not as clever as you, of course; I have known that for a long while,
Jaques; and to-night in particular I don't quite follow you, my dear,
but I love you, and--why, there is _nothing_ I could deny you!"
"Then give me back my freedom," said I. "For, look you, Rosalind,
marriage is proverbially a slippery business. Always there are a
variety of excellent reasons for perpetrating matrimony; but the rub of
it is that not any one of them insures you against to-morrow. Love, for
example, we have all heard of; but I have known fine fellows to fling
away their chances in life, after the most approved romantic fashion,
on account of a pretty stenographer, and to beat her within the
twelvemonth. And upon my word, you know, nobody has a right to blame
the swindled lover for doing this--"
I paused to inspect the china pug-dog which squatted on the pink-tiled
hearth and which glared inanely at the huge brass coal-box just
opposite. Then I turned from these two abominations and faced Rosalind
with a bantering flirt of my head.
"--For put it that I marry some entrancing slip of girlhood, what am I
to say when, later, I discover myself irrevocably chained to a fat and
dowdy matron? I married no such person, I have indeed sworn eternal
fidelity to an entirely different person; and this unsolicited usurper
of my hearth is nothing whatever to me, unless perhaps the object of my
entire abhorrence. Yet am I none the less compelled to justify the
ensuing action before an irrational audience, which faces common logic
in very much the attitude of Augustine's famed adder! Decidedly I think
that, on the whole, I would prefer my Freedom."
It was as though I had struck her. She sat as if frozen. "Jaques, is
there another woman in this?"
"Why, in a fashion, yes. Yet it is mainly because I am really fond of
you, Rosalind."
She handed me that exceedingly expensive ring the jeweler had charged
to me. I thought her action damnably theatrical, but still, it was not
as though I could afford to waste money on rings, so I took the trinket
absent-mindedly.
"You are unflatteringly prompt in closing out the account," I said,
with a grieved smile....
"Good-bye!" said Rosalind, and her voice broke. "Oh, and I had
thought--! Well, as it is, I pay for the luxury of thinking, just as
you forewarned me, don't I, Jaques? And you won't forget the
hall-light? Aunt Marcia, you know--but how glad _she_ will be! I feel
rather near to Aunt Marcia to-night," said Rosalind.
7
She left Lichfield the next day but one, and spent the following winter
with the aunt that lived in Brooklyn. She was Rosalind Gelwix the next
time I saw her....
And Aunt Marcia, whose taste is upon a par with her physical
attractions, inserted a paragraph in the "Social Items" of the
Lichfield _Courier-Herald_ to announce the breaking-off of the
engagement. Aunt Marcia also took the trouble to explain, quite
confidentially, to some seven hundred and ninety-three people, just why
the engagement had been broken off: and these explanations were more
creditable to Mrs. Dumby's imagination than to me.
And I remembered, then, that the last request my mother made of me was
to keep out of the newspapers--"except, of course, the social
items"....
20.
_He Dines Out, Impeded by Superstitions_
Within the week I had repented of what I termed my idiotic quixotism,
and for precisely nine days after that I cursed my folly. And then, at
the Provises, I comprehended that in breaking off my engagement to
Rosalind Jemmett I had acted with profound wisdom, and I unfolded my
napkin, and said:
"Do you know I didn't catch your name--not even this time?"
She took a liberal supply of lemon juice. "How delightful!" she
murmured, "for I heard yours quite distinctly, and these oysters are
delicious."
I noted with approval that her gown was pink and fluffy; it had also the
advantage of displaying shoulders that were incredibly white, and a
throat which was little short of marvellous. "I am glad," I whispered,
confidentially, "that you are still wearing that faint vein about your
left temple. I thought it admirable for early morning wear upon the
house tops of Liege, but it seems equally effective for dinner parties."
She raised her eyebrows slightly and selected a biscuit.
"You see," said I, "I was horribly late. And when Kittie Provis said,
'Allow me,' and I saw--well, I didn't care," I concluded, lucidly,
"because to have every one of your dreams come true, all of a sudden,
leaves you past caring."
"It really is funny," she confided to a spoonful of _consomme a la
Julienne_.
"After almost two years!" sighed I, ever so happily. But I continued,
with reproach, "To go without a word--that very day--"
"Mamma--" she began.
I recalled the canary-bird, and the purple shawl. "I sought wildly,"
said I; "you were evanished. The _proprietaire_ was tearing his hair--no
insurance--he knew nothing. So I too tore my hair; and I said things.
