 
|
| "—Ange ou diable, |
| Écume de la mer?" |
Still smiling, she sank in an exhausted heap upon the floor.
Then she went to bed and fell asleep, lamenting that her head rested upon a cotton pillow-slip.
In time long past, when the Huguenots were better known, if less esteemed, an impecunious gentleman of France left his native land for the sake of faith and fortune.
Lured by that blatant boast of liberty which swelled the throats of the Western colonies, even while their hands were employed in meting out the reward of witchcraft and in forging the chains of slavery, he directed his way towards American soil.
His mission failed, and, in search of theological freedom, he only succeeded in weaving matrimonial fetters. Amid an unassorted medley of creeds and customs he came upon the red-cheeked daughter of a Swiss adventurer—an ambitious pioneer who lived upon the theory that the New World having been created for the service of its foreign invaders, the might of the sword was the right of possession.
The gentleman of France, deciding to found a farm and family in the land of his adoption, awoke suddenly to the knowledge that, to insure the success of such an enterprise, feminine intervention is a necessary evil.
Accordingly, he set about his preparations with an economic industry. Casting his eye upon a tract of land upon a Southern river, he acquired it for certain services rendered in an unguarded moment to the Swiss adventurer, who had acquired it in a manner that concerned himself alone.
The next step of the French gentleman was to build
The gentleman's name was Marcel Musin de Biencourt; the lady's has no place in the following history.
For a period matters progressed in natural sequence. The land was tilled, the cotton picked, and the lady installed in the best bedroom of the newly erected mansion. Had she played the part for which nature and her lord intended her, there is reason to suppose that she would have become a serviceable instrument in the preservation of the species.
But the gentleman had reckoned without Providence. With the ending of the year of her bridehood the roses in the lady's cheeks grew waxen, and she turned with a sigh of relief from the labor of travail to the rest of the little church-yard upon the hill.
The aspens shivered above her, the river purled between level fields far down below, and from the uprooted furrows around the dutiful corn put forth tender sprouts; but the lady had shirked her mission in its first fulfilment, and with the birth-time of the year she neither rose nor stirred.
In the best bedroom the dust thickened upon the chintz curtains, and a weak and sickly hostage to fortune yelled his new throat hoarse with premonition of the inhospitality of the planet upon which he had been precipitated.
Disappointed in his estimate of woman's nature, the gentleman of France decided to economize in material, and to rear a race from the unpromising specimen in his possession. Faithfully he strove to fulfil his part, and when the boy reached manhood, he laid himself down beside his wife upon the hill.
From this time on the family record is biblically concise. Marcel begot Marcel, and again Marcel begot Marcel, and yet again.
While the root Musin languished, De Biencourt, the lofty family tree, withered and died, to be forgotten. Neither in history nor in tradition, nor in the paths of private virtue, was a Musin known to have distinguished himself. If he took up arms in the American Revolution, he took them up in a manner unworthy of record; if he favored the Declaration of Independence, he did not commit his preference to paper; if he excelled in any way, it was in the way of mediocrity—which is perhaps the safest way of all.
But extinction was not to be the end of the venturesome blood of the French gentleman. His spirit animated one of his name to confide to the care of his ex-slaves the mansion crumbling above his head, and to become a wanderer in the States which had been so nearly disunited. Like the minstrels of old, he strung his harp from his shoulder, and journeyed from South to North and from East to West. His Norman blood still ran blue in his veins, and his faith was the faith of his fathers.
In his travels he played his passage into the vivacious affections of an Irish maiden, who wore a rosary about her neck and a cross upon her sleeve. But these conspicuous badges of Popery failed to chill the passion of Marcel. And, in truth, if the maiden's heart was as black as the arch-fiend, her eyes (which is more to the point) were not less blue than heaven. With an improvidence sufficient to bleach the ghost of his
Love was lord, and their marriage-bonds were double-locked and barred by Protestant and Catholic clergy. But there is a power which laughs at religious locksmiths. Within six months the illusions with which each had draped the other melted before the fire and brimstone of ecclesiastical dispute. Between the kisses of their lips each offered petitions to a patient Omnipotence for the salvation of the other's soul. As the kisses grew colder the prayers grew warmer. There is a tendency in man, when he has fallen out with the human brother whom he has seen, to wax more zealous in his attentions to the Divine Father whom he has not. To be courteous to one's neighbor is so much more difficult than to be cringing to one's God.
And then a child was given. In the large family Bible upon the father's desk the event is recorded in two different hands, and the child was christened with two different names.
The first reads:
"Marie Musin, born April 24, 1868."
And the second:
"Mary Ann Musin, born April 24, 1868."
After fifteen years the matter was settled, as were most family matters, by the child herself.
"I will be both," she said, decisively. "I will be Mariana."
And Mariana she became.
In the same high-handed fashion the theological disputes of the parents were reduced to trifles as light as air.
"I will be a Presbyterian one Sunday and a Catholic
For a time these regulations were observed with uncompromising impartiality, but, upon moving to a smaller town, she foresaw a diplomatic stroke.
"I think it better," she announced, sweetly, "for one of us to become an Episcopalian. I have noticed that most of the society people here are Episcopalians—and in that way the family will be so evenly distributed. I see that it will be easier for me to make the sacrifice than for either of you. Of course, I should love to go with you, mamma, but incense makes me sneeze; and you know, papa, I can't stand congregational singing. It grates upon my nerves. And I must be something, for I have so much religious feeling. I will be an Episcopalian."
She cast herself into the arms of the Church with all the zeal of a convert. From an artistic stand-point she repudiated insincerity, and, though cultivated, her professions were as fertile as the most natural product. Even to herself she scorned to admit that her alliance with a particular creed was the result of aught but a moral tendency in that direction. And the burden of the truth was with her. She was as changeable as wind and as impressionable as wax, and the swelling tide of sentiment had taken an ecclesiastical turn.
She dressed in sober grays, and attended service with the regularity of the sexton; she decorated her walls with Madonnas; and she undertook, by way of the Sunday-school room, to lead a class of eight small boys into the path of righteousness. She read Christina Rossetti and George Herbert, and she placed tiny silver crosses, suspended from purple ribbons, in her school-books.
At the age of sixteen she attached herself to a society whose mission it was to cultivate, by frequent
At that period her expression was in perfect harmony with the tenor of her mind. The dramatic effect was always good.
In the daily school, which she attended when the fancy seized her, she ruled as a popular fetish. Between the younger children, whom she terrorized, and the elder, whom she mesmerized, there was an intermediate class with whom she was in high favor. As a tiny child she had caught the street songs quicker than any other, and had sung them better; and to the accompaniment of a hand-organ she could render a marvellous ballet.
During her tenth year she fell into a passionate friendship for one of the scholars—a stately girl with phlegmatic eyes of gray. For six months she paid her lover-like attentions in surreptitious ways, and expended her pocket-money in nosegays, with which to adorn the desk of her divinity. She wore a photograph of the gray-eyed girl above her heart, and lingered for an hour to walk home with her upon Fridays.
The friendship was sundered at last by visits exchanged between them, and Mariana's emotions became theological.
But this passed also. Vague amatory impulses of old racial meaning were born. At sixteen she was precipitated into a sentiment for the photograph, printed by the daily press, of a young fellow who was
Mariana attended missions less and meditated more. She divided her time between her journal and the piano, showing a preference for songs of riotous sentiment. Without apparent trouble to herself, she grew wan and mysteriously poetic. She wore picturesque gowns with romantic draperies. Her hair possessed a charming disorder, the expression of her face passed from the placid into the intense. The dramatic effect was as good as ever. Her journal of that year contains a declaration of undying constancy. The object of this avowal is nominally the young highwayman—in reality the creation of an over-fertile brain craving the intoxicant of a great passion. The highwayman was but a picturesque nucleus round which her dreams clustered and from which they gathered color. She existed in a maze of the imagination, feasting upon the unsubstantial food of idealism. Her longings for fame and for love were so closely interwoven that even in her own mind it was impossible to disassociate them. If she bedewed her pillow with tears of anguish for the sake of a man whom she had never seen, and whom, seeing, she would have passed with averted eyes, the tears were often dried by ecstatic visions of artistic aspirations. And yet this romance of straw was not the less intense because it was the creation of overwrought susceptibilities; perhaps the more so. If real troubles were the only troubles, how many tortured hearts would be uplifted to the hills. And Mariana's mystical romance was a daemon that lured her in a dozen different disguises towards the quicksands of life.
But this passed also and was done with.
Her mother died, and her father married an early love. Mariana, who had been first, declined to become last. Dissensions followed swiftly, and the domestic atmosphere only cleared when Mariana departed from the paternal dwelling-place.
From the small Southern village, under the protection of an elderly female relation, she had flown to New York in search of theatrical employment. Failing in her object, she turned desperately to the culture of her voice, living meanwhile upon a meagre allowance donated by her father. The elderly female relation had remained with her for a time, but finding Mariana intractable in minor ways, and foreseeing a future in which she would serve as cat's-paw for the girl's vagaries, she had blessed her young relative and departed.
"One must either worship or detest you, my dear," she remarked as a parting shaft. "And to worship you means to wait upon you, which is wearing. Your personality is as absorbent as cotton. It absorbs the individual comfort of those around you. It is very pleasant to be absorbed, and you do it charmingly; but there is so much to see in the world, and I'm getting old fast enough."
So she went, leaving Mariana alone in a fourth-story front room of The Gotham apartment-house.
Mr. Nevins once said to Mariana: "You are as elusive as thistle-down whipped up with snow."
Mariana smiled that radiating, indescribable smile which dawned gradually from within, deepening until it burst into pervasive wealth of charm.
"Why snow?" was her query.
Mr. Paul, who apparently had been engrossed in his dinner, glanced up grimly. "The only possible reason for a metaphor," he observed, "is lack of reason."
Mr. Nevins dismissed him with a shrug and looked in sentimental perplexity at Mariana.
"Merely because it is impossible to whip up ice with anything," he replied.
"I should have supposed," interrupted Mr. Paul, in unabashed disapproval, "that the same objection would apply to thistle-down. It would certainly apply to a woman."
Miss Ramsey, who sat opposite, turned her tired eyes upon him.
"Life is not of your opinion, Mr. Paul," she said. "It whips us up with all kinds of ingredients, and it never seems to realize when we have been reduced to the proper consistency."
She looked worn and harassed, and had come in to dinner later than usual. It was the first remark she had made, and, after making it, she relapsed into silence. Her small red hands trembled as she lifted her fork, the rebellious lines between her brows grew deeper, and she ate her dinner with that complete exhaustion
Mariana watched her sympathetically. She wondered why the gravy upon Miss Ramsey's plate congealed sooner than it did upon any one else's, while the sobbiest potatoes invariably fell to her share.
"A false metaphor!" commented Mr. Paul. "Most metaphors are false. I don't trust Shakespeare himself when he gets to metaphor. I always skip them."
"Oh, they have their uses," broke in the cheery tones of the optimist. "I'm not much on Shakespeare, but I've no doubt he has his uses also. As for metaphor, it is a convenient way of saying more than you mean."
"So is lying," retorted Mr. Paul, crossly, and the conversation languished. Mariana ate her dinner and looked at the table-cloth. Mr. Nevins ate his dinner and looked at Mariana. He regarded her as an artistic possibility. Her appearance was a source of constant interest to him, and he felt, were he in the position of nature, with the palette and brush of an omnipotent colorist, he might blend the harmonious lines of Mariana's person to better advantage. He resented the fact that her nose was irregular and her chin too long. He wondered how such a subject could have been wilfully neglected.
As for himself, he honestly felt that he had wasted no opportunities. Upon their first acquaintance he had made a poster of Mariana which undeniably surpassed the original. It represented her in a limp and scantily made gown of green, with strange reptiles sprawling over it, relieved against the ardor of a purple sunset. The hair was a marvel of the imagination.
Mariana had liked it, with the single exception of the reptilian figures.
"They have such an unpleasant suggestion," was her critical comment. "I feel quite like Medusa. Couldn't you change them into nice little butterflies and things?"
Mr. Nevins was afraid he could not. The poster satisfied him as it was. Miss Musin could not deny, he protested, that he had remodelled her nose and chin in an eminently successful job, and if the hair and eyes and complexion in the poster bore close resemblance in color, so did the hair and eyes and complexion in the original. He had done his best.
Mariana accepted his explanation and went complacently on her way, as enigmatical as a Chinese puzzle. She was full of swift surprises and tremulous changes, varying color with her environment; gay one moment, and sad before the gayety had left her lips—cruel and calm, passionate and tender—always and ever herself.
Twice a week she went to Signor Morani's for a vocal lesson. Signor Morani was small and romantic and severe. In his youth he had travelled as Jenny Lind's barytone, and he had fallen a slave to her voice. He had worshipped a voice as other men worship a woman. Unlike other men, he had been faithful for a lifetime—to a voice.
When Mariana had gone to him, an emotional and aspiring soprano of nineteen, he had listened to her quietly and advised patience.
"You must wait," he said. "All art is waiting."
"I will not wait," said Mariana. "Waiting is starvation."
He looked at her critically.
"More of us starve than the world suspects," he answered. "It is the privilege of genius. This is a planet, my dear child, where mediocrity is exalted and genius brought low. It is a living fulfilment of the scriptural prophecy, 'The first shall be last and
Mariana stood up and sang. His words had depressed her, and her voice trembled. She looked at him wistfully, her hands hanging at her sides, her head thrown back. It was an aria from "Faust." He shook his head slowly.
"You will never be great," he said. "I can give you technique, but not volume. Your voice will never be great."
With a half-defiant gesture Mariana broke forth again. This time it was a popular song, with a quick refrain running through it. As she sang she acted the accompaniment half unconsciously.
