tall hollyhocks behind her which were crowded with white and yellow
rosettes of bloom. She had her long dress wound around her, holding it
up with one hand, and the other hand and arm hung whitely at her side in
the folds. She stood perfectly still and looked at the man in the porch,
on whose face the moon was shining. He looked more than ever to her like
something wonderful beyond common. The man had really a wonderful
beauty. He was not very young, but no years could affect the classic
outlines of his face, and his colorless skin was as clear and smooth as
a boys. And more than anything to be remarked was the majestic serenity
of his expression. He looked like a man who all his life had dominated
not only other men, but himself. And there was, besides the appearance
of the man, a certain fascination of mystery attached to him. Nobody in
Adams knew just how or where he had spent his life. The old Ware house
had been occupied for many years only by an old caretaker, who still
remained. This caretaker was a man, but with all the housekeeping
ability of a woman. He was never seen by Adams people except when he
made his marketing expeditions. He was said to keep the house in
immaculate order, and he also took care of the garden. He had always
been in the Ware household, and there was a tradition that in his youth
he had been a very handsome man. “As handsome as any handsome woman you
ever saw,” the old inhabitants said. He had come not very long before
Joseph Ware, the father of Hyacinthus, had died. Joseph's wife had
survived him several years. She died quite suddenly of pneumonia when
still a comparatively young woman and when Hyacinthus was a boy. Then a
maternal uncle had come and taken the boy away with him, to live nobody
knew where nor how, until his return a few months since.
There was, of course, much curiosity in Adams concerning him, and the
curiosity was not, generally speaking, of a complimentary tendency. Some
young and marriageable girls esteemed him very handsome, but the
majority of the people said that he was odd and stuck up, as his mother
had been before him. He led a quiet life with his books, and he had a
room on the ground-floor fitted up as a studio. In there he made things
of clay and plaster, as the Adams people said, and curious-looking boxes
were sent away by express. It was rumored that a statue by him had been
exhibited in New York.
Some faces show more plainly in the moonlight, or one imagines so.
Hyacinthus Ware's showed as clearly as if carved in marble. He in
reality looked so like a statue that the girl standing in the enclosure
of box with the background of hollyhocks had for a moment imagined that
he might be one of his own statues. The eyes, either closed in sleep or
appearing to be, heightened the effect.
But the girl was not now in a position to do more than tremble at the
plight into which she had gotten herself. It seemed to her that no girl,
certainly no girl in Adams, had ever done such a thing. Her freedom of
mind now failed her. Another heredity asserted itself. She felt very
much as her mother or her great-grandmother might have felt in a similar
predicament. It was as horrible as dreams she had sometimes had of
walking into church in her nightgear. She was sure that she must not
move, and the more so because at a very slight motion of hers there had
been a motion as if in response from the man on the porch. Then there
was another drawback. Some roses grew behind the hollyhocks, and her
skirt was caught. She had felt a little pull at her skirt when she
essayed a slight tentative motion. Therefore, in order to fly she could
not merely slip away; she would have to make extra motions to
disentangle her dress. She therefore remained perfectly still in the
attitude of shrinking and flight. She thought that her only course until
the man should wake and enter the house; then she could slip away. She
had not much fear of being discovered unless by motion; she stood in
shadow. Besides, the man had no reason whatever to apprehend the
presence of a girl in his garden at that hour, and would not be looking
for her. She had an intuitive feeling that unless she moved he would not
perceive her. Cramps began to assail even her untrammelled limbs. To
maintain one pose so long was almost an impossible feat. She kept hoping
that he would wake, that he must wake. It did not seem possible that he
could sit there much longer and not wake; and yet the night was so
hot--hot, probably, even in the great square rooms of the old Ware
house. It was quite natural that he should prefer sleeping there in the
cool out-of-door if he could, but an unreasoning rage seized upon her
that he should. She rebelled against the very freedom in another which
she had always coveted for herself.
And still he sat there, as white and beautiful and motionless as a
statue, and still she kept her enforced attitude. She suffered tortures,
but she said to herself that she would not yield, that she would not
move. Rather than have that man discover her at that hour in his garden,
she would suffer everything. It did not occur to her that possibly this
suffering might have consequences which she did not foresee. All that
she considered was a simple question of endurance; but all at once her
head swam, and she sank down at the feet of the hollyhocks like a broken
flower herself. She had completely lost consciousness.
