is naturally so highly gifted that he would produce good work under any circumstances, poverty is a drawback.”
“You didn’t know what you were going to get, Miss Lauderdale, when you prevailed on Griggs to answer a serious question,” said Crowdie, as Griggs paused a moment. “He’s a didactic old bird, when he mounts his hobby.”
“There’s something wrong about that metaphor, Crowdie,” observed Griggs. “Bird mounting hobby—you know.”
“Did you never see a crow on a cow’s back?” enquired Crowdie, unmoved. “Or on a sheep? It’s funny when he gets his claws caught in the wool.”
“Go on, please, Mr. Griggs,” said Katharine. “It’s very interesting. What’s the other side of the question?”
“Oh—I don’t know!” Griggs rose abruptly from his seat and began to pace the room. “It’s lots of things, I suppose. Things we don’t understand and never shall—in this world.”
“But in the other world, perhaps,” suggested Crowdie, with a smile which Katharine did not like.
“The other world is the inside of this one,” said Griggs, coming up to the easel and looking at the painting. “That’s good, Crowdie,” he said, thoughtfully. “It’s distinctly good. I mean that it’s like, that’s all. Of course, I don’t know anything about painting—that’s your business.”
“Of course it is,” answered Crowdie; “I didn’t ask you to criticise. But I’m glad if you think it’s like.”
“Yes. Don’t mind my telling you, Crowdie—Miss Lauderdale, I hope you’ll forgive me—there’s a slight irregularity in the pupil of Miss Lauderdale’s right eye—it isn’t exactly round. It affects the expression. Do you see?”
“I never noticed it,” said Katharine in surprise.
“By Jove—you’re right!” exclaimed Crowdie. “What eyes you have, Griggs!”
“It doesn’t affect your sight in the least,” said Griggs, “and nobody would notice it, but it affects the expression all the same.”
“You saw it at once,” remarked Katharine.
“Oh—Griggs sees everything,” answered Crowdie. “He probably observed the fact last night when he was introduced to you, and has been thinking about it ever since.”
“Now you’ve interrupted him again,” said Katharine. “Do sit down again, Mr. Griggs, and go on with what you were saying—about the other side of the question.”
“The question of success?”
“Yes—and difficulties—and all that.”
“Delightfully vague—‘all that’! I can only give you an idea of what I mean. The question of success involves its own value, and the ultimate happiness of mankind. Do you see how big it is? It goes through everything, and it has no end. What is success? Getting ahead of other people, I suppose. But in what direction? In the direction of one’s own happiness, presumably. Every one has a prime and innate right to be happy. Ideas about happiness differ. With most people it’s a matter of taste and inherited proclivities. All schemes for making all mankind happy in one direction must fail. A man is happy when he feels that he has succeeded—the sportsman when he has killed his game, the parson when he believes he has saved a soul. We can’t all be parsons, nor all good shots. There must be variety. Happiness is success, in each variety, and nothing else. I mean, of course, belief in one’s own success, with a reasonable amount of acknowledgment. It’s of much less consequence to Crowdie, for instance, what you think, or I think, or Mrs. Crowdie thinks about that picture, than it is to himself. But our opinion has a certain value for him. With an amateur, public opinion is everything, or nearly everything. With a good professional it is quite secondary, because he knows much better than the public can, whether his work is good or bad. He himself is his world—the public is only his weather, fine one day and rainy the next. He prefers his world in fine weather, but even when it rains he would not exchange it for any other. He’s his own king, kingdom and court. He’s his own enemy, his own conqueror, and his own captive—slave is a better word. In the course of time he may even become perfectly indifferent to the weather in his world—that is, to the public. And if he can believe that he is doing a good work, and if he can keep inside his own world, he will probably be happy.”
“But if he goes beyond it?” asked Katharine.
“He will probably be killed—body or soul, or both,” said Griggs, with a queer change of tone.
“It seems to me, that you exclude women altogether from your paradise,” observed Mrs. Crowdie, with a laugh.
“And amateurs,” said her husband. “It’s to be a professional paradise for men—no admittance except on business. No one who hasn’t had a picture on the line need apply. Special hell for minor poets. Crowns of glory may be had on application at the desk—fit not guaranteed in cases of swelled head—”
“Don’t be vulgar, Crowdie,” interrupted Griggs.
“Is ‘swelled head’ vulgar, Miss Lauderdale?” enquired the painter.
“It sounds like something horrid—mumps, or that sort of thing. What does it mean?”
“It means a bad case of conceit. It’s a good New York expression. I wonder you haven’t heard it. Go on about the professional persons, Griggs. I’m not half good enough to chaff you. I wish Frank Miner were here. He’s the literary man in the family.”
“Little Frank Miner—the brother of the three Miss Miners?” asked Griggs.
“Yes—looks a well-dressed cock sparrow—always in a good humour—don’t you know him?”
“Of course I do—the brother of the three Miss Miners,” said Griggs, meditatively. “Does he write? I didn’t know.” Crowdie laughed, and Hester smiled.
“Such is fame!” exclaimed Crowdie. “But then, literary men never seem to have heard of each other.”
“No,” answered Griggs. “By the bye, Crowdie, have you heard anything of Chang-Li-Ho lately?”
“Chang-Li-Ho? Who on earth is he? A Chinese laundryman?”
“No,” replied Griggs, unmoved. “He’s the greatest painter in the Chinese Empire. But then, you painters never seem to have heard of one another.”
“By Jove! that’s not fair, Griggs! Is he to be in the professional heaven, too?”
“I suppose so. There’ll probably be more Chinamen than New Yorkers there. They know a great deal more about art.”
“You’re getting deucedly sarcastic, Griggs,” observed Crowdie. “You’d better tell Miss Lauderdale more about the life to come. Your hobby can’t be tired yet, and if you ride him industriously, it will soon be time for luncheon.”
“We’d better have it at once if you two are going to quarrel,” suggested Hester, with a laugh.
“Oh, we never quarrel,” answered Crowdie. “Besides, I’ve got no soul, Griggs says, and he sold his own to the printer’s devil ages ago—so that the life to come is a perfectly safe subject.”
“What do you mean by saying that Walter has no soul?” asked Hester, looking up quickly at Griggs.
“My dear lady,” he answered, “please don’t be so terribly angry with me. In the first place, I said it in fun; and secondly, it’s quite true; and thirdly, it’s very lucky for him that he has none.”
“Are you joking now, or are you unintentionally funny?” asked Crowdie.
“I don’t think it’s very funny to be talking about people having no souls,” said Katharine.
“Do you think every one has a soul, Miss Lauderdale?” asked Griggs, beginning to walk about again.
“Yes—of course. Don’t you?”
Griggs looked at her a moment in silence, as though he were hesitating as to what he should say.
“Can you see the soul, as you did the defect in my eyes?” asked Katharine, smiling.
“Sometimes—sometimes one almost fancies that one might.”
“And what do you see in mine, may I ask? A defect?”
