Chapter III

“Virginia! Do you mean that Rogers actually approached _you_ in the matter?”

Mrs. Le Garde moved uneasily under the scorching light in her husband’s eyes. It was a new experience to see anything but tenderness in his face, but she respected him for the look she resented.

“He had to consult some one, of course. You have given no attention to things of late.” Her voice was irritatingly even. “Papa always said you had no head for business.”

“Your father was an honest man, Virginia,” cried her husband, desperately. “He would have been the last person in the world to attempt to increase his gains dishonestly.”

“I see nothing dishonest about it,” said Virginia, coldly. “I really think, Roderick, under all the circumstances, it would have been more appropriate if you had learned something about money in the last seven years--besides how to spend it.”

Nothing dishonest!

“Don’t you understand,” demanded Le Garde, in a terrible voice, “that the ‘commission’ you paid Rogers was blackmail, the price of his ‘news’ and his silence?”

Mrs. Le Garde shrugged her shoulders.

Roderick rose dumbly. He knew all that he need. The room whirled round him. How he made his way out of the house he did not know. Had he served seven years--for this? The fair house of his life, built up on the insubstantial foundations of a woman’s silence and her sweet looks, was tumbling about his ears. She whom he had made his wife, who wore the name he honored though it was his own, whom he had worshipped as woman never yet was worshipped, had failed in common honesty, and taunted him with the life he had led for her sake. She had betrayed him into a shameful position. That restitution was an easy matter and might be a secret one did not make the case less hard. He could have defended her had she been disgraced in the world’s eyes, but how might he defend her from himself?

It was a raw November night. As he went swiftly on, he felt the river-mists sweep soft against his face. He wrung his helpless hands. “Oh, God! It is dishonor! What shall I do? What shall I do?”

No help in the murky sky above him; none in the home whose lights lay behind; none in the river that rushed along beneath the bluff--that was the refuge of a coward and a shirk. Had he not already shirked too much in life?

What must he do? He tried to think collectedly, but in his pain he could not. There were visions before his eyes. He saw Virginia as she had seemed to him seven years ago--five years--yesterday--to-night. Was it true that he had never really seen her till to-night?

Oh, that brave, lost youth of his! His strong, light-hearted youth, with its poverty, its pride, and its blessed, blessed freedom! If he could but go back to it, and feel himself his own man once more, with his life before him to be lived as he had planned it. How was it that he had become entangled with a soul so alien to his own? And what did a man do when he reached a point from which he could not go back, yet loathed to go forward?

He tramped on and on through the drizzling November darkness. Gradually the tumult in his heart was stilled. He became aware that the air was cold, that he was splashed with mud and rain, that he had no hat, and wore only thin evening clothes. He turned at last, his teeth chattering in his head, and plodded back.

Two things grew clear before his mind--he must settle with Macomb to-morrow, and he must henceforth assume the control of John Fenley’s affairs which he had hitherto nominally possessed. Thank Heaven for the gift of work!

And Virginia?

Who was it who said that for our sins there was all forgiveness, but our mistakes even infinite mercy could not pardon? Virginia was a mistake of his; that was all. It was safer to blame himself, not her--not her. That way lay madness.

Perhaps she, too, had found herself mistaken. Was that the secret he sometimes fancied he saw stirring behind the curtain of her placid eyes? If so, God pity them; and God help him to play the part he had to play.

He had reached his own threshold, and his latch-key faltered in the door. As he stepped into the wide hall, a curious figure in the disarray of his fastidious attire, he caught the odor of roses--they were Maréchal Niels--floating out of the drawing-room. The rooms were warm and bright and sweet, but their cheer seemed to him oppressive, and he sickened at the faint perfume of the roses.

His wife came and put the portière aside, standing with one white, lifted arm outlined against its heavy folds. Virginia always wore simple evening dress at home for her husband. She had been heard to say that it was one of the amenities that made domestic life endurable.

