All morning she had gazed on the shining reaches of the Hudson, their
colour deepening to blue as she neared the sea. A gold-bound volume of
Shelley, with his name on the fly-leaf, lay in her lap. And two lines
she repeated softly to herself--two lines that held a vision:
“He was as the sun in his fierce youth,
As terrible and lovely as a tempest;”
She summoned him out of the chaos of the past, and the past became the
present, and he stood before her as though in the flesh. Nay, she heard
his voice, his laugh, she even recognized again the smouldering flames
in his eyes as he glanced into hers, and his characteristic manners and
gestures. Honora wondered. In vain, during those long months of exile
had she tried to reconstruct him thus the vision in its entirety would
not come: rare, fleeting, partial, and tantalizing glimpses she had been
vouchsafed, it is true. The whole of him had been withheld until this
breathless hour before the dawn of her happiness.
Yet, though his own impatient spirit had fared forth to meet her with
this premature gift of his attributes, she had to fight the growing fear
within her. Now that the days of suffering were as they had not been,
insistent questions dinned in her ears: was she entitled to the joys to
come? What had she done to earn them? Had hers not been an attempt, on
a gigantic scale, to cheat the fates? Nor could she say whether this
feeling were a wholly natural failure to grasp a future too big, or
the old sense of the unreality of events that had followed her so
persistently.
The Hudson disappeared. Factories, bridges, beflagged week-end resorts,
ramshackle houses, and blocks of new buildings were scattered here and
there. The train was running on a causeway between miles of tenements
where women and children, overtaken by lassitude, hung out of the
windows: then the blackness of the tunnel, and Honora closed her eyes.
Four minutes, three minutes, two minutes.... The motion ceased. At the
steps of the car a uniformed station porter seized her bag; and she
started to walk down the long, narrow platform. Suddenly she halted.
“Drop anything, Miss?” inquired the porter.
“No,” answered Honora, faintly. He looked at her in concern, and she
began to walk on again, more slowly.
It had suddenly come over her that the man she was going to meet she
scarcely knew! Shyness seized her, a shyness that bordered on panic. And
what was he really like, that she should put her whole trust in him?
She glanced behind her: that way was closed: she had a mad desire to
get away, to hide, to think. It must have been an obsession that had
possessed her all these months. The porter was looking again, and he
voiced her predicament.
“There's only one way out, Miss.”
And then, amongst the figures massed behind the exit in the grill, she
saw him, his face red-bronze with the sea tan, his crisp, curly head
bared, his eyes alight with a terrifying welcome; and a tremor of a fear
akin to ecstasy ran through her: the fear of the women of days gone by
whose courage carried them to the postern or the strand, and fainted
there. She could have taken no step farther--and there was no need. New
strength flowed from the hand she held that was to carry her on and on.
He spoke her name. He led her passive, obedient, through the press to
the side street, and then he paused and looked into her burning face.
“I have you at last,” he said. “Are you happy?”
“I don't know,” she faltered. “Oh, Hugh, it all seems so strange! I
don't know what I have done.”
“I know,” he said exultantly; “but to save my soul I can't believe it.”
She watched him, bewildered, while he put her maid into a cab, and by an
effort roused herself.
“Where are you going, Hugh?”
“To get married,” he replied promptly.
She pulled down her veil.
“Please be sensible,” she implored. “I've arranged to go to a hotel.”
“What hotel?”
“The--the Barnstable,” she said. The place had come to her memory on
the train. “It's very nice and--and quiet--so I've been told. And I've
telegraphed for my rooms.”
“I'll humour you this once,” he answered, and gave the order.
She got into the carriage. It had blue cushions with the familiar smell
of carriage upholstery, and the people in the street still hurried
about their business as though nothing in particular were happening.
The horses started, and some forgotten key in her brain was touched as
Chiltern raised her veil again.
“You'll tear it, Hugh,” she said, and perforce lifted it herself. Her
eyes met his--and she awoke. Not to memories or regrets, but to the
future, for the recording angel had mercifully destroyed his book.
“Did you miss me?” she said.
“Miss you! My God, Honora, how can you ask? When I look back upon these
last months, I don't see how I ever passed through them. And you are
changed,” he said. “I could not have believed it possible, but you are.
You are--you are finer.”
He had chosen his word exquisitely. And then, as they trotted sedately
through Madison Avenue, he strained her in his arms and kissed her.
“Oh, Hugh!” she cried, scarlet, as she disengaged, herself, “you
mustn't--here!”
