Chapter IX: Part 9

“We all know,” she continued softly. “We played the game very nicely, but now something must be done about it. Sabine knows it too. She’s known all along and it hurts her perhaps more than any of us because she understands that in my son there are things which are beyond her control....” She coughed. “For that, my dear, you are much better equipped. I hope you respect Sabine for an extraordinary woman ... civilized. I think you might put her to torture and never succeed in making her cry out.”

Ellen, sitting now with her head bowed as if she had been accused, said, “I know.... I know that.”

“I know my own son ...” repeated Mrs. Callendar gravely. “I know him well. We are very different in some ways ... but I know him.” Here she paused for a moment and stirred her coffee with the tiny silver spoon. “I’ve seen him when he fancied he was in love with a woman.” She raised one plump hand and the soiled diamonds glittered darkly. “Oh, this has not been the first time. It has happened before. But this time there is a difference.” She coughed and added, “This time instead of pursuing the object, he has run away from her.... That makes it serious.”

Ellen, mute and frightened by the frankness of the older woman, sat awkwardly, like a little girl, regarding her. Surely she had never heard any one talk in quite this fashion ... so honestly and yet so calmly. In a moment like this she had expected anger, even denunciation; she had prepared herself for it.

“I don’t know what is to be done about it ...” continued Mrs. Callendar, “because I don’t know everything.... In a case like this, one must know everything in order to make sense. You have done something to him. I don’t blame you.... It is simply one of those things which happens.... I fancy if you had not met each other as you did, you would have met in some other fashion....” Her green eyes narrowed and her lips contracted so that all her plumpness appeared to shrivel and vanish. She seemed suddenly to become vastly old and wizened. “Yes, I am sure you would have met. Nothing could have kept you apart.” And then, plump and kindly once more, she said, “I don’t know what it is you have done to him. I don’t fancy he knows himself, but he’s miserable.... You see, the trouble is that he is really romantic ... just as I am romantic ... and he’s always pretended he was an experienced, cynical _homme du monde_.... In that one thing he is dishonest.”

She reached over and in an unexpected gesture touched the hand of the girl so that Ellen, taken unaware by this movement of sympathy, began to cry softly.

“I _am_ romantic,” said Mrs. Callendar softly, “though you might not believe it. Listen!” She leaned forward. “Listen! I’ll tell you a story about myself and you’ll see. You’ll understand then perhaps that I have sympathy enough to be of use in this matter ... because in a time of this sort, it’s sympathy that’s needed more than anything else.”

And then she settled back and between puffs on her cigarette related bit by bit, from the very beginning, the romantic story of her elopement with Richard Callendar’s father. She told the story with an Oriental sense of color, and slowly before the eyes of the girl she recreated the color of Constantinople in her youth, all the magic of the summer palace and the Bosphorus by moonlight, all the desolation of the Greek aunts, all the crafty manner of the rich old Dikran Leopopulos, and above all the somber glow of the love she had known for the blond and handsome young American. Under the spell of her own tale she began to speak half in French, half in English, but Ellen, listening, became so caught up in the magic of the story that she understood it all, even those things which Thérèse Callendar related in an alien tongue. The tale set fire to a vein of warmth in the girl which until now had gone undiscovered, save only at times when, lost in her music, it had emerged translated into a beauty of sound. For the moment even the plump Greek woman herself appeared no longer to be old and ugly and covered with diamonds in need of cleaning. In the fervor of her story, she attained for a passing instant the quality of youth and of a fleeting beauty out of the Levant.

And when she had finished, she leaned back and said, with a wicked chuckle, “_Voyez_. I am ugly now and fat. But I was not then.” Then she sighed quickly and looked down at her rings. “You see the thing is that he died ... he was drowned before we had been married two years.”

* * * * *

Again Ellen kept silent. There was nothing for her to say that would not have been trivial and idiotic. She waited and presently Thérèse said, “You see, I can understand.... I wanted you to know that.... One would have said that he and I were separated by a thousand things. None of them made the least difference.”

* * * * *

It was Ellen who in the end interrupted the strange, breathless silence which enveloped them at the conclusion of Thérèse’s story. She murmured, “It was nothing that I meant to do.... It happened.... I don’t know how.... It happened without either of us saying anything. It was,” (she groped for the words and collapsed into banality), “It was like a flash of lightning.”

“It would be,” said Thérèse, “with him. I don’t believe he understands what it is.”

“And I haven’t seen him since.”

“He has never spoken a word of it.... Always he tells me.”

Something of the girl’s awkwardness had vanished now, and between them there was a sense of a sympathy that had not before existed. It was the manner now of two women who were confidants.

“There is nothing I can do,” said Ellen, “nothing. It is hopeless.”

“You were a brave girl to go on coming here.”

A flash of Ellen’s old spirit returned as she said, “What could I do? Running away helped nothing.... It’s hard because I have had no one to speak to ... no one I could talk it over with.... You see, I am really alone.... It never mattered before.... I mean ... the loneliness.”

