and gazing at his wife. Then he said: "Sarah, you are a clever woman. If
you would come into my office and work steadily, you could double my
income at the bar; but you need practice; your points are too fine; you
run too many risks, and no male judge would ever support your management
of a case. As practice I grant you it is bold and has much to recommend
it, but in the law we cannot look so far ahead. Now, why won't you let
Esther marry George?"
"I shall practice only before women judges," replied Mrs. Murray, "and I
will undertake to say that I never should find one so stupid as not to
see that George is not at all the sort of man whom a girl with Esther's
notions would marry. If I tried to make her do it, I should be as
wrong-headed as some men I know."
"I suppose you don't mean to put yourself in George's way, if he asks
her," inquired Mr. Murray rather anxiously.
"My dear husband, there is no use in thinking about George one way or
the other. Do put him out of your head! You fancy because Esther seems
bright this morning, that she might marry George to-morrow. Now I can
see a great deal more of Esther's mind than you, and I tell you that it
is all we can do to prevent her from recalling Mr. Hazard, and that if
we do prevent it, we shall have to take her abroad for at least two
years before she gets over the strain."
At this emphatic announcement that his life was to be for two years a
sacrifice to Esther's love-affairs, Mr. Murray retired again to his
window and meditated in a more subdued spirit. He knew that protest
would avail nothing.
Meanwhile the two girls were already down on the edge of the icy river,
talking at first of the scene which lay before their eyes.
"Think what the Greeks would have done with it!" said Wharton. "They
would have set Zeus in a throne on Table Rock, firing away his
lightnings at Prometheus under the fall."
"Just for a change I rather like our way of sticking advertisements
there," said Catherine. "It makes one feel at home."
"A woman feels most the kind of human life in it," said Esther.
"A big, rollicking, Newfoundland dog sort of humanity," said Strong.
"You are all wrong," said Catherine. "The fall is a woman, and she is as
self-conscious this morning as if she were at church. Look at the
coquetry of the pretty curve where the water falls over, and the lace on
the skirt where it breaks into foam! Only a woman could do that and look
so pretty when she might just as easily be hideous."
"It is not a woman! It is a man!" broke in Esther vehemently. "No woman
ever had a voice like that!" She felt hurt that her cataract should be
treated as a self-conscious woman.
"Now, Mr. Wharton!" cried Catherine, appealing to the artist: "Now, you
see I'm right, and self-consciousness is sometimes a beauty."
Wharton answered this original observation of nature by a lecture which
may be read to more advantage in his printed works. It ended by
Catherine requiring him to draw for her the design of a dress which
should have the soul of Niagara in its folds, and while he was engaged
in this labor, which absorbed Catherine's thoughts and gave her extreme
amusement, Esther strolled on with Strong, and for nearly an hour walked
up and down the road, or leaned against the rock in sheltered places
where the sun was warm. At first they went on talking of the scenery,
then Esther wanted to know about the geology, and quickly broke in on
Strong's remarks upon this subject by questions which led further and
further away from it. The river boiled at their feet; the sun melted
the enormous icicles which hung from the precipice behind them; a mass
of frozen spray was banked up against the American fall opposite them,
making it look like an iceberg, and snow covered every thing except the
perpendicular river banks and the dark water. The rainbow hung over the
cataract, and the mist rose from the furious waters into the peace of
the quiet air.
"You know what has happened?" she asked.
Strong nodded assent. He was afraid to tell her how much he knew.
"Do you think I have done wrong?"
"How can I tell without knowing all your reasons?" he asked. "It looks
to me as though you were uncertain of yourself and cared less for him
than he for you. If I were in his place I should follow you close up,
and refuse to leave you."
Esther gave a little gasp: "You don't think he will do that? if he does,
I shall run away again."
"Why run away? if you really want to get rid of him, why not make him
run away?"
"Because I don't want to make him run away from me, and because I don't
know how. If I could only get him away from his church! All I know about
it is that I can't be a clergyman's wife, but the moment that I try to
explain why, he proves to me that my reasons are good for nothing."
"Are you sure he's not right?" asked Strong.
