Chapter II (1)

To that little portion of the busy world-in-general which concerned itself with her, one may be sure it seemed very soon after her disappearance that it began to be said Nevers might be looked for again. Already? Yet, when one had grumbled that love, after all, does not last very long, he made calculations, and these told him that three years and more had slipped past since the tragico-comic retreat of the poor crossed-in-love. Certainly, something may be expected of three years.

She was really coming back? There was excitement. She was coming, no longer any doubt of it; there was glee, there was expanding of the heart. She was come; there was a rush to see her. Affection accounted for much of this; for the rest, curiosity to see the result of her three years. But when she had been seen, delight knew no reserve; each felt as if he had won a bet.

A movement arose, as a breeze comes up, and gradually gained force, till it resulted in a concert given for Marie-Aimée, a testimony of the regard felt for her, and the joy at her return. The occasion was made a magnificent one; the house was crowded, and contained such a proportion of personal friends of Marie-Aimée that the affair took the character of a huge family festivity. But the applause resounding when Marie-Aimée herself appeared to perform her little task at the piano was in excess of all the rest. In the sound, in the faces, in the air, one felt "How she is beloved!"

She came forward in the child-like manner one remembered of her, with that adorable absence of self-consciousness which touches more than grace, bowing from side to side with the moved air which infallibly moves, half in tears, yet smiling. To gratify her faithful, she had gone into hearty extravagance, and appeared wonderfully encased in a warm delicious pink, worthy of the event, much of it rustling off far from her heels, not much of it at all troubling her dimpled arms and shoulders. She held her sweet little black head on one side, like a tender bird; it looked as if dragged over by the weight of a big rose in her hair. And the people could not be satisfied with clapping their hands. The public was for the occasion become romantic, and, as much as the artist, was applauding the woman who had loved and, by this token, triumphed over a villainous deserter. They kept it up _ad absurdum_, intoxicated by the noise they made, more and more touched by their own loyalty to the old favorite, wishing to proclaim it still more loudly; and so expressing at last, it is sad to say, far more than any one felt. But it had been a goodly demonstration, and all thought better of themselves when finally those who were eager to hear the playing began hushing, and silence gradually came about.

Then she played, and it was to many what they were pleased to call a revelation. It was at all events a fresh, delicate, inspirating, moving music. There were those who listened with eyes upturned, and thought of sunrise upon Eden; there were those who nodded surprise and commendation, and spoke of technique.

Marie-Aimée was one of those persons about whom all who know them talk. She offered opportunity for it, certainly, by herself talking; her manner of being and her ways were fertile in food for comment; but her modest ray of fame was also accountable, being felt to brighten all who could claim sufficient nearness to her to know her affairs.

Had she changed? was the capital question in the discussions of her following upon her return. Most said not in the least, except, the presumption was, toward Bronson. She was open-hearted as ever, merry once more as she had used to be when her star first rose among them. She was still the one that so lent herself to be loved and gently, almost enviously, laughed at. But if she were changed, as some maintained, it was for the better. She looked younger, rested; her face was clear and untroubled now. If, after the first, one missed something in her, she explained that it was her old faults.

"When I began to see glimmering ahead of me in the distance a triumphal re-entrance among you," she held forth to a little group, "I began to prepare for it. I tried to fit myself better to please you. For the _bon Dieu's_ sake, I had tried to obtain a clean soul; but for the world's sake--your sake, my dears--I tried to become thin! I did gymnastics, I walked, I dosed myself, I gave up eating everything I liked, and you see the result? Honor my beautiful shape, will you? and do not press upon me sponge-cake and plum-cake, as you used to do. Then I became orderly. Haven't you noticed? All my buttons there, all my hooks and eyes. And every little spot at once rubbed out with cologne. When did you know such things of me before? But look at my head! I tell you I hunt up mirrors expressly to see myself in them; and I set my bonnet straight, and tuck in my loose ends. Then I became prudent. I always think before I act, now, and before I speak, and before I spend my money. And punctual! I catch trains, and I keep appointments. I look at my watch, like the rest of you, and see that it is time to go, and I _go_. I no longer, like some one I remember, sit down and play and play and play, or talk and talk and talk, till it is dinner time, and I have to be invited. And then I am not a chatter-box now, no, not what you could call a chatter-box."

Her joy at being again among her old friends softened and won them; and no less did the humility of her attitude toward the past. In regard to that she was shame-faced, apologetic, reformed.

So much of the story of her exile filtered through those who received it at first hand, that a legend of it was before long public property; and such a character was given the event, Marie-Aimée's own view perhaps initially tinging it for all, that, without fear of being thereby unacceptable, the multitude of those who stood with Marie-Aimée on a footing of good-humored comradeship neglected, even in speaking to her, to disguise their familiarity with what concerned her. It was common, on the ground of a perfect understanding with her, and a supposition of at least some small degree of that enmity which often succeeds love and takes satisfaction in hearing of Fortune's disparaging turns on the ex-beloved, to entertain her with late accounts of Bronson. And though she merely listened, as she would have done to anything well-intentioned, her unoffended air left a feeling that encouragement had not been wanting. One irresponsible, feather-brained youth, of the baritone variety, reached such recklessness, while regaling her with good stories as they stood waiting for her cab, as to inquire, "Have you heard the latest joke about old Bronson?" He brought his lips near her ear, and breathed through a chuckle: "They say it takes two years and seven months to get over being in love with Bronson, but if you marry him it doesn't take so long!" And as he laughed heartily, she let her bright laugh ring out companionably alongside of his. Having got into her cab, she repeated the joke carefully over to herself, to apprehend the point of it.

