Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Julie MacDonald, born Dessaix, was the daughter of a French market-gardener and of a Spanish woman, the danseuse of a travelling troupe, who, when the company was left stranded in an Indiana town, married this thrifty admirer. The latter part of Julie’s childhood was passed in a convent school, whence she emerged at fifteen a rabid little Protestant with manners which the Sisters had subdued slightly but had not been able to make gentle. She learned the milliner’s trade, which she practised until, at twenty-two, she married Frazer MacDonald, a gigantic, red-haired Scotch surveyor.

A few years after their marriage MacDonald went West, intending to establish himself and then send for Julie, whom he left meanwhile with her sister, the wife of a well-to-do mechanic living in Pullman. His train was wrecked somewhere in Arizona and the ruins took fire. MacDonald was reported among those victims whose bodies were too badly burned for complete identification, and though Julie refused to believe it at first, when the long days brought no tidings she knew in her heart that it was true.

She established herself at her old trade in one of the county towns of the Indiana prairie country, where she worked and prospered for three years before John Applegate asked her to marry him.

At the convent they had tried to teach her to worship God, but abstractions were not in Julie’s line. Respectability was more tangible than righteousness, and deference to the opinion of the world an idea she could grasp. The worship of appearances came to be Julie’s religion. Nothing could be more respectable than John Applegate, who was a hardware dealer and one of Belleplaine’s leading merchants, and she accepted him with an almost religious enthusiasm.

The hardware business in a rich farming country is a good one. And then, in her own very unreasonable way, Julie was fond of Applegate.

“A little mouse of a man, yes,” she said to herself, “but such a good little mouse! I’ll have my way with things. When MacDonald was alive he had his way. Now--we’ll see.”

As for Applegate, he was just an average, unheroic, common-place man, such stuff as the mass of people are made of. Having decided to remarry for the sake of his children, he committed the not-uncommon inconsistency of choosing a woman who could never be acceptable to them and who suited himself entirely only in certain rare and unreckoning moods which were as remote from the whole trend of his existence as scarlet is from slate-color. But he found this untamed daughter of the people distinctly fascinating, and, with the easy optimism of one whose eyes are blinded by beauty, assured himself that it would come out all right.

His little daughter kissed him dutifully and promised to try to be a good girl when he told her he was going to bring a new mamma home, a pretty, jolly mamma, who would be almost a play-mate for her and Teddy, but secretly she felt a prescience that this was not the kind of mamma she wanted.

A few weeks after his marriage her father found her one day shaking in a passion of childhood’s bitter, ineffectual tears. With great difficulty he succeeded in getting an explanation. It came in whispers, tremblingly.

“Papa, she--she says _bad words_! And this morning Teddy said one too. Oh, Papa”--the sobs broke out afresh--“how can he grow up to be _nice_ and how am I going to get to be a lady--a lady like my own mamma--if nobody shows us how?”

Applegate dropped his head on his chest with a smothered groan. For himself he had not minded the occasional touches of profanity--to do her justice, they were rare--with which Julie emphasized her speech, for they had only seemed a part of the alien, piquantly un-English element in her which attracted him, but when Dora looked up at him with his dead wife’s eyes he could not but acknowledge the justice of her tragic horror of “bad words.”

“What have I done?” he asked himself as the child nestled closer, and then, “What shall I do?” for he found himself face to face with a future before whose problems he shrank helplessly.

One does not decide upon the merits of falcons according to the traditions of doves, and it would be quite as unjust to judge Julie Applegate from what came to be the standpoint of her husband and his children. There is no doubt that she made life hideous to them, but this result was accidental rather than intentional. There are those to whom the unbridled speech of natures without discipline is as much a matter of course as the sunshine and the rain. If to Applegate and Dora it was thunder-burst and cyclone, whose was the blame?

And if one is considering the matter of grievances, Julie certainly had hers. Most acute of all, she had expected to acquire a certain social prominence by her marriage, but was accorded only a grudging toleration by the circle to which the first Mrs. Applegate had belonged. This was the more grinding from the fact that in Belleplaine, as in all small towns of the great Middle-West, social distinctions are based upon personal quality and not upon position.

Then, there was Dora. From Julie’s point of view tempers were made to lose, but Dora habitually retained hers with a dignity which, while it endeared her to her father, only exasperated his wife. Julie developed an inordinate jealousy of the girl, and the love of the father and daughter became a rod to scourge them. With the most pacific intentions in the world it was impossible to divine what would or what would not offend Julie.

On the occasion of the family quarrel recorded, Julie departed for Pullman, according to her threat, and for a few days thereafter life was delightfully peaceful. Dora exhibited all sorts of housewifely aptitudes and solicitudes, the wheels of the household machinery moved smoothly, and the domestic amenities blossomed unchecked.

Julie had been gone a week, a week of golden Indian summer weather, when one day, as Applegate was leaving the house after dinner, he was met by the telegraph boy just coming in. He stopped at the gate and tore the message open. It was from Julie’s brother-in-law, Hopson, and condensed in its irreverent ten words a stupefying amount of information. Applegate stared at it, unable to understand.

