"Herriott, I owe you an apology for coming so late, but feel quite sure
you will pardon a delay that was unavoidable. I have kept your dinner
waiting half an hour."
"No matter, provided you bring an appetite that can defy overdone fish.
I am glad it is only delay, and not total failure. Vernon, you look so
spent, may I venture to offer your reverence a tonic--club-labelled
'cocktail'? It is the best antidote I dare suggest for the slow method
of suicide you have adopted."
"Thank you--no."
"Then come in to dinner."
"I wasted the whole afternoon trying to find a boy down on the East
Side, but when at last I reached the house I was told he had moved from
that neighborhood. He is a soloist at St. Hyacinth's, and I had promised
him a booklet."
"Leighton Dane?"
"Yes. What do you know of him?"
"That he will sing no more at St. Hyacinth's. Henceforth his solos
belong to choirs beyond the stars. The boy is slowly dying of
consumption."
"When did you see him?"
"A few days ago. He is at No. 980 ---- Street, Brooklyn. Your cousin
Eglah asked me to keep an eye on him. Poor little lad! His battle with
pain and loneliness is pathetic, and I rather think the end is not far
off."
"Loneliness? Who takes care of him?"
"His mother is away all day at her work, but an old German and his wife
living on the same floor of the tenement look after him as best they
can."
"Could you deliver the book to him?"
"If you wish it; but why not make another effort to see him?"
"My hands are so full. In two days I must run down to Washington, and
then back home, where I am needed. How luxurious your quarters are! Less
like a bachelor's den than one would expect."
"Next week I give up these rooms, and when I chance to be in the city
shall live at the club."
"Is not this decision rather sudden?"
"No. For some time I have contemplated another expedition to Arizona and
Montana, in quest of prehistoric records needed for an anthropological
paper that Professor De Wette asked me to contribute to the next volume
of Reports."
"What date have you fixed?"
"About the middle of July, immediately after the visit to 'Greyledge,'
which Senator Kent and Eglah have promised as soon as Congress adjourns.
I am sorry you could not arrange to join the small 'house party,' and
rest yourself by fishing in the Lake, instead of the turbid pools of
humanity."
"What about Calvary House? We expect you there."
"That pleasure must be deferred; but I have thought a good deal about
your need of more ground there, and believe I have found just what you
want. Come into the library, it is cooler, and I have some papers for
you. You know the Ravenal lands--some twenty acres--lie across "Tangled
Brook," west of your lines. The property was sold recently by the
trustees and my agent bought it. Now you can easily bridge the stream,
using the foundation of the old paper-mill dam, and by extending your
fences cover the whole. I know the old farmhouse was burned years ago,
but those pasture lands are fine, and that hill sloping south will make
a good vineyard. Here are all the papers, and my deed to the
Brotherhood. Stop! No thanks, not a word, or I cancel the transfer. Some
day, when I visit you, I may not be welcome, because I promise you now,
if your stewardship does not suit me and things seem mismanaged, I will
most certainly turn you all out."
Father Temple laid the bundle of papers on the table and grasped Mr.
Herriott's hand, pressing it warmly, but something in the bright, steady
grey eyes warned him to attempt no verbal expression of gratitude.
His host lighted a cigar, and drew from a stand near his elbow a
portfolio tied with purple tape.
"Does your reverence ever waste time now in sketches and water-color?"
"Life is far too strenuous for such trifling."
"How do you know that some day you will not be required to dig up that
buried talent and answer the charge of neglecting to bring in the
expected interest? Nature intended you for one of her artistic
interpreters, and if you had been loyal to her commission you might rank
to-day as R.A. Last summer I was searching an old trunk for a college
text-book, when I happened to find some of your drawings, that were
packed by mistake with my luggage in the bustle of leaving the
university."
From the pile of loose sheets he held up one, and, after a moment's
survey, in which he turned it at various angles, he handed it to his
guest.