“You're free!” he exclaimed. “You're mine at last! I can't believe it!
Look at me, and tell me so.”
She tried.
“Yes,” she faltered.
“Yes--what?”
“Yes. I--I am yours.”
She looked out of the window to avoid those eyes. Was this New York, or
Jerusalem? Were these the streets through which she had driven and trod
in her former life? Her whole soul cried out denial. No episode,
no accusing reminiscences stood out--not one: the very corners were
changed. Would it all change back again if he were to lessen the
insistent pressure on the hand in her lap.
“Honora?”
“Yes?” she answered, with a start.
“You missed me? Look at me and tell me the truth.”
“The truth!” she faltered, and shuddered. The contrast was too
great--the horror of it too great for her to speak of. The pen of Dante
had not been adequate. “Don't ask me, Hugh,” she begged, “I can't talk
about it--I never shall be able to talk about it. If I had not loved
you, I should have died.”
How deeply he felt and understood and sympathized she knew by the
quivering pressure on her hand. Ah, if he had not! If he had failed to
grasp the meaning of her purgatory.
“You are wonderful, Honora,” was what he said in a voice broken by
emotion.
She thanked him with one fleeting, tearful glance that was as a grant
of all her priceless possessions. The carriage stopped, but it was some
moments before they realized it.
“You may come up in a little while,” she whispered, “and lunch with
me--if you like.”
“If I like!” he repeated.
But she was on the sidewalk, following the bell boy into the cool,
marble-lined area of the hotel. A smiling clerk handed her a pen, and
set the new universe to rocking.
“Mrs. Leffingwell, I presume? We have your telegram.”
Mrs. Leffingwell! Who was that person? For an instant she stood blankly
holding the pen, and then she wrote rapidly, if a trifle unsteadily:
“Mrs. Leffingwell and maid.” A pause. Where was her home? Then she added
the words, “St. Louis.”
Her rooms were above the narrow canon of the side street, looking over
the roofs of the inevitable brownstone fronts opposite. While Mathilde,
in the adjoining chamber, unpacked her bag, Honora stood gazing out of
the sitting-room windows, trying to collect her thoughts. Her spirits
had unaccountably fallen, the sense of homelessness that had pursued
her all these months overtaken her once more. Never, never, she told
herself, would she enter a hotel again alone; and when at last he came
she clung to him with a passion that thrilled him the more because he
could not understand it.
“Hugh--you will care for me?” she cried.
He kissed away her tears. He could not follow her; he only knew that
what he held to him was a woman such as he had never known before.
Tender, and again strangely and fiercely tender: an instrument of such
miraculous delicacy as to respond, quivering, to the lightest touch;
an harmonious and perfect blending of strength and weakness, of joy and
sorrow,--of all the warring elements in the world. What he felt was the
supreme masculine joy of possession.
At last they sat down on either side of the white cloth the waiter had
laid, for even the gods must eat. Not that our deified mortals ate much
on this occasion. Vesta presided once more, and after the feast was over
gently led them down the slopes until certain practical affairs began to
take shape in the mind of the man. Presently he looked at his watch, and
then at the woman, and made a suggestion.
“Marry you now--this of afternoon!” she cried, aghast. “Hugh, are you in
your right senses?”
“Yes,” he said, “I'm reasonable for the first time in my life.”
She laughed, and immediately became serious. But when she sought to
marshal her arguments, she found that they had fled.
“Oh, but I couldn't,” she answered. “And besides, there are so many
things I ought to do. I--I haven't any clothes.”
But this was a plea he could not be expected to recognize. He saw no
reason why she could not buy as many as she wanted after the ceremony.
“Is that all?” he demanded.
“No--that isn't all. Can't you see that--that we ought to wait, Hugh?”
“No,” he exclaimed, “No I can't see it. I can only see that every
moment of waiting would be a misery for us both. I can only see that the
situation, as it is to-day, is an intolerable one for you.”
She had not expected him to see this.
“There are others to be thought of,” she said, after a moment's
hesitation.
“What others?”
The answer she should have made died on her lips.
“It seems so-indecorous, Hugh.”
“Indecorous!” he cried, and pushed back his chair and rose. “What's
indecorous about it? To leave you here alone in a hotel in New York
would not only be indecorous, but senseless. How long would you put it
off? a week--a month--a year? Where would you go in the meantime, and
what would you do?”
“But your friends, Hugh--and mine?”
“Friends! What have they got to do with it?”
