To be in the heart of a great country, fifteen hundred miles from the Atlantic, and two thousand miles from the Pacific, to be forbidden the public highway of the train, and to have one’s objective point India,—this is by no means an easy problem, even to the oriental mind. And who could know what was going on in the being that crept away into the storm, strong with the instinct of hiding and of cunning. He must have balanced all things. To go westward, where the great steamers plied toward the Orient, this would seem the natural course; and yet that way lay interminable prairies and empty stretches, and again deserts and piled mountains, without shelter and without food. It is easier to hide among people than amid solitudes. On crowded city streets, we jostle without seeing.
It was no great feat to transform the once Swami of the flowing robes and lofty port into a hulking skulking negro tramp, like the sturdy villains of ancient days, sleeping in woody nooks by day, and pursuing his slow journey under the stars, answering the look of such human beings as he met with suspicion, keeping to the hamlets where police officers were scarce and knowledge of the criminal world scarcer, and where solitary house-wives, whose men were in the field, could be persuaded, half through charity and half through fear, to dole out food. Ah, but it was a weary journey. The world, of whose littleness we boast when we think of steam and electricity, grows very sizable again when a man comes back to the elemental means of progress—his own two legs. As for the smaller world in which he had been living—the world of luxury and of worshiping disciples—he laughed silently to think what a mirage it was and always had been.
Down the Mississippi he crept, sometimes peering from between the great trees that flanked its steep banks, as the red Indians did long ago, to see the boats of the white man go serenely up and down that mighty swirling current, and stopping even in his self-absorption to feel a little of the beauty when the great river spread itself into the shimmering expanse of Lake Pipin, or to remember, at Winona, the picturesque legend that he had heard of the deserted Chippewa maiden who here threw herself from the overhanging rocks into the pitiless rush of waters below, and left only her ghost and her sweet-sounding name to the spot. He halted to inspect the great monolith, a hundred feet in height, of Sugar Loaf.
He had an idea that in some little town to the south he might venture to board a straggling cross-country train to Chicago; and, once in the thick of men again, he believed himself safe. He had always been wary enough to keep on his person a certain sum of money. Such as it was, it might serve his purpose. It also tickled his sense of humor to think that—shabby black wayfarer that he was—he had in his pocket a check for five thousand dollars, that he could not cash, and a handful of rubies that were enough to awaken the suspicions of the least suspicious. But still, day after day and night after night, he plodded patiently on his way down the water course, until at last, at Prairie du Chien, two hundred miles from St. Etienne, he felt that he might comfort his inner man with hot food, and his weary legs with a bed and a pillow. He prowled along the streets of the country town looking for some cheap lodging-house where such as he, a humble, cringing, dog-like fellow, might find shelter. He looked through a dusty window and saw a shaggy-bearded, roughly-dressed man shoveling food with a knife, and he felt that he had found the right place.
The proprietor of the establishment sat at a small table absorbed in the perusal of a week-old Sunday newspaper. He growled out a “Guess so. Sausages; baked beans; coffee,” to Ram Juna’s polite inquiry. It neither looked nor smelled inviting, but the Hindu submitted to fate and swallowed a hasty and unpalatable meal.
“Can you tell me where I can get a bed for the night?” he asked, turning to his host.
The evident refinement in his voice made that worthy look up from his literary occupation in some startled curiosity.
“They ain’t many places where they take niggers,” he said with an unpleasant grin. “But I guess you might find a berth at Sally Munn’s, if you ain’t too particular about morals. She’s a merlatter herself; keeps a place ’bout six houses down, first street to the left.” The man stared impudently as he spoke, but Ram Juna said, “Thank you,” with his usual politeness as he went out. The Hindu noted the impudent stare, but he went away with an indifferent air.
“See here!” said the proprietor to his single other customer, “ain’t this picture in the paper the very image of that black feller that just skipped?”
“Say, it’s him!”
“We’d ought to look this up. There’s a big reward offered.”
While Ram Juna slept, lying in all his day clothes, some subtle subconsciousness kept watch, became aware of disturbance, and roused his body to attention. He got up, tiptoed to the open window and looked out at the group of men standing below in the darkness.
“Aw, shut up, Sal,” one of them was saying to an angry woman in the doorway. “We ain’t goin’ to raid ye, though Lord knows you wouldn’t have no kick comin’ if we did. What we want is that black feller that come to-night. We suspect he’s one of a gang of counterfeiters that the St. Etienne police are after; and we ain’t goin’ to lose the chance of the reward. You fellers keep right under the window, and I’ll take you six up stairs with me. He’s big and he may show fight. Get your guns ready. Don’t shoot to kill. We want to deliver him alive. But you needn’t be afraid to use a ball on him.”
Ram Juna drew away from the window and smiled his old Buddha smile. With clumsy creaking precautions they mounted the stair. The moment for the climax came; there was a rush all together, a breaking down of the shaky door. The crew burst into the room—an empty room—and stared puzzled and stupefied at the walls and at each other.
