The Novelist Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 - August 11, 1937) was born Edith Newbold Jones. The Joneses were a wealthy New York family often associated with the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses."
Wharton was the first woman to with the Pulitzer Prize for literature, taking that honor in 1921 for THE AGE OF INNOCENCE..
Her 1911 novel , ETHAN FROME, has become a staple of American Literature and is widely studied in classrooms around the world
A Venetian Night's Entertainment
This is the story that, in the dining-room of the old Beacon Street house (now the Aldebaran Club), Judge Anthony Bracknell, of the famous East India firm of Bracknell & Saulsbee, when the ladies had withdrawn to the oval parlour (and Maria's harp was throwing its gauzy web of sound across the Common), used to relate to his grandsons, about the year that Buonaparte marched upon Moscow.
I
"Him Venice!" said the Lascar with the big earrings; and Tony Bracknell,
leaning on the high gunwale of his father's East Indiaman, the Hepzibah
B., saw far off, across the morning sea, a faint vision of towers and
domes dissolved in golden air.
It was a rare February day of the year 1760, and a young Tony,
newly of age, and bound on the grand tour aboard the crack merchantman
of old Bracknell's fleet, felt his heart leap up as the distant city
trembled into shape. Venice! The name, since childhood, had been a
magician's wand to him. In the hall of the old Bracknell house at Salem
there hung a series of yellowing prints which Uncle Richard Saulsbee had
brought home from one of his long voyages: views of heathen mosques and
palaces, of the Grand Turk's Seraglio, of St. Peter's Church in Rome;
and, in a corner -- the corner nearest the rack where the old flintlocks
hung -- a busy merry populous scene, entitled: ST. MARK'S SQUARE IN
VENICE. This picture, from the first, had singularly taken little Tony's
fancy. His unformulated criticism on the others was that they lacked
action.
True, in the view of St. Peter's an experienced-looking
gentleman in a full-bottomed wig was pointing out the fairly obvious
monument to a bashful companion, who had presumably not ventured to
raise his eyes to it; while, at the doors of the Seraglio, a group of
turbaned infidels observed with less hesitancy the approach of a veiled
lady on a camel. But in Venice so many things were happening at once --
more, Tony was sure, than had ever happened in Boston in a twelve-month
or in Salem in a long lifetime. For here, by their garb, were people of
every nation on earth, Chinamen, Turks, Spaniards, and many more, mixed
with a parti-coloured throng of gentry, lacqueys, chapmen, hucksters,
and tall personages in parsons' gowns who stalked through the crowd with
an air of mastery, a string of parasites at their heels. And all these
people seemed to be diverting themselves hugely, chaffering with the
hucksters, watching the antics of trained dogs and monkeys, distributing
doles to maimed beggars or having their pockets picked by
slippery-looking fellows in black -- the whole with such an air of ease
and good-humour that one felt the cut-purses to be as much a part of the
show as the tumbling acrobats and animals.
As Tony advanced in years and experience this childish mumming lost
its magic; but not so the early imaginings it had excited. For the old
picture had been but the spring-board of fancy, the first step of a
cloud-ladder leading to a land of dreams. With these dreams the name of
Venice remained associated; and all that observation or report
subsequently brought him concerning the place seemed, on a sober
warranty of fact, to confirm its claim to stand midway between reality
and illusion. There was, for instance, a slender Venice glass,
gold-powdered as with lilypollen or the dust of sunbeams, that, standing
in the corner cabinet betwixt two Lowestoft caddies, seemed, among its
lifeless neighbours, to palpitate like an impaled butterfly. There was,
farther, a gold chain of his mother's, spun of that same sunpollen, so
thread-like, impalpable, that it slipped through the fingers like light,
yet so strong that it carried a heavy pendant which seemed held in air
as if by magic. Magic! That was the word which the thought of Venice
evoked. It was the kind of place, Tony felt, in which things elsewhere
impossible might naturally happen, in which two and two might make five,
a paradox elope with a syllogism, and a conclusion give the lie to its
own premiss. Was there ever a young heart that did not, once and again,
long to get away into such a world as that? Tony, at least, had felt the
longing from the first hour when the axioms in his horn-book had brought
home to him his heavy responsibilities as a Christian and a sinner. And
now here was his wish taking shape before him, as the distant haze of
gold shaped itself into towers and domes across the morning sea!
The Reverend Ozias Mounce, Tony's governor and bear-leader, was
just putting a hand to the third clause of the fourth part of a sermon
on Free-Will and Predestination as the Hepzibah B.'s anchor rattled
overboard. Tony, in his haste to be ashore, would have made one plunge
with the anchor; but the Reverend Ozias, on being roused from his
lucubrations, earnestly protested against leaving his argument in
suspense. What was the trifle of an arrival at some Papistical foreign
city, where the very churches wore turbans like so many Moslem
idolators, to the important fact of Mr. Mounce's summing up his
conclusions before the Muse of Theology took flight? He should be happy,
he said, if the tide served, to visit Venice with Mr. Bracknell the next
morning.
The next morning, ha! -- Tony murmured a submissive "Yes, sir,"
winked at the subjugated captain, buckled on his sword, pressed his hat
down with a flourish, and before the Reverend Ozias had arrived at his
next deduction, was skimming merrily shoreward in the Hepzibah's gig.
A moment more and he was in the thick of it! Here was the very
world of the old print, only suffused with sunlight and colour, and
bubbling with merry noises. What a scene it was! A square enclosed in
fantastic painted buildings, and peopled with a throng as fantastic: a
bawling, laughing, jostling, sweating mob, parti-coloured,
parti-speeched, crackling and sputtering under the hot sun like a dish
of fritters over a kitchen fire. Tony, agape, shouldered his way through
the press, aware at once that, spite of the tumult, the shrillness, the
gesticulation, there was no undercurrent of clownishness, no tendency to
horse-play, as in such crowds on market-day at home, but a kind of
facetious suavity which seemed to include everybody in the circumference
of one huge joke. In such an air the sense of strangeness soon wore off,
and Tony was beginning to feel himself vastly at home, when a lift of
the tide bore him against a droll-looking bell-ringing fellow who
carried above his head a tall metal tree hung with sherbet-glasses.
The encounter set the glasses spinning and three or four spun off
and clattered to the stones. The sherbet-seller called on all the
saints, and Tony, clapping a lordly hand to his pocket, tossed him a
ducat by mistake for a sequin. The fellow's eyes shot out of their
orbits, and just then a personable-looking young man who had observed
the transaction stepped up to Tony and said pleasantly, in English:
"I perceive, sir, that you are not familiar with our currency."
"Does he want more?" says Tony, very lordly; whereat the other
laughed and replied: "You have given him enough to retire from his
business and open a gaming-house over the arcade."
Tony joined in the laugh, and this incident bridging the
preliminaries, the two young men were presently hobnobbing over a glass
of Canary in front of one of the coffee-houses about the square. Tony
counted himself lucky to have run across an English-speaking companion
who was good-natured enough to give him a clue to the labyrinth; and
when he had paid for the Canary (in the coin his friend selected) they
set out again to view the town. The Italian gentleman, who called
himself Count Rialto, appeared to have a very numerous acquaintance, and
was able to point out to Tony all the chief dignitaries of the state,
the men of ton and ladies of fashion, as well as a number of other
characters of a kind not openly mentioned in taking a census of Salem.
Tony, who was not averse from reading when nothing better offered,
had perused the "Merchant of Venice" and Mr. Otway's fine tragedy; but
though these pieces had given him a notion that the social usages of
Venice differed from those at home, he was unprepared for the surprising
appearance and manners of the great people his friend named to him. The
gravest Senators of the Republic went in prodigious striped trousers,
short cloaks and feathered hats. One nobleman wore a ruff and doctor's
gown, another a black velvet tunic slashed with rose-colour; while the
President of the dreaded Council of Ten was a terrible strutting fellow
with a rapier-like nose, a buff leather jerkin and a trailing scarlet
cloak that the crowd was careful not to step on.
It was all vastly diverting, and Tony would gladly have gone on
forever; but he had given his word to the captain to be at the
landing-place at sunset, and here was dusk already creeping over the
skies! Tony was a man of honour; and having pressed on the Count a
handsome damascened dagger selected from one of the goldsmiths' shops in
a narrow street lined with such wares, he insisted on turning his face
toward the Hepzibah's gig. The Count yielded reluctantly; but as they
came out again on the square they were caught in a great throng pouring
toward the doors of the cathedral.
"They go to Benediction," said the Count. "A beautiful sight, with
many lights and flowers. It is a pity you cannot take a peep at it."
Tony thought so too, and in another minute a legless beggar had
pulled back the leathern flap of the cathedral door, and they stood in a
haze of gold and perfume that seemed to rise and fall on the mighty
undulations of the organ. Here the press was as thick as without; and as
Tony flattened himself against a pillar, he heard a pretty voice at his
elbow:
--"Oh, sir, oh, sir, your sword!"
He turned at sound of the broken English, and saw a girl who
matched the voice trying to disengage her dress from the tip of his
scabbard. She wore one of the voluminous black hoods which the Venetian
ladies affected, and under its projecting eaves her face spied out at
him as sweet as a nesting bird.
In the dusk their hands met over the scabbard, and as she freed
herself a shred of her lace flounce clung to Tony's enchanted fingers.
Looking after her, he saw she was on the arm of a pompous-looking
graybeard in a long black gown and scarlet stockings, who, on perceiving
the exchange of glances between the young people, drew the lady away
with a threatening look.
The Count met Tony's eye with a smile. "One of our Venetian
beauties," said he; "the lovely Polixena Cador. She is thought to have
the finest eyes in Venice."
"She spoke English," stammered Tony.
"Oh -- ah -- precisely: she learned the language at the Court of
Saint James's, where her father, the Senator, was formerly accredited as
Ambassador. She played as an infant with the royal princes of England."
"And that was her father?"
"Assuredly: young ladies of Donna Polixena's rank do not go abroad
save with their parents or a duenna."
Just then a soft hand slid into Tony's. His heart gave a foolish
bound, and he turned about half-expecting to meet again the merry eyes
under the hood; but saw instead a slender brown boy, in some kind of
fanciful page's dress, who thrust a folded paper between his fingers and
vanished in the throng. Tony, in a tingle, glanced surreptitiously at
the Count, who appeared absorbed in his prayers. The crowd, at the
ringing of a bell, had in fact been overswept by a sudden wave of
devotion; and Tony seized the moment to step beneath a lighted shrine
with his letter.
"I am in dreadful trouble and implore your help. Polixena" -- he
read; but hardly had he seized the sense of the words when a hand fell
on his shoulder, and a stern-looking man in a cocked hat, and bearing a
kind of rod or mace, pronounced a few words in Venetian.
Tony, with a start, thrust the letter in his breast, and tried to
jerk himself free; but the harder he jerked the tighter grew the other's
grip, and the Count, presently perceiving what had happened, pushed his
way through the crowd, and whispered hastily to his companion: "For
God's sake, make no struggle. This is serious. Keep quiet and do as I
tell you."
Tony was no chicken-heart. He had something of a name for pugnacity
among the lads of his own age at home, and was not the man to stand in
Venice what he would have resented in Salem; but the devil of it was
that this black fellow seemed to be pointing to the letter in his
breast; and this suspicion was confirmed by the Count's agitated whisper.
"This is one of the agents of the Ten. -- For God's sake, no
outcry." He exchanged a word or two with the mace-bearer and again
turned to Tony. "You have been seen concealing a letter about your
person --"
"And what of that?" says Tony furiously.
"Gently, gently, my master. A letter handed to you by the page of
Donna Polixena Cador. A black business! Oh, a very black business!
This Cador is one of the most powerful nobles in Venice I beseech
you, not a word, sir! Let me think deliberate --"
His hand on Tony's shoulder, he carried on a rapid dialogue with
the potentate in the cocked hat.
"I am sorry, sir -- but our young ladies of rank are as jealously
guarded as the Grand Turk's wives, and you must be answerable for this
scandal. The best I can do is to have you taken privately to the Palazzo
Cador, instead of being brought before the Council. I have pleaded your
youth and inexperience" -- Tony winced at this --"and I think the
business may still be arranged."
Meanwhile the agent of the Ten had yielded his place to a
sharp-featured shabby-looking fellow in black, dressed somewhat like a
lawyer's clerk, who laid a grimy hand on Tony's arm, and with many
apologetic gestures steered him through the crowd to the doors of the
church. The Count held him by the other arm, and in this fashion they
emerged on the square, which now lay in darkness save for the many
lights twinkling under the arcade and in the windows of the gaming-rooms
above it.
Tony by this time had regained voice enough to declare that he
would go where they pleased, but that he must first say a word to the
mate of the Hepzibah, who had now been awaiting him some two hours or
more at the landing-place.
The Count repeated this to Tony's custodian, but the latter shook
his head and rattled off a sharp denial.
"Impossible, sir," said the Count. "I entreat you not to insist.
Any resistance will tell against you in the end."
Tony fell silent. With a rapid eye he was measuring his chances of
escape. In wind and limb he was more than a mate for his captors, and
boyhood's ruses were not so far behind him but he felt himself equal to
outwitting a dozen grown men; but he had the sense to see that at a cry
the crowd would close in on him. Space was what he wanted: a clear ten
yards, and he would have laughed at Doge and Council. But the throng was
thick as glue, and he walked on submissively, keeping his eye alert for
an opening. Suddenly the mob swerved aside after some new show. Tony's
fist shot out at the black fellow's chest, and before the latter could
right himself the young New Englander was showing a clean pair of heels
to his escort. On he sped, cleaving the crowd like a flood-tide in
Gloucester bay, diving under the first arch that caught his eye, dashing
down a lane to an unlit waterway, and plunging across a narrow hump-back
bridge which landed him in a black pocket between walls. But now his
pursuers were at his back, reinforced by the yelping mob. The walls were
too high to scale, and for all his courage Tony's breath came short as
he paced the masonry cage in which ill-luck had landed him. Suddenly a
gate opened in one of the walls, and a slip of a servant wench looked
out and beckoned him. There was no time to weigh chances. Tony dashed
through the gate, his rescuer slammed and bolted it, and the two stood
in a narrow paved well between high houses.
II
The servant picked up a lantern and signed to Tony to follow her. They
climbed a squalid stairway of stone, felt their way along a corridor,
and entered a tall vaulted room feebly lit by an oillamp hung from the
painted ceiling. Tony discerned traces of former splendour in his
surroundings, but he had no time to examine them, for a figure started
up at his approach and in the dim light he recognized the girl who was
the cause of all his troubles.
She sprang toward him with outstretched hands, but as he advanced
her face changed and she shrank back abashed.
"This is a misunderstanding -- a dreadful misunderstanding," she
cried out in her pretty broken English. "Oh, how does it happen that you
are here?"
"Through no choice of my own, madam, I assure you!" retorted Tony,
not over-pleased by his reception.
"But why -- how -- how did you make this unfortunate mistake?"
"Why, madam, if you'll excuse my candour, I think the mistake was
yours --"
"Mine?"
--"in sending me a letter --"
"You -- a letter?"
--"by a simpleton of a lad, who must needs hand it to me under your
father's very nose --"
The girl broke in on him with a cry. "What! It was you who
received my letter?" She swept round on the little maid-servant and
submerged her under a flood of Venetian. The latter volleyed back in the
same jargon, and as she did so, Tony's astonished eye detected in her
the doubleted page who had handed him the letter in Saint Mark's.
"What!" he cried, "the lad was this girl in disguise?"
Polixena broke off with an irrepressible smile; but her face
clouded instantly and she returned to the charge.
"This wicked, careless girl -- she has ruined me, she will be my
undoing! Oh, sir, how can I make you understand? The letter was not
intended for you -- it was meant for the English Ambassador, an old
friend of my mother's, from whom I hoped to obtain assistance -- oh, how
can I ever excuse myself to you?"
"No excuses are needed, madam," said Tony, bowing; "though I am
surprised, I own, that any one should mistake me for an ambassador."
Here a wave of mirth again overran Polixena's face. "Oh, sir, you
must pardon my poor girl's mistake. She heard you speaking English, and
-- and -- I had told her to hand the letter to the handsomest foreigner
in the church." Tony bowed again, more profoundly. "The English
Ambassador," Polixena added simply, "is a very handsome man."
"I wish, madam, I were a better proxy!"
She echoed his laugh, and then clapped her hands together with a
look of anguish. "Fool that I am! How can I jest at such a moment? I am
in dreadful trouble, and now perhaps I have brought trouble on you also
-- Oh, my father! I hear my father coming!" She turned pale and leaned
tremblingly upon the little servant.
Footsteps and loud voices were in fact heard outside, and a moment
later the red-stockinged Senator stalked into the room attended by
half-a-dozen of the magnificoes whom Tony had seen abroad in the square.
At sight of him, all clapped hands to their swords and burst into
furious outcries; and though their jargon was unintelligible to the
young man, their tones and gestures made their meaning unpleasantly
plain. The Senator, with a start of anger, first flung himself on the
intruder; then, snatched back by his companions, turned wrathfully on
his daughter, who, at his feet, with outstretched arms and streaming
face, pleaded her cause with all the eloquence of young distress.
Meanwhile the other nobles gesticulated vehemently among themselves, and
one, a truculent-looking personage in ruff and Spanish cape, stalked
apart, keeping a jealous eye on Tony. The latter was at his wit's end
how to comport himself, for the lovely Polixena's tears had quite
drowned her few words of English, and beyond guessing that the
magnificoes meant him a mischief he had no notion what they would be at.
At this point, luckily, his friend Count Rialto suddenly broke in
on the scene, and was at once assailed by all the tongues in the room.
He pulled a long face at sight of Tony, but signed to the young man to
be silent, and addressed himself earnestly to the Senator. The latter,
at first, would not draw breath to hear him; but presently, sobering, he
walked apart with the Count, and the two conversed together out of earshot.
"My dear sir," said the Count, at length turning to Tony with a
perturbed countenance, "it is as I feared, and you are fallen into a
great misfortune."
"A great misfortune! A great trap, I call it!" shouted Tony, whose
blood, by this time, was boiling; but as he uttered the word the
beautiful Polixena cast such a stricken look on him that he blushed up
to the forehead.
"Be careful," said the Count, in a low tone. "Though his
Illustriousness does not speak your language, he understands a few words
of it, and --"
"So much the better!" broke in Tony; "I hope he will understand me
if I ask him in plain English what is his grievance against me."
The Senator, at this, would have burst forth again; but the Count,
stepping between, answered quickly: "His grievance against you is that
you have been detected in secret correspondence with his daughter, the
most noble Polixena Cador, the betrothed bride of this gentleman, the
most illustrious Marquess Zanipolo --" and he waved a deferential hand
at the frowning hidalgo of the cape and ruff.
"Sir," said Tony, "if that is the extent of my offence, it lies
with the young lady to set me free, since by her own avowal --" but here
he stopped short, for, to his surprise, Polixena shot a terrified glance
at him.
"Sir," interposed the Count, "we are not accustomed in Venice to
take shelter behind a lady's reputation."
"No more are we in Salem," retorted Tony in a white heat. "I was
merely about to remark that, by the young lady's avowal, she has never
seen me before."
Polixena's eyes signalled her gratitude, and he felt he would have
died to defend her.
The Count translated his statement, and presently pursued: "His
Illustriousness observes that, in that case, his daughter's misconduct
has been all the more reprehensible."
"Her misconduct? Of what does he accuse her?"
"Of sending you, just now, in the church of Saint Mark's, a letter
which you were seen to read openly and thrust in your bosom. The
incident was witnessed by his Illustriousness the Marquess Zanipolo,
who, in consequence, has already repudiated his unhappy bride."
Tony stared contemptuously at the black Marquess. "If his
Illustriousness is so lacking in gallantry as to repudiate a lady on so
trivial a pretext, it is he and not I who should be the object of her
father's resentment."
"That, my dear young gentleman, is hardly for you to decide. Your
only excuse being your ignorance of our customs, it is scarcely for you
to advise us how to behave in matters of punctilio."
It seemed to Tony as though the Count were going over to his
enemies, and the thought sharpened his retort.
