Frank and Lali did not meet until dinner was announced. The conversation at dinner was mainly upon the return to Greyhope, which was fixed for the following morning, and it was deftly kept gay and superficial by Marion and Richard and Captain Vidall, until General Armour became reminiscent, and held the interest of the table through a dozen little incidents of camp and barrack life until the ladies rose. There had been an engagement for late in the evening, but it had been given up because of Frank’s home-coming, and there was to be a family gathering merely—for Captain Vidall was now as much one of the family as Frank or Richard, by virtue of his approaching marriage with Marion. The men left alone, General Armour questioned Frank freely about life in the Hudson’s Bay country, and the conversation ran on idly till it was time to join the ladies.
When they reached the drawing-room, Marion was seated at the piano, playing a rhapsody of Raff’s, and Mrs. Armour and Lali were seated side by side. Frank thrilled at seeing his wife’s hand in his mother’s. Marion nodded over the piano at the men, and presently played a snatch of Carmen, then wandered off into the barbaric strength of Tannhauser, and as suddenly again into the ballet music of Faust.
“Why so wilful, my girl?” asked her father, who had a keen taste for music. “Why this tangle? Let us have something definite.”
Marion sprang up from the piano. “I can’t. I’m not definite myself to-night.” Then, turning to Lali: “Lali dear, sing something—do! Sing my favourite, ‘The Chase of the Yellow Swan.’”
This was a song which in the later days at Greyhope, Lali had sung for Marion, first in her own language, with the few notes of an Indian chant, and afterwards, by the help of the celebrated musician who had taught her both music and singing, both of which she had learned but slowly, it was translated and set to music. Lali looked Marion steadily in the eyes for a moment and then rose. It cost her something to do this thing, for while she had often talked much and long with Richard about that old life, it now seemed as if she were to sing it to one who would not quite understand why she should sing it at all, or what was her real attitude towards her past—that she looked upon it from the infinite distance of affectionate pity, knowledge, and indescribable change, and yet loved the inspiring atmosphere and mystery of that lonely North, which once in the veins never leaves it—never. Would he understand that she was feeling, not the common detail of the lodge and the camp-fire and the Company’s post, but the deep spirit of Nature, filtering through the senses in a thousand ways—the wild ducks’ flight, the sweet smell of the balsam, the exquisite gallop of the deer, the powder of the frost, the sun and snow and blue plains of water, the thrilling eternity of plain and the splendid steps of the hills, which led away by stair and entresol to the Kimash Hills, the Hills of the Mighty Men?
She did not know what he would think, and again on second thought she determined to make him, by this song, contrast her as she was when he married her, and now—how she herself could look upon that past unabashed, speak of it without blushing, sing of it with pride, having reached a point where she could look down and say: “This was the way by which I came.”
She rose, and was accompanied to the piano by General Armour, Frank admiring her soft, springing steps, her figure so girlish and lissom. She paused for a little before she began. Her eyes showed for a moment over the piano, deep, burning, in-looking; then they veiled; her fingers touched the keys, wandered over them in a few strange, soft chords, paused, wandered again, more firmly and very intimately, and then she sang. Her voice was a good contralto, well balanced, true, of no great range, but within its compass melodious, and having some inexpressible charm of temperament. Frank did not need to strain his ears to hear the words; every one came clear, searching, delicately valued:
Frank Armour listened as in a dream. The song had the wild swing of savage life, the deep sweetness of a monotone, but it had also the fine intelligence, the subtle allusiveness of romance. He could read between the lines. The allegory touched him where his nerves were sensitive. Where she had gone he could not go until his eyes had seen and known what hers had seen and known; he could not grasp his happiness all in a moment; she was no longer at his feet, but equal with him, and wiser than he. She had not meant the song to be allusive when she began, but to speak to him through it by singing the heathen song as his own sister might sing it. As the song went on, however, she felt the inherent suggestion in it, so that when she had finished it required all her strength to get up calmly, come among them again, and listen to their praises and thanks. She had no particular wish to be alone with Frank just yet, but the others soon arranged themselves so that the husband and wife were left in a cosey corner of the room.
