Hagar

CHAPTER XXIV
DENNY GAYDE

A few days after this she grew tired one morning of working. At ten o'clock she put away paper and pencil, pen and ink, letters and manuscript, and went out, first into the garden, and then through the gate in the wall into the high white light of the street and the pale-coloured town. Few were abroad in this section; she gave a friendly nod to those she met, but they were not many—an old negress carrying chickens, a few slow wagons, a priest, a young girl and boy, white-clad, with tennis rackets; two or three others. The street swam in light, the blue vault above sprang intense, there was just enough air to keep away languor. She turned into the grounds of the old, closed Royal Victoria Hotel. Here was shade and greater freshness. She sat down on the rock coping of the driveway; then, as there was no one about, lay down upon it pillowing her head on her arms. Above her was a tall, tall tree, and between the branches the deep and vivid blue. It seemed so near, it was as though with a little upward effort you might touch a sapphire roof. Between the leaves the sun scattered gold sequins. They lay upon her white skirt, the hat she had discarded, her arms, her hair. She looked sideways watching a chameleon, burnished and slender, upon the wall below her. It saw her at last and with a jerk of its head scuttled away. Hagar laughed, sat up and stretched her arms. Some neighbouring, one-storey house, buried in foliage, possessed a parrot or cockatoo. She watched it now, on some hidden perch, a vivid splash of colour in the enfolding green, dancing about, chattering and screaming. Some curious, exotic fragrance came to her; she could not trace its source. "It's a morning for the gods!" she said, and walked slowly by winding paths downward through the garden to the street. Before her, seen through foliage, rose the curiously shaped building with a history where now was lodged the public library. She had visited it several times; she liked the place, which had a quaintness, and liked the way the air blew in through its deep windows; and where books were she was at home. She crossed the white street, entered and went up the stair past dusty casts, pieces of coral and sea-curios, and into the round room where English and American papers and magazines were spread upon a table. From this centre sprang, like short spokes, alcoves made by the book-stacks. Each of these divisions had its chair or two and its open window. The air came in coolly, deliciously. There were the librarian and two or three people standing or seated about the central table,—no one else in the cool, quiet place. Hagar, too, stood by the table for a while, turning over the January magazines, looking at the table of contents or glancing at some article or illustration. Catholicism versus Ultramontanism—Why Ireland is Disloyal—Drama of the Future—The Coal Strike and its Lessons—Labour and the Trusts—Labour and Capital—Municipalization of Public Services—The Battleship of the Future—The War against Disease—Tschaikowsky and Tolstoy—Mankind in the Making—Mendel's Law—The Advancement of Woman—The Woman who Toils—Variation in Man and Woman—Genesis of the Æsthetic Categories—New Metaphysical Movement—Inversion of Ideas as to the Structure of the Universe—The World and the Individual.—After a while she left these and the table and moved to one of the alcoves. It was not a day somehow for magazines. The rows of books! Her gaze lingered with fondness upon them—this familiar title, this loved old friend and that. Finally she drew forth a volume of Keats, and with it sat down in the sweet air from the window.

An hour passed. A man, who had come into the room a few minutes before, was standing, looking about him—evidently the first time he had been in the building.

The librarian joined him. "It's a pleasant old place, isn't it?" she said politely.

"It certainly is," answered the man. "But it's so curious with that narrow stair and these deep-set windows."

"Yes. You see it's the old jail. Once they kept men here instead of books."

There was a pause. Then the man said, "This is the nobler use, don't you think?"

"Oh," said the librarian; "but of course they were wicked men—that is, most of them. There wasn't anything else to do with them."

"I see," said the man. He looked about him. "Well, it's sweet and clean and useful now at last!"

Some one called the librarian and she went away. The man moved on with slow steps from alcove to alcove. Hagar, from her recess, watched him, fascinated. Her book had fallen upon the floor. With half of her mind she was again in a poor hall in New York on a winter night.... Five or six people entered the library together. They came between her and the man she was following with her eyes. When at last they moved from before her alcove, she saw him leaving the place. Before she could hastily rise and come out into the wider space he was out of the room upon the landing—he was going downstairs. She caught up the book from the floor, thrust it hurriedly into its place, and with a light and rapid step followed. He was at the foot of the stair when she reached the head.

"Oh," she called, "will you stop—will you wait?"

He stopped short, turned. She was halfway down the stair, which was not long. "I beg your pardon. Was it to me you were speaking?"

"Yes!" She came up with him—they stood together in the light-washed doorway. "I—You do not remember me." She put up her hand and took off her wide hat of straw and lace. "Do you, now?"

He gazed. "No—Yes! Wait.... Oh—h! You are the little girl again!"

They both laughed with pure pleasure. A soft, bright swirl of feeling enfolded the ancient doorway.

"Oh," she said, "I have so often thought of you!"

"Not oftener than I have thought of you.... You've always been like a quaint, bright picture and a piece of music in my mind.—I don't know your name."

"Hagar Ashendyne.—And I don't know yours."

"Denny Gayde.... I tried to find you in the crowd that night—the night of the meeting, you remember—but you were gone."

"Yes. And for weeks after that night I used to think that perhaps I might meet you on the street any day. And then I went away."

The sun was dazzling where they stood. People, too, were coming down the stairs behind them.

"Let us go somewhere where we can talk," said Hagar; "the gardens over there—have you time?"

"I'm here on a holiday. I came yesterday. I don't know a soul and I was lonely. I've all the time there is."

They crossed the street, passed under an arch of blossoming vines, and entered the Royal Victoria's garden—deserted, cool, and silent as when Hagar had quitted it earlier in the morning. Built high above the ground, about the vast trunk of a vast silk-cotton tree was a square, railed platform reached by a flight of steps. A bench ran around it; it was a cool and airy perch, chequered with shadows of leaf and twig and with a sight of the azure sea. The two mounted the steps, and moving around the trunk to a well-shaded angle, sat down. No one at all seemed near; for solitude it was much like a tree house which, shipwrecked, they might have built on a desert island.