When she came to herself she was lying on the back porch of the old Ware
house and a pile of pillows was under her head, and she had a confused
impression of vanishing woman draperies, which later on she thought she
must have been mistaken about, as she knew, of course, that there was no
woman there. Hyacinthus Ware himself was bending over her and fanning
her with a great fan of peacock feathers, and the old caretaker had a
little glass of wine on a tray. The first thing Sarah heard was
Hyacinthus's voice, evenly modulated, with a curious stillness about it.
“I think if you can drink a little of this wine,” he said, “you will
feel better.”
Sarah looked up at the face looking down at her, and all at once a
conviction seized upon her that he had not been asleep at all; that he
had pretended to be so, and had been enjoying himself at her expense,
simply waiting to see how long she would stand there. He probably
thought that she--she, Sarah Lynn--had come into his garden at midnight
to see him. A sudden fury seized upon her, but when she tried to raise
herself she found that she could not. Then she reached out her hand for
the wine, and drank it with a fierce gulp, spilling some of it over her
dress. It affected her almost instantly. She raised herself, the wine
giving her strength, and she looked with a haughty anger at the man,
whose expression seemed something between compassion and mocking.
“You saw me all the time,” she said. “You did, I know you did, and you
let me think you were asleep to see how long I would stand still there,
and you think--you think--I was sitting on my door-step--I live in the
next house--and it was very warm in the house, so I came out again and I
smelled the lilies over the hedge, and--and--I did not think of you at
all.” She was quite on her feet then, and she looked at him with her
head thrown back with an air of challenge. “I thought I would like to
come over here in the garden,” she continued, in the same angrily
excusing tone, “and I did not dream of seeing any one. It was so late, I
thought the house would be closed, and when I saw you I thought you were
asleep.”
The man began to look genuinely compassionate; the half-smile faded from
his lips. “I understand,” he said.
“And I thought if I moved you would wake and see me, and you were awake
all the time. You knew all the time, and you waited for me to stand
there and feel as I did. I never dreamed a man could be so cruel.”
“I beg your pardon with all my heart,” began Hyacinthus Ware.
But the girl was gone. She staggered a little as she ran, leaping over
the box borders. When she was at last in her own home, with the door
softly closed and locked behind her, and she was in the parlor bedroom,
she could not believe that she was herself. She began to look at things
differently. The influence of the intergeneration waned. She thought how
her mother would never have done such a thing when she was a girl, how
shocked she would be if she knew, and she herself was as shocked as her
mother would have been.
It was only a week from the night of the garden episode that Mr. Ware
came to make a call, and he came with the minister, who had been an old
friend of his father's.
She lay awake a long time that night, thinking with angry humiliation
how her mother wanted her to marry John Mangam, and she thought of Mr.
Hyacinthus Ware and his polished, gentle manner, which was yet strong.
Then all at once a feeling which she had never known before came over
her. She saw quite plainly before her, in the moonlit dusk of the room,
Hyacinthus Ware's face, and she felt that she could go down on her knees
before him and worship him.
“Never was such a man,” she said to herself. “Never was a man so
beautiful and so good. He is not like other men.”
It was not so much love as devotion which possessed her. She looked out
of her little window opposite the bed, at the moonlit night, for the
storm had cleared the air. She had the window open and a cool wind was
blowing through the room. She looked out at the silver-lit immensity of
the sky, and a feeling of exaltation came over her. She thought of
Hyacinthus as she might have thought of a divinity. Love and marriage
were hardly within her imagination in connection with him. But they came
later.
Ware quite often called at the Lynn house. He often joined the group on
the door-step in the summer nights. He often came when John Mangam
occupied his usual chair in his usual place, and his graceful urbanity
on such occasions seemed to make more evident the other man's stolid or
stupid silence. Hyacinthus and Sarah usually had the most of the
conversation to themselves, as even Mrs. Lynn and the old woman, who
were not backward in speech, were at a loss to discuss many of the
topics introduced. One evening, after they had all gone home, Mrs. Lynn
looked fiercely at her daughter as she turned, holding her little lamp,
which cast a glorifying reflection upon her face, into the parlor whence
led her little bedroom.
“You are a good-for-nothin' girl,” she said. “You ought to be ashamed of
yourself.”