Lali’s heart fluttered a little at first, for the day had been trying, and she was not as strong as she could wish. Admirably as she had gone through the season, it had worn on her, and her constitution had become sensitive and delicate, while yet strong. The life had almost refined her too much. Always on the watch that she should do exactly as Marion or Mrs. Armour, always so sensitive as to what was required of her, always preparing for this very time, now that it had come, and her heart and mind were strong, her body seemed to weaken. Once or twice during the day she had felt a little faint, but it had passed off, and she had scolded herself. She did not wish a serious talk with her husband to-night, but she saw now that it was inevitable.
He said to her as he sat down beside her: “You sing very well indeed. The song is full of meaning, and you bring it all out.”
“I am glad you like it,” she responded conventionally. “Of course it’s an unusual song for an English drawing-room.”
“As you sing it, it would be beautiful and acceptable anywhere, Lali.”
“Thank you again,” she answered, closing and unclosing her fan, her eyes wandering to where Mrs. Armour was. She wished she could escape, for she did not feel like talking, and yet though the man was her husband she could not say that she was too tired to talk; she must be polite. Then, with a little dainty malice: “It is more interesting, though, in the vernacular—and costume!”
“Not unless you sang it so,” he answered gallantly, and with a kind of earnestness.
“You have not forgotten the way of London men,” she rejoined.
“Perhaps that is well, for I do not know the way of women,” he said, with a faint bitterness. “Yet, I don’t speak unadvisedly in this,”—here he meant to be a little bold and bring the talk to the past,—“for I heard you sing that song once before.”
She turned on him half puzzled, a little nervous. “Where did you hear me sing it?”
He had made up his mind, wisely enough, to speak with much openness and some tact also, if possible. “It was on the Glow Worm River at the Clip Claw Hills. I came into your father’s camp one evening in the autumn, hungry and tired and knocked about. I was given the next tent to yours. It was night, and just before I turned in I heard your voice singing. I couldn’t understand much of the language, but I had the sense of it, and I know it when I hear it again.”
“Yes, I remember singing it that night,” she said. “Next day was the Feast of the Yellow Swan.”
Her eyes presently became dreamy, and her face took on a distant, rapt look. She sat looking straight before her for a moment.
He did not speak, for he interpreted the look aright, and he was going to be patient, to wait.
“Tell me of my father,” she said. “You have been kind to him?”
He winced a little. “When I left Fort Charles he was very well,” he said, “and he asked me to tell you to come some day. He also has sent you a half-dozen silver-fox skins, a sash, and moccasins made by his own hands. The things are not yet unpacked.”
Moccasins?—She remembered when last she had moccasins on her feet—the day she rode the horse at the quick-set hedge, and nearly lost her life. How very distant that all was, and yet how near too! Suddenly she remembered also why she took that mad ride, and her heart hardened a little.
“You have been kind to my father since I left?” she asked.
He met her eyes steadily. “No, not always; not more than I have been kind to you. But at the last, yes.” Suddenly his voice became intensely direct and honest. “Lali,” he continued, “there is much that I want to say to you.” She waved her hand in a wearied fashion. “I want to tell you that I would do the hardest penance if I could wipe out these last four years.”
“Penance?” she said dreamily—“penance? What guarantee of happiness would that be? One would not wish another to do penance if—”
She paused.
“I understand,” he said—“if one cared—if one loved. Yes, I understand. But that does not alter the force or meaning of the wish. I swear to you that I repent with all my heart—the first wrong to you, the long absence—the neglect—everything.”
She turned slowly to him. “Everything-Everything?” she repeated after him. “Do you understand what that means? Do you know a woman’s heart? No. Do you know what a shameful neglect is at the most pitiful time in your life? No. How can a man know! He has a thousand things—the woman has nothing, nothing at all except the refuge of home, that for which she gave up everything!”