"Life's the most curious thing!" said Gayde.

"Isn't it? 'Curiouser and curiouser!' said Alice. I was twelve years old that summer we shared the apple turnovers."

"We didn't share them. You gave me all.—I was nineteen."

"And then—how many years?—Nine, isn't it?—that night at that Socialist meeting, when you spoke—"

"What were you doing there? I asked about you—I got to know well many of the people who were there that night—but no one could identify you. And though I kept you in mind, and looked for you, too, I could never find you again."

"I was spending the winter in New York. That night we had missed the theatre. We walked down Fourth Avenue and across—we were seeing New York at night. A crowd was going into that hall, and we went in too—"

"I see."

"Not until I got home that night did I remember that I did not know your name.... And in a month I was upon the ocean, and I have been in America very little in all the years since. I am here this winter with my father.... And you?"

She regarded him with dark eyes, simple and serious and interested as the eyes with which as a child she had regarded him above her flower dolls. He was not hungry and haggard and fear-ridden as then, nor was he as he had been the night of the Socialist meeting, somewhat embarrassed and stumbling, strong, but piteous, too.... He was a little thin and worn, and looked as though he had been ill, she noted, but he was quiet, at ease, and assured. There needed no elaborate process in telling her things; to intuition she added a considerable knowledge of the world and of ways and means; to heart, intellect. One could do much in nine years; she knew that from personal experience. This man had added to native strength education, experience, poise, and significance. She might have said culture, only she had grown to dislike the word. He had not, evidently, attained to wealth as wealth is counted. In a region where the male visitor, though he might arrive in winter garments, promptly sloughed them off for fine white flannels, he had not followed custom. It was true that he was not wearing a winter suit, but what was probably a last summer's one. It was not white—only a grey, light-weight business suit, ready-made and somewhat worn. His straw hat looked new. He was clean-shaven. His face was at once the face of the boy in the thicket, and the face of the workman talking out of bitter experience to other workmen, and a new face, too,—a judging face, ascetic rather than not, with eyes that carried a passion for something vaster than the flesh. "And you?" asked Hagar again.

But he had fallen into a brown study. "Hagar Ashendyne—You can't be—do you mean that you are—Hagar Ashendyne, the writer?"

"Yes, Hagar Ashendyne, the writer." She smiled. "It never occurred to me that you might read what I have written. Have you?"

"Yes, I have read what you have written—read it and cared for it greatly.... Well, all life's a strange encounter!"

"And that's true enough. And now will you tell me about yourself?"

His eyes smiled back at her. "Let me see—what is there to tell? That night in New York.... Well, after that night ... I was fortunate in the work I got, and I rose from grade to grade. I studied hard, every moment I could get. I read and read and read. I became secretary to a certain Socialist organization. I have been for some years a Socialist organizer, lecturer, and occasional writer. In the summer I am to take the editorship of a Socialist paper. Behold the short and simple annals of the poor!"

"How long are you going to be in Nassau?"

"A whole month. These last two years have been years of exacting, constant work, and there's a prospect of the same continuing. I thought I'd got my second wind—and then I came down suddenly. The doctor said that if I wanted to do the paper justice—and I do—I'd have to give it an editor who could sleep. So he and Rose packed me off."

"Rose?"

"My wife—Rose Darragh."

He spoke as though she would know the name. Indeed, it seemed to have for her some association; but it wavered like a dream; she could not fix it. She seemed to feel how long she had been away from America—out of touch—not knowing things, events, trendings. "Nine years," she said again, uncertainly; "so much happens in nine years."

"Yes," he said. "Personal life changes rapidly to-day—with everything more flexible, with horizons growing wider—and the age follows and changes and changes—changes and mounts. We are in for a great century. I'm glad to be alive!"

"Yes, I am, too." Presently she looked at her watch. It was luncheon-time. Would he not take it with her father and herself? No; he would not do that to-day; but leaving the great tree and the garden they walked together to the house. At the gate in the wall she said, "Come to see me here to-morrow morning, if you will. I should like you to come and go as you please."

"Thank you," he said, then, with emphasis, "friend.... That is what, when I was nineteen and afterwards, I called you in my mind."

"It's a good word—'friend.' Let us use it still."

"With all the will in the world. You are wonderful to me—Hagar Ashendyne."

"I am glad to have found you again, Denny Gayde."

That night, suddenly, before she slept, she placed the name Rose Darragh.... A feminist—A Socialist agitator and leader—a writer of vigorous prose—sociology—economics.... She seemed to see her picture in some magazine of current life—a face rich, alert, and daring, rising on a strong throat from a blouse like a peasant's.

CHAPTER XXV
HAGAR AND DENNY

The afternoon sun yet made a dazzle of the white road. Infrequent trees cast infrequent shadows. It was warm, but not too warm, with an endless low wind. The tide was going out; there spread an expanse of iridescent shallows, and beyond a line of water so blue that it was unearthly. There was a tonic smell of salt and marsh. The wheels of the surrey, the horse's hoofs, brought a pleasant, monotonous, rhythmic sense of sound and motion.

"That is the shell house," said Hagar, breaking a long silence; "that small, small house with the boat behind. There you can buy throngs of things that come out of the sea—coral and sponges and purple sea-fans and wonderful shells."

"I walked out here last week. There's a sick child I know—a little cripple. I am going to take her a great box of the prettiest shells. She'll lie there and play with them in her dingy corner of the dingy room where all the others work, and maybe they'll bring her a little of all this.... God knows!"

The wheels went on. They passed the small house with a great lump of coral on one side of the door, and a tall purple sea-fan upon the other.

