epithets on my account. As I’ve said, I don’t presume to question
the wisdom of your choice in this particular case, and that your
inamorata is the best of her kind, but personally, I don’t take to
the _kind_. By Jupiter! I was telling Jones of Illinois, last night,
of an incident that gave me a ‘scunner’ against woman authors, twenty
years ago. Mrs. Shenstone of New York was a literary light in her day.
There’s a fashion in writers, as in everything else, and she went
out with balloon skirts and _chig-nongs_. But she was a star of the
first magnitude in her own opinion, and, at any rate, something in
the stellar line in others’ eyes. Her husband had money and she was
a poor girl when she married him. They say he made a show of holding
his own while the shekels lasted. A more meek-spirited atomy I never
beheld than when they called upon my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Lamar from
Charleston, then staying at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, one evening, when I
chanced to be sitting with the Lamars in their private parlor. And as
sure as I am a sinner and you’re another, the card brought in to Mrs.
Lamar was ‘Mrs. Cordelia Shenstone _and husband_.’ The last two words
were added in pencil. Fact, ’pon honor! Mrs. Lamar carried the card
home and had it framed as a domestic and literary curiosity.”
“You cite an extreme case”—another glance at the slow clock. “If that
woman had been a shopkeeper, or a dressmaker, with the same arbitrary,
selfish spirit, she would have been guilty of the same gross violation
of taste and feeling.”
“Maybe so! maybe so! But the writing woman is a prickly problem in
modern society. She is leading the van in all revolutionary rot about
women’s wrongs and women’s rights. The party can’t do without her, for
the rank and file couldn’t draft a resolution or write a report to save
their lives, and they’ve flattered up our blue-stocking until she steps
out of all bounds. It makes a conservative patriot’s blood run cold to
think what the upshot of it all is to be. And I confess I don’t like
to anticipate seeing your cards engraved—‘Mrs. Clytemnestra Ashe and
husband.’”
A dark red torrent poured over the listener’s face. Physically and
morally, he was thin-skinned.
“There is nothing of the Clytemnestra in her make-up, sir. No woman
ever made could rule me, were she my wife. Agnes is too gentle and
too sensible to attempt it. As to the cards!” He went to a drawer and
took out a bit of pasteboard which he tossed to his kinsman, with a
derisive laugh. “That is all settled, you see. Come in!” to a knock at
the door.
When the tardy best man appeared, the Hon. Simeon Barton, his head
on one shoulder, and eyes half shut, after the manner of an impudent
cock-sparrow, was scanning the engraved inscription,
MR. AND MRS. BARTON ASHE,
170 West —— St.
“Leave the ‘Simeon’ out, do you? Clytem—_Agnes_ doesn’t like it,
maybe?” And without waiting for a reply—“Good-evening, Mr. White. I’m
just advising Bart here to use up this batch of cards plaguey quick, to
make room for ‘Mrs. Ashe _and husband_.’”
Mr. White laughed a little and politely. The jest was in miserable
taste, but much was pardonable in rich uncles who were self-made men,
when they showed a disposition to help make their nephews. A glimmer
of like reasoning may have entered Barton’s mind, for he turned an
unshadowed brow to the eccentric millionaire.
“When that time comes I shall employ you to draw up the articles of
separation. White, here, is witness to the agreement.”
An hour later, he would not have believed the words had passed his
lips. Jest upon such a horror would have seemed profanation to the
newly made husband. As the woman who would never again answer to the
name of Agnes Welles stood beside him, his were not the only eyes
that paid silent homage to her strange beauty—strange, because to
the guests, and to the assembled relatives, this phase of one whom
most people had hitherto thought only “interesting” and “pleasing,”
was new and unexpected. She was but a few inches shorter than her
manly partner, and slender to fragility. Straight and supple as a
willow-wand, she was ethereal in grace when clad in the misty robes
and veil which were the wedding gift of her godmother. Her dark eyes
were full of living light, illumining the colorless face into weird
loveliness, that belonged neither to feature nor complexion. The short,
tense bow of the upper lip, the fine spirited line of the nostrils,
the perfect oval of cheek and chin, were always high-bred—some said,
haughty. To-night they were chastened into lofty sweetness that was
pure womanly.
“She might pass for _twenty_-two,” said an audaciously young
_débutante_ to a crony just behind Mr. Barton.
And—“By George!” thought that astute individual—“the young dog never
hinted that his divinity was six years his senior. I should have been
surer than ever of receiving that card. Pity! pity! pity! _That’s_ a
fault that won’t mend with time.”
Agnes knew better than he could have told her what risks the woman
takes who consents to marry her junior in years. Early in their
acquaintanceship she had contrived to apprise Barton of this disparity.
When he declared his love she set it boldly in the foreground of
hesitation and demur.
“When you are thirty-five, in man’s proudest prime and yet far from
the comb of the hill, I shall have begun to go down the other side,”
she urged. “You might be able to contemplate the contrast boldly, but
could I forgive myself? There may be a suspicion of poetry—pathetic
but real—in the idea of an old man’s darling, but an old woman’s
pet! _that_ is a theme no painter or poet has dared to handle. The
suggestion of grotesqueness is inevitable. Both are to be pitied, but
I think the wife needs compassion even more than the man she has made
ridiculous.”
The rising young lawyer was a clever advocate, and he had never striven
longer and harder to win a cause. When his triumph was secured Agnes
could not quite dismiss the subject. It haunted her like a wan ghost,
with threatening beck and ominous eye. Once, but a month before their
wedding day, they were speaking of George Eliot’s singular marriage
with a man young enough to be her son, and an abrupt change fell upon
Agnes’ visage—a shade of painful doubt and misgiving.
“Dinah Maria Mulock, too!” she exclaimed. “And Mme. de Staël!
Elizabeth Browning’s husband was some months younger than she. Then,
there are Mrs. —— and Mrs. ——” naming two prominent living American
authors. “How very singular! There must be some occult reason for
what we cannot set down as coincidences. It looks like fatality—or”
hesitatingly—“infatuation.”
“Rather,” said Barton in gentle seriousness, for her perturbation was
too real for playful rallying—“attribute such cases to the truth of the
eternal youthfulness of genius. These men see in the faces and forms
of the women they woo, the beautiful minds that will never know age or
change. Time salutes, instead of challenging those high in favor with
the king.”
“Do you know,” Agnes said, her slim white hand threading the
brown curls of the head she thought more beautiful than that of
Antinous—“that you will never say a more graceful thing than that? You
are more truly a poet than I. Don’t disclaim, for I am not a bard at
all. When I drop into poetry _à la_ Wegg, it is _not_ ‘in the light of
a friend.’ When I am in the dark or at best in a half-light, sorry or
weary, or lonely of heart, my thoughts take rhythmic shape. They are
only homely little crickets, creeping out in the twilight to sing by
the fire that is beginning to gather ashes. I am a born story-teller,
but I deserve no credit for that. Something within me that is not
myself tells the stories so fast that I can hardly write them down
as they are made. I am no genius, dear. Don’t marry me with that
impression. I wish for your sake that I were. How gloriously proud you
would be of me!”
“I am ‘gloriously proud’ of you now!” He said it in fervent sincerity.
“If you have genius, don’t develop it. I can hardly keep you in sight
as it is.”
Dimly and queerly, the feeling that prompted the half-laughing protest
returned upon him to-night. The solemn radiance overflooding her
eyes and clearing into exalted beauty lineaments critics pronounced
irregular, positively awed him—an uncommon and not altogether agreeable
sensation for a bridegroom, especially one of his practical and
somewhat dogmatic cast of mind. Rebel though romantic lovers may at
what they consider derogatory to the constancy and depth of wedded
affection, it is not to be denied that the turn of the bridal pair from
the altar symbolizes a reversal in their mutual relation. The bonds
that have held the lover in vassalage—very sweet bondage, perhaps, but
still not liberty—are with the utterance of the nuptial benediction
transferred to the woman he holds by the hand. Barton Ashe was very
much in love, but he was a very man. His wife was now his property.
“I feel a wild desire to put my arms around you to keep your wings from
unfurling,” he found occasion to whisper presently. “I suppose these
people would think me insane if I were to yield to the impulse and tell
them why I did it.”
The luminous eyes laughed joyously into his. With all her intellect and
passionate depth of feeling, she had seasons of childlike glee that
became her rarely.