"Perfectly sure!" replied Esther earnestly. "I can't reason it out, but
I feel it. I believe you could explain it if you would, but when I asked
you, in the worst of my trouble, you refused to help me."
"I gave you all the help I could, and I am ready to give you whatever
you want more," replied Strong.
"Tell me what you think about religion!"
Strong drew himself together with a perceptible effort: "I think about
it as little as possible," said he.
"Do you believe in a God?"
"Not in a personal one."
"Or in future rewards and punishments?"
"Old women's nursery tales!"
"Do you believe in nothing?"
"There is evidence amounting to strong probability, of the existence of
two things," said Strong, slowly, and as though in his lecture-room.
"What are they, if you please?"
"Should you know better if I said they were mind and matter?"
"You believe in nothing else?"
"N-N-No!" hesitated Strong.
"Isn't it horrible, your doctrine?"
"What of that, if it's true? I never said it was pleasant."
"Do you expect to convert any one to such a religion?"
"Great Buddha, no! I don't want to convert any one. I prefer almost any
kind of religion. No one ever took up this doctrine who could help
himself."
Esther pondered deeply for a time. Strong's trick of driving her to do
what he wanted was so old a habit that she had learned to distrust it.
At last she began again from another side.
"You really mean that this life is every thing, and the future nothing?"
"I never said so. I rather think the church is right in thinking this
life nothing and the future every thing."
"But you deny a future life!"
Strong began to feel uncomfortable. He wanted to defend his opinions,
and it became irksome to go on making out the strongest case he could
against himself.
"Come!" said he: "don't go beyond what I said. I only denied the rewards
and punishments. Mind! I'll not say there is a future life, but I don't
deny it's possibility."
"You are willing to give us a chance?" said Esther rather sarcastically.
"I don't know that you would call it one," replied Strong satisfied by
Esther's irony that he had now gone far enough. "If our minds could get
hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth
is concerned. My trouble is to find out how we can get hold of the truth
at all."
"My trouble is that I don't think I understand in the least what you
mean," replied Esther.
"I thought you knew enough theology for that," said George. "The thing
is simple enough. Hazard and I and every one else agree that thought is
eternal. If you can get hold of one true thought, you are immortal as
far as that thought goes. The only difficulty is that every fellow
thinks his thought the true one. Hazard wants you to believe in his, and
I don't want you to believe in mine, because I've not got one which I
believe in myself."
"Still I don't understand," said Esther. "How can I make myself immortal
by taking Mr. Hazard's opinions?"
"Because then the truth is a part of you! if I understand St. Paul, this
is sound church doctrine, leaving out the personal part of the Trinity
which Hazard insists on tacking to it. Except for the rubbish, I don't
think I am so very far away from him," continued Strong, now assuming
that he had done what he could to set Esther straight, and going on with
the conversation as though it had no longer a personal interest. As he
talked, he poked holes in the snow with his stick, as though what he
said was for his own satisfaction, and he were turning this old problem
over again in his mind to see whether he could find any thing new at the
bottom of it. "I can't see that my ideas are so brutally shocking. We
may some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have
our religion and immortality. We have got far more than half way.
Infinity is infinitely more intelligible to you than you are to a
sponge. If the soul of a sponge can grow to be the soul of a Darwin, why
may we not all grow up to abstract truth? What more do you want?"
As he looked up again, saying these words without thinking of Esther's
interest, he was startled to see that this time she was listening with a
very different expression in her face. She broke in with a question
which staggered him.
"Does your idea mean that the next world is a sort of great reservoir of
truth, and that what is true in us just pours into it like raindrops?"
"Well!" said he, alarmed and puzzled: "the figure is not perfectly
correct, but the idea is a little of that kind."
"After all I wonder whether that may not be what Niagara has been
telling me!" said Esther, and she spoke with an outburst of energy that
made Strong's blood run cold.