Signor Morani frowned as she commenced, and then watched her attentively. In the fragile little girl, with the changeable eyes of green and the aureole of shadowless hair, he scented possibilities.
"Your voice will never be great," he repeated; "but you may make men believe so."
"And you will take me?" pleaded Mariana. She stretched out her beautiful hands. Her eyes prayed. Her flexible tones drooped.
Signor Morani took her hands in his with kindly reassurance.
"Yes," he said—"yes; it will keep you out of mischief, at least."
And it had kept her out of mischief. It had opened a channel for her emotions. Like a tide, the romanticism of her nature veered towards art. She became the most fanatical of devotees. She breathed it and lived it. In her heart it transplanted all other religions, and the Æstheticism of its expression gained a marvellous hold upon her faith. Above the little mosaic altar at her bedside she enshrined a bust of Wagner, and she worshipped it as some more orthodox believer had once worshipped an enshrined Madonna.
She began to haunt the Metropolitan Opera-house. From the fifth gallery she looked down every evening upon an Italian or German landscape. She herself trembled like a harp swept by invisible fingers; she grew pale with Marguerite, wept over the dead Juliet, and went mad with the madness of Lucia.
When the voice of that fair Bride of Lammermoor who sang for us that season was borne to her on the notes of a flute which flagged beneath the exceeding sweetness of the human notes they carried, Mariana grasped the railing with her quivering hands and bowed her head in an ecstasy of appreciation. It was the ecstasy with which a monk in mediÆval days must have thrilled when he faced in a dim cathedral some beautiful and earthly Virgin of the great Raphael. It was the purest form of sensuous self-abnegation.
There was also a tragic side to her emotions. Her past inheritance of ages of image-worshippers laid hold upon her. From being merely symbols of art the singers became divinities in their own right. She haunted their hotels for fleeting glimpses of them. She bought their photographs with the money which should have gone for a winter hat. She would gladly have kissed the dust upon which they trod. After her first hearing of "Tristan and Isolde," she placed the prima donna's photograph beneath the bust of Wagner, and worshipped her for weeks as a bright particular star.
In the evening she attended the opera alone. Returning when it was over, she crossed Broadway, boarded a car, and, reaching The Gotham, toiled up to the fourth landing. She was innocent of prudery, and she went unharmed. Perhaps her complete absorption in something beyond herself was her safeguard. At all events, she brushed men by, glanced at them with unseeing eyes, and passed placidly on her way.
Mariana was famished for romance, but not for the romance of the street. She had an instinctive aversion to things common and of vulgar intent. Her unsatisfied desire was but the craving of a young and impressionable heart for untried emotion. It was the poetry of living she thirsted for—poetry in Æsthetic
For a period her susceptibilities abated. The wave of activity spent its violence. Life flowed for her like a meadow stream, sensitive to faint impressions from a passing breeze, but calm when the breeze was afar.
Upon a night of "Carmen" she saw from the fifth gallery a velvet rose fall from the prima donna's bosom to the stage. When the curtain fell she rushed madly down and begged it of an usher. She carried it home, and hung it upon the wall above her bed. At night, before falling asleep, she would draw the curtains
At The Gotham, her bare little chamber, with its garish wall-paper, was a source of acute discomfort to her. Once, after a long spell of pneumonia, she had fallen into a fit of desperation, and had attacked the paper with a breakfast-knife. The result was a square of whitewashed wall above the bureau. An atmosphere of harmony was so necessary to her growth that she seemed to droop and pine in uncongenial environment. In the apartment-house, with its close, unventilated halls, its creaking elevator, its wretchedly served dinners, she had always felt strangely ill at ease. Her last prayer at night was that the morrow might see her transplanted to richer soil, her first thought upon awakening was that the coming day was pregnant with possibilities. Life in its entirety, life with passionate color and emotional fulfilment, was the food she craved.
Of Mariana, Mr. Ardly had made a laborious and profound analysis.
"That young person is a self-igniting taper," he had concluded. "If some one doesn't apply the match, she will go off of her own accord—and she will burn herself out before time has cast a wet blanket upon her."
He himself was a self-contained young fellow, who, like a greater before him, followed with wisdom both wine and women. His life was regulated by a theory which he had propounded in youth and attempted to practice in maturer years. The theory asserted that experience was the one reliable test of existing conditions. "I refused to believe that alcohol was an intoxicant," he had once said, "until I tested it."
When Mariana first arrived, he surprised in his heart an embryonic sentiment concerning her, and proceeded to crush it as coolly as he would have crushed a fly that encroached upon the private domain of his person.
"I have no dissipations," he explained, when discussing the affair with Mariana. "I neither drink nor love."
"Which is unwise," retorted Mariana. "I do both in moderation. And a man who has never been in love is always a great school-boy. I should be continually expecting him to tread upon my gown or to break my fan. Sentiment is the greatest civilizer of the race. If I were you I would begin immediately."
"I dislike all effort," returned Ardly, gravely, "and love is cloying. Over-loving produces mental indigestion, as over-eating produces physical. I have suffered from it, and experience has made me abstemious. I shall abstain from falling in love with you."
"What a pity!" sighed Mariana, lifting her lashes.
"Well, I can't agree with you," argued Ardly, "and I don't regret it. I am very comfortable as I am."
"I am not," retorted Mariana. "I detest the dinners. Who could be comfortable on overdone mutton and cold potatoes?"
"Even in the matter of food I am without prejudices," declared the other. "I had as soon want a good dinner and have a poor one as have a good one and want none. These are the only conditions with which I am acquainted. There may be estates where things are more equally adjusted, but I know nothing of them; I have not experienced them."
Mariana sighed. "You are as depressing as Mr. Paul," she complained.
"I only speak of what I know," explained Ardly, complacently. "Upon other matters I have no opinions, and I calmly repeat that I have found appetite
"I shall cut a passage through," said Mariana. "If life doesn't equalize things, I will."
"And I will watch the process," remarked Ardly, indolently.
It was shortly after this that Mariana went to Long Island for a holiday, spending a couple of weeks in the cottage of an acquaintance, who, by dint of successive matrimonial ventures, had succeeded in reaching the equilibrium to which Mariana aspired.
Upon returning to New York the girl found her distaste for The Gotham to have trebled. When she had toiled up the dingy stairway and installed herself in her old place, she sat upon her trunk and looked about her. Never had the room appeared so dull, so desperately plain. The close odor caused by lack of ventilation offended her nostrils, and yet she hesitated to fling back the shutters and reveal the rusty balcony with its spindling fire-escape, beyond which stretched the sombre outlook, the elevated road looming like a skeleton in the foreground. The door into the hall was ajar, and she could see a dull expanse of corridor, lighted day and night by a solitary and ineffectual electric jet.
A sob stuck in her throat, and, crossing to the window, she raised it and threw back the shutters, letting in a thin stream of dust and sunshine. Her geranium stood where she had left it, and its withered and yellow leaves smote her with accusing neglect.
"Oh, you poor thing!" she cried, in an impulsive burst of pity.
Then she saw that it had been freshly watered, and that its famished leaves were unfolding. Turning her eyes, they encountered a row of small pots containing seedlings which lined her neighbor's window, encroaching slightly upon her own possession. Before them a
The afternoon sun shone full upon him, and Mariana saw him plainly. He was young, with stooping shoulders, and he wore a cheap and shabby suit of clothes, with apparent disregard of their quality. His face was thin and cleanly shaven, there was a nervous tension about the mouth, and the hair, falling dark and heavy upon the temples, lent a haggardness to his colorless and burned-out profile. It was a face in which the poetic principle was obscured by an ascetic veneering. In his whole appearance was borne out the suggestion flashing from the eyes—a suggestion of mental sustentation upon physical force.
Mariana regarded him mutely. Her gaze was almost tragic in its intensity. For a moment her lips quivered and her fingers interlaced. Then she retreated into her room, slamming the shutters after her. Throwing herself into a chair, she buried her face in her hands.
"I—I can't have even that to myself!" she said, and burst into tears.
Mariana's neighbor sat in his room. He sat motionless, his head resting upon his hands, his arms resting upon an office desk, which was plainly finished and of cheap walnut. At his left elbow a lamp cast an illumination upon his relaxed and exhausted figure, upon the straight, dark hair, upon the bulging brow, and upon the sinewy and squarely shaped hands, with their thin and nervous fingers.
The desk upon which he leaned was covered with a litter of closely written letter-sheets, and at the back a row of pigeon-holes contained an unassorted profusion of manuscripts.
The walls of the room were lined with roughly constructed shelves of painted wood, which were filled to overflowing with well-worn volumes in English, French, and German, Oken's Die Zeugung upon the north side confronting Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication upon the south. A cabinet in one corner contained a number of alcoholic specimens of embryonic development, and a small table near by supported a microscope and several instruments for physiological experiments. Above the mantel, perhaps arranged in freakish disregard of superstition, hung a skull and a pair of cross-bones, and beneath them a series of photographs illustrating the evolution of rudimentary nervous systems.
Upon the hearth, within convenient reach of the desk, stood a small spirit-stove, and on it a coffee-pot, which emitted a strong and stimulating aroma. Beside
The man lifted his head from his hands, turned up the wick of the lamp, and took up his pen.
From without came the rumble of the elevated road and the shrill cries of a newsboy proclaiming the redundant virtues of the Evening Post. A warm August breeze, entering at the open window, which was raised from the floor, caused the flame of the lamp to flicker slightly. Outside upon the fire-escape the young plants were arranged in rows of systematic precision, their tender leaves revealed in the narrow path of lamplight leading from the heated room to the iron railing overlooking the street. With absent-minded elaboration the man drew an irregular line upon the paper before him. The line bore no relation whatever to the heading of the paper, which was written in a remarkably firm and heavy hand, and read:
"Transmission of Acquired Characteristics."
Suddenly he laid the pen aside, and rose, wiping the moisture from his brow with his handkerchief. Then he threw off his coat and drew up his shirt-sleeves. It was oppressively warm, and the lamp seemed to possess the heating qualities of a Latrobe stove. For a couple of minutes he walked slowly up and down the uncarpeted floor. From the adjoining room came the sound of a piano and a woman singing. He shook his head impatiently, but the sound continued, and he yawned and stretched his arms with resentful resignation. After which he lifted the coffee-pot from the little stove and filled the cup upon the table.
Returning to his seat, he drank his coffee slowly, allowing his abstracted gaze to wander through the window and into the city night without. Upon the drawn shades of the opposite tenement-house he could trace the shadows of men and women passing to and fro like the unsubstantial outlines of figures remembered
He set the cup aside and returned to his work. From a drawer of his desk he drew a thick volume, consisting of a number of legal-cap sheets, bound with a systematic regard for subject. Upon the cover was written in printed letters: "Notes," and beneath: "A History of Man, with Special Application of the Science of Ontogeny."
After consulting this briefly he laid it away and fell to writing. From the adjoining room still came the sound of a woman singing. The voice was light and flippant.
"Damn it!" said the man, suddenly, with angry impatience. He said it vehemently, looking up from his work with nervous irritability. At the same moment there came a slight tap at his door.
He laid aside his pen, rose, and opened it. Mr. Paul stood upon the outside.
"Well, Mr. Algarcife," he began, grimly, "you see I have broken a life-long principle and taken a man at his word. I came for the book you spoke of."
Algarcife welcomed him impatiently. "So I suppose I must prove your principle relative, if not erroneous," he answered. His voice was singularly full and clear. "It was Milligan on the Vocabulary of Aboriginal Tasmanians, was it not? Yes, I think it will aid you."
Mr. Paul came in and they sat down. Algarcife offered him coffee and cigars, but he declined. He sat stiffly in his chair and looked at the other with cynical interest.
"You write all night on this lye, I suppose?" he said, abruptly. "A combined production of brains and coffee."
Algarcife lighted his pipe and leaned back in his chair, blowing gray circles of smoke upon the atmosphere.
"You are right," he responded; "I find I do my best work after midnight, when I am drunk on caffeine or coffee. I suppose it will do for me in the end."
Mr. Paul returned his indifferent gaze with one of severity. "You are all nerves as it is," he said. "You haven't an ounce of good barbarian blood in your body—merely a colorless machine for ratiocination. I tell you, there is no bigger fool than the man who,
The other laughed abstractedly.
"What wholesome truths you deliver," he said. "I think Luther must have had your manner. Well, if I were in your place, I should probably say the same, though less forcibly. But they are theories. You see, I argue this way: with one man's mind and one man's power of work, I could never accomplish what I have before me—any more than poor Buckle, with the brain of a giant, could accomplish what he undertook. It is too big for a single man in this stage of development. So, with one man's mind, I intend to do six men's amount of labor. If I hold out, I will have my reward; if I go to pieces, I shall at least have the satisfaction of a good fight."
His voice was distinct and forcible, with a widely varied range of expression.
There was a second tap at the door, and Mr. Nevins entered, looking depressed and ill-humored.
"Hello, Anthony!" he called. "What! is Mr. Paul squandering your midnight oil? You should have sent him to bed long ago."
"It is not my hour for retiring," responded Mr. Paul.
Anthony interrupted pacifically.
"Mr. Paul is exhorting me," he said, "and I have no doubt that, with slight modifications, his sermon may be adapted to your case. He predicts brain-softening and general senility."
"An inspired prophecy," returned Mr. Nevins, crossly, "and savoring of Jeremiah. As for myself, it is but common justice that a man who has conscientiously refused the cultivation of the mind should not be called upon to lose what he doesn't possess." Then he grew suddenly cheerful. "Confound it! What's the use of being a philosopher on paper when you can be
"Eating," remarked Mr. Paul, with depressing effect, "produces dyspepsia, drinking produces gout."
"And thought, paresis," added Anthony, lightly. "They are all merely different forms of dissipation. I have chosen mine; Nevins has chosen his. Only, as a matter of taste, I'd rather die by work than wine. Personally, I prefer consumption to apoplexy."
