Chapter X (4)

Here he left me, and directed his steps toward the swinging lanterns that marked the spot where his companions were busy. They had run their large surf boat to the edge of the waves, and were making strenuous efforts to launch it, but in the darkness and in such a sea it was little short of madness. Every time there was a momentary lull, the men, with their hands grasping the gunwales, rushed waist-deep into the water, but before they could scramble into the boat, a great roller would drive it and them back on the beach, and they were beginning to lose heart.

Half an hour had passed since the stranded vessel had signaled, and I began to fear that all was over, when close--quite close--a blue light burned, and we saw her plainly only a few hundred yards from the shore. I was standing as near the tide line as I dared, and in my excitement was frequently caught by the invading waves and wet to my knees--but what do such things matter in the presence of a tragedy?

While I looked I became conscious that the figures of the life-saving crew were dimly visible, and far across the sea a gray light crept into the sky; the day was breaking, and one element of terror was gone.

Our men abandoned the idea of using their boat, and they drew it out of reach of the waves, and dragged their mortar into position. By this time it was light enough for us to see the vessel, and a sorry sight she was. She was pointing up the coast, her bowsprit gone and her forward mast broken about halfway down; she listed terribly to leeward, and every third or fourth wave washed entirely over her deck. Her crew were in the rigging of the mainmast; we thought we could make out six. She was a little craft to have ventured upon a voyage, for no pleasure boat would be off Southstrand at that season of the spring unless returning from southern or European waters, and there was something in her appearance that pronounced her a yacht even to my inexperienced eyes.

Bang went the mortar! But in the uncertain light the aim must have missed, for I saw the men hauling back the line and coiling it with lightning speed. My heart beat to suffocation; I felt as if it were tied to the end of that slender cord, and was now being dragged through the fury of the sea.

Once more they sighted and fired, and as they stood grouped, watching the effect, I ventured to join them. My friend Herrick had a glass, and was reporting his observations. Out of the rigging a man swung down to the deck--the line had evidently crossed the ship! Now came a moment of intense excitement--would he get it before a monster wave washed it away, or would both he and the life line be swept off before the eyes of his comrades in the rigging? Whatever happened, he had written himself a hero in one woman’s heart.

“He’s got it!” I heard Herrick shout, and in confirmation we could see him climbing back on the mast, while another man seemed to be aiding him in making the line fast. We could distinguish even distant objects now; the day was coming on apace.

At that moment a mountainous wave struck the yacht, making her careen so violently that the mast seemed to touch the sea, and when she righted herself the lowest man was gone!

Without knowing it, I must have sobbed aloud, for Herrick laid a rough hand on my shoulder.

“This ain’t no place for women,” he said, though not unkindly. “You had better go home, Miss Russell.”

“I’ll not go home,” I answered, angrily, and then I, in my turn, grasped his arm.

“What is that in that wave?” I almost screamed, and he answered, with an oath I dare not set down:

“It’s a man!”

Most of the life-saving men were busy paying out the heavy line that was to support the breeches buoy to and from the sinking ship, but one young fellow heard Herrick’s shout, and followed him to the edge of the waves. They were already in their cork belts, and Herrick now fastened a rope round his waist and gave the coil to his companion as he waited for the incoming surge. The two stood like a pair of leashed greyhounds prepared to spring.

On came the roller--not a wall of water, like many that had preceded it, but low, swift and sweeping, with a nasty side twist--and in its foam, sometimes tossed high, sometimes hidden in the spray, came its human burden.

Herrick ran forward to meet the wave, and plunged under as it broke, while we on shore watched with throbbing hearts his game with death. It seemed an even chance whether he would snatch his prey from the sea, or be trampled himself in its cruel pounding. The agony of the moment made it seem interminable, and I think I must have lost consciousness, for I found myself on the sands with my head against the lifeboat, and, a hundred feet away, Herrick and the man he had saved were stretched side by side.

I never saw anything as humanly perfect as that sailor. He was a young man--decidedly under thirty--with the regularity of feature we usually consider Greek, and a look of repose beautiful to behold. Dignity, tenderness and a soft languor all mingled in the expression of his face.

I could not believe that he was dead, such a little time had elapsed since he had been swept from the vessel, and I knelt beside him and began to rub his cold hands between my own.

The hands were good--too good for a seafaring man, and with feminine precipitance I jumped to the conclusion that this beautiful, fair-haired Viking was the owner of the yacht, and no sooner had this idea entered my mind than romance was busy weaving a web round my heart. The lower part of his face was bronzed by exposure, but the forehead was white as a child’s, and above it the short hair grew low, and ruffled itself in little rings as the water dripped from it. I knew if ever the eyes met mine they would be blue, and I gazed as if the force of my will could compel them to disclose their secret to me. Perhaps it did--for suddenly the lids trembled, then opened, and a pair of blue-gray eyes looked sternly in my face. The expression was defiant, as if the spirit had been braced to meet danger, but in a second the hard look vanished, and the eyes seemed to smile before they slowly shut, as if the effort had cost all remaining vitality.

