The whole landscape was golden, the sea was silver, on that October
morning. It was the brilliant decline of the year. Edith stood with Jack
on the veranda. He had his grip-sack in hand and was equipped for town.
Both were silent in the entrancing scene.
The birds, twittering in the fruit-trees and over the vines, had the
air of an orchestra, the concerts of the season over, gathering their
instruments and about to depart. One could detect in the lapse of the
waves along the shore the note of weariness preceding the change into
the fretfulness and the tumult of tempests. In the soft ripening of the
season there was peace and hope, but it was the hope of another day. The
curtain was falling on this.
Was life beginning, then, or ending? If life only could change and renew
itself like the seasons, with the perpetually recurring springs! But
youth comes only once, and thereafter the man gathers the fruit of it,
sweet or bitter.
Jack was not given to moralizing, but perhaps a subtle suggestion of
this came to him in the thought that an enterprise, a new enterprise,
might have seemed easier in May, when the forces of nature were with
him, than in October. There was something, at least, that fell in with
his mood, a mood of acquiescence in failure, in this closing season of
the year, when he stood empty-handed in the harvest-time.
“Edith,” he said, as they paced down the walk which was flaming with
scarlet and crimson borders, and turned to look at the peaceful brown
house, “I hate to go.”
“But you are not going,” said Edith, brightly. “I feel all the time as
if you were just coming back. Jack, do you know,” and she put her hand
on his shoulder, “this is the sweetest home in the world now!”
“It is the only one, dear;” and Jack made the statement with a humorous
sense of its truth. “Well, there's the train, and I'm off with the other
clerks.”
“Clerk, indeed!” cried Edith, putting up her face to his; “you are going
to be a Merchant Prince, Jack, that is what you are going to be.”
On the train there was an atmosphere of business. Jack felt that he was
not going to the New York that he knew--not to his New York, but to a
city of traffic; down into the streets of commercial enterprise, not at
all to the metropolis of leisure, of pleasure, to the world of clubs and
drawing-rooms and elegant loiterings and the rivalries of society life.
That was all ended. Jack was hurrying to catch the down-town car for the
dingy office of Fletcher & Co. at an hour fixed.
It was ended, to be sure, but the struggle with Jack in his new life was
not ended, his biographer knows, for months and years.
It was long before he could pass his club windows without a pang of
humiliation, or lift his hat to a lady of his acquaintance in her
passing carriage without a vivid feeling of separateness from his old
life. For the old life--he could see that any day in the Avenue, any
evening by the flaming lights--went by in its gilded chariots and
entrancing toilets, the fascinating whirl of Vanity Fair crowned with
roses and with ennui. Did he regret it? No doubt. Not to regret would
have been to change his nature, and that were a feat impossible for his
biographer to accomplish. In a way his life was gone, and to build up a
new life, serene and enduring, was not the work of a day.
One thing he did not regret in the shock he had received, and that was
the absence of Carmen and her world. When he thought of her he had a
sense of escape. She was still abroad, and he heard from time to time
that Mavick was philandering about from capital to capital in her train.
Certainly he would have envied neither of them if he had been aware, as
the reader is aware, of the guilty secret that drew them together and
must be forever their torment. They knew each other.
But this glittering world, to attain a place in which is the object of
most of the struggles and hungry competition of modern life, seemed
not so real nor so desirable when he was at home with Edith, and in his
gradually growing interest in nobler pursuits. They had decided to take
a modest apartment in town for the winter, and almost before the lease
was signed, Edith, in her mind, had transformed it into a charming home.
Jack used to rally her on her enthusiasm in its simple furnishing; it
reminded him, he said, of Carmen's interest in her projected house of
Nero. It was a great contrast, to be sure, to their stately house by the
Park, but it was to them both what that had never been. To one who knows
how life goes astray in the solicitations of the great world, there was
something pathetic in Edith's pleasure. Even to Jack it might some day
come with the force of keen regret for years wasted, that it is enough
to break a body's heart to see how little a thing can make a woman
happy.
It was another summer. Major Fairfax had come down with Jack to spend
Sunday at the Golden House. Edith was showing the Major the view from
the end of the veranda. Jack was running through the evening paper.
“Hi!” he cried; “here's news. Mavick is to have the mission to Rome, and
it is rumored that the rich and accomplished Mrs. Henderson, as the wife
of the minister, will make the Roman season very gay.”
“It's too bad,” said Edith. “Nothing is said about the training-school?”
“Nothing.” “Poor Henderson!” was the Major's comment. “It was for this
that he drudged and schemed and heaped up his colossal fortune! His life
must look to him like a burlesque.”