"There is such a thing as the means justifying the end," responded Mr. Nevins, in reckless ill-humor. "And it is a great principle. If I wasn't a fool, I'd make a bonfire of my brush and palette, and start afresh on a level with my appetite. I would become the apostle of good-living, which means fast living. I tell you, an hour of downright devilment is worth all the art since Adam. Aristippus is greater than Raphael."
"What has gone wrong?" demanded Algarcife, soothingly. "Too much purple in the 'Andromeda'? I always said that purple was the imperial color of his satanic majesty. If you had followed the orthodox art of your college days, and hadn't gone wandering after strange gods, you might have escaped a dash of that purple melancholia."
"You're a proper fellow," returned Mr. Nevins, with disgust. "Who was it that won that last debate in '82 by a glowing defence of Christianity against agnosticism, and, when the Reverend Miles lit out about the new orator in his flock, floored him with: 'Was that good? Then what a magnificent thing I could have made of the other side!'"
Mr. Paul had opened his book, and glanced up with candid lack of interest. Anthony laughed languidly.
"I saw Miles some weeks ago," he said, "and he is still talking about my 'defection,' as he calls it. I couldn't convince him that I was merely the counsel
Mr. Nevins lighted a cigar in silence. Then he nodded abruptly towards the wall. "What's that noise?" he demanded, irritably.
"That," replied Algarcife, "is a fiend in woman's form, who makes night hideous. I can't begin to work until she sings herself hoarse, and she doesn't do that until midnight. Verily, she is possessed of seven devils, and singing devils at that."
Mr. Nevins was listening attentively. His irritability had vanished.
"Why, it's Mariana!" he exclaimed. "Bless her pretty throat! An hour of Mariana is worth all the spoken or unspoken thoughts of—of Marcus Aurelius, to say nothing of Solomon."
Mr. Paul closed his book and looked up gravely. "A worthy young woman," he observed, "though a trifle fast. As for Solomon, his wisdom has been greatly exaggerated."
"Fast!" protested Mr. Nevins. "She's as fast as—as Mr. Paul—"
"Your insinuation is absurd," returned Mr. Paul, stiffly. But Mr. Nevins was not to be suppressed.
"Then don't display your ignorance of such matters. As for this St. Anthony, he thinks every woman who walks the New York streets a bleached pattern of virtue. I don't believe he'd know a painted Jezebel unless she wore a scarlet letter."
Anthony turned upon him resentfully. "Confound it, Nevins," he said, "I am not a born fool!"
"Only an innocent," retorted Mr. Nevins, complacently.
A resounding rap upon the panels of the door interrupted them. Mr. Nevins rose.
"That's Ardly," he said. "He and I are doing New York to-night."
Ardly came inside, and stood with his hand upon the door-knob.
"Come on, Nevins," he said. "I've got to do a column on that new danseuse. She dances like a midge, but, by Jove! she has a figure to swear by—"
"And escape perjury," added Mr. Nevins. "Mariana says it is false."
"Mariana," replied Ardly, "is a sworn enemy to polite illusions. She surveys the stage through a microscope situated upon the end of a lorgnette. It is a mistake. One should never look at a woman through glasses unless they be rose-colored ones. A man preserves this principle, and his faith in plumpness and curves along with it; a woman penetrates to the padding and powder. Come on, Nevins."
Mr. Nevins followed him into the hall, and then turned to look in again. "Algarcife, won't you join us on a jolly little drunk? Won't you, Mr. Paul?"
When they had gone, and Mr. Paul had gone likewise, though upon a different way, Anthony heated the coffee, drank two cups, and resumed his work.
"Taken collectively," he remarked, "the human race is a consummate nuisance. What a deuced opportunity for work the last man will have—only, most likely, he'll be an ass."
The next day he passed Mariana on the stairs without seeing her. He was returning from the college laboratory, and his mind was full of his experiments. Later in the afternoon, when he watered his plants, he turned his can, in absent-minded custom, upon the geranium, and saw that there was a scarlet bloom among the leaves. The sight pleased him. It was as if he had given sustenance to a famished life.
But Mariana, engrossed in lesser things, had seen him upon the stairs and upon the balcony. She still cherished an unreasonable resentment at what she considered his trespass upon her individual rights; and
It was as if semi-barbarism, in all its exuberance of undisciplined emotion, had converged with the highest type of modern civilization—the civilization in which the flesh is degraded from its pedestal and forced to serve as a jangled vehicle for the progress of the mind.
The next night, as Algarcife stood at his window looking idly down upon the street below, he heard the sound of a woman sobbing in the adjoining room. His first impulse was to hasten in the direction from whence the sound came. He curbed the impulse with a shake.
"Hang it," he said, "it is no business of mine!"
But the suppressed sobbing from the darkness beyond invited him with its enlistment of his quick sympathies.
The electric light, falling upon the fire-escape, cast inky shadows from end to end. They formed themselves into dense outlines, which shivered as if stirred by a phantom breeze.
He turned and went back to his desk. Upon the table he had spread the supper of which he intended partaking at eleven o'clock. For an unknown reason he had conceived an aversion to the restaurant in the basement, and seldom entered it. He slept late in the
He wrote a line, and rose and went back to the window. For an instant he stood and listened, then stepped out upon the fire-escape and walked across the shivering shadows towards the open window beyond.
Upon the little door beneath the window a girl was leaning, her head bowed upon her outstretched arm. The light in the room beyond was low, but he could see distinctly the slight outlines of her figure and the confusion of her heavy hair. She was sobbing softly.
"I beg your pardon," he said, the sympathetic quality in his voice dominating, "but I am sure that I can help you."
His forcible self-confidence exercised a compelling effect. The girl lifted her head and looked at him. Tears stood in her eyes, and as the electric light caught the clear drops they cast out scintillant flashes. Against the dim interior her head, with its nimbus of hair, had the droop and poise of the head of a mediÆval saint.
"Oh, but you don't know how unhappy I am!" she said.
He spoke as he would have spoken to Mr. Paul in the same circumstances. "You have no one to whom you can go?"
"No."
"Then tell me about it."
His tone was that in which a physician might inquire the condition of a patient's digestion. It was absolutely devoid of the recognition of sex.
"Oh, I have worked so hard!" said Mariana.
"Yes?"
"And I hoped to sing in opera, and—Morani tells me that—it will be impossible."
"Ah!" In the peculiar power of his voice the exclamation had the warmth of a handshake.
Mariana rested her chin upon her clasped hands and looked at him. "He says it must be a music-hall—or—or nothing," she added.
He was silent for a moment. He felt that it was a case in which his sympathy could be exceeded only by his ignorance. "And this is why you are unhappy?" he asked. "Is there nothing else?"
She gave a little sob. "I am tired," she said. "My allowance hasn't come—and I missed my dinner, and I am—hungry."
Algarcife responded with relieved cheerfulness.
"Why, we are prepared for that," he said. "I was just sitting down to my supper, and you will join me."
In his complete estrangement from the artificial restraints of society, it seemed to him the simplest of possible adjustments of the difficulty. He felt that his intervention had not been wholly without beneficial results.
Mariana glanced swiftly up into his face.
"Come!" he said; and she rose and followed him.
As Mariana crossed the threshold the light dazzled her, and she raised her hand to her eyes. Then she lowered it and looked at him between half-closed lids. It was a trick of mannerism which heightened the subtlety of her smile. In the deep shadows cast by her lashes her eyes were untranslatable.
"You are very hospitable," she said.
"A virtue which covers a multitude of sins," he answered, pleasantly. "If you will make yourself at home, I'll fix things up a bit."
He opened the doors of the cupboard and took out a plate and a cup and saucer, which he placed before her. "I am sorry I can't offer you a napkin," he said, apologetically, "but they allow me only one a day, and I had that at luncheon."
Mariana laughed merrily. The effects of recent tears were visible only in the added lustre of her glance and the pallor of her face. She had grown suddenly mirthful.
"Don't let's be civilized!" she pleaded. "I abhor civilization. It invented so many unnecessary evils. Barbarians didn't want napkins; they wanted only food. I am a barbarian."
Algarcife cut the cold chicken and passed her the bread and butter.
"Why, none of us are really civilized, you know," he returned, dogmatically. "True, we have a thin layer of hypocrisy, which we call civilization. It prompts us to sugar-coat the sins which our forefathers swallowed
Mariana leaned forward with a pretty show of interest. She did not quite understand what he meant, but she adapted herself instinctively to whatever he might mean.
"And then?" she questioned.
"And then we will realize that to be civilized is to shrink as instinctively from inflicting as from enduring pain. Sympathy is merely a quickening of the imagination, in which state we are able to propel ourselves mentally into conditions other than our own." His manner was aggressive in its self-assertiveness. Then he smiled, regarded her with critical keenness, and lifted the coffee-pot.
"I sha'n't give you coffee," he said, "because it is not good for you. You need rest. Why, your hands are trembling! You shall have milk instead."
"I don't like milk," returned Mariana, fretfully. "I'd rather have coffee, please. I want to be stimulated."
"But not artificially," he responded. His gaze softened. "This is my party, you know," he said, "and it isn't polite to ask for what is not offered you. Come here."
He had risen and was standing beside his desk. Mariana went up to him. The power of his will had enthralled her, and she felt strangely submissive. Her coquetry she recognized as an unworthy weapon, and it was discarded. She grew suddenly shy and nervous, and stood before him in the flushed timidity of a young feminine thing.
He had taken a bottle from a shelf and was measuring some dark liquid into a wine-glass. As Mariana reached him he took her hand with frank kindliness.
"You have cried half the evening?"
"Yes."
"Drink this." His tone was peremptory.
He gave her the glass, watching her as she looked into it, with the gleam of a smile in his intent regard. Mariana hesitated an instant. Then she drank it with a slight grimace.
"Your hospitality has taken an unpleasant turn," she remarked. "You might at least give me something to destroy the taste."
He laughed and pointed to a plate of grapes, and they sat down to supper.
The girl glanced about the room critically. Then she looked at her companion.
"I don't quite like your room," she observed. "It is grewsome."
"It is a work-shop," he answered. "But your dislike is pure nonsense. Skulls and cross-bones are as natural in their way as flesh and blood. Nothing in nature is repellent to the mind that follows her."
Mariana repressed a shudder. "I have no doubt that toads are natural enough in their way," she returned, "but I don't like the way of toads."
Anthony met her serious protest lightly.
"You are a beautiful subject for morbid psychology," he said. "Why, toads are eminently respectable creatures, and if we regard them without prejudice, we will discover that, as a point of justice, they have an equal right with ourselves to the possession of this planet. Only, right is not might, you know."
"But I love beautiful things," protested Mariana. She looked at him wistfully, like a child desiring approbation. There was an amber light in her eyes.
He smiled upon her.
"So do I," he made answer; "but to me each one of those nice little specimens is a special revelation of beauty."
The girl broke her bread daintily. "You misunderstand me," she said, with flattering earnestness and a deprecatory inflection in her voice. Her head drooped sideways on its slender throat. There was a virginal illusiveness about her that tinged with seriousness the lightness of her words. "Surely you love art," she said.
"Oh, I like painting, if that is what you mean," he answered, carelessly, though her image in his eyes was relieved against a sudden warmth. "That is, I like Raphael and Murillo and a few of the modern French fellows. As for music, I don't know one note from another. The only air I ever caught was 'In the Fragrant Summer-time,' and that was an accident. I thought it was 'Maryland.'"
Mariana did not smile. She shrank from him, and he felt as if he had struck her.
"It isn't worth your thinking of," he said, "nor am I."
Mariana protested with her restless hands.
"Oh, but I can't help thinking of it," she answered. "It is dreadful. Why, such things are a part of my religion!"
He returned her startled gaze with one of amusement.
"I might supply you with an alphabetical dictionary of my peculiar vices. An unabridged edition would serve for a criminal catalogue as well. A—Acrimony, Adhesiveness, Atheism, Aggressiveness, Aggravation, Ambition, Artfulness—"
"Oh, stop!" cried Mariana. "You bewilder me."
He leaned back in his chair and fixed his intent gaze upon her. His eyes were so deeply set as to be almost
"Why, I thought you displayed an interest in the subject!" he rejoined. "You lack the genius of patience."
"Patience," returned Mariana, with a swift change of manner, "is only lack of vitality. I haven't an atom of it."
A shade of the nervous irritability, which appeared from apparently no provocation, was in his voice as he answered:
"There is nothing fate likes better than to drill it into us. And it is not without its usefulness. If patience is the bugbear of youth, it is the panacea of middle age. We learn to sit and wait as we learn to accept passivity for passion and indifference for belief. The worst of it is that it is a lesson which none of us may skip and most of us are forced to learn by heart." He spoke slowly, his voice softened. Beneath the veneering of philosophic asceticism, the scarlet veins of primeval nature were still palpitant. The chill lines of self-restraint in his face might, in the whirlwind of strong passions, become ingulfed in chaos.
With an effort Mariana threw off the spell of his personality. She straightened herself with an energetic movement. From the childlike her manner passed to the imperious. Her head poised itself proudly, her eyes darkened, her lips lost their pliant curve and grew audacious.
"That is as grewsome as your room," she said. "Let's talk of pleasant things."
The changes in her mystified Algarcife. He regarded her gravely. "Of yourself, or of myself?" he demanded.
"The first would only display your ignorance. I
He spoke jestingly. "Here goes. Name, Algarcife. Christened Anthony. Age, twenty-seven years, three weeks, ten days. Height, five feet eleven inches. Complexion, anÆmic. Physique, bad. Disposition, worse. Manners, still worse. Does the exactness of my information satisfy you?"
"No;" she enveloped him in her smile. "You haven't told me anything I want to know. I could have guessed your height, and your manners I have tested. What were you doing before I came in?"