He was quite near to her. She looked up at him earnestly with her pure girl’s eyes, wide, grey and honest. The fresh pallor of her skin was thrown into relief by the black she wore, and her features by the rich stuff which covered the high back of the chair. There was a deeper interest in her expression than Griggs often saw in the faces of those with whom he talked, but it was not that which fascinated him. There was something suggestive of holy things, of innocent suffering, of the romance of a virgin martyr—something which, perhaps, took him back to strange sights he had seen in his youth.
He stood looking down into her eyes, a gaunt, world-worn fighter of fifty years, with a strong, ugly, determined but yet kindly face—the face of a man who has passed beyond a certain barrier which few men ever reach at all.
Crowdie dropped his hand, holding his brush, and gazing at the two in silent and genuine delight. The contrast was wonderful, he thought. He would have given much to paint them as they were before him, with their expressions—with the very thoughts of which the look in each face was born. Whatever Crowdie might be at heart, he was an artist first.
And Hester watched them, too, accustomed to notice whatever struck her husband’s attention. A very different nature was hers from any of the three—one reserved for an unusual destiny, and with something of fate’s shadowy painting already in all her outward self—passionate, first, and having, also, many qualities of mercy and cruelty at passion’s command, but not having anything of the keen insight into the world spiritual, and material, which in varied measure belonged to each of the others.
“And what defect do you see in my soul?” asked Katharine, her exquisite lips just parting in a smile.
“Forgive me!” exclaimed Griggs, as though roused from a reverie. “I didn’t realize that I was staring at you.” He was an oddly natural man at certain times. Katharine almost laughed.
“I didn’t realize it either,” she answered. “I was too much interested in what I thought you were going to say.”
“He’s a very clever fellow, Miss Lauderdale,” said Crowdie, going on with his painting. “But you’ll turn his head completely. To be so much interested—not in what he has said, or is saying, or even is going to say, but just in what you think he possibly may say—it’s amazing! Griggs, you’re not half enough nattered! But then, you’re so spoilt!”
“Yes—in my old age, people are spoiling me.” Griggs smiled rather sourly. “I can’t read souls, Miss Lauderdale,” he continued. “But if I could, I should rather read yours than most books. It has something to say.”
“It’s impossible to be more vague, I’m sure,” observed Crowdie.
“It’s impossible to be more flattering,” said Katharine, quietly. “Thank you, Mr. Griggs.”
She was beginning to be tired of Crowdie’s observations upon what Griggs said—possibly because she was beginning to like Griggs himself more than she had expected.
“I didn’t mean to be either vague or flattering. It’s servile to be the one and weak to be the other. I said what I thought. Do you call it flattery to paint a beautiful portrait of Miss Lauderdale?”
“Not unless I make it more beautiful than she is,” answered the painter.
“You can’t.”
“That’s decisive, at all events,” laughed Crowdie. “Not but that I agree with you, entirely.”
“Oh, I don’t mean it as you do,” answered Griggs. “That would be flattery—exactly what I don’t mean. Miss Lauderdale is perfectly well aware that you’re a great portrait painter and that she is not altogether the most beautiful young lady living at the present moment. You mean flesh and blood and eyes and hair. I don’t. I mean all that flesh and blood and eyes and hair don’t mean, and never can mean.”
“Soul,” suggested Crowdie. “I was talking about that to Miss Lauderdale the last time she sat for me—that was on Wednesday, wasn’t it—the day before yesterday? It seems like last year, for some reason or other. Yes, I know what you mean. You needn’t get into such a state of frenzied excitement.”
“I appeal to you, Mrs. Crowdie—was I talking excitedly?”
“A little,” answered Hester, who was incapable of disagreeing with her husband.
“Oh—well—I daresay,” said Griggs. “It hasn’t been my weakness in life to get excited, though.” He laughed.
“Walter always makes you talk, Mr. Griggs,” answered Mrs. Crowdie.
“A great deal too much. I think I shall be rude, and not stay to luncheon, after all.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Crowdie. “Don’t go in for being young and eccentric—the ‘man of genius’ style, who runs in and out like a hen in a thunder-storm, and is in everybody’s way when he’s not wanted and can’t be found when people want him. You’ve outgrown that sort of absurdity long ago.”
Katharine would have liked to see Griggs’ face at that moment, but he was behind her again. There was something in the relation of the two men which she found it hard to understand. Crowdie was much younger than Griggs—fourteen or fifteen years, she fancied, and Griggs did not seem to be at all the kind of man with whom people would naturally be familiar or take liberties, to use the common phrase. Yet they talked together like a couple of schoolboys. She should not have thought, either, that they could be mutually attracted. Yet they appeared to have many ideas in common, and to understand each other wonderfully well. Crowdie was evidently not repulsive to Griggs as he was to many men she knew—to Bright and Miner, for instance—and the two had undoubtedly been very intimate in former days. Nevertheless, it was strange to hear the younger man, who was little more than a youth in appearance, comparing the celebrated Paul Griggs to a hen in a thunder-storm, and still stranger to see that Griggs did not resent it at all. An older woman might have unjustly suspected that the elderly man of letters was in love with Hester Crowdie, but such an idea could never have crossed Katharine’s mind. In that respect she was singularly unsophisticated. She had been accustomed to see her beautiful mother surrounded and courted by men of all ages, and she knew that her mother was utterly indifferent to them except in so far as she liked to be admired. In some books, men fall in love with married women, and Katharine had always been told that those were bad books, and had accepted the fact without question and without interest.
But in ordinary matters she was keen of perception. It struck her that there was some bond or link between the two men, and it seemed strange to her that there should be—as strange as though she had seen an old wolf playing amicably with a little rabbit. She thought of the two animals in connection with the two men.
While she had been thinking, Hester and Griggs had been talking together in lower tones, on the divan, and Crowdie had been painting industriously.
“It’s time for luncheon,” said Mrs. Crowdie. “Mr. Griggs says he really must go away very early, and perhaps, if Katharine will stay, she will let you paint for another quarter of an hour afterward.”
“I wish you would!” answered Crowdie, with alacrity. “The snow-light is so soft—you see the snow lies on the skylight like a blanket.”
Katharine looked up at the glass roof, turning her head far back, for it was immediately overhead. When she dropped her eyes she saw that Griggs was looking at her again, but he turned away instantly. She had no sensation of unpleasantness, as she always had when she met Crowdie’s womanish glance; but she wondered about the man and his past.
Hester was just leaving the studio, going downstairs to be sure that luncheon was ready, and Crowdie had disappeared behind his curtain to put his palette and brushes out of sight, as usual. Katharine was alone with Griggs for a few moments. They stood together, looking at the portrait.
“How long have you known Mr. Crowdie?” she asked, yielding to an irresistible impulse.
“Crowdie?” repeated Griggs. “Oh—a long time—fifteen or sixteen years, I should think. That’s going to be a very good portrait, Miss Lauderdale—one of his best. And Crowdie, at his best, is first rate.”
