Chapter VII: Part 7

But that was not my only reward, though of what I received in addition I find it difficult to tell you. Indeed, I should make no attempt to tell you at all were it not so essential to this small record of a human life. All I want to say is that that thing came to me as a new revelation which is probably an every-day fact to you—that by the simple process of loving I could dwell in God, I could be aware that God was all round me.

I mean that once I understood that love was God the great mystery that had tantalized me all my life was solved. All my life I had been tortured by the questions: Who is God? What is God? What is my relation to Him—or have I any? And now I seemed to have found the answer. When I got back to love—the common, natural love for my father and mother and sisters—when I got back to feeling more gently toward my brothers—I began to see—you must forgive me if I seem blatant, but that is not my intention—I began to see faintly and very inadequately that I was actually in touch with God.

I am far from saying that all my difficulties were overcome. Of course they were not. I mean only that that divine force of which I had been told the universe was full, but which had always seemed apart from me, remote from my needs, actually came, in some measure at least, within my possession. Just as Beady Lamont found the furniture-moving business shiny with it, once he knew where to look for it, so I began to see my work as an architect. It was as if a golden key had been put into my hand which unlocked the richest of life’s secrets.

All at once people whom I had known to be well disposed toward me, and whom I had dismissed at that, began to translate God to me. Ralph Coningsby, Cantyre, Lovey, Christian, Pyn, not to speak of others, were like reflectors that threw the rays of the great Central Sun straight into my soul. I am not declaring that there was no tarnish on the surfaces that caught those beams and transmitted them to me—probably there was—but light and warmth were poured into me for all that. Not that there was a change in their attitude toward me; the change was in my point of view, in my capacity for seeing. What I had thought of only as human aid I now perceived to be the celestial bread and wine; and where I had supposed I was living only with men, I knew I was walking with God.

And yet there was a love with regard to which I could not have this peace of mind. Christian would perhaps have ascribed that defect to the fact that there was passion in it. My own fear was that, having had its inception in a moment of crime, it could never free itself from the conditions that gave it birth.

After the Christmas dinner there was a change toward me in the bearing of Regina Barry and her mother. Without growing colder, they became slightly more formal; and that I understood. As they had come so far in my direction, it was for me to go some of the distance in theirs, and I didn’t.

I didn’t because I couldn’t. I was like a man who would have been glad to walk if paralysis hadn’t nailed him to his seat. As, however, it was emotional paralysis and not physical, there was no means by which they could become aware of it; nor could I make up my mind to tell them.

For quite apart from my damnable secret was the common, every-day fact that I had no income sufficient to maintain a wife in anything like the comfort to which Regina Barry had been accustomed. Though she might have accepted what I had to offer, I felt the usual masculine scruples as to offering it. This, too, was something that couldn’t be explained unless there was some urgent need of the explanation; and so when I was mad to go forward I had, to my shame and confusion, to hang back.

Their retreat was managed with tact and dignity. During the week after Christmas I saw them on a number of occasions, always by invitation, though I had no further talk with Regina Barry alone. Two or three times I guessed she would have been willing to go out to walk with me, but I didn’t suggest it. As she had proposed it once, she could hardly do so a second time, and so we sat tamely in a sitting-room. Like that minute on Christmas Eve when she would have flown into my arms had I opened them, other minutes came and went; and I saw my coldness reacting on her visibly.

At the end of ten days a note told me that they had returned to New York, apologizing for the fact that they had not had time to bid me good-by. Though seeing plainly enough the folly of a correspondence, I wrote in response to that note, hoping that a correspondence might ensue. But I got no answer. I got nothing. Not so much as a message was sent to me on the days when Ralph Coningsby came down.

I did not resent this; I only suffered. I suffered the more because of supposing that she suffered too. And yet when I next saw her I found nothing to support that theory.

When I went to New York for a few days in February I called, but they were not at home. Having left my card, I waited for a message that would name an hour when I should find them; but I waited in vain. During the four days my visit lasted I heard nothing kindlier than what Cantyre repeated, that they were sorry to have been out when I came.

As I sent them flowers before leaving the city, a note from Mrs. Barry thanked me for them cordially; but there was not a syllable in it that gave me an excuse for writing in response. Reason told me that it was better that it should be so, but reason had ceased to be sufficient as a guide.

In March I made an errand that took me to town for a week-end, and on the Sunday afternoon I called again at the house which had so curiously become the focusing-point of my destiny. Miss Barry was at home and receiving. I found her with two or three other people, and she welcomed me as doubtless she had welcomed them. Even when I had outstayed them she betrayed none of that matter-of-course intimacy which had marked her attitude toward me in December. She seemed to have retired behind all sorts of mental fortifications over which I couldn’t at first make my way.