* * * * *

They faced each other, two women, each possessed of intelligence and honesty, striving to discover some way out of the tangle in which they were caught. Being wise, they knew perhaps the uselessness of violence. They waited, each knowing well enough that there was much more concerned than simple romance. Thérèse knew, no doubt, that the young woman who, stripped now of her fierce secrecy, sat opposite her, frightened and tearful, was not simply an adventuress seeking to gain a husband and a vast fortune. She knew, too, how much these things would have meant to the girl, and she understood well enough that Ellen, face to face with an unaccustomed tangle, lacked the experience which could have helped her.

On Ellen’s side, she must have been conscious of facing a mystery. The plump woman, covered with dirty diamonds, was her friend, yet, despite her kindliness, she was remote, separated from her by differences of blood, of tradition, of a million things. She was as remote, as beyond comprehension in the subtlety of her wise, old mind as her dark son, even in the moments when he was most disarming. Her own people Ellen might battle and overthrow, but these were different. She could not even fathom the woman’s friendliness.

“I am not a cheap adventuress,” she repeated. “Don’t believe that.”

“My dear girl, I am not such a fool.... I was not born yesterday.... I have dealt with women of that sort.”

“You see,” said Ellen, folding and refolding her handkerchief like a little girl, “I am quite alone.... I looked on him as a friend ... as I might look on my own brother.... I never thought of such a thing.”

At this Mrs. Callendar made a clucking noise and bowed her head for a time in thought. At last she said, “Ah, but that is where the trouble lay! That is where you were wrong!... Such a thing is not possible with him.... There is acquaintance and the next step is the other thing. He is not, after all, like your American men.”

Ellen looked up now and ceased to plait the handkerchief. “I can see that ...” she said. “I’ve learned a great deal. I’ve thought of nothing else for weeks.... It frightens me because I can’t stop thinking of it when I want to ... not even at night. There’s never been anything like it before.” She looked directly at Mrs. Callendar. “Could I talk to you ...? Could I tell you the truth?”

“My dear, it is the only way we shall arrive anywhere.”

“I’ve got to tell some one.... I’ve thought and thought about the whole thing. I don’t know what it is he wants of me. He has never said anything.... We have never even mentioned it.” She smiled faintly. “Perhaps I am a fool and silly. We’ve never mentioned it in any way....”

Mrs. Callendar interrupted her. “Ah, but that’s it. That’s what makes it serious....”

“Perhaps I’m talking of something that doesn’t exist.”

“Oh, it exists all right.” Thérèse knocked the ash from her cigarette. “You would know it if you had seen him.” She turned sharply to Ellen. “Why do you think he is avoiding you? It’s not because he regards you as a virgin not to be defiled. It’s himself he’s thinking of too.”

“But there is nothing to be done.... Nothing can be done.”

“Do you love him?”

Ellen smiled again. “How should I know that? I’ve not been in love a hundred times. I had never met anything like this. I had my whole life planned, perfectly, to the very end. I don’t know what’s to happen now.”

Before she answered Mrs. Callendar sighed. “If there is enough of love, anything is possible.” She raised her plump hand. “Oh, I’m not being a romantic fool. I only mean that if there is enough of passion.... If you believe that it is the greatest thing of all, worth all else in the world, then take what life can give you. Let nothing stop you. It will come to an end soon enough and you will be unhappy, but you must understand that in the beginning. If you are to have remorse, have it before you act and be done with it.... That is the only rule for intelligent people, and they are after all the only ones who dare know such a rule.”

* * * * *

For a time Ellen sat quietly regarding the floor, lost in consideration of all her companion had said. It was a bewildering speech and colossally unmoral. She must have thought, then or later, of the vast distance which separated the girl who sat in Mrs. Callendar’s drawing-room from the girl who sat on Hattie Tolliver’s knee the night that Jimmy Seton rang the bell and brought Clarence into her life; yet she had only gone a little way. Turning the speech of Mrs. Callendar over and over in her mind, she became aware that it savored curiously of Lily. It was a consciousness always present, an awareness of Lily’s charm, her beauty, her curious soft independence, the beauty, the talk, the scandal that centered about her.... If Hattie Tolliver could have known it, the influence of wicked Lily was stronger at that moment than it had ever been. Out of all the talk, the experience, the sorrow, Lily was emerging slowly from the well of mystery that engulfed her.

“It is impossible,” said Ellen slowly, “because I could not marry him.” She hesitated for a moment and then added in a whisper, “I have a husband already.... I’ve never told any one.”

She began to weep once more, gently and wearily, while Mrs. Callendar, poised and remote in black satin and diamonds, regarded her with an expression of astonishment.

At last the older woman said, “You should have told me this. It changes everything. Sabine told me that you had a lover ... that she had seen him at your flat.”

“That was my husband.”

“You never spoke of him, so we had nothing else to believe.” She smiled suddenly and touched Ellen’s hand once more. “I was right then. I did not believe it possible.”