“How long you have been out!” she said, in just her usual sweet, unhurried voice, ignoring his dishevelled aspect. “I am afraid you are quite chilled through.”

He looked at her an instant curiously--this exquisite piece of flesh and blood that was his second self for time and eternity--realizing that he did not understand her, had never understood her, could never hope nor desire to do so again. Then he gathered himself together to make the first speech in the part he had appointed hereafter to play--that rôle of devoted husband, whose cues he knew by heart. As he spoke he was shivering slightly, but surely that was because of the raw outer air.

“What a charming pose!” he said. “Did I ever tell you that throughout Homer ‘white-armed’ is used as a synonyme for beautiful?”

RIVALS

“I didn’t presume to suppose that you could care for me yet,” said Rollinson, humbly.

“I am not at all sure that I cannot,” said the girl, meditatively, “but, then, neither am I at all sure that I can.” She looked at him with clear, untroubled eyes as she spoke, eyes in which he read her interest, her detachment, and her exquisite sincerity. She had not grown fluttered or self-conscious over his avowal. She was a modern woman, and she was young. Nothing had yet happened in her life to disturb her conviction that this was a subject upon which one could reason as upon other subjects. She was not emotional, and she suspected that the poets were not unerring guides in matters of the heart. She liked Rollinson very much, and she was willing to listen to his arguments.

It seemed to her a little strange that he did not proceed with those arguments at once, when suddenly she perceived that the adoration in his eyes was intended as the chief of them, and this discovery was so disconcerting that she blushed.

“I am twenty years older than you,” murmured Rollinson. As this was the fact he most wished to forget, he felt it his duty to remind her of it.

“Nineteen only,” she answered, calmly, “and, besides, I do not see what that has to do with it. It is not the years but the man one marries.”

“It is very good of you to think so,” he answered, still humbly, “and since there is no one else you care for, perhaps in time--”

He left the sentence hanging in the air, as if afraid to finish it, and neither this modesty nor the yearning tenderness of his accent was lost upon the girl.

“As you say, there is no one else.”

“But--but there might be,” suggested Rollinson, who was strongly possessed by the insane delusion of the lover that all men must needs worship his lady. “Bertha! If you are going to learn to love me, make haste to be kind. I am horribly unreasonable. I see a rival in every man you speak to, dance with, smile at. Until my probation is over I should like to depopulate the world you move in. I want, at least, to be rejected on my own demerits, not because of the merits of another man!”

Bertha regarded him attentively, still with that serious, candid air.

“Indeed, I will try,” she murmured, and for the moment he wisely said no more.

Rollinson had been a thoughtful youth, who early conceived of old age--which he thought began between forty and forty-five--as one of the most desirable periods of life.

“Patience! Afterwards,” he had said to himself during the storm and stress, the confusion and uncertainty of youth--“afterwards, when I am old, when all this fermentation has ceased, when I know what I think, what I feel, what I want and can do, how glorious life will be!”

And in accordance with this conception, as he advanced in years, he looked confidently for the subsidence of the swelling tide of his prejudices, passions, partialities, and for the emergence of reason undefiled as the second Ararat upon which the long-tossed and buffeted ark of his mind might rest.

To say the least, he was taken aback when, in the midst of those ripe years, whose fruitage he had hoped to gather in great peace, he came again upon tempestuous days. In brief, when past forty, it befell him to love as he had never loved before, and with an unrest far exceeding that of youth, for he could not fail to see that the chances were by rights against him.

“Good Lord!” said Rollinson, when he faced his emotional condition, “for the heart there _is_ no afterwards!”

But, happily, Bertha did not think so ill of his chances for happiness as did he himself, and he ventured to hope, although he was terrified by her calmness and her ability to see from all sides the subject he could only see from one.

