light is behind you. Do, I pray, come in."
She hurried ahead into the drawing-room, which was unexpectedly light,
from the reflection upon its ceiling of the snow on lower neighboring
roofs. She turned and looked at the visitor who was entering; she
uttered an exclamation, unfollowed by any word.
"I see you have recalled me," said the visitor. "Mrs. Bronson? Kate
Cheriton that was?"
"Take a seat, I pray!" said Marie-Aimée faintly.
Mrs. Bronson looked around her for once. Though her eye confessed no
more scrutiny than accords with good breeding, it missed little in the
tiny room, warm-colored, crowded, a bit untidy, but genially so, as
where a pair of evening gloves and a crumpled play-bill lay on a chair,
and a lace bonnet saddled a green bronze lion. The walls were covered
with gimcracks and pictures, among which in profusion photographs of
the celebrated, overscrawled with their various calligraphies. The
piano stood open, littered with music; a tea-table, ready for service,
the kettle steaming, was drawn close to the fire; a faint smell of
macaroons mingled in the air with the smell of violets, whereof a
big double handful was fading in a bowl. A well-worn leather chair,
deep and wide, patriarchal, was on one side of the fire-place; and,
suggestively at its elbow, matches and an ash-tray.
In this seat, after her casual circular glance, Mrs. Bronson quietly
arranged herself; and Marie-Aimée took the rocker on the opposite side
of the fire. She dropped back in it, leaning, and loosely folded her
hands; which no sooner had she done, than she sat upright, and moved
forward to the edge of her chair.
There was a longer silence than is often suffered by persons of the
world. To attempt "carrying off" anything whatsoever was not in
Marie-Aimée's _moyens_.
"Do you know why I have come, Miss Nevers?" Mrs. Bronson asked.
Marie-Aimée regarded her with eyes as steady as they were inwardly
frightened. Her whole face expressed what one had never expected to see
in it, something very near hostility; its like could be imagined in the
look of a tame animal uncertain whether harm is meant to its young.
"I judge you have come here to find Mr. Bronson," she answered, "I
expect him at any moment."
It was plain there would be no delicate fencing this afternoon.
Mrs. Bronson shook her head, and laughed in spite of herself at this
unheard-of directness. "Oh, no! I scarcely think he will come to-day, I
mentioned at lunch that I should call on you."
This was spoken without the hint of a sneer, yet Marie-Aimée flushed.
"You are quite mistaken if you think he makes love to me," she blurted
out, her breath coming quick.
Mrs. Bronson lifted her hand in deprecation. "And you are mistaken, my
dear Miss Nevers, if you think I have come to make a vulgar scene about
him. I am here, and solely, because I like you!"
Marie-Aimée stared, doubt in her eyes; then, expressing wonder by the
faintest possible effect of a shrug, looked down in her lap, all her
face slowly relaxing to a plaintive look of trouble. Her lips composed
themselves to lines of such stiff stillness, it might be guessed that
if she tried to speak they would tremble; she picked at the folds of
her tea-gown, readjusting them, smoothing the fabric across her knees.
"I don't believe you have any idea how much I felt myself attracted
to you that single time we met, Miss Nevers. You made my conquest
completely, and I am not one who takes fancies. Though you are so
contrary to all I am, it seemed to me I understood you better than all
the others did, just as I had always felt that I appreciated your work
more truly at its worth. I don't know what I would not have given to
have you for a friend."
Marie-Aimée put out her hands, to stop her, her kindness at that moment
hurt so much. But Mrs. Bronson went on eagerly. "You are not made
right for this low world. Your very virtues have the effect of faults,
and bring calamity upon you. There you are, one piece of honesty,
lovingness, unselfishness; and the consequence,--you have no chance
among us who are nothing of the sort. Being as you are would be all
right in a world peopled with angels, but here----!"
Marie-Aimée, with a deepening look of dejection and a vast returning
softness, slowly shook her head; rather as if she were trying to make
these notions of herself fit into place, than in denial of what she
heard.
"And now I find you doing something dreadfully foolish," Mrs. Bronson
continued, with a remonstrative mother's persuasive inflections,
"something, I am afraid, which will prove the deadliest mistake.