Herrick’s companion was just starting to run for help when that redoubtable person sat up and then staggered to his feet. He had only had the wind knocked out of him, and was his own sturdy self in a few minutes, with a wealth of invectives that broke rudely upon my exalted mood. He called to his companion to get to work if he didn’t want the man to die on their hands, and added, crossly:

“We can’t do anything here with a woman lookin’ on. Just carry him over to the station, and we’ll cut these wet clothes off him and give him a show at the fire, and I guess he’ll pull round all right.”

They hoisted him over the shoulder of the younger man, and bore him off, leaving me humiliated by my disabilities for usefulness. I stood rooted to the spot where I had knelt beside the sailor, a flood of pity and admiration filling my heart, and a passionate wondering whether life or death were to be the portion of the man whose beauty and courage had so moved me. Herrick’s rough kindness seemed to me sacrilege.

In the meantime the breeches buoy had made one trip and landed its first passenger, a monkey-like old sailor with gold earrings and black whiskers surrounding his flat face. He spat the salt water from his mouth, and with as little concern as if he were furling a sail he lent a hand to the coast crew in their work of rescue.

I approached the group to repeat the offer I had already made to Herrick of fire and refreshment at my cottage, and overheard the old fellow’s replies to certain questions our men put to him concerning the yacht and the man who had been washed overboard.

“That was our captain,” he said. “I’ve sailed with worse--durned sight worse! Got him, did you? Name is Holford--yacht _Dido_--coming from Nassau by way of Bermuda--here she comes!”

This last was in reference to the breeches, which was freighted for the second time.

The wind was going down as the day advanced, and the waves seemed less vicious. To my shame, I found my interest in the rescue of my fellow creatures had dwindled since the Viking had been borne off, and I became keenly aware of my bodily discomfort. I was wet to the skin and exhausted to the last degree, and hardly had the strength to drag myself home. Before going to my room, however, I dispatched Murphy over to the station with blankets and hot coffee, together with a bottle of whisky, and I charged Bridget to let me know his report of Captain Holford.

It was a long time before she brought me any news, and then it was interspersed with characteristic scoldings.

“Why didn’t I come before? Glory be to goodness, this day and this night, child. How can I be everywhere at once? People running in for hot drinks, and half-drowned creatures sopping the kitchen with sea water; it’s half dead I am! The captain of the ship? Well, Murphy says he’s alive, but he guesses he’s hurt internal, and the doctor’s been and taken him over to that little house across the field, where he can be more quiet and have a room to himself. You drink this hot tea, Miss Kate, and get into your bed, if you don’t want to be sick after this night’s work.”

She set down the tea and walked off, disapprobation expressed in every line of her retreating figure. When she reached the stairs I heard her mutter:

“Young ladies running out with the men in the middle of the night. ’Tain’t my idea of manners, and I guess it won’t be Mrs. Russell’s either, when I tell her what Miss Kate’s been up to.”

If I had been a boy I should have said something forcible to Bridget.

* * * * *

A severe cold kept me in my room for two days, and made me humble enough to swallow Bridget’s nostrums as well as her reproaches, for the dread that she might send for my mother and put an end to future free action on my part held me enslaved.

The gale blew itself out, and nature remembered that the month was May. May at Southstrand meant buttercups as large as daisies, and, in the woods, clustering masses of pink azaleas. The beach grass on the dunes waved silver in the south wind, the fields and meadows intensified their spring freshness by a cunning shading of velvet greens, and the blue of the sky melted into the sea.

During the hours of my imprisonment I had thought but one thought, seen but one vision--the face of my sailor captain as he lay on the beach, and I asked myself how I dared to thus idealize a stranger. Not for a second did I doubt his place in life. Class prejudice was mine to an overmastering extent, but I told myself that such beauty of body could only be the home of what I was pleased to call _the soul of a gentleman_. For narrowness of vision commend me to that which has only seen life through plate-glass windows and lace curtains. Thanks to a new influence, mine broadened and matured with the ripening summer.

The morning of the third day I ventured out, and naturally directed my steps to the life-saving station to ask news of the yacht’s crew. Herrick was just outside with his bicycle, prepared to skim off to the village to spend his leisure hours with his family, but he courteously waited to greet me and answer my questions.

The rescued men had been sent to New York. The captain had attended to that, for, while he was unable to be moved just yet owing to injuries he had received, he was able to give his orders and see that they were carried out.

“Doesn’t he mourn the wreck of his yacht?” I asked, and Herrick answered:

“Lor’, miss! ’Tain’t nothin’ to him; he’s only the sailing master. The _Dido’s_ owned by a rich man, who is off on his wedding trip, and sent the yacht home from Nassau with this young fellow.”

Only the sailing master! My lips kept whispering it, and my brain would not take it in. It meant that I--Katherine Russell, the fastidious daughter of tradition, of all exclusiveness--had fallen in love with a sailing master, and, what was far worse, I had fallen in love unsolicited. What would my mother say--and uncle Barton? Uncle Barton, who was always rolling that magic word, “gentleman,” under his tongue, and despising others. Of course they need never know, but my secret hurt me.

Desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and as I walked along the lanes in a passion of rage at my own weakness, I determined to see this man and let him destroy his own image in my heart. I was in love with a creature of my own creation--I knew neither his mind nor his speech--perhaps his first words would dispel the illusion and set me free.

Across the field was the little house that harbored him, open doored and cheerful in the sunshine, and I boldly turned my face thither. As I approached, the farmer’s wife came out of her henhouse with her apron full of fresh eggs, and I affected to wish to buy some for my housekeeping, and strolled with her to the porch.

“I’ll put them in a basket for you, Miss Russell,” she said, pausing. “I am sorry I cannot ask you inside to wait, but my parlor is let to the captain of that wrecked vessel, and he’s still too sick to leave his bed.”

As she spoke a towering figure filled the doorway and a deep voice said:

“Oh, no, he isn’t, Mrs. Price, for here he is, and hungry enough to beg for one of those eggs for a second breakfast.”

He was dressed in a blue flannel shirt, such as the village shops furnished, a pair of dark trousers, also village made, and a coat which must have been lent to him by the farmer: and he wore them with an air that was regal.

Now that I was face to face with my folly, I recovered my senses, and, while I felt puzzled by the contradictions he presented, I was brave enough to take advantage of opportunity.

“You must allow me to congratulate you upon your rescue and that of your crew, Mr. Holford,” I said. “You had a narrow escape.”

“The congratulations are due to the gallantry of your coast guards,” he answered, with enthusiasm.

“I am sorry about the yacht,” I continued; “she is still holding together, for one mast thrusts itself out of the water at low tide and looks so pathetic.”

“A monument to bad seamanship,” he said, impatiently. “It is the last boat I shall ever attempt to sail.”

“But isn’t sailing your occupation?” I asked, aghast at his easy way of laying down his livelihood. “There must be plenty of gentlemen needing sailing masters, even if this one especial yacht has gone to the bottom.”

He stared at me blankly, and then a quizzical look came into his eyes, as he answered:

“Few gentlemen care to employ an unsuccessful sailing master; indeed, I am not sure but that my license will be revoked. No, no, the ocean has thrown me upon the land, and I mean to take the hint.”

“It seems hard to begin life all over again,” I said, sympathetically.

He impressed me as a man gently nurtured, who had adopted a profession for which he was not originally intended.

“You mustn’t waste too much compassion on me,” he replied. “I have no one dependent upon me, and, besides, I am not at the end of my resources. I possess a few acres of farm land. There is nothing to prevent my turning myself into a son of the soil.”

At this juncture Mrs. Price came back with the eggs, and I turned to go, feeling the conversation was becoming almost too personal.

“Good-by,” I said. “I am glad you are better. Is there anything I can do for you?”

He came painfully after me down the path; the muscles of his back had been hurt and he moved stiffly.

“Two things if you will,” he said, with rather a saucy smile: “tell me where I have seen you before, and lend me some books.”

This was getting on a little too fast. If he had been my social equal, if we had possessed friends in common, he could not have been more assured in his manner.

“I have never spoken to you before in my life,” I said, coldly. “I will send you some books, Mr. Holford.”

Again the merriment flashed into his eyes, and he stood in my path.

“You would prefer me with manners cold as my hands were the other day when you chafed them for me on the beach. You see, I remember--and I prefer you with a red Tam o’ Shanter on your curly locks. Oh, don’t be vexed!” he added, with entreaty in his voice. “I do not mean to be impertinent, but I have been haunted by a vision, and the impression is intensified by reality.” He drew aside to let me pass, and I hurried down the path, more in love with this impudent, outrageous stranger than before.

I sent Murphy with the books; a choice collection of direct narratives--Conan Doyle, Clark Russell stories, that I considered suited to a taste more practical than scholarly--but as an afterthought I added a novel I had just read, a psychological problem as to one’s right to dispose of life in the manner to give the richest fulfillment to present desires at the expense of future wreck or death.

I was thoroughly disingenuous with myself, for my only object in sending that book was to mark its effect, to welcome its discussion, and yet I pretended I never wished to see Mr. Holford again.

* * * * *

Perhaps it was not altogether my fault that we met every day, and sometimes twice a day, in that week allotted to his recovery. If I strolled up the beach when my house duties were over, I was sure to be waylaid by Mr. Holford on my return, and he leaned so heavily on his cane, and entreated me so earnestly to sit down for a moment and rest, that common humanity made me accede to his request.

I had a shrewd suspicion that Bridget was always dogging my footsteps, and once or twice I surprised a flitting figure disappearing round the piazza when Captain Holford walked home with me, but as she never ventured to remonstrate openly, I did not suppose she would presume to write about me to mamma.