Ellen looked at her silently, in amazement. “But you had me to your house, as a friend. How could you have done that when you thought me a woman of that sort?”

Across the gulf that separated them, Mrs. Callendar laughed and said, “But that would have made no difference. I learned long ago not to be concerned with the morals of my friends. You are what you are and I like you, my dear, whether you had one lover or fifty, except that if you had had fifty I should have known you to be a woman of no taste.” She paused and lighted another cigarette out of the box she had sent her from Constantinople. “I had no idea,” she continued thoughtfully, “how wide the difference was.... Besides, you are a musician ... an artist. One does not require of an artist the morals of the _bourgeoisie_. One expects such things. It is so because it is so, and there’s an end to it.” She puffed for a time, slowly, lost in thought, and then added in a kind of postscript. “My poor girl! What a lot you have not learned! You will not be free until you do what you see fit ... regardless of any one.”

And now Ellen found herself once more where she had begun. In all their talk they had arrived after all nowhere, because they had been talking all the while of two different things. Mrs. Callendar, conscious perhaps of the hopelessness of the muddle, rose and began to walk slowly up and down the room, an absurd and untragic figure, plump and much laced but energetic and clever. After a time she came and stood by Ellen’s chair.

“I take it then,” she said, “that you do not love your husband.”

“I don’t know,” Ellen replied dully, “I don’t know. It is nothing like this new thing ... nothing at all. I am sorry for him. Perhaps that is it.”

“It is a match then that your parents made?”

“No.... It is not that.... It’s quite different....” She hesitated for a moment and then said in a low voice, “I ran away with him.... I eloped. It was not because I loved him. It was because I had to escape. I wanted to be a musician.... I wanted to be great. Lately I have thought sometimes I was only a fool ... that I have only confused and ruined everything.”

This Mrs. Callendar pondered for a time, returning to her chair and lighting another cigarette before she spoke. “And why do you pity him?” she asked presently.

“It is because he is so good and so humble. I am afraid of hurting him. He has been good to me and generous. It is almost worse than if I had loved him.... Don’t you see?”

“You would not divorce him?” asked Mrs. Callendar.

“No,” Ellen cried suddenly. “No, I could not do that.... I couldn’t....”

“And you would not run away from him?”

“It is the same thing in the end.... It would hurt him. It might kill him.... He’s such a good man ... so kind, so helpless. He wants me to love him always.... He’s done everything he could for me ... everything and more than he is able to do. You see. I told you there was nothing to be done.”

“No,” said Mrs. Callendar slowly, “I’m afraid there is nothing to be done....” Again she rose from her chair and walked over to the window. “You had best think it over.” She turned and faced Ellen. “I will talk to Richard. I will not sail to-morrow. I will stay. It must be settled somehow, for the sake of all of us.... I have not forgotten Sabine. She must be considered.”

33

It was long after midnight when Ellen, entering the cabriolet at last, was driven off by the impatient Wilkes to the Babylon Arms. When she arrived, she found Clarence in the lower hall pacing up and down with a pitiful air of anxiety.

“I should have telephoned,” she said, “but I forgot. I did not know how late it was. You see we talked for a long time afterward.”

And then she kissed him gently, swept again by the old sense of pity. During all the drive home, in the long moments when she had been alone in the dark cabriolet, she had struggled, bitterly, with the puzzle that confronted her, knowing always in the back of her mind that whatever happened she could never run away with Richard Callendar. She might fall ill, she might die, she might go mad, but there were some things which she could not do. Deep down in her heart there was a force that was quite beyond her, a power that was an instinct, as much a physical thing as her very arms and hands. It was the part of her that was Hattie Tolliver.

There had been the other way out, but when she kissed Clarence she knew that it too was impossible. When she saw him waiting, his eyes wild with anxiety, his whole face suddenly lighted up with joy and adoration at sight of her, she knew too that she could never divorce him. His very weakness destroyed her, for she knew that if she had asked him he would have freed her. There was nothing that he would deny her ... nothing that he was able to give; and what she wanted from him, he would never be able to give because he was, after all, only a poor thing.

* * * * *

But the hardest part of the ordeal lay before her. It was the meeting with Callendar when, for the first time, they would both be forced to recognize the truth and deny it, forever. She understood this well enough; she was in a way even eager to have it occur at once so that she might put the memory of it behind her, so that she might stamp out the incident forever and go on her triumphant way. It came at last when Callendar, in a brief note, asked if he might call upon her. The letter, in a headlong handwriting so unlike the mocking cynicism which he cultivated, gave no hint of what was in his mind. It asked merely that she set a time and place.