“Well, if that don’t beat all!” ejaculated the sheriff. “Where in —— has that fellow disappeared to?”
“They say,” said Josiah Strait, a lank westernized Yankee, “that them Hindu jugglers and lamas, and so forth, has supernatural gifts, and I begin to believe it.”
Something over a month later, Mr. Early burst in on Mr. and Mrs. Percival as they dawdled over the breakfast-table.
“It’s no time to be paying calls, I know,” he apologized, “but I’ve had such a sensation this morning that I had to come over and share it. Yes, there are times when a man wishes that he had a wife to talk to!”
“What is it, Early?” Dick asked indifferently.
Mr. Early was waving a bit of paper about in a way quite hysterical.
“Do you see that?” he cried exultantly. “I never expected to see it again, but I declare it is worth its price. I was going over my bank accounts the first thing this morning and I found it.”
“How do you expect us to know what it is when you’re fanning it about that way?” Dick demanded.
“It’s a check, man, a check for five thousand that I gave Ram Juna the very day of his unceremonious departure.” Lena turned scarlet, and Mr. Early noticed it with fresh glee. “A check I gave Ram Juna,” he repeated. “It’s been cashed, with four indorsements, in New Orleans. Now how did he manage that, tell me. The Swami is one of the great geniuses of the age. Of course I wanted to see the rascals punished, and it makes me hot to think how they used my house and all that, but, by Jove! I’m glad they haven’t Ram Juna. From New Orleans, a seaport, mind you! I am willing to make a good-sized bet that he’s well on his way to his favorite Himalayas by this time, ready to meditate on the syllable ‘Om’ for the rest of his life. Oh, it’s too good! How he must laugh in his sleeve at the rest of the world! But how did he get that check cashed?”
“Well, if I were in your place, I should have it traced back,” said Dick, the practical.
“Of course I shall,” exclaimed Mr. Early. “Of course I shall. I shall put it in the hands of the police at once, for I’m sure of one thing, if it helps to root out any sinners, Swami Ram Juna won’t be among them. He’s gone for good, take my word for it; and as for the other rascals, I hope with all my heart they may suffer.” He nodded jubilantly at Mrs. Percival, and she flushed again.
“It’s a very good joke, certainly,” said Dick, “but rather an expensive one for you, I should say, Early.”
“Oh, I shall get five thousand dollars’ worth of satisfaction out of it,” Mr. Early went on enthusiastically. “And I’m proud of the Swami, proud of him. And the splendid simplicity of him! I was talking yesterday with the detective that ferreted him out. The plunder they found in my little room was perfectly primitive. He had practically no tools to make the cleverest counterfeits in years. A deft hand and a wonderful thumb had the Swami.”
“What are they going to do with the big ruby in his turban?” asked Lena.
“Oh, that is one of the chief things that I came to tell you about. You, my dear Mrs. Percival, have especial reason to be interested in this.” He turned, brimming with information, to Lena, “The captain of police took it to Brand’s—the jeweler, you know—to be appraised. Now isn’t this the crown of the whole story? Brand tells him that it is paste!”
Dick sat back in his chair and laughed with abandon, and laughed again.
“And what about my rubies’?” screamed Lena, springing to her feet.
“I have not the slightest doubt that they are paste, too. Everything he touched was fraud.”
“I’m glad of it! I’m glad of it!” cried Dick, with a new access of mirth. “The old rascal! Giving my wife jewels! Why, Lena, you couldn’t wear his stuff anyway, after all this fracas. It will do to trim a Christmas tree.”
But Lena, with angry face, tapped the floor nervously with her gaudy small slipper, and made no reply to her husband’s hilarity.
Even to her slow-working mind it was evident that she had paid a high price for some worthless bits of glass. This conferring of a favor was indeed a bond.
She wondered what Mr. Early thought of her; what Dick would say if he ever discovered.
The strenuousness of the fall campaign almost wiped these events from Dick’s mind. Day after day he spent in bringing home his points to the man on the street and in the workshop. Much of it was dreary and monotonous work, but he kept doggedly at it. It seemed his whole life, now. And night after night Mr. Preston, Dick and Ellery tried to put fire into some dingy little hall-full of men. To Percival’s surprise, Norris developed a plain common-sense variety of eloquence that appealed to his audiences quite as much as did Dick’s more fervid eloquence. Ellery invariably spoke straight to some well-known condition. But they hammered and pounded and reasoned and explained; they tried emotion, and logic and everything except bribes to win their ground, until their speeches began to sound automatic to themselves, their voices grew hoarse, and they moved like men in a dream.
“If there were one day more of this,” Dick said to Norris, as they tramped home late on the night before election, and felt a certain restfulness in the November starlight, “I should send down a wheezing nasal phonograph to grind out my speech. I am played out. Everything I say sounds like tommy-rot.”
“It does grow hollow. The worst of it is it robs me of my evenings with Madeline.”
“Um!” said Dick. “When are you to be married?”