_Chapter X_
Strong kept his word about amusing the two girls. They were not allowed
the time to make themselves unhappy, restless or discontented. This
Sunday afternoon he set out with a pair of the fastest horses to be got
in the neighborhood, and if these did not go several times over the
cliff, it was, as Strong had said, rather their own good sense than
their driver's which held them back. Catherine, who sat by Strong's
side, made the matter worse by taking the reins, and a more reckless
little Amazon never defied men. Even Strong himself at one moment, when
wreck seemed certain, asked her to kindly see to the publication of a
posthumous memoir, and Esther declared that although she did not fear
death, she disliked Catherine's way of killing her. Catherine paid no
attention to such ribaldry, and drove on like Phaeton. Wharton was
carried away by the girl's dash and coolness. He wanted to paint her as
the charioteer of the cataract. They drove by the whirlpool, and so far
and fast that, when Esther found herself that night tossing and feverish
in her bed, she could only dream that she was still skurrying over a
snow-bound country, aching with jolts and jerks, but unable ever to
stop. The next day she was glad to stay quietly in the house and amuse
herself with sketching, while the rest of the party crossed the river to
get Mr. Murray's sleeping-berth by the night train to New York, and to
waste their time and money on the small attractions of the village. Mr.
Murray was forced to return to his office. Wharton, who had no right to
be here at all, for a score of pressing engagements were calling for
instant attention in New York, telegraphed simply that his work would
detain him several days longer at Niagara, and he even talked of
returning with the others by way of Quebec.
While the rest of the party were attending to their own affairs at the
railway station and the telegraph office, Wharton and Catherine strolled
down to the little park over the American Fall and looked at the scene
from there. Catherine in her furs was prettier than ever; her fresh
color was brightened by the red handkerchief she had tied round her
neck, and her eyes were more mutinous than usual. As she leaned over
the parapet, and looked into the bubbling torrent which leaped into
space at her feet, Wharton would have liked to carry her off like the
torrent and give her no chance to resist. Yet, reckless as he was, he
had still common sense enough to understand that, until he was fairly
rid of one wife, he could not expect another to throw herself into his
arms, and he awkwardly flitted about her, like a moth about a lantern,
unable even to singe his wings in the flame.
"Then it is decided?" he asked. "You are really going abroad?"
"I am really going to take Esther to Europe for at least two years. We
want excitement. America is too tame."
"May I come over and see you there?"
"No followers are to be allowed. I have forbidden Esther to think of
them. She must devote all her time to art, or I shall be severe with
her."
"But I suppose you don't mean to devote all your own time to art."
"I must take care of her," replied Catherine. "Then I have got to write
some more sonnets. My hand is getting out in sonnets."
"Paris will spoil you; I shall wish you had never left your prairie,"
said Wharton sadly.
"It is you that have spoiled me," replied she. "You have made me
self-conscious, and I am going abroad to escape your influence."
"Do me a favor when you are there; go to Avignon and Vaucluse; when you
come to Petrarch's house, think of me, for there I passed the most
hopeless hours of my life."
"No, I will not go there to be sad. Sadness is made only for poetry or
painting. It is your affair, not mine. I mean to be gay."
"Try, then!" said Wharton. "See for yourself how far gayety will carry
you. My turn will come! We all have to go over that cataract, and you
will have to go over with the rest of us."
Catherine peered down into the spray and foam beneath as though she were
watching herself fall, and then replied: "I shall stay in the shallowest
puddle I can find."
"You will one day learn to give up your own life and follow an ideal,"
said Wharton.
Catherine laughed at his solemn speech with a boldness that irritated
him. "Men are always making themselves into ideals and expecting women
to follow them," said she. "You are all selfish. Tell me now honestly,
would you not sell yourself and me and all New York, like Faust in the
opera, if you could paint one picture like Titian?"
Wharton answered sulkily: "I would like to do it on Faust's conditions."
"I knew it," cried she exultingly.
"If ever the devil, or any one else," continued Wharton, "can get me to
say to the passing moment, 'stay, thou art so fair,' he can have me for
nothing. By that time I shall be worth nothing."
"Your temper will be much sweeter," interjected Catherine.
"Faust made a bargain that any man would be glad to make," growled
Wharton. "It was not till he had no soul worth taking that the devil had
a chance to win."