“_MacDonald has come alive. Claims Julie. High old times. Come._”

He crushed the yellow paper in his hands, and turning back, sat down heavily upon the steps of the veranda, staring stupidly ahead of him. If this were true, what did it mean to him? Out of the hundred thoughts assailing him one only was clear and distinct. It meant that he was free!

He turned the telegram over in his fingers, touching it with the look of one who sees visions.

Free. His home--his pretty home--his own again, with Dora, who grew daily more like her mother, as his little housekeeper. Free from that tempestuous presence which repelled even while it attracted. Free from the endless scenes, the tiresome bickerings, the futile jealousies, the fierce reproaches and the fierce caresses, both of which wearied him equally now. He had scarcely known how all these things which he bore in silence had worn and weighed upon him, but he knew at last. The measure of the relief was the measure of the pressure also. The tears trickled weakly down his cheeks, and he buried his face in his hands as if to hide his thankfulness even from himself. The prospect overwhelmed him. No boy’s delight nor man’s joy had ever been so sweet as this. When he looked up, the pale November sunlight seemed to hold for him a promise more alluring than that of all the May-time suns that ever shone--the promise of a quiet life.

As he accustomed himself to this thought, there came others less pleasant. The preeminently distasteful features of the situation began to raise their heads and hiss at him like a coil of snakes. He shrank nervously from the gossip and the publicity. This was a hideous, repulsive thing to come into the lives of upright people who had thought to order their ways according to the laws of God and man. It was only Julie’s due to say she had intended that. But it had come and must be met. Julie was MacDonald’s wife, not his--not his. The only thing to be done was to accept the situation quietly. He knew that his own compensation was ample--no price could be too great to pay for this new joy of freedom--but he shivered a little when he thought of Julie with her incongruous devotion to the customary and the respectable. It would hurt Julie cruelly, but there was no one to blame and no help for it. And MacDonald could take her away into the far new West and make her forget this miserable interlude. He knew that for MacDonald, who was of a different fibre from himself, Julie’s charm had been sufficient and enduring. Whatever might be the explanation of his long absence, Applegate did not doubt that the charm still endured. And, in the end, even they themselves would forget this unhappy time which was just ahead of them, and its memory would cease to seem a shame and become a regret, whose bitterness the passing years would lessen tenderly.

Having thus adjusted the ultimate outcome of the situation to suit the optimism of his mood, Applegate drew out his watch and looked at it. He had just time to make the necessary arrangements and catch the afternoon train for Chicago.

He telegraphed to Hopson, and as he left the train that evening he found the man awaiting him. The two shook hands awkwardly and walked away together in silence. It was only after they had gone a block or two that Hopson said:

“Well, I’m glad you’ve got here. We’ve been having a picnic up at the house. Julie’s been having the hysterics and MacDonald--you never knew MacDonald, did you?”

Applegate listened politely. He had a curious feeling that Julie and her hysterics were already very far away and unimportant to him, but he did not wish to be so brutal as to show this.

“When did MacDonald return and where has he been?” he asked, gravely.

“He got here yesterday. He says he had a shock or something in that accident--anyhow, he just couldn’t remember anything, and when he come to he didn’t know who he was, nor anything about himself, and all his papers and clothes had been burnt, so there was nothing to show anybody who he was. He could work, and he was all right most ways. Says he was that way till about six months ago, when a Frisco doctor got hold of him and did something to his head that put him right. He has papers from the doctor to show it’s true. His case attracted lots of attention out there. Of course he wrote to Julie when he came to himself, but his letters went to our old address and she never got them. So then he started East to see about it. He says he’s got into a good business and is going to do well.”

There was a long silence. Presently Hopson began again, awkwardly:

“I don’t know how you feel about it, but I think Julie’d ought to go back to him.”

Applegate’s heart began to beat in curious, irregular throbs; he could feel the pulsing of the arteries in his neck and there was a singing in his ears.

“Of course Julie agrees with you?” he said, thickly.

“Well, no; she don’t. That’s what she wanted me to talk to you about. She can’t see it but one way. She says he died, or if he didn’t it was the same thing to her, and she married you. She says nobody can have two husbands, and it’s you who are hers. I told her the law didn’t look at it that way, and she says then she must get a divorce from MacDonald and remarry you. MacDonald says if she brings suit on the ground of desertion he will fight it. He says he can prove it ain’t been no wilful desertion. But probably he could be brought round if he saw she wouldn’t go back to him anyhow. MacDonald wouldn’t be spiteful. But he was pretty fond of Julie.”

Applegate had stopped suddenly in the middle of Hopson’s speech. Now he went forward rapidly, but he made no answer. Hopson scrutinized his face a moment before he continued:

“Julie says you won’t be spiteful either. She says maybe she was a little hasty in what she said just before she came up here. But you know Julie’s way.”

“Yes,” said Applegate, “I know Julie’s way.”

Hopson drew a breath of relief. He had at least discharged himself of his intercessory mission.