“About Christmas. The death of Golden, poor fellow, shoves me up a peg on the editorial staff, and justifies me in facing matrimony. Mr. Elton is good enough to give us a little home. They are a family to hang to, Dick. I feel as though I had ‘belongings’ for the first time since I lost my own father and mother. Madeline and I shall make rather a small beginning, but, as you know, she has not set her heart on luxuries.”
“No,” said Dick slowly. “You are a lucky fellow, Ellery. You’re going to get away ahead of me in the long run. Preston said yesterday that the honors of this campaign were yours. He has been a fine figure-head, and I have hollered loud, but you’ve hollered deepest, and the public knows it. I guess that’s the real reason that you’ve been shoved ahead on the staff. Here’s your boarding-house. Good night, old fellow. To-morrow night our labors will be over.”
“I hope yours will have just begun, Mr. Alderman,” Norris retorted.
The polls closed in uncertainty and for three days speculation filled the papers, and election bets remained unpaid. Then the decks cleared. Mr. Preston was elected mayor by a narrow plurality; and out of the eighteen aldermen, the reform element had carried seven, Dick Percival among them, to victory. The Municipal Club counted its gains and was jubilant, for this meant that, if the city council passed any objectionable measure, their iniquity could be vetoed by the mayor, and the bad men of the city fathers lacked one of the two-thirds majority which they would need to carry their legislation over the executive’s veto.
Dick took Lena and went away for a fortnight’s rest, but came back looking old and dissatisfied.
It was understood that the first battle in the new council would be over the lighting franchise, which was about to expire and which the company in power wished to renew. There had been some talk of an attempt to force it through before the old council went out of power, but even Billy Barry’s henchmen refused to commit themselves to so unpopular a measure on the very eve of election; for St. Etienne had been paying a notoriously high price for notably bad lighting, and the citizen, usually a meek animal, had been stirred to a realization of his injuries by wholesale exposition of the truth.
But now there were new councils of war, and Billy swore more intricate oaths than he had ever been known to produce in days of yore. He was still in possession of his aldermanic seat, but a little uncertain whether it was a throne or a stool of repentance. Still Billy talked loudly of the things he meant to do; and, as usual in his troubles, went to consult the delphic Mr. Murdock; and Mr. Murdock went to see Mr. Early; and Mr. Early, after very much demur, went to see Mr. Percival. Sebastian did not like to mix himself publicly in politics, and the reformers were his friends.
Still, one evening just before the franchise was introduced, Mr. Early did drop in on Dick in a friendly sort of way. Percival took him to his own sanctum, and settled down with him to the friendly communion of cigars.
Mr. Early hesitated and was manifestly ill at ease, which gave Dick a pleasurable amusement while he waited to hear the discomfort unfolded.
At last Sebastian said: “Dick, you know I am a man of art rather than of politics, and of course I am in entire sympathy with the idea of clean government; but I want to talk to you about this lighting business.”
“Well?” said Dick, as he took out his cigar.
“It’s a matter of some importance to one or two of my friends, and I may say, to myself, that the old contract should be renewed,” said Mr. Early, gaining confidence. “I want to ask you to look at it in a reasonable light. I suppose you fellows had to be a little outrageously virtuous to make your campaign; but now it’s time to drop that and get down to business.”
Dick resumed his cigar with an air of settling the question.
“Mr. Early,” he said, “I do not think it necessary for us even to discuss this matter. This was one of the main issues in the campaign. Some of us were elected on purpose that we might rid the city of this kind of thing; and we propose to carry out our pledges. There is nothing more to be said.”
“There are personal considerations to every question, Percival,” answered Mr. Early, shading his face with his hand, and watching Dick’s expression with artistic appreciation of the changes that he felt sure he should see.
“Not for me,” said Dick. “Thank Heaven my hands are clean, and I can do whatever I believe to be right.”
“Yes, for you,” answered Mr. Early suavely, and then he broke into a suppressed laugh. “Why, you young idiot, if you care to be told, your feet are limed, and the sooner you recognize the fact the better.”
“What do you mean?” cried Dick with fierce resentment.
“Oh, sit down, my boy,” said Mr. Early, still amiable. “There’s no use in rampaging. I just want to tell you a little story and show you a little piece of paper.”
Dick sat down and glared at his guest.
“Your wife—” Dick started up with something like a groan. “Yes, your wife, Percival. You see a man does not always stand alone. Your wife has a necklace of worthless rubies, which she has told you was a present from our dear departed Swami. If people only knew about it, there might be a certain amount of scandal about a young woman’s receiving a supposedly valuable gift from a swindler who was also a social idol. Don’t go off your head, Dick. You’ve got to listen to me. As a matter of fact, she lied to you when she told you he gave them to her. She bought them; and she had not the money to pay for them. I suppose it was at his suggestion that she borrowed the sum from me. That would have been all right, except that she gave me a note signed by Richard Percival, and she quite omitted to tell me that her husband was away at the time. I found that out by chance afterward, after I had supplied her demand. Would you like to see the forgery, Dick? It’s an ugly word, but we might just as well be plain with each other.”