"I sometimes think," said Hagar, "that the trouble with me is that I am too general. My own sharp inner struggle was for intellectual and spiritual freedom. I had to think away from concepts with which the atmosphere in which I was raised was saturated. I had to think away from creeds and dogmas and affirmations made for me by my ancestors. I had to think away from the idea of a sacrosanct Past and the virtue of Immobility;—not the true idea of the mighty Past as our present body which we are to lift and ennoble, and not Immobility as the supreme refusal to be diverted from that purpose,—but the Past, that is made up of steps forward, set and stubborn against another step, and Immobility blind to any virtue in Change. I had to think away from a concept of woman that the future can surely only sadly laugh at. I had to think away from Sanctions and Authorities and Taboos and Divine Rights—and when I had done so, I had to go back with the lamp of wider knowledge, deeper feeling, and find how organic and on the whole virtuous in its day was each husk and shell. The trouble was that in love with the lesser we would keep out the stronger day ... and there was everywhere a sickness of conflict. I had to think away from my own dogmatisms and intolerances. I'm still engaged in doing that.... What has come of it all is a certain universal feeling.... I'm not explaining very well what I mean, but—though I want to be able to do it—it is difficult for me to drive the lightning in a narrow track to a definite end. It's playing over everything."

"I see what you mean. You're more the philosopher than the crusader. Well, we need philosophers, too!... I'm more, I think, the type that is sharpened to a point, that couches its lance for one Promised Land, which it believes is the key to many another. But I hold that it is better to move full-orbed, if you can."

"I do not know—I do not know," said Hagar. "I try to plunge with my whole mind into some political or social theory, but I fail. Even the slow drawing-up of the submerged capacities in woman, even the helping in that,—which is greater than would be the discovery of Atlantis, which is greater than almost anything else,—cannot bring the ends together. Name everything and there is so much besides!"

"There is such a thing," said Denny, "as going to the stake for what you know to be partial, only factors, scaffoldings, stairs to mount by.... Stairs and scaffoldings are necessary; therefore, die for them if need be."

"I agree there," answered Hagar.

The surrey had left the sight of the sea. The pale road stretched straight before them, going on until it touched the cobalt sky. On either hand stood growing walls, dense and thorny as those about the Sleeping Beauty's palace—all manner of trees, silver palm and thatch palm, tamarind, poison-wood and plum, ink-berry and jack-bush, bound all together with smilax and many another vine. At long intervals occurred an opening, a ragged space and a hut or cabin, with an odour, too languid-sweet, of orange blossoms, and a vision of black children. The walls closed in again sombrely. The road would have been a little dreary but for the sky and the sun and the jewel-fine air.

"I suppose," said Hagar, "that there is a certain Brahmin-like attitude to be overcome. I suppose that to take wallet and staff and go with the mass upon the day's march, encouraging, lifting, helping, pointing forward, bearing with the others, is a nobler thing than to run ahead upon your own path and cry back to the throng, 'Why are you not here as well?' I suppose that ... and yet there are times when I am Nietzschean, too. I can be opposites."

"Yes; that is what bewilders," said Denny. "To include contradictories and irreconcilables—to be both centripetal and centrifugal—to be in one brain Socialist and Individualist!... But the greatest among mankind have found themselves able. They have been farthest ahead, and yet they have always seemed to be in the midst."

The sun sank low, the white road grew pallid. "Better turn presently," said Hagar.

"When we get to that palm. How wonderful it stands against the sky!—I never thought that I should see palm trees."

When they came to it, the negro driver turned the horse. Roll of wheel and slow thud of hoofs they went dreamily back toward Nassau. The walls on either hand were darkening; the sky was putting on a splendid dress.

"Years and years now I have been away," said Hagar. "In the spring I am going home."

"Home to—to Gilead Balm?"

"At first, yes, I think ... then, I do not know. I have been away so long. There are people in New York I want to see—old friends—women. Do you chance to know Elizabeth Eden?"

"Yes, I know her. She's one of the blessed." After a moment he said abruptly, "I want you to know Rose Darragh."

"Yes, I want to," said Hagar simply.

They came before long to the shell house. "Let us stop and get some shells."

Inside they had the place, save for the merchant of shells, to themselves. Right and left and all around were strewn the pearl and pink and purply spoils. All the sunset tints were here, and the beauty of delicate form—grotesqueries, too; nature in queer moods. It was pleasant to run the hands through the myriad small shells heaped in baskets, to weigh the sea-cushions and sea-stars and golden seafeathers, to admire rose coral and brain coral and finger coral, and hold the conch shells to the ear. Through the open door, too, came the smell and murmur of the near-by sea, and on the floor lay one last splash of sunlight. "Give me a shell," said Hagar, "and I will give you one. Then each of us will have something to remember the other by."

They gravely picked them out, and it took some minutes to do it. Then in turn each crossed to the merchant in his corner and paid the purchase price, then came back to the light in the doorway.

Denny held out a delicate, translucent, rosy shell. "It won't hold my gratitude," he said. "You'll never know.... I used to see you in the moonlight, between me and the bars.... Somebody had cried for me, ... wept passionately. It helped to keep me human. I've always seen you with a light about you. This is your shell."

"Thank you. I shall keep your kind gift always," said Hagar. She spoke in a child's lyric voice, quaintly and properly, so precisely as she might have spoken at twelve years old that, startled herself, she laughed, and Denny, with a catch in his voice, laughed too. "Oh," she cried with something like a sob, "sixteen years to slip from one like that!" She held out a small purple shell. "This is yours, Denny Gayde.... And I've thought of you often, and wished you well. If I did you, unknowing, a service, so you, unknowing, have done me a service, too. That summer morning, long ago—it shocked me awake. The world since then has been different always, more pitiful and nearer. Here's your shell. It won't hold my gratitude and well-wishing either."

They passed out between the coral and the sea-fans, entered the surrey, and it drove on. Now they were back by the sea. The tide was far out, the expanse of shallows vaster. The salt pools had been fired by the torch of the sky; they lay in reds and purples, wonderful. The smell of the sea impregnated the air and there blew a whispering wind. The town began to appear, straggling out to meet them, low chimneyless houses of the poorer sort. Men and women were out in the twilight, and children calling to one another and playing. The vivid lights had faded from sky and from wet sand and rock, shoal and lagoon, but colour was left, though it was the ghost of itself. It swam in the air, it gleamed from the earth. Warmth was there, too, and languor, and the melancholy of the gathering night. A dreamlike quality came into things—the children's voices sounded faint and far; only there were waves of some faint odour, coming now it seemed from gardens.... Now they were in the town and the sea was shut away.