"Cursing my luck."
"And before that?" She leaned forward eagerly.
"Dogging at a theory of heredity which will reconcile Darwin's gemmules, Weismann's germ-plasm, and Galton's stirp."
She wrinkled her brows in perplexity. Her show of interest had not fled. A woman who cannot talk of the things she knows nothing about might as well be a man.
"And you will do it?" she asked. He had a sudden consciousness that no one had ever been quite so in sympathy with him as this elusive little woman with the changeable eyes.
"Well, I hardly think so," he said. "At any rate, I expect to discover what Spencer would call the germ of truth in each one of them, and then I suppose I'll formulate a theory of my own which will contain the best in all of them."
Her manner did not betray her ignorance of his meaning.
"And you will explain it all to me when it is finished?" she asked.
His smile cast a light upon her.
"If you wish it," he answered, "but I had no idea that you cared for such things."
"You did not know me," she responded, reproachfully. "I am very, very ignorant, but I want so much to learn." Then her voice regained its brightness. "And you have read all these books?" she questioned.
He followed with his eyes her swift gestures.
"Those," he answered, pointing to the north shelves, "I have skimmed. Those behind you, I have read; and those," he nodded towards his right, "I know word for word."
"And what do you do?" The delicacy of her manner imbued the question with unconscious flattery.
"I—oh, I eke out an existence with the assistance of the Bodley College."
"What have you to do with it? Oh, I beg your pardon! I had forgotten we were almost strangers."
He answered, naturally.
"It is my unhappy fate to endeavor to instil a few brains and a good deal of information into the heads of sixty-one young females."
"And don't you like them?" queried Mariana, eagerly.
"I do not."
"Why?"
"What an inquisitor you are, to be sure!"
"But tell me," she pleaded.
"Why?" he demanded, in his turn.
She lowered her lashes, looking at her quiet hands.
"Because I want so much to know."
His smiling eyes were probing her. "Tell me why."
She raised her lashes suddenly and returned his gaze. There was a wistful sincerity in her eyes.
"I wish to know," she said, slowly, "so that I may not be like them."
For a moment he regarded her silently. Then he spoke. "My reasons are valid. They giggle; they flirt; and they put candy in my pockets."
"And you don't like women at all?"
"I like nice, sensible women, who wear square-toed shoes, and who don't distort themselves with corsets."
The girl put out her pretty foot in its pointed and high-heeled slipper. Then she shook her head with mock seriousness.
"I don't suppose you think that very sensible?" she remarked.
He looked at it critically.
"Well, hardly. No, it isn't in the least sensible, but it—it is very small, isn't it?"
"Oh yes," responded Mariana, eagerly. She felt a sudden desire to flaunt her graces in his face. He was watching the play of her hands, but she became conscious, with an aggrieved surprise, that he was not thinking of them.
"But you don't like just mere—mere women?" she asked, gravely.
"Are you a mere—mere woman?"
"Yes."
"Then I like them."
The radiance that overflowed her eyes startled him.
"But you aren't just a mere—mere man," she volunteered.
"But I am—a good deal merer, in fact, than many others. I am a shape of clay."
"Then I like shapes of clay," said Mariana.
For an instant they looked at each other in silence. In Mariana's self-conscious eyes there was a soft suffusion of shyness; in his subjective ones there was the quickening of an involuntary interest.
"Then we agree most amicably," he remarked, quietly. As she rose he stood facing her. "It is time for your sleep and my work," he added, and held out his hand.
As Mariana placed her own within it she flashed whitely with a sudden resentment of his cool dismissal.
"Good-night!" she said.
He looked down at her as she lingered before him. "I want to be of use to you," he said, frankly, "but things have an unfortunate way of slipping my memory. If at any time I can serve you, just come to the fire-escape and call me."
"No," answered the girl, pettishly, "certainly not."
His brow wrinkled. "That was rude, I know," he rejoined, "but I meant it honestly."
"I have no doubt of it."
As she turned to go he detained her with a compelling touch.
"You aren't angry?"
"No."
"And you forgive me?"
"I have nothing to forgive. Indeed, I am grateful for your charity."
He surveyed her in puzzled scrutiny. "Well, I am sure I sha'n't forget you," he said. "Yes, I am quite sure of it."
"What a marvellous memory!" exclaimed Mariana, crossly, and she stepped out upon the fire-escape.
"Good-night!" he called.
"Good-night!" she responded, and entered her room.
"He is very rude," she whispered as she closed the shutters. In the half-light she undressed and sat in her night-gown, brushing the heavy tangles of her hair. Then she lighted the flame before the little altar and said her prayers; kneeling with bowed head. As she turned off the light she spoke again. "I am not sure that I don't like rudeness," she added.
Meanwhile Algarcife had watched her vanish into the shadows, a smile lightening the gravity of his face. When she had disappeared he turned to his desk. With his singular powers of concentration, he had not taken up his pen before all impressions save
"Yes; I think, after all, that a strongly modified theory of pangenesis may survive," he said.
At the extreme end of the corridor upon which Mariana's door opened there was a small apartment occupied by three young women from the South, who were bent upon aims of art.
They had moved in a month before, and had celebrated a room-warming by asking Mariana and several of the other lodgers to a feast of beer and pretzels. Since then the girl had seen them occasionally. She knew that they lived in a semi-poverty-stricken Bohemia, and that the pretty one with pink cheeks and a ragged and uncurled fringe of hair, whose name was Freighley, worked in Mr. Nevins's studio and did chrysanthemums in oils. She had once heard Mr. Nevins remark that she was a pupil worth having, and upon asking, "Has she talent?" had met with, "Not a bit, but she's pretty."
"Then it is a pity she isn't a model," said Mariana.
"An example of the eternal contrariness of things," responded Mr. Nevins. "All the good-looking ones want to paint and all the ugly ones want to be painted." Then he rumpled his flaxen head. "In this confounded century everything is in the wrong place, from a woman to her waist-line."
After this Mariana accompanied Miss Freighley on students' day to the Metropolitan Museum, and watched her make a laborious copy of "The Christian Martyr." Upon returning she was introduced to Miss Hill and Miss Oliver, who shared the apartment, and was told to make herself at home.
Then, one rainy Saturday afternoon there was a knock at her door, and, opening it, she found Miss Freighley upon the outside.
"It is our mending afternoon," she said, "and we want you to come and sit with us. If you have any sewing to do, just bring it."
Mariana picked up her work-basket, and, finding that her thimble was missing, began rummaging in a bureau-drawer.
"I never mend anything until I go to put it on," she said. "It saves so much trouble."
Then she found her thimble and followed Miss Freighley into the hall.
Miss Freighley laughed in a pretty, inconsequential way. She had a soft, monotonous voice, and spoke with a marked elimination of vowel sounds.
"We take the last Saturday of the month," she said. "Only Juliet and I do Gerty's things, because she can't sew, and she cleans our palettes and brushes in return."
She swung open the door of the apartment, and they entered a room which served as studio and general lounging-room in one.
A tall girl, sitting upon the hearth-rug beside a heap of freshly laundered garments, stood up and held out a limp, thin hand.
"I told Carrie she would find you," she said, speaking with a slight drawl and an affected listlessness.
She was angular, with a consumptive chest and narrow shoulders. She wore her hair—which was vivid, like flame, with golden ripples in the undulations—coiled confusedly upon the crown of her head. Her name was Juliet Hill. A mistaken but well-known colorist had once traced in her a likeness to Rossetti's "Beata Beatrix." The tracing had resulted in the spoiling of a woman without the making of an artist.
Mariana threw herself upon a divan near the hearth-rug and looked down upon the pile of clothes.
"What a lot of them!" she observed, sympathetically.
Miss Hill drew a stocking from the heap and ran her darning-egg into the heel to locate a hole.
"It is, rather," she responded, "but we never mend until everything we have is in rags. I couldn't find a single pair of stockings this morning, so I knew it was time."
"If you had looked into Gerty's bureau-drawer you might have found them," said Miss Freighley, seating herself upon the end of the divan. "Gerty never marks her things, and somehow she gets all of ours. Regularly once a month I institute a search through her belongings, and discover more of my clothes than I knew I possessed. Here, give me that night-gown, Juliet. The laundress tore every bit of lace off the sleeve. What a shame!"
Mariana removed a guitar from the couch and leaned back among the pillows, glancing about the room. The walls were covered with coarse hangings, decorated in vague outlines of flying cranes and vaguer rushes. Here and there were tacked groups of unframed water-colors and drawings in charcoal—all crude and fanciful and feminine. Upon a small shelf above the door stood a plaster bust, and upon it a dejected and moth-eaten raven—the relic of a past passion for taxidermy. In the centre of the room were several easels, a desk, with Webster's Unabridged for a foot-stool, and a collection of palettes, half-used tubes of paint, and unassorted legs and arms in plaster.
"How do you ever find anything?" asked Mariana, leaning upon her arm.
"We don't," responded a small, dark girl, coming from the tiny kitchen with a dish of cooling caramels in her hand; "we don't find, we just lose." She placed the dish upon the table and drew up a chair. "I would mortgage a share of my life if I could turn my old mammy loose in here for an hour."
"Gerty used to be particular," explained Miss Freighley; "but it is a vicious habit, and we broke her of it. Even now it attacks her at intervals, and she gets out a duster and goes to work."
"I can't write in a mess," interrupted Miss Oliver, a shade ruefully. "I haven't written a line since I came to New York." Then she sighed. "I only wish I hadn't written a word before coming. At home I thought I was a genius; now I know I am a fool."
"I have felt the same way," said Mariana, sympathetically, "but it doesn't last. The first stage-manager I went to I almost fell at his feet; the next almost fell at mine. Neither of them gave me a place, but they taught me the value of men."
"I don't think it's worth learning," returned Miss Oliver, passing her caramels. "Try one, and see if they are hard."
"Poor Gerty!" drawled Miss Hill, watching Mariana bite the caramel. "She faces editors and all kinds of bad characters. Her views of life are depressing."
"They are not views," remonstrated Miss Oliver, "they are facts. Facts are always depressing, except when they are maddening."
"I have begged her to leave off writing and take to water-color or china painting," said Miss Freighley, cheerfully, "but she won't."
"How can she?" asked Mariana.
"Of course I can't," retorted Miss Oliver, shortly. "I never had a paint-brush in my hand in my life, except when I was cleaning it."
Miss Freighley laid her sewing aside and stretched her arms.
"It only requires a little determination," she said, "and I have it. I got tired of Alabama. I couldn't come to New York without an object, so I invented one. It was as good as any other, and I stuck to it."
Miss Hill shook her head, and her glorious hair shone like amber.
"Art is serious," she said, slowly. She was just entering the life-class at the Art League.
"But the artist is not," returned Miss Freighley, "and one can be an artist without having any art. I am. They think at home I am learning to paint pictures to go on the parlor wall in place of the portraits that were burned in the war. But I am not. I am here because I love New York, and—"
"Claude Nevins," concluded Miss Oliver.
Mariana looked up with interest. "How nice!" she said. "He told me you were awfully pretty."
Miss Freighley blushed and laughed.
"Nonsense!" she rejoined; "but Gerty is so faithful to her young fellow down South that it has gone to her brain."
"I am faithful because I have no opportunity for faithlessness," sang Gerty to an accompaniment she was picking upon the guitar. "I have been in love one—two—six times since I came to New York. Once it was with an editor, who accepted my first story. He was short and thick and gray-haired, but I loved him. Once it was with that dark, ill-fed man who rooms next to Mariana. He almost knocked me down upon the stairway and forgot to apologize. I have forgotten the honorable others, as the Japanese say, but I know it is six times, because whenever it happened I made a little cross-mark on my desk, and there are six of them."
"It must have been Mr. Ardly," said Mariana. "I never look at him without thinking what an adorable lover he would make."
"He has such nice hands," said Miss Oliver. "I do like a man with nice hands."
"And he is clean-shaven," added Miss Freighley. "I detest a man with a beard."
Miss Hill crossed her thin ankles upon the hearth.
"Love should be taken seriously," she said, with a wistful look in her dark eyes.
Miss Freighley's pretty, inconsequent laugh broke in.
"That is one of Juliet's platitudes," she said. "But, my dear, it shouldn't be taken seriously. Indeed, it shouldn't be taken at all—except in cases of extreme ennui, and then in broken doses. The women who take men seriously—and taking love means taking men, of course—sit down at home and grow shapeless and have babies galore. To grow shapeless is the fate of the woman who takes sentiment seriously. It is a more convincing argument against it than all the statistics of the divorce court—"
"For the Lord's sake, Carrie, beware of woman's rights," protested Miss Oliver. "That is exactly what Mrs. Simpson said in her lecture on 'Our Tyrant, Man.' Why, those dear old aunts of yours in Alabama have inserted an additional clause in their Litany: 'From intemperance, evil desires, and woman's suffrage, good Lord deliver us!' They are grounded in the belief that the new woman is an Édition de luxe of the devil."
Mariana rose and shook out her skirts. "I must go," she said, "and you haven't done a bit of work."
"So we haven't," replied Miss Hill, picking up her needle. "But take some caramels—do."
Mariana took a caramel and went out into the hall. Algarcife's door was open, and he was standing upon the threshold talking to Claude Nevins.
As Mariana passed, Nevins smiled and called to her:
"I say, Miss Musin, here is a vandal who complains that you make night hideous."
Algarcife scowled.
"Nevins is a fool," he retorted, "and if he doesn't know it, he ought to be told so."
"Thanks," returned Nevins, amiably, "but I have long since learned not to believe anything I hear."
Anthony's irritation increased. "I should have thought the presumptive evidence sufficient to overcome any personal bias," he replied.
Nevins spread out his hands with an imperturbable shrug.
