Chapter II (2)

“How curiously it all happened,” she said, her full tones trembling a little. “It was autumn--do you remember?--and the trees in the Bois and the gardens of the Luxembourg were getting yellowy brown. There were well-dressed crowds walking on the Boulevards, and sitting round the little tables outside the restaurants. One could smell chloride of lime and carbolic acid crossing the gutters, and see the braziers burning at the corners of infected streets, and long strings of hearses going by; but nothing seemed so unlikely as that either of us should be taken ill and die. We were too wicked, you said, and too happy! ... only the good, miserable people were carried off, because any other world would be more suitable to them than this.... It was nonsense, of course, but it served us to laugh at. Then, because you could not sell your great Salon picture, and we could not afford the expense, you gave a supper at the _Café des Trois Oiseaux_ (_Cabinet particulier No. 6_)--and Valéry and the others joined us. I was so happy that night ... my new dress became me ... I wore yellow roses--your favorite Maréchal Niel’s. When I was putting them in my bosom and my hair you came behind and kissed me on the shoulder. O, _mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ I can feel it now! We went to the Variétés, and then to supper. I had never felt so gay. People are like that, I remember having heard, just when they are going to die. Valéry gaped--I believe he was half in love with me--and I teased him because I knew you would be jealous. In those days you would have been jealous of the studio _écorché_. Ha! ha! ha!”

Daymond shuddered. The recurrent French phrases jarred on him; something in her voice and manner scarified inexpressibly his sensitive perceptions. He wondered, dumbly, whether she had always been like this? She went on:

“And then, suddenly, in the midst of the laughter, the champagne, the good dishes--the pains of hell!” She shuddered. “And then a blank, and waking up in bed at the hospital, still in those tortures--and getting worse and seeing in your white face that I was going to die! Drip-drip! I could feel your tears falling upon my face, upon my hand; but I was even impatient of you in my pain. Once I fancied that I heard myself saying that I hated you. Did I really?”

“I think--I believe you did! But, of course----” Daymond stopped, and shuddered to the marrow as she leaned across to him caressingly, so near that her draperies brushed his knee and her breath fanned upon his face.

“Imagine it!” she cried, “that I _hated_ you! _You_ to whom I had given myself--you for whom I left my----”

He interrupted, speaking in an odd, strained voice: “Never mind that now.”

“I had always wished to die first,” she resumed, “but not in that way; not without leaving you a legacy of kind words and kisses. Ah!” (her voice stole to his ears most pleadingly), “do you know that I have been here, I cannot tell how long, and you have not kissed me once, darling?”

She rose up in her place--she would have come to him, but he sprang to his feet, and thrust out both hands to keep her off, crying:

“No! no!”

She sank back into her seat, looking at him wide-eyed and wonderingly. “Is he afraid of me?” she whispered to herself.

“I am not afraid of you,” Daymond returned almost roughly. “But you must make allowances for me at first. Your sudden coming--the surprise----”

“Ah yes! the surprise--and the joy----?”

He cleared his throat and looked another way. He was shamedly conscious that the emotion that stiffened his tongue and hampered his gestures was something widely different from joy. He spoke again, confusedly. “This seems like old times--before----”

“Before I died,” she said, “without bidding good-bye to you. Dear! if you guessed how I have longed to know what you said and did when it was all over, you would not mind telling me.... ‘_Are they grieving--those whom I have left behind?_’ is a question that is often asked in the place I come from. You were sorry? You cried? Ah! I know you must have cried!”

“I believe,” Daymond returned, moving restlessly in his chair, “that I did. And I--I kissed you, though the doctors told me not to. I wanted to catch the cholera and die, too, I believe!...”

“Yes?”

“And when the people came with--the coffin, I”--he bit his lip--“I would not let them touch you!...”

“My poor boy!”

He winced from the tenderness. He felt with indescribable sensations the light pressure of that well-known once well-loved touch upon his arm.

“And then--after the funeral, I believe I had a brain fever.” He passed his hand through his waving, slightly grizzled hair, as if to assist his lagging memory--really, as an excuse for shaking off that intolerable burden of her hand. “And when I recovered I found there was no way to forgetfulness”--he heard her sigh faintly--“except through work. I worked then--I am working still.”

“Always alone?”

“Generally alone. I have never married.”

“Of course not!”

A faint dissent began to stir in him at this matter-of-fact acquiescence in his widowed turtle-like celibacy. “It may interest you to know,” he observed, with a touch of the pompous manner which had grown upon him with the growth of his reputation, “that my career has been successful in the strongest sense of the word. I have become, I may say, one of the leaders of the world of Art. Upon the decease or resignation of the President of the ----, it is more than probable that I shall be invited to occupy his vacant place. And an intimation has reached me, from certain eminent quarters”--he paused weightily--“that a baronetcy will be conferred upon me, in that event!”

“Yes?”

The tone betrayed an absolute lack of attention. She had once been used to take a keen interest in his occupations; to be cast down by his failures and elated by his successes. Had that enthusiasm constituted the greater part of her charm? In its absence Daymond began to find her--must it be confessed?--but indifferent company.

In the embarrassment that momentarily stiffened him, an old habit came to his rescue. Before he knew it, he had taken a cigar from a silver box upon the writing table, and was saying, with the politely apologetic accent of the would-be smoker:

“May I? You used not to mind!”

She made a gesture of assent. As the first rings of bluish vapor mounted into the air, Daymond found her watching him with those intent, expectant eyes.

Feeling himself bound to make some observation, he said: “It is very wonderful to me to see you here! It was very good of you to come!”

She returned: “They had to let me come, I think! I begged so--I prayed so, that at last----” She paused. Daymond was not listening. He was looking at her steadfastly and pondering....