“I tell Julie she’d better put up with it and go with MacDonald. The life would be more the sort of thing she likes. But her head’s set and she won’t hear to anything Henriette or I say. You see, that’s what Julie holds by, what she thinks is respectable. And it’s about all she does hold by.” He hesitated, groping blindly about in his consciousness for words to express his feeling that this passionate, reckless nature was only anchored to the better things of life by her fervent belief in the righteousness of the established social order.

“Julie thinks everything of being respectable,” he concluded, lamely.

“Is it much farther to your house?” asked Applegate, dully.

“Right here,” answered Hopson, pulling his key from his pocket.

They entered a crude little parlor whose carpet was too gaudy, and whose plush furniture was too obviously purchased at a bargain, but its air was none the less heavy with tragedy. A single gas-jet flickered in the centre of the room. On one side a great, broad-shouldered fellow sat doggedly with his elbows on his knees and his face buried in his hands. There was resistance in every line of his figure. On the sofa opposite was Julie in her crimson dress. As she lifted her face eagerly, Applegate noticed traces of tears upon it. Mrs. Hopson, who had been moving about the room aimlessly, a pale and ineffective figure between these two vivid personalities, came to a standstill and looked at Applegate breathlessly. For a moment no one spoke. Then Julie, baffled by the eyes she could not read, sprang to her feet and stretched out her hands with a vehement gesture.

“John Applegate, you’ll put me right! You will. I know you will. I can’t go back to him! How can I?” Her hungry eyes scrutinized his still, inexpressive face.

“John, you aren’t going to turn me off?” Her voice had a despairing passion in it. “You won’t refuse to marry me if I get the divorce? Good God! You can’t be such a devil. John! oh, John!”

Applegate sat down and looked at her apathetically. He was not used to being called a devil. Somehow it seemed to him the term was misapplied.

“Don’t take on so, Julie,” he said, quietly. The room seemed to whirl around him, and he added, with a palpable effort:

“I’ll think it over and try to do what is best for both of us.”

At that MacDonald lifted his sullen face from his hands for the first time and glanced across at the other man with blood-shot eyes. Then he rose slowly, his great bulk seeming to fill the room, and walking over to Applegate’s chair stood in front of it looking down at him. His scrutiny was long. Once Applegate looked up and met his eyes, but he was too tired to bear their fierce light and dropped his own lids wearily.

MacDonald turned from him contemptuously and faced his wife, who averted her head.

“Look at me, Julie!” he cried, appealingly. “I am better worth it than he is. Good Lord! I don’t see what you see in him. He’s so _tame_! Let him go about his business. He’s nobody. He don’t want you. Come along with me and we’ll lead a life! You shall cut a dash out there. I can make money hand over fist. It’s the place for you. Come on!”

For a moment Julie’s eyes glittered. The words allured her, but her old gods prevailed. She threw out her arms as if to ward off his proposal.

“No, no,” she said, shrilly. “I cannot make it seem right. You were dead to me, and I married him. One does not go back to the dead. If I am your wife, what am I to him? It puts me in the wrong these two years. I cannot have it so, I tell you. I cannot have it so!”

Applegate felt faint and sick. Rising, he groped for the door. “I must have air,” he said to Hopson, confusedly. “I will come back in a minute.”

Once outside, the cool November night refreshed him. He dropped down upon the doorstep and threw back his head, drinking in long breaths as he looked up at the mocking stars.

When he found at last the courage to ask himself what he was going to do, the answer was not ready. The decision lay entirely in his hands. He might still be free if he said the word; and as he thought of this he trembled. He had always tried to be what his neighbors called a straight man, and he wanted to be straight in this also. But where, in such a hideous tangle, was the real morality to be found? Surely not in acceding to Julie’s demands! What claim had she upon the home whose simple traditions of peace and happiness she had trampled rudely under foot? Was it not a poor, cheap convention of righteousness which demanded he should take such a woman back to embitter the rest of his days and warp his children’s lives? He rebelled hotly at the thought. That it was Julie’s view of the ethical requirement of her position made it all the more improbable that it was really right. Surely his duty was to his children first, and as for Julie, let her reap the reward of her own temperament. The Lord God Himself could not say that this was unjust, for it is so that He deals with the souls of men.

It seemed to him that he had decided, but as he rose and turned to the door a new thought stabbed him so sharply that he dropped his lifted hand with a groan.

Where had been that sense of duty to his children, just now so imperative, in the days when he had yielded to Julie’s charm against his better judgment? Had duty ever prevailed against inclination with him? Was it prevailing now?

High over all the turmoil and desperation of his thoughts shone out a fresh perception that mocked him as the winter stars had mocked. For that hour at least, the crucial one of his decision, he felt assured that in the relation of man and woman to each other lies the supreme ethical test of each, and in that relation there is no room for selfishness. It might be, indeed, that he owed Julie nothing, but might it not also be that the consideration he owed all womankind could only be paid through this woman he had called his wife? This was an ideal with which he had never had to reckon.

He turned and sat him down again to fight the fight with a chill suspicion in his heart of what the end would be.

Being a plain man he had only plain words in which to phrase his decision when at last he came to it.