"My dear fellow, I never found my conclusions upon presumptive evidence. Had I done so, I should hold life to be a hollow mockery—whereas I am convinced that it is a deuced solid one."
"You are so bad-tempered—both of you," said Mariana; "but, Mr. Algarcife, do you really object to my singing? I can't keep silent, you know."
Algarcife smiled.
"I never supposed that you could," he answered. "And as for music, I had as soon listen to you as to—to Patti."
"Not that he values your accomplishments more, but Patti's less," observed Nevins, placidly.
"On the other hand, I should say that Miss Musin would make decidedly the less noise," said Anthony.
"He's a brute, isn't he, Mariana?" asked Nevins—and added, "Now I never said you made anything hideous, did I?"
Mariana laughed, looking a little vexed. "If you wouldn't always repeat everything you hear other people say, it would be wiser," she responded, tartly.
"Such is the reward of virtue," sighed Nevins. "All my life I have been held as responsible for other people's speeches as for my own. And all from a conscientious endeavor to let my neighbors see themselves as others see them—"
Algarcife smiled good-humoredly. "Whatever bad qualities Nevins may possess," he said, "he has at least the courage of his convictions—"
Nevins shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't know about the convictions," he rejoined, "but I've got the courage all right." Then he looked at Mariana. "Is that an implement of housewifery that I see?" he demanded.
"I have been to a darning-party," she answered, "but we didn't darn anything—not even circumstances."
"Lucky circumstances!" ejaculated Nevins. Then he lowered his voice. "I should not have believed it of you," he protested; "to attend a darning-party, and to leave not only me, but my socks, outside."
Mariana flushed angrily.
"You are insufferable," she said, "and you haven't a particle of tact—not a particle. Only yesterday I heard you tell Mr. Morris that his head looked like an advertisement for sapolio, and the day before you told Miss Freighley that I said she didn't know how to dress her hair."
"It was true," said Nevins. "You can't make a liar of me, Mariana."
"I wish you wouldn't call me Mariana," she retorted; and he went upon his way with a lament.
As Mariana laid her hand upon her door-knob she looked at Anthony.
"Mr. Algarcife," she said, "do you really mind my singing so very much?"
From the end of the corridor Nevins's voice was heard chanting:
| "How fickle women are, |
| Fickle as falling star." |
"I wish that Nevins would attend to his own affairs," Algarcife responded. "As for me, you may dance a break-down every night of your life, and, if it amuses you, I'll grin and bear it."
During Algarcife's first term at college, a fellow fraternity man remarked of him that he resembled the eternal void, in that he might have been anything and was nothing. Algarcife accepted the criticism with a shrug.
"Wait and see," he responded, shortly, and the fraternity man had waited and had seen.
In that first year Anthony succeeded in sowing a supply of wild oats sufficient for the domestication of the species. He was improvident from principle and reckless from an inborn distrust of accepted dogmas. "I shall live as I please," he replied, in answer to the warnings of a classmate, "and I shall think as I damn please."
For a year he went about his dissipations in a kind of inquiring ardor. He called it "seeing life," and he pursued his observations with entire obliviousness to public regard, but with philosophic concern as to the accuracy of the information obtained. He was known to have got drunk upon whiskey and light wine in order to test the differences in effect, and it was rumored that he made love to the homeliest and most virtuous daughter of the saloon-keeper that he might convince himself whether her virtue was the logical resultant of her homeliness. Into all experiments he carried an entire absence of prejudice, and a half-defiant acceptance of consequences.
"It is a sheer waste of time," said John Driscoll, of the Senior class. "You haven't learned the first principle
Algarcife laughed. "I am going to reform," he said. "I am not enough of an artist to see the Æsthetic values of vice. Let's become decent. It is more economical."
It was at this time that he reduced his living expenses one-half, and appropriated the surplus funds to the support of a young mechanic, whose health had collapsed in the struggle to work his way to a university degree. "He not only gave it," declared the young mechanic, in a burst of gratitude, "but he gave it without knowing that he did a generous thing."
When Algarcife left college that summer he followed Driscoll to his cabin in the Adirondacks and spent several months botanizing. The chance application to science decided the tenor of his mind, and, upon his return to study, he refused to bow beneath the weight of authority hurled upon him. He denounced the classics and a classical training. Several courses he declared superficial, and he mastered various systems of moral philosophy that he might refute the fallacies of the professor. The brilliancy which he had frittered during the preceding year was turned into newer channels, and the closeness of his reliance upon inductive reasoning caused him to become at once a source of amusement to his classmates and of annoyance to his instructor. To see him rise in class, his face charged with the nervous vigor which seized him in moments of excitement, his keen glance riveted upon the professor as he mercilessly dissected his utterances, was an event which, to his fellow-students, rendered even old Monckton's lectures of interest.
Then he took a prominent part in a debating society. With a readiness which his friends declared to spring
Before leaving college, and at the urgency of his guardian, he had carried through with dogged distaste a course in dogmatic theology. It was then that he fell into the way of writing theses from opposite sides of a subject, and when handing in a treatise upon "Historical Evidences of Christianity," or "The Pelagian Heresy," it was invariably accompanied by the remark: "I wish you'd look over that 'Lack of Historical Evidences,' or 'Defence of Pelagianism,' at the same time. You know, I always do the other side."
And it was "the other side" which finally drove him out of theology and his guardian into despair. Whether it was an argument in moral philosophy, a mooted question in Egyptology, or a stand in current politics, Algarcife was ready with what his classmates called "the damned eternal opposition." It was even said that a facetious professor, in remarking to his class that it was "a fine day," had turned in absent-minded custom and called upon Mr. Algarcife for "the other side," an appeal which drew a howl of approbation from hilarious students.
Anthony was not popular at college, though his friends were steadfast. It was not until later years, when life had tempered the incisive irony of his speech and endowed him with the diplomacy of indifference, that men fell beneath the attraction of his personality. At that time he was looked upon in an ominous light, and the scintillant scepticism which he carried fearlessly into every department of knowledge caused him to be regarded as one who might prove himself to be an enemy to society. Even his voice, which long afterwards exerted so potent an influence, had
So, when, years later, the public lauded the qualities they had formerly condemned, there was no inconsistence—since life is more colored by points of view than by principles. At the end of his theological course he had delivered an address, at the request of his class, upon the "Christian Revelation." When it was over he went into his guardian's room, the flame of a long determination in his eyes. The paper which he had read was still in his hands, and he laid it upon the table as he spoke.
"It can't be," he said. "I give it up."
The man whom he addressed rose slowly and faced him, standing, a tall, gaunt figure in his clerical coat. His hair was white, and at a first glance he presented the impression of a statue modelled in plaster, so much did the value of form outweigh that of color in his appearance. In meeting his eyes an observer would, perhaps, have gained a conception of expression rather than shade. One would have said that the eyes were benevolent, not that they were gray or blue. His forehead was high and somewhat narrow, three heavy furrows running diagonally between the eyebrows—ruts left by the constant passage of perplexities. He was called Father Speares, and was an impassioned leader of the High Church movement.
"Do you mean it?" he asked, slowly—"that you give up your faith?"
Algarcife's brow wrinkled in sudden irritation. "That I have given up long ago," he answered. "If I ever had any, it was an ingrafted product. What I do mean is that I give up the Church—that I give up theology—that I give up religion."
The other flinched suddenly. He put out one frail, white hand as if in protest.
"I—I cannot believe it," he said.
"And yet I have been honest."
"Honest! Yes, I suppose so. Honest—" he lifted the paper from the table and unfolded it mechanically. "And yet you could write this?"
Anthony shook his head impatiently. "I was but a special pleader with the side assigned, and you knew it."
"But I did not know your power—nor do you. It convinced me—convinced me, though I came with the knowledge that your words were empty—empty and rotten—"
"They were words. The case was given me, and I defended it as a lawyer defends a client. What else could I do?"
Father Speares sighed and passed his hand across his brow.
"It is not the first disappointment of my life," he said, "but it is the greatest."
Algarcife was looking through the open window to the sunlight falling upon the waving grass. A large butterfly, with black and yellow wings, was dancing above a clump of dandelions.
"I am sorry," he said, more gently—"sorry for that—but it can't be helped. I am not a theologian, but a scientist; I am not a believer, but an agnostic; I am not a priest, but a man."
"But you are young. The pendulum may swing back—"
"Never," said Algarcife—"never." He lifted his head, looking into the other's eyes. "Don't you see that when a man has once conceived the magnitude of the universe he can never bow his head to a creed? Don't you see that when he has grasped the essential verity in all religions he no longer allies himself to a single one? Don't you see that when he has realized the dominance of law in religions—the law of their growth and decay, of their evolution and dissolution,
"I see that he can awake to the knowledge of the spiritual life as well as to the physical—that he can grasp the existence of a vital ethical principle in nature. I shall pray for you, and I shall hope—"
Algarcife frowned. "I am sick of it," he said—"sick to death. To please you, I plodded away at theology for three solid years. To please you, I weighed assumptions as light as air. To please you, I read all the rot of all the Fathers—and I am sick of it. I shall live my own life in my own way."
"And may God help you!" said the elder man; and then, "Where will you go?"
"To Egypt—to India—to the old civilizations."
"And then?"
"I do not know. I shall work and I shall succeed—with or without the help of God."
And he had gone. During the next few years he travelled in Africa and Asia, when the sudden loss of his income recalled him to America. Finding it fruitless to rebel, he resigned himself philosophically, secured a position as instructor in a woman's college, made up an annual deficit by writing for the scientific reviews, and continued his studies. His physical nature he believed he had rendered quiescent.
Some days after his encounter with Mariana he came upon her again. He had just entered the park at the Seventy-second Street entrance, on his way from his lecture at the Bodley College. The battered bonnet of a beggar-woman had blown beneath the horses' hoofs in the drive, and he had stopped to rescue it, when he heard his name called, and saw Mariana beside him.
She spoke impulsively.
"I have been watching you," she said.
He looked at her in perplexity.
"Indeed! And what have you discovered?"
"I discovered that you are a gentleman."
He laughed outright.
"Your powers of intuition are positively miraculous," he replied.
She upbraided him with a glance.
"You are unkind," she said.
"Am I?"
"You are unkind to me." Her manner had grown subtly personal. He felt suddenly as if he had known her from the beginning of time and through various transmigrations.
"You laugh at me," she added. "You were kinder to that woman—"
He broke in upon her, perplexity giving place to amusement.
"Oh!" he said; "so that is what you mean! Why, if you were to lose your hat, I shouldn't laugh, I assure you."
Mariana walked on silently. Her eyes were bent upon the gray sidewalk, there was a faint flush in her face. A line of men seated upon the benches beside the way surveyed her with interest.
"Miss Musin!"
Her face quickened.
"I have a confession to make."
She looked up inquiringly. A finger of sunlight pierced the branches of an elm and pointed to her upraised face.
"I have rather bad manners," he went on. "It is a failing which you must accept as you accept the color of my hair—"
Mariana smiled.
"I say just what I think," he added.
Mariana frowned.
"That is what I complain of," she responded. Then she laughed so brightly that a tiny child, toddling with a toy upon the walk, looked up and clapped its hands.
His eyes warmed.
"But you will take me for better or for worse?" he demanded.
"Could it be better?" she asked, demurely.
"That is a matter of opinion."
They left the park and turned into a cross-town street. The distant blocks sloped down into the blue blur of the river, from which several gaunt, gray masts rose like phantom wrecks evolved from the mist. Beyond them the filmy outline of the opposite shore was revealed.
Suddenly Mariana stopped.
"This is Morani's, and I must go in." She held out her hand.
"How is the voice?" he asked.
"I am nursing it. Some day you shall hear it."
"I have heard it," he responded.
She smiled.
"Oh, I forgot. You are next door. Well, some day you shall hear it in opera."
"Shall I?"
"And I shall sing Elsa with Alvary. My God! I would give ten years of my life for that—to sing with Alvary."
He smiled at the warmth in her words and, as he smiled he became conscious that her artistic passion ignited the fire of a more material passion in himself. A fugitive desire seized him to possess the woman before him, body and brain. From the quivering of his pulses he knew that the physical nature he had drugged had stirred in response to a passing appeal.
"Good-bye," said Mariana. She tripped lightly up the brown-stone steps. As she opened the outer door she turned with a smile and a nod. Then the door closed and he went on his way. But the leaping of his pulses was not appeased.
One morning, several days later, Mariana, looking from her window, saw Anthony standing upon the fire-escape. He had thrown a handful of crumbs to a swarm of noisy sparrows quarrelling about his feet.
As he stood there with the morning sunlight flashing upon his face and gilding the dark abundance of his hair, the singularly mystic beauty of his appearance was brought into bold relief. It was a beauty which contained no suggestion of physical supremacy. He seemed the survival of a lost type—of those purified prophets of old who walked with God and trampled upon the flesh which was His handiwork. It was the striking contrast between the intellectual tenor of his mind and its physical expression which emphasized his personality. To the boldest advance in scientific progress he had the effect of uniting a suggestion of that poetized mysticism which constitutes the charm of a remote past. With the addition of the yellow robe and a beggar's bowl, he might have been transformed into one of the Enlightened of nigh on three thousand years ago, and have followed the Blessed One upon his pilgrimage towards Nirvana. The modernity of his mind was almost tantalizing in its inconsistency with his external aspect.
Mariana, looking through the open window, smiled unconsciously. Anthony glanced up, saw her, and nodded.
"Good-morning," he called. "Won't you come out and help quiet these rogues?"
Mariana opened the little door beneath the window and stepped outside. She looked shy and girlish, and the flutter with which she greeted him had a quaint suggestion of flattery.
He came towards her, and they stood together beside the railing. Beneath them the noise of trade and traffic went on tumultuously. Overhead the sky was of a still, intense blueness, the horizon flecked by several church-spires, which rose sharply against the burning remoteness. Across the tenement roofs lines of drying garments fluttered like banners.