This went on for six glorious days, and we talked of everything on earth, and even exchanged views of the trans-celestial, and the rest of the time we talked of ourselves, and again of ourselves. He drew from me my thoughts and hopes, the monotonous story of a sheltered girl’s life, and the shrinking and longing--so oddly mixed--with which she viewed the impending future; and in return he talked much of his feelings, but little of his past, though vaguely I guessed that a great financial change had come to him not very long ago, and I understood how painful explanations might be, and admired his uncomplaining courage.

At our last meeting, for he was going away the next day, we discussed that burning question of what an enlightened conscience owes to others--to prejudice and class distinction as against its larger usefulness and happiness.

We were seated near the top of a sand dune with the Atlantic murmuring at our feet, and behind us the merry little village settling down to rest after the labors of the day. Mr. Holford had been talking of youth, its sensuous keenness to pain or pleasure, and saying that worldly prudence meant sacrificing life at its flood of physical development to the dreary protection of its decay.

“We must go hungry,” he concluded, disdainfully, “while we have the teeth to eat, in order that our mumbling old age may be regaled with banquets it is past enjoying.”

His reasoning seemed to me fallacious.

“If youth is restrained,” I said, “it is only in the cause of self-respect. What civilized being wishes to be a burden to others?”

“Civilization means hardened selfishness,” he said. “It conjugates all its tenses with _to have_, seldom with _to be_.”

I asked myself whether this bitterness was a protest against the social barrier between us, and I said, reproachfully:

“I don’t like you in this mood. You are hard.”

“The sordid side of life has been thrust upon me,” he said, sadly. “I have known poverty and riches, and I have suffered almost as much from one as the other, till I hate such influences. Why, even you--a girl of twenty--would deny your best impulses if you fell in love with a man below you in position. Look into my eyes and tell me if I have guessed the truth?”

I looked into his eyes and saw something that made the color mount to my cheeks and set my heart thumping.

“A girl doesn’t own her own life, Mr. Holford,” I managed to answer. “She only owns a little part of herself called her heart, and that seems of small consequence to her elders.”

“Her elders!” he repeated, scornfully. “There spoke the conventional girl. We will not talk in quibbles any longer. I love you. I am an honorable man, and therefore worthy of the woman I love. I can support you in decent comfort. Will you marry me?”

He held out that handsome brown hand to me, and I put mine in it.

“I will love you,” I said, “because I cannot help myself, but I will not marry you without my mother’s consent, because it would make me miserable. You have loved me in spite of my classbound education, now win me openly and honorably or go your way.”

I sprang to my feet, meaning to leave him, but he caught my frock like a naughty child, and held me while he scrambled painfully to his feet.

“God bless you, Kate,” he said, “you are right, as usual. As long as you love me for my very self, it makes little difference that your mother may probably accept me for a different reason. Tell me once more that you love the poor sailing master of the _Dido_--that if left to yourself, you would share his fortunes, no matter how humble--and then I will tell you the truth.”

And I told him; indeed, it was sweet to make the confession, with no one to share it but the crickets in the beach grass, and a belated bird calling to her mate, and when I had satisfied his craving to be loved, I claimed his promise.

“Now what have you to tell me?” I demanded, for he had stung my woman’s curiosity.

“Only that Holford is no longer my name,” he said, smiling; “at least only a part of it. Several years ago, by a strange turn of fortune, I----”

He stopped abruptly, for mamma appeared on the top of the sand hill and fluttered down upon us like an avenging angel.

“Kate!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here? And who is this person with whom you are on such intimate terms that he holds your hands while he talks to you? My daughter seems unable to answer me,” she continued, turning to my lover; “perhaps you will favor me with some account of yourself?”

“With pleasure,” he said, his eyes dancing wickedly. “Miss Russell could not tell you my name because she doesn’t know it herself. I am----”

And here he was again interrupted by uncle Barton sliding down the sand hill and landing heavily.

“Great Scott!” he grumbled, “I’ve a ton of sand in each shoe! I hope I did not hurt you, sir--why, can it be? What the devil are you doing here, Battleford? Do you know my sister, Mrs. Russell? This is Lord Battleford, Julia, whom I met at Nassau.”

At this point his wits revealed to him that Lord Battleford was the castaway sailor whose attentions to me had alarmed Bridget into writing to my mother for help, and he turned upon the young gentleman with rancor.

“You don’t seem to need any introduction to my niece, Lord Battleford,” he said, loftily, while his face flushed with turkey-cock rage, “and I beg to inform you that I think it a deuced ungentlemanlike thing on your part to compromise a girl with clandestine meetings and flirtations in the absence of her family, and I tell you plainly the whole thing has got to stop.”

“Not so fast, if you please, Mr. Hay,” said my sailor, laughing. “I have won a wife who likes me for what I _am_ irrespective of what I _have_, and I hope you and Mrs. Russell are not going to spoil our romance by refusing your consent. Speak up, Kate,” he said, turning to me; “tell these discreet people that I am something better than a title--a man you have learned to love.”

And so I had to make a second confession of the state of my heart, and mamma succumbed in two minutes to Battleford’s charms--or those of his title--but I heard Uncle Barton still scolding as he helped her up the sand dune.

