Chapter II

He pushed open the swinging door and found himself in a long corridor with a tessellated floor, at the end of which, in a brightly-lit enclosure of plate-glass and mahogany, the night-clerk dozed over a copy of the _Police Gazette_. The air in the corridor was rich in reminiscences of yesterday’s dinners, and a bronzed radiator poured a wave of dry heat into Woburn’s face.

The night-clerk, roused by the swinging of the door, sat watching Woburn’s approach with the unexpectant eye of one who has full confidence in his capacity for digesting surprises. Not that there was anything surprising in Woburn’s appearance; but the night-clerk’s callers were given to such imaginative flights in explaining their luggageless arrival in the small hours of the morning, that he fared habitually on fictions which would have staggered a less experienced stomach. The night-clerk, whose unwrinkled bloom showed that he throve on this high-seasoned diet, had a fancy for classifying his applicants before they could frame their explanations.

“This one’s been locked out,” he said to himself as he mustered Woburn.

Having exercised his powers of divination with his accustomed accuracy he listened without stirring an eye-lid to Woburn’s statement; merely replying, when the latter asked the price of a room, “Two-fifty.”

“Very well,” said Woburn, pushing the money under the brass lattice, “I’ll go up at once; and I want to be called at seven.”

To this the night-clerk proffered no reply, but stretching out his hand to press an electric button, returned apathetically to the perusal of the _Police Gazette_. His summons was answered by the appearance of a man in shirt-sleeves, whose rumpled head indicated that he had recently risen from some kind of makeshift repose; to him the night-clerk tossed a key, with the brief comment, “Ninety-seven;” and the man, after a sleepy glance at Woburn, turned on his heel and lounged toward the staircase at the back of the corridor.

Woburn followed and they climbed three flights in silence. At each landing Woburn glanced down, the long passage-way lit by a lowered gas-jet, with a double line of boots before the doors, waiting, like yesterday’s deeds, to carry their owners so many miles farther on the morrow’s destined road. On the third landing the man paused, and after examining the number on the key, turned to the left, and slouching past three or four doors, finally unlocked one and preceded Woburn into a room lit only by the upward gleam of the electric globes in the street below.

The man felt in his pockets; then he turned to Woburn. “Got a match?” he asked.

Woburn politely offered him one, and he applied it to the gas-fixture which extended its jointed arm above an ash dressing-table with a blurred mirror fixed between two standards. Having performed this office with an air of detachment designed to make Woburn recognize it as an act of supererogation, he turned without a word and vanished down the passage-way.

Woburn, after an indifferent glance about the room, which seemed to afford the amount of luxury generally obtainable for two dollars and a half in a fashionable quarter of New York, locked the door and sat down at the ink-stained writing-table in the window. Far below him lay the pallidly-lit depths of the forsaken thoroughfare. Now and then he heard the jingle of a horsecar and the ring of hoofs on the freezing pavement, or saw the lonely figure of a policeman eclipsing the illumination of the plate-glass windows on the opposite side of the street. He sat thus for a long time, his elbows on the table, his chin between his hands, till at length the contemplation of the abandoned sidewalks, above which the electric globes kept Stylites-like vigil, became intolerable to him, and he drew down the window-shade, and lit the gas-fixture beside the dressing-table. Then he took a cigar from his case, and held it to the flame.

The passage from the stinging freshness of the night to the stale overheated atmosphere of the Haslemere Hotel had checked the preternaturally rapid working of his mind, and he was now scarcely conscious of thinking at all. His head was heavy, and he would have thrown himself on the bed had he not feared to oversleep the hour fixed for his departure. He thought it safest, instead, to seat himself once more by the table, in the most uncomfortable chair that he could find, and smoke one cigar after another till the first sign of dawn should give an excuse for action.

He had laid his watch on the table before him, and was gazing at the hour-hand, and trying to convince himself by so doing that he was still wide awake, when a noise in the adjoining room suddenly straightened him in his chair and banished all fear of sleep.

There was no mistaking the nature of the noise; it was that of a woman’s sobs. The sobs were not loud, but the sound reached him distinctly through the frail door between the two rooms; it expressed an utter abandonment to grief; not the cloud-burst of some passing emotion, but the slow down-pour of a whole heaven of sorrow.

Woburn sat listening. There was nothing else to be done; and at least his listening was a mute tribute to the trouble he was powerless to relieve. It roused, too, the drugged pulses of his own grief: he was touched by the chance propinquity of two alien sorrows in a great city throbbing with multifarious passions. It would have been more in keeping with the irony of life had he found himself next to a mother singing her child to sleep: there seemed a mute commiseration in the hand that had led him to such neighborhood.

Gradually the sobs subsided, with pauses betokening an effort at self-control. At last they died off softly, like the intermittent drops that end a day of rain.