She bade him come to the apartment in the Babylon Arms and he came, strangely sobered and quiet, with a chastened look in his gray eyes. At sight of him he appeared to her, as it seemed long afterward, for the first time in any semblance of reality; he existed with a new clarity, a new distinctness of outline. It was as if she had never seen him rightly before, as if until now he had been to her some one whom she accepted vaguely without questioning. Only one quality carried over completely into the new Callendar; it was the old sense of conflict, of will against will, of a pleasurable, almost perverse sensation of struggle. The new Callendar was an older man in a fashion she could not altogether define, save that the impression was related to the effect which his mother had upon her, of weakening and diminishing all reliance in herself.

The first thing she said to him was, “I am frightened.”

He took off his hat and laid it quietly on the divan by the side of his stick and then he turned and looking at her with his strange gray eyes, replied, “I too am frightened.”

Among the cheap furniture that crowded the room the old sense of his superiority returned to her, mingled this time with a new consciousness that he was utterly alien, stranger than she had ever imagined until now. She sat down quietly while he drew a chair to her side.

“I’ve talked to my mother,” he said. “Or rather she talked to me. She’s told me everything.”

Under the gaze of the gray eyes, Ellen turned aside, discomfited, wretched. “I wasn’t honest,” she murmured. “I’m sorry, but I hadn’t meant to be dishonest. I never thought it would make the least difference to any one.”

“It has made a difference though ... a great difference. It’s changed everything.” He reached over with a tenderness that suddenly weakened her and took one of her hands in his. She knew his hands; she knew them as she had known Clarence’s on the night in the Setons’ parlor when she had judged him nice enough but a bit of a prig. Callendar’s hands were slender, dark and strong, beautifully shaped in a way that made her fear them. When they approached her, she became weak; she felt that she was losing herself. She could not have explained the feeling save by a sense she had of their power. He was talking again, softly in the low voice with the thin trace of an accent, like Lily’s.

“I was foolish,” he was saying. “I should have known that the thing which made me afraid of you was the thing that would have kept you from taking a lover. I’d never encountered anything quite like it before.” He smiled and touched his mustache gently. “I was a fool. I should have known better. I thought perhaps you would love me some time ... not without a struggle. No, I never expected that. I thought we might understand each other....” For an instant the incredible happened. Callendar was blushing. It was a thing which she had not seen happen before. “I thought that one day we should come together.... I thought you were an artist, living as artists I have known do live. I was idiotic. I should have known better. You’ll forgive me that ... won’t you?”

For a moment she did not answer. The sound of his soft voice, the touch of the dark hands, had taken possession of her. Dimly she knew that she should have been insulted, yet she had no feeling at all, no sense of indignation; there was only a curious faintness that made her afraid. Somehow she understood that all this in reality had nothing to do with insults, with conventions, even with laws. It was something which might never again come her way and yet something which was to be feared, because it might destroy her forever. At last she said, “Why should I forgive you? It would make no difference now....”

“It would make a difference.... It would make a difference,” he said quickly. “I want you to marry me.... We can arrange everything. It makes no difference how.” And then after a sharp silence, he added in a low voice, “There is a magnificence about you, ... a bravery....” And the rest of the sentence trailed away so that she did not hear it.

Out of a great depth as if by a great physical effort she returned into the daylight. She found her lips moving. She found herself saying over and over again, “I must remember.... I must remember.... I must not ruin everything.” He had never even asked whether she loved him. He had accepted it as a fact. He had asked her nothing. He had come simply to take her.

Then she withdrew her hand slowly and sat staring at it with an air of looking at some object unfamiliar to her. “I can’t marry you,” she said slowly. “I can’t.... I can’t.... There is nothing to be done.... There is nothing to be done.” And she began to cry silently, so that the tears fell down upon her hands.

The speech appeared to astonish him, for he made no effort to regain her hand but sat staring at her as at a stranger. When at last he spoke it was in a voice that was low and caressing, but the tenderness had slipped away and in its place there was a hardness, as of steel; it was like a sudden glimpse of claws emerging from a soft and furry paw.

“Is it because you won’t give him up,” he asked, “as you told my mother?”

“It is because I cannot give him up.... I cannot treat him that way.... I cannot ... cannot.”

The steel in the voice emerged a little more sharply. There was an edge to it now, sarcastic, cutting. “Is it because he is so fine ... so handsome ... so magnificent ... so dazzling?”

He repeated thus all the things that Clarence was not, and so he gave her the last bit of strength that she required, for the sound of his voice, the sharp edge of the sarcasm, filled her with a sudden anger and a wild desire to protect Clarence as something which was her own. She found herself fighting for a man who was none of these things against a man who to her was all of them. It struck somehow at her sense of gallantry ... that Callendar who had everything should sneer at poor Clarence who had nothing.

She said, “It has nothing to do with that.... There are some things that one cannot do.... This I will not do.” She dried her eyes and sat more erectly. “There is no use.... There was no use in your coming here.... My mind was made up ... long before you came.”

At this he turned angry. “You are like all your women.... Love to you is nothing.... It is something to be controlled. You don’t know what love is.... You would exploit it.... You are like all your women.”

