She had made everything comfortable for the artist; there was no
further pretext for staying. So she said she would go, now, and asked
him to summon the servants in case he should need anything. She went
away unhappy; and she left unhappiness behind her; for she carried away
all the sunshine. The time dragged heavily for both, now. He couldn’t
paint for thinking of her; she couldn’t design or millinerize with any
heart, for thinking of him. Never before had painting seemed so empty
to him, never before had millinerizing seemed so void of interest to
her. She had gone without repeating that dinner-invitation—an almost
unendurable disappointment to him. On her part-well, she was suffering,
too; for she had found she _couldn’t_ invite him. It was not hard
yesterday, but it was impossible to-day. A thousand innocent privileges
seemed to have been filched from her unawares in the past twenty-four
hours. To-day she felt strangely hampered, restrained of her liberty.
To-day she couldn’t propose to herself to do anything or say anything
concerning this young man without being instantly paralyzed into
non-action by the fear that he might “suspect.” Invite him to dinner
_to-day?_ It made her shiver to think of it.
And so her afternoon was one long fret. Broken at intervals. Three
times she had to go down stairs on errands—that is, she thought she had
to go down stairs on errands. Thus, going and coming, she had six
glimpses of him, in the aggregate, without seeming to look in his
direction; and she tried to endure these electric ecstasies without
showing any sign, but they fluttered her up a good deal, and she felt
that the naturalness she was putting on was overdone and quite too
frantically sober and hysterically calm to deceive.
The painter had his share of the rapture; he had his six glimpses, and
they smote him with waves of pleasure that assaulted him, beat upon
him, washed over him deliciously, and drowned out all consciousness of
what he was doing with his brush. So there were six places in his
canvas which had to be done over again.
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At last Gwendolen got some peace of mind by sending word to the
Thompsons, in the neighborhood, that she was coming there to dinner.
She wouldn’t be reminded, at _that_ table, that there was an absentee
who ought to be a presentee—a word which she meant to look out in the
dictionary at a calmer time.
About this time the old earl dropped in for a chat with the artist, and
invited him to stay to dinner. Tracy cramped down his joy and gratitude
by a sudden and powerful exercise of all his forces; and he felt that
now that he was going to be close to Gwendolen, and hear her voice and
watch her face during several precious hours, earth had nothing
valuable to add to his life for the present.
The earl said to himself, “This spectre can eat apples, apparently. We
shall find out, now, if that is a specialty. I think, myself, it’s a
specialty. Apples, without doubt, constitute the spectral limit. It was
the case with our first parents. No, I am wrong—at least only partly
right. The line _was_ drawn at apples, just as in the present case, but
it was from the other direction.” The new clothes gave him a thrill of
pleasure and pride. He said to himself, “I’ve got part of him down to
date, anyway.”
Sellers said he was pleased with Tracy’s work; and he went on and
engaged him to restore his old masters, and said he should also want
him to paint his portrait and his wife’s and possibly his daughter’s.
The tide of the artist’s happiness was at flood, now. The chat flowed
pleasantly along while Tracy painted and Sellers carefully unpacked a
picture which he had brought with him. It was a chromo; a new one, just
out. It was the smirking, self-satisfied portrait of a man who was
inundating the Union with advertisements inviting everybody to buy his
specialty, which was a three-dollar shoe or a dress-suit or something
of that kind. The old gentleman rested the chromo flat upon his lap and
gazed down tenderly upon it, and became silent and meditative.
Presently Tracy noticed that he was dripping tears on it. This touched
the young fellow’s sympathetic nature, and at the same time gave him
the painful sense of being an intruder upon a sacred privacy, an
observer of emotions which a stranger ought not to witness. But his
pity rose superior to other considerations, and compelled him to try to
comfort the old mourner with kindly words and a show of friendly
interest. He said:
“I am very sorry—is it a friend whom—”
“Ah, more than that, far more than that—a relative, the dearest I had
on earth, although I was never permitted to see him. Yes, it is young
Lord Berkeley, who perished so heroically in the awful conflagration.
Why what is the matter?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing.”
“It was a little startling to be so suddenly brought face to face, so
to speak, with a person one has heard so much talk about. Is it a good
likeness?”
“Without doubt, yes. I never saw him, but you can easily see the
resemblance to his father,” said Sellers, holding up the chromo and
glancing from it to the chromo misrepresenting the Usurping Earl and
back again with an approving eye.
“Well, no—I am not sure that I make out the likeness. It is plain that
the Usurping Earl there has a great deal of character and a long face
like a horse’s, whereas his heir here is smirky, moon-faced and
characterless.”
“We are all that way in the beginning—all the line,” said Sellers,
undisturbed. “We all start as moonfaced fools, then later we tadpole
along into horse-faced marvels of intellect and character. It is by
that sign and by that fact that I detect the resemblance here and know
this portrait to be genuine and perfect. Yes, all our family are fools
at first.”