Dick’s tongue had grown dry and speechless, so that he seemed to have no power to check this recital, and now all he could do was to reach out an eager hand.
“Not so fast,” said Mr. Early. “It’s mine, not yours. And it will take more than the five thousand dollars out of which it swindled me to buy it back. It sounds bad, doesn’t it? A forgery, connected with a rascal who was the talk of the country. I should not myself care to pose again as the dupe of a woman and her friendly counterfeiter, but that would be a small matter compared with the hail of scandal that would whir around the head of that pretty little butterfly, your wife.”
“Scandal! My wife!” Dick staggered to his feet.
“That is what we all want to avoid, don’t we?” Mr. Early asked with his fat smile.
They looked at each other in silence. Dick had a wild impulse to fling himself on his knees, spiritually speaking, and to beg for mercy; but the expression of Mr. Early’s face suggested that all sentiment would fall into cold storage in his breast.
“You’ve been devoting yourself, with a certain amount of success, to digging out the hidden things in other men’s careers,” the tormentor went on with a cheerful sneer. “I suppose it has amused you. I know it amuses me, and it would doubtless amuse the public, to fix attention on this little affair of your own. You must remember that you have this disadvantage: you and your kind are thin-skinned. Billy Barry and his kind are pachyderms.”
He settled back comfortably in his chair and smiled benevolently at Dick’s white face.
“Well?” Dick asked at last hoarsely.
Mr. Early carefully refolded the slip of paper, and tucked it away in his vest pocket, but he spoke with engaging openness.
“It’s yours, my dear boy, the day after the lighting franchise passes over the mayor’s veto. If they fail to pass it, I shall know that you and Mrs. Percival are willing to stand a little public obloquy for the sake of what you consider right. Very creditable to you, I am sure, and damned uncomfortable for your wife.”
Dick still stared at him, and he went on: “I’ll leave you to think it over. In fact, I do not know that it is necessary for me to learn your decision except by your action. Sorry to have to take extreme measures, but it’s every one for himself, in this world.”
He went out, and Dick sank into a chair and stared at his toes and the ashes.
“What’s the use?” he said to himself. “She didn’t know what she was doing. I can’t change it or her.”
Winter went on, and Ellery and Madeline were married. Dick squandered himself on their wedding present, and looked like a thunder-cloud as he watched the ceremony. On the day after he returned from his brief honeymoon, Norris started down town to take up the routine of life, irradiated now by love and purpose. The world seemed fresh and fair, and even the face of Billy Barry less unlovely than usual as they met near Newspaper Row.
“Morning,” said Mr. Barry. “You look ripping. My congratulations. Sorry you could not come around to the council meeting, last night. You’d have been pleased to see the old franchise waltz through.”
“What do you mean?” demanded Norris, stopping short.
“Haven’t even read the morning paper? Good land, that’s what it means to be a bridegroom!” Barry went on with a chuckle. “Couldn’t stop looking at her face behind the coffee-pot!”
Norris restrained an impulse to throttle him and allowed Barry to proceed.
“Why, yes, we passed the old thing. I always said we would. Your friend Percival voted with the combine. He’s the real stuff. When he saw how truth and justice lay, he buckled down and did the square thing. Have a cigar? No? Oh yes, it’s straight goods I’m givin’ you. You needn’t look so queer. And say, on the quiet, I’m rather stuck on you reform fellers. All they need is argument. So when you get ’em, you get ’em cheap. Say, it’s better than cash, any day.”
Norris ran up the steps and snatched a morning’s paper. Yes, it was true. Percival had voted against his friends and had given the victory to the other side. Ellery flung into his office and whirled into his day’s work in a kind of daze. There was much to do and no time for outside thought, but when the afternoon was over, instead of rushing back to the little home, as he had expected, Norris hurried into his coat and hastened to find Dick. Mr. Percival was at home; and, without waiting to be announced, Ellery sprang up the stairs to the little sanctum where the two had confabbed on many a day. He plunged in on Dick, pale and unresponsive, and blurted out his question.
“Yes,” said Dick, “I voted for it. I became convinced that it was the best thing the city could do. I’ve been telling the boys so for the past two weeks. I really didn’t understand the matter before. Don’t get so excited, Norris.”
He spoke quietly, but without meeting his friend’s eyes, and Ellery’s heart sank.
“I don’t know what it means, Dick,” he said bitterly, “but it seems to me that, like Lucifer, you’ve been falling from dawn to dewy eve, and now you are likely to consort with the devils in the pit. Are you the old Dick who used to be my idol?”
“Oh, bosh!” said Dick. “You are making mountains out of mole hills. The franchise is all right.”
“It’s not all right; and you’re not all right,” cried Norris, in a frantic grasping after the truth of the matter. “The old relationships are slipping away and something that was as dear to me as myself is going with them.”
He turned away and Dick suddenly rose.
