and darted into the store without a word. The man’s smiling eyes as they
turned away encountered Miss Abbie’s, in which was a troubled interest.
She had taken a piece of silver from her own purse. He smiled, as
perceiving a kindly impulse that matched his own; and she, to her own
later surprise, smiled too. The smile changed in a flash to a startled
look; all the color drifted out of her face, and she took a step forward
so hastily that she stumbled on her skirt. Recovering herself, she
dropped her purse; and a man who had just approached went down on one
knee to pick it up. But the tall man was too quick for him; a long arm
swooped in between the other’s outstretched hand and the gleaming bit
of lizard-skin on the bricks. The new-comer barely avoided a collision.
He did not take the escape with good-humor, scowling blackly as he made
a scramble, while still on his knee, at something behind the tall man’s
back. This must have been a handkerchief, since he immediately presented
a white flutter to Miss Courtlandt, bowing and murmuring, “You dropped
this too, I guess, madam.”
“Yes, thank you,” stammered Miss Courtlandt; “thank you very much, Mr.
Slater.” She entered the store by his side, but at the door she turned
her head for a parting nod of acknowledgment to the other. He remained
a second longer, staring at the dolls, and gnawing the ends of his
mustache, not irritated, but sharply thoughtful.
Thus she saw him, glancing out again, once more, when inside the store.
And through all the anguish of the moment—for she was in a dire
strait—she felt a faint pang that she should have been rude to this kind
stranger. In a feeble way she wondered, as they say condemned criminals
wonder at street sights on the way to the gallows, what he was thinking
of. But had he spoken his thought aloud she had not been the wiser, since
he was simply saying softly to himself, “Well, wouldn’t it kill you dead!”
Miss Abbie stopped at the glove-counter to buy a pair of gloves. As she
walked away she heard distinctly one shop-girl’s sigh and exclamation to
the other, “My, I wish I was her!”
A kind of quiver stirred Miss Abbie’s faded cold face. Her dark gray eyes
recoiled sidewise; then she stiffened from head to heel and passed out of
the store.
To a casual observer she looked annoyed; in reality she was both
miserable and humiliated. And once back in the shelter of the brougham
her inward torment showed plainly in her face.
Abigail Courtlandt was the second daughter of the house; never so admired
as Mabel, the oldest, who died, or Margaret, the youngest, who married
Judge Etheridge, and was now a widow, living with her widowed mother.
Abigail had neither the soft Hayward loveliness of Mabel and her mother,
nor the haughty beauty of Margaret, who was all a Courtlandt, yet she
was not uncomely. If her chin was too long, her forehead too high, her
ears a trifle too large, to offset these defects she had a skin of
exquisite texture, pale and clear, white teeth, and beautiful black brows.
She was thin, too thin; but her dressmaker was an artist, and Abbie
would have been graceful were she not so nervous, moving so abruptly,
and forever fiddling at something with her fingers. When she sat next
any one talking, it did not help that person’s complacency to have her
always sink slightly on the elbow further from her companion, as if
averting her presence. An embarrassed little laugh used to escape her
at the wrong moment. Withal, she was cold and stiff, although some keen
people fancied that her coldness and stiffness were no more than a mask
to shield a morbid shyness. These same people said that if she would
only forget herself and become interested in other people she would be a
lovable woman, for she had the kindest heart in the world. Unfortunately
all her thoughts concentred on herself. Like many shy people, Abbie was
vain. Diffidence as often comes from vanity, which is timid, as from
self-distrust. Abbie longed passionately not only to be loved, but to be
admired. She was loved, assuredly, but she was not especially admired.
Margaret Etheridge, with her courage, her sparkle, and her beauty,
was always the more popular of the sisters. Margaret was imperious,
but she was generous too, and never oppressed her following; only the
rebels were treated to those stinging speeches of hers. Those who loved
Margaret admired her with enthusiasm. No one admired poor Abbie with
enthusiasm. She was her father’s favorite child, but he died when she was
in short dresses; and, while she was dear to all the family, she did not
especially gratify the family pride.
Her hungry vanity sought refuge in its own creations. She busied herself
in endless fictions of reverie, wherein an imaginary husband and an
imaginary home of splendor appeased all her longings for triumph. While
she walked and talked and drove and sewed, like other people, only a
little more silent, she was really in a land of dreams.
