Adrian Savage: A Novel

CHAPTER VII

IN WHICH ADRIAN HELPS TO THROW EARTH INTO AN OPEN GRAVE

Adrian Savage, meanwhile, his native buoyancy of spirit notwithstanding, became increasingly sensible of the depressing moral atmosphere surrounding him. He was impatient of it. For did they not really take things rather ridiculously hard, these excellent English people? Had they no sense of proportion? Had they no power of averaging, no little consolations of good-tempered philosophy? He went so far, in moments of levity, as to accuse le bon Dieu of reprehensible squandering by thus bestowing the eminently good gift of life upon persons so deplorably incapable of profiting by it. To him they appeared thankless, cowardly, and quite unpardonably clumsy in their handling of opportunity. Moreover, while curiously clannish, ready on the slightest provocation to stand back to back against the world, they waged internecine war, being permanently suspicious of, and unamiable toward, one another. If this represented a fair sample of the much-vaunted English home and the English character—well, for his part, Adrian was of opinion they did these things quite as well, if not a great deal better, in France!

He shrugged his shoulders, elevated his black eyebrows, stroked his neat beard, trying at once to overcome his sense of depression and stifle his sense of humor. The atmosphere would, he told himself, no doubt become more exhilarating when poor Montagu Smyrthwaite's body had been removed from that rather terrible best bedroom—apparently "turned up," as the maids have it, for spring cleaning—and finally consigned to the tomb. Never had he seen a dead fellow-creature treated with such meager tribute, either in language or symbol, of human pity or eternal hope! It shocked his sensibility that the corpse should lie there, locked away by itself in a cold, dismal twilight of drawn blinds, without any orderly setting-out of the death-chamber, without watchers, or prayer offered, or lighted candles, or flowers, or other suggestion either of tenderness or of religious obligation. Observances of this sort, he was given to understand by Joseph Challoner, were discredited in highly intellectual circles, such as that in which the Smyrthwaites moved, as savoring of antiquated and unscientific superstitions. The result, to Adrian's thinking, presented an effect at once so abjectly domestic, and so miserably deficient in any appreciation of the eternal mystery of human fate, that the crudest death-rites of the most degraded aborigines would have been preferable.

And then, by a singular inversion of sentiment, it was held necessary as a testimony of respect to keep the poor, disagreeable old gentleman's body waiting such a quite inordinately long time for interment! During a, to Adrian, positively endless week did it remain there, amid a doleful array of dusting-sheets and disinfectants! So that, what with the dark, snow-patched fir woods without, and the dark, neutral-tinted house within; what with conventionally hushed footsteps and lowered voices, plus an all-pervasive odor of iodiform tainting the close, heated air, the young man found the present among quite the most trying and distasteful of all his personal experiences.

Yet, as the interminable days went by—while Joseph Challoner, jealous alike of his own position and of the newcomer's breeding and ability, alternately bluffed, snarled and flattered, and pompous, little Colonel Haig fell headlong from attempted patronage to a certain fulsomeness of conciliation—against this dismal background the figure of Joanna Smyrthwaite came to stand out, to Adrian's seeing, with an intensity of moral effort and sustained determination of duty both impressive and admirable. Beneath the bloodless surface, behind the anxious, unlovely countenance and coldly nervous manner, he began to divine a remarkable character. He had been mistaken in calling her a shadow. She was a distinct entity, but she was also, to him, quite arrestingly unattractive. And, just on that account, the chivalry both of the man and the artist grew alert to be very gentle to her, to omit no smallest offering of friendliness or courtesy. The very reason and purpose of woman's existence being charm and beauty—his thought turned with a great yearning to remembrance of a certain enigmatic fair lady, the windows of whose rose-red and canvas-colored drawing-room overlooked the heart of Paris from above the Quai Malaquais—it was pitiful in the extreme to see any woman thus disfranchised.

The inherent tragedy of that disfranchisement was brought home to him, with peculiar force, on the evening following Montagu Smyrthwaite's funeral. For eventually, almost to Adrian's surprise, the poor lonely corpse really did get itself buried! Then, at the Tower House, the blinds were drawn up, and the mourners, local and official, returning thither, discarding the appointed countenance assumed as due to the mournful character of the rites lately accomplished and resuming that common to them under ordinary conditions, prepared almost jovially to do justice to an excellent luncheon. The Miss Smyrthwaites excused themselves from attendance, no other ladies being there, so it fell to Adrian's lot to preside at the banquet. He was amused to note the fact that they had left all which was mortal of the late owner of the house in the new West Stourmouth cemetery—which, with its pale monuments, roads and pathways, showed as a gigantic scar upon the face of the dusky moorland—in no perceptible degree impaired the healthy appetite of any member of the company. To eat offers agreeably convincing testimony that one is as yet well within the pale of the living; and none of the eighteen or twenty gentlemen present, whatever their diversities of profession or of social standing, entertained the faintest desire to follow Montagu Smyrthwaite—their neighbor, kinsman, patron, or employer—to the grave in any sense save a strictly complimentary one. That final civility being now duly paid in respect of him, it was in the spirit of those who receive well-earned reward for well-performed labor that they sat down to feed.

In Adrian, both the Latin and the Catholic were still somewhat in revolt against this scant tenderness shown toward death. The whole matter from start to finish had been, as he reflected, notably of the earth-to-earth order. The alacrity, displayed by the assistants, in the direction of food and drink, was of the earth earthy, too. It, however, had at least the merit of being very human. Therefore, to him, it came as a rather humorous relief. Since his childhood his visits to England had been infrequent. With London and London society he was fairly well acquainted, but of provincial life and its social conditions he knew next to nothing. It followed that, in their racial and psychological aspects, the members of the present company were interesting to him. He tried to forget the poor, unloved corpse lying beneath the rattling snow-sodden gravel of the moorland and absorb himself in observation of the men seated on either side the dinner-table; to where, at the opposite end of it, the hard-featured, taciturn, sagacious, Yorkshire manufacturer, Andrew Merriman, manager and part proprietor of the Priestly woolen mills, faced him. This man had not taken off the appointed countenance, for the very good reason that he had never put it on, his nature being of a type which disdains conventional manifestations, either of joy or woe. Throughout the day, in this as in other particulars, Merriman's personality had struck Adrian as distinct, standing away from the rest of the company, silently declaring itself as possessed of unusual vigor and independence. He tried to enter into conversation, but invariably Joseph Challoner contrived to intervene; and it was not till evening, shortly before Merriman and the rest of the Yorkshire contingent were due to depart to Stourmouth on their return journey by the night mail to Leeds, that he succeeded in getting private speech of him.