So he talked thus for a time in a childish vein strange and new while she sat impassive, conscious all the while of the power he could exert over her, a power that had to do with the beauty of his hands, with the strange quality of his eyes, with the sound of his voice, with the soft catlike way in which he moved; yet she remained in some mysterious way safe from that power. It was, perhaps, her intelligence which saved her, for as she watched him she gained slowly a curious intuition of what he might do to her if she yielded. The old sense of conflict was fanned into a new life, more intense than it had ever been. He sought to overpower her will. She knew all at once that this was the very essence of his confused, unreasonable emotion.

And as she listened to him her woman’s instinct for the dramatic came to her aid. She saw herself sitting there calm and a little cold, slowly but surely winning in the battle. She listened to his abuse. It did not enrage her. It did not even make her weep. It seemed rather to increase her coldness, her very strength. She felt him beating against the wall of her serenity and a kind of fierce triumph flowed through her body. For a time she possessed truly a great magnificence. At a little distance, she stood outside herself and watched the spectacle. She saw him standing by her, white with anger.

“You have lied to me ...” he was saying. “You have never cared at all....” And again the reproach. “You are like all your women ... cold ... magnificent ... not worthy of love.” He came nearer to her. “I will love you.... I will teach you what love can be.... What does he know of love ...? Nothing.... I will give you a happiness such as you never dreamed of.... I ... I am a lover.... I know these things.”

And then he went down suddenly upon his knees, the steel gone swiftly from his voice; the warmth and tenderness flowing back. “You will not refuse me.” He leaned forward and pressed his head against her. “You cannot.... I will give you everything ... all the things which he cannot give you....” And again he took her hands and this time kissed them passionately in a fashion that frightened her and filled her with the old weakness.

The spectacle of his humility, of this sudden collapse of what to her was his dignity, his will, his strength, astonished and embarrassed her. In her coldness it seemed to her incredible that any woman, least of all herself, should possess such power over any man. It was all unreal, beyond belief, and yet it fed her pride and gave her strength with which, one might have said, to destroy her own happiness, to resist the force of circumstances, even of nature, as she had defied it once before in marrying Clarence.

At last he rested his head against her knee and she bent over him, touching his dark hair with gentle fingers.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t.... Please don’t.... It is no good. I know better than you.... I should always be thinking of him.... I should never be happy, so neither of us could be happy. There are some things which I cannot do ... and this is one. It is impossible.”

They said nothing more. Richard remained kneeling with his head against her knees and slowly the old peace which she had not known in months took possession of her, heightened now by a new knowledge of her completeness and power. It was a kind of satisfaction which was new to her, an emotion which was heady and intoxicating. She was uplifted, free now of Callendar, free of Clarence, free of everything in all the world ... alone, liberated, triumphant. She had defeated them all. And when he turned toward her for the last time there was a look in her eyes which said, “It is no use. You need have no hope. It can never be.”

On leaving, he kissed her hand, gently this time as if the passion had gone out of him. All he said was, “I shall do then what they expect of me. Some day you may wish for what you have thrown away.... I don’t imagine a thing like this happens every day.”

He was polite but, like herself, he was unbroken. He appeared to have regained possession of himself, to have become cold and calm and even a trifle indifferent. That was all he said and when he had gone the sight of his back, so slim, so strong, so inscrutable, filled her with a sudden weakness, for she knew that she had closed the door not alone upon Callendar but upon his mother, upon Sabine, upon the big house on Murray Hill, upon all that she had built up with such terrible patience.

* * * * *

He did what was expected of him. In a fortnight there appeared in the newspapers an announcement of the engagement of Richard Callendar to Sabine Cane. It described the great fortune of the prospective bridegroom and enlarged upon the social position of the happy couple. On the same day there was a paragraph apprising the world of the fact that Thérèse Callendar had sailed as usual to spend the remainder of the year abroad. But there was nothing said of the girl whom the world had seen lunching with Richard Callendar in Sherry’s. She was talked of, to be sure, in the circles in which Mrs. Champion and the Virgins, Mrs. Mallinson and the Apostle to the Genteel, were shining lights. They agreed that it must have been the clever Thérèse who disposed of the girl (perhaps paid her well) and made the match she desired; and they predicted with some satisfaction an unhappy life for Sabine. But Sabine in the end had won her game of patience, though she never knew the reason.

34

It was in the weeks which followed the final meeting that Ellen came really to suffer. Together there in the shabby little room she had been sustained by the very struggle between them, by all the excitement that warmed and strengthened her. Now that he was gone forever, he kept returning to her in a fashion more terrifying than he had ever been in the flesh. Even at night when she lay in the apple green bed, so near and yet remote from Clarence, trying always to conceal from him the faintest suspicion, she could not free her memory from the sound of his voice and the persuasion of his hands. The memory of him haunted her, so that she grew pale and thin and Clarence, filled as always with nervous anxiety, urged her to go away into the country. In moments of depression she even reproached herself with being a fool for having thrown away what Callendar could have given her ... his wealth, which she needed, the place which he could have given her in the world. Indeed when life seemed altogether hopeless, she went so far as to contemplate a return to the Town, a thing she had sworn never to do save in triumph.