Father Temple was leaning back in a cushioned arm-chair, and against the
violet velvet background his pale, placid, scholarly face was sharply
silhouetted. Listlessly raising the sketch sidewise, so that a gas jet
on his left shone upon it, he looked at it. The profound repose that
habitually rested on his countenance broke up swiftly, as a sleeping
pool shivers when a stone is hurled into its motionless depths. His lips
whitened, and he laid the paper as a screen over his eyes. Mr. Herriott
crossed the floor to the door of the dining-room, and, loitering
deliberately, ordered coffee. When he came back, followed by a servant
bearing coffee and liqueurs, the priest was standing at an open window,
and in the clenched fingers of the hands clasped behind him the sketch
quivered as though shaken by the wind.
"Close the door, Hawkins, and when I want you I will ring. Come, Vernon;
I remember your fondness for coffee, and this is good and piping hot."
The thin figure in the girded cassock shook his head and leaned out of
the window, staring up at the golden stars throbbing above the roar and
din of the crowded street.
After some minutes, during which the host rattled cups and glasses,
Father Temple walked up and down the room, then came back to the table.
The despairing sorrow in his deep, soft eyes made Mr. Herriott rise
instantly.
"Vernon, have I wounded you by my reminiscent babble of college days?"
Without a word, the arms of the priest were lifted to the man towering
over him, and he laid his head on the shoulder of one who had never
failed him.
"Temple, forgive me, dear old fellow, if I have broken rudely into some
sacred, sealed chamber."
"You have done me a priceless kindness in restoring my picture, but with
it comes the hour of humiliation I always knew must sooner or later
overtake me. Noel, your good opinion is so precious to me I shrink from
losing it. I have dreaded your condemnation next to that of my God. You
always trusted and respected me, even in what you deemed foolish monkish
extremes, and yet--and yet----"
"Sit down, and pull yourself together. You have fasted and prayed your
starved nerves into a fit of womanish hysteria. I am no father confessor
for you, and if you are not the true, loyal man I have believed you all
these years, then, while you are under my roof, I prefer not to find out
that you are a hypocrite."
He pushed his friend back into the easy chair, and handed him a glass of
chartreuse, but it was put aside.
"Noel, you must hear me. After the first bitterness I shall feel
relieved that you know literally all I can tell, and then you will
understand many things in my life. To-day I am what I am, simply and
solely in the hope of expiating the sin of my youth. Noel, the sin of my
youth found me out early, and this life I lead is an attempted
atonement. Do you begin to understand?"
Mr. Herriott held up the sketch, and, as he struck it sharply with his
fingers, his face darkened.
"Whose portrait is this?"
"The woman--the young girl--whose life I blighted."
"Good God! Blighted? Is your villainy so black?"
"I am Father Temple, vowed to celibacy, and somewhere in the wide, cruel
world a wife and child of mine may have gone down to perdition because I
was a coward--a vile coward, too base for a brave man to recognize. I
knew you would despise me, and I kept silent as long as I could. Do you
wonder?"
Mr. Herriott stood over him like an avenging Viking.
"You betrayed a woman? Wife, or victim of----"
"Both. I married and I deserted her."
"The marriage was legal--no swindling sham?"
"Legal in form, though I was a minor and she a mere child."
"And you ensnared her deliberately, intending to----"
The priest sprang to his feet and his eyes flashed.
"I loved her, and married her secretly, and intended no wrong; but
before I could publicly claim her--before I was of age and dared to face
my father with the fact of my marriage--I lost her. She disappeared as
completely as if the ocean rolled over her."
"Is this the unvarnished truth? There is nothing worse, nothing more
heinous than what you have told me?" Mr. Herriott breathed quickly, as
his keen, cold eyes searched severely the wan face before him.
"I have told you the whole, bitter truth."
"Then I have not entirely lost my friend. Now sit down; begin at the
beginning of this black business, and let me try to share your load of
trouble. Don't hurry--be explicit. Keep back nothing. If you intended no
wrong, there must and shall be found some way to right it."