When we were seated in the style of Darby and Joan at the opposite corners of a slumbering fire she told me her father had made one hurried visit from California, and that, now that he had returned to the Pacific coast, she and her mother were thinking of joining him there. Should they do so, they would probably remain till it was time to go to Long Island in June. Two or three protestations against this absence came to my lips, but of course I couldn’t utter them.

I could have sworn that she was saying to herself, “You don’t seem to care!” though aloud it became, “We’ve never been in California, and we want to see what it’s like.”

I seized the opportunity to rejoin, “You’ve a fancy for seeing what things are like, haven’t you?”

She took up the challenge instantly. “Why do you say that?”

“Only because of what you’ve said at different times yourself.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t want to quote. I was thinking of the taste you’ve frequently acknowledged for making experiments.”

“Experiments in things—or people?”

“I was thinking of people.”

She marched right into my camp by saying, boldly, “Oh, you mean the number of times I’ve—I’ve broken engagements?”

“Perhaps I mean rather the number of times you’ve formed them.”

“Did you ever buy a house?”

I replied with some wonder that I had not.

“Well, we’ve bought two—this one and the one at Rosyth. But before buying either we rented each for a season to see whether or not we liked it.”

“And you did.”

“But we’ve rented others which we didn’t. So you see.”

“I see that experiments are justified. Is that what you mean?”

“If one is satisfied with anything that comes along, by all means take it. But if one only wants what one wants—”

“And you know what you want?”

Her eyes were all fire; her lips had the daring scarlet of a poppy.

“I’ve never got beyond knowing what I don’t want.”

“That is, you’ve never taken anything up except in the long run to throw it down?”

“Your expressions are too harsh. One doesn’t throw down everything one doesn’t want. One sets it aside.”

“And would it be discreet to ask why you—why you set certain things—and people—aside?”

She looked at the fire as if considering.

“Do you mean—men?”

“To narrow the inquiry down, suppose I say I do.”

“And”—she threw me a swift, daring glance—“and marriage?”

“That defines the question still further.”

Her words came as the utterance of long, long thoughts.

“One couldn’t marry a man one didn’t trust.”

“No; of course not.”

“Nor a milksop.”

“You couldn’t.”

“Nor a man who wasn’t a thoroughbred.”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“Oh, don’t you know? If not I can’t explain. All I can say is that there are things a thoroughbred couldn’t do.”

“What sort of things?”

“Why should you want me to tell you? You know as well as I do. The things that make a man impossible—mean things—ignoble things.”

“Criminal things?”

“Criminal things, too, I suppose. I don’t know so much about them; but I do see a lot of meanness and pettiness and— Oh, well, the sort of lack of the fastidious in honor that—that puts a man out of the question.”

“Aren’t you very hard to please?”

“Possibly.”

“And if you don’t find what—what you’re looking for?”

“I shall do without it, I suppose.”

“And if you think you find it—and then discover that, after all—”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I don’t know. I’ve never been absolutely disillusioned so far. When disillusion has come to me—as it has—I could see it on the way. But if I—I cared for some one and found I was deceived in him— But what’s the use in talking of it?” she laughed. “Please don’t think I’m putting forth a claim to be treated better than the average. It’s only when I see the average—”

“The average of men?”

“No, the average of women. When I see what they’re willing to take—and marry—and live with—I can only say that I find myself very well off as I am.”

This conversation did not make it easier for me to go back to the starting-point of our acquaintance; but the moment came when I did it.

_CHAPTER XVI_

I did not, however, do it that spring, since the event that compelled me at last to the step took up all my attention.

It was toward the end of April that I received a telegram signed by my sister’s name:

“Mother seriously ill. Wants to see you. Come at once.”

In spite of my alarm at this summons I saw the opportunity of putting up a good front before my relatives. Taking Lovey with me as valet, and stopping at the best hotel, I presented the appearance of a successful man.

Though anxiety on my mother’s account made my return a matter of secondary interest, I could see the surprise and relief my apparent prosperity created. My brothers had been expecting one of whom they would have to be ashamed. Furthermore, they had not been too confident as to my attitude with regard to my father’s will. Looking for me to contest it, they had suspected that behind my acquiescence lay a ruse. When they saw that there was none, that I made no complaint, that I seemed to have plenty of money, that I traveled with a servant, that I had the air of a man of means—a curious note of wonder and respect stole into their manner toward me. I know that in private they were saying to each other that they couldn’t make me out; and I gave them no help in doing so.

I gave them no help during all the month I remained in Montreal. I arranged with Coningsby to take that time, and my little stock of savings was sufficient to finance me. Though I was once more putting up a bluff, it was a bluff that I felt to be justified; and in the end it found its justification.

I have no intention of giving you the details of those four weeks of watching beside a bed where the end was apparent from the first. Now that I look back upon them, I can see that they were not without their element of happiness, since to my mother at least it was happiness to know that I was beside her. The joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth was on her face from the day I appeared, and never left it up to that moment when we took our last look at her dear smiling features.

