Hugh, lightly. He shoved the papers into the drawers and swung it shut.
His heart was beating quite ridiculously. He would know at last--What
wouldn't he know? "Uncle Hugh's girl, Uncle Hugh's girl," he told
himself, and his temperamental responsiveness to the interest and the
mystery of life expanded like a sea-anemone in the Gulf Stream.
Gannett opened the door, announced in his impeccable English, "Mrs.
Shirley," and was not.
* * * * *
A very small, very graceful woman hesitated in the doorway. Hugh's first
impression was surprise that there was so little of her. Then his always
alert subconsciousness registered:
"A lady, yes, but a country lady; not _de par le monde_. Pleasantly
rather than well dressed; those veils are out." He had met her at once
with outstretched hand and the most cordial, "I am glad to see you, Mrs.
Shirley." Then he mentioned the names of his aunt and uncle. He did not
dare to leave anything to Aunt Maria.
That lady made a movement that might or might not have been a gesture of
recognition. Mr. Fowler, who had risen, inclined his handsome head with
a polite murmur and indicated a chair which faced the light. Mrs.
Shirley sat, instead, upon the edge of the sofa, which happened to be
nearer. With her coming Hugh's expansiveness had suffered a sudden
rebuff. A feeling of dismal conventionality permeated the room like a
fog. He plumbed it in vain for the wonder and the magic that ought to
have been the inescapable aura of Uncle Hugh's girl. Was this the mighty
ocean, was this all? She was a little nervous, too. That was a pity.
Nervousness in social relations was one of the numerous things that Aunt
Maria never forgave.
Then the stranger spoke, and Hugh's friendliness went out to the sound
as to something familiar for which he had been waiting.
"It is very good of you to let me come," she said.
"But she must be over forty," Hugh told himself, "and her voice is
young. So was his always." It was also very natural and moving and not
untinged by what Miss Fowler called the Southern patois. "And her feet
are young."
Mr. Fowler uttered another polite murmur. There was no help from that
quarter. She made another start.
"It seemed to me--" she addressed Miss Fowler, who looked obdurate. She
cast a helpless glance at the cat, who opened surprising topaz eyes and
looked supercilious. Then she turned to Hugh. "It seemed to me," she
said, steadily, "that I could make you understand--I mean I could
express myself more clearly if I could see you, than I could by writing,
but--it is rather difficult."
The overheated, inclement room waited. Hugh restrained his foot from
twitching. Why didn't Aunt Maria say something? She was behaving
abominably. She was still seething with her suppressed outburst like a
tea-kettle under the cozy of civilization. And it was catching.
"I explained at the time, three years ago," Mrs. Shirley made the
plunge, "why I took the--money at all." The hard word was out, and Hugh
relaxed. "I don't know what you thought of me, but at the time it seemed
like the mercy of Heaven. I had to educate the children. We were
horribly poor. I was almost in despair. And I felt that if I could take
it from any one I could take it from him ..."
"Yes," said Hugh, unhappily. The depression that dropped on him at
intervals seemed waiting to pounce. He glanced at his uncle's judicial
mask, knowing utterly the distaste for sentimental encounters that it
covered. He detested his aunt's aloofness. He was almost angry with this
little woman's ingenuousness that put her so candidly at their cynical
mercy.
"But now," she went on, "some land we have that seemed worth nothing at
the time has become very valuable. The town grew out in that direction.
And my eldest boy is doing very well indeed, and my daughter is studying
for a library position."
"The short and simple annals of the poor," sighed Hugh to Hugh.
"And so," said little Mrs. Shirley, with astounding simplicity, "I came
to ask you please to take it back again." She gave an involuntary sigh
of relief, as though she had returned a rather valuable umbrella. Mr.
Fowl's eyeglasses dropped from his nose as his eyebrows shot up.
"Good Lord!" ejaculated Miss Maria with all the unexpectedness of
Galatea. "You don't really mean it?" Her bag slid to the floor and the
cat became thoroughly intrigued.
"Do I understand you to say"--Mr. Fowler's voice was almost
stirred--"that you wish to return my brother's legacy to the family?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Shirley, "only, it wasn't a legacy. It was merely
kindness that let me have it. You never can know how kind it was. But we
can get on without it now."