"One half of my fairy month is gone."

"You are sleeping better?"

"Yes—much better.... Where shall we go to-morrow?"

"Leave it to to-morrow. Look at the star ... oh, beauty!"

When to-morrow was here they walked inland to Fort Fincastle, and then to the Queen's Staircase. Negro children raced after them with some sweet-smelling yellow flower in their hands. "Penny, Boss!—Penny, Boss!—Penny, Boss!" When they were gone, and when two surreys filled with white-dressed hotel people vanished likewise, they had the Queen's Staircase to themselves. Broad-stepped, cut in the living rock, it plunged downward to the green bottom of the seventy-foot deep ancient quarry. Trees overhung it and yellow flowers, and there was a rich, green light like the bottom of the sea. Denny and Hagar sat upon a step a quarter of the way down.

"I do not know why," said Denny, "there should be so deadly a fear of upheaval. All growth comes with upheaval—surely all spiritual growth comes so. Growth by accretion means little. Growth from within comes with upheaval—what you have been transformed or discarded. A little higher, a little finer breaks the sod and grows forth so. The deadly fear should be of down-sinking—from the stagnant grow-no-farther-than-our-fathers-grew down—down.... Of course, the Woman Movement means upheaval and great upheaval—but that is a poor reason for condemnation.... As far as its political aspect is concerned, most open-minded men, Socialists and others, with whom I come into contact, admit the right and the need. Unless a man is very stupid he can see what a farce it is to talk of a democracy—government of the people, for the people, by the people—when one out of every two human beings is notoriously living under an aristocracy. And, of course, we who want an associative gain of livelihood, no less than an associative form of government, stand for her equality there.... But to me there is something other than all that in this upheaval. I cannot express it. I do not know what it is, unless it is some faint, supernal promise.... It is as though the Spirit were again working upon the face of the waters." He paused, gazing upward at the sky above the wall of rock. "We are in for a deep change."

"Yes, I think so. A lift of mind and a change of heart, on which to base a chance for a deep change, indeed. A richer, deeper life.... Oh, there will be dross enough for a time, tares, detritus, heat and dust and wounds of conflict, Babel, cries and counter-cries! and some will think they lose...."

"They'll only think so for a while. Nothing can be lost."

"No—only transmuted.... But I hate the tumult and the shouting while the people are yet bewildered. If that's the Brahmin in me, I am going to sacrifice him. I am going where the battle is."

"I do not doubt that."

More white-suited people appeared, at their heels the black children. "Penny, Boss!—Penny, Boss!—Penny, Boss!" Hagar and Denny rose and walked back to town through the warm, fragrant ways. He left her at Greer's studio—she had promised to come look at the portrait. As they stood a moment in the verandah, Medway's golden drawl was heard from within. "Well, I've known a good many philosophers—but none that were irreducible. Every heroic, every transcendental treads at last the same pavement. 'I love and seek the street called pleasure. I abhor and avoid the street called pain.' Therefore the summum bonum—" The door opened to Hagar. She smiled and waved her hand, and the studio swallowed her up.

Some days after this they drove one afternoon over the Blue Hills to the southern beach. Long white road—long white road—and on either hand pine and scrub, pine and scrub, and over all a vault of sky achingly blue. It was a lonely road, a road untravelled to-day, and the wind shook in the palmetto scrub. Small grey birds flitted before them, or cheeped from the tangled wood. It was a day for silence and they stayed silent so long that the negro driving, who was afraid of silence, broke it himself. He told them about things, and when they awoke and genially answered, he was happy and talked on to himself until they, too, were talking, when he lapsed into silence and contentment. The wind blew, the scrub rustled, the sky was sapphire—oh, sapphire!

When they came after a good while to the South Beach, they left the surrey and the horse and the driver, in the shade of the trees that fringed the beach, and walked slowly a long way, over the firm sand. It stretched, a silver shore; the sun was westering, the great sea making a hoarse, profound murmur. They walked in silence, thinking their own thoughts. Before them, half-sunken in the sand, lay an old boat. When they came to it, they sat down upon its shattered, sun-dried boards, with the sand at their feet and the grave evening light stealing up and Mother Ocean speaking, speaking....

"In the last analysis it is," said Hagar, "a metaphysical adventure—a love-quest if you will. There is a passion of the mind, there is the questing soul, there is the desire that will have union with nothing less than the whole. I will think freely, and largely, and doing that, under pain of being false, I must act freely and largely, live freely and largely. Nor must I think one thing and speak another, nor must I be silent when silence betrays the whole.... And so woman no less than man comes into the open."

"There is something that broods in this time," said Denny. "I do not know what it will hatch. But something vaster, something nobler...."

Hagar let the warm sand stream through her fingers. "Oh, how blue is the sea.... Æons and æons and æons ago, when slowly, slowly life drew itself forth from such a sea as this into upper air—when Amphibian began to know two elements, how much richer was life for Amphibian, how great was the gain!... When, after æons and æons, there was all manner of warm-blooded life in woods like these behind us, or in richer woods ... and one day, dimly, dimly, some primate thought, and her children and grandchildren a little, little more consciously thought, and it spread.... To that tribe how strange a dawn! 'We are growing away from the four-footed—we are growing away from our sister the gibbon and our brother the chimpanzee—we are growing—we are changing—we feel the heavens over us and a strange new life within us—we are passing out, we are coming in—we need a new word....' And at last they called themselves human—æons ago...."

"And now?"

"And now, on the human plane, it seems to me that we may be immediately above that region." She took a pointed piece of driftwood and drew upon the sand. "Here is the human plane—and here above it is another plane." She drew a diagonal line between. "And that is a stairway of growth from one to the other. And we are turning from this plane—the lower plane—and coming upon that stairway, and down it, to meet us, pours like a morning wind, like the first light in the sky, a hint of what may be. Like that ancestral tribe, we are growing, we are changing—we feel a strange new life within us—we are passing out, we are coming in—we need a new word."

