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BOOKS BY GUY WETMORE CARRYL
_PUBLISHED BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY_
THE TRANSGRESSION OF ANDREW VANE $1.50
_PUBLISHED BY HARPER AND BROTHERS_
FABLES FOR THE FRIVOLOUS $1.50
MOTHER GOOSE FOR GROWN-UPS $1.50
_PUBLISHED BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO._
GRIMM TALES MADE GAY $1.50
THE LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR $1.50
ZUT, AND OTHER PARISIANS $1.50
[Illustration: Guy Wetmore Carryl.]
The Transgression of
Andrew Vane
_A NOVEL_
BY
GUY WETMORE CARRYL
_Author of "Zut, and Other Parisians"_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1904
Copyright, 1904
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
_Published April, 1904_
ROBERT DRUMMOND, PRINTER, NEW YORK
TO
HENRY HOLT
Table of Contents.
PAGE
PROLOGUE 1
CHAPTER I.
MR. CARNBY RECEIVES A LETTER 22
CHAPTER II.
NEW FRIENDS AND OLD 36
CHAPTER III.
THE GIRL IN RED 51
CHAPTER IV.
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER 71
CHAPTER V.
THE GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT 89
CHAPTER VI.
A REVOLT SUPPRESSED 106
CHAPTER VII.
A PLEDGE OF FRIENDSHIP 117
CHAPTER VIII.
A PARLEY AND A PRAYER 130
CHAPTER IX.
THE WOMAN IN THE CASE 143
CHAPTER X.
THE FAIRY GODMOTHER 159
CHAPTER XI.
SOME AFTER-DINNER CONVERSATION 175
CHAPTER XII.
REACTION 192
CHAPTER XIII.
RHAPSODIE HONGROISE, NO. 2 204
CHAPTER XIV.
FATE IS HARD--CASH! 218
CHAPTER XV.
"AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING, IS NOW, AND EVER SHALL BE." 237
CHAPTER XVI.
A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 256
CHAPTER XVII.
A DOG AND HIS MASTER 268
CHAPTER XVIII.
FAIR EXCHANGE IS NO ROBBERY 283
CHAPTER XIX.
REDEMPTION 297
CHAPTER XX.
THE SHADOW 311
The Transgression of Andrew Vane
For the things ye do, when your life is new,
And your sin is sinned with a smile,
Ye shall pay full sore, ye men, though the score
The Fates hold back for a while:
Ye shall pay, at the end, for your frauded friend,
For the secret your lips betray,
For the lust and the lie, to the Gods on High
Ye shall pay--ye shall pay--ye shall pay!
Ye shall pay ten-fold, with your heart's best gold,
Ah, tempted women and true!
Ye shall render account, to the full amount,
For each beautiful thing ye do.
For the youth ye yield, for the soul ye shield,
For the pitiful prayers ye pray,
'Tis the fancy of Fate that, soon or late,
Ye shall pay--ye shall pay--ye shall pay!
The Transgression of Andrew Vane.
PROLOGUE.
For months past, she had felt that she was weakening, that the crescent
wretchedness of five long years--an uninterrupted descent from level to
level, on each of which the thorns of disillusion caught at, and tore
from her, some shred of hope or self-respect--had done its work at last.
Her courage and her faith, inherited, the one from the mental, the other
from the moral, vigour of a rigid and uncompromising Puritan ancestry,
were slipping from her. What the end was to be, she did not dare to ask;
but it lay there ahead, grim and ominous, gradually taking form, through
the mist of the immediate future. Its very suggestion of divergence from
all that was familiar to her, of being even a degree more monstrous than
what she had already suffered, sickened and appalled her, who had never
known a dread of mere death, but drew back with unspeakable fear before
the looming of this unknown, ultimate degradation.
John Vane had wooed his wife with the easy confidence born of adequate
position, adequate means, and more than adequate ability. Four years of
Harvard had taught him to believe life in the little Western town which
had been his birthplace, to be, for a man of literary bent, a practical
impossibility; and when he stepped easily from the halls of his Alma
Mater into the offices of a Boston magazine, it was a practical
renunciation of his early environment, and an expression of his resolve
to follow in the actual as well as the metaphorical footprints of some
of the greatest figures in American literature.
Six months later, he announced his engagement to Helen Sterling, the
only daughter of a pioneer in copper, whose character had long since
built him up a reputation, to which, later, the five figures of his
income lent an added lustre. From first to last, from the occasion of
the young collegian's presentation to the reigning belle of her season
to the moment when she said, "I, Helen, do take thee, John"--and the
rest of it--there was, by way of proving the rule, never a
stumbling-block in the exceptionally smooth course of their love. They
were made for each other, people said, and no one subscribed more
confidently to this opinion than themselves.
But--and does ever a honeymoon pass without the uneasy awakening of that
latent 'But'?--Helen was not a month older before she was forced to the
unwilling conclusion that there was a singular, intangible something
lacking in her husband's character. It was not that he was not gifted;
for that, his most casual acquaintance knew him to be;--or in love with
her; for of that he gave evidence almost as conclusive as would have
been furnished by the ceaseless reiteration of that spoken devotion
which a woman craves, without hope of receiving, from the man she loves.