It had been his whim, in the first poignancy of bereavement, to destroy all portraits of her, so that with the lapse of years no faulty touch should bewray the memory of her vanished beauty. It struck him now for the first time that his brush had played the courtier, and flattered her, for the most part, unblushingly. He found himself criticizing unfavorably the turn of her throat and the swell of her bosom, and the dark voluptuous languishment of her look. The faint perfume of heliotrope that was shaken forth now, as of old time, from her hair and her garments no longer intoxicated, but sickened him. This, then, was the woman he had mourned for fifteen years! He began to feel that he had murmured unwisely at the dispensation of Providence. He began to revolt at this recrudescence of an outworn passion--to realize that at twenty-five he had taken a commonplace woman for a divinity--a woman whom, if she had not died when she did, he would have wearied of--ended perhaps in hating. He found himself in danger of hating her now.

“At last they let me come. They said I should repent it--as if I could!” Her eyes rested on him lingeringly; her hand stilled the eager trembling of her lips. “Never! Of course, you seemed a little strange at first. You are not quite--not quite yourself now; it is natural--after fifteen years. And presently, when I tell you---- Oh! what will you say when I tell you all?”

She left her chair and came toward him, so swiftly that he had not time to avoid her. She laid her hand on his shoulder and bent her mouth to his ear. One of her peculiarities had been that her lips were always cold, even when her passion burned most fiercely. The nearness of those lips, once so maddeningly desirable and sweet, made Daymond’s flesh creep horribly. He breathed with difficulty, and the great drops of agony stood thickly on his forehead--not with weak, superstitious terror of the ghost; with unutterable loathing of the woman.

“Listen!” she said. “They are wise in the place I came from; they know things that are not known here.... You have heard it said that once in the life of every human being living upon earth comes a time when the utterance of a wish will be followed by its fulfilment. The poor might be made rich, the sick well, the sad merry, the loveless beloved--in one moment--if they could only know when that moment comes! But not once in a million million lifetimes do they hit upon it; and so they live penniless and in pain, and sorrowful and lonely, all their lives. I let my chance go by, like many others, long before I died; but yours is yet to come.” Her voice thrilled with a note of wild triumph; the clasp of her arm tightened on his neck. “Oh, love!” she cried; “the wonderful moment is close at hand! It is midnight now”--she pointed to the great north window, through which the frosty silver face of the moon was staring in relief against a framed-in square of velvet blackness, studded with twinkling star-points--“but with the first signs of the dawn that you and I have greeted together, heart of my heart!--how many times in the days that may come again!--with the graying of the East and the paling of the stars comes the Opportunity for you. Now, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

He understood and quailed before her. But she was blindly confident in his truth, stupidly reliant on his constancy.

“When it comes, beloved, you shall take me in your arms--breathe your wish upon these lips of mine, in a kiss. Say, while God’s ear is open, ‘Father, give her back to me, living and loving, as of old!’ and I shall be given--I shall be given!”

She threw both arms about him and leaned to him, and sobbed and laughed with the rapture of her revelation and the anticipation of the joy that was to come.

“Remember, you must not hesitate, or the golden chance will pass beyond recall, and I shall go back whence I came, never more to return--never more to clasp you, dearest one, until you die too, and come to me (are you cold, that you shudder so?)--and be with me for always. Listen, listen!”

As she lifted her hand the greatest of all the great clock voices of London spoke out the midnight hour. As other voices answered from far and near Daymond shuddered, and put his dead love from him, and rose up trembling and ghastly pale.

They moved together to the window, and stood looking out. The weather was about to change; the snow was melting, the thaw drip plashed heavily from roof gutters and balconies, cornices and window ledges. As she laid her hand once more upon his shoulder the stars began to fade out one by one, and in a little while from then the eastward horizon quivered with the first faint throes of dawn.

“Wish!” she cried. “Now! now! before it is too late!” She moved as if to throw herself again upon his breast; but he thrust her from him with resolute hands that trembled no more.

“I wish,” he said very distinctly, “to be Sir Robert Daymond, Baronet, and President of the ---- before the year is out!”

She fell away from him, and waned, and became unsubstantial and shadowy like the ghost she was, and unlike the thing of flesh and blood she had seemed before. Nothing remained to her of lifelikeness but the scorn and anger, the anguish and reproach of her great eyes.

“Only the dead are faithful to Love--because they are dead,” she said. “The living live on--and forget! They may remember sometimes to regret us--beat their breasts and call upon our names--but they shudder if we answer back across the distance; and if we should offer to come back, ‘Return!’ they say! ‘go and lie down in the comfortable graves we have made you; there is no room for you in your old places any more!’ They told me I should be sorry for coming; but I would not listen, I had such confidence. I am wiser now! Good-bye!”

A long sigh fluttered by him in the semi-obscurity, like a bird with a broken wing. There was a rattling of curtain rings, the dull sough of falling tapestry, and the opening and closing of a door. She was gone! And Daymond, waking from strangely dreamful slumbers to the cheerlessness of dying embers and burned-out candle, rang the bell for his servant, and ordered lights. A few minutes later saw him, perfectly dressed, stepping into his cab.

“Chesterfield Gardens, Mayfair,” he said, giving the direction to his valet for transference to the groom.

“Beg pardon, sir, but Lady Mary Fraber’s servant is still waiting!” The man pointed back to the house.

“Ah!” said Daymond, who had had a passing glimpse of alien cord gaiters reposing before his hall-fire. “Tell him I have taken the answer to his mistress myself.”

And as he spoke he scattered a handful of torn-up squares of paper--the fragments of a letter--in largesse to the night and the gusty weather.