I cannot resist the impulse to come and warn you of it, to try to
drag you back into the safe path--all, I do assure you, because I
so sincerely like and respect and admire you. Of those in question,
believe me, it is you, you, who are the one I care about."
There was a pause. Marie-Aimée sat as if considering a proposition; but
in reality she was only groping after thoughts among emotions. She made
a gesture of resignation, casting up her hands and letting them drop
again. "Well? I am listening, but is it not likely that I know already
all you are intending to say?"
"No, no, it is not possible!" Mrs. Bronson said emphatically. "You
cannot see clearly for yourself, else you would have turned back long
ago. Mind you, I know how easy it will be for you to misunderstand
me in this. Almost necessarily, you will imagine that it is myself I
have principally in view, that I am jealous, perhaps, or anxious about
appearances, concerned in the figure I myself cut in all this. But
you would be wrong. To all that I am highly indifferent. Jealous! For
jealousy there must be some remnant of the folly of fondness. And, for
the rest, I refuse to grant that anything Mr. Bronson does can either
lift or lower me. No, what he chooses to do affects me not at all. But
for you, I tell you, I am sorry."
"If it is as you say," said Marie-Aimée, regaining a little life, "you
need be troubled about nothing. It is all so much simpler than one
thinks, than, I find, one is willing to think. Because once or twice
a caller has found him here, a caller likewise, it has been taken for
granted that he spends I don't know how much of his time with me, which
is particularly false and unfair. He comes from time to time; I will
be quite honest, perhaps once or twice in the week, when he happens to
be in town. Then we try over music, and I tell him the gossip of the
world which used to be his as well as mine, and we laugh together as we
used to do. You know that I always had a knack of cheering him. And I
give him tea, and let him smoke, and that is all. And is it not truly
innocent enough?"
"I believe you perfectly, Miss Nevers. And for that you are willing to
give up all that I know you are losing?"
Marie-Aimée repeated her little French gesture of resignation. "When it
comes to contending with the evil mind of the world, how can one hope
to do it? I used to believe in the world, I loved it. I have lately
discovered it to be such that I care very little what I lose with it.
Its good opinion? I don't want it any more!"
"Quite right, Miss Nevers. You are as right as possible in valuing the
opinion of the world lightly. Still, the loss of all that comes to make
life pleasant, from being on good terms with it, is serious. There
should be something to counterbalance it, in that for the sake of which
one renounces it. And you, will you tell me what you are getting? You
are ruining your life, Miss Nevers, no other word serves, for a man who
is perfectly willing to let you do it, for the satisfaction he derives
from his occasional afternoons here of gossip and tea, music and smoke."
Marie-Aimée kept her eyes unflinchingly upon Mrs. Bronson's, eyes full
of resentment and denial, but she was too moved now to speak.
"He spoiled the best years of your life," Mrs. Bronson went on, her
nostrils sharpening till their edges were white, a cold fire in her
eyes. "Oh, how well I see now, now that I know him better, what his
conduct would be with you. But when the moment came in which it was
convenient, he set you aside without one second's hesitation. You
patiently take the broken pieces of your life out of sight, you manage
to put them together again, you reappear bravely patched up, poor
child; oh, I saw you. To me, you were pathetic--and again, because it
is convenient, just a little bit convenient, he takes you up, calmly,
to break you into pieces a second time."
"You don't understand him!" burst forth Marie-Aimée, in her tone the
deepest hopelessness that the other ever could understand.
"I don't understand him? I don't?"
"No, no, no!"
"Then you think three years of marriage not instructive?" Mrs. Bronson
asked rapidly. "Or do you think him complicated? The truth is, he is
as simple as simplicity. Suppose a man with one instinct, one motive,
heretofore and forever: to do that which is at the moment easiest and
pleasantest and most profitable for himself, and you have him. But you
must, to have him exact, accommodate this tendency with a brain the
most elementary; and must suppose his objects always of the lowest and
most ordinary: little common satisfactions, material or mental, good
wine and cigars, or the flattery of some woman's silly admiration. And,
for I will do him justice, you must accommodate it with a constitution
completely healthy, like a prize animal's, without any more viciousness
than he has imagination. For the rest, ideas?" continued the coldly
indignant woman, reaching a fearful fluency, "he has none. All the
fine things which his singing brings to our minds have no existence
in himself. Talent? I do you the credit, Miss Nevers, to suppose you
with me in the secret of his musical talent. Talent he has none, nor
ever had any, nor the least real love or appreciation of music. But
a God-given voice he had, and an instinct for using it to perfection
which he shares with nightingales and mocking-birds; and, besides
these, what you call _a presence_, combined with an enormous vanity and
an equal hatred of hard work!"