But things had come to him so easily, so independent of any effort of
his own, that he was become the chief of optimists, imbued with the
serene and confident _laisser aller_ of the clan; and, now that
association was making her intimate with his methods of work, she found
them to be wholly haphazard, inspired merely by the whim of the moment,
unregulated by any remotest evidence of system. His performances were
the meaningless flashes and snaps of Chinese crackers, not the steady
and purposeful, if less imposing, fire of a skilfully laid fuse, leading
on to great results. His confidence in his own ability, in the certainty
of his ultimate triumph, was so absolute that he was content with the
minimum of endeavor, oblivious to the fact that only statues can remain
thus passive with the assurance that laurel wreaths will be laid before
them. He did not realize that the living must pluck their laurels for
themselves.
Lacking the initiative which is its indispensable ally, Vane
nevertheless possessed all the impatience of restraint or routine
characteristic of the creative faculty. A year of editorial work was
sufficient to convince him that it was not possible for such a
temperament as his to be trammelled by fixed hours, and strait-jacketed
by observance of detail. He resigned his position, on the plea of
devoting himself entirely to writing, and there ensued a period during
which he sunned himself in society's favour, and received his share of
flattery in return for several trifles contributed to the magazines, but
created nothing worthy even of the infinitesimal effort which he made. A
man had to think, to arrange, to compose, he told his wife. Rome was not
built in a day, and the mere manual act of transferring his thoughts to
paper was a trifle, when contrasted with the process of incubation. So
month after month dragged by, and little by little, as his novelty wore
off, John Vane dropped out of society's consideration as a literary
potentiality, and came to be regarded as nothing more than one of many
good-looking, agreeable men-about-town, to whom, in the matter of his
wife and his worldly weal, the Fates had been generous beyond the
ordinary.
One of the first unmistakable signs of degeneration was his now constant
complaint that he was unappreciated. The average man's share of applause
is in strict proportion to his deserts. In Vane's case the allowance had
been appreciably in excess of his due, but it was exhausted at last; and
flattery is a drug which, with indulgence, becomes, a necessity.
Deprived of it, he grew fretful and impatient, made occasional abortive
efforts at performance of the great things formerly expected of him, and
talked savagely of prejudice when his manuscripts came back from the
editors, accompanied by polite notes wherein the pill of
non-availability was sugar-coated with reference to the pleasure of
examining his work, and the regret with which it was returned.
For a time he had his wife's most loyal support and sympathy. She liked
to believe that what he said was true, that literary excellence counted
for nothing in a commercial age, and that a man who would not conform to
silly superficial standards had no chance of recognition. But Helen was
a woman to whom a goose was a goose, and a swan a swan, at all times,
and regardless of ownership. Moreover, she had been a lover of the best
in literature since first she had been given the run of her father's
library, and sat for entire afternoons curled into a big arm-chair,
skipping the long words of Thackeray or Charles Lamb. Her critical
sense, thus perfected, was now too alert to allow of any treachery to
standard. Intensely loyal she was, but intensely just, as well; and all
her eagerness to believe her husband what he claimed to be could not
blind her to the mediocrity, often the utter worthlessness, of his later
work. With revelation arose, naturally, an ardent desire to aid him, and
strict sincerity, which was her most admirable quality, pointed to
candour as the only adequate means. With his resentment of her counsel
came her first disheartening insight into the shallowness and perversity
of his nature. That he could accuse her of attempting to belittle him,
rank her as at one with those who misunderstood him, hurt her more
keenly than if he had turned and cursed her. It was the parting of
their ways, the first decisive step on the road which she was to follow
wearily for five years of discouragement and disillusion.
With the waning of his popularity Vane renounced Boston, as he had
renounced his birthplace, and they moved to New York. Here, for a time,
he contributed listlessly to the humorous weeklies and the less
pretentious magazines; but reputation of the kind he sought was not to
be won by mere facility in rhyming or in writing around a dozen
illustrations; and, presently, he reverted to his old complaint of
prejudice and non-appreciation. Then a chance acquaintance led him into
speculation. Where abler men failed, John Vane was swept into complete
disaster. In a transient panic, he was caught long of a big line of
stocks, tried to average too soon, and was finally forced to let go his
holdings at about the bottom of the market.
It was ruin, absolute and utter; but Helen almost welcomed it, in the
belief that the spur of a necessity he had never known before would goad
him to the achievement of better things. But the character of John Vane
was not the stuff whereof is made the moral phoenix. He shrivelled
before the fire of defeat, and sank hopelessly into the ashes of
surrender.
They moved from their luxurious apartment to a cheap hotel, thence to a
cheaper one, thence to a boarding-house. The backward path was strewn
with unsettled bills, and loans never to be repaid. Vane wrote
spasmodically for the daily papers, and for such of the magazines as
would still accept his work, and, on the pittance thus earned, and the
generosity of Helen's father, they contrived to exist, in a fashion, for
something over two years.
But, given the temperament of John Vane, the next development was
inevitable. At first Helen sturdily refused to believe that a new demon
had entered the hell which he was making of her life. She met him, at
night, with an attempt at a smile, deliberately ignoring his unsteady
gait, his sodden face, his hot, rank breath. But the evidence was plain,
constant, incontestable. Drink had gripped him, and she knew too well
that whatever of weakness laid hand upon her husband never relinquished
hold.
So another year went by, the gulf between them widening and widening.
Finally, he struck her--and then, or the first time, that final
degradation, that ominous, unknowable end of hope and self-respect,
loomed, hideous and shadowy, through the fog before her. Unable to
interpret its significance, she told herself, nevertheless, that it was
very near.