“As you would be. I was never farther from ‘wanting to be an angel’
than at this instant. The life that now is appears to me eminently
satisfactory.”
A fresh bevy of congratulatory guests interrupted the hasty “aside.”
“We find it hard to forgive you, Mr. Ashe,” twittered an overdressed,
overcolored, and overmannered spinster. “How can you reconcile it to
your conscience to change a broad, beneficent river into a canal to
serve your own particular mill? I shall not congratulate you upon a
private good which is a public disaster.”
“Many others are thinking the same thing, but they cannot express
it so beautifully,” said a plaintive matron, one of the many whose
perfunctory sighs at weddings are the reverse of complimentary to their
bonded partners. “But we must be thankful you have been spared so long
to make us happy and do so much good in the world.”
“I am puzzled,” Barton observed, looking from one to the other. “If I
were taking her out of town, to Coromandel, we will say, or even to New
Jersey, there might be occasion for outcry.”
“You are robbing us of the better part of this woman,” interrupted
the hortatory spinster in a dramatic contralto. “My protest is in the
name of those to whom she belonged by the right the benefited have to
the benefactor, before you crossed her path, in an evil hour for the
world. It passes my comprehension, and I know much of the arrogant
vanity of your sex, how any one man can hope to make up to his author
wife for the audience she resigns when she sits down to pour out his
coffee and darn his socks for the rest of her mortal existence. It is
breaking stones with a gold mallet to make a mere housekeeper out of
such material as this,” lightly touching the head crowned by the bridal
veil. “But my imagination is not of the masculine gender.”
“Don’t strain it needlessly,” smiled Agnes, before the attacked person
summoned wit for a retort. “Soup-making is a finer art than writing
essays, to _my_ comprehension, yet I hope to learn it.”
The matron put in her sentence, sandwiched between sighs.
“You will find the two incompatible. Once married, a woman’s life is
merged in that of another. She has no volition, no thought, no name of
her own.”
“The married woman does not possess herself!” cried the spinster in
shrill volubility. “She effaces her individuality in uttering the
promise to ‘serve and obey’—vile words that belong rather to the harem
of the sixteenth century than to the home of the nineteenth. Somebody
else has reported me in yesterday’s _World_ and _Herald_, so I may
as well tell you that I brought forward a motion in Sorosis last
Monday, that the club should wear crape upon the left arm for thirty
days, dating from this evening, in affectionate memory of one of our
youngest and most brilliant members. Talk of the self-immolation of the
Jesuit who changes the name his mother gave him and resigns the right
of private judgment and personal desire in joining the Order! He is
riotously free by comparison with the model wife. Her assumption of the
conventual veil is mournfully symbolical.”
Another wave of newcomers swept her onward, still hortatory and
gesticulatory.
She was never spoken of again by the bridal pair until the marriage day
was a fortnight old.
They were pacing the wooden esplanade in front of the Hygeia Hotel
at Old Point Comfort, basking in the December sunshine. The sea air
had set roses in Agnes’ cheeks; her lips were full and red, her eye
sparkled with soft content, and her step was elastic. Barton, surveying
these changes with the undisguised satisfaction of a man who has
secured legally the right to exhibit his prize, took his cigar from his
mouth to say carelessly:
“By the way, I have never asked the name of the painted-and-powdered
party who gave a parlor lecture upon Jesuits and harems the night we
were married.”
“It was Miss Marvel,” said Agnes, laughing. “She is an eccentric
woman, and as I need not tell you, indiscreet and flippant in talk,
letting her theories and spirits run away with her judgment. But she
accomplishes a great deal of good in her way and has many fine traits
of character. It is a pity she does herself such injustice.”
“Humph! Does she belong to the sisterhood of letters?”
“In a way—yes. Her articles upon the Working Girls of New York, written
for newspaper publication two years ago, attracted so much attention
that they were collected into a volume last summer.”
“She is a member of Sorosis—I gather from her tirade?”
“Oh, yes. One of the oldest members.”
“What a hotch-potch that society or club—or whatever you may choose to
call it—must be! Do you know, darling, I never associate you—or any
other true, refined woman with the crew to which you nominally belong?
You are a lily among thorns in such a connection. I should rather
say among thistles and burdocks and stramonium and the like rank,
vile-smelling weeds.”
“I thank you for the pretty praise of myself,” smiling sweetly and
fondly at him. “But I cannot accept it at the expense of fairer flowers
than I can ever hope to be, true, strong women who are trying to help
their sex to a higher plane and prepare them for better work than they
have yet accomplished, in spite of the limitations of sex—”
He caught her up on the word.
“Don’t fall into their cant, for Heaven’s sake! The ‘limitations of
sex’ are woman’s crown of glory. I have done some sober thinking
lately—especially since the drubbing received from your Miss
Marvel—with regard to the mooted subject of the emancipation of women,
falsely so called. My conclusions may not coincide with your views upon
the subject. But, perhaps you do not care to discuss it?”
Her face was sunny; her look at once fearless and confiding.
“We are both reasonable people, I hope. If we are not, we love each
other too well not to agree amicably upon unavoidable disagreements.”
Barton tossed his cigar stump into the foam of the nearest wave; a
touch of impatience went with fling and laugh.
“Isn’t that like a woman? She presupposes disagreement and forestalls
argument by pledging herself to forgive for love’s sake whatever she
will not admit. The wisest and best of the sex—and you are both of
these—will press feeling into what should be impersonal debate. Perhaps
it is safer to talk of other things. See that gull swoop down and come
up empty-clawed. That is his fourth unsuccessful trip to market within
thirty minutes. The _passée_ belle upon the pavilion over there has had
that rich youngling in tow twice as long. I will wager a pair of gloves
against a buttonhole bouquet with you that she doesn’t land him.”
Neither tone nor manner was pleasant. Agnes laid her hand upon his arm.
“Won’t you go on with what you were about to say? I may not be able to
argue. I think, with you, that logic is not woman’s forte. Perhaps we
may learn, with time and education, to divorce thought and feeling. But
I am a capital listener, and a willing learner.”
“You are an angel”—pressing the hand to his side, “and so far above
Miss Marvel and her compeers in intellect and breeding that I fret at
the alleged partnership. This talk of woman’s serfdom and the need
of elevating her, mentally and politically, is stuff from first to
last. Vile and pestilential stuff! Heresy against the teachings of
Nature and of Him who ordained that man should be the superior being
of the two. Those who are pressing forward in what they call Reform of
Existing Wrongs are your worst enemies. You should need no champion
but your other self, Man. In arraying one sex against the other, you
antagonize him. I see this rampant attitude of woman everywhere and
hourly. If a man resigns his seat in a public conveyance to a woman,
she takes it arrogantly—not gratefully. She pushes him aside with
sharp elbows in crowds, jostles him upon gangways, presses before him
into doors, always with a ‘good-as-you’ air which exasperates the most
amiable of us. Her voice is heard in debating societies; she sits
beside man upon the rostrum; competes with him in business, often
successfully, because she can live upon less than he. The devilish
spirit of revolt permeates all grades of society. The home—God’s best
gift to earth—has no longer a recognized governor, no judge to whom
appeal is final. Sisters wrangle with brothers for equal educational
advantages, instead of making home so pleasant that boys will be
content to stay there. Women’s Clubs, Women’s Congresses, Women’s
Protective Unions, are part and parcel of the disunion policy. Instead
of refining man this is surely, if slowly, arousing the latent savage
in him. When that does spring to action, let the weaker sex beware.
Outraged natural laws will right themselves in the long run, but
sometimes at fearful cost.”
Agnes was perfectly silent during this harangue, ignorant as was he
of his resemblance to pudgy and pompous Uncle Simeon, while he beat
the palm of the right hand with the empty left-hand glove, and rolled
slightly from one leg to the other in the slow promenade. The bloom
gradually receded from her cheeks, her profile was still and clear as a
cameo. Her eyes were directed toward the gray-blues of the meeting line
of wave and sky. Once she glanced up to follow the gull, rising from a
fifth unsuccessful dip.
Presently she halted and leaned upon the parapet to watch the
half-consumed cigar, swinging and bumping like a truncated canoe in
the foam-fringes of the rising tide. Barton stopped with her without
staying his talk. An impulse born of the innate savagery he imputed to
his sex, bore him on. His wife’s very impassiveness irked him. Silence
was non-sympathetic; white silence, like hers, chilling. Irritation,
engendered by piqued vanity, does not withhold the home-thrust because
the victim is dearly beloved.