It was not to have been expected that the peculiar extreme enthusiasm for Marie-Aimée, with the exaggerated form of tribute to her, should continue long unabated. Still, with discretion on her part, it might have had the ordinary length of such things. As it was, alas, there soon seemed occasion to believe that the public mind is ruled by the law of reaction: By so much as the public had gone beyond rational appreciation, it seemed now threatening to fall below it.

Those who watched Marie-Aimée's fortunes with most interest, with a sinking of the spirit began to note a decrease in her social popularity. As they witnessed this trifling evidence of it and that, these lifted their eyebrows and pushed out their chins, with the expression which one interprets, "But what can be done about it?" Whenever there was reference to her now, it seemed to bring about in the atmosphere a vague fall of temperature. A just appreciable effect of disappointment, disapproval, regret, followed the long-loved name.

Those fondest of her could scarcely be brought to speak of it; when they did speak, it was not frankly and openly, as everyone had used to discuss her affairs once, shaking the head amusedly. They talked in dreary undertones, and ended asking each other "Now, can you understand it?"

Presently, she was by certain ones avoided, because of an awkwardness they felt in meeting her, with a consciousness of what were best not mentioned--disagreeable to those accustomed to dealings with her of a perfect candor. When met, she was at best in these days indifferent fun, preoccupied, unlike herself, with little to say.

At last, as an increasing coldness takes a definite pattern of frost, certain persons refrained from calling upon her, explaining privately that they had heard it said that it was possible to come upon Anthony Bronson in her little drawing-room. This refraining did not signify by any means in all a wish to express condemnation; on the part of most it really expressed a good-humored wish not to be in the way.

It was as winter was waning, that, reversing somewhat the order of the day, one who had never called on her resolved to do so. With her clothes and her hair and her eyes full of March, she ascended to Miss Nevers' little flat. The door was opened by Marie-Aimée herself, who stood looking up, uncertain, inquiring.

"I fear you do not remember me," the visitor said. "May I come in?"

"Your voice," Marie-Aimée faltered, "is familiar--but the light--the light is behind you. Do, I pray, come in."

She hurried ahead into the drawing-room, which was unexpectedly light, from the reflection upon its ceiling of the snow on lower neighboring roofs. She turned and looked at the visitor who was entering; she uttered an exclamation, unfollowed by any word.

"I see you have recalled me," said the visitor. "Mrs. Bronson? Kate Cheriton that was?"

"Take a seat, I pray!" said Marie-Aimée faintly.

Mrs. Bronson looked around her for once. Though her eye confessed no more scrutiny than accords with good breeding, it missed little in the tiny room, warm-colored, crowded, a bit untidy, but genially so, as where a pair of evening gloves and a crumpled play-bill lay on a chair, and a lace bonnet saddled a green bronze lion. The walls were covered with gimcracks and pictures, among which in profusion photographs of the celebrated, overscrawled with their various calligraphies. The piano stood open, littered with music; a tea-table, ready for service, the kettle steaming, was drawn close to the fire; a faint smell of macaroons mingled in the air with the smell of violets, whereof a big double handful was fading in a bowl. A well-worn leather chair, deep and wide, patriarchal, was on one side of the fire-place; and, suggestively at its elbow, matches and an ash-tray.

In this seat, after her casual circular glance, Mrs. Bronson quietly arranged herself; and Marie-Aimée took the rocker on the opposite side of the fire. She dropped back in it, leaning, and loosely folded her hands; which no sooner had she done, than she sat upright, and moved forward to the edge of her chair.

There was a longer silence than is often suffered by persons of the world. To attempt "carrying off" anything whatsoever was not in Marie-Aimée's _moyens_.

"Do you know why I have come, Miss Nevers?" Mrs. Bronson asked.

Marie-Aimée regarded her with eyes as steady as they were inwardly frightened. Her whole face expressed what one had never expected to see in it, something very near hostility; its like could be imagined in the look of a tame animal uncertain whether harm is meant to its young.

"I judge you have come here to find Mr. Bronson," she answered, "I expect him at any moment."

It was plain there would be no delicate fencing this afternoon.

Mrs. Bronson shook her head, and laughed in spite of herself at this unheard-of directness. "Oh, no! I scarcely think he will come to-day, I mentioned at lunch that I should call on you."

This was spoken without the hint of a sneer, yet Marie-Aimée flushed.

"You are quite mistaken if you think he makes love to me," she blurted out, her breath coming quick.

Mrs. Bronson lifted her hand in deprecation. "And you are mistaken, my dear Miss Nevers, if you think I have come to make a vulgar scene about him. I am here, and solely, because I like you!"