When the lawyer came to read us her will I found, to my amazement, that she had left me everything she possessed.

It was then that I reaped that which I had sown at Andy Christian’s suggestion. Since with a good grace I had accepted my father’s will, the rest of the family could hardly do otherwise with regard to my mother’s. She left a note saying that, had my father lived a few months longer, he would have seen that I had re-established myself sufficiently to be allowed to share equally with the rest of the family in what he had to leave; but, as it was too late for that, she was endeavoring to right the seeming injustice—which he had not meant as an injustice—as far as lay in her power. These words from her pen being much more emphatic than any I could remember from her lips, my brothers and sisters, whatever they felt inwardly, could only give their assent to them.

What my mother possessed included not only the personal estate she had inherited from her father, considerably augmented by her husband’s careful management, but books, furniture, and jewelry. The books and furniture I made over to my sister to remain in the two houses, the one in Montreal, the other on the Ottawa. Some of the jewelry I gave to her, to my sister in England, and to my two sisters-in-law, though keeping the bulk for my wife—when I got one.

For I was now in a position to marry. Though my mother had had no great wealth, what she left me, together with the trust fund established by my father and what I earned, would assure me enough to live in at least as much comfort as Ralph Coningsby. I could, therefore, propose to Regina Barry and feel I could make a home for her.

I had again come to the conclusion that if I asked her she would accept me. I make no attempt to analyze this feeling on her part, because I saw plainly enough that it was founded on mistake. That is to say, having developed an ideal of the man whom she could marry, she had nursed herself into the belief that I came up to it, when, as a matter of fact, I did not.

Now I had seen enough of husbands and wives to know that in most marriages there is some such illusion as this, and that it can be successfully maintained for years. When the illusion itself has faded it can live on as the illusion of an illusion. By the time there is no illusion or shadow of illusion left at all it has ceased in the majority of cases to matter. Time has welded what mutual distaste might have put asunder, and the married state remains undisturbed.

I was, therefore, obliged to face the consideration that if I married the woman I loved she would probably never discover what I felt it my duty to confess. Was it really, then, my duty to confess it? Since no one knew it but myself, was it not rather my duty to keep it concealed? Other men had secrets from their wives—especially those that concerned the days when they were unmarried—and all were probably the happier for the secrecy. Even Ralph Coningsby, who was the most model husband I could think of, had said that if he were to tell his wife all he could tell her about himself he would be ashamed to go home. There were weeks when I debated these questions every day and night, arriving at one conclusion by what I may call my rough horse sense, and at another by my instinct. Horse sense said, “Marry her and keep mum.” Instinct warned, “You can never marry her and be safe and happy with such a secret as this to come between you.”

Throughout this wavering of opinion I knew that when the time came I should act from instinct. It wasn’t merely that I wanted to be safe; it was also that, all pros and cons apart, there was such a thing as honor. Not even to be happy—not even to make the woman I cared for happy—could I ignore that.

I am not sure how much Andrew Christian understood of the circumstances when, without giving him the facts or mentioning a name, I asked his advice. He only said:

“You’ve had some experience, Frank, of the potency of love, haven’t you? Well, love has a twin sister—truth. In love and truth together there’s a power which, if we have the patience to wait for its working out, will solve all difficulties and meet all needs.”

My experiences during the past few months having given me some reason to believe this, I decided, so far as I came actively to a decision, to let it rule my course; but in the end the critical moment came by what you would probably call an accident.

It was the last Sunday in June. My work in Atlantic City being over, Mrs. Grace had asked me to come down for the week-end to her little place in Long Island. It was not exactly a party, though there were two or three other people staying in the house. My chief reason for accepting the invitation—as I think it was the chief reason for its being given—was that the Barry family were in residence on the old Hornblower estate, which was the adjoining property.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Grace and her guests were all asked to Idlewild, as the late Mrs. Hornblower had named her house, to Sunday lunch.

The path from the one dwelling to the other was down the gentle slope of Mrs. Grace’s gardens, across a meadow, at the other side of which it joined the Idlewild avenue, and then up a steep hill to the rambling red-and-yellow house. Here one dominated the Sound for a great part of the hundred and twenty miles between Montauk Point and Brooklyn.

Sauntering idly through the hot summer noon, I found myself beside Mrs. Grace, while the rest of the party straggled on ahead. As my hostess was not more free than other women from the match-making instinct, it was natural that she should give to the conversation a turn that she knew would not be distasteful to me.

“She’s a wonderful girl,” she observed, “with just that danger to threaten her that comes from being over-fastidious.”

“I know what you mean by her being over-fastidious; but why is it a danger?”

“In the first place, because people misunderstand her. They’ve ascribed to light-mindedness what has only been the thing that literary people call the divine searching for perfection.”

“And do you know the kind of thing she’d consider perfect?”