Then, after some brief mention of certain business details, Merriman said to him, gruffly, and as though grudgingly:

"I own I am more satisfied now I have met you, Mr. Savage. I did not much care about your appointment as executor. But I might have trusted Mr. Smyrthwaite's judgment. I have seldom known him wrong in his estimate of a man."

"You wish me to understand that you believe me to be quite fairly honest and competent?" Adrian returned, in mingled annoyance and pleasure. The intention was complimentary, but the address so singularly blunt! "I venture to agree with you, my dear sir. Without vanity, I have reason to believe I really am both."

"So much the better," Merriman answered, sardonically. "I have no wish to offend you. But an uncommon amount of property, in which I am interested, is changing hands; and honest, trustworthy persons are pretty scarce." He glanced from under penthouse eyebrows across the room to where Challoner, shifting his weight uneasily from one foot to the other, dancing-bear fashion, stood talking to Colonel Haig. "At least in my experience they are, Mr. Savage. When a family is dying out you generally find the males are debilitated specimens and the females the strongest. In this family, if Miss Smyrthwaite had been born a boy it would have been better for the name and for the business. Only, then, you and I shouldn't have met here to-day, because Mr. Smyrthwaite would never have left Highdene, and I should never have been manager at the mills."

"Which would have been a misfortune—for me, in any case," Adrian returned, suavely.

"Maybe," the other said. "But I can tell you Joanna Smyrthwaite's all right. She has sound commercial instincts if she's allowed to use them. It is an all-fired pity she's a woman."

An idea occurred to Adrian.

"She should have married," he said. This bluntness of statement became lamentably infectious! "Every woman should marry. Then her abilities find their natural expression and development."

"Quite right, sir. And it is on the cards, I am thinking, Joanna would have married if a man had not been too much afraid of her father to ask her. Mind," he added, "I have no quarrel with our late head. My father was a national schoolmaster. My grandfather was a mill-hand. I should not be where I am but for Mr. Smyrthwaite. He fancied my looks when I was quite a little nipper, picked me out and gave me my start. And I'm not boasting, any more than you were just now, if I say I know he never had reason to regret doing that."

The speaker straightened up his heavy figure, looking Adrian steadily in the eyes.

"I told you he was a sure judge of men. But women, except to bring him children, and mind his house, and put up with his tempers, and fetch and carry for him, didn't enter into his calculations at all. He was a bit of a Grand Turk was Mr. Smyrthwaite. And Joanna, from quite a little mite, made herself useful as his amanuensis and reader and so on. He looked upon her as his private property, and kept her busy, I promise you; so that the man who wanted to take her away from him didn't have a fighting chance."

"But now the Grand Turk is finally removed," Adrian declared. "Haven't we just concluded all that?"

"And now a man is afraid of her money, I'm thinking," the big Yorkshireman returned, slowly, a grim smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. "Joanna was always the plain one of the two girls. And she has aged lately. You can't seem to picture her with a healthy baby on her lap. And so, nobody would believe—the man, though he wished it ever so, would hardly believe himself—it was the woman he wanted, the woman he was after, and not just her wealth."

He stood silent a moment, his jaw set, and then held out a large, hard, but not unkindly hand to Adrian.

"I reckon our time's about up," he said. "Write or wire me to come if I am needed, Mr. Savage. And, when you leave, I should be obliged if you'll remind Joanna I'm always at her service. I shall look after the girls' interest at the mills right enough, but I can get away down here for twenty-four hours almost any time at a push. Good-day to you, sir. I am glad we've met. Now I must round up my lads and take 'em back home to work."

This conversation, in its crude sincerity of language and statement, remained by Adrian, and was still present to his mind next morning when he rose. Early in his stay at the Tower House he had petitioned Smallbridge to bring him rolls and coffee when calling him, since a solid breakfast at nine, followed by a solid luncheon at one-thirty, proved too serious an undertaking for the comfort of the Latin stomach. By the above arrangement he secured two or three hours to himself either for writing or for exercise. This morning he went out soon after eight and walked down the wide avenue, past large, jealously secluded villas, each standing in its acre or half acre of thickly planted grounds, to where the mouth of the long, dark wooded valley opens between striated gray and orange sand-cliffs, as through a giant gateway, upon the sea. Thin, primrose-yellow sunlight glinted on the backs of the steel-blue waves. A great flight of gulls, driven inshore by stress of weather, swept, and dropped, and lifted again, with wild, yelping laughter, above the flowing tide. Fringing the cliff edge the purple boles, red trunks, and black, ragged heads of a line of wind-tormented Scotch firs, detached themselves, from foot to crown, against the colorless winter sky.

The thirty or forty yards of level sand, stretching from the turn of the road in the valley bottom to the dark windrows of sea-wrack marking the tide-line, were pocketed by footsteps. But, at this hour, the place was wholly deserted, it being too early in the day, and too early in the season, for invasion by any advance guard of the mighty army of tourists and trippers which infests the coast from Marychurch and Stourmouth, westward to Barryport, during the summer and autumn months. Adrian found himself solitary, in a silent wilderness, save for the murmur of the pines, the plunge and hush of the waves, and harsh laughter of the strong-winged gulls. From where he stood, looking inland, the surface of the vast, somber amphitheater of blue-black fir forest, variegated here and there by the purple-brown of a grove of bare, deciduous trees, or the pallor of a snow-dusted space of tussock-grass and heather, was unbroken by house-roof or other sign of human habitation. Looking seaward no shipping was visible. To Adrian the scene appeared arrestingly northern in character, the spirit of it questioning, introspective, coldly complex, yet primitive and elfin, reminding him of Grieg's Occasional Music to the haunting parable-poem of Peer Gynt. Then, as he paced the harder sand to the seaward side of the tide-mark, the chill breeze pushing against him and the keen smell of the brine in his nostrils, his thought carried back vividly to his conversation of last night with Andrew Merriman.