“Ellery,” he cried hoarsely, and Norris turned to see anguish in Dick’s face and outstretched hand, “I—I—can’t explain to you,” cried Percival; “but, Ellery—” he moved forward, “don’t cut the bonds of old friendship, for God’s sake! I need you now, as I never did before. If you desert me, I shall lose my grip.”
Norris stepped back, and the two took each other’s hands and looked steadfastly, eye into eye. And Norris saw something that took on him the hold that death has on us, and made him ready to forgive. Death is the big problem of every mind. We may perhaps master and solve the question when the death is of the body, but when the soul dies out, the problem is too great.
Ellery sank into a chair with weariness.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
Then Dick stiffened again.
“There isn’t anything to tell.”
“See here,” said Norris. “This isn’t only a question of the lighting franchise. The city may walk in darkness and be damned for all I care; but I can’t bear that you should walk in darkness. Do you realize what it means? You have fought your first public battle on a basis of truth. You make your first public appearance in league with evil. You are killing the hope of your public career before it is fairly in bud.”
“I know it,” said Dick.
“Percival, you’ve stirred this city into consciousness. It’s been wonderful how you have done it so swiftly, for it is your doing. The decent elements are marching forward into control and it belongs to you to march at their head. The thing has got to go on. If you don’t lead it, some one else will.”
“And you are going to give up?” Ellery urged, incredulous.
“I haven’t decided. Perhaps I have done with politics.”
“And if you abandon your public career, what are you going to do?”
“What do other failures do?”
“Oh, stuff!” exclaimed Norris, and began to pace the room. “Then you did not vote for the franchise because you believed in it. Somebody has a pull on you. I’d never have believed that any man in this wide world would get a pull on Dick Percival.”
“Well, somebody has,” said Dick shortly. “I wouldn’t say so much as that to any mortal but yourself. Now spare me, Ellery, and don’t carry it any further. Do you think,” he went on bitterly, “that I have not gone over the whole ground and told myself the old truths that never mean anything to you until life rams them home on your consciousness? A man may creep out from under the machinery of state law, and escape from the punishment he deserves; but from the laws under which we really live, there is no escape. It is reap what you sow; hate and you shall be hated; sin and suffer. And it isn’t as though one went out to sow. One sows perforce, every minute, whether he will or not. In some instances the reaping is singularly little fun, Ellery.”
“Well, whatever hold this mysterious some one has on you, be a man. Stand up and own yourself and let the consequences go hang.”
“I know some men could. You could. That’s the advantage of having taken a good many hard blows. You learn to stand up against them,” Dick answered slowly. “You know other people’s opinion has always been a god to me. I haven’t the strength to defy it now.”
There was a short silence, then Dick laid his arms across his friend’s shoulders, quite in the old friendly way.
“Now may we drop that subject and be good pals again?”
“Not yet,” Ellery said sharply. “We won’t drop it till I’ve had one more say. Dick, don’t be knocked out by a single blow. You! Why, I thought you had a grip like a bulldog. I can’t believe even in this ugly mess. Still less will I believe that you haven’t the courage—that you aren’t man enough to own your defeat, and then go on as though you hadn’t been beaten.”
Dick poked at the andirons with his toe. Suddenly he looked up with a flash of his old brilliance and buoyancy.
“Suppose I do!” he exclaimed. “What a fellow you are, Ellery, to stick to me this way! But don’t underestimate my difficulty. I’m not an absolute coward, but I’ve been beaten not only once, but on both flanks and in the middle. Everything in life seemed to be giving me a kick. I was at the bottom when you came in, but if you believe in me, perhaps I’ll begin to believe in myself again. You’ve always been telling me how much I did for you. You’ve done more for me to-night than I ever dreamed of doing for you.”
Ellery’s face cleared. They stood with clasped hands, and there seemed no need of further explanations or assurances. Norris drew a long breath of relief.
“So we are friends still?” asked Dick.
“Till the Judgment Day and beyond.”
“Now good-by,” said Dick, as though anxious to get rid of him, “till to-morrow.”
“Till to-morrow.”
A moment later a radiant vision stood in the doorway making a pouting face.
“Dick,” said Lena.
Dick started and stiffened himself as though to give battle, his hands rested on the chair-back in front of him, but an instant’s survey of his wife’s rose-leaf face, her well-groomed masses of hair, her dainty evening gown, seemed to inspire another attitude. He threw his arms passionately around her.
“Oh, Lena,” he cried, “love me! You must love me—you have cost me so dear!”
“Nonsense!” Lena gave him a sharp push and spoke resentfully. “I’m not half so extravagant as most of the women we know.”
Dick drew away and became rigid again.
“Extravagant!” he exclaimed as though to himself. “You have cost me my self-respect, a big part of my future and the cream of my best friendship. What higher price could a man pay for the thing he loves?”
“I do think, Dick,” said Lena severely, “that you can talk the silliest nonsense of any person I ever heard. What on earth is the meaning of all this? No—no—” as she saw that he was getting ready to reply. “I have not time to hear. I thought that tiresome Mr. Norris would never go. What can you see in him?—Have you forgotten that we are going to the Country Club for dinner? It’s long past time for you to dress.”