They were living in Kingsbridge, in a little frame house into which a
man who had known her husband in his Wall Street days had come, in
settlement of a bad debt, and which he had offered them, for charity's
sake, at a paltry annual rental. The same Samaritan had given Vane a
small position in his office, and the latter now went to and fro,
between the city and its gruesome little neighbour on the Harlem, taking
leave of his wife with a curt, contemptuous nod, and returning, bloated
and foul-breathed, to pass the evenings in a semi-stupor.
The chance had been too good to be disregarded, but life under such
conditions was no better than sheer existence. The cottage was one of a
squat, ill-favoured row on a side street, within a stone's throw of the
railway station. They had found it equipped, in a way, with cheap,
yellowish furniture, worn and faded carpets, and kitchen utensils
distinguished by the grime of many meals and the musty inheritance of
insufficient washings. About the house there was a stale, moist smell of
plaster, and the plot of turf in the little front yard was dry and
discoloured, like the mats of imitation grass in the establishment of a
country photographer. Helen had striven to redeem the desolation of the
tiny living-room with the few pictures and articles of furniture which
she had contrived to save from the wreck of their former fortunes; but
the attempt was not successful. The rare prints were out of place
against the tawdry wall-paper, and the few pieces of Sheraton and
Chippendale to which she had clung took on, in such surroundings, the
shabbiness of what was already there.
She was obliged to do her own marketing and cooking and housework, since
a servant, in their straitened circumstances, was out of the question:
and not the least part of her martyrdom was the purchase of scrawny
yellow fowls, and vegetables of a freshness past, and their preparation
in the dingy little kitchen, which left an odour of frying lard on the
very clothes she wore.
Vane had left her, an hour before, on his way to the city; and now, as
the weight of depression became intolerable, she took her hat, locked
the door behind her, and started for a long walk over the hill-roads
back of the town. This had lately come to be her habit. It was something
to escape, even for half a day, from the dispirited little suburb, with
its sallow frame houses, its patched fences, and its cinder-strewn
roadways, along which lean cats slunk guiltily, and dishevelled fowls
picked their way in search of food. Up on the hills, the air of late
November was keen and chill, and grayed with a drifting smoke-mist from
distant fires of dried leaves. The brown grass was veiled here and there
with thin patches of snow, stippled with faint shadows, cast by the
filial oak-leaves, which cling longer than any other to the maternal
bough. As Helen passed, squirrels darted nimbly away to a safe distance,
and then sat up to watch her, with their fore paws held coquettishly
against their breasts. It was all very sane and healthy, all in
wonderful contrast to her morbid life in the shadow of John Vane's
personality.
There had been no children--a fact which, in happier hours, she had
deplored, but for which she was now profoundly grateful. There are
things which it is easier to bear alone. To share with another--and
that other her child--the humiliation of her ill-starred association
with her husband, would but have been to double the burden's weight. In
her own case the period of martyrdom was well-nigh done. For his son and
hers it would simply be at its beginning, tragic in its boundless
possibilities of shame.
As the thought came of the motherhood thus denied her, she wondered why
she had been faithful to John Vane. Once she had believed in him, and so
strong had been this faith that some shreds of it yet remained, to bind
her to him through all the unspeakably humiliating days of his gradual
but inevitable degradation. Nor was her fidelity of the negative,
meaningless kind which is strong simply because unassailed. As a woman
of the world, she had, more than once, been brought into contact with
men lax in their scrupulosity, but scrupulous in their laxity. She had
had her temptations, her chances of escape; and the price to be paid was
not exorbitant, in view of the relief to be obtained. But upon these she
had resolutely turned her back, hoping against hope for the miracle
which never came. Even now, her father's door stood wide to her, and
every instinct of reason impelled her to a separation. But Vane had not
only killed her love for him; he had destroyed her very taste for life
itself, under any circumstances whatever. She clung to him now, not
because she loved him, not because it was impossible to do without him,
but because he had sapped her youth, her faith, her craving for
anything short of oblivion.
She stood for a long time, motionless, at a point where a little stream
tinkled pleasantly over the stones beneath its first thin sheathing of
ice. The trees, saving only the oaks, were bare, and stood stiffly, in
close proximity, in the weird, white brilliance of _contre-lumiere_; and
for a few moments the barren tranquillity of the scene was indescribably
restful. Then the light changed, as a slow cloud crept across the sun,
and, with the coming of the resultant shadow, Helen, always exquisitely
sensible to the moods of nature, returned suddenly to a consciousness of
her extremity. It was not real, then, this negative beauty, this serene
simplicity of nun-like, early winter; it was not real, her own unwonted
calm! What _was_ actual, material, inevitable, was the personality of
the man who dominated her life like an evil spirit, using her as his
chattel, abusing her as his slave. Abruptly, the whole course of their
association spread itself before her, up to her last glimpse of him,
that morning, shambling on his way to the miserable daily duty to which
he had sunk. And this was the life which she had been so eager to share
with him, the life which, in those early days, his promises had made to
seem so fair! Together, they were to have seen the world--the wonderful,
great world, that had shone in the distance, like a Promised Land, from
the Pisgah of her girlish imaginings: London, Paris, Rome, the Nile,
Greece, India, and Japan. They were to have seen them all--drunk, in
company, of the wine of beauty and inspiration, doubling their
individual pleasures with the magic wand of mutual comprehension, as he
should turn the treasures found along their enchanted way into such
words as men preserve to praise, and she stand at his side, the first to
read and reverence. And now? For the first time, the full splendour of
the dream, the full squalor of the reality, swept down upon her. She saw
him, diverted from his own ideals, and ignorant of hers, taking the
initial step upon his downward way, no foot of which was ever to be
retraced: drunken, debauched, impotent to write one worthy word,
skulking, shamefaced and sodden, through a world of sunlight and manly
endeavour, like some noisome prowler of the night, surprised, far from
its lair, by the dawn of sweet young day. She was no more than a girl,
and already it was too late. The blitheness of life was gone, never to
return. For a moment she stood with her worn hands crushed against her
face, and then she stretched her arms upward to their full length, and
cried aloud, "Ah, God! Ah, _God_!" to the chill, clear sky of the
November day.