"I had supposed," said he, "that men of sense had much the same
behaviour in all countries, and that, here as elsewhere, a gentleman
would be taken at his word. I solemnly affirm that the letter I was seen
to read reflects in no way on the honour of this young lady, and has in
fact nothing to do with what you suppose."
As he had himself no notion what the letter was about, this was as
far as he dared commit himself.
There was another brief consultation in the opposing camp, and the
Count then said: --"We all know, sir, that a gentleman is obliged to
meet certain enquiries by a denial; but you have at your command the
means of immediately clearing the lady. Will you show the letter to her
father?"
There was a perceptible pause, during which Tony, while appearing
to look straight before him, managed to deflect an interrogatory glance
toward Polixena. Her reply was a faint negative motion, accompanied by
unmistakable signs of apprehension.
"Poor girl!" he thought, "she is in a worse case than I imagined,
and whatever happens I must keep her secret."
He turned to the Senator with a deep bow. "I am not," said he, "in
the habit of showing my private correspondence to strangers."
The Count interpreted these words, and Donna Polixena's father,
dashing his hand on his hilt, broke into furious invective, while the
Marquess continued to nurse his outraged feelings aloof.
The Count shook his head funereally. "Alas, sir, it is as I feared.
This is not the first time that youth and propinquity have led to fatal
imprudence. But I need hardly, I suppose, point out the obligation
incumbent upon you as a man of honour."
Tony stared at him haughtily, with a look which was meant for the
Marquess. "And what obligation is that?"
"To repair the wrong you have done -- in other words, to marry the
lady."
Polixena at this burst into tears, and Tony said to himself: "Why
in heaven does she not bid me show the letter?" Then he remembered that
it had no superscription, and that the words it contained, supposing
them to have been addressed to himself, were hardly of a nature to
disarm suspicion. The sense of the girl's grave plight effaced all
thought of his own risk, but the Count's last words struck him as so
preposterous that he could not repress a smile.
"I cannot flatter myself," said he, "that the lady would welcome
this solution."
The Count's manner became increasingly ceremonious. "Such modesty,"
he said, "becomes your youth and inexperience; but even if it were
justified it would scarcely alter the case, as it is always assumed in
this country that a young lady wishes to marry the man whom her father
has selected."
"But I understood just now," Tony interposed, "that the gentleman
yonder was in that enviable position."
"So he was, till circumstances obliged him to waive the privilege
in your favour."
"He does me too much honour; but if a deep sense of my unworthiness
obliges me to decline --"
"You are still," interrupted the Count, "labouring under a
misapprehension. Your choice in the matter is no more to be consulted
than the lady's. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is necessary that
you should marry her within the hour."
Tony, at this, for all his spirit, felt the blood run thin in his
veins. He looked in silence at the threatening visages between himself
and the door, stole a side-glance at the high barred windows of the
apartment, and then turned to Polixena, who had fallen sobbing at her
father's feet.
"And if I refuse?" said he.
The Count made a significant gesture. "I am not so foolish as to
threaten a man of your mettle. But perhaps you are unaware what the
consequences would be to the lady."
Polixena, at this, struggling to her feet, addressed a few
impassioned words to the Count and her father; but the latter put her
aside with an obdurate gesture.
The Count turned to Tony. "The lady herself pleads for you -- at
what cost you do not guess -- but as you see it is vain. In an hour his
Illustriousness's chaplain will be here. Meanwhile his Illustriousness
consents to leave you in the custody of your betrothed."
He stepped back, and the other gentlemen, bowing with deep ceremony
to Tony, stalked out one by one from the room. Tony heard the key turn
in the lock, and found himself alone with Polixena.
III
The girl had sunk into a chair, her face hidden, a picture of shame and
agony. So moving was the sight that Tony once again forgot his own
extremity in the view of her distress. He went and kneeled beside her,
drawing her hands from her face.
"Oh, don't make me look at you!" she sobbed; but it was on his
bosom that she hid from his gaze. He held her there a breathingspace, as
he might have clasped a weeping child; then she drew back and put him
gently from her.
"What humiliation!" she lamented.
"Do you think I blame you for what has happened?"
"Alas, was it not my foolish letter that brought you to this
plight? And how nobly you defended me! How generous it was of you not to
show the letter! If my father knew I had written to the Ambassador to
save me from this dreadful marriage his anger against me would be even
greater."
"Ah -- it was that you wrote for?" cried Tony with unaccountable
relief.
"Of course -- what else did you think?"
"But is it too late for the Ambassador to save you?"
"From you?" A smile flashed through her tears. "Alas, yes." She
drew back and hid her face again, as though overcome by a fresh wave of
shame.
Tony glanced about him. "If I could wrench a bar out of that window
--" he muttered.
"Impossible! The court is guarded. You are a prisoner, alas. -- Oh,
I must speak!" She sprang up and paced the room. "But indeed you can
scarce think worse of me than you do already --"
"I think ill of you?"
"Alas, you must! To be unwilling to marry the man my father has
chosen for me --"
"Such a beetle-browed lout! It would be a burning shame if you
married him."
"Ah, you come from a free country. Here a girl is allowed no choice."
"It is infamous, I say -- infamous!"
"No, no -- I ought to have resigned myself, like so many others."
"Resigned yourself to that brute! Impossible!"
"He has a dreadful name for violence -- his gondolier has told my
little maid such tales of him! But why do I talk of myself, when it is
of you I should be thinking?"
"Of me, poor child?" cried Tony, losing his head.
"Yes, and how to save you -- for I can save you! But every moment
counts -- and yet what I have to say is so dreadful."
"Nothing from your lips could seem dreadful."
"Ah, if he had had your way of speaking!"
"Well, now at least you are free of him," said Tony, a little
wildly; but at this she stood up and bent a grave look on him.
"No, I am not free," she said; "but you are, if you will do as I
tell you."
Tony, at this, felt a sudden dizziness; as though, from a mad
flight through clouds and darkness, he had dropped to safety again, and
the fall had stunned him.
"What am I to do?" he said.
"Look away from me, or I can never tell you."
He thought at first that this was a jest, but her eyes commanded
him, and reluctantly he walked away and leaned in the embrasure of the
window. She stood in the middle of the room, and as soon as his back was
turned she began to speak in a quick monotonous voice, as though she
were reciting a lesson.
"You must know that the Marquess Zanipolo, though a great noble, is
not a rich man. True, he has large estates, but he is a desperate
spendthrift and gambler, and would sell his soul for a round sum of
ready money. -- If you turn round I shall not go on! -- He wrangled
horribly with my father over my dowry -- he wanted me to have more than
either of my sisters, though one married a Procurator and the other a
grandee of Spain. But my father is a gambler too -- oh, such fortunes as
are squandered over the arcade yonder! And so -- and so -- don't turn, I
implore you -- oh, do you begin to see my meaning?"
She broke off sobbing, and it took all his strength to keep his
eyes from her.
"Go on," he said.
"Will you not understand? Oh, I would say anything to save you! You
don't know us Venetians -- we're all to be bought for a price. It is not
only the brides who are marketable -- sometimes the husbands sell
themselves too. And they think you rich -- my father does, and the
others -- I don't know why, unless you have shown your money too freely
-- and the English are all rich, are they not? And -- oh, oh -- do you
understand? Oh, I can't bear your eyes!"
She dropped into a chair, her head on her arms, and Tony in a flash
was at her side.
"My poor child, my poor Polixena!" he cried, and wept and clasped her.
"You are rich, are you not? You would promise them a ransom?" she
persisted.
"To enable you to marry the Marquess?"
"To enable you to escape from this place. Oh, I hope I may never
see your face again." She fell to weeping once more, and he drew away
and paced the floor in a fever.
Presently she sprang up with a fresh air of resolution, and pointed
to a clock against the wall. "The hour is nearly over. It is quite true
that my father is gone to fetch his chaplain. Oh, I implore you, be
warned by me! There is no other way of escape."
"And if I do as you say -- ?"
"You are safe! You are free! I stake my life on it."
"And you -- you are married to that villain?"
"But I shall have saved you. Tell me your name, that I may say it
to myself when I am alone."
"My name is Anthony. But you must not marry that fellow."
"You forgive me, Anthony? You don't think too badly of me?"
"I say you must not marry that fellow."
She laid a trembling hand on his arm. "Time presses," she adjured
him, "and I warn you there is no other way."
For a moment he had a vision of his mother, sitting very upright,
on a Sunday evening, reading Dr. Tillotson's sermons in the best parlour
at Salem; then he swung round on the girl and caught both her hands in
his. "Yes, there is," he cried, "if you are willing. Polixena, let the
priest come!"
She shrank back from him, white and radiant. "Oh, hush, be silent!"
she said.
"I am no noble Marquess, and have no great estates," he cried. "My
father is a plain India merchant in the colony of Massachusetts -- but
if you --"
"Oh, hush, I say! I don't know what your long words mean. But I
bless you, bless you, bless you on my knees!" And she knelt before him,
and fell to kissing his hands.
He drew her up to his breast and held her there.
"You are willing, Polixena?" he said.
"No, no!" She broke from him with outstretched hands. "I am not
willing. You mistake me. I must marry the Marquess, I tell you!"
"On my money?" he taunted her; and her burning blush rebuked him.
"Yes, on your money," she said sadly.
"Why? Because, much as you hate him, you hate me still more?"
She was silent.
"If you hate me, why do you sacrifice yourself for me?" he persisted.
"You torture me! And I tell you the hour is past."
"Let it pass. I'll not accept your sacrifice. I will not lift a
finger to help another man to marry you."
"Oh, madman, madman!" she murmured.
Tony, with crossed arms, faced her squarely, and she leaned against
the wall a few feet off from him. Her breast throbbed under its lace and
falbalas, and her eyes swam with terror and entreaty.
"Polixena, I love you!" he cried.
A blush swept over her throat and bosom, bathing her in light to
the verge of her troubled brows.
"I love you! I love you!" he repeated.
And now she was on his breast again, and all their youth was in
their lips. But her embrace was as fleeting as a bird's poise and before
he knew it he clasped empty air, and half the room was between them.
She was holding up a little coral charm and laughing. "I took it
from your fob," she said. "It is of no value, is it? And I shall not get
any of the money, you know."
She continued to laugh strangely, and the rouge burned like fire in
her ashen face.
"What are you talking of?" he said.
"They never give me anything but the clothes I wear. And I shall
never see you again, Anthony!" She gave him a dreadful look. "Oh, my
poor boy, my poor love -- 'I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, POLIXENA!'"
He thought she had turned light-headed, and advanced to her with
soothing words; but she held him quietly at arm's length, and as he
gazed he read the truth in her face.
He fell back from her, and a sob broke from him as he bowed his
head on his hands.
"Only, for God's sake, have the money ready, or there may be foul
play here," she said.
As she spoke there was a great tramping of steps outside and a
burst of voices on the threshold.
"It is all a lie," she gasped out, "about my marriage, and the
Marquess, and the Ambassador, and the Senator -- but not, oh, not about
your danger in this place -- or about my love," she breathed to him. And
as the key rattled in the door she laid her lips on his brow.
The key rattled, and the door swung open -- but the black-cassocked
gentleman who stepped in, though a priest indeed, was no votary of
idolatrous rites, but that sound orthodox divine, the Reverend Ozias
Mounce, looking very much perturbed at his surroundings, and very much
on the alert for the Scarlet Woman. He was supported, to his evident
relief, by the captain of the Hepzibah B., and the procession was closed
by an escort of stern-looking fellows in cocked hats and small-swords,
who led between them Tony's late friends the magnificoes, now as sorry a
looking company as the law ever landed in her net.
The captain strode briskly into the room, uttering a grunt of
satisfaction as he clapped eyes on Tony.
"So, Mr. Bracknell," said he, "you have been seeing the Carnival
with this pack of mummers, have you? And this is where your pleasuring
has landed you? H'm -- a pretty establishment, and a pretty lady at the
head of it." He glanced about the apartment and doffed his hat with mock
ceremony to Polixena, who faced him like a princess.
"Why, my girl," said he, amicably, "I think I saw you this morning
in the square, on the arm of the Pantaloon yonder; and as for that
Captain Spavent --" and he pointed a derisive finger at the Marquess
--"I've watched him drive his bully's trade under the arcade ever since
I first dropped anchor in these waters. Well, well," he continued, his
indignation subsiding, "all's fair in Carnival, I suppose, but this
gentleman here is under sailing orders, and I fear we must break up your
little party."
At this Tony saw Count Rialto step forward, looking very small and
explanatory, and uncovering obsequiously to the captain.
"I can assure you, sir," said the Count in his best English, "that
this incident is the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding, and if
you will oblige us by dismissing these myrmidons, any of my friends here
will be happy to offer satisfaction to Mr. Bracknell and his companions."
Mr. Mounce shrank visibly at this, and the captain burst into a
loud guffaw.
"Satisfaction?" says he. "Why, my cock, that's very handsome of
you, considering the rope's at your throats. But we'll not take
advantage of your generosity, for I fear Mr. Bracknell has already
trespassed on it too long. You pack of galley-slaves, you!" he
spluttered suddenly, "decoying young innocents with that devil's bait of
yours --" His eye fell on Polixena, and his voice softened
unaccountably. "Ah, well, we must all see the Carnival once, I suppose,"
he said. "All's well that ends well, as the fellow says in the play; and
now, if you please, Mr. Bracknell, if you'll take the reverend
gentleman's arm there, we'll bid adieu to our hospitable entertainers,
and right about face for the Hepzibah."
SOULS BELATED
Their railway carriage had been full when the train left Bologna; but at
the first station beyond Milan their only remaining companion a courtly
person who ate garlic out of a carpetbag had left his crumb-strewn seat
with a bow.
Lydia's eye regretfully followed the shiny broadcloth of his retreating
back till it lost itself in the cloud of touts and cab drivers hanging
about the station; then she glanced across at Gannett and caught the
same regret in his look. They were both sorry to be alone.
"Par-ten-za!" shouted the guard. The train vibrated to a sudden slamming
of doors; a waiter ran along the platform with a tray of fossilized
sandwiches; a belated porter flung a bundle of shawls and band-boxes
into a third-class carriage; the guard snapped out a brief Partenza!
which indicated the purely ornamental nature of his first shout; and the
train swung out of the station.
The direction of the road had changed, and a shaft of sunlight struck
across the dusty red velvet seats into Lydia's corner. Gannett did not
notice it. He had returned to his Revue de Paris, and she had to rise
and lower the shade of the farther window. Against the vast horizon of
their leisure such incidents stood out sharply.
Having lowered the shade, Lydia sat down, leaving the length of the
carriage between herself and Gannett. At length he missed her and looked
up.
I moved out of the sun," she hastily explained.
He looked at her curiously: the sun was beating on her through the shade.
"Very well," he said pleasantly; adding, "You don't mind?" as he drew a cigarette case from his pocket.
It was a refreshing touch, relieving the tension of her spirit with the
suggestion that, after all, if he could smoke! The relief was only
momentary. Her experience of smokers was limited (her husband had
disapproved of the use of tobacco) but she knew from hearsay that men
sometimes smoked to get away from things; that a cigar might be the
masculine equivalent of darkened windows and a headache. Gannett, after a
puff or two, returned to his review.
It was just as she had foreseen; he feared to speak as much as she did.
It was one of the misfortunes of their situation that they were never
busy enough to necessitate, or even to justify, the postponement of
unpleasant discussions. If they avoided a question it was disagreeable.
They had unlimited leisure and an accumulation of mental energy to
devote to any subject that presented itself; new topics were in fact at a
premium. Lydia sometimes had premonitions of a famine-stricken period
when there would be nothing left to talk about, and she had already
caught herself doling out piecemeal what, in the first prodigality of
their confidences, she would have flung to him in a breath. Their
silence therefore might simply mean that they had nothing to say; but it
was another disadvantage of their position that it allowed infinite
opportunity for the classification of minute differences.
Lydia had
learned to distinguish between real and factitious silences; and under
Gannett's she now detected a hum of speech to which her own thoughts
made breathless answer.
How could it be otherwise, with that thing between them? She glanced up
at the rack overhead. The thing was there, in her dressing bag,
symbolically suspended over her head and his. He was thinking of it now,
just as she was; they had been thinking of it in unison ever since they
had entered the train. While the carriage had held other travelers they
had screened her from his thought; but now that he and she were alone
she knew exactly what was passing through his mind; she could almost
hear him asking himself what he should say to her.
The thing had come that morning, brought up to her in an
innocent-looking envelope with the rest of their letters, as they were
leaving the hotel at Bologna. As she tore it open, she and Gannett were
laughing over some ineptitude of the local guidebook they had been
driven, of late, to make the most of such incidental humors of travel.
Even when she had unfolded the document she took it for some unimportant
business paper sent abroad for her signature, and her eye traveled
inattentively over the curly Whereases of the preamble until a word
arrested her: Divorce. There it stood, an impassable barrier, between
her husband's name and hers.
She had been prepared for it, of course, as healthy people are said to
be prepared for death, in the sense of knowing it must come without in
the least expecting that it will. She had known from the first that
Tillotson meant to divorce her but what did it matter? Nothing mattered,
in those first days of supreme deliverance, but the fact that she was
free; and not so much (she had begun to be aware) that freedom had
released her from Tillotson as that it had given her to Gannett. This
discovery had not been agreeable to her self-esteem. She had preferred
to think that Tillotson had himself embodied all her reasons for leaving
him; and those he represented had seemed cogent enough to stand in no
need of reinforcement. Yet she had not left him till she met Gannett. It
was her love for Gannett that had made life with Tillotson so poor and
incomplete a business. If she had never, from the first, regarded her
marriage as a full cancelling of her claims upon life, she had at least,
for a number of years, accepted it as a provisional compensation, she
had made it "do." Existence in the commodious Tillotson mansion in Fifth
Avenue with Mrs. Tillotson senior commanding the approaches from the
second-story front windows had been reduced to a series of purely
automatic acts. The moral atmosphere of the Tillotson interior was as
carefully screened and curtained as the house itself: Mrs. Tillotson
senior dreaded ideas as much as a draft in her back. Prudent people
liked an even temperature; and to do anything unexpected was as foolish
as going out in the rain. One of the chief advantages of being rich was
that one need not be exposed to unforeseen contingencies: by the use of
ordinary firmness and common sense one could make sure of doing exactly
the same thing every day at the same hour. These doctrines,
reverentially imbibed with his mother's milk,
Tillotson (a model son who
had never given his parents an hour's anxiety) complacently expounded
to his wife, testifying to his sense of their importance by the
regularity with which he wore galoshes on damp days, his punctuality at
meals, and his elaborate precautions against burglars and contagious
diseases. Lydia, coming from a smaller town, and entering New York life
through the portals of the Tillotson mansion, had mechanically accepted
this point of view as inseparable from having a front pew in church and a
parterre box at the opera. All the people who came to the house
revolved in the same small circle of predjudices. It was the kind of
society in which, after dinner, the ladies compared the exorbitant
charges of thier children's teachers, and agreed that, even with the new
duties on French clothes, it was cheaper in the end to get everything
from Worth; while the husbands, over their cigars, lamented municipal
corruption, and decided that the men to start a reform were those who
had no private interests at stake.
To Lydia this view of life had become a matter of course, just as
lumbering about in her mother-in-law's locomotion, and listening every
Sunday to fashionable Presbyterian divine the inevitable atonement for
having thought oneself bored on the other six days of the week. Before
she met Gannett her life had seemed merely dull; his coming made it
appear like one of those dismal Cruikshank prints in which the people
are all ugly and all engaged in occupations that are either vulgar or
stupid.
It was natural that Tillotson should be the chief sufferer from this
readjustment of focus. Gannett's nearness had made her husband
ridiculous, and a part of the ridicule had been reflected on herself.
Her tolerance laid her open to a suspicion of obtuseness from which she
must, at all costs, clear herself in Gannett's eyes.