“You do not like to hear me talk in this strain,” he pursued. “It is
only natural that a woman of independent thought and action, accustomed
to adulation, and to whom the excitement of a public hearing for
whatever she has to say has become a necessity of existence; who
has looked beyond the quiet round of home interests and home loves
for a career; who has fed her imagination upon unreal scenes and
situations—should——”
He could get no further. Fluent as he was in speech, he had wound
himself up in nominative specifications, and the verb climax failed him
unexpectedly.
“Should—what?” said Agnes, turning the set, tintless visage toward him.
Her eyes, blank and questionless, showed how far from her thought was
sarcastic pleasure in his discomfiture. Barton was too much incensed to
reason.
“Should—and _does_ sneer at her husband’s serious talk upon a matter in
which, as he is fast discovering, his happiness is fatally involved!”
“_Fatally!_ O Barton!”
Independent and strong-minded she might be to others, but he had hurt
her terribly. The stifled cry took all her strength with it. She caught
at the railing for support, and leaned upon it, sick and trembling.
He lifted his hat in mock courtesy.
“If you will excuse me I will continue my walk alone. It is useless
to attempt the temperate discussion of any subject when my words are
caught up in that tone and manner. May I take you back to the hotel?”
Agnes straightened herself up. Her color did not return, but her voice
was her own. It had always a peculiar and vibrant melody, and her
articulation was singularly distinct for an American speaking her own
language.
“You misunderstand me. I did not mean to be abrupt, much less rude.
If I seemed to be either or both I ask your forgiveness. You need not
trouble yourself to escort me to the hotel. I will sit here for a while
and then go in. I hope, when you think the matter over dispassionately,
you will see that I could not be guilty of what you imply.”
He strode off toward the Fort, the deep sand somewhat derogatory to
dignity of carriage, but favoring the increase of irritability. Agnes
strolled slowly along the beach until she found a lonely rock upon the
tip of a tongue of bleached sand, where she could sit and think out
the bitterest hour she had ever known. People, passing upon pier and
esplanade, saw her there all the forenoon, a slight figure whose gray
gown matched in color the stones among which she sat, as motionless as
they. The brackish tide rose slowly until the spray sprinkled her feet,
whispering mournful things to rock and sand. She saw and heard nothing,
while her eyes seemed to follow the stately sail and swoop of the gulls
whose breasts showed whitely against the blue of the December sky.
Other wives than Lorraine Loree have wedded men of high degree only to
find that “husbands can be cruel,” and more than Lorraine or Agnes
dreamed of have made the discovery before the wane of the honeymoon.
This bride felt bruised and beaten all over, and suffered the more, not
less, for her sorrowful bewilderment as to the exact cause of this, the
first quarrel.
CHAPTER II.
SOME women and many men are compounded and shaped into sentient beings
without the infusion of so much as a pennyweight of tact.
Many women and a few men combine with this deficiency—which is, in
itself, a deformity—a fatal facility for saying exactly the wrong thing
when the wrong thing will do most harm.
Miss Marvel had taken all the honors in this line which native bias and
feminine fussiness could win, and she wove a new spray into her laurel
wreath one day in the March succeeding the winter in which Barton Ashe
and Agnes Welles were made one—in law and gospel.
The morrow would be his wife’s birthday, and Barton had in his breast
pocket a tiny box containing a sapphire ring for her, when he arose
to resign his seat in the street car to the dashing spinster, whom he
recognized as soon as she entered. He had never seen her since his
wedding eve, but she was not a woman to be forgotten or overlooked.
She was in great force to-day, gorgeously appareled and flushed beyond
high-rouge mark by three hours at a literary breakfast, given at
Delmonico’s to a distinguished foreigner.
“I am surcharged with electric thought,” she confided to Mr. Ashe when
she had taken the vacated place with a cavalier nod that might mean
“Thanks,” or “That’s only decent, my good man.”
“Ah!” said Barton, in naïve wonderment, for the want of anything else
to say.
“Surcharged! bristling! I could fancy that at the approach of the
negative pole I should crackle and emit sparkles like a brisk battery.
Such a feast of intellect! such flow of soul! such scintillating wit!
Three hours of such intercourse were worth ten—a thousand cycles of
Cathay. Our guest was superb! such dignity and such graciousness of
affability as can only coexist in an Old World product.”
She spoke loudly, after the manner of the New World product (_genus
homo_, feminine gender). Several solid men peered at her around or over
the evening papers. Two giddy girls, who had taken without thanks or
scruples seats from weary men, smiled undisguisedly. Barton, standing
in the aisle, holding on by the strap, his knees abraded by the jet
passementerie of Miss Marvel’s velvet skirt, could not budge an inch.
He must hear and, hearing, essay reply of some sort. “Ah!” albeit the
safest and most commodious monosyllable in the language, cannot go on
forever.
“The lunch was largely attended, I suppose?” he ventured in tones
studiously lowered.
“By every woman in New York who is worth the notice of an intelligent
being. With one distinguished exception. Mrs. Ashe’s absence was the
occasion of universal regret. As a well-wisher let me warn you that you
may be mobbed some day for your unconscionable cruelty to the highest
order of created things; for imprisoning the eagle and stilling the
song of the lark. At least fifty people asked me to-day why Agnes
Welles had disappeared from the literary firmament. For one and all, I
had one and the same reply. ‘She has taken the bridal veil,’ I said,
tears in eyes and voice. ‘In consequence of that piece of barbarity,
and for no other cause, the places that once knew her know her no
more.’ One woman—I won’t divulge her name, lest you should _hate_
her—said she ‘should as soon think of chaining a thrush to the leg of
a kitchen chair as of obliging that glorious young thing to resign her
Heaven-appointed mission for the position of caterer, housekeeper, and
seamstress.’ I shall work that _bon mot_ into my next literary letter
to the Boston _Globe_. Another delightfully satirical creature advised
me to take up the cause of ‘Great Women Married to Small Men,’ in my
next series of papers upon ‘Unconsidered Wrongs of Our Sex.’ You see
the reputation you are earning for yourself with the powers that be!”
Barton Ashe was a sensible man, well educated and well bred. Under
favoring circumstances, as when inspired by the society of his wife
and her loving appreciation, he was quick with repartee and apt at
fence even with a wordy woman. Under the present onslaught he was
furious and dumb. Had a man insulted him, and less grossly, he would
have knocked him down or given him his card and demanded a meeting
elsewhere. This berouged and bedizened old maid compromised him in the
eyes of solid men and giddy girls by entering into conversation with
him at all. Each shrill word was a prickle in a pore of his mental
cuticle. She advertised his wife as one of _her_ kind, arraigned him as
despot and churl, menaced him with public exposure, and posed as Agnes’
champion against the oppressor on whose side was the power of law and
tradition—made him ridiculous to all within the sound of her brazen
tongue—and he was powerless.
He did the only thing possible to a man calling himself a gentleman,
when baited to desperation in a public place by a woman who passes for
a lady—he lifted his hat silently and pulled the strap to stop the car.
Other passengers than Miss Marvel marked the dark face and blazing
eyes, and curious regards wandered back to the offender, smiling to
herself at this new proof of her ability to, in her favorite phrase,
“drive a poisoned needle under a man’s fifth rib.”
“_Great Women Married To Small Men!_”
The most offensive count in the unanswered indictment seemed to be
flung after him by the shrieking March wind. Until this moment of
intensest exasperation he had never consciously compared himself
mentally with his wife. That spiritually she was purer and better he
was ever ready to admit. The gallant alacrity with which men yield the
palm of virtue and piety to women may be due to the candor of real
greatness, but a keen student of human contrarieties is excusable for
likening it, sometimes, to the ostentatious generosity of the child who
surrenders to a playfellow the wholesome “cookey,” while he holds fast
to the plum cake for his own delectation.
“Great” and “Small” were explicit terms that threw our hero upon the
hostile-defensive. Agnes was a pearl among women, as good, true, and
sweet as any man need covet for a lifelong companion. She kept his
house well and his home bright, her sympathies were ready, her love
was poured out upon him in unstinted measure, she studied his tastes,
humored his few foibles, in brief, filled his life, or so much of it as
she could reach, most satisfactorily. Her mind was fairly stocked with
miscellaneous information; she had remarkable facility in composition
and graceful fancies, and, above all, the happy knack of saying, in a
telling way, things people cared to hear. Being in “the literary ring,”
she had secured a respectable audience, and, being a tactful woman,
she had kept it.
