"They tried all sorts of ways, and tried and tried, but it never was any use, and they gave up and died."
"Did it seem so clear? He's beginning again."
It was a kind of nocturne or slumber song, a rocking movement with a flute tone moving through a dimmer mist of harmonies, soothing here and there a restless chord. "Has He not made the night for your slumber, and darkened the earth for your sleep, and lit the earth softly with stars, and moved it among them as a child's cradle is rocked? Wake, then, if you may not sleep, but only to watch the moon rising and hear the croon of the sea. Murmur and motion, motion and murmur; but remember wonder, remember beauty, and let not anything persuade you from them. A moon and a sea be in your heart, a hush of an inner place. Ora pro nobis, and for the growth of flowers on ancient graves. Requiescant in pace, souls stately and dead. If the truth is a dream, then the dream is true, and therefore He made the night for your slumber, and darkened and lit the earth and moved it softly among stars, and gave to the moon its rising and to the sea its motion and murmur."
They went out by the swing-door together, passed from the shadow of the apse to the level yard, and stopped.
"I think your name is Helen Bourn," said the other. "Mine is Rachel Mavering. You will come to see me often. We are so near."
One warm, rainy evening in the year '44, and in the great city that is flanked on either side by a river and a strait, Father Andrew plodded along an avenue of small shops, whose windows rested their chins on the wet sidewalk and blinked through steaming panes. His dingy umbrella dripped in the rain, and the skirts of his robe flapped against his white stockings. He had in his mind no more than presently the opening of the door in the brick wall of a cloister court, the sleepy roll of the vesper service, refection, complines, a little private, companionable prayer, such as ever seems to be heard kindly if one is trustful, and then the sleep which comes to tired saint and sinner alike with singular tolerance. Alas! one's fat legs became tired enough with climbing stairways, and the soul sore with its strained sympathies.
A lean, wet-haired boy, plodding past him, glanced up with large, drowsy-lidded eyes, and slid under his broad umbrella, making no comment. Father Andrew chuckled and sighed. Giving and taking were a simple incident, if giving were merely to carry an umbrella for two, taking merely to step under it, and charity were not charity but companionship.
"Where are you going?"
"I guess I'll go with you," after hesitating.
"But where did you come from?"
"Lappo's."
"And where's Lappo?"
"I don' know. He's dead."
Father Andrew chuckled and sighed again. Very likely he could not have decided himself, from any earthly information, where Lappo was. "Was it Lappo the fruit-seller? Yes, yes. And what is your name?"
"Gard Windham."
"Good—Well, well! A—mm—And Lappo wasn't your father? Who was?"
"I don' know."
"Anybody know?"
"I guess they don't."
"Well, what—that is, dear me! You don't say so! I mean, where'd he get you?"
"Got me to the Foundlings. Lappo"—speaking in the way of quiet conversation—"Lappo had fits."
"Yes, yes. Ga—"
"Gard Windham."
Father Andrew fell to patting one fat hand on the back of the other, which gripped the umbrella. It was his habit to pat one hand softly over the other whenever he was giving himself advice, or found himself driven to some conclusion which could not be soothed or softened by any more logical method. "Yes, yes. Dear me!" A life probably of unsanctioned origin. It was apt to be the reason for the closed door and the lost key.
They came to the door in the brick wall, and went from the street that murmured sadly with the rain, into the little paved court that murmured sadly with the rain.
Then Father Andrew sat down before the Father Superior, whose black eyes glowed and dreamed, and felt himself like a small particle of dust, happy in its humility.
"It is as you say," said the Superior. "A door is closed behind it. Consecration is sometimes the more complete."
Father Andrew murmured that it was, and thought of the refectory and a salad he knew of with peppers in it. He was used to thinking of salads when he should not be thinking of them. He was sorry for it, and knew that he had no claim to anything but humility.
"The face promises and threatens," mused the Superior. "How often is it that the highest that is spiritual is based on the strongest that is worldly."
The Superior was a man of symbols and analogies, swarthy of skin and large of frame, one whose conceptions came red from their furnace. Father Andrew's mind was nestled the rather in a certain padded placidity. Moreover, there was the salad, with its peppers. No doubt, if the Superior saw promises of a more than common consecration, and threatenings of peculiar importance in this young person without origin, it was a thing to be expected of the Superior's holy and profound discernment. The Superior's spiritual enterprise was ever extraordinary. He was of such as had from the beginning fought in the vanguard of the Church, and been her glory and adornment. For himself, Father Andrew discerned little further than to feel that his duty of distributing the brotherhood's charities would be easier if every one had the young person's native assurance. He felt that Providence, clearly with a purpose, had bestowed upon himself such limited insight wherewith to be content. It enabled him at least to admire the Superior without limit. He went his way to the salad and the peppers, and Gard remained in the house of the Brotherhood of Consolation.
It was a Catholic order, somewhat quiet in its ways. Not many of the brothers were like the Superior, whose faith was a yearning in the blood as fiery as young love, and for whom night-long struggles of prayer appeared to be a normal way of living. For the most part they seemed to be elderly men, keeping the rule without any apparent effort, but rather as something it would be an effort to vary from. Probably they were happier than most, in the shuffle of fate, manage to be. It would be difficult to show they were not. The monastery bell clinked at small intervals of the day and night, and slippered feet were ever going whispering down the corridors on the heels of the sliding moment, to place some office of performance or prayer accurately in its little division of time. And this method and regulation of hours, so old, so grown from measureless experience and minute knowledge of humanity, seemed to be a kind of setting or framework to keep in place, till their times came, the souls for whom atonement was accomplished; or for the others, to keep the saving of their souls in orderly process of accomplishment. The faces of all except the Superior looked something alike. They broke easily into smiles, but laughter seldom went beyond a happy chuckle.
The window of Gard's little cell looked over the court against the face of a dead wall that ended a block of uniform houses. The cloister covered two of the remaining sides, a brick wall ten feet high the fourth, and a thick wooden door led through this into the street. The court was asphalted, except for a strip under the dead wall, where one Brother Francis planted things hopefully every spring, and found entertainment all summer in the ill-advised efforts they made to grow.
It was Francis who taught Gard his Latin accidents, and later the writings of those dignified heathen, Cæsar and Tullius Cicero; later still his Greek, in which language appeared the writings of one Herodotus, and of others called "Fathers of the Church," of whom he might disbelieve Herodotus if he chose—an unnecessary distinction; he believed them all fervently. One of his vivid memories was the delivering before brothers Francis and Andrew, with violence and tears, the oration, "Tandem aliquando, Quirites," with indignation because both chuckled without intermission, and would not see the importance of condemning Catiline. Francis had general charge of the monastery school, which was filled and emptied daily through a special door on the avenue. But the scholars seldom went further than reading and writing, sums and fractions, and the lives of those saints who had had the more interesting adventures; so that, under the Superior's permission, to lead Gard into these high places of learning was a pleasure to which Francis surrendered himself, he feared, with sinful abandonment.
