A private chivalry

A fortnight or such a matter after his rebuff in the presence of outraged art—typified by the newly finished “Sunset in Platte Cañon”—and a week after the Draconian episode and Brant’s dismissal by Mrs. Langford, Antrim took Isabel to the opera, meaning to have his answer once for all before he slept.

Another man under similar hard conditions might have hesitated to preface his coup de grace matrimonial with an evening’s amusement; but Antrim was wise in his generation, and he knew Isabel’s leanings well enough to be sure that no other preliminary would add more to his chances of success.

Now Rigoletto, well sung, is a treat not to be despised even by a jaded theatregoer, and the younger Miss Langford was neither jaded nor lacking the artistic sense which finds its complement in good music. Wherefore she gave a little sigh of regret when the curtain ran down on the last act, and stood up mechanically in her place that Antrim might adjust her wrap.

“Great show, wasn’t it?” he said, making a praise-worthy but purely manlike effort to strike the proper note of appreciation.

She did not respond, and when they came out in the lighted foyer he saw the rapt isolation of her mood and resented it.

“Up on top of the mountain as usual, aren’t you? Did you happen to come down far enough any time during the evening to think of the thing as a play meant to amuse people?” He tried to say it jestingly, but the whetstone of sarcasm sharpened the words in spite of the placable intention.

“Don’t tease me, please, Harry; at least, not now while I’m in the seventh heaven of the aftermath. I’ll talk practical things with you by and by, if you like, but just now it would be sacrilege.”

Ordinarily Antrim would have laughed, as he was wont to laugh at her extravagances. As it was, he sulked and was silent while they were drifting with the slow-moving human glacier out through the vestibule and during the long street-car ride over to the Highlands.

Since early morning he had been fighting a desperate battle with the Apollyon who disputes the way with that man who is foolish enough to set the day and hour in which a question of moment is to be decided. No sooner had he written it down that Isabel should that evening be brought to hear reason, than an imp of disorder came and sat at his elbow, and after this the business of his office went awry and the day became a lengthened misery.

He had quarrelled with his stenographer, found fault with the operator, and made life burdensome for the office boy. Last, and worst of all, just before the day’s end he had fallen into a wrangle over the wires with the division train despatcher at Lone Pine Junction, the upshot of which was to bring the man’s resignation, garnished with a few terse “wire” oaths, clicking back through the sounder in the superintendent’s office.

So much for the day’s tribulations. But since he had not taken the trouble to tell her, Isabel knew naught of these things. Hence it was not until they had left the car and were nearing the Hollywood gate that she began to wonder if his silence were altogether of abstraction.

“You are in a sweet temper to-night, aren’t you, Harry?” she said, merely by way of arousing him to a sense of the social part of his duty.

Antrim helped her across the bank-full irrigation ditch at the curb and answered not a word.

“I suppose you are just aching to take it out on somebody,” she went on. “If that is the case, you may begin on me. I’m young and strong, and not too thin-skinned.”

Still Antrim held his peace, fearing to open his mouth lest a worse thing should come of it.

“Why don’t you say something? You needn’t go into your shell like a disappointed turtle just because I wouldn’t let you spoil my negative of the opera before I could get it developed.”

Still no reply.

“What is the matter with you, Harry, dear? Have you lost your tongue?”

“No; I’ve been waiting till you saw fit to come down out of the clouds; that’s all.”

“Well, I have arrived. And I am ready to forgive you for being so sulky. My, oh!”

They had reached the gate, and Antrim tried to open it. The latch stuck, and straightway the gate flew across the sidewalk bereft of its hinges. Isabel laughed joyously, and the small explosion served to clear the moral atmosphere, as other wooden profanities are said to.

“Good as a play, isn’t it?” growled the young man, and he sought to re-establish the wrecked gate.

“Ever so much better,” was the quick retort. “It was positively the most human thing I ever saw you do. You are always so self-contained and precise that you put a quick-tempered mortal like me to shame.”

“Did you ever do anything as senseless as this?”

“Haven’t I? Come into the house and I’ll show you.”

He followed her obediently and stood in the dark hall while she lighted the lamp in her studio. When he joined her she was running over a stack of canvases standing in a corner.

“Do you see that?” she asked, slipping out one of the oil studies and giving it to him.

It was a sketchy little painting of Long’s Peak, and it was punctured with numberless penknife stabs.

“I did that one day when I was particularly savage,” she confessed; “just as you were when you smashed the gate. You don’t know how much good it does me to find out now and then that I haven’t a monopoly of all the bad temper in the world.”

Antrim grinned. “Don’t lose any sleep on that score; you have lots of good company. I have been having a tough time of it all day, and the gate business was only the wind-up.”

“Poor old martyr! And I have been sticking pins into it all evening! What has been the trouble? Or is it tellable?”