Mariana, in her cotton gown of dull blue, cast a slender shadow across the fire-escape. In the morning light her eyes showed gray and limpid. The sallow tones of her skin were exaggerated, and the peculiar harmony of hair and brows and complexion was strongly marked. She was looking her plainest, and she knew it.
But Anthony did not. He had seen her, perhaps, half a dozen times, and upon each occasion he had discovered his previous conceptions of her to be erroneous. Her extreme mobility of mood and manner at once perplexed and attracted him. Yesterday he had resolved her character into a compound of surface emotions. Now he told himself that she was cool and calm and sweetly reasonable.
"I am glad you like sparrows," she said, "because nobody else does, and, somehow, it doesn't seem fair. You do like them, don't you?"
"I believe," he answered, "that I have two passions beyond the usual number with which man is supplied—a passion for books and a passion for animals. I can't say I have a special regard for sparrows, but I like them. They are hardy little fellows, though a trifle pugnacious, and they have learned the value of co-operation."
"I had a canary," remarked Mariana, with pathos,
He laughed, looking at her with quizzical humor. "Do you expect them to escape the common fate?" he demanded; and then: "If there is anything that could give me an attack of horrors sooner than a dancing dog—and there isn't—it would be a bird in a cage. I left my last lodgings because my neighbor kept a mocking-bird outside of her window. If it had been a canary I might have endured it, but I knew that if I stayed there a week longer I should break in and set that bird free. I used to hear it at night beating itself against the cage."
"Oh, hush!" said Mariana, putting her hands to her ears. She wondered vaguely at his peculiar sensitiveness of sympathy. It was a type of manhood that she had not before encountered—one as unlike the jovial, fox-hunting heroes of her childish days as mind is unlike matter. She remembered that among them such expressions would have been regarded as a mark of effeminacy and ruthlessly laughed to scorn. She even remembered that her own father had denounced a prohibition of prize-fighting as "mawkish rot." This eccentric type of nervous vigor, in which all remnants of semi-barbarism were apparently extinguished, possessed a fascination for her in its very strangeness. In his character all those active virtues around which her youthful romances were woven held no place. Patriotism was modified into a sense of general humanity; chivalry was tempered into commonplace politeness. She did not know that the force which attracted her was but a dominant mentality; that where the mind holds sway the character is modified accordingly. With a great expenditure of nerve force those attributes which result from physical hardihood occupy a less prominent part. In Anthony she beheld, without knowing it, a forced and abnormal result of existing
To Mariana's ignorant eyes Anthony seemed one in whom passion had been annihilated. In reality it was only smothered beneath the weight of a strenuous will. Let the pressure be removed, and it would burst forth the fiercer for its long confinement, ingulfing perhaps the whole organism in its destructive flame.
"Oh, hush!" Mariana had said, and turned from him. "You seem to delight in unpleasant things. I make it a point to believe that suffering and death do not exist. I know they do, but I believe they do not."
He drew nearer. Across his face she saw a sudden flash—so vivid that it seemed the awakening of a dormant element in his nature. "You are wonderfully vital," he said. "There is as much life in you as there is in a dozen of us poor effete mortals. What is your secret?"
The girl leaned her arm upon the railing and rested her chin in her hand. She looked up at him and her eyes grew darker. "It is the pure animal love of existence," she answered. "I love the world. I love living and breathing, and feeling the blood quicken in my veins. I love dancing and singing and eating and sleeping. The simple sensuousness of life is delicious to me. If I could not be a queen, I had rather be a beggar upon the road-side than to be nothing. If I could not be a human being, I had rather be a butterfly
She had spoken passionately, the words coming quickly from between her parted lips. She seemed so light and etherealized as to be almost bodiless. The materialistic philosophy to which she gave utterance was spiritualized by her own illusiveness.
For an instant she hesitated, looking across the tenement roofs to the horizon beyond. Then she went on: "I am different from you—oh, so different! Where you think, I feel. You are all mind, I am all senses. I am only fulfilling my place in nature when I am hearing or seeing or feeling beautiful things. My sense of beauty is my soul."
Anthony watched her with steadfast intentness. He had never before seen her in this mood, and it was a new surprise to him. His former generalizations were displaced.
But if he had known it, the present aspect was a result of his own influence upon Mariana. In a moment of contrition for small deceptions, she had been precipitated into an extravagant self-abasement.
"You are disappointed," she added, presently, meeting his gaze. "You expected something different, but I am shallow, and I can't help it." It was like her that in the tendency to self-depreciation she was as sincere as she had been in the former tendency to self-esteem.
And perhaps Anthony was the juster judge of the two. He was certainly the more dispassionate.
"I have told you," concluded Mariana, with an eager catch at the redeeming grace, "because I want to be truthful."
"My dear girl," responded Anthony, a warm friendliness in his voice, "you might have spared yourself this little piece of analysis. It is as useless as most morbid rot of the kind. It doesn't in the least affect what I think of you, and what I do think of you is of little consequence."
"But what do you think?" demanded Mariana.
"I think that you know yourself just a little less well than you know that old lady wheeling her cart of vegetables in the street below. Had she, by the way, known herself a little better she would not have flown into such a rage because she spilled a few. If we knew ourselves we would see that things are not very much our fault, after all, and that a few slips the more or less on our uphill road are very little matter."
Mariana glowed suddenly. She looked up at him, a woman's regard for power warming her eyes. To her impressionable temperament there seemed an element of sublimity in his ethical composure.
"Teach me," she said, simply. Anthony smiled. If he seemed a Stoic to Mariana, it was not because he was one, and perhaps he was conscious of it. But our conceptions of others are colored solely by their attitudes towards ourselves, and not in the least by their attitudes towards the universe, which, when all is said, is of far less consequence.
"I should have first to learn the lesson myself," he answered.
"Would you, if you could?" asked Mariana.
For an instant he looked at her thoughtfully. "Teach you what?" he questioned. "Teach you to endure instead of to enjoy? To know instead of to believe? To play with skulls and cross-bones instead of with flowers and sunshine? No, I think not."
Mariana grew radiant. She felt a desire to force from him a reluctant confession of liking. "Why wouldn't you?" she demanded.
"Well, on the whole, I think your present point of view better suited to you. And everything, after all, is in the point of view." He leaned against the railing, looking down into the street. "Look over and tell me what you see. Is it not the color of those purple egg-plants in the grocer's stall? the pretty girl in that big hat, standing upon the corner? the roguish faces of those ragamuffins at play? Well, I see these, but I see also the drooping figure of the woman beside the stall; the consumptive girl with the heavy bundle, going from her work; the panting horses that draw the surface cars."
They both gazed silently from the balcony. Then Mariana turned away. "It is the hour for my music," she said. "I must go."
The sunlight caught the nimbus around her head and brightened it with veins of gold.
"All joy goes with you," he answered, lightly. "And I shall return to work."
"All frivolity, you mean," laughed Mariana, and she left him with a nod.
According to the theory that vices are but virtues run to seed, moderation was the dominant characteristic of Anthony Algarcife. At the time of his meeting with Mariana, his natural tendencies, whatever they may have been, were atrophied in the barren soil of long self-repression. It is only when one is freed from the prejudices engendered by the play of the affections that one's horizon is unbroken by a vision of the objects in the foreground, and the forest is no longer lost in consideration of the trees.
And it was under the spell of this moderation that Mariana had fallen. Her own virtues were of that particular quality of which the species is by no means immutable, and of which the crossing often produces an opposite variety, since a union of negative virtues has not infrequently begotten a positive vice. But Mariana's character, of which at that time even the verdict of society had not deprived her, possessed a jewel in its inconsistency. Her very faults were rendered generous by their vivacity, and redeemed her from inflexibility, that most unforgivable trait in womanhood, which, after all, is merely firmness crystallized. And as the lack of formativeness in Mariana left her responsive to the influences beneath which she came, so the anger of yesterday was tempered into the tenderness of to-day, and her nature modified by the changes rung upon her moods.
So far, the influence of Anthony had worked for good. The girl was startled at the wave of gentleness
So it was as well that Mariana's aspirations were short-lived. She confessed them to Anthony, and they were overruled.
"My dear girl," he said, "stop fasting, and don't wear away your knees at prayer. All the breath in your body isn't going to affect the decision of Omniscience. The only duty you owe to the universe is to scatter as much pleasure in life as you can. Eat good red beef and ward off anÆmia, and give the time you have wasted in devotions to exercise and fresh air. If we are all doomed to hell, you can't turn the earth out of its track by bodily maceration. Evil plus evil doesn't equal good."
Mariana ceased praying and went out to walk. She was conscious of strange quickenings of sympathy. She loved the world and the people that passed her and the children laughing in the gutter. She bought a pot of primroses from the flower-stall at the corner, and, having spent a week's car-fare, walked a couple of miles in the sun to carry them to a rheumatic old lady who had once been kind to her. With patient good-humor she sat an hour in the sick-room, and,
The praise stirred her pulses with pleasure. She wondered if she might not become a Sister of Charity and spend her life in ministering to others, and when a ragged boot-black in the street begged for a dime she gave him the money she had saved for a pair of gloves, and glorified the sacrifice by the smile of a Saint Elizabeth. She felt that she would like to give some one the coat from her back, and, as she passed in and out of the crowd around her, her heart stirred in imaginative sympathy for humanity. That vital recognition of the fellowship of man which is as transient as it is inspiring, uplifted her. She wished that some one from the crowd would single her out, saying, "I am wretched, comfort me!" or, "I am starving, feed me!"
But no one did so. They looked at her with indifferent eyes, and her impulses recoiled upon themselves. At that moment she felt capable of complete self-abnegation in the cause of mankind, and even commonplace goodness possessed an attraction. But she realized that the desire to sacrifice is short-lived, and that, after all, it is easier to lay down one's life for the human race than to endure the idiosyncrasies of its atoms.
To us who adopt the proprieties as a profession and wear respectability for a mantle, unauthorized impulses in any form are to be contemned, and Mariana, flushed with generous desires, was as unacceptable as Mariana submerged in self.
After paying a couple of calls the girl's spirit of altruism evaporated. It was warm and close, and the sun made her head ache, while the fatigue from the unusual exercise produced a fit of ill-humor. She wondered why she had left her room, and then looked at her soiled gloves and regretted her encounter with
A block from The Gotham she ran upon Jerome Ardly, and her irritation vanished.
"Hello!" he ejaculated, "you are as white as a sheet. Too much September sun. Had luncheon?"
"Yes," responded Mariana; and she added, plaintively, "I am so tired. I have walked myself to death—and all for nothing."
"Form of monomania?" he inquired, sympathetically. "Nothing short of arrant idiocy would take any one out for nothing on a day like this."
Mariana looked at him and laughed. "I have been paying calls," she said. "I went to see Mrs. Simpson and she told me all about the rights of women. It was very instructive."
"If they resemble the rights of man," remarked Ardly, "they are not to be seen, heard, or felt."
"Ah, but it is all the fault of men," responded Mariana; "she told me so. She said that men were the only things that kept us back."
Ardly laughed.
"And you?" he inquired.
"I! Oh, I agreed with her! I told her that if men hindered us we would stamp them out."
"The devil you did!" retorted Ardly. "I know of no one better fitted for the job. You will begin on your fellow-lodgers, I suppose. As if you had not been treading on our hearts for the last year!"
Mariana lowered her parasol and entered The Gotham. As she mounted the stairs she turned towards him. The time had been when the presence of Jerome Ardly had caused a flutter among the tremulous strings of her heart, but that had been before Anthony crossed her horizon. And yet coquetry was not extinguished. "Our?" she emphasized, smiling.
Ardly grasped at the hand which lay upon the railing, but Mariana eluded him.
"Why, all of us," he returned, with unabashed good-nature—"poor devils that we are! Myself, Nevins, Mr. Paul, to say nothing of Algarcife."
Mariana's color rose swiftly. "Oh, nonsense!" she laughed, and sped upward.
Upon the landing Mr. Nevins opened the door of his studio and greeted them.
"I say, Miss Musin, won't you come and have a look at 'Andromeda'?"
Mariana entered the studio, and Ardly followed her. In the centre of the room a tea-table was spread, and Miss Freighley, a smear of yellow ochre on the sleeve where she had accidentally wiped her brush, was engaged in brewing the beverage. Upon the hearth-rug Juliet Hill was standing, her tall, undeveloped figure and vivid hair relieved against a dull-brown hanging, and around the "Andromeda" a group of youthful artists were gathered.
"How delightful!" exclaimed Mariana, genially. She kissed Miss Freighley, and pressed the extended hands of the others with demonstrative cordiality.
"Oh, if I could only paint!" she said to Miss Freighley, in affectionate undertones. "If I could only go about with a box of brushes, without feeling silly, and wear a smudge of paint upon my sleeve without being dishonest." And she wiped Miss Freighley's sleeve upon her handkerchief.
"Thanks," responded that young lady, amiably; "but you can carry a music-roll, you know, which is much handier and a good deal tidier."
Mariana had turned to the "Andromeda." "Oh, Mr. Ponsonby!" she remarked, to one of the group surrounding it, "don't you uphold me in thinking the shadows upon the throat too heavy?"
Mr. Ponsonby protested that he would uphold her
Mariana frowned. "Mr. Ardly thinks as I do—now don't you?"
Ardly sauntered over to them.
"Why, of course," he assented. "That shadow was put on with a pitchfork. I am positively surprised at you, Nevins."
"On your conscience?" demanded Mariana.
"Haven't any," protested Ardly, indolently. "Left it in Boston. It is indigenous to the soil, and won't bear transplanting."
"Miss Ramsey brought hers with her," replied Mariana, with a smile. "It worries her dreadfully. It is just like a ball on the leg of a convict. She has to drag it wherever she goes, and it makes her awfully tired sometimes."