Mr. Fowler cleared his throat. To Hugh his manner faintly suggested the
cat busy with the yarn, full of a sort of devout curiosity. "Pardon me,"
he said, gently, "but are you sure--have you given this matter
sufficient thought? The sum is a considerable one. Your children--"
"I have talked it over with them. They feel just as I do."
"A very proper feeling," said Miss Fowler, approvingly. "I must say that
I never expected it. I shall add part of my share of it to the Marian
Fowler Ward in the Home for Deficient Children. A most worthy charity.
Perhaps I could interest you--"
"Oh, that would be lovely!" cried Mrs. Shirley. "Anything for
children.... I've already spoken to my cousin, who is a lawyer, about
transferring the securities back to you."
"I shall communicate with him at once," said Mr. Fowler. His court-room
manner had bourgeoned into his best drawing-room blend of faintly
implied gallantry and deep consideration. One almost caught Winter
getting out of the lap of Spring. Then the three heads which had
unconsciously leaned together suddenly straightened up and turned in the
same direction.
Hugh stood almost over them. In one hand he held his aunt's knitting,
which he had mechanically rescued from the cat. Now he drew out one of
the ivory needles and snapped it into accurate halves. "This is
atrocious!" he said, with care and precision. His voice shook. "I shall
not touch a cent of it and"--he embraced his uncle and aunt in the same
devastating look--"neither will you if you have any sense of decency."
"I think--"
"It doesn't matter remotely what you--we think sir. What matters is what
Uncle Hugh thought." He turned to Mrs. Shirley with an extraordinary
softening of tone. "Couldn't you keep it? When he died ... in the room
over this"--with a little gasp her glance flew to the ceiling as though
this topographical detail had brought her a sharp realization of that
long-past scene--"he made us promise that you should have it, all of it.
He felt that you needed it; he worried about it."
"Oh, how kind of him--how kind!" cried the little woman. The poignancy
of her voice cut into his disappointment like a sharp ray of light.
"Even then--to think of me. But don't you understand that he wouldn't
want me to--to take anything that I felt I ought not to take?"
"That's the way out," rippled across Mr. Fowler's face. He was
experiencing a variety of mental disturbances, but this came to the
surface just in time for Hugh to catch it.
"Oh well," he murmured, wearily. "Only, none for this deficient child,
thank you." He walked to the window and stood looking out into the blown
spring green of the elm opposite. His ebbed anger had left a residuum of
stubbornness. There was still an act of justice to be consummated and
the position of grand-justicer offered a certain righteous attraction.
As he reminded himself, if you put your will to work on a difficult
action you were fain to commit, after a while the will worked
automatically and your mind functioned without aid from you, and the
action bloomed of itself. This kinetic process was a constant device of
the freakish impulse that he called his devil. He deliberately laid the
train.
"There is one more thing," the alien was saying. Her voice had gained a
wonderful fluency amid the general thaw. "I didn't dare to ask before,
but if we thought of me then--I have always hoped he left some message
for me ... a letter, perhaps."
Hugh smiled agreeably. "In just a moment," he considered, "I am going to
do something so outrageous that I can't even imagine how my dear
families are going to take it." He was about to hurt them severely, but
that was all right. His uncle was a tempered weapon of war that despised
quarter; and as for Aunt Maria, he rather wanted to hurt Aunt Maria for
her own good.
Into the eloquent and mendacious silence that was a gift of their caste
the voice fell humbly: "So there wasn't? I suppose I oughtn't to have
expected it."
"Any time now, Gridley," Hugh signalled to his familiar. Like a
response, a thin breeze tickled the roots of his hair. He swung around
with the pivot of a definite purpose. With an economy of movement that
would have contented an efficiency expert he set a straight
fiddle-backed chair squarely in front of Uncle Hugh's girl and settled
himself in it with his back to his own people.
"Mrs. Shirley," he began, quietly, "will you talk to me, please? I hope
I shan't startle you, but there are things I absolutely have to know,
and this is my one chance. I am entirely determined not to let it slip.
Talk to me, please, not to them. As you have doubtless noticed, though
excellent people where the things not flatly of this world are
concerned, my uncle is a graven image and my aunt is a deaf mute. As for
me, I am just unbalanced enough to understand anything." He was aware of
the rustle of consternation behind him and hurried on, ignoring that and
whatever else might be happening there. "That's what I'm banking on now.