It was so stupid a question that I couldn’t be surprised to see a gleam of quiet mischief in her glance as she replied, “From little hints she’s dropped to me, quite confidentially, I rather think I do.”

Fair men blush easily, but I tried to ignore the fact that I was doing it as I said, “That’s quite a common delusion at one stage of the game; but suppose she were to find that she was mistaken?”

The answer shelved the question, though she did it disconcertingly: “Oh, well, in the case she’s thinking of I don’t believe she will.”

I was so eager for data that I pushed the inquiry indiscreetly.

“What makes you so sure?”

“One can tell. It isn’t a thing one can put into words. You know by a kind of intuition.”

“Know what?”

“That a certain kind of person can never have had any but a certain kind of standard.” She gave me another of those quietly mischievous glances. “I’ll tell you what she said to me one day not long ago. She said she’d only known one man in her life—known him well, that is—of whom she was sure that he was a thoroughbred to the core.”

“But you admitted at the beginning that that kind of conviction is a danger.”

“It would be a danger if her friends couldn’t bear her out in believing it to be justified.”

Unable to face any more of this subtle flattery, I was obliged to let the subject drop.

The lunch was like any other lunch. As an unimportant person at a gathering where every one knew every one else more or less intimately, I was to some extent at liberty to follow my own thoughts, which were not altogether happy ones. For telling what I had to tell, the necessity had grown urgent. What was lacking, what had always seemed to be lacking, was the positive opportunity. This I resolved to seek; but suddenly I found it before me.

This was toward the middle of the afternoon, when the party had broken up. It had broken up imperceptibly by dissolving into groups that strolled about the lawns and descended the long flights of steps leading to the beach below. As I had not been seated near Miss Barry at table, it was no more than civil for me to approach her when the party was on the veranda and the lawn. Our right to privacy was recognized at once by a withdrawal of the rest of the company. It was probably assumed that I was to be the fourth in the series of experiments of which Jim Hunter and Stephen Cantyre had been the second and the third; and, though my fellow-guests might be sorry for me, they would not intervene to protect me.

Considering it sufficient to make their adieux to Mrs. Barry, they left us undisturbed in a nook of one of the verandas. Here we were out of sight of any of the avenues and pathways to the house, and Mrs. Barry was sufficiently in sympathy with our desire to be alone not to send any one in search of us. On the lawn robins were hopping, and along the edge of shorn grass the last foxgloves made upright lines of color against the olive-green scrub-oak. Far down through the trees one caught the silvery glinting of water.

The sounds of voices and motor wheels having died away, Miss Barry said, languidly: “I think they must be all gone. They’ll say I’m terribly rude to keep myself out of sight. But it’s lovely here, isn’t it? And this is such a cozy spot in which to smoke and have coffee. I read here, too, and— Oh, dear, what’s happening?”

It was then that the little accident which was to play so large a part in my life occurred. She had leaned forward from her wicker chair to set her empty coffee-cup on the table. As she did so the string of pearls which she wore at the opening of her simple white dress loosened itself and slipped like a tiny snake to the floor of the veranda. From a corresponding chair on the other side of the table I sprang up and stooped. When I raised myself with the pearls in my right hand I slipped them into my pocket.

Between the fingers of my left hand I held a lighted cigar. Bareheaded, I was wearing white flannels and tennis shoes. Now that the moment had come, I felt extraordinarily cool—as cool as on the night when I had slipped this string of pearls into my pocket before. I looked down and smiled at her. Leaning back in her chair, she looked up and smiled at me.

I shall always see her like that—in white with a slash of silk of the red of her lips somewhere about her waist, and a ribbon of the same round her dashing Panama hat. Her feet in little brown shoes were crossed. With an elbow on the arm of her chair, she held a small red fan out from her person, though she wasn’t actively using it.

“What does that mean?” she asked, idly, at last.

“Doesn’t it remind you of anything?”

“No—of nothing.”

“Didn’t you ever see any one put these pearls into his pocket before?”

“Why, no!” She added, as if an idea had begun to dawn in the back of her memory, “Not in that way.”

“Oh, I remember. You didn’t see him put them in at all. You only saw him take them out.”

The smile remained on her features, but something puzzled gave it faint new curves.

“Why—”

“It was like this, wasn’t it?”

I drew out the pearls and threw them on the table.

She bent forward slightly, still smiling, like a person watching with bewildered intensity a conjurer’s trick.

“Why—”

“Only your gold-mesh purse was with them—and your diamond bar-pin—and your rings.”

“Why—who, who on earth could have told you?”

I, too, continued to smile, consciously wondering if I should be as calm as this in the hour of death.

“Who do you think?”

“It wasn’t Elsie Coningsby?”

“No. She was in the house, but—”

“How did you know that?” She uttered a mystified laugh. “She _was_ there! It was one of the nights she stayed with me when papa and mamma were down here superintending some changes before we could move in. But I never told her anything about it.”