“Oh, yes, he’ll make a she-earl of Kate--countess, I mean--but he’ll take her away from us, and I fancy you will yet regret the day you trusted her out of your sight, when the ocean lies between us and our little girl.”

But she didn’t! For in giving me to Battleford she not only had me often with her, but gained the dearest of sons.

MRS. EVREMOND

By

Mrs. John Van Vorst

& Marie Van Vorst

When Mrs. Evremond found herself actually in her carriage it seemed to her that it would never go fast enough, although Heaven knows she was indifferent to the speed of her vehicles as a rule, there being no reason why she should hasten--no place she especially cared to arrive at, no excitement or element of it in her quiet life. But this afternoon she was conscious of every rotation of the wheels.

When the Arc de Triomphe had been passed and in and out among automobiles and tramways her little yellow-wheeled brougham crossed the Etoile and began the descent, suddenly, with the inconsequence marking a woman’s emotions as clearly as it stamps her reasonings, Mrs. Evremond decided the coachman was driving at a ridiculous rate. After all, she hoped never to reach the Place de la Concorde--never to traverse the Pont Royal and leave for the Latin Quarter and the other side of the river--the _insouciant_ world of the Bois and American Paris. She had no desire to find the obscure street in which her husband had his studio--which street was, however, the direction she had given her footman, and it was toward No. 15 bis, Passage du Maine, that with such useless speed she was being driven.

They reached and passed the Elysée Palace Hotel. Mrs. Evremond blew through the tube at her side, the brougham drew up to the curb, stopped and she got out.

“You may go home. I shall not need you again to-day,” she directed, and, turning to the avenue, she began to walk down the Champs Elysées. She might at least be mistress of her own gait; walk with short, feverish little steps or retard her pace to keep harmony with her alternate rapid or halting reflections, for her mind, as she walked, went back over the past six months of her married life with a persistence, a clearness, that denoted how important were the details, how ineffaceable were the marks her experiences had made upon her, how intensely she felt what she had lived, how seriously she had taken life, how absorbed she was in the man to whom she had attached herself--how desperately she loved her husband. The vividness with which she thought of him had the precision of a fresh image. The impulsive rush of herself toward the harbor her conception of him made proved, by its very force and freshness, that thinking of him like this was a new thing. She had lived with him, existed by his side, for six years, and had never thought about him, around him, as she did to-day.

She gasped. “Perhaps if I had thought about him a little more and loved him a little less, _this_ might not have happened!”

The happening, so distressing to her, which had caused her, at an unusual hour, to ring for her carriage, dress and fly from the house on an expedition she knew to be close to ill-breeding in its likeness to melodrama and its distinct opposition to codes of expedient, had been finding a letter--the world-worn story that comes to each woman with a new pang.

As Mrs. Evremond reached the Rond Point, she asked herself: “What am I really going to do? What do I expect to see and find, and how shall I act when I find it?”

Women constantly commit the platitude--if such an expression can be used--of thinking they are acting on certain occasions contrary to their characters, out of gear with their codes. Mrs. Evremond was not an impulsive temperament. Unaccustomed to crises or events that called for the quick decision of more brilliant and self-sufficient minds, she had found herself face to face with a problem, and was acting with a precipitation that made her dizzy, and a promptitude that suggested she had been brought into contact with just such difficulties many times before.

The well-bred gentlewoman had seized, without second thought, the letter lying open at her feet, read it, gasped over it, paled over it, hated and disbelieved it--crushed it in her hand, and, with the now crumpled sheet between glove and palm, she was on her way to verify its purport; to make sure of the fact which women, if they would but know it, are many times happier in ignoring; to prove to herself what? That her husband was unfaithful to her; that she must either “cease to love him”--by the operation of one of those unbalancing _coups de foudre_ which, we are told, turn honey to gall and love to hate in the human breast at one revolution--or that with the discovery she must also acknowledge, no matter _what_ he did, she would love him still, and would, therefore, curse an enlightenment which should only give her a useless bitter grief to suffer for the rest of her life.

She stopped still at the Place de la Concorde. She never walked alone in the streets of Paris at this hour, and the aspect of the city was new to her. In the early winter twilight the Place shone through the mingled mists of evening, and the golden hazy scintillations haloing the yellow lamps. The sunset had left the sky over the Tuileries still red, and above the river the heavens darkened and grew cold, but the bridge lights beckoned. Her hands were in her muff, her cheeks red with exercise, and her eyes, which had wept more tears in the last few hours than they would acknowledge to have seen for many months, stung in the sharp air. She stood irresolute. Behind her the Champs Elysées stretched to the apex at the Arc. It would be a quiet, restful walk home. Should she not take it, return and force herself to learn the lesson--that it is folly to be too wise? As she clasped her hands together in her muff the letter crushed upon her palm; she set her lips, drew a sharp breath, and resumed her walk, turning across to the Pont de la Concorde, traversing it quickly, a graceful, agile pedestrian among the many foot passengers, unobserving of the admiring eyes of those whose chase is beauty.

