Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, October, 1905

“Well?” he smiled.

“Well, I’m going to run – on wheels!”

“Are they unkind to you?”

“No, they’re not; they’re kind, rather too kind. I mean they make you feel it’s a moral obligation to treat such an outsider humanely. Of course they can’t help it, and it’s nasty of me to mention it, but I can’t help feeling it, either, and it makes me mad. Everything does down there, from morning prayers, with half a squadron of bluey-white servants on red chairs, to the candles at ten o’clock, and to bed with what appetite you mayn’t. And I’ve got to do it! If I suggest anything fresh and sensible they look at me as if I were a sort of missing link. So I shut up and scream inside me and wish for something to bite. Put your hand here.”

He smiled at the sudden change, but laid his hand on the arm of her seat, and she closed her gloved fingers over it.

“Do you want it to bite?” he asked.

“No. Jim!”

“Well?”

“Do you think me a fool?”

“No; I understand.”

There was a breadth in his tone which comforted her.

“You said: Marry him,” she pleaded.

“Yes, I did; perhaps I was the fool; but I didn’t say ‘for three months.’”

“Three? Six!”

“Never!”

“Five, then; I ought to know.”

A certain sharpness in her registry seemed to give it claims to be considered calendar. South looked up at her quickly, and she flushed scarlet.

“Well, five,” he said; “hardly time for a very exhaustive study of the married state.”

“Oh, it’s not the married state,” she explained, slowly, looking out over the square. “I shouldn’t mind being married – married to a man. I’m married to a house.”

“It’s a very good house.”

“I dare say it is; but I’m not a snail, and can’t stand having it on my back;’ I wasn’t born under family bricks.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to leave them.”

“And why did you come here?”

She turned her head and flashed a shy glance across his eyes.

“I thought you might be leaving, too.”

She looked away as she said it, and he did not immediately reply. Presently she loosened her fingers from his, and laid her hand in her lap. She broke the silence sharply.

“I don’t understand you,” she said; “why do you suppose I’ve come here, ever? Do you fancy it’s for the pleasure of a little talk? Why, I’ve gone home sometimes clinching my hands to keep from crying, and hating you fit to kill you.”

South sighed.

“Have you?” he said.

“Yes, I have! It’s horrid of me, I know, because you’ve tried to be kind, mostly; but being kind is worse than anything, sometimes.”

She turned toward him, and through the shadow upon her face her eyes glowed molten, as lead grows red in the ladle.

“Well,” he said, “you may forgive me; I haven’t tried to be kind. I thought all the kindness on the other side. Your very coming was a concession.”

“To what?”

“To a man unknown and immaterial; to the genius of futility.”

“Genius of fiddlesticks! Why did you suppose I came?”

South swung his head in pendulous ignorance.

“Oh, you needn’t mind my blushes, it’s too dark to see them. And when I startled you with Veynes’ proposal, and bored you to admire my figure, and my frock, and everything he might be master of, was that a concession?”

“To my stupidity?” he parried.

“No; the genius for futility – a woman’s!” she said, with drawn bitterness. “All the same, if you guessed?”

“Oh, guessing!” he shrugged.

“No! You’re no such fool. Are you?”

She leaned somewhat away from him with a suggestion of disdain.

“No,” he replied, slowly, rising, “I did not guess; I knew.”

She heard him pacing in the dusky room behind her, and stop at last before the fireplace. He laid one hand over the other and pressed them with his forehead against the mantelpiece.

Cries, shrill and hoarse, drifted in with the darkness from the Palace Road; the evening’s pennyworth of print in shouted headlines, the details draining incoherently into the night.

“Won’t you say you’re sorry?” she inquired, presently.

“For you?”

“No, for yourself. Mightn’t we both have done better?”

“I’ve done nothing,” he murmured, between his arms.

“It’s not a fine confession,” she laughed, curtly; “but you chose.”

“Between what?”

“Between these arms and mine,” she said, slowly, tapping the chair; “between horsehair and flesh and blood. And you chose the horsehair.”

“It’s permanent,” he retorted, somewhat piqued, “and it hasn’t a pulse.”

“Oh, no,” she sighed, “it’s a ‘dead-sure thing’ – dead and sure, they’re about the same; you can’t reckon up things that live; and, as for a pulse, it beats faster for other things than fever, you know, and it’s not only the doctor who feels it.”