For, now that he came to think of it, might not Joanna, the main subject of that conversation, in all her feminine leanness and overstrained mentality, have stepped straight out of one of those plays of Ibsen's which, heretofore, had so perplexed him by their distance from any moral and racial conditions with which he was familiar? Northern, joyless, uncertain in faith, burdened by scruples, prey to a misplaced intellectualism, yet clear-headed and able in practical matters, could not her prototype be found again and again in the Norwegian playwright's penetrating and disheartening pages? And, if it came to that, in the relentless common-sense of the big Yorkshireman's cruelly sagacious estimate of his own attitude toward her was there not an Ibsenish element, too? For that Andrew Merriman was, himself, "the man" of whom he had spoken, Adrian entertained no doubt.

So he paced the sand, absorbed in analysis and in apprehension, while ripples of spent waves slipped, in foam-outlined curves, near and nearer to his feet. It seemed to him he touched something new here in human tendencies and human development; something which, in the coming social order, might very widely obtain, especially among Protestant English-speaking peoples.—A democratic, scientific, unsparing self-knowledge, physical and mental, on the one hand, and a narrow, sectarian, self-sufficiency, on the other; a morbidly cold-blooded acknowledgment of fact and application of means to ends, in which neither poetry nor religion had any determining part. The artist in him protested hotly. For really a world so ordered did not look enticing in the very least!

Then, his thought fixing itself again exclusively on Joanna, played around the everlastingly baffling problem of woman's mind, woman's outlook, in itself, divorced from her relation to man. It was not the first time his imagination had been held up by this problem, nor was he conceited enough to suppose it would be the last. Woman in her relation to man was a stale enough, obvious enough, story. But in her relation to her fellow-woman, in her relation to herself—had not this tripped even the cleverest novelists and dramatists of his own sex? Wasn't it, after all, easier for a woman rightly to imagine the life a man lives among men, than for a man to conceive woman's life with his own great self left out of it? He feared so, though the admission was far from flattering to masculine perspicacity. He resented his own inability to negotiate those moral and emotional lines of cleavage which do, so very actually, divide the sexes. To think, for example, that Joanna Smyrthwaite and Gabrielle St. Leger—their radical differences of circumstances, endowment, and experience notwithstanding—were still essentially nearer to each other, more capable of mutual sympathy and understanding in the deep places of their nature, than he, with all his acute sensibility and dramatic insight, could ever be to either of them!

But there the young man stopped and fairly laughed outright. For to class Gabrielle St. Leger, the devoutly worshiped and desired, and poor Joanna Smyrthwaite together, even in passing, was a little too outrageously far-fetched. Here, indeed, the study of psychology ran frankly and, in a sense, almost profanely mad.

He looked away, through the shifting cloud of screaming gulls, over the steel-blue levels of the Channel toward far-distant France, and a strong nostalgia took him for the delightful, quick-witted land of his birth. It seemed a thousand years since he left Paris. What were they all doing over there, the dear people whose friendship spelled for him more than half the joy of living? Save for one brief note, in the response to the announcement of his arrival, Madame St. Leger had given no sign. And he, in face of his last interview with her, wanted to know—wanted so very badly to know. He wanted to look at her. He wanted to hear her voice.—Whereupon he turned positively vindictive. Oh! most consoling doctrine of purgatory!—Might Montagu Smyrthwaite very thoroughly suffer the depleting pains of it as punishment for this fiendishly tiresome legacy of an executorship! Why couldn't he have left Adrian free to pursue his delicious love campaign, and appointed somebody else—the unpleasant, heavy-weight Challoner, say, or the worldly, feather-weight Haig? Either of them would have reveled in the brief authority it conferred, while to him it constituted an intolerable waste of time. He was sick to death, interesting racial and psychological researches notwithstanding, sick to death of the whole corvée.

And then he skipped aside with quite undignified haste, for an incoming wave threatened his long-toed French boots with total immersion.

CHAPTER VIII

A MODERN ANTIGONE

His retina still holding that northern elfin landscape and seascape, his ears the voices of the forest and of the wildly yelping gulls, his mind still working on the thought of that new moral and social order now coming into being, his heart and his manhood crying out for the woman he loved, Adrian—the keen freshness of the winter morning pouring in through the open door along with him—entered the hall of the Tower House. And down the broad staircase, over the thick, sound-muffling carpet, the wan light streaming in through the blurred, leaded glass of the great staircase windows falling upon her meager, flat-bosomed, crape-clad figure, yellowish-auburn hair and strained, anxious countenance, came the other woman, the Ibsen woman, concerning whose nature and attributes he had just indulged in so much analytic speculation.

Joanna held up the front of her crape dress. Her feet showed as she stepped down the shallow treads. And Adrian, standing below, looking up at her, hat in hand, saw—though he didn't in the least want to see—that she wore black velvet slippers with square toes and no heels to them, and that both her feet and hands, though comparatively small, were lacking in individuality and in that sharpness of outline which is the mark of fineness of breeding. They might have been just anybody's hands and feet; and so—he felt amusedly ashamed of himself for admitting it—they were exactly the hands and feet one would expect Joanna Smyrthwaite to possess.

Taking himself to task for this involuntary cruelty of observation, his manner the more persuasive and gallant because he felt himself to blame, the young man advanced through the dull reds and browns of the spacious hall to the foot of the staircase.

"Ah! you are here! Good-morning, chère cousine," he said. "I rose early and have already been out walking in your great woods and down on the shore. It is all a poem of the first days of creation, before man intruded his perplexing presence upon the earth. I felt quite rampantly decadent in this overcivilized twentieth-century costume, under obligation to offer the humblest apologies to the hairy mammoths and pterodactyls, which, at every turn of the road, I instinctively braced my courage to meet. But really it is rather wonderful how 'the desert and the sown' jostle one another here in England. The contrasts are so unexpected, so violent, so complete!"

Adrian talked on rather at random, smiling, his head thrown back, the expression of his handsome face gay yet subtlely apologetic; the general effect of him pleasantly healthy, self-secure, finished, and on excellently good terms both with fortune and with himself. And Joanna, looking down at him, faltered, stopped in her descent, let slip the folds of her crape skirt, while she laid one hand hurriedly upon the baluster-rail and pressed the other nervously against her left side over her heart.

