window. I don't want to influence you a bit by any personal magnetism
I possess; I want you to listen. I have told you he divorced me. The
co-respondent was an old friend, a friend of my childhood, of my
girlhood. He died just after the first application was made, luckily
for me; he would have considered my honor before my happiness. _I_
did not defend the case; it wasn't likely--ah, if you knew all! He
proved his case, given clever counsel, willing witnesses to whom you
make it worth while, and no defence, divorce is always attainable
even in England. But remember, I figure as an adulteress in every
English-speaking paper. If you buy last week's evening papers--do you
remember the day I was in town?" I nod. "You will see a sketch of me
in that day's; some one, perhaps he, must have given it; it was from
an old photograph. I bought one at Victoria as I came out; it is funny
[with an hysterical laugh] to buy a caricature of one's own poor face
at a news-stall. Yet in spite of that I have felt glad. The point for
you is that I made no defence to the world; and [with a lifting of her
head] I will make no apology, no explanation, no denial to you, now
nor ever. I am very desolate, and your attention came very warm to me;
but I don't love you. Perhaps I could learn to [with a rush of color]
for what you have said to-night; and it is because of that I tell you
to weigh what this means. Later, when your care for me will grow into
habit, you may chafe at my past; it is from that I would save you."
I hold out my hands, and she comes and puts them aside, and takes me
by the beard and turns up my face and scans it earnestly. She must
have been deceived a good deal. I let her do as she pleases; it is the
wisest way with women, and it is good to have her touch me in that way.
She seems satisfied. She stands leaning against the arm of the chair
and says,--
"I must learn first to think of myself as a free woman again; it almost
seems wrong to-day to talk like this. Can you understand that feeling?"
I nod assent.
"Next time I must be sure, and you must be sure," she lays her fingers
on my mouth as I am about to protest, "S-sh! You shall have a year to
think; if you repeat then what you have said to-day, I shall give you
your answer. You must not try to find me; I have money. If I am living
I will come here to you; if I am dead you will be told of it. In the
year between I shall look upon myself as belonging to you, and render
an account if you wish of every hour. You will not be influenced by me
in any way, and you will be able to reason it out calmly. If you think
better of it, don't come."
I feel there would be no use trying to move her; I simply kiss her
hands and say,--
"As you will, dear woman; I shall be here."
We don't say any more; she sits down on a footstool with her head
against my knee, and I just smooth it. When the clocks strike ten
through the house, she rises, and I stand up. I see that she has been
crying quietly,--poor, lonely, little soul! I lift her off her feet and
kiss her, and stammer out my sorrow at losing her, and she is gone.
Next morning the little maid brought me an envelope from the lady who
left by the first train. It held a little gray glove. That is why I
carry it always, and why I haunt the inn and never leave it for longer
than a week; why I sit and dream in the old chair that has a ghost of
her presence always, dream of the spring to come with the May-fly on
the wing, and the young summer when midges dance, and the trout are
growing fastidious; when she will come to me across the meadow grass,
through the silver haze, as she did before,--come with her gray eyes
shining to exchange herself for her little gray glove.
AN EMPTY FRAME.
It was a simple, pretty little frame, such as you may buy at any sale
cheaply; its ribbed wood, aspinalled white, with an inner frame of
pale-blue plush; its one noticeable feature that it was empty. And yet
it stood on the middle of the bedroom mantelboard.
It was not a luxurious room; none of the furniture matched. It was a
typical boarding-house bedroom.
Any one preserving the child habit of endowing inanimate objects
with human attributes might fancy that the flickering flames of the
fire took a pleasure in bringing into relief the bright bits in its
dinginess; for they played over the silver-backed brushes and the
cut-glass perfume bottles on the dressing-table, flicked the bright
beads on the toes of coquettish small shoes and the steel clasps of a
travelling bag in the corner, imparting a casual air of comfort such as
the touch of certain dainty women lends to a common room.