There was a row. For he also said things: 'Figure to yourselves,
messieurs! I lose the Continental--two ladies come and go, I know not
who--I am ruined, desolated, is it not?--and this pig of an American
blusters--ah, my new carpets, just down, what horror!' And then, you
know, he launched into a quite feeling peroration concerning our
notorious custom of tomahawking one another--
"Yes," I coldly concluded into Mrs. Clement Dumby's ear, "we all behaved
disgracefully. As you very justly observe, liquor has been the curse of
the South." It was of a piece with Kittie Provis to put me next to Aunt
Marcia, I reflected.
And mentally I decided that even though a portion of my assertions had
not actually gone through the formality of occurring, it all might very
easily have happened, had I remained a while longer in Liege; and then
ensued a silent interval and an entree.
"And so--?"
"And so I knocked about the world, in various places, hoping against
hope that at last--"
"Your voice carries frightfully--"
I glanced toward Mrs. Clement Dumby, who, as a dining dowager of many
years' experience, was, to all appearances, engrossed by the contents of
her plate. "My elderly neighbour is as hard of hearing as a
telephone-girl," I announced. She was the exact contrary, which was why
I said it quite audibly. "And your neighbour--why, _his_ neighbour is
Nannie Allsotts. We might as well be on a desert island, Elena--" And
the given name slipped out so carelessly as to appear almost accidental.
"Sir!" said she, with proper indignation; "after so short an
acquaintance--"
"Centuries," I suggested, meekly. "You remember I explained about that."
She frowned,--an untrustworthy frown that was tinged with laughter. "One
meets so many people! Yes, it really is frightfully warm, Colonel
Grimshaw; they ought to open some of the windows."
"Er--haw--hum! Didn't see you at the Anchesters."
"No; I am usually lucky enough to be in bed with a sick headache when
Mrs. Anchester entertains. Of two evils one should choose the lesser,
you know."
In the manner of divers veterans Colonel Grimshaw evinced his mirth upon
a scale more proper to an elephant; and relapsed, with a reassuring air
of having done his duty once and for all.
"I never," she suggested, tentatively, "heard any more of your poem,
about--?"
"Oh, I finished it; every magazine in the country knows it. It is poor
stuff, of course, but then how could I write of Helen when Helen had
disappeared?"
The lashes exhibited themselves at full length. "I looked her up,"
confessed their owner, guiltily, "in the encyclopaedia. It was very
instructive--about sun-myths and bronzes and the growth of the epic, you
know, and tree-worship and moon-goddesses. Of course"--here ensued a
flush and a certain hiatus in logic,--"of course it is nonsense."
"Nonsense?" My voice sank tenderly. "Is it nonsense, Elena, that for two
years I have remembered the woman whose soft body I held, for one
unforgettable moment, in my arms? and nonsense that I have fought all
this time against--against the temptations every man has,--that I might
ask her at last--some day when she at last returned, as always I knew
she would--to share a fairly decent life? and nonsense that I have
dreamed, waking and sleeping, of a wondrous face I knew in Ilium first,
and in old Rome, and later on in France, I think, when the Valois were
kings? Well!" I sighed, after vainly racking my brain for a tenderer
fragment of those two-year-old verses, "I suppose it is nonsense!"
"The salt, please," quoth she. She flashed that unforgotten broadside at
me. "I believe you need it."
"Why, dear me! of course not!" said I, to Mrs. Dumby; "immorality lost
the true _cachet_ about the same time that ping-pong did. Nowadays
divorces are going out, you know, and divorcees are not allowed to.
Quite modish women are seen in public with their husbands nowadays."
"H'mph!" said Mrs. Dumby; "I've no doubt that you must find it a most
inconvenient fad!"
I ate my portion of duck abstractedly. "Thus to dive into the
refuse-heap of last year's slang does not quite cover the requirements
of the case. For I wish--only I hardly dare to ask--"
"If I were half of what you make out," meditatively said she, "I would
be a regular fairy, and couldn't refuse you the usual three wishes."
"Two," I declared, "would be sufficient."
"First?"
"That you tell me your name."
"I adore orange ices, don't you? And the second?" was her comment.
"Well, then, you' re a pig," was mine. "You are simply a nomenclatural
Berkshire. But the second is that you let me measure your finger--oh,
any finger will do. Say, the third on the left hand."
"You really talk to me as if--" But this non-existent state of affairs
proved indescribable, and the unreal condition lapsed into a pout.