She did not understand this until afterwards. At the time she fancied
that she had merely reached the limits of endurance. In so large a
charter of liberties as the mere act of leaving Tillotson seemed to
confer, the small question of divorce or no divorce did not count. It
was when she saw that she had left her husband only to be with Gannett
that she perceived the significance of anything affecting their
relations. Her husband, in casting her off, had virtually flung her at
Gannett: it was thus that the world viewed it. The measure of alacrity
with which Gannett would receive her would be the subject of curious
speculation over afternoon tea tables and in club corners. She knew what
would be said she had heard it so often of others! The recollection
bathed her in misery. The men would probably back Gannett to "do the
decent thing"; but the ladies' eyebrows would emphasize the
worthlessness of such enforced fidelity; and after all, they would be
right. She had put herself in a position where Ganett "owed" her
something; where, as a gentleman, he was bound to "stand the damage."
The idea of accepting such compensation had never crossed her mind; the
so-called rehabilitation of such a marriage had always seemed to her the
only real disgrace. What she dreaded was the necessity of having to
explain herself; of having to combat his arguments; of calculating, in
spite of herself, the exact measure of insistence with which he presssed
them. She knew not whether she most shrank from his insisting too much
or too little. In such a case the nicest sense of proportion might be at
fault; and how easily to fall into the error of taking her resistance
for a test of his sincerity! Whichever way she turned, an ironical
implication confronted her: she had the exasperated sense of having
walked into the trap of some stupid practical joke.
Beneath all these preoccupations lurked the dread of what he was
thinking. Sooner or later, of course, he would have to speak; but that,
in the meantime, he should think, even for a moment that there was any
use in speaking, seemed to her simply unendurable. Her sensitiveness on
this point was aggravated by another fear, as yet barely on the level of
consciousness; the fear of unwillingly involving Gannett in the
trammels of her dependence. To look upon him as the instrument of her
liberation; to resist in herself the least tendency to a wifely taking
possession of his future; had seemed to Lydia the one way of maintaining
the dignity of their relation. Her view had not changed, but she was
aware of a growing inability to keep her thoughts fixed on the essential
point the point of parting with Gannett. It was easy to face as long as
she kept it sufficiently far off: but what was this act of mental
postponement but a gradual encroachment on his future? What was needful
was the courage to recognize the moment when by some word or look, their
voluntary fellowship should be transformed into a bondage the more
wearing that it was based on none of those common obligations which make
the most imperfect marriage in some sort a center of gravity.
When the porter, at the next station, threw the door open, Lydia drew
back, making way for the hoped-for intruder; but none came, and the
train took up its leisurely progress through the spring wheat fields and
budding copses. She now began to hope that Gannett would speak before
the next station. She watched him furtively, half-disposed to return to
the seat opposite his, but there was an artificiality about his
absorption that restrained her. She had never before seen him read with
so conspicuous an air of warding off interruption. What could he be
thinking of? Why should he be afraid to speak? Or was it her answer that
he dreaded?.
The train paused for the passing of an express, and he put down his book
and leaned out of the window. Presently he turned to her with a smile.
"There's a jolly old villa out here," he said.
His easy tone relieved her, and she smiled back at him as she crossed over to his corner.
Beyond the embankment, through the opening in a mossy wall, she caught
sight of the villa, with its broken balustrades, its stagnant fountains,
and the stone satyr closing the perspective of a dusky grass walk.
"How should you like to live there?" he asked as the train moved on.
"There?"
"In some such place, I mean. One might do worse, don't you think so?
There must be at least two centuries of solitude under those yew trees.
Shouldn't you like it?"
"I don't know," she faltered. She knew now that he meant to speak.
He lit another cigarette. "We shall have to live somewhere, you know," he said as he bent above the match.
Lydia tried to speak carelessly. "Je n'en vois pas la necessite! Why not live everywhere, as we have been doing?"
"But we can't travel forever, can we?
"Oh, forever's a long word," she objected, picking up the review he had thrown aside.
"For the rest of our lives then," he said, moving nearer.
She made a slight gesture which caused his hand to slip from hers.
"Why should we make plans? I thought you agreed with me that it's pleasanter to drift."
He looked at her hesitatingly. "It's been pleasant, certainly; but I
suppose I shall have to get at my work again some day. You know I
haven't written a line since all this time," he hastily amended.
She flamed with sympathy and self-reproach. "Oh, if you mean that if you
want to write of course we must settle down. How stupid of me not to
have thought of it sooner! Where shall we go? Where do you think you
could work best? We oughtn't to lose any more time."
He hesitated again. "I had thought of a villa in these parts. It's quiet; we shouldn't be bothered. Should you like it?"
"Of course I should like it." She paused and looked away. "But I thought
I remember your telling me once that your best work had been done in a
crowd in big cities. Why should you shut yourself up in a desert?"
Gannett, for a moment, made no reply. At length he said, avoiding her
eye as carefully as she avoided his: "It might be different now; I can't
tell, of course, till I try. A writer ought not be dependent on his
milieu, it's a mistake to humor oneself in that way; and I thought that
just at first you might prefer to be."
She faced him. "To be what?"
"Well quiet. I mean."
"What do you mean by 'at first'?" she interruped.
He paused again. "I mean after we are married."
She thrust up her chin and turned toward the window. "Thank you!" she tossed back at him.
"Lydia!" he exclaimed blankly; and she felt in every fiber of her
averted person that he had made the inconceivable, the unpardonable
mistake of anticipating her acquiescence.
The train rattled on and he groped for a third cigarette. Lydia remained silent.
"I haven't offended you?" he ventured at length, in the tone of a man who feels his way.
She shook her head with a sigh. "I thought you understood," she moaned. Their eyes met and she moved back to his side.
"Do you want to know how not to offend me? By taking it for granted,
once for all, that you've said your say on the odious question and that
I've said mine, and that we stand just where we did this morning before
that that hateful paper came to spoil everything between us!"
"To spoil everything between us? What on earth do you mean? Aren't you glad to be free?"
"I was free before."
"Not to marry me," he suggested.
But I don't want to marry you!" she cried.
She saw that he turned pale. "I'm obtuse, I suppose," he said slowly. "I
confess I don't see what you're driving at. Are you tired of the whole
business? Or was I simply an excuse for getting away? Perhaps you didn't
care to travel alone? Was that it? And now you want to chuck me?" His
voice had grown harsh. "You owe me a straight answer, you know; don't be
tenderhearted!"
Her eyes swam as she leaned to him. "Don't you see it's because I care
because I care so much? Oh, Ralph! Can't you see how it would humiliate
me? Try to feel it as a woman would! Don't you see the misery of being
made your wife in this way? If I'd known you as a girl that would have
been a real marriage! But now this vulgar fraud upon society and upon a
society we despised and laughed at this sneaking back into a position
that we've voluntarily foreited: don't you see what a cheap compromise
it is? We neither of us believe in the abstract 'sacredness' of
marriage; we both know that no ceremony is needed to consecrate our love
for each other; what object can we have in marrying, except the secret
fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret longing to work
our way back graduallyoh, very gradually into the esteem of the people
whose conventional morality we have always ridiculed and hated? And the
very fact that, after a decent interval, these same people would come
and dine with us the women who would let me die in a gutter today
because I am 'leading a life of sin doesn't that disgust you more than
their turning their backs on us now? I can stand being cut by them, but I
couldn't stand their coming to call and asking what I meant to do about
visiting that unfortunate Mrs. So-and-so!"
She paused, and Gannett maintained a perplexed silence.
"You judge things too theoretically," he said at length, slowly. "Life is made up of compromises."
"The life we ran away from yes! If we had been willing to accept them
"she flushed" we might have gone on meeting each other at Mrs.
Tillotson's dinners."
He smiled slightly. "I didn't know that we ran away to found a new
system of ethics. I supposed it was because we loved each other."
"Life is complex, of course; isn't it the very recognition of that fact
that separates us from the people who see it tout d'une piece? If they
are right, if marriage is sacred in itself and the individual must
always be sacrificed to the family then there can be no real marriage
between us, since our being together is a protest against the sacrifice
of the individual to the family." She interrupted herself with a laugh.
"You'll say now that I'm giving you a lecture on sociology! Of course
one acts as one can as one must, perhaps pulled by all sorts of
invisible threads; but at least one needn't pretend, for social
advantages, to subscribe to a creed that ignores the complexity of human
motives that classifies people by arbitrary signs, and puts it in
everybody's reach to be on Mrs. Tillotson's visiting list. It may be
necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions but if we
believed in them, why did we break through them? And if we don't believe
in them, is it honest to take advantage of the protection they afford?"
Gannett hesitated. "One may believe in them or not; but as long as they
do rule the world it is only by taking advantage of their protection
that one can find a modus vivendi."
"Do outlaws need a modus vivendi?"
He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more perplexing to man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.
She thought she had scored a point and followed it up passionately. "You
do understand, don't you? You see how the very thought of the thing
humiliates me! We are together today because we choose to be don't let
us look any farther than that!" She caught his hands. "Promise me you'll
never speak of it again; promise me you'll never think of it even," she
implored, with a tearful prodigality of italics.
Through what followed his protests, his arguments, his final unconvinced
submission to her wishes she had a sense of his but half-discerning all
that, for her, had made the moment so tumultuous. They had reached that
memorable point in every heart history when, for the first time, the
man seems obtuse and the woman irrational. It was the abundance of his
intentions that consoled her, on reflection, for what they lacked in
quality. After all, it would have been worse, incalculably worse, to
have detected any overreadiness to understand her.
When the train at nightfall brought them to their journey's end at the
edge of one of the lakes, Lydia was glad that they were not, as usual,
to pass from one solitude to another. Their wanderings during the year
had indeed been like the flight of the outlaws: through Sicily,
Dalmatia, Translyvania and Southern Italy they had persisted in their
tacit avoidance of their kind. Isolation, at first, had deepened the
flavor of their happiness, as night intensifies the scent of certain
flowers; but in the new phase on which they were entering, Lydia's chief
wish was that they should be less abnormally exposed to the action of
each other's thoughts.
She shrank, nevertheless, as the brightly-looming bulk of the
fashionable Anglo-American hotel on the water's brink began to radiate
toward their advancing boat its vivid suggestion of social order,
visitors' lists, Church services, and the bland inquisition of the table
d'hote. The mere fact that in a moment or two she must take her place
on the hotel register as Mrs. Gannett seemed to weaken the springs of
her resistance.
They had meant to stay for a night only, on their way to a lofty village
among the glaciers of Monte Rosa; but after the first plunge into
publicity, when they entered the dining room, Lydia felt the relief of
being lost in a crowd, of ceasing for a moment to be the center of
Gannett's scrutiny; and in his face she caught the reflection of her
feeling. After dinner, when she went upstairs, he strolled into the
smoking room, and an hour or two later, sitting in the darkness of her
window, she heard his voice below and saw him walking up and down the
terrace with a companion cigar at his side. When he came he told her he
had been talking to the hotel chaplain a very good sort of fellow.
"Queer little microcosms, these hotels! Most of these people live here
all summer and then migrate to Italy or the Riviera. The English are the
only people who can lead that kind of life with dignity those
soft-voiced old ladies in Shetland shawls somehow carry the British
Empire under their caps. Civis Romanus sum. It's a curious study there
might be some good things to work up here."
He stood before her with the vivid preoccupied stare of the novelist on
the trail of a "subject." With a relief that was half painful she
noticed that, for the first time since they had been together, he was
hardly aware of her presence.
"Do you think you could write here?"
"Here? I don't know." His stare dropped. "After being out of things so
long one's first impressions are bound to be tremendously vivid, you
know. I see a dozen threads already that one might follow "
He broke off with a touch of embarrassment.
"Then follow them. We'll stay," she said with sudden decision.
"Stay here?" He glanced at her in surprise, and then, walking to the window, looked out upon the dusky slumber of the garden.
"Why not?" she said at length, in a tone of veiled irritation.
"The place is full of old cats in caps who gossip with the chaplain. Shall you like I mean, it would be different if "
She flamed up.
"Do you suppose I care? It's none of their business."
"Of course not; but you won't get them to think so."
"They may think what they please."
He looked at her doubtfully.
"It's for you to decide."
"We'll stay," she repeated.
Gannett, before they met, had made himself known as a successful writer
of short stories and of a novel which had achieved the distinction of
being widely discussed. The reviewers called him "promising," and Lydia
now accused herself of having too long interfered with the fulfillment
of his promise. There was a special irony in the fact, since his
passionate assurance that only the stimulus of her companionship could
bring out his latent faculty had almost given the dignity of a
"vocation" to her course: there had been moments when she had felt
unable to assume, before posterity, the responsibility of thwarting his
career. And, after all, he had not written a line since they had been
together: his first desire to write had come from renewed contact with
the world! Was it all a mistake then? Must the most intelligent choice
work more disastrously than the blundering combinations of chance? Or
was there a still more humiliating answer to her perplexities? His
sudden imp! ulse of activity so exactly coincided with her own wish to
withdraw, for a time, from the range of his observation, that she
wondered if he too were not seeking sanctuary from intolerable problems.
"You must begin tomorrow!" she cried, hiding a tremor under the laugh
with which she added, "I wonder if there's any ink in the inkstand?"
Whatever else they had at the Hotel Bellosguardo, they had, as Miss
Pinsent said, "a certain tone." It was to Lady Susan Condit that they
owed this inestimable benefit; an advantage ranking in Miss Pinsent's
opinion above even the lawn tennis courts and the resident chaplain. It
was the fact of Lady Susan's annual visit that made the hotel what it
was. Miss Pinsent was certainly the last to underrate such a privilege:
"It's so important, my dear, forming as we do a little family, that
there should be someone to give the tone; and no one could do it better
than Lady Susan an earl's daughter and a person of such determination.
Dear Mrs. Ainger now who really ought, you know, when Lady Susan's away
absolutely refuses to assert herself." Miss Pinsent sniffed derisively.
"A bishop's niece! my dear, I saw her once actually give in to some
South Americans and before us all. She gave up her seat at table to
oblige them such a lack of ! dignity! Lady Susan spoke to her very
plainly about it afterwards."
Miss Pinsent glanced across the lake and adjusted her auburn front.
"But of course I don't deny that the stand Lady Susan takes is not
always easy to live up to for the rest of us, I mean. Monsieur Grossart,
our good proprietor, finds it trying at times, I know he has said as
much, privately, to Mrs. Ainger and me. After all, the poor man is not
to blame for wanting to fill his hotel, is he? And Lady Susan is so
difficult so very difficult about new people. One might almost say that
she disapproves of them beforehand, on principle. And yet she's had
warnings she very nearly made a dreadful mistake once with the Duchess
of Levens, who dyed her hair and well, swore and smoked. One would have
thought that might have been a lesson to Lady Susan." Miss Pinsent
resumed her knitting with a sigh. "There are exceptions, of course. She
took at once to you and Mr. Gannett it was quite remarkable, really. Oh,
I don't mean that either of course not! It was perfectly natural we all
thought you so charming and interesting form the first day we knew at
once that Mr. Gannett was intellectual, by the magazines you took in;
but you know what I mean. Lady Susan is so very well, I won't say
prejudiced, as Mrs. Ainger does but so prepared not to like new people,
that her taking to you in that way was a surprise to us all, I confess."
Miss Pinsent sent a significant glance down the long laurustinus alley
from the other end of which two people a lady and a gentleman were
strolling toward them through the smiling neglect of the garden.
"In this case, of course, it's very different; that I'm willing to
admit. Their looks are against them; but, as Mrs. Ainger says, one can't
exactly tell them so."
"She's very handsome," Lydia ventured, with her eyes on the lady, who
showed, under the dome of a vivid sunshade, the hourglass figure and
superlative coloring of a Christmas chromo.
"That's the worst of it. She's too handsome."
"Well, after all, she can't help that."
"Other people manage to," said Miss Pinsent skeptically.
"But isn't it rather unfair of Lady Susan considering that nothing is known about them?"
"But my dear, that's the very thing that's against them. It's infinitely worse than any actual knowledge."
Lydia mentally agreed that, in the case of Mrs. Linton, it possibly might be.
"I wonder why they came here?" she mused.
"That's against them too. It's always a bad sign when loud people come
to a quiet place. And they've brought van loads of boxes her maid told
Mrs. Ainger's that they meant to stop indefinitely."
"And Lady Susan actually turned her back on her in the salon?"
"My dear, she said it was for our sakes; that makes it so unanswerable!
But poor Grossart is in a way! The Lintons have taken his most
expressive suite, you know the yellow damask drawing room above the
portico and they have champagne with every meal!"
They were silent as Mr. and Mrs. Linton sauntered by; the lady with
tempestuous brows and challenging chin; the gentleman, a blond
stripling, trailing after her, head downward, like a reluctant child
dragged by his nurse.
"What does your husband think of them, my dear?" Miss Pinsent whispered as they passed out of earshot.
Lydia stooped to pick a violet in the border.
"He hasn't told me."
"Of your speaking to them, I mean. Would he approve of that? I know how
very particular nice Americans are. I think your action might make a
difference; it would certainly carry weight with Lady Susan."
"Dear Miss Pinsent, you flatter me!"
Lydia rose and gathered up her book and sunshade.
"Well, if you're asked for an opinion if Lady Susan asks you for one I
think you ought to be prepared," Miss Pinsent admonished her as she
moved away.
Lady Susan held her own. She ignored the Lintons, and her little family,
as Miss Pinsent phrased it, followed suit. Even Mrs. Ainger agreed that
it was obligatory. If Lady Susan owed it to the others not to speak to
the Lintons, the others clearly owed it to Lady Susan to back her up. It
was generally found expedient, at the Hotel Bellosguardo, to adopt this
form of reasoning.
Whatever effect this combined action may have had upon the Lintons, it
did not at least have that of driving them away. Monsieur Grossart,
after a few days of suspense, had the satisfaction of seeing them settle
down in his yellow damask premier with what looked like a permanent
installation of palm trees and silk cushions, and a gratifying
continuance in the consumption of champagne. Mrs. Linton trailed her
Doucet draperies up and down the garden with the same challenging air,
while her husband, smoking innumerable cigarettes, dragged himself
dejectedly in her wake; but neither of them, after the first encounter
with Lady Susan, made any attempt to extend their acquaintance. They
simply ignored their ignorers. As Miss Pinsent resentfully observed,
they behaved exactly as though the hotel were empty.
It was therefore a matter of surprise, as well as of displeasure, to
Lydia, to find, on glancing up one day from her seat in the garden, that
the shadow which had fallen across her book was that of the enigmatic
Mrs. Linton.
"I want to speak to you," that lady said, in a rich hard voice that
seemed the audible expression of her gown and her complexion.
Lydia started. She certainly did not want to speak to Mrs. Linton.
"Shall I sit down here?" the latter continued, fixing her
intensely-shaded eyes on Lydia's face, "or are you afraid of being seen
with me?"
"Afraid?" Lydia colored. "Sit down, please. What is it that you wish to say?"
Mrs. Linton, with a smile, drew up a garden chair and crossed one openwork ankle above the other.
"I want you to tell me what my husband said to your husband last night."
Lydia turned pale.
"My husband to yours?" she faltered, staring at the other.
"Didn't you know they were closeted together for hours in the smoking
room after you went upstairs? My man didn't get to bed until nearly two
o'clock and when he did I couldn't get a word out of him. When he wants
to be aggravating I'll back him against anybody living!" Her teeth and
eyes flashed persuasively upon Lydia. "But you'll tell me what they were
talking about, won't you? I know I can trust you you look so awfully
kind. And it's for his own good. He's such a precious donkey and I'm so
afraid he's got into some beastly scrape or other. If he'd only trust
his own old woman! But they're always writing to him and setting him
against me. And I've got nobody to turn to." She laid her hand on
Lydia's with a rattle of bracelets. "You'll help me, won't you?"
Lydia drew back from the smiling fierceness of her brows.
"I'm sorry but I don't think I understand. My husband has said nothing to me of of yours."
The great black crescents above Mrs. Linton's eyes met angrily.
"I say is that true?" she demanded.
Lydia rose from her seat.
"Oh, look here, I didn't mean that, you know you mustn't take one up so! Can't you see how rattled I am?"
Lydia saw that, in fact, her beautiful mouth was quivering beneath softened eyes.
"I'm beside myself!" the splendid creature wailed, dropping into her seat.
"I'm so sorry," Lydia repeated, forcing herself to speak kindly; "but how can I help you?"
Mrs. Linton raised her head sharply.
"By finding out there's a darling!"
"Finding what out?"
"What Trevenna told him."