A woman enters,--a woman wondrously soft and swift in all her
movements. She seems to reach a place without your seeing how; no
motion of elbow or knee betrays her. Her fingers glide swiftly down
the buttons of her gown; in a second she has freed herself from its
ensheathing; garment after garment falls from her, until she stands
almost free. She gets into nightdress and loose woollen dressing-gown,
and slips her naked feet into fur-lined slippers, with a movement that
is somehow the expression of an intense nervous relief from a thrall.
Everything she does is done so swiftly that you see the result rather
than the working out of each action.
She sinks into a chair before the fire, and clasping her hands behind
her head, peers into the glowing embers. The firelight, lower than her
face, touches it cruelly; picks out and accentuates as remorselessly
as a rival woman the autographs past emotions have traced on its
surface; deepens the hollows of her delicate thoughtful temples and
the double furrow between her clever irregular eyebrows. Her face is
more characteristic than beautiful. Nine men would pass it, the tenth
sell his immortal soul for it. The chin is strong, the curve of jaw
determined; there is a little full place under the chin's sharp point.
The eyes tell you little; they are keen and inquiring, and probe
others' thoughts rather than reveal their own. The whole face is one of
peculiar strength and self-reliance. The mouth is its contradiction;
the passionate curve of the upper-lip with its mobile corners, and the
tender little under-lip that shelters timidly under it, are encouraging
promises against its strength.
The paleness of some strong feeling tinges her face; a slight trembling
runs through her frame. Her inner soul-struggle is acting as a strong
developing fluid upon a highly sensitized plate; anger, scorn, pity,
contempt chase one another like shadows across her face. Her eyes rest
upon the empty frame, and the plain white space becomes alive to her.
Her mind's eye fills it with a picture it once held in its dainty
embrace,--a rare head among the rarest heads of men, with its crest of
hair tossed back from the great brow, its proud poise and the impress
of grand, confident, compelling genius that reveals itself, one scarce
knows how; with the brute possibility of an untamed, natural man
lurking about the mouth and powerful throat. She feels the subduing
smile of eyes that never failed to make her weak as a child under their
gaze, and tame as a hungry bird. She stretches out her hands with a
pitiful little movement, and then, remembering, lets them drop, and
locks them until the knuckles stand out whitely. She shuts her eyes,
and one tear after the other starts from beneath her lids, trickles
down her cheeks, and drops with a splash into her lap. She does not
sob, only cries quietly; and she sees, as if she held the letter in her
hand, the words that decided her fate:--
"You love me; I know it, you other half of me. You want me to
complete your life, as I you, you good, sweet woman; you slight,
weak thing, with your strong will and your grand, great heart; you
witch, with a soul of clean white fire. I kiss your hands,--such
little hands! I never saw the like; slim child-hands, with a touch
as cool and as soft as a snow-flake! You dear one, come to me; I
want you, now, always. Be with me, work with me, share with me,
live with me, my equal as a creature; above me, as my queen of
women! I love you, I worship you; but you know my views. I cannot,
I will not bind myself to you by any legal or religious tie. I must
be free and unfettered to follow that which I believe right for
me. If you come to me in all trust, I can and will give myself to
you in all good faith,--yours as much as you will, forever! I will
kneel to you; why should I always desire to kneel to you? It is not
that I stand in awe of you, or that I ever feel a need to kneel at
all; but always to you, and to you alone. Come! I will crouch at
your feet and swear myself to you!"
And she had replied "No!" and in her loneliness of spirit married him
who seemed to need her most out of those who admired her.
The door opens, and he comes in. He looks inquiringly at her, touches
her hair half hesitatingly, and then stands with his hands thrust in
his pockets and gnaws his mustache.
"Are you angry, little woman?"
"No," very quietly; "why should I be?"
She closes her eyes again, and after five minutes' silence he begins to
undress. He does it very slowly, looking perplexedly at her. When he
has finished, he stands with his back to the fire, an unlovely object
in sleeping suit.
"Would you like to read her letter?"
She shakes her head.
"I suppose I ought to have sent her back her letters before, you know.
She hadn't heard I was married."
"Yes," she interjects, "it would have been better to start with a clean
bill; but why talk about it?"