Music, Gard studied with one Brother Johannes, who played the little organ in the whitewashed chapel, all white except by the altar, where there was a distinction of gilded woodwork, silver candlesticks, and purple cloths, and so cold in winter that one's fingers were numb on the keys. He was an old, bowed-over man, Johannes, with frail, waxen hands, absent-minded, apt to forget his rule and be late, and not understand why the Superior persisted in modifying his discipline. He feared the Superior estimated his sins too lightly, and died in the year '52, when Gard was seventeen. Gard had to play the organ at offices after that, and to go daily three blocks up the avenue to the church of the Sacred Trinity, and take his lesson from Fritz Moselle, a mighty German from Strassburg, near the Rhine. He learned many things besides harmony and counterpoint of Fritz, who was a cosmopolitan, and believed not in the faith of man or woman; but he believed that art was the one country of the soul, and that in conduct it was the duty of every one to "do as he verdammt please."
"Look you, kleiner! In de mass—yes. Some monk he haf art in him—Gott, yes! He found a place for his soul to live in. He know diese vorldt was a circus, und he vas a lil' boy und can't go. He mus' stay to home. Ach! he feel sad. Und by-and-by he compose music to a circus in hefen, vich vas de mass you play yesterday. Aber you mus' play de Bach fugue severe. Maybe you make a good monk, but you haf too much luxury in your bones to play de Bach fugue, hein? No? Play den, p'tit anchorite, und let each of your fingers be von of de Ten Commandments, or Gott! you don' play him not any." The organ at Trinity was quite another matter than the little one which wheezed plaintively in the brotherhood's whitewashed chapel.
Once a week he had to go to the Superior and be examined, and probably read a chapter of St. Augustine. It was a ceremony of indefinite length, for the Superior sometimes fell into a monologue, fervid as St. Augustine's, while walking to and fro; and Gard used to imagine the room full of spirits and misty angels, listening—all of them—breathless, astonished, and a little frightened; for there could not be any one who was not afraid of the Superior, unless it were the bonus Deus, and even He must be astonished. At length the great, swarthy man would lay his hand on Gard's head—a large hand, lean and strong, and vibrating with the throb and blast of the furnace that was in him.
"Oh, Infinite and Tender, if it is needed for the saving of this young soul, send him sorrow and pain, and let his grief be deep." And Gard would come away tingling like the bells of Trinity, which had a chime of twenty, and it made the bell-tower rock to play them hard. He never after lost the impression that those interviews, of all kinds of human experience, probably most resembled death and resurrection, and things likely to happen at the gate of the celestial city. He grew to something over a medium, slim height at this time, had drowsy eyelids, and wakeful gray eyes under them. He laughed with a bass voice, liked brothers Francis and Andrews, and Fritz Moselle, and worshipped the Superior, but preferred to dodge him. The preference was probably a sin, one which Brother Francis claimed to have prayed for in himself some twenty years without effecting. He discovered that the Superior, Francis, and Fritz Moselle had each severally a distinct point of view, and that you could tell beforehand in what direction their interpretations of anything would point. He found that he liked the organ in Trinity better than Cicero, and watching the throng of men and women, with bright colors in their hats, as he went to and from the brotherhood and Trinity, if not better, at least differently, than either. And in the year '55 he discovered that he was expected presently to take the vows, and awoke to the further fact that the idea filled him with melancholy. It resembled to him a sandy desert, with not an oasis in sight, not a palm-tree against the sky.
The children who followed the piper of Hamelin, the mariners of Odysseus who cocked their ears to the sirens, and other harkers to such instrumental enchantment, have reported experiences that are much alike. They heard, it seems, a high, thin fluting, ineffably sweet, which seemed to imply that just beyond those blue hills, or those white breakers, or a few turns of the next street, there lay an extraordinary region overrun with smiling probabilities; for there, whatever one dreamed of most was more than likely to be found, whether it was sugar-plums, or a girl in the brake with sunny hair, or a sword and shield, and a banner to follow withal.
But when Gard told Father Andrew that he would not take the vows, Father Andrew acted as if it were a new thing, and lifted his fat hands helplessly.
"Good—A—Dear me! That is, I mean why not?"
Then he patted Gard's hand with his soft palm, and chuckled and sighed.
"But it's true," Gard said. "I'll tell you why."
"The blessed—I mean, don't! Tell the Superior." And he scuttled away in alarm, murmuring, "I wish that boy didn't surprise me so."
It had not occurred to Gard, but evidently he must tell the Superior; and how could the Superior be made to understand about the high fluting, and that it said "Follow, follow," so that one needs must go; and all about the sugar-plums and the girl in the brake, and the banner and sword and shield? And, if not, what was there to tell the Superior, more than to make a bare statement of his rooted ingratitude, his incorrigibly evil nature, and his resolve to go? Probably there was not another such case in the history of orders, and he would be excommunicated. He knew the Superior had meant him to be peculiarly consecrated, and, because he had no origin back of the Foundlings' Hospital, had thought him a soul only the better fitted to be seized and sent heavenward powerfully. What right had he to interfere with the Superior's great purpose? Nevertheless, he set his mouth and knocked on the familiar door.
The Superior was pacing the room, as his habit was. It was a long, gray-walled room, containing a few chairs, a picture of the Annunciation, a writing-table with a crucifix over it, a bookcase with, by Gard's frequent counting, one hundred and twelve books, leaving out the controversial pamphlets. It was flooded with light from three large windows. The floor was uncarpeted.
Gard entered on the subject promptly.
"I've found I can't take the vows, father. I'm afraid you'll never forgive me."
The Superior stopped short; a spasm of pain crossed his face. Gard thought, "Now it's coming."
"Do I seem to you unforgiving?" he said, sadly. "Do you know, that sin of mine was pointed out to me thirty years ago, when I was your age. I imagined it was conquered. I'm afraid I have not watched for it of late years."
Gard was dumb with surprise. The Superior resumed his pacing.
"I have been hoping that you would come to me in this way of your own will. You will think it best, then, to leave the brotherhood—at least for a time? Have you any plans?"
"I would play in some church, father. There is Fritz Moselle."
"Moselle? Yes, your teacher. A curious instance. I remember him. Made up of a thousand fragments, shivered pieces of glass, from what have been faiths and systems of philosophy, and have had, perhaps, in their time a certain fragile beauty. He probably uses such terms as 'art' and 'cosmopolitanism' in connection with it. A curious, modern type. You will learn by observing such." There was a pause. Gard began to collect himself.
"When I said for a time," went on the Superior. "I meant that my hopes and your issues are in His hands, where they belong. You will write to me if you are in need."
He stood still a moment.
"There is one result of experience for one soul and another for another. 'As often as I have gone forth among men I have returned home less a man,' saith St. Thomas à Kempis; but the spirit of our time does not speak in this way. I suppose"—smiling—"it is only the young men who really hear what the spirit of the time says."
He put his hands on Gard's bowed head, and there was a long silence. Then Gard stammered something, and presently—somehow—got away and stood in the corridor alone. His eyes were full of blinding tears, and yet there was a sense of wild relief. The interview was over, and he had never seen the Superior so mild, so politely talkative.