Presently she broke off, and something sprang up and caught her in the throat. Years of indignation were at work in her. “I have had a home,” she said, in a low, thrilling voice—“a good home; but what did that cost you? Not one honest sentiment of pity, kindness, or solicitude. You clothed me, fed me, abandoned me, as—how can one say it? Do I not know, if coming back you had found me as you expected to find me, what the result would have been? Do I not know? You would have endured me if I did not thrust myself upon you, for you have after all a sense of legal duty, a kind of stubborn honour. But you would have made my life such that some day one or both of us would have died suddenly. For”—she looked him with a hot clearness in the eyes—“for there is just so much that a woman can bear. I wish this talk had not come now, but, since it has come, it is better to speak plainly. You see, you misunderstand. A heathen has a heart as another—has a life to be spoiled or made happy as another. Had there been one honest passion in your treatment of me—in your marrying me—there would be something on which to base mutual respect, which is more or less necessary when one is expected to love. But—but I will not speak more of it, for it chokes me, the insult to me, not as I was, but as I am. Then it would probably have driven me mad, if I had known; now it eats into my life like rust.”
He made a motion as if to take her hands, but lifting them away quietly she said: “You forget that there are others present, as well as the fact that we can talk better without demonstration.”
He was about to speak, but she stopped him. “No, wait,” she said; “for I want to say a little more. I was only an Indian girl, but you must remember that I had also in my veins good white blood, Scotch blood. Perhaps it was that which drew me to you then—for Lali the Indian girl loved you. Life had been to me pleasant enough—without care, without misery, open, strong and free; our people were not as those others which had learned the white man’s vices. We loved the hunt, the camp-fires, the sacred feasts, the legends of the Mighty Men; and the earth was a good friend, whom we knew as the child knows its mother.”
She paused. Something seemed to arrest her attention. Frank followed her eyes. She was watching Captain Vidall and Marion. He guessed what she was thinking—how different her own wooing had been from theirs, how concerning her courtship she had not one sweet memory—the thing that keeps alive more love and loyalty in this world than anything else. Presently General Armour joined them, and Frank’s opportunity was over for the present.
Captain Vidall and Marion were engaged in a very earnest conversation, though it might not appear so to observers.
“Come, now, Marion,” he said protestingly, “don’t be impossible. Please give the day a name. Don’t you think we’ve waited about long enough?”
“There was a man in the Bible who served seven years.”
“I’ve served over three in India since I met you at the well, and that counts double. Why so particular to a day? It’s a bit Jewish. Anyhow, that seven years was rough on Rachel.”
“How, Hume? Because she got passee?”
“Well, that counted; but do you suppose that Jew was going to put in those seven years without interest? Don’t you believe it. Rachel paid capital and interest back, or Jacob was no Jew. Tell me, Marion, when shall it be?”
“Hume, for a man who has trifled away years in India, you are strangely impatient.”
“Mrs. Lambert says that I have the sweetest disposition.”
“My dear sir!”
“Don’t look at me like that at this distance, or I shall have to wear goggles, as the man did who went courting the Sun.”
“How supremely ridiculous you are! And I thought you such a sensible, serious man.”
“Mrs. Lambert put that in your head. We used to meet at the annual dinners of the Bible Society.”
“Why do you tell me such stuff?”
“It’s a fact. Her father and my aunt were in that swim, and we were sympathisers.”
“Mercenary people!”
“It worked very well in her case; not so well in mine. But we conceived a profound respect for each other then. But tell me, Marion, when is it to be? Why put off the inevitable?”
“It isn’t inevitable—and I’m only twenty-three.”
he responded, laughing. “Yes, but you’ve set the precedent for a courtship of four years and a bit, and what man could face it?”
“You did.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t advertised of the fact beforehand. Suppose I had seen the notice at the start: ‘This mortgage cannot be raised inside of four years—and a bit!’ There’s a limit to human endurance.”
“Why shouldn’t I hold to the number, but alter the years to days?”
“You wouldn’t dare. A woman must live up to her reputation.”
“Indeed? What an ambition!”
“And a man to his manners.”
“An unknown quantity.”
“And a lover to his promises.”
“A book of jokes.” Marion had developed a taste for satire.