"What would it be?"

"I do not know.... After a while, an age hence maybe, when the light is stronger, we will coin it. Now there is only intuition of the change.... There is something in a translation I was reading of one of the Upanishads, 'But he who discerns all creatures in his Self and his Self in all creatures, has no disquiet.... What delusion, what grief can be with him in whom all creatures have become the very self of the thinker, discerning their oneness?... He has spread around a thing, bright, bodiless, taking no hurt, sinewless, pure, unsmitten by evil.... That might come after a long, long time, after change upon change."

The great sea murmured on, a wild white bird flew across the round of vision, melted into the sunset.

"And each change is greater by geometrical progression than was the one before?"

"Not the change itself, but that into which the change leads us. Each time we depart at right angles.... Yes, I think so."

"And the movement of women toward freedom of field and toward self-recognition—no less than the general movement toward socialization—is part of the change?"

"All things are part of it.... Yes, it is part."

She rose from the sand. "The sun is setting." They walked back to the surrey and took the homeward road. As they came over the Blue Hills it was first dusk; the town lay, grey-pearl, before them, and above it swam the moon, full and opaline. "How many days have you now?"

"Just seven."

"Have you heard from Rose Darragh?"

"Yes. She's been doing her work and mine, too. She begs me to stay another two weeks, but I must not. There is no need—I am perfectly well again—it would only be selfish enjoyment."

"I wish it were possible—but if it's not, it's not.... Oh, how large the moon is! You can almost see it a globe—it is like a beautiful, lighted Japanese lantern."

"Where will we go to-morrow afternoon?"

"We cannot go anywhere to-morrow afternoon, for, alas! I have to go to a garden-party at Government House. But the next day we might go to Old Fort. What is that fragrance—those strange lilies? Look now at the Japanese lantern!"

They went to Old Fort and came back in the warm evening light, driving close to the sounding sea. "Five days now," said Denny. "Well, I have been so happy."

That night Hagar could not sleep. She rose at last from the bed and paced her moon-flooded room. All the long windows were wide; the night air came in and brought a sighing of the trees. After a while she stepped out upon the gallery that ran along the face of the house. Medway's room was down stairs and away from this front; she had the long silvered pathway to herself. She paced it slowly, up and down, wooing calm. Each time she reached the end of the gallery, she paused a moment and looked across the sleeping town that lay for the most part below this house and garden, to where she could guess the roof of the small, inexpensive, half hotel, half boarding-house where Denny bided. When after a time she discovered that she was doing this, she shook herself away from the action. "No, Hagar, no!"

Going to the other end of the gallery, she found there a low chair and sat down, leaning her head against the railing. It was the middle of the night. Something in the place and in the balm of the air brought back to her those days and nights in Alexandria, so long ago. There, too, she had had to make choice.... "I could love him here and now—love him—love him in the old immemorial way.... Well, I will not!" She put her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands. "Rose Darragh—Rose Darragh—Rose Darragh"—it struck through her mind, slow and heavily vibrant, like a deep and melancholy music. She rose and paced the gallery again, but when she came to the farther end, she turned without pause or look over the moonlit town.

"Rose Darragh—Rose Darragh"—she made it rhythmic, breathing deeply and quietly, saying the name inwardly, deeply, but without passion now, saying it like a comrade's name. "Rose Darragh—Rose Darragh—Rose Darragh—"

Calm came at last, repose of mind, victory. She sat down again, leaned her arms upon the railing, and followed with her eyes the lonely, silver moon. Work was in the world, the all-friend Work; and Beauty was in the world, the all-friend Beauty; and one good put out of reach, mind and spirit must make another and were equal to the task. "Rose Darragh—Rose Darragh!—not if I could would I hurt you," said Hagar; and took her attention from that matter and put it first upon the stars, and then upon some lines of Shelley's that she loved, and then upon the story she had in hand. It was not well to go to bed thinking of a story, and when at last she left the gallery and laid herself straight upon the cool linen, she stilled the waves of the mind-stuff and let the barque of attention drift whither it would. At last she seemed in a deep forest long ago and far away, and there she went to sleep with a feeling of violets under her hand.

Five days, and Denny left Nassau. "It's not saying good-bye. In May, when you come to New York—"

"Yes, in May I'll see you and Rose Darragh. Until May, then—"

Denny and she clasped hands, both hands. "Thank God for friends!" he said with the odd little laugh that she liked, with the catch in the voice at the end of it as though he had started to laugh and then Life had come in. His eyes were misty. He brushed his hand across them. "You are dancing before me," he said apologetically.

She laughed herself. "And you are dancing before me! Good-bye, good-bye, Denny Gayde! Let's be friends always."

From the garden she watched the Miami steam slowly down the narrow harbour, and, passing the lighthouse, turn to the open sea. She watched it until it was but a black speck with a dark feather of smoke, and then until the feather and all had melted into the sky. "Well," she said, "there's work and beauty and high cheer, and Time that smooths away most violences!"

But she did not see Denny and Rose Darragh in May. That evening at dinner Medway was more than usually good company. He had a high colour; his hair and curling beard had been cut just the length that was most becoming; he looked superbly handsome. Often he affected Hagar as would a very fine canvas, some portrait by Titian. To-night was one of these nights.

Greer dined with them, and he was urging Medway as he had urged before to let him paint him. "Fortune's smiling on us both—on you as well as me. Neither of us may have such a chance again! Let me—ah, let me!"

"What should I do with it when it was done, and if I liked it—which you know, Greer, is not dead certain? You can't hang portraits in a nomad's tent, and I haven't a soul in the world to give it to,—my mother would like a coloured photograph of me, but she wouldn't like Greer's picture,—unless Gipsy will take it when she sets up her own establishment—"

"I will take it with thanks," said Hagar. "Let Mr. Greer do it."