A voice at her side aroused her before she realized that she was not
alone. At the sound she turned guiltily, and found herself face to face
with a man she had never seen. He stood quite near, hat in hand,
surveying her with cool, steel-blue eyes. In that first instant, with a
perception sharpened by her mental anguish, she became suddenly as
familiar with every detail of his appearance as if they had been
intimates for years. He was tall and slender, and unmistakably young;
and, in singular contrast to his pallid complexion, his lips, under the
thin mustache, were full and red, with a strange, sensual crookedness
that was half a smile and half a sneer. There was about him a curious,
compellant air of mastery and self-possession, as of one sure of
himself, and accustomed to control; and his first words, under their
veneer of polite solicitude, were, in their total lack of surprise or
idle curiosity, significant of the trained man of the world, while the
quaint, foreign flavour of the title by which he addressed her was
equally suggestive of the cosmopolite.
"You are in distress, _madame_?"
Helen paused before replying. With the instinctive delicacy of her sex,
she realized that in the approach of a stranger who had surprised her in
a betrayal of extreme emotion there was something which she would do
well to resent; and yet she was come to one of those crises which every
woman knows; when the need of sympathy, even the most casual, was
imperative--when, albeit at the sacrifice of conventionality, she was
fain to seek support, to grasp a firm hand, to hear a friendly, though
an unknown, voice. Pride, her stanch ally through all the bitter hours
of her despair, had weakened at this the most crucial point, and, like a
frightened child, she would have run for reassurance into the arms of
the veriest passer-by.
"Perhaps," she answered presently. "But, believe me, the expression of
my feeling was purely involuntary. I thought myself alone. There are,
ordinarily, few passers by this road."
He had replaced his hat now, and was no longer looking at her, but down
across the shelving slope of hillside, spiked with slender trees, as
close-set as the bristles of a giant brush. When he spoke again, his
tone had curiously assumed the existence of a relation between them, as
if, instead of total strangers, they had been old acquaintances, come
together at this spot, and exchanging impressions of the scene before
them.
"Strange," he said slowly, "that you should be in distress, when Nature,
which always seems to me the most sympathetic of companions, is wrapped
in so great repose. In my dealings with humanity, I've frequently met
with misunderstanding; but never, in the attitude of Nature, a lack of
what I felt to be completest comprehension of my mood. She always seems
to divine our difficulties, and to have some little helpful hint, some
small parable, which, if we read it aright, will point out the solution
of our problem, or at least serve to soothe the momentary pang. This
little stream at our feet, for example: how it preaches the lesson that
while we must meet with days that are cold, unsympathetic, drear, it's
not only possible, but best, to preserve, under the ice in which
adversity wraps our hearts, the life and laughter which friendlier suns
have taught us! I wonder if that is not the secret of all human
contentment--to resign oneself to the chilling touch of the wintry days
of life, secure in the knowledge that summer will return, the
compensation be made manifest, and the wrong turned to right."
The rebuff which was on Helen's lips an instant before was never spoken.
It was one of those moments when the intuitive assertion of dignity and
self-reliance lays down its arms before the need of comfort and
companionship. She did not look at him, but in her silence there was
that which encouraged him to continue.
"You don't resent my speaking to you in this way?" he asked. "After all,
why should you? You are a bubble on this strange, erratic stream of
life, and I another. Bubble does not ask bubble the reason of their
meeting, at some predestined spot between source and sea. Instead, they
touch, perhaps to drift apart again after a moment; perhaps, as one
often sees them, to unite in one larger, better, brighter bubble than
either had been before. Neither cares a tittle for its chance
companion's previous history, or for what the other bubbles say.
Curiosity as to another's past is the prerogative of small-spirited man,
as is also the dread of adverse criticism. Now the commingling bubbles
are one of Nature's little parables, and my conception of ideal
sympathy."
His eyes were upon her now, and, strangely impelled, her own came round
to meet them.
"I'm not wholly sure that I get your meaning," she said, feeling that he
exacted a reply. "Is it that association and sympathy are merely the
result of chance?"
"Chance is only a word that we use to express the workings of a force
beyond our understanding." He stooped and picked up a little stone,
weighed it momentarily in his palm, and then, reversing his hand, let it
fall. "One would hardly be apt to call it chance," he added, "that,
after leaving my hand, that pebble reached the ground. If we understood
destiny as we understand gravitation, we should not say that our present
meeting was due to chance, but rather that it was the logical outcome of
a natural law."
There was a long pause, during which he glanced at her more than once,
with the seemingly careless but actually keenly observant air of a
skilled physician studying a nervous patient. She was a little
frightened, she confessed to herself, as she gathered her wits, staring
at the bit of river which was visible from where they stood, and the
slopes beyond. For weeks she had been prey to an apathy which was only
broken, at intervals, by an outburst of passionate revolt. Now, in some
inexplicable fashion, the burden seemed to have slipped from her
shoulders, and the feeling of depression was replaced by one of
uplifting, of unreasonable exhilaration. The sensation was vaguely
familiar to her, and, groping for a clue, she found its parallel in the
preliminary action of ether, which she had taken a year or so before.