"Too late! If you take a white flower and inhale its perfume, and then
carelessly drop it where hurrying crowds are sure to trample it into the
dust, what hope that, search as you may, you will ever find it, or,
finding it, be able to restore the torn, soiled, ruined petals? Wherever
she is, no matter what she has become, what sin and shame stain and
defile her, she is my wife. I swore before God I would take her for my
wife, 'for better, for worse,' and though it is my fault--and mine
only--that I did not publish the marriage, I have kept my vows, and am
dedicated to life-long celibacy. My boyish cowardice--what awful
shipwreck it has made of two lives! You want the details? It is a
shameful story, but not long. In the early summer of my nineteenth year
I spent vacation in the far Northwest, at an advanced army station,
Post ----, where father was in command of his regiment. Hunting was fine
but dangerous, as Indians on the frontier were ugly just then, and
several tribes were painting for the war path. One hot afternoon,
tramping back to camp with my rifle on my shoulder, I went down a steep,
wooded hill to drink at a spring, and as I parted the thick growth I saw
a cow chewing her cud, while a bare-footed girl stooped and milked into
a cedar pail. She sprang up, much alarmed, and stood against a glowing
background of scarlet rhododendrons. Her calico bonnet had fallen off,
her sleeves rolled up showed her white, dimpled arms, and all over her
head and shoulders the gold-colored hair was twisted into little curls
and waves and tendrils that glittered like gilt wire. As she stared at
me with large purplish-blue eyes, her bright red lips trembled, and--"
He paused, and involuntarily wrung his thin white hands.
"I had seen handsome women, and many lovely girls, but never so
exquisite a creature as this, and from that moment I lost reason,
prudence, everything but conscience, and my heritage of honorable
instincts. Nona Moorland was the daughter of a teamster attached to
father's command; a brutal, rough man, whose second wife--a selfish,
jealous virago--made the step-daughter's life a cruel burden. They
occupied a log cabin just outside the Post parade grounds, and the girl
was never allowed in sight of drill lines except when under convoy of
the stepmother she assisted in carrying to headquarters the freshly
laundered clothes of the officers. Having been forbidden, under threat
of corporeal punishment, to speak to or be seen with any soldier, save
in her father's cabin, she was terrified at the danger of a discovery of
our acquaintance; hence our interviews were secret, and adroitly
arranged to elude suspicion. Her extraordinary personal beauty and
gentleness of deportment more than compensated for illiteracy and humble
origin, and after a few days I planned a clandestine marriage, to which
she readily assented. The Post chaplain had made a pet of me, because I
aided him in some botanical and geological tramps close to the frontier,
and finally he consented to help us, provided his agency was never
betrayed. We both swore we would not divulge his name or knowledge of
our scheme, and so one starry night he and Hill, a private soldier who
went as witness, stole out, and met Nona and me in a dense grove of
trees near Moorland's cabin. There we were married according to the
ritual of the Episcopal Church. I was not quite nineteen, she a slender
girl just past her fifteenth birthday. Under the quiet stars that shone
as our altar lights, we took solemn, life-long vows as husband and wife,
and there, when a written certificate had been given to Nona, we all
joined hands and pledged ourselves in the sight of God to keep the
secret until I was of age, or thought it prudent to publish the
marriage. To her I meant no more wrong than to myself, and kept to the
form of law, knowing we were minors, and that no license legalized the
ceremony which I believed and argued the Church sanctified. You knew my
father sufficiently well to remember how terribly stern he was, how
morose he often seemed, and I dared not defy him. For three weeks life
was a brief vision of heaven to Nona and me. She was so lovely, so
tender, so humbly conscious of her social inferiority and lack of
education, so fired with an ambitious zeal for culture and improvement
to fit herself for the circle where Colonel Temple's son was born to
move. Then the bolt fell. A courier from the nearest telegraph station
brought news that father had been promoted, was ordered to Washington,
and would soon go abroad on some military commission. I begged to spend
the remaining days of my vacation at Post ----, but was sharply refused,
and all things were ordered in readiness for our departure next day at
sunrise."