“Imagine it! I had forgotten that dinner!” Dick answered bitterly. For a moment he turned away as though, he would not see her while he readjusted something in himself. He felt like a different man and looked to her indefinably strange when he faced her again quietly. To himself he was saying, “What would Ellery do?” and on his answer to his own question he was readjusting his whole life.
“We will not go out this evening, Lena,” he said. “We’ve come to a crisis in our affairs more important than a club dinner.”
“What, have you been losing money?” cried Lena, startled and resentful.
Dick looked at her with a very unpleasant smile.
“No,” he answered. “I wonder what you would say if I told you that I was ruined?”
Lena gasped with horror. For the moment she could not speak. A gulf of poverty—no one knew better than she what that meant—yawned before her. A blind fury against Dick, if he should have plunged her into this, possessed her; and Dick watched her and read her as he had never done before.
“Will you sit down?” he asked courteously. “I want to talk with you—just by our two selves. I haven’t lost any money, Lena. Let me relieve your mind of its worst apprehension.” Her face smoothed, but she seated herself quietly, puzzled and foreboding. Dick was so singularly inaccessible.
“I’ve lost no money,” he repeated, “but I’ve come desperately near ruin for all that. Lena, a moment ago I made a real appeal to your love. You answered me by a shrug and a push for fear that I might muss that very pretty and exceedingly becoming gown. It was a kind of illustration of all our married life.”
Lena still stared at him dumbly, vague with uncomprehending fear. This didn’t seem like the easy-going husband she knew. She wished he would look at her.
“When we were married,” he went on, “I had a dream that a man’s wife stood for his ideals, that he might mold his life by her purity and nobleness and love. I’ve always been saying, in effect, ‘Lead on, Mrs. Percival and I will follow where you lead!’ You’ve led me into the depths, Lena, and I’m never going to say that to you any more. You and I have got to remold our relations and start again.”
“What has happened?” Lena asked faintly, and feeling very helpless. She seemed suddenly to realize how very big Dick’s body was, and how little chance she stood against it. If he was inaccessible in spirit she had no hold over him. She wished he would get angry. That would be something concrete. She would know how to meet it.
“What has happened?” she repeated.
“Only this,” Dick said. “I am going to refuse to delude myself any longer; and it is fair to you as it is to me that you should know it. I am going to stop telling myself that you are my ideal woman, when you have shown me, for instance, your unwillingness to make such tender self-sacrifice as a mother must give to a child—that you are true and honest when you are guilty of an underhand thrust like that little squib about Madeline—that—”
“Ah,” shrieked Lena, leaping to her feet with the light beginning to come into her eyes. “So that’s what’s the matter! That girl—”
“No,” said Dick evenly, “that is not what cuts most. What hurts through and through, Lena, is the knowledge that you don’t even love me enough, in spite of all my wasted passion, to keep from intriguing with another man behind my back for the sake of a few bits of red glass.”
“How—did Mr. Early—?” Lena began, but he interrupted her again.
“Did it seem such a simple thing to keep me perpetually blinded? Last night, Lena, I paid your debt to Mr. Early. I sold my vote in the council, along with my self-respect and my honor in the sight of others to get back this shred of paper. Once I might have thought you sinned ignorantly, but I know you better now. Here is that priceless scrap.” He drew it from his pocket and threw it into her lap. “Now I’ve swept away all the mists! There can’t be any sweet illusions between you and me, Lena.” He drew a sharp breath.
Lena’s heart was beating very fast and her eyes were down. She saw shrewdly that there was no need of argument on any of these topics. The less she said about them the better for her. And Dick, with his hands in his pockets, was watching her from the other side of the room. She twisted the piece of paper in her hands. She had always a bald way of telling herself the truth. Now she would face Dick in the same spirit. After all, she was his wife. He couldn’t get away from that.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose you don’t love me any more?” Her voice was like her mother’s, acid and selfish.
“Do you love me?” asked Dick.
“No!” said Lena. She saw him writhe and felt glad that she had the power to hurt him, but he answered very gently.
“Then I still have the advantage of you, Lena. I love you, not in the old way I once dreamed of loving—but still I love you. All this that I’ve said to-night was not spoken in the heat of anger. I’ve known these facts for a long time, and you have never felt any change in my manner; but gradually I have come to see that there could never be any genuine relations between us—you and me—so long as you thought me just a silly dupe for you to get everything you could from, to be played on as you pleased. We must begin again, a new way. You don’t love me, you say. I do love you, sweetheart, not for what I thought you were, but for what you are, because you are my wife, because you need my tenderness and help. But I’m not going to let you lead any longer. We can’t even walk side by side as some husbands and wives do.” Dick seemed to hear the voices of Ellery and Madeline by their own fireside, and he went on hurriedly. “You needn’t look at me that way, Lena, as if you were afraid of me. I shall want you to be comfortable and happy. I shall try to give you the things you want—things—things—things! But I have some purposes in life, and they, not you, are to be my master-spirits.”