“I chose her and I’ll bear the consequences of my choice,” he said, “but I’ll bear them by myself. His aunt will be glad to take Teddy, and Dora is old enough to go away to school.” Then he opened the door.

Hopson and his wife had left the little parlor. Julie on the sofa had fallen into the deep sleep of exhaustion. MacDonald still sat there, with his head in his hands, and to him Applegate turned. At the sound of his step the man lifted his massive head and shook it impatiently.

“Well?” he demanded.

“The fact is, Mr. MacDonald, Julie and I don’t get along very well together, but I don’t know as that is any reason why I should force her to do anything that don’t seem right to her. She thinks it would be more”--he hesitated for a word--“more nearly right to get a divorce from you and remarry me. As I see it now, it’s for her to say what she wants, and for you and me to do it.”

MacDonald looked at him piercingly.

“You know you’d be glad of the chance to get rid of her!” he exclaimed, excitedly. “In Heaven’s name, then, why don’t you make her come to me? You know I suit her best. You know she’s my sort, not yours. She’s as uncomfortable with you as you with her, and she’d soon get over the feeling she has against me. Man! There’s no use in it! Why can’t you give my own to me?”

“I can’t say I don’t agree with you,” said Applegate, and the words seem to ooze painfully from his white lips, “but she thinks she’d rather not, and--it’s for her to say.”

A CONSUMING FIRE

He is a man who has failed in this life, and says he has no chance of success in another; but out of the fragments of his failures he has pieced together for himself a fabric of existence more satisfying than most of us make of our successes. It is a kind of triumph to look as he does, to have his manner, and to preserve his attitude toward advancing years--those dreaded years which he faces with pale but smiling lips.

If you would see my friend Hayden, commonly called by his friends the connoisseur, figure to yourself a tall gentleman of sixty-five, very erect still and graceful, gray-headed and gray-bearded, with fine gray eyes that have the storm-tossed look of clouds on a windy March day, and a bearing that somehow impresses you with an idea of the gracious and pathetic dignity of his lonely age.

I myself am a quiet young man, with but one gift--I am a finished and artistic listener. It is this talent of mine which wins for me a degree of Hayden’s esteem and a place at his table when he has a new story to tell. His connoisseurship extends to everything of human interest, and his stories are often of the best.

The last time that I had the honor of dining with him, there was present, besides the host and myself, only his close friend, that vigorous and successful man, Dr. Richard Langworthy, the eminent alienist and specialist in nervous diseases. The connoisseur evidently had something to relate, but he refused to give it to us until the pretty dinner was over. Hayden’s dinners are always pretty, and he has ideals in the matter of china, glass, and napery which it would require a woman to appreciate. It is one of his accomplishments that he manages to live like a gentleman and entertain his friends on an income which most people find quite inadequate for the purpose.

After dinner we took coffee and cigars in the library.

On the table, full in the mellow light of the great lamp (Hayden has a distaste for gas), was a bit of white plush on which two large opals were lying. One was an intensely brilliant globe of broken gleaming lights, in which the red flame burned strongest and most steadily; the other was as large, but paler. You would have said that the prisoned heart of fire within it had ceased to throb against the outer rim of ice. Langworthy, who is wise in gems, bent over them with an exclamation of delight.

“Fine stones,” he said; “where did you pick them up, Hayden?”

Hayden, standing with one hand on Langworthy’s shoulder, smiled down on the opals with a singular expression. It was as if he looked into beloved eyes for an answering smile.

“They came into my possession in a singular way, very singular. It interested me immensely, and I want to tell you about it, and ask your advice on something connected with it. I am afraid you people will hardly care for the story as much as I do. It’s--it’s a little too rococo and sublimated to please you, Langworthy. But here it is:

“When I was in the West last summer, I spent some time in a city on the Pacific slope which has more pawnbrokers’ shops and that sort of thing in full sight on the prominent streets than any other town of the same size and respectability that I have ever seen. One day, when I had been looking in the bazaars for something a little out of the regular line in Chinese curios and didn’t find it, it occurred to me that in such a cosmopolitan town there might possibly be some interesting things in the pawn-shops, so I went into one to look. It was a common, dingy place, kept by a common, dingy man with shrewd eyes and a coarse mouth. Talking to him across the counter was a man of another type. Distinction in good clothes, you know, one is never sure of. It may be only that a man’s tailor is distinguished. But distinction in indifferent garments is distinction indeed, and there before me I saw it. A young, slight, carelessly dressed man, his bearing was attractive and noteworthy beyond anything I can express. His appearance was perhaps a little too unusual, for the contrast between his soft, straw-colored hair and wine-brown eyes was such a striking one that it attracted attention from the real beauty of his face. The delicacy of a cameo is rough,” added the connoisseur, parenthetically, “compared to the delicacy of outline and feature in a face that thought, and perhaps suffering, have worn away, but this is one of the distinctive attractions of the old. You do not look for it in young faces such as this.