"Trevenna ?" Lydia echoed in bewilderment.
Mrs. Linton clapped her hand to her mouth.
"Oh, Lord there, it's out! What a fool I am! But I supposed of course
you knew; I supposed everybody knew." She dried her eyes and bridled.
"Didn't you know that he's Lord Trevenna? I'm Mrs. Cope."
Lydia recognized the names. They had figured in a flamboyant elopement
which had thrilled fashionable London some six months earlier.
"Now you see how it is you understand, don't you?" Mrs. Cope continued
on a note of appeal. "I knew you would that's the reason I came to you. I
suppose he felt the same thing about your husband; he's not spoken to
another soul in the place." Her face grew anxious again. "He's awfully
sensitive, generally he feels our position, he says as if it wasn't my
place to feel that! But when he does get talking there's no knowing what
he'll say. I know he's been brooding over something lately, and I must
find out what it is it's to his interest that I should. I always tell
him that I think only of his interest; if he'd only trust me! But he's
been so odd lately I can't think what he's plotting. You will help me,
dear?"
Lydia, who had remained standing, looked away uncomfortably.
"If you mean by finding out what Lord Trevenna has told my husband, I'm afraid it's impossible."
"Why impossible?"
"Because I infer that is was told in confidence."
Mrs. Cope stared incredulously.
"Well, what of that? Your husband looks such a dear anyone can see he's
awfully gone on you. What's to prevent your getting it out of him?"
Lydia flushed.
"I'm not a spy!" she exclaimed.
"A spy a spy? How dare you?" Mrs. Cope flamed out. "Oh, I don't mean
that either! Don't be angry with me I'm so miserable." She essayed a
softer note. "Do you call that spying for one woman to help out another?
I do need help so dreadfully! I'm at my wits' end with Trevenna, I am
indeed. He's such a boy a mere baby, you know; he's only
two-and-twenty." She dropped her orbed lids. "He's younger than me only
fancy, a few months younger. I tell him he ought to listen to me as if I
was his mother, oughtn't he now? But he won't, he won't! All his people
are at him, you see oh, I know their little game! Trying to get him
away from me before I can get my divorce that's what they're up to. At
first he wouldn't listen to them; he used to toss their letters over to
me to read; but now he reads them himself, and answers 'em too, I fancy;
he's always shut up in his room, writing. If I only knew what his plan
is I could stop him fa! st enough he's such a simpleton. But he's
dreadfully deep too at times I can't make him out. but I know he's told
your husband everything I knew that last night the minute I laid eyes on
him. And I must find out you must help me I've got no one else to turn
to!"
She caught Lydia's fingers in a stormy pressure.
"Say you'll help me you and your husband."
Lydia tried to free herself.
"What you ask is impossible; you must see that it is. No one could interfere in in the way you ask."
Mrs. Cope's clutch tightened.
"You won't, then? You won't?"
"Certainly not. Let me go, please."
Mrs. Cope released her with a laugh.
"Oh, go by all means pray don't let me detain you! Shall you go and tell
Lady Susan Condit that there's a pair of us or shall I save you the
trouble of enlightening her?"
Lydia stood still in the middle of the path, seeing her antagonist through a mist of terror. Mrs. Cope was still laughing.
"Oh, I'm not spiteful by nature, my dear; but you're a little more than
flesh and blood can stand! It's impossible, is it? Let you go, indeed!
You're too good to be mixed up in my affairs, are you? Why, you little
fool, the first day I laid eyes on you I saw that you and I were both in
the same box that's the reason I spoke to you."
She stepped nearer, her smile dilating on Lydia like a lamp through a fog.
"You can take your choice, you know; I always play fair. If you'll tell I'll promise not to. Now then, which is it to be?"
Lydia, involuntarily, had begun to move away from the pelting storm of words; but at this she turned and sat down again.
"You may go," she said simply. "I shall stay here."
She stayed there for a long time, in the hypnotized contemplation, not
of Mrs. Cope's present, but of her own past. Gannett, early that
morning, had gone off on a long walk he had fallen into the habit of
taking these mountain tramps with various fellow lodgers; but even had
he been within reach she could not have gone to him just then. She had
to deal with herself first. She was surprised to find how, in the last
months, she had lost the habit of introspection. Since their coming to
the Hotel Bellosguardo she and Gannett had tacitly avoided themselves
and each other.
She was aroused by the whistle of the three o'clock steamboat as it
neared the landing just beyond the hotel gates. Three o'clock! Then
Gannett would soon be back he had told her to expect him before four.
She rose hurriedly, her face averted from the inquisitorial facade of
the hotel. She could not see him just yet; she could not go indoors. She
slipped through one of the overgrown garden alleys and climbed a steep
path to the hills.
It was dark when she opened their sitting-room door. Gannett was sitting
on the window ledge smoking a cigarette. Cigarettes were now his chief
resource: he had not written a line during the two months they had spent
at the Hotel Bellosguardo. In that respect, it had turned out not to be
the right milieu after all.
He started up at Lydia's entrance.
"Where have you been? I was getting anxious."
She sat down in a chair near the door.
"Up the mountain," she said wearily.
"Alone?"
"Yes."
Gannett threw away his cigarette: the sound of her voice made him want to see her face.
"Shall we have a little light?" he suggested.
She made no answer and he lifted the globe from the lamp and put a match to the wick. Then he looked at her.
"Anything wrong? You look done up."
She sat glancing vaguely about the little sitting room, dimly lit by the
pallid-globed lamp, which left in twilight the outlines of the
furniture, of his writing table heaped with books and papers, of the tea
roses and jasmine drooping on the mantelpiece. How like home it had all
grown how like home!
"Lydia, what is wrong?" he repeated.
She moved away from him, feeling for her hatpins and turning to lay her hat and sunshade on the table.
Suddenly she said: "That woman has been talking to me."
Gannett stared.
"That woman? What woman?"
"Mrs. Linton Mrs. Cope."
He gave a start of annoyance, still, as she perceived, not grasping the full import of her words.
"The deuce! She told you ?"
"She told me everything."
Gannett looked at her anxiously.
"What impudence! I'm so sorry that you should have been exposed to this, dear."
"Exposed!" Lydia laughed.
Gannett's brow clouded and they looked away from each other.
"Do you know why she told me? She had the best of reasons. The first
time she laid eyes on me she saw that we were both in the same box."
"Lydia!"
"So it was natural, of course, that she should turn to me in a difficulty."
"What difficulty?"
"It seems she has reason to think that Lord Trevenna's people are trying to get him away from her before she gets her divorce "
"Well?"
"And she fancied he had been consulting with you last night as to as to the best way of escaping from her."
Gannett stood up with an angry forehead.
"Well what concern of yours was all this dirty business? Why should she go to you?"
"Don't you see? It's so simple. I was to wheedle his secret out of you."
"To oblige that woman?"
"Yes; or, if I was unwilling to oblige her, then to protect myself."
"To protect yourself? Against whom?"
"Against her telling everyone in the hotel that she and I are in the same box."
"She threatened that?"
"She left me the choice of telling it myself or of doing it for me."
"The beast!"
There was a long silence. Lydia had seated herself on the sofa, beyond
the radius of the lamp, and he leaned against the window. His next
question surprised her.
"When did this happen? At what time, I mean?"
She looked at him vaguely.
"I don't know after luncheon, I think. Yes, I remember, it must have been at about three o'clock."
He stepped into the middle of the room and as he approached the light she saw that his brow had cleared.
"Why do you ask?" she said.
"Because when I came in, at about half-past three, the mail was just
being distributed, and Mrs. Cope was waiting as usual to pounce on her
letters; you know she was always watching for the postman. She was
standing so close to me that I couldn't help seeing a big
official-looking envelope that was handed to her. She tore it open, gave
one look at the inside, and rushed off upstairs like a whirlwind, with
the director shouting after her that she had left all her other letters
behind. I don't believe she ever thought of you again after that paper
was put into her hand."
"Why?"
"Because she was too busy. I was sitting in the window , watching for
you, when the five o'clock boat left, and who should go on board, bag
and baggage, valet and maid, dressing bags and poodle, but Mrs. Cope and
Trevenna. Just an hour and a half to pack up in! And you should have
seen her when they started. She was radiant shaking hands with everybody
waving her handkerchief from the deck 8212distributing bows and smiles
like an empress. If ever a woman got what she wanted just in the nick of
time that woman did. She'll be Lady Trevenna within a week, I'll
wager."
"You think she has her divorce?"
"I'm sure of it. And she must have got it just after her talk with you."
Lydia was silent.
At length she said, with a kind of reluctance, "She was horribly angry
when she left me. It wouldn't have taken long to tell Lady Susan
Condit."
"Lady Susan Condit has not been told."
"How do you you know."
"Because when I went downstairs half an hour ago I met Lady Susan on the way "
He stopped, half smiling.
"Well?"
"And she stopped to ask if I thought you would act as patroness to a charity concert she is getting up."
In spite of themselves they both broke into a laugh. Lydia's ended in
sobs and she sank down with her face hidden. Gannett bent over her,
seeking her hands.
"That vile woman I ought to have warned you to keep away from her; I
can't forgive myself! But he spoke to me in confidence; and I never
dreamed well, it's all over now."
Lydia lifted her head.
"Not for me. It's only just beginning."
"What do you mean?"
She put him gently aside and moved in her turn to the window. Then she
went on, with her face turned toward the shimmering blackness of the
lake, "You see of course that it might happen again at any moment."
"What?"
"This this risk of being found out. And we could hardly count again on such a lucky combination of chances, could we?"
He sat down with a groan.
Still keeping her face toward the darkness, she said, "I want you to go and tell Lady Susan and the others."
Gannett, who had moved towards her, paused a few feet off.
"Why do you wish me to do this?" he said at length, with less surprise in his voice than she had been prepared for.
"Because I've behaved basely, abominably, since we came here: letting
these people believe we were married lying with every breath I drew "
"Yes, I've felt that too," Gannett exclaimed with sudden energy.
The words shook her like a tempest: all her thoughts seemed to fall about her in ruins.
"You you've felt so?"
"Of course I have." He spoke with low-voiced vehemence. "Do you suppose I
like playing the sneak any better than you do? It's damnable."
He had dropped on the arm of a chair, and they stared at each other like blind people who suddenly see.
"But you have liked it here," she faltered.
"Oh, I've liked it I've liked it." He moved impatiently. "Haven't you?"
"Yes," she burst out; "that's the worst of it that's what I can't bear. I
fancied it was for your sake that I insisted on staying because you
thought you could write here; and perhaps just at first that really was
the reason. But afterwards I wanted to stay myself I loved it." She
broke into a laugh. "Oh, do you see the full derision of it? These
people the very prototypes of the bores you took me away from, with the
same fenced-in view of life, the same keep-off-the-grass morality, the
same little cautious virtues and the same little frightened vices well,
I've clung to them, I've delighted in them, I've done my best to please
them. I've toadied Lady Susan, I've gossiped with Miss Pinsent, I've
pretended to be shocked with Mrs. Ainger. Respectability! It was the one
thing in life that I was sure I didn't care about, and it's grown so
precious to me that I've stolen it because I couldn't get it any other
way."
She moved across the room and returned to his side with another laugh.
"I who used to fancy myself unconventional! I must have been born with a
cardcase in my hand. You should have seen me with that poor woman in
the garden. She came to me for help, poor creature, because she fancied
that, having 'sinned,' as they call it, I might feel some pity for
others who had been tempted in the same way. Not I! She didn't know me.
Lady Susan would have been kinder, because Lady Susan wouldn't have been
afraid. I hated the woman my one thought was not to be seen with her I
could have killed her for guessing my secret. The one thing that
mattered to me at that moment was my standing with Lady Susan!"
Gannett did not speak.
"And you you've felt it too!" she broke out accusingly. "You've enjoyed
being with these people as much as I have; you've let the chaplain talk
to you by the hour about The Reign of Law and Professor Drummond. When
they asked you to hand the plate in church I was watching you you wanted
to accept."
She stepped close, laying her hand on his arm.
"Do you know, I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people
away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each
other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between
them children, duties, visits, bores, relations the things that protect
married people from each other. We've been too close together-that has
been our sin. We've seen the nakedness of each other's souls."
She sank again on the sofa, hiding her face in her hands.
Gannett stood above her perplexedly: he felt as though she were being
swept away by some implacable current while he stood helpless on its
bank.
At length he said, "Lydia, don't think me a brute but don't you see yourself that it won't do?"
"Yes, I see it won't do," she said without raising her head.
His face cleared.
"Then we'll go tomorrow."
"Go where?"
"To Paris; to be married."
For a long time she made no answer; then she asked slowly, "Would they have us here if we were married?"
"Have us here?"
"I mean Lady Susan and the others."
"Have us here? Of course they would."
"Not if they knew at least, not unless they could pretend not to know."
He made an impatient gesture.
"We shouldn't come back here, of course; and other people needn't know no one need know."
She sighed. "Then it's only another form of deception and a meaner one. Don't you see that?"
"I see that we're not accountable to any Lady Susans on earth!"
"Then why are you ashamed of what we are doing here?"
"Because I'm sick of pretending that you're my wife when you're not when you won't be."
She looked at him sadly.
"If I were your wife you'd have to go on pretending. You'd have to
pretend that I'd never been anything else. And our friends would have to
pretend that they believed what you pretended."
Gannett pulled off the sofa tassel and flung it away.
"You're impossible," he groaned.
"It's not I it's our being together that's impossible. I only want you to see that marriage won't help it."
"What will help it then?"
She raised her head.
"My leaving you."
"Your leaving me?" He sat motionless, staring at the tassel which lay at
the other end of the room. At length some impulse of retaliation for
the pain she was inflicting made him say deliberately:
"And where would you go if you left me?"
"Oh!" she cried.
He was at her side in an instant.
"Lydia Lydia you know I didn't mean it; I couldn't mean it! But you've
driven me out of my senses; I don't know what I'm saying. Can't you get
out of this labyrinth of self-torture? It's destroying us both."
"That's why I must leave you."
"How easily you say it!" He drew her hands down and made her face him.
"You're very scrupulous about yourself and others. But have you thought
of me? You have no right to leave me unless you've ceased to care "
"It's because I care "
"Then I have a right to be heard. If you love me you can't leave me."
Her eyes defied him.
"Why not?"
He dropped her hands and rose from her side.
"Can you?" he said sadly.
The hour was late and the lamp flickered and sank. She stood up with a shiver and turned toward the door of her room.
At daylight a sound in Lydia's room woke Ganett from a troubled sleep.
He sat up and listened. She was moving about softly, as though fearful
of disturbing him. He heard her push back one of the creaking shutters;
then there was a moment's silence, which seemed to indicate that she was
waiting to see if the noise had roused him.
Presently she began to move again. She had spent a sleepless night,
probably, and was dressing to go down to the garden for a breath of air.
Gannett rose also; but some undefinable instinct made his movements as
cautious as hers. He stole to his window and looked out through the
slats of the shutter.
It had rained in the night and the dawn was gray and lifeless. The
cloud-muffled hills across the lake were reflected in its surface as in a
tarnished mirror. In the garden, the birds were beginning to shake the
drops from the motionless laurustinus boughs.
An immense pity for Lydia filled Gannett's soul. Her seeming
intellectual independence had blinded him for a time to the feminine
cast of her mind. He had never thought of her as a woman who wept and
clung: there was a lucidity in her intuitions that made them appear to
be the result of reasoning. Now he saw the cruelty he had committed in
detaching her from the normal conditions of life; he felt, too, the
insight with which she had hit upon the real cause of their suffering.
Their life was "impossible," as she had said and its worst penalty was
that it had made any other life impossible for them. Even had his love
lessened, he was bound to her now by a hundred ties of pity and
self-reproach; and she, poor child, must turn back to him as Latude
returned to his cell.
A new sound startled him: it was the stealthy closing of Lydia's door.
He crept to his own and heard her footsteps passing down the corridor.
Then he went back to the window and looked out.
A minute or two later he saw her go down the steps of the porch and
enter the garden. From his post of observation her face was invisible,
but something about her appearance struck him. She wore a long traveling
cloak and under its folds he detected the outline of a bag or bundle.
He drew a deep breath and stood watching her.
She walked quickly down the laurustinus alley toward the gate; there she
paused a moment, glancing about the little shady square. The stone
benches under the trees were empty, and she seemed to gather resolution
from the solitude about her, for she crossed the square to the steamboat
landing, and he saw her pause before the ticket office at the head of
the wharf. Now she was buying her ticket. Gannett turned his head a
moment to look at the clock: the boat was due in five minutes. He had
time to jump into his clothes and overtake her
He made no attempt to move; an obscure reluctance restrained him. If any
thought emerged from the tumult of his sensations, it was that he must
let her go if she wished it. He had spoken last night of his rights:
what were they? At the last issue, he and she were two separate beings,
not made one by the miracle of common forbearances, duties, abnegations,
but bound together in a noyade of passion that left them resisting yet
clinging as they went down.
After buying her ticket, Lydia had stood for a moment looking out across
the lake; then he saw her seat herself on one of the benches near the
landing. He and she, at that moment, were both listening for the same
sound: the whistle of the boat as it rounded the nearest promontory.
Gannett turned again to glance at the clock: the boat was due now.
Where would she go? What would her life be when she had left him? She
had no near relations and few friends. There was money enough . . . but
she asked so much of life, in ways so complex and immaterial. He thought
of her as walking barefooted through a stony waste. No one would
understand her no one would pity her and he, who did both, was powerless
to come to her aid.
He saw that she had risen from the bench and walked toward the edge of
the lake. She stood looking in the direction from which the steamboat
was to come; then she turned to the ticket office, doubtless to ask the
cause of the delay. After that she went back to the bench and sat down
with bent head. What was she thinking of?
The whistle sounded; she started up, and Gannett involuntarily made a
movement toward the door. But he turned back and continued to watch her.
She stood motionless, her eyes on the trail of smoke that preceded the
appearance of the boat. Then the little craft rounded the point, a dead
white object on the leaden water: a minute later it was puffing and
backing at the wharf.
The few passengers who were waiting two or three peasants and a snuffy
priest were clustered near the ticket office. Lydia stood apart under
the trees.
The boat lay alongside now; the gangplank was run out and the peasants
went on board with their baskets of vegetables, followed by the priest.
Still Lydia did not move. A bell began to ring querulously; there was a
shriek of steam, and someone must have called to her that she would be
late, for she started forward, as though in answer to a summons. She
moved waveringly, and at the edge of the wharf she paused. Gannett saw a
sailor beckon to her; the bell rang again and she stepped upon the
gangplank.
Halfway down the short incline to the deck she stopped again; then she
turned and ran back to the land. The gangplank was drawn in, the bell
ceased to ring, and the boat backed out into the lake. Lydia, with slow
steps, was walking toward the garden.
As she approached the hotel she looked up furtively and Gannett drew
back into the room. He sat down beside a table; a Bradshaw lay at his
elbow, and mechanically, without knowing what he did, he began looking
out the trains to Paris.
The Dilettante
It was on an impulse hardly needing the arguments he found himself
advancing in its favor, that Thursdale, on his way to the club, turned
as usual into Mrs. Vervain's street.
The "as usual" was his own qualification of the act; a convenient
way of bridging the interval -- in days and other sequences -- that lay
between this visit and the last. It was characteristic of him that he
instinctively excluded his call two days earlier, with Ruth Gaynor, from
the list of his visits to Mrs. Vervain: the special conditions attending
it had made it no more like a visit to Mrs. Vervain than an engraved
dinner invitation is like a personal letter. Yet it was to talk over his
call with Miss Gaynor that he was now returning to the scene of that
episode; and it was because Mrs. Vervain could be trusted to handle the
talking over as skilfully as the interview itself that, at her corner,
he had felt the dilettante's irresistible craving to take a last look at
a work of art that was passing out of his possession.