Katharine was conscious that during the time she had spent in the studio she had been taken out of herself. She had listened to what the others had said, she had been interested in Griggs, she had speculated upon the probable origin of his apparent friendship with Crowdie; in a word, she had temporarily lulled the tempest which had threatened to overwhelm her altogether in the earlier part of the morning. She was not much given to analyzing herself and her feelings, but as she descended the stairs, followed by Crowdie and Griggs, she was inclined to doubt whether she were awake, or dreaming. She told herself that it was all true; that she had been married to John Ralston on the previous morning in the quiet, remote church, that she had seen John for one moment in the afternoon, at her own door, that he had failed her in the evening, and that she knew only too certainly how he had disgraced himself in the eyes of decent people during the remainder of the day. It was all true, and yet there was something misty about it all, as though it were a dream. She did not feel angry or hurt any more. It only seemed to her that John, and everything connected with him, had all at once passed out of her life, beyond the possibility of recall. And she did not wish to recall it, for she had reached something like peace, very unexpectedly.
It was, of course, only temporary. Physically speaking, it might be explained as the reaction from violent emotions, which had left her nerves weary and deadened. And speaking not merely of the material side, it is true that the life of love has moments of suspended animation, during which it is hard to believe that love was ever alive at all—times when love has a past and a future, but no present.
If she had met John at that moment, on the stairs, she would very probably have put out her hand quite naturally, and would have greeted him with a smile, before the reality of all that had happened could come back to her. Many of us have dreamed that those dearest to us have done us some cruel and bitter wrong, struck us, insulted us, trampled on our life-long devotion to them; and in the morning, awaking, we have met them, and smiled, and loved them just the same. For it was only a dream. And there are those who have known the reality; who, after much time, have very suddenly found out that they have been betrayed and wickedly deceived, and used ill, by their most dear—and who, in the first moment, have met them, and smiled, and loved them just the same. For it was only a dream, they thought indeed. And then comes the waking, which is as though one fell asleep upon his beloved’s bosom and awoke among thorns, and having a crown of thorns about his brows—very hard to bear without crying aloud.
Katharine pressed the polished banister of the staircase with her hand, and with the other she found the point of the little gold pin she wore at her throat and made it prick her a little. It was a foolish idea and a childish thought. She knew that she was not really dreaming, and yet, as though she might have been, she wanted a physical sensation to assure her that she was awake. Griggs was close behind her. Crowdie had stopped a moment to pull the cord of a curtain which covered the skylight of the staircase.
“I wonder where real things end, and dreams begin!” said Katharine, half turning her head, and then immediately looking before her again.
“At every minute of every hour,” answered Griggs, as quickly as though the thought had been in his own mind.
From higher up came Crowdie’s golden voice, singing very softly to himself. He had heard the question and the answer.
“ ‘La vie est un songe,’ ” he sang, and then, breaking off suddenly, laughed a little and began to descend.
At the first note, Katharine stood still and turned her face upwards. Griggs stopped, too, and looked down at her. Even after Crowdie had laughed Katharine did not move.
“I wish you’d go on, Mr. Crowdie!” she cried, speaking so that he could hear her.
“Griggs is anxious for the Blue Points,” he answered, coming down. “Besides, he hates music, and makes no secret of the fact.”
“Is it true? Do you really hate music?” asked Katharine, turning and beginning to descend again.
“Quite true,” answered Griggs, quietly. “I detest it. Crowdie’s a nuisance with his perpetual yapping.”
Crowdie laughed good naturedly, and Katharine said nothing. As they reached the lower landing she turned and paused an instant, so that Griggs came beside her.
“Did you always hate music?” she asked, looking up into his weather-beaten face with some curiosity.
“Hm!” Griggs uttered a doubtful sound. “It’s a long time since I heard any that pleased me, at all events.”
“There are certain subjects, Miss Lauderdale, upon which Griggs is unapproachable, because he won’t say anything. And there are others upon which it is dangerous to approach him, because he is likely to say too much. Hester! Where are you?”
He disappeared into the little room at the front of the house in search of his wife, and Katharine stood alone with Griggs in the entry. Again she looked at him with curiosity.
“You’re a very good-humoured person, Mr. Griggs,” she said, with a smile.
“You mean about Crowdie? Oh, I can stand a lot of his chaff—and he has to stand mine, too.”
“That was a very interesting answer you gave to my question about dreams,” said Katharine, leaning against the pillar of the banister.
“Was it? Let me see—what did I say?” He seemed to be absent-minded again.
“Come to luncheon!” cried Crowdie, reappearing with Hester at that moment. “You can talk metaphysics over the oysters.”
“Metaphysics!” exclaimed Griggs, with a smile.
“Oh, I know,” answered Crowdie. “I can’t tell the difference between metaphysics and psychics, and geography and Totem. It is all precisely the same to me—and it is to Griggs, if he’d only acknowledge it. Come along, Miss Lauderdale—to oysters and culture!”
Hester laughed at Crowdie’s good spirits, and Griggs smiled. He had large, sharp teeth, and Katharine thought of the wolf and the rabbit again. It was strange that they should be on such good terms.
They sat down to luncheon. The dining-room, like every other part of the small house, had been beautified as much as its position and dimensions would allow. It had originally been small, but an extension of glass had been built out into the yard, which Hester had turned into a fernery. There were a great number of plants of many varieties, some of which had been obtained with great difficulty from immense distances. Hester had been told that it would be impossible to make them grow in an inhabited room, but she had succeeded, and the result was something altogether out of the common.
She admitted that, besides the attention she bestowed upon the plants herself, they occupied the whole time of a specially trained gardener. They were her only hobby, and where they were concerned, time and money had no value for her. The dining-room itself was simple, but exquisite in its way. There were a few pieces of wonderfully chiselled silver on the sideboard, and the glasses on the table were Venetian and Bohemian, and very old. The linen was as fine as fine writing paper, the porcelain was plain white Sèvres. There was nothing superfluous, but there were all the little, unobtrusive, almost priceless details which are the highest expression “of intimate luxury—in which the eye alone receives rest, while the other senses are flattered to the utmost. Colour and the precious metals are terribly cheap things nowadays compared with what appeals to touch and taste. There are times when certain dainties, like terrapin, for instance, are certainly worth much more than their weight in silver, if not quite their weight in gold. But as for that, to say that a man is worth his weight in gold has ceased to mean very much. Some ingenious persons have lately calculated that the average man’s weight in gold would be worth about forty thousand dollars, and that a few minutes’ worth of the income of some men living would pay for a life-sized golden calf. The further development of luxury will be an interesting thing to watch during the next century. A poor woman in New York recently returned a roast turkey to a charitable lady who had sent it to her, with the remark that she was accustomed to eat roast beef at Christmas, though she ‘did not mind turkey on Thanksgiving Day.’
Katharine wondered how far such a man as Griggs, who said that he hated music, could appreciate the excessive refinement of a luxury which could be felt rather than seen. It was all familiar to Katharine, and there were little things at the Crowdies which she longed to have at home. Griggs ate his oysters in silence. Fletcher came to his elbow with a decanter.
“Vin de Grave, sir?” enquired the old butler in a low voice.