"I am afraid," she said, "you get up and go out so early on our account—I mean so that you may devote all the rest of the day to us."

"Oh no," Adrian returned, still smiling. "It is an old habit, one of my very few good habits, that of early rising. You see, I am quite a busy man in my own small way, what with my Review, my friends, my literary work—"

"I realize that, and so I am very much distressed at the demands which we are making upon your valuable time. I cannot justify or excuse it to myself. I do not think it was proper that papa should have appointed you as my coexecutor without consulting you and asking your permission first."

She spoke with a suppressed violence of feeling which caused Adrian to gulp down his complete agreement in these sentiments, and reply in soothing tones:

"But, dear cousin, surely at this time of day it is superfluous to vex yourself about that! Believe me, you are too scrupulous, too considerate. I assure you, as I have so often assured you before, that I am touched by the confidence your father showed me in thus temporarily intrusting not only his affairs, but yourself and your sister, to my care. My sole desire is worthily to fulfil that trust. To do so constitutes, in as far as my time is concerned, an all-sufficient reward. And then, after all," he added, gaily, "ten days, a fortnight even, should I have to go north to Leeds for a brief visit, will see all imperative business through and so put a term to our joint labors."

There he paused, looking discreetly aside as he unbuttoned his overcoat, since he was aware that the gladness of coming freedom might declare itself with unflattering distinctness. For in imagination he sprinted once again, three steps at a time, up the three flights of stairs to the top story of the tall, gray house overlooking the Quai Malaquais, while high expectation, at once delicious and disturbing, circulated through every fiber of his being. How adorable it would be—how richly, poignantly enchanting! But just then, though by no means easily open to hypnotic or mesmeric influences, he became conscious that Joanna Smyrthwaite's eyes—those tenacious, prominent, faded-blue eyes, with red-rimmed lids to them, which, to his seeing, so perpetually gave away the inward tempest of feeling to which the compressed lips refused utterance—were fixed upon him with an extraordinary intensity of questioning scrutiny. For a moment the young man felt frankly embarrassed, uncertain how to comport himself. For he had no answer whatever to give to that questioning scrutiny. He suddenly grew wary, fearing demand might create supply—of a fraudulent sort—courtesy betraying him into return glances dishonestly sympathetic in character. But, to his relief, the sound of an opening door, followed by that of two chattering feminine voices—high-pitched, unmusical in tone, one indeed peevish and complaining—coming from the gallery above created a diversion. He felt, rather than saw, Joanna Smyrthwaite start and look impatiently upward. Thus the awkward minute passed, resolving itself; and the situation—if the little episode deserved so high-sounding a title—was saved. Adrian backed away and slipped off his overcoat, doubling it together across his arm.

Joanna, her expression and manner agitated, descending the remaining treads of the staircase hastily, followed and stood close by him.

"That is Margaret," she said, in a hurried undertone. "Marion Chase is with her as usual. And Mr. Challoner comes here at half-past eleven. It was his own proposition. I had a note from him early this morning. I should have been glad to put aside legal business just for to-day, but Margaret expressed unwillingness that I should refuse to receive him. There is something I feel I must explain to you, Cousin Adrian, before I see him. But I cannot speak of it before Margaret, still less before Marion Chase. Would it trouble you too much to come into the library with me? We should be alone. Margaret would hardly attempt to bring Marion in there, I should think."

The young man assented readily, though the invitation was not very much to his taste. Of all the rooms in this finely proportioned yet gloomy house, that distinctly masculine apartment, the library aforesaid, was, to his thinking, the most depressing. Facing north and east, its windows were darkened by the rough corrugated trunks and scraggy lower branches of a grove of Weymouth pines, spared when the rest of the site had been cleared for building. These, at close quarters and when old, are doleful trees, lifeless and unchanging in aspect, telling of sour soil and barren, unprofitable spaces. Two sides of the room were lined, to within a couple of feet of the ceiling, with mahogany bookcases, the contents of which, in Adrian's opinion, only too thoroughly harmonized in spirit with the doleful grove outside. They consisted of ranges of well-bound volumes upon such juiceless subjects as commercial and municipal law, ethics of citizenship and political economy, together with an extensive collection of pamphlets embodying the controversies of the last fifty years—social, political, ecclesiastical, and religious—neatly indexed and bound. Not only did the complete works of Adam Smith, David Hume, Dugald Stewart, and the two Mills—elder and younger—decorate the shelves; but portrait prints of these authors, along with those of certain liberal statesmen and Nonconformist divines, solidly framed and glazed, decorated the remaining wall spaces. The carpet and curtains were of a dull brown, patterned in dusky blues and greens. A writing-table of huge dimensions, fitted with many drawers; dark leather-covered chairs, various mechanical devices in the form of reading-desks and leg-rests, and an elaborate adjustable invalid couch constituted the other appointments of the room.

Following Joanna's crape-clad figure into this severely educational sanctuary, Adrian could not but think of the long joyless hours she must have spent there reading to or writing for that imperious old gentleman, the late lamented Montagu. And this thought softened his attitude toward her, reawakening sentiments of chivalrous pity. For, though rich, highly educated, and clever, had not she, poor girl, every bit as much as her cautious, halting lover, been denied the very barest fighting chance?

"You are tired, chère cousine," he said, consolingly. "Is it any wonder after the painful fatigues of yesterday? See, I place this chair comfortably near the fire for you. Sit down, and, while resting, tell me at your leisure what it is that you wish to explain."

And Joanna not only sat down obediently, but, rather to his consternation, bowed her lean person together and pressed a fine, black-bordered pocket-handkerchief—insisted upon by the stylish young person from Grays' as a necessary part of her mourning equipment—against her faded eyes and wept. Ah! poor thing! poor thing! she was a pitiful spectacle, a pitiful creature, inciting all the young man's goodness of heart, sense of personal success, delight in living, physical soundness and well-being, to claim sympathy and forbearance toward her!

