From Dorothy Newhall’s favorite chair, where often she sat cross-legged
like a tailor, she could look through the broad library window, across
velvet lawns and a flowering hedge, and thence straight down the long,
white boulevard of Walton Way. It was characteristic of a certain part
of her that in late years had come into the ascendency that she
preferred this view—that which surveyed the fashionable traffic of the
boulevard—to that from the wide glass spaces of the sun parlor, the
vista of dark pines, deep in shadow, and the fields surrendering to the
ardor of the Georgia sun. Dorothy’s father-in-law had contrived the sun
parlor for his own delight, and in his lifetime had been rather
intolerant of the stream of motor vehicles that flowed ceaselessly up
Augusta’s most fashionable street; but they were all part of Dorothy’s
life. To-day she saw the colored messenger boy, pedaling stiffly up the
grade, before ever he had passed the great, fashionable tourist hotel on
the brow of the hill.
She had time in plenty to watch him, and nothing better to do. She
clasped her slender, lovely hands—hands that might have come to life
upon a Da Vinci canvas—under the delicate curve of her chin, lowered
her wonderful violet eyes, and watched. The boy did not look for house
numbers as she rather expected him to do. Evidently he knew just where
he was going, likely to some famous house like her own. Her gaze had
been half-dreamy before, but now it was suddenly, surprisingly alert.
Since tragedy had overtaken this household, something over a year
before, she had had full cause to watch for telegrams. A swift
premonition told her that the boy was heading straight toward her door.
The fact she had felt the same fear on many previous occasions and it
had always come to nothing did not lessen the poignancy of the moment.
She had no great sense of surprise when the boy turned into her own
beautifully curving driveway, circled to the wide veranda, leisurely
propped up his wheel, and passed beyond the range of her vision as he
mounted the veranda steps to her door. Dorothy got up slowly from her
chair. It required some effort to move so slowly; and she did it only to
convince herself that she had not yet yielded entirely to the surging
fear that clutched her heart. She walked freely through the door, took
time to glance once at a great bouquet of flowers, and her hand was
steady as she signed for the message. Then her fluttering fingers tore
it open.
The next moment was a blank forever in her life. She had no memory of
that first reading; yet when consciousness streamed back to her, a
moment later, she lay half-sprawled over the great settee in the alcove
just off the hall, and she knew the burden, if not the exact wording, of
the message.
The yellow slip still lay in her hand. She did not look at it at once.
Instead she lay with closed eyes, and the world swept through space, and
time moved as in the grayness of half-sleep. She raised her hand slowly,
and the message came with it; and slowly, laboriously, she read it
through again.
It had been filed in the wireless office at Pirate Cove, in Alaska—a
place of which she had never heard—and had unquestionably come by
wireless to Seattle, whence it was sent by wire across the continent. It
did not mince words:
MRS. PETER NEWHALL,
Walton Way,
Augusta, Georgia.
Papers found on dead body of man picked up on beach identify him
as Peter Newhall of Augusta, Georgia, though known locally by
another name. Death resulted from drowning and mutilation by
reefs. He left instructions for immediate burial also that you
be notified and personal effects be sent you. These are being
forwarded. Body was embalmed and given decent burial by my crew
near place of finding. If I can be of any other service please
command me.
CAPTAIN JOHANSEN,
Steamer _Norwood_.
Just yesterday, it seemed to her, in girlhood, she had tried to imagine
how she would receive such news as this,—the sudden taking-off of some
one she loved. To conceive of such a thing had been almost impossible to
her. Yet here it was, bald-faced on the yellow paper; and still the
boulevard lay white under the winter sun; she still moved and breathed,
smelled flowers and knew the onward march of time. No tears came yet;
instead only a limitless amazement. Indeed her eyes felt dry as the hand
after too many immersions in water.
She _had_ loved this man who had died. No one dared deny that. It was
true that he had often failed to understand her—that he was careless of
her needs, that he had been insanely jealous without cause—but she had
loved him and had continued to love him throughout all those cold, hard
weeks before the tragedy, after his drinking had ceased being a joke to
her and her friends and had become a subject avoided in his presence. He
had failed to understand her, to recognize the artist-self in her that
demanded expression and companionship, yet she had given him her love,
her hand, a few of her best years,—indeed, all she had to give. She had
done her part; and no blame could be laid on her. She had been faithful
to him, and faithful until now to the image that her mind kept of what
he had been.