The parting with the rest of the brotherhood was more of an ordeal. Brothers Andrew and Francis kissed his cheek and turned away. It seemed to him they looked suddenly old, and gray, and broken.
The cold, white corridor was full of ghosts of his own past hours and days staring reproachfully. He passed out through the cloister court, carrying his little bundle under his arm. The asphalt was wet with the mist. Francis's flower-bed had only a few crooked, brown, uncannily-shaped stalks, like dry mummies' hands thrust through the mould and clutching blindly. He opened the door in the brick wall of the court. The hinge was worn and the gate had been sagging lately. It grated as he closed it behind him.
It was yet early in the afternoon. There was a hint of the sun overhead, a semi-luminous space in the thin mist, though the pavements were still wet. The two opposite currents of flowing humanity on the avenue mingled and jostled and dodged, with haste and with leisure, with good-humor and petulance.
The avenue as far as Trinity, and Gard in his black robe, knew each other very well. The policeman had nodded to him kindly for years, and of late had taken to touching his helmet. The avenue did not appear to see anything peculiar about him now, but it came to him with a shock, so that he knew of a certainty that the relations between them were quite changed. The policeman touched his helmet, the man at the newspaper booth his hat, but that was a mistake. Properly, he ought to stop and tell them it was a mistake, that he had put off consecration, declined reverence, and cast his lot with them and the avenue's democracy.
The sexton of Trinity was sweeping the steps. He took off his cap when Gard stopped to ask him where Moselle lived. "Two streets up, riverence," he said, "an' turn to your left; number sixty-siven, on'y it's rubbed out, riverence. Is it a bit o' music you're carryin', sor?"
Gard found where sixty-seven was rubbed out on a street door, and under direction climbed three narrow flights, to a narrow, top-story hall, with a skylight overhead and several doors, one with the grimy card of Fritz Moselle tacked upon it. He knocked. "Herein! Come! Veil, du lieber Himmel! It's de lil' anchorite!"
The room which Moselle came storming across seemed to have been originally three rooms, but the partitions had been mainly cut away. There were two pianos, and two grates for coal fires. Floor and chairs and tables were a welter of sheet-music, beer-bottles, steins, books, flower-pots, cats, pipes, newspapers, and rumpled rugs. Moselle came through it like a loose meteor, bent on breaking chaos into smaller fragments; hair brushed back and yellowish, dingy with age, eyebrows and mustache that swelled and dropped like cataracts, weight to threaten floors, huge, fat fist, and porcelain pipe in mouth. He hugged Gard to his mighty belly, muttered and puffed hoarsely, and pulled him across the room to where a man in black had risen from his chair, who had a long jaw and aggressive chin, shaven bluish, a slouched hat on his head, a frock-coat, and was tall, gaunt and bony. He held out his hand.
"I'm glad to know you, Mr. Windham," he said, in a deep, drawling voice, with a certain winningness of smile.
"'Tis Shack Mavering. He knows about you, kleiner," cried Moselle, boisterous, explanatory. "'Tis a friend of Mephisto, der Faust-devil, und of me. Ha! Sit down. Vat iss dat?" pointing to Gard's bundle.
Gard dropped his bundle beside his chair. At the brotherhood was orderly calm, thoughtful silence, cool, clear walls, and whispering sound of slippered feet. Moselle at organ lessons in Trinity had never seemed so loose and free, broad, joyous, unlimited. Somehow Gard felt as if vacant spaces about his soul were growing warm and inhabited. He laughed, and knew no reason for it.
"I've left the brotherhood. I'm going to be—"
"Gott! Vat you going to be?"
Gard laughed again.
"I thought you might know, and if you did you'd be sure to tell me."
"So!" Moselle's face, when it dropped vivacity and took on gravity, fell into rugged, powerful lines. "Got no money?"
"No."
"Nor clothes of a human too much, nor plans, nor friends but old Fritz, nor knowledge of perversity? Good! All good! You will stay mit old Fritz some veek or more, und I vill get you a church-organ to play somevere. Good! Hein? Shplendid! Shack!"—gesticulating over Gard—"look you at his head, his eyelid, his shape of der hair-line. Vat? It is super-sensuous Florentine, und de back of his head is Yankee, und so hard you not break him mit an axe. I say in all human variety is law, und device, und chain of causes, und you are mitout science to know not music itself haf more severe und mathematic system. Dat boy is at de end of his shtring of causes—at de end of his shtring. Ha!"
"End of his rope is the idiom," said Mavering, in solemn bass. "It means he's down on his uppers. You'd better attend to me and learn pure English. Your English is composite, mistaken, and slangy, and you are, in body and mind, an epitome of gross fatness, whom no science of human variety could classify."
The depth and solemnity of his voice, the funereal gravity of his long face, seemed burlesquely classical. His speech was flowing, and composed of structural sentences. Moselle waved his pipe joyously.
"Continuez, Shack! Heet her up! Advance! Boy, I gif you a lil' pipe and a lil' beer, but not much, um so you be not sick. My friend Shack is eloquent und foolish. Und ve tree vill talk now till to-morrow is gray."
The talk ran on. Already Gard seemed to himself not merely an hour, but days, weeks—a period which the clock could not understand or measure—away from the brotherhood. The country of ideas into which he had come was a loose republic, where no man knew the limits of his personality or his daring. He might loosen his belt and shout, if he chose. Here conversation was erratic and glancing, not necessarily an exchange of what one really thought; and yet, however obliquely from his meaning one spoke, there seemed to be less misunderstanding than among the brothers, with whom the guiding of the tongue to simple truth was a matter of searching conscience. And again, at times, both Moselle and Mavering would say things that seemed to Gard to meet the fact or question before them with a sharper recognition, a more instant candor. He admired and laughed in pure joy of the brave, new world that had such creatures in it, with unstraightened ideas that were free to dance in the sunbeam or dig in the mine, and forget whether they had or had not any connection with the soul's salvation. It was a kind of renaissance for him, a discovery of humanism and the pagan pleasure of mere living with vivacity of body and mind. Here on the threshold of his new life were two to greet him who were witty, kind, ironical, experienced, and seemed to be without care or fear. If, as Moselle had implied, there were something hard and critical in the back of his head, some reserve of judgment, something not plastic and receptive, but resistent and decisive, it did not trouble him now with criticisms or decisions, but let him bask and admire.
"Dey want an organist in Hamilton. It is Saint Mary's, a church Protestant Episcopal, called High Church, videlicet, protesting mit apologies, und cultured to beat de band, vich is an idiom obscure, my friend Shack. Vat band?"
"Brass band."
"Ach so! Vell, vat did I mean?"
"Your German mind was headed right, but went astray on a by-path of idiom. Saint Mary's culture is not in competition with a brass band in blue uniform, but aims at the highest orchestral and surpliced effects."
"Vell, a choir committee wrote me, anyhow, und I loss de letter. Helas! I loss everyt'ing—my reputation, my bes' friends! I put 'em somevere und forget 'em. Vat did I do mit my letter?"