On the whole, he knew no one better fitted to deal with the
unexpected than Mrs. Vervain. She excelled in the rare art of taking
things for granted, and Thursdale felt a pardonable pride in the thought
that she owed her excellence to his training. Early in his career
Thursdale had made the mistake, at the outset of his acquaintance with a
lady, of telling her that he loved her and exacting the same avowal in
return. The latter part of that episode had been like the long walk back
from a picnic, when one has to carry all the crockery one has finished
using: it was the last time Thursdale ever allowed himself to be
encumbered with the debris of a feast. He thus incidentally learned that
the privilege of loving her is one of the least favors that a charming
woman can accord; and in seeking to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment he
had developed a science of evasion in which the woman of the moment
became a mere implement of the game. He owed a great deal of delicate
enjoyment to the cultivation of this art. The perils from which it had
been his refuge became naively harmless: was it possible that he who now
took his easy way along the levels had once preferred to gasp on the raw
heights of emotion? Youth is a high-colored season; but he had the
satisfaction of feeling that he had entered earlier than most into that
chiar'oscuro of sensation where every half-tone has its value.
As a promoter of this pleasure no one he had known was comparable
to Mrs. Vervain. He had taught a good many women not to betray their
feelings, but he had never before had such fine material to work in. She
had been surprisingly crude when he first knew her; capable of making
the most awkward inferences, of plunging through thin ice, of recklessly
undressing her emotions; but she had acquired, under the discipline of
his reticences and evasions, a skill almost equal to his own, and
perhaps more remarkable in that it involved keeping time with any tune
he played and reading at sight some uncommonly difficult passages.
It had taken Thursdale seven years to form this fine talent; but
the result justified the effort. At the crucial moment she had been
perfect: her way of greeting Miss Gaynor had made him regret that he had
announced his engagement by letter. It was an evasion that confessed a
difficulty; a deviation implying an obstacle, where, by common consent,
it was agreed to see none; it betrayed, in short, a lack of confidence
in the completeness of his method. It had been his pride never to put
himself in a position which had to be quitted, as it were, by the back
door; but here, as he perceived, the main portals would have opened for
him of their own accord. All this, and much more, he read in the
finished naturalness with which Mrs. Vervain had met Miss Gaynor. He had
never seen a better piece of work: there was no over-eagerness, no
suspicious warmth, above all (and this gave her art the grace of a
natural quality) there were none of those damnable implications whereby
a woman, in welcoming her friend's betrothed, may keep him on pins and
needles while she laps the lady in complacency. So masterly a
performance, indeed, hardly needed the offset of Miss Gaynor's door-step
words -- "To be so kind to me, how she must have liked you!" -- though
he caught himself wishing it lay within the bounds of fitness to
transmit them, as a final tribute, to the one woman he knew who was
unfailingly certain to enjoy a good thing. It was perhaps the one
drawback to his new situation that it might develop good things which it
would be impossible to hand on to Margaret Vervain.
The fact that he had made the mistake of underrating his friend's
powers, the consciousness that his writing must have betrayed his
distrust of her efficiency, seemed an added reason for turning down her
street instead of going on to the club. He would show her that he knew
how to value her; he would ask her to achieve with him a feat infinitely
rarer and more delicate than the one he had appeared to avoid.
Incidentally, he would also dispose of the interval of time before
dinner: ever since he had seen Miss Gaynor off, an hour earlier, on her
return journey to Buffalo, he had been wondering how he should put in
the rest of the afternoon. It was absurd, how he missed the girl. . . .
Yes, that was it; the desire to talk about her was, after all, at the
bottom of his impulse to call on Mrs. Vervain! It was absurd, if you
like -- but it was delightfully rejuvenating. He could recall the time
when he had been afraid of being obvious: now he felt that this return
to the primitive emotions might be as restorative as a holiday in the
Canadian woods. And it was precisely by the girl's candor, her
directness, her lack of complications, that he was taken. The sense that
she might say something rash at any moment was positively exhilarating:
if she had thrown her arms about him at the station he would not have
given a thought to his crumpled dignity. It surprised Thursdale to find
what freshness of heart he brought to the adventure; and though his
sense of irony prevented his ascribing his intactness to any conscious
purpose, he could but rejoice in the fact that his sentimental economies
had left him such a large surplus to draw upon.
Mrs. Vervain was at home -- as usual. When one visits the cemetery
one expects to find the angel on the tombstone, and it struck Thursdale
as another proof of his friend's good taste that she had been in no
undue haste to change her habits. The whole house appeared to count on
his coming; the footman took his hat and overcoat as naturally as though
there had been no lapse in his visits; and the drawing-room at once
enveloped him in that atmosphere of tacit intelligence which Mrs.
Vervain imparted to her very furniture.
It was a surprise that, in this general harmony of circumstances,
Mrs. Vervain should herself sound the first false note.
"You?" she exclaimed; and the book she held slipped from her hand.
It was crude, certainly; unless it were a touch of the finest art.
The difficulty of classifying it disturbed Thursdale's balance.
"Why not?" he said, restoring the book. "Isn't it my hour?" And as
she made no answer, he added gently, "Unless it's some one else's?"
She laid the book aside and sank back into her chair. "Mine,
merely," she said.
"I hope that doesn't mean that you're unwilling to share it?"
"With you? By no means. You're welcome to my last crust."
He looked at her reproachfully. "Do you call this the last?"
She smiled as he dropped into the seat across the hearth. "It's a
way of giving it more flavor!"
He returned the smile. "A visit to you doesn't need such condiments."
She took this with just the right measure of retrospective amusement.
"Ah, but I want to put into this one a very special taste," she
confessed.
Her smile was so confident, so reassuring, that it lulled him into
the imprudence of saying, "Why should you want it to be different from
what was always so perfectly right?"
She hesitated. "Doesn't the fact that it's the last constitute a
difference?"
"The last -- my last visit to you?"
"Oh, metaphorically, I mean -- there's a break in the continuity."
Decidedly, she was pressing too hard: unlearning his arts already!
"I don't recognize it," he said. "Unless you make me --" he added,
with a note that slightly stirred her attitude of languid attention.
She turned to him with grave eyes. "You recognize no difference
whatever?"
"None -- except an added link in the chain."
"An added link?"
"In having one more thing to like you for -- your letting Miss
Gaynor see why I had already so many." He flattered himself that this
turn had taken the least hint of fatuity from the phrase.
Mrs. Vervain sank into her former easy pose. "Was it that you came
for?" she asked, almost gaily.
"If it is necessary to have a reason -- that was one."
"To talk to me about Miss Gaynor?"
"To tell you how she talks about you."
"That will be very interesting -- especially if you have seen her
since her second visit to me."
"Her second visit?" Thursdale pushed his chair back with a start
and moved to another. "She came to see you again?"
"This morning, yes -- by appointment."
He continued to look at her blankly. "You sent for her?"
"I didn't have to -- she wrote and asked me last night. But no
doubt you have seen her since."
Thursdale sat silent. He was trying to separate his words from his
thoughts, but they still clung together inextricably. "I saw her off
just now at the station."
"And she didn't tell you that she had been here again?"
"There was hardly time, I suppose -- there were people about --" he
floundered.
"Ah, she'll write, then."
He regained his composure. "Of course she'll write: very often, I
hope. You know I'm absurdly in love," he cried audaciously.
She tilted her head back, looking up at him as he leaned against
the chimney-piece. He had leaned there so often that the attitude
touched a pulse which set up a throbbing in her throat. "Oh, my poor
Thursdale!" she murmured.
"I suppose it's rather ridiculous," he owned; and as she remained
silent, he added, with a sudden break --"Or have you another reason for
pitying me?"
Her answer was another question. "Have you been back to your rooms
since you left her?"
"Since I left her at the station? I came straight here."
"Ah, yes -- you could: there was no reason --" Her words passed
into a silent musing.
Thursdale moved nervously nearer. "You said you had something to
tell me?"
"Perhaps I had better let her do so. There may be a letter at your
rooms."
"A letter? What do you mean? A letter from her? What has happened?"
His paleness shook her, and she raised a hand of reassurance.
"Nothing has happened -- perhaps that is just the worst of it. You
always hated, you know," she added incoherently, "to have things
happen: you never would let them."
"And now -- ?"
"Well, that was what she came here for: I supposed you had guessed.
To know if anything had happened."
"Had happened?" He gazed at her slowly. "Between you and me?" he
said with a rush of light.
The words were so much cruder than any that had ever passed between
them that the color rose to her face; but she held his startled gaze.
"You know girls are not quite as unsophisticated as they used to
be. Are you surprised that such an idea should occur to her?"
His own color answered hers: it was the only reply that came to him.
Mrs. Vervain went on, smoothly: "I supposed it might have struck
you that there were times when we presented that appearance."
He made an impatient gesture. "A man's past is his own!"
"Perhaps -- it certainly never belongs to the woman who has shared
it. But one learns such truths only by experience; and Miss Gaynor is
naturally inexperienced."
"Of course -- but -- supposing her act a natural one -- " he
floundered lamentably among his innuendoes -- "I still don't see -- how
there was anything --"
"Anything to take hold of? There wasn't --"
"Well, then -- ?" escaped him, in crude satisfaction; but as she
did not complete the sentence he went on with a faltering laugh: "She
can hardly object to the existence of a mere friendship between us!"
"But she does," said Mrs. Vervain.
Thursdale stood perplexed. He had seen, on the previous day, no
trace of jealousy or resentment in his betrothed: he could still hear
the candid ring of the girl's praise of Mrs. Vervain. If she were such
an abyss of insincerity as to dissemble distrust under such frankness,
she must at least be more subtle than to bring her doubts to her rival
for solution. The situation seemed one through which one could no longer
move in a penumbra, and he let in a burst of light with the direct
query: "Won't you explain what you mean?"
Mrs. Vervain sat silent, not provokingly, as though to prolong his
distress, but as if, in the attenuated phraseology he had taught her, it
was difficult to find words robust enough to meet his challenge. It was
the first time he had ever asked her to explain anything; and she had
lived so long in dread of offering elucidations which were not wanted,
that she seemed unable to produce one on the spot.
At last she said slowly: "She came to find out if you were really
free."
Thursdale colored again. "Free?" he stammered, with a sense of
physical disgust at contact with such crassness.
"Yes -- if I had quite done with you." She smiled in recovered
security. "It seems she likes clear outlines; she has a passion for
definitions."
"Yes -- well?" he said, wincing at the echo of his own subtlety.
"Well -- and when I told her that you had never belonged to me, she
wanted me to define my status -- to know exactly where I had stood all
along."
Thursdale sat gazing at her intently; his hand was not yet on the
clue. "And even when you had told her that --"
"Even when I had told her that I had had no status -- that I had
never stood anywhere, in any sense she meant," said Mrs. Vervain, slowly
-- "even then she wasn't satisfied, it seems."
He uttered an uneasy exclamation. "She didn't believe you, you mean?"
"I mean that she did believe me: too thoroughly."
"Well, then -- in God's name, what did she want?"
"Something more -- those were the words she used."
"Something more? Between -- between you and me? Is it a conundrum?"
He laughed awkwardly.
"Girls are not what they were in my day; they are no longer
forbidden to contemplate the relation of the sexes."
"So it seems!" he commented. "But since, in this case, there wasn't
any --" he broke off, catching the dawn of a revelation in her gaze.
"That's just it. The unpardonable offence has been -- in our not
offending."
He flung himself down despairingly. "I give it up! -- What did you
tell her?" he burst out with sudden crudeness.
"The exact truth. If I had only known," she broke off with a
beseeching tenderness, "won't you believe that I would still have lied
for you?"
"Lied for me? Why on earth should you have lied for either of us?"
"To save you -- to hide you from her to the last! As I've hidden
you from myself all these years!" She stood up with a sudden tragic
import in her movement. "You believe me capable of that, don't you? If I
had only guessed -- but I have never known a girl like her; she had the
truth out of me with a spring."
"The truth that you and I had never --"
"Had never -- never in all these years! Oh, she knew why -- she
measured us both in a flash. She didn't suspect me of having haggled
with you -- her words pelted me like hail. 'He just took what he wanted
-- sifted and sorted you to suit his taste. Burnt out the gold and left
a heap of cinders. And you let him -- you let yourself be cut in bits'
-- she mixed her metaphors a little -- 'be cut in bits, and used or
discarded, while all the while every drop of blood in you belonged to
him! But he's Shylock -- and you have bled to death of the pound of
flesh he has cut out of you.' But she despises me the most, you know --
far the most --" Mrs. Vervain ended.
The words fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room: they
seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind
of intimacy on which at any moment, a visitor might intrude without
perceptibly lowering the atmosphere. It was as though a grand
opera-singer had strained the acoustics of a private music-room.
Thursdale stood up, facing his hostess. Half the room was between
them, but they seemed to stare close at each other now that the veils of
reticence and ambiguity had fallen.
His first words were characteristic. "She does despise me, then?"
he exclaimed.
"She thinks the pound of flesh you took was a little too near the
heart."
He was excessively pale. "Please tell me exactly what she said of me."
"She did not speak much of you: she is proud. But I gather that
while she understands love or indifference, her eyes have never been
opened to the many intermediate shades of feeling. At any rate, she
expressed an unwillingness to be taken with reservations -- she thinks
you would have loved her better if you had loved some one else first.
The point of view is original -- she insists on a man with a past!"
"Oh, a past -- if she's serious -- I could rake up a past!" he said
with a laugh.
"So I suggested: but she has her eyes on his particular portion of
it. She insists on making it a test case. She wanted to know what you
had done to me; and before I could guess her drift I blundered into
telling her."
Thursdale drew a difficult breath. "I never supposed -- your
revenge is complete," he said slowly.
He heard a little gasp in her throat. "My revenge? When I sent for
you to warn you -- to save you from being surprised as I was surprised?"
"You're very good -- but it's rather late to talk of saving me." He
held out his hand in the mechanical gesture of leave-taking.
"How you must care! -- for I never saw you so dull," was her
answer. "Don't you see that it's not too late for me to help you?" And
as he continued to stare, she brought out sublimely: "Take the rest --
in imagination! Let it at least be of that much use to you. Tell her I
lied to her -- she's too ready to believe it! And so, after all, in a
sense, I sha'n't have been wasted."
His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder. She gave the
look back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too
simple to need oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words
had swept them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to
this contact of naked souls.
It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but
something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He went
up to his friend and took her hand.
"You would do it -- you would do it!"
She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook.
"Good-by," he said, kissing it.
"Good-by? You are going -- ?"
"To get my letter."
"Your letter? The letter won't matter, if you will only do what I
ask."
He returned her gaze. "I might, I suppose, without being out of
character. Only, don't you see that if your plan helped me it could only
harm her?"
"Harm her?"
"To sacrifice you wouldn't make me different. I shall go on being
what I have always been -- sifting and sorting, as she calls it. Do you
want my punishment to fall on her?"
She looked at him long and deeply. "Ah, if I had to choose between
you -- !"
"You would let her take her chance? But I can't, you see. I must
take my punishment alone."
She drew her hand away, sighing. "Oh, there will be no punishment
for either of you."
"For either of us? There will be the reading of her letter for me."
She shook her head with a slight laugh. "There will be no letter."
Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his
look. "No letter? You don't mean --"
"I mean that she's been with you since I saw her -- she's seen you
and heard your voice. If there is a letter, she has recalled it --
from the first station, by telegraph."
He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her smile. "But in
the mean while I shall have read it," he said.
The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the dreadful
emptiness of the room.
THE VERDICT
I had always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius -- though a good
fellow enough -- so it was no great surprise to me to hear that, in the
height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a rich widow,
and established himself in a villa on the Riviera. (Though I rather
thought it would have been Rome or Florence.)
"The height of his glory" -- that was what the women called it. I
can hear Mrs. Gideon Thwing -- his last Chicago sitter -- deploring his
unaccountable abdication. "Of course it's going to send the value of my
picture 'way up; but I don't think of that, Mr. Rickham -- the loss to
Arrt is all I think of." The word, on Mrs. Thwing's lips, multiplied its
rs as though they were reflected in an endless vista of mirrors. And
it was not only the Mrs. Thwings who mourned. Had not the exquisite
Hermia Croft, at the last Grafton Gallery show, stopped me before
Gisburn's "Moon-dancers" to say, with tears in her eyes: "We shall not
look upon its like again"?
Well! -- even through the prism of Hermia's tears I felt able to
face the fact with equanimity. Poor Jack Gisburn! The women had made him
-- it was fitting that they should mourn him. Among his own sex fewer
regrets were heard, and in his own trade hardly a murmur. Professional
jealousy? Perhaps. If it were, the honour of the craft was vindicated by
little Claude Nutley, who, in all good faith, brought out in the
Burlington a very handsome "obituary" on Jack -- one of those showy
articles stocked with random technicalities that I have heard (I won't
say by whom) compared to Gisburn's painting. And so -- his resolve being
apparently irrevocable -- the discussion gradually died out, and, as
Mrs. Thwing had predicted, the price of "Gisburns" went up.
It was not till three years later that, in the course of a few
weeks' idling on the Riviera, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder why
Gisburn had given up his painting. On reflection, it really was a
tempting problem. To accuse his wife would have been too easy -- his
fair sitters had been denied the solace of saying that Mrs. Gisburn had
"dragged him down." For Mrs. Gisburn -- as such -- had not existed till
nearly a year after Jack's resolve had been taken. It might be that he
had married her -- since he liked his ease -- because he didn't want to
go on painting; but it would have been hard to prove that he had given
up his painting because he had married her.
Of course, if she had not dragged him down, she had equally, as
Miss Croft contended, failed to "lift him up" -- she had not led him
back to the easel. To put the brush into his hand again-what a vocation
for a wife! But Mrs. Gisburn appeared to have disdained it -- and I felt
it might be interesting to find out why.
The desultory life of the Riviera lends itself to such purely
academic speculations; and having, on my way to Monte Carlo, caught a
glimpse of Jack's balustraded terraces between the pines, I had myself
borne thither the next day.
I found the couple at tea beneath their palm-trees; and Mrs.
Gisburn's welcome was so genial that, in the ensuing weeks, I claimed it
frequently. It was not that my hostess was "interesting": on that point
I could have given Miss Croft the fullest reassurance. It was just
because she was not interesting -- if I may be pardoned the bull --
that I found her so. For Jack, all his life, had been surrounded by
interesting women: they had fostered his art, it had been reared in the
hot-house of their adulation. And it was therefore instructive to note
what effect the "deadening atmosphere of mediocrity" (I quote Miss
Croft) was having on him.
I have mentioned that Mrs. Gisburn was rich; and it was immediately
perceptible that her husband was extracting from this circumstance a
delicate but substantial satisfaction. It is, as a rule, the people who
scorn money who get most out of it; and Jack's elegant disdain of his
wife's big balance enabled him, with an appearance of perfect
good-breeding, to transmute it into objects of art and luxury. To the
latter, I must add, he remained relatively indifferent; but he was
buying Renaissance bronzes and eighteenth-century pictures with a
discrimination that bespoke the amplest resources.
"Money's only excuse is to put beauty into circulation," was one of
the axioms he laid down across the Sevres and silver of an exquisitely
appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had again run over
from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on him, added for my
enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive to every form of beauty."
Poor Jack! It had always been his fate to have women say such
things of him: the fact should be set down in extenuation. What struck
me now was that, for the first time, he resented the tone. I had seen
him, so often, basking under similar tributes -- was it the conjugal
note that robbed them of their savour? No -- for, oddly enough, it
became apparent that he was fond of Mrs. Gisburn -- fond enough not to
see her absurdity. It was his own absurdity he seemed to be wincing
under -- his own attitude as an object for garlands and incense.
"My dear, since I've chucked painting people don't say that stuff
about me -- they say it about Victor Grindle," was his only protest, as
he rose from the table and strolled out onto the sunlit terrace.
I glanced after him, struck by his last word. Victor Grindle was,
in fact, becoming the man of the moment -- as Jack himself, one might
put it, had been the man of the hour. The younger artist was said to
have formed himself at my friend's feet, and I wondered if a tinge of
jealousy underlay the latter's mysterious abdication. But no -- for it
was not till after that event that the rose Dubarry drawing-rooms had
begun to display their "Grindles."
I turned to Mrs. Gisburn, who had lingered to give a lump of sugar
to her spaniel in the dining-room.
"Why has he chucked painting?" I asked abruptly.
She raised her eyebrows with a hint of good-humoured surprise.
"Oh, he doesn't have to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy
himself," she said quite simply.