I intend to say my say and they are going to allow it, because it is
dangerous to thwart queer people--very dangerous indeed. You know, they
thwarted Uncle Hugh in every possible way. My grandfather was a
composite of those two, and all of them adored my uncle and contradicted
him and watched him until he went over the border. And they're so dead
scared that I'm going to follow him some day that they let me do quite
as I please." He passed his hand across his eyes as though brushing away
cobwebs. "Will you be so good as to put your veil up."
"Why--why, certainly!" Mrs. Shirley faltered. She uncovered her face and
Hugh nodded to the witness within.
"Yes, he'd have liked that," he told himself. "Lots of expression and
those beautiful haunted shadows about the eyes." He laughed gently.
"Don't look so frightened. I don't bite. Just humour me, as Uncle
Winthrop is signalling you to do. You understand, don't you, that Uncle
Hugh was the romance and the adventure of my life? I'm still saturated
with him, but there was lots of him that I could never get through to.
There never was a creature better worth knowing, and he couldn't show
me, or else I had blind spots. There were vast tracts of undiscovered
country in him, as far as I was concerned--lands of wonder, east of the
sun and west of the moon--that sort of thing. But I knew that there was
a certain woman who must have been there, who held the heart of the
mystery, and to-day, when this incredible chance came--when you came--I
made up my mind that I was not going to be restrained nor baffled by the
customs of my tribe. I want the truth and I'm prepared to give it. From
the shoulder. If you will tell me everything you know about him I
promise to tell you everything I know. You'll want to--" The sound of
the closing door made him turn. The room behind him was empty. His
manner quieted instantly. "That's uncommonly tactful of them.... You
won't think that they meant any discourtesy by leaving?" he added,
anxiously. "They wouldn't do that."
"Oh, I'm sure not! Your uncle made me understand," faltered Mrs.
Shirley. "They knew you could speak more freely without them."
"He's wonderful with the wireless," Hugh agreed. "But they were in
terror, anyway, as to how freely I was about to speak before them. They
can't stand this. Everything really human seems pretty well alien to
Uncle Winthrop. He's exhibit A of the people who consider civilization
a mistake. And my aunt Maria is a truly good woman--charities and all
that--but if you put a rabbit in her brain it would incontinently curl
up and die in convulsions."
She laughed helplessly, and Hugh reported an advance.
"Nevertheless," he added quaintly, "we don't really dislike each other."
"I'm the last of the family, you see; I'm the future.... Can't we skip
the preliminaries?" he broke out. "You don't feel that I am a stranger,
do you?" He halted on the verge of the confidence that he found no
barrier in her advanced age. He knew plenty of women of forty who had
never grown up much and who met him on perfectly equal terms. This,
however, was a case by itself. He plunged back into the memories of
Uncle Hugh. He spoke of his charm, his outlook on life, sometimes
curiously veiled, often uncannily clairvoyant; his periods of restless
suffering tending to queer, unsocial impulses; then the flowering of an
interval of hard work and its reward of almost supernatural joy.
"He used to go around in a rainbow," said Hugh, "a sort of holy soap
bubble. I hardly dared to speak to him for fear of breaking it. It came
with a new inspiration, and while it lasted nothing on earth was so
important. Then when it was finished he never wanted to see the thing
again."
"Go on," said his listener. Her grey eyes plumbed his with a child's
directness. He was conscious of his will playing on her. He was keeping
his part of the contract, but he was also breaking the way for hers. He
must not let them go for a moment, those grey eyes like a girl's that
grew absent-minded so easily. Only a little more and his mood would
curve around both them, a glamorous mist of feeling.
"You go on," he murmured. "Can't you see how much I want you to? Can't
you feel how much I'm the right person to know?"
"I could never tell any one. You want--"
"Anything, everything. You must have known him better than anybody in
he world did."
"I think so," she said, slowly "And I saw him alone only twice in my
life."
For some time he had sat with his long fingers over his mouth, afraid of
checking her by an untimely word.
"Of course I was in his classes. You know he had an extraordinary
success; he struck twelve at once, as they say there. The French really
discovered him as a poet, just as Mallarmé discovered Poe; some of them
used that parallel. And the girls--he was a matinée idol and a
cult--even the French girls. We went into that classroom thrilling as we
never went to any ball. I worked that winter for him harder than I had
ever worked in my life, and about Easter he began to single me out for
the most merciless fault-finding. That was his way of showing that he
considered you worth while. He had a habit of standing over you in
class, holding your paper like a knout. And once or twice--I called
myself a conceited little idiot--but once or twice--"
Hugh nodded. His pulses were singing like morning stars at the spectacle
of a new world.