"I suppose it's in your pocket."
"Gott! So it is! Vell, dey vant an organist, und Saint Mary's—"
"Has a three-banked organ, and Hamilton is a sleepy place, good for your neophyte to sit down in and learn the alphabet of humanity. I know Saint Mary's."
"Ach! Plazes! So you do!" Moselle stopped short and looked at Mavering under overhanging, yellowish eyebrows. "Am I intruding—roping in your domestic circle, Shack?"
"I think likely. It's no circle. It's an incommensurable ratio. You know that."
"I know no more than you like, Shack," said Moselle, gently. "You haf no objections?"
"None at all."
"Vell," said Moselle, after a pause, "so it is."
"Mr. Windham," said Mavering, flowingly, "nature cast me for the part of the villain. She gave me the countenance of one reflecting darkness, a voice unfit for lighter remarks than 'I will be revenged!'—made me a lean and hungry Cassius, and bid me assassinate and betray. The inspired text has it that 'All the world's a stage.' It follows that every man is cast for a rôle, and if he tries to introduce anything not in character he appears to make a mess of it, the management docks his salary, and the public blights his career. I once tried to play a hero and a lover, and invited the conjunction of happy stars. It was no good. The notion of it, as you see, is causing this German monster to make a braying ass of himself."
"Ho! Ho!" Moselle chuckled, and puffed. "Der kleiner don' know your stage und your Shakespeare. He shtare like a house afire."
"Oh, that's it."
"Vat is dat, Shack, a house afire? An idiom extravagant, confusing."
"It means he stares with breathless expectancy, with bewilderment and fear. I don't recommend the figure to your use. The conception of red conflagration and fire-bells is a Shakespearean flight, and you can't handle combination figures. You stick to a simple retail line of business for cash or you'll bust. You can't take risks and thirty days' credit for a meaning. The English language has no confidence in you. You aren't sound for the market. Mr. Windham, you will probably meet in Hamilton a Mrs. Mavering, who lives close by Saint Mary's, and who will say nothing whatever of me. If I were you I would cultivate her acquaintance, but imitate that particular reserve."
"Vell," said Moselle, gently, "das iss good, but don't fill de kleiner mit bevilderment. He don' understand, und he take indigestion. Go buy de grocery und de beer, Shack, und ve make a dinner here, und to-morrow de kleiner shall haf human clothes, und go to the theatre und see friend Shack arrested for his vickedness in de fif' act."
After a while the dusk began falling. When Mavering came back with bundles and a basket containing a hot shoulder of meat from the baker's, the long room was lit glimmeringly by a lamp or two. And Moselle declared finally, and referred especially to the beer and seasoned cheese, that he was in favor of the animal half of man.
"He develope his soul too fast. Let him vait, let him vait. For his
shtomach und feet haf stood by him, his friends from old, so old, und maybe his soul don' do so. She act frisky, hein?"
Mavering said, "I'm something of a conservative myself. Man ate before he prayed and loved the way he ate, but we live in a radical age."
Then Moselle played dream music, with fluffy, floating things in it, on one of the pianos, as though he never ate anything heavier than lettuce, and was, in the verity of music, a fair maiden who walked in a green-and-white garden and was pure and slim as the lilies; a woodthrush in the distance sang a love song that was like a hymn, but never came into the garden, and finally each lily became the spirit of a lily, the woodthrush the memory of a song, and garden, maiden and all went up a silver moonbeam to the moon.
Moselle played on through the evening, and towards twelve Mavering rose and left. Half an hour later Moselle swung around on his piano-stool.
"Shack gone? Kleiner, kleiner! your eyes are full mit damp shleep;" and he looked at Gard with his own eyes, grave and old and calm. "I denke you are more lofable als lofing, kleiner, an' for an artist de first's nodding, de last is all. 'Geliebt und gelebet.' Aber one must lieben in order to leben. 'Geliebt und gelebet.' Ach! I haf so."
Gard slept in a room at the end of the hall, woke in the dawn, and lay waiting for the bell before matins. Then he remembered, and laughed aloud. But a throng of memories rose reproachfully. The chapel organ would be played badly now; Francis would drone all day in the schoolroom, but there would be no one for him to talk with about Cicero's beautiful adjectives; Brother Andrew would pat himself on the back of the hand, look wistfully down the corridor, trot away to the refectory, and find the salad uninteresting.
So Gard became organist at Saint Mary's in Hamilton, in the fall of '55, and in time a noted young person. In the immediate years that followed, the old life came to seem hardly more than a vivid dream, or a story told him by another man who had never left the brothers, but was still playing for offices and hurrying along white corridors. He had time on his hands, and read eagerly, and his rooms grew littered like Fritz Moselle's. He hardly knew what he was himself, except a kind of highway, along which the thoughts of other men, and emotions that he might claim his own since they came from nowhere in particular, travelled hastily. It was something additional to that sense common to humanity of existence as a hurried journey from the unknown to the unknown, his ignorance of his antecedents back of the Foundlings' Hospital. Yet he seemed to feel no curiosity about them. They had no claim upon him, those antecedents, and he had none to them that he cared to put forward. The past might bury its wrecks if it could. His name might be a clue, or it might be the effort of an inventive or reminiscent nurse. He never inquired and never knew, then or thereafter, but was content to have and possess it, as something that had floated ashore with him and served well the purposes of a name. After all, the mortal millions have their severance from each other ruled with not so great a difference in point of isolation, and with the same "salt, estranging sea." Each is for himself the centre of things; the currents of the deep swing round him; he is alone with his main issues.
Gard saw a place and repute slowly forming for him, and had almost come to see himself a citizen of Hamilton, the straight road of a quiet life stretching before him under a cool gray sky. Moselle, whom he went down into the greater city to see now and then, doubted that outcome.
One night in January he came down Charles Street towards the church. He had fallen into the habit of playing an hour or two in the latter part of the evening, and people in the neighborhood had accepted the custom. Some formed habits of their own to meet it, and went to their windows regularly about nine to hark whether he played that night. It was not an agreement, but the silent adaptation in close communities of habit to habit.
The snow was falling, blown by a keen wind, and the great side window of Mrs. Mavering's house glowed warmly through the sharp, slanting lines of the snow. It occurred to him that he would rather talk to Mrs. Mavering that night than summon only spectral visitations from Saint Mary's organ. At that moment Helen clung with warm fingers to Mrs. Mavering's hand, saying, "I shall call you Lady Rachel, because you're beautiful."
Helen put her forehead against the cold window.
"It's snowing. Do you think he'll play to-night? But he would if he knew we wanted to hear him, wouldn't he?"
"If he knew that we knew he knew it, he probably would."
The fire glowed and snapped, and reflected its varying mood on the andirons and the red-and-white tiles of the fireplace. Mrs. Mavering, garmented in black and dusky red, lay back in a deep chair, and the firelight played across her face and dress in a more subdued manner than on the tiles and andirons, as if it felt that was not the right place to be familiar and reckless.
"Why?"