Clarence, understanding dimly that she was unhappy, sought to help her with a kindness that hurt her more deeply than any cruelty could have done. There were nights when he lay awake listening until the gray light appeared over the river and the sound of her regular breathing told him that at last she was asleep. Beneath the strain he too became pale and thin. His nose grew more pointed and his little round shoulders more and more stooped. In the mornings when Ellen, busy over his breakfast, caught rare glimpses of him, as he patiently did his exercises on the floor of the bath room, she was smitten with the old sense of pity at the thinness of his poor body. It hurt her in a fierce way because it was so different from the catlike suppleness of the man who was gone now forever. It was the valiant quality in Clarence, the struggle to be worthy of her, to make her always love him that made her helpless. Until now she had never clearly understood the power he had over her. It was the terrible power which the weak have over the strong.

* * * * *

It proved a hot, breathless summer when the asphalt turned spongy and the carriage wheels left great ruts and ridges. Even on the top floor of the Babylon Arms there was no coolness save on the rare nights when the wind, blowing up the river from the free and open sea, penetrated the high windows. It became more and more difficult too when Clarence came to her one evening and said, “I’m sorry dear, but we must economize. I find that we have been living beyond our income.”

He said it so meekly, so apologetically and he looked so weary that she kissed him and replied, “I have money saved ... money that I earned this winter. We can use that if we’re in a tight place.”

But he refused it. He assured her that there was no such deep necessity. He would not, he said, take anything she earned. He must support them always. And when she told him that this was absurd, he straightened himself and grew indignant.

“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “If you’ll give me time, we’ll be rich one day.... I’m getting ahead. It’s not easy. There’s so much competition. Don’t think I’m a failure.” He took her hand and pressed it savagely. “You won’t think that ... will you?... Just be patient and give me time. I’ll be rich some day.”

Time! Time! She knew then what she had always known--that time would make no difference with Clarence. There was no way out. Whatever was to be done, she must do it herself. The old passion swept her. She would not sink. She would not yield to circumstance. She would die rather than fail!

35

When Fergus came in early September to make his home in the little flat atop the Babylon Arms, the strain, the weariness, the very heat itself appeared for a time to dissipate. He was, of course, a novelty. Into an existence which had become flat and stale through the long routine of petty things, into a monotony which even the energy of Ellen was unable to dissipate, the brother carried a sense of excitement. At seventeen he bore a resemblance to his father, but only in a physical sense, for there was more dash, more vitality in him than there had ever been in Charles Tolliver. Tall, with wide shoulders and blue eyes that looked out from beneath sensuous drooping lids, he possessed the same blond charm which in Charles Tolliver’s youth had made the vigorous Hattie Barr his slave. In the son there was even the same echo of that quality which the world, in its stupidity, called weakness and which was not weakness at all. The boy as yet was too young to understand what it was; the father, long past middle age, knew that it was a precious gift, a quality which protected him against the pettiness of the same stupid world. It was a disarming tolerance and geniality that made him friend alike to every one, beggar or prince, who passed his way. Father or son would have been at home in any part of the world; they would have found friends among the Lapps as easily as among the farmers of their own county; the Moros would have received them as honored comrades. It was a quality that transcended limitations of family, of nationality, of race; it was a simple friendliness. And in their way they loved life as passionately as Ellen and Hattie Tolliver; the difference lay in the fact that their joy was a warm, glowing, steady emotion less spectacular and vivid.

* * * * *

It was Clarence who suffered the first onslaught of the brother’s charm, for Fergus arrived to find his brother-in-law lying in one of the green beds, alone in the flat. Carrying bundles of luggage carefully prepared by the hand of Hattie, he burst into the room and came suddenly upon Clarence, asleep beneath the blankets, his mouth open a little way, his face a shade near to the green of the painted beds. Asleep and off his guard, Clarence was not a spirited picture. Fergus could not have remembered him distinctly, for he had seen him but twice and then long ago in the days when he was courting May Seton. More than three years had passed and Fergus, standing now at the foot of the bed, big and placid and blond, regarded his brother-in-law with the air of a stranger. Clarence slept quietly; his narrow nose appeared more pinched than it had been; the brown tousled hair had thinned until at the back of his head there appeared a tiny island that was entirely bald. The nervous, knotty hands lay outside the cover, pale and covered with pallid skin that was transparent and showed beneath it a network of tiny blue veins.

If Ellen had come in that moment, her brother, in his naïve honesty, might have turned to her and asked, “What have you done to him?” But she did not come and, as he turned to leave the room, Clarence stirred and opened his eyes. Out of the depths of his sleep he emerged painfully, leaning for an instant on one elbow and staring silently in reply to the cheery “Hello” of Fergus.

“It’s me--Fergus,” said the boy. “I just came in.”