“Feels it flag?” he queried.

“Oh, bother you!” she exclaimed. “If all men were such chickens, who’d ever marry?”

“The women,” he suggested.

“No, I think they’d be too wise,” she said.

He laughed, an echo of hers; there was not much mirth between them.

“That last day I came here,” she continued, presently, with a musing air, “you might have said more than you did.”

“More?”

“Yes, more for me; something to pretend you couldn’t see me; I felt stripped.”

He smiled at the fire-dogs, remembering her dress.

“I didn’t know it,” he said.

“No, a man never does. Some men, you know, lie to a woman to be rid of her, lie about their love and about their life; say it’s heartbreaking, but impossible; one forgives that – it’s craven but it’s kind; but one can’t forgive the men who lie by saying nothing, merely to be rid of her the sooner, when she might go comforted, and only a little slower, by just one whisper of the love they have.”

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“Oh, no,” she sighed, “we never do, we women. We pray not to sometimes; pray to be kept blind, dull, doting.” She laughed abruptly. “Well, I wish you’d said you loved me then, Jim; even though I might have hugged you. Couldn’t you say it now?”

“It’s not lawful.”

“Oh, no,” she sighed again, but reminiscently, “it’s not lawful; but it would be kinder and better than many things that are. Besides, you might rise in my esteem.”

“Thanks,” he said, smiling, pushing himself erect. “I think I’ll stay as I am. I’m high enough now to feel dizzy sometimes when you commend me. The question is, where are you going to stay?”

“To-night at the Grand; my things are there. To-morrow I shall be across the Channel.”

She swung her chair round toward the room.

“Am I going alone?”

“No,” he said, decidedly. “I want you to wait a day.”

“With you?”

“No, but for me. I’m going down to the Court.”

“To give me away?”

He had been staring at the dark mirror. He turned his face slowly toward her with a smile.

“I suppose I need not deny that,” he said. “I shall not give you away, even for your good; you know that.”

“Then for what are you going?”

“You’re making a mistake,” he said, ignoring her question. “If you must leave your husband, you should go by the front door; it’s a higher class of exit, pleasanter, more modern, and more effective; besides, it prevents the good man running after you with a posse of detectives.”

“Do you think he’ll do that?” she groaned.

“Doubtless; perhaps offer a reward. Now, to avoid that and live secure, you’ll grant me a day’s grace, won’t you – and wait?”

“I shall be trusting you,” she said.

“And now you’d better go. I have to catch the nine-fifteen, isn’t it? And I’m very certain you’ve had no dinner.”

“Besides, appearances!” she mocked.

“Yes; or non-appearances, as at present,” he replied, unruffled. “If you’ll wait I’ll call a hansom.”

But she said she would go down with him; and after a glance at her frock, a traveling one, before the mirror, opened the door as he relit the lamp. He followed her along the dusk of the passage to show her the way, but she stopped abruptly on the edge of the stairs, throwing back her head so that it nearly struck him.

“Kiss me,” she whispered.

“No,” he said, quietly; “you’re not mine to kiss.”

She bent her right arm back with a quick movement behind his head, and drew his lips down to her face.

“Ah! if it were only a question of possession,” she sighed, as she pressed them to her own.

She turned on the stairs and looked back at him.

“You don’t resent it?” she inquired.

“Why should I?”

“Oh, because you’re not mine to kiss, I suppose.”

“Ah! that’s your affair,” he smiled.

At the hall door she suggested that, being bound for Waterloo, he might accompany her.

“I’m afraid of you,” he said.

“You needn’t be,” she murmured. “I’m done.”

In the end she waited while he packed a bag, and they drove together under the withered planes through the park to her hotel. But she declined to alight.

“You promised to be good,” he reminded her.

“I’m good – good as gold – I wouldn’t touch you for the world, but I’m going to see you off. Jim, do let me! I’ll come straight back and eat no end of dinner; I will, really! But I must say good-by to you there!”

“Why?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand; it’s a presentiment.”

“Presentiments are all stuff.”

“Yes, I know; so are women; but one has them both in – hansoms. Jim!”

“All right; but only to the station, not inside!”

She assented, and they parted, finally, with a feminine complexity of farewell, under the glass-roofed entry; South arriving on the platform to discover that the nine-fifteen had been advanced ten minutes since the first of the month, and that, thanks to Rosamond’s presentiments, he had lost the last train to Veyne St. Mary’s by a few seconds.