Did her mother complain because she had forgotten to send the Book Club
magazines or books to the next lawful reader, she solaced herself by
visions of a book club in the future which she and “he” would organize,
and a reception of distinguished elegance which “they” would give, to
which the disagreeable person who made a fuss over nothing (meaning the
reader to whom reading was due) should not be invited—thereby reducing
her to humility and tears. But even the visionary tears of her offender
affected Abbie’s soft nature, and all was always forgiven.
Did Margaret have a swarm of young fellows disputing over her card at a
ball, while Abbie must sit out the dances, cheered by no livelier company
than that of old friends of the family, who kept up a water-logged
pretence of conversation that sank on the approach of the first new-comer
or a glimpse of their own daughters on the floor, Abbie through it all
was dreaming of the balls “they” would give, and beholding herself
beaming and gracious amid a worshipping throng.
These mental exercises, this double life that she lived, kept her
inexperienced. At thirty she knew less of the world than a girl in her
first season; and at thirty she met Ashton Clarke. Western society is
elastic, or Clarke never would have been on the edges even; he never did
get any further, and his morals were more dubious than his position; but
he was Abbie’s first impassioned suitor, and his flattering love covered
every crack in his manners or his habits. Men had asked her to marry them
before, but never had a man made love to her. For two weeks she was a
happy woman. Then came discovery, and the storm broke. The Courtlandts
were in a rage—except gentle Madam Courtlandt, who was broken-hearted and
ashamed, which was worse for Abbie. Jack, the older brother, was summoned
from Chicago. Ralph, the younger, tore home on his own account from Yale.
It was really a testimony to the family’s affection for Abbie that she
created such a commotion, but it did not impress her in that way. In the
end she yielded, but she yielded with a sense of cruel injustice done her.
Time proved Clarke worse than her people’s accusations; but time did not
efface what the boys had said, much less what the girls had said. They
forgot, of course; it is so much easier to forget the ugly words that we
say than those that are said to us. But she remembered that Jack felt
that Abbie never did have any sense, and that Ralph raged because she
did not even know a cad from a gentleman, and that Margaret, pacing the
floor, too angry to sit still, would not have minded so much had Abbie
made a fool of herself for a _man_; but she didn’t wait long enough to
discover what he was; she positively accepted the first thing with a
mustache on it that offered!
Time healed her heart, but not her crushed and lacerated vanity. And it
is a question whether we do not suffer more keenly, if less deeply, from
wounds to the self-esteem than to the heart. Generally we mistake the
former for the latter, and declare ourselves to have a sensitive heart,
when what we do have is only a thin-skinned vanity!
But there was no mistake about Abbie’s misery, however a moralist might
speculate concerning the cause. She suffered intensely. And she had no
confidant. She had not even her old fairyland of fancy, for love and
lovers were become hateful to her. At first she went to church—until an
unlucky difference with the rector’s wife at a church fair. Later it was
as much her unsatisfied vanity and unsatisfied heart as any spiritual
confusion that led her into all manner of excursions into the shadowy
border-land of the occult. She was a secret attendant on table-tippings
and séances; a reader of every kind of mystical lore that she could buy;
an habitual consulter of spiritual mediums and clairvoyants and seventh
sons and daughters and the whole tribe of charlatans. But the family had
not noticed. They were not afraid of the occult ones; they were glad to
have Abbie happy and more contented; and they concerned themselves no
further, as is the manner of families, being occupied with their own
concerns.
And so unguarded Abbie went to her evil fate. One morning, with her maid
Lucy, she went to see “the celebrated clairvoyant and seer, Professor
Rudolph Slater, the greatest revealer of the future in this or any other
century.”
Lucy looked askance at the shabby one-story saloons on the street, and
the dying lindens before the house. Her disapproval deepened as they went
up the wooden steps. The house was one of a tiny brick block, with wooden
cornices, and unshaded wooden steps in need not only of painting but
scrubbing.
The door opened into an entry which was dark, but not dark enough to
conceal the rents in the oil-cloth on the floor or the blotches on the
imitation oak paper of the walls.
Lucy sniffed; she was a faithful and affectionate attendant, and she used
considerable freedom with her mistress. “I don’t know about there being
spirits here, but there’s been lots of onions!” remarked Lucy. Nor did
her unfavorable opinion end with the approach to the sorcerer’s presence.