“What do you mean, mother?” asked Sarah. She stood fair and white,
confronting her mother, who was burning and coarse with wrath.
“You talk about things you and him know that the rest of us can't talk
about. You take advantage because your father and me sent you to school
where you could learn more than we could. It wasn't my fault I didn't go
to school, and 'twa'n't his fault, poor man. He had to go to work and
get all that money he has.” By the last masculine pronoun Mrs. Lynn
meant John Mangam.
Sarah had a spirit of her own, and she turned upon her mother, and for
the time the two faces looked alike, being swayed with one emotion.
“If,” she said, “Mr. Ware and I had to regulate our conversation in
order to enable Mr. Mangam to talk with us, I am sure I don't know what
we could say. Mr. Mangam never talks, anyway.”
“It ain't always the folks that talks that knows the most and is the
best,” said Mrs. Lynn. Then her face upon her daughter's turned
malevolent, triumphant, and cruel. “I wa'n't goin' to tell you what I
heard when I was in Mis' Ketchum's this afternoon,” she said. “I thought
at first I wouldn't, but now I'm goin' to.”
“What do you mean, mother?” asked Sarah, in an angry voice; but she
quailed.
“I thought at first I wouldn't,” her mother continued, pitilessly, “but
I see to-night how things are goin'.”
“What do you mean by that, mother?”
“I see that you are fool enough to get to likin' a man that has got the
gift of the gab, and that you think is good-lookin', and that wears
clothes made in the city, better than a good honest feller that we have
all known about ever since he was born, and that ain't got no outlandish
blood in him, neither.”
“Mother!”
“You needn't say mother that way. I ain't a fool, if I haven't been to
school like some folks, and I see the way you two looked at each other
to-night right before that poor man that has been comin' here steady and
means honorable.”
“Nobody asked or wanted him to come,” said Sarah.
“Maybe you'll change your mind when you hear what I've got to tell you.
And I'm goin' to tell you. _Hyacinthus Ware has got a woman livin' over
there in that house._” Sarah turned ghastly pale, but she spoke firmly.
“You mean he is married?” she said.
“I dun'no' whether he is married or not, but there is a woman livin'
there.”
“I don't believe a word of it.”
“It don't make no odds whether you believe it or not, she's there.”
“I don't believe it.”
“She's been seed.”
“Who has seen her.”
“Abby Jane Ketchum herself, when she went round to the back door day
before yesterday afternoon to ask if Mr. Ware would buy some of her
soap. You know she's sellin' soap to get a prize.”
“Where was the woman?”
“She was sittin' on the back porch with Mr. Ware, and she up and run
when she see Abby Jane, and Mr. Ware turned as white as a sheet, and he
bought all the soap Abby Jane had left to git out of it, so she's got
enough to get a sideboard for a prize. And Abby Jane she kept her eyes
open and she see a blind close in the southwest chamber, and that's
where the woman sleeps.”
“What kind of a looking woman was she?” asked Sarah, in a strange voice.
“As handsome as a picture, Abby Jane said, and she had on an awful
stylish dress. Now if you want to have men like that comin' here to see
you, and want to make more of them than you do of a man that you know is
all right and is good and honest, you can.”
There was something about the girl's face, as she turned away without a
word, that smote her mother's heart. “I felt as if I had to tell you,
Sarah,” she said, in a voice which was suddenly changed to pity and
apology.
“You did perfectly right to tell me, mother,” said Sarah. When at last
she got in her little bedroom she scarcely knew her own face in the
glass. Hyacinthus Ware had kissed that face the night before, and ever
since the memory of it had seemed like a lamp in her heart. She had met
him when she was coming home from the post-office after dark, and he had
kissed her at the gate and told her he loved her, and she expected, of
course, to marry him. Even now she could not bring herself to entirely
doubt him. “Suppose there is a woman there,” she said to herself, “what
does it prove?” But she felt in her inmost heart that it did prove a
good deal.
She remembered just how Hyacinthus looked when he spoke to her; there
had been something almost childlike in his face. She could not believe,
and yet in the face of all this evidence! If there was a woman living in
the house with him, why had he kept it secret? Suddenly it occurred to
her that she could go over in the garden and see for herself. It was a
bright moonlight night and not yet late. If the woman was there, if she
inhabited the southwest chamber, there might be some sign of her. Sarah
placed her lamp on her bureau, gathered her skirts around her, and ran
swiftly out into the night. She hurried stealthily through the garden.