I looked about the spacious white-panelled room, with its
famille-verte vases repeating the tones of the pale damask curtains, and
its eighteenth-century pastels in delicate faded frames.
"Has he chucked his pictures too? I haven't seen a single one in
the house."
A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn's open
countenance. "It's his ridiculous modesty, you know. He says they're not
fit to have about; he's sent them all away except one -- my portrait --
and that I have to keep upstairs."
His ridiculous modesty -- Jack's modesty about his pictures? My
curiosity was growing like the bean-stalk. I said persuasively to my
hostess: "I must really see your portrait, you know."
She glanced out almost timorously at the terrace where her husband,
lounging in a hooded chair, had lit a cigar and drawn the Russian
deerhound's head between his knees.
"Well, come while he's not looking," she said, with a laugh that
tried to hide her nervousness; and I followed her between the marble
Emperors of the hall, and up the wide stairs with terracotta nymphs
poised among flowers at each landing.
In the dimmest corner of her boudoir, amid a profusion of delicate
and distinguished objects, hung one of the familiar oval canvases, in
the inevitable garlanded frame. The mere outline of the frame called up
all Gisburn's past!
Mrs. Gisburn drew back the window-curtains, moved aside a
jardiniere full of pink azaleas, pushed an arm-chair away, and said: "If
you stand here you can just manage to see it. I had it over the
mantel-piece, but he wouldn't let it stay."
Yes -- I could just manage to see it -- the first portrait of
Jack's I had ever had to strain my eyes over! Usually they had the place
of honour -- say the central panel in a pale yellow or rose Dubarry
drawing-room, or a monumental easel placed so that it took the light
through curtains of old Venetian point. The more modest place became the
picture better; yet, as my eyes grew accustomed to the half-light, all
the characteristic qualities came out -- all the hesitations disguised
as audacities, the tricks of prestidigitation by which, with such
consummate skill, he managed to divert attention from the real business
of the picture to some pretty irrelevance of detail. Mrs. Gisburn,
presenting a neutral surface to work on -- forming, as it were, so
inevitably the background of her own picture -- had lent herself in an
unusual degree to the display of this false virtuosity. The picture was
one of Jack's "strongest," as his admirers would have put it -- it
represented, on his part, a swelling of muscles, a congesting of veins,
a balancing, straddling and straining, that reminded one of the
circus-clown's ironic efforts to lift a feather. It met, in short, at
every point the demand of lovely woman to be painted "strongly" because
she was tired of being painted "sweetly" -- and yet not to lose an atom
of the sweetness.
"It's the last he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with
pardonable pride. "The last but one," she corrected herself-"but the
other doesn't count, because he destroyed it."
"Destroyed it?" I was about to follow up this clue when I heard a
footstep and saw Jack himself on the threshold.
As he stood there, his hands in the pockets of his velveteen coat,
the thin brown waves of hair pushed back from his white forehead, his
lean sunburnt cheeks furrowed by a smile that lifted the tips of a
self-confident moustache, I felt to what a degree he had the same
quality as his pictures -- the quality of looking cleverer than he was.
His wife glanced at him deprecatingly, but his eyes travelled past
her to the portrait.
"Mr. Rickham wanted to see it," she began, as if excusing herself.
He shrugged his shoulders, still smiling.
"Oh, Rickham found me out long ago," he said lightly; then, passing
his arm through mine: "Come and see the rest of the house."
He showed it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the
bath-rooms, the speaking-tubes, the dress-closets, the trouserpresses --
all the complex simplifications of the millionaire's domestic economy.
And whenever my wonder paid the expected tribute he said, throwing out
his chest a little: "Yes, I really don't see how people manage to live
without that."
Well -- it was just the end one might have foreseen for him. Only
he was, through it all and in spite of it all -- as he had been through,
and in spite of, his pictures -- so handsome, so charming, so disarming,
that one longed to cry out: "Be dissatisfied with your leisure!" as once
one had longed to say: "Be dissatisfied with your work!"
But, with the cry on my lips, my diagnosis suffered an unexpected
check.
"This is my own lair," he said, leading me into a dark plain room
at the end of the florid vista. It was square and brown and leathery: no
"effects"; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing for reproduction in
a picture weekly -- above all, no least sign of ever having been used as
a studio.
The fact brought home to me the absolute finality of Jack's break
with his old life.
"Don't you ever dabble with paint any more?" I asked, still looking
about for a trace of such activity.
"Never," he said briefly.
"Or water-colour -- or etching?"
His confident eyes grew dim, and his cheeks paled a little under
their handsome sunburn.
"Never think of it, my dear fellow -- any more than if I'd never
touched a brush."
And his tone told me in a flash that he never thought of anything
else.
I moved away, instinctively embarrassed by my unexpected discovery;
and as I turned, my eye fell on a small picture above the mantel-piece
-- the only object breaking the plain oak panelling of the room.
"Oh, by Jove!" I said.
It was a sketch of a donkey -- an old tired donkey, standing in the
rain under a wall.
"By Jove -- a Stroud!" I cried.
He was silent; but I felt him close behind me, breathing a little
quickly.
"What a wonder! Made with a dozen lines -- but on everlasting
foundations. You lucky chap, where did you get it?"
He answered slowly: "Mrs. Stroud gave it to me."
"Ah -- I didn't know you even knew the Strouds. He was such an
inflexible hermit."
"I didn't -- till after. . . . She sent for me to paint him when he
was dead."
"When he was dead? You?"
I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my
surprise, for he answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes -- she's an
awful simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have him
done by a fashionable painter -- ah, poor Stroud! She thought it the
surest way of proclaiming his greatness -- of forcing it on a purblind
public. And at the moment I was the fashionable painter."
"Ah, poor Stroud -- as you say. Was that his history?"
"That was his history. She believed in him, gloried in him -- or
thought she did. But she couldn't bear not to have all the drawing-rooms
with her. She couldn't bear the fact that, on varnishing days, one could
always get near enough to see his pictures. Poor woman! She's just a
fragment groping for other fragments. Stroud is the only whole I ever
knew."
"You ever knew? But you just said --"
Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.
"Oh, I knew him, and he knew me -- only it happened after he was
dead."
I dropped my voice instinctively. "When she sent for you?"
"Yes -- quite insensible to the irony. She wanted him
vindicated-and by me!"
He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the sketch
of the donkey. "There were days when I couldn't look at that thing --
couldn't face it. But I forced myself to put it here; and now it's cured
me -- cured me. That's the reason why I don't dabble any more, my dear
Rickham; or rather Stroud himself is the reason."
For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned into
a serious desire to understand him better.
"I wish you'd tell me how it happened," I said.
He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his fingers
a cigarette he had forgotten to light. Suddenly he turned toward me.
"I'd rather like to tell you -- because I've always suspected you
of loathing my work."
I made a deprecating gesture, which he negatived with a
goodhumoured shrug.
"Oh, I didn't care a straw when I believed in myself -- and now
it's an added tie between us!"
He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the deep
arm-chairs forward. "There: make yourself comfortable -- and here are
the cigars you like."
He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down the
room, stopping now and then beneath the picture.
"How it happened? I can tell you in five minutes -- and it didn't
take much longer to happen. . . . I can remember now how surprised and
pleased I was when I got Mrs. Stroud's note. Of course, deep down, I had
always felt there was no one like him-only I had gone with the stream,
echoed the usual platitudes about him, till I half got to think he was a
failure, one of the kind that are left behind. By Jove, and he was
left behind-because he had come to stay! The rest of us had to let
ourselves be swept along or go under, but he was high above the current
-- on everlasting foundations, as you say.
"Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood -- rather
moved, Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud's career of failure
being crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course I meant to do
the picture for nothing -- I told Mrs. Stroud so when she began to
stammer something about her poverty. I remember getting off a prodigious
phrase about the honour being mine -- oh, I was princely, my dear
Rickham! I was posing to myself like one of my own sitters.
"Then I was taken up and left alone with him. I had sent all my
traps in advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to work. He
had been dead only twenty-four hours, and he died suddenly, of heart
disease, so that there had been no preliminary work of destruction --
his face was clear and untouched. I had met him once or twice, years
before, and thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I saw that he was
superb.
"I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to
have my hand on such a 'subject.' Then his strange lifelikeness began to
affect me queerly -- as I blocked the head in I felt as if he were
watching me do it. The sensation was followed by the thought: if he
were watching me, what would he say to my way of working? My strokes
began to go a little wild -- I felt nervous and uncertain.
"Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close
grayish beard -- as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself by
holding it back from me. That exasperated me still more. The secret?
Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his! I dashed at the canvas
furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks. But they failed me, they
crumbled. I saw that he wasn't watching the showy bits -- I couldn't
distract his attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard passages
between. Those were the ones I had always shirked, or covered up with
some lying paint. And how he saw through my lies!
"I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey
hanging on the wall near his bed. His wife told me afterward it was the
last thing he had done -- just a note taken with a shaking hand, when he
was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous heart attack. Just a
note! But it tells his whole history. There are years of patient
scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum with the current
could never have learned that mighty up-stream stroke. . . .
"I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I
looked at the donkey again. I saw that, when Stroud laid in the first
stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed his
subject, absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with any of my
things? They hadn't been born of me -- I had just adopted them. . . .
"Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn't do another
stroke. The plain truth was, I didn't know where to put it -- I had
never known. Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of
colour covered up the fact -- I just threw paint into their faces. . . .
Well, paint was the one medium those dead eyes could see through -- see
straight to the tottering foundations underneath. Don't you know how, in
talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not
what one wants to but what one can? Well -- that was the way I painted;
and as he lay there and watched me, the thing they called my 'technique'
collapsed like a house of cards. He didn't sneer, you understand, poor
Stroud -- he just lay there quietly watching, and on his lips, through
the gray beard, I seemed to hear the question: 'Are you sure you know
where you're coming out?'
"If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I
should have done a great thing. The next greatest thing was to see that
I couldn't -- and that grace was given me. But, oh, at that minute,
Rickham, was there anything on earth I wouldn't have given to have
Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say: 'It's not too late -- I'll
show you how'?
"It was too late -- it would have been, even if he'd been alive.
I packed up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud. Of course I
didn't tell her that -- it would have been Greek to her. I simply said
I couldn't paint him, that I was too moved. She rather liked the idea --
she's so romantic! It was that that made her give me the donkey. But she
was terribly upset at not getting the portrait -- she did so want him
'done' by some one showy! At first I was afraid she wouldn't let me off
-- and at my wits' end I suggested Grindle. Yes, it was I who started
Grindle: I told Mrs. Stroud he was the 'coming' man, and she told
somebody else, and so it got to be true. . . . And he painted Stroud
without wincing; and she hung the picture among her husband's things. .
. ."
He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his
head, and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture above
the chimney-piece.
"I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if
he'd been able to say what he thought that day."
And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically --"Begin
again?" he flashed out. "When the one thing that brings me anywhere near
him is that I knew enough to leave off?"
He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. "Only
the irony of it is that I am still painting -- since Grindle's doing
it for me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once -- but there's no
exterminating our kind of art."
THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD HAND
I
"Above all," the letter ended, "don't leave Siena without seeing Doctor
Lombard's Leonardo. Lombard is a queer old Englishman, a mystic or a
madman (if the two are not synonymous), and a devout student of the
Italian Renaissance. He has lived for years in Italy, exploring its
remotest corners, and has lately picked up an undoubted Leonardo, which
came to light in a farmhouse near Bergamo. It is believed to be one of
the missing pictures mentioned by Vasari, and is at any rate, according
to the most competent authorities, a genuine and almost untouched
example of the best period.
"Lombard is a queer stick, and jealous of showing his treasures;
but we struck up a friendship when I was working on the Sodomas in Siena
three years ago, and if you will give him the enclosed line you may get
a peep at the Leonardo. Probably not more than a peep, though, for I
hear he refuses to have it reproduced. I want badly to use it in my
monograph on the Windsor drawings, so please see what you can do for me,
and if you can't persuade him to let you take a photograph or make a
sketch, at least jot down a detailed description of the picture and get
from him all the facts you can. I hear that the French and Italian
governments have offered him a large advance on his purchase, but that
he refuses to sell at any price, though he certainly can't afford such
luxuries; in fact, I don't see where he got enough money to buy the
picture. He lives in the Via Papa Giulio."
Wyant sat at the table d'hote of his hotel, re-reading his friend's
letter over a late luncheon. He had been five days in Siena without
having found time to call on Doctor Lombard; not from any indifference
to the opportunity presented, but because it was his first visit to the
strange red city and he was still under the spell of its more
conspicuous wonders -- the brick palaces flinging out their wrought-iron
torch-holders with a gesture of arrogant suzerainty; the great
council-chamber emblazoned with civic allegories; the pageant of Pope
Julius on the Library walls; the Sodomas smiling balefully through the
dusk of mouldering chapels -- and it was only when his first hunger was
appeased that he remembered that one course in the banquet was still
untasted.
He put the letter in his pocket and turned to leave the room, with
a nod to its only other occupant, an olive-skinned young man with
lustrous eyes and a low collar, who sat on the other side of the table,
perusing the Fanfulla di Domenica. This gentleman, his daily vis-a-vis,
returned the nod with a Latin eloquence of gesture, and Wyant passed on
to the ante-chamber, where he paused to light a cigarette. He was just
restoring the case to his pocket when he heard a hurried step behind
him, and the lustrouseyed young man advanced through the glass doors of
the diningroom.
"Pardon me, sir," he said in measured English, and with an
intonation of exquisite politeness; "you have let this letter fall."
Wyant, recognizing his friend's note of introduction to Doctor
Lombard, took it with a word of thanks, and was about to turn away when
he perceived that the eyes of his fellow diner remained fixed on him
with a gaze of melancholy interrogation.
"Again pardon me," the young man at length ventured, "but are you
by chance the friend of the illustrious Doctor Lombard?"
"No," returned Wyant, with the instinctive Anglo-Saxon distrust of
foreign advances. Then, fearing to appear rude, he said with a guarded
politeness: "Perhaps, by the way, you can tell me the number of his
house. I see it is not given here."
The young man brightened perceptibly. "The number of the house is
thirteen; but any one can indicate it to you -- it is well known in
Siena. It is called," he continued after a moment, "the House of the
Dead Hand."
Wyant stared. "What a queer name!" he said.
"The name comes from an antique hand of marble which for many
hundred years has been above the door."
Wyant was turning away with a gesture of thanks, when the other
added: "If you would have the kindness to ring twice."
"To ring twice?"
"At the doctor's." The young man smiled. "It is the custom."
It was a dazzling March afternoon, with a shower of sun from the
mid-blue, and a marshalling of slaty clouds behind the umbercolored
hills. For nearly an hour Wyant loitered on the Lizza, watching the
shadows race across the naked landscape and the thunder blacken in the
west; then he decided to set out for the House of the Dead Hand. The map
in his guidebook showed him that the Via Papa Giulio was one of the
streets which radiate from the Piazza, and thither he bent his course,
pausing at every other step to fill his eye with some fresh image of
weather-beaten beauty. The clouds had rolled upward, obscuring the
sunshine and hanging like a funereal baldachin above the projecting
cornices of Doctor Lombard's street, and Wyant walked for some distance
in the shade of the beetling palace fronts before his eye fell on a
doorway surmounted by a sallow marble hand. He stood for a moment
staring up at the strange emblem. The hand was a woman's -- a dead
drooping hand, which hung there convulsed and helpless, as though it had
been thrust forth in denunciation of some evil mystery within the house,
and had sunk struggling into death.
A girl who was drawing water from the well in the court said that
the English doctor lived on the first floor, and Wyant, passing through
a glazed door, mounted the damp degrees of a vaulted stairway with a
plaster AEsculapius mouldering in a niche on the landing. Facing the
AEsculapius was another door, and as Wyant put his hand on the bell-rope
he remembered his unknown friend's injunction, and rang twice.
His ring was answered by a peasant woman with a low forehead and
small close-set eyes, who, after a prolonged scrutiny of himself, his
card, and his letter of introduction, left him standing in a high, cold
ante-chamber floored with brick. He heard her wooden pattens click down
an interminable corridor, and after some delay she returned and told him
to follow her.
They passed through a long saloon, bare as the ante-chamber, but
loftily vaulted, and frescoed with a seventeenth-century Triumph of
Scipio or Alexander -- martial figures following Wyant with the filmed
melancholy gaze of shades in limbo. At the end of this apartment he was
admitted to a smaller room, with the same atmosphere of mortal cold, but
showing more obvious signs of occupancy. The walls were covered with
tapestry which had faded to the gray-brown tints of decaying vegetation,
so that the young man felt as though he were entering a sunless autumn
wood. Against these hangings stood a few tall cabinets on heavy gilt
feet, and at a table in the window three persons were seated: an elderly
lady who was warming her hands over a brazier, a girl bent above a strip
of needle-work, and an old man.
As the latter advanced toward Wyant, the young man was conscious of
staring with unseemly intentness at his small round-backed figure,
dressed with shabby disorder and surmounted by a wonderful head, lean,
vulpine, eagle-beaked as that of some artloving despot of the
Renaissance: a head combining the venerable hair and large prominent
eyes of the humanist with the greedy profile of the adventurer. Wyant,
in musing on the Italian portrait-medals of the fifteenth century, had
often fancied that only in that period of fierce individualism could
types so paradoxical have been produced; yet the subtle craftsmen who
committed them to the bronze had never drawn a face more strangely
stamped with contradictory passions than that of Doctor Lombard.
"I am glad to see you," he said to Wyant, extending a hand which
seemed a mere framework held together by knotted veins. "We lead a quiet
life here and receive few visitors, but any friend of Professor Clyde's
is welcome." Then, with a gesture which included the two women, he added
dryly: "My wife and daughter often talk of Professor Clyde."
"Oh yes -- he used to make me such nice toast; they don't
understand toast in Italy," said Mrs. Lombard in a high plaintive voice.
It would have been difficult, from Doctor Lombard's manner and
appearance to guess his nationality; but his wife was so inconsciently
and ineradicably English that even the silhouette of her cap seemed a
protest against Continental laxities. She was a stout fair woman, with
pale cheeks netted with red lines. A brooch with a miniature portrait
sustained a bogwood watchchain upon her bosom, and at her elbow lay a
heap of knitting and an old copy of The Queen.
The young girl, who had remained standing, was a slim replica of
her mother, with an apple-cheeked face and opaque blue eyes. Her small
head was prodigally laden with braids of dull fair hair, and she might
have had a kind of transient prettiness but for the sullen droop of her
round mouth. It was hard to say whether her expression implied
ill-temper or apathy; but Wyant was struck by the contrast between the
fierce vitality of the doctor's age and the inanimateness of his
daughter's youth.
Seating himself in the chair which his host advanced, the young man
tried to open the conversation by addressing to Mrs. Lombard some random
remark on the beauties of Siena. The lady murmured a resigned assent,
and Doctor Lombard interposed with a smile: "My dear sir, my wife
considers Siena a most salubrious spot, and is favorably impressed by
the cheapness of the marketing; but she deplores the total absence of
muffins and cannel coal, and cannot resign herself to the Italian method
of dusting furniture."
"But they don't, you know -- they don't dust it!" Mrs. Lombard
protested, without showing any resentment of her husband's manner.
"Precisely -- they don't dust it. Since we have lived in Siena we
have not once seen the cobwebs removed from the battlements of the
Mangia. Can you conceive of such housekeeping? My wife has never yet
dared to write it home to her aunts at Bonchurch."
Mrs. Lombard accepted in silence this remarkable statement of her
views, and her husband, with a malicious smile at Wyant's embarrassment,
planted himself suddenly before the young man.
"And now," said he, "do you want to see my Leonardo?"
"Do I?" cried Wyant, on his feet in a flash.
The doctor chuckled. "Ah," he said, with a kind of crooning
deliberation, "that's the way they all behave -- that's what they all
come for." He turned to his daughter with another variation of mockery
in his smile. "Don't fancy it's for your beaux yeux, my dear; or for the
mature charms of Mrs. Lombard," he added, glaring suddenly at his wife,
who had taken up her knitting and was softly murmuring over the number
of her stitches.