Through the growing, not unpleasurable, dizziness which came upon her
thus, the man's voice made its way.
"Let me try to explain myself more clearly," he was saying.
"Something--God, or chance, or destiny, or whatever you choose to call
it--led me around that last turn of the road at a moment when, if I'm
not mistaken, a fellow being came to the snapping-point of self-control.
I can't think our meeting without significance. I believe I was sent to
help you. The question is, whether you're broad and generous and
courageous enough to take for granted a formal introduction, and the
gradual evolution of acquaintance into intimacy, up to the moment when
you would naturally turn to me, as your most loyal friend, for sympathy.
And I think you will do that."
Once more Helen looked at him. Her mind was curiously clouded, but the
sensation gave her no uneasiness. Instead, she felt that she was
smiling.
"I think you will do it," he repeated.
He was holding out his hand with the confidence of one who knows it will
be accepted, and, after a moment, she laid her own within it. His
fingers closed firmly on hers, and, of a sudden, the world drew in about
her, graying, as under the touch of fog. Her last perception was of his
eyes fixed full on hers with an expression of quiet amusement.
"I'm faint," she murmured, "I am--faint--"
When she came to herself, his eyes still held her.
"In the strange, unknowable book of Fate," he said, "it was written,
from the beginning of time, that you and I should meet upon a dull
hillside in late November, and--and that all that has been should be!"
Before she had time to answer, he had left her.
Briefly she stood, dizzy and perplexed, and then, after one great leap,
her heart seemed to shudder and stand still. _She was in the sordid
little living-room of the Kingsbridge cottage, and outside the day was
glooming into twilight!_
Without power to move, she watched from the window the man who had just
gone, pass down the path and through the gate, and, turning, wave a
farewell, before he hurried away in the direction of the station. Then
she was fully aroused by the entrance of the postman, and went slowly to
meet him at the door. There was only one letter, but this was directed
in her husband's unsteady hand, and, as she opened it, the contents
leapt at her like a blow:
"HELEN:"
"Let me be as brief as you will think me brutal. When this reaches
you I shall already be far at sea--with another woman. I have seen
how you despised me, and I think that you know this, and that I
hate you for it. I shall not ask you to forgive me, for I, too, have
many things to forgive. If you had understood me, much that has
happened might never have been. But what is past is past. Let us
bury it and have done."
"JOHN."
For minutes, which seemed an eternity, Helen stood, fingering the
wretched sheet, and gazing straight before her with blank, unwinking
eyes. Then, with a rush, came remembrance, and with it a great wave of
relief. Before she fully comprehended her intention, she was at the gate
of the cottage. But there she halted, with a nameless sense of loss and
desperation. From the distance had come the yelp of a signalled
locomotive, and then a dozen short, choking pants, as it dragged the
reluctant train into motion. He had gone!
"But he will come back!" she murmured, "and, that he may come sooner, I
will write."
It was only towards the end of her black, sleepless night that she
remembered that she did not even know his name.
Late autumn slid gloomily into winter, and winter into spring, before
she realized that he would never come. To her father she had written
nothing of Vane's desertion. For a year past, his name had not been
mentioned in their letters, so the omission was no longer noted, and Mr.
Sterling's remittances enabled her to live in material comfort. She
clung to the forlorn little cottage with a vague feeling that by it
alone could she be traced when He should come back for her; but took a
servant, a slovenly little wench, who moved in a circumambient odour of
carbolic acid, and amassed dust under beds and sofas as a miser hoards
his gold.
Helen herself saw nothing, heeded nothing. Save in the impulse which
followed her reading of Vane's letter, her mind was never wholly clear
from the shadow which had descended upon it at the moment of that
hand-grip on the hillside. Hour after hour, day after day, week after
week, she sat at the window, motionless, listening for the creak of the
gate, the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path, which would tell her
that He had returned.
With spring the disillusion came, and she crept back to the shelter of
her father's house, but to no change, save slow and listless surrender
to the inevitable. Sometimes they heard her whispering to herself, as
she sat, with some book which they had brought her, unopened on her
knee--odd scraps of sentences, and broken phrases, without apparent
relevancy or connection. The family physician, a friend from boyhood of
Andrew Sterling, tapped his forehead significantly at such times as
these, and the hands of the two men would meet in a grasp of mutual
understanding.
One night in late August her child was born, and the west wind that
brought a new soul to the Sterling door, pausing an instant in its
passing, gathered up, and in its kind arms bore away, on its pathless
flight into the Great Unknown, the tired spirit of Helen Vane.
CHAPTER I.
MR. CARNBY RECEIVES A LETTER.
Mr. and Mrs. Jeremy Carnby furnished to the reflective observer a
striking illustration of the circumstance that extremes not only meet,
but, not infrequently, marry. Mrs. Carnby confessed to fifty, and was in
reality forty-seven. As, in any event, incredulity answers "Never!" when
a woman makes mention of her age, she preferred that the adverb should
be voiced with flattering emphasis and in her presence, rather than
sarcastically and behind her back. She was nothing if not original.