Medway said he would consider it. Dinner went off gaily with stories and badinage. Afterwards the traveller from the Colonial came in, and then the violinist. He played for them—played rhapsodies and fantasias. It was after eleven when the three guests departed. Greer's gay voice could be heard down the street—

Thomson appeared, with Mahomet behind him to put out the lights.

"Good-night—sleep right!" said Medway. "Pleasant fellows, aren't they?"

Toward daylight she was awakened by a knock at her door, followed by Thomson's voice. "Mr. Ashendyne has had some kind of a stroke, Miss Hagar—" She sprang up, threw on a kimono, opened the door, and ran downstairs with Thomson. "I heard him breathing heavily—I've waked Mahomet and sent the black boy for the doctor—"

It was paralysis. And after months of Nassau, she took him back to the mainland and northward by slow stages, not to Gilead Balm, for he made always "No!" with his head and eyes to that, and not to New York for he seemed impatient of that, too; but at last to Washington. There she and Thomson found a pleasant residence to let on a tree-embowered avenue, and there they moved him, and there she stayed with him two years and read a vast number of books aloud, and between the readings cultivated a sunny talkativeness. At the end of the two years there came a second stroke which killed him.

CHAPTER XXVI
GILEAD BALM

"It's a foolish piece of idealism," said Ralph. "But she's had her way so long I suppose it's impossible now to check her."

The Colonel's irritation exploded. White-haired, hawk-nosed and eyed, a little stooped now, a good deal shrunken in his black, old-fashioned, aristocratic clothes, he lifted a bloodless hand and made emphasis with a long forefinger. "Precisely so! One world mistake lay in ever giving property unqualifiedly into a woman's hands, and another in ever encouraging occupations outside the household, and so breeding this independent attitude—an attitude which I for one find the most intolerable feature of this intolerable latter age! I opposed the Married Woman's Property Act in this state, but the people were infatuated and passed it. Married or single, the principle is the same. It is folly to give woman control of any considerable sum of money—"

Mrs. LeGrand, entering the Gilead Balm library, caught the last three sentences. She smiled on the two gentlemen and took her seat upon the sofa. "Money and women are you talking about? Where money comes in," said Mrs. LeGrand, "I always act under advice. Women know very little about finance, and their judgment is rarely to be trusted."

"Just so, my dear friend! It is not in the least," spoke the Colonel, "that I am acquisitive or that it will make any great difference to me personally if Medway's wealth stays in the family or no. What I am commenting upon is the folly of giving a woman power to do so foolish a thing."

"Hagar always could do foolish things," said Miss Serena, looking up from her Mexican drawnwork.

"I don't quite understand yet," said Mrs. LeGrand. "Mrs. Ashendyne was telling me in the big room yesterday evening, and then some one came in—dear Medway's will left her without proviso all that he had—"

"As was quite proper," said Ralph, "the Colonel to the contrary. Well, the principal comes to considerably over a million dollars—the cool million his second wife left him by her will and the settlement she had already made upon their marriage. The investment is gilt-edged. Altogether it would make Hagar not an extremely rich woman as riches are counted nowadays, but—yes, certainly for the South—a very rich woman. But now comes in your feminine tender conscience—"

"Hagar refuses to put on black," said Miss Serena. "I don't see that she's got a tender conscience—"

"The entire amount—everything that came from the fortune—she turns back to the fund which the second wife established for workingmen's housing. She states that she agrees with her stepmother's views as to how the fortune was made, and that she does not care to be a beneficiary. She says that her stepmother had evidently given thought to the matter and preferred that form of 'restitution' and that her only duty is simply to return this million and more to the fund already erected, and from which it was diverted for Cousin Medway's benefit."

"Duty!" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand. "I don't see where 'duty' comes in. Her 'duty' is to see that her father was wise for her. If he was content there's surely no reason why she should not be so!"

"Hagar," said Miss Serena, "never could see proper distinctions between people. I don't see that working-people are housed so badly—"

Ralph laughed mirthlessly. "Yes, they are, Cousin Serena! Scarcely any of them have tiled bathrooms and the best type of porcelain-lined tub, and very few have libraries that'll accommodate more than a thousand volumes, and quite a number do without nurseries papered with scenes from Mother Goose. And as they're all for that kind of housing, they're preparing to move in—just a little preliminary ousting of a few people with more brains and money and in they go!—cuckoos laying their eggs in abler folks' nests! This is the age of the cuckoo."

"How absurd," said Miss Serena, "Gilead Balm hasn't a tiled bathroom, nor an extremely large library, and when I was a child the nursery wasn't papered at all. But we are perfectly comfortable at Gilead Balm. It's a heinous sin—discontent with your lot in life."

"Do you mean," asked Mrs. LeGrand, "that, against your counsel and advice, Hagar is really going headstrongly on to do this silly thing?"

"Apparently so. She is," said the Colonel, "of age. There again was a mistake—to let women come of age. Perpetual minors—"

Mrs. LeGrand laughed. "Colonel, you are not very gallant!"

The Colonel turned to her. "Oh, my dear friend, you're not the modern, unwomanly type that professes to see something degrading in the subordination that God and Nature have decreed for woman! Gallant! That's just what I am. Knights and gallantry were for the type that's vanishing, though"—he bowed to Mrs. LeGrand, who had not a little of her old beauty left—"though here and there is left a shining example!"

Mrs. LeGrand used her fan. "Oh, Colonel, there are many of us who like the old ways best."

Ralph drummed with his fingers upon the table. "To come back to Hagar—"

Hagar herself entered the room.

She was dressed in white; she was a little thin and pale, for the last weeks had been trying ones. Habitually she had a glancing way of ranging from an appearance of youth almost girlish to a noble look of young maturity. To-day she looked her thirty-one years, but looked them regally.