“No wine, thank you,” said Griggs.
“There’s Sauterne, isn’t there, Walter?” asked Hester. “Perhaps Mr. Griggs—”
“Griggs is a cold water man, like me,” answered Crowdie. “His secret vice is to drink a bucket of it, when nobody is looking.”
Fletcher looked disappointed, and replaced the decanter on the sideboard.
“It’s uncommon to see two men who drink nothing,” observed Hester. “But I remember that Mr. Griggs never did.”
“Never—since you knew me, Mrs. Crowdie. I did when I was younger.”
“Did you? What made you give it up?”
Katharine felt a strange pain in her heart, as they began to talk of the subject. The reality was suddenly coming back out of dreamland.
“I lost my taste for it,” answered Griggs, indifferently.
“About the same time as when you began to hate music, wasn’t it?” asked Crowdie, gravely.
“Yes, I daresay.”
The elder man spoke quietly enough, and there was not a shade of interest in his voice as he answered the question. But Katharine, who was watching him unconsciously, saw a momentary change pass over his face. He glanced at Crowdie with an expression that was almost savage. The dark, weary eyes gleamed fiercely for an instant, the great veins swelled at the lean temples, the lips parted and just showed the big, sharp teeth. Then it was all over again and the kindly look came back. Crowdie was not smiling, and the tone in which he had asked the question showed plainly enough that it was not meant as a jest. Indeed, the painter himself seemed unusually serious. But he had not been looking at Griggs, nor had Hester seen the sudden flash of what was very like half-suppressed anger. Katharine wondered more and more, and the little incident diverted her thoughts again from the suggestion which had given her pain.
“Lots of men drink water altogether, nowadays,” observed Crowdie. “It’s a mistake, of course, but it’s much more agreeable.”
“A mistake!” exclaimed Katharine, very much astonished.
“Oh, yes—it’s an awful mistake,” echoed Griggs, in the most natural way possible.
“I’m not so sure,” said Hester Crowdie, in a tone of voice which showed plainly that the idea was not new to her.
“I don’t understand,” said Katharine, unable to recover from her surprise. “I always thought that—” she checked herself and looked across at the ferns, for her heart was hurting her again.
She suddenly realized, also, that considering what had happened on the previous night, it was very tactless of Crowdie not to change the subject. But he seemed not at all inclined to drop it yet.
“Yes,” he said. “In the first place, total abstinence shortens life. Statistics show that moderate consumers of alcoholic drinks live considerably longer than drunkards and total abstainers.”
“Of course,” assented Griggs. “A certain amount of wine makes a man lazy for a time, and that rests his nerves. We who drink water accomplish more in a given time, but we don’t live so long. We wear ourselves out. If we were not the strongest generation there has been for centuries, we should all be in our graves by this time.”
“Do you think we are a very strong generation?” asked Crowdie, who looked as weak as a girl.
“Yes, I do,” answered Griggs. “Look at yourself and at me. You’re not an athlete, and an average street boy of fifteen or sixteen might kill you in a fight. That has nothing to do with it. The amount of actual hard work, in your profession, which you’ve done—ever since you were a mere lad—is amazing, and you’re none the worse for it, either. You go on, just as though you had begun yesterday. Heaving weights and rowing races is no test of what a man’s strength will bear in everyday life. You don’t need big muscles and strong joints. But you need good nerves and enormous endurance. I consider you a very strong man—in most ways that are of any use.”
“That’s true,” said Mrs. Crowdie. “It’s what I’ve always been trying to put into words.”
“All the same,” continued Griggs, “one reason why you do more than other people is that you drink water. If we are strong, it’s because the last generation and the one before it lived too well. The next generation will be ruined by the advance of science.”
“The advance of science!” exclaimed Katharine. “But, Mr. Griggs—what extraordinary ideas you have!”
“Have I? It’s very simple, and it’s absolutely true. We’ve had the survival of the fittest, and now we’re to have the survival of the weakest, because medical science is learning how to keep all the weaklings alive. If they were puppies, they’d all be drowned, for fear of spoiling the breed. That’s rather a brutal way of putting it, but it’s true. As for the question of drink, the races that produce the most effect on the world are those that consume the most meat and the most alcohol. I don’t suppose any one will try to deny that. Of course, the consequences of drinking last for many generations after alcohol has gone out of use. It’s pretty certain that before Mohammed’s time the national vice of the Arabs was drunkenness. So long as the effects lasted—for a good many generations—they swept everything before them. The most terrible nation is the one that has alcohol in its veins but not in its head. But when the effects wore out, the Arabs retired from the field before nations that drank—and drank hard. They had no chance.”
“What a horrible view to take!” Katharine was really shocked by the man’s cool statements, and most of all by the appearance of indisputable truth which he undoubtedly gave to them.
“And as for saying that drink is the principal cause of crime,” he continued, quietly finishing a piece of shad on his plate, “it’s the most arrant nonsense that ever was invented. The Hindus are total abstainers and always have been, so far as we know. The vast majority of them take no stimulant whatever, no tea, no coffee. They smoke a little. There are, I believe, about two hundred millions of them alive now, and their capacity for most kinds of wickedness is quite as great as ours. Any Indian official will tell you that. It’s pure nonsense to lay all the blame on whiskey. There would be just as many crimes committed without it, and it would be much harder to detect them, because the criminals would keep their heads better under difficulties. Crime is in human nature, like virtue—like most things, if you know how to find them.”
“That’s perfectly true,” said Crowdie. “I believe every word of it. And I know that if I drank a certain amount of wine I should have a better chance of long life, but I don’t like the taste of it—couldn’t bear it when I was a boy. I like to see men get mellow and good-natured over a bottle of claret, too. All the same, there’s nothing so positively disgusting as a man who has had too much.”
Hester looked at him quickly, warning him to drop the subject. But Griggs knew nothing of the circumstances, and went on discussing the matter from his original point of view.
“There’s a beast somewhere, in every human being,” he said, thoughtfully. “If you grant the fact that it is a beast, it’s no worse to look at than other beasts. But it’s quite proper to call a drunkard a beast, because almost all animals will drink anything alcoholic which hasn’t a bad taste, until they’re blind drunk. It’s a natural instinct. Did you ever see a goat drink rum, or a Western pony drink a pint of whiskey? All animals like it. I’ve tried it on lots of them. It’s an old sailors’ trick.”
“I think it’s horrid!” exclaimed Hester. “Altogether, it’s a most unpleasant subject. Can’t we talk of something else?”
“Griggs can talk about anything except botany, my dear,” said Crowdie. “Don’t ask him about ferns, unless you want an exhibition of ignorance which will startle you.”
Katharine sat still in silence, though it would have been easy for her at that moment to turn the conversation into a new channel, by asking Griggs the first question which chanced to present itself. But she could not have spoken just then. She could not eat, either, though she made a pretence of using her fork. The reality had come back out of dreamland altogether this time, and would not be banished again. The long discussion about the subject which of all others was most painful to her, and the cynical indifference with which the two men had discussed it, had goaded her memory back through all the details of the last twenty-four hours. She was scarcely conscious that Hester had interfered, as she became more and more absorbed by her own suffering.