Again Clarence stared for a time and then murmured slowly. “Oh! yes. It’s you!... I didn’t recognize you at first.... I was having a dream ... a bad dream. Won’t you sit down?”

It was a stiff greeting, somewhat awkward, not because the boy was unwelcome but because Clarence, who would have welcomed the devil himself for the sake of his wife, was ill at ease. It may have been the dream that disturbed him.

Fergus pulled up a chair beside the bed, and asked if his brother-in-law were ill.

“It’s nothing,” was the answer. “It’s just a bilious attack. I have them every now and then.... I’ll be over it in a day or two.”

Then he lay back once more, wearily, and asked Fergus about his trip and about his mother and father and the people in the Town--all save the Setons. They made polite conversation to each other and Clarence, beneath the spell of the boy’s friendliness, melted a little so that the stiffness presently slipped away. But after a time the conversation for want of interest died back into silence and Fergus went to the window to feast his young eyes on the panorama of the river and the great city into which he had escaped. The boy was happy with an animal sort of joy which showed itself in the very lines of his tall body, in the brightness of his blue eyes. He too was free now, a rover, attached to nothing.

“It’s a great place,” he said presently, and turning from the window, added, “I think I’ll get settled.... Where do I hang out?”

He had picked up his hat before Clarence said, “Wait.... There’s something I want to talk to you about.... Just a minute.” And then humbly after a pause: “It won’t be long.”

* * * * *

So the boy seated himself again and waited while Clarence sat up in bed, looking thin and worried in his mauve pajamas, and, after coughing nervously, said, “It’s about Ellen.... You know her better than I do.... I’ve lived with her for three years but she’s more like you.... She’s not like me, at all.”

Fergus stirred nervously and blushed a little, perhaps in doubt of what Clarence was to say.

“It’s about Ellen,” Clarence repeated, looking down at the quilt. “I don’t think she’s happy and I don’t know what to do about it.”

The boy laughed. “Oh, she’s always like that.... It doesn’t mean anything. She used to be cross with us at home most of the time.” He knew Ellen well enough. She was a cross, bad-tempered girl whom you could control if you understood the method.

“I don’t mean that.... I’ve known her when she’s like that.... This is different.” He halted for a moment and fell to tracing the design on the quilt with his thin finger. He was thinking, thinking, trying to explain. “No, it’s not like that,” he said presently. “It’s worse than that. She never complains.... She never says anything. Only it doesn’t go away.... It hangs ... like a cloud. I’m not meaning to complain about her.... It’s my fault if it’s any one’s.... But she’s sad now ... in spite of anything I can do.” And then he added painfully, “She’s unhappy.”

Fergus waited. He sat with the air of a man desiring to escape, as if he would in some way repel these confidences and force Clarence into silence. He hated confidences, sorrow, trouble, of any sort. But Clarence was not to be silenced. He even grew a little excited.

“You see, the trouble goes back farther than that.... I can’t explain it.... I don’t know how.... Only she’s never belonged to me at all. She’s always escaping me.... And I try and try.”

“It’s her music,” repeated Fergus. “She’s crazy about it.... She always has been.” Sitting there he seemed the symbol of a youth which could have no belief in disaster. He would never be hurt as Clarence was being hurt.

Clarence, ignoring the interruption, continued. “I married her and she’s my wife.... She’s a good wife and she does everything for me.... She never refuses me anything....” He coughed and, looking down, added, “Not even herself.”

The color in Fergus’ cheeks flamed out now. He too became ill at ease.

“Don’t think,” said Clarence, “that I mean to complain. It’s all my fault. A man ought to be able to make his wife happy.... I’ve tried hard. I’ve tried to make money. I’m good to her ... but....” He trailed into silence for a time and when he returned it was easy to say, “But somehow she escapes me always.... There’s something in her that doesn’t belong to me. I don’t know what it is because I’ve never been able to discover it.... And you can’t talk to her about such things.... I’ve tried. Once I got almost to the point and she said, ‘Don’t worry, Clarence. You mustn’t take things so seriously.... I’m all right. Don’t think about me.’ But I can’t help thinking, because when she’s unhappy I am too, because I love her so much. I’d do anything for her.”

He lay back and fell to regarding the ceiling. Fergus, in silence, watched him now with a look of intense curiosity. Perhaps he guessed what it was Ellen had done to him. Perhaps he realized that, without knowing it, he had himself come to look upon Clarence in the same fashion that his sister regarded him ... as a nice, kind, good man whom one tolerated. He was older and paler and more insignificant than he had been in the days when he courted May Seton. What the man needed perhaps was some one--a wife--who would lean upon him, who would think him a wonderful creature. And instead of that he had Ellen. Clarence rose on one elbow and said slowly, “But don’t tell her.... Don’t say I spoke of it.”

It was the end of their talk. They never mentioned the thing again, but in some way the conversation appeared to bring Clarence a kind of dumb relief.