Some overwhelming memory arrested the narrative, and Father Temple held
the portrait sketch toward the light. Then he crossed his arms on the
table and bowed his face upon them. The room was very still, and there
seemed suddenly a startling insistence in the harsh sound of an organ
that began to grind out "O promise me," on the pavement below. Mr.
Herriott threw down a coin, closed the window, and resumed his seat.
"Noel, you must think me weak and unmanly. You are so strong yourself,
you can scarcely----"
"Strong? I think if I had to carry your burden I should go out and hang
myself."
"That last interview is a perpetual nightmare no noon sunshine ever
dispels. Nona was frantic at the unexpectedly sudden separation, and she
clung to me like a drowning child; but by degrees she accepted the
inevitable, and her trust in me was supreme. She would be patient, and
study books the chaplain would provide, and rely on him to forward her
letters, and receive and find means to deliver mine. A full moon showed
me her tearful face when we stood up to say good-bye. Oh, beautiful,
tender, devoted, and pure as any lily God ever set to bloom in a wicked
world! As I took her in my arms, she kissed me repeatedly, and I felt
her lips tremble on mine as she sobbed:
"'No matter what happens, you must trust me as perfectly as I trust you.
If we keep true to each other, all the world can't part us long.'
"That farewell vision abides with me--sleeping, it walks as a living
presence through my dreams; waking, it thrusts itself between me and my
God; and when I kneel before the marble image of the Mother of my Lord,
her holy face is hidden by that of my fair, sweet young wife. It has
become an obsession from which I cannot escape. After I went east, two
letters reached me; then, in the late autumn when father had sailed, I
was stricken with typhoid fever, that kept me prisoner for three months,
and the inflammatory rheumatism that followed it so completely wrecked
me, I was carried to the country home of an aunt in Massachusetts, in
whose care father left me when he went to Europe. In my convalescence I
wrote repeatedly under cover to the chaplain, signing only my middle
name, Pembroke, but heard nothing until the next June. While still on
crutches, I went for a day's visit to college to collect and pack my
belongings, and there I found one dusty, mislaid letter from Nona, full
of sad forebodings. The chaplain had wandered too far away to a mountain
range, accompanied only by an orderly, who reported on his return that
his companion had been scalped by Indians while he was examining some
rock ledges, and that he had barely escaped by desperate riding. A
cavalry troop, sent out to recover the body and avenge the death, was
ambushed in a wooded defile and four troopers were killed, among the
number Hill. The letter had been written in January--five months before.
Both witnesses of our marriage in the grave! Anxiety and distress
brought on renewal of rheumatic fever, and I was crippled in hands and
feet for six terrible weeks. One day, as I was trying my ability to walk
about the room, a delayed letter was forwarded from college--the last I
ever received from Nona. Her father had died very suddenly from
congestion of the lungs, and his wife returned immediately to her family
in Arkansas; but because of my poor Nona's condition, which had
subjected her to severe abuse and horrible accusations, the stepmother
had cast her off, refused her recognition, and abandoned her. Because
she refused to divulge the name of her husband, her declaration that she
was a wife only increased the torrent of insults that swept her beyond
the pale of respectability. She wrote that one friend--the only person
who believed her assertion that she had been lawfully married--was just
then leaving the Post for his old home, his time of service having
expired, and he had kindly carried her in a covered wagon to a small
village some days' travel east of the Post, where he found shelter for
her until after the birth of her child. She begged I would send money to
pay her board and also to enable her to travel east and live near me,
because she was so terror-stricken among strangers. The same day my
father summoned me to Europe, having decided I should attend lectures
in Germany and at Oxford. By express, I forwarded the money to
Nona, in accordance with her directions--"Care of Delia Brown,
Thompsonville, ---- Territory"--and I wrote her, explaining all the
circumstances, assuring her I would join her as soon as I could travel,
and that henceforth we should never be separated. A few hours later I
was laid up with a severe relapse, and when, finally, I started west in
September, I was still so lame any movement was torture. At last the
stage coach put me down at the cluster of log houses called
Thompsonville, and by the aid of crutches I found my way to a low, dark
cabin of two rooms, where Delia Brown made a scanty living by washing
and ironing for men attached to a party of prospecting miners. She was
a gaunt, sinister looking woman from Maine, with small, deep-set, faded
yellow eyes that bored like a gimlet, and as she took a pipe from her
ugly bluish lips and greeted me my heart sank. Where was Nona? Gone--with
the man who brought her there, and who 'paid well for her keep.' When?