At present it did not occur to her that she had perhaps failed to
understand him, too. Her thought had never taken this bent; indeed she
was not trained to imagine another’s point of view. Fortunately it was a
matter of training only, not innate selfishness. There was no hint of
selfishness in her wide-open, frank, clear eyes of such a marvelous
violet hue; no evil lines about her lips or running vertically between
her fine, silken brows; nothing but friendliness and open-heartedness in
the habitual curl of her red, rather petulant mouth. But this mouth was
not curling now. The news typed on the yellow slip had gone home, and
she realized that this matter of mutual understanding between herself
and Peter was closed and done forever. Their great problems had been
instantly, tragically solved.
She read the message again. It had been sent from Alaska, the far North,
thousands of weary miles distant from her and thousands of miles farther
from the corner of the earth where she had thought he had been hiding.
She had not dreamed but that he had fled to South America, as Ivan
Ishmin had advised. Certainly he had gone to Savannah and had boarded
the disreputable trader of which Ivan had told him; but some adventure
of the journey had fetched him up in the far North rather than in Rio de
Janeiro. The letters Ivan had given him to his great friends in the
Brazilian capital—letters to facilitate his flight back to the
frontier—had evidently been no use to him, after all.
For months past Dorothy had lived in constant fear of his capture. Such
news she had expected in the telegram to-day, that in spite of Ivan’s
heroic efforts to cover up the fugitive’s tracks, the arm of the law had
seized him at last. Ivan had withheld his testimony to the very last,
running the risk of being haled into court himself on the charge of
assisting a murderer to escape, not telling the tragic story of what he
had seen and taken part in on the deck of the motor boat until it was
veritably forced from him at the inquiry several days later, but she had
not dared to believe that Peter could escape the hue and cry that was
subsequently raised. But now this was over, at least. Peter could never
be brought to earthly justice. He could not be brought back in irons,
nor could he return to her in any way at all. This was the close of the
whole, tragic chapter. He had been destined for tragedy, this laughing
husband of hers; and surely she had shared in it to the full. But this
was the end, even as she might have expected.
The truth grew upon her like a cloud advancing over the horizon of her
thought. It was dim, at first, hardly to be believed; but now the
knowledge was like a stone wall, not to be crossed or encircled. Swift,
stabbing darts of pain began to pierce her heart at ever narrowing
intervals: they seemed like actual blades of steel.
The full shock of such news as this scarcely ever sinks home at once.
Rather it was like a bullet wound, blunting at first, but later
shriveling the body with pain. Dorothy was known, throughout her
beautiful resident city, for the unfailing loveliness of her
appearance—eyes always bright, cheeks flushed, quaint frocks dainty and
fresh, bobbed curls, clustering in dark glory about her head and around
her childish, slender neck and throat—but her nearest friends would
hardly have known her now. The lovely dull-red glow on her brown cheeks
had faded, her sensuous mouth was drawn and haggard with agony, her eyes
like dark blotches below the brows. The realization of what had occurred
deepened and spread until it filled her known world. It was like a great
weight that crushed her, remorselessly, to the earth.
She bowed her lovely, bobbed head into the cushion of the divan; and the
blessing of tears was hers at last. The long hours of the afternoon
dragged away. She was miserably alone: her mother was out of the city,
even old Rose, her colored mammy, did not know of her grief and thus
could not come to comfort her; and Ivan—on whom, in these past months,
she had begun to lean—was in high communion with the gods as, his
violin tucked under his clear-cut chin, he practiced lovingly in his
studio.
She was aroused at last by the sharp ring of the telephone bell and the
shuffling steps of Nora, the second girl, who went to answer it. A
moment later the servant came to the doorway.
“He say it’s Mistah Ishmin,” the servant told her stolidly. “He want to
know if you feel like comin’ to de ’phone——”
Dorothy hesitated, started to instruct Nora to repeat a message, then
got up and went to the ‘phone herself. Ivan would be quick to come to
her when he knew the tragic contents of the telegram. He was always a
strong arm to lean on: even Peter had granted him this. Yet the expected
surge of relief at his calling did not immediately materialize, and the
groping sense of loss remained.