It was the woman, now, who for a moment turned practical--and for the
man's sake. She loved, and the fair fabric of the future which they were
to weave together, and the plans with which his letters had been filled
and of which she had dreamed in exile, had become to-day as the stuff of
which moonbeams are made. As she looked up at him, eternity itself did
not seem long enough for the fulfilment of that love. But he? Would
the time not come when he would demand something more? and suppose that
something were denied? She tried to rouse herself, to think, to consider
a situation in which her instinct had whispered just once--there must
be some hidden danger: but the electric touch of his hand destroyed the
process, and made her incapable of reason.
“What should we gain by a week's or a fortnight's delay,” he was saying,
“except so much misery?”
She looked around the hotel sitting-room, and tried to imagine the
desolation of it, stripped of his presence. Why not? There was reason
in what he said. And yet, if she had known it, it was not to reason she
yielded, but to the touch of his hand.
“We will be married to-day,” he decreed. “I have planned it all. I have
bought the 'Adhemar', the yacht which I chartered last winter. She is
here. We'll go off on her together, away from the world, for as long
as you like. And then,” he ended triumphantly, “then we'll go back to
Grenoble and begin our life.”
“And begin our life!” she repeated. But it was not to him that she
spoke. “Hugh, I positively have to have some clothes.”
“Clothes!” His voice expressed his contempt for the mundane thought.
“Yes, clothes,” she repeated resolutely.
He looked at his watch once more.
“Very well,” he said, “we'll get 'em on the way.”
“On the way?” she asked.
“We'll have to have a marriage license, I'm afraid,” he explained
apologetically.
Honora grew crimson. A marriage license!
She yielded, of course. Who could resist him? Nor need the details of
that interminable journey down the crowded artery of Broadway to the
Centre of Things be entered into. An ignoble errand, Honora thought; and
she sat very still, with flushed cheeks, in the corner of the carriage.
Chiltern's finer feelings came to her rescue. He, too, resented this
senseless demand of civilization as an indignity to their Olympian
loves. And he was a man to chafe at all restraints. But at last the
odious thing was over, grim and implacable Law satisfied after he had
compelled them to stand in line for an interminable period before his
grill, and mingle with those whom he chose, in his ignorance, to call
their peers. Honora felt degraded as they emerged with the hateful
paper, bought at such a price. The City Hall Park, with its moving
streams of people, etched itself in her memory.
“Leave me, Hugh,” she said; “I will take this carriage--you must get
another one.”
For once, he accepted his dismissal with comparative meekness.
“When shall I come?” he asked.
“She smiled a little, in spite of herself.
“You may come for me at six o'clock,” she replied.
“Six o'clock!” he exclaimed; but accepted with resignation and closed
the carriage door. Enigmatical sex!
Enigmatical sex indeed! Honora spent a feverish afternoon, rest and
reflection being things she feared. An afternoon in familiar places; and
(strangest of all facts to be recorded!) memories and regrets troubled
her not at all. Her old dressmakers, her old milliners, welcomed her
as one risen, radiant, from the grave; risen, in their estimation, to
a higher life. Honora knew this, and was indifferent to the wealth of
meaning that lay behind their discretion. Milliners and dressmakers read
the newspapers and periodicals--certain periodicals. Well they knew that
the lady they flattered was the future Mrs. Hugh Chiltern.
Nothing whatever of an indelicate nature happened. There was no mention
of where to send the bill, or of whom to send it to. Such things as
she bought on the spot were placed in her carriage. And happiest of
all omissions, she met no one she knew. The praise that Madame Barriere
lavished on Honora's figure was not flattery, because the Paris models
fitted her to perfection. A little after five she returned to her hotel,
to a Mathilde in a high state of suppressed excitement. And at six,
the appointed fateful hour, arrayed in a new street gown of dark green
cloth, she stood awaiting him.
He was no laggard. The bell on the church near by was still singing from
the last stroke when he knocked, flung open the door, and stood for a
moment staring at her. Not that she had been shabby when he had wished
to marry her at noon: no self-respecting woman is ever shabby; not that
her present costume had any of the elements of overdress; far from it.
Being a woman, she had her thrill of triumph at his exclamation. Diana
had no need, perhaps, of a French dressmaker, but it is an open question
whether she would have scorned them. Honora stood motionless, but her
smile for him was like the first quivering shaft of day. He opened
a box, and with a strange mixture of impetuosity and reverence came
forward. And she saw that he held in his hand a string of great,
glistening pearls.
“They were my mother's,” he said. “I have had them restrung--for you.”