“Why didn’t you—when she was right on the spot?”

“Oh, because.”

The smile disappeared. She stopped looking up at me to turn her eyes toward the foxgloves and scrub-oak.

“Yes? Because—what?”

“Because I promised—that man—I wouldn’t.”

“Why should you have made him such a promise?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just at the time I was—I was sorry for him.”

“And aren’t you sorry for him still?”

She looked up at me again with one of her bright challenges.

“Look here! Do you know him?”

“Tell me first what I asked you. Aren’t you sorry for him still?”

“I dare say I am. I don’t know.”

“What did you—what did you—think of him at the time?”

“I thought he was—terrible.”

“Terrible—in what way?”

“I don’t know that I can tell you in what way. It was so awful to think that a man who had had some advantages should have sunk to that. If he’d been a real burglar—I mean a professional criminal—I should have been afraid of him; but I shouldn’t have had that sensation of something meant for better things that had been debased.”

“Didn’t he tell you he was hungry?”

The smile came back—faintly.

“You seem to know all about it, don’t you? It’s the strangest thing I ever knew. No one in this world could have told you but himself. Yes, he did say he was hungry; but then, a man who’d been what he must have been shouldn’t have got into that condition. He’d stolen into our pantry, poor creature, and drunk the cooking-wine. He told me that—” Without rising, her figure became alert with a new impulse. “Oh, I see! You do know him. He was an Englishman. I remember that.”

I placed myself fully before her. “No, he wasn’t an Englishman.”

“He spoke like one.”

“So do I, for the matter of that.”

“Then he was a Canadian. Was he?”

“He was a Canadian.”

“Oh, then that accounts for it. But you did puzzle me at first. But how did you come to meet him? Was it at that Down and Out Club that papa and Mr. Christian are so interested in? You go to it, too, don’t you? I think Stephen Cantyre said you did.”

“Yes, I go to it, too.”

She grew pensive, resting her chin on a hand, with her elbow on the arm of the chair.

“I suppose it’s all right; but I never can understand how men can be so merciful to one other’s vices. It looks as if they recognized the seed of them within themselves.”

“Probably that’s the reason.”

“Women don’t feel like that about one another.”

“They haven’t the same cause.”

“I hope he’s doing better—that man—and picking up again.”

“He is.”

She asked, in quite another tone, “You’re not going back to New York to-morrow, are you?”

“I’m not sure—yet.”

“Hilda said she was going to try to persuade you and the Grahams to stay till Tuesday. If you can stay, mamma and I were planning—”

I put myself directly in front of her, no more than a few feet away, my hands in the pockets of my jacket.

“Look at me again. Look at me well. Try to recall—”

Slowly, very slowly, she struggled to her feet. The color went out of her lips and the light from her eyes as she backed away from me in a kind of terror.

“What—what—are you trying to make me—to make me understand?”

“Think! How should I know all that I’ve been saying if—”

“If the man himself didn’t tell you. But he did.”

“No, he didn’t. No one had to tell me.”

She reached the veranda rail, which she clutched with one hand, while the other, clenched, was pressed against her breast.

“You don’t mean—”

“Yes, I do mean—”

“Oh, you can’t?”

“Why can’t I.”

“Because—because it isn’t—it isn’t possible! You”—she seemed to be shivering—“you could never have—”

“But I did.”

She gasped brokenly. “You? You?”

I nodded. “Yes—I.”

I tried to tell her, but I suppose I did it badly. Put into a few bald words the tale was not merely sordid, it was low. I could give it no softening touch, no saving grace. It was more beastly than I had ever imagined it.

Fortunately she didn’t listen with attention. The means were indifferent to her when she knew the end. For the minute, at any rate, she saw me not as I stood there, clean and in white, but as I had been a year before, dirty and in rags. But she saw more than that. With every word I uttered she saw the ideal she had formed broken into shivers, like a shattered looking-glass.

She interrupted my preposterous story to gasp, “I can’t believe it!”

“But it’s true.”

“Then you mustn’t mind if—if I put you to a test. Did you—did you write anything while you were there?”

“I printed something—in the same kind of letters you’ve seen at the bottom of architects’ plans.”

“And how did you come to do it?”

I recounted the circumstance, at which she nodded her head in verification.

“So that was how you knew the words you repeated to me a few months ago?”

“That was how. I said there were men in the world different from any you’d seen yet; and I told you to wait.”

She made a tremendous effort to become again the daring mistress of herself which she generally was. She smiled, too, nervously, and with a kind of sickening, ghastly whiteness.

“Funny, isn’t it? There are men in the world different from any I’d seen before that time. I’ve—I’ve waited—and found out.”

Before I could utter a rejoinder to this she said, quite courteously, “Will you excuse me?”

I bowed.