"He used to say of a certain excited, happy feeling, a sort of fey
feeling, that you seemed to have swallowed a heavenly pigeon. And--well,
he looked like that. But I knocked my vanity on the head and told it,
'Down to the other dogs.' I was used to young men; I knew how little
such manifestations could mean. But after that I used to set little
lines in the things I wrote for him, very delicately, and sometimes I
fancied I had caught a fish. It was most exciting."
Hugh again impersonated a Chinese mandarin.
"You see, he allowed so few people to know him, he moved with such
difficulty in that formally laid-out small, professional world, with its
endless leaving of cards and showing yourself on the proper days. I
think they considered him a sort of Huron afflicted with genius, and
forgave him. He ran away from them, he fought them off. And to feel that
there was a magic spiderweb between this creature and me, new every day
and invisible to everybody else and dripping with poetry like dewdrops!
Can't you fancy the intoxication? I was nineteen.... I had engaged
myself to be married to Beverly Shirley. I had known him all my
life--before I left home--but I had absolutely no conviction of
disloyalty. This was different; this was another life."
"Another you," agreed Hugh, as one who took exotic states of mind for
granted.
"Well, yes.... It was one of the awful at-homes of Madame Normand's. She
took American girls _en pension_, and she was supposed to look after us
severely; but as she was an American herself, of course she gave us a
great deal of liberty. She was the wife of a _professeur_, and she had
rather an imposing _salon_, so she received just so often, and you had
to go or she never stopped asking you why. You have been to those French
receptions?"
"Where they serve music and syrup and little hard cakes, and you carry
away the impression of a lordly function because of the scenery and the
manners? Indeed yes!"
"I slid away after a while, out upon the iron balcony, filled with new
lilacs, that overhung the garden. Something had hurt my little feelings;
a letter hadn't come, perhaps. I remember how dark and warm the night
was, like a gulf under me, and the stars and the lights of Paris seemed
very much alike and rather disappointing. Then I heard his voice behind
me, and I was as overwhelmed as--as Daphne or Danaë or one of those
pagan ladies might have been when the god came.
"He said, 'What are you doing, hanging over this dark, romantic chasm?'
And I just had presence of mind enough to play up.
"'Naturally, I'm waiting for a phantom lover.' Then the answer to that
flashed on me and I said in a hurry, 'I thought you never came to these
things.'
"'I came to see you'--he really said it--and then, 'And--am I
sufficiently demoniacal?' And he _had_ swallowed a pigeon.
"'Oh dear, no!' said I. 'You are much too respectable. You are from
Boston.'
"'And you from Virginia,' said he. 'I hear that a certain Stewart once
unjustifiably claimed kinship with your branch of the family and has
since been known as the Pretender.'
"'That is quite true,' said I. 'And I hear that once when the Ark ran
aground a little voice was heard piping: 'Save me! save me! I am a
Fowler of Boston!'
"That was the silly way we began. Isn't it incredible?"
"He could be silly--that was one of the lovable things," Hugh mused.
"And he could say the most nakedly natural things. But he generally used
the mandarin dialect. He thought in it, I suppose."
"No," the stranger corrected him. "He thought in thoughts. Brilliant
people always do. The words just wait like a--a--"
"Layette," said Hugh. "What else did he say?"
"The next I remember we were leaning together, all but touching. And he
was telling me about the little green gate."
Hugh's hand shut. "He always called it that. Was he thinking of it even
then?"
"Oh yes!"
"He never was like a person of this world," said Hugh, under his breath.
"The loneliest creature I ever knew."
They fell silent, like two old friends whose sorrow is the same.
"He believed," Hugh went on, after a moment, "that when life became
intolerable you had a perfect right to take the shortest way out. And he
thought of it as a little green gate, swinging with its shadow in the
twilight so that a touch would let you into the sweetest, dimmest old
garden."
"But he loved life."
"Sometimes. The colour of it and the unexpectedness. He believed the
word didn't have any definite plan, but just wandered along the road and
picked up adventures. And he loved that. He said God made a new earth
every day and he rather fancied a new heaven oftener. But he got so
dead tired at the end, homesick for the underground.... I wonder ..."