“Which reminds me of Lady Halwood and Mrs. Lambert. Lady Halwood was more impertinent than usual the other day at the Sinclairs’ show, and had a little fling at Mrs. Lambert. The talk turned on gowns. Lady Halwood was much interested at once. She has a weakness that way. ‘Why,’ said she, ‘I like these fashions this year, but I’m not sure that they suit me. They’re the same as when the Queen came to the throne.’ ‘Well,’ said Mrs. Lambert sweetly, ‘if they suited you then—’ There was an audible titter, and Mrs. Lambert had an enemy for life.”
“I don’t see the point of your story in this connection.”
“No? Well, it was merely to suggest that if you had to live up to this scheme of four-years’ probation, other people besides lovers would make up books of jokes, and—”
“That’s like a man—to threaten.”
“Yes, I threaten—on my knees.”
“Hume, how long do you think Frank will have to wait?”
They were sitting where they had a good view of the husband and wife, and Vidall, after a moment, said: “I don’t know. She has waited four years, too; now it looks as if, like Jacob, she was going to gather in her shekels of interest compounded.”
“It isn’t going to be a bit pleasant to watch.”
“But you won’t be here to see.”
Marion ignored the suggestion. “She seems to have hardened since he came yesterday. I hardly know her; and yet she looks awfully worn to-night, don’t you think?”
“Yes, as if she had to keep a hand on herself. But it’ll come out all right in the end, you’ll see.”
“Yes, of course; but she might be sensible and fall in love with Frank at once. That’s what she did when—”
“When she didn’t know man.”
“Yes, but where would you all be if we women acted on what we know of you?”
“On our knees chiefly, as I am. Remember this, Marion, that half a sinner is better than no man.”
“You mean that no man is better than half a saint?”
“How you must admire me!”
“Why?”
“As you are about to name the day, I assume that I’m a whole saint in your eyes.”
“St. Augustine!”
“Who was he?”
“A man that reformed.”
“Before or after marriage?”
“Before, I suppose.”
“I don’t think he died happy.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve a faint recollection that he was boiled.”
“Don’t be horrid. What has that to do with it?”
“Nothing, perhaps. But he probably broke out again after marriage, and sank at last into that caldron. That’s what it means by being-steeped in crime.”
“How utterly nonsensical you are!”
“I feel light-headed. You’ve been at sea, on a yacht becalmed, haven’t you? when along comes a groundswell, and as you rock in the sun there comes trouble, and your head goes round like a top? Now, that’s my case. I’ve been becalmed four years, and while I pray for a little wind to take me—home, you rock me in the trough of uncertainty. Suspense is very gall and wormwood. You know what the jailer said to the criminal who was hanging on a reprieve: ‘Rope deferred maketh the heart sick.’ Marion, give me the hour, or give me the rope.”
“The rope enough to hang yourself?”
She suddenly reached up and pulled a hair from her head. She laid it in his hand-a long brown silken thread. “Hume,” she said airily yet gently, “there is the rope. Can you love me for a month of Sundays?”
“Yes, for ever and a day!”
“I will cancel the day, and take your bond for the rest. I will be generous. I will marry you in two months-and a day.”
“My dearest girl!”—he drew her hand into both of his—“I can’t have you more generous than myself, I’ll throw off the month.” But his eyes were shining very seriously, though his mouth smiled.
“Two months and a day,” she repeated.
“We must all bundle off to Greyhope to-morrow,” came General Armour’s voice across the room. “Down comes the baby, cradle and all.”
Lali rose. “I am very tired,” she said; “I think I will say good-night.”
“I’ll go and see the boy with you,” Frank said, rising also.
Lali turned towards Marion. Marion’s face was flushed, and had a sweet, happy confusion. With a low, trembling good-night to Captain Vidall, a hurried kiss on her mother’s cheek, and a tip-toed caress on her father’s head, she ran and linked her arm in Lali’s, and together they proceeded to the child’s room. Richard was there when they arrived, mending a broken toy. Two hours later, the brothers parted at Frank’s door.
“Reaping the whirlwind, Dick?” Frank said, dropping his hand on his brother’s arm.
Richard pointed to the child’s room.
“Nonsense! Do you want all the world at once? You are reaping the forgiveness of your sins.” Somehow Richard’s voice was a little stern.
“I was thinking of my devilry, Dick. That’s the whirlwind—here!” His hand dropped on his breast.
