I.
ÆNEAS AND CAMILLA.
Poor Austin! A boy’s love feeds on the romance of hopelessness, flourishes apace in the shadow of despair; it delights in patient waiting, in faithful fidelity, in lapses of years; but a man’s is peremptory, immediate, uncompromising. Some secret instinct bids a Romeo to contemplate a tragedy with cheerfulness; and ten to one that his years of gloom change, as they fall behind him, to “un joli souvenir.” But a man, middle-aged, knows when he wants his Dulcinea, and he wants her here and now. No glamour of blighted affections can make up for the hard facts of life to him.
When a middle-aged man can’t get the woman he wants, there are three recognized and respectable courses open to him. He works a little harder, plays a good deal harder, or he marries someone else. The last was out of the question for a man so consumed by the fires of passion as Austin May, but the fuel of his heart was transformed into nervous energy of the entire system. He plunged again, like a rocket, into a rapid and circuitous course of travel and adventure; and, after a brilliant career through the remote East, descended, like a burned-out stick, some fifteen months later, in San Francisco. Thence he went home.
The fact was, he wanted rest. His heart was tired of throbbing, his head weary with thinking. And all his mad adventure had only tired the body, had made him sleep at night, nothing more. He had been through the world again, but Gladys Dehon was all of it to him. He thought of her now with a certain dull pain—less madly, more hopelessly, than in England the two years before.
He could not bear to go back to his home. He went to Boston, and he saw his lawyers; but he did not go out to Brookline. This he vowed he would not do until that day when he had promised Gladys he would be there. He did not forget that he had promised the countess, too; but he was no longer so much troubled by the countess. He would kill her, if necessary.
Meantime, he went to pass the winter in New York. He had himself elected a member of two fashionable clubs. He followed the hounds in Long Island and in Jersey. He went to dinners and he danced at Germans, albeit with an aching heart. He renaturalized himself; he made friends with his countrymen, and he studied his countrywomen. He got himself once more désorienté in American society. He observed what respect was everywhere shown to the VanDees, and how little, comparatively, one thought of the McDums. He found that civilization was pitched on a higher scale, financially, than he had supposed. Thirty thousand a year was none too much for a man to marry on. Now, Austin had not over twenty thousand, even if he fulfilled the hard conditions of his uncle’s will.
He took an interest in yachting, and gave orders for a cutter that was to beat the prevailing style of sloop. He also imported a horse or two, and entered one of them at Sheepshead Bay. He had a luxuriously furnished flat, near Madison Square. He went to St. Augustine in the spring, with the VanDees, and while there was introduced to Georgiana Rutherford. He saw her afterward in New York, and early in June he asked her to marry him.
Miss Rutherford was a young lady of supreme social position, great wealth, and beauty. She had for two years been the leading newspaper belle of New York society. Her movements, her looks, her dresses, the state of her health, the probable state of her affections—everything about her, to the very dimples in her white shoulders—had been chronicled with crude precision in the various metropolitan journals having pretensions to haut ton (for high tone is not a good translation), and had thence been eagerly copied throughout the provincial weeklies of the land. Miss Rutherford was absolutely a person to be desired.
It would not be fair to May to say that he was false to Gladys Dehon. His passion for her, too vehement, had fairly burned itself out. In the two years since he had left her, May’s heart had, as it were, banked its volcanic fires. However fissured were its ravined depths, the surface was at rest, and the lava-flood that concealed it was already cool. And a beautiful huntswoman who had ridden out of sight of her first husband, as had Gladys Dehon, was not at all the sort of person for middle-aged Austin May to marry and bring to Boston. These things he felt for some weeks before he proposed to Miss Rutherford, and she was precisely the sort of girl he saw was best. If old Uncle Austin had selected her himself, he could not have made a better choice. And well, thought May, he saw the motives of his kind old uncle’s will, and the wisdom born of much experience, and long consideration and a knowledge of Eclipse claret that had prompted it. A young man, if left to himself, would choose him a different wife for each three years of his life. It is only after he has run the gamut of all impossibilities that he settles down upon the proper thing. And this, at last, May felt assured that he had done.
May did not pretend to himself that he loved Georgiana Rutherford as he had loved Gladys Dehon. Even now, he was not blind to that. But he thought that she was pretty, and well-placed, and good style; and she had a large fortune, and a still larger family connection, all of the very best securities.
In fact, May, at least so far as he admitted to himself, did not do justice to the qualities of Miss Rutherford. Miss Rutherford was a very charming girl; much cleverer and much better educated, to say nothing of her style and beauty, than any embryo Gladys Dehon that May had ever seen. She was perfectly mistress of her own heart, as she was of her own fortune, and it was dangerous to present to her foreigners, lest they afterward shot themselves. They always went wild about her; much to Miss Rutherford’s discomfort. Some would besiege her; others would curse her; others, still, say evil things about her in the true Parisian manner. Miss Rutherford remained “more than usual calm” through it all.
She had the reputation of being a flirt, but it was not so. She tried her adorers, Portia-like, successively; the moment that they failed to reach a certain standard, it was entirely right and fair for her to drop them. Some of them would cry that they were hurt, and these she contemned from her very soul. She did not regard such matters as subjects for tears. Marriage was a step in life, like any other, and only deserved more serious consideration because it was final.
This was the woman whose love was to make heart-haven for Austin May; the serious, sober choice of his manhood, after all his boyish follies were past. He had told her very seriously and politely of his desire to marry her, one Sunday evening, on the piazza of a house at Newport. It was necessary for him to speak in a low tone, as the people of the house were not far off. She was silent for some seconds, and then he had kissed her.
But here came in the first really difficult thing to do in the whole proceeding. Not, indeed, the kissing her. But how was he to tell her of the countess and Gladys Dehon? And yet he must tell her, if only to explain the necessary delay in announcing their engagement. He looked at her in the light that came from the late sunset; how perfectly of the great world she was! He could not bear to lose her now; she was just such a wife as he would invent for himself, had she not existed. She was sitting silently, in a pose that was full of grace and training; much too finely bred to be blushing because he had kissed her. No man had ever kissed her before; and yet, when she deemed that the occasion had come when she could fitly let one do it, she no more blushed because she had so resolved than she would blush at entering a ball-room.
Then he pulled himself together, and told her very calmly the history of his life. She was greatly interested, and listened with attention and sympathy.
“Of course, you must be there—on August 14th, I mean.”
“And keep my word?”
“That,” said Miss Rutherford, “I must leave to you. You can’t keep your word with both of them.”
“After all,” said May, hopefully, “they may not come.”
“You surely do not expect them to cross the Atlantic in person to meet you?”
“Oh, no!” said May. “They won’t do that—but they may write or telegraph.” But May did not feel sure what Mme. Polacca de Valska might or might not do.
“At all events,” said she, “I think our engagement had better not come out until after the 14th of August.” And May felt constrained to admit that this was best.
“And I do not think that you had better see me until then.”
“What?” cried Austin.
But Miss Rutherford was firm. She would not have him with her every day unless she could tell people that they were engaged. What was she to say to the world if, after that 14th of August, he were to be engaged to Mrs. Dehon, for instance? This she delicately hinted; but, moreover, she told him she had promised to visit the Larneds, at Pomfret, and the Charles Mt. Vernons, at Beverly, and to spend three weeks with the Breezes, at Mount Desert, in August. He could not trail about after her; and it was only three months, after all. So May had consented, with an ill grace; and when she left, two days later, he found nothing better than to join VanKnyper on a yachting cruise. Then he had gone up on the Restigouche, salmon-fishing; and on the 12th of August he was in the Maine woods.