“My dear girl, I have just heard the awful news,” he began in his
gentle, comforting voice. Even over the ‘phone she caught the dim hint
of his accent,—an almost imperceptible purring tone that went through
every sound, like the eternal murmur that woodsmen hear, running through
the silence of the forest. No man of her acquaintance spoke such perfect
English; indeed his speech was more classic and refined than any one of
her American-born friends. The fact that he was native of a far,
mysterious country enhanced him in her eyes rather than prejudiced her
against him. The tone was full, overflowing with consideration and
feeling for her; and she wondered anew at the refinement, the wonderful
modulation of his well-bred voice. No wonder that voice won women’s
hearts. It was a highly flexible organ, reflecting perfectly every shade
of his mood. “I just read it, in the papers,” he went on, “and I’m
wondering if it would make you feel worse to have me come out——”
“I want you to come very much,” she answered simply.
“Perhaps you’d rather wait—I could come out later just as well—you can
‘phone me when you want me,” he went on, in his instinctive, well-bred
effort to put her at her ease. “Maybe you’d like to be alone for these
first hours, but if, later, I can help in any way, I am always ready.”
“No, I really want you to come.—And bring the Stradivarius, if you
will. I think it will help—to hear that.”
Ivan hung up, and as she waited for him to come she sent Nora after the
latest paper. She had not expected that the news would be made public so
soon. Evidently it was no longer her own secret, but had been sent by
wire around the world. She found the article on the first page, and saw
with relief it was entirely fair:
Pirate Cove, Alaska, December 2nd—The body of Peter Newhall, of
Augusta, Georgia, was picked up dead on the beach on the north
coast of Alaska Peninsula. He was a victim of the wreck of the
cannery-boat _Jupiter_ that went to pieces on the rocks in her
effort to aid the auxiliary schooner _Vigten_, which was in
distress.
* * * * *
The above news came as a great shock to the entire city to-day.
Mr. Newhall was a member of one of the South’s most ancient and
distinguished families; and although the last part of his life
has been overtaken with tragedy, his friends remember him for
the good friend, chivalrous gentleman, and social favorite that
he was throughout the years of his young manhood.
Peter Newhall was born in this city thirty-six years ago, the
son of Col. Newhall of Gettysburg fame. He was married two years
ago to Miss Dorothy Stanhope of Savannah.
The affair that led to his downfall occurred in a motor-boat
party on the Savannah River a year ago last summer. According to
testimony brought out at the inquiry Peter had sought a bitter
quarrel with Mr. Ivan Ishmin, a violinist of international fame
who was spending the season at Aiken, South Carolina. When the
men were at the verge of blows, Paul Sarichef, Ishmin’s
secretary, interfered in Ishmin’s behalf, and turning on him in
a fury, Newhall was heard to threaten to throw him out of the
boat into the river.
Ishmin himself was the sole observer of the tragic outcome of
the quarrel, and torn between grief at the death of his
secretary and loyalty to his friend Newhall, it was with the
greatest difficulty that his testimony was drawn from him at the
inquiry. Later this same night Ishmin was aroused by angry
voices, and he left his stateroom to find his secretary, Paul
Sarichef, and Newhall struggling on the deck; and before he
could interfere, Newhall had hurled the unfortunate Russian into
the water. Ishmin immediately dived to rescue him, but he saw
the man go down for the third time before he could reach his
side. Almost crazed with grief Ishmin spent most of the night in
the river trying to rescue his friend’s body, but though once he
saw it drifting, he lost it in the darkness and it was never
recovered.
Not even the officers of the law, though making every effort to
apprehend Newhall, believed that it was a wilful, premeditated
murder. Newhall was deeply under the influence of liquor at the
time, and it is believed that he committed the crime in a burst
of drunken rage. According to Mrs. Newhall’s testimony Newhall
had wakened from a drunken stupor the next morning with no
memory whatever of either threatening Sarichef on the deck or of
throwing him overboard. He fled to Western Alaska—far out on
the Peninsula toward Siberia—and the above telegraphic dispatch
completes the tragic story.
She read the piece through, then washed her tear-reddened eyes and
waited for the sound of Ivan’s long, low roadster on the drive. She
resolved at once to keep a brave front in his presence, mostly because
of a great good-sportsmanship that Peter had found and loved in her long
ago, and partly, perhaps, for purely feminine reasons that were—by a
long stretch of the imagination—almost disloyalty to Peter’s memory.