“Great,” she was not, in any sense of the word, except according to the
perverted standard of the “Club” gang, the mutual-admiration circle,
with whom every poetaster was a Browning, and the writer of turgid
essays a Carlyle or Emerson.
He gave a scornful snort in repeating the adjective. Agnes would be
the first to deprecate the application of it to herself. Yet—if she
had not invited the commendation of the _Précieuses ridicules_—had her
name never been bandied from mouth to mouth in public, the antithetical
“small” had never been fitted to him. Husband and wife were in false
positions. That was clear—and galling. Almost as clear, and harder to
endure, was his conviction that the situation could not be altered for
the better.
He had not made up his mind to graceful acceptance of the inevitable
when he fitted the latchkey in the door of his own house.
The popular impression as to the housewifery of pen-wrights had no
confirmation within the modest domicile of which Agnes Ashe was the
presiding genius. During her mother’s protracted invalidism and her own
betrothal she had studied domestic economy, including cookery, with
the just regard to system and thoroughness that made her successful in
her other profession of authorship. Her computations were correct and
her methods dainty. She deserved the more honor for all this because
she was not naturally fond of household occupations. If she reduced
dusting to a fine art, mixing and baking to an exact science, it was
conscientiously, not with love for the duties themselves.
Once, when praised for excellent housekeeping by a friend in her
husband’s hearing, her native sincerity made her say:
“You are mistaken in supposing that the drudgery connected with
home-making is easy or pleasant to me. If I did not feel it my duty
to go into the kitchen sometimes, and to arrange rooms, I doubt if I
should ever do either. Nor am I fond of sewing.”
“Yet your needle-work is exquisitely neat,” said the surprised visitor.
“Because I hold myself to the necessity of doing well what I undertake.
It is all business, not delight.”
After the visitor had gone, Barton gave a gentle and needful caution.
“Don’t talk in that way to acquaintances, dear,” he said. “I don’t want
people to report that your tastes are unfeminine.”
“Surely there are other feminine tastes besides love for needle,
broom, and egg-beater?” Agnes protested, no less gently. “Why should
every woman be proficient in baking, when every man is not compelled
to learn book-keeping? I am faithful in the discharge of domestic
duties because I love you and consider your happiness rather than
selfish ease. I love my home, and to enjoy the effect of clean, orderly
rooms and well-served meals, I am willing to perform tasks for which
I have no real liking. The game is well worth the candle—a good many
waxlights, in fact—but I question if you, for example, really _like_ to
draw up conveyances and make searches.”
“Illustration is not argument,” said Barton dryly. “You are undeniably
a clever woman, my love, but your reasoning would hardly convince a
jury. Women’s efforts in that direction are what we style ‘special
pleading.’”
This talk was held two months ago. Agnes knew better, by now, than
to attempt argument with him, and his love grew apace because of the
forbearance he mistook for conviction of his ability to direct thought
with action. She was the dearer for being dutiful. The docility with
which she listened to his dicta, never betraying a suspicion that they
were dogmas, won him to forgetfulness of the circumstance that she was
his senior by six years and a blue-stocking.
She was in the front hall when he got home to-night, receiving the
adieu of a spectacled personage whom she introduced as “Mr. Rowland of
Boston.”
“Charmed, I am sure,” said the stranger airily. “The more that I am
positive of enlisting Mr. Ashe’s powerful interest upon my side, and
that of the book-loving public. If Mrs. Ashe will pardon the additional
trespass upon her time, I should like to explain to you, my dear sir,
the nature of my petition to her, and now to yourself.”
They returned to the parlor, and he had his say. It was succinct
and comprehensive. He wished to engage Mrs. Ashe to write one of a
projected series of popular novels. Her coadjutors would be authors of
repute; the programme was attractive and must take immensely with the
best class of readers. His terms were liberal.
In any other mood than that for which Miss Marvel was chiefly
responsible, even a prejudiced man must have been gratified by the
compliment to his wife implied in the application. It acted upon
the chafed surface of husbandly vanity and dignity like moral _aqua
fortis_. Barton listened with lowering brow and compressed lips while
the fashionable publisher subjoined appeal to statement. When both
were concluded the master of the house waited with palpable patience,
apparently to make sure that all the pleas were in, then arose with the
air of the long-bored householder who dismisses a book agent.
“Mrs. Ashe is so well acquainted with my views upon the subject of her
undertaking any literary work whatsoever, that I may be allowed the
expression of my surprise at her reference of this matter to me. I
believe, however, that the feminine _littérateur_ considers a show of
deference to her husband a graceful form. Your appeal to me is, you
see, the idlest of courtesies. Now, as I have just come home after a
wearisome day of business, may I ask you to excuse me from further and
fruitless consideration of this subject?”
He bowed and went off to his dressing room.
The man of the world, left thus awkwardly _en tête-à-tête_ with an
insulted wife, always remembered with grateful admiration the perfect
breeding that helped him out of the dilemma.
“Mr. Ashe is very tired and far from well,” Agnes remarked, eye and
smile cool and unembarrassed. “As one conversant with the fatigues
and harassments of business life, you need no apology beyond this for
his seeming brusqueness. I dare say—” with archness that was well
achieved—“that Mrs. Rowland would comprehend, better than you, what
serpentlike wisdom we wives must exercise in broaching any subject
that requires thought to our hungry lords. I will appeal from Philip
famished to Philip full, in due season, but I think you would better
not depend upon me. I am a very busy woman just now, and shall be for
some time to come.”
“It would give me solid satisfaction to punch that fellow’s head,”
muttered the publisher in the street. “He is a boor and a tyrant, and
his wife is an angel.”
He was wrong in both specifications. Barton Ashe was a vain man,
and his vanity was smarting from a recent attack. His ideas of the
supremacy, intellectual and official, that do hedge a husband were
overstrained, but natural.
Agnes Ashe was a very mortal woman, walking up and down her pretty
room after the departure of her visitor, hands clenched until the
nails wounded the flesh, and cheeks so hot they dried the tears before
they fell. Her breath came fast between the shut teeth. Women will
comprehend how much easier it was to forgive her husband for the slur
cast upon her than for lowering himself in the eyes of a stranger.
“I am afraid of myself!” she whispered pantingly. “I am afraid of
_myself_! Must I, then, despise him utterly? What right has he to
charge upon me as shame what others account as honor? Can it be that he
is conscious of being small and fears to let me grow?”
By different roads, the refined woman, who loved her art for its own
sake and reverenced it for the good it might do, and the pretender,
tolerated by true artists out of charity, and out of respect for
the active benevolence that redeemed her from the rank of a public
nuisance—had arrived at a like conclusion.
Barton, after his bath and toilet, sat down to dinner, and scarcely
spoke until excellent clear soup and the delicious creamed lobster
prepared by Agnes’ own hands, had paved the way for more substantial
viands. Then his righteous wrath was partially cooled by perception
of the truth that the still, pale woman opposite meant to enter no
defense against the aspersions cast upon her in another’s hearing. Nay,
more, she made no attempt to cheat him into a milder mood, broached no
prudent topics, attempted no diversion. Second thought found fresh fuel
for displeasure in her reticence. The double offense of Miss Marvel’s
tirade and the airy publisher’s errand were not condonable by discreet
silence.
He slashed simultaneously into a roast of beef and the grievance upon
his mind.
“I met your particular crony, Miss Marvel, in the car on my way uptown.
She was, if possible, more detestably impertinent than usual.”
Agnes beckoned to the waitress and gave her in a low tone an errand to
the kitchen. Glancing up at her husband, she saw that he had laid down
the carver and was gazing sternly at herself.
“May I, as the least important member of this household, inquire why
you sent that girl out of the room? I may be, as your dear friends
assert, a small man married to a great woman, but I am credited by
others with a modicum of common sense and discretion. I am willing to
abide by the consequences of whatever I say at my own table and in the
presence of my servants, if I have any proprietorship in either.”
Red heat he had never seen before in Agnes’ face suffused it now, her
eyes dilated and gleamed.
