When Tredennis rose to take his leave, the professor rose also.
"I will go with you," he said. "And if you will, you shall give me a few
minutes of your time before going home. I have some new books to show
you."
They went out together; but, until they reached the other house and
entered the library, very little was said. The catastrophe of the broken
teacup, or something of greater moment, seemed to occupy the professor's
thoughts. By the time they took their accustomed chairs he appeared to
have forgotten the new books. His thoughtful face wore so sadly
perplexed a look that he even seemed older than usual.
Tredennis awaited his first words in silence. His quiet fondness for him
had become a very warm and tender feeling during the past months. It had
been his pleasure to try to be of use to him. He had studied his needs,
and endeavored to supply them; he had managed to share hours with him
which might otherwise have been lonely; he had brought to him the stir
of the outside working world when he seemed to require its stimulant; he
had placed his own vigor and endurance at his disposal without seeming
to do so, and his efforts at making his rather lonely life a brighter
and more attractive thing had not been in vain. It was to him the
professor turned in his moments of fatigue and necessity, and it was to
him he turned now.
"I am going to do a curious thing," he said.--"I am going to do a
curious thing; but I think it is the best thing and the simplest."
"The simplest thing is always the best," said Tredennis, more because
there was a pause than because he felt an answer was needed.
"Yes, yes," said the professor, seriously. "I think so. And it is easier
to be simple with you, my boy, than with another man. It is your way to
be direct and serious. You always had the habit. It never was your way
to trifle. It is rather the fashion to trifle nowadays, you know, but
you,--I have always liked it in you that you were not a trifler."
"No," answered Tredennis; "I have not trifled much. It may have been
against me. Sometimes I have thought it was. I cannot count it among my
merits, at any rate. I am a grim fellow by nature."
"No," said the professor. "Not a grim fellow. A silent fellow, and
rather unyielding with yourself, but"--
He stopped, and looked up at him with a simple affection which made the
young man's heart beat as a woman's glance might have done.
"I think you know I love you," he said. "I have begun to depend on you
and count you among my luxuries. I am an old man, and my luxuries are
worth a great deal to me. No kindly, thoughtful act of yours has been
unregarded, and I have liked your fancy for me almost as a girl likes
the attentions of her first lover. Sometimes it has pleased me to be
half sentimental over them, and half sentimental over you."
Tredennis flushed with pleasure and warm feeling. He rose impulsively
and crossed the hearth.
"I never say things well," he said, "but I should like to try to put
into words something of what I feel. You once said you wished I was your
son, and I have been glad to remember it. I have no ties. Let your wish
be a sort of tie between us. It is a tie I should be proud of, and glad
to honor and make an object in my life. Give me what affection you can.
I wish for it and need it. If I had been your son you would have counted
on me; give me the pleasure and comfort of knowing you count on me now.
It has somehow seemed my lot to have no place in the lives of others.
Give me this, if I am worth it. I shall be better for it, and happier."
The professor gave him a quiet, half-wistful glance.
"I gave it to you long ago," he said, at length. "The wish has been a
tie between us from the first."
And he said it even with a touch of solemnity.
"If it had not been," he added, afterward, "I should not have come to
you with my trouble to-night,--feeling so sure that you would understand
it."
He made a gesture with his hand.
"Go and walk up and down the room there, as I am used to seeing you," he
said. "And I will tell you about it."
Tredennis did as he bade him,--went to the other side of the room and
began his measured march.
"We talked of Bertha in this very room years ago," he began. "It seems
to be our lot to talk of Bertha. I am going to speak of her again."
Tredennis continued his measured tramp without speaking.
The professor rested his forehead upon his hand and sat so, looking
downward. He went on in a quiet voice, and with a quiet, absorbed
manner,--the manner of a man who, having the habit of close and careful
study, was giving his whole attention simply and carefully to his
subject.
"I shall have to go back to that night and repeat something I said
then," he went on. "It was that her only hope for happiness would lie in
her marriage with a man she loved deeply."
"I remember it," Tredennis answered.
"And I added that the chances were that, instead, she would marry the
man who loved her."
"I remember that too."
The professor sighed heavily and wearily.
"The chances were too many," he said. "She married the man who loved
her."