“Shall we talk of roses and green fields and angels’ loves?” asked Griggs. “How many portraits have you painted since last summer, Crowdie?”
“By way of reminding me of roses you stick the thorns into me—four, I think—and two I’m doing now, besides Miss Lauderdale’s. There’s been a depression down town. That accounts for the small number. Portrait painters suffer first. In hard times people don’t want them.”
“Yes,” answered Griggs, thoughtfully. “Portrait painters and hatters. Did you know that, Crowdie? When money is tight in Wall Street, people don’t bet hats, and the hatters say it makes a great difference.”
“That’s queer. And you—how many books have you written?”
“Since last summer? Only one—a boshy little thing of sixty thousand.”
“Sixty thousand what?” asked Hester. “Dollars?”
“Dollars!” Griggs laughed. “No—only words. Sixty thousand words. That’s the way we count what we do. No—it’s a tiresome little thing. I had an idea,—or thought I had,—and just when I got to the end of it I found it was trash. That’s generally the way with me, unless I have a stroke of luck. Haven’t you got an idea for me, Mrs. Crowdie? I’m getting old and people won’t give me any, as they used to.”
“I wish I had! What do you want? A love story?”
“Of course. But what I want is a character. There are no new plots, nor incidents, nor things of that sort, you know. Everything that’s ever happened has happened so often. But there are new characters. The end of the century, the sharp end of the century, is digging them up out of the sands of life—as you might dig up clams with a pointed stick.”
“That’s bathos!” laughed Crowdie. “The sands of life—and clams!”
“I wish you’d stick to your daubs, Crowdie, and leave my English alone!” said Griggs. “It sells just as well as your portraits. No—what I mean is that just when fate is twisting the tail of the century—”
“Really, my dear fellow—that’s a little too bad, you know! To compare the century to a refractory cow!”
“Crowdie,” said Griggs, gravely, “in a former state I was a wolf, and you were a rabbit, and I gobbled you up. If you go on interrupting me, I’ll do it again and destroy your Totem.”
Katharine started suddenly and stared at Griggs. It seemed so strange that he should have used the very words—wolf and rabbit—which had been in her mind more than once during the morning.
“What is it, Miss Lauderdale?” he asked, in some surprise. “You look startled.”
“Oh—nothing!” Katharine hastened to say. “I happened to have thought of wolves and rabbits, and it seemed odd that you should mention them.”
“Write to the Psychical Research people,” suggested Crowdie. “It’s a distinct case of thought-transference.”
“I daresay it is,” said Griggs, indifferently. “Everything is transferable—why shouldn’t thoughts be?”
“Everything?” repeated Crowdie. “Even the affections?”
“Oh, yes—even the affections—but punched, like a railway ticket,” answered Griggs, promptly. Everybody laughed a little, except Griggs himself.
“Of course the affections are transferable,” he continued, meditatively. “The affections are the hat—the object is only the peg on which it’s hung. One peg is almost as good as another—if it’s within reach; but the best place for the hat is on the man’s own head. Nothing shields a man like devoting all his affections to himself.”
“That’s perfectly outrageous!” exclaimed Hester Crowdie. “You make one think that you don’t believe in anything! Oh, it’s too bad—really it is!”
“I believe in ever so many things, my dear lady,” answered Griggs, looking at her with a singularly gentle expression on his weather-beaten face. “I believe in lots of good things—more than Crowdie does, as he knows. I believe in roses, and green fields, and love, as much as you do. Only—the things one believes in are not always good for one—it depends—love’s path may lie among roses or among thorns; yet the path always has two ends—the one end is life, if the love is true.”
“And the other?” asked Katharine, meeting his far-away glance.
“The other is death,” he answered, almost solemnly.
A momentary silence followed the words. Even Crowdie made no remark, while both Hester and Katharine watched the elder man’s face, as women do when a man who has known the world well speaks seriously of love.
“But then,” added Griggs himself, more lightly, and as though to destroy the impression he had made, “most people never go to either end of the path. They enter at one side, look up and down it, cross it, and go out at the other. Something frightens them, or they don’t like the colour of the roses, or they’re afraid of the thorns—in nine cases out of ten, something drives them out of it.”
“How can one be driven out of love?” asked Katharine, gravely.
“I put the thing generally, and adorned it with nice similes and things—and now you want me to explain all the details!” protested Griggs, with a little rough laugh. “How can one be driven out of love? In many ways, I fancy. By a real or imaginary fault of the other person in the path, I suppose, as much as by anything. It won’t do to stand at trifles when one loves. There’s a meaning in the words of the marriage service—‘for better, for worse.’ ”
“I know there is,” said Katharine, growing pale, and choking herself with the words in the determination to be brave.
“Of course there is. People don’t know much about one another when they get married. At least, not as a rule. They’ve met on the stage like actors in a play—and then, suddenly, they meet in private life, and are quite different people. Very probably the woman is jealous and extravagant, and has a temper, and has been playing the ingenuous young girl’s parts on the stage. And the man, who has been doing the self-sacrificing hero, who proposes to go without butter in order to support his starving mother-in-law, turns out to be a gambler—or drinks, or otherwise plays the fool. Of course that’s all very distressing to the bride or the bridegroom, as the case may be. But it can’t be helped. They’ve taken one another ‘for better, for worse,’ and it’s turned out to be for worse. They can go to Sioux City and get a divorce, but then that’s troublesome and scandalous, and one thing and another. So they just put up with it. Besides, they may love each other so much that the defects don’t drive them out of it. Then the bad one drags down the good one—or, in rare cases, the good one raises the bad one. Oh, yes—I’m not a cynic—that happens, too, from time to time.”
Crowdie looked at his wife with his soft, languishing glance, and if Katharine had been watching him, she might have seen on his red lips the smile she especially detested. But she was looking down and pressing her hands together under the table. Hester Crowdie’s eyes were fixed on her face, for she was very pale and was evidently suffering. Griggs also looked at her, and saw that something unusual was happening.
“Mrs. Crowdie,” he said, vigorously changing the subject, as a man can who has been leading the conversation, “if it isn’t a very rude question, may I ask where you get the extraordinary ham you always have whenever I lunch with you? I’ve been all over the world, and I’ve never eaten anything like it. I’m not sure whether it’s the ham itself, or some secret in the cooking.”
Mrs. Crowdie glanced at Katharine’s face once more, and then looked at him. Crowdie also turned towards him, and Katharine slowly unclasped her hands beneath the table, as though the bitterness of death were passed.
“Oh—the ham?” repeated Mrs. Crowdie. “They’re Yorkshire hams, aren’t they, Walter? You always order them.”
“No, my dear,” answered Crowdie. “They’re American. We’ve not had any English ones for two or three years. Fletcher gets them. He’s a better judge than the cook. Griggs is quite right—there’s a trick about boiling them—something to do with changing the water a certain number of times before you put in the wine. Are you going to set up housekeeping, Griggs? I should think that oatmeal and water and dried herrings would be your sort of fare, from what I remember.”