“That’s where it ought to be. Good-night.”
“Good-night.”
Part of Frank’s most trying interview, next to the meeting with his wife, was that with Mackenzie, who had been his special commissioner in the movement of his masquerade. Mackenzie also had learned a great deal since she had brought Lali—home. She, like others, had come to care truly for the sweet barbarian, and served her with a grim kind of reverence. Just in proportion as this had increased, her respect for Frank had decreased. No man can keep a front of dignity in the face of an unbecoming action. However, Mackenzie had her moment, and when it was over, the new life began at no general disadvantage to Frank. To all save the immediate family Frank and Lali were a companionable husband and wife. She rode with him, occasionally walked with him, now and again sang to him, and they appeared in the streets of St. Albans and at the Abbey together, and oftener still in the village church near, where the Armours of many generations were proclaimed of much account in the solid virtues of tomb and tablet.
The day had gone by when Lali attracted any especial notice among the villagers, and she enjoyed the quiet beauty and earnestness of the service. But she received a shock one Sunday. She had been nervous all the week, she could not tell why, and others remarked how her face had taken on a new sensitiveness, a delicate anxiety, and that her strength was not what it had been. As, for instance, after riding she required to rest, a thing before unknown, and she often lay down for an hour before dinner. Then, too, at table once she grew suddenly pale and swayed against Edward Lambert, who was sitting next to her. She would not, however, leave the table, but sat the dinner out, to Frank’s apprehension. He was devoted, but it was clear to Marion and her mother at least that his attentions were trying to her. They seemed to put her under an obligation which to meet was a trial. There is nothing more wearing to a woman than affectionate attentions from a man who has claims upon her, but whom she does not love. These same attentions from one who has no claims give her a thrill of pleasure. It is useless to ask for justice in such a matter. These things are governed by no law; and rightly so, else the world would be in good time a loveless multitude, held together only by the hungering ties of parent and child.
But this Sunday wherein Lali received a shock. She did not know that the banns for Marion’s and Captain Vidall’s marriage were to be announced, and at the time her thoughts were far away. She was recalled to herself by the clergyman’s voice pronouncing their names, and saying: “If any of you do know cause or just impediment why these two people should not be joined together in the bonds of holy matrimony, ye are to declare it.” All at once there came back to her her own marriage when the Protestant missionary, in his nasal monotone, mumbled these very words, not as if he expected that any human being would, or could, offer objection.
She almost sprang from her seat now. Her nerves all at once came to such a tension that she could have cried out. Why had there been no one there at her marriage to say: “I forbid it”? How shameful it had all been! And the first kiss her husband had given her had the flavour of brandy! If she could but turn back the hands upon the clock of Time! Under the influence of the music and the excited condition of her nerves, the event became magnified, distorted; it burned into her brain. It was not made less poignant by the sermon from the text: “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.” When the words were first announced in the original, it sounded like her own language, save that it was softer, and her heart throbbed fast. Then came the interpretation: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”
Then suddenly swept over her a new feeling, one she had never felt before. Up to this point a determination to justify her child, to reverse the verdict of the world, to turn her husband’s sin upon himself, had made her defiant, even bitter; in all things eager to live up to her new life, to the standard that Richard had by manner and suggestion, rather than by words, laid down for her. But now there came in upon her a flood of despair. At best she was only of this race through one-third of her parentage, and education and refinement and all things could do no more than make her possible. There must always be in the record: “She was of a strange people. She was born in a wigwam.” She did not know that failing health was really the cause of this lapse of self-confidence, this growing self-depreciation, this languor for which she could not account. She found that she could not toss the child and frolic with it as she had done; she was conscious that within a month there had stolen upon her the desire to be much alone, to avoid noises and bustle—it irritated her. She found herself thinking more and more of her father, her father to whom she had never written one line since she had left the North. She had had good reasons for not writing—writing could do no good whatever, particularly to a man who could not read, and who would not have understood her new life if he had read. Yet now she seemed not to know why she had not written, and to blame herself for neglect and forgetfulness. It weighed on her. Why had she ever been taken from the place of tamarack-trees and the sweeping prairie grass? No, no, she was not, after all, fit for this life. She had been mistaken, and Richard had been mistaken—Richard, who was so wise. The London season? Ah! that was because people had found a novelty, and herself of better manners than had been expected.