"A good Bohemian conscience is the only variety worth possessing," observed Mr. Nevins. "It changes color with every change of scene and revolves upon an axis. Hurrah for Bohemia!"
"Hear! hear!" cried Mariana, gayly. She lifted a glass of sherry, and, lighting a cigarette, sprang upon the music-stool. Mr. Ponsonby drew up a chair and seated himself at the piano, and, blowing a cloud of smoke about her head, Mariana sang a rollicking song of the street.
As she finished, the door opened and Algarcife stood upon the threshold. For a moment he gazed at the scene—at Mariana poised upon the music-stool with upraised arms, her hat hanging by an elastic from her shoulder, her head circled by wreaths of cigarette smoke, her eyes reckless. His look was expressive of absolute amazement. Innocent as the scene was in
"I beg your pardon, Nevins," he said, abruptly. "No, I won't come in." And the door closed.
But Mariana had seen his face, and, with a flutter of impulse and a precipitate rush, she was after him.
"Mr. Algarcife!" Her voice broke.
He turned and faced her.
"What is it?"
"You—you looked so shocked!" she cried.
She stood before him, breathless and warm, the smoking cigarette still in her hand.
"Throw that away!" he said.
She took a step forward, struggling like a netted bird beneath the spell of his power.
"How absurd!" she said, softly. The cigarette dropped from her fingers to the floor.
He laughed. His eyes burned steadily upon her. Before his gaze her lashes wavered and fell, but not until she had seen the flashing of latent impulse in his face.
"But you dropped it," he said.
"Yes."
"Why did you?"
Mariana made a desperate effort at her old fearlessness. It failed her. Her eyes were upon the floor, but she felt his gaze piercing her fallen lids. She spoke hurriedly.
"Because—because I did," she answered.
He came a step nearer. She felt that the passion in his glance was straining at the leash of self-control. She did not know that desire was insurgent against the dominion of will, and was waging a combat with fire and sword.
She put up her hands.
"You are my friend," she said. Her tones faltered. The haze of idealism with which he had surrounded her was suffused with a roseate glow. He caught her hands. His face had grown dark and set, and the lines upon his forehead seemed ineffaceable.
Mariana was conscious of a sudden uplifting within her. It was as if her heart had broken into song. She stood motionless, her hands closing upon his detaining ones. Her face was vivid with animation, and there was a suggestion of frank surrender in her attitude. He caught his breath sharply. Then his accustomed composure fell upon him. His mouth relaxed its nervous tension, and the electric current which had burned his fingers was dissipated.
At the other end of the corridor a door opened and shut, and some one came whistling along the hall.
"It is Mr. Sellars," said Mariana, smiling. "I recognize his whistling two blocks away, because it is always out of tune. He thinks he is whistling 'Robin Hood,' but he is mistaken."
"Is he?" asked Anthony, abstractedly. His mind was less agile than Mariana's, and he found more difficulty in spanning the space between sentiment and comic opera.
Mr. Sellars greeted them cheerfully and passed on.
"I must go," said Mariana. "I promised to dine with Miss Ramsey."
There was an aggrieved note in her voice, but it had no connection with Anthony. With the passing of the enjoyment of emotion for the sake of the mental exaltation which accompanied it, the dramatic instinct reasserted itself. She even experienced a mild resentment against fate that the emotional altitude she had craved should have been revealed to her in the damp and unventilated corridor of The Gotham apartment-house. At a glance from Anthony the resentment would have vanished, and Mariana have been swept
"Yes," said Anthony, "it is late." His voice sounded hushed and constrained, and, as he stood aside to allow her to pass, he looked beyond and not at the girl.
She turned from him and entered her room.
Mariana found Miss Ramsey lying at length upon the hearth-rug in her tiny sitting-room, her head resting upon an eider-down cushion.
At the girl's entrance she looked up nervously. "I can't rest," she said, with a plaintive intonation, "and I am so tired. But when I shut my eyes I see spread before me all the work I've got to do to-morrow."
She sat up, passing her hand restlessly across her forehead. In her appearance there might be detected an almost fierce renunciation of youth. Her gown was exaggerated in severity, and her colorless and uncurled hair was strained from her forehead and worn in a tight knot upon the crown of her head. The prettiness of her face was almost aggressive amid contrasting disfigurements.
Miss Ramsey belonged to that numerous army of women who fulfil life as they fulfil an appointment at the dentist's—with a desperate sense of duty and shaken nerves. And beside such commonplace tragedies all dramatic climaxes show purposeless. The saints of old, who were sanctified by fire and sword, might well shrink from the martyrdom sustained, smiling, by many who have endured the rack of daily despair. To be a martyr for an hour is so much less heroic than to be a man for a lifetime.
But in Miss Ramsey's worn little body, incased in its network of nerves, there was the passionless determination of her Puritan ancestors. Life had been thrust upon her, and she accepted it. In much the
Mariana knelt beside her and kissed her with quick sympathy.
"I can't rest," repeated the elder woman, fretfully. "I can't rest for thinking of the work I must do to-morrow."
"Don't think of it," remonstrated Mariana. "This isn't to-morrow, so there is no use thinking of it."
In Miss Ramsey's eyes there shone a flicker of girlishness which, had fate willed it, might have irradiated her whole face.
"I have been wondering," added Mariana, softly, "what you need, and I believe it is a canary. I will buy you a canary when my allowance comes."
For the girl had looked into her own heart and had read an unwritten law. She had seen sanctification through love, and she felt that a woman may owe her salvation to a canary.
"How could I care for it?" asked the other, a little wistfully. "I have no time. But it would be nice to own something."
Then they left the hearth-rug and ate dinner, and Mariana drove the overhanging cloud from Miss Ramsey's eyes. The desire to be first with all who surrounded her had prompted her to ingratiate herself in every heart that throbbed and ached within. The Gotham, from little, overworked Miss Ramsey to the smaller and more overworked maid who dusted her chamber.
After dinner, when Mariana returned to her room, she found a letter awaiting her. It was from her father, and, as was usual with his utterances, it was straight and to the mark.
"I have met with reverses," it stated, "and the family is growing large. In my present position I find it impossible to continue your allowance, and I think that, on the whole, your duty is at home. My wife has much care with the children, and you would be of service in educating them."
Mariana dropped the letter and sat motionless. In a flash she realized all that it meant. It meant returning to drudgery and hideous monotony. It meant returning to the house she hated and to the atmosphere that stifled her. It meant a colorless life of poverty and sordid self-denial. It meant relinquishing her art and Anthony.
With a rush of impulse she stepped out upon the fire-escape, the letter fluttering in her hand.
"Mr. Algarcife!" she called, softly.
As his figure darkened the lighted space between the window-sashes she went towards him. He faced her in surprise. "What is it?" he inquired, abruptly.
Mariana held out the letter, and then followed him as he re-entered his room.
"I cannot do it!" she said, passionately. "I cannot! I cannot!"
Without heeding her, Anthony unfolded the letter, read it and reread it with judicial composure; after which he folded it again, placed it in the envelope, and stood holding it in his right hand. The only visible effect it produced upon him was a nervous twitching of his thin lips.
"And what have you decided?" he asked, slowly.
Mariana interlaced her fingers impatiently. She looked small and white, and excitement caused her eyes to appear abnormally large. Her features quivered and her tone was tremulous.
"I will not go back," she protested. "I will not! Oh, I will not!"
"Is it so bad?" He still held the letter.
"Bad! It is worse than—than anything. If I had stayed there I should have gone mad. It was paralyzing me inch by inch. Oh, if you could only know what it is—a dusty, dirty little house, smelling of cabbage, a troop of screaming children, and quarrels all day long."
He met her outburst with a remonstrative gesture, but there was a mellow light in his eyes and his face had softened. As if resenting a voluntary restraint, he shook back a lock of hair that had fallen upon his forehead.
"But your father?"
Mariana looked at him as if he represented the bar of judgment and she were pleading her cause. She spoke with feverish conviction.
"Oh, he doesn't want me! If you only knew what a relief it was to him when I came away. Things were so much quieter. He likes his wife and I hate her, so we don't agree. There is never any peace when I am there—never."
"And the children?" His eyes met Mariana's, and again his lips twitched nervously. He held the check-rein of desire with a relentless hand, but the struggle told.
"They are horrid," responded Mariana, insistently. "They are all hers. If they had really belonged to me, I wouldn't have left them, but they didn't, not one. And I won't teach them. I'd rather teach the children of that shoemaker across the way. I'd rather scrub the streets."
Anthony smiled, and the tenderness in his eyes rained upon her. The fact that she had thrown herself upon his sympathy completed the charm she exercised over him.
Still he held himself in hand.
"You know of nothing that could call you back?" he asked.
"Nothing," answered Mariana. "I shouldn't like to starve, but I'd almost as soon starve as live on cabbage." Then she faced him tragically. "My father's wife is a very coarse woman. She has cabbage one day and onions the next."
The smile in Anthony's eyes deepened. "It would be impossible to select a more wholesome article of food than the latter," he observed.
But Mariana was unmoved.
"Before I left, it was horrible," she continued. "Whenever onions were served I would leave the table. My father's wife would get angry and that would make me angry."
"A congenial family."
"But when we get angry we quarrel. It is our nature to do so." She lifted her lashes. "And when we quarrel we talk a great deal, and some of us talk very loud. That is unpleasant, isn't it?"
"Very," Algarcife commented. "I find, by the way, that I am beginning to harbor a sympathy for your father's wife."
Mariana stared at him and shook her head.
"I wasn't nice to her," she admitted, "but she is such a loud woman. I am never nice to people I dislike—but I don't dislike many."
She smiled. Algarcife took a step forward, but checked himself. "We will talk it over—to-morrow," he said, and his voice sounded cold from constraint.
"I won't go back," protested Mariana. "I—I will marry Mr. Paul first."
He held out his hand, and it closed firmly over the one she gave him. "You will not do that, at all events," he said; "for Mr. Paul's sake, as well as your own."
Then he drew aside, and Mariana went back to her room.
Anthony recrossed the window-sill and paced slowly
Presently he crossed to the fire-escape, stepped outside, hesitated an instant, and then went to Mariana's window. The shutters were closed, but the light burned behind them.
"Mariana!" he called; and again, "Mariana!"
Through the slats of the shutters the figure of Mariana was visible in high relief against the brightness.
"What is it?" she asked, coming nearer.
He spoke slowly and with constraint.
"Mariana, you will not marry Mr. Paul."
She laughed. The sound was like wine in his blood, and constraint was shattered.
"Is there any obstacle?" she inquired.
"There will be," he answered, and his voice rang clear.
"What?" She was leaning against the shutters. He felt her breath upon his brow.
"You will marry me."
"Oh!" gasped Mariana, and was silent.
Suddenly he surrendered self-control. "Open the shutters," he said.
The shutters were unfastened, they swung back, and Mariana came out. She looked very young, her hair hung about her shoulders, and in the dim light her face showed small and white. For a moment they stood motionless, each dumb before the knowledge of the other's dominance. Anthony looked at her in heated silence. His face was pale, his eyes glowing.
"Mariana!" He did not move nearer, but his voice thrilled her like a caress. She shrank from him, and a heavy shadow fell between them.
"Mariana, you will marry me?" In the stillness following his words she heard the sharpness of his breathing.
"I—I am not good enough," said Mariana.
"My saint!"
As if impelled, she leaned towards him, and he caught her in his arms. Beneath them the noise of traffic went on, and with it the hunger and the thirst and the weariness, but they stood above it all, and he felt the beating of her pulses as he held her.
"Say you love me," he pleaded—"say it." His breath burned her forehead.
"Oh, don't you see?" she asked—"don't you see?"
She lifted her head and he took her hands and drew her from the darkness into the light and looked into her eyes. They shone like lamps illuminating an altar, and the altar was his own.
"Yes," he said; "but say it."
Mariana was silent for an instant, and when she spoke her voice was vibrant with passion.
"You are my love, and I love you," she answered. "And I?"
"The desire of my eyes."
She came nearer, laying one hand upon his arm. He did not move, and his arm hung motionless, but his eyes were hot.
"I am yours," she said, slowly, "for ever and ever, to have and to hold, to leave or to take—yours utterly."
The news of Mariana's engagement was received without enthusiasm in The Gotham. A resentment against innovations of so sweeping an order was visible in the bearing of a number of the lodgers, and Mr. Nevins was heard publicly expressing his disapproval. "I never got comfortably settled anywhere in my life," he announced, "that somebody didn't step in and disarrange matters. At the last place the head waiter married the cook, and now Algarcife is marrying Mariana. After our discovering her, too. I say, it's a beastly shame!"
Mr. Ardly was of one mind with him; so was Mr. Morris. Alone, of all the table, Mr. Paul stood firm upon the opposite side. An hour after the news was out he encountered Algarcife upon the stairs and smiled compassionately.
"I have heard with concern," he began, stiffly, "that you contemplate taking a serious step."
"Indeed?" returned Anthony, with embarrassment. "I believe I do contemplate something of the kind, but I had hoped to get it over before anybody heard of it."
"Such things travel fast," commented Mr. Paul, cheerfully. "I think I may say that I was in possession of the fact five minutes after your ultimate decision was reached. It is a serious step, as I have said. As for the young woman, I have no doubt of her worthiness, though I have heard contrary opinions—"
"Who has dared?" demanded Anthony.
"Merely opinions, my dear sir, and the right of private judgment is what we stand on. But, I repeat, I have no doubt of her uprightness. It is not the individual, sir, but the office. It is the office that is at fault."
Mr. Paul passed on, and upon the next landing Algarcife found Mr. Nevins in wait.
"Look here, Algarcife," he remonstrated, "I don't call this fair play, you know! I've had my eye on Mariana for the last twelve months!"