Mrs. Carnby was distinctly plain, a fact which five minutes of her
company effectually deprived of all significance: her power of
attraction being as forceful as that of a magnet, and similar to a
magnet's in its absence of outward evidence. She was a woman of
temperate but kaleidoscopic enthusiasms, who had retained enough of the
atmosphere of each to render her interesting to a variety of persons.
Prolonged experience of the world had invested her with an admirable
broad-mindedness, which caused her to tread the notoriously dangerous
paths of the American Colony, in which she was a constant and
conspicuous figure, with the assurance of an Indian fakir walking on
broken glass--pleasurably appreciative of the risk, that is, while
assured by consummate _savoir faire_ against cutting her feet. Her
_fort_ was tact. She had at one and the same time a faculty for
forgetting confidences which commended her to women, and a knack of
remembering them which endeared her to men. It was with the latter that
she was preeminently successful. What might have been termed her
masculine method was based on the broad, general principle that the
adult male is most interested in the persons most interested in him, and
it never failed, in its many modifications, of effect. Men told her of
their love-affairs, for example, with the same unquestioning assurance
wherewith they intrusted their funds to a reputable banker; and were apt
to remember the manner in which their confidences were received, longer
than the details of the confidences themselves. And when you can listen
for an hour, with every evidence of extreme interest, to a man's
rhapsodies about another woman, and, at the end, send him away with a
distinct recollection of the gown you wore, or the perfume on the
handkerchief he picked up for you, then, dear lady, there is nothing
more to be said.
Mr. Jeremy Carnby infrequently accompanied his wife to a reception or a
_musicale_, somewhat as Chinese idols and emperors are occasionally
produced in public--as an assurance of good faith, that is, and in
proof of actual existence. As it is not good form to flaunt one's
marriage certificate in the faces of society, an undeniable,
flesh-and-blood husband is, perhaps, the next best thing--when
exhibited, of course, with that golden mean of frequency which lies
between a hint of henpeck on the one side and a suggestion of neglect
upon the other. Mrs. Carnby blazed in the social firmament of the
American Colony with the unwavering fixity of the Polar Star: Jeremy
appeared rarely, but with extreme regularity, like a comet of wide
orbit, as evidence that the marital solar system was working smoothly
and well.
Mrs. Carnby was, and not unreasonably, proud of Jeremy. They had lived
twenty-five years in Paris, and, to the best of her knowledge and
belief, he was as yet unaware, at least in a sentimental sense, that
other women so much as existed. Since one cannot own the Obelisque or
the Venus de Milo, it is assuredly something to have a husband who never
turns his head on the Avenue du Bois, or finds a use for an opera-glass
at the Folies-Bergere. Jeremy was not amusing, still less brilliant,
least of all popular; but he was preeminently loyal and unfeignedly
affectionate--qualities sufficiently rare in the world in which Mrs.
Carnby lived, and moved, and had the greater portion of her being, to
recommend themselves strongly to her shrewd, uncompromising mind. In her
somewhat over-furnished life he occupied a distinct niche, which one
else could have filled; and in this, to her way of thinking, he was
unique--as a husband. After _foie gras_ and champagne, Mrs. Carnby
always breakfasted on American hominy, a mealy red apple, and a glass of
milk. She was equally careful, however, to take the meal in company with
Jeremy. He was part of the treatment.
The Carnby _hotel_ was one of the number in the Villa Dupont. One turned
in through a narrow gateway, from the sordid dinginess of the Rue
Pergolese, and, at a stone's throw from the latter's pungent cheese and
butter shops, and grimy _charbonneries_, came delightfully into the
shade of chestnuts greener than those exposed to the dust of the great
avenues, and to the sound of fountains plashing into basins buried in
fresh turf. It was very quiet, like some charming little back street at
St. Germain or Versailles, and the houses, with their white walls and
green shutters and glass-enclosed porticos, were more like country
villas than Parisian _hotels_. The gay stir of the boulevards and the
Avenue du Bois might, to all seeming, have been a hundred kilometres
distant, so still and simple was this little corner of the capital.
Jeremy frankly adored it. He had a great office looking out upon the
Place de l'Opera, and when he rose from his desk, his head aching with
the reports and accounts of the mighty insurance company of which he was
the European manager, and went to the window in search of distraction,
it was only to have his eyes met by a dizzier hodge-podge than that of
the figures he had left--the moil of _camions_, omnibuses, and cabs,
threading in and out at the intersection of the six wide driveways,
first up and down, and then across, as the brigadier in charge regulated
the traffic with sharp trills of his whistle, which jerked up the right
arms of the policemen at the crossings, as if some one had pulled the
strings of so many marionettes with white batons in their hands. All
this was not irritating, or even displeasing, to Jeremy. He was too
thorough an American, despite his long residence in Paris, and too keen
a business man, notwithstanding his wife's fortune, not to derive
satisfaction from every evidence of human energy. The Place de l'Opera
appealed to the same instincts in his temperament that would have been
gratified by the sight of a stop-cylinder printing-machine in action.
But, not the less for that, his heart was domiciled in the _hotel_ in
the Villa Dupont.