"Yes, yes," he declared, almost tenderly. "I comprehend and associate myself with your grief. The trial has been so prolonged. You cannot expect to throw off painful impressions and adjust yourself to new conditions immediately. But that adjustment will come, dear cousin, believe me. It is merely a question of time, for you are young, and in youth our recuperative power is immense. So do not fight against your tears. If they relieve you, shed them freely."

For a while Joanna remained bowed together, then she threw herself back in her chair almost convulsively.

"You must not be too kind to me," she cried. "I enjoy it, but it encourages my want of self-control."

"Don't you good English people set an exaggerated value upon self-control, perhaps?" Adrian asked, gently, argumentatively. "Why waste so much energy in the effort to maintain an appearance of Red Indian stoicism and impassivity? Why fear to be human? Sensibility is a grace rather than a fault, especially in a woman—"

He moved away and stood by one of the eastern windows looking out into the pine grove. A draught of air, round the corner of the house, shook the stiff branches. He felt sorry for her, quite horribly sorry. But, just Heaven, how plain she was, with that tear-blotched face and those quivering lips and nostrils! Andrew Merriman's appraisement of her appearance and the consequences entailed by it in respect of a possible suitor were not overstated. Adrian waited, giving not only her, but himself, time to recover, and, approaching her again, did so smiling.

"Ah! that is well, dear cousin," he said. "Already you feel better, you regain your serenity. Well then, let us talk quietly about this matter which you wish to explain to me."

"It was about our wills—Margaret's and mine, I mean; about the disposition of our property." As she spoke she clenched her right hand, working it against the palm of her left, like a ball working in a socket. "Mr. Challoner has mentioned this subject to Margaret, impressing upon her that we ought to attend to it without delay."

"Our good Challoner is a little disposed to magnify his office," Adrian put in, lightly.

"So I have thought—sometimes," Joanna agreed, a trace of eagerness in her flat, colorless voice, produced—as always—from the top of an empty lung. "But he has great influence over Margaret. I do not want to be unjust, but I think the ideas he suggests to her are not always suitable. They tend to create difficulties between us. From what Margaret tells me I gather that he has discussed this subject very freely with her. She refers to it and quotes him continually when we are alone. I gather that he thinks I ought to make a will exclusively in Margaret's favor, so that in the event of my death the estate may pass to papa's direct descendants. He tells Margaret, as I gather, that papa wished this although he left no written instructions regarding it. And he—he—Mr. Challoner, I mean—appears to take for granted that while Margaret will almost certainly marry now, it is improbable I shall ever marry."

"But," Adrian cried, indignantly, though against his convictions and his better judgment, "in even hinting at such a thing Challoner is guilty of a very great impertinence! He takes for granted that which is no concern of his, and takes it for granted altogether prematurely, thereby laying himself open to a well-deserved and very extensive snubbing."

Joanna's breath caught in her throat. Again the young man felt her eyes fix on him with an extraordinary intensity of gaze.

"Cousin Adrian," she said, hurriedly, "has any one ever told you—do you know—I think you ought to know—about our brother William—about Bibby?"

This time Adrian met her gaze steadily. He felt it imperative to do so. To his relief, after a momentary fluttering, the red-rimmed eyelids were lowered.

"I have heard a little about him, poor boy," he answered, gently and respectfully. "I have heard that he caused those who loved him anxiety and trouble."

"And humiliation and disgrace," Joanna whispered.

"But what would you have, dear cousin? It must be so at times. Life is a tremendous, a dangerous, though, in my opinion, a very splendid experiment. We all start as amateurs, in ignorance of the laws which govern it. Is it not, therefore, inevitable that some should get off the true lines, and make mistakes injurious to themselves and lamentable to others?"

"But papa did not permit mistakes. He never forgave them."

"Pardon me, but in not forgiving them did he not himself, perhaps, commit the very gravest of all mistakes?" Adrian could not resist asking, though he feared the question trenched on levity.

"I wish I could believe that." She spoke bitterly. "It would simplify so much for me. I should be so thankful to believe it. It would help to excuse Bibby. I know he was weak in character; but he was so nervous and delicate as a child. Papa alarmed him. He demanded too much of him, and was stern and sarcastic because Bibby could not meet that demand. My brother did not go to a preparatory school, but at thirteen he was sent to Rugby. It was papa's old school, and he believed the traditions and atmosphere of it were calculated to induce the serious sense of moral and intellectual responsibility in which he thought Bibby deficient."

"Poor child!" Adrian murmured.

"Yes," she said; "I am thankful you understand and pity him. I know papa's purpose was Bibby's good, the improvement and development of his character; but the treatment was too severe. It did not brace him, but only broke his spirit. He was unaccustomed to associate with other boys. They frightened and bullied him. He was so miserable that at the beginning of his second term he ran away."

She waited a moment, struggling against rising emotion, her hands working again ball-and-socket fashion.

"It was all very dreadful. For nearly a week he was lost. We knew he could have very little money, for his allowance was small. Papa held economy to be a duty for the young. I think, next to mamma, I suffered most, for I always loved Bibby best—better than I did Margaret. I shall never forget that week. I suppose papa suffered, too, in his own way. He was very silent, and looked angry. Andrew Merriman traced Bibby to London and brought him home. Mamma pleaded to keep him for a time, but he was sent straight back to school. About six months later papa received a request to remove him. He was accused of taking money from another boy's locker. Nothing was actually proved, but suspicion clung to him, and as his general conduct was reported unsatisfactory, the authorities thought it better he should leave. Papa sent him abroad to a private school at Lausanne. He remained there three years, until he was seventeen. Papa refused to let him spend the holidays at home, so during the whole of that time we only saw him twice, when we were traveling."

The monotonous, colorless voice, the monotonous story of well-meaning, cold-blooded tyranny it narrated, got upon the listener's nerves. With difficulty he restrained explosive comment reflecting far from politely upon the so recently buried dead. He really could not sit still under the indignation it provoked in him. He got up, moved away and stood leaning his shoulder against the dark, polished woodwork of the eastern window, his back to the light. He thought it well the narrator should not see his expression too clearly.

"It is almost inconceivable," he said.

"I am not exaggerating, Cousin Adrian," Joanna returned, straining her eyes in the effort to fix them upon his face. "All these events in their consecutive order are stamped indelibly upon my memory."