She had always cared to appear at her best in Ivan’s presence. She
secretly wondered if this were not, after all, an indication that what
he had begged for was his at last,—her heart.
Had her love gone out to him in these past, bleak, miserable months of
mourning? It is true that he had always attracted her with his striking
good looks that almost constituted beauty, the charm of his manner, most
of all his wonderful music. He had always suggested a splendid tiger to
her, lithe, graceful, quivering with restrained power, marvelously
subtle and deft. His ardent attentions to her—while other women tried
in vain to lionize and run after him—had been immensely flattering to
her. But both of these things had been true even before Peter’s
disgrace, and she did not confuse them with heart’s desire. However, in
the last few months she had found herself regarding him in a different
light. He had been her almost constant companion, her consolation, a
tower of strength to lean on. The great sea of tenderness that in her
first months of marriage had been Peter’s had not flowed out to him yet;
but there was, indeed, absolute respect, the deepest admiration, a sense
of need, perhaps even—in certain mysterious hours—a feeling of deep
fear. He fascinated her, this master violinist from the East. And there
was no barrier between them now. The divorce Ivan had urged upon her
would not now be necessary; the news from far Alaska had made her free.
In a moment Ivan himself was standing at her side, his countenance
clouded in sympathy for her. She was ever amazed at this man. He was
tall and looked slender; but she knew the iron in those long, easily
flowing muscles. Once he had lifted her down from her horse—long and
long ago—and she remembered yet the hardness of steel that had reached
her through the caressing gentleness of that embrace. Their lips had met
that day—illicitly—but he had begged her pardon with a gallantry that
even her gallant husband could not have equalled; and had been the model
of discretion thereafter. There was a darkness, a foreign look in his
handsome face that fascinated her even as it estranged her, something
Oriental and mysterious that she could not exactly trace or analyze.
Ishmin was of noble blood, but it was the blood of a race oceans and
centuries apart from hers in ideas, in philosophy, in attitude toward
life.
He had come out of Russia at the beginning of the revolution, and was
hailed at once as a new master of the violin. Before that time he was
widely known in the theater of Petrograd and the Russian court, but he
had not cared to seek laurels abroad. He had told her of his vivid,
romantic youth in a great, weird, ancestral castle lost in the wild
fastnesses of the Siberian side of the Ural Mountains. She never thought
of him as a Slav; indeed, he was almost pure Mongol, and the Oriental
strain revealed itself in his high cheek bones, his black, glossy hair,
most of all in the almost imperceptible slant of his glittering,
musician’s eyes. His hand itself was a miracle to her,—slender,
long-fingered, throbbing with his musician’s passion, ineffably deft and
agile.
“My dear girl!” he told her, his thin face lighting. He took her hand,
bowed, and touched it to his lips. Then they took seats, side by side,
on the big divan. His voice streamed on, comforting, cheering not only
with his carefully chosen though swift-flowing words, but by the
exquisite modulation of its tones.
“I suppose you’ll never forgive me,” he said at last, in a more quiet
hour.
“I don’t see how I owe you anything but gratitude——”
“You know what I mean. You remember—that morning—after the trouble.
You remember that when Peter wakened from his drunken sleep and could
not remember the fight on the deck at all, he wanted to stay and fight
the thing through the courts? It was I, you remember—of course with
your help—who induced him to flee. And his flight has ended—by that.”
He pointed to the telegram.
“I don’t see how it can be held against you, in the least degree,”
Dorothy assured him earnestly. “You were kind—generous—wonderful all
the way through.” Her voice dropped a tone. “Besides, this is no
worse—better, in fact—that he should die doing a decent thing—going
to the help of a sinking ship—than to die—in the prison on Elbert
Street!”
“There would have been some way out! Life imprisonment, at the
worst——”
“Life imprisonment! No, Ivan—not for Peter. Liberty was always a
passion with him—with all his race, for that matter—and he’d rather be
dead than in prison. I’ve got that consolation at least.”
“How amazed I am that this should come from the North when we both
supposed he was in South America.”