“This young man seems to meet the hereditary requirement, certainly.”
“Yes, yes, he was a fool, without any doubt. Examine the face, the
shape of the head, the expression. It’s all fool, fool, fool, straight
through.”
“Thanks,—” said Tracy, involuntarily.
“Thanks?”
“I mean for explaining it to me. Go on, please.”
“As I was saying, fool is printed all over the face. A body can even
read the _de_tails.”
“What do they say?”
“Well, added up, he is a wobbler.”
“A which?”
“Wobbler. A person that’s always taking a firm stand about something or
other—kind of a Gibraltar stand, _he_ thinks, for unshakable fidelity
and everlastingness—and then, inside of a little while, he begins to
wobble; no more Gibraltar there; no, sir, a mighty ordinary commonplace
weakling wobbling around on stilts. That’s Lord Berkeley to a dot, you
can _see_ it—_look_ at that sheep! But,—why are you blushing like
sunset! Dear sir, have I unwittingly offended in some way?”
“Oh, no indeed, no indeed. Far from it. But it always makes me blush to
hear a man revile his own blood.” He said to himself, “How strangely
his vagrant and unguided fancies have hit upon the truth. By accident,
he has described me. I am that contemptible thing. When I left England
I thought I knew myself; I thought I was a very Frederick the Great for
resolution and staying capacity; whereas in truth I am just a Wobbler,
simply a Wobbler. Well—after all, it is at least creditable to _have_
high ideals and give birth to lofty resolutions; I will allow myself
that comfort.” Then he said, aloud, “Could this sheep, as you call him,
breed a great and self-sacrificing idea in his head, do you think?
Could he meditate such a thing, for instance, as the renunciation of
the earldom and its wealth and its glories, and voluntary retirement to
the ranks of the commonalty, there to rise by his own merit or remain
forever poor and obscure?”
“_Could_ he? Why, look at him—look at this simpering self-righteous
mug! There is your answer. It’s the very thing he would think of. And
he would start in to do it, too.”
“And then?”
“He’d wobble.”
“And back down?”
“Every time.”
“Is that to happen with _all_ my—I mean would that happen to _all_ his
high resolutions?”
“Oh certainly—certainly. It’s the Rossmore of it.”
“Then this creature was fortunate to die! Suppose, for argument’s sake,
that I was a Rossmore, and—”
“It can’t be done.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not a supposable case. To be a Rossmore at your age,
you’d have to be a fool, and you’re not a fool. And you’d have to be a
Wobbler, whereas anybody that is an expert in reading character can see
at a glance that when you set your foot down once, it’s there to stay;
and earthquake can’t wobble it.” He added to himself, “That’s enough to
say to him, but it isn’t half strong enough for the facts. The more I
observe him, now, the more remarkable I find him. It is the strongest
face I have ever examined. There is almost superhuman firmness here,
immovable purpose, iron steadfastness of will. A most extraordinary
young man.”
He presently said, aloud:
“Some time I want to ask your advice about a little matter, Mr. Tracy.
You see, I’ve got that young lord’s remains—my goodness, how you jump!”
“Oh, it’s nothing, pray go on. You’ve got his remains?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure they are his, and not somebody else’s?”
“Oh, perfectly sure. Samples, I mean. Not all of him.”
“Samples?”
“Yes—in baskets. Some time you will be going home; and if you wouldn’t
mind taking them along—”
“Who? I?”
“Yes—certainly. I don’t mean _now;_ but after a while; after—but look
here, would you like to see them?”
“No! Most certainly not. I don’t want to see them.”
“O, very well. I only thought—hey, where are you going, dear?”
“Out to dinner, papa.”
Tracy was aghast. The colonel said, in a disappointed voice:
“Well, I’m sorry. Sho, I didn’t know she was going out, Mr. Tracy.”
Gwendolen’s face began to take on a sort of apprehensive
What-have-I-done expression. “Three old people to one young one—well,
it _isn’t_ a good team, that’s a fact.” Gwendolen’s face betrayed a
dawning hopefulness and she said—with a tone of reluctance which hadn’t
the hall-mark on it—
“If you prefer, I will send word to the Thompsons that I—”
“Oh, is it the Thompsons? That simplifies it—sets everything right. We
can fix it without spoiling your arrangements, my child. You’ve got
your heart set on—”
“But papa, I’d _just_ as soon go there some other—”
“No—I won’t have it. You are a good hard-working darling child, and
your father is not the man to disappoint you when you—”
“But papa, I—”
“Go along, I won’t hear a word. We’ll get along, dear.”