"I am convinced you are not exaggerating, my dear cousin, and just on that very account it is the more inconceivable," Adrian declared.

"But in your present relation to us—to me—I feel you ought to know all about poor Bibby, all about our—my—family history. My duty is to place the facts before you. I should be guilty of great self-indulgence if I concealed anything from you in that connection," Joanna protested, with growing agitation. "I should do very wrong if, to spare myself pain, I deceived you."

And again that sensation of embarrassment, of uncertainty how to comport himself, returned upon Adrian.

"But, dear cousin," he said, in a mildly argumentative manner, "don't you emphasize the obligation of truth-telling unnecessarily? I am here to be of help to you, to shield you, in so far as possible, from that which is distressing. In thus reviving painful memories do you not defeat the very object of my presence?"

"Oh no, no," Joanna cried. "Surely you realize how bitterly I might have cause to upbraid myself—later—if I now left anything untold which it was right you should have heard? It is incumbent upon me, a matter of—of honor, to be perfectly explicit."

Adrian raised his eyebrows the least bit. How providential he stood with his back to the light! He passed his left hand down over his neat black beard, and his lips parted silently. Poor, dear young woman, what in the name of wonder did—And then he came near laughing. The idea was too preposterous, and, worse still—shame filled him at even momentary entertainment of it—too fatuous! He gave it unqualified dismissal.

"No," she repeated, with a veiled and somber violence, "I should do very wrong by permitting you to remain in ignorance. I should deserve any after suffering which might come to me. For I have a duty to fulfil to Bibby as well—that is what I wanted to explain to you before giving instructions to Mr. Challoner about drafting my will. Some day my duty to Bibby may appear to clash with another duty; and therefore it is necessary you should know clearly beforehand."

Joanna flung herself back in her chair.

"Whatever it may cost me now or—or—in the future, I must tell you the rest, Adrian."

More mystified than ever, startled by the use of his Christian name without any qualifying prefix, at once affected and repelled by her excitement, the young man moved from his station at the window and stood near her, leaning his hands upon the head of the ungainly adjustable, couch.

"Pray tell me any and everything which may help to procure you relief," he said, kindly.

And Joanna, lying back, looked up at him, an immense appeal, a something desperate and unsatiable in her faded blue eyes, which made him consciously shrink. The Ibsen woman—the Ibsen woman in another manifestation!—It was not pleasant. He didn't like it in the very least.—Then, as if at the touch of a spring, she sat bolt upright, looking past him out of the window at the dark, wind-shaken branches of the pines.

"When my brother returned from Lausanne," she began again in that colorless, monotonous voice, "he was put into Andrew Merriman's office at the mills. Mamma and I were glad at first. We trusted Andrew Merriman. He had always been tactful and kind about Bibby. But papa decided he—my brother—should live at home so that he might exert a direct personal authority over him. And the two had nothing, nothing in common. You can judge from the contents of this library what papa's tastes and pursuits were. My brother did not care anything about politics, or social reform, or that class of subject. He was pleasure-loving, and I do not think his long stay abroad improved him in that respect. Papa supposed the discipline at M. Leonard's school to be rigid. Among the elder boys I have reason to fear it was decidedly lax."

Adrian made a slight movement of comprehension. He could picture the régime, and could well imagine the nice little games these exiled young gentlemen had been at!

"Papa was stern; Bibby inattentive, sullen, and nervous. At dinner we—mamma and I—used constantly to be in dread of collisions. We were in perpetual anxiety as to what Bibby might inadvertently say, or not say, which might provoke papa's sarcasm. Then mamma's health began to give way. We went to Torquay for the winter, taking the servants, and Highdene was shut up. Bibby went into lodgings near to Andrew Merriman, in the suburb of Leeds, in which the mills are situated. Papa wishing to train him in habits of economy, only allowed him the salary of a junior clerk. But every one there knew we were rich, so the tradespeople were only too ready to give Bibby credit, while unscrupulous persons borrowed of him. He was naturally generous, and easily imposed upon, and he enjoyed the society of those who flattered and made much of him. It was said he frequented low company, that he gambled at cards and got intoxicated. I I do not know how far this was true, but he did get deeply into debt. More than once Andrew Merriman helped him, but he could not afford to be responsible for Bibby's continued extravagance. And then—then—my brother manipulated certain accounts and embezzled a large sum of money. Andrew Merriman discovered this. He tried to shield him, and interceded with papa for him—"

The speaker broke off, pausing for breath, bending down as though crushed by the weight of her recollections.

"It was very, very dreadful," she said. "Papa paid my brother's debts, but he forbade him all intercourse with us. He cut Bibby out of our family life, as a surgeon might cut out some malignant growth. He regarded him thus, I think—indeed, he said so once—as a diseased part the excision of which was imperative if the moral health of the family was to be preserved. He gave Andrew Merriman a capital sum, which was to be remitted to Bibby in small quarterly instalments. When that sum was exhausted he was to receive nothing further. We never saw him again. Papa bought this house, and we moved here. He would not remain at Highdene. The scandal had been too great. He could not forgive, nor could he endure pity. He made the business into a company, and retired. Mamma had become a complete invalid. The doctors thought this climate might benefit her; and then this place is far away from our former friends and associations. We knew no one here."

Joanna raised herself, looking, not at Adrian Savage, but past him, out at the dusky pines. She wiped her lips with her black-bordered handkerchief.

"That is all, Cousin Adrian," she said.

But, when the young man would have spoken she held up one hand restrainingly, and he saw that she shivered.

"Except—except this," she went on. "Papa ordered that Bibby should be considered as dead. Later Andrew ceased to hear from him, and rumors came that he was actually dead—that he had died at Buenos Ayres, where he had gone as a member of some theatrical troupe. But mamma and I never credited those rumors. Nor did Andrew Merriman. He does not credit them now."

She turned her head, looking full at Adrian with that same desperation of appeal.

"I asked him yesterday," she said. "It was dreadful to speak to him on the subject, but I felt it my duty to do so. I felt I ought to know where I stood in regard to my fortune, because—because of the future. Andrew believes my brother is still alive. And that is why I must refuse to make a will in Margaret's favor. If, as you say, papa made the gravest of all mistakes in never pardoning mistakes, clearly my duty to his memory is to redress the mistake he made in the case of my brother in as far as it is possible for me to do so. Margaret will have ample means of her own. I cannot be ruled by Mr. Challoner's opinion."