V

Vexed as he was with the woman who had barred the way, he was almost minded, driving back, to acquaint her with his failure.

The inclination was perverse and not in his sanest manner; but her presence had overpowered him that night as an inhaled narcotic; something diffusive in her strong, warm beauty, filling his room, had numbed him as he breathed it.

But his senses came again in the night air, and he kept on, after crossing the river, by the abbey, and his homeward way.

He had left his key behind him, and learned, on entering, that a gentleman awaited him above.

“Who?” he inquired, and was told Lord Veynes.

“Said as ’e couldn’t afford to miss you, sir; so ’e’d wait, and take ’is chance.”

South always faced trouble, but he went more slowly upstairs. The door of his room was ajar, the lamp had been relit upon the table, and soused in its shaded dome of light was the figure of a man, stretched along the big chair before the fire. Veynes did not respond to his host’s hail of welcome; his eyes were staring into the shadowy mirror; and his face reflected there was like a ghostlight on the glass.

Knowing something of his visitor’s moods, South took no notice of his silence, but, drawing a chair beside him, brought his hand down on the other’s fingers with an exclamation of abusive kindliness.

One speaks of words frozen on the lips, but those seemed frozen in the air, ringing with an awful icy vibration in the silent room, as South started back, dumb with horror, for the hand upon which his had fallen was damp with the grip of death.

* * * * *

Of the days which followed, South could never give a complete account. A stranger to sorrow, almost, indeed, to every ruinous emotion, the scenes he witnessed seemed to alter the spacing of the hours so that no two were of a length.

The noise and crush of daily life were suddenly muted, as though death had closed a door and shut them out; and within, behind the bolted silence of despair, were tears, sad talk, mourning darkness, and the melancholy business of the dead, haunted, as with pale marsh lights, by the pitiful inquisition in the dead eyes which he had closed.

His consolation, in that dreary time, was that he bore half the burden of its grief.

The earl knew nothing of his son’s death but what the doctors could tell him, for Lady Veynes, with a curious, but to her a natural, discretion had kept the motive of her movements a secret even from her maid.

So the two chief agents in the tragedy carried the weight of it between them, and alone heard the inquest verdict of “an overstrained heart,” with the desolate knowledge of all it meant – South with dry eyes, so dry that their color seemed faded, and hers so wet that they seemed mixed with their tears.

He had feared once, only once, that she would forget the righteous necessities of her secret, and admit another, with cruel penitence, to its miserable pale.

It was on her first entry to the room where the body was lying, the earl sitting by it, his face almost as gray and sharp as that of the dead. One of his hands was on his son’s, the other crept presently to Rosamond’s golden hair. She had dropped on her knees beside the bed, her eyes buried in the coverlet, her arms flung out across it, moaning an inarticulate torrent of useless tenderness, and penitence, and despair. Her head was shaken by its sorrow like a yellow leaf, but the old man’s grief ran silently, as a stream that dries upon its stones.

That was the one occasion when South had distrusted the charity and shrewdness of her discretion; after that his doubts were at rest. She was everything a woman could be who would not sink her duties in sorrow, and South often wondered what the earl would have done without her.

He had beside ample reason for surprise. Her delicate little performance as a woman of affairs for the benefit of the lawyers, her equally fine and far more difficult personation before the family as lady paramount, were revelations of an ability he had been indisposed to admit.

He called it mummery to himself, but there was a dreary earnestness and effort in it which gave his slight the lie. He would not see the whiteness of her face, or the sorrow in her clouded eyes; and for a curious reason, because her grief left him, and it seemed with deliberate intention, in the cold.

She bore it with a certain stiffness of control as a burden she was too proud to share, yet which bent her into measured steps.

But South, who felt himself almost an accessory to her fate, could better have endured complaint; he would sooner have been hated, so he told himself.

So, since that memorable morning when she had flung a crumb of toast across the table at the gravity on his face, gray as it was with its news, and, afterward, in anguish and self-contempt, laid her sobbing head among the breakfast things, South had doubted everything about her but her charm.

Yet her sorrow proved, as he was finally to discover, exceedingly sincere; it outlasted even his demands upon it; but it lived, as all her clouds, in a windy sky; and broke, and blew over.

