Perfection City

When Madame saw the white covers of the returning waggons creeping across the prairie she set out to meet Ezra in order to deliver her message to him. Her manner was as quiet and collected as ever, her white smooth brow was perfectly unruffled, and her blue eyes were as gentle in expression as her friends had ever known them to be. Was her heart in reality as calm as her outward appearance would have led the casual observer to conclude? No one ever knew what was passing in Madame’s mind. Still she must have known that she was about to stab to the heart a man upon whose friendship she had seemed to set great value. Having reached the slope over Weddell’s Gully, whence she could see that blackened field where she had saved Ezra on the night of the fire, she sat down and waited until his waggon came up.

“Ah, Madame!” said he cheerily, as he pulled up. “How glad I am to get home again! It has seemed such a long four days to me.”

“And to us also,” answered Madame.

“All well, I hope,” said Ezra reaching down his hand in order to help her up to the seat beside himself.

“We have had misfortunes at Perfection City. The brown mare has been stolen.”

“What! Queen Katharine gone, and our most valuable animal too! That is indeed a loss!”

“Just wait a few minutes,” said she, putting her hand on his to stop him from giving the signal to the horses to start on again. “I have some things to talk about, Ezra. Do you remember that night, not long ago in reality, though it seems an age, when I found you lying here on the edge of the fire?”

“Is it likely I could ever forget that or who it was came to my rescue?” said Ezra warmly.

“I was thinking as you drove up that perhaps it would have been a kinder act to have left you to die in your unconsciousness.”

“What’s the matter?” said Ezra, greatly startled by her words.

“I have bad news,” said Madame.

“Is it Olive?” asked Ezra, hoarsely.

“Yes, it is Olive.”

“Is she ill?”

“Worse than that.”

“My God, is my wife dead?” cried Ezra in a stifled whisper.

“Worse than that.”

“There can’t be worse,” said Ezra.

“Yes, there can. She has left you and gone off with Cotterell.”

Ezra threw up his arms and fell backwards. Madame thought for a moment or two that he was dying, for an awful blue-purple look passed over his face as if his heart had stopped beating. He recovered himself and sat up, turned ghastly white, and moved his lips. He was trying to speak, but no sound came. At length he gasped,

“Olive, Olive, where is she?”

“We don’t know. Cotterell took the brown mare, the men turned out and caught him. Olive disappeared, no one knew where, night before last, taking our last horse. There was a sort of lynch-law trial at Union Mills, she appeared in the middle of the proceedings and said she gave him the horse, and then they went off together and have not since been heard of.”

“Olive, Olive, Olive!” Ezra kept moaning as Madame drove him back to his deserted home. He seemed dazed and stupefied.

Surely terrible news was never more crudely broken to a sufferer than was his bereavement to Ezra Weston, and by that tender and sympathetic friend, Madame Morozoff-Smith. Had Uncle David or Brother Green heard her, they would have been shocked beyond measure at having entrusted the painful embassy to such hands. Not one word of hope or comfort or of doubt even, nothing but the bald hideous story in its worst complexion thrown at him.

Olive was gone from him—gone with Cotterell!

Yet after having thus dealt him a death-blow, Madame seemed full of pity and little acts of personal attention. She helped him out of the waggon, brought him into the house, took his hands and washed them, cooled his forehead with a wet towel, offered him food, and in short treated him much as if he had been a suffering child whom she was tending. At last he seemed to recover himself somewhat as she was passing her soft hand across his brow.

“You are very good to me,” he said brokenly, “and if I seem to accept your kindness unheedingly, forgive me. I am not myself to-night. I don’t know what I am doing. Oh, it can’t be!” he suddenly burst out. “She is not gone. I shall see her again. She will come back. How do you know she has gone with him? I don’t believe it.”

“Poor Ezra, love dies hard, I know. Some of the men asked if she was going with him, and she answered distinctly, ‘Yes.’ Then they were sorry, they said, they had not hung him before she came up with them.”

“No, I won’t believe it. Something has happened to her. Why should she go off with him?” said Ezra distractedly.

“Did you not know that he was repeatedly here to see her, whenever you were out of the way?” said Madame, who did not think she was exaggerating in any way.

“She told me all that,” answered Ezra nervously, “but she was only amused by his talk.”

“No, your love is blind. Dear Ezra, I wish I could soften the blow. There is no doubt about it. I saw them once together at the spring, he kissed her at parting. It was a man and the woman he loved. I cannot be mistaken. Remember he was very handsome and winning in his manners, and she was young and pretty.”

“Ah, my sweet little Ollie! My little rose-bud,” cried Ezra, starting to his feet. “I’ll go to her, she shall not wander away out of my reach without one effort to save her from herself. She was only a child. Why didn’t you look after her?” he asked, suddenly facing Madame with an angry glance.

“Did you give her into my charge either by word or hint?” returned she, somewhat taken aback.