Bertha respected his learning and revered his wisdom--which is learning hitched to life--and envied his experiences, and exulted in his grasp of people and things, and in his breadth of vision. She thought such a grip upon life as he possessed could only come with years. And compared to these things the disadvantages which also come with years seemed trifling. Obesity, baldness, and a touch of ancestral gout were the penalties he had to pay for being what he was. On the whole, the price did not seem too high. She felt quite sure that she would ultimately accept him, and that they would marry and live happily ever after.

This impression was still strong in her mind when, some days after the conversation recorded, she went with her aunt to a little lunch-party which he gave in his bachelor apartments.

Although he modestly spoke of them as being very simple, Rollinson’s rooms were really a liberal education. He had been about the world a great deal and had carried with him fastidious taste and a purse only moderately filled. As he said once, he had never had so much money that he could afford to buy trash. The result was very happy. Pictures, rugs, draperies, brasses, ceramics, all were satisfactory.

“Your things are so delightfully intelligent!” said Bertha, with a gratified sigh. He found himself by her side as she was inspecting a bit of antique silver on a cabinet with obvious approval. “It makes me feel as I have never felt before, what a wonderful thing is taste!”

He smiled. “I am more than repaid if they have pleased you,” he said. “Will you step this way an instant? I want to show you the thing I am vain enough to value most of all.”

In the corner which he indicated, hung a picture she had not noticed, the portrait of a young man about twenty-five. The girl stared at it with fascinated eyes. “You! Can it be _you_?” she questioned, with an accent that was almost a reproach. Ah, how splendid he was, the painted youth in his hunter’s costume who stood there fixed forever in all the beautiful insolence of his young manhood! What a mass of dark hair tossed back from his fine forehead, and what soldierly erectness in his bearing! How the eyes flashed--those eyes that only twinkled now! He was radiant, courageous, strong. What a hold he had on life--one read it in the lines of his mouth, in his eyes, his brow. What zest, what eagerness of spirit! He was more than all that she most admired in her lover, and he was young--young!

The girl gave a strange look at Rollinson and then turned back to the picture again. All fulfilment is pitiful compared with its prophecy, and in that moment she realized this.

“It was painted by my friend Van Anden, who died too early to achieve the fame he should have had,” said Rollinson. “All that toggery I am wearing, which paints so effectively, was part of my outfit when I went to Africa with my cousin.”

“It is very fine,” said Bertha, with constraint, and then, with an unmistakably final movement, she turned away from it. Rollinson felt a sudden, wretched pang. If she cared at all for him, would not she also exult in this fair presentment of his young years?

After the luncheon had been served and before his guests had moved to go, he saw with a hopeful thrill that she had gone back to the picture and was standing before it again, intent and questioning.

He went up to her.

“Bertha! Dearest!” he said, beneath his breath. “After all, you like it, then?”

She turned upon him sharply. “It is wonderful--wonderful! But you should not have shown it to me! I do not understand. I--I thought I could have married you. Now I know that I never can. I--I never dreamed there was youth like that in the world. Oh, why did you let me find it out?”

Rollinson stood dumfounded.

“But it is I,” he found voice to plead at last. “Bertha, have the added years of worthy life made me less deserving of your love? Am I to be punished for becoming what he only promised to be?”

The girl passed her hand over her eyes in a bewildered way.

“It seems to me that one can love promise better than achievement,” she said, faintly. “To care for what is not, is, I fancy, the very essence of love.”

“I love you as he never could have done,” urged Rollinson. “As he never dreamed of caring for any one. His loves were superficial and selfish, Bertha. I have gained much, and I have lost nothing that--that is essential.”

“You have lost comprehension--he would have understood what I mean,” answered the girl, quickly.

“But--Bertha! This is unreasonable. How can you expect me to comprehend?”

“I have been too reasonable!” she cried, with sudden passion. “That is my discovery. Love is not reasonable, youth is not--and they belong together. Oh, don’t, don’t make me say any more!”

For an instant there was a heavy silence between them; then Rollinson found voice to say:

“It shall be as you please. Your aunt seems to be looking for you. Shall we go over to her?”