The little woman was looking past him, straight into an evocation of a
vanished presence that was so real, so nearly tangible, that Hugh was
forced to lay violent hands upon his absurd impulse to glance over his
shoulder "I wouldn't let him," she said, in a tone the young man had
never heard before.
"You mean ..."
"I couldn't bear it. I made him promise me that he wouldn't. I can't
tell you that. We talked for a long time and the night was full of doom.
He was tired then, but that wasn't all. He felt what was coming--the
Shadow ... and he was in terror. What he dreaded most was that it might
change him in some way, make him something beastly and devilish--he who
had always loved whatever was lovely and merciful and of good report."
Hugh got up with a shudder. "Hush!" he said, sharply. "It's too ghastly.
Don't tell me any more about it." He wandered across the room, pulling a
leaf from the azaleas, stopping at the window for a long look out. The
wind was blowing some riotous young clouds over the sky like
inarticulate shouts. There was an arrogant bird in the elm; there were
pert crocus-buds in the window-boxes. The place was full of foolhardy
little dare-devils who trusted their fate and might never find it out.
After all, that was the way to live--as long as one was allowed. He
turned suddenly with his whimsical smile. "I look out o' window quite a
bit," he explained, "well, because of my aunt Maria." When he sat down
again in the Sheraton chair Mrs. Shirley shifted her story to the plane
of the smile.
"I don't know how late it was when Madame Normand popped her head out of
the balcony door."
"'Who was then surprised? It was the lady,' as dear old Brantome says?"
"It was everybody. The company had gone and Mélanie the _bonne_ was
putting out the candles.
"'Miss Stewart and I have just discovered that we are very nearly
related,' said he.
"'But how delightful,' said Madame, thoroughly annoyed."
"And the other time," Hugh hinted. What he wanted to say was, "So you
prevented it, you kept him here, God bless you!" His natural resilience
had asserted itself. Vistas were opening. The Hugh who accepted life for
what it was worth was again in the ascendant, but he found a second to
call up the other Hugh, whose legal residence was somewhere near the
threshold of consciousness, to take notice. He had always known that
there must have been something in Uncle Hugh's girl.
"That was a few days later, the afternoon before I left Paris. I went
quite suddenly. Somebody was sick at home, and I had the chance to
travel with some friends who were going. He had sent me flowers--no, not
roses."
"Narcissus?"
"Yes. Old Monsieur Normand was scandalized; it seems one doesn't send
yellow flowers to a _jeune fille_. To me it was the most incredibly
thoughtful and original thing. All the other girls had gone with Madame
to a very special piano recital, in spite of a drizzling rain. It had
turned cool, too, I remember, because there was a wood fire in the
little sitting-room--not the _salon_, but the girls' room. Being an
American, Madame was almost lavish about fires. And it was a most
un-French room, the most careless little place, where the second-best
piano lived, and the lilacs, when they were taken in out of the cold.
There were sweet old curtains, and a long sofa in front of the fireplace
instead of the traditional armchairs. Anybody's books and bibelots lay
about. I was playing."
"What?" This was important.
"What would a girl play, over twenty years ago, in Paris? In the
_crépuscule_, with the lilacs that _embaument_, as they say there, and
with a sort of panic in her mind? Because, after all, the man to whom
one is engaged is a man whom one knows very slightly."
"Absolutely," said Hugh.
"And I didn't want to leave Paris.... Of course I was playing Chopin
bits, with an ache in my heart to match, that I couldn't bear and was
enjoying to the utmost. What do girls play now? Then all of us had
attacks of Chopin. Madame used to laugh and say, 'I hear the harbour bar
still moaning,' and order that particular girl's favourite dessert. She
spoiled us. And Monsieur would say something about _si jeunesse savait_.
He was a nice old man, not very successful; his colleagues patronized
him. Oh yes he was obvious!
"And then Mélanie opened the door and announced, '_Monsieur, le cousin
de Mademoiselle_.' I don't know what made her do it except a general
wish to be kind. She remembered from the other night, and, besides, she
hated to attempt English names; she made salmi of them."
Hugh had ceased to hold her eyes long ago. They looked into the window's
square of light. He had no wish to intrude his presence. She was finding
it natural to tell him, just as he had acknowledged her right to explore
the intimate places of his soul. Things simply happened that way
sometimes, and one was humbly thankful.