Of course, there were things that Fergus could not have known. He could not have known--Fergus, who took life so lightly--that the little man’s only experience with love had been Ellen. He could not have known that Clarence was the victim of a sensual nature placed by some ironic trick of fate in the body of a prig. He could not have known that the man was the victim of that little vein, so amusing to Lily, which with the march of the years beat less and less passionately. He could not have known that Clarence had discovered love in the body of Ellen and was now love’s victim--that he was being destroyed because he had never known, even now, what love might be.

Of this secret Fergus said nothing to Ellen, perhaps because Clarence had asked him to keep silence and perhaps because he came to understand in the succeeding days that in her present mood, it would serve only to increase the strain. It was not until years afterward that he broke his silence and wrote her that he had known from the first day how matters stood. In his good-natured way, he sought rather to drive away the mood entirely. During the remainder of the week, while Clarence lay in bed, the brother and sister made excursions together into various parts of the city and Ellen, for a little time, grew again eager and filled with the old restless energy. They understood each other, this pair, in a miraculous fashion, though they were in many ways so different. They looked upon the world in the same way, as a great pie from which plums are to be wrested. They knew the same delights of being free and alone, the strange joy of being a part of a vast spectacle from which they were, at the same time, curiously aloof. For neither of them did the past exist. They lived wholly in the future. If there was a difference it lay in this--that Fergus looked upon the future as a land filled with a host of careless delights; to Ellen the future was a country in which lay the rewards of fame, of wealth, of vindication. She would force those who had mocked to bend their knees. As for these, Fergus never even thought of them. The world to him was a friendly place.

* * * * *

He began presently to attend his classes. Clarence recovered and returned to the offices of the Superba Electrical Company, and Ellen, pondering secret plans for the expedition to Paris and Lily, returned to her endless practising. In the evenings she played magnificently, for she had now a superb audience in the person of Fergus who, sprawling on the divan with his eyes closed, listened to her in a sensual abandonment. There were times when it must have seemed to her that Callendar had returned and listened. The old likeness, so elusive, so indefinable, came to live again in the long evenings. She could not say what it was, save that they both possessed a wildness not to be hindered by ambition or restraint or even laws. They were both among those who were born free.

But as the month of October advanced, a depression appeared slowly to envelope her. To Fergus the change became apparent and to Clarence it was acute. She betrayed herself by no single thought or action; it was far less simple and direct. Outwardly she went through the old motions of living. Sometimes in the autumn evenings when the husband and the brother sat listening to her music, Clarence would turn his pale eyes toward Fergus with a look which said, “You see what I mean? What am I to do?” The grayness trapped them all, even the genial, careless boy.

In the hours when she was alone, she did things which might have betrayed her, had they been known. Instead of spending the long hours at her piano she walked for miles, sometimes along the river, sometimes in the park. And she developed a new interest in newspapers, an interest which centered itself upon the columns setting forth the doings in the world of the rich and fashionable. From these she learned that Thérèse Callendar and her son had returned from abroad, bringing with them Sabine and a trousseau which cost fabulous sums. She discovered that the wedding party was not to be in Sabine’s narrow house (it was too small) but in the solid brownstone house of the Callendars. The wedding, said the columns, was to be not in the flamboyant new St. Jude’s on the Avenue but in St. Bart’s two blocks away, a small church of dark brown stone, rather shabby but really distinguished. Knowledge of this sort she had picked up in the course of her brief adventure into the world. She understood the difference between St. Jude’s which was the richest church and St. Bart’s which was the most fashionable. These things were put away in the little pigeonholes of her observing brain (so like the pigeonholes in Gramp Tolliver’s walnut desk).

She learned all this and never once did she betray any sign of her knowledge or her interest. Clarence would have known nothing of the wedding save that Mr. Wyck, over one of their greasy lunches far down town, mentioned it to him with the sly suggestion that his wife might be interested and would no doubt be invited. Wyck appeared to know most of the details, for in the secrecy of his bleak room he read the society columns, and there was always the backstairs gossip which came to him through the two aunts in Yonkers. Over the apple-sauce, and under the eye of the peroxide blonde cashier, he insinuated other things, suggestions that Ellen might even be more interested than her husband imagined, but Clarence either was too stupid to understand these hints or in his loyalty saw fit to ignore them.

But when he returned to the flat he did say to Ellen, “I see your friend Mrs. Callendar’s son is being married. I suppose you’ll be invited to the wedding.”

Ellen glanced at him sharply and then returned to her work. “No,” she said calmly. “I don’t think I’ll be invited. Why should I be?”

“I didn’t know,” he replied awkwardly. “I thought they were friends of yours.”

“No. I worked for them.... A thing like that means nothing.”

After that he was silent and for a time wore an air of disappointment. She knew, beyond all doubt, that it would have pleased him to know that his wife had been invited to a fashionable wedding. The old ambitions, less vigorous now, stirred more and more rarely. To-night, for a moment they had been kindled, but it was the last time they ever raised their dangerous heads. Clarence read his newspaper and did not speak again of the event.