After a very long walk, Mrs. Evremond gained the boulevard she sought, turned into a dark little street, into a still darker alley.

The old _concierge_ met her at the _loge_, a peasant _gardienne_, blear-eyed and wearing the white cap of her province. She blinked at madame, and under the thick lace veil Mrs. Evremond had worn to shield her emotion from the curious, the old woman did not recognize her tenant’s wife.

“Monsieur told me that he is expecting madame,” she said, familiarly. “He will not be long. Madame will go in----”

Without reply, she passed the woman and went up to her husband’s room.

Expecting her? No, that she knew was not the case--he was expecting another; even the old _portière_ was in his wretched secret, while she alone, perhaps, of all Paris had been ignorant.

As she crossed the threshold of the studio she seemed to enter the apartment of a perfect stranger, so far away from her the last few hours had served to put him. The room was cold. She opened the door of the little stove, and, finding the fire laid, put a match to the kindling; in a moment the sharp crackling of the wood met her ears with a friendly domestic voice whose language was to her ears cruelly that of the hearth and home. If what the missive implied were true, her husband had loved another woman for many months. He had met her here in this place which the wife looked upon as sacred to his art; whose precincts she had respected with fidelity, believing them devoted to his work, and fearing to be obtrusive.

The studio had indeed been sacred, but to an unlawful love.

Her first impulse was to throw her muff down, unwind the fur from her neck and make herself as comfortable as she could in the gloom of the spacious room; but instead she walked restlessly about, taking in the details of decoration, the attractive disorder, with unseeing eyes. Behind that large screen Maurice’s models dressed and undressed--women of the people, women of the streets, of course, of the lowest, most degrading type; face to face with them, alone with them, he had passed hours of his life with them for years. She had never been jealous of them, she had never thought of them; she had regarded them in the same light with easels, and paint, and studio equipment.

Why had she not been jealous of them? They were women, and if Maurice was so unattached that he was either a prey or a victim, or a seeker of such affairs as this which she now believed she had discovered, why should she not take it for granted that there were many and varied experiences of which she had been the unconscious dupe? She shuddered--anger and distrust whispered her to hate her husband, to despise his weakness and never to forgive him.

In her lonely promenade she peopled the room with incidents and scenes which did her wrong, and proved to what extent she had unnerved herself, what rein she gave to jealousy and fear. She had lighted a lamp, and in its light took out the crumpled piece of paper from her glove and re-read it again. It was a love letter, the warm and confident letter of a woman who loves to the man who loves her. At its close it gave him rendezvous for half-past five o’clock at 11 bis, Passage du Maine.

As Mrs. Evremond’s eyes followed the lines among the wrinkles of the crumpled page, her eyes brimmed over again with tears, her knees trembled, she felt herself actually ready to fall. With the return of her tears came a softening of her anger--a relief of her unnerved state, of her suffering--for a second she wept silently. At the moment when her control was beyond her power she thought she heard a sound on the stairway, and her heart stopped beating very nearly--the blood flew to her face.

A sense of shame overcame her--shame for herself, for him and for the other woman. What a horrible thing to follow and spy upon her husband! What scene did she meditate? What tirade should spring to her lips? It showed, indeed--the fact of her presence--how degrading was the whole matter, if it could bring her to this. And the woman who bravely had come all the way from her home to find out what she dreaded, now that enlightenment was at hand, longed to run from it, and wished herself a thousand miles away. _If it were true, she would rather die than know._ If it were not true, how she would loathe herself for her presence here!

The steps ceased, and in the consoling silence Mrs. Evremond regained her natural balance--and swung true. She turned from the table near which she had been standing, and more hurriedly than she had entered left the studio--almost ran past the _loge_ of the old _concierge_, and unseen by her slipped out of the open gate, called a passing cab and crept into it, guiltily, closing the door upon what she felt was her dishonor.

* * * * *

Whereas Mrs. Evremond’s life was made up of monologue reflection, of days of solitude and lately of lonely evenings, Mr. Evremond was seldom alone. Weariness and ennui possessed him as soon as he was face to face with his thoughts in solitude, and he, therefore, arranged his life, in as much as possible, to avoid his ego, which, for some reason or other, he cared never to entertain _en tête-à-tête_!

He gave rendezvous for the morning hours to his men friends, so that even while he painted he was attended by one or another of a dozen intimates, who amused and diverted him. When these failed, he would even call in the curtain hanger or a carpenter for some impromptu task, and the necessity of sharing the burden of his personality he attributed to his sociability. It was innocent enough that the mere noise of a carpenter’s plane, the tap, tap, of an upholsterer’s hammer, should be company to him, yet this need of another’s presence had been the demoralization of his character. So long as there was somebody with him, he put off the moment of reckoning with himself, the salutary confession productive of the efforts which count in a man’s life. And so the inward voice of conscience had been drowned by the voice of human companions.