AN ORDEAL BY FIRE

Mr. Lanter was bookkeeping clerk in a New York dry-goods store. For his services he was remunerated at the rate of fifteen dollars per week. His bedroom at the boarding house with daily breakfast and three meals on the Sunday, cost him ten dollars; the remaining five supplied all other necessities--fed him at cheap restaurants, dressed him from cheap clothing stores, and allowed him to send a cash bill now and then to his mother, who lived in a New Hampshire village on tea, bread and sauce, wore her hair in looped bell-ropes on either side of her forehead and a rosette behind, and thought her son the most splendid man in the world. But despite heroic efforts, Mr. Lanter had not succeeded in putting by anything against a rainy day. As to marriage, it was not to be dreamt of, which is probably the reason why Mr. Lanter dreamed of it so frequently. But the feminine form that figured in those dreams was not that of a typist, or a sales-lady, or even a chorus-girl or variety artist. Mr. Lanter was a young man with a turn for reading, who regularly spent his Sundays at the Cooper Institute, and he did not feel that he could undertake to do his duty as a husband by anything short of a heroine of romantic classical fiction. He had had imaginary love passages with several of these, both ancient and modern. _The Faëry Queen_ had given him Britomart, and the _Volsunga Saga_ had supplied him with Brunhild. Hypatia’s erudition made her a little alarming, but the affair was pleasant while it lasted; and Iseult was too dark for Mr. Lanter’s taste, but he changed the color of her locks as expeditiously as a French hairdresser, and roamed the forest ways with her more appreciatively than Prosper. Theaters Mr. Lanter did not frequent, because Mrs. Lanter regarded such places as pitfalls dug by the devil for the capture of unwary young America, and he had promised his mother he would not visit them. Indeed, had he been inclined to go back on his word, he could not have afforded to do so. But neither concert-halls, museums, nor circuses figured on Mrs. Lanter’s black list, because she had forgotten to specify them; and one half-holiday Mr. Lanter found himself entering Kneeman’s Star Musée with an order.

The Kneeman Musée is a big, opulent building, with a central dome of colored glass, a gorgeous façade ornamented with groups of sculptured figures and a gilded vestibule where are displayed an array of life-sized photographs and gigantic colored posters illustrating the wonders to be seen within; promising upon this occasion, among other exquisite novelties, the unique whistling entertainment of Madame Smithers, the Kentucky Mocking Bird; the Celebrated Centaur Family, in their feats of Equitation; the Balancing Bonellis, in their electrifying plank-and-ladder interlude; Madame la Comtesse Püspök Ladany, the Beautiful Hungarian (heroine of one of the most sensational European elopements) in her Elegant Effects of Equestrianism upon the highly-trained Arab Maimoun, assisted by Rurik the Gitano, who had the honor, upon the sensational occasion above alluded to, of eloping with Madame la Comtesse. Then came the Mermaids in a Tank Act, and three-inch notes of exclamation clamorously invited attention to the American Girl Giantess, Mademoiselle Minota, nineteen years of age, nine feet in height, weighing four hundred and twenty-six pounds, able to lift a weight of one hundred and forty pounds with one hand.... The remainder of the bill was filled with dwarfs, performing lions, snake-charmers, and ventriloquists.

Mr. Lanter presented nothing remarkable to the ordinary observation. He was fair, undersized, and short-sighted, and the necktie he had chosen was of a vivid salmon-pink, trying to his complexion, which had been injured by overwork and close confinement in a glass counting-hutch lighted by electricity, and heated by steam. He followed his companion, who was a smart, bustling young salesman with a lady-killing reputation, and sporting proclivities; and as he went he smiled a little vaguely, and his mouth was not quite shut, a negligence which deprives the expression of intellectuality. They had fauteuil seats so close to the Ring that their knees rubbed against the low velvet-cushioned barrier that enclosed the sand-strewn space, which seemed to Mr. Lanter to be a brown central-patch, in a gorgeous, multi-colored dream. The dome above, all glass and gilding, the pretty women in the boxes, the perambulating vendors of candy and ices, the orchestra tuning up in a gilded balcony on the left of the stage, the whiffs of menagerie, gas, and stabling which escaped from the coulisses, the people who pushed past into their places, Madame Smithers trilling and piping in emulation of the feathered songsters of American groves, the Centaur Family upon their gaily-trapped steeds, the bursts of applause, the shouts of laughter, were all made of dream-stuff.... But when heavy tableau-curtains rose upon a scene representing a mediæval banqueting-hall, and revealed the American Girl Giantess, throned upon a high seat, arrayed in gilded chain-mail and flowing purple draperies, a sword in her large white right hand, a crimson cloak upon her shoulders and a dragon-crested helm upon her large fair head, the start Mr. Lanter gave would have awakened any ordinary sleeper. But the dream closed in again, as Miss Minota rose, and, bowing to the right, to the left, to the middle, descended the baize-covered staircase which led from the stage to the Ring.... Other spectators saw a young woman monstrously overgrown, with tow-colored hairplaits as thick as coir-cable, and blue eyes as round as silver dollars, who was well-proportioned in her huge way, and who, if looked at through the wrong end of an opera-glass, when divested of her tawdry theatrical trappings, might have appeared an honest, ordinary young person of average good looks. But Mr. Lanter saw a golden roof-ridge and a ring of magic fire roaring up, and the Brunhild of his visions; and breathed hard, and felt a clammy sensation about the palms of the hands, while his heart drummed heavily against the lining of his ready-made waistcoat. He must have been very pale or very purple in the face, for his companion nudged him.

“Guess you’re feeling off color!... Like to get out into the air?... If so, I’ll keep your seat,” he whispered; but Mr. Lanter shook his head.