“Poor soul,” Woburn mused, “she’s got the better of it for the time. I wonder what it’s all about?”

At the same moment he heard another sound that made him jump to his feet. It was a very low sound, but in that nocturnal silence which gives distinctness to the faintest noises, Woburn knew at once that he had heard the click of a pistol.

“What is she up to now?” he asked himself, with his eye on the door between the two rooms; and the brightly-lit keyhole seemed to reply with a glance of intelligence. He turned out the gas and crept to the door, pressing his eye to the illuminated circle.

After a moment or two of adjustment, during which he seemed to himself to be breathing like a steam-engine, he discerned a room like his own, with the same dressing-table flanked by gas-fixtures, and the same table in the window. This table was directly in his line of vision; and beside it stood a woman with a small revolver in her hands. The lights being behind her, Woburn could only infer her youth from her slender silhouette and the nimbus of fair hair defining her head. Her dress seemed dark and simple, and on a chair under one of the gas-jets lay a jacket edged with cheap fur and a small travelling-bag. He could not see the other end of the room, but something in her manner told him that she was alone. At length she put the revolver down and took up a letter that lay on the table. She drew the letter from its envelope and read it over two or three times; then she put it back, sealing the envelope, and placing it conspicuously against the mirror of the dressing-table.

There was so grave a significance in this dumb-show that Woburn felt sure that her next act would be to return to the table and take up the revolver; but he had not reckoned on the vanity of woman. After putting the letter in place she still lingered at the mirror, standing a little sideways, so that he could now see her face, which was distinctly pretty, but of a small and unelastic mould, inadequate to the expression of the larger emotions. For some moments she continued to study herself with the expression of a child looking at a playmate who has been scolded; then she turned to the table and lifted the revolver to her forehead.

A sudden crash made her arm drop, and sent her darting backward to the opposite side of the room. Woburn had broken down the door, and stood torn and breathless in the breach.

“Oh!” she gasped, pressing closer to the wall.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said; “I saw what you were going to do and I had to stop you.”

She looked at him for a moment in silence, and he saw the terrified flutter of her breast; then she said, “No one can stop me for long. And besides, what right have you--”

“Every one has the right to prevent a crime,” he returned, the sound of the last word sending the blood to his forehead.

“I deny it,” she said passionately. “Every one who has tried to live and failed has the right to die.”

“Failed in what?”

“In everything!” she replied. They stood looking at each other in silence.

At length he advanced a few steps.

“You’ve no right to say you’ve failed,” he said, “while you have breath to try again.” He drew the revolver from her hand.

“Try again--try again? I tell you I’ve tried seventy times seven!”

“What have you tried?”

She looked at him with a certain dignity.

“I don’t know,” she said, “that you’ve any right to question me--or to be in this room at all--” and suddenly she burst into tears.

The discrepancy between her words and action struck the chord which, in a man’s heart, always responds to the touch of feminine unreason. She dropped into the nearest chair, hiding her face in her hands, while Woburn watched the course of her weeping.

At last she lifted her head, looking up between drenched lashes.

“Please go away,” she said in childish entreaty.

“How can I?” he returned. “It’s impossible that I should leave you in this state. Trust me--let me help you. Tell me what has gone wrong, and let’s see if there’s no other way out of it.”

Woburn had a voice full of sensitive inflections, and it was now trembling with profoundest pity. Its note seemed to reassure the girl, for she said, with a beginning of confidence in her own tones, “But I don’t even know who you are.”

Woburn was silent: the words startled him. He moved nearer to her and went on in the same quieting tone.

“I am a man who has suffered enough to want to help others. I don’t want to know any more about you than will enable me to do what I can for you. I’ve probably seen more of life than you have, and if you’re willing to tell me your troubles perhaps together we may find a way out of them.”

She dried her eyes and glanced at the revolver.

“That’s the only way out,” she said.

“How do you know? Are you sure you’ve tried every other?”

“Perfectly sure, I’ve written and written, and humbled myself like a slave before him, and she won’t even let him answer my letters. Oh, but you don’t understand”--she broke off with a renewal of weeping.

“I begin to understand--you’re sorry for something you’ve done?”

“Oh, I’ve never denied that--I’ve never denied that I was wicked.”

“And you want the forgiveness of some one you care about?”

“My husband,” she whispered.

“You’ve done something to displease your husband?”

“To displease him? I ran away with another man!” There was a dismal exultation in her tone, as though she were paying Woburn off for having underrated her offense.

She had certainly surprised him; at worst he had expected a quarrel over a rival, with a possible complication of mother-in-law. He wondered how such helpless little feet could have taken so bold a step; then he remembered that there is no audacity like that of weakness.

He was wondering how to lead her to completer avowal when she added forlornly, “You see there’s nothing else to do.”