"Men take great pains to be nice to us if they see their sacrifice is in the way to be appreciated. They would rather have the sacrifice appreciated than the service. Oh, it isn't like that, dear eyes!—not nearly so solemn!" Helen had come and curled herself at Mrs. Mavering's feet to consider this proposition. "If you always look at me so you'll frighten me out of all my little cynicisms, and I think them pretty."
Mrs. Mavering reminded one of something costly, like a vase upon which some master-workman had spent himself, careless of time, considering only line and curve, and how it might be made to glow from within and be more than worthy of the palace of the king; and as if afterwards, when the palace had been sacked, and fallen with ruin and wailing, and the vase had somehow escaped destruction, it had come to stand in the guarded corner of a museum. In this meaning Thaddeus had spoken of her as something to be seen rather than some one to know. Thaddeus's social instinct was quick, and sometimes accurate. He need not have been so mistaken, understood as implying the general facts of a period in Mrs. Mavering's life.
Helen demanded personality even of things. She inveterately accused persons of being persons, and brought them to her judgment bar to account for themselves. Thaddeus thought Mrs. Mavering should be looked at for art's sake, for the improvement of the tone of society; that an official sign, so to speak, was somewhere at hand, warning that no one was permitted to touch her humanly.
Helen had not seen the sign. They had met first in the dark and had been introduced by a sigh, and she had never been aware of the barrier with which Mrs. Mavering was observed to be surrounded. Only Mrs. Mavering was given to riddling. She acknowledged herself a person to Helen, stormed by her headlong admiration, but she never accounted for herself at the bar, or, as Helen stated it. "Whenever you say something, and I ask what you mean, you always act as if you didn't like what you meant, but you never say what it was." So far as our sayings come out of ourselves and ourselves out of our experience, if part of the experience were such that we wished to fly from that part of ourselves and could only flutter the more about it, supposing this to be Mrs. Mavering's case, her impulse to dodge Helen's bar of equity might be understood—and the fact, too, that she found herself ever provoking an arraignment. Helen had to dismiss case after case for lack of evidence, and because the defendant wanted to play something else. So that she only wondered now what Mrs. Mavering meant by "Men would rather have the sacrifice appreciated than the service," and whether one would naturally become difficult by being ten years older.
"I shall call you Lady Rachel, because you're beautiful," she said, and the organist of Saint Mary's stood outside the while and thought he would rather talk to Mrs. Mavering than call spectres from the peaks of his gilded organ-pipes that blown, desolate night.
Of course, one could not become beautiful like Mrs. Mavering—not in a hundred years. One's nose would not become straight, one's hair black and heapy, nor eyes change from gray to amber and brown; and in order to become as difficult it would be necessary to be married and have one's husband become unapparent without becoming dead. Mrs. Mavering was an arduous ideal. Helen doubted that she would ever achieve it.
"Then I must call you Sir Helen, because you're such a valiant knight, and always charging something, and driving a spear into the middle of an idea, as if it were a dragon. But my ideas are not honest, so they have no middles, and it only makes them look mussy."
"Then," said Helen, quickly, "if I'm a knight I choose to be in love with you. You're locked in a tower and I'm after an ogre, only I don't make out very well what he's doing. Of course, he growls and rages."
"I dare say he does."
"Well, then, Saint Denis Montjoie! It is a beautiful fight."
Gard was announced and presently came in. Mrs. Mavering said:
"Can you play a game? You haven't met Miss Bourn? She is pursuing an ogre around a tower. I am locked in the tower. She doesn't care whether I like being rescued or not. She isn't sure yet about the ogre, but thinks she needs one."
"I am a humble person; so is an ogre, isn't he?" said Gard. "Maybe I'd do. An ogre ought not to be proud."
"But he always is," said Helen, eagerly. "He keeps a tower to be proud in."
"Where is my tower, then?"
Helen hesitated. She had never seen him near before. He looked a little singular, not quite like other people, a little weary and very white-faced, a little impenetrable. She remembered all he had said to her through Saint Mary's organ, things sensitive and intimate.
The process of putting together two groups of impressions to make one personality is difficult, and one ought to have time. But he insisted on knowing where the tower was. "I don't know how to be an ogre without it," so that she said, hastily, "You must have one in the organ-loft," and was not at all sure that it meant anything, if it were not an entire mistake, and was glad when they sat down without calling for more explanations. She slid down to her old place by Mrs. Mavering and half listened to them, and half studied a problem, to see what was honestly true about it, or whether it had any middle.
When Helen was little, she used to compose parables and sermons, and sometimes wept to think how beautiful they were, and declaimed them to her mother, who had only one comment to make. It was, "Why, Helen!" Such was the parable of the Perfect Cat, who lived a life of absolute sinlessness. There was a sermon on David and Absalom—"Oh, Absalom, my son!" It was tearful at that point. But the moral was that Absalom was hung by his hair—a sorrowful incident. People should not make their children have long hair. "And I have asked you three times to-day, 'Mother, please, may I cut it off?' and you just said, 'Why, Helen!' and I'm not going to ask again. I'm going to put you in the closing prayer." So that now she put her conclusion into a sermon, to the effect that every one had a tower in which part of himself or herself was a proud ogre, and another part was a valiant knight who ought to eventually thrust a lance into the middle of the ogre to make him humble and social, or else dead, so that both together might become a perfect character before the benediction. Because a proper sermon was like a story, inasmuch as in the first part you made things look as badly as possible and talked about wickedness, so that everybody might become interested; and in the last part you talked about goodness and made goodness succeed after difficulty, so that everybody might become calm; and in the benediction you told everybody to be happy ever after.
"Do you read Emerson," Gard was saying to Mrs. Mavering—"the Massachusetts lecturer? He says, 'The Eden of God is bare and grand'; but I don't see anything more than a personal fancy in that. Anyway, the poets would be wrong in putting music in such an Eden. An organ is full of sin and sorrow. The pipes always seem to me to hold so many human emotions compressed and stowed away, like the genius in Solomon's bottle. Say one of them is a pure aspiration and one of them a snarling desire. You set the snarling desire chasing the pure aspiration, and you have one of the simple formulæ for expressing humanity. It isn't Eden."
"Oh, that's like my knight and ogre!" cried Helen. "Do you do sermons and parables? But you have the wrong one running away."
Gard looked surprised, and then laughed. "It was all going on round and round a tower, wasn't it? And if the tower were small you couldn't tell which was running away."
"But they would know!" said Helen, triumphantly.
"But they might differ, or they might forget, on account of going so fast. Then they'd have to stop and ask the lady in the tower to straighten them out."
Helen looked puzzled, felt that the parable was too mixed to mean anything now, and suspected Gard of mixing it frivolously.
"The lady in the tower is too dizzy, you both run about so fast," said Mrs. Mavering. "But she thinks Helen would never run away."
"There's no chance for me to be proud in this tower," said Gard, and Helen murmured:
"It's all mixed up."
"Music, after all," said Gard, breaking a few moments' silence, "leaves you unsatisfied at your strongest. It is misty emotion. It has wings, but no feet. You seem to want something that has more grip and bite."