The band struck up a march, Miss Minota descended into the arena, a voluble gentleman in evening dress, who acted as showman, and, when necessary, as interpreter, walking in the shadow of her elbow. She seemed, indeed, an overwhelming example of feminine physical development as she gravely performed her round, replying in monosyllables to the remarks that were made to her by members of the audience, complying with their expressed desire to shake her enormous hand. Mr. Lanter was hot and cold by turns as her monumental proportions drew nearer; he meant to rise in his place and boldly engage her in conversation; he got as far as getting on his legs. It seemed that the large blue eyes of the giantess dropped upon him inquiringly; he almost fancied her about to pause. But his tongue refused to utter the word which would have arrested her progress.... She swept past, and it was as though the mainsail of a yacht had gone over on the starboard tack, emptying a whole breeze out of an acre of canvas. Another moment and she had ascended to the stage, her draperies of crimson and purple trailing as she went; she had lifted her weights, respectively guaranteed at one hundred and one hundred and forty pounds avoirdupois; she had made her three bows, and the tableau-curtains had descended and closed. Thenceforward Mr. Lanter took no interest in the entertainment. With fishy eyes he sat, retrospective, unobservant; and his companion, the lively Mr. Goter, found him mighty dull.

“Oh, look here!... Say now! what’s up with you?” he protested, as they walked home together through the crowded streets.

The clang of street-car gongs, the intermittent roar and rattle of the elevated railway, mingled with the blare of tin horns, and the clamor of voices. It was hot May weather, and there was a smell upon the languid air that seemed to combine in itself the flavor of rotten fruit, the musky odor of African skins, the pungent acridity of frying oil, and the rankness of coarse tobacco.

“Up with me? Why, I’m all right,” said Mr. Lanter, “and I’ve had a real good time, thanks to you, old man!”

“Come, have a drink?” said the pacified Goter, and they turned in at the swing doors of a beer saloon. “Bully, wasn’t she?” he broke out, after ordering two iced bocks. “My style all over! Guess I’ve a good mind to take her on!” and he winked knowingly.

Mr. Lanter set down his tall glass of untasted Münchener. “Look here, who are you talking about?” He was salmon-pink to the edge of his black Derby hat, and his pale blue eyes had angry sparks in them.

“That girl that did the jugglin’ business on the plank-and-ladder,” responded Goter. “Black eyes, black hair, high color, and spankin’ action. Did you s’pose I meant that walkin’ grain-elevator in the tin armor? No, sir!”

He had yet another fulminating witticism on hand, and he discharged it. Before it had done crackling he saw stars, for the placable Lanter had suddenly smitten him upon the nose.

“Good thunder! what are you up to, anyway?” spluttered the astonished Mr. Goter.

“Hol’ off there! Go easy!” shouted the barkeeper. Half a dozen men, their drinks in their hands, their hats tilted back from interested faces, had gathered round, and a colored boy was mopping the red-stained marble table with a wet cloth.

“He--he insulted a lady!” gasped Mr. Lanter, “and I struck him! If he does it again--I’ll do it again!... Mind that!” The tone and the look with which he delivered the final warning convinced Mr. Goter that he had better mind.

Thenceforward he ceased to regard Mr. Lanter as a “Willie” and Mr. Lanter ceased to regard himself as a Christian young man. His own violence had shocked him. There must be a good deal of cold reason, he reflected, at the bottom of Mrs. Lanter’s inveterate prejudice against public places of entertainment, and his conscience pricked him. But she had made him promise that he would not go to “theaters,” and he salved his conscience by reminding himself that he had kept his word. But he went again and yet again to Kneeman’s Star Musée. And upon the third occasion he mustered up courage to speak to Miss Minota.

“How do you do?” he blurted out. Then as an afterthought he blurted out, “Mademoiselle.” He had to tilt his head quite back to look up into Miss Minota’s large fair moon-face. He wondered what she would say if anybody told her that she was his ideal of womanhood?

“I guess I am very well, thank you,” responded the giantess. She had a plaintive, mooing voice, and despite the usage of a public career, she seemed little less bashful than Mr. Lanter.

“Do you like N’York?” Mr. Lanter inquired.

“Well,” Miss Minota returned, “I guess I do!” She sighed as she continued: “But one place is much the same as another to you--when you don’t see anythin’ more of it than the inside of the hotel where you happen to be located, and the inside of the hall where you chance to be exhibitin’.”

“Why, now, that’s a shame!” said Mr. Lanter, growing red with sympathy. “Don’t your friends take you around some, when you feel you’d like to go?”

“I suppose they’d be real pleased,” said Miss Minota, after an instant’s consideration, “if I didn’t attract so much attention. But when you’re too big to go on the cars, like other folk, or pass along the sidewalk without blockin’ it----” She shrugged her enormous shoulders with a little air of fatigue, and the gentleman in evening dress, who officiated as showman, gave her the signal to move. “Good-afternoon!” she said graciously, and passed on.