Tredennis had marched one length of the room before he continued:--
"He did love her," the professor said, after his pause,
"tempestuously--overwhelmingly. Overwhelmingly is a good word to use. He
overwhelmed her in the end. At first she liked him; but when the nature
of his feeling for her began to express itself, it is my impression that
she felt a secret fear of and dislike to it. She tried to avoid him, but
he absolutely refused to allow it. He followed her, and was
picturesquely wretched before her eyes. There is no denying he was
picturesque. That was his strong point. He was picturesque and
pathetic--and poetic. She was only a girl, and she was tremendously at a
disadvantage before him. When she treated him badly he bore it with
tender patience, and he devoted himself to her with a faithfulness which
might have touched a heart harder and more experienced than hers was,
poor child! Of course his picturesque unhappiness and his poetic
magnanimity told; I knew they would, and they did. Reaction set in, and
she began to feel the fascination of making him happy."
He stopped, and suddenly lifted his head.
"My boy," he said, "one of the most damnable things in life is a
fascination like that in the mind of a generous, ignorant creature!"
He dropped his head again.
"That is strong language," he said, "and I don't often use strong
language. I--don't consider it gentlemanly, but I felt strongly at the
moment, and the word is expressive. Well, the time came when, in a
moment when her mood being softer and more sympathetic than usual, and
she herself, as a consequence, at a greater disadvantage than ever,--she
committed herself; and then it was all over. The trouble is, that the
experience of a woman of forty is what a girl needs when she chooses her
husband at twenty, and, as the two things are incompatible, the chances
are always against her. Bertha had the faults and follies that I told
you go to make a martyr. When she had made her mistake, she was strong
and weak enough to abide by it. It is mostly imagination in matters of
this kind; it was imagination in hers. She was young enough to believe
in everything. She believed that if she broke her engagement she would
break Amory's heart and ruin his life for him. There was no danger of
either catastrophe, but they were realities to her, and they terrified
her. Then she had never been touched by any deeper feeling than the
anxious tenderness he awakened in her. She had not been given to
sentiments, and, I am afraid, had regarded them rather contemptuously in
others. She had no conception of a feeling stronger than herself, and
held curiously obstinate and lofty views of the conduct of women who did
not hold their emotions neatly in check. Her girlish bigotry was
touching to me sometimes, because it was so thorough, and revealed such
ignorance. I wish--I wish I could hear something of it now!"
Tredennis had reached the end of the room. He turned sharply, but
recovered himself and said nothing.
"Lately," the professor added slowly, "she has been more silent on such
subjects than she used to be."
He lifted his head from his hand and looked at Tredennis again.
"Philip," he said, "I--I wish to heaven chance had sent you to us that
year."
Tredennis stopped in his walk, a dark and rigid figure in the shadow.
"Had sent me?" he said, in a strained voice. "Me! What--could _I_ have
done?"
"I--I don't know," answered the professor; "but I solemnly believe, my
boy, that _if_ you had come, you would have averted an evil."
"Then," said Tredennis, "I wish to God I had!"
"I say it," said the professor, "with all the more certainty,
remembering, as I do, one day when she wished for you herself."
"She!" said Tredennis. "Bertha? Bertha?"
"Yes, Bertha herself. It was a few weeks before her marriage, and she
had not been exactly herself for a week or more. One evening I came into
the parlor and found the room full of the odor of flowers. Amory had
been with her and had left her a bouquet of heliotrope. She had some on
her knee as she sat on a low seat before the fire. When I seated myself
near her, she looked up at me suddenly and said, in a rather unsteady
voice, 'Papa, I have been thinking about Philip Tredennis. I have not
thought of him for a long time. I should like to see him. I--wish he
could come back.' She half laughed at herself as she said it, but her
laugh was nervous, and when I said to her, 'Why? Were _you_ great
friends? I did not know that,' she tried to laugh again, and answered,
'Yes--no--not exactly. But it seems to me that he was a strong sort of
person, and sensible, and--and you might rely on his decisions. It is
only a fancy, I suppose--but it just came into my mind that I should
like to see him again.' There is no doubt, in my mind, that she felt a
need of your obstinate strength, which she did not comprehend wholly
herself. I wish you had come--I wish from my soul you had!"
"I might have come if I had known," said Tredennis, in a low tone.
"There was nothing--_nothing_ to have stood in my way." And he turned
and began his walk again.
The professor sighed, as he had sighed before--heavily and drearily.
"But you did not," he said. "And she married Amory."
"I should like to know," asked Tredennis, "if you think she is unhappy
now. Do not tell me if you do not wish."
The professor's reply was very simple and direct.