The house was now full of preparations for the wedding. It stared her in the face every day, almost every hour. Dressmakers, milliners, tailors, and all those other necessary people. Did the others think what all this meant to her? It was impossible that they should. When Marion came back from town at night and told of her trials among the dressmakers, when she asked the general opinion and sometimes individual judgment, she could not know that it was at the expense of Lali’s nerves.
Lali, when she married, had changed her moccasins, combed her hair, and put on a fine red belt, and that was all. She was not envious now, not at all. But somehow it all was a deadly kind of evidence against herself and her marriage. Her reproach was public, the world knew it, and no woman can forgive a public shame, even was it brought about by a man she loved, or loves. Her chiefest property in life is her self-esteem and her name before the world. Rob her of these, and her heaven has fallen, and if a man has shifted the foundations of her peace, there is no forgiveness for him till her Paradise has been reconquered. So busy were all the others that they did not see how her strength was failing. There were three weeks between the day the banns were announced and the day of the wedding, which was to be in the village church, not in town; for, as Marion said, she had seen too many marriages for one day’s triumph and criticism; she wanted hers where there would be neither triumph nor criticism, but among people who had known her from her childhood up. A happy romance had raised Marion’s point of view.
Meanwhile Frank was winning the confidence of his own child, who, however, ranked Richard higher always, and became to a degree his father’s tyrant. But Frank’s nature was undergoing a change. His point of view also had enlarged. The suffering, bitterness, and humiliation of his life in the North had done him good. He was being disciplined to take his position as a husband and father, but he sometimes grew heavy-hearted when he saw how his attentions oppressed his wife, and had it not been for Richard he might probably have brought on disaster, for the position was trying to all concerned. A few days before the wedding Edward Lambert and his wife arrived, and he, Captain Vidall, and Frank Armour took rides and walks together, or set the world right in the billiard-room. Richard seldom joined them, though their efforts to induce him to do so were many. He had his pensioners, his books, his pipe, and “the boy,” and he had returned in all respects, in so far as could be seen, to his old life, save for the new and larger interest of his nephew.
One evening the three men with General Armour were all gathered in the billiard-room. Conversation had been general and without particular force, as it always is when merely civic or political matters are under view. But some one gave a social twist to the talk, and presently they were launched upon that sea where every man provides his own chart, or he is a very worm and no man. Each man had been differently trained, each viewed life from a different stand-point, and yet each had been brought up in the same social atmosphere, in the same social sets, had imbibed the same traditions, been moved generally by the same public considerations.
“But there’s little to be said for a man who doesn’t, outwardly at least, live up to the social necessity,” said Lambert.
“And keep the Ten Commandments in the vulgar tongue,” rejoined Vidall.
“I’ve lived seventy-odd years, and I’ve knocked about a good deal in my time,” said the general, “but I’ve never found that you could make a breach of social necessity, as you call it, without paying for it one way or another. The trouble with us when we’re young is that we want to get more out of life than there really is in it. There is not much in it, after all. You can stand just so much fighting, just so much work, just so much emotion—and you can stand less emotion than anything else. I’m sure more men and women break up from a hydrostatic pressure of emotion than from anything else. Upon my soul, that’s so.”
“You are right, General,” said Lambert. “The steady way is the best way. The world is a passable place, if a fellow has a decent income by inheritance, or can earn a big one, but to be really contented to earn money it must be a big one, otherwise he is far better pleased to take the small inherited income. It has a lot of dignity, which the other can only bring when it is large.”
“That’s only true in this country; it’s not true in America,” said Frank, “for there the man who doesn’t earn money is looked upon as a muff, and is treated as such. A small inherited income is thought to be a trifle enervating. But there is a country of emotions, if you like. The American heart is worn upon the American sleeve, and the American mind is the most active thing in this world. That’s why they grow old so young.”