Marie-Aimée stared, doubt in her eyes; then, expressing wonder by the faintest possible effect of a shrug, looked down in her lap, all her face slowly relaxing to a plaintive look of trouble. Her lips composed themselves to lines of such stiff stillness, it might be guessed that if she tried to speak they would tremble; she picked at the folds of her tea-gown, readjusting them, smoothing the fabric across her knees.

"I don't believe you have any idea how much I felt myself attracted to you that single time we met, Miss Nevers. You made my conquest completely, and I am not one who takes fancies. Though you are so contrary to all I am, it seemed to me I understood you better than all the others did, just as I had always felt that I appreciated your work more truly at its worth. I don't know what I would not have given to have you for a friend."

Marie-Aimée put out her hands, to stop her, her kindness at that moment hurt so much. But Mrs. Bronson went on eagerly. "You are not made right for this low world. Your very virtues have the effect of faults, and bring calamity upon you. There you are, one piece of honesty, lovingness, unselfishness; and the consequence,--you have no chance among us who are nothing of the sort. Being as you are would be all right in a world peopled with angels, but here----!"

Marie-Aimée, with a deepening look of dejection and a vast returning softness, slowly shook her head; rather as if she were trying to make these notions of herself fit into place, than in denial of what she heard.

"And now I find you doing something dreadfully foolish," Mrs. Bronson continued, with a remonstrative mother's persuasive inflections, "something, I am afraid, which will prove the deadliest mistake. I cannot resist the impulse to come and warn you of it, to try to drag you back into the safe path--all, I do assure you, because I so sincerely like and respect and admire you. Of those in question, believe me, it is you, you, who are the one I care about."

There was a pause. Marie-Aimée sat as if considering a proposition; but in reality she was only groping after thoughts among emotions. She made a gesture of resignation, casting up her hands and letting them drop again. "Well? I am listening, but is it not likely that I know already all you are intending to say?"

"No, no, it is not possible!" Mrs. Bronson said emphatically. "You cannot see clearly for yourself, else you would have turned back long ago. Mind you, I know how easy it will be for you to misunderstand me in this. Almost necessarily, you will imagine that it is myself I have principally in view, that I am jealous, perhaps, or anxious about appearances, concerned in the figure I myself cut in all this. But you would be wrong. To all that I am highly indifferent. Jealous! For jealousy there must be some remnant of the folly of fondness. And, for the rest, I refuse to grant that anything Mr. Bronson does can either lift or lower me. No, what he chooses to do affects me not at all. But for you, I tell you, I am sorry."

"If it is as you say," said Marie-Aimée, regaining a little life, "you need be troubled about nothing. It is all so much simpler than one thinks, than, I find, one is willing to think. Because once or twice a caller has found him here, a caller likewise, it has been taken for granted that he spends I don't know how much of his time with me, which is particularly false and unfair. He comes from time to time; I will be quite honest, perhaps once or twice in the week, when he happens to be in town. Then we try over music, and I tell him the gossip of the world which used to be his as well as mine, and we laugh together as we used to do. You know that I always had a knack of cheering him. And I give him tea, and let him smoke, and that is all. And is it not truly innocent enough?"

"I believe you perfectly, Miss Nevers. And for that you are willing to give up all that I know you are losing?"

Marie-Aimée repeated her little French gesture of resignation. "When it comes to contending with the evil mind of the world, how can one hope to do it? I used to believe in the world, I loved it. I have lately discovered it to be such that I care very little what I lose with it. Its good opinion? I don't want it any more!"

"Quite right, Miss Nevers. You are as right as possible in valuing the opinion of the world lightly. Still, the loss of all that comes to make life pleasant, from being on good terms with it, is serious. There should be something to counterbalance it, in that for the sake of which one renounces it. And you, will you tell me what you are getting? You are ruining your life, Miss Nevers, no other word serves, for a man who is perfectly willing to let you do it, for the satisfaction he derives from his occasional afternoons here of gossip and tea, music and smoke."

Marie-Aimée kept her eyes unflinchingly upon Mrs. Bronson's, eyes full of resentment and denial, but she was too moved now to speak.

"He spoiled the best years of your life," Mrs. Bronson went on, her nostrils sharpening till their edges were white, a cold fire in her eyes. "Oh, how well I see now, now that I know him better, what his conduct would be with you. But when the moment came in which it was convenient, he set you aside without one second's hesitation. You patiently take the broken pieces of your life out of sight, you manage to put them together again, you reappear bravely patched up, poor child; oh, I saw you. To me, you were pathetic--and again, because it is convenient, just a little bit convenient, he takes you up, calmly, to break you into pieces a second time."

"You don't understand him!" burst forth Marie-Aimée, in her tone the deepest hopelessness that the other ever could understand.

"I don't understand him? I don't?"

"No, no, no!"