“It was not your fault. Forgive me. I am too distracted to know what I say. I remember she refused to go to you. She said she would rather stay at home. I tried to urge her, but she would not consent to it,” said Ezra in a low voice.

“Ah,” remarked Madame, “very possibly she expected him to come to her during your absence.”

“No, no, you shall not say that!” said Ezra in agony. “I cannot bear it. She had no such thought. She was as innocent as the flowers, as she looked at me with her sweet eyes. She had no such thought, I know.”

“It is ever thus,” said Madame, coming closer to him and speaking with an unwonted tremor in her voice. “Love seems always at cross purposes. You give all your love to Olive, who gives all hers to Cotterell. Another gives all her love to you. We are equally unhappy.”

Ezra gazed at her in silent amazement as if he were doubting that he had understood her.

“Yes,” she went on more calmly in her deep sweet voice. “I am more in need of pity than you. Your love has left you, and you grieve, but men will give you sympathy. When I lost my love I had to smile and pretend delight. I had to look on his joy and hers. You are not called upon to congratulate Cotterell on his happiness.”

“Great God, is that you, Madame? Or is it that I am going mad, and is this some mocking fiend?” gasped Ezra, starting up.

“Not a mocking fiend, Ezra, but I myself who for once in this world am enjoying the rare privilege of telling the truth. Ezra Weston, you are not the most unhappy person in Perfection City. I have long enjoyed that melancholy pre-eminence. Now in a common misfortune let us comfort one another.”

Ezra sat down again and dropped his head in his hands. Occasionally he looked at her as she moved about the room putting everything in order. It almost seemed as if he was trying to understand who she was and that he could hardly do so, his mind was in such a turmoil of grief and misery. She laid out two more candles beside those already alight in the candle-sticks.

“You will sit up all night,” she said at last. “These candles will last half the time, then light the other two. It is hard sitting in the dark alone with one’s breaking thoughts. Light the candles and keep them burning. That is what I did on the night you left to go to Smyrna to be married, and on the night when you brought her home here to Perfection City.”

She closed the door and left him alone with those two thoughts. Was it her marvellous reading of the human heart which prompted this extraordinary woman to declare her love to Ezra in those bold uncompromising words on this night of all others in his life? She knew that he would sit there in his deserted home, brooding over his lost wife, she knew also that every now and then the scorching recollection of what she had said would break in upon the brooding thoughts and scatter them. This then was the means, the almost unheard-of means, she had taken in order to soften the blow that had fallen upon him. He would not be able to think of himself as the most unhappy individual in Perfection City, because she had claimed that distinction in words which he never could forget. It was just as she had foreseen. It repeatedly happened during the course of that long and dreadful night that Ezra forgot why he was sitting alone in the kitchen, so lost was he in amazement at the recollection of the words which Madame had spoken. As the hours wore on it seemed to him that they became more and more impossible, until he began to think of them as the work of a brain unhinged by sorrow. Was it all a hideous dream, and would he awake by and bye? The first pair of candles burned out, and he lighted the second pair, recalling as he did so what she had said she did when he brought Olive home. Ah, Olive, Olive! His heart kept calling out in its misery.

He went into their little private room off the kitchen, in a sort of infatuation to see if she might be there. No. All was silent, still, deserted. He examined the tiny room minutely, saw the half-withered flowers on the table, took them up, and would have kissed them in his misery, only his eye lighted on a strange object he had never seen before. It was a man’s heavy seal-ring. He picked it up and examined it by the light of the candle: a plain gold ring set with a well-cut onyx intaglio of a griffin’s head. As he turned it about the light showed something-engraved in the inside of the ring. He held the candle nearer and read “J. G. C.”

He dropped the ring as if it had been an adder, and fled out of the room. As if pursued by furies, he rushed from the house and wandered about out of doors. Diana, who since Olive’s departure had been in a most miserable frame of mind, followed him about dejectedly, with her tail between her legs. Ezra, turning, saw the dog and for one moment felt a savage desire to kill it, for Olive had loved the dog and Olive had broken his heart. This phase passed, and in a passion of grief and despair he stooped and kissed the animal, for Olive had often patted Diana’s head, and fondled her long ears. The dog whined in sympathy and turned suggestively back to the house. Ezra followed mechanically. He would not go into the room where that ring lay, but remained in the kitchen. Exhausted nature could stand no more, and towards morning he fell into a troubled sleep, with his head resting upon his arms crossed on the table. Then in his dreams Olive came back to him in that vivid yet unsatisfying way in which our dearest do sometimes return to us, seemingly but to mock our grief. Olive was there, standing before him, but she looked at him not with her eyes, but with Madame’s. There was something terrible in seeing her own expression gone and in its place the look of another, and yet it was Olive, and she called on him to follow her. He hurried after her with the lead-clogged feet that always walk in dreams, and strained to reach her. When he did so, he found Madame. Olive and Madame flitted before his fevered fancy, always shifting and changing one into another, until he panted with the horror of it.