"She has never been given to taking sentimental views of herself," he
said, "and she is self-controlled and fond of her children, but she has
never been happy for an hour since her marriage. I think the first year
was very bitter to her. Amory has always been very fond of her; he is
fond of her now, but her illusions concerning his passion for her soon
died. She found out in two months that he would not have perished if she
had discarded him. She had been his one object at first, but she was
only one of a dozen others after they were married. He was amiable and
delightful, but he was not always considerate. The picturesqueness of
his attitude toward her was lost. He did not require her care and
sympathy, and the sacrifices she made for him were very simple and
natural matters in his eyes.
"In the beginning she was, perhaps, bewildered and desperate; but, girl
as she was, she was too proud and just not to see that her youth and
ignorance had led her into a folly, and that the result was its natural
punishment. Once she said to me, 'The worse punishments in life are the
punishments for ignorance--the worst, the worst!' And I knew what she
meant, though she said no more. When her first child was born, she went
down to the door of death, and her physicians said there seemed to be a
lack of effort. And yet, I tell you she might have been the happiest
young mother in the world. When she has been near happiness at all it
has been in her quiet moments with her children. If it had not been for
her children she might have been a harder and more heartless creature
than she can ever be now. If she had been something less and slighter
than fate made her she might have been either a dull nurse and
housekeeper or a vapid woman of society; in either case she would have
been happier than she is to-day. What a long story it is, and I did not
think it would be so long when I began."
"I want to hear it all," broke in Tredennis,--"every word. I have not
understood the changes I saw in her I want to understand."
"That brings me to the point of it all," was the reply. "If she had been
a laborer's wife she might have been too hard-worked to be restless;
but she has had leisure, and social duties, and she has set herself
deliberately the desperate task of making them her pleasures. She has
found an exhilaration in them which has given her no time for regrets.
She is a woman, young, attractive, and spirited. She was too full of
spirit to permit herself to be subdued by her disappointment. As she
cannot retrieve her mistake, she will make the best of it. She has
reasoned herself into a belief that she is satisfied with what fortune
has given her, and so long as that belief remains unshaken, she will be
as happy as nine women out of ten are. Women are not happy, as a rule,
Philip; they are not happy. I have learned that."
"But so long as her belief remains unshaken"--said Tredennis.
The professor interrupted him, gravely, sadly.
"That is the point," he said. "My fear is that it is shaken now."
Tredennis stopped in the middle of the room--stood quite still.
"She has had friends and admirers," said the professor, "scores of them.
Perhaps all the more because she has cared less for them than they for
her. She has a pretty trick of making the best of people, and it wins
the public heart. She has friends, acquaintances, and even harmless
devotees; but among them all there is only one man who gauges her, and
that man is the one who very naturally presents himself to your mind as
a fair dandy, with a ready tongue and good manners."
"Arbuthnot!" exclaimed Tredennis. "Arbuthnot!"
The professor smiled faintly.
"What," he said, "you recognize him at once! Well, my one vanity is my
pride in my private knowledge of the thought of others. I am very proud
of it, in a senile way. I have been studying and classifying all my
life, and now I sit and look on, and treat human beings as I have
treated insects. If it had not been so, I should not have known so much
of Bertha. Yes, Arbuthnot. Among all the men she knows and has
known--diplomates, literati, politicians, honest men--I have found only
one to disturb me, and that one Laurence Arbuthnot."
Tredennis stood still, looking down at the floor, with folded arms.
"I"--he began, "I have thought"--
The professor started.
"What!" he exclaimed. "_You_ have thought? If you have thought--it must
be plainer than I feared."
"No," said Tredennis, hurriedly. "Do not let that trouble you. What I
have thought is so trivial and vague that it should not weigh at all. It
has only been because I remembered her girlhood, and--and I thought her
changed--and did not understand."
"Ah!" said the professor, letting his face fall upon both his hands.
"That is not _his_ trouble; _he_ understands, and that is his strength.
He has had his evil hour, that composed, well-dressed fellow, and he did
not come out of it without scars. He covers them well, with his light
overcoat and the rose in his buttonhole, but they are there, and they
have made him wise. He has been silent, but he has looked on too,--as I
have,--and he has seen what others were blind to. She has never
suspected him, but his knowledge has given him power. When her _mauvais
quart d'heure_ has come upon her he has known what to say and what to
avoid saying, and while she has not comprehended his motives she has
been grateful to him. She has liked his songs and his readiness, and his
unsentimental air, and she has unconsciously learned to rely on him. Her
first sincere liking for him arose from her discovery of his
inconsistent and incongruous knack with the children. She had thought of
him as a rather clever, selfish, well-mannered creature, and once in a
juvenile crisis he surprised her by developing natural gifts--somewhat
cold-blooded, but still amazingly effective. The children began to be
fond of him, and his path was smoothed. She began to be fond of him
herself, genuinely and simply, and if it had ended there she would have
been safer than before. But it did not end there, I suppose. The cup and
saucer were not broken too soon this evening,--they were not broken soon
enough."