Evremond was pleased with the world and disgusted with himself. Good health and a love of beauty caused him perpetual enjoyment, whereas his moral insensibility, the deadening of his ego, deprived him of all happiness. He had too long stifled his yawns with a smile to be capable now of tears or laughter, and his attitude was a menace to his wife’s contentment. In the best hours of Mrs. Evremond’s married life, she had felt between her husband and herself that breach of solitude which, no matter by whom, _must be filled_.

She was six years younger than her husband, whom, without knowing, she loved passionately and timidly. Silent as he was, indifferent, as a rule, and always preoccupied, nevertheless he depended upon her. She was the blank page at the end of a book, the instant’s repose for the emotions--she was a habit--she was his wife.

Evremond was at the close of an affair; on his part, an affair not of business, but of the heart. For the past three months he had made desperate love to a woman not his wife. She had denied him nothing. And now it was over. Their meetings had taken place at her house and his own studio, he had seen her in her own boudoir, he had driven with her in the broad light of day through hidden alleys in the Bois. They had made sentimental journeys to the Louvre. Together they had sat in the public gardens of the Tuileries. For three long months they had amused themselves and each other. And now the affair was ended. Evremond was ready to yawn upon it already. Already the memory was becoming indistinct, blent with memories of other adventures so like to this one that it would require a useless effort to distinguish it. But this time there was something different in the ending of the romance, the happy ending reserved for sensitive readers.

This afternoon at five they had met and parted in his studio, a sundering of friendship by mutual consent, with adieux into which both had tried to put feeling enough to justify the hours they had consecrated to each other.

After she had gone he lingered in the familiar room. A long glass screen reflected the dying embers that had fallen red against the iron hearth of the stove. A certain perfume brought with a rush to his mind moments that now became intolerable to him. As he impatiently put the scenes from him, between the stove and the mirror, the mirror in which Evremond could not, try as he would, imagine himself alone, he saw a small gray spot on the polished floor. A handkerchief--no, a glove! He stooped, picked it up, and, as though in defiance of the bolder odors of heavier scent that hung in the air, a faint breath like an appeal came from the bit of _suède_ which held still the imprint of a woman’s hand. His heart seemed to stop as he turned the object over in his hand. It was a small gray glove, distinctly not the property of the woman to whom he had said good-by.

He picked it up and smoothed it out; there was something in it--a bit of crumpled paper over whose ruffled surface ran the words of love and the appeal which had brought him to his last rendezvous. He could not believe his eyes! This was his wife’s glove! It meant, then, that she had found the letter which he had evidently carelessly let fall, and she had read the ridiculous sheet of paper whose words and expressions gave him now a sort of wearied nausea. She had come to the studio to confirm her doubts, she had seen them enter together, of course. She knew everything, then, everything--everything except that it was over--all that should never have been was ended. But that would not clear him in her eyes.

Much disturbed and sick at heart, he went out into the streets and walked slowly along, somewhat like a man in a dream, lighting one cigarette after another, following, as it were, the leading of the tiny light that faded and glowed at the end of the paper cylinder. He walked on until the small house in which he lived near the Avenue du Bois was not more than fifteen minutes distant, then he wandered away from it, his thoughts following an irregular route.

* * * * *

As Mrs. Evremond got into her cab without giving an address, the coachman waited for a second, then leaned down from his box and asked her where he should drive her.

Home--she had none! Why, the term was a farce! It had meant a place shared by her husband and herself--he had dishonored it, blighted it forever in her eyes. She would go at once to her mother’s, and from there write him her conditions--they were hers to make, she knew--he would not put forth any plea; she would never see him again.

She gave the coachman an address in Passy, and the speaking of the number and street out into the dark put finality to what she did. He received it with a “_Bien, madame_,” as casual and cheerful as if she had given him a point of happy meeting instead of neutral ground on which to decide for misery. She sank back in the _fiacre_, white and shaking, and watched the lights of the interminable streets mark her as she passed, and the unconcerned passersby, whom she envied in their apparent freedom from an hour of agony.

She had been betrayed; horribly, cruelly, disloyally left for another woman. At first the jealous bitterness of it obscured all other feeling. She was only conscious of a desire to escape--to put miles between herself and her husband and to be free. He had then not loved her for long, and she had believed herself cherished. Now she believed she had only been uneasily watched. No doubt, even the few occasions on which he had showed her marked affection--notably after some unintended indifference on her part--were to be attributed to his uneasiness, to the assuaging of his conscience. That to such caresses she had been dupe was a fatal obstacle to any reconciliation.

It was her hour to choose between her rights as a wife and her divine right as a woman, and as she mused, hidden in the corner of the little, rattling carriage, Mrs. Evremond saw only the first. The reality from which she was fleeing brought its flood of indignant shame to her face, and she began to despise the ignorance which had placed her in the way of being so easily deceived. She scorned her trust in her husband, and the beautiful qualities of confidence and belief grew to appear as the most pitiable dupes--a rage of humiliation filled her as she realized her blindness during the most poignant moments of her husband’s treachery. Her constancy, her very loyal love, made her pitifully ridiculous in her own eyes.