With no further explanation she marched down the length of the veranda—carrying herself proudly, placing her dainty feet daintily, walking with that care which people show when they are not certain of their ability to walk straight—and entered the house.

I didn’t know why she had gone; but I knew the worst was over. Though I felt humiliation to the core of the heart’s core, I also felt relief.

With a foot dangling, I sat sidewise on the veranda rail and waited. Glancing at my watch, I saw it was not yet four, and I had lived through years since I had climbed the hill at one. My sensations were comparable only to those of the man who has been on trial for his life and is waiting for the verdict.

I waited nervously, and yet humbly. Now that it was all over, it seemed to me that the bitterness of death was past. Whatever else I should have to go through in life, nothing could equal the past quarter of an hour.

The sensations I hadn’t had while making my confession began to come to me by degrees. Looking back over the chasm I had crossed, I was amazed to think I had had the nerve for it. I trembled reminiscently; the cold sweat broke out on my forehead. It was terrible to think that at that very minute she was in there weighing the evidence, against me and in my favor.

Mechanically I relighted the cigar that had gone out. Against me and in my favor! I was not blind to the fact that in my favor there was something. I had gone down, but I had also struggled up again; and you can make an appeal for the man who has done that.

She was long in coming back. I glanced at my watch, and it was nearly half past four. Her weighing of the evidence had taken her half an hour, and it was evidently not over yet. Well, juries were often slow in coming to a verdict; and doubtless she was balancing the extenuating circumstance that I had struggled up against the main fact that I had gone down.

What she considered her ideal had during the past few weeks been gradually transferring itself from her mind to my own. She wouldn’t marry a man she couldn’t trust; she wouldn’t marry a man who hadn’t what she called spirit; she wouldn’t marry a milksop. But she had well-defined—and yet indefinable—conceptions as to how far in spirit a man should go, and of the difference between being a milksop and a man of honor. She might find it hard to admit that the pendulum of human impulse that swung far in one direction might swing equally far in the other; and therein would lie my danger.

But I must soon know. It was ten minutes of five. The jury had been out more than three-quarters of an hour.

A new quality was being transmuted into the atmosphere. It was as if the lightest, flimsiest veil had been flung across the sun. In the distant glinting of the sea, which had been silver, there came a tremulous shade of gold. The foxgloves bowed themselves like men at prayer. The robins betook themselves to the branches. From unseen depths of the scrub-oak there was an occasional luscious trill, as the time for the singing of birds wasn’t over yet.

Round me there was silence. I might have been sitting at the door of an empty house. I listened intently for the sound of returning footsteps, but none came.

At a quarter past five a chill about the heart began to strike me. I had been waiting more than an hour. Could it be possible that...?

It would be the last degree of insult. Whatever she did, she wouldn’t subject me to that. It would be worse than her glove across the face. It was out of the question. I couldn’t bear to think of it. Rather than think of it, I went over the probabilities that she would come back with the smile of forgiveness. It would doubtless be a tearful smile, for tears were surely the cause of her delay. When she had controlled them, when she was able to speak and bid me be of good comfort, I should hear the tap of her high heels coming down the uncarpeted stairway. No red Indian ever listened for the tread of a maid’s moccasins on forest moss so intently as I for that staccato click.

But only the birds rewarded me, and the cries of boys who had come to bathe on the beach below. There was more gold in the light; more trilling in the branches; a more pungent scent from the trees, the flowers, and the grass; and that was all.

It was half past five; it was a quarter to six; it was six.

At six o’clock I knew.

My hat was lying on a chair near by. I picked it up—and went.

I went, not by the avenue and the path, but down the queer, rickety flights of steps that led from one jutting rock to another over the face of the cliff, till I reached the beach. It was a broad, whitish, sandy beach, with a quietly lapping tide almost at the full. Full tide was marked a few feet farther up by a long, wavy line of seaweed and other jetsam.

It was the delicious hour for bathing. As far as one could see in either direction there were heads bobbing in the water and people scrambling in and out. Shrill cries of women and children, hoarse shouts of men, mingled with the piping of birds overhead. Farther out than the bathers there were rowboats, and beyond the rowboats sails. In the middle of the Sound a steamer or two trailed a lazy flag of smoke. Far, far to the south and the west a haze like that round a volcano hung over New York. I should return there next day to face new conditions. I only wished to God that it could be that night.

The new conditions were, briefly, three: I could use the revolver still lying in my desk; or I could begin to drink again; or, like the bull wounded in the ring, I could seek shelter in the dumb sympathy of the Down and Out.

The last seemed to me the least attractive. I had climbed that hill, and found it led only to a precipice that I had fallen over.

Neither did the first possibility charm me especially. Apart from the horror of it, it was too brief, too sudden, too conclusive. I wanted the gradual, the prolonged.

It was the second course to which my mind turned with the nearest approach to satisfaction. Christian had told me that some of my severest tussles lay ahead; and now I had come to the one in which I should go under. In that the flesh at least would get its hour of compensation, when all was said and done.