“On the desk between the two men lay a fine opal--this one,” said Hayden, touching the more brilliant of the two stones. “The younger man was talking eagerly, fingering the gem lightly as he spoke. I inferred that he was offering to sell or pawn it.

“The proprietor, seeing that I waited, apparently cut the young man short. He started, and caught up the stone. ‘I’ll give you--’ I heard the other say, but the young man shook his head, and departed abruptly. I found nothing that I wanted in the place, and soon passed out.

“In front of a shop-window a little farther down the street stood the other man, looking in listlessly with eyes that evidently saw nothing. As I came by he turned and looked into my face. His eyes fixed me as the Ancient Mariner’s did the Wedding Guest. It was an appealing yet commanding look, and I--I felt constrained to stop. I couldn’t help it, you know. Even at my age one is not beyond feeling the force of an imperious attraction, and when you are past sixty you ought to be thankful on your knees for any emotion that is imperative in its nature. So I stopped beside him. I said: ‘It is a fine stone you were showing that man. I have a great fondness for opals. May I ask if you were offering it for sale?’

“He continued to look at me, inspecting me calmly, with a fastidious expression. Upon my word, I felt singularly honored when, at the end of a minute or two, he said: ‘I should like to show it to you. If you will come to my room with me, you may see that, and another;’ and he turned and led the way, I following quite humbly and gladly, though surprised at myself.

“The room, somewhat to my astonishment, proved to be a large apartment--a front room high up in one of the best hotels. There were a good many things lying about which obviously were not hotel furnishings, and the walls, the bed, and even the floor were covered with a litter of water-color sketches. Those that I could see were admirable, being chiefly impressions of delicate and fleeting atmospheric effects.

“I took the chair he offered. He stood, still looking at me, apparently not in haste to show me the opals. I looked about the room.

“‘You are an artist?’ I said.

“‘Oh, I used to be, when I was alive,’ he answered, drearily. ‘I am nothing now.’ And then turning away he fetched a little leather case, and placed the two opals on the table before me.

“‘This is the one I have always worn,’ he said, indicating the more brilliant. ‘That chillier one I gave once to the woman whom I loved. It was more vivid then. They are strange stones--strange stones.’

“He said nothing more, and I sat in perfect silence, only dreading that he should not speak again. I am not making you understand how he impressed me. In the delicate, hopeless patience of his face, in the refined, uninsistent accents of his voice, there was somehow struck a note of self-abnegation, of aloofness from the world, pathetic in any one so young.

“I am old. There is little in life that I care for. My interests are largely affected. Wine does not warm me now, and beauty seems no longer beautiful; but I thank Heaven I am not beyond the reach of a penetrating human personality. I have at least the ordinary instincts for convention in social matters, but I assure you it seemed not in the least strange to me that I should be sitting in the private apartment of a man whom I had met only half an hour before, and then in a pawnbroker’s shop, listening eagerly for his account of matters wholly personal to himself. It struck me as the most natural and charming thing in the world. It was just such chance passing intercourse as I expect to hold with wandering spirits on the green hills of paradise.

“It was some time before he spoke again.

“‘I saw her first,’ he said, looking at the paler opal, as if it was of that he spoke, ‘on the street in Florence. It was a day in April, and the air was liquid gold. She was looking at the Campanile, as if she were akin to it. It was the friendly grace of one lily looking at another. Later, I met her as one meets other people, and was presented to her. And after that the days went fast. I think she was the sweetest woman God ever made. I sometimes wonder how He came to think of her. Whatever you may have missed in life,’ he said, lifting calm eyes to mine, and smiling a little, ‘you whose aspect is so sweet, decorous, and depressing, whose griefs, if you have griefs, are the subtle sorrows of the old and unimpassioned’--I remember his phrases literally. I thought them striking and descriptive,” confessed Hayden--“‘I hope you have not missed that last touch of exaltation which I knew then. It is the most exquisite thing in life. The Fates must hate those from whose lips they keep that cup.’ He mused awhile and added, ‘There is only one real want in life, and that is comradeship--comradeship with the divine, and that we call religion; with the human, and that we call love.’

“‘Your definitions are literature,’ I ventured to suggest, ‘but they are not fact. Believe me, neither love nor religion is exactly what you call it. And there are other things almost as good in life, as surely you must know. There is art, and there is work which is work only, and yet is good.’

“‘You speak from your own experience?’ he said, simply.

“It was a home thrust. I did not, and I knew I did not. I am sixty-five years old, and I have never known just that complete satisfaction which I believe arises from the perfect performance of distasteful work. I said so. He smiled.

“‘I knew it when I set my eyes upon you, and I knew you would listen to me and my vaporing. Your sympathy with me is what you feel toward all forms of weakness, and in the last analysis it is self-sympathy. You are beautiful, not strong,’ he added, with an air of finality, ‘and I--I am like you. If I had been a strong man.... Christ!’

“I enjoyed this singular analysis of myself, but I wanted something else.

“‘You were telling me of the opals,’ I suggested.

