Pacific slope which has more pawnbrokers’ shops and that sort of thing
in full sight on the prominent streets than any other town of the same
size and respectability that I have ever seen. One day, when I had
been looking in the bazaars for something a little out of the regular
line in Chinese curios and didn’t find it, it occurred to me that in
such a cosmopolitan town there might possibly be some interesting
things in the pawn-shops, so I went into one to look. It was a common,
dingy place, kept by a common, dingy man with shrewd eyes and a
coarse mouth. Talking to him across the counter was a man of another
type. Distinction in good clothes, you know, one is never sure of.
It may be only that a man’s tailor is distinguished. But distinction
in indifferent garments is distinction indeed, and there before me
I saw it. A young, slight, carelessly dressed man, his bearing was
attractive and noteworthy beyond anything I can express. His appearance
was perhaps a little too unusual, for the contrast between his soft,
straw-colored hair and wine-brown eyes was such a striking one that it
attracted attention from the real beauty of his face. The delicacy of
a cameo is rough,” added the connoisseur, parenthetically, “compared
to the delicacy of outline and feature in a face that thought, and
perhaps suffering, have worn away, but this is one of the distinctive
attractions of the old. You do not look for it in young faces such as
this.
“On the desk between the two men lay a fine opal--this one,” said
Hayden, touching the more brilliant of the two stones. “The younger man
was talking eagerly, fingering the gem lightly as he spoke. I inferred
that he was offering to sell or pawn it.
“The proprietor, seeing that I waited, apparently cut the young man
short. He started, and caught up the stone. ‘I’ll give you--’ I heard
the other say, but the young man shook his head, and departed abruptly.
I found nothing that I wanted in the place, and soon passed out.
“In front of a shop-window a little farther down the street stood the
other man, looking in listlessly with eyes that evidently saw nothing.
As I came by he turned and looked into my face. His eyes fixed me as
the Ancient Mariner’s did the Wedding Guest. It was an appealing yet
commanding look, and I--I felt constrained to stop. I couldn’t help
it, you know. Even at my age one is not beyond feeling the force of
an imperious attraction, and when you are past sixty you ought to
be thankful on your knees for any emotion that is imperative in its
nature. So I stopped beside him. I said: ‘It is a fine stone you were
showing that man. I have a great fondness for opals. May I ask if you
were offering it for sale?’
“He continued to look at me, inspecting me calmly, with a fastidious
expression. Upon my word, I felt singularly honored when, at the end of
a minute or two, he said: ‘I should like to show it to you. If you will
come to my room with me, you may see that, and another;’ and he turned
and led the way, I following quite humbly and gladly, though surprised
at myself.
“The room, somewhat to my astonishment, proved to be a large
apartment--a front room high up in one of the best hotels. There
were a good many things lying about which obviously were not hotel
furnishings, and the walls, the bed, and even the floor were covered
with a litter of water-color sketches. Those that I could see were
admirable, being chiefly impressions of delicate and fleeting
atmospheric effects.
“I took the chair he offered. He stood, still looking at me, apparently
not in haste to show me the opals. I looked about the room.
“‘You are an artist?’ I said.
“‘Oh, I used to be, when I was alive,’ he answered, drearily. ‘I am
nothing now.’ And then turning away he fetched a little leather case,
and placed the two opals on the table before me.
“‘This is the one I have always worn,’ he said, indicating the more
brilliant. ‘That chillier one I gave once to the woman whom I loved. It
was more vivid then. They are strange stones--strange stones.’
“He said nothing more, and I sat in perfect silence, only dreading
that he should not speak again. I am not making you understand how he
impressed me. In the delicate, hopeless patience of his face, in the
refined, uninsistent accents of his voice, there was somehow struck a
note of self-abnegation, of aloofness from the world, pathetic in any
one so young.
“I am old. There is little in life that I care for. My interests are
largely affected. Wine does not warm me now, and beauty seems no
longer beautiful; but I thank Heaven I am not beyond the reach of a
penetrating human personality. I have at least the ordinary instincts
for convention in social matters, but I assure you it seemed not
in the least strange to me that I should be sitting in the private
apartment of a man whom I had met only half an hour before, and
then in a pawnbroker’s shop, listening eagerly for his account of
matters wholly personal to himself. It struck me as the most natural
and charming thing in the world. It was just such chance passing
intercourse as I expect to hold with wandering spirits on the green
hills of paradise.
“It was some time before he spoke again.