"It was not an accident?" exclaimed Tredennis.
"No, it was not an accident. I have heard his 'Serenade' before. There
is the danger. He means no harm; but his 'Serenade' and the moments when
what is past gets the better of him, and the little touches of passion
his overcoat won't always cover, and the bits of sincerity he struggles
against and she ponders over, are good for neither him nor her. I have
heard his 'Serenade' before; but to-night, when she got up and followed
him as if he had called her, and--and she had only half heard his voice
and yet must obey it; and when she stood there against the wall, with
her pale face, and her soft eyes fixed on him, it was time for some
common thing to happen to bring her back to life,--and the cup and
saucer were offered as the sacrifice."
He said it whimsically, and yet sadly.
"Poor child!" he added. "Poor child! I dare say it was hard enough."
He paused a moment, and then rose, went to Tredennis's side, and laid
his hand on his shoulder.
"There," he said,--"there is the confession, and I can make my appeal to
you with fewer words."
"Your appeal?" Tredennis repeated.
"I can ask you for your help."
"If there is any help I can give which is worth the asking and giving,"
said Tredennis, slowly, "you know it will be yours."
"Yes, I know it will be mine, and so I ask it easily. And what I ask is
this. Let us walk slowly while we talk, and I will keep my hand on your
shoulder,--I like to feel your support. What I would say is this: if
you had been my son, you would have watched over her and stood between
her and any pain which could threaten her. You know that what I fear for
her now is only the desperate, hopeless misery such an experience as
this would be sure to bring her if it were allowed to ripen; for her
there is nothing else to fear. No, I know I need not have said that to
you."
"No," answered Tredennis, "there was no need to say it."
"She does not know herself. I know her, and know what such an experience
holds for her. Better that her life should be barren to the end than
that she should bear what she must bear if her heart is once awakened."
"Better!" said Tredennis.
He felt the tremulous hand weigh heavily upon him.
"I am an old man," he was answered. "I have lived my life nearly to its
close, and I say a _thousand_ times better! I married a woman I did not
love, and I loved a woman I could not marry."
"And you wished to ask me," said Tredennis, breaking the short silence
which followed.
"I ask you to defend her against this pain. If I were a younger and
stronger man, I might do for her what I ask of you; but I cannot often
be with her. You are with her day after day. She likes you."
"I have fancied," Tredennis said, "that she did _not_ like me."
"It is only fancy. She sees in you the strength she vaguely longed for
when she was at the turning-point of her life. Let her feel that it is
always near her, and that she may rely upon it now. You are fond of her
children,--talk to her of them. When you see her inclined to be silent
and unlike herself, bring them to her mind; when that fellow is there,
manage that she shall think of them. Her tenderness for them is your
stronghold and mine. To-night, why did I take her to the nursery?
Because they lay asleep there, and when she saw them she stopped to
cover them more warmly, and touch them with her hand, and bend to kiss
them, and forgot her 'Serenade.' She loves them better than she loves
anything else on earth,--better than she could love anything else,
perhaps. That's her woman's way. God made it so. That is the one help
and safeguard He gave to women out of the whole bitter universe. Bring
her back to her children at her saddest and weariest, and when the fight
is hardest, and they will beat the rest back. It is Nature. You will do
what I ask, I know.
"I shall be more at ease," he said next, "that I have asked this of you.
When you are with her I shall feel that she is safe. I trust her in your
hands."
"I will try to be worthy of the trust."
"It is rather a strange one to repose in a man of your age, but I give
it to you with the rest,--it goes with the tie you wished for. It is a
relief to me to share it with a strong fellow who can bear it well."
They talked a little longer, walking across the floor two or three times
together, and then Tredennis went away. He was in a strange frame of
mind. It was almost as if he had received a blow which had partially
stunned him. When he reached the street he stood for a moment looking up
at the starlit sky.
"A strong fellow," he said. "_Am_ I such a strong fellow? And _I_ am to
stand between you and your lover,--_I_? That is a strange thing,
Bertha--a strange thing."
And, rousing himself suddenly, he strode down the street, and the
professor, who had gone to his room, heard his military tread ringing
steady and measured upon the pavement and felt a vague comfort in the
sound.