“‘The opals, yes. Opals always made me happy, you know. While I wore one, I felt a friend was near. My father found these in Hungary, and sent them to me--two perfect jewels. He said they were the twin halves of a single stone. I believe it to be true. Their mutual relation is an odd one. One has paled as the other brightened. You see them now. When they were both mine, they were of almost equal brilliancy. This,’ touching the paler, ‘is the one I gave to her. You see the difference in them now. Hers began to pale before she had worn it a month. I do not try to explain it, not even on the ground of the old superstition. It was not her fault that they made her send it back to me. But the fact remains; her opal is fading slowly; mine is burning to a deeper red. Some day hers will be frozen quite, while mine--mine--’ his voice wavered and fell on silence, as the flame of a candle fighting against the wind flickers and goes out.

“I waited many minutes for him to speak again, but the silence was unbroken. At last I rose. ‘Surely you did not mean to part with either stone?’ I said.

“He looked up as if from a dream. ‘Part with them? Why should I sell my soul? I would not part with them if I were starving. I had a minute’s temptation, but that is past now.’ Then, with a change of manner, ‘You are going?’ He rose with a gesture that I felt then and still feel as a benediction. ‘Good-by. I wish for your own sake that you had not been so like my poor self that I knew you for a friend.’

“We had exchanged cards, but I did not see or hear of him again. Last week these stones came to me, sent by some one here in New York of his own name--his executor. He is dead, and left me these.

“It is here that I want your counsel. These stones do not belong to me, you know. It is true that we are like, as like as blue and violet. But there is that woman somewhere--I don’t know where; and I know no more of their story than he told me. I have not cared to be curious regarding it or him. But they loved once, and these belong to her. Do you suppose they would be a comfort or a curse to her? If--if--” the connoisseur evidently found difficulty in stating his position. “Of course I do not mean to say that I believe one of the stones waned while the other grew more brilliant. I simply say nothing of it; but I know that he believed it, and I, even I, feel a superstition about it. I do not want the light in that stone to go out; or if it should, or could, I do not want to see it. And, besides, if I were a woman, and that man had loved me so, I should wish those opals.” Here Hayden looked up and caught Langworthy’s amused, tolerant smile. He stopped, and there was almost a flush upon his cheek.

“You think I am maudlin--doting--I see,” he said. “Langworthy, I do hope the Lord will kindly let you die in the harness. You haven’t any taste for these innocent, green pastures where we old fellows must disport ourselves, if we disport at all. Now, I want to know if it would be--er--indelicate to attempt to find out who she is, and to restore the stones to her?”

Langworthy, who had preserved throughout his usual air of strict scientific attention, jumped up and began to pace the room.

“His name?” he said.

Hayden gave it.

“I know the man,” said Langworthy, almost reluctantly. “Did any one who ever saw him forget him? He was on the verge of melancholia, but what a mind he had!”

“How did you know him, Langworthy?” asked Hayden, with pathetic eagerness.

“As a patient. It’s a sad story. You won’t like it. You had better keep your fancies without the addition of any of the facts.”

“Go on,” said Hayden, briefly.

“They live here, you know. He was the only son. He unconsciously acquired the morphine habit from taking quantities of the stuff for neuralgic symptoms during a severe protracted illness. After he got better, and found what had happened to him, he came to me. I had to tell him he would die if he didn’t break it off, and would probably die if he did. ‘Oh, no matter,’ he said. ‘What disgusts me is the idea that it has taken such hold of me.’ He did break it off directly and absolutely. I never knew but one other man who did that thing. But between the pain and the shock from the sudden cessation of the drug, his mind was unbalanced for awhile. Of course the girl’s parents broke off the engagement. I knew they were travelling with him last summer. It was a trying case, and the way he accepted his own weakness touched me. At his own request he carried no money with him. It was a temptation when he wanted the drug, you see. It must have been at some such moment, when he contemplated giving up the struggle, that you met him in the pawn-shop.”

“I am glad I knew enough to respect him even there,” murmured Hayden, in his beard.

“Oh, you may respect him, and love him if you like. He died a moral hero, if a mental and physical wreck. That is as good a way as any, or ought to be, to enter another life--if there is another life.”

“And the woman?” asked the connoisseur.

“Keep the opals, Hayden; they and he are more to you than to her. She--in fact it is very soon--is to marry another man.”

“Who is--”

“A gilded cad. That’s all.”

Langworthy took out his watch and looked at it. I turned to the table. What had happened to the dreaming stones? Did a light flash across from one to the other, or did my eyes deceive me? I looked down, not trusting what I saw. One opal lay as pale, as pure, as lifeless, as a moon-stone is. The other glowed with a yet fierier spark; instead of coming from within, the color seemed to play over its surface in unrestricted flame.

“See here!” I said.

Langworthy looked, then turned his head away sharply. The distaste of the scientific man for the inexplicable and irrational was very strong within him.

But the old man bent forward, the lamp-light shining on his white hair, and with a womanish gesture caught the gleaming opal to his lips.

“A human soul!” he said. “A human soul!”