Neither lady appeared to notice his pleasantries, and he continued,
addressing himself to Wyant: "They all come -- they all come; but many
are called and few are chosen." His voice sank to solemnity. "While I
live," he said, "no unworthy eye shall desecrate that picture. But I
will not do my friend Clyde the injustice to suppose that he would send
an unworthy representative. He tells me he wishes a description of the
picture for his book; and you shall describe it to him -- if you can."
Wyant hesitated, not knowing whether it was a propitious moment to
put in his appeal for a photograph.
"Well, sir," he said, "you know Clyde wants me to take away all I
can of it."
Doctor Lombard eyed him sardonically. "You're welcome to take away
all you can carry," he replied; adding, as he turned to his daughter:
"That is, if he has your permission, Sybilla."
The girl rose without a word, and laying aside her work, took a key
from a secret drawer in one of the cabinets, while the doctor continued
in the same note of grim jocularity: "For you must know that the picture
is not mine -- it is my daughter's."
He followed with evident amusement the surprised glance which Wyant
turned on the young girl's impassive figure.
"Sybilla," he pursued, "is a votary of the arts; she has inherited
her fond father's passion for the unattainable. Luckily, however, she
also recently inherited a tidy legacy from her grandmother; and having
seen the Leonardo, on which its discoverer had placed a price far beyond
my reach, she took a step which deserves to go down to history: she
invested her whole inheritance in the purchase of the picture, thus
enabling me to spend my closing years in communion with one of the
world's masterpieces. My dear sir, could Antigone do more?"
The object of this strange eulogy had meanwhile drawn aside one of
the tapestry hangings, and fitted her key into a concealed door.
"Come," said Doctor Lombard, "let us go before the light fails us."
Wyant glanced at Mrs. Lombard, who continued to knit impassively.
"No, no," said his host, "my wife will not come with us. You might
not suspect it from her conversation, but my wife has no feeling for art
-- Italian art, that is; for no one is fonder of our early Victorian
school."
"Frith's Railway Station, you know," said Mrs. Lombard, smiling. "I
like an animated picture."
Miss Lombard, who had unlocked the door, held back the tapestry to
let her father and Wyant pass out; then she followed them down a narrow
stone passage with another door at its end. This door was iron-barred,
and Wyant noticed that it had a complicated patent lock. The girl fitted
another key into the lock, and Doctor Lombard led the way into a small
room. The dark panelling of this apartment was irradiated by streams of
yellow light slanting through the disbanded thunder clouds, and in the
central brightness hung a picture concealed by a curtain of faded velvet.
"A little too bright, Sybilla," said Doctor Lombard. His face had
grown solemn, and his mouth twitched nervously as his daughter drew a
linen drapery across the upper part of the window.
"That will do -- that will do." He turned impressively to Wyant.
"Do you see the pomegranate bud in this rug? Place yourself there --
keep your left foot on it, please. And now, Sybilla, draw the cord."
Miss Lombard advanced and placed her hand on a cord hidden behind
the velvet curtain.
"Ah," said the doctor, "one moment: I should like you, while
looking at the picture, to have in mind a few lines of verse. Sybilla --"
Without the slightest change of countenance, and with a promptness
which proved her to be prepared for the request, Miss Lombard began to
recite, in a full round voice like her mother's, St. Bernard's
invocation to the Virgin, in the thirty-third canto of the Paradise.
"Thank you, my dear," said her father, drawing a deep breath as she
ended. "That unapproachable combination of vowel sounds prepares one
better than anything I know for the contemplation of the picture."
As he spoke the folds of velvet slowly parted, and the Leonardo
appeared in its frame of tarnished gold:
From the nature of Miss Lombard's recitation Wyant had expected a
sacred subject, and his surprise was therefore great as the composition
was gradually revealed by the widening division of the curtain.
In the background a steel-colored river wound through a pale
calcareous landscape; while to the left, on a lonely peak, a crucified
Christ hung livid against indigo clouds. The central figure of the
foreground, however, was that of a woman seated in an antique chair of
marble with bas-reliefs of dancing maenads. Her feet rested on a meadow
sprinkled with minute wild-flowers, and her attitude of smiling majesty
recalled that of Dosso Dossi's Circe. She wore a red robe, flowing in
closely fluted lines from under a fancifully embroidered cloak. Above
her high forehead the crinkled golden hair flowed sideways beneath a
veil; one hand drooped on the arm of her chair; the other held up an
inverted human skull, into which a young Dionysus, smooth, brown and
sidelong as the St. John of the Louvre, poured a stream of wine from a
high-poised flagon. At the lady's feet lay the symbols of art and
luxury: a flute and a roll of music, a platter heaped with grapes and
roses, the torso of a Greek statuette, and a bowl overflowing with coins
and jewels; behind her, on the chalky hilltop, hung the crucified
Christ. A scroll in a corner of the foreground bore the legend: Lux Mundi.
Wyant, emerging from the first plunge of wonder, turned inquiringly
toward his companions. Neither had moved. Miss Lombard stood with her
hand on the cord, her lids lowered, her mouth drooping; the doctor, his
strange Thoth-like profile turned toward his guest, was still lost in
rapt contemplation of his treasure.
Wyant addressed the young girl.
"You are fortunate," he said, "to be the possessor of anything so
perfect."
"It is considered very beautiful," she said coldly.
"Beautiful -- beautiful!" the doctor burst out. "Ah, the poor,
worn out, over-worked word! There are no adjectives in the language
fresh enough to describe such pristine brilliancy; all their brightness
has been worn off by misuse. Think of the things that have been called
beautiful, and then look at that!"
"It is worthy of a new vocabulary," Wyant agreed.
"Yes," Doctor Lombard continued, "my daughter is indeed fortunate.
She has chosen what Catholics call the higher life -- the counsel of
perfection. What other private person enjoys the same opportunity of
understanding the master? Who else lives under the same roof with an
untouched masterpiece of Leonardo's? Think of the happiness of being
always under the influence of such a creation; of living into it; of
partaking of it in daily and hourly communion! This room is a chapel;
the sight of that picture is a sacrament. What an atmosphere for a young
life to unfold itself in! My daughter is singularly blessed. Sybilla,
point out some of the details to Mr. Wyant; I see that he will
appreciate them."
The girl turned her dense blue eyes toward Wyant; then, glancing
away from him, she pointed to the canvas.
"Notice the modeling of the left hand," she began in a monotonous
voice; "it recalls the hand of the Mona Lisa. The head of the naked
genius will remind you of that of the St. John of the Louvre, but it is
more purely pagan and is turned a little less to the right. The
embroidery on the cloak is symbolic: you will see that the roots of this
plant have burst through the vase. This recalls the famous definition of
Hamlet's character in Wilhelm Meister. Here are the mystic rose, the
flame, and the serpent, emblem of eternity. Some of the other symbols we
have not yet been able to decipher."
Wyant watched her curiously; she seemed to be reciting a lesson.
"And the picture itself?" he said. "How do you explain that? Lux
Mundi -- what a curious device to connect with such a subject! What can
it mean?"
Miss Lombard dropped her eyes: the answer was evidently not
included in her lesson.
"What, indeed?" the doctor interposed. "What does life mean? As one
may define it in a hundred different ways, so one may find a hundred
different meanings in this picture. Its symbolism is as many-faceted as
a well-cut diamond. Who, for instance, is that divine lady? Is it she
who is the true Lux Mundi -- the light reflected from jewels and young
eyes, from polished marble and clear waters and statues of bronze? Or is
that the Light of the World, extinguished on yonder stormy hill, and is
this lady the Pride of Life, feasting blindly on the wine of iniquity,
with her back turned to the light which has shone for her in vain?
Something of both these meanings may be traced in the picture; but to me
it symbolizes rather the central truth of existence: that all that is
raised in incorruption is sown in corruption; art, beauty, love,
religion; that all our wine is drunk out of skulls, and poured for us by
the mysterious genius of a remote and cruel past."
The doctor's face blazed: his bent figure seemed to straighten
itself and become taller.
"Ah," he cried, growing more dithyrambic, "how lightly you ask what
it means! How confidently you expect an answer! Yet here am I who have
given my life to the study of the Renaissance; who have violated its
tomb, laid open its dead body, and traced the course of every muscle,
bone, and artery; who have sucked its very soul from the pages of poets
and humanists; who have wept and believed with Joachim of Flora, smiled
and doubted with AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini; who have patiently followed
to its source the least inspiration of the masters, and groped in
neolithic caverns and Babylonian ruins for the first unfolding tendrils
of the arabesques of Mantegna and Crivelli; and I tell you that I stand
abashed and ignorant before the mystery of this picture. It means
nothing -- it means all things. It may represent the period which saw
its creation; it may represent all ages past and to come. There are
volumes of meaning in the tiniest emblem on the lady's cloak; the
blossoms of its border are rooted in the deepest soil of myth and
tradition. Don't ask what it means, young man, but bow your head in
thankfulness for having seen it!"
Miss Lombard laid her hand on his arm.
"Don't excite yourself, father," she said in the detached tone of a
professional nurse.
He answered with a despairing gesture. "Ah, it's easy for you to
talk. You have years and years to spend with it; I am an old man, and
every moment counts!"
"It's bad for you," she repeated with gentle obstinacy.
The doctor's sacred fury had in fact burnt itself out. He dropped
into a seat with dull eyes and slackening lips, and his daughter drew
the curtain across the picture.
Wyant turned away reluctantly. He felt that his opportunity was
slipping from him, yet he dared not refer to Clyde's wish for a
photograph. He now understood the meaning of the laugh with which Doctor
Lombard had given him leave to carry away all the details he could
remember. The picture was so dazzling, so unexpected, so crossed with
elusive and contradictory suggestions, that the most alert observer,
when placed suddenly before it, must lose his coordinating faculty in a
sense of confused wonder. Yet how valuable to Clyde the record of such a
work would be! In some ways it seemed to be the summing up of the
master's thought, the key to his enigmatic philosophy.
The doctor had risen and was walking slowly toward the door. His
daughter unlocked it, and Wyant followed them back in silence to the
room in which they had left Mrs. Lombard. That lady was no longer there,
and he could think of no excuse for lingering.
He thanked the doctor, and turned to Miss Lombard, who stood in the
middle of the room as though awaiting farther orders.
"It is very good of you," he said, "to allow one even a glimpse of
such a treasure."
She looked at him with her odd directness. "You will come again?"
she said quickly; and turning to her father she added: "You know what
Professor Clyde asked. This gentleman cannot give him any account of the
picture without seeing it again."
Doctor Lombard glanced at her vaguely; he was still like a person
in a trance.
"Eh?" he said, rousing himself with an effort.
"I said, father, that Mr. Wyant must see the picture again if he is
to tell Professor Clyde about it," Miss Lombard repeated with
extraordinary precision of tone.
Wyant was silent. He had the puzzled sense that his wishes were
being divined and gratified for reasons with which he was in no way
connected.
"Well, well," the doctor muttered, "I don't say no, I don't say
no. I know what Clyde wants I don't refuse to help him." He turned to
Wyant. "You may come again you may make notes," he added with a
sudden effort. "Jot down what occurs to you. I'm willing to concede that."
Wyant again caught the girl's eye, but its emphatic message
perplexed him.
"You're very good," he said tentatively, "but the fact is the
picture is so mysterious, so full of complicated detail that I'm
afraid no notes I could make would serve Clyde's purpose as well
as a photograph, say. If you would allow me "
Miss Lombard's brow darkened, and her father raised his head
furiously.
"A photograph? A photograph, did you say? Good God, man, not ten
people have been allowed to set foot in that room! A photograph ?"
Wyant saw his mistake, but saw also that he had gone too far to
retreat.
"I know, sir, from what Clyde has told me, that you object to
having any reproduction of the picture published; but he hoped you might
let me take a photograph for his personal use not to be reproduced in
his book, but simply to give him something to work by. I should take the
photograph myself, and the negative would of course be yours. If you
wished it, only one impression would be struck off, and that one Clyde
could return to you when he had done with it."
Doctor Lombard interrupted him with a snarl. "When he had done with
it ? Just so: I thank thee for that word! When it had been
re-photographed, drawn, traced, autotyped, passed about from hand to
hand, defiled by every ignorant eye in England, vulgarized by the
blundering praise of every art-scribbler in Europe! Bah! I'd as soon
give you the picture itself: why don't you ask for that?"
"Well, sir," said Wyant calmly, "if you will trust me with it, I'll
engage to take it safely to England and back, and to let no eye but
Clyde's see it while it is out of your keeping."
The doctor received this remarkable proposal in silence; then he
burst into a laugh.
"Upon my soul !" he said with sardonic good humor.
It was Miss Lombard's turn to look perplexedly at Wyant. His last
words and her father's unexpected reply had evidently carried her beyond
her depth.
"Well, sir, am I to take the picture ?" Wyant smilingly pursued.
"No, young man; nor a photograph of it. Nor a sketch, either; mind
that, -- nothing that can be reproduced. Sybilla," he cried with sudden
passion, "swear to me that the picture shall never be reproduced ! No
photograph, no sketch now or afterward. Do you hear me?"
"Yes, father," said the girl quietly.
"The vandals," he muttered, "the desecrators of beauty; if I
thought it would ever get into their hands I'd burn it first, by God!"
He turned to Wyant, speaking more quietly. "I said you might come back I
never retract what I say. But you must give me your word that no
one but Clyde shall see the notes you make."
Wyant was growing warm.
"If you won't trust me with a photograph I wonder you trust me not
to show my notes!" he exclaimed.
The doctor looked at him with a malicious smile.
"Humph!" he said; "would they be of much use to anybody ?"
Wyant saw that he was losing ground and controlled his impatience.
"To Clyde, I hope, at any rate," he answered, holding out his hand.
The doctor shook it without a trace of resentment, and Wyant added:
"When shall I come, sir? "
"To-morrow to-morrow morning," cried Miss Lombard, speaking
suddenly.
She looked fixedly at her father, and he shrugged his shoulders.
"The picture is hers," he said to Wyant.
In the ante-chamber the young man was met by the woman who had
admitted him. She handed him his hat and stick, and turned to unbar the
door. As the bolt slipped back he felt a touch on his arm.
"You have a letter?" she said in a low tone.
"A letter?" He stared. "What letter?"
She shrugged her shoulders, and drew back to let him pass.
II
As Wyant emerged from the house he paused once more to glance up at its
scarred brick facade. The marble hand drooped tragically above the
entrance: in the waning light it seemed to have relaxed into the
passiveness of despair, and Wyant stood musing on its hidden meaning.
But the Dead Hand was not the only mysterious thing about Doctor
Lombard's house. What were the relations between Miss Lombard and her
father? Above all, between Miss Lombard and her picture? She did not
look like a person capable of a disinterested passion for the arts; and
there had been moments when it struck Wyant that she hated the picture.
The sky at the end of the street was flooded with turbulent yellow
light, and the young man turned his steps toward the church of San
Domenico, in the hope of catching the lingering brightness on Sodoma's
St. Catherine.
The great bare aisles were almost dark when he entered, and he had
to grope his way to the chapel steps. Under the momentary evocation of
the sunset, the saint's figure emerged pale and swooning from the dusk,
and the warm light gave a sensual tinge to her ecstasy. The flesh seemed
to glow and heave, the eyelids to tremble; Wyant stood fascinated by the
accidental collaboration of light and color.
Suddenly he noticed that something white had fluttered to the
ground at his feet. He stooped and picked up a small thin sheet of
note-paper, folded and sealed like an old-fashioned letter, and bearing
the superscription:
To the Count Ottaviano Celsi.
Wyant stared at this mysterious document. Where had it come from ?
He was distinctly conscious of having seen it fall through the air,
close to his feet. He glanced up at the dark ceiling of the chapel; then
he turned and looked about the church. There was only one figure in it,
that of a man who knelt near the high altar.
Suddenly Wyant recalled the question of Doctor Lombard's
maidservant. Was this the letter she had asked for ? Had he been
unconsciously carrying it about with him all the afternoon ? Who was
Count Ottaviano Celsi, and how came Wyant to have been chosen to act as
that nobleman's ambulant letter-box ?
Wyant laid his hat and stick on the chapel steps and began to
explore his pockets, in the irrational hope of finding there some clue
to the mystery; but they held nothing which he had not himself put
there, and he was reduced to wondering how the letter, supposing some
unknown hand to have bestowed it on him, had happened to fall out while
he stood motionless before the picture.
At this point he was disturbed by a step on the floor of the aisle,
and turning, he saw his lustrous-eyed neighbor of the table d'hote.
The young man bowed and waved an apologetic hand.
"I do not intrude ?" he inquired suavely.
Without waiting for a reply, he mounted the steps of the chapel,
glancing about him with the affable air of an afternoon caller.
"I see," he remarked with a smile, "that you know the hour at which
our saint should be visited."
Wyant agreed that the hour was indeed felicitous.
The stranger stood beamingly before the picture.
"What grace ! What poetry !" he murmured, apostrophizing the St.
Catherine, but letting his glance slip rapidly about the chapel as he
spoke.
Wyant, detecting the manoeuvre, murmured a brief assent.
"But it is cold here mortally cold; you do not find it so?" The
intruder put on his hat. "It is permitted at this hour -- when the
church is empty. And you, my dear sir, do you not feel the dampness ?
You are an artist, are you not ? And to artists it is permitted to cover
the head when they are engaged in the study of the paintings."
He darted suddenly toward the steps and bent over Wyant's hat.
"Permit me cover yourself !" he said a moment later, holding out
the hat with an ingratiating gesture.
A light flashed on Wyant.
"Perhaps," he said, looking straight at the young man, "you will
tell me your name. My own is Wyant."
The stranger, surprised, but not disconcerted, drew forth a
coroneted card, which he offered with a low bow. On the card was
engraved: --
Il Conte Ottaviano Celsi.
"I am much obliged to you," said Wyant; "and I may as well tell you
that the letter which you apparently expected to find in the lining of
my hat is not there, but in my pocket."
He drew it out and handed it to its owner, who had grown very pale.
"And now," Wyant continued, "you will perhaps be good enough to
tell me what all this means."
There was no mistaking the effect produced on Count Ottaviano by
this request. His lips moved, but he achieved only an ineffectual smile.
"I suppose you know," Wyant went on, his anger rising at the sight
of the other's discomfiture, "that you have taken an unwarrantable
liberty. I don't yet understand what part I have been made to play, but
it's evident that you have made use of me to serve some purpose of your
own, and I propose to know the reason why."
Count Ottaviano advanced with an imploring gesture.
"Sir," he pleaded, "you permit me to speak ?"
"I expect you to," cried Wyant. "But not here," he added, hearing
the clank of the verger's keys. "It is growing dark, and we shall be
turned out in a few minutes."
He walked across the church, and Count Ottaviano followed him out
into the deserted square.
"Now," said Wyant, pausing on the steps.
The Count, who had regained some measure of self-possession, began
to speak in a high key, with an accompaniment of conciliatory gesture.
"My dear sir,my dear Mr. Wyant , you find me in an abominable
position -- that, as a man of honor, I immediately confess. I have taken
advantage of you -- yes! I have counted on your amiability, your
chivalry too far, perhaps ? I confess it! But what could I do? It was
to oblige a lady" - he laid a hand on his heart "a lady whom I would
die to serve!" He went on with increasing volubility, his deliberate
English swept away by a torrent of Italian, through which Wyant, with
some difficulty, struggled to a comprehension of the case.
Count Ottaviano, according to his own statement, had come to Siena
some months previously, on business connected with his mother's
property; the paternal estate being near Orvieto, of which ancient city
his father was syndic. Soon after his arrival in Siena the young Count
had met the incomparable daughter of Doctor Lombard, and falling deeply
in love with her, had prevailed on his parents to ask her hand in
marriage. Doctor Lombard had not opposed his suit, but when the question
of settlements arose it became known that Miss Lombard, who was
possessed of a small property in her own right, had a short time before
invested the whole amount in the purchase of the Bergamo Leonardo.
Thereupon Count Ottaviano's parents had politely suggested that she
should sell the picture and thus recover her independence; and this
proposal being met by a curt refusal from Doctor Lombard, they had
withdrawn their consent to their son's marriage. The young lady's
attitude had hitherto been one of passive submission; she was horribly
afraid of her father, and would never venture openly to oppose him; but
she had made known to Ottaviano her intention of not giving him up, of
waiting patiently till events should take a more favorable turn. She
seemed hardly aware, the Count said with a sigh, that the means of
escape lay in her own hands; that she was of age, and had a right to
sell the picture, and to marry without asking her father's consent.