Ere that, however, or the lightening of her widow’s crape, a fresh link was welded from her life, which gave the sad earl a joy in his old age, and a despot to Veynes Court.

South used to run down, sometimes, on the summer evenings, to watch Lady Veynes, the earl and his grandson playing like three children in the dappled sunlight on the lawn.

Or, at least, if there were other reasons for his appearance, he was not on thinking terms with them.

Lady Veynes was. She thought, moreover, that his visits were far too few.

THE RIVALS

STRANGE when you passed me with him in the crowd,That twixt us two the selfsame thought should be:“So this was she!” your long glance spake aloud;And I, to my own heart, “So this is she!”Theodosia Garrison.

CONVERSATIONS WITH EGERIA

The Feminine Temperament

By MRS. WILSON WOODROW

IT is delightful to talk to a bishop,” smiled Egeria; “it immediately becomes a serious duty to be frivolous.”

“And why, pray?” The bishop looked slightly bewildered.

“To afford you the pleasures of contrast. To convince you from the start that one woman does not seek priestly counsel, nor intend to bore you with the vagaries of her soul.”

The bishop smiled benignly, deprecatingly and yet comprehendingly. He even shook his head in paternal and playful admonition.

“Oh, I know us,” Egeria assured him. “A woman, if she is young, is always either occupied with her heart or her soul. When the one absorbs her the other doesn’t. When she’s in love she forgets all about her soul. When she’s out of love she turns to it again. Then she yearns for incense, altar lights and a pale, young priest, who is willing to devote time and prayer to assuaging her spiritual doubts. She doesn’t care in the least to be spiritually directed by any well-fed, commonplace parson with a fat wife and a pack of rosy children. No, no, a wistful young ascetic, with hollows under his eyes – wan and worn with fasting and vigils. She is perfectly aware that he has ultimately not the ghost of a show; but she is entirely willing that he shall have a run for his money. In fact, she hopes that the struggle may be keen and prolonged. To play a game fish which is putting up the fight of its life is infinitely more exciting than to languidly reel in the line and secure a victim which has not made the least resistance.”

The bishop smiled tolerantly, tapping his finger tips together. “Doubtless correct, doubtless correct. Your astuteness and intellectual acumen have always elicited my admiration.”

A sparkle of annoyance brightened Egeria’s eyes.

“Checkmate,” she murmured, with a little bow of deference.

The bishop raised his brows innocently.

“Oh, you know,” continued Egeria, resentfully, “that there is one compliment a woman never forgives, and that is a tribute to her intellect at the expense of her power of attraction. If the lure the serpent taught her is vain, then is her destiny barren, her desire unfulfilled.”

“You deserved it,” laughed the bishop; “but, dear lady, have you ever paused to consider what a debt of gratitude the world owes us? When I listen to the outpourings of overcharged feminine hearts, and read the diaries, confessions and novels of innumerable women, I am forced to the conclusion that the church thoroughly understood one of the first needs of a woman’s heart when it established the confessional. Then man, with his restless, protesting conscience, did his best to estrange you from the consolation, and, in consequence, some eccentric, undisciplined creature now and again voices to the world the disorganized, hysterical feminine emotions which should have been discreetly sobbed into the ecclesiastical ear, decently entombed in the silence of the confessional.”

There was a faint wrinkle of displeasure in Egeria’s brow. “Admitted, admitted” – hastily – “and thank you kindly, dear bishop, for your little criticism of us. It makes it quite possible for me to discuss the clergy if I wish. Now I can ask, without being impertinent, a question which has long puzzled me. Why is it that you prelates and the princes of the church are almost invariably tolerant, delightfully broad-minded and free from bias, while the rank and file are so frequently strenuous and discomposing? For instance, last summer I was thrown, through force of circumstances, with a sallow-faced, stoop-shouldered preacher, who always spoke of himself as ‘a minister of the gospel.’ Whenever his dyspepsia was especially severe he informed his parishioners that he had girded on his armor and was prepared to rebuke evil in high places, and that he would be recalcitrant to his trust if he did not lift up his voice to condemn civic rottenness and social degeneracy. His wife was ‘an estimable lady,’ with the figure of a suburbanite who only wears stays in the evening, and a pronounced taste for the clinging perfume of moth balls. No children having blessed their union, they decided to adopt some definite aim in life. They were talking it over once when I was present.