Joanna rose and walked over to the window, standing exactly where Adrian had stood some ten minutes before. There seemed a definite purpose in her selection of the exact spot, both in the placing of her feet and the leaning of her shoulder against the window-frame. Her back was to the light. Adrian could not see the expression of her face distinctly. He was glad of this. He did not want to see it, for again he was conscious of shrinking from her.

"After all, Mr. Challoner may be wrong—as you yourself just now said, Cousin Adrian—in taking for granted I shall never marry. I may marry. But, whatever happens, I shall not leave any part of my fortune to Margaret. I shall leave two-thirds of it to Bibby, and the rest—"

Smallbridge threw open the library door.

"Mr. Challoner, ma'am," he said; and the Stourmouth solicitor, his Mongolian countenance quite strikingly devoid of all expression, ponderously entered the room.

II

THE DRAWINGS UPON THE WALL

CHAPTER I

A WASTER

It was still cold, but the skies were clear. The snow had been carted away and Paris was herself again; the note of her exhilarating, seductive, vibrant—a note at once curiously fiercer and more feminine than that of London.

René Dax, crossing the Place du Carrousel, stood for a moment listening to that vibrant note, sensible of its charm and challenge; looking westward, meanwhile, across the Tuileries Gardens and Place de la Concorde to the ascending perspective of the Champs-Élysées. The superb ensemble and detail of the scene, softened by lavender mist at the ground levels, was crowned by the blood-red and gold of a wide-flung frosty sunset—a city of fire, as the young man told himself, built on foundations of dreams!

He had just come away from the press view of a one-man show of his own drawings. The rooms were crowded to suffocation. The success of the exhibition was already assured, promising to be prodigious, to amount to a veritable sensation. He was aware of this, yet his mood remained an unhappy one. As usual the critics showed themselves a herd of imbeciles. They praised the wrong things, or, more exasperating still, praising the right ones praised them wrongly, extolling their weak points rather than their fine ones, misinterpreting their message and inner meaning. Had Adrian Savage been there—unluckily he was still in England—some sense might have been spoken. Adrian was an austere critic, but always an intelligent and discriminating one. As for the rest of the confraternity—René gazed mournfully at the flaming sunset splendor—they got upon his nerves, they nauseated him.

And it all went deeper than that. For those many square yards of wall, plastered with his mordant verdict upon the human species, got upon his nerves, too, and nauseated him. He recoiled, as he had often recoiled before—taking it thus wholesale—from his own merciless exposure of the follies, vulgarities, the mental and physical deformities and distortions of his fellow-creatures; recoiled from the reek of his own Rabelaisian humor, of his own extravagant ribaldry and ingenious grossness. It was his vocation, as that of other and more famous satirists, to wreak a vindictive vengeance thus upon humanity. Only, in his care, reaction invariably followed. The devil of unsanctified laughter for the time satiated and cast out of him, he wandered—as this evening—a very sad and plaintive little being, firmly resolving—as how often before!—once and for all to throw away his rather horrible pencil, and betake himself exclusively to the construction of those delicate lyrics and rondels from which, whatever minor perversions of sentiment they might exhibit, the witty bestiality common to his caricatures was conspicuously absent.

He wanted to forget the hot, close rooms, packed with admirers, male, and, though happily in a minority, female also. By René Dax that minority was held in particularly small respect. The woman who relished, or affected to relish, his art ought to be ashamed of herself—such at least was his opinion. His art was meant for men, not for women; and the women who couldn't arrive at that conclusion by instinct, unaided, were women for whom, especially in his existing mood, he had no use whatever, didn't want in the very least. That which he did want, under the head of things feminine, was something conspicuously different—a far-removed, stately, inaccessible type of womanhood. And, still more, he wanted the child who should grow into such womanhood—a tender, elusive, sprite-like, spotlessly innocent and unsoiled creature, to whom moral and physical ugliness were equally unknown and equally, saving the paradox, abhorrent.

Well, were not the tall, old-fashioned houses of the Quai Malaquais across the river there just opposite, and was it not still early enough to pay a visit? But then, as he rather fretfully remembered, Madame St. Leger had been pertinaciously invisible of late. He had called several times, only to be told she was not receiving or that she was out. He had never succeeded in seeing her and little Bette; never, now that he came to think of it, since the day of the great snow, the day when Adrian, whose absence he had just been deploring, left for England.

The bringing of these two facts into any relation of cause and effect had not previously occurred to him. It did not do so seriously even now. Yet unquestionably the names of Madame St. Leger and Adrian Savage took up a position side by side in his mind, thereby subtly coloring his reflections. He had no friend upon whom he depended and who, in his capricious exacting fashion, he loved as he did Adrian. The friendship had remained practically unbroken since the time when Adrian, the healthier, happier-natured boy, protected him, the queer little Tadpole, from tormentors at school. This friendship had been among the wholesomest influences of his life, and, amid many aberrations and perversities of thought and conduct, he clung to it. But it followed on his self-absorption and selfishness, natural and assumed, that his friend's interests and concerns, save in so far as they bore direct relation to his own, were a matter of indifference to him. He had never troubled himself as to the possible state or direction of Adrian's affections, and perhaps consequently, this sudden juxtaposition of names came to him as a surprise, and an irritating one.

Slipping in and out between private cars, taxis, and humbler, horse-drawn vehicles, he crossed the roadway to the Pont des Saints Pères. The sunset glories faded, while avenues of living white and glow-worm green lights sprang into being. Still, here and there, red splashes, as of blood, stained the livid, swirling surface of the Seine, which, in half flood, fed by the melted snow, hissed and gurgled under the arches and against the masonry of the bridge.

As it happened, just then, a lull occurred in the cross-river traffic, a break in the quick-moving throng of foot-passengers, so that in front of René Dax the pale arc of the right-hand pavement showed empty in the whole of its length, save for a single tall, slouching, shabby figure, clothed in a blue-serge suit unmistakably English in cut and in pattern. As René advanced, his mind still working around those two names set in such irritating juxtaposition, he saw the man in the English-made suit first glance sharply to right and left, then bend down, grasping the outer edge of the parapet, while slowly and, as it seemed, furtively, drawing one knee up on to the flat of the coping.