On a certain evening in mid-April, Jeremy had elaborated his customary
half-hour walk homeward with a detour by way of the Boulevard
Malesherbes, the Parc Monceau, and the Avenue Hoche, and it was close
upon six when he let himself in at his front door, and laid his derby
among the shining top-hats of his wife's callers, on the table in the
_antichambre_. Through the half-parted curtains at the _salon_ door came
scraps of conversation, both in French and English, and the pleasant
tinkle of cups and saucers; and, as he passed, he had a glimpse of
several well-groomed men, in white waistcoats and gaiters, sitting on
the extreme edges of their chairs, with their toes turned in, their
elbows on their knees, and tea-cups in their hands; and smartly-dressed
women, with big hats, and their veils tucked up across their noses,
nibbling at _petits fours_. He turned into his study with a feeling of
satisfaction. It was incomprehensible to his mind, this seemingly
universal passion for tea and sweet cakes; but if the institution was to
exist under his roof at all, it was gratifying to know that, albeit the
tea was the finest Indian overland, and the sweet cakes from the Maison
Gage, it was not for these reasons alone that the 16th Arrondissement
was eager, and the 7th not loath, to be received at the _hotel_ in the
Villa Dupont. Jeremy knew that his wife was the most popular woman in
the Colony, as to him she was the best and most beautiful in the world.
Before he touched the _Temps_ or the half-dozen letters which lay upon
his table, he leaned forward, with his elbows on the silver-mounted
blotter, and his temples in his hands, and looked long at her photograph
smiling at him out of its Russian enamel frame. If the world, which
laughed at him for his prim black neckties and his common-sense shoes,
even while it respected him for his business ability, had seen him thus,
it would have shared his wife's knowledge that Jeremy Carnby was an
uncommonly good sort.
He opened his letters carefully, slitting the envelopes with a slender
paper-knife, and endorsing each one methodically with the date of
receipt before passing on to the next. All were private and personal,
his voluminous business mail being handled at his office by a secretary
and two stenographers. With characteristic loyalty, Jeremy wrote
regularly to a score of old acquaintances and poor relations in the
States, most of whom he had seen but once or twice in the twenty-five
years of his exile, and read their replies with interest, often with
emotion: and his own left hand knew not how many cheques had been
signed, and cheering words written, by his unassuming right, in reply to
the plaints and appeals of his intimates of former years. For the
steady, white light of Jeremy Carnby's kindliness let never a glint of
its brightness pass through the closely-woven bushel of his modesty.
He hesitated with the last letter in his hand, reread it slowly, and
then lit a cigar and sat looking fixedly at his inkstand, blowing out
thin coils of smoke. So Mrs. Carnby found him, as she swept in, dropped
into a big red-leather arm-chair, and slid smoothly into an especial
variety of small talk, wherewith she was wont to smooth the business
wrinkles from his forehead, and bring him into a frame of mind proper to
an appreciation of the efforts of their _chef_.
"If it isn't smoking a cigar at fifteen minutes before the dinner-hour!"
she began, with an assumption of indignation. "Really, Jeremy, you're
getting quite revolutionary in your ways. I think I shall tell Armand
that hereafter we shall begin dinner with coffee, have salad with the
Ruedesheimer, and take our soup in the conservatory."
Mr. Carnby laid down his cigar.
"I lit it absent-mindedly," he answered. "Have they gone?"
"No, of course not, stupid!" retorted his wife. "They're all out there.
I told them to wait until we'd finished dinner. Now, Jeremy! why _will_
you ask such questions?"
"It _was_ stupid of me," he admitted.
"And to punish you, I shall tell you who they were," announced Mrs.
Carnby. "I might do worse and tell you all they said. You're so--so
_comfortable_, Jeremy. When I'm on the point of boiling over because of
the inanities of society I can always come in here and open my
safety-valve, and you don't care a particle, do you, if I fill your
study full of conversational steam?"
Jeremy smiled pleasantly.
"You _nice_ person!" added his wife. "Well, here goes. First, there was
that stupid Mrs. Maitland. She told me all about her portrait. It seems
Benjamin-Constant is painting it--and I thought the others would never
come. Finally, however, they did--the Villemot girls and Mrs. Sidney
Kane, and a few men--Daulas and De Bousac and Gerald Kennedy and that
insufferable little Lister man. Then Madame Palffy. It makes me furious
every time I hear her called 'madame.' The creature was born in
Worcester--and do you know, Jeremy, I'm positive she buys her gowns at
an upholsterer's? No mere dressmaker could lend her that striking
resemblance to a sofa, which is growing stronger every day! Her French
is too impossible. She was telling Daulas about something that never
happened to her on her way out to their country place, and I heard her
say '_compartiment de dames soules_' quite distinctly. I can't imagine
how she contrives to know so many things that aren't so. One would
suppose she'd stumble over a real, live fact now and again, if only by
accident. And her husband's no better. Trying to find the truth in one
of his stories severely taxes one's aptitude in long division. I saw him
at the Hatzfeldts' _musicale_ night before last. Pazzini was playing,
and Palffy was sound asleep in a corner, after three glasses of punch. I
really felt sorry that a man with such a wife should be missing
something attractive, and I was going to poke him surreptitiously with
my fan, but Tom Radwalader said, 'Better let the lying dog sleep!' He
positively _is_ amusing, that Radwalader man!"
Mrs. Carnby looked up at her husband for the admiring smile which was
the usual guarantee that she had amused him, but only to find Jeremy's
eyes once more riveted upon the inkstand, and the cigar between his thin
lips again.
"My dear Jeremy," she said, "I'm convinced that you've not heard one
syllable of my carefully prepared discourse."
"My dear Louisa," responded Mr. Carnby with unwonted readiness, "I'm
convinced that I have not. The truth of the matter is," he added
apologetically, "that I've received an unusual letter."