She maintained her wooden expression even sitting in the great man’s room
and hearing his speech.
Abbie did not see the hole in the green rep covering of the arm-chair,
nor the large round oil-stain on the faded roses of the carpet, nor the
dust on the Parian ornaments of the table; she was too absorbed in the
man himself.
If his surroundings were sordid, he was splendid in a black velvet jacket
and embroidered shirt-front sparkling with diamonds. He was a short man,
rather thick-set, and although his hair was gray, his face was young and
florid. The gray hair was very thick, growing low on his forehead and
curling. Abbie thought it beautiful. She thought his eyes beautiful also,
and spoke to Lucy of their wonderful blue color and soul-piercing gaze.
“I thought they were just awful impudent,” said Lucy. “I never did see a
man stare so, Miss Abbie; I wanted to slap him!”
“But his hair _was_ beautiful,” Abbie persisted; “and he said it used to
be straight as a poker, but the spirits curled it.”
“Why, Miss Abbie,” cried Lucy, “I could see the little straight ends
sticking out of the curls, that come when you do your hair up on irons.
I’ve frizzed my hair too many times not to know _them_.”
“But, Lucy,” said Abbie, in a low, shocked voice, “didn’t you feel
_something_ when he put on those handcuffs and sat before the cabinet in
the dark, and his control spoke, and we saw the hands? What do you think
of that?”
“I think it was him all the time,” said Lucy, doggedly.
“But, Lucy, _why_?”
“Finger-nails were dirty just the same,” said Lucy. Nor was there any
shaking her. But Abbie, under ordinary circumstances the most fastidious
of women, had not noted the finger-nails; one witching sentence had
captured her.
The moment he took her hand he had started violently. “Excuse me, madam,”
said he, “but are you not a medium _yourself_?”
“No—at least, I never was supposed to be,” fluttered Abbie, blushing.
“Then, madam, you don’t perhaps realize that you yourself possess
marvellous psychic power. I never saw any one who had so much, when it
had not been developed.”
To-day Abbie ground her teeth and wrung her hands in an impotent agony of
rage, remembering her pleasure. He would not take any money; no, he said,
there had been too much happiness for him in meeting such a favorite of
the spiritual influences as she.
“But you will come again,” he pleaded; “only don’t ask me to take money
for such a great privilege. _You_ caynt see the invisible guardians that
hover around you!”
His refusal of her gold piece completed his victory over Abbie’s
imagination. She was sure he could not be a cheat, since he would not
be paid. She did come again; she came many times, always with Lucy, who
grew more and more suspicious, but could not make up her mind to expose
Abbie’s folly to her people. “Think of all the things she gives me!”
argued Lucy. “Miss Abbie’s always been a kind of stray sheep in the
family; they are all kind of hard on her. I can’t bear to be the one to
get her into trouble.”
So Lucy’s conscience squirmed in silence until the fortune-teller
persuaded Abbie to allow him to throw her into a trance. The wretched
woman in the carriage cowered back farther into the shade, living over
that ghastly hour when Lucy at her elbow was as far away from her
helpless soul as if at the poles. How his blue eyes glowed! How the flame
in them contracted to a glittering spark, like the star-tip of the silver
wand, waving and curving and interlacing its dazzling flashes before her
until her eyeballs ached! How of a sudden the star rested, blinking at
her between his eyes, and she looked; she must look at it, though her
will, her very self, seemed to be sucked out of her into the gleaming
whirlpool of that star!
She made a feeble rally under a woful impression of fright and misery
impending, but in vain; and, with the carelessness of a creature who is
chloroformed, she let her soul drift away.
When she opened her eyes, Lucy was rubbing her hands, while the
clairvoyant watched the two women motionless and smiling.
The fear still on her prompted her first words, “Let me go home now!”
“Not now,” begged the conjurer; “you must go into a trance again. I want
you to see something that will be very interesting to you. Please, Miss
Courtlandt.” He spoke in the gentlest of tones, but there was a repressed
assurance about his manner that was infuriating to Lucy.
“Miss Abbie’s going home,” she cried, angrily; “we ain’t going to have
any more of this nonsense. Come, Miss Abbie.” She touched her on her
arm, but trembling Abbie fixed her eyes on the conjurer, and he, in that
gentle tone, answered:
“Certainly, if she wishes; but she _wants_ to stay. You want to stay,
Miss Courtlandt, don’t you?”