“I met a woman a year or so ago at dinner,” said Vidall, “who looked forty. She looked it, and she acted it. She was younger than any woman present, but she seemed older. There was a kind of hopeless languor about her which struck me as pathetic. Yet she had been beautiful, and might even have been so when I saw her, if it hadn’t been for that look. It was the look of a person who had no interest in things. And the person who has no interest in things is the person who once had a great deal of interest in things, who had too passionate an interest. The revulsion is always terrible. Too much romance is deadly. It is as false a stimulant as opium or alcohol, and leaves a corresponding mark. Well, I heard her history. She was married at fifteen—ran away to be married; and in spite of the fact that a railway accident nearly took her husband from her on the night of her marriage—one would have thought that would make a strong bond—she was soon alive to the attentions that are given a pretty and—considerate woman. At a ball at Naples, her husband, having in vain tried to induce her to go home, picked her up under his arm and carried her out of the ballroom. Then came a couple of years of opium-eating, fierce social excitement, divorce, new marriage, and so on, until her husband agreeably decided to live in Nice, while she lived somewhere else. Four days after I had met her at the dinner I saw her again. I could scarcely believe my eyes. The woman had changed completely. She was young again-twenty-five, in face and carriage, in the eye and hand, in step and voice.”
“Who was the man?” suggested Frank Armour. “A man about her own age, or a little more, but who was an infant beside her in knowledge of the world.” “She was in love with the fellow? It was a grande passion?” asked Lambert.
“In love with him? No, not at all. It was a momentary revival of an old-possibility.”
“You mean that such women never really love?”
“Perhaps once, Frank, but only after a fashion. The rest was mere imitation of their first impulses.”
“And this woman?”
“Well, the end came sooner than I expected. I tell you I was shocked at the look in her face when I saw it again. That light had flickered out; the sensitive alertness of hand, eye, voice, and carriage had died away; lines had settled in the face, and the face itself had gone cold, with that hard, cold passiveness which comes from exhausted emotions and a closed heart. The jewels she wore might have been put upon a statue with equal effect.”
“It seems to me that we might pitch into men in these things and not make women the dreadful examples,” said a voice from the corner. It was the voice of Richard, who had but just entered.
“My dear Dick,” said his father, “men don’t make such frightful examples, because these things mean less to men than they do to women. Romance is an incident to a man; he can even come through an affaire with no ideals gone, with his mental fineness unimpaired; but it is different with a woman. She has more emotion than mind, else there were no cradles in the land. Her standards are set by the rules of the heart, and when she has broken these rules she has lost her standard too. But to come back, it is true, I think, as I said, that man or woman must not expect too much out of life, but be satisfied with what they can get within the normal courses of society and convention and home, and the end thereof is peace—yes, upon my soul, it’s peace.”
There was something very fine in the blunt, honest words of the old man, whose name had ever been sweet with honour.
“And the chief thing is that a man live up to his own standard,” said Lambert. “Isn’t that so, Dick?—you’re the wise man.”
“Every man should have laws of his own, I should think; commandments of his own, for every man has a different set of circumstances wherein to work—or worry.”
“The wisest man I ever knew,” said Frank, dropping his cigar, “was a little French-Canadian trapper up in the Saskatchewan country. A priest asked him one day what was the best thing in life, and he answered: ‘For a young man’s mind to be old, and an old man’s heart to be young.’ The priest asked him how that could be. And he said: ‘Good food, a good woman to teach him when he is young, and a child to teach him when he is old.’ Then the priest said: ‘What about the Church and the love of God?’ The little man thought a little, and then said: ‘Well, it is the same—the love of man and woman came first in the world, then the child, then God in the garden.’ Afterwards he made a little speech of good-bye to us, for we were going to the south while he remained in a fork of the Far Off River. It was like some ancient blessing: that we should always have a safe tent and no sorrow as we travelled; that we should always have a cache for our food, and food for our cache; that we should never find a tree that would not give sap, nor a field that would not grow grain; that our bees should not freeze in winter, and that the honey should be thick, and the comb break like snow in the teeth; that we keep hearts like the morning, and that we come slow to the Four Corners where man says Good-night.”
Each of the other men present wondered at that instant if Frank Armour would, or could, have said this with the same feelings two months before. He seemed almost transformed.