"That is heresy from you," said Mrs. Mavering.
"I've made a creed of heresy, you know. That Massachusetts lecturer preaches the creed, 'Every man his own issue, for conformity is death.' But I don't know whether he has said that conformity to the forms you have made yourself is as much death as conformity to those made by other men. I call myself a musician, and something keeps asking me, 'Is that all?' It seems to think it time I called myself something else."
"Then why not call yourself a still better musician?"
"Of course, one needn't stand still altogether. You become more skilful with your fingers and feet, and learn better how to render and interpret the emotions, musical ideas, more or less eccentric crotchets, of other men, the best of them dead. Their emotions are not so important, are they? Haven't we eyes of our own to see that grass is green? Oh yes, we compose. Have you seen my new book? It consists of a prelude, that is very bad, and highly praised by competent critics in journals; an offertory, in which Charity appears as despondent of the results of the collection—I'm conceited about that piece—and a symphony in five movements, which is a padded invalid. Room enough for improvement, you see. I might learn to symbolize a mood more accurately. It wouldn't make the mood any less futile. The point is really that it doesn't get you out of a rut, if you make the rut even a very good rut of its kind. The more you dig at it the deeper it grows. There is too much that you never see and never know. You take the shape of your mould. Do you know Dr. Holmes' 'Chambered Nautilus'? The nautilus made a larger shell for himself every time he changed, but the poet didn't comment on his making each shell of the same shape as the last. He was a stale conformer after all, that nautilus."
"Do you think he would have done better if he had tried to make a shell for himself like an oyster's or a crab's?"
"He wouldn't have done better in the matter of shells. But personally he would have gone up the scale of intelligence."
"He would have been very uncomfortable."
"Oh, it wasn't claimed that conformity was not comfortable. It was only said to be death."
"Didn't the nautilus have a very beautiful shell?" Mrs. Mavering spoke in a low voice. "If you ask me, I don't think human life is better than music. I think music is the better of the two." Gard seemed mutely to understand her, and was silent a moment as if to let the shadow pass, then said:
"Music is a little like the nautilus-shell, isn't it?—the venturous bark that flings its purple wings in gulfs enchanted, and all that. But isn't 'all that' rather a foolish thing to do forever? Purple wings in enchanted gulfs—it's a narrow experience when you come to think of it."
Gard rose to go, but stood a moment looking at the two, as if he wanted to fix the picture of them and carry it away; of the woman with heavy hair, in a black-and-red dress, who gave the impression of wearing jewelry and really wore none, and the girl in white with a blue band at her throat, slim hands that somehow looked so strong, and gray eyes that demanded candor and offered imaginations. The firelight played over them as if it were trying to illustrate the subject, saying, "This is worth while to understand."
"Do you know there's a war coming?" said Gard. "Trumpets and drums are in the air."
After that he went away, and through the blowing storm along Philip's road to his rooms, which looked out on the law school square. The front room was full of the traces and tokens of the six years past, indicating what the mental life then had been, but not very clearly what result had come out of it all. There were books in number and confusion, as if he did not care for them in a bookish way, but only as mines, clefts, or fissures where metals are sometimes to be found—and if found and dug out, the source has no more personal value. There were some lounging-chairs, a desk with a litter of sheet-music and scored manuscript.
Gard's face was whiter and thinner than of old. It was noticeably white, with heavy eyelids, and the peculiar curve of hair-line that Moselle once noticed. One might fancy a trace of the cloister in it, not in anything that could be called clerical, but in something that could be called isolated. If there is manifestation in all faces of the spirit within, it would have seemed to manifest a certain separateness; as if, having learned in the cloister, at the age when one takes fundamental impressions, that a man is nothing else noticeable than a soul alone, with the eternities watching and the one issue of its salvation before it, he had never been rid of that sense of things, but had only altered his conception of the issue, and so the terms of description and the method of pursuit. This sense of things, of life as a kind of personal adventure, a kind of fortune-hunting after an ideal of self-culture, an ambition for a mental career rather than one apparent outwardly to men, may have sprung from far back in his nature and been of precloistral origin, come slowly of late years to a theory. The peculiarity of his coming, as one dropped out of a darker cloud than most men come from into the light of consciousness, may have added to this dim sense of isolation, of adventure, of destiny experimenting more definitely with him, of eternities more watchful. Not that he compared himself in that way with other men. The comparison, if it had occurred to him, would not have seemed interesting, or bearing on the issue. To each belonged his independent adventure; each was at the same time an end to himself and a means to other people.
Such progress and pilgrimage had its own perils, excitements, and new landscapes opening unexpectedly.
The picture that remained in Gard's mind of Mrs. Mavering and Helen seemed to him significant of something—Helen looking up with question and appeal to the older woman, the coloring, the firelight. She had brave eyes, that girl. One ought to see more of women. Mrs. Mavering looked like a kind of imperial exile. He sat down at the piano and touched a key thoughtfully. They signified something, surely, if one could put it into form. He wondered what had become of Mavering. Fritz Moselle was growing apoplectic, and people were talking about war. If old orders were changing, it was probably time they changed.
"In point of fact," said Thaddeus, "I am proposing a partnership, to be entitled 'The Helen Banking and Brokerage Company,' organized to do business for a commission."
"I don't know that I understand," said Mrs. Mavering, slowly.
"We make investments at interest, speculate in futures, examine securities." He paused, seeking precision of phrase. "It is in terms of happiness. One pursues it—happiness. One sees fortunes in it lost and fortunes won. I find I have spent my own capital. I have to be content with a commission."
But then it was not evident that Mrs. Mavering need be in the same case. It would be poor taste to seem to assume it. "In point of fact," she suggested a hoarded wealth, an unknown, mysterious sum in reserve, rather than even poverty in respect to a future. But she might be allowed to express for herself the terms of her profit.
"I think I understand now," she said.
Her veil had little beads of moisture on it from the damp March wind that blew down Shannon Street in their faces. The gutters were slushy running streams, the elms shook their branches restlessly, as if full of the sweet pains of stirring sap and the coming birth of leaves.
"Acting," continued Thaddeus, "in behalf of the Helen estate, which I believe, I trust, will prove large, but is, I think, I fear—"
"You think uncertain?"
"Doubtless uncertain. There are elements of uncertainty. And in this matter I must confess myself only a man, a sad limitation. Mrs. Mavering; somewhat elderly, too; and so, one who feels he must husband his slender resources. I fear I depend very much on that commission. I fear the bankruptcy of that estate would be disastrous for me."
Mrs. Mavering drew her veil closer, and they walked on a few moments in silence. Then she ventured:
"Uncertain, of course; but you spoke of elements."
"I might mention, in regard to the nature of it at present, a certain impetuosity, a determination, a loyalty perhaps a little too inflexible. Flexibility is, so to speak, to have a good portion of one's capital near by for emergencies. I might mention, to speak technically, as a liability, a certain Morgan Map."
"But that," said she, hurriedly—"I mean. I know him only slightly, but Helen said—"
"You would wish me to convince you that he is liability rather than an asset."
"Why not convince her?"