"Why do you say all this to me?" gasped Marie-Aimée, choking.
"Because I cannot conceive but that you misrepresent him to yourself,
but that you still have illusions about him. If I were removed
to-morrow, do you imagine he would by any chance marry you? If my
removal left him wealthy, he would not marry at all; if it left him
poor, you can be sure he would not marry you."
After another gesture of warding off, Marie-Aimée, shuddering, buried
her face in her hands, as if blinding herself might deaden hearing too.
Mrs. Bronson at once accorded the respite for which this action seemed
to entreat. She sat in silence, critically regarding the top of
Marie-Aimée's bent head, as if one could hope to see through it into
her brain.
"Can you tell me that all this is not so?" she asked at last, heat and
anger conspicuously absent from her voice, speaking in that reasonable
tone of debate which seems to lay a compulsion of reasonableness
upon others. The question sounded genuine, as if, for plain human
curiosity's sake, she would like to know if there could be two points
of view about Anthony.
Marie-Aimée raised her face, all sickened protest and repudiation.
"Everything you have said, and have made to sound so heinous, might,
differently worded, fit perfectly into one's description of a nice
normal boy. And is a boy unworthy of one's love? Say that Anthony
Bronson remained all his life a boy, and who will contradict you? It is
the same nature, that reaches out so simply toward what pleases him,
that wants what it wants without thought of afterwards. But you must
add to this, in his case, that sort of native kingliness of the great,
who have never a doubt but theirs is the first right, and that others
will be glad to yield for them. He has never meant to hurt anyone, one
could not be further from cruel. He merely, in order to go where he
would be, must drive steadily onward. He would be sorry if his wheels
crushed anything, but that it should stop him could never enter his
brain. Call it an incapacity, it is that of most strong, healthy big
boys."
"It must have likewise characterized arboreal man."
"Don't, Mrs. Bronson!" Marie-Aimée cried, and rose whole-heartedly
at last to the encounter, bringing to bear the most piercing of her
arguments, "He is not happy now! He wants things as much as ever, but
he no longer can get what he wants. He can't sing any more. His voice
is gone. You think he doesn't care, but he does, indeed, he does! He
feels so dreadfully out of it. The public is ungrateful. His friends
are not yours, they scarcely any longer seem his own; your friends are
not his; Everything has turned out wrong. Don't sneer at him. Nothing
can brighten his life to what it was before. And he feels helpless
against it, just as the boy we were speaking of would feel. Oh, he is
blue--blue! You have not made him happy!"
"Has he made me happy?"
"He has meant to!" Marie-Aimée said earnestly. "Your quarrel is with
his whole manner of being. One must take him as he is."
"Yes! And whatever he is is to be enough, so he thinks in his calm
Jovian babyhood. How could he but satisfy any woman? How should any
but feel honored to be his servant and worshipper? the great, heavy,
self-pleased, all-sufficient Male!"
"You married him!"
"You are right. My stupidity deserves exactly what I have got. But I
didn't come here to speak of myself, or to complain of him. It has been
vulgar enough, as it is. I beg your pardon and I beg you to believe,
Miss Nevers, that I speak to no one--no one, I assure you--as I have
spoken to you. I go my way, with my chin high, my eyes well above the
heads of the scandal-mongering crowd. It was by accident I discovered
his renewed visits to you; and the brazenness, the heartlessness of
it, revolted even me, prepared for anything, God knows, in the way
of calm, colossal selfishness. My first thought was the most common
one--that he acted from pique, that his vanity could not quite stand
having it blazed abroad that you had recovered. But I know him better
than that, after all. I am just. It was simpler. It was nothing more
than a big dog wanting to be petted. He felt in need of consolation,
sympathy, condolence, some one to talk to about me--oh, I know it--and
never stopping a moment to think of you, poor woman, he turned to
the quarter where he felt surest of getting it. But what puzzles me
beyond everything is that he should have guessed right. Pardon me,
Marie-Aimée, but in those three years at the convent, what were you
doing? You seem to have wasted your time. What was that far-spread
anecdote that you had come out because it was all over, lived down, you
were cured, immune? Did others make up this fable, or did you?"