“Everything and nothing. It has just been an off day with me all around. I have quarrelled with everybody I could get at, and with myself more than all. I need a balance-wheel worse than anything, Isabel, and it’s for you to say whether I shall have it or not.”

He knelt to clear the smouldering fire in the grate, and then got up to walk back and forth in front of it. Isabel sat down and shaded her eyes from the light. Levity was on the tip of her tongue, but she felt that his mood was one in which ridicule would be as the spark to gunpowder. Therefore she met it fairly and tried to reason with him.

“Must we go all over the old ground again, Harry?” she began. “Can’t I say something new and fresh—something that will make it clear to you that the worst possible thing that could happen to either of us would be this that you have set your heart upon?”

“I don’t think you can,” he objected, pausing in front of the mantel to adjust a picture which was three hairs’ breadths out of plumb. “But you may try, if you care to.”

But having leave to try, Isabel found that new sayings on a well-worn subject do not always suggest themselves on the spur of the moment, and she was obliged to leave the promise unfulfilled.

“It would only be dressing the old things up in new clothes if I did,” she confessed, “and that wouldn’t bring us to any better understanding.”

“It isn’t a question of understanding, Isabel; it is your ambition against my love—against reason, I had pretty nearly said. I don’t believe you love anybody else; and I—well, I’d be glad enough to take the chances of winning later on what you say you can’t give me now. That is the whole thing in a sentence, and it is for you to say whether I shall go away from here to-night the happiest of men or the most miserable.”

He said it calmly and with the air of one who has weighed and measured the possibilities of success or failure. Then it was that Isabel first began dimly to understand that Harry Antrim, her schoolfellow and playmate, had somehow come to man’s estate what time she had been calling him a boy; and while she replied out of an honest heart, the newborn conviction helped her to choose the words.

“It wouldn’t be right, Harry, even if you are willing to risk it and take the consequences, good or bad. I want you to believe me when I say that I don’t seem to know anything about the love that reaches out toward marriage; and I am afraid I don’t want to. I love my friends, and you more than any of the others; but I would turn my back on all of them if the doing of it would bring the answer to the question which is always and always at the tip end of my paint brushes. It’s unwomanly, hard-hearted—anything you like to call it—but it is the simple truth. You don’t want to marry a woman who feels that way, Harry, dear.”

He ignored the argument, if, indeed, he had tried to follow it, and pressed her to give him his answer.

“Which is it to be, Isabel—Yes, or No?”

She parried the direct demand, not because there was any present uncertainty in her own mind, but because she discerned that in his eyes which warned her to deal gently with him.

“I say you wouldn’t want to marry a woman without a heart—a loving, home-making heart, I mean; and that is what you would do if you took me. I have my own little battle to fight, and I must fight it alone, Harry. That is simple justice to you, or to any other good man who might ask me to marry him.”

Antrim pounced upon the suggested alternative with unreasoning and vindictive acerbity.

“Any other man, you say. Who is the other man, Isabel?”

The steel of jealousy struck fire at once upon the flint of Isabel’s quick temper, and her mood changed in a twinkling.

“You intimated, the other day, that it might be Mr. Brant,” she retorted with malice aforethought.

Antrim set his teeth hard to keep back the bitter sayings that came uppermost, and when he could trust himself to speak again tried hard to make her deny his own assertion. “Just tell me there is no one else, Isabel, and I’ll be satisfied,” he pleaded; but Isabel, caring at that moment very little for Brant and a great deal for Antrim, yet stubbornly refused to give her lover even this small crumb of comfort.

“Then—once more, Isabel—give me my answer. Is it to be Yes, or No?”

“Oh, can’t you see? Can’t you understand that it must be No?”

“There is no reservation—no little green twig of hope that you can hold out to me?”

“Not as I hope to be sincere, Harry.”

“Not if I should wait until you had won or lost the battle?”

The little arrow of self-effacement found its mark, and Isabel hesitated. With the enthusiasm of a young devotee she had striven to unsex herself in the singleness of her purpose, but Antrim’s pleading stirred the woman within her, and in that fleeting instant of introspection she saw how frail was the barrier defending her ambition from his love. Honesty, pure and simple—the shame of taking so much where she could give so little—stepped in to save her.

“No, not even then, Harry. You deserve the full cup, and I couldn’t be mean enough to offer you the dregs. If I fail, I sha’n’t be worth anybody’s having; and if I succeed—ah, God knows, but I am afraid I should be still less the woman you ought to marry.”

“As you will,” he said, and held out his hand. “Let us say ‘Good-bye’ and have it over with.”

She put her hand in his and let him keep it while she said: “It mustn’t be ‘Good-bye,’ Harry. I can’t afford to lose you as a friend—as a—as a brother.”