"Then you think three years of marriage not instructive?" Mrs. Bronson asked rapidly. "Or do you think him complicated? The truth is, he is as simple as simplicity. Suppose a man with one instinct, one motive, heretofore and forever: to do that which is at the moment easiest and pleasantest and most profitable for himself, and you have him. But you must, to have him exact, accommodate this tendency with a brain the most elementary; and must suppose his objects always of the lowest and most ordinary: little common satisfactions, material or mental, good wine and cigars, or the flattery of some woman's silly admiration. And, for I will do him justice, you must accommodate it with a constitution completely healthy, like a prize animal's, without any more viciousness than he has imagination. For the rest, ideas?" continued the coldly indignant woman, reaching a fearful fluency, "he has none. All the fine things which his singing brings to our minds have no existence in himself. Talent? I do you the credit, Miss Nevers, to suppose you with me in the secret of his musical talent. Talent he has none, nor ever had any, nor the least real love or appreciation of music. But a God-given voice he had, and an instinct for using it to perfection which he shares with nightingales and mocking-birds; and, besides these, what you call _a presence_, combined with an enormous vanity and an equal hatred of hard work!"

"Why do you say all this to me?" gasped Marie-Aimée, choking.

"Because I cannot conceive but that you misrepresent him to yourself, but that you still have illusions about him. If I were removed to-morrow, do you imagine he would by any chance marry you? If my removal left him wealthy, he would not marry at all; if it left him poor, you can be sure he would not marry you."

After another gesture of warding off, Marie-Aimée, shuddering, buried her face in her hands, as if blinding herself might deaden hearing too.

Mrs. Bronson at once accorded the respite for which this action seemed to entreat. She sat in silence, critically regarding the top of Marie-Aimée's bent head, as if one could hope to see through it into her brain.

"Can you tell me that all this is not so?" she asked at last, heat and anger conspicuously absent from her voice, speaking in that reasonable tone of debate which seems to lay a compulsion of reasonableness upon others. The question sounded genuine, as if, for plain human curiosity's sake, she would like to know if there could be two points of view about Anthony.

Marie-Aimée raised her face, all sickened protest and repudiation. "Everything you have said, and have made to sound so heinous, might, differently worded, fit perfectly into one's description of a nice normal boy. And is a boy unworthy of one's love? Say that Anthony Bronson remained all his life a boy, and who will contradict you? It is the same nature, that reaches out so simply toward what pleases him, that wants what it wants without thought of afterwards. But you must add to this, in his case, that sort of native kingliness of the great, who have never a doubt but theirs is the first right, and that others will be glad to yield for them. He has never meant to hurt anyone, one could not be further from cruel. He merely, in order to go where he would be, must drive steadily onward. He would be sorry if his wheels crushed anything, but that it should stop him could never enter his brain. Call it an incapacity, it is that of most strong, healthy big boys."

"It must have likewise characterized arboreal man."

"Don't, Mrs. Bronson!" Marie-Aimée cried, and rose whole-heartedly at last to the encounter, bringing to bear the most piercing of her arguments, "He is not happy now! He wants things as much as ever, but he no longer can get what he wants. He can't sing any more. His voice is gone. You think he doesn't care, but he does, indeed, he does! He feels so dreadfully out of it. The public is ungrateful. His friends are not yours, they scarcely any longer seem his own; your friends are not his; Everything has turned out wrong. Don't sneer at him. Nothing can brighten his life to what it was before. And he feels helpless against it, just as the boy we were speaking of would feel. Oh, he is blue--blue! You have not made him happy!"

"Has he made me happy?"

"He has meant to!" Marie-Aimée said earnestly. "Your quarrel is with his whole manner of being. One must take him as he is."

"Yes! And whatever he is is to be enough, so he thinks in his calm Jovian babyhood. How could he but satisfy any woman? How should any but feel honored to be his servant and worshipper? the great, heavy, self-pleased, all-sufficient Male!"

"You married him!"

"You are right. My stupidity deserves exactly what I have got. But I didn't come here to speak of myself, or to complain of him. It has been vulgar enough, as it is. I beg your pardon and I beg you to believe, Miss Nevers, that I speak to no one--no one, I assure you--as I have spoken to you. I go my way, with my chin high, my eyes well above the heads of the scandal-mongering crowd. It was by accident I discovered his renewed visits to you; and the brazenness, the heartlessness of it, revolted even me, prepared for anything, God knows, in the way of calm, colossal selfishness. My first thought was the most common one--that he acted from pique, that his vanity could not quite stand having it blazed abroad that you had recovered. But I know him better than that, after all. I am just. It was simpler. It was nothing more than a big dog wanting to be petted. He felt in need of consolation, sympathy, condolence, some one to talk to about me--oh, I know it--and never stopping a moment to think of you, poor woman, he turned to the quarter where he felt surest of getting it. But what puzzles me beyond everything is that he should have guessed right. Pardon me, Marie-Aimée, but in those three years at the convent, what were you doing? You seem to have wasted your time. What was that far-spread anecdote that you had come out because it was all over, lived down, you were cured, immune? Did others make up this fable, or did you?"

"Ah, don't speak of it! I was in good faith."

"You really thought it was all done with? You honestly felt sure of yourself?"

"But certainly! More than sure! How otherwise would I have come back?"

"And then?"