He awoke with a start as the door opened. His half-aroused eyes saw a vaguely defined figure in the door-way, blocking out the light of the morning.

“Olive,” he said, putting out his hand blindly.

“I have come to cook your breakfast,” said Madame’s soft smooth voice.

“Don’t. I can’t eat it,” said Ezra, falling back into despair.

“Life must go on, even when all joy is banished from it,” she said. “We have each one of us to learn that lesson, friend Ezra.”

She began deftly enough to light the fire and make the necessary preparations for breakfast. Madame knew how to do the ordinary house-work that falls to woman’s lot, only she did not choose to do it in her own home. Therefore she employed Lucinda for this purpose, until other and stronger motives arose which prompted her to undertake the work herself. The habit of every day life is strong, and when Ezra saw Madame getting breakfast ready, as a matter of course he arose and got himself ready, by changing his clothes and generally performing the necessary preliminaries to the morning meal. He was less wild and hollow-eyed after this ceremony, but the extraordinary drawn and aged look on his face seemed only the more marked.

Madame cooked an omelette with scraps of savoury dried beef in it, and after the first mouthful Ezra was obliged to admit that he relished the food. He could not go on living on his grief, as Madame said. She sat with him and took her breakfast also. Napoleon Pompey, who would have been in the way, was relegated to the society of his mother, who divided her emotions between maternal anger at boyish shortcomings and maternal love for the short-comer, both of which were expressed with the exalted vehemence customary to the negro nature.

“I shall come each day and cook your food for you. I have often longed to be able to do something for you, Ezra. Do not forbid my coming. I have had so little joy in my life,” said Madame, with a strange humility of manner totally at variance with her usual character, which was almost domineering, one might say. Ezra looked at her in a troubled sort of way. It soothed him to have her there, and he was glad that somebody, that anybody, could take an interest in him. Still there came across his mind flashes of doubt as to what this interest meant. He could not forget those words that Madame had used on the evening before. No man who had ever heard such words from a woman’s lips, if ever man did hear them under similar circumstances, would ever again be able to drive them from his memory, but in his bruised and suffering state Ezra was content to drift on and let things rest. So Madame came daily to his house and cooked his food and saw that he ate something at each meal.

Uncle David and the brethren came to see him, but that gave him no comfort. He shrank from their sympathy, expressed with kindness, but each word was like a drop of molten lead upon a raw wound. Willette was perhaps the only one who gave him real consolation in this awful time.

“I say,” remarked the child, in a clear voice and without a trace of embarrassment, “Sister Ollie’s gone an’ lost herself down there in the bush, I reckon. She was ’bout the greenest hand at keepin’ to the Pole Star ever I see. You could throw her out o’ her direction quicker nor nothin’. I guess she headed plumb for the Missouri border when she come ’long with Cotterell to show him out o’ Union Mills. Guess she’ll ride ’bout down to Saint Jo ’fore she knows she’s headin’ wrong. I wouldn’t ’spect her back ’fore a fortnight.” Willette laughed pleasantly, and poor Ezra derived some comfort from the preposterous convictions of the child and her unshakable belief in Olive.

He went to Union Mills to make some inquiries about his lost wife, and met there the same story that Madame had already told, but the story was so brutally hurled at him he could not bear it, and came home bruised and stricken, his heart bleeding tears of agony. Instinctively he went to Madame for comfort.

“Ezra, perhaps this terrible trial was needed to purify us all, to make us all more perfect communists. I can discern a valuable lesson that may be of profit to the brethren. I begin to think that after all marriage is selfish: perfect love alone is unselfish. You would not have kept Olive beside you by force, if her heart had gone from you, would you?”

“I thought our marriage was for life.”

“Yes, but she made a mistake as to her feelings; she found she loved someone else better. It was wise of her, after all, to break the bond. It would only have galled you both.”

“I should have been content if she had only let me love her,” said Ezra.

“Ah yes, I know that feeling but too well,” said Madame, bringing his mind with a shock to the thought that she never long allowed to sleep.

“It is a terrible world,” said Ezra beginning to realize what a spell she was weaving around him.

“It rests with ourselves to make it easier in the only way,” replied Madame.

Uncle David took up a firm position of his own and refused to listen to anybody or anything.

“I hain’t agoin’ to b’lieve nothin’ ’gin little Ollie,” he announced. “I don’t care ’bout proofs an’ things. Land! If I b’lieved in proofs there hain’t no sort o’ foolishness I shouldn’t be up to. I b’lieve in pussons.”

That was his position, and he stuck to it with unswerving fidelity. He was happy in his blind faith, and no one tried to shake it. The old man then began a strange sort of hunt after Olive. He would sit all day long at the forge, where, of course, strangers were most likely to pass, and to each he would put questions about the “little gal” he was so pathetically seeking. He spoke little, he who used to be so chatty, but sat hour after hour in silent patient expectation of the return of his loved one. The brethren began to think he must be losing his wits from sorrow, poor old man!