Woburn took a turn in the room. It was certainly a narrower strait than he had foreseen, and he hardly knew how to answer; but the first flow of confession had eased her, and she went on without farther persuasion.

“I don’t know how I could ever have done it; I must have been downright crazy. I didn’t care much for Joe when I married him--he wasn’t exactly handsome, and girls think such a lot of that. But he just laid down and worshipped me, and I _was_ getting fond of him in a way; only the life was so dull. I’d been used to a big city--I come from Detroit--and Hinksville is such a poky little place; that’s where we lived; Joe is telegraph-operator on the railroad there. He’d have been in a much bigger place now, if he hadn’t--well, after all, he behaved perfectly splendidly about _that_.

“I really was getting fond of him, and I believe I should have realized in time how good and noble and unselfish he was, if his mother hadn’t been always sitting there and everlastingly telling me so. We learned in school about the Athenians hating some man who was always called just, and that’s the way I felt about Joe. Whenever I did anything that wasn’t quite right his mother would say how differently Joe would have done it. And she was forever telling me that Joe didn’t approve of this and that and the other. When we were alone he approved of everything, but when his mother was round he’d sit quiet and let her say he didn’t. I knew he’d let me have my way afterwards, but somehow that didn’t prevent my getting mad at the time.

“And then the evenings were so long, with Joe away, and Mrs. Glenn (that’s his mother) sitting there like an image knitting socks for the heathen. The only caller we ever had was the Baptist minister, and he never took any more notice of me than if I’d been a piece of furniture. I believe he was afraid to before Mrs. Glenn.”

She paused breathlessly, and the tears in her eyes were now of anger.

“Well?” said Woburn gently.

“Well--then Arthur Hackett came along; he was travelling for a big publishing firm in Philadelphia. He was awfully handsome and as clever and sarcastic as anything. He used to lend me lots of novels and magazines, and tell me all about society life in New York. All the girls were after him, and Alice Sprague, whose father is the richest man in Hinksville, fell desperately in love with him and carried on like a fool; but he wouldn’t take any notice of her. He never looked at anybody but me.” Her face lit up with a reminiscent smile, and then clouded again. “I hate him now,” she exclaimed, with a change of tone that startled Woburn. “I’d like to kill him--but he’s killed me instead.

“Well, he bewitched me so I didn’t know what I was doing; I was like somebody in a trance. When he wasn’t there I didn’t want to speak to anybody; I used to lie in bed half the day just to get away from folks; I hated Joe and Hinksville and everything else. When he came back the days went like a flash; we were together nearly all the time. I knew Joe’s mother was spying on us, but I didn’t care. And at last it seemed as if I couldn’t let him go away again without me; so one evening he stopped at the back gate in a buggy, and we drove off together and caught the eastern express at River Bend. He promised to bring me to New York.” She paused, and then added scornfully, “He didn’t even do that!”

Woburn had returned to his seat and was watching her attentively. It was curious to note how her passion was spending itself in words; he saw that she would never kill herself while she had any one to talk to.

“That was five months ago,” she continued, “and we travelled all through the southern states, and stayed a little while near Philadelphia, where his business is. He did things real stylishly at first. Then he was sent to Albany, and we stayed a week at the Delavan House. One afternoon I went out to do some shopping, and when I came back he was gone. He had taken his trunk with him, and hadn’t left any address; but in my travelling-bag I found a fifty-dollar bill, with a slip of paper on which he had written, ‘No use coming after me; I’m married.’ We’d been together less than four months, and I never saw him again.

“At first I couldn’t believe it. I stayed on, thinking it was a joke--or that he’d feel sorry for me and come back. But he never came and never wrote me a line. Then I began to hate him, and to see what a wicked fool I’d been to leave Joe. I was so lonesome--I thought I’d go crazy. And I kept thinking how good and patient Joe had been, and how badly I’d used him, and how lovely it would be to be back in the little parlor at Hinksville, even with Mrs. Glenn and the minister talking about free-will and predestination. So at last I wrote to Joe. I wrote him the humblest letters you ever read, one after another; but I never got any answer.

“Finally I found I’d spent all my money, so I sold my watch and my rings--Joe gave me a lovely turquoise ring when we were married--and came to New York. I felt ashamed to stay alone any longer in Albany; I was afraid that some of Arthur’s friends, who had met me with him on the road, might come there and recognize me. After I got here I wrote to Susy Price, a great friend of mine who lives at Hinksville, and she answered at once, and told me just what I had expected--that Joe was ready to forgive me and crazy to have me back, but that his mother wouldn’t let him stir a step or write me a line, and that she and the minister were at him all day long, telling him how bad I was and what a sin it would be to forgive me. I got Susy’s letter two or three days ago, and after that I saw it was no use writing to Joe. He’ll never dare go against his mother and she watches him like a cat. I suppose I deserve it--but he might have given me another chance! I know he would if he could only see me.”