“Something of that kind,” answered Griggs. “Anything’s good enough that will support life.”
The luncheon came to an end without any further incident, and the conversation ran on in the very smallest of small talk. Then Griggs, who was a very busy man, lighted a cigarette and took his departure. As he shook hands with Katharine, and bowed in his rather foreign way, he looked at her once more, as though she interested him very much.
“I hope I shall see you again,” said Katharine, quietly.
“I hope so, indeed,” answered Griggs. “You’re very kind to say so.”
When he was gone the other three remained together in the little front room, which has been so often mentioned.
“Will you sit for me a little longer, Miss Lauderdale?” asked Crowdie.
“Oh, don’t work any more just yet, Walter!” cried Hester, with sudden anxiety.
“Why? What’s the matter?” enquired Crowdie in some surprise.
“You know what Mr. Griggs was just saying at luncheon. You work so hard! You’ll overdo it some day. It’s perfectly true, you know. You never give yourself any rest!”
“Except during about one-half of the year, my dear, when you and I do absolutely nothing together in the most beautiful places in the world—in the most perfect climates, and without one solitary little shadow of a care for anything on earth but our two selves.”
“Yes—I know. But you work all the harder the rest of the time. Besides, we haven’t been abroad this year, and you say we can’t get away for at least two months. Do give yourself time to breathe—just after luncheon, too. I’m sure it’s not good for him, is it Katharine?” she asked, appealing to her friend.
“Of course not!” answered Katharine. “And besides, I must run home. My dear, just fancy! I forgot to ask you to send word to say that I wasn’t coming, and they won’t know where I am. But we lunch later than you do—if I go directly, I shall find them still at table.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Hester. “You don’t want to go really? Do you? You know, I could send word still—it wouldn’t be too late.” She glanced at her husband, who shook his head, and smiled—he was standing behind Katharine. “Well—if you must, then,” continued Hester, “I won’t keep you. But come back soon. It seems to me that I never see you now—and I have lots of things to tell you.”
Katharine shook hands with Crowdie, whose soft, white fingers felt cold in hers. Hester went out with her into the entry, and helped her to put on her thick coat.
“Take courage, dear!” said Mrs. Crowdie in a low voice, as she kissed her. “It will come right in the end.”
Katharine looked fixedly at her for a few seconds, buttoning her coat.
“It’s not courage that I need,” she said slowly, at last. “I think I have enough—good-bye—Hester, darling—good-bye!”
She put her arms round her friend and kissed her three times, and then turned quickly and let herself out, leaving Hester standing in the entry, wondering at the solemn way in which she had taken leave of her.
Katharine’s mood had changed very much since she had entered the Crowdies’ house. She had felt then a certain sense of strength which had been familiar to her all her life, but which had never before seemed so real and serviceable. She had been sure that she could defy the world—in that black frock she wore—and that her face would be of marble and her heart of steel under all imaginable circumstances. She had carried her head high and had walked with a firm tread. She had felt that if she met John Ralston she could tell him what she thought of him, and hurt him, so that in his suffering, at least, he should repent of what he had done.
It was different now. She did not attempt to find reasons for the difference, and they would have been hard to discover. But she knew that she had been exposed to a sort of test of her strength, and had broken down, and that Hester Crowdie had seen her defeat. Possibly it was the knowledge that Hester had seen and understood which was the most immediately painful circumstance at the present moment; but it was not the most important one, for she was really quite as brave as she had believed herself, and what suffered most in her was not her vanity.
The conversation at table had somehow brought the whole truth more clearly before her, as the developer brings out the picture on a photographer’s plate. The facts were fixed now, and she could not hide them nor turn from them at will.
Whether she were mistaken or not, the position was bad enough. As she saw it, it was intolerable. By her own act, by the exercise of her own will, and by nothing else, she had been secretly married to John Ralston. She had counted with certainty upon old Robert Lauderdale to provide her husband with some occupation immediately, feeling sure that within a few days she should be able to acknowledge the marriage and assume her position before the world as a married woman. But Robert Lauderdale had demonstrated to her that this was impossible under the conditions she required, namely, that John should support himself. He had indeed offered to make her independent, but that solution of the difficulty was not acceptable. To obtain what she and Ralston had both desired, it was necessary, and she admitted the fact, that John should work regularly in some office for a certain time. Robert Lauderdale himself could not take an idle man from a fashionable club and suddenly turn him into a partner in a house of business or a firm of lawyers, if the idle man himself refused to accept money in any shape. Even if he had accepted it, such a proceeding would have been criticised and laughed at as a piece of plutocratic juggling. It would have made John contemptible. Therefore it was impossible that John and Katharine should have a house of their own and appear as a married couple for some time, for at least a year, and probably for a longer period. Under such circumstances to declare the marriage would have been to make themselves the laughing-stock of society, so long as John continued to live under his mother’s roof, and Katharine with her father. The secret marriage would have to be kept a secret, except, perhaps, from the more discreet members of the family. Alexander Lauderdale would have to be told, and life would not be very pleasant for Katharine until she could leave the paternal dwelling. She knew that, but she would have been able to bear it, to look upon the next year or two as years of betrothal, and to give her whole heart and soul to help John in his work. It was the worst contingency which she had foreseen when she had persuaded him to take the step with her, and she had certainly not expected that it could arise; but since it had arisen, she was ready to meet it. There was nothing within the limits of reason which she would not have done for John, and she had driven those limits as far from ordinary common sense as was possible, to rashness, even to the verge of things desperate in their folly.
She knew that. But she had counted on John Ralston with that singularly whole-hearted faith which characterizes very refined women. Many years ago, when analytical fiction was in its infancy, Charles de Bernard made the very wise and true observation that no women abandon themselves more completely in thought and deed to the men they love, or make such real slaves of themselves, as those whom he calls ‘great ladies,’—that is, as we should say, women of the highest refinement, the most unassailable social position, and the most rigid traditions. The remark is a very profound one. The explanation of the fact is very simple. Women who have grown up in surroundings wherein the letter of honour is rigidly observed, and in which the spirit of virtue prevails for honour’s sake, readily believe that the men they love are as honourable as they seem, and more virtuous in all ways than sinful man is likely to be. The man whom such a woman loves with all her heart, before she has met truth face to face, cannot possibly be as worthy as she imagines that he is; and if he be an honest man, he must be aware of the fact, and must constantly suffer by the ever present knowledge that he is casting a shadow greater than himself, so to say—and to push the simile further, it is true that in attempting to overtake that shadow of himself, he often deliberately walks away from the light which makes him cast it.
John Ralston could never, under any circumstances, have done all that Katharine had expected of him, although she had professed to expect so little. Woman fills the hours of her lover’s absence with scenes from her own sweet dreamland. In nine cases out of ten, when she has the chance of comparing what she has learned with what she has imagined, she has a moment of sickening disappointment. Later in life there is an adjustment, and at forty years of age she merely warns her daughter vaguely that she must not believe too much in men. That is the usual sequence of events.