"Ah, don't speak of it! I was in good faith."
"You really thought it was all done with? You honestly felt sure of
yourself?"
"But certainly! More than sure! How otherwise would I have come back?"
"And then?"
"Then at the rehearsal for Mrs. MacDougal's charity concert I met him
again. He had consented to sing, you remember, but afterwards withdrew.
And I had scarcely more than seen him, when the three years might as
well not have been. But to whom--dear me, to whom am I saying this?"
Mrs. Bronson leaned forward till she could touch Marie-Aimée's knee.
"It's all right," she said gently. "Don't mind because it's I. I can
understand," and as she saw tears springing into Marie-Aimée's eyes,
she patted the knee, and murmured in her most soothing note, "You poor
darling!"
"Oh, you needn't pity me at all!" Marie-Aimée laughed harshly through
her tears. "When I think that I might--that there could have been the
possibility--that those three years should so have changed me, that I
should have grown so cold and dry-hearted, and proud of my dry-hearted
coldness, and supposed it a virtue, and called it morality, that when
he turned to his old comrade for a little cheer against the thickening
shadows, the fast-coming gray hairs, the lost voice, the domestic
_misères_, I might have refused, I am glad and grateful for the
ill-name and the snubs that may follow me the rest of my life because I
didn't." Whereupon her voice came utterly to wreck; she subsided into
soft unrestrained weeping.
Mrs. Bronson with a distressed frown left her seat for the
corner of a divan which was nearer Marie-Aimée. After listening
helplessly a moment, fidgeting, embarrassed by her life-habit of
undemonstrativeness, she put out her hands, quick as darting swallows,
and enclosed one of Marie-Aimée's, pressing it, stroking it, murmuring,
"Don't! Don't! You are a dear!"
Without a word Marie-Aimée turned her wet face to kiss the cheek of the
consoler. Mrs. Bronson pressed closer to her; and the two sat crushed
against each other with interlocked, hands--and so, silently drifted
into a different relation. It was as if the thoughts of their blood had
communed through their hands, and there were no need more to conceal
anything.
"Imagine," Marie-Aimée said, in a voice cracked with rueful laughter,
"that when I was in the convent I had reached the point of believing
that it was one of the laws of nature which was being accomplished in
me! I said that love was like a plant, and if it got neither sunshine
nor rain, it perished. I was not in the least happy over it, you know.
But I became philosophical about it, and was glad, as one might be over
something one owned which was not beautiful, but had a practical use.
When I went into that place, you know, I honestly believed I should
never come out of it again; and I used to read his old letters, and
pore upon photographs of him, and play over and over all the music
associated with him.
"But one day I found them flatly wearying me. I shall never understand
it! I could picture seeing him again, meeting him in company with you
at his side, and not minding. I could picture meeting him again, free,
and anxious that all should be as before, and I could be calm over it,
inclined, if anything, to refuse. I was worn out, I suppose. I imagined
it was my illusion about him which had worn out. I judged him! But
in the same breath I judged myself, as likewise incapable of any but
shallow feelings; and I despised us both equally, and forgave him, as
one forgives offences one no longer suffers from. And so, foolhardily,
I come forth again. And when I see him, all I know is that it is he,
the same one, who was all the romance of life to me once; that the
same door is still open between our eyes through which we come and go
familiarly into each other. All that I had thought dead and buried
comes to life again. And I know that I may go into a convent for twenty
years, that I might be buried and dust as many more, but when Anthony
Bronson comes by, and we are face to face again, it will be all as
nothing. And the marvel is that though it can only mean a return to
suffering, I can only be glad. Isn't it strange?"
"Oh, yes!" Mrs. Bronson pressed one of her hands across her tearless
eyes; her cheek was pale. "Strange, and beautiful. But terrible too!"