Her voice had dropped from anger to lamentation, and her tears again overflowed.

Woburn looked at her with the pity one feels for a child who is suddenly confronted with the result of some unpremeditated naughtiness.

“But why not go back to Hinksville,” he suggested, “if your husband is ready to forgive you? You could go to your friend’s house, and once your husband knows you are there you can easily persuade him to see you.”

“Perhaps I could--Susy thinks I could. But I can’t go back; I haven’t got a cent left.”

“But surely you can borrow money? Can’t you ask your friend to forward you the amount of your fare?”

She shook her head.

“Susy ain’t well off; she couldn’t raise five dollars, and it costs twenty-five to get back to Hinksville. And besides, what would become of me while I waited for the money? They’ll turn me out of here to-morrow; I haven’t paid my last week’s board, and I haven’t got anything to give them; my bag’s empty; I’ve pawned everything.”

“And don’t you know any one here who would lend you the money?”

“No; not a soul. At least I do know one gentleman; he’s a friend of Arthur’s, a Mr. Devine; he was staying at Rochester when we were there. I met him in the street the other day, and I didn’t mean to speak to him, but he came up to me, and said he knew all about Arthur and how meanly he had behaved, and he wanted to know if he couldn’t help me--I suppose he saw I was in trouble. He tried to persuade me to go and stay with his aunt, who has a lovely house right round here in Twenty-fourth Street; he must be very rich, for he offered to lend me as much money as I wanted.”

“You didn’t take it?”

“No,” she returned; “I daresay he meant to be kind, but I didn’t care to be beholden to any friend of Arthur’s. He came here again yesterday, but I wouldn’t see him, so he left a note giving me his aunt’s address and saying she’d have a room ready for me at any time.”

There was a long silence; she had dried her tears and sat looking at Woburn with eyes full of helpless reliance.

“Well,” he said at length, “you did right not to take that man’s money; but this isn’t the only alternative,” he added, pointing to the revolver.

“I don’t know any other,” she answered wearily. “I’m not smart enough to get employment; I can’t make dresses or do type-writing, or any of the useful things they teach girls now; and besides, even if I could get work I couldn’t stand the loneliness. I can never hold my head up again--I can’t bear the disgrace. If I can’t go back to Joe I’d rather be dead.”

“And if you go back to Joe it will be all right?” Woburn suggested with a smile.

“Oh,” she cried, her whole face alight, “if I could only go back to Joe!”

They were both silent again; Woburn sat with his hands in his pockets gazing at the floor. At length his silence seemed to rouse her to the unwontedness of the situation, and she rose from her seat, saying in a more constrained tone, “I don’t know why I’ve told you all this.”

“Because you believed that I would help you,” Woburn answered, rising also; “and you were right; I’m going to send you home.”

She colored vividly. “You told me I was right not to take Mr. Devine’s money,” she faltered.

“Yes,” he answered, “but did Mr. Devine want to send you home?”

“He wanted me to wait at his aunt’s a little while first and then write to Joe again.”

“I don’t--I want you to start tomorrow morning; this morning, I mean. I’ll take you to the station and buy your ticket, and your husband can send me back the money.”

“Oh, I can’t--I can’t--you mustn’t--” she stammered, reddening and paling. “Besides, they’ll never let me leave here without paying.”

“How much do you owe?”

“Fourteen dollars.”

“Very well; I’ll pay that for you; you can leave me your revolver as a pledge. But you must start by the first train; have you any idea at what time it leaves the Grand Central?”

“I think there’s one at eight.”

He glanced at his watch.

“In less than two hours, then; it’s after six now.”

She stood before him with fascinated eyes.

“You must have a very strong will,” she said. “When you talk like that you make me feel as if I had to do everything you say.”

“Well, you must,” said Woburn lightly. “Man was made to be obeyed.”

“Oh, you’re not like other men,” she returned; “I never heard a voice like yours; it’s so strong and kind. You must be a very good man; you remind me of Joe; I’m sure you’ve got just such a nature; and Joe is the best man I’ve ever seen.”

Woburn made no reply, and she rambled on, with little pauses and fresh bursts of confidence.

“Joe’s a real hero, you know; he did the most splendid thing you ever heard of. I think I began to tell you about it, but I didn’t finish. I’ll tell you now. It happened just after we were married; I was mad with him at the time, I’m afraid, but now I see how splendid he was. He’d been telegraph operator at Hinksville for four years and was hoping that he’d get promoted to a bigger place; but he was afraid to ask for a raise. Well, I was very sick with a bad attack of pneumonia and one night the doctor said he wasn’t sure whether he could pull me through. When they sent word to Joe at the telegraph office he couldn’t stand being away from me another minute. There was a poor consumptive boy always hanging round the station; Joe had taught him how to operate, just to help him along; so he left him in the office and tore home for half an hour, knowing he could get back before the eastern express came along.