But Mr. Lanter’s brain was surging with sympathy. “My gracious!” he cried to himself, “is it possible that that splendid creature isn’t happy?” A vague look of gentle melancholy was certainly floating on the surface of those limpid china-blue eyes. He breathed through his nose and clenched his fists, one of which already bore a proof impression of Mr. Goter’s projecting front tooth. And the very next half-holiday found him waiting at the side-door through which professionals found entrance to the back scenes of Kneeman’s. One or two sallow, cropped men in furred overcoats passed in, one of them in company with a black-eyed, vivacious, middle-aged woman, who conversed with her fingers, her shoulders, and every muscle of her face--and in whom Mr. Lanter recognized Goter’s houri. Then a vehicle like a hotel-omnibus, only taller and shinier, drawn by a pair of stout horses, pulled up by the curb; two men, moustached, and dressed in a kind of buff uniform faced with red (Mr. Lanter recognized it as the livery common to the attendants of the Musée), got down from the box seat and opened the omnibus door.... Mr. Lanter’s heart thumped wildly as a colossal foot and ankle, appareled in a pink silk stocking and rosetted black satin shoe, cautiously descended to the ground, and the rest of Miss Minota followed by gradual instalments until the giantess stood upright on the pavement, her nine feet of height handsomely accentuated by an umbrageous hat, with a plume of nodding feathers which might have served for the central ornament of a canopy of state. She inclined this tremendous headgear in gracious recognition of Mr. Lanter. Mr. Lanter took off his hat with his best manner, and boldly stepped forward.

A large pink flush invaded the giantess’s immense cheeks, previously of a pale or dough-colored complexion. “Won’t you walk in a minute?” she said, in a timid, fluttering way. Then, not without difficulty, she went in at the side-door, Mr. Lanter followed, the attendants mounted to their seats, and the large shiny omnibus drove away.

The sensation of moving and speaking in a dream bore heavily upon Mr. Lanter as he followed the tall, stooping figure of the giantess up a short flight of stairs and through what seemed to be a labyrinth of winding passages, each of which seemed more dark and dusky than the preceding one, and conveyed a stronger olfactory impression of gas, mice, and turpentine. But the labyrinth ended in a vast echoing chaos of shaky canvas scenes and machinery, which Miss Minota introduced as the stage. The iron curtain that separated the stage from the auditorium was down, and they stood together in the midst of a heterogeneous jumble of properties among which Mr. Lanter recognized the plank-and-ladder of the equilibrists, the gilded props and rubber-covered block-tackle used by the tight-rope dancer, the belled and ribboned saddles employed by the Centaur Family, and Miss Minota’s mediæval throne, flanked by the gilded weights employed in her exhibition of manual strength.

“Won’t you----” Involuntarily he pointed to the gaudy throne-seat.

“Well,” said the giantess, “I don’t know but what I will sit down--just a minute.” Seated, her large round face and china-blue, rather foolish eyes were above the level of Mr. Lanter’s as he stood before her. Certainly, but for the suet dumpling pallor of her fair complexion and a prevailing flabbiness, the result of insufficient exercise, Miss Minota would have been good-looking. “I guess I ought to thank you for being so polite!” she said, and her tone and accent were homely as those of the New England village-folk among whom Mr. Lanter had been raised. “I guess you thought I acted like I was silly just now; but boys do scare me so.... If there’s one thing more than another I dasn’t face, it’s a boy; and you bet boys know it, and lay along for me--the nasty little things! So there’s another reason why I can’t go round like other folks--even if the management wouldn’t object to my givin’ the show away!” She folded her immense hands upon her knees and looked placidly at Mr. Lanter.

“But why should the management object, Miss--Mademoiselle?” asked Mr. Lanter, standing, very red and stiff and embarrassed, at Miss Minota’s knee, like a somewhat dull little boy about to say a lesson.

“Because once folks have seen me for nothin’, they’ll leave the pay-place alone,” said Miss Minota. “It’s human natur’, take it how you will. An’ I’m only Mademoiselle on the posters. My first professional exhibitin’ tour was in the State of Minnesota, an’ that’s how I got my professional name. My own name seemed kind of one-horse for a poster--Quilt--Miss Hattie Quilt of Smartsville, New Hampshire, I was when I lived to-home.”

“I’ve been to Smartsville,” said Mr. Lanter eagerly, as though it were a bond. “It’s only forty miles from Saunderstown where I was raised. My mother, Mrs. Lanter, she lives there now. And Quilt’s a name I’ve heard.... There was old Deacon Quilt that had the lawsuit----”

“I guess he was my grandfather!” said Miss Minota soberly.

Mr. Lanter tilted his head, trying to remember what the lawsuit had been about.

“It was a suit about an iron bedstead,” said Miss Minota. “It’s ’most ten years ago. Grandfather bought it for me, because I’d crowded mother out of hers. We slep’ together till I was ’bout eleven years old. Well, grandfather measured me himself for that bed, but it didn’t get delivered for a month on end, and I’d growed beyond my measure, and didn’t fit it, or it didn’t fit me. Mother tried to convince the old man by showin’ him my frocks--she’d let ’em down eight inches only four weeks back, an’ they was hardly on speakin’ terms with my boot-tops by then--but he said on’y Jonah’s gourd growed at that rate, an’ the dry-goods man must change the bedstead or he’d go to law. An’ the dry-goods man said rather than have legal trouble he’d change the bed for a bigger, ’n he did; but the new one was six weeks in gettin’ delivered, and it was the same story over again--it didn’t fit me, nohow! So grandfather went to law, an’ the case was tried in the Smartsville court-house, an’ grandfather would ’a got damages if the dry-goods man’s lawyer hadn’t asked to have me produced in court. It was my first public appearance, an’ I was dretful shy. People used to laugh at me bein’ so shy, but you’ve no idee what a tryin’ thing it is bein’ bigger ’n anybody else--when you first find it out!” The large form of Miss Minota was convulsed by a shudder. “You’d hide yourself in a mousehole, if it was big enough to hold you. Well, they called Miss Hattie Quilt, an’ I got up an’ straightened out, for I’d been settin’ cramped in a kind of pew, an’ it seemed even to myself as if I’d never end. An’ the judge looked at me through his glasses. My! didn’t he stare! An’ he asked how old I was, an’ I said ‘Risin’ twelve’; an’ the judge allowed if I kep’ on risin’ I might get somewheres in time; an’ that a man with a granddaughter like that growin’ up about him ought to provide india-rubber bedsteads an’ a sliding roof. An’ all the folks laughed an’ grandfather had to pay sixty dollars damages an’ costs.” Miss Minota’s gentle, monotonous, mooing voice left off talking; she paused to draw breath.