"Ah, but there! Might it not—I have tested, I fear it would, I ask your better intuition—might not the attempt, if made seriously, defeat its end by rousing that loyalty, giving perhaps direction and opportunity to that—that inflexibility?"
"It might."
Thaddeus lifted a neatly gloved hand, and cane swinging between the fingers.
"To be flexible, to adapt oneself. There are so many doors, it is well not to be too absolutely one kind of key. I have heard a phrase, which appears to be a recent discovery—this phrase, 'The survival of the fittest.' It was explained to me, who am not profound, I confess. Dear me, no; nor a reader of new books. But I understood it to mean the survival of that which fits, the introduction of order by the elimination of the disorderly, of the—a—antagonistic, and so the final result of a race and a world to fit each other like hand and glove. A happy consummation."
"But Helen—"
"Exactly. Helen's ancestors—my own, too; how singular! They cultivated a characteristic—a tendency to martyrdom. I believe a certain Bourn was put to death in the sixteenth century for obdurate persistence in a proscribed opinion. Probably later, in New England, some of them were by their neighbors said to be 'sot.' My brother was an obdurately unhappy person."
"But this Morgan Map?"
"An aboriginal, an anachronism. He belongs in the primeval wilderness with other—pardon me—brutes. His father had a singular opinion of him—a—that reminds me; he had a very singular opinion, very singular."
Thaddeus mused a moment.
"Mrs. Mavering, will you dine with us on Wednesday?"
They came to the corner of Charles Street, and parted at Mrs. Mavering's door.
To obtain a small measure of happiness as a commission for managing another person's estate in the same kind of property! She wondered if Thaddeus were not really a wise man, who made a pretext of frivolity. He seemed to have definite theories of things. It might be his rapid and light manner was part of his wisdom and his theory, as if he had found it the part of wisdom not to look gravely and long at any phase of human life. Who knows what might be disclosed, for all depths are black and threatening. One should touch surfaces and slip away before the depths boil up. If Thaddeus had really attained skill and success, it was something to admire. For herself, she seemed to have failed. She had stirred the depths and had not found them on the whole pleasant.
Thaddeus's house was four-square, of a yellowish stucco, with a raised entrance and a windowed cupola. They built so, and so decorated within, when they endeavored to build decoratively, a half century or more ago; they impressed a generation following with a hunted, persistent sense that in some manner a marble mantel, a plaster ornament on the ceiling, an ormolu clock, a flowered carpet, and china figurines with neat stockings, were the types and accepted symbols of earthly splendor. Plush upholstery was a proper thing in Thaddeus's day, and Thaddeus had it. He desired the presence of that which was fit, accepted, not provocative of dispute.
And so his little dinner of five passed fitly. He manipulated Gard to the piano, Helen near by, Morgan in position to observe her, and Mrs. Mavering in position to observe all. He drew his chair near Mrs. Mavering and smiled a wrinkled smile of content. He felt creative with respect to the situation, a strategist who had securely arranged how the enemy should act.
"He will growl," he said to Mrs. Mavering, softly; "the bristles will rise on his spine. My dear Mrs. Mavering, a primary egotist is an impossible person out of the jungle."
Mrs. Mavering thought she could see why Morgan suggested to Thaddeus such terms as "primitive," "aboriginal." There was something rugged and rough-hewn evident in the first place, a massiveness of antediluvian bone, such as they dig from the clay banks of rivers. "We are all egotists," was Thaddeus's theory, "but the primary won't do." He is savage and solitary, too direct, too elemental. He jumps to his aim. He does not care, so he gets it, what happens in between. He does not care for minor points. But civilization is a system of minor points. He has no sympathy, cannot move from his footing an inch to take another point of view. Doubtless he will lie and betray, for they are minor points of method, and faith and truth are social products. At least, he will not notice what he may happen incidentally to step on, or what becomes of an opposition after it is sufficiently smashed. "Why," he asked, primitively, "why should I?"
But Mrs. Mavering thought all this seemed an airy structure, built on a theory which was very likely a prejudice.
Gard was playing something martial, with the shrilling of fifes, the mutter of drums in it, and the measured tramp of feet. He was looking at Helen to see if she knew what he meant, because one liked to look at her, no doubt; it seemed to justify itself; but more particularly because he had fancied of late that her face was a kind of magic mirror, such as enchanters used to raise upon by incantation their pictured prophecies, and that he was become able to summon to it the shadows and counterparts of his moods, and watch the brightening and darkening of himself in reflection.
When he would come from the organ-loft, find her with Mrs. Mavering in the dark under the gallery by the stone pillar, and the three go out across the yard to Mrs. Mavering's house, he always found that Helen's interpretations, however wide they might be from his own in point of verbal symbols and form of allegory, followed the mood with accurate detail. Only the mirror tended to add moral judgments, or to substitute the terms, right and wrong, for beautiful and ugly, for harmony and discord, and in that respect appeared to be inaccurate. Still, it enabled him to realize himself with curious vividness.
Helen's face was flushed. Presently Gard became absorbed and looked at it no longer. He was trying to get not merely the sound of the marching, the ripple of the flags, and the elation of the crowds, but something about devotion and the spirit of the nation shining like the sun on the faces of its soldiers. Mrs. Mavering, too, turned from Helen, and noticed how thickly Morgan's yellow eyebrows were knit above his eyes, which seemed to have a kind of green glare in them. They were fixed on Helen. A sudden memory shot through Mrs. Mavering's mind like a sharp pain—she shivered. Thaddeus noted it.
"Exactly," he murmured to her; "quite so."
Gard found his theme and began weaving it in among the drums and fifes, increasing it until drums, fifes, and flags seemed only like the surface ripple of a deep stream, so grave it was, so large and resolute, so brimmed with its purpose. Helen saw the success and bent forward. Morgan made a slight choking noise in his throat.
"Exactly," murmured Thaddeus; "quite so."
Gard finished abruptly and turned to Helen. "I don't suppose it's half true." He appeared to be continuing the subject, secure of her understanding it up to that point.
"Oh, why not?"
"It doesn't read like it in the newspapers," he said, and rose presently to go. Thaddeus, too, must run down to his club; would Mrs. Mavering forgive him and stay with Helen till he came back? Morgan took his leave with conventional phrases. And the three having each taken himself and his egoism away, Helen and Mrs. Mavering were left with Thaddeus's trim sea-coal fire, marble mantle, china figurines of the neat ankles, gilt chandeliers, and flowered carpet.
Helen took her favorite place at Mrs. Mavering's feet, and said, "Uncle Tad's fires always have company manners."
As for Morgan, Mrs. Mavering thought, he did not like to see that Helen could be moved by powers that he could not himself attain; perhaps neither knew nor cared what those powers were, only knew that he could not attain them. But Thaddeus's airy structure, his theory of the primitive, did not follow necessarily. Yet she felt that a certain atmosphere of animosity surrounded Morgan; he was either aggressively or indifferently hostile; or else it was because one felt his intention to dominate, and indifference whether the dominance were admitted with peace or in process of war.