“He hadn’t been gone five minutes when a freight-train ran off the rails about a mile up the track. It was a very still night, and the boy heard the smash and shouting, and knew something had happened. He couldn’t tell what it was, but the minute he heard it he sent a message over the wires like a flash, and caught the eastern express just as it was pulling out of the station above Hinksville. If he’d hesitated a second, or made any mistake, the express would have come on, and the loss of life would have been fearful. The next day the Hinksville papers were full of Operator Glenn’s presence of mind; they all said he’d be promoted. That was early in November and Joe didn’t hear anything from the company till the first of January. Meanwhile the boy had gone home to his father’s farm out in the country, and before Christmas he was dead. Well, on New Year’s day Joe got a notice from the company saying that his pay was to be raised, and that he was to be promoted to a big junction near Detroit, in recognition of his presence of mind in stopping the eastern express. It was just what we’d both been pining for and I was nearly wild with joy; but I noticed Joe didn’t say much. He just telegraphed for leave, and the next day he went right up to Detroit and told the directors there what had really happened. When he came back he told us they’d suspended him; I cried every night for a week, and even his mother said he was a fool. After that we just lived on at Hinksville, and six months later the company took him back; but I don’t suppose they’ll ever promote him now.”

Her voice again trembled with facile emotion.

“Wasn’t it beautiful of him? Ain’t he a real hero?” she said. “And I’m sure you’d behave just like him; you’d be just as gentle about little things, and you’d never move an inch about big ones. You’d never do a mean action, but you’d be sorry for people who did; I can see it in your face; that’s why I trusted you right off.”

Woburn’s eyes were fixed on the window; he hardly seemed to hear her. At length he walked across the room and pulled up the shade. The electric lights were dissolving in the gray alembic of the dawn. A milk-cart rattled down the street and, like a witch returning late from the Sabbath, a stray cat whisked into an area. So rose the appointed day.

Woburn turned back, drawing from his pocket the roll of bills which he had thrust there with so different a purpose. He counted them out, and handed her fifteen dollars.

“That will pay for your board, including your breakfast this morning,” he said. “We’ll breakfast together presently if you like; and meanwhile suppose we sit down and watch the sunrise. I haven’t seen it for years.”

He pushed two chairs toward the window, and they sat down side by side. The light came gradually, with the icy reluctance of winter; at last a red disk pushed itself above the opposite house-tops and a long cold gleam slanted across their window. They did not talk much; there was a silencing awe in the spectacle.

Presently Woburn rose and looked again at his watch.

“I must go and cover up my dress-coat”, he said, “and you had better put on your hat and jacket. We shall have to be starting in half an hour.”

As he turned away she laid her hand on his arm.

“You haven’t even told me your name,” she said.

“No,” he answered; “but if you get safely back to Joe you can call me Providence.”

“But how am I to send you the money?”

“Oh--well, I’ll write you a line in a day or two and give you my address; I don’t know myself what it will be; I’m a wanderer on the face of the earth.”

“But you must have my name if you mean to write to me.”

“Well, what is your name?”

“Ruby Glenn. And I think--I almost think you might send the letter right to Joe’s--send it to the Hinksville station.”

“Very well.”

“You promise?”

“Of course I promise.”

He went back into his room, thinking how appropriate it was that she should have an absurd name like Ruby. As he re-entered the room, where the gas sickened in the daylight, it seemed to him that he was returning to some forgotten land; he had passed, with the last few hours, into a wholly new phase of consciousness. He put on his fur coat, turning up the collar and crossing the lapels to hide his white tie. Then he put his cigar-case in his pocket, turned out the gas, and, picking up his hat and stick, walked back through the open doorway.

Ruby Glenn had obediently prepared herself for departure and was standing before the mirror, patting her curls into place. Her eyes were still red, but she had the happy look of a child that has outslept its grief. On the floor he noticed the tattered fragments of the letter which, a few hours earlier, he had seen her place before the mirror.

“Shall we go down now?” he asked.

“Very well,” she assented; then, with a quick movement, she stepped close to him, and putting her hands on his shoulders lifted her face to his.

“I believe you’re the best man I ever knew,” she said, “the very best--except Joe.”

She drew back blushing deeply, and unlocked the door which led into the passage-way. Woburn picked up her bag, which she had forgotten, and followed her out of the room. They passed a frowzy chambermaid, who stared at them with a yawn. Before the doors the row of boots still waited; there was a faint new aroma of coffee mingling with the smell of vanished dinners, and a fresh blast of heat had begun to tingle through the radiators.