“Oh, Hugh!” she cried. She could find no words to express the tremor
within. And she stood passively, her eyes half closed, while he clasped
the string around the lace collar that pressed the slender column of her
neck and kissed her.
Even the humble beings who work in hotels are responsive to unusual
disturbances in the ether. At the Barnstable, a gala note prevailed:
bell boys, porters, clerk, and cashier, proud of their sudden wisdom,
were wreathed in smiles. A new automobile, in Chiltern's colours, with
his crest on the panel, was panting beside the curb.
“I meant to have had it this morning,” he apologized as he handed her
in, “but it wasn't ready in time.”
Honora heard him, and said something in reply. She tried in vain to
rouse herself from the lethargy into which she had fallen, to cast off
the spell. Up Fifth Avenue they sped, past meaningless houses, to the
Park. The crystal air of evening was suffused with the level evening
light; and as they wound in and out under the spreading trees she caught
glimpses across the shrubbery of the deepening blue of waters. Pools of
mystery were her eyes.
The upper West Side is a definite place on the map, and full,
undoubtedly, of palpitating human joys and sorrows. So far as Honora was
concerned, it might have been Bagdad. The automobile had stopped before
a residence, and she found herself mounting the steps at Chiltern's
side. A Swedish maid opened the door.
“Is Mr. White at home?” Chiltern asked.
It seemed that “the Reverend Mr. White” was. He appeared, a portly
gentleman with frock coat and lawn tie who resembled the man in the
moon. His head, like polished ivory, increased the beaming effect of his
welcome, and the hand that pressed Honora's was large and soft and warm.
But dreams are queer things, in which no events surprise us.
The reverend gentleman, as he greeted Chiltern, pronounced his name with
unction. His air of hospitality, of good-fellowship, of taking the world
as he found it, could not have been improved upon. He made it apparent
at once that nothing could surprise him. It was the most natural
circumstance in life that two people should arrive at his house in an
automobile at half-past six in the evening and wish to get married:
if they chose this method instead of the one involving awnings and
policemen and uncomfortably-arrayed relations and friends, it was none
of Mr. White's affair. He led them into the Gothic sanctum at the
rear of the house where the famous sermons were written that shook the
sounding-board of the temple where the gentleman preached,--the sermons
that sometimes got into the newspapers. Mr. White cleared his throat.
“I am--very familiar with your name, Mr. Chiltern,” he said, “and it is
a pleasure to be able to serve you, and the lady who is so shortly to
be your wife. Your servant arrived with your note at four o'clock. Ten
minutes later, and I should have missed him.”
And then Honora heard Chiltern saying somewhat coldly:--“In order to
save time, Mr. White, I wish to tell you that Mrs. Leffingwell has been
divorced--”
The Reverend Mr. White put up a hand before him, and looked down at the
carpet, as one who would not dwell upon painful things.
“Unfortunate--ahem--mistakes will occur in life, Mr. Chiltern--in the
best of lives,” he replied. “Say no more about it. I am sure, looking at
you both--”
“Very well then,” said Chiltern brusquely, “I knew you would have to
know. And here,” he added, “is an essential paper.”
A few minutes later, in continuation of the same strange dream,
Honora was standing at Chiltern's side and the Reverend Mr. White was
addressing them: What he said--apart of it at least--seemed curiously
familiar. Chiltern put a ring on a finger of her ungloved hand. It was a
supreme moment in her destiny--this she knew. Between her responses she
repeated it to herself, but the mighty fact refused to be registered.
And then, suddenly, rang out the words:
“Those whom God hath joined together let no man Put asunder.”
Those whom God hath joined together! Mr. White was congratulating
her. Other people were in the room--the minister's son, his wife, his
brother-in-law. She was in the street again, in the automobile,
without knowing how she got there, and Chiltern close beside her in the
limousine.
“My wife!” he whispered.
Was she? Could it be true, be lasting, be binding for ever and ever? Her
hand pressed his convulsively.
“Oh, Hugh!” she cried, “care for me--stay by me forever. Will you
promise?”
“I promise, Honora,” he repeated. “Henceforth we are one.”
Honora would have prolonged forever that honeymoon on summer seas. In
those blissful days she was content to sit by the hour watching him as,
bareheaded in the damp salt breeze, he sailed the great schooner and
gave sharp orders to the crew. He was a man who would be obeyed, and
even his flashes of temper pleased her. He was her master, too, and she
gloried in the fact. By the aid of the precious light within her, she
studied him.