When his guests were gone at last, Rollinson came back to the picture. He took it down and placed it upon a chair where the light fell full upon it. Truly, he did not look like that to-day.

Although it was himself, he hated it, for it had cost him something dearer than the young strength which it portrayed. Of all the irrational humiliations of the long, wayward years of life this seemed to him the most hideous.

He took his knife from his pocket, opened it and put the point against the canvas. It would be easy to satisfy the brute anger in his soul by two sharp cross-cuts which should effectually destroy that remote, insolent beauty which had once been his own and now was his no longer.

He hesitated a moment, then dropped the knife and shook his head. He could not possibly do such a melodramatic, tawdry thing as that.

He knew that the day might yet come when he should not remember the bitterness of this hour; he might even grow to be glad again that he had once walked the earth in the likeness of this picture, but just now--just now he must forget it for awhile.

With one short sigh, Rollinson lifted the portrait of his rival and set it down, the face against the wall.

AT THE END OF THE WORLD

“And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.”

She was sitting quietly in the sleeper, writing a letter to a friend. She had got as far as “I feel it my duty to tell you,” when the pencil flew out of her fingers. She had an instantaneous impression, grotesque in its horror, that all the natural laws were being unsettled with a terrible, grinding noise; for the pencil was falling toward the ceiling instead of the floor, and the man in front of her was following it, and even she herself. Then something struck her head and she lost consciousness.

When she came to herself she was lying on a cot in one corner of a large, unfamiliar room. As her gaze wandered slowly from object to object on the whitewashed walls, she concluded, from the combination of railway maps, time-cards, dusty windows filled with geraniums in pots, and a large, rusty Bible chained to a wall-pocket, that she was in a country railroad station; but when she turned her head she saw that it also resembled a hospital. She felt bruised and sore, but was not in much pain, and only an indefinable sensation of great weakness warned her not to move.

Presently some one noticed that her eyes were open and, drawing near, asked her some questions. She answered them with ease, and then in her turn asked a few. The man, obviously a physician, answered briefly but definitely. Then he drew a note-book from his pocket, took down some addresses that she gave him, and moved away softly in the direction of the telegraph window. She lay, looking after him incredulously. So this was death! She had at farthest two more hours on earth. It was part of her creed that one may permit one’s self to be surprised but never startled. She was not startled now, but, decidedly, she was sorry. Her best work was yet undone, and she had not meant to leave earth while there still remained so much to do.

The sounds and sights of the hastily improvised hospital were unpleasant to her, and she turned her head away from them. There was one cot between her and the corner. She recognized the profile of that bandaged head as belonging to the man who had sat across the aisle in the sleeper. She had jotted down a description of him in her note-book, thinking she might use it some day. It ran:

“Sallow skin, soft, brown hair, fine eyes, but an iron mouth with a devil-may-care expression. He has the get-up of a man who is too busy being prosperous to take time to be comfortable. His face, a singular combination of sensitiveness and stolidity, the latter leading. Neither hard enough for this world nor tender enough for the next. An Achilles with a dozen vulnerable spots, he sheds two drops of his own blood for every one he draws in his battles; so, whether he wins or not, they are always losing fields for him.”

She lay, looking at his profile, thinking that never, so long as she lived, could she see the other side of that anguished countenance, and the thought irritated her. This, she reflected, was an instance of the strength of the ruling passion. She had always been thirstily curious about life, even to its least details. Now the opportunities for quenching that thirst were at an end. There was no more for her in this world of that friction of spirit upon spirit which she loved. She was dying in a corner. Between herself and the immensity of eternity hung only that one white face.

Suddenly a thought came into her mind. Why should she not talk to him--while she was waiting?

“Are you badly hurt?” she asked, softly.

He groaned. “I am a dead man.”

“They tell me I am dying, too,” she said. “Why have they put us here in this corner, away from the others?”

“Because neither of us is in great pain, and we are both hopeless cases. They have no time to waste on us.”