But Katharine’s case just now was very much worse than the common. It is not necessary to recapitulate the evidence against John’s soberness on that memorable Thursday. It might have ruined the reputation of a Father of the Church. Up to one o’clock on the following day no one but Mrs. Ralston and Doctor Routh were aware that there was anything whatsoever to be said on the other side of the question. So far as Katharine or any one else could fairly judge, John had been through one of the most outrageous and complete sprees of which New York society had heard for a long time. A certain number of people knew that he had practically fought Hamilton Bright in the hall of his club, and had undoubtedly tripped him up and thrown him. Katharine, naturally enough, supposed that every one knew it, and in spite of Bright’s reassuring words on the previous night, she fully expected that John would have to withdraw from the club in question. Even she, girl as she was, knew that this was a sort of public disgrace.
There was no other word for it. The man she loved, and to whom she had been secretly married, had publicly disgraced himself on the very day of the marriage, had been tipsy in the club, had been seen drunk in the streets, had been in a light with a professional boxer, and had been incapable of getting home alone—much more of going to meet his wife at the Assembly ball.
If he had done such things on their wedding day, what might he not do hereafter? The question was a natural one. Katharine had bound herself to a hopeless drunkard. She had heard of such cases, unfortunately, though they have become rare enough in society, and she knew what it all meant. There would be years of a wretched existence, of a perfectly hopeless attempt to cure him. She had heard her father tell such stories, for Alexander Junior was not a peaceable abstainer like Griggs and Crowdie. He was not an abstainer at all—he was a man of ferocious moderation. She remembered painful details about the drunkard’s children. Then there was a story of a blow—and then a separation—a wife who, for her child’s sake, would not go to another State and be divorced—and the going back to the father’s house to live, while the husband sank from bad to worse, and his acquaintances avoided him in the street, till he had been seen hanging about low liquor saloons and telling drunken loafers the story of his married life—speaking to them of the pure and suffering woman who was still his lawful wife—and laughing about it. Alexander had told it all, as a wholesome lesson to his household, which, by the way, consisted of his aged father, his wife, and his two daughters, none of whom, one might have thought, could ever stand in need of such lessons. Charlotte had laughed then, and Katharine had been disgusted. Mrs. Lauderdale’s perfectly classical face had expressed nothing, for she had been thinking of something else, and the old philanthropist had made some remarks about the close connection between intemperance and idiocy. But the so-called lesson was telling heavily against John Ralston now, two or three years after it had been delivered.
It was clear to Katharine that her life was ruined before it had begun. In those first hours after the shock it did not occur to her that she could ever forgive John. She was therefore doubly sure that the ruin he had wrought was irretrievable. She could not naturally think now of the possibility of ever acknowledging her marriage. To proclaim it meant to attempt just such a life as she had heard her father describe. Unfortunately, too, in that very case, she knew the people, and knew that Alexander Junior, who never exaggerated anything but the terrors of the life to come, had kept within the truth rather than gone beyond it.
She did not even tell herself that matters would have been still worse if she had been made publicly John Ralston’s wife on the previous day. At that moment she did not seek to make things look more bearable, if they might. She had faced the situation and it was terrible—it justified anything she might choose to do. If she chose to do something desperate to free herself, she wished to be fully justified, and that desired justification would be weakened by anything which should make her position seem more easy to bear.
Indeed, she could hardly have been blamed, whatever she had done. She was bound without being united, married and yet not married, but necessarily shut off from all future thought of marriage, so long as John Ralston lived.
She had assumed duties, too, which she was far from wishing to avoid. In her girlish view, the difference between the married and the single state lay mainly in the loss of the individual liberty which seemed to belong to the latter. She had been brought up, as most American girls are, in old-fashioned ideas on the subject, which are good,—much better than European ideas,—though in extended practice they occasionally lead to some odd results, and are not always carried out in after life. In two words, our American idea is that, on being married, woman assumes certain responsibilities, and ceases, so to say, to be a free dancer in a ball-room. The general idea in Europe is that, at marriage, a woman gets rid of as many responsibilities as she can, and acquires the liberty to do as she pleases, which has been withheld from her before.
Katharine felt, therefore, even at that crisis, that she had forfeited her freedom, and, amidst all she felt, there was room for that bitter regret. A French girl could hardly understand her point of view; a certain number of English girls might appreciate it, and some might possibly feel as she did; to an American girl it will seem natural enough. It was not merely out of a feeling of self-respect that she looked upon a change as necessary, nor out of a blind reverence for the religious ceremony which had taken place. Every inborn and cultivated instinct and tradition told her that as a married woman, though the whole world should believe her to be a young girl, she could not behave as she had behaved formerly; that a certain form of perfectly innocent amusement would no longer be at all innocent now; that she had forfeited the right to look upon every man she met as a possible admirer—she went no further than that in her idea of flirtation—and finally that, somehow, she should feel out of place in the parties of very young people to which she was naturally invited.
She was a married woman, and she must behave as one, for the rest of her natural life, though no one was ever to know that she was married. It was a very general idea, with her, but it was a very strong one, and none the less so for its ingenuous simplicity.
But the fact that she regretted her liberty did not even distantly suggest that she might ever fall in love with any one but John Ralston. Her only wish was to make him feel bitterly what he had done, that he might regret it as long as he lived, just as she must regret her liberty. The offence was so monstrous that the possibility of forgiving it did not cross her mind. She did not, however, ask herself whether the love that still remained was making the injury he had done it seem yet more atrocious. Love was still in a state of suspended animation—there was no telling what he might do when he came to life again. For the time being he was not to be taken into consideration at all. If she were to love him during the coming years, that would only make matters much worse.
There is not, perhaps, in the yet comparatively passionless nature of most young girls so great a capacity for real suffering as there is in older women. But there is something else instead. There is a sensitiveness which most women lose by degrees to a certain point, though never altogether, the sensitiveness of the very young animal when it is roughly exposed to the first storm of its first winter, if it has been born under the spring breezes and reared amongst the flowers of summer.
It will suffer much more acutely later,—lash and spur, or shears and knife, sharper than wind and snow,—but it will never be so sensitive again. It will never forget how the cruel cold bit its young skin, and got into its delicate throat, and made its slender limbs tremble like the tendrils of a creeper.
It was snowing again, but Katharine walked slowly, and went out of her way in her unformulated wish to lose time, and to put off the moment at which she must meet the familiar faces and hear the well-known voices at home. Until Griggs had broached the fatal subject at table, she had been taken out of herself at the Crowdies’. She must go back to herself now, and she hated the thought as she hated all her own existence. But the regions between Clinton Place and Fourth Avenue are not the part of New York in which it is best for a young girl to walk about alone. She did not like to be stared at by the loafers at the corners, nor to be treated with too much familiarity by the patronizing policeman who saw her over the Broadway crossing. Then, too, she remembered that she had given no notice of her absence from luncheon, and that her mother might perhaps be anxious about her. There was nothing for it but to take courage and go home. She only hoped that Charlotte might not be there.