Catherine turned on him suddenly with her eyes full of humor: "Then that
is the bargain you offer us women. You want us to take you on condition
that we amuse you, and then you tell us that if we do amuse you, it will
be because you are no longer worth taking. Thank you! I can amuse myself
better. When we come home from Europe, I am going to buy a cattle ranche
in Colorado and run it myself. You and Mr. Strong and Mr. Hazard shall
come out there and see it. You will want me to take you on wages as
cowboys. I mean to have ten thousand head, and when you see them you
will say that they are better worth painting than all the saints and
naiads round the Mediterranean."
Wharton looked earnestly at her for a moment before replying, and she
met his eyes with a laugh that left him helpless. Unless taken
seriously, he was beneath the level of average men. At last he closed
the talk with a desperate confession of failure.
"If you will not go to Vaucluse, Miss Brooke, go at least to the British
Museum in London, and when you are there, take a long look at what are
called the Elgin marbles. There you will see Greek warriors killing each
other with a smile on their faces. You remind me of them. You are like
Achilles who answers his Trojan friend's prayer for life by saying:
'Die, friend; you are no better than others I have killed.' I mean to
get Miss Dudley to give me her portrait of you, and I shall paint in,
over your head: [Greek: PHILOS THANE KAI SY]; and hang it up in my
studio to look at, when I am in danger of feeling happy."
With this they rambled back again towards their friends and ended for
the time their struggle for mastery. The morning was soon over; all
returned to their hotel, and luncheon followed; a silent meal at which
no one seemed bright except Strong, who felt that the burden was
beginning to be a heavy one. Had it not been for Strong, not one of the
party would have moved out of the house again that day, but the
Professor privately ordered a sleigh to the door at three o'clock, and
packed his uncle and aunt into it together with Catherine and Wharton.
Catherine's love of driving lent her energy, and Mrs. Murray, sadly
enough, consented to let her take the reins. As they drove away, Strong
stood on the porch and watched them till they had disappeared down the
road. The afternoon was cloudy and gray, with flakes of snow dropping
occasionally through a despondent air. After the sleigh had gone, Strong
still gazed down the road, as though he expected to see something, but
the road was bare.
He had stayed at home under the pretense of writing letters, and now
returned to the sitting-room, where Esther was sketching from the window
a view of the cataract. She went quietly on with her work, while he sat
down to write as well as his conscience would allow him; for now that he
saw how much good Esther's escape had done her, how quiet she had become
again, and how her look of trouble had vanished, leaving only a tender
little air of gravity, as she worked in the silence of her memories; and
when he thought how violently this serenity was likely to be disturbed,
his conscience smote him, he bitterly regretted his interference, and
roundly denounced himself for a fool.
"Does Mr. Wharton really care for Catherine?" asked Esther, as she went
on with her sketch.
"I guess he thinks he does," answered Strong. "He looks at her as though
he would eat her."
"What a pity!"
"He is tough! Don't waste sympathy on him! If she took him, he would
make her a slave within a week. As it is, his passion will go into his
painting."
"She is a practical young savage," said Esther. "I thought at one time
she was dazzled by him, but the moment she saw how unfit she was for
such a man, she gave it up without a pang."
"I don't see her unfitness," replied Strong. "She has plenty of beauty,
more common sense than he, and some money which would help him amazingly
except that he would soon spend it. I should say it was he who wanted
fitness, but you can't harness a mustang with a unicorn."
"He wants me to study in Paris," said Esther; "but I mean to go to Rome
and Venice. I am afraid to tell him."
"When do you expect to be there?"
"Some time in May, if we can get any one to take us."
"Perhaps I will look you up in the summer. If I do not go to Oregon, I
may run over to Germany."
"We shall be terribly homesick," replied Esther.
Silence now followed till Strong finished his letters and looked again
at his watch. It was four o'clock. "If he is coming," thought Strong,
"it is time he were here; but I would draw him a check for his church if
he would stay away." The jingling of sleigh-bells made itself heard on
the road below as though to rebuke him, and presently a cry of fright
from Esther at the window told that she knew what was before her.
"What shall I do?" she cried breathlessly. "Here he is! I can't see him!
I can't go through that scene again. George! won't you stop him?"
"What under the sun are you afraid of?" said Strong. "He'll not shoot
you! If you don't mean to marry him, tell him so, and this time make it
clear. Let there be no mistake about it! But don't send him away if you
mean to make yourself unhappy afterwards."