AN UNEARNED REWARD

It is the very last corner of the world in which you would expect to find a sermon. Overhead hang the Colorado skies, curtains of deepest, dullest cobalt, against which the unthreatening white clouds stand out with a certain solidity, a tangible look seen nowhere else save in that clear air. All around are the great upland swells of the mountains, rising endlessly, ridge beyond ridge, like the waves of the sea. In a hollow beside the glittering track is the one sign of human existence in sight--the sun-scorched, brown railway station. It is an insignificant structure planted on a high platform. There is a red tool-chest standing against the wall; a tin advertisement of somebody’s yeast-cakes is nailed to the clap-boards; three buffalo hides, with horns still on them, hang over a beam by the coal-shed, and across the side of the platform, visible only to those approaching from the west, is written, in great, black letters:

THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.

This legend had no place there on the September afternoon, some years ago, when Carroll Forbes stepped off the west-bound express as it halted a minute at the desolate spot. Because it looked to him like the loneliest place in all the world the notion seized him suddenly, as the train drew up beside the high platform, to catch up his valise and leave the car. He was looking for a lonely place, and looking helplessly. He snatched at the idea that here might be what he sought, as a drowning man at the proverbial straw.

When the train had gone on and left him there, already repenting tremulously of what might prove his disastrous folly, a man, who was possibly the station agent--if this were indeed a station--came limping toward him with an inquiring look.

Forbes was a handsome man himself, and thoroughly aware of the value of beauty as an endowment. He was conscious of a half-envious pang as he faced the blonde giant halting across the platform. This was, or had been, a singularly perfect specimen of the physical man. Over six feet in height, muscular, finely proportioned, fair-haired and fair-skinned, with a curling, blonde beard, and big, expressionless blue eyes, he looked as one might who had been made when the world was young, and there was more room for mighty men than now.

The slight, olive-skinned young man who faced him was conscious of the sudden feeling of physical disadvantage that comes upon one in the presence of imposing natural objects, for the man was as august in his way as the cliffs and canyons.

“I am a--an artist,” said Carroll Forbes. “Is there any place hereabouts where I can get my meals and sometimes a bed, while I am sketching in the mountains?”

The man stared at him.

“Would it have been better if I had said I was a surveyor?” asked Forbes of his confused inner consciousness.

“We feed folks here sometimes--that is, my wife does. Mebbe you could have a shake-down in the loft. Or there’s Connor’s ranch off north a ways. But they don’t care about taking in folks up there.”

“Then, if you would ask your wife?” ventured Forbes, politely. “I shall not trouble you long,” he added.

“Ellen!”

A woman appeared at the door, then moving slowly forward, stood at her husband’s side, and the admiration Forbes had felt at the sight of the man flamed into sudden enthusiasm as he watched the wife. She was tall, with heavy, black hair, great eyes like unpolished jet, one of the thick white, smooth, perfectly colorless skins, which neither the sun nor the wind affect, and clear-cut, perfect features. Standing so, side by side, the two were singularly well worth looking at.

“What a regal pair!” was Forbes’s internal comment; and while they conferred together he watched them idly, wondering what their history was, for of course they had one. It is safe to affirm that every human creature cast in the mould of the beautiful has, or is to have, one.

“She says you c’n stay,” announced the man. “Just put those traps of yours inside, will you?” and, turning, he limped off the length of the platform at a call from somebody who had ridden up with jingling spurs.

Forbes, left to his own devices, picked up his valise, then set it down again and looked around him helplessly, wondering if there was a night train by which he could get away from this heaven-forsaken spot.

“If you want to see where you can sleep,” said a voice at his side, “I will show you.” It was the woman. She bent as she spoke to pick up some of his impedimenta, but he hastily forestalled her with a murmur of deprecation.

She turned and looked at him, and as he met her eyes it occurred to him that the indifference of her face was the indifference of the desert--arid and hopeless. The look she gave him was searching and impersonal; he saw no reason for it, nor for the slow, dark color that spread over her face, and there was less than no excuse for the way she set her lips and stretched a peremptory hand, saying, “Give me those,” in tones that could not be disobeyed. To his own astonishment he surrendered them, and followed her meekly up a ladder-like flight of steps to the rough loft over the station. It was unfinished, but partitioned into two rooms. She opened the door of one of these apartments, silently set his luggage inside, and vanished down the stairs.

Forbes sat down on the edge of a broken chair and looked about him.

“Now, in heaven’s name,” he demanded of the barren walls, “what have I let myself in for, and why did I do it?”

To this question there seemed no sufficient answer, and for awhile he sat there fretting with the futile anxiety of a man who knows that his fate pursues him, who hopes that this turning or that may help him to evade it, yet always feels the benumbing certainty that the path he has taken is the shortest road to that he would avoid. When at last--recognizing that his meditations were unprofitable--he rose and went down the stairs, it was supper-time.