“‘There are the sick and the poor; I am sure there are plenty of them,’ suggested the lady.

“Her husband looked at her scornfully, and coldly remarked that that field was full of reapers.

“‘Oh, you mean to stand up openly in the pulpit and rebuke the rich men who make their money in queer ways!’ she exclaimed, excitedly.

“‘And offend half my wealthy parishioners by branding them as thieves on insufficient evidence?’ he thundered. ‘Are you insane?’

“Finally, however, being a shrewd creature, he solved the problem and incidentally won for himself a great deal of gratuitous advertising. They organized a society for the suppression of bridge – aware that the public loves sensational details regarding women of position; the insidious cocktail – the public delights to know that the social leaders look too often upon the wine when it’s red; ostracising divorcées – women thus having the sanction of Heaven for attacking their own sex. Oh, it was a holy crusade in a teapot, and made him quite famous; and, bishop, what do you think was the motto of the organization?”

The bishop shook his head. Mild curiosity was in his eyes; but the shake of his head was distinctly reproving.

“The watchword chosen,” chuckled Egeria, “was, ‘Neither do I condemn thee.’ Now, bishop, tell me, please, what makes the difference between his type of man and yours?”

A humorous twinkle shone in the bishop’s eye, then he leaned forward and whispered one word in Egeria’s ear: “Money.”

She laughed, and then returned to her muttons. “But, really, quite under the rose, do you not become fearfully bored sometimes by the various manifestations of the feminine temperament?”

“It may be a trifle self-conscious, a little inclined to regard itself pathologically,” admitted the bishop, with caution.

“It is frequently yellow,” said Egeria. decisively. “Why don’t you clergymen and novelists occasionally tell us the truth?”

“We must fill our churches and sell our books, I suppose,” returned the bishop, half whimsically, half regretfully. “What would you say, Lady Egeria, if we put you in orders, and disregarding St. Paul’s advice, let you occupy the pulpit? Would you thunder denunciations at poor, defenseless women?”

“I’d have a fine time,” cried Egeria her eyes alight. “I would do what you sermonizers and novel writers haven’t the courage to do – just tell them the truth about themselves. Chide them for their frivolities and extravagances and vanities? Not I. They don’t care a straw for that. No, no, I should have a new evangel and a new text. It should be: ‘Play the game gamely, and don’t whine if you lose.’ Now, bishop, confess that you never meet a strange woman that you do not observe a speculative gleam in her eye which long experience has taught you to interpret as: ‘How soon can I tell him my troubles?’”

“Poor ladies! You have so many,” sighed the bishop, sympathetically.

“Of course we have, we multiply them by three. To sedulously observe all tragic and harrowing anniversaries is a part of our religion. ‘It’s just five years ago to-day since Edwin left me for another,’ she says, mournfully, and then, shrouding herself in gloom, lives over each poignant, past moment. If anyone ask the cause of her dejected demeanor, she murmurs, in a sad, sweet voice: ‘It is an anniversary. Would you like to hear of my grief?’

“But what does a man do? He says: ‘Jove! It’s just a year ago to-morrow since Jemima was run down by an automobile. I must keep myself well amused or it may be a depressing occasion.’

“Seriously, bishop, if I were you, I’d have a phonograph in my study, and the moment a woman set foot within the door it should begin that good old hymn: ‘Go bury thy sorrow, the world hath its share.’”

“But what can the poor things do,” asked the bishop, “if they may not turn to their clergyman for consolation and comfort?”

“Twang on Emerson’s iron string: ‘Trust thyself.’ Why always twine about a pole, like a limp pea vine, and flop on the ground the minute the upholding stick is withdrawn? Imagine the emotions of the pole, if it were sentient! At first it would say: ‘Delicate, dainty pea vine, lean on me, the clasp of your myriad tendrils fills me with rapture. How sweet is your adorable dependence!’ But in time: ‘Oh! stifling, smothering pea vine, I am suffocated by your deadening passivity. Would I could tear myself free from your throbbing tendrils.’”

“You evidently believe in the dead burying their dead,” said the bishop, meditatively.

“No sounder philosophy was ever enjoined on a living world. Let the dead – dead pasts, dead lives, dead loves, dead memories – bury their dead. Ah, bishop, the great art of life is the art of forgetting.”