He loved her mightily, fiercely, but withal tenderly. With her alone he
was infinitely tender, and it seemed that something in him cried out for
battle against the rest of the world. He had his way, in port and out
of it. He brooked no opposition, and delighted to carry, against his
captain's advice, more canvas than was wise when it blew heavily. But
the yacht, like a woman, seemed a creature of his will; to know no fear
when she felt his guiding hand, even though the green water ran in the
scuppers.
And every day anew she scanned his face, even as he scanned the face
of the waters. What was she searching for? To have so much is to become
miserly, to fear lest a grain of the precious store be lost. On the
second day they had anchored, for an hour or two, between the sandy
headlands of a small New England port, and she had stood on the deck
watching his receding figure under the flag of the gasoline launch as
it made its way towards the deserted wharves. Beyond the wharves was an
elm-arched village street, and above the verdure rose the white cupola
of the house of some prosperous sea-captain of bygone times. Honora had
not wished to go ashore. First he had begged, and then he had laughed as
he had leaped into the launch. She lay in a chaise longue, watching it
swinging idly at the dock.
The night before he had written letters and telegrams. Once he had
looked up at her as she sat with a book in her hand across the saloon,
and caught her eyes. She had been pretending not to watch him.
“Wedding announcements,” he said.
And she had smiled back at him bravely. Such was the first
acknowledgment between them that the world existed.
“A little late,” he observed, smiling in his turn as he changed his
pen, “but they'll have to make allowances for the exigencies of the
situation. And they've been after me to settle down for so many years
that they ought to be thankful to get them at all. I've told them that
after a decent period they may come to Grenoble--in the late autumn. We
don't want anybody before then, do we, Honora?”
“No,” she said faintly; and added, “I shall always be satisfied with you
alone, Hugh.”
He laughed happily, and presently she went up on deck and stood with her
face to the breeze. There were no sounds save the musical beat of the
water against the strakes, and the low hum of wind on the towering
vibrant sails. One moulten silver star stood out above all others. To
the northward, somewhere beyond the spot where sea and sky met in the
hidden kiss of night, was Newport,--were his relations and her friends.
What did they think? He, at least, had no anxieties about the world,
why should she? Their defiance of it had been no greater than that of
an hundred others on whom it had smiled benignly. But had not the others
truckled more to its conventions? Little she cared about it, indeed, and
if he had turned the prow of the 'Adhemar' towards the unpeopled places
of the earth, her joy would have been untroubled.
One after another the days glided by, while with the sharpened senses of
a great love she watched for a sign of the thing that slept in him--of
the thing that had driven him home from his wanderings to re-create his
life. When it awoke, she would have to share him; now he was hers
alone. Her feelings towards this thing did not assume the proportions
of jealousy or fear; they were merely alert, vaguely disquieting. The
sleeping thing was not a monster. No, but it might grow into one, if its
appetite were not satisfied, and blame her.
She told herself that, had he lacked ambition, she could not have
loved him, and did not stop to reflect upon the completeness of her
satisfaction with the Viking. He seemed, indeed, in these weeks, one
whom the sea has marked for its own, and her delight in watching him as
he moved about the boat never palled. His nose reminded her of the prow
of a ship of war, and his deep-set eyes were continually searching the
horizon for an enemy. Such were her fancies. In the early morning
when he donned his sleeveless bathing suit, she could never resist the
temptation to follow him on deck to see him plunge into the cold ocean:
it gave her a delightful little shiver--and he was made like one of the
gods of Valhalla.
She had discovered, too, in these intimate days, that he had the
Northman's temperament; she both loved and dreaded his moods. And
sometimes, when the yacht glided over smoother seas, it was his pleasure
to read to her, even poetry and the great epics. That he should be fond
of the cruel Scotch ballads she was not surprised; but his familiarity
with the book of Job, and his love for it, astonished her. It was a
singular library that he had put on board the 'Adhemar'.
One evening when the sails flapped idly and the blocks rattled, when
they had been watching in silence the flaming orange of the sunset above
the amethystine Camden hills, he spoke the words for which she had been
waiting.
“Honora, what do you say to going back to Grenoble?”
She succeeded in smiling at him.
“Whenever you like, Hugh,” she said.
So the bowsprit of the 'Adhemar' was turned homewards; and with every
league of water they left behind them his excitement and impatience
seemed to grow.
“I can't wait to show it to you, Honora--to see you in it,” he
exclaimed. “I have so long pictured you there, and our life as it will
be.”