"Then at the rehearsal for Mrs. MacDougal's charity concert I met him again. He had consented to sing, you remember, but afterwards withdrew. And I had scarcely more than seen him, when the three years might as well not have been. But to whom--dear me, to whom am I saying this?"

Mrs. Bronson leaned forward till she could touch Marie-Aimée's knee. "It's all right," she said gently. "Don't mind because it's I. I can understand," and as she saw tears springing into Marie-Aimée's eyes, she patted the knee, and murmured in her most soothing note, "You poor darling!"

"Oh, you needn't pity me at all!" Marie-Aimée laughed harshly through her tears. "When I think that I might--that there could have been the possibility--that those three years should so have changed me, that I should have grown so cold and dry-hearted, and proud of my dry-hearted coldness, and supposed it a virtue, and called it morality, that when he turned to his old comrade for a little cheer against the thickening shadows, the fast-coming gray hairs, the lost voice, the domestic _misères_, I might have refused, I am glad and grateful for the ill-name and the snubs that may follow me the rest of my life because I didn't." Whereupon her voice came utterly to wreck; she subsided into soft unrestrained weeping.

Mrs. Bronson with a distressed frown left her seat for the corner of a divan which was nearer Marie-Aimée. After listening helplessly a moment, fidgeting, embarrassed by her life-habit of undemonstrativeness, she put out her hands, quick as darting swallows, and enclosed one of Marie-Aimée's, pressing it, stroking it, murmuring, "Don't! Don't! You are a dear!"

Without a word Marie-Aimée turned her wet face to kiss the cheek of the consoler. Mrs. Bronson pressed closer to her; and the two sat crushed against each other with interlocked, hands--and so, silently drifted into a different relation. It was as if the thoughts of their blood had communed through their hands, and there were no need more to conceal anything.

"Imagine," Marie-Aimée said, in a voice cracked with rueful laughter, "that when I was in the convent I had reached the point of believing that it was one of the laws of nature which was being accomplished in me! I said that love was like a plant, and if it got neither sunshine nor rain, it perished. I was not in the least happy over it, you know. But I became philosophical about it, and was glad, as one might be over something one owned which was not beautiful, but had a practical use. When I went into that place, you know, I honestly believed I should never come out of it again; and I used to read his old letters, and pore upon photographs of him, and play over and over all the music associated with him.

"But one day I found them flatly wearying me. I shall never understand it! I could picture seeing him again, meeting him in company with you at his side, and not minding. I could picture meeting him again, free, and anxious that all should be as before, and I could be calm over it, inclined, if anything, to refuse. I was worn out, I suppose. I imagined it was my illusion about him which had worn out. I judged him! But in the same breath I judged myself, as likewise incapable of any but shallow feelings; and I despised us both equally, and forgave him, as one forgives offences one no longer suffers from. And so, foolhardily, I come forth again. And when I see him, all I know is that it is he, the same one, who was all the romance of life to me once; that the same door is still open between our eyes through which we come and go familiarly into each other. All that I had thought dead and buried comes to life again. And I know that I may go into a convent for twenty years, that I might be buried and dust as many more, but when Anthony Bronson comes by, and we are face to face again, it will be all as nothing. And the marvel is that though it can only mean a return to suffering, I can only be glad. Isn't it strange?"

"Oh, yes!" Mrs. Bronson pressed one of her hands across her tearless eyes; her cheek was pale. "Strange, and beautiful. But terrible too!"

She got up abruptly, as if to escape an oppression from the atmosphere down on Marie-Aimée's level; she made a motion with her head as if to disengage it; and walking to the window, stood looking out across the snowy roofs and the steeples, to the dull distance, the bank of purplish dun hanging at the horizon over the enormous city, her eyes full of gloomy distances too.

In the long silence ensuing there developed small homely noises of tea-making, over yonder, near the fire.

"But it's all really wasted!" Mrs. Bronson exclaimed unexpectedly, as if in expostulation with herself as much as with Marie-Aimée, "I know it! You saw him again, he had grown older, it shocked you. His hair had turned--it is his time of life--it saddened you. You say he has lost his voice. That is a manner of speaking; nothing is wrong with his throat. But he has never cared to sing since he was married. A little careful practice, and he could sing very acceptably still--I won't say in public, but for his own pleasure--if he cared anything for music, and for that of others who have had a cult for his singing. You have thought him blue, and it has moved you. I understand it. But do believe me that he is a little bit of a humbug. Why should he be so blue? Everything is his own fault. Do you really believe that I have never tried? He is blue when he is with you, just because it will move you. He is not so very blue when among others. I can imagine circumstances, with which you would have nothing to do, you, nor music, nor the past, but simple, sordid, material circumstances, in which he would be perfectly happy, perfectly content--"

She had said this staring out of the window. She turned, feeling Marie-Aimée at her elbow. Marie-Aimée held toward her a cup of tea and a piece of thin bread-and-butter. Mrs. Bronson let her stand there, apparently not seeing these things, while she searched her little shut over-clouded face, which showed plainly enough a resolve to say no more about it. "But to you, I do believe, all this makes no difference!" Mrs. Bronson pursued. "Let him be, let him do, what he pleases, you will care just the same, just as much. Are you completely a fool, my dear, and blind as a mole, or--do you see more than we do? That's what I can't make out. I beg your pardon!"