—Was it possible that Madame St. Leger's repeated refusals to receive him were other than accidental? Was it possible they had some connection with Adrian's absence? Was it conceivable his friend had turned traitor, had interfered, saying or hinting at that which might, socially, justify such denial of admission? Suspicion, resentment, self-pity, a lively sense of personal injury invaded him.—

The shabby, slouching loafer's right knee was fairly upon the coping now. He threw up both arms, threw back his head, his mouth opened wide as one letting loose a great cry. René Dax saw his extended arms, his bare head, his profile with that wide-open mouth, dark against a pale background of buildings and cold, translucent sky. The effect was of the strangest, the more so that no sound came from the apparently loud-crying mouth. Suddenly his chin dropped on his breast. His hands were lowered, clutching at the edge of the parapet again, and he remained thus for a few seconds, immobile, crouched together, his left foot, in a well-cut but bulging hole-riddled boot, still resting upon the pavement.

Then in a flash, awakening from contemplation of his own lately discovered woes, René realized what was about to occur. His height and reach were insufficient, encumbered as he was, moreover, by a thick fur-lined overcoat, for him to get his arms round the crouching figure. So he just clutched whatever came handiest, the back of the fellow's jacket, the slack of the seat of his trousers. Exerting all his strength, René hauled and jerked at these well-worn garments. The attack, though neither very forcible nor very scientific, was completely unexpected. The man's grip relaxed. His knee slipped and he fell back, an amorphous indigo and sandy-red heap, upon the pallid asphalt.

René pulled a scented pocket-handkerchief out of the breast-pocket of his coat and proceeded delicately to wipe the fingers and palms of his gray suède gloves. He was unaccustomed to such exertion. His heart thumped against his ribs. His sight was blurred. He felt slightly faint and light-headed and was grateful for the cold back-draught of air off the rapidly flowing river. It was his pride, part of his pose, in fact, never to display emotion; and he now found himself excited and shaken, by no means fully self-possessed. He needed a space of quiet in which to regain his accustomed affectations of bearing and manner. He was aware, too, that those shabby garments were decidedly unpleasant to touch. Therefore he stood still, breathing rather hard through his nostrils, and daintily wiping the neat, little gray suede gloves incasing his quick, clever little fingers.

"I must express regret for my violence," he said, with the utmost civility, to the heap on the pavement, as soon as he judged his voice sufficiently steady for speech. "I must apologize to you for such absence of ceremony, but really, my dear sir, it appeared to me no time should be lost. You had, unconsciously of course, placed yourself in a highly ridiculous position from which it was clearly incumbent upon me, as an amiable and sympathetic person, immediately to remove you. At times one is compelled to act with decision rather than politeness. This was a case in point. Doubtless you are at present annoyed with me. But a few moments' reflection will, I feel sure, commend my action to you. You will recognize how right, even to the point of an apparent sacrifice of personal dignity, I was."

The man by now had got upon all fours, looking like some unsightly, shambling animal. Limply he rose to his feet and, supporting himself against the balustrade, turned upon his savior a dissipated boyish countenance, down which tears dribbled miserably.

"Why the devil couldn't you leave me alone?" he asked, petulantly, in English. "What earthly concern is it of yours? Aren't I my own master?"

His voice rose to a wail.

"I've been trying to—to do it all day, but there have been too many people about. They stared at me. They suspected and followed me. I could not dodge them. Now I thought the opportunity had come. I was rid of them at last. I never saw you, curse you, you're so short. After all, one doesn't think of looking on the ground, except for vermin. And I'd just pulled myself together. I mayn't have the nerve to try again. I've lost my chance," he wailed, childishly, his weak, loose-lipped mouth twisted by the wretchedness of crying. "I've lost my chance through you, you beast. And you've torn my coat, too. It's the only one I have left; and I did want to look decent, when they found me, when I was dead."

He flung away passionately, pressing his face down on his folded arms upon the parapet, while his angular shoulders heaved and his body shuddered under the ragged blue-serge jacket.

"I shall not have the pluck again. I know myself, and I sha'n't have it. By now I should have been out of the whole accursed tangle. The whole show would have been over—over—I should know nothing more. I should be quit of my misery. I should be dead—ah! my God, dead—dead—"

But René Dax continued to wipe his neat, little gray suède gloves. For his mood had changed. The taunt regarding his smallness of stature had turned him wicked, so that the exquisite minor poet, yearning for the companionship of things pure, lovely, and of good report, fled away. The injured friend fled away likewise. And the satirist, the caricaturist, impure and unsimple, greedy of human ugliness and degradation, malignant, mercilessly scoffing, reigned in their stead. And here, in this loose-limbed, blue-eyed, tawny-headed foreign youth—whose voice and speech, coarseness of expression notwithstanding, witnessed to education and gentle blood—vainly essaying to drown himself under the dying sunset skies of the city of fire built on foundations of dreams, was a subject, surely made to the satirist's hand, a subject of great price! The despotism of his art came upon René Dax, that necessity for vengeance upon humanity; and this time, for him, the edge of vengeance was sharpened by personal insult. For this was no common vagabond wastrel, thrown up from the foul underlying dregs of the population, but a person of condition, once his social equal, whose insolence therefore touched his honor as that of a man of the people could not.

"You are offensive, my young friend," he said, in careful, slightly over-pronounced, but fluent English. "You are also remarkably unattractive and wanting in intelligence. But I, being happily none of these things—offensive, I would say, unattractive or wanting in intelligence—can afford to be magnanimous. Learn, then, that had I not intervened—at much inconvenience to myself—to prevent your projecting your unsavory carcass into the river, but permitted you to carry out your thrice-idiotic purpose, it would not, as you say, have been all over by now and you quit of your misery, not one bit of it! Were you less crude in idea, less bestially ignorant, you would be aware that the principle of life is indestructible. Choking and struggling in the black water there you would have suffered abominable discomfort. But, even when the process of asphyxiation was complete, you yourself would have been still alive, still conscious, and would have discovered, to your infinite chagrin, that you had merely exchanged one state of being for an other and more odious one."