“‘I saw her first,’ he said, looking at the paler opal, as if it was
of that he spoke, ‘on the street in Florence. It was a day in April,
and the air was liquid gold. She was looking at the Campanile, as if
she were akin to it. It was the friendly grace of one lily looking
at another. Later, I met her as one meets other people, and was
presented to her. And after that the days went fast. I think she was
the sweetest woman God ever made. I sometimes wonder how He came to
think of her. Whatever you may have missed in life,’ he said, lifting
calm eyes to mine, and smiling a little, ‘you whose aspect is so
sweet, decorous, and depressing, whose griefs, if you have griefs,
are the subtle sorrows of the old and unimpassioned’--I remember
his phrases literally. I thought them striking and descriptive,”
confessed Hayden--“‘I hope you have not missed that last touch of
exaltation which I knew then. It is the most exquisite thing in life.
The Fates must hate those from whose lips they keep that cup.’ He mused
awhile and added, ‘There is only one real want in life, and that is
comradeship--comradeship with the divine, and that we call religion;
with the human, and that we call love.’
“‘Your definitions are literature,’ I ventured to suggest, ‘but they
are not fact. Believe me, neither love nor religion is exactly what you
call it. And there are other things almost as good in life, as surely
you must know. There is art, and there is work which is work only, and
yet is good.’
“‘You speak from your own experience?’ he said, simply.
“It was a home thrust. I did not, and I knew I did not. I am sixty-five
years old, and I have never known just that complete satisfaction which
I believe arises from the perfect performance of distasteful work. I
said so. He smiled.
“‘I knew it when I set my eyes upon you, and I knew you would listen
to me and my vaporing. Your sympathy with me is what you feel toward
all forms of weakness, and in the last analysis it is self-sympathy.
You are beautiful, not strong,’ he added, with an air of finality, ‘and
I--I am like you. If I had been a strong man.... Christ!’
“I enjoyed this singular analysis of myself, but I wanted something
else.
“‘You were telling me of the opals,’ I suggested.
“‘The opals, yes. Opals always made me happy, you know. While I wore
one, I felt a friend was near. My father found these in Hungary, and
sent them to me--two perfect jewels. He said they were the twin halves
of a single stone. I believe it to be true. Their mutual relation is
an odd one. One has paled as the other brightened. You see them now.
When they were both mine, they were of almost equal brilliancy. This,’
touching the paler, ‘is the one I gave to her. You see the difference
in them now. Hers began to pale before she had worn it a month. I do
not try to explain it, not even on the ground of the old superstition.
It was not her fault that they made her send it back to me. But the
fact remains; her opal is fading slowly; mine is burning to a deeper
red. Some day hers will be frozen quite, while mine--mine--’ his voice
wavered and fell on silence, as the flame of a candle fighting against
the wind flickers and goes out.
“I waited many minutes for him to speak again, but the silence was
unbroken. At last I rose. ‘Surely you did not mean to part with either
stone?’ I said.
“He looked up as if from a dream. ‘Part with them? Why should I sell my
soul? I would not part with them if I were starving. I had a minute’s
temptation, but that is past now.’ Then, with a change of manner, ‘You
are going?’ He rose with a gesture that I felt then and still feel as a
benediction. ‘Good-by. I wish for your own sake that you had not been
so like my poor self that I knew you for a friend.’
“We had exchanged cards, but I did not see or hear of him again. Last
week these stones came to me, sent by some one here in New York of his
own name--his executor. He is dead, and left me these.
“It is here that I want your counsel. These stones do not belong to
me, you know. It is true that we are like, as like as blue and violet.
But there is that woman somewhere--I don’t know where; and I know no
more of their story than he told me. I have not cared to be curious
regarding it or him. But they loved once, and these belong to her. Do
you suppose they would be a comfort or a curse to her? If--if--” the
connoisseur evidently found difficulty in stating his position. “Of
course I do not mean to say that I believe one of the stones waned
while the other grew more brilliant. I simply say nothing of it; but
I know that he believed it, and I, even I, feel a superstition about
it. I do not want the light in that stone to go out; or if it should,
or could, I do not want to see it. And, besides, if I were a woman,
and that man had loved me so, I should wish those opals.” Here Hayden
looked up and caught Langworthy’s amused, tolerant smile. He stopped,
and there was almost a flush upon his cheek.