Once the Colonel would not have hesitated to hector her, Miss Serena peevishly to blame what she could not understand, Mrs. LeGrand to attempt smoothly to put her down. All that seemed impossible now. There was about her the glamour of successful work, of a known person. Mrs. LeGrand had recently purchased a "Who's Who," and had found her there. Ashendyne, Hagar, author; b. Gilead Balm, in Virginia, and so on. From various chronicles of the realm of contemporary literature she had gathered that Hagar's name would be found in yet more exclusive lists than "Who's Who." Of course, all in the room had read much of what she had written, and equally, of course, each of the four had, for temperamental reasons, spokenly or unspokenly depreciated it. But all knew that she had—though they could not see the justice of her having—that standing in the world. Mrs. LeGrand always, with patrons, smoothly brought it in that she had been a pupil at Eglantine. None of them knew how much she made by her writing; it was to be supposed it was something, seeing that she was coolly throwing away a million dollars. There was likewise the glamour of much absence in foreign lands; the undefined feeling that here were novelties of experience and adventure, ground with which she was familiar and they were not. Of experience and adventure in psychical lands they took no account. But it was undeniable that her knowing Europe and Asia and Africa added to the already considerable difficulty in properly expressing to Hagar how criminally foolish she was being. Added to that, there was something in herself that prevented it.

Ralph spoke first. "We were talking, Hagar, about your idea of what to do with Cousin Medway's money. Here are only kinspeople and old friends, and we all wish that you wouldn't do it, and think that there'll come a day when you'll be sorry—"

The Colonel, leaning back in his chair, stroked his white imperial. "I should never have said, Gipsy, that you were the sentimental, beggar-tending kind—"

Hagar's kindly eyes that had travelled from her cousin to her grandfather, now went on to Mrs. LeGrand. "And you?" they seemed to say.

"Why couldn't you," said Mrs. LeGrand, "do both? Why couldn't you give a handsome donation—give a really large amount to this charity? And then why not feel that you had, so to speak, the rest in trust, and give liberally, so much a year, to all kinds of worthy enterprises? I don't believe the most benevolent heart could find anything to complain of in that—"

Hagar's eyes went to Miss Serena.

"You ought to take advice," said Miss Serena. "How can you know that your judgment is good?"

Hagar gave her eyes to all in company. "It is right that you should say what you think. We are all too bound together for one not to be ready to listen and give weight to what the others think. But having done it, our own judgment has to determine at last, hasn't it? It seems to me that it is right to do what I am doing—what I have done, for it is practically accomplished. I saw all necessary lawyers and people last week in New York. Of course, I hope that you'll come to see it as I do, but if you do not, still I'll hope that you'll believe that I am right in doing what I hold to be right. And now don't let's talk of that any more."

"What I want to know," said Miss Serena, "is how you're going to live, if you don't take your dead father's support—"

Hagar looked at her in surprise. "Live? Why, live as I have lived for years—upon what I earn."

"I didn't suppose you could do that.—What do you earn?"

"It depends. Some years more, some years less. I have published a good deal and there is a continuing sale. England and America together, I am good for something more than ten thousand a year."

Miss Serena stared at her. A film seemed to come over her eyes, the muscles of her face slightly worked. "Somewhere about thirty years ago," she said painfully, "I thought I'd write a book. I'd thought of a pretty story. I wrote to a printing and publishing company in Richmond about it, but they wrote back that I'd have to pay to have it printed."

That night in her bedroom, plethoric with small products of needle, crochet-needle, and paint-box, Miss Serena drew down the shades of all four windows preparatory to undressing. She was upstairs, there was a thick screen of cedars and no house or hill or person who could possibly command her windows, but she would have been horribly uneasy with undrawn shades. Ready for bed, she always blew out the lamp before she again bared the windows.

Some one knocked at the door. "Who is it?" called Miss Serena, her hand upon her dress-waist.

"It's Hagar. May I come in?"

It seemed that Hagar just wanted to talk. And she talked, with charm, of twenty things. Mostly of happenings about the old place. She asked about the latest panel of garden lilies and cat-tails, and she took the wonderfully embroidered pincushion from the bureau and admired it. "I think that I'm going to have an apartment in New York this winter, and if I do, won't you make me a pincushion? And, Aunt Serena, you must come sometimes to see me."

"You'll be marrying. You ought to marry Ralph."

"Even so, you could come to see me, couldn't you? But I am not going to marry Ralph."

Miss Serena stiffened. "The whole family wants you to—" She was upon family authority, and the wooing had to be done all over again....

"I saw Thomasine in New York. She's going to live with me as my secretary. You know that she has been a typewriter and stenographer for a long time, and they say she is an excellent one. She has been studying, too, other things at night, after her long hours. She is as pretty and sweet as ever. When you come, the three of us will do wonderful things together—"

Miss Serena's bosom swelled. "I wonder when Ashendynes and Dales and Greens began to 'do things'—by which I suppose you mean going to theatres and concerts and stores and such things—together! The bottom rail's on top with a vengeance in these days! But your mother before you had no sense of blood."

Hagar sat silent, with a feeling of despair. Then she began again, her subject the flower garden, and then, at last—"Aunt Serena, tell me about the story you wanted to write...."

Ralph—Ralph was too insistent, she thought. He found her the next morning, under the old sycamore by the river, and he proceeded again to be insistent.

She stopped him impatiently. "Ralph, do you wish still to be friends, or do you wish me to put you one side of the Equator and myself on the other? I can do it."

"The Equator's an imaginary line."

"You'll find that an imaginary line can change you into a stranger."

"Hagar, I'm used to getting what I set my heart and brain upon."

"So was a gentleman named Napoleon Bonaparte. He got it—up to a certain limit."

"I don't believe you are in earnest. I don't believe you have ever really considered—And I intend one day to make you see—"

"See what? See my enormous advantage in marrying you? Oh, you—man!"

"See that you love me."

"How, you mean, can I help it? Oh, you—featherless biped!"

Ralph broke in two the bit of stick in his hands with a snapping sound. "I'm mad for you, and I'd like to pay you out—"

"You are more remotely ancestral than almost any man I know!—Come, come! let us stop this and talk as cousins and old playmates. There's Wall Street left, and who is going to be President, and what are you going to do with Hawk Nest."