She looked at him quickly. There was no doubt about the genuineness of
this amazement. It was of no great importance—plainly the outcome of
some minor incident of his flight—that Peter should have fled north
instead of south as planned; yet she got the idea that Ivan was
profoundly stirred and shaken. He saw her look of surprise and turned
quickly in explanation. “He took such a chance, Dorothy! I had a perfect
course laid out for him—one that no one could have followed—but up
there, in American territory, he was in hourly risk of arrest! It
frightens me to think of the risk he ran——”
“But there is no risk now!” she told him grimly. “He’s past all
that——”
“Yes. Perhaps it’s for the best. Try not to mourn too much, little girl.
He would have been a marked man, a fugitive from justice, all his life.
This way he died honorably. Perhaps it was for the best.”
To turn the current of her thought he took his violin—a marvelous thing
of shell-like mahogany—from its case, and standing beside the window,
he began to play. He had always told her that brilliant, adoring throngs
could not draw the music out of him that she could; and she believed
him. He chose the simple but eternally beautiful Schubert’s Serenade,
and at the first round, perfect, moving note, her heart leaped into her
throat.
He was wooing her with his music. The marvelous succession of sounds was
an actual appeal to her. She stole a look at his face: it was white with
exultation; his chin embraced the instrument, his hand caressed it.
He was telling her of his love,—a love that would go through fire or
water, triumph or disgrace. She need never doubt its reality, its
genuineness. She felt, that moment, he would renounce his high place and
go to the end of the world for her, that there was no sacrifice he would
not make to win her, no lengths to which he would not go. It was a love
that glorified her, but yet it some way appalled her too.
It was not the kind of love that Peter had given her,—tender, almost
fatherly, a tolerant, protective love and yet strong with that eternal
strength of the Anglo-Saxon. Peter had been bitterly jealous at last,
but it had taken many little indiscretions—harmless, truly, but yet
doubtless intolerable from his point of view—to make him so. She would
not dare play thus with Ivan! His jealousy would be like a firebrand,
his hate like a dagger blade. Peter could not have hated any one if he
had tried. Hate was not in him; the madness that dwells in the cups, not
hatred, had impelled the reckless, tragic deed on the motor boat more
than a year before. It was true that he had now and then given way to
violent anger, wild and ungoverned as the storms that sweep down the
North Sea and wash his ancestral home; but he could not cherish a grudge
or bear malice, and his tolerance, his finely developed sense of right
and wrong, most of all his eternal fairness toward his foes, would keep
him from any deliberate crime. It was not thus with Ivan. His crimes
would never be the reckless ones of anger: they would be deliberate,
carefully covered, remorseless.
The Anglo-Saxon does not live for women alone; he is too busy with his
wars. He does not even prefer to do his drinking with women; rather he
prefers other men, comrades in arms. When there are no wars he gives the
fighting side of himself to his business, perhaps to sport or adventure.
To his wife he gives comradeship, the tenderness that is all that he
knows of love and unceasing, vigilant protection; but she is merely the
dearest part of his life rather than his life itself, the shelter and
warmth that he comes to after his day of toil or battle. The love that
Ivan told her of in his soaring music was not like this. It was hot,
deadly, passionate rather than tender; and Christian fellowship between
man and woman had no part in it. Peter would not have ruined himself
financially, perhaps he would not have even broken old and dear
friendships with other men in order to hold her love. In the hour of
need he would have gone to the sea’s depths for her, but he would have
taken the stand that if he could not hold her love without needless
sacrifice it was not worth holding. This man who played Schubert’s
Serenade was of another race and another mind. He demanded her with a
passion that brooked no interference.
He was bewildering her now with the incredible music,—playing of a
white moon that poured down into summer gardens, of dream castles far
away, of exotic fragrances. He was pleading with her now; and she could
not remember that Peter had ever pleaded, except for forgiveness after
some blundering wrong. His desire for her was articulate in every note.
Yet she did not make full response in her heart. In a way Ivan defeated
his own ends. The very beauty of his music recalled to Dorothy a
tenderness that was gone, a grace and a happiness that she had found in
Peter’s arms in those first glorious months of their marriage. There was
no fierceness then, no white heat, but there were holy hours breathless
with a sweet, unearthly happiness. There was comradeship such as she
could never, though she loved him to the world’s end, feel for this
fiery artist of another race; there was a mutual joy in the adventure of
living, and there was laughter, not to be heard again.
It was for the best that Peter was dead, Ivan had said. Yet the words
stuck in her throat when she tried to repeat them.