? For dusky, read freckled.
By Jove, thought May--an idea indeed. If he gave it out as such? If,
in consideration of a trip to Boston, new bonnets, and a junket of
quite Merovingian dimensions, she were to consent to go to Brookline
and personate his bride, for that day only? How natural that he, at
the very end of his eleven years, should have plunged into nature and
married la première venue. It was just the thing, he felt assured his
friends would say, that he was certain to do. Why, even the heroes
of the Lady of Aroostook did as much. And even the Comtesse Polacca
dei Cascadegli de Valska could have nothing to reply to such a living
argument as this Maine girl would present. My wife--Mrs. Austin May.
Gladys Dehon would scorn, but believe. And then, having nobly earned
her reward, his salvatress might retire to her primitive forest decked
with new fal-lals to astound the rustic breast.
But now, confound it, here as always, the cursed conventions rose
in his way. The proprieties were ever his fatality, a very ghost of
Banquo at the feast of life. Why had he been born in Boston? True,
they had once saved him from the countess; but now they were to offer
him a humble sacrifice to her unlovely years. For she came first
chronologically, and she was certain to come first in fact.
May had no further ideas; and he had to leave his river at the height
of the salmon season.
We have told how, on the 14th of August, he arrived at Brookline, true
to his appointment with all three. He got to Boston late in the evening
before, went to his club, passed a sleepless night, and took an early
morning train for Brookline, as we have seen.
And, perhaps, as we have also seen, a much more awkward thing than this
had happened. Austin May was there, ready to meet any one of them. The
period of probation required by the will had elapsed.
But as May travelled up to the city in that hot weather, he had been
wondering to himself which and how many of them he should see, and it
had become very clear to him that he did not feel the least desire to
see any one of the three.