“You think I am maudlin--doting--I see,” he said. “Langworthy, I do
hope the Lord will kindly let you die in the harness. You haven’t any
taste for these innocent, green pastures where we old fellows must
disport ourselves, if we disport at all. Now, I want to know if it
would be--er--indelicate to attempt to find out who she is, and to
restore the stones to her?”
Langworthy, who had preserved throughout his usual air of strict
scientific attention, jumped up and began to pace the room.
“His name?” he said.
Hayden gave it.
“I know the man,” said Langworthy, almost reluctantly. “Did any one who
ever saw him forget him? He was on the verge of melancholia, but what a
mind he had!”
“How did you know him, Langworthy?” asked Hayden, with pathetic
eagerness.
“As a patient. It’s a sad story. You won’t like it. You had better keep
your fancies without the addition of any of the facts.”
“Go on,” said Hayden, briefly.
“They live here, you know. He was the only son. He unconsciously
acquired the morphine habit from taking quantities of the stuff for
neuralgic symptoms during a severe protracted illness. After he got
better, and found what had happened to him, he came to me. I had to
tell him he would die if he didn’t break it off, and would probably
die if he did. ‘Oh, no matter,’ he said. ‘What disgusts me is the
idea that it has taken such hold of me.’ He did break it off directly
and absolutely. I never knew but one other man who did that thing.
But between the pain and the shock from the sudden cessation of the
drug, his mind was unbalanced for awhile. Of course the girl’s parents
broke off the engagement. I knew they were travelling with him last
summer. It was a trying case, and the way he accepted his own weakness
touched me. At his own request he carried no money with him. It was a
temptation when he wanted the drug, you see. It must have been at some
such moment, when he contemplated giving up the struggle, that you met
him in the pawn-shop.”
“I am glad I knew enough to respect him even there,” murmured Hayden,
in his beard.
“Oh, you may respect him, and love him if you like. He died a moral
hero, if a mental and physical wreck. That is as good a way as any, or
ought to be, to enter another life--if there is another life.”
“And the woman?” asked the connoisseur.
“Keep the opals, Hayden; they and he are more to you than to her.
She--in fact it is very soon--is to marry another man.”
“Who is--”
“A gilded cad. That’s all.”
Langworthy took out his watch and looked at it. I turned to the table.
What had happened to the dreaming stones? Did a light flash across
from one to the other, or did my eyes deceive me? I looked down, not
trusting what I saw. One opal lay as pale, as pure, as lifeless, as
a moon-stone is. The other glowed with a yet fierier spark; instead
of coming from within, the color seemed to play over its surface in
unrestricted flame.
“See here!” I said.
Langworthy looked, then turned his head away sharply. The distaste of
the scientific man for the inexplicable and irrational was very strong
within him.
But the old man bent forward, the lamp-light shining on his white hair,
and with a womanish gesture caught the gleaming opal to his lips.
“A human soul!” he said. “A human soul!”
AN UNEARNED REWARD
It is the very last corner of the world in which you would expect to
find a sermon. Overhead hang the Colorado skies, curtains of deepest,
dullest cobalt, against which the unthreatening white clouds stand
out with a certain solidity, a tangible look seen nowhere else save
in that clear air. All around are the great upland swells of the
mountains, rising endlessly, ridge beyond ridge, like the waves of the
sea. In a hollow beside the glittering track is the one sign of human
existence in sight--the sun-scorched, brown railway station. It is an
insignificant structure planted on a high platform. There is a red
tool-chest standing against the wall; a tin advertisement of somebody’s
yeast-cakes is nailed to the clap-boards; three buffalo hides, with
horns still on them, hang over a beam by the coal-shed, and across the
side of the platform, visible only to those approaching from the west,
is written, in great, black letters:
THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.
This legend had no place there on the September afternoon, some years
ago, when Carroll Forbes stepped off the west-bound express as it
halted a minute at the desolate spot. Because it looked to him like
the loneliest place in all the world the notion seized him suddenly,
as the train drew up beside the high platform, to catch up his valise
and leave the car. He was looking for a lonely place, and looking
helplessly. He snatched at the idea that here might be what he sought,
as a drowning man at the proverbial straw.
When the train had gone on and left him there, already repenting
tremulously of what might prove his disastrous folly, a man, who was
possibly the station agent--if this were indeed a station--came limping
toward him with an inquiring look.