Gwendolen was ready to cry with vexation. But there was nothing to do
but start; which she was about to do when her father hit upon an idea
which filled him with delight because it so deftly covered all the
difficulties of the situation and made things smooth and satisfactory:
“I’ve got it, my love, so that you won’t be robbed of your holiday and
at the same time we’ll be pretty satisfactorily fixed for a good time
here. You send Belle Thompson here—perfectly beautiful creature, Tracy,
perfectly beautiful; I want you to see that girl; why, you’ll just go
mad; you’ll go mad inside of a minute; yes, you send her right along,
Gwendolen, and tell her—why, she’s gone!” He turned—she was already
passing out at the gate. He muttered, “I wonder what’s the matter; I
don’t know what her mouth’s doing, but I think her shoulders are
swearing. Well,” said Sellers blithely to Tracy, “I shall miss
her—parents always miss the children as soon as they’re out of sight,
it’s only a natural and wisely ordained partiality—but you’ll be all
right, because Miss Belle will supply the youthful element for you and
to your entire content; and we old people will do our best, too. We
shall have a good enough time. And you’ll have a chance to get better
acquainted with Admiral Hawkins. That’s a rare character, Mr. Tracy—one
of the rarest and most engaging characters the world has produced.
You’ll find him worth studying. I’ve studied him ever since he was a
child and have always found him developing. I really consider that one
of the main things that have enabled me to master the difficult science
of character-reading was the vivid interest I always felt in that boy
and the baffling inscrutabilities of his ways and inspirations.”
Tracy was not hearing a word. His spirits were gone, he was desolate.
“Yes, a most wonderful character. Concealment—that’s the basis of it.
Always the first thing you want to do is to find the keystone a man’s
character is built on—then you’ve got it. No misleading and apparently
inconsistent peculiarities can fool you then. What do you read on the
Senator’s surface? Simplicity; a kind of rank and protuberant
simplicity; whereas, in fact, that’s one of the deepest minds in the
world. A perfectly honest man—an absolutely honest and honorable
man—and yet without doubt the profoundest master of dissimulation the
world has ever seen.”
“O, it’s devilish!” This was wrung from the unlistening Tracy by the
anguished thought of what might have been if only the dinner
arrangements hadn’t got mixed.
“No, I shouldn’t call it that,” said Sellers, who was now placidly
walking up and down the room with his hands under his coat-tails and
listening to himself talk. “One could quite properly call it devilish
in another man, but not in the Senator. Your _term_ is right—perfectly
right—I grant that—but the application is wrong. It makes a great
difference. Yes, he is a marvelous character. I do not suppose that any
other statesman ever had such a colossal sense of humor, combined with
the ability to totally conceal it. I may except George Washington and
Cromwell, and perhaps Robespierre, but I draw the line there. A person
not an expert might be in Judge Hawkins’s company a lifetime and never
find out he had any more sense of humor than a cemetery.”
A deep-drawn yard-long sigh from the distraught and dreaming artist,
followed by a murmured, “Miserable, oh, miserable!”
“Well, no, I shouldn’t say _that_ about it, quite. On the contrary, I
admire his ability to conceal his humor even more if possible than I
admire the gift itself, stupendous as it is. Another thing—General
Hawkins is a thinker; a keen, logical, exhaustive, analytical
thinker—perhaps the ablest of modern times. That is, of course, upon
themes suited to his size, like the glacial period, and the correlation
of forces, and the evolution of the Christian from the caterpillar—any
of those things; give him a subject according to his size, and just
stand back and watch him think! Why you can see the place rock! Ah,
yes, you must know him; you must get on the inside of him. Perhaps the
most extraordinary mind since Aristotle.”
Dinner was kept waiting for a while for Miss Thompson, but as Gwendolen
had not delivered the invitation to her the waiting did no good, and
the household presently went to the meal without her. Poor old Sellers
tried everything his hospitable soul could devise to make the occasion
an enjoyable one for the guest, and the guest tried his honest best to
be cheery and chatty and happy for the old gentleman’s sake; in fact
all hands worked hard in the interest of a mutual good time, but the
thing was a failure from the start; Tracy’s heart was lead in his
bosom, there seemed to be only one prominent feature in the landscape
and that was a vacant chair, he couldn’t drag his mind away from
Gwendolen and his hard luck; consequently his distractions allowed
deadly pauses to slip in every now and then when it was his turn to say
something, and of course this disease spread to the rest of the
conversation—wherefore, instead of having a breezy sail in sunny
waters, as anticipated, everybody was bailing out and praying for land.
What _could_ the matter be? Tracy alone could have told, the others
couldn’t even invent a theory.