The lilies were gone, but there was still a strong breath of sweetness,
a bouquet, as it were, of mignonette and verbena and sweet thyme and
other fragrant blossoms, and the hollyhocks still bloomed. She went very
carefully when she reached the last enclosure of box; she peeped through
the tall file of hollyhocks, and there was Hyacinthus on the porch and
there was a woman beside him. In fact, the woman was sitting in the old
chair and Hyacinthus was at her feet, on the step, with his head in her
lap. The moon shone on them; they looked as if they were carved with
marble.
Sarah never knew how she got home, but she was back there in her little
room and nobody knew that she had been in the Ware garden except
herself. The next morning she had a talk with her mother. “Mother,” said
she, “if Mr. John Mangam wants to marry me why doesn't he say so?” She
was fairly brutal in her manner of putting the question. She did not
change color in the least. She was very pale that morning, and she stood
more like her mother and her great-grandmother than herself.
Mrs. Lynn looked at her, and she was almost shocked. “Why, Sarah Lynn!”
she gasped.
“I mean just what I say,” said Sarah, firmly. “I want to know. John
Mangam has been coming here steadily for nearly two years, and he never
even says a word, much less asks me to marry him. Does he expect me to
do it?”
“I suppose he thinks you might at least meet him half-way,” said her
mother, confusedly.
That afternoon she went over to Mrs. Wilford Biggs's, and the next
night, it being John Mangam's night to call, Mrs. Biggs waylaid him as
he was just about to cross the street to the Lynn house.
After a short conversation Mrs. Biggs and her brother crossed the street
together, and it was not long before Mrs. Lynn asked Mrs. Biggs and the
old grandmother, who had also come over, to go in the house and see her
new black silk dress. Then it was that John Mangam mumbled something
inarticulate, which Sarah translated into an offer of marriage. “Very
well, I will marry you if you want me to, Mr. Mangam,” she said. “I
don't love you at all, but if you don't mind about that--”
John Mangam said nothing at all.
“If you don't mind that, I will marry you,” said Sarah, and nobody would
have known her voice. It was a voice to be ashamed of, full of despair
and shame and pride, so wronged and mangled that her very spirit seemed
violated. John Mangam said nothing then. She and the man sat there quite
still, when Hyacinthus came stepping over the hedge.
Sarah found a voice when she saw him. She turned to him. “Good evening,
Mr. Ware,” she said, clearly. “I would like to announce my engagement to
Mr. Mangam.”
Hyacinthus stood staring at her. Sarah repeated her announcement. Then
Hyacinthus Ware disregarded John Mangam as much as if he had been a post
of the white fence that enclosed the Lynn yard. “What does it mean?” he
cried.
“You have no right to ask,” said she, also disregarding John Mangam, who
sat perfectly still in his chair.
“No right to ask after--Sarah, what do you mean? Why have I no right to
ask, after what we told each other?--and I intended to see your mother
to-night. I only waited because--”
“Because you had a guest in the house,” said Sarah, in a cold, low
voice. Then John Mangam looked up with some show of animation. He had
heard the gossip.
Hyacinthus looked at her a moment, speechless, then he left her without
another word and went home across the hedge.
It was soon told in Adams that Sarah Lynn and John Mangam were to be
married. Everybody agreed that it was a good match and that Sarah was a
lucky girl. She went on with her wedding preparations. John Mangam came
as usual and sat silently. Sometimes when Sarah looked at him and
reflected that she would have to pass her life with this automaton a
sort of madness seized her.
Hyacinthus she almost never saw. Once in a great while she met him on
the street, and he bowed, raising his hat silently. He never made the
slightest attempt at explanation.
One night, after supper, Sarah and her mother sat on the front
door-step, and by and by the old grandmother came across the fields, and
Mrs. Wilford Biggs across the street, and Mr. John Mangam from his own
house farther down. He looked preoccupied and worried that night, and
while he was as silent as ever, yet his silence had the effect of
speech.
They sat in their customary places: Mrs. Lynn and Mrs. Biggs in the
chairs on the broad step-stone, Sarah and the old woman on the step, and
Mr. John Mangam in his chair on the gravel path,--when a strange lady
came stepping across the hedge from the Ware garden. She was not so very
young, although she was undeniably very handsome, and her clothes were
of a fashion never seen in Adams. She went straight up to the group on
the door-step, and although she had too much poise of manner to appear
agitated, it was evident that she was very eager and very much in
earnest. Mrs. Lynn half arose, with an idea of giving her a chair, but
there was no time, the lady began talking so at once.