“Yes, I want to stay,” said Abbie; and her heart was cold within her, for
the words seemed to say themselves, even while she struggled frantically
against the utterance of them.
[Illustration: “‘SHE MUST LOOK AT IT’”]
“Do you mean it, Miss Abbie?” the girl repeated, sorely puzzled.
“Certainly, just once more,” said Miss Abbie. And she sat down again in
her chair.
What she saw she never remembered. Lucy said it was all nonsense she
talked, and, anyhow, she whispered so low that nobody could catch more
than a word, except that she seemed to be promising something over and
over again. In a little while the conjurer whispered to her, and with
a few passes of his hand consciousness returned. She rose, white and
shaken, but quite herself again. He bade the two good-bye, and bowed
them out with much suavity of manner. Abbie returned not a single word.
As they drove home, the maid spoke, “Miss Abbie, Miss Abbie—you won’t go
there again, will you?”
“Never,” cried Abbie—“_never_!”
But the next morning, after a sleepless night, there returned the same
horrible, dragging longing to see him; and with the longing came the same
fear that had suffocated her will the day before—a fear like the fear of
dreams, formless, reasonless, more dreadful than death.
Impelled by this frightful force that did not seem to have anything to do
with her, herself, she left the house and boarded a street-car. She felt
as if a demon were riding her soul, spurring it wherever he willed. She
went to a little park outside the city, frequented by Germans and almost
deserted of a week-day. And on her way she remembered that this was what
she had promised him to do.
He was waiting to assist her from the car. As he helped her alight, she
noticed his hands and his nails. They were neat enough; yet she suddenly
recalled Lucy’s words; and suddenly she saw the man, in his tasteless,
expensive clothes, with his swagger and the odor of whiskey about him,
as any other gentlewoman would have seen him. Her fright had swept all
his seer’s glamour away; he was no longer the mystical ruler of the
spirit-world; he was a squalid adventurer—and her master!
He made her realize that in five minutes. “You caynt help yourself, Miss
Courtlandt,” he said, and she believed him.
Whether it were the influence of a strong will on a hysterical
temperament and a morbidly impressible fancy, or whether it were a black
power from the unseen, beyond his knowledge but not beyond his abuse,
matters little so far as poor Abbie Courtlandt was concerned; on either
supposition, she was powerless.
She left him, hating him as only slavery and fear can hate; but she
left him pledged to bring him five hundred dollars in the morning and
to marry him in the afternoon; and now, having kept her word about the
money, she was driving home, clinching in her cold fingers the slip of
paper containing the address of a justice of the peace in the suburbs,
where she must meet him and be bound to this unclean vulture, who would
bear her away from home and kindred and all fair repute and peace.
A passion of revolt shook her. She _must_ meet him? Why must she? Why not
tear his address to bits? Why not drive fast, fast home, and tell her
mother that she was going to Chicago about some gowns that night? Why
not stay there at Jack’s, and let this fiend, who harried her, wait in
vain? She twisted the paper and ground her teeth; yet she knew that she
shouldn’t tear it, just as we all know we shall not do the frantic things
that we imagine, even while we are finishing up the minutest details the
better to feign ourselves in earnest. Poor, weak Abbie knew that she
never would dare to confess her plight to her people. No, she could never
endure another family council of war.
“There is only one way,” she muttered. Instead of tearing the paper she
read it:
“_Be at Squire L. B. Leitner’s, 398 S. Miller Street, at 3 p.m. sharp._”
And now she did tear the odious message, flinging the pieces furiously
out of the carriage window.
The same tall, dark, square-shouldered man that she had seen in front of
the shop-window was passing, and immediately bent and picked up some of
the shreds. For an instant the current of her terror turned, but only for
an instant. “What could a stranger do with an address?” She sank into the
corner, and her miserable thoughts harked back to the trap that held her.
Like one in a nightmare, she sat, watching the familiar sights of the
town drift by, to the accompaniment of her horses’ hoofs and jingling
chains. “This is the last drive I shall ever take,” she thought.