Forbes was a handsome man himself, and thoroughly aware of the value of
beauty as an endowment. He was conscious of a half-envious pang as he
faced the blonde giant halting across the platform. This was, or had
been, a singularly perfect specimen of the physical man. Over six feet
in height, muscular, finely proportioned, fair-haired and fair-skinned,
with a curling, blonde beard, and big, expressionless blue eyes, he
looked as one might who had been made when the world was young, and
there was more room for mighty men than now.
The slight, olive-skinned young man who faced him was conscious of the
sudden feeling of physical disadvantage that comes upon one in the
presence of imposing natural objects, for the man was as august in his
way as the cliffs and canyons.
“I am a--an artist,” said Carroll Forbes. “Is there any place
hereabouts where I can get my meals and sometimes a bed, while I am
sketching in the mountains?”
The man stared at him.
“Would it have been better if I had said I was a surveyor?” asked
Forbes of his confused inner consciousness.
“We feed folks here sometimes--that is, my wife does. Mebbe you could
have a shake-down in the loft. Or there’s Connor’s ranch off north a
ways. But they don’t care about taking in folks up there.”
“Then, if you would ask your wife?” ventured Forbes, politely. “I shall
not trouble you long,” he added.
“Ellen!”
A woman appeared at the door, then moving slowly forward, stood at her
husband’s side, and the admiration Forbes had felt at the sight of the
man flamed into sudden enthusiasm as he watched the wife. She was tall,
with heavy, black hair, great eyes like unpolished jet, one of the
thick white, smooth, perfectly colorless skins, which neither the sun
nor the wind affect, and clear-cut, perfect features. Standing so, side
by side, the two were singularly well worth looking at.
“What a regal pair!” was Forbes’s internal comment; and while they
conferred together he watched them idly, wondering what their history
was, for of course they had one. It is safe to affirm that every human
creature cast in the mould of the beautiful has, or is to have, one.
“She says you c’n stay,” announced the man. “Just put those traps of
yours inside, will you?” and, turning, he limped off the length of the
platform at a call from somebody who had ridden up with jingling spurs.
Forbes, left to his own devices, picked up his valise, then set it down
again and looked around him helplessly, wondering if there was a night
train by which he could get away from this heaven-forsaken spot.
“If you want to see where you can sleep,” said a voice at his side, “I
will show you.” It was the woman. She bent as she spoke to pick up some
of his impedimenta, but he hastily forestalled her with a murmur of
deprecation.
She turned and looked at him, and as he met her eyes it occurred to
him that the indifference of her face was the indifference of the
desert--arid and hopeless. The look she gave him was searching and
impersonal; he saw no reason for it, nor for the slow, dark color that
spread over her face, and there was less than no excuse for the way
she set her lips and stretched a peremptory hand, saying, “Give me
those,” in tones that could not be disobeyed. To his own astonishment
he surrendered them, and followed her meekly up a ladder-like flight
of steps to the rough loft over the station. It was unfinished, but
partitioned into two rooms. She opened the door of one of these
apartments, silently set his luggage inside, and vanished down the
stairs.
Forbes sat down on the edge of a broken chair and looked about him.
“Now, in heaven’s name,” he demanded of the barren walls, “what have I
let myself in for, and why did I do it?”
To this question there seemed no sufficient answer, and for awhile he
sat there fretting with the futile anxiety of a man who knows that
his fate pursues him, who hopes that this turning or that may help
him to evade it, yet always feels the benumbing certainty that the
path he has taken is the shortest road to that he would avoid. When at
last--recognizing that his meditations were unprofitable--he rose and
went down the stairs, it was supper-time.
The woman was uncommunicative, but he could feel that her eyes were
on him. The man--it occurred to Forbes that he had probably been
drinking--was talkative. After the meal was over they went outside.
Forbes, by way of supporting his pretence of being an artist, took
out a pocket sketch-book and made notes of the values of the clouds
and the outlines of the hills against the sky in a sort of artistic
short-hand. The man Wilson sat down on a bench and began to talk.
Between the exciting effects of the whiskey he had taken, the soothing
influence of the cigar Forbes proffered him, and a natural talent for
communicativeness, he presently went on to tell his own story. Forbes
listened attentively. It seemed a part of the melodrama of the whole
situation and was as unreal to him as the flaming miracle of the
western skies or his own presence here.
“So the upshot of it all was that we just skipped out. She ran away
with me.”
It was a curious story. As Forbes listened he became aware that it was
one with which he had occasionally met in the newspapers, but never in
real life before. It was, apparently, the story of a girl belonging to
a family of wealth and possibly of high social traditions--naturally
he did not know what importance to attach to Wilson’s boast that his
wife belonged “to the top of the heap”--who had eloped with the man who
drove her father’s carriage.