In the unventilated coffee-room they found a waiter who had the melancholy air of being the last survivor of an exterminated race, and who reluctantly brought them some tea made with water which had not boiled, and a supply of stale rolls and staler butter. On this meagre diet they fared in silence, Woburn occasionally glancing at his watch; at length he rose, telling his companion to go and pay her bill while he called a hansom. After all, there was no use in economizing his remaining dollars.

In a few moments she joined him under the portico of the hotel. The hansom stood waiting and he sprang in after her, calling to the driver to take them to the Forty-second Street station.

When they reached the station he found a seat for her and went to buy her ticket. There were several people ahead of him at the window, and when he had bought the ticket he found that it was time to put her in the train. She rose in answer to his glance, and together they walked down the long platform in the murky chill of the roofed-in air. He followed her into the railway carriage, making sure that she had her bag, and that the ticket was safe inside it; then he held out his hand, in its pearl-coloured evening glove: he felt that the people in the other seats were staring at them.

“Good-bye,” he said.

“Good-bye,” she answered, flushing gratefully. “I’ll never forget--never. And you _will_ write, won’t you? Promise!”

“Of course, of course,” he said, hastening from the carriage.

He retraced his way along the platform, passed through the dismal waiting-room and stepped out into the early sunshine. On the sidewalk outside the station he hesitated awhile; then he strolled slowly down Forty-second Street and, skirting the melancholy flank of the Reservoir, walked across Bryant Park. Finally he sat down on one of the benches near the Sixth Avenue and lit a cigar. The signs of life were multiplying around him; he watched the cars roll by with their increasing freight of dingy toilers, the shop-girls hurrying to their work, the children trudging schoolward, their small vague noses red with cold, their satchels clasped in woollen-gloved hands. There is nothing very imposing in the first stirring of a great city’s activities; it is a slow reluctant process, like the waking of a heavy sleeper; but to Woburn’s mood the sight of that obscure renewal of humble duties was more moving than the spectacle of an army with banners.

He sat for a long time, smoking the last cigar in his case, and murmuring to himself a line from Hamlet--the saddest, he thought, in the play--

_For every man hath business and desire_.

Suddenly an unpremeditated movement made him feel the pressure of Ruby Glenn’s revolver in his pocket; it was like a devil’s touch on his arm, and he sprang up hastily. In his other pocket there were just four dollars and fifty cents; but that didn’t matter now. He had no thought of flight.

For a few minutes he loitered vaguely about the park; then the cold drove him on again, and with the rapidity born of a sudden resolve he began to walk down the Fifth Avenue towards his lodgings. He brushed past a maid-servant who was washing the vestibule and ran up stairs to his room. A fire was burning in the grate and his books and photographs greeted him cheerfully from the walls; the tranquil air of the whole room seemed to take it for granted that he meant to have his bath and breakfast and go down town as usual.

He threw off his coat and pulled the revolver out of his pocket; for some moments he held it curiously in his hand, bending over to examine it as Ruby Glenn had done; then he laid it in the top drawer of a small cabinet, and locking the drawer threw the key into the fire.

After that he went quietly about the usual business of his toilet. In taking off his dress-coat he noticed the Legion of Honor which Miss Talcott had given him at the ball. He pulled it out of his buttonhole and tossed it into the fire-place. When he had finished dressing he saw with surprise that it was nearly ten o’clock. Ruby Glenn was already two hours nearer home.

Woburn stood looking about the room of which he had thought to take final leave the night before; among the ashes beneath the grate he caught sight of a little white heap which symbolized to his fancy the remains of his brief correspondence with Miss Talcott. He roused himself from this unseasonable musing and with a final glance at the familiar setting of his past, turned to face the future which the last hours had prepared for him.

He went down stairs and stepped out of doors, hastening down the street towards Broadway as though he were late for an appointment. Every now and then he encountered an acquaintance, whom he greeted with a nod and smile; he carried his head high, and shunned no man’s recognition.

At length he reached the doors of a tall granite building honey-combed with windows. He mounted the steps of the portico, and passing through the double doors of plate-glass, crossed a vestibule floored with mosaic to another glass door on which was emblazoned the name of the firm.

This door he also opened, entering a large room with wainscotted subdivisions, behind which appeared the stooping shoulders of a row of clerks.

As Woburn crossed the threshold a gray-haired man emerged from an inner office at the opposite end of the room.

At sight of Woburn he stopped short.

“Mr. Woburn!” he exclaimed; then he stepped nearer and added in a low tone: “I was requested to tell you when you came that the members of the firm are waiting; will you step into the private office?”

THE PORTRAIT

It was at Mrs. Mellish’s, one Sunday afternoon last spring. We were talking over George Lillo’s portraits--a collection of them was being shown at Durand-Ruel’s--and a pretty woman had emphatically declared:--

“Nothing on earth would induce me to sit to him!”

There was a chorus of interrogations.