She felt the slackening of speed, and saw (still in her nightmare) the
broad stone steps and the stately, old-fashioned mansion, where the
daintiest of care and the trimmest of lawns had turned the old ways of
architecture from decrepitude into pride.
Lunch was on the table, and her mother nodded her pretty smile as she
passed. Abbie had a box of flowers in her hand, purchased earlier in the
morning; these she brought into the dining-room. There were violets for
her mother and American Beauties for Margaret. “They looked so sweet I
had to buy them,” she half apologized. Going through the hall, she heard
her mother say, “How nice and thoughtful Abbie has grown lately!” And
Margaret answered, “Abbie is a good deal more of a woman than I ever
expected her to be.”
All her life she had grieved because—so she morbidly put it to
herself—her people despised her; now that it was too late, was their
approval come to her only to be flung away with the rest? She returned to
the dining-room and went through the farce of eating. She forced herself
to swallow; she talked with an unnatural ease and fluency. Several
times her sister laughed at her words. Her mother smiled on her fondly.
Margaret said, “Abbie, why can’t you go to Chicago with me to-night and
have a little lark? You have clothes to fit, too; Lucy can pack you up,
and we can take the night train.”
“I _would_,” chimed in Mrs. Courtlandt. “You look so ill, Abbie. I think
you must be bilious; a change will be nice for you. And I’ll ask Mrs.
Curtis over for a few days while you are gone, and we will have a little
tea-party of our own and a little lark for ourselves.”
Never before had Margaret wished Abbie to accompany her on “a little
lark.” Abbie assented like a person in a dream; only she must go down to
the bank after luncheon, she said.
Up-stairs in her own chamber she gazed about the pretty furnishings
with blank eyes. There was the writing-desk that her mother gave her
Christmas, there glistened the new dressing-table that Margaret helped
her about finishing, and there was the new paper with the sprawly flowers
that she thought so ugly in the pattern, and took under protest, and
liked so much on the walls. How often she had been unjust to her people,
and yet it had turned out that they were right! Her thoughts rambled on
through a thousand memories, stumbling now into pit-falls of remorse over
long-forgotten petulance and ingratitude and hardenings of her heart
against kindness, again recovering and threading some narrow way of
possible release, only to sink as the wall closed again hopelessly about
her.
For the first time she arraigned her own vanity as the cause of her long
unhappiness. Well, it was no use now. All she could do for them would be
to drift forever out of their lives. She opened the drawer, and took a
vial from a secret corner. “It is only a little faintness and numbness,
and then it is all over,” she thought, as she slipped the vial into the
chatelaine bag at her waist. In a sudden gust of courage she took it out
again; but that instinctive trusting to hope to the last, which urges
the most desperate of us on delay, held her hand. She put back the vial,
and, without a final glance, went down the stairs. It was in her heart to
have one more look at her mother, but at the drawing-room door she heard
voices, and happening to glance up at the clock, she saw how near the
time the hour was; so she hurried through the hall into the street.
During the journey she hardly felt a distinct thought. But at intervals
she would touch the outline of the vial at her waist.
The justice’s office was in the second story of a new brick building that
twinkled all over with white mortar. Below, men laughed, and glasses
and billiard-balls clicked behind bright new green blinds. A steep,
dark wooden stairway, apparently trodden by many men who chewed tobacco
and regarded the world as their cuspidor, led between the walls up to
a narrow hall, at the farther end of which a door showed on its glass
panels the name L. B. Leitner, J.P.
Abbie rapped feebly on the glass, to see the door instantly opened by
Slater himself. He had donned a glossy new frock-coat and a white tie.
His face was flushed.
“I didn’t intend you should have to enter here alone,” he exclaimed,
drawing her into the room with both hands; “I was just going outside to
wait for you. Allow me to introduce Squire Leitner. Squire, let me make
you acquainted with Miss Courtlandt, the lady who will do me the honor.”
He laughed a little nervous laugh. He was plainly affecting the manner of
the fortunate bridegroom, and not quite at ease in his rôle. Neither of
the two other men in the room returned any answering smile.
The justice, a bald, gray-bearded, kindly, and worried-looking man, bowed
and said, “Glad to meet you, ma’am,” in a tone as melancholy as his
wrinkled brow.
“Squire is afraid you are not here with your own free-will and consent,
Abbie,” said Slater, airily; “but I guess you can relieve his mind.”