Dick turned away and stared out of the winter window, stirred by his own words into a strange new understanding of himself—a mere fatuous self-believer, a man who trusted to fate not fight, to fortune not to mastery, who had not made his standards, but let them make themselves. And now it was come to this, that a half-hour in a room with a foolish girl was the turning-point in his life.
He seemed strange to himself, as though he were examining a life from the outside rather than from the inside, and fumbling at its real meaning.
He had done no wrong; but what does the march of events care whether the failure be intentional or careless? Results follow just the same.
There flashed before his inward eye the face of his long-dead father, white and set with some inward pain of which he did not speak. Dick remembered that as a boy that had seemed to him a pitiful thing. Now he saw it somewhat as the believers once saw the face of the martyr, the visible manifestation of triumph—the success of being true to yourself in spite of all the world.
Dick drew a long breath and dropped his boyhood without even a regret. He knew he could accept conditions and limitations and not kick against the pricks, but quietly, as one who is capable of being superior to them. The bitterness, the depression of an hour, two hours, ago faded into trifles, and the thing nearest to his consciousness was that dead father who had had his wound and lived his life in spite of it; nearer, infinitely nearer, than the living wife whom a slight noise brought to his remembrance. He had forgotten her. She belonged now to the elements outside his dearest life.
He turned toward Lena, waiting, silent, uncomprehending,—poor little Lena, a woman who could never be anything more. He felt a wave of strange new pity for her, unlike the pity he had once experienced for her poverty of body, a sorrow, this, for what she was in herself, his wife—poor, poor little child!
Lena sat still, picking at the bit of paper, but she looked up now, moved in spite of herself by the exultant ring in Dick’s voice, as he strode over to her and held out both his hands.
“And so we begin again—honestly, this time. Perhaps some day you’ll come to accept my standards inwardly as well as outwardly. Perhaps you’ll even come to love me, some day, little wife.”
Lena took his hands submissively. Her small tyranny, her stock of little ambitions had slipped from her and she shivered as though she was stripped and cold; but behind there was a kind of delight in this new Dick, with authoritative eyes into which she stared, wondering still, with trepidation, what he was going to make of her life.
Norris, as he left Percival’s house, had a glimpse of Lena coming down the hall, wonderful in her shimmering evening gown, brave in jewels. She dazzled him, though he despised his eyes for admiring her and told himself that she was tinsel.
He bowed in response to her curt nod, well aware that she thought him too unimportant to merit her courtesy, while she resented her husband’s inexplicable regard for him. He went out into a cold winter drizzle and turned his face toward home and Madeline, those new and thrilling possessions. For the moment, however, there was no exhilaration in his heart, rather a depressed questioning whether, after all, everything beautiful was a sham. Was the daily grind a mechanical millwheel? Dick and Dick’s marriage, were they but samples of the way life deals with hope? A pang stabbed through him as his own marriage rose and stood beside Dick’s in his mind. It meant so much to him; yet only a few months before his friend had been bubbling with an exultation more open-voiced than his own.
There are not only great Sloughs of Despond waiting here and there for the pilgrim, but there are in almost every day little gutters of despond that must be jumped if one does not wish cold and soiled feet; so here his healthy mind cried out against morbid thoughts and he reviled himself for companioning the thing he held sacred with the thing he had always felt foredoomed to failure. He told himself that middle-age was not a dead level of hopes grown gray and withered, but rather a heightening of the contrasts between success and failure. A word of Mr. Elton’s spoken long ago, flashed back to him: “Don’t build your attics before you’ve finished your cellars.” That, after all, was a test. If one could but get a good solid foundation under hope, one might trust it to lift its pinnacle as far toward Heaven as the ethereal upper air. Alas for Dick!
Then, though he still loved his one-time hero, Ellery put Dick from his mind. His feet quickened and his heart began to beat joyously again. He ran up his steps, delighting in the commonplace performance of putting a latch-key into a lock. The cold and drizzle were shut outside, and Madeline waited in the warmth and light of the hall to insist on helping him off with his overcoat, a task so absurdly difficult that when it was finished they laughed and kissed each other in mutual delight at their own foolishness.
Then Madeline took his hand and drew him into the living-room, where the light was low and shaded, but blazing logs painted even far-shadowed corners with warmth, and pranked the girl’s white dress into glowing pink, while the fire hummed and crackled its own triumph:
“I consumed the deep green forest with all its songs,
And all the songs of the forest now sing aloud in me.”
Ellery stood with his arm around his wife’s waist and looked about with a quizzical expression that made her ask,
“What are you thinking?”
“I was remembering.”
“And pray what business have you, sir, to live in anything but the present?”
“Perhaps I get more from to-day because I don’t forget yesterday. When I first came to St. Etienne, sweetheart, Dick took me to his home. You know, with your mere mind, but you can not appreciate, how unrelated my life had been. You can’t imagine how hungrily I looked at that restful room and at Dick’s mother. I felt as though I would give anything—my soul—to have a home. And now, behold, I have one.”