"Oh, very possibly!" I conceded; "since the way in which a man talks to
a woman--to _the_ woman--depends by ordinary upon the depth--"
"The depth of his devotion?" she queried, helpfully. "Of course!"
I faced the broadside, without flinching. "No," said I, critically; "the
depth of her dimples."
"Nonsense!" Nevertheless, the dimples were, and by a deal, the more
conspicuous. We were getting on pretty well.
I bent forward; there was a little catch in my voice. Aunt Marcia was
listening. I wanted her to listen.
"You must know that I love you," I said, simply, "I have always loved
you, I think, since the moment my eyes first fell upon you in
that--other pink thing. Of course, I realize the absurdity of my talking
in this way to a woman whose name I don't know; but I realise more
strongly that I love you. Why, there is not a pulse in my body which
isn't throbbing and tingling and leaping riotously from pure joy of
being with you again, Elena! And in time, you will love me a little,
simply because I want you to,--isn't that always a woman's main reason
for caring for a man?"
She considered this, dubious and flushed.
"I will not insist," said I, with a hurried and contented laugh, "that
you were formerly an Argive queen. I mean I will not be obstinate about
it, because that, I confess, was a paraphrase of my verses. But Helen
has always been to me the symbol of perfect loveliness, and so it was
not unnatural that I should confuse you with her."
"Thank you, sir," said she, demurely.
"I half believe it is true, even now; and if not--well, Helen was
acceptable enough in her day, Elena, but I am willing to Italianise, for
I have seen you and loved you, and Helen is forgot. It is not exactly
the orthodox pace for falling in love," I added, with a boyish candour,
"but it is very real to me."
"You--you couldn't have fallen in love--really--"
"It was not in the least difficult," I protested.
"And you don't even know my _name_--"
"I know, however, what it is going to be," said I; "and Mrs. 'Enry
'Awkins, as we'll put it, has found favour in the judgment of
connoisseurs. So after dinner--in an hour--?"
"Oh, very well! since you're an author and insist, I will be ready, in
an hour, to decline you, with thanks."
"Rejection not implying any lack of merit," I suggested. "This is
damnable iteration; but I am accustomed to it."
But by this, Mrs. Provis was gathering eyes around the table, and her
guests arose, with the usual outburst of conversation, and swishing of
dresses, and the not always unpremeditated dropping of handkerchiefs and
fans. Mrs. Clement Dumby bore down upon us now, a determined and
generously proportioned figure in her notorious black silk.
"Really," said she, aggressively, "I never saw two people more
engrossed. My dear Mrs. Barry-Smith, you have been so taken up with Mr.
Townsend, all during dinner, that I haven't had a chance to welcome you
to Lichfield. Your mother and I were at school together, you know. And
your husband was quite a beau of mine. So I don't feel, now, at all as
if we were strangers--"
And thus she bore Elena off, and I knew that within ten minutes Elena
would have been warned against me, as "not quite a desirable
acquaintance, you know, my dear, and it is only my duty to tell you that
as a young and attractive married woman--"
2
"And so," I said in my soul, as the men redistributed themselves, "she
is married,--married while you were pottering with books and the turn of
phrases and immortality and such trifles--oh, you ass! And to a man
named Barry-Smith--damn him, I wonder whether he is the hungry scut that
hasn't had his hair cut this fall, or the blancmange-bellied one with
the mashed-strawberry nose? Yes, I know everybody else. And Jimmy Travis
is telling a funny story, so _laugh_! People will think you are grieving
over Rosalind.... But why in heaven's name isn't Jimmy at home this very
moment,--with a wife and carpet-slippers and a large-size bottle of
paregoric on his mantelpiece,--instead of here, grinning like a fool
over some blatant indecency? He ought to marry; every young man ought to
marry. Oh, you futile, abject, burbling twin-brother of the first patron
that procured a reputation for Bedlam! why aren't _you_ married--married
years ago,--with a home of your own, and a victoria for Mrs. Townsend
and bills from the kindergarten every quarter? Oh, you bartender of
verbal cocktails! I believe your worst enemy flung your mind at you in a
moment of unbridled hatred."
So I snapped the stem of my glass carefully, and scowled with morose
disapproval at the unconscious Mr. Travis, and his now-applauded and
very Fescennine jest....
3
I found her inspecting a bulky folio with remarkable interest. There was
a lamp, with a red shade, that cast a glow over her, such as one
sometimes sees reflected from a great fire. The people about us were
chattering idiotically, and something inside my throat prevented my
breathing properly, and I was miserable.