“It is very strange to think that this is really the last of it. Are you prepared to die?”

“Prepared? What is prepared?” he answered. “One is never ready to stop living. And there were a great many things I wanted to do yet.”

“Were any of them important?”

An ironic smile twisted the corner of his lips. “Now that you mention it--no. I wanted to make a good deal more money. I was going to turn over two or three pieces of real estate next week that I expected a profit upon. I meant to build a finer house for my wife--a big, new one, with all the modern wrinkles of architecture and furnishing. Then, if I had known she was going to have charge of things so soon, I should have altered one or two investments”----

His pain grew sharper and he groaned. When he was still she spoke again.

“If I had met you yesterday I should have said that your interests in life were very much less fine and spiritual than my own. I wrote things that people praised. They said I was clever, ingenious, witty; but they never said I was an artist. I meant to make them say it. I was going to write a novel next winter that should show”--She stopped, but presently went on, musingly: “It is very odd, but somehow it doesn’t seem as important as it did this morning. Do you care that your house will never be built?”

“No.”

“And I don’t care about my novel. I called my interest in life art, and you called yours business; but neither of them seems to count any more. The question is, What does count?”

“Close your eyes and lie still for five minutes, and note what you find yourself unable to avoid thinking of. That will show you what counts.”

“You have been trying it?”

He made a motion of assent.

“Well,” he asked, after a silence on her part that seemed long, “does it work?”

“Yes,” she said, in a tense way; “it works too well. What did _you_ see?”

Again the ironic smile twisted the visible corner of his mouth. “Shall we exchange confidences--last confessions, and all that? I’d just as soon. Reticence isn’t worth much now. Only--you begin.”

“I saw,” she said, slowly, “my husband’s eyes. I had forgotten how they looked when he found that I really meant to insist on a separation. He could not bear it, for he adored the ground I walked on. It was five years ago. I had no presentable reason for leaving him. He was so horribly good-natured that it used to irritate me. And I didn’t care for the domestic life. It interfered with my work, although he had promised that it should not. I wanted to be free again. He let me have the child. He was very good about the whole business--painfully good, in fact. But it did hurt him cruelly. I have been very much happier since, but I don’t suppose he has.”

“Did he have brown eyes--the big, faithful, dog-like kind?” asked the man.

“How did you know?”

“That good sort often do. The girl I jilted did. We had been engaged almost from our cradles. There was an accident with horses, and she got hurt. She limped a little afterward, and there were scars on her face and neck--not very bad scars, but still they were there. She had been a little beauty before that; but she never at any time thought much about her looks, and it hadn’t occurred to her that I minded. But I did mind. I fretted over it until I fancied that I didn’t love her, after all; but I did. One day I told her so. You know how she looked at me. She asked if the accident made any difference, and I hadn’t the skill to lie about it so that she believed me. She rose at once, as if to put an end to our interview. All she said was, ‘I thought you knew better what love was.’ I can hear how her voice sounded. She was badly cut up; lost her health and all that. And I never could pretend I wasn’t to blame. The girl I married later was faultlessly pretty, but there was nothing in the world to her.”

“We seem to be a nice sort, don’t we?” said the woman, reflectively.

“We are no worse than others. Unselfishness is out of fashion. Everybody takes what he wants nowadays.”

“My husband didn’t.”

“I respect your husband. But you did it. We did the same sort of thing, you and I; only I think you are the worse of the two. It is natural for a man to want a wife who isn’t disfigured.”

“It is natural for a clever woman to want to live unfettered.”

“Perhaps. But I erred through the worser part of my nature, and you through the better. My revolt against unselfishness was physical, and yours intellectual. Therefore you fell farther than I, by as much as the mind is better than the body; don’t you see?”

“That is speciously put, but I doubt its truth.”

Both were silent for a space.