He looks at her awhile, then gets into bed and watches her from behind
the pages of the "Field." It seems unusually quiet. His watch that he
has left in his waistcoat pocket, thrown across the back of a chair,
seems to fill the whole room with a nervous tick.
He tosses the paper on to the floor. She looks up as it falls, rises,
turns off the gas-jet, sinks back into her old position, and stares
into the fire. He gets up, goes over, and kneels down next her.
"I am awfully sorry you are put out, old girl. I saw you were when I
answered you like that; but I couldn't help feeling a bit cut up, you
know. She wrote such an awfully nice letter, you know, wished--"
"You all sorts of happiness," with a snap, "and hopes you'll meet in a
better world?"
He rises to his feet and stares at her in dumb amazement. How could she
know? She smiles with a touch of malicious satisfaction, as she sees
the effect of her chance shot.
"It's a pity, isn't it, that you both have to wait so long?"
He imagines he sees light, and blunders ahead like an honest man.
"I wouldn't have sent those things back now if I had thought you cared.
By Jove, it never entered my head that you'd be jealous!"
"Jealous?" She is on her feet like a red white flash. "I, jealous
of her?" Each word is emphasized. "I couldn't be jealous of her,
_Nur die Dummen sind bescheiden_! Why, the girl isn't fit to tie my
shoe-strings!"
This is too much; he feels he must protest.
"You don't know her," feebly. "She is an awfully nice girl!"
"Nice girl! I don't doubt it; and she will be an awfully nice woman,
and under each and every circumstance of life she will behave like
an awfully nice person. Jealous! Do you think I cried because I was
jealous? Good God, no! I cried because I was sorry, fearfully sorry,
for myself. She"--with a fine thin contempt--"would have suited you
better than I. Jealous! no, only sorry. Sorry because any nice average
girl of her type, who would model her frocks out of the 'Lady's
Pictorial,' gush over that dear Mr. Irving, paint milking-stools, try
poker-work, or any other fashionable fad, would have done you just
as well. And I"--with a catch of voice--"with a great man might have
made a great woman; and now those who know and understand me [bitterly]
think of me as a great failure."
She finishes wearily; the fire dies out of eyes and voice. She adds
half aloud, as if to herself,--
"I don't think I quite realized this until I saw how you took that
letter. I was watching your face as you read it; and the fact that you
could put her on the same level, that if it had not been for a mistake
she would have suited you as well, made me realize, don't you see? that
I would have done some one else better!"
He is looking at her in utter bewilderment, and she smiles as she
notes his expression; she touches his cheek gently, and leans her head
against his arm.
"There it's all right, boy! Don't mind me. I have a bit of a complex
nature; you couldn't understand me if you tried to, and better not try!"
She has slipped, while speaking, her warm bare foot out of her slipper,
and is rubbing it gently over his chilled ones.
"You are cold, better go back to bed; I shall go too!"
She stands a moment quietly as he turns to obey, and then takes the
frame, and kneeling down puts it gently into the hollowed red heart of
the fire. It crackles crisply, and little tongues of flame shoot up;
and she gets into bed by their light.
* * * * *
When the fire has burnt out, and he is sleeping like a child with his
curly head on her breast, she falls asleep too, and dreams that she
is sitting on a fiery globe rolling away into space; that her head is
wedged in a huge frame, the top of her head touches its top, the sides
its sides, and it keeps growing larger and larger, and her head with
it, until she seems to be sitting inside her own head, and the inside
is one vast hollow.
UNDER NORTHERN SKY.
I.
HOW MARIE LARSEN EXORCISED A DEMON.
There has been a mighty storm; it has been raging for two days,--a
storm in which the demon of drink has reigned like a sinister god in
the big white house, and the frightened women have cowered away, driven
before the hot blast of the breath upon which curses danced, and the
blaze of ire in the lurid eyes of the master. Only the pale little
mistress has stood unmoved through the whirlwind of his passion. Who
knows? Maybe that roused him to higher, madder paroxysms of impotent
rage; for he abuses her most when he loves her most,--a way man has, he
being a creature of higher understanding.