"Mrs. Barry-Smith,"--thus I began,--"if you've the tiniest scrap of pity
in your heart for a very presumptuous, blundering and unhappy person, I
pray you to forgive and to forget, as people say, all that I have
blatted out to you. I spoke, as I thought, to a free woman, who had the
right to listen to my boyish talk, even though she might elect to laugh
at it. And now I hardly dare to ask forgiveness."
Mrs. Barry-Smith inspected a view of the Matterhorn, with careful
deliberation. "Forgiveness?" said she.
"Indeed," said I, "I _don't_ deserve it." And I smiled most resolutely.
"I had always known that somewhere, somehow, you would come into my life
again. It has been my dream all these two years; but I dream carelessly.
My visions had not included this--obstacle."
She made wide eyes at me. "What?" said she.
"Your husband," I suggested, delicately.
The eyes flashed. And a view of Monaco, to all appearances, awoke some
pleasing recollection. "I confess," said Mrs. Barry-Smith, "that--for
the time--I had quite forgotten him. I--I reckon you must think me
very horrid?"
But she was at pains to accompany this query with a broadside that
rendered such a supposition most unthinkable. And so--
"I think you--" My speech was hushed and breathless, and ended in a
click of the teeth. "Oh, don't let's go into the minor details,"
I pleaded.
Then Mrs. Barry-Smith descended to a truism. "It is usually better not
to," said she, with the air of an authority. And latterly, addressing
the facade of Notre Dame, "You see, Mr. Barry-Smith being so much
older than I--"
"I would prefer that. Of course, though, it is none of my business."
"You see, you came and went so suddenly that--of course I never thought
to see you again--not that I ever thought about it, I reckon--" Her
candour would have been cruel had it not been reassuringly
over-emphasized. "And Mr. Barry-Smith was very pressing--"
"He would be," I assented, after consideration. "It is, indeed, the
single point in his outrageous conduct I am willing to condone."
"--and he was a great friend of my father's, and I _liked_ him--"
"So you married him and lived together ever afterward, without ever
throwing the tureen at each other. That is the most modern version; but
there is usually a footnote concerning the bread-and-butter plates."
She smiled, inscrutably, a sphinx in Dresden china. "And yet," she
murmured, plaintively, "I _would_ like to know what you think of me."
"Why, prefacing with the announcement that I pray God I may never see
you after to-night, I think you the most adorable creature He ever made.
What does it matter now? I have lost you. I think--ah, desire o' the
world, what can I think of you? The notion of you dazzles me like
flame,--and I dare not think of you, for I love you."
"Yes?" she queried, sweetly; "then I reckon Mrs. Dumby was right after
all. She said you were a most depraved person and that, as a young
and--well, _she_ said it, you know--attractive widow--"
"H'm!" said I; and I sat down. "Elena Barry-Smith," I added, "you are an
unmitigated and unconscionable and unpardonable rascal. There is just
one punishment which would be adequate to meet your case; and I warn you
that I mean to inflict it. Why, how dare you be a widow! The court
decides it is unable to put up with any such nonsense, and that you've
got to stop it at once."
"Really," said she, tossing her head and moving swiftly, "one would
think we _were_ on a desert island!"
"Or a strange roof"--and I laughed, contentedly. "Meanwhile, about that
ring--it should be, I think, a heavy, Byzantine ring, with the stones
sunk deep in the dull gold. Yes, we'll have six stones in it; say, R, a
ruby; O, an opal; B, a beryl; E, an emerald; R, a ruby again, I suppose;
and T, a topaz. Elena, that's the very ring I mean to buy as soon as
I've had breakfast, tomorrow, as a token of my mortgage on the desire of
the world, and as the badge of your impendent slavery." And I reflected
that Rosalind had, after all, behaved commendably in humiliating me by
so promptly returning this ring.
Very calmly Elena Barry-Smith regarded the Bay of Naples; very calmly
she turned to the Taj Mahal. "An obese young Lochinvar," she reflected
aloud, "who has seen me twice, unblushingly assumes he is about to marry
me! Of course," she sighed, quite tolerantly, "I know he is clean out of
his head, for otherwise--" "Yes,--otherwise?" I prompted.
"--he would never ask me to wear an opal. Why," she cried in horror, "I
couldn't think of it!" "You mean--?" said I.