“I have it!” she breathed suddenly, and her voice was stronger; for even in the clutches of death a new insight into the meaning of things had power to stimulate her whole being. “It is this way. Our error was the same. We both betrayed their trust in us. We grieved love. And the reason that we remember now is that love and God are one, and this is the judgment. That is why we see their eyes rebuking us. It comes to us, now that we die. That is all life is for--to learn not to grieve love. Why did I never know it before? Oh, if I had put that in my books!”

“If you had put it in your life it would have been better,” interrupted the man; but she went on, unheeding:

“That must be what they meant when they said my work lacked conviction. It is the heart that takes sides. One man said I was too clever to be interesting. I never understood what he meant before, but I see now. It was that I had mind enough but too little heart. I wanted to become as one of the gods by knowing, and the appointed path is by loving. To be human and to love is to be divine.”

“Oh, wise conclusion!” mocked the man. “What does it profit you to know it--now?”

She was silent, spent with the effort of her eager speech. The maps on the opposite wall whirled before her eyes. She felt herself slipping--slipping. Yet, though she found no words to tell him why, there came to her a sudden, sweet assurance that it profited her much, even at this last hour, to know the thing she had just spoken.

It was a long time before she found strength to ask: “Shall you be here after I am gone?”

“Why?”

“I gave them my husband’s name. I knew he would be glad to come. He lives a hundred miles from here, and it will only take him four hours at the longest. I shall not last that long. If you would tell him”--

“Tell him what?”

“Tell him,” said the woman, slowly, “that I saw; that I am sorry I grieved love and him; that I wish I had been wiser about what life meant; that love is always best.”

“The fact is,” said the man, reluctantly, “I did not mean to stay. I dabbled in medicine a little once, and I know that I can last this way a day or two. But I am in pain now, and it will grow worse. What is the use of staying? They tied an artery for me; it might easily get untied, you know.”

“Aren’t you going to wait until your wife comes?” she asked, wonderingly.

“Better not,” answered the man, briefly. “It would hurt her less this way, and me too. Scenes worry me, and her nerves are delicate.”

“What farces such marriages as yours are!”

“Better a farce than a tragedy. My wife has been happier than your husband. She has been very comfortable, and she will continue to be so, for my estate is reasonably large.”

“Then Arthur will never know that I am sorry, and I want him to. Oh, God! I want him to.”

The man lay, frowning sharply at the ceiling. The ineffectual anguish of her cry had touched him, but his pain was growing worse. At last he spoke.

“Look here. If I will stay and deliver that message for you, will you do something for me?”

“I? What can I do for any one?”

“You are a woman, though not, it seems, a very loving one. You can tell me if there is any forgiveness for the hurt I gave that girl, and if there is, absolve me in love’s name! I cannot bear her eyes.”

“Love forgives everything,” she answered, simply. “Wait until you see Arthur’s face when you tell him I was sorry. That will show you.”

“Say it!” murmured the man, peremptorily. “Let me hear the words, as she might say them.”

She turned upon her side to smile at him. Her voice had grown so faint that it seemed but a disembodied, yearning tenderness that spoke.

“In love’s name, then, and hers, _absolvo te_”--And the thread of sound dropped into a silence that was to remain unbroken.

The man lay still, clenching his hands and unclenching them. The thrusts of pain had grown very sharp, but he grimly set his teeth. He might ask for morphine; but if he took it “Arthur” might come and go while he lay in stupor, and the message remain forever undelivered. He looked at the clock on the opposite wall. Perhaps he had still three hours to wait. What should he do? That last dart was keenest of them all. What did people do in torture, people who had made promises that they must stay to keep? Surely there was something. Ah, that was it. Of course. They prayed. Then why not he, as well?

His lips moved feverishly.

“Christ, thou who suffered for love’s sake, give me--give me the pluck to hold out three hours more.”

Transcriber’s Notes

Minor punctuation errors have been corrected.

Page 115: “at at the corner” changed to “at the corner”

Page 151: “the amenites” changed to “the amenities”