She got up abruptly, as if to escape an oppression from the atmosphere
down on Marie-Aimée's level; she made a motion with her head as if
to disengage it; and walking to the window, stood looking out across
the snowy roofs and the steeples, to the dull distance, the bank of
purplish dun hanging at the horizon over the enormous city, her eyes
full of gloomy distances too.
In the long silence ensuing there developed small homely noises of
tea-making, over yonder, near the fire.
"But it's all really wasted!" Mrs. Bronson exclaimed unexpectedly, as
if in expostulation with herself as much as with Marie-Aimée, "I know
it! You saw him again, he had grown older, it shocked you. His hair
had turned--it is his time of life--it saddened you. You say he has
lost his voice. That is a manner of speaking; nothing is wrong with his
throat. But he has never cared to sing since he was married. A little
careful practice, and he could sing very acceptably still--I won't say
in public, but for his own pleasure--if he cared anything for music,
and for that of others who have had a cult for his singing. You have
thought him blue, and it has moved you. I understand it. But do believe
me that he is a little bit of a humbug. Why should he be so blue?
Everything is his own fault. Do you really believe that I have never
tried? He is blue when he is with you, just because it will move you.
He is not so very blue when among others. I can imagine circumstances,
with which you would have nothing to do, you, nor music, nor the past,
but simple, sordid, material circumstances, in which he would be
perfectly happy, perfectly content--"
She had said this staring out of the window. She turned, feeling
Marie-Aimée at her elbow. Marie-Aimée held toward her a cup of tea and
a piece of thin bread-and-butter. Mrs. Bronson let her stand there,
apparently not seeing these things, while she searched her little shut
over-clouded face, which showed plainly enough a resolve to say no more
about it. "But to you, I do believe, all this makes no difference!"
Mrs. Bronson pursued. "Let him be, let him do, what he pleases, you
will care just the same, just as much. Are you completely a fool, my
dear, and blind as a mole, or--do you see more than we do? That's what
I can't make out. I beg your pardon!"
She accepted the cup from her, and helped herself to the bread, and
took a seat on the music-stool. She drew the gloves off her beautiful
milk-white hands liberally begemmed with diamonds and sapphires, and
mechanically folded her bread. She tasted the tea, and continued
looking off out of the window. Marie-Aimée brought a cup of tea for
herself, and stood in the window-place too, looking off, drinking.
What Mrs. Bronson thought in her long stare at the grave distance from
which the light was beginning to depart, she may, as her eye caught
the silhouette against it of the other woman's meek, set profile, have
perceived the futility of saying. "You have a beautiful view," was her
next remark.
Marie-Aimée deplored its not being to-day at its best; she described it
by touches, when finest. And they talked a while like parties to the
most ordinary call, of views, flats, and so forth, but in intonations
so curiously detached and melancholy that they might have been ghosts
talking over a tragedy that had its end three centuries ago.
Suddenly, over the roofs, flashed an arc of light, splendid; strings
of lamp-like jewels, red and green and golden, publishing to earth and
sky the name of an actor and of a melodrama. Mrs. Bronson looked at her
watch, set down her cup, and rose.
"So I shall go as I came," she said; "I had thought I had such things
to say to you, Miss Nevers, so to the point, so irrefutable, that you
could not but listen to me. I thought that the fact that it was I who
came to you and said them would have its weight. I meant, at a pinch,
Miss Nevers, to demand of you to leave, at all events to break off
relations with Anthony. But now, see, I am going, and I have demanded
nothing. I am all adrift. You have taken me out beyond my depth. You
shall do as you feel right. As for me, I don't know. I have not a heart
to lead me, as you have. I have only my common share of hard worldly
sense, and you have made me feel that it might be unsafe sometimes to
trust it. Do as you please. I don't know! I don't know! Perhaps it is
you who are right, you who love him, and all we who are fools."
In Marie-Aimée's face, which her eyes were intently interrogating as
she spoke this, Mrs. Bronson could not fail to read a perplexity equal
to her own, but coupled with a forlornness such as her own nature could
never match, no, not if Fate should place her alone on a storm-beaten
rock in mid-ocean--as Marie-Aimée might have been imagined standing,
with that face. Marie-Aimée drew in the air through her lips, till her
shoulders were lifted, and let it out in a great sigh.