She accepted the cup from her, and helped herself to the bread, and took a seat on the music-stool. She drew the gloves off her beautiful milk-white hands liberally begemmed with diamonds and sapphires, and mechanically folded her bread. She tasted the tea, and continued looking off out of the window. Marie-Aimée brought a cup of tea for herself, and stood in the window-place too, looking off, drinking.

What Mrs. Bronson thought in her long stare at the grave distance from which the light was beginning to depart, she may, as her eye caught the silhouette against it of the other woman's meek, set profile, have perceived the futility of saying. "You have a beautiful view," was her next remark.

Marie-Aimée deplored its not being to-day at its best; she described it by touches, when finest. And they talked a while like parties to the most ordinary call, of views, flats, and so forth, but in intonations so curiously detached and melancholy that they might have been ghosts talking over a tragedy that had its end three centuries ago.

Suddenly, over the roofs, flashed an arc of light, splendid; strings of lamp-like jewels, red and green and golden, publishing to earth and sky the name of an actor and of a melodrama. Mrs. Bronson looked at her watch, set down her cup, and rose.

"So I shall go as I came," she said; "I had thought I had such things to say to you, Miss Nevers, so to the point, so irrefutable, that you could not but listen to me. I thought that the fact that it was I who came to you and said them would have its weight. I meant, at a pinch, Miss Nevers, to demand of you to leave, at all events to break off relations with Anthony. But now, see, I am going, and I have demanded nothing. I am all adrift. You have taken me out beyond my depth. You shall do as you feel right. As for me, I don't know. I have not a heart to lead me, as you have. I have only my common share of hard worldly sense, and you have made me feel that it might be unsafe sometimes to trust it. Do as you please. I don't know! I don't know! Perhaps it is you who are right, you who love him, and all we who are fools."

In Marie-Aimée's face, which her eyes were intently interrogating as she spoke this, Mrs. Bronson could not fail to read a perplexity equal to her own, but coupled with a forlornness such as her own nature could never match, no, not if Fate should place her alone on a storm-beaten rock in mid-ocean--as Marie-Aimée might have been imagined standing, with that face. Marie-Aimée drew in the air through her lips, till her shoulders were lifted, and let it out in a great sigh.

"Ah, we are poor things all!" Mrs. Bronson agreed, with an echo of the sigh; and repeated that gesture of pressing her hand to her eyes, not to hide tears, but as part of an attempt to concentrate the mental vision upon those mysteries in life which offer the effect of blank impenetrable walls. She tore away her hand almost at once, her brief pantomime declaring the uselessness of trying to understand anything, verily, of all that happens in this sorrowful world; and whether in mockery of it, or of herself, or in the wish merely to effect a change in the current of their thoughts, struck a startling, brilliant chord on the piano under her hand; and while it still vibrated, another, and another, and executed a cadenza that seemed to laugh aloud and shake fool's-bells.

"Do you remember," she sat fairly down before the keyboard, and preluded while she talked, "the last time? After that scene of blood and tears, you poor sweet thing, how you played for me, so dearly obliging as you were? And polonaises and waltzes you played; as well as elegies and nocturnes. And then I played and then you played. You played and played, my dear, till you had missed an engagement. I shall miss one now if I don't hurry off instantly, but let it be missed. I shall count it well done, if you will sit down here a moment and play for me."

"Oh," moaned Marie-Aimée, putting up the ever-willing hands, like a martyr in prayer, "don't ask me. And don't take it ill if I can't. It's not the same thing any longer." She let her head hang; "I haven't the heart for it to-night."

"I am a beast!" said Mrs. Bronson heartily, and without adding a note further to the musical phrase she was in the middle of, jumped up, sick at herself. And feeling of so little importance before depths of woe such as she suspected near her that it mattered nothing whether she apologized, she pressed Marie-Aimée's hand with all her strength, and murmuring, "I will take myself away," made haste to be gone.

Mrs. Bronson was conscious of a vast relief, by which she first learned in what suspense she had been living, when a few days later she recognized Marie-Aimée's hand-writing on a letter to her. She read:

"I went, you see, after all. I am at my sister's, to remain with her and the dear children until I have thought further what I had better do. You were right in wishing me to go, though not perhaps for the reasons you gave. My thoughts are not at all clear upon the subject of the rightness or wrongness of what I was doing then, or what I have done since. I felt sure I was justified against the whole world, and even now I find no good argument against it. Only, it came home to me that I who used to love everyone and have only feelings of kindness towards others, was fast coming to hate everybody, myself most, and it seemed a sufficient sign. But you won't think that was quite all. I did also think of you, who perhaps--which of us knows her own heart?--care more than you believe. Very likely not. But on the barest possibility of the sort, how could I continue obstinately fixed in my position?