He smiled reproachfully. “And you said you would try to say something new!” Then the little upflash of pleasantry died out, and he spoke as one who leaves hope behind. “No, Isabel; I meant it literally. It must be ‘Good-bye,’ so far as I am concerned. I couldn’t go on as we’ve been going on all these years; I should go mad, some day when the right man turns up, and do that which would make you hate me. No, I shouldn’t”—the denial came quickly in response to the distress that crept into her eyes—“no, I shouldn’t do that, for your sake; but I should be sore and miserable, and that would hurt you, too. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

She shook her head, and he stood irresolute for a moment. Then he said: “Won’t you kiss me, Isabel? You haven’t, you know, since we used to play boy and girl games in the old, old days.”

She withdrew her hand quickly. “You mustn’t ask that. It would—it would——”

How was he to know that she was trying to tell him that it would undo all that had gone before; that it would break down the frail barrier she had been at such pains to uprear? How was he to guess that he stood at last before the open door of the woman’s heart of her; that he had but to take her in his arms to possess her?

Not by anything that she said or did, truly; and yet at that moment her love for him sprang full-armed into being, filling her with joy unspeakable, and promising thenceforth to dominate ambition and all else. But her lover knew it not, and he turned away to grope in thick darkness for the door because the vertigo of failure was blinding him. On the threshold he stopped, and when sight returned looked back at her as she stood under the light of the high easel lamp.

He made sure that the picture and its setting would be a lasting memory, and the sight of it brought back a swelling wave of recollection that went nigh to submerging him. There was the piano, where he had so often stood beside her, turning the leaves of her music while she played for him. In the corner, where the cross light from the windows could be shaded and controlled from her chair, stood her easel—the workbench before which she had spent so many patient hours. On the wall opposite, hanging just where she could see it while she worked, was the little Vedder—his one valuable gift; and beside the fire, which was now burning brightly, stood the easy-chair which had come to be called his, so often had he claimed it.

Some such background he had always imagined for his own home—the home wherein he could escape from the growing responsibilities of his work; the home which Isabel was to make for him. But she had said it could never be, and she was sending him away without hope, and with nothing but the remembrance of her pity to fill the place she had made for herself in his life. She might have kissed him once, he thought, and the thought set itself in words before he could check it.

“It couldn’t have made much difference to you, Isabel; a kiss is only a little thing. And yet I had an idea that if you gave me one the remembrance of it would tide me over some of the hard places. That was all.”

Her eyes met his when he began to say it, but she neither saw nor heard him when he went away. When she looked up and found him gone she ran to the door to call him back, but she was not quick enough. The night had swallowed him, and when she made sure of it she went back to the studio to bury her face in the lounge pillows and to cry bitterly—for what, she knew not, save that her world seemed suddenly to have fallen out of its orbit.

Thus the maid. And the man? As Brant had left the same house a few nights earlier with the devil beckoning him, so went Antrim, stumbling over the curb at the crossing and splashing through the pools made by the overflowing irrigation ditches without once realizing the discomfort. It was mirth for the gods, doubtless. His trouble was only a microscopic bit of side play in the great human comedy. But it was tragic enough to the young man, and many a spoiled life answers to promptings no more insistent than those which gather, buzzardlike, to pick the bones of a starved passion.

In the ruck of it Antrim tramped wearily back to the city, unmindful of all the familiarities until some one spoke to him at the corner of Sixteenth and Larimer Streets. It was Grotter, the division engineer, and he linked arms with the chief clerk and caught step.

“Chilly night, isn’t it, Harry?” he said, shouldering his companion diagonally across the street toward a stained-glass transparency marking the entrance to a saloon. “I should think you’d freeze in that light overcoat. Let’s go in here and have a nip to go to bed on—what do you say?”

Now, no anchoret of the Libyan Desert was ever less a tippler than was Antrim. But the thought of his great disappointment came and grappled with him, and the devil, to whom some very worthy people are yet willing to accord a personality, tempted him with a specious promise of comfort. So he did no more than hang upon the doorstep while Grotter overpersuaded him.

This was at midnight, and therein lay one of life’s little ironies. At the very moment when Isabel, kneeling at her bedside, was trying with innocent cheeks aflame to frame the first halting petition for her acknowledged lover, Antrim was entering the house of temptation with the engineer. And presently he joined Grotter in a cup of some insidious mixture in which beaten eggs and liquid fire seemed to be the chief ingredients, sipping it slowly while he listened to the engineer’s stories of his perils by fire, flood, and unruly grade labourers in the mountains.

That was the beginning. In the end the devil’s promise was kept after a fashion, inasmuch as Antrim stumbled up the steps of Mrs. Seeley’s boarding house some two hours later in a frame of mind which, whatever may have been its lacks or its havings, was at least bullet-proof on the side of sorrow.