“You are Miss Sarah Lynn, are you not?” she asked of Sarah, and she did
not wait for a reply, “and you are going to be married to him?” and
there was an unmistakable emphasis of scorn.
“I have just returned,” said the lady; “I have not been in the house
half an hour, and my father told me. You do not know, but the gentleman
who has lived so long in the Ware house, the caretaker, is my father,
and--and my mother was Hyacinthus's mother; her second marriage was
secret, and he would never tell. My father and my mother were cousins.
Hyacinthus never told.” She turned to Sarah. “He would not even tell
you, when he knew that you must have seen or heard something that made
you believe otherwise, because--because of our mother. No, he would not
even tell you.”
She spoke again with a great impetuosity which made her seem very young,
although she was not so very young. “I have been kept away all my life,”
she said, “all my life from here, that the memory of our mother should
not suffer, and now I come to tell, myself, and you will marry my
brother, whom you must love better than that gentleman. You must. Will
you not? Tell me that you will,” said she, “for Hyacinthus is breaking
his heart, and he loves you.”
Before anything further could be said John Mangam rose, and walked
rapidly down the gravel walk out of the yard and down the street.
Sarah felt dizzy. She bent lower as she sat and held her head in her two
hands, and the strange lady came on the other side of her, and she was
enveloped in a fragrance of some foreign perfume.
“My brother has been almost mad,” she whispered in her ear, “and I have
just found out what the trouble was. He would not tell on account of our
mother, but poor mother is dead and gone.”
Then the old woman on the other side raised her voice unexpectedly, and
she spoke to her granddaughter, Mrs. Lynn. “You are a fool,” said she,
“if you wouldn't rather hev Serrah merry a man like Hyacinthus Ware,
with all his money and livin' in the biggest house in Adams, than a man
like John Mangam, who sets an' sets an' sets the hull evenin' and never
opens his mouth to say boo to a goose, and beside bein' threatened with
a suit for breach.”
“I don't care who she marries, as long as she is happy,” said Sarah's
mother.
“Well, I'm goin',” said the old woman. “I left my winders open, and I
think there's a shower comin' up.”
She rose, and Mrs. Wilford Biggs at the same time. Sarah's mother went
into the house.
“Won't you?” whispered the strange lady, and it was as if a rose
whispered in Sarah's ear.
“I didn't know that he--I thought--” stammered Sarah.
Sarah did not exactly know when the lady left and when Hyacinthus came,
but after a while they were sitting side by side on the door-step, and
the moon was rising over the mountain, and the wonderful shadows were
gathering about them like a company of wedding-guests.
JANE'S GRAY EYES
BY SEWELL FORD
When _The Insurgent_ took its place among the “best six sellers,”
Decatur Brown formed several good resolutions. He would not have himself
photographed in a literary pose, holding a book on his knee, or propping
his forehead up with one hand and gazing dreamily into space; he would
not accept the praise of newspaper reviewers as laurel dropped from
Olympus; and he would not tell “how he wrote it.”
Firmly he held to this commendable programme, despite frequent urgings
to depart from it. Yet observe what pitfalls beset the path of the
popular fictionist. There came a breezy, shrewd-eyed young woman of
beguiling tongue who announced herself as a “lady journalist.”
“Now for goodness' sake don't shy,” she pleaded. “I'm not going to ask
about your literary methods, or do a kodak write-up of the way you brush
your hair, or any of that rot. I merely want you to say something about
Sunday Weeks. That's legitimate, isn't it? Sunday's a public character
now, you know. Every one talks about her. So why shouldn't you, who know
her best?”
It was the voice of the siren. Decatur Brown should have recognized it
as such. But the breezy young person was so plausible, she bubbled with
such enthusiasm for his heroine, that in the end he yielded. He talked
of Sunday Weeks. And such talk!
Obviously the “lady journalist” had come all primed with the rather
shop-worn theory that the Sunday Weeks who figured as the heroine of
_The Insurgent_ must be a real personage, a young woman in whom Decatur
Brown took more than a literary interest. Possibly the cards were ready
to be sent out.