Meanwhile her suitor spared no pains to keep himself before her, to
remind her that he, too, was waiting and would never give her up.
Doctor Lombard, who suspected the young man of trying to persuade
Sybilla to sell the picture, had forbidden the lovers to meet or to
correspond; they were thus driven to clandestine communication, and had
several times, the Count ingenuously avowed, made use of the doctor's
visitors as a means of exchanging letters.
"And you told the visitors to ring twice ?" Wyant interposed.
The young man extended his hands in a deprecating gesture. Could
Mr. Wyant blame him? He was young, he was ardent, he was enamored! The
young lady had done him the supreme honor of avowing her attachment, of
pledging her unalterable fidelity; should he suffer his devotion to be
outdone? But his purpose in writing to her, he admitted, was not merely
to reiterate his fidelity; he was trying by every means in his power to
induce her to sell the picture. He had organized a plan of action; every
detail was complete; if she would but have the courage to carry out his
instructions he would answer for the result. His idea was that she
should secretly retire to a convent of which his aunt was the Mother
Superior, and from that stronghold should transact the sale of the
Leonardo. He had a purchaser ready, who was willing to pay a large sum;
a sum, Count Ottaviano whispered, considerably in excess of the young
lady's original inheritance; once the picture sold, it could, if
necessary, be removed by force from Doctor Lombard's house, and his
daughter, being safely in the convent, would be spared the painful
scenes incidental to the removal. Finally, if Doctor Lombard were
vindictive enough to refuse his consent to her marriage, she had only to
make a sommation respectueuse, and at the end of the prescribed delay no
power on earth could prevent her becoming the wife of Count Ottaviano.
Wyant's anger had fallen at the recital of this simple romance. It
was absurd to be angry with a young man who confided his secrets to the
first stranger he met in the streets, and placed his hand on his heart
whenever he mentioned the name of his betrothed. The easiest way out of
the business was to take it as a joke. Wyant had played the wall to this
new Pyramus and Thisbe, and was philosophic enough to laugh at the part
he had unwittingly performed.
He held out his hand with a smile to Count Ottaviano.
"I won't deprive you any longer," he said, "of the pleasure of
reading your letter."
"Oh, sir, a thousand thanks ! And when you return to the casa
Lombard, you will take a message from me the letter she expected this
afternoon?"
"The letter she expected ?" Wyant paused. "No, thank you. I thought
you understood that where I come from we don't do that kind of thing knowingly."
"But, sir, to serve a young lady !"
"I'm sorry for the young lady, if what you tell me is true" the
Count's expressive hands resented the doubt "but remember that if I am
under obligations to any one in this matter, it is to her father, who
has admitted me to his house and has allowed me to see his picture."
"His picture ? Hers !"
"Well, the house is his, at all events."
"Unhappily, since to her it is a dungeon!"
"Why doesn't she leave it, then ?" exclaimed Wyant impatiently.
The Count clasped his hands. "Ah, how you say that -- with what
force, with what virility! If you would but say it to her in that tone
you, her countryman! She has no one to advise her; the mother is an
idiot; the father is terrible; she is in his power; it is my belief that
he would kill her if she resisted him. Mr. Wyant, I tremble for her life
while she remains in that house!"
"Oh, come," said Wyant lightly, "they seem to understand each other
well enough. But in any case, you must see that I can't interfere at
least you would if you were an Englishman," he added with an escape of
contempt.
III
Wyant's affiliations in Siena being restricted to an acquaintance with
his land-lady, he was forced to apply to her for the verification of
Count Ottaviano's story.
The young nobleman had, it appeared, given a perfectly correct
account of his situation. His father, Count Celsi-Mongirone, was a man
of distinguished family and some wealth. He was syndic of Orvieto, and
lived either in that town or on his neighboring estate of Mongirone. His
wife owned a large property near Siena, and Count Ottaviano, who was the
second son, came there from time to time to look into its management.
The eldest son was in the army, the youngest in the Church; and an aunt
of Count Ottaviano's was Mother Superior of the Visitandine convent in
Siena. At one time it had been said that Count Ottaviano, who was a most
amiable and accomplished young man, was to marry the daughter of the
strange Englishman, Doctor Lombard, but difficulties having arisen as to
the adjustment of the young lady's dower, Count Celsi-Mongirone had very
properly broken off the match. It was sad for the young man, however,
who was said to be deeply in love, and to find frequent excuses for
coming to Siena to inspect his mother's estate.
Viewed in the light of Count Ottaviano's personality the story had
a tinge of opera bouffe; but the next morning, as Wyant mounted the
stairs of the House of the Dead Hand, the situation insensibly assumed
another aspect. It was impossible to take Doctor Lombard lightly; and
there was a suggestion of fatality in the appearance of his gaunt
dwelling. Who could tell amid what tragic records of domestic tyranny
and fluttering broken purposes the little drama of Miss Lombard's fate
was being played out? Might not the accumulated influences of such a
house modify the lives within it in a manner unguessed by the inmates of
a suburban villa with sanitary plumbing and a telephone?
One person, at least, remained unperturbed by such fanciful
problems; and that was Mrs. Lombard, who, at Wyant's entrance, raised a
placidly wrinkled brow from her knitting. The morning was mild, and her
chair had been wheeled into a bar of sunshine near the window, so that
she made a cheerful spot of prose in the poetic gloom of her surroundings.
"What a nice morning !" she said; "it must be delightful weather at
Bonchurch."
Her dull blue glance wandered across the narrow street with its
threatening house fronts, and fluttered back baffled, like a bird with
clipped wings. It was evident, poor lady, that she had never seen beyond
the opposite houses.
Wyant was not sorry to find her alone. Seeing that she was
surprised at his reappearance he said at once: "I have come back to
study Miss Lombard's picture."
"Oh, the picture " Mrs. Lombard's face expressed a gentle
disappointment, which might have been boredom in a person of acuter
sensibilities. "It's an original Leonardo, you know," she said
mechanically.
"And Miss Lombard is very proud of it, I suppose? She seems to have
inherited her father's love for art."
Mrs. Lombard counted her stitches, and he went on: "It's unusual in
so young a girl. Such tastes generally develop later."
Mrs. Lombard looked up eagerly. "That's what I say! I was quite
different at her age, you know. I liked dancing, and doing a pretty bit
of fancy-work. Not that I couldn't sketch, too; I had a master down from
London. My aunts have some of my crayons hung up in their drawing-room
now I did a view of Kenilworth which was thought pleasing. But I
liked a picnic, too, or a pretty walk through the woods with young
people of my own age. I say it's more natural, Mr. Wyant; one may have a
feeling for art, and do crayons that are worth framing, and yet not give
up everything else. I was taught that there were other things."
Wyant, half-ashamed of provoking these innocent confidences, could
not resist another question. "And Miss Lombard cares for nothing else?"
Her mother looked troubled.
"Sybilla is so clever -- she says I don't understand. You know how
self-confident young people are! My husband never said that of me, now
-- he knows I had an excellent education. My aunts were very particular;
I was brought up to have opinions, and my husband has always respected
them. He says himself that he wouldn't for the world miss hearing my
opinion on any subject; you may have noticed that he often refers to my
tastes. He has always respected my preference for living in England; he
likes to hear me give my reasons for it. He is so much interested in my
ideas that he often says he knows just what I am going to say before I
speak. But Sybilla does not care for what I think --"
At this point Doctor Lombard entered. He glanced sharply at Wyant.
"The servant is a fool; she didn't tell me you were here." His eye
turned to his wife. "Well, my dear, what have you been telling Mr.
Wyant? About the aunts at Bonchurch, I'll be bound!"
Mrs. Lombard looked triumphantly at Wyant, and her husband rubbed
his hooked fingers, with a smile.
"Mrs. Lombard's aunts are very superior women. They subscribe to
the circulating library, and borrow Good Words and the Monthly Packet
from the curate's wife across the way. They have the rector to tea twice
a year, and keep a page-boy, and are visited by two baronets' wives.
They devoted themselves to the education of their orphan niece, and I
think I may say without boasting that Mrs. Lombard's conversation shows
marked traces of the advantages she enjoyed."
Mrs. Lombard colored with pleasure.
"I was telling Mr. Wyant that my aunts were very particular."
"Quite so, my dear; and did you mention that they never sleep in
anything but linen, and that Miss Sophia puts away the furs and blankets
every spring with her own hands? Both those facts are interesting to the
student of human nature." Doctor Lombard glanced at his watch. "But we
are missing an incomparable moment; the light is perfect at this hour."
Wyant rose, and the doctor led him through the tapestried door and
down the passageway.
The light was, in fact, perfect, and the picture shone with an
inner radiancy, as though a lamp burned behind the soft screen of the
lady's flesh. Every detail of the foreground detached itself with
jewel-like precision. Wyant noticed a dozen accessories which had
escaped him on the previous day.
He drew out his note-book, and the doctor, who had dropped his
sardonic grin for a look of devout contemplation, pushed a chair
forward, and seated himself on a carved settle against the wall.
"Now, then," he said, "tell Clyde what you can; but the letter
killeth."
He sank down, his hands hanging on the arm of the settle like the
claws of a dead bird, his eyes fixed on Wyant's notebook with the
obvious intention of detecting any attempt at a surreptitious sketch.
Wyant, nettled at this surveillance, and disturbed by the
speculations which Doctor Lombard's strange household excited, sat
motionless for a few minutes, staring first at the picture and then at
the blank pages of the note-book. The thought that Doctor Lombard was
enjoying his discomfiture at length roused him, and he began to write.
He was interrupted by a knock on the iron door. Doctor Lombard rose
to unlock it, and his daughter entered.
She bowed hurriedly to Wyant, without looking at him.
"Father, had you forgotten that the man from Monte Amiato was to
come back this morning with an answer about the bas-relief? He is here
now; he says he can't wait."
"The devil!" cried her father impatiently. "Didn't you tell him "
"Yes; but he says he can't come back. If you want to see him you
must come now."
"Then you think there's a chance? "
She nodded.
He turned and looked at Wyant, who was writing assiduously.
"You will stay here, Sybilla; I shall be back in a moment."
He hurried out, locking the door behind him.
Wyant had looked up, wondering if Miss Lombard would show any
surprise at being locked in with him; but it was his turn to be
surprised, for hardly had they heard the key withdrawn when she moved
close to him, her small face pale and tumultuous.
"I arranged it , I must speak to you," she gasped. "He'll be back
in five minutes."
Her courage seemed to fail, and she looked at him helplessly.
Wyant had a sense of stepping among explosives. He glanced about
him at the dusky vaulted room, at the haunting smile of the strange
picture overhead, and at the pink-and-white girl whispering of
conspiracies in a voice meant to exchange platitudes with a curate.
"How can I help you ?" he said with a rush of compassion.
"Oh, if you would ! I never have a chance to speak to any one; it's
so difficult , he watches me, he'll be back immediately."
"Try to tell me what I can do."
"I don't dare; I feel as if he were behind me." She turned away,
fixing her eyes on the picture. A sound startled her. "There he comes,
and I haven't spoken ! It was my only chance; but it bewilders me so to
be hurried."
"I don't hear any one," said Wyant, listening. "Try to tell me."
"How can I make you understand? It would take so long to explain."
She drew a deep breath, and then with a plunge "Will you come here
again this afternoon at about five ?" she whispered.
"Come here again ?"
"Yes, you can ask to see the picture, make some excuse. He
will come with you, of course; I will open the door for you and ...
and lock you both in" she gasped.
"Lock us in ?"
"You see ? You understand ? It's the only way for me to leave the
house, if I am ever to do it" She drew another difficult breath.
"The key will be returned, by a safe person, in half an hour, perhaps sooner ..."
She trembled so much that she was obliged to lean against the
settle for support.
"Wyant looked at her steadily; he was very sorry for her.
"I can't, Miss Lombard," he said at length.
"You can't ?"
"I'm sorry; I must seem cruel; but consider "
He was stopped by the futility of the word: as well ask a hunted
rabbit to pause in its dash for a hole !
Wyant took her hand; it was cold and nerveless.
"I will serve you in any way I can; but you must see that this way
is impossible. Can't I talk to you again ? Perhaps "
"Oh," she cried, starting up, "there he comes !"
Doctor Lombard's step sounded in the passage.
Wyant held her fast. "Tell me one thing: he won't let you sell the
picture ?"
"No, hush !"
"Make no pledges for the future, then; promise me that."
"The future ?"
"In case he should die: your father is an old man. You haven't
promised ?"
She shook her head.
"Don't, then; remember that."
She made no answer, and the key turned in the lock.
As he passed out of the house, its scowling cornice and facade of
ravaged brick looked down on him with the startlingness of a strange
face, seen momentarily in a crowd, and impressing itself on the brain as
part of an inevitable future. Above the doorway, the marble hand reached
out like the cry of an imprisoned anguish.
Wyant turned away impatiently.
"Rubbish!" he said to himself. "She isn't walled in; she can get
out if she wants to."
IV
Wyant had any number of plans for coming to Miss Lombard's aid: he was
elaborating the twentieth when, on the same afternoon, he stepped into
the express train for Florence. By the time the train reached Certaldo
he was convinced that, in thus hastening his departure, he had followed
the only reasonable course; at Empoli, he began to reflect that the
priest and the Levite had probably justified themselves in much the same
manner.
A month later, after his return to England, he was unexpectedly
relieved from these alternatives of extenuation and approval. A
paragraph in the morning paper announced the sudden death of Doctor
Lombard, the distinguished English dilettante who had long resided in
Siena. Wyant's justification was complete. Our blindest impulses become
evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.
Wyant could now comfortably speculate on the particular
complications from which his foresight had probably saved him. The
climax was unexpectedly dramatic. Miss Lombard, on the brink of a step
which, whatever its issue, would have burdened her with retrospective
compunction, had been set free before her suitor's ardor could have had
time to cool, and was now doubtless planning a life of domestic felicity
on the proceeds of the Leonardo. One thing, however, struck Wyant as odd
-- he saw no mention of the sale of the picture. He had scanned the
papers for an immediate announcement of its transfer to one of the great
museums; but presently concluding that Miss Lombard, out of filial
piety, had wished to avoid an appearance of unseemly haste in the
disposal of her treasure, he dismissed the matter from his mind. Other
affairs happened to engage him; the months slipped by, and gradually the
lady and the picture dwelt less vividly in his mind.
It was not till five or six years later, when chance took him again
to Siena, that the recollection started from some inner fold of memory.
He found himself, as it happened, at the head of Doctor Lombard's
street, and glancing down that grim thoroughfare, caught an oblique
glimpse of the doctor's house front, with the Dead Hand projecting above
its threshold. The sight revived his interest, and that evening, over an
admirable frittata, he questioned his landlady about Miss Lombard's
marriage.
"The daughter of the English doctor ? But she has never married,
signore."
"Never married ? What, then, became of Count Ottaviano ?"
"For a long time he waited; but last year he married a noble lady
of the Maremma."
"But what happened, why was the marriage broken ?"
The landlady enacted a pantomime of baffled interrogation.
"And Miss Lombard still lives in her father's house ?"
"Yes, signore; she is still there."
"And the Leonardo "
"The Leonardo, also, is still there."
The next day, as Wyant entered the House of the Dead Hand, he
remembered Count Ottaviano's injunction to ring twice, and smiled
mournfully to think that so much subtlety had been vain. But what could
have prevented the marriage ? If Doctor Lombard's death had been long
delayed, time might have acted as a dissolvent, or the young lady's
resolve have failed; but it seemed impossible that the white heat of
ardor in which Wyant had left the lovers should have cooled in a few
short weeks.
As he ascended the vaulted stairway the atmosphere of the place
seemed a reply to his conjectures. The same numbing air fell on him,
like an emanation from some persistent will-power, a something fierce
and imminent which might reduce to impotence every impulse within its
range. Wyant could almost fancy a hand on his shoulder, guiding him
upward with the ironical intent of confronting him with the evidence of
its work.
A strange servant opened the door, and he was presently introduced
to the tapestried room, where, from their usual seats in the window,
Mrs. Lombard and her daughter advanced to welcome him with faint
ejaculations of surprise.
Both had grown oddly old, but in a dry, smooth way, as fruits might
shrivel on a shelf instead of ripening on the tree. Mrs. Lombard was
still knitting, and pausing now and then to warm her swollen hands above
the brazier; and Miss Lombard, in rising, had laid aside a strip of
needle-work which might have been the same on which Wyant had first seen
her engaged.
Their visitor inquired discreetly how they had fared in the
interval, and learned that they had thought of returning to England, but
had somehow never done so.
"I am sorry not to see my aunts again," Mrs. Lombard said
resignedly; "but Sybilla thinks it best that we should not go this year."
"Next year, perhaps," murmured Miss Lombard, in a voice which
seemed to suggest that they had a great waste of time to fill.
She had returned to her seat, and sat bending over her work. Her
hair enveloped her head in the same thick braids, but the rose color of
her cheeks had turned to blotches of dull red, like some pigment which
has darkened in drying.
"And Professor Clyde, is he well?" Mrs. Lombard asked affably;
continuing, as her daughter raised a startled eye: "Surely, Sybilla, Mr.
Wyant was the gentleman who was sent by Professor Clyde to see the
Leonardo ?"
Miss Lombard was silent, but Wyant hastened to assure the elder
lady of his friend's well-being.
"Ah, perhaps, then, he will come back some day to Siena," she
said, sighing. Wyant declared that it was more than likely; and there
ensued a pause, which he presently broke by saying to Miss Lombard: "And
you still have the picture ?"
She raised her eyes and looked at him. "Should you like to see it ?"
she asked.
On his assenting, she rose, and extracting the same key from the
same secret drawer, unlocked the door beneath the tapestry. They walked
down the passage in silence, and she stood aside with a grave gesture,
making Wyant pass before her into the room. Then she crossed over and
drew the curtain back from the picture.
The light of the early afternoon poured full on it: its surface
appeared to ripple and heave with a fluid splendor. The colors had lost
none of their warmth, the outlines none of their pure precision; it
seemed to Wyant like some magical flower which had burst suddenly from
the mould of darkness and oblivion.
He turned to Miss Lombard with a movement of comprehension.
"Ah, I understand, you couldn't part with it, after all!" he cried.
"No, I couldn't part with it," she answered.
"It's too beautiful, too beautiful," he assented.
"Too beautiful ?" She turned on him with a curious stare. "I have
never thought it beautiful, you know."
He gave back the stare. "You have never "
She shook her head. "It's not that. I hate it; I've always hated
it. But he wouldn't let me, he will never let me now."
Wyant was startled by her use of the present tense. Her look
surprised him, too: there was a strange fixity of resentment in her
innocuous eye. Was it possible that she was laboring under some
delusion ? Or did the pronoun not refer to her father ?
"You mean that Doctor Lombard did not wish you to part with the
picture ?"
"No, he prevented me; he will always prevent me."
There was another pause. "You promised him, then, before his death "
"No; I promised nothing. He died too suddenly to make me." Her
voice sank to a whisper. "I was free, perfectly free, or I thought I
was till I tried."
"Till you tried ?"
"To disobey him to sell the picture. Then I found it was
impossible. I tried again and again; but he was always in the room with
me."
She glanced over her shoulder as though she had heard a step; and
to Wyant, too, for a moment, the room seemed full of a third presence.
"And you can't" he faltered, unconsciously dropping his voice to
the pitch of hers.
She shook her head, gazing at him mystically. "I can't lock him
out; I can never lock him out now. I told you I should never have
another chance."
Wyant felt the chill of her words like a cold breath in his hair.
"Oh" he groaned; but she cut him off with a grave gesture.
"It is too late," she said; "but you ought to have helped me that
day."
Note: if you need to read the noverls by Edith Wharton go to :
for ETHAN FROME : http://www.americanliterature.com/author/edith-wharton/book/ethan-frome/summary
for THE AGE OF INNOCENCE : http://www.americanliterature.com/author/edith-wharton/book/the-age-of-innocence/summary