"And now, lest the sympathy you showed me be troubled on my account, I want you to be sure that I shall not be unhappy. For one thing, because there is something strangely compensating in the assurance a person may gain that the one she loves is never, to the edge of doom, to lack the whole love of at least one heart; and then, because I believe you will grant a request I am about to make, oh, more humbly and supplicatingly than pen and ink can show: which is that you will try to see him more truly, to discern what is good and lovable in him; and that--I find it difficult. Yet why? Let me seem brazen and indelicate, I will finish. I have thought I divined that he is a pensioner of yours, and sometimes a straightened one. It cannot be but that you are by nature as generous as you are kind, nothing else would accord with your forehead and eyes. I can only think that you have imagined things about him, that his marriage perhaps was mercenary, and this has been your revenge. Do differently hereafter. Show him and yourself this respect. Grudge him not the independence and the honors that beseem the state of the lion growing old. For, do not deceive yourself, he has been great. Those upon whom God bestows such a gift are marked for the reverence of others.

"You will forgive my meddling and will do what I ask? You asked me to go, and I went. You could not demand it, nor can I demand this. Yet let it be as a bargain between us, will you?

"For your infinite kindness and gentleness and generosity to myself, receive the assurance of my utmost gratitude; and for the affection you were so good as to say you feel for me, a return of affection which is of sufficient strength, I believe, to outlast all that divides us.

Marie-Aimée."

Mrs. Bronson kissed the name, like a school-girl; but glancing back over the letter could not repress a laugh tinged with disdain as the thought presented itself: "She wishes to provide against his missing her. Oh, the poor child, how well she knows him, after all!" Rising to the noblest height of her nature, she determined to set the figure of Anthony Bronson's income, as near as her fortune permitted, at what should represent her own estimate of his loss in Marie-Aimée; at the same time reflecting that very much less--but very much less, indeed--would quite as effectually have kept him from missing her overmuch.

VERSES

BY

A. E. HOUSMAN

There pass the careless people
That call their souls their own:
Here by the road I loiter,
How idle and alone.

Ah, past the plunge of plummet,
In seas I cannot sound,
My heart and soul and senses,
World without end, are drowned.

His folly has not fellow
Beneath the blue of day
That gives to man or woman
His heart and soul away.

There flowers no balm to sain him
From east of earth to west
That's lost for everlasting
The heart out of his breast.

Here by the laboring highway
With empty hands I stroll:
Sea-deep, till doomsday morning
Lie lost my heart and soul.

_From "A Shropshire Lad."_

MY ELECTION TO THE SENATE

BY

CARL SCHURZ

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

When I arrived in the United States again, the impeachment trial was over and President Johnson had been acquitted. There had indeed not been any revolutionary disturbance, but the public mind was much agitated by what had happened.

I had, since I left Washington, been quietly engaged in editing the Detroit _Post_, when one day in the spring of 1867 I received, quite unexpectedly, a proposition from the proprietors of the _Westliche Post_, a daily journal published in the German language in St. Louis, Missouri, inviting me to join them, and offering me, on reasonable terms, a property interest in their prosperous concern. On further inquiry I found the proposition advantageous, and accepted it. My connection with the Detroit _Post_, which, owing to the excellent character of the persons with whom it brought me into contact, had been most pleasant, was amicably dissolved, and I went to St. Louis to take charge of the new duties.

A particular attraction to me in this new arrangement was the association with Dr. Emil Preetorius, one of the proprietors of the _Westliche Post_. He was a native of the Bavarian Palatinate, the same province in which in 1849 the great popular uprising in favor of the National Constitution of Germany had taken place, and of the town of Alzei, which, according to ancient legend, had been the home of the great fiddler among the heroes of the Nibelungenlied--"Volker von Alzeien," grim Hagen's valiant brother in arms. The town of Alzei still carries a fiddle in its coat of arms. Mr. Preetorius was a few years older than I. He had already won the diploma of Doctor of Laws when the revolution of 1848 broke out. With all the ardor of his soul he threw himself into the movement for free government and had to leave the Fatherland in consequence. But all the idealism of 1848 he brought with him to his new home in America. As a matter of course, he at once embraced the anti-slavery cause with the warmest devotion and became one of the leaders of the German-born citizens of St. Louis, who, in the spring of 1861, by their courageous patriotism, saved their city and their State to the Union. He then remained in public life as a journalist and as a speaker of sonorous eloquence.

_The Convention of 1868_

In the winter of 1867-8, as I have said, I made a visit to Germany. Not long after my return to St. Louis, the Republican State Convention was held for the purpose of selecting delegates for the Republican National Convention which was to meet at Chicago on the 20th of May. I was appointed one of the delegates at large, and at its first meeting the Missouri delegation elected me its chairman. At Chicago a surprise awaited me which is usually reckoned by men engaged in politics as an agreeable one. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mr. Marcus L. Ward, informed me that his committee had chosen me to serve as the temporary chairman of the Republican National Convention. It was an entirely unexpected honor, which I accepted with due appreciation. I made as short a speech as is permissible on such occasions, and, after the customary routine proceedings, surrendered the gavel to the permanent president, General Joseph R. Hawley of Connecticut.