“I sent the girl from the room because she was recommended to me by the
matron of an orphan asylum in which she was brought up. Miss Marvel is
a manager of the institution and had the girl trained in a school for
domestics. Mary is much attached to her. I thought it hardly safe or
kind to discuss her in Mary’s presence.”
Barton met generous heat with deadly coldness.
“When is your waitress’ month up?”
“On the fifteenth.”
“This is the seventh. Pay her a week’s wages to-morrow and pack her
off. I will have none of that woman’s spies in my house—that is, always
supposing it to be mine. I understand this afternoon’s scene. She is
kept posted as to the status of domestic affairs.”
“You are out of humor, Barton, or you could not be so unjust to me and
to a faithful servant.”
Griselda would not have retorted in a hard, cutting tone, but Griselda
could neither read nor write. Diffusion of knowledge has a tendency to
breed sedition among the lower orders.
Clubs for the lofty, and lager beer saloons for the lowly, stand, with
controversial Benedicks, for the “refuges” foreign cities offer to the
fugitive from wheels and hoofs.
“Excuse me for leaving you to digest your dinner and the memory of that
last remark in solitude,” Barton said sardonically. “I shall finish
_my_ dinner at the club.”
The library was the coziest room in the house. Before Mr. Rowland
called, Agnes had looked into it to see that the fire was bright and
that Barton’s easy-chair, newspaper, and cigar-stand were in place.
Upon the table was a bowl of _Bon Silène_ roses he had ordered on his
way downtown that morning. She had poured out his coffee and lighted
his cigar here for him last night. It all rushed over her with the pure
deliciousness of the roses’ breath, as she returned to the deserted
apartment after dinner. As she moved, the fragrance broke into waves
that overwhelmed her with the sweet agony of associativeness.
Sinking upon her knees before her husband’s chair, she laid her head
within her enfolding arms and remained thus until the clock struck
nine. Then she spoke aloud:
“What has he given me in exchange for my beautiful ideal world and for
my work? A drugged cup, with gall and wormwood in the bottom.”
The slow, scornful syllables jarred the perfumed waves and echoed
hollowly in the still corners.
She arose, unlocked a secretary at the back of the room, and took out
a worn portfolio—also locked. Selecting from the contents several large
sheets of paper, she laid them in order upon the table, and drew from
an inner pocket a gold pen in a shabby handle. With it she had written
her first book. For six years she had used no other. Before dipping it
into the ink, she kissed it.
“I have come back to you!” she said.
CHAPTER III.
WITH the first heavy snows of December a little daughter was given to
Agnes Ashe.
On New Year’s Day her husband proposed to read aloud to her a book
“some of the Club fellows were talking about last night.” The pale face
flushed nervously when he undid the wrapping paper.
It was one of the “happenings” we persist in classing among singular
coincidences, although they are of daily occurrence, that he should
have selected that particular novel for their entertainment on the
holiday he proposed to devote entirely to his convalescent wife.
“The Story of Walter King” had not been sent, as one might suppose
would have been natural, to Mr. Rowland of Boston.
“He would guess instantly how matters are,” Agnes reasoned. “I am still
too proud to run that risk.”
She took the MS. instead to a New York publisher in whose discretion
she could trust, told him of her whim to establish a new reputation
which should owe nothing to past gains, and left the story with
him. In a week it was accepted and in the printer’s hands. When Baby
Agnes—upon whom the mother bestowed the Scotch pet-name of “Nest”—was
born, new editions were selling as fast as the press could turn them
out.
It was evident, said critics, that the fresh, nervous novel was
from the hand of a young writer, skilled in the use of language but
unhackneyed by the need of furnishing “pot-boilers.” It was as evident,
said readers, that the unknown author had fed the pen directly from his
heart, and that personal experience had had much to do with the make-up
of the “live book.”
Agnes had held no communication with the discreet publisher since the
contract was signed. She had not corrected the proof-sheets, or had an
advance copy of the work. There was, therefore, literal truth in her
reply to Barton’s query—“Have you read it?”
“I have not even seen the book that I recollect. Who is the author?”
“John C. Hart”—turning to the title page. “What else has he done?”
“The name sounds familiar. Or, perhaps it may be that I am thinking of
Professor John S. Hart. You are very kind to think of getting a new
book for me! trebly kind to offer to read it to me.”
“It is little enough I can do for the best wife in Christendom!”
stooping to kiss her and then Baby Nest asleep in her crib beside
Agnes’ reclining chair.
The languid mother, grateful for his society and loverly attentions,
was more like his ideal wife than Agnes had been since the eve of her
birthday, when he had almost forgotten (through her fault) that he was
a gentleman. No explanations had followed the ugly scene. They had met
at breakfast the next morning as if the fracas had not occurred, but
then and thereafter he had missed something from his married life.
Had he tried to analyze the vague, ever present discomfort, he would
have said that his wife was always on guard. No surprise of abrupt or
rough speech betrayed her into a show of temper or wounded feeling. No
overflow of tenderness elicited a confession of answering devotion.
When questioned, she was frank in declaring that she loved him, and
sought to make him happy in his home and content with her. She was
never sad in his sight. Domestic and society duties were cheerfully
performed, she was always ready to go out with him when he desired it
and gave him her company at home conscientiously. There was the sore
spot! He could not prove that her love and duty were perfunctory, but
he never got away from the irritating suspicion that they were. Had she
been miserable, pettish, or fretfully exacting, it would have accorded
better with his creed of the absolute dependence of a woman upon her
lord. In plain English—which, however, he would have been ashamed to
put into words in any language—it irked him that his mental and moral
barometer could not set the weather for his household. There was a
_something_ back of Agnes’ even temper and equable spirits he could
not touch and that told him she was sufficient unto herself. Into this
she seemed to retire as into the cleft of a rock when the matrimonial
horizon threatened storm.
There was no one to tell him of mornings spent in the library, or of
the work done during the evenings he passed at the club. He ought
to have been gratified at her smiling aquiescence in his apologetic
representation of the business necessity laid upon a man to mingle
socially with “the fellows.” Some women made it preciously disagreeable
for husbands who acted upon this compulsion, but his wife was never
lonely by day or night. If he came home at eleven o’clock, she was
in the library, reading or knitting beside a glowing fire, ready to
receive him and to listen with interest to club stories or incidents.
If he stayed out after midnight, she went to bed like a sensible
Christian and slept soundly.
What could be more exemplary and satisfactory? He had a model wife.
Would sulks, tears, and chidings have been more to his taste? This
conclusion reached, he would berate himself for “an unreasonable
dog”—and go on missing something he could not define.
An odd conceit came to Agnes as the full, manly voice began “The
Story of Walter King”—a fancy that won a smile from her at first, and
terrified her when she could not shake it off. She was the unsuspected
mother of a foundling. In secret and in fear, she had laid the new-born
baby at a stranger’s door. He had cared for, fostered, and clothed it,
and on this New Year’s Day, her husband had ignorantly adopted the waif
and led it, a beautiful child, to her, bespeaking her admiration for it.
For her own baby! the thing born of her soul, the express image of her
thought, the bright, glorious darling in whom, and with whom, and by
whom, she had lived all these weary, weary months! Her husband would
introduce these two to one another! Was her left hand a stranger to her
right? Was her heart alien to the blood leaping from it?
She could have laughed and cried hysterically, could have snatched the
book from the unconscious reader and covered it with tears and kisses.
She must touch and hold it once, if but for a minute, or the strained
heart-strings would part.
“Can you see well?” she interrupted the reader to ask. The calm tone
surprised herself and lent her courage to carry out her stratagem.
“Does the light fall right for you? In her anxiety to exclude draughts
and the snow glare, Mrs. Ames may have made it too dark for well
people. Is the type pretty clear?”
She put out her hand and drew the volume from his. The sight of
familiar paragraphs and names was as if the child had laughed, in happy
recognition, into her eyes. She passed her fingers lovingly over the
page, stroked the binding, raised the open book to her lips, and gave
it back reluctantly.
“The smell of newly printed pages is delicious to me,” she said, trying
to laugh. “Sweeter than new-mown hay.”
“They have brought it out in good style,” observed Barton carelessly.
“One gets no slipshod literature from that house. Their imprint is a
title of intellectual nobility.”