All yesterday the bells jangled, until one by one a violent jerk
snapped the connecting wire, and hurled them with a last echoing crash
on the hall floor. The serving-men kept out of it, as men do. The
horses cowered to the sides of their boxes, and set their hind legs
hard, and pointed their ears when they heard his halting step. The
great hounds shrank shiveringly into their boxes, and refused to come
forth at his threatening call; and when he lashed their houses in his
rage they winced at each blow, and showed their fangs when he turned
away.
Night brought little rest, for lamps and candles were lit in every
room. Champagne replaced brandy; then brandy, champagne; and then both
mingled in one glass. And in measure as the liquid fire was tossed down
the poor parched throat, the brain grew clearer; the intellect, with
its Rabelaisque fertility of diseased imagining, keener; the sting the
tongue carried more adder-like, and the ingenuity of its blasphemies
more devilish. The tired women crept to bed at midnight, to start
in their sleep at the hoot of every night-owl, the flitter of every
bat, and the whistle of every passing steamer,--all save the little
mistress of the great house, with its stores of linen and silver, its
flower-filled garden, its farmyard with lowing sleek kine, its meadows
in prime heart heavy with the sweetness of red clover, its line of
brown nets pegged down to catch the incoming eager salmon at the mouth
of the fjord, and the wood with its peaceful nooks of cool green and
its winding paths, with their brown carpet of last year's pine-needles
and fir-cones. She sits wearily in her low chair, with her thin hands
clasped on her sharp knees and her shawl drawn round her shoulders,
for in spite of the fire the first hour of the morning sends its chill
breath into the room. He is lying on the sofa talking to himself,
emphasizing his words with his heavy stick. A table with decanters and
glasses stands next him.
"Women! ay, women! man's curse. At the end of the race they beat us
always. We get one soft spot with our mother's milk, and well they know
it, well they know it. What a man I would have been [a rising growl]
if it hadn't been for women! Do you hear, you white-faced spawn? Yes,
I mean it. God! when I look back--But [chuckling] I paid them out, the
brutes!"
And curse follows curse, and worse than that; as from the lips of the
stepdaughter in the fairy tale, the words that drop from his lips are
the toads and vipers of filth.
"If one could forget! There was one, one long ago,--I might have spared
her; she pleaded hard against me. Why do I think of her to-night? It is
years, years ago. Ah, but I was big and beautiful in those days! She,
she was an innocent little thing. I fascinated her like a snake, and
I can see her eyes. They were blue, with long lashes. _I can see them
now_, curse them! She and the child, gibbering idiots both! Oh [groan],
curses on you for a devil, to plague me thus! Keep away! I say, keep
away! How the ghosts dance about the room! There is another one I had
forgotten. Light more candles, more! [a shriek] more! I say, all round
the room! make a damn wake of it!"
Mutter, mutter,--a sourdine epic of Hades. She closes her eyes. The
stick whirls past her, striking a vase off a table near her; she gets
up, hands it to him without a word. He hiccoughs and laughs; and then
he heaves one sob, and cries bitterly, with the great tears gushing
forth in jets. She picks up his handkerchief and puts it into his hand,
and he looks at her with a piteous softening of his wild eyes; and
he says quietly, hiccoughing all the while like a child tired after
a fit of passion,--for man in all his passions has a little of the
inconsequent child; it is only woman who sins with clear seeing,--
"I am a brute, I know it; but you don't know what it is to see the
ghosts of sins stirring in a man's soul like maggots in a dead rat. And
the children, that is the worst of all. Oh, God! my poor little girls!
What will become of them? Oh, oh!"
"But you settled for them!" soothing with her weary voice. "But you
settled for them all right!"