That a man’s betrayal has power to waken such heat of passion and base humiliation as this in a gentle breast is too unfortunately the case. Evremond’s excuses for tardy entrances, his evading of little attentions to herself which would have involved the devotion of several hours, how puerile and trifling they seemed!--how bald and flagrant they appeared to her illumined understanding! Worst of all it was to feel that whatever love she had innocently shown her husband during these few months had for him no value; had only served to assure him that his wife was suspicionless--at ease; that she was successfully duped, and he might more fearlessly continue on his way. She would set him free--leave him to love whatever woman he chose without the sin of a dishonored vow. He would be at liberty--there would be no trace of her left in his life. And for herself? What would it mean for her? She must well think of it now.

With the completeness a supreme moment of grief alone is capable to accomplish, she saw in a flash her past filled with Maurice and her future without him. With an audible cry, quickly stifled, she leaned forward in the little vehicle, and stretched her hands before her as if she would seize the first, then shrank back, covering her face as if she would shut out the latter.

“I don’t believe he loves her more than me!” she cried, to her wounded soul. “I don’t _believe_ it; there is something in me still that tells me he cares for me--and there is _nothing_ in me to tell me that I do not love my husband--nothing to help me to take the stand of pride and jealousy. I love him--and I always shall.”

Ah, she loved him! There was no doubt about that. And how deeply inevitably it shamed her now to acknowledge it. Her history is the repetition of many a woman’s, and of women less one-minded, less unselfish, more warped by petty jealousies, whose frequency has become habit. But this, the first jealous hour of Mrs. Evremond’s life, was met by a storm of love, in which it was beaten down to the ground as, with a rush, came over her the accumulated tenderness of years, never checked, spontaneously allowed to live in her heart, if never shown to her husband. Instantly purged by its holiness--spiritualized by its unselfishness--she began to wonder if the fault did not lie with herself.

“It is never one-sided,” she thought. “He really loved me very much once--why should he stop loving me? If I have not been able to keep my husband’s love, part, at least, of the fault must be mine?”

It is rare that when a height is reached, after a painful climb, that the vision is dimmed; the reward of the struggle is sight. Whether or not she fatuously blamed herself, whether or not a stronger-minded woman, zealous for her rights and keen to the sense of hurt honor, would be able to detect _any_ fault in the years of the gentle life, the wife, examining herself, believed she saw clear.

She had too readily accepted as a matter of course the idea that devotion promised at the altar is a commodity given over in sacred form and secure from all assaults; hers without future effort. She had slipped into married life too easily, too calmly, and now she thought stupidly, without varying, or seeking to amuse, distract or entertain--without eternally charming the man whom she had once charmed. For her restless and vacillating husband--he was this in her eyes as she mused--she had discovered nothing new in six years. She was a fixture to him--an article of furniture, one with the home, indispensable perhaps as the home itself, but only because, like inanimate things, she had been useful and had made no claim. If she now sought him in judicial manner and demanded confession, renunciation, and all the rest of it, what power remained with her still? Having brought her this far in her musings, the _fiacre_ drove up and stopped. Looking out she saw the _grille_ and the iron lamps hanging lit on either side the posts of the gate, and back of it the garden and her mother’s home. But the sight of this destination brought only a chill to her and no comfort. It was no welcome asylum; she had no desire to fly to her mother’s arms, to weep and pour out her grief. She felt no need of a confidant. She wanted to find some basis of her unchanged loyalty to rest upon--a natural resting place--some strength to take her to her own door.

Her grief, her contemplation of the disaster to her faith in her husband, had left her shaken in all but her love. She loved him, and any life without him was intolerable for her to face. “But,” she reflected, “however much I may prefer a future with him to no matter what life without him, it does not follow that he would decide in the same way.” Yet for some intangible reason she believed it.

She had arrived at the hour which presents itself sooner or later in the life of every married woman, the hour of combat whose issue decides the limit for all future relations.

If she should go to him to-night--wounded vanity recalcitrant--she might stipulate conditions that should forever sunder their lives. Sunder their lives she believed for a passing fantasy, for a weakness, for a caprice on his part. If, on the contrary, she went to him with forgiveness, the very fact that there _was_ such need, that he was forced to receive it, would leave a scar. It requires more grace to forget forgiveness than to forgive. She knew her husband’s nature--it would rankle and corrode. She shrank from the ordeal of an explanation, of any rôle that would link her with this _liaison_.

At all events, descent here at the friendly home was impossible. She gave her own address, Rue Leonard de Vinci, and directed a return through the Bois de Boulogne. The coachman, thinking he was driving a disappointed lady from a _rendezvous manqué_, said: “_Très bien, madame!_” with less cheerfulness than he had shown at the first instructions. Turning briskly through Passy to La Muette, and entering the Bois at that gate, he drove her along at a jogging pace toward home. Home--it had become this once again; not as yet destroyed and marred by torturing questions and recriminations--never, please God, so to be by her! If it had any sacredness, she would try to save it still; if the link were not too fragile, she would mend it; if there were a hearthstone left she would, if she might, kindle some warmth upon it still.