"What I wanted to do with Hawk Nest was to fix it up for you."

"Oh, Ralph, Ralph! I should laugh at you, but I feel more like crying. The pattern is so criss-cross!" She rose from beneath the sycamore. "I'm going back to the house now."

He walked beside her. "Do you remember once I told you I was going to make a great fortune, and you made light of it? Well, I'm a wealthy man to-day and I shall be a much wealthier one. It grows now automatically. And that I would be powerful. Well, I am powerful to-day, and that, too, grows."

"Oh, Ralph, I wish you well! And if we don't define wealth and power alike, still your definition is your definition. And if that's your heart's desire, and I think it is, be happy in your heart's desire—until it changes, and then be happier in the change!"

"I have told you what is my heart's desire."

"I will not go back to that. Look! the sumach is turning red."

"Yes, it is very pretty.... You didn't see Sylvie Maine—Sylvie Carter—when you were in New York?"

"No. I haven't seen Sylvie since that one first winter there. I wrote to her when I heard of Jack Carter's death."

"That has been three years ago now. She is a very beautiful woman and much sought after. I saw a good deal of her last winter.... Yes, that sumach is getting red. Autumn's coming.... Hagar! I'm not in the least going to give up."

"Ralph, I'm going to advise you to use your business acumen and recognize an unprofitable enterprise when you see it.... Look at the painted ladies on that thistle!"

"I'm old-fashioned enough to believe that a man can make a woman love him—"

"Are you? Be so good as to let me know when you succeed.—I warn you that the Equator is getting ready to drop between."

When they passed the cedars and came to the porch steps, it was to find Old Miss sitting in the large chair, her white-stockinged feet firmly planted, her key-basket beside her, and her knitting-needles glinting.

"Did you have a pleasant walk?" she asked, and looked at them with a certain massive eagerness.

"Ask Hagar, ma'am. She may have," answered Ralph; and took himself into the house. They heard his rather heavy footfall upon the stair.

Hagar sat down on the porch step. "Ralph has, doubtless, a great many good qualities, but he is spoiled."

Now Old Miss had a favourite project or projects, and that was matings between Coltsworths and Ashendynes. Every few years for perhaps two centuries such matings had occurred. Many had occurred in her day. With great intensity she wanted and had wanted for years to see a match made between her granddaughter and so promising, nay, so accomplishing, a Coltsworth as Ralph. She was proud of Ralph—proud of his appearance, of his ability to get on in the world and make money and restore Hawk Nest, of his judgment and knowledge of public affairs which seemed to her extraordinary. She wanted him to marry Hagar, and characteristically she refused to admit the possibility of defeat. But Ralph was no longer quite a young man—he ought to have been married years ago. As for Hagar—Old Miss loved her granddaughter, but she had very little patience with her. She was not patient with women generally. She thought that, on the whole, women were a poor lot—witness Maria. Maria lived for Old Miss, lived on one side in space of her own, core of an atmosphere of smouldering, dull resentment. If Maria had been different, Medway would have lived at home. If Maria had known her duty, there would have been a brood of grandchildren to match with broods of Coltsworths and others of rank just under the first. If Maria had been different, this one grandchild wouldn't be throwing a million dollars away and failing to love her cousin! If Maria hadn't been a wilful piece, Hagar might have escaped being a wilful piece. Old Miss loved her granddaughter, but that was what she was calling her now in her mind—a wilful piece.

Factors that counted with the others at Gilead Balm, Hagar's very actual detachment and independence, name and prestige and personality, failed to count with Old Miss.

Such things counted in other cases; they counted in Ralph's case. But Hagar was of the younger, therefore rightfully subordinate, generation, and she was female. Ralph was of the younger generation, also, and as a boy, while Old Miss spoiled him when he came to Gilead Balm, she expected to rule him, too. But Ralph had crossed the Rubicon. As soon as he grew from young boy to man, some mysterious force placed him without trouble of his own in the conquering superior class whose dicta must be accepted and whose judgment must be deferred to. The halo appeared about his head. He came up equal with and passed ahead of old Miss, elder generation to the contrary. But Hagar—Hagar was yet in the class that was young and couldn't know; she was in the class of the "poor lot." She was a wilful piece.

"I do not see that Ralph is spoiled," said Old Miss. "He receives a natural recognition of his ability and success in life. He is a very successful man, a very able man. He is giving new weight to the family name. There was a piece in the paper the other day that said the state ought to be proud of Ralph. I cut it out," said Old Miss, "and put it in my scrapbook. I'll show it to you. You ought to read it. I don't see why you aren't proud of your cousin."

"I hope I may be.—What are you knitting, grandmother?"

"Any woman might be happy to have Ralph propose to her. And any woman but your mother's daughter might have some care for family happiness and advantage—"

"Oh, grandmother, would my unhappiness in truth advantage the family?"

"Unhappiness! There's no need for unhappiness. That's your mother again! Ralph is a splendid man. You ought to feel flattered. I don't believe in marrying without love, certainly not without respect; but when you see it is your duty and make your mind submissive you can manage easily enough to feel both. That's the trouble with you as it was with your mother before you. You don't see your duty and you don't make your mind submissive. I've no patience with you."

"Grandmother," said Hagar, "did you ever realize that you yourself only make your mind submissive when it comes into relation with men, or with ideas advanced by men? I have never seen you humble-minded with a woman."

Old Miss appeared to take this as a startling proposition, and to consider it for a moment; then, "I don't know what you mean."

"I mean that outraged nature must be itself somewhere—else there's annihilation."

Old Miss's needles clicked. "I don't pretend to be 'literary,' or to understand literary talk. What Moses and St. Paul said and the way we've always done in Virginia is good enough for me. You're perverse and rebellious as Maria was before you. It's simple obstinacy, your not caring for Ralph—and as for throwing away Medway's million dollars, there ought to be a law to keep you from doing it!—Are you going upstairs? My scrapbook is on the fourth shelf of the big closet. Get it and read that piece about Ralph."