Agnes smiled brightly in assent, turned her cheek to the cushioned back
of her chair, and closed her eyes to keep the happy tears from slipping
beneath the lids. Was the time close at hand in which she could safely
acknowledge her offspring? To screen the fact of her maternity from
possible premature discovery she had refrained from so much as looking
upon or speaking of the bantling for these long weeks. Providence had
put this opportunity of honorable recognition before her. How should
she seize it?
A thought struck her like an icebolt. What would Barton say, even in
this auspicious hour, to the systematic concealment practiced before
and since the advent of the adopted child? Would he throw it from him
as he would a snake? She pictured the possibility of virtuous horror
in the regards turned upon her, the aversion a moral man feels for a
lost woman. Deception—even untruth might be forgiven; the deliberate
disregard of his expressed wish that his wife should never again
put sentiment or feeling of hers into print would be construed into
absolute crime. He held the desire for literary renown on the part of
a woman to be a fault that unsexed her. In a young girl the ambition
might spring from the unrest of an unfilled heart, mistaken, but
pardonable as a blunder of ignorance. A wife’s heart, thoughts, and
hands should be _full_ of home and home loves, or she did not deserve
her high and blessed estate.
She felt, now, that she could never make him understand how the side
of her nature which he saw and knew was bettered and elevated by the
healthful action of its twin, to which he was a stranger. She _had_
“put herself into the book,” but not in the lower and vulgar sense in
which the reviewers had used the phrase. The aspirations with which
others could not intermeddle—least of all, the husband who so grossly
misjudged her, the fancies that beguiled Time of heaviness and drew
the soreness from her heart while she dallied with them—were there.
Her ideals were her real companions; her dream children her only
confidants.
“_The things which are seen are temporal; the things which are not seen
are eternal._”
The author who is not made, but born; the idealist whose brain
creations are to him almost visible and tangible, while he communes
with them—can, of all men, enter most joyfully into the meaning of the
sweet mysticism uttered by the Creator of things temporal and things
eternal.
It was a snowy day; transient glimmers of white light, shed from
thinner clouds, were the precursors of thicker falls of soundless
flakes. There was no wind, and as Agnes watched the storm between the
slightly parted blinds, a curtain of purest lace seemed unfolding and
wavering earthward. The hush of a great holiday enwrapped the city.
Baby Nest slumbered peacefully amid billows of lawn and wool; the
strong, mobile features of the husband she loved and feared more than
any other living mortal darkened and lightened like the snow clouds,
with the progress of the story. He read well, and threw unusual spirit
into the present task.
Agnes hearkened, with a growing sense of unreality. The disowned child
pressed nearer and closer, gazed appealingly into her face, cooed love
words in her ear, covered with kisses the hands with which the hapless
mother was constrained to hold it aloof from the heart that yearned to
take it in.
Sometimes Barton’s voice sounded a great way off, and she confused
his utterances with the winged ideas she had formulated into human
language. Was she thinking it all out? or was _he_ enunciating what
she _had_ thought through the languorous summer days and cool autumn
evenings? She used to wonder, amusedly, what he supposed she did during
the many hours she spent in solitude. He never asked, but if he had
deemed the matter worthy of speculation, he might have reasoned that a
woman who did not make her own clothes and had no taste for fancy work,
whose house was well appointed and not large, and whose health was good
must, with two servants to do housework and cooking, have much time
upon her hands.
“How do women occupy themselves who keep plenty of servants and do not
write, paint, or study anything in particular?” asked the young son of
a woman who kept house, wrote books, painted pictures, and studied with
her children.
“They make a profession of _horacide_!” answered the mother.
Barton lowered the book so abruptly that his wife started and clasped
her hands involuntarily. She was very weak.
“I should like to know this man!”
“What man?”
“The fellow who wrote this book! He is a New York lawyer—that is plain.
His insight of legal chicanery and his apt use of technical law terms
show that, if his clever reasoning did not. A Columbia graduate, too!
I’ll go bail for that. And a society man. By George! that narrows the
case down pretty well. I don’t know a man at the city bar, though, who
has sufficient literary skill to turn out such a piece of work as this.
‘John C. Hart’ is a pseudonym, of course—but there may be a meaning in
it.”
He fell into a muse over the title page, knotting his brows and
plucking at his lower lip while he scanned the name.
Agnes’ breath came quick; her head swam as in seasickness. She shook
herself mentally and tried to speak as usual:
“It may be another case of George Eliot, _alias_ Mary Anne Evans; or
Charles Egbert Craddock, _alias_ Miss Murfree.”
“Preposterous! There isn’t a feminine touch in the book. And no woman
of the education and refinement of this writer could know anything of
the scenes and motives he describes. Men can paint women faithfully.
Women who try to depict men show us up as hybrids, creatures of their
own sex disguised in masculine habiliments. Ready-made clothes at that,
baggy at the knees and short at the wrists. I should _not_ like,
however, to know a woman who could write ‘The Story of Walter King.’”
“It does not impress me as coarse!” Agnes was nerved by instinctive
resentment to say.
“Not a symptom of coarseness about it. But it _is_ virile—and that
your woman author ought never to be! Any man might be proud of having
written this novel. Any true, modest woman would blush to be accused of
it. You see the difference?”
“_I_ see the difference between the patient I left three hours ago, and
the one I find here now!” interjected the nurse bluntly.
She had come in while Barton was speaking, and had her hand on Mrs.
Ashe’s pulse.
“Tut! tut! tut!” she went on in grave vexation. “We shall have the
doctor again if this sort of excitement goes on. Eyes glassy, pulse up,
and, I venture to say, headache back of the eyes. Don’t deny it, Mrs.
Ashe! I know the signs. Here’s your lunch—after which, we _must_ have
the room darkened and try to compose your nerves. It won’t do to have a
throw-back at this late day.”
Barton carried off “The Story of Walter King” with him to the library,
a little anxious, but more aggrieved. In common with the mighty
majority of husbands, he resented Mrs. Gamp the more virulently because
impotent against her tyranny.
“Thank Heaven that her time, like her infernal master’s, is short!”
growled he, dropping into his easy-chair and throwing his legs over
the foot-rest in lordly disdain of appearances. “I suppose women enjoy
being hectored, or the sex would rise _en masse_ against this order of
haggish humbugs. Agnes didn’t dare peep a defense of herself, or of me.
Great Scott! suppose I had been born a woman!”
He lighted a cigar and reopened his book. A luxurious, if lonely,
lunch was served at half-past one. Wine and walnuts went with him into
the library after the meal was eaten. The air was blue with fragrant
smoke for the rest of the day. He did not take the nap he had promised
himself as the chief delight of a lazy afternoon, until the last page
of “The Story of Walter King” was devoured. Even after he had stretched
himself upon the lounge and drawn the silken and eiderdown slumber-robe
over him, he lay looking at the purring fire of sea-coal and listening
to the muffled tinkle of sleigh-bells along Fifth Avenue, which was but
a block distant—and thinking of the book that had enchained him so many
hours. It had taken a powerful grip of his imagination and titillated
his intellectual palate smartly. There were passages in it that
recalled pertinent and pregnant sayings of his own relative to certain
topics discussed in the fascinating pages; theories he had advanced and
maintained; his very turns of speech were here and there.
Again he said, “I should like to know that man. He has a long head
and sharp wits of his own. Immense knowledge of the world and human
nature.” Without the least intention of being conceited he subjoined
to the silent soliloquy: “If I had turned my attention to literature,
I believe I could have written that book. But one man cannot be
proficient in everything. The suggestion of feminine authorship is
ridiculous. Poor Agnes is a sensible girl, but she is wide of the mark
there.”
Here his thoughts wandered into the poppied plains of sleep.
Awaking from his siesta to find himself in the dark, he arose
refreshed, and paid a dutiful call to his wife’s chamber before going
out to dine at his club. The nurse met him upon the threshold and
stepped out into the hall for a whispered colloquy. Both of her charges
had been restless all the afternoon. The baby was colicky, Mrs. Ashe
feverish and excited, although persisting that nothing ailed her.
“She has an exquisitely susceptible nervous organization,” she
continued in the parrotlike lingo of the trained nurse. “We must really
guard her more carefully in future. She was talking about that novel
in her sleep just now—begging you not to take it away from her and all
that, in quite a wild way. There is evidently cerebral excitement.
Perhaps, as you are going out, it might be prudent to telephone the
doctor to drop in toward bedtime.”