"Don't you want to confess, Helen?"
"I'm always confessing, Lady Rachel."
"But about Morgan Map?"
"Oh, why, Morgan is—just Morgan, don't you see?"
"That sounds like a whole dictionary, but the words don't seem to be arranged."
"It's arranged by the alphabet," Helen laughed. "It begins with A, when I was born."
"I was wondering if it went through to Z."
"Oh! But, Lady Rachel, I don't think I know what you mean."
"Has he asked you to marry him?"
"Not that, of course not. But he said he was going to marry me."
"When? How long ago?"
"Oh, I don't remember."
"But what did you think about it?"
"Well, you see, Lady Rachel, I suppose I thought it was too good of him to believe, and I suppose I wondered if he wouldn't forget about it by-and-by. And do you know, he didn't—that is, I don't think so."
"But, you funny child, you don't tell me at all. Did you promise to marry him?"
"Promise! He never asked me to do that."
"Do you love him, dear?"
"Never asked me to do that, either."
"But, Helen, you dodge like a wild thing. If you don't love him and he expects you to marry him, you must tell him you won't."
"Why?" Helen rumpled her hair with swift hand. "There'd be a frightful fight. You see, Lady Rachel"—plaintively—"whenever I fight with Morgan I get so—so smashed. Don't you know, it makes your bones sore, and gives you a headache. Besides, Morgan always does what he means to do, and he knows all sorts of things, and if he means to marry me I suppose he will, and I suppose he knows—well, whether I love him or not. 'My word!' says Uncle Tad, 'I don't.'"
"Don't what?"
"Don't know, Lady Rachel. Suppose I said 'Morgan Map, I don't love you, there!' then he'd say, 'You do, too,' or else, 'That's my lookout,' or something, and what would I do then? Oh, yes, I'd say, 'Well, then, I won't marry you,' and he'd say, 'Much you know about it,' or if he was cross there'd be a fight, and I never get anything out of that. Isn't it funny, Uncle Tad doesn't like Morgan at all."
"I don't think," said Mrs. Mavering, slowly, "that I do, either, but it looks as if I ought not to say so. Do you mind?"
"Of course not. Morgan doesn't care who dislikes him, except me; and if I did, don't you see, it would be only one of the words in the dictionary."
"I think I begin to see. But I'm still wondering if there isn't one word left out."
"Why—But I don't know what you mean. What makes you so solemn, Lady Rachel? You bother and bother about Morgan, and he's not so worth while, not so—around in the dark as Gard Windham, who says things out of the middle of himself without talking at all, and you understand him, you don't know how, and it makes your hair tingle. Lady Rachel, listen! Let's go to the war."
"The war!"
"Didn't you know there is to be one? And Morgan's going to be a captain, or colonel, or something. He wouldn't let me, but we'd wait till he was gone, and then I'd only have to fight with Uncle Tad, and I wouldn't mind that."
Mrs. Mavering fell to wondering if there had ever been a time when she was like this herself, as bright and fearless; as little conscious or afraid of looming shadows. She thought she had not been quite like this. There must have been less will and more desire of ease. She thought she had loved a better man than Morgan Map, at least one more varied and peculiar, if not so poised and secure of himself; a strange man, restless and reckless. The two did not look alike; Jack was dark, long-jawed, and lean; but when she had noted Morgan knitting his yellow brows, and imagined there was an odd glint in his eyes, she had thought of one of Jack's moods, and shivered. Jack was never jealous. But there was some mark, something common to them both, that sent a searching chill, that seemed like a denial of all close comforts and small loving things. Or was it only her own weakness and fanciful fears, born of those past times when she had learned to be afraid of the next day?
Thaddeus was an airy theorist. Besides, he seemed to be mainly interested in his commission, which perhaps would not accrue if Helen went off with her capital of happiness independently. Searching through her experience, she was not sure how much that she found bore on the subject. It had not seemed a question of courage when she had first girded up her garments and followed where she was led. It had seemed inevitable. Jack's name was the whole dictionary, and there appeared to be no word entirely outside of it. And then the awakening; a series of chasms opening, the bright world breaking up, and sections of it tumbling down the black chasms. She seemed to see his face, with its large, mobile mouth, painted against Thaddeus's fireplace, as he had looked when he had left her that last day in the early morning; heard his laugh, and the echo in the empty hall of the door that had closed behind him.
"I'm afraid I have had almost enough of adventures. When I came back to live here I was very tired."
"Are you going to tell me?" said Helen, in an awed tone.
"Perhaps not everything. But you know I was born here, and my name was Ulic, and all that, till I was married. Mr. Mavering came to Hamilton when I was about your age, and I think he was looking for anything that would interest him, but not expecting it would interest him very long. He had a great deal of money then, but he has done all sorts of things with it, and I don't know that he has any now. I suppose he was engaged in what your uncle calls 'the pursuit of happiness,' and he seemed to be successful. He got so much amusement wherever he went, and his way of doing it was—some of it—expensive. But perhaps it cost me more than any one else, unless—but I don't know about that. He was very clever, and I thought him wonderful. I think he must have been a little extraordinary. I thought no one else had a lover who paid such compliments. He used to say, 'Life is a joke between God and the devil. You are a bright remark by the former, Rachel, and I am the latter's repartee.' He never tried to conceal anything about himself. Then we went adventuring. You see, my story turns on Jack's being so queer—at least, his coming to seems so to me. I couldn't like things and people that were evil and coarse, or like being always dragged into the danger of some kind of disgrace. You can't, if you have been taught to be scrupulous. But he did not seem to see differences between good and bad, and refined and coarse, or else he thought them petty differences. He liked almost anything except being dull. We went from place to place, and across the sea and back again. He was restless—and reckless. I think he was too reckless of me. Once we had a house at New Orleans, where the planters used to come and play cards, and there were queer women with very dark eyes, and some of the planters were quite old men. But one night one of the women killed a planter with a knife, on the stairs. Then we got out of a window on a back roof, and through alleys to the levee, and went up the river in the morning on a steamer. I don't know what it was all about—quite. But there were things that happened which I minded more than that. I used to be so tired, so afraid. Then I grew to be afraid of Jack, because I couldn't understand him, because whenever things were very black and horrible, or seemed so to me, he acted more amused and queer, as if it were all a kind of play in the theatre. And he did not grow worse through all this; he did not change at all; but I grew worse. I tried to be like him, but I couldn't. Of course, we knew a great many people, and sometimes were fashionable. Once in London we went to great balls and receptions. But Jack saw some Hindoo snake-charmers, and wanted to be one, and travel about in turbans and yellow cloth. I don't know why we didn't do that, but we came home soon after. And we quarrelled very miserably—that is, I did. Then the Ulics became excited about it. One night, or early in the morning, I woke up and heard some one very angry in the next room. Jack never became angry. It was another man. I don't know who it was. There was a struggle. I suppose Jack struck him, and he fell. I crept and opened the door. The window was open and Jack was dropping the man out of it into the area. Then he laughed to himself, and turned around and saw me." Mrs. Mavering's voice faltered, and she paused.