She closed the album, with firmness. "Why, you are just a child," said
Mrs. Barry-Smith. "We are utter strangers to each other. Please remember
that, for all you know, I may have an unbridled temper, or an imported
complexion, or a liking for old man Ibsen. What you ask--only you don't,
you simply assume it,--is preposterous. And besides, opals
_are_ unlucky."
"Desire o' the world," I said, in dolorous wise, "I have just remembered
the black-lace mitts and reticule you left upon the dinner-table. Oh,
truly, I had meant to bring 'em to you--Only _do_ you think it quite
good form to put on those cloth-sided shoes when you've been invited to
a real party?"
For a moment Mrs. Barry-Smith regarded me critically. Then she shook her
head, and tried to frown, and reopened the album, and inspected the
crater of Vesuvius, and quite frankly laughed. And a tender, pink-tipped
hand rested upon my arm for an instant,--a brief instant, yet pulsing
with a sense of many lights and of music playing somewhere, and of a
man's heart keeping time to it.
"If you were to make it an onyx--" said Mrs. Barry-Smith.
21.
_He is Urged to Desert His Galley_
She had been a widow even when I first encountered her in Liege. I may
have passed her dozens of times, only she was in mourning then, for
Barry-Smith, and so I never really saw her.
It seems, though, that "in the second year" it is permissible to wear
pink garments in the privacy of your own apartments, and that if people
see you in them, accidentally, it is simply their own fault.
And very often they are punished for it; as most certainly was I, for
Elena led me a devil's dance of jealousy, and rapture, and abject
misery, and suspicion, and supreme content, that next four months. She
and her mother had rented a house on Regis Avenue for the winter; and I
frequented it with zeal. Mrs. Vokins said I "came reg'lar as
the milkman."
2
Now of Mrs. Vokins I desire to speak with the greatest respect, if only
for the reason that she was Elena Barry-Smith's mother. Mrs. Vokins had,
no doubt, the kindest heart in the world; but she had spent the first
thirty years of her life in a mountain-girdled village, and after her
husband's wonderful luck--if you will permit me her vernacular,--in
being "let in on the groundfloor" when the Amalgamated Tobacco Company
was organised, I believe that Mrs. Vokins was never again quite at ease.
I am abysmally sure she never grew accustomed to being waited on by any
servant other than a girl who "came in by the day"; though, oddly
enough, she was incessantly harassed by the suspicion that one or
another "good-for-nothing nigger was getting ready to quit." Her time
was about equally devoted to tending her canary, Bill Bryan, and to
furthering an apparently diurnal desire to have supper served a quarter
of an hour earlier to-night, "so that the servants can get off."
Finally Mrs. Vokins considered that "a good woman's place was right in
her own home, with a nice clean kitchen," and was used to declare that
the fummadiddles of Mrs. Carrie Nation--who was in New York that winter,
you may remember, advocating Prohibition,--would never have been stood
for where Mrs. Vokins was riz. Them Yankee huzzies, she estimated, did
beat her time.
3
It was, and is, the oddest thing I ever knew of that Elena could have
been her daughter. Though, mind you, even to-day, I cannot commit myself
to any statement whatever as concerns Elena Barry-Smith, beyond
asserting that she was beautiful. I am willing to concede that since the
world's creation there may have lived, say, six or seven women who were
equally good to look upon; but at the bottom of my heart I know the
concession is simply verbal. For she was not pretty; she was not
handsome; she was beautiful. Indeed, I sometimes thought her beauty
overshadowed any serious consideration of the woman who wore it, just as
in admiration of a picture you rarely think to wonder what sort of
canvas it is painted on.
Yes, I am quite sure, upon reflection, that to Elena Barry-Smith her
beauty was a sort of tyrant. She devoted her life, I think, to the
retention of her charms; and what with the fixed seven hours for
sleep--no more and not a moment less,--the rigid limits of her diet, the
walking of exactly five miles a day, and her mathematical adherence to a
predetermined programme of massage and hair-treatment and manicuring and
face-creams and so on, Elena had hardly two hours in a day at her
own disposal.
She would as soon have thought of sacrificing her afternoon walk to the
Musgrave Monument and back, as of having a front-tooth unnecessarily
removed; and would as willingly have partaken of prussic acid as of
candy or potatoes. She was, in fine, an artist of the truest type, in
that she immolated her body, and her own preferences, in the cause
of beauty.
Nor was she vain, or stupid either, though what I have written vaguely
sounds as though she were both. She was just Elena Barry-Smith, of whom
your memory was always how beautiful she had been at this or that
particular moment, rather than what she said or did. And I believe that
every man in Lichfield was in love with her.