The woman was uncommunicative, but he could feel that her eyes were on him. The man--it occurred to Forbes that he had probably been drinking--was talkative. After the meal was over they went outside. Forbes, by way of supporting his pretence of being an artist, took out a pocket sketch-book and made notes of the values of the clouds and the outlines of the hills against the sky in a sort of artistic short-hand. The man Wilson sat down on a bench and began to talk. Between the exciting effects of the whiskey he had taken, the soothing influence of the cigar Forbes proffered him, and a natural talent for communicativeness, he presently went on to tell his own story. Forbes listened attentively. It seemed a part of the melodrama of the whole situation and was as unreal to him as the flaming miracle of the western skies or his own presence here.

“So the upshot of it all was that we just skipped out. She ran away with me.”

It was a curious story. As Forbes listened he became aware that it was one with which he had occasionally met in the newspapers, but never in real life before. It was, apparently, the story of a girl belonging to a family of wealth and possibly of high social traditions--naturally he did not know what importance to attach to Wilson’s boast that his wife belonged “to the top of the heap”--who had eloped with the man who drove her father’s carriage.

The reasons for this revolt against the natural order of her life was obscure; there was, perhaps, too high a temper on her side and too strict a restraint on the part of her guardians. There was necessarily a total absence of knowledge of life; there was also the fact that the coachman was undoubtedly a fine creature to look at; there might have been a momentary yielding on the part of a naturally dramatic temperament to the impulse for the spectacular in her life.

But whatever the reasons, the result was the same. She had married this man and gone away with him, and they had drifted westward. And when they had gone so far west that coachmen of his stamp were no longer in demand, he took to railroading, and from brakeman became engineer; and finally, being maimed in an accident in which he had stood by his engine while the fireman jumped--breaking his neck thereby--he had picked up enough knowledge of telegraphy to qualify him for this post among the mountains. He and his handsome wife lived here and shared the everlasting solitude of the spot together, and occasionally fed stray travellers like this one who had dropped down on them to-day.

“He drinks over-freely and he swears profusely,” mused Forbes, scrutinizing him, “but he is too big to be cruel, and he still worships her beauty as she, perhaps, once worshipped his; and he still feels an uncouth pride in all that she gave up for his sake.”

It had never occurred to him before to wonder what the after-life of a girl who eloped with her father’s servant might be like. He speculated upon it now. By just what process does a woman so utterly _déclassée_ adjust herself to her altered position? Would she make it a point to forget, or would every reminder of lives, such as her own had been, be a turning of the knife in her wound? Would not a saving recollection of the little refinements of life cling longer to a weak nature than to a strong one under such circumstances?

This woman apparently gave tongue to no vain regrets, for her husband was exulting in the “grit” with which she had taken the fortunes of their life. “No whine about her,” was his way of expressing his conviction that the courage of the thoroughbred was in her.

“No, sir; there’s no whine about her. Un she’s never been sorry, un, s’help me, she sha’n’t never be,” concluded Wilson. There were maudlin tears in his eyes.

“Few men can say that of their wives,” said Forbes’s smooth, sympathetic voice. “You are indeed fortunate.”

While her husband was repeating the oft-told tale of their conjugal happiness, Ellen Wilson had done her after-supper work, and, slipping out of the door, climbed the short, rocky spur to the north of the station. Beyond the summit, completely out of sight and hearing, there was a little hollow that knew her well, but never had it seen her as it saw her now, when, throwing herself down, her face to the earth, she shed the most scalding tears of all her wretched years.

They were such little things this stranger had done--things so slight, so involuntary, so unconscious that they did not deserve the name of courtesies, but they were enough to open the flood-gates of an embittered heart. There was a world where all the men were deferential and all the women’s lives were wrapped about with the fine, small courtesies of life--formal, but not meaningless. It had been her world once and now was so no longer.

Good or bad, she knew little and cared less, this man had come from that lost world of hers, as she was made aware by a thousand small signs, whose very existence she had forgotten; and silently, fiercely she claimed him as an equal.

“I--I too was--” Slow tears drowned the rest.

She could have told him how a _déclassée_ grows used to it. She knew how the mind can adjust itself to any phase of experience, and had learned that what woman has undergone, woman can undergo--yes, and be strong about it. She knew how, under the impulse of necessity, the once impossible grows to be the accepted life, and the food that could not be swallowed becomes the daily bread.

When the struggle for existence becomes a hand-to-hand fight, traditions of one’s ancestry do not matter, except, possibly, that some traditions bind you to strength and silence, while others leave you free to scream. She knew what it was to forget the past and ignore the future, and survey the present with the single-hearted purpose of securing three meals a day, if possible; two, if it were not.

She had forgotten with what facility she might the faces and scenes that once were dear to her. She had nothing to do with them any longer, as she knew. She might, perhaps, have heard their names without emotion. But, even in this day and generation and among this democratic people, in the soul of a woman bred as she had been the feeling for her caste is the last feeling that dies. And to her anguish she found that in her it was not yet dead.

The color died from the sky, and the stars came swiftly out.

She rose at last. It was time that she should be going. She stretched out the tired arms upon which she had been lying, looked at the patient hands which had long lost the beauty her face still kept, and lifted her eyes to the solemn sky.

“I shall die some day,” she said, passionately. “No one can take that away from me. Thank Heaven, it is not one of the privileges a woman forfeits by marrying out of her station.”