Meanwhile they were having a similarly dismal time at the Thompson
house; in fact a twin experience. Gwendolen was ashamed of herself for
allowing her disappointment to so depress her spirits and make her so
strangely and profoundly miserable; but feeling ashamed of herself
didn’t improve the matter any; it only seemed to aggravate the
suffering. She explained that she was not feeling very well, and
everybody could see that this was true; so she got sincere sympathy and
commiseration; but that didn’t help the case. Nothing helps that kind
of a case. It is best to just stand off and let it fester. The moment
the dinner was over the girl excused herself, and she hurried home
feeling unspeakably grateful to get away from that house and that
intolerable captivity and suffering.
Will he be gone? The thought arose in her brain, but took effect in her
heels. She slipped into the house, threw off her things and made
straight for the dining room. She stopped and listened. Her father’s
voice—with no life in it; presently her mother’s—no life in that; a
considerable vacancy, then a sterile remark from Washington Hawkins.
Another silence; then, not Tracy’s but her father’s voice again.
“He’s gone,” she said to herself despairingly, and listlessly opened
the door and stepped within.
“Why, my child,” cried the mother, “how white you are! Are you—has
anything—”
“White?” exclaimed Sellers. “It’s gone like a flash; ’twasn’t serious.
Already she’s as red as the soul of a watermelon! Sit down, dear, sit
down—goodness knows you’re welcome. Did you have a good time? We’ve had
great times here—immense. Why didn’t Miss Belle come? Mr. Tracy is not
feeling well, and she’d have made him forget it.”
She was content now; and out from her happy eyes there went a light
that told a secret to another pair of eyes there and got a secret in
return. In just that infinitely small fraction of a second those two
great confessions were made, received, and perfectly understood. All
anxiety, apprehension, uncertainty, vanished out of these young
people’s hearts and left them filled with a great peace.
Sellers had had the most confident faith that with the new
reinforcement victory would be at this last moment snatched from the
jaws of defeat, but it was an error. The talk was as stubbornly
disjointed as ever. He was proud of Gwendolen, and liked to show her
off, even against Miss Belle Thompson, and here had been a great
opportunity, and what had she made of it? He felt a good deal put out.
It vexed him to think that this Englishman, with the traveling Briton’s
everlasting disposition to generalize whole mountain ranges from single
sample-grains of sand, would jump to the conclusion that American girls
were as dumb as himself—generalizing the whole tribe from this single
sample and she at her poorest, there being nothing at that table to
inspire her, give her a start, keep her from going to sleep. He made up
his mind that for the honor of the country he would bring these two
together again over the social board before long. There would be a
different result another time, he judged. He said to himself, with a
deep sense of injury, “He’ll put in his diary—they all keep
diaries—he’ll put in his diary that she was miraculously
uninteresting—dear, dear, but _wasn’t_ she!—I never saw the like—and
yet looking as beautiful as Satan, too—and couldn’t seem to do anything
but paw bread crumbs, and pick flowers to pieces, and look fidgety. And
it isn’t any better here in the Hall of Audience. I’ve had enough; I’ll
haul down my flag—the others may fight it out if they want to.”
He shook hands all around and went off to do some work which he said
was pressing. The idolaters were the width of the room apart; and
apparently unconscious of each other’s presence. The distance got
shortened a little, now. Very soon the mother withdrew. The distance
narrowed again. Tracy stood before a chromo of some Ohio politician
which had been retouched and chain-mailed for a crusading Rossmore, and
Gwendolen was sitting on the sofa not far from his elbow artificially
absorbed in examining a photograph album that hadn’t any photographs in
it.
The “Senator” still lingered. He was sorry for the young people; it had
been a dull evening for them. In the goodness of his heart he tried to
make it pleasant for them now; tried to remove the ill impression
necessarily left by the general defeat; tried to be chatty, even tried
to be gay. But the responses were sickly, there was no starting any
enthusiasm; he would give it up and quit—it was a day specially picked
out and consecrated to failures.
But when Gwendolen rose up promptly and smiled a glad smile and said
with thankfulness and blessing,—“_Must_ you go?” it seemed cruel to
desert, and he sat down again.
He was about to begin a remark when—when he didn’t. We have all been
there. He didn’t know how he knew his concluding to stay longer had
been a mistake, he merely knew it; and knew it for dead certain, too.
And so he bade goodnight, and went mooning out, wondering what he could
have done that changed the atmosphere that way. As the door closed
behind him those two were standing side by side, looking at that
door—looking at it in a waiting, second-counting, but deeply grateful
kind of way. And the instant it closed they flung their arms about each
other’s necks, and there, heart to heart and lip to lip—
“Oh, my God, she’s kissing it!”
Nobody heard this remark, because Hawkins, who bred it, only thought
it, he didn’t utter it. He had turned, the moment he had closed the
door, and had pushed it open a little, intending to re-enter and ask
what ill-advised thing he had done or said, and apologize for it. But
he didn’t re-enter; he staggered off stunned, terrified, distressed.
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