“Oh, because--he makes people look so horrid; the way one looks on board ship, or early in the morning, or when one’s hair is out of curl and one knows it. I’d so much rather be done by Mr. Cumberton!”

Little Cumberton, the fashionable purveyor of rose-water pastels, stroked his moustache to hide a conscious smile.

“Lillo is a genius--that we must all admit,” he said indulgently, as though condoning a friend’s weakness; “but he has an unfortunate temperament. He has been denied the gift--so precious to an artist--of perceiving the ideal. He sees only the defects of his sitters; one might almost fancy that he takes a morbid pleasure in exaggerating their weak points, in painting them on their worst days; but I honestly believe he can’t help himself. His peculiar limitations prevent his seeing anything but the most prosaic side of human nature--

“‘_A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose is to him,
And it is nothing more._’”

Cumberton looked round to surprise an order in the eye of the lady whose sentiments he had so deftly interpreted, but poetry always made her uncomfortable, and her nomadic attention had strayed to other topics. His glance was tripped up by Mrs. Mellish.

“Limitations? But, my dear man, it’s because he hasn’t any limitations, because he doesn’t wear the portrait-painter’s conventional blinders, that we’re all so afraid of being painted by him. It’s not because he sees only one aspect of his sitters, it’s because he selects the real, the typical one, as instinctively as a detective collars a pick-pocket in a crowd. If there’s nothing to paint--no real person--he paints nothing; look at the sumptuous emptiness of his portrait of Mrs. Guy Awdrey”--(“Why,” the pretty woman perplexedly interjected, “that’s the only nice picture he ever did!”) “If there’s one positive trait in a negative whole he brings it out in spite of himself; if it isn’t a nice trait, so much the worse for the sitter; it isn’t Lillo’s fault: he’s no more to blame than a mirror. Your other painters do the surface--he does the depths; they paint the ripples on the pond, he drags the bottom. He makes flesh seem as fortuitous as clothes. When I look at his portraits of fine ladies in pearls and velvet I seem to see a little naked cowering wisp of a soul sitting beside the big splendid body, like a poor relation in the darkest corner of an opera-box. But look at his pictures of really great people--how great _they_ are! There’s plenty of ideal there. Take his Professor Clyde; how clearly the man’s history is written in those broad steady strokes of the brush: the hard work, the endless patience, the fearless imagination of the great _savant_! Or the picture of Mr. Domfrey--the man who has felt beauty without having the power to create it. The very brush-work expresses the difference between the two; the crowding of nervous tentative lines, the subtler gradations of color, somehow convey a suggestion of dilettantism. You feel what a delicate instrument the man is, how every sense has been tuned to the finest responsiveness.” Mrs. Mellish paused, blushing a little at the echo of her own eloquence. “My advice is, don’t let George Lillo paint you if you don’t want to be found out--or to find yourself out. That’s why I’ve never let him do _me_; I’m waiting for the day of judgment,” she ended with a laugh.

Every one but the pretty woman, whose eyes betrayed a quivering impatience to discuss clothes, had listened attentively to Mrs. Mellish. Lillo’s presence in New York--he had come over from Paris for the first time in twelve years, to arrange the exhibition of his pictures--gave to the analysis of his methods as personal a flavor as though one had been furtively dissecting his domestic relations. The analogy, indeed, is not unapt; for in Lillo’s curiously detached existence it is difficult to figure any closer tie than that which unites him to his pictures. In this light, Mrs. Mellish’s flushed harangue seemed not unfitted to the trivialities of the tea hour, and some one almost at once carried on the argument by saying:--“But according to your theory--that the significance of his work depends on the significance of the sitter--his portrait of Vard ought to be a master-piece; and it’s his biggest failure.”

Alonzo Vard’s suicide--he killed himself, strangely enough, the day that Lillo’s pictures were first shown--had made his portrait the chief feature of the exhibition. It had been painted ten or twelve years earlier, when the terrible “Boss” was at the height of his power; and if ever man presented a type to stimulate such insight as Lillo’s, that man was Vard; yet the portrait was a failure. It was magnificently composed; the technique was dazzling; but the face had been--well, expurgated. It was Vard as Cumberton might have painted him--a common man trying to look at ease in a good coat. The picture had never before been exhibited, and there was a general outcry of disappointment. It wasn’t only the critics and the artists who grumbled. Even the big public, which had gaped and shuddered at Vard, revelling in his genial villany, and enjoying in his death that succumbing to divine wrath which, as a spectacle, is next best to its successful defiance--even the public felt itself defrauded. What had the painter done with their hero? Where was the big sneering domineering face that figured so convincingly in political cartoons and patent-medicine advertisements, on cigar-boxes and electioneering posters? They had admired the man for looking his part so boldly; for showing the undisguised blackguard in every line of his coarse body and cruel face; the pseudo-gentleman of Lillo’s picture was a poor thing compared to the real Vard. It had been vaguely expected that the great boss’s portrait would have the zest of an incriminating document, the scandalous attraction of secret memoirs; and instead, it was as insipid as an obituary. It was as though the artist had been in league with his sitter, had pledged himself to oppose to the lust for post-mortem “revelations” an impassable blank wall of negation. The public was resentful, the critics were aggrieved. Even Mrs. Mellish had to lay down her arms.