“Oh, a good sleep will set her up all right!” returned Barton
slightingly. It did not suit his notions of marital rights to be
interviewed and advised in a ghostly whisper without the precincts of
his own room, by this pretentious hireling. “The book had nothing to
do with her uncomfortable afternoon. It was probably the luncheon. I
thought, when you brought it up, that it was more like a meal for a
ditcher than for a delicate invalid.”
Pleased at administering this Roland for accumulated Olivers, he ran
downstairs without attending to her protest, and whistled softly while
equipping himself for the walk through the snow. The night was sharply
cold; the drifts were as dry as dust. He laughed like a boy in plowing
through them. The return to bachelor freedom was not bad, for a change,
and there were sure to be a lot of prime fellows at the club on a
stormy holiday night.
CHAPTER IV.
AT eleven o’clock of that New Year’s night the snow still fell, but the
wind had increased to a gale, and shook the eastward windows of Agnes
Ashe’s bedchamber.
Nurse and baby were sound asleep in the adjoining nursery. Even in the
well-built house and curtained room, the night-light wavered in the
unquiet air, sending fitful hosts of specter shadows scurrying over the
ceiling and falling down the walls. Sometimes one dropped upon the bed
and made mouths or crooked lean fingers at the convalescent. Now and
then they whispered something in fleeing or skulking past. When this
happened they spoke of her husband and how he had carried off both her
babies downstairs. For Baby Nest’s crib was gone. She had been doubly
robbed.
The door of communication between the rooms was ajar. Mrs. Ashe had
need to move cautiously in arising and wrapping herself in a dressing
gown. She had been three weeks upstairs. Mrs. Ames had declared her too
feeble to walk across the room unaided, but to-night she felt strong
and restless. Her brain was teeming with fledged thoughts, crying and
fluttering to escape. If she had pen and ink she could begin another
book, now that the nurse was asleep and Barton out. But that was not
her reason for getting up and slipping on the wrapper. Oh, no! She
drew the door to behind her cautiously, listened with held breath for
sounds from the inner room, and hearing nothing, smiled cunningly,
crept to the stair-head and down the polished steps. Their chill struck
through the slippers into which she had thrust her stockingless feet;
she shivered in the wind that drove fine snow under the front door and
whistled jeeringly at her as she went by.
The library was void of human presence but warm and murky red with
firelight. The vivid glow of the Argand burner, as she touched the
regulator, shone upon glittering eyes, scarlet cheeks, and red lips
that showed her teeth in the fixed smile of successful cunning. She
found what she sought at once. Barton had left “The Story of Walter
King” upon the table beside his reading chair. He would be out late.
There was nothing to call him home and he was fond of his club. She was
quite safe for an hour or two—secure from spy and intrusion—she and her
brain-baby.
Clasping it to her heart, she wept and smiled, rocked herself to and
fro as she would cuddle Baby Nest, did the nurse allow it. There was
nobody to meddle with her here. She settled herself in the easy-chair
and, finding where Barton had left off, read on and on, until the type
began to gyrate queerly in fantastic measure across the page. Her eyes
were getting tired. The tyrant above-stairs had prohibited reading so
long that the effort tried her strength.
Still holding the book to her bosom, she looked around. The library
was not so orderly as when she visited it tri-daily. There were no
flowers on the table, yet she fancied that she smelled _Bon Silène_
roses, as she had on that far-back March night when she unlocked the
door leading into her beautiful, comforting Other World, where no
rough blasts shook buds from blowing, no iron hand pressed down Fancy
and held in Imagination with curb and bridle. The ash-cup of the
bronze smoking table was filled with ashes, burnt stumps of cigars
littered the hearth. Seeing them she bethought herself of the truncated
brown canoe tossing in the foam-fringe of the tide on the Old Point
beach. By shutting her eyes she could reproduce the scene with the
minuteness of a photograph; could see the floating and swooping gulls,
silver-breasted against the blue sky, and hear the swash of the waters
between the rocks.
She was dreaming! It would never do to fall asleep here and be
discovered by Barton or Mrs. Ames! Rubbing her eyes, she forced herself
to note that one slipper lay on the rug, the other under a chair, just
as Barton had kicked it off.
“Fie! fie! what would people say of a literary woman’s _menage_, were
these things seen?”
Presently, when her head stopped reeling, she would pick them up and
straighten the slumber-robe, all crumpled together on the foot of the
lounge, the pillow of which was indented by Barton’s head. Sitting bolt
upright, she stared at robe and cushion, so eloquent of her husband’s
recent presence. Her eyes were dry with misery, her features worked
into sharpness. She looked, not six, but twenty years older than the
hale man who had lain there, indolent and at ease, while she turned
wretchedly upon her bed throughout the tedious afternoon.
Oh, the dead Past! Oh, murdered Love!
“He said that no pure woman would have written that book,” she
murmured. “He must never know! Why, he would turn me into the street
to-night, if he found it out.”
She crossed the room, catching at the furniture as she staggered along
to the secretary. The key hung upon a hidden hook under the drawers.
She felt for it, opened the central compartment of the escritoire, and
took out an old, roomy portfolio. There were papers in it that must be
destroyed. She meant to do it before she was taken ill, but everything
had been so sudden. It would never do to leave them for other eyes in
case of her death. While she fumbled in the pockets and drew out the
MSS. she checked herself in repeating irrelevant rhymes:
“That husbands could be cruel,
I have known for seasons three,
But, oh! to ride Vindictive while a baby cries for me.”
“If only my head would be steady and clear again for five minutes!”
The portfolio was nearly emptied into her lap when an awful voice from
the doorway said:
“Mrs. Ashe! what am I to think of this extraordinary proceeding?”
Mrs. Ames, portentous in flannel gown and curl-papers, confronted the
affrighted culprit. Through the open door and down the stairway came
the wail of the hungry baby.
“I only came down for her brother,” tremblingly clutching her book, and
letting the portfolio slide to the floor. “I felt so strong! so well!
I will run up to the little sister now—at once. Poor little Nest! she
wants me, I suppose?”
Mrs. Gamp’s severe eyes softened into anxiety. She spoke soothingly, in
passing her powerful arm around the shaking form.
“Yes, dear. She wants mamma. Lean on me and don’t hurry too much. The
stairs are a steep climb.”
Upon the upper landing Agnes, stopping to breathe, smiled piteously
into the compassionate face.
“You see”—showing a corner of the volume hidden in the folds of her
gown—“this is as much my baby as the other one, and I knew he was
downstairs all alone. You will let me keep him—won’t you?”
“Certainly, dear! We’ll put him to bed with you, right under your
pillow.”
“And not a word to Barton?” Putting her lips close to the other’s ear,
she whispered fearfully—“You know he would turn us both out into the
street if he knew.”
“He shan’t hear a lisp from me!” asseverated the nurse stoutly. “We’ll
have the two of you sound asleep before he comes in.”
She always humored delirious patients. In such cases veracity
courtesied to expediency.
The prime fellows made up a theater party after the club dinner and
ended a jolly day with a jollier supper. The silvery tongue of the
French timepiece upon the library mantel said it was one o’clock as
Barton, entering, was amazed to see that he must have left the Argand
reading burner up at full height. A second step showed traces of other
occupation than his and of later date. His wife’s secretary was open, a
portfolio lay wide upon the floor, and the rug was strewed with papers.
Before the suspicion of burglary could cross his mind, he trod upon
something hard. It was a heavy gold hair pin of a peculiar pattern,
which Agnes wore constantly. He had noticed it in her hair at noon
to-day, as her head lay back against the cushions, weighed down, it
would seem, by the heavy coils.
Had that hypocritical hag of a nurse allowed such outrageous imprudence
in his absence? He examined the lock of the secretary. The key which
he believed was kept upstairs by Agnes was in it; a survey of the
apartment revealed no other signs of unwonted disorder.
“Oh, these women!” his face, florid with champagne, hock, and righteous
choler, crimsoned apoplectically when he stooped for the portfolio. A
sheet of paper, covered with his wife’s neat, compact chirography, fell
out.
It was in verse, and bore no caption.
“So-ho! poetry!”
As in a dream, he seemed to hear Agnes’ voice:
“I am not a bard at all. When I am in the dark, or at best in a
half-light—sorry or weary, or lonely of heart—my thoughts take rhythmic
shape.”
At the bottom of the third page of the rhymes was a date.