“And you had to pledge your soul to me to get it.”
“True. I paid dearly,” he said. “But I was wondering how it was that you had managed to put so much atmosphere into so untried a place. It looks to me as impossible as a miracle. Here are some new walls, and new furniture and new curtains and new vases and new pictures. Even the books are mostly new. I always resented new books. They are like green fruit. A book isn’t ripe until it begins to be frayed around the edges. It would seem to me a hopeless job to make a home out of all this raw material. Yet this room already reminds me of Mrs. Percival’s library, Madeline, and it isn’t only because it is a long room with a big fireplace.”
“I think it is a good beginning,” she answered. “Now all we have to do is to live in it.”
“You talk as though ‘living’ were a very easy matter,” he remonstrated. “I think it must be the hardest thing in the world, judging by the failures. I know heaps of people who are drifting, or grubbing, or wallowing, or stumbling, or racing, but only a handful that are living. The thought of it made me blue all the way home.”
“Dick?” Madeline asked with ready intuition.
“Yes, Dick. He voted with the combine and against the reform element in last night’s council meeting; and he did it on some one’s compulsion. I can’t tell you how it has stirred and disheartened me.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“That he could not explain.”
“Then,” said his wife decisively, “it is some of Lena’s doings. About anything else—anything—he would have told you, Ellery.”
“Very likely, though it is hard to see how Mrs. Percival could be mixed up in affairs like this.”
Madeline was moving about restlessly.
“Ellery,” she said at last, “I feel as though you and I had to be a sort of pair of god-parents to Dick. He is so dear, so lovable, so fine—and so unable to go alone. You, particularly, dearest, are the stanchest thing he has. I know just how he feels about you, for I feel so, too. You are going to push behind him and understand him and back up all his resolves, aren’t you, even if he does half disappoint you? You aren’t going to let anything alienate you or come between your friendship and his, are you? I know you love him, and I’m sure he needs you.”
Ellery smiled down at her questioning eyes and the intoxicating appeal of her confidence in him—Madeline’s!
“I rather think I am Dick’s friend for all I’m worth,” he said slowly, at last. “Even if I were tempted to disloyalty, I should be ashamed to harbor it with your faithfulness standing before me. And I believe this very afternoon was a kind of crisis with him—that he was gathering himself together when I came away.”
“And by your help, I dare say,” added his wife.
“I hope so. I know but one thing that seems to me more worth while than the purpose of helping Dick Percival to be what it is in him to be.”
“And what is that other better thing?”
“You arrant fraud! Do you need to ask?” he said, laughing.
“Well, comfort yourself. You are to go on fulfilling your two purposes in life—you and I together.”
“I pray we may. I believe we shall,” answered her husband earnestly.
“I know we shall, doubting Thomas. I’m one of the women who are strong in unreasoning faith.”
They stood silently smiling at each other for a moment.
“Shall we celebrate the beginning of home with pomp and music?” she asked. “There’s a little time before dinner. Make yourself comfortable. Push Mrs. Percival up to the fire.”
“Mrs. Percival!” Ellery exclaimed, dropping his guilty arm and looking about in a startled manner.
“Oh, I forgot you didn’t know. I’ve been all over the house this afternoon, christening our things with the names of the people that gave them to us. Doesn’t it make all the wedding presents seem very friendly and not at all new? Wouldn’t you know, even if you hadn’t been told, that this particular chair was Mother Percival—it’s so graceful and comforting. Dump yourself into it, Ellery.”
She pushed him down laughing.
“Ah, I begin to see that you stole your atmosphere. The things aren’t so new after all. They’re old acquaintances.”
“Of course they are. Isn’t it jolly to have ‘your loving friends’ tucked around in spirit in every nook and corner of the house, without the nuisance of having the good people here in the body to disturb our privacy?”
“I see,” he meditated, then went on ungratefully: “After all, I think I’m more taken with the privacy than with the spiritual presences, though they can hardly be considered skeletons at the feast.”
“I should think not,” exclaimed Madeline indignantly. “I love them each and all—well, with a few exceptions, Ellery. You needn’t grin sarcastically. Now there’s the piano—such a piano as I have always dreamed of but never hoped to own. If I called it a Steinway Grand, I should know that it was an excellent instrument; but when I call it ‘Vera,’ it warms and delights my heart a thousand times.”
Ellery rose and bowed ceremoniously to the piano.
“Vera, will you and Mrs. Norris favor me with Schubert’s Serenade, while I sit on Mrs. Percival?” he asked. “I am ragingly hungry, but perhaps the Serenade will keep me harmless and quiet for a little.”
He sat and listened and looked into the warm deep heart of the friendly fire. Dreams and hopes came back to him, as things once seen through a glass darkly, but now face to face. Without turning, he was conscious of Madeline, across the room, filling life with music.
When a small maid, as new as the books, appeared to announce dinner, he looked up startled.
“Shall we go?” asked Madeline, rising.
“To our own private particular family communion-table,” he answered, drawing her arm through his.