"It must indeed be unusual if it can cause you to ignore my
conversation," said Louisa Carnby.
"That is perfectly true," said Jeremy with conviction.
His wife rose, came over to his side, and kissed him on the tip of his
nose.
"Good my lord," she said, "I think I like your tranquil endorsement of
the compliments I make for myself better than those which other men
invent out of their own silly heads! Am I to know what is in your
unusual letter?"
"Why not?" asked Jeremy seriously.
"Why not, indeed?" said Mrs. Carnby. "I have taken you for better or
worse. There's so little 'worse' about the contract, Jeremy, that I
stand ready to accept such as there is in a willing spirit, even when it
comes in the form of a dull letter."
Jeremy looked up at her with his familiar smile.
"Louisa," he said, "if I were twenty years of age, I should ask nothing
better than the chance to marry you again."
"Man! but thou'rt the cozener!" exclaimed Mrs. Carnby. "Thou'dst fair
turn the head of a puir lassis. There--that'll do. Go on with your
letter!"
"It's from Andrew Sterling," said Jeremy. "You'll remember him, I think,
in Boston. He was a friend of my father's, and kept a friendly eye on me
after the old gentleman's death. We've always corresponded, more or less
regularly, and now he writes to say--but perhaps I'd best read you that
part of his letter."
"Undoubtedly," put in his wife. "That is, if you can. People write so
badly, nowadays."
"Um--um--" mumbled Jeremy, skipping the introductory sentences. "Ah!
Here we have it. Mr. Sterling says: 'Now for the main purpose of this
letter. My poor daughter's only son, Andrew Sterling Vane, is sailing
to-day on the _Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse_. He has been obliged to leave
Harvard, as his health is not robust, and I have thought that perhaps
the sea-voyage and some months in Paris might put him in shape--'"
"_Good_ Lord!" broke in Mrs. Carnby. "Imagine some months in Paris by
way of rest-cure!"
"'And so,'" continued Jeremy, "'I'm sending him over, in hopes that the
change may be of benefit. He is a singular lad--sensitive in the
extreme, and utterly inexperienced--and I am going to ask if, "for auld
lang syne," you will be so good as to make him welcome. I don't mean, of
course, that I expect you to exercise any sort of supervision. The boy
must take care of himself, like all of us, but I would like to feel
that, in a strange city, there is one place where he may find a hint of
home."
Jeremy paused.
"Go on!" observed Mrs. Carnby.
"There is really nothing more of importance," said her husband, "except
that I've also received a note from young Vane. He's at the Ritz."
"Of course!" ejaculated Mrs. Carnby. "Paying two louis per diem for his
room, and making semi-daily trips to Morgan, Harjes'. They're wonderful,
these tourist bank-accounts. Their progress from a respectable amount to
absolute zero is as inevitable as the recession of the sea from
high-water mark to dead low tide--a steady withdrawal from the bank, my
dear Jeremy! How old might the young gentlemen be?"
Mr. Carnby made a mental calculation.
"His mother was about my own age," he said presently. "I know she and I
used to go to dancing-school together. And she died in childbirth, if I
remember rightly. Her husband was a scamp--ran off with another woman. I
never saw him. That would make the boy about twenty or twenty-one."
"He will be rather good-looking," said Mrs. Carnby reflectively, "with a
general suggestion of soap and cold water about him. He will wear
preposterously heavy boots with the soles projecting all around like
little piazzas, and a straw hat, and dog-skin gloves with seams like
small hedges, and turned back at the wrists. They're all exactly alike,
the young Americans one sees over here. One would think they came by the
dozen, in a box. And when he is sitting down he will be hitching at his
trousers all the time, so that the only thing one remembers about him
afterwards is the pattern of his stockings."
"We ought to invite him to dinner," suggested Jeremy.
"Without doubt," agreed his wife; "but to breakfast first, I think--and
on Sunday. One can judge a man's character so well by the way he behaves
at Sunday breakfast. If he fidgets, and drinks quantities of water, then
he's dissipated! I don't know why Saturday night is always fatal to
dissipated men, but it is. If his top hat looks as if it had been
brushed the wrong way, then he's religious, and has been to church. I
shall go out and inspect it while you're smoking. If he does all the
talking, he's an ass; and if I do it all, he's a fool."
"You're a difficult critic, my dear," said Jeremy. "You must remember he
is only twenty or so."
"To be twenty or so in appearance is a man's misfortune," replied Mrs.
Carnby. "To be twenty or so in behaviour is his fault. I'll write to him
to-night, and ask him to breakfast on Sunday, _tout a fait en famille_,
and we'll try him on a--you don't mind my calling you a dog, Jeremy?"
"Not in the least," said Mr. Carnby.
"_Eh bien!_" said his wife. "We'll have him to breakfast on Sunday, and
try him on a dog! If he's presentable and amusing, I shall make him my
exclusive property. If he's dull, I shall tell him Madame Palffy is a
woman he should cultivate assiduously. I send her all the people who
don't pass muster at my dinners. She has them next day, like warmed-over
_vol-au-vents_. My funeral baked meats do coldly furnish forth her
breakfast-table."
"When you wish to appear most unmerciful, my dear," said Jeremy, "you
always pick out Madame Palffy; and whenever you do, I spoil the effect
of what you say by thinking of--"
"Margery?" put in Mrs. Carnby. "Yes, of course, that's my soft spot,
Jeremy. There's only one thing which Margery Palffy ought to be that she
isn't, and that's--ahem!--an orphan."