“_October 5, 188—._”
He recollected the day. He had gone off to join some friends for a
week’s hunting, leaving her in a quiet mountain inn.
“And she was lonely of heart—poor little wifie!”
He sat down to read:
“He turned him at the maple tree,
To wave a fond farewell to me.
The burning branches touched his head,
Tawny and ash, and dappled red.
Behind him, in still fold on fold—
As painters lay with leaves of gold
The ground on which they mean to trace
Some favorite saint of special grace—
The chestnuts floored and roofed and hung
Niche for my hero saint. Down-flung
From cedar tops, the wild woodbine
Lent pennons brave to deck the shrine;
Barbaric sumachs straight upbore
Their crimson lamps, and, light and hoar,—
Like votive lace bestowed by dame,
Repentant of her splendid shame,—
O’er withered shrub and brier and stone,
The seeded clematis was thrown.
I thought my heart broke in the rush
Of tears that blotted out the flush
Of draping vine and burning bough.
‘Oh, love of mine!’—thus ran my vow—
‘Let Heaven but stoop to hear my prayer,
But lift the cross I cannot bear,
This lonely, living death of pain,
And give my darling back again
To longing heart and straining eyes—
To grief and loss in other guise,
Silent I’ll bow, and, smiling, see
Sweet dawn in gloom that’s shared with thee!’”
The champagne had been heady, and there was a good deal of hock. Tears
of maudlin sentimentality suffused the reader’s eyes at the metrical
tribute to himself as his wife’s “hero-saint.” So long as she published
nothing of the sort, it was pleasant to find, accidentally, that
she wrote love verses in his absence, dedicated to him. He had not
suspected how much she felt their parting—she had borne herself so
heroically. Brushing away the soft moisture, he read on:
“To-day, I stood and saw him stay
His horse upon the woodland way,
And toss to me a gay farewell.
The chestnut leaves about him fell;
The royal maples burned and shone,
Veiling misshapen branch and stone,
The misty clematis lay white;
The woodbine from the cedar’s height,
The sumach’s crimson cones, the breath
That amber hickories yield in death—
All were the same. October rare
Held sway divine o’er earth and air.
The horseman’s port was kingly—yet
My lips unwrung, my eyes unwet,
My heart recoils in cold despair
At memory of that granted prayer.
* * * * *
My beautiful dead dream! The Spring
Beyond Life’s winter, which will bring
Earth’s buried ones to love’s embrace,
Will hold for me no quickening grace.
Summers may go, Octobers come;—
Deep out of sight, and pale and dumb,
Lies the hope that never was to be.
My saint who lived not—save to me!”
He went over the second section of the poem twice before the
wine-warmed brain accepted the significance of the lines.
Then, he swore a little. He would be no-matter-what-ed if he could
make out women’s fantasies. He supposed this was a fancy sketch, an
impersonal rigmarole, altogether, but it was no-matter-what-ed (again)
disagreeable stuff for a fellow to read who recollected that he had
ridden away last October from a dry-eyed wife into the burning heart of
such a wood as was here described. He did not remember turning under
the maple tree, it was true—if indeed there were a maple tree at the
top of the hill. There might be some mistake in the whole thing, but it
went against a fellow’s grain to admit the possibility that his wife
had another man even in the eye of her imagination.
He renewed the business of collecting the scattered papers. He would
read no more poetry to-night, but an unsealed law envelope, without
address, lay under the armchair. It was white and fresh, and the folds
of the instrument inclosed were crisp with newness. He pulled it out:
“MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT made this 6th Day of August,
188—, between AGNES WELLES ASHE of New York City, and
RHINE, RHONE & CO., Publishers of New York City.
“Said AGNES WELLES ASHE being the author and
proprietor of a work entitled, ‘THE STORY OF WALTER
KING, BY JOHN C. HART,’ in consideration of the
covenants and stipulation, etc., etc., etc.”
The shock cleared the lawyer’s head on the instant. He perused the
document to signatures, seals, and witnesses, refolded and restored
it to the envelope, put it back into the portfolio, and the portfolio
into the escritoire, turned the key in the lock and took his stand upon
the rug, his hands behind his back, his back to the fire. His face was
purple, his eyes glared.
“So much for marrying a literary woman! They are a _bad_ lot!”
He spat it out viciously and a bitter, sounding oath after it.
The door-bell rang loudly, attended by the sound of stamping feet upon
the mat outside. The master of the house answered the summons. The
family physician crowded in past him, pulling off his overcoat as he
came.
“How is she?” he demanded, without preamble.
“She! Who?”
“Mrs. Ashe! One of your maids telephoned for me at half-past twelve,
from the nearest station—‘Come at once! Mrs. Ashe is dangerously ill.’
Can there be some mistake?”
Mrs. Ames called him from the top of the stairs: “Come up quick,
please, doctor. It takes two of us to hold her in bed.”
The doctor rushed upstairs. Barton walked leisurely back into the
library and shut the door. A woman who had sat here reading old MSS.
and new contracts until she heard her husband’s latchkey in the outer
door, then rushed off up a long flight of stairs to avoid him, in such
frantic haste that she fell into a fit at the top, might come out of it
without his help. He would never be fooled by her again, so help him
God!
Half an hour went by and he had not moved, although the stealthy rush
of feet overhead bespoke excitement and yet caution on the part of the
attendants, and twice a faint scream penetrated the ceiling. At last he
reached out his hand for pen and paper and began a letter.
“MY DEAR UNCLE:
“I said to you, jestingly, thirteen months ago, that I
would employ you to draw up articles of separation in
the event of my needing——”
The pen stopped. He could have sworn that someone passed him, so close
that he felt the wind from floating garments, and that there was the
odor of _Bon Silène_ roses in the air. It was strangely still overhead.
Cold sweat broke out all over him; when he strove to resume his
writing, his fingers were nerveless. Slow, heavy feet came down the
stairs and to the library door. It was opened without the ceremony of
knocking, and the physician appeared.
A withering glance took in the details of the quiet figure at the
table, the paper, and the pen arrested in the hand. He went through no
form of merciful preparation.
“Mr. Ashe! your wife is dead! A severe shock of some kind—the nurse
thinks you can explain it—brought on convulsions and suffusion of the
brain.”
* * * * *
Baby Nest survived her mother but a week. Her father married again,
eighteen months afterward, a beautiful society girl with a tolerable
fortune.
She said a good thing in my hearing the other night, which I offer here
in the place of the conventional moral, my story having none.
“What have you been doing with yourself all the winter?” she asked of a
fine-featured, dainty little old lady, whose blue blood adds nameless
finish to the fair product of brains and breeding. “I have not seen you
for an age.”
“I have gone out to few large assemblies this season,” said Queen Mab.
“But I have greatly enjoyed certain conclaves of choice spirits, to
which I have been admitted. Evenings with the Laurence Huttons, the
Edmund Clarence Stedmans, the Brander Matthewses, and Mr. and Mrs.
William Dean Howells are something to be remembered forever with pride
and delight.”
“Ye-es?” the priceless lace on bust and sleeves swaying in the languid
breeze of her fan. “I have heard others say that _some of these
Bohemians_ are really very, very nice—don’t you know?”[B]
THE END.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Literal report.
[B] A verbatim report.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Obvious punctution errors repaired.
Page 6, “knickerbcokers” changed to “knickerbockers” (jackets and
knickerbockers)
Page 9, “seeming” changed to “seaming” (out the seaming gallantly)
Page 15, “nectkies” changed to “neckties” (white neckties upon weekdays)
Page 49, “croning” changed to “crooning” (hear Tony crooning)
Page 62, “prceious” changed to “precious” (My precious one!)
Page 74, “to-morow” changed to “to-morrow” (minds that to-morrow we)
Page 109, “atmosphrere” changed to “atmosphere” (long in the atmosphere)
Page 129, “presumptous” changed to “presumptuous” (star-gazing and
presumptuous)
Page 133, “Adironacks” changed to “Adirondacks” (week for the
Adirondacks)
Page 170, “theatened” changed to “threatened” (laughter threatened
dissolution)
Page 185, “Christain” changed to “Christian” (a thing as Christian)
Page 245, “apeing” changed to “aping” (her aping is more)
Page 245, “entreé” changed to “entrée” (_entrée_ of uppertendom)
End of Project Gutenberg's Mr. Wayt's Wife's Sister, by Marion Harland