"Of course I am going to be unhappy afterwards," groaned Esther. "What
do you know about it, George? Do you think I feel about him as you would
about a lump of coal? I was just beginning to be quiet and peaceful, and
now it must all start up again. Go away! Leave us alone! But not long!
If he is not gone within an hour, come back!"
The next instant the door opened and Hazard was shown into the room. His
manner at this awkward moment was quiet and self-possessed, as though he
had made it the business of his life to chase flying maidens. Having
taken his own time, he was not to be thrown off his balance by any
ordinary chance. He nodded familiarly to Strong, who left the room as he
entered, and walking straight to Esther, held out his hand with a look
of entreaty harder for her to resist than any form of reproach.
"I told you that I should follow," he said.
She drew back, raising her hand to check him, and putting on what she
intended for a forbidding expression.
"It is my own fault. I should have spoken more plainly," she replied.
Instead of taking up the challenge, Hazard turned to the table where her
unfinished drawing lay.
"What a good sketch!" he said, bending over it. "But you have not yet
caught the real fall. I never saw an artist that had."
Esther's defense was disconcerted by this attack. Hazard was bent on
getting back to his old familiar ground, and she let him take it. Her
last hope was that he might be willing to take it, and be made content
with it. If she could but persuade him to forget what had passed, and
return to the footing of friendship which ought never to have been left!
This was what she was made for! Her courage rose as she thought that
perhaps this was possible, and as he sat down before the drawing and
discussed it, she fancied that her object was already gained, and that
this young greyhound at her elbow could be held in a leash and made to
obey a sign.
In a few minutes he had taken again his old friendly place, and if she
did not treat him with all the old familiarity, he still gained ground
enough to warrant him in believing more firmly than ever that she could
not resist his influence so long as he was at her side. They ran on
together in talk about the drawing, until he felt that he might risk
another approach, and his way of doing it was almost too easy and
dexterous.
"What you want to get into your picture," he was saying; "is the air,
which the fall has, of being something final. You can't go beyond
Niagara. The universe seems made for it. Whenever I come here, I find
myself repeating our sonnet: 'Siccome eterna vita e veder dio;' for the
sight of it suggests eternity and infinite power." Then suddenly putting
down the drawing, and looking up to her face, as she stood by his side,
he said: "Do you know, I feel now for the first time the beauty of the
next two verses:
'So, lady, sight of you, in my despair,
Brings paradise to this brief life and frail.'"
"Hush!" said Esther, raising her hand again; "we are friends now and
nothing more."
"Mere friends, are we?" quoted Hazard, with a courageous smile. "No!" he
went on quickly. "I love you. I cannot help loving you. There is no
friendship about it."
"If you tell me so, I must run away again. I shall leave the room.
Remember! I am terribly serious now."
"If you tell me, honestly and seriously, that you love me no longer and
want me to go away, I will leave the room myself," answered Hazard.
"I won't say that unless you force me to it, but I expect you from this
time to help me in carrying out what you know is my duty."
"I will promise, on condition that you prove to me first what your duty
is."
To come back again to their starting point was not encouraging, and they
felt it, but this time Esther was determined to be obeyed even if it
cost her a lover as well as a husband. She did not flinch.
"What more proof do you need? I am not fit to be a clergyman's wife. I
should be a scandal in the church, and you would have to choose between
it and me."
"I know you better," said Hazard calmly. "You will find all your fears
vanish if you once boldly face them."
"I have tried," said Esther. "I tried desperately and failed utterly."
"Try once more! Do not turn from all that has been the hope and comfort
of men, until you have fairly learned what it is!"
"Is it not enough to know myself?" asked Esther. "Some people are made
with faith. I am made without it."
Hazard broke in here in a warmer tone: "I know you better than you know
yourself! Do you think that I, whose business it is to witness every day
of my life the power of my faith, am going to hesitate before a trifle
like your common, daily, matter-of-course fears and doubts, such as have
risen and been laid in every mind that was worth being called one, ever
since minds existed?"
"Have they always been laid?" asked Esther gravely.
"Always!" answered Hazard firmly; "provided the doubter wanted to lay
them. It is a simple matter of will!"