At the foot of Mrs. Grace’s steps I paused to recall Christian’s words of a few days previously:

“In love and truth together there’s a power which, if we have the patience to wait for its working out, will solve all difficulties and meet all needs.”

I had tried that—love and truth together!—and at the result I could only laugh.

My immediate fear was lest Mrs. Grace and the Grahams would be on the veranda, vaguely expecting to offer me their congratulations. When half-way up the steps I heard voices and knew that they were there. So be it! I had faced worse things in my life; and now I could face that.

But as I advanced up the lawn I saw them moving about and talking with animation. As soon as Mrs. Grace caught sight of me she hurried down the steps, meeting me as I passed among the flower-beds. She held a newspaper marked Extra in her hand, and seemed to have forgotten that I had love-affairs.

“Have you seen this? Colt, the chauffeur, was at the station and brought it back. It’s just come down from New York.”

Glad of anything that would distract attention from myself, I took the paper in my hand and pretended to be reading it. All I got was the vague information that some one had been assassinated—some man and his morganatic wife. What did it matter to me? What did it matter to any one? Of all that was printed there, only five syllables took possession of my memory—and that because they were meaningless, “Gavrilo Prinzip!”

I was repeating them to myself as I handed the paper back, and we exchanged comments of which I have no recollection. More comments were passed with the Grahams, and then, blindly, drunkenly, I made my way to my room.

There I found nothing to do less classic than to sit at the open window, to look over at the red-and-yellow house on the opposite hill. It was my intention to think the matter out, but my brain seemed to have stopped working. Nothing came to me but those barbaric sounds, that kept repeating themselves with a kind of hiss: “Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip!”

From my stupefied scanning of the paper I hadn’t grasped the fact that a name utterly unknown that morning was being flashed round the world at a speed more rapid than that of the earth round the sun. Still less did I suspect that it was to become in its way the most sinister name in history. I kept repeating it only as you repeat senseless things in the minutes before you go to sleep.

“Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip!”

_CHAPTER XVII_

I came back as Major Melbury, of one of the Canadian regiments.

It was in November, 1916, that I was invalided home to Canada, lamed and wearing a disfiguring black patch over what had been my left eye.

There were other differences of which I can hardly tell you in so many words, but which must transpire as I go on. Briefly, they summed themselves up in the fact that I had gone away one man and I was coming back another. My old self had not only been melted down in the crucible, but it had been stamped with a new image and superscription. It was of a new value and a new currency, and, I think I may venture to add, of that new coinage minted in the civil strife of mankind.

The day of my sailing from Liverpool was exactly two years four months and three weeks from that on which I had last seen Regina Barry; and because it was so I must tell you at once of an incident that occurred at the minute when I stepped on board.

Having come up the long gangway easily enough, I found that at the top, where passengers and their friends congregate, my difficulties began.

When my left eye had been shot out the right had suffered in sympathy, and also from shock to the retina. For a while I had been blind. Rest and care in the hospital my sister, Mabel Rideover, maintained at Taplow had, however, restored the sight of my right eye; and now my trouble was only with perspective. People and things crowded on one another as they do in the vision of a baby. I would dodge that which was far away, and allow myself to bump into objects quite near me.

As I stepped on deck I had a minute or two of bewilderment. There were so many men more helpless than I that whatever care there was to give was naturally bestowed on them. Moreover, most of those who thronged the top of the gangway had too many anxieties of their own to notice that a man who at worst was only half blind didn’t know which way to turn.

But I did turn—at a venture. The venture took me straight into a woman holding a baby in her arms, whom I crushed against the nearest cabin wall. The woman protested; the baby screamed. I was about, in the rebound, to crash into some other victim when I felt from behind me a hand take me by the arm. An almost invisible guide began to pilot me through the crowd. All I caught sight of was a Canadian nurse’s uniform.

It is one of the results of the war that men, who are often reduced to the mere shreds of human nature, grow accustomed to being taken care of by women, who remain the able-bodied ones.

“Thanks,” I laughed, as the light touch pushed me along, slightly in advance. “You caught me right in the nick of time. I can see pretty well with my good eye, only I can’t measure distances. They tell me that will come by degrees.”

Even though occupied with other thoughts, I was surprised that my rescuer didn’t respond to my civility, for another result of the war is the ease with which the men and women who have been engaged in it get on terms of natural acquaintanceship. When artificial barriers are removed, it is extraordinary how quickly we go back to primitive human simplicity. Social and sex considerations have thus been minimized to a degree which, it seems to me, will make it difficult ever to re-establish them in their old first place. They say it was an advance in civilization when we ceased to see each other as primarily males and females and knew we were men and women. Possibly the war will lead us a step farther still and reveal us as children of one family.