Several weeks ago. Did she receive my letter, and had the money reached
her? Yes, the money had been delivered to her--Delia Brown--and she had
given it to the woman Nona, in the presence of one Josh' Smith. My
letter had seemed to terrify the woman, and as soon as she knew I was
coming she went away suddenly, saying she was going to New Orleans, and
she and the man could take care of the baby. What was the man's name? He
called himself Lay' Walker, but she doubted 'if he was not somebody else,
and folks had their suspicions about the whole affair.' The baby boy was
four months old when the man and woman took it away, but it was 'such a
poor, puny, ailing child it had little chance to live.' What I suffered
then only God will ever know, but faith in Nona sustained me while I
went from cabin to cabin, receiving on all sides confirmation of Delia
Brown's statements from women who had met her, and also from the mail
and express agent--Josh' Smith--who assured me he had delivered the
letter and package of money addressed to Nona Moorland, care of Delia
Brown, to the latter, and exhibited her receipt. Lay' Walker was
described as a very 'handsome Spanish-looking young fellow,' and he and
the woman seemed fond of each other. He spent his money freely on her,
and talked about Florida and banana growing, and said they wanted to get
to New Orleans, where his friends had a schooner running in the West
India fruit trade. After an exhaustive search, I made my way to New
Orleans and engaged police assistance, but no clue could be found. Then I
arranged advertisements to run six months, and went on to Pensacola and
to Tampa. I advertised in two Florida newspapers, asking Nona Moorland
to write to me, care of my father's lawyer in Boston. No response, no
word, no hint ever reached me. When December arrived and I had no
tidings, I deposited money in a Boston bank to the credit of Nona
Moorland, and leaving instructions that all mail matter should be
forwarded promptly to me, I sailed for Europe, shattered in body, almost
hopeless, and the tortured prey of remorseful regret at the awful
consequence of my midsummer madness."
A nervous shiver seized him, and he lifted the chartreuse to his
colorless lips.
Mr. Herriott's sinewy brown hand closed over the cold white fingers half
hidden in the folds of the black cassock.
"And the woman, Delia Brown? What became of her?"
"How should I know?"
"There lies the crux of this dreadful entanglement. She duped you."
"Possibly. When I left Thompsonville she was preparing to remove to
Maine, where she had relatives. I doubted her as long as I could; but
nearly eleven years of cruel silence have slowly destroyed every vestige
of hope, or of faith in Nona's loyalty. Understand, I do not accuse
her--I dare not--I accept the blame. The fault was mine; she was an
innocent, ignorant child, and what she considered my heartless, wicked
desertion has thrown her into the jaws of destruction. If her soul is
lost, God will require me to answer for the ruin--and that is the
bitterness of my intolerable life. The immortal soul of my wife, of the
mother of my child--a homeless, nameless, fatherless waif! I hold
marriage indissoluble by human enactment, and while Nona lives I regard
her as my wife, no matter what she has become, no matter into what
shameful career she may have been driven by my cowardly course of
action. When she believed I had abandoned her, the poor girl doubtless
grew desperate. What I have told you is known only to my confessor, to
the Superior of our Order in England, where I took my vows, and to my
father, to whom I promptly confided everything when I joined him in
Germany just before his death. That he refused to forgive me you will
readily believe. This sketch you have restored to me was enlarged from
one I made at Post ----, and its loss greatly grieved me. Oh, Noel,
stinging memory is more merciless than sharp-set hair shirts that fret
the flesh. When I see happy mothers and children, their laughter smites
my heart like an iron hand; and while I minister to the suffering
outcast little ones in pauper homes, my bruised soul seems to hear the
accusing, piteous cry of my own forsaken, lost lamb--thrown out to
hungry wolves."