"Oh, yes, the money's all right; oh, Lord, yes! I settled, I settled,"
with the reiteration of drunken gravity, "I settled that. But the
mother was a brute, a heartless brute; and she was a lady too, ay, in
her own right. And she never asked a word about them, not one word;
it was I, I, poor disreputable brute, that put them to nurse, and I
loathed her for it. Ah, if you women knew what a hold simple goodness
has on us! I met her once, I had one at each hand; I used to go to see
them. Oh, they don't know, they don't know, God forbid! and she lay
back in her victoria and looked at us, curse her! She has children
now, legitimate ones, and my little girls don't know I'm alive. Oh,
my poor little girls! They are so pretty! Mind you bury that locket
with me; don't open it! Yes, yes, I know; don't think I don't trust
you,--only woman I ever trusted in the world. But I'm afraid for them:
curse this water in my eyes [sob]; don't you imagine I'm crying, I'm
not! It's whiskey, pure, unadulterated [hiccough] whiskey; but I can't
help thinking of them. The others, ay, Lord! how many others? I don't
care about them, I settled for them; _they weren't ladies_, they'll get
on well enough; but these my pretty little ones, I'm afraid for them,
afraid for them! I, who spared no man's daughter, how can I tell if
some brute won't hurt mine? Oh, God! oh, God! how can they be good with
such a father and such a mother?"
He drinks as he speaks, and pours out in grief and rage a wild torrent
of prayers and curses.
"Ay, verily, it's reaping the whirlwind! How the faces crowd round!
they always come with the gray morning light,--women's faces, girls'
faces, child-girls' faces--oh, damn you! hide me from them! hold me
tight and keep them away! put your arms right round me! you are clean,
a clean little thing,--they can't come through you."
And she holds the throbbing head in her arms, and hides the wild eyes
in her breast, and she feels as if there is a rustle of trailing skirts
about her, and waving hair and a feel of women; and then he tears
himself out of her clasp, and she falls, bruising herself sorely; and
he throws over the table, with a shatter of falling glass, and bounds
up the stairs, snatching a riding-whip out of the hall; and he beats
its gold head into jagged shreds of glitter on the maids' door, and
shouts to them to rise and come down. He'll show them he is master in
his own house! He has eaten nothing all day,--no, nor for many days!
down at once, or he'll know why, and cook, cook his dinner and light
fires,--yes, fires everywhere! What does he pay them for, lazy sluts!
what does he keep house for?
And so, man, the master mind of creation, asserts his authority, and
the maids troop down, heavy-eyed and stupid with sleep; and bake and
roast, and giggle hysterically under their breaths, and tell stories
of other masters they have served, and goings on, and grind fresh
coffee-beans, and have white bread and lump sugar and cold fowl, for
there is no one to say them nay, and the larders are full of good
things; and only the pale little mistress knows how near the grand
place is drawing to bankruptcy.
Morning came, and the table was decked and the dinner served, and taken
out again untasted; and another storm simmered all through the sunny
forenoon, to burst like a hurricane over the house at noon.
The kitchen is empty and the fire has gone out; a wreck of crockery
shows where the storm raged worst. The girls flew before the thunder
of voice and flash of whip; the Swedish gardener left his birthright
of song untouched, and followed them: he is skylarking with them now
up in the great loft; they have pulled up the ladder, and are pelting
one another with last year's hay. The cow-girl, a wench from Hittedal,
lured the cattle and goats and long-legged heifer calves deeper into
the woods with her quaint Lokke song, calling,--
"Come, sweet breath, come cowslip, come rich milk,
Aa lukelei aa lura, lura, luralai!"
Only the housemaid, who is consumptive, and who stays for the little
mistress's sake, her own days in the land being numbered, has taken
her Bible up to the lookout in the wood, and laid it open on the stone
table. She is crushing the Linnae, as she kneels, into a fragrant
incense, rocking to and fro to the somber rhythm of the last book of
Ecclesiastes.
And the master of them all is sitting exhausted in his big chair, and
Marie Larsen and he are doing battle. She came on the scene just as the
grand retreat was sounded, and took the enemy by stratagem. She lifted
the little mistress bodily up, and carried her upstairs, leaving him,
as she puts it, "to ramp like a bull of Basan below." She lays her on
her bed, takes off her shoes, pulls down the blind, and pours out some
drops out of a little blue bottle she carries in her pocket, talking
as she might to a child: "There, Tulla, take naptha drops, very good
drops; you go sleep, good sleep; Marie mind him, Marie not afraid," and
with a final pat she goes down. He is laughing between his oaths at the
stampede of petticoats, and he holds out his arms when she comes in.