“And then----?” said Mr. Lanter, in whose brain dim and faded hearsays connected with the Quilt law-case were stirring.

“Then grandfather took a kind of down on me,” Miss Minota explained, “though he’d set a deal of store on me before. An’ mother used to beg me with tears in her eyes not to grow at that rate; an’ I tried not--hard; but I kep’ on. I stinted meals an’ wore an iron pound-weight on my head under my hat--but still I kep’ on. An’ at last grandfather opinioned to father and mother it was time to let out the house--or to let out me. So they hired me to Dan Slater--perhaps you’ve heard of Slater’s Traveling Museum of Marvels--an’----”

“I should have thought they’d been ashamed!” burst out Mr. Lanter, flushing to the temples. “Their own flesh and blood!”

“That’s what other people kep’ saying to grandfather, ‘your own flesh and blood’!” returned Miss Minota. “But all grandfather ever said was that there was more flesh and blood than he’d bargained for, and he’d thank ’em to ’tend to their own affairs.”

“I don’t think he was a nice kind of man,” said little Mr. Lanter, thrilling with indignation to his toes and finger-tips, “to send a young girl away from her home and her mother--out into the world--among strangers who might have treated her badly!” He looked up at his ideal of womanhood with passionate chivalry.

“Oh, but they didn’t treat me badly!” said Miss Minota. “Dan Slater was real kind. An’ when I outgrew the caravan I traveled in at first, he telescoped two together--an’ as one of ’em had been made for the giraffe, I got on pretty well. But I’ve never got used to bein’ made a show of, an’ stared at, and asked questions by people, whether they’re ordinary folks or Kings an’ Queens an’ Serene Highnesses--an’ I guess I never will. Perhaps you wouldn’t believe it’s lonsome to be bigger ’n anybody else--but it makes me feel so, times!”

“I wish I could prevent your feeling lonesome!” burst out Mr. Lanter, before he was aware. “I wish I could carry you right away from this”--he waved his hand comprehensively--“and take care of you. I wouldn’t let a rough breath blow on you as I could help. I’d stand between you and the world, and shelter you--I’d spend my life in doing it--and spend it gladly!” He forgot himself in what he was saying, and therefore did not blush, but his awkward, plain, and homely little figure in its badly-fitting store clothes was a spectacle to smile at. “Oh! if you knew all I’d thought and dreamed of since I saw you first!” he said, with a quiver of passion in his voice. “It seems like a dream to be talking to you here.... If it didn’t how could I tell you straight out as I am telling you now, what I haven’t even had the courage to write--that I--I----”

Miss Minota modestly reared her Alpine height from the mediæval throne as a trampling of feet sounded from the dusty passage beyond. “I guess I have got to go and dress,” she said modestly.

“Oh, please wait one minute!” pleaded Mr. Lanter. “You must know it, if you never speak to me or look at me again. I think you the grandest, most glorious woman I ever saw! I’m ready to die for you right now, if the dying of a common store clerk would be any use! But it wouldn’t,” said Mr. Lanter, “and so I must go on thinking of you, and worshipping you, and loving you to the end of my days----” He broke down, blushing and stammering.

“Oh, my!” cried Miss Minota. In her surprise she sat down again so unguardedly that the mediæval throne creaked and tottered. “You don’t mean it? Honest, you don’t?”

“I mean it with all my soul!” asseverated Mr. Lanter.

Miss Minota blushed a dull red all over her immense face, as she met the young man’s rather ugly, candid gaze. Then her large china-blue eyes brimmed over; she pulled from her pocket a cambric handkerchief as large as the mainsail of a toy yacht, and began to cry like a thunder-cloud.

“Don’t!” begged Mr. Lanter. “Please don’t! If you’re angry with me I don’t know what I should do. I don’t, indeed!” He was dreadfully in earnest, and quite pale, and large drops stood upon his forehead, for the air in the Musée was insufferably hot and close. There was a smell of charred wood and blistering paint, and the unsettled dust of the place made the straggling rays of daylight that bored their way into it seem blue and smoky. A sudden clamor of voices broke out below, almost under the stage it seemed, and then came the trampling of feet, the crash of broken glass, and the smell of some spilled chemical mingled with the grosser odors of the place. The scent, the stir, the sounds, seemed vaguely associated in Mr. Lanter’s mind with something dangerous and sinister. But he was listening to Miss Minota.

“I ain’t a mite angry,” said the giantess, giving her overflowing eyes a final dab with the handkerchief, now crumpled into a damp ball. “I should hate to have you believe it! I--I think you’re real generous, an’ kind, an’ noble. And I shall be grateful to you all my life”--she mopped her eyes again--“for makin’ me feel--for once--like I’d been an ordinary-sized girl; for I--I’ll own I have fretted considerable. But there, when things can’t be altered, anyhow, it’s no good frettin’, is it? An’, of course, there could never be nothin’ between us--I couldn’t ever play it so low down on a man that’s as generous and kind as you are, as to say there could be. But I’m just as obliged. And now I’ll say good-bye, and if we don’t never meet again you’re to remember I was grateful. My land! I do believe the show’s afire!”