The reasons for this revolt against the natural order of her life was
obscure; there was, perhaps, too high a temper on her side and too
strict a restraint on the part of her guardians. There was necessarily
a total absence of knowledge of life; there was also the fact that
the coachman was undoubtedly a fine creature to look at; there might
have been a momentary yielding on the part of a naturally dramatic
temperament to the impulse for the spectacular in her life.
But whatever the reasons, the result was the same. She had married this
man and gone away with him, and they had drifted westward. And when
they had gone so far west that coachmen of his stamp were no longer
in demand, he took to railroading, and from brakeman became engineer;
and finally, being maimed in an accident in which he had stood by his
engine while the fireman jumped--breaking his neck thereby--he had
picked up enough knowledge of telegraphy to qualify him for this post
among the mountains. He and his handsome wife lived here and shared the
everlasting solitude of the spot together, and occasionally fed stray
travellers like this one who had dropped down on them to-day.
“He drinks over-freely and he swears profusely,” mused Forbes,
scrutinizing him, “but he is too big to be cruel, and he still worships
her beauty as she, perhaps, once worshipped his; and he still feels an
uncouth pride in all that she gave up for his sake.”
It had never occurred to him before to wonder what the after-life of a
girl who eloped with her father’s servant might be like. He speculated
upon it now. By just what process does a woman so utterly _déclassée_
adjust herself to her altered position? Would she make it a point to
forget, or would every reminder of lives, such as her own had been, be
a turning of the knife in her wound? Would not a saving recollection of
the little refinements of life cling longer to a weak nature than to a
strong one under such circumstances?
This woman apparently gave tongue to no vain regrets, for her husband
was exulting in the “grit” with which she had taken the fortunes
of their life. “No whine about her,” was his way of expressing his
conviction that the courage of the thoroughbred was in her.
“No, sir; there’s no whine about her. Un she’s never been sorry, un,
s’help me, she sha’n’t never be,” concluded Wilson. There were maudlin
tears in his eyes.
“Few men can say that of their wives,” said Forbes’s smooth,
sympathetic voice. “You are indeed fortunate.”
While her husband was repeating the oft-told tale of their conjugal
happiness, Ellen Wilson had done her after-supper work, and, slipping
out of the door, climbed the short, rocky spur to the north of the
station. Beyond the summit, completely out of sight and hearing, there
was a little hollow that knew her well, but never had it seen her as it
saw her now, when, throwing herself down, her face to the earth, she
shed the most scalding tears of all her wretched years.
They were such little things this stranger had done--things so slight,
so involuntary, so unconscious that they did not deserve the name
of courtesies, but they were enough to open the flood-gates of an
embittered heart. There was a world where all the men were deferential
and all the women’s lives were wrapped about with the fine, small
courtesies of life--formal, but not meaningless. It had been her world
once and now was so no longer.
Good or bad, she knew little and cared less, this man had come from
that lost world of hers, as she was made aware by a thousand small
signs, whose very existence she had forgotten; and silently, fiercely
she claimed him as an equal.
“I--I too was--” Slow tears drowned the rest.
She could have told him how a _déclassée_ grows used to it. She knew
how the mind can adjust itself to any phase of experience, and had
learned that what woman has undergone, woman can undergo--yes, and be
strong about it. She knew how, under the impulse of necessity, the once
impossible grows to be the accepted life, and the food that could not
be swallowed becomes the daily bread.
When the struggle for existence becomes a hand-to-hand fight,
traditions of one’s ancestry do not matter, except, possibly, that
some traditions bind you to strength and silence, while others leave
you free to scream. She knew what it was to forget the past and ignore
the future, and survey the present with the single-hearted purpose of
securing three meals a day, if possible; two, if it were not.
She had forgotten with what facility she might the faces and scenes
that once were dear to her. She had nothing to do with them any longer,
as she knew. She might, perhaps, have heard their names without
emotion. But, even in this day and generation and among this democratic
people, in the soul of a woman bred as she had been the feeling for her
caste is the last feeling that dies. And to her anguish she found that
in her it was not yet dead.
The color died from the sky, and the stars came swiftly out.
She rose at last. It was time that she should be going. She stretched
out the tired arms upon which she had been lying, looked at the patient
hands which had long lost the beauty her face still kept, and lifted
her eyes to the solemn sky.