“Yes, the portrait of Vard _is_ a failure,” she admitted, “and I’ve never known why. If he’d been an obscure elusive type of villain, one could understand Lillo’s missing the mark for once; but with that face from the pit--!”

She turned at the announcement of a name which our discussion had drowned, and found herself shaking hands with Lillo.

The pretty woman started and put her hands to her curls; Cumberton dropped a condescending eyelid (he never classed himself by recognizing degrees in the profession), and Mrs. Mellish, cheerfully aware that she had been overheard, said, as she made room for Lillo--

“I wish you’d explain it.”

Lillo smoothed his beard and waited for a cup of tea. Then, “Would there be any failures,” he said, “if one could explain them?”

“Ah, in some cases I can imagine it’s impossible to seize the type--or to say why one has missed it. Some people are like daguerreotypes; in certain lights one can’t see them at all. But surely Vard was obvious enough. What I want to know is, what became of him? What did you do with him? How did you manage to shuffle him out of sight?”

“It was much easier than you think. I simply missed an opportunity--”

“That a sign-painter would have seen!”

“Very likely. In fighting shy of the obvious one may miss the significant--”

“--And when I got back from Paris,” the pretty woman was heard to wail, “I found all the women here were wearing the very models I’d brought home with me!”

Mrs. Mellish, as became a vigilant hostess, got up and shuffled her guests; and the question of Yard’s portrait was dropped.

I left the house with Lillo; and on the way down Fifth Avenue, after one of his long silences, he suddenly asked:

“Is that what is generally said of my picture of Vard? I don’t mean in the newspapers, but by the fellows who know?”

I said it was.

He drew a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “it’s good to know that when one tries to fail one can make such a complete success of it.”

“Tries to fail?”

“Well, no; that’s not quite it, either; I didn’t want to make a failure of Vard’s picture, but I did so deliberately, with my eyes open, all the same. It was what one might call a lucid failure.”

“But why--?”

“The why of it is rather complicated. I’ll tell you some time--” He hesitated. “Come and dine with me at the club by and by, and I’ll tell you afterwards. It’s a nice morsel for a psychologist.”

At dinner he said little; but I didn’t mind that. I had known him for years, and had always found something soothing and companionable in his long abstentions from speech. His silence was never unsocial; it was bland as a natural hush; one felt one’s self included in it, not left out. He stroked his beard and gazed absently at me; and when we had finished our coffee and liqueurs we strolled down to his studio.

At the studio--which was less draped, less posed, less consciously “artistic” than those of the smaller men--he handed me a cigar, and fell to smoking before the fire. When he began to talk it was of indifferent matters, and I had dismissed the hope of hearing more of Vard’s portrait, when my eye lit on a photograph of the picture. I walked across the room to look at it, and Lillo presently followed with a light.

“It certainly is a complete disguise,” he muttered over my shoulder; then he turned away and stooped to a big portfolio propped against the wall.

“Did you ever know Miss Vard?” he asked, with his head in the portfolio; and without waiting for my answer he handed me a crayon sketch of a girl’s profile.

I had never seen a crayon of Lillo’s, and I lost sight of the sitter’s personality in the interest aroused by this new aspect of the master’s complex genius. The few lines--faint, yet how decisive!--flowered out of the rough paper with the lightness of opening petals. It was a mere hint of a picture, but vivid as some word that wakens long reverberations in the memory.

I felt Lillo at my shoulder again.

“You knew her, I suppose?”

I had to stop and think. Why, of course I’d known her: a silent handsome girl, showy yet ineffective, whom I had seen without seeing the winter that society had capitulated to Vard. Still looking at the crayon, I tried to trace some connection between the Miss Vard I recalled and the grave young seraph of Lillo’s sketch. Had the Vards bewitched him? By what masterstroke of suggestion had he been beguiled into drawing the terrible father as a barber’s block, the commonplace daughter as this memorable creature?

“You don’t remember much about her? No, I suppose not. She was a quiet girl and nobody noticed her much, even when--” he paused with a smile--“you were all asking Vard to dine.”

I winced. Yes, it was true--we had all asked Vard to dine. It was some comfort to think that fate had made him expiate our weakness.

Lillo put the sketch on the mantel-shelf and drew his arm-chair to the fire.

“It’s cold to-night. Take another cigar, old man; and some whiskey? There ought to be a bottle and some glasses in that cupboard behind you... help yourself...”