For the crackling, blistering heat that parched the flooring underfoot, with the sudden volume of smoke that rolled upward, betrayed the condition of things no less than the thin tongues of flame that licked upward between the boards. In the regions under the stage the conflagration had broken out; they heard the shouts of the stage-hands, the crash of glass fire-bombs breaking one after another, and next moment a solitary man, smoke-blackened and red-faced, burst upward from the regions below, and, rushing to the fire-hose, coiled like a brown snake against the bare masonry of the wall, began to haul it down. As the man tugged and swore at the hose, other voices shouted and other feet clattered, and half a dozen other men, singed and blackened like so many demons, emerged as the first had done, from those conjectural lower depths.

“It’s no use--no use!” they shouted as they ran, and the fireman dropped the hose and ran with them. They did not have to cross the charring, blistering stage, for they were on the right side for the passage-way. They fought and struggled, shrieking, in the narrow exit, blocked by their terrified bodies.

“Come! Didn’t you hear?” shouted Mr. Lanter. He caught Miss Minota by the skirt and tugged at it like a faithful terrier. “Run!” he shouted again. But a choking volume of smoke, a blast of fiercer heat fanned up from below. The boards of the stage were now in flames. And the flames were of beautiful, ravishingly-delicate shades of blue and hyacinth and orange-red. And they devoured where they licked with a deadly greed and a purring, crackling kind of satisfaction.... “Come!” Mr. Lanter shouted again. The giantess had sunk upon her knees, he shook her violently by the shoulder, and she lifted her large, terrified face and staring blue eyes, now for the first time upon a level with his own.

“I dasn’t!” she cried. “The floor wouldn’t bear me--I should never git across! Save yourself while you have time!” As she sobbed and shuddered, Mr. Lanter put his arm round her, as though she had been quite an ordinary-sized girl.

“Pluck up!” he shouted, for the fire roared as triumphantly as though Kneeman’s Star Musée were the choicest morsel in the world. “I’ll get you out of this or burn with you, by--thunder!” and he kissed her. The kiss seemed to revive Miss Minota, for she gasped, and struggled to her feet, and looked with him upon a wall of rejoicing flame that soared upward between them and the passage-way. “These doors behind us--where do they lead?” Mr. Lanter shouted, and Miss Minota shouted back, “To the dressing-rooms!”

There was no way of escape before them; the iron curtain walled them in. As the slim greedy tongues of fire began to lick the boards on which they stood, they retreated to the back of the stage. But the stifling smoke and the greedy fire followed them, and the end of things seemed not far off.... It seemed quite natural now that they should be holding hands. They were blackened both, and smoke-begrimed, parched and giddy with the terrific heat, and the incandescent air fanned on their smirched faces as though the wings of Azrael had stirred it; but they were a comfort to each other. To be heard by each other in that fiendish tumult of insentient things was impossible; but they pressed close to one another like children in the smoky dark, and held one another’s hands.

“I don’t know as I’d choose to have things different,” said a grip of Mr. Lanter’s; and the answering squeeze of Miss Minota’s large hand said, “Thank you for helping me to die so like an ordinary-sized girl!” But the hand she pressed seemed to melt in hers and slip away, and, groping downward in the dun-colored smother, the giantess touched the senseless body of Mr. Lanter lying at her feet. And then she gave a cry of love and grief and anger mingled, as an ordinary-sized woman might have done--and lifted her lover from the blistering floor as though he had been a baby. The smoke seemed less dense a few feet beyond where she stood, and, moving forward with Mr. Lanter held upon one arm, the other outstretched gropingly, Miss Minota bruised her knuckles against a wooden door. It was the high, narrow door of solid, iron-clamped timber (usually situated at the back of the scene-dock), by which scenery and the more bulky properties were hoisted up to or removed from the stage of Kneeman’s Musée. In the joy of the discovery Miss Minota cried out. Then she laid down Mr. Lanter very gently on the floor, and fumbled for the door-bolts. But the door opened by a winch and lever, and Miss Minota fumbled in vain. A chill despair seized her. He lay so helpless and inert at her feet that he might have been dead! “O Lord!” Miss Minota prayed, “where’s the use in You havin’ made me so much bigger than other folk if I can’t save him? Help me to do it, and I’ll never go back on You by grumblin’ at my size any more!”

A dizziness overcame her, she reeled and staggered against the side wall of the scene-dock, bruising her knee against something that fell with a dull, reverberating crash. It was a solid bar of iron used by a professional athlete in a weight-lifting exhibition, and it might have weighed a hundred and sixty pounds. The crash of its fall brought Miss Minota to herself. She stooped, and found and lifted it, and exultant, for the first time, in the stature and the strength that marked her out and set her apart from her ordinary-sized sisters, the giantess attacked the door. One battering blow from the weapon wielded by those tremendous arms, and the hinges started and the stout planks split; a second, and a plank crashed splintering outward; a third, and a shout went up from the crowd assembled in the street below, as, amid volumes of escaping smoke, the begrimed and fire-scorched figure of Miss Minota appeared, carrying the insensible body of Mr. Lanter in her arms.

* * * * *

“Well,” said Madame Lanter, the Colossal American Marvel, some months later, to an interviewer specially despatched from the office of the _Boston Magpie_, “I guess you know what happened after that!” She blushed a little, being yet a bride, and coyly turned her wedding ring, a golden circlet of the dimensions of a baby’s bracelet, upon her colossal finger. “We brought him to, and then _he_ brought it off. Flesh an’ blood is flesh an’ blood, an’ we all have our weak p’ints!--and if I did lay out never to marry a man as I couldn’t look up to--I guess it would take half a dozen of my size, standing on each other’s heads, to equal the loftiness of Mr. Lanter’s mind!”