“It reminds me,” said the general, “of an inscription from an Egyptian monument which an officer of the First put into English verse for me years ago:
There was a moment’s silence after he had finished, and then there was noise without, a sound of pattering feet; the door flew open, and in ran a little figure in white—young Richard in his bed-gown, who had broken away from his nurse, and had made his way to the billiard-room, where he knew his uncle had gone.
The child’s face was flashing with mischief and adventure. He ran in among the group, and stretched out his hands with a little fighting air. His uncle Richard made a step towards him, but he ran back; his father made as if to take him in his arms, but he evaded him. Presently the door opened, the nurse entered, the child sprang from among the group, and ran with a laughing defiance to the farthest end of the room, and, leaning his chin on the billiard-table, flashed a look of defiant humour at his pursuer. Presently the door opened again, and the figure of the mother appeared. All at once the child’s face altered; he stood perfectly still, and waited for his mother to come to him. Lali had not spoken, and she did not speak until, lifting the child, she came the length of the billiard-table and faced them.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, “for intruding; but Richard has led us a dance, and I suppose the mother may go where her child goes.”
“The mother and the child are always welcome wherever they go,” said General Armour quietly.
All the men had risen to their feet, and they made a kind of semicircle before her. The white-robed child had clasped its arms about her neck, and nestled its face against hers, as if, with perfect satisfaction, it had got to the end of its adventure; but the look of humour was still in the eyes as they ran from Richard to his father and back again.
Frank Armour stepped forwards and took the child’s hand, as it rested on the mother’s shoulder. Lali’s face underwent a slight change as her husband’s fingers touched her neck.
“I must go,” she said. “I hope I have not broken up a serious conversation—or were you not so serious after all?” she said, glancing archly at General Armour. “We were talking of women,” said Lambert.
“The subject is wide,” replied Lali, “and the speakers many. One would think some wisdom might be got in such a case.”
“Believe me, we were not trying to understand the subject,” said Captain Vidall; “the most that a mere man can do is to appreciate it.”
“There are some things that are hidden from the struggling mind of man, and are revealed unto babes and the mothers of babes,” said General Armour gravely, as, reaching out his hands, he took the child from the mother’s arms, kissed it full upon the lips, and added: “Men do not understand women, because men’s minds have not been trained in the same school. When once a man has mastered the very alphabet of motherhood, then he shall have mastered the mind of woman; but I, at least, refuse to say that I do not understand, from the stand-point of modern cynicism.”
“Ah, General, General!” said Lambert, “we have lost the chivalric way of saying things, which belongs to your generation.”
By this time the wife had reached the door. She turned and held out her arms for the child. General Armour came and placed the boy where he had found it, and, with eyes suddenly filling, laid both his hands upon Lali’s and they clasped the child, and said: “It is worth while to have lived so long and to have seen so much.” Her eyes met his in a wistful, anxious expression, shifted to those of her husband, dropped to the cheeks of the child, and with the whispered word, which no one, not even the general, heard, she passed from the room, the nurse following her.
Perhaps some of the most striking contrasts are achieved in the least melodramatic way. The sudden incursion of the child and its mother into the group, the effect of their presence, and their soft departure, leaving behind them, as it were, a trail of light, changed the whole atmosphere of the room, as though some new life had been breathed into it, charged each mind with new sensations, and gave each figure new attitude. Not a man present but had had his full swing with the world, none worse than most men, none better than most, save that each had latent in him a good sense of honour concerning all civic and domestic virtues. They were not men of sentimentality; they were not accustomed to exposing their hearts upon their sleeve, but each, as the door closed, recognised that something for one instant had come in among them, had made their past conversation to appear meagre, crude, and lacking in both height and depth. Somehow, they seemed to feel, although no words expressed the thought, that for an instant they were in the presence of a wisdom greater than any wisdom of a man’s smoking-room.
“It is wonderful, wonderful,” said the general slowly, and no man asked him why he said it, or what was wonderful. But Richard, sitting apart, watched Frank’s face acutely, himself wondering when the hour would come that the wife would forgive her husband, and this situation so fraught with danger would be relieved.