But Charlotte had come, in the hope of enjoying herself as she had done on the previous day. Katharine ascertained the fact from the girl who let her in, and went straight to her room, sending word to her mother that she had lunched with the Crowdies and would come down presently. Even as she went up the stairs she felt a sharp pain at the thought that her mother and sister were probably at that very moment discussing John’s mishaps, and comparing notes about the stories they had heard—and perhaps reading more paragraphs from the papers. The shame of the horrible publicity of it all overcame her, and she locked her door, and tried the handle to be sure that it was fast—with a woman’s distrust of all mechanical contrivances when she wishes to be quite sure of a situation. It was instinctive, and she had no second thought which she tried to hide from herself.
As she took off her hat and coat she grew very pale, and the deep shadows came under her eyes—so dark that she wondered at them vaguely as she glanced at herself in the mirror. She felt faint and sick. She drank a little water, and then, with a sudden impulse, threw herself upon her bed, and lay staring at the ceiling, as she had lain at dawn. The same glare still came in from the street and penetrated every corner, but not so vividly as before, for the snow was falling fast, and the mist of the whirling flakes softened the light.
It was a forlorn little room. Robert the Rich would have been very much surprised if he could have seen it. He was a generous man, and was very fond of his grand-niece, and if he had known exactly how she lived under her father’s roof it would have been like him to have interfered. All that he ever saw of the house was very different. There was great simplicity downstairs, and his practised eye detected the signs of a rigid economy—far too rigid, he thought, when he calculated what Alexander Junior must be worth; a ridiculously exaggerated economy, he considered, when he thought of his own wealth, and that his only surviving brother lived in the house in Clinton Place. But there was nothing squalid or mean about it all. The meanness was relative. It was like an aspersion upon the solidity of Robert’s fortune, and upon his intention of providing suitably for all his relations.
Upstairs, however, and notably in Katharine’s room, things had a different aspect. Nothing had been done there since long before Charlotte had been married. The wall-paper was old-fashioned, faded, and badly damaged by generations of tacks and pins. The carpet was threadbare and patched, and there were holes where even a patch had not been attempted. The furniture was in the style of fifty years ago or more, veneered with dark mahogany, but the veneering was coming off in places, leaving bare little surfaces of dusty pine wood smeared with yellowish, hardened glue. Few objects can look more desperately shabby than veneered furniture which is coming to pieces. There was nothing in the room which Katharine could distinctly remember to have seen in good condition, except the old carpet, which had been put down when she and Charlotte had been little girls. To Charlotte herself, when she had come in on Wednesday afternoon, there had been something delightful in the renewal of acquaintance with all her old dinginess of intimate surroundings. Charlotte’s own life was almost oppressed with luxury, so that it destroyed her independence. But to Katharine, worn out and heartsore with the troubles of her darkening life, it was all inexpressibly depressing. She stared at the ceiling as she lay there, in order not to look at the room itself. She was very tired, too, and she would have given anything to go to sleep.
It was not merely sleep for which she longed. It was a going out. Again the thought crossed her mind, as it had that morning, that if the whole world were a single taper, she would extinguish the flame with one short breath, and everything would be over. And now, too, in her exhaustion, came the idea that something less complete, but quite as effectual, was in her power. It had passed through her brain half an hour previously, when she had bidden Hester Crowdie good-bye—with a sort of intuitive certainty that she was never to see her friend again. She had left Hester with a vague and sudden presentiment of darkness. She had assuredly not any intention of seeking death in any definite form, but it had seemed to be close to her as she had said those few words of farewell. It came nearer still as she lay alone in her own room. It came nearer, and hovered over her, and spoke to her.
It would be the instant solution of all difficulties, the end of all troubles. The deep calm against which no storm would have power any more. On the one hand, there was life in two aspects. Either to live an existence of misery and daily torture with the victim of a most degrading vice, a man openly disgraced, and at whom every one she respected would forever look askance. Or else to live out that other life of secret bondage, neither girl nor wife, so long as John Ralston was alive, suffering each time he was dragged lower, as she was suffering to-day, bound, tied in every way, beyond possibility of escaping. Why should she suffer less to-morrow than now? It would be the same, since all the conditions must remain unchanged. It would be the same always. Those were the two aspects of living on in the future which presented themselves. The torn carpet and the broken veneering of the furniture made them seem even more terrible. There may be a point at which the trivial has the power to push the tragic to the last extremity.
And on the other side stood death, the liberator, with his white smile and far-away eyes. The snow-glare was in his face, and he did not seem to feel it, but looked quietly into it, as though he saw something very peaceful beyond. It was a mere passing fancy that evoked the picture in the weary, restless mind, but it was pleasant to gaze at it, so long as it lasted. It was gone in a moment again, leaving, however, a new impression—that of light, rather than of darkness. She wished it would come back.
Possibly she had been almost or quite dozing, seeing that she was so much exhausted. But she was wide awake again now. She turned upon her side with a long-drawn sigh, and stared at the hideous furniture, the ragged carpet, and the dilapidated wall-paper. It was not that they meant anything of themselves—certainly not poverty, as they might have seemed to mean to any one else. They were the result of a curious combination of contradictory characters in one family, which ultimately produced stranger results than Katharine Lauderdale’s secret marriage, some of which shall be chronicled hereafter. The idea of poverty was not associated with the absence of money in Katharine’s mind. She might be in need of a pair of new gloves, and she and her mother might go to the opera upstairs, because the stalls were too dear. But poverty! How could it enter under the roof of any who bore the name of Lauderdale? If, yesterday, she had begged uncle Robert to give her half a million, instead of refusing a hundred thousand, it was quite within the bounds of possibility that he might have written the cheque there and then. No. The shabby furniture in Katharine’s room had nothing to do with poverty, nor with the absence of money, either. It was the fatal result of certain family peculiarities concerning which the public knew nothing, and it was there, and at that moment it had a strong effect upon Katharine’s mind. It represented the dilapidation of her life, the literal dilapidation, the tearing down of one stone after another from the crowning point she had reached yesterday to the deep foundation which was laid bare as an open tomb to-day. She dwelt on the idea now, and she stared at the forlorn objects, as she had at first avoided both.
Death has a strange fascination, sometimes, both for young and old people. Men and women in the prime and strength of life rarely fall under its influence. It is the refuge of those who, having seen little, believe that there is little to see, and of the others who, having seen all, have died of the sight, inwardly, and desire bodily death as the completion of experience. Let one, or both, be wrong or right; it matters little, since the facts are there. But the fascination aforesaid is stronger upon the young than upon the old. They have fewer ties, and less to keep them with the living. For the ascendant bond is weaker than the descendant in humanity, and the love of the child for its mother is not as her love for the child. It is right that it should be so. In spite of many proverbs, we know that what the child owes the parent is as nothing compared with the parent’s debt to it. Have we all found it so easy to live that we should cast stones upon heart-broken youths and maidens who would fain give back the life thrust upon them without their consent?