The young man thus eulogized presented to the reporter’s view a spare and rather undersized personality, plain of feature, and awkward of manner, drawbacks afterward transmuted by the magic touch of the stylographic pen into “_slightness, unpretending elegance, and unaffected simplicity. The beaming affection discernible in the glance he turned upon his stately bride justified the eulogistic terms in which that lady spoke of her husband. Their brief but thrillingly romantic courtship, with its strikingly sensational ‘dénouement,’ created a ‘furore’ when detailed by the New York press. The disinterested nature of the attachment of Mr. Lanter (who is a member of one of our oldest New England families) to the superb specimen of American womanhood who bears his aristocratic name may be gathered from the fact that the marriage ceremony was some weeks old before Mr. Lanter discovered that Mrs. Lanter had amassed, during the period of time spent by her in exhibiting her personal developments in the principal cities of Europe and the States, a fortune of ninety-five thousand dollars._”

And in this final statement the stylographic pen distilled pure truth.

HOW THE MISTRESS CAME HOME

The avenue of lofty elms was veiled in a white fog; upon the low-lying parklands, cropped meadows, and sere stubble-fields, the same woolly vapor lay dankly. But the square windows of the fine old Tudor manor-house flashed with ruddy light, and the hospitable hearth-fires of the hall diffused glow and radiance through open doors. Sir Vivian and Lady Wroth were coming home after a honeymoon of eight months’ duration spent in scampering over the face of the habitable globe; and the village was in a state of loyal ferment over the advent of the lord and lady of the manor. Already the local band, heavily primed with home-brewed, was posted at the station in readiness to burst into the strains of “See the Conquering Hero” upon the arrival of the London express. Eight sturdy laborers, in clean smock-frocks, waited, rope in hand, for the opportunity of harnessing themselves to the bridal brougham, while Venetian masts, upbearing strings of flags and fairy lanterns, testified to the strength and temperature of popular goodwill.

“A sweet pretty creature, ’m, I hear!” said Mrs. Ansdey, the white-haired, handsome, black-silk-clad housekeeper to the Rector’s wife, who had driven up to the house to ask for a cup of tea, and leave a parcel addressed to the new mistress of the manor, containing three dozen very raspy cambric handkerchiefs, hemmed and initialed by the Girls’ Sewing Class at the National Schools.

“Quite a picture, Sir Vivian’s valet said!” added the butler, who was comparatively young, not being over sixty, and therefore looked down upon by Mrs. Ansdey from her vantage of fifteen summers.

“Beauty is grass!” said the Rector’s wife, who was not overburdened with the commodity. She was a long, thin, high-nosed woman, with color distributed over her countenance in little islands. She drank her tea, and toasted her large, useful feet at the glowing wood-fire, and praised the Sally Lunns.

Her reverend partner was down at the village reading-rooms, rehearsing the shrill-voiced school children in the “Greet Ye To-night, Thrice Happy Pair,” chorus from _Lohengrin_. She knew the quality of the cocoa to be obtained there, and longed to share with him the hospitable burden of Mrs. Ansdey’s silver tray. But as this amicable division of spoil was manifestly impossible, the Rector’s wife consoled herself by making a clean sweep. And so she ate and drank and chatted to the not displeased Mrs. Ansdey with unflagging vigor, while the famous Reynolds portraits of departed ladies of the manor smiled and simpered from the shining paneled walls, and the gray-muzzled bloodhounds, last of a famous race and favorite of the last Baronet, snored upon the leopard-skin hearthrug.

“You have had many visitors this season?” queried the Rector’s wife, with a calculating glance at the donation box, the contents of which went to the Cottage Hospital twice in the year.

“Troops of them,” returned the housekeeper, nodding her lace lappets. “And, as usual, half of ’em with American twangs. Even if they didn’t talk through their noses, I should guess ’em from the States, shouldn’t you, Mr. Cradell?”

“Without doubt, ma’am,” rejoined the butler. “There’s a feverish anxiety to get the greatest amount of information in the shortest possible time, and an equally ardent determination to finger what isn’t meant to be fingered, price what can’t be priced, and buy what isn’t for sale, which, to my mind, is a trademark distinguishing the bearer, male or female, as hailing from the other side of the Atlantic.”

“Even if he didn’t call me ‘marm’--if he’s a man and middle-aged, and put American dollars in the box instead of English half-crowns if he happens to be a lady,” continued Mrs. Ansdey. “But what I will say is, if it was with my latest breath, that the young ladies are most elegant and have a real appreciation for old and what you might call romantic things,” she added somewhat hastily; and the Rector’s wife said, as she added sugar to her fourth cup:

“The new Lady Wroth is an American, I have always understood.”

“Born in Washington, but edicated in Paris,” said Mr. Cradell, putting a fresh log of apple-wood upon the glowing fire at the lower end of the hall.

“She comes of a fine old family, we have always understood,” said the housekeeper, smoothing her lace apron with her plump white hands. “Rutherfoord her maiden name was, and with her beauty and her jewels--for her late papa was a Senator, besides being what I’ve heard called a Railway King--she created a sensation when she was presented by the Duchess of Balgowrie last May but one.”

“As to her style of good looks,” said Mr. Cradell, dusting lichen from his coat, “Sir Vivian was always partial to dark beauty. ‘What is she like?’ says he to me when I took the liberty of asking, as an old servant may. ‘A black pearl, Cradell, and I hope to wear my jewel in my bonnet as my ancestor Sir Guy wore Queen Elizabeth’s ruby--until the day I die!’ He’d a light in his eyes when he said it, and what with love and happiness and all, he looked more like a boy of twenty-three than a man of forty. And I said to Mrs. Ansdey, ‘If ever there was a love-match,’ I says, ‘Sir Vivian’s is one.’ And now the carriage is waiting at the station to bring home both the master and the mistress--bless them both!”