That a nurse shouldn’t have a friendly word for a partly incapacitated man struck me, therefore, as odd, though my mind would not have dwelt on the circumstance if she hadn’t released my arm as abruptly as she had taken it. Having helped me to reach a comparatively empty quarter of the deck, she had counted, apparently, on the slowness and awkwardness of my movements to slip away before I could turn round.

When I managed this feat she was already some yards down the length of the deck, hurrying back toward the crowd from which we had emerged. I saw then that she was too little to be tall and too tall to be considered little. Moreover, she carried herself proudly, placing her dainty feet daintily, and walking with that care which people display when they are not certain of their ability to walk straight. Reaching one of the entrances, she went in, exactly as I had seen a woman pass through a doorway two years four months and three weeks before.

I was sure it was she—and yet I told myself it couldn’t be. I told myself it couldn’t be, for the reason that I had been deceived so frequently before that I had grown distrustful of my senses. All through the intervening time I had been getting glimpses of a slight figure here, of an alert movement there, of the poise of a head, of the wave of a hand—that for an instant would make my heart stop beating; but in the end it had meant nothing but the stirring of old memories. In this case I could have been convinced if the coincidence had not put too great a strain on all the probabilities.

I was to learn later that there was no coincidence; but I must tell my story in its right order.

The right order takes me back to my return to New York, after my week-end at Mrs. Grace’s, on the morning of June 29, 1914.

During the two or three hours of jogging down the length of Long Island in the train I tried to keep out of my mind all thoughts but one; having deposited my bags at my rooms, I should go to Stinson’s.

With regard to this intention I was clearly aware of a threefold blend of reaction.

First, there was the pity of it. I could take a detached view of this downfall, just as if I had heard of it in connection with Beady Lamont or old Colonel Straight. Though I should be only a man dropped in the ranks, while they would have been leaders, the grief of my comrades over my collapse would be no less sincere.

But by tearing my mind away from that aspect of the case I reverted to the satisfaction at being in the gutter, of which the memories had never ceased to haunt me. I cannot expect to make you, who have always lived on the upper levels, understand this temptation; I can only tell you that for men who have once been outside the moral law there is a recurrent tugging at the senses to get there again. I once knew an Englishman who had lived in the interior of Australia and had “gone black.” On his return to make his home in England he was seized with so consuming a nostalgia for his black wives and black children that in the end he went back to them. Something like this was the call I was always hearing—the call of Circe to go down.

But I knew, too, that there was method in this madness. I was deliberately starting out to earn the wages of sin; and the wages of sin would be death. I must repeat that going to Stinson’s would be no more than a slow, convenient process of committing suicide. It would be committing suicide in a way for which Regina Barry would not have to feel herself responsible, as she would were I to use the revolver. Having brought so much on her, I was unwilling to bring more, even though my heart was hot against her.

My heart was hot against her—and yet I had to admit that she had been within her rights. When all was said that could be said in my favor, I had deceived her. I had let her go on for the best part of a year believing me to be what I was not, when during much of the time I could see that such a belief was growing perilous to her happiness. I had been a coward. I should have said from the first moment—the moment when she took me for my brother Jack—“I am a crook.” Then all would have been open and aboveboard between us; but as it was there was only one way out. Any other way—any way that would have allowed me to go on living longer than the time it would take drink to kill me—would have been unbearable.

The checkmate to these musings came when my eyes fell upon Lovey. He was at the door of the apartment, not only to welcome me, but to give me ocular demonstration that he had kept the faith while I had been away. It was the first time since the beginning of our association that I had left him for forty-eight hours; and that he was on his honor during those two days was no secret between us. The radiant triumph of his greeting struck into me like a stab.

For Lovey now was almost as completely reconstructed as I. I use the qualifying “almost” only because the longer standing of his habits and the harder conditions of his life had burnt the past more indelibly into him. Of either of us one could say, as the Florentines are reported to have said of Dante, “There goes a man who has been in hell”; but the marks of the experience had been laid more brutally on my companion than on me.

Otherwise he showed cheering signs of resuscitation. Neat, even at the worst of times, he was now habitually scrubbed and shaved, and as elegant as Colonel Straight’s establishment could turn him out. He had, in fact, for the hours he had free from washing windows, metamorphosed himself into the typical, self-respecting English valet, with a pride in his work sprung chiefly of devotion.

And for me he made a home. I mean by that that he was always there—something living to greet me, to move about in the dingy little apartment. As I am too gregarious, I may say too affectionate, to live contentedly alone, it meant much to me to have some one else within the walls I called mine, even if actual companionship was limited.

But whatever it was, I was about to destroy it. I could scarcely look him in the eyes; I could hardly say a word to him.

While unpacking my suit-case he said, timorously, “Y’ain’t sick, Slim?”

I began to change the suit I had been wearing for one that would attract less attention at Stinson’s.

“No, Lovey; I’m all right. I’m just—I’m just going out.”