ONE OF THE PROPRIETORS OF THE WESTLICHE POST, THE NEWSPAPER WITH WHICH CARL SCHURZ BECAME ASSOCIATED IN 1867]

That General Grant would be nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency was a foregone conclusion. As to the nomination for the vice-presidency, there was a rather tame contest, which resulted in the choice of Schuyler Colfax, the Speaker of the National House of Representatives, who at that time enjoyed much popularity and seemed to have a brilliant future before him, but was fated to be wrecked on the rocks of finance.

SCHUYLER COLFAX

WHO WAS ELECTED VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES ON THE REPUBLICAN TICKET OF 1868]

When the Committee on Resolutions made its report, I observed with surprise that the proposed platform contained nothing on the subject of an amnesty to be granted to any of the participants in the late rebellion. This omission struck me as a grave blunder. Should the great Republican party go into the next contest for the presidency without, in its profession of faith and its program of policy, holding out a friendly hand to the erring brethren who were to return to their old allegiance, and without marking out for itself a policy of generosity and conciliation? I resolved at once upon an effort to prevent so grievous a mistake by offering an amendment to the platform. Not knowing whether the subject had not been thought of in the committee, or whether a resolution touching it had been debated and voted down there, and deeming it important that my amendment should be adopted by the Convention without a discussion that might have let loose the lingering war passions of some hot-heads, I drew up a resolution which did not go as far as I should have liked it to go, but which would substantially accomplish the double object I had in view--the encouragement of well-disposed Southerners and the commitment of the Republican party--without arousing any opposition. It was as follows:

"That we highly commend the spirit of magnanimity and forbearance with which men who have served in the rebellion, but who now frankly and honestly coöperate with us in restoring the peace of the country and reconstructing the Southern State governments upon the basis of impartial justice and equal rights, are received back into the communion of the loyal people; and we favor the removal of the disqualifications and restrictions imposed upon the late rebels in the same measure as the spirit of disloyalty will die out, and as may be consistent with the safety of the loyal people."

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN 1869, THE YEAR OF HIS FIRST INAUGURATION]

The resolution received general applause when it was read to the Convention, and, as I had hoped, it was adopted and made a part of the platform without a word of adverse debate.

_Grant, the Candidate of the Whole Republic_

The presidential campaign of 1868 was not one of uncommon excitement or enthusiasm.

THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR VICE-PRESIDENT IN THE CAMPAIGN OF 1868]

The Republican candidate, General Grant, was then at the height of his prestige. He had never been active in politics and never identified himself with any political party. Whether he held any settled opinions on political questions, and, if so, what they were, nobody could tell with any assurance. But people were willing to take him for the presidency, just as he was. It is quite probable, and it has frequently been said, that, had the Democrats succeeded in "capturing" him as their candidate, he would have been accepted with equal readiness on that side. He was one of the most striking examples in history of the military hero who is endowed by the popular imagination with every conceivable capacity and virtue. People believed in perfectly good faith that the man who had commanded such mighty armies, and conducted such brilliant campaigns, and won such great battles, must necessarily be able and wise and energetic enough to lead in the solution of any problem of civil government; that he who had performed great tasks of strategy in the field must be fitted to accomplish great tasks of statesmanship in the forum or in the closet. General Grant had the advantage of such presumptions in the highest degree, especially as he had, in addition to his luster as a warrior, won a reputation for wise generosity and a fine tact in fixing the terms of Lee's surrender and in quietly composing the disagreements which had sprung from the precipitate action of General Sherman in treating with the Confederate General Johnston. On the whole, the country received the candidacy of General Grant as that of a deserving and a safe man.

THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT IN THE CAMPAIGN OF 1868]

On the other hand, the Democratic party had not only to bear the traditional odium of the sympathy of some of its prominent members with the rebellion, which at that time still counted for much, but it managed to produce an especially unfavorable impression by the action of its convention. Its platform stopped but little short of advocating violence to accomplish the annulment of the reconstruction laws adopted by Congress, and it demanded the payment of a large part of the national debt in depreciated greenbacks. The floundering search for a candidate and the final forcing of the nomination upon the unwilling, weak, and amiable Horatio Seymour presented an almost ludicrous spectacle of helplessness, while the furious utterances of the fiery Frank Blair, the candidate for the vice-presidency, sounded like the wild cries of a madman bent upon stirring up another revolution when the people wanted peace. The Democrats were evidently riding for a fall.

ONE OF THE SEVEN REPUBLICAN SENATORS WHOSE VOTES DEFEATED THE IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON. HE WAS SUCCEEDED IN THE SENATE BY CARL SCHURZ]

I was called upon for a good many speeches in the campaign, and had large and enthusiastic audiences. One of the experiences I had in this campaign I remember with especial pleasure. The movement in favor of paying off national bonds, not in coin, but in depreciated paper money, which found advocacy in the Democratic platform, was in fact not confined to the ranks of the Democratic party. Although the Republican Convention had in its platform sternly declared against any form of repudiation, yet that movement found supporters among the Republicans, too, especially among people of confused moral notions, small politicians eager to win a cheap popularity by catering to questionable impulses, and politicians of higher rank nervously anxious to catch every popular breeze and inclined to bend to it whenever it seemed to blow with some force.

_An Appeal to the Plain People_