A thunder-cloud broke upon Anthony's brow. "Then you will be kind enough to remove it!" he retorted, angrily.
"Oh, come off!" protested Mr. Nevins. "Why, Mariana and I were chums before you darkened this blessed Gotham! She'd have married me long ago if I'd had the funds."
"Confound you!" exclaimed Anthony. "Can't you hold your tongue?"
Mr. Nevins smiled amiably and spread out his hands.
"No, I cannot," he answered, imperturbably. "Say, old man, don't get riled! You'll let me appear at the wedding, won't you?"
Algarcife strode on in a rage, which was not appeased by Ardly's voice singing out from his open door.
"Congratulations, Algarcife! You are a lucky dog! Like to change shoes."
Upon the balcony he found Mariana, with a blossom of scarlet geranium in her hair. She stretched out both hands and flashed him a smile like a caress. "You look positively furious," she observed.
Algarcife's sensitiveness had caused him to treat Mariana much as he would have treated a Galatea in Dresden, had one been in his possession. But Claude Nevins had annoyed him, and he spoke irritably.
"I wish you would have nothing to do with that fellow Nevins," he said.
"Why, what has he done?"
"Done? Why, he's an ass—a consummate ass! He told me he had his eye on you!"
Mariana's laugh pealed out. She raised her hand and brushed the heavy hair from his forehead. Then she tried to brush the lines from his brow, but they would not go.
"Why, he's going to give me a supper the night before our marriage," she said; "that is, they all are—Mr. Ardly, Mr. Sellars, and the rest. They made a pot of money for it, and each one of them contributed a share, and it is quite a large pot. We are to have champagne, and I am to sing, and so will Mr. Nevins. I wanted them to ask you, but Mr. Nevins said you'd be a damper, and Mr. Ardly said you would be bored."
"Probably," interpolated Anthony.
"But I insisted I wanted you, so Mr. Ardly said they would have to have you, and Mr. Nevins said they'd have Mr. Paul, if I made a point of it; but they thought I might give them one jolly evening before settling down, so I said I would."
"You will do nothing of the kind," retorted Algarcife.
"But they are so anxious. It will be such a dreadful disappointment to them."
"I will not have it."
"But I've done it before."
"Don't tell me of it. You want to go, and without me?"
"Of course I'd rather you should be there, but it is cruel to disappoint them," Mariana objected, "when they have made such a nice pot of money."
"But I do not like it," said Anthony.
Mariana laughed into his eyes. "Then you sha'n't have it," she said, and leaned against the railing and touched his arm with her fingers. "Say you love me, and I will not go," she added.
Anthony did not touch the hand that lay upon his arm. His mood was too deep for caresses.
"If you knew how I love you," he said, slowly—"if you only knew! There is no happiness in it; it is agony. I am afraid—afraid for the first time in my life—afraid of losing you."
"You shall never lose me."
"It is a horrible thing, this fear—this fear for something outside of yourself!" He spoke with a sudden, half-fierce possession. "You are mine," he said, "and you love me!"
Mariana pressed closer to his side. "If I had not come," she began, softly, "you would have read and worked and fed the sparrows, and you would never have known it."
"But you came." The hand upon the railing relaxed. "My mother was a Creole," he continued. "She came from New Orleans to marry my father, and died because the North was cold and her heart was in the South. You are my South, and the world is cold, for my heart is in you."
"I have wanted love all my life," said Mariana, "and now I have found it. I have thought before that I had it, but it was only a shadow. This is real. As real as myself—as real as this railing. I feel glad—oh, so glad!—and I feel tender. I should like to pray and go softly. I should like to make that old woman at the flower-stall happy and to freshen the withered flowers. I should like to kiss the children playing on the sidewalk. See how merry they look," and she leaned far over. "I should like to pat the head of that yellow dog in the gutter. I should like to make the whole world glad—because of you."
"Mariana!"
"The world is beautiful, and I love you; but I am sorry—oh, so sorry!—for the people in the street."
"Forget them, beloved, and think of me."
"But you taught me to think of them."
"I will teach you to think of me."
"That I have learned by heart."
"Mariana!"
They stood with locked hands upon the balcony, and the roar of the elevated road came up to them, and the old flower-woman put up her withered flowers and went her way, and the children's laughter grew fainter upon the air, and the yellow dog gnawed at a rock that it took for a bone; and the great, great wheel ground on, grinding to each man and to each dog according to his kind his share of the things written and unwritten in the book of life.
A week later they were married. Mariana had coveted a church ceremony, and Anthony had desired a registrar's office, so they compromised, and the service was read in Mr. Speares's study.
"I should have dearly liked the 'Lohengrin March' and stained-glass windows," remarked Mariana, a little regretfully, as they walked homeward. "It seems as if something were missing. I can't tell just what."
"What does it matter?" asked Algarcife, cheerfully. "A street corner and an organ-grinder would have answered my purpose, had he been legally empowered to pronounce the blessing. It is all rot, I suppose, but I'd face every priest and rabbi in New York if they could bind us closer."
He smiled at Mariana. His eager face looked almost boyish, and he walked with the confident air of one who is sure of his pathway.
"But they could not," added Mariana, and they both laughed, because they were young and life was before them.
They retained the rooms in The Gotham with the fire-escape outside the windows, though Anthony found that his income, after deducting a portion for Mariana'
At this time his great work was laid aside, a sacrifice to necessity, and he spent his days and nights in unmurmuring toil for the sake of Mariana. He was willing to labor, so long as he might love in the intervals of rest.
As for Mariana, she was vividly alive. Beneath the warmth of emotion her nature expanded into fulfilment, and with fulfilment awoke the subtle charm of her personality.
"Have you seen Mariana?" inquired Nevins of Ardly one day. "If so, you have seen a woman in love."
Ardly smiled and flicked the ashes from his cigar.
"Is she?" he asked, cynically; "or is it that the froth of sentiment above her heart is troubled and she believes the depth of passion is stirred? I have lived, my dear fellow, as you probably know, and I have seen strange things, but the strangest of these is the way of a maid with a man."
"Be that as it may, she is charming," returned Nevins. "And Algarcife ought to thank his stars, though why she married him is a mystery I relegate to the general unravelling of judgment-day."
"She probably had sense enough to appreciate the most brilliant man in New York," concluded Ardly,
And that Mariana did appreciate Algarcife was not to be questioned. She threw herself into the worship of him with absolute disregard of all retarding interests. When he was near, she lavished demonstrations upon him; when he was away, she sat with folded hands and dreamed day-dreams. She had given up her music, and she even went so far as to declare that she would give up her acquaintances, that they might be sufficient unto each other. For his sake she discussed theories which she did not understand, and accepted doctrines of which she had once been intolerant. That emotional energy which had led her imagination into devious ways had at last, she told herself, found its appropriate channel. Even the stringent economy which was forced upon them was turned into merriment by the play of Mariana's humor.
"Life must only be taken seriously," she said, "when it has ceased to be a jest, and that will be when one has grown too dull to see the point—for the point is always there."
"And sometimes it pricks," laughed Anthony.
In an up-town block, a stone's-throw west of Fifth Avenue, stands the Church of the Immaculate Conception. It is a newly erected structure of gray stone, between two rows of expressionless tenements, and, despite the aggressive finality emphasized in its architecture, wearing a general air of holding its ground by sheer force of stolidity.
The interior of the church is less suggestive of modernity, and bears, on the whole, a surface relationship to a mediÆval cathedral. The purple light filtering through the stained-glass windows is, in its essential quality, a European importation, and the altar-piece is a passable reproduction of a painting of Murillo's.
More than fifty years ago the church, then an unpretentious building of red brick, endowed neither with rood-screen nor waxen candles, had called to its rectorship the Reverend Clement Speares, a youthful leader of the ritualistic element in Episcopalianism. Father Speares heard the call and accepted the charge, and within a dozen years he had succeeded in trebling the number of his congregation, and in exchanging the red-brick building for the present Church of the Immaculate Conception, with its mystic light of mediÆvalism.
The congregation, of that class who toil not, neither spin, but before whose raiment Easter lilies falter, was fashionable, and also wealthy. The single-hearted zeal which its priest had put into fifty years of service had failed to wean his flock from a taste for the flesh-pots.
Father Speares, who, had his temporal power been in proportion to his ecclesiastical influence, would have thrown open the Holy of Holies to the beggar in the street, and have knelt with equal charity between the Pharisees and Publicans, resigned himself to the recognition of spiritual caste, and devoted his days to Fifth Avenue and his evenings to the Bowery.
To his honor be it said that he made no more valiant stand for the salvation of the one than of the other. A soul was a soul to him, and personal cleanliness a matter of taste.
He was a man of resolute convictions and unswerving purpose. If he did not possess eloquence of speech, he possessed sincerity of mind, which is quite as rare, and very nearly as effective. He had a benevolent countenance combined with a sympathetic manner, and the combination exercised a charm over those of his hearers who attended his church in the endeavor to narcotize troublesome nerves. Unconsciously, by his adoption of celibacy from the mother church, he had borrowed from the elder faith the powerful weapon of romanticism, exciting the imaginative qualities, while he emphasized the maxim of the right of private judgment by rejecting the dogma of papal infallibility.
But since the Church of the Immaculate Conception had risen into being with Father Speares, there was an Ishmaelitish rumor afloat that with Father Speares it would pass away. Father Speares himself was not insensible
When Anthony Algarcife, a young orphan, had been sent to him, he had taken the child into his confidence.
"I will help you," the boy had said, enthusiastically—"I will help you." And he rolled up his little shirt-sleeves in the desire to settle spiritual differences in the good old fashion of physical force.
Father Speares had smiled and patted him upon the shoulder. "Please God, you shall, my boy!" he had answered, and had made the child a white-robed acolyte, that he might ignite by youthful hands the fires of faith.
Anthony had been a disappointment, he had said, but of the bitterness of the disappointment he had made no mention. Beneath his teaching he had seen the young mind unfold and expand strenuously, and then, while his eager eyes were watching, he had seen it shoot from him and beyond his grasp, trampling his cherished convictions beneath ruthless feet.
"It is all rubbish," Anthony had declared in the first intolerance of his youth. "The mental world is filled with a lot of decaying theology, which has been accumulating for centuries. It remains for us to sweep it away."
"And you would sweep me with it," said Father Speares, a little bitterly.
"The ground must be cleared," returned Anthony. "You are sitting upon the rubbish, as a miser in Pompeii might have sat upon his gold while Vesuvius overflowed. It is wiser to flee and leave hoarded treasure to be ingulfed. That the rubbish was once sound theology, I grant, but it has crumbled, and its usefulness of a thousand years ago will not it save from the ash-heap of outgrown ideas to-day."
Father Speares sighed and set his lips. "The boy is young," he said, with the yearning self-deception of age. "It will pass, and he will return the stronger for his wandering."
But the event had not borne out his prophecy. It did not pass, and Anthony did not return.
"It is my head," he explained, half irritably. "There is a wall of scepticism surrounding my brain, through which only the toughest facts may penetrate. I am minus the faculty of credulity."
"Or reverence," Father Speares added, reproachfully. "You regard spiritual things as a deaf man regards sound or a blind man sight."
Anthony's irritation triumphed.
"Or as a man awake regards a dream," he suggested. "The film of superstition has cleared from my eyes, and I see. The truth is that I regard all religions exactly as you regard all except the one which you inherited. An accident of birth has made you a Christian instead of a Moslem or a Brahman, that is all."
"And a twist of the mind has made you an atheist."
"As you please—atheist, agnostic, sceptic, what you will. It only means that you offer me an irrational assumption, and I reject it. It is the custom of you theologians to fit ugly epithets to your opponents, whereas the denial of Christianity no more
"And has missed the greater lesson of the wisdom of God."
Algarcife shrugged his shoulders.
"It is no use," he said; "I can't believe, and I wouldn't if I could."
So he had gone from Father Speares into the world. Virile, strenuous, and possessed with intellectual passion, he had closed the doors of his mind upon commonplaces, and with the improvidence from which mental stamina failed to redeem him had wedded himself to poverty and science.
Five years after leaving Father Speares's roof he returned with Mariana at his side.
"We have come to be married," he announced.
Father Speares gasped and suggested prudence. "It is unwise," he remonstrated—"it is utterly unwise."
"I agree with you," admitted Anthony. "It is unwise, and we know it; but there is nothing else to be done—is there, Mariana?"
Mariana looked into Father Speares's face and smiled.
"Of course you are right," she said, "and we are very foolish, but—but there really isn't anything else to do."
And Father Speares was silenced. He looked at the license a little ruefully, read the service, and sent them off with a benediction.
"God knows, I wish you happiness," he assured Mariana when she kissed him.
Several months later, meeting Algarcife on Broadway, he repeated the words.
"I am happy," returned Algarcife, emphatically. "Mariana is an angel."
"I am glad to hear it," said Father Speares, and he sighed irrelevantly. "A good woman is a jewel of rare value."
The term "good woman," applied to Mariana, gave Anthony a sense of unfitness. Mariana was certainly a jewel, but, somehow, it had never occurred to him to look upon her as a "good woman."
"She is very charming," he remarked, quietly.
Father Speares was regarding him critically. "You are not looking well," he said. "Is it work or worry?"
Algarcife shook his head impatiently. "I—oh, I am all right," he rejoined. "A little extra work, that's all."
"Your book?"
Algarcife's face contracted, and the harassed expression about his mouth deepened.
"No, not my book," he answered, hastily. "I've put that aside for a while. I am trying a hand at bread-winning."
"With satisfactory results, I hope."
Anthony's laugh was slightly constrained.
"Why, certainly! Am I the man to fail?"
"I don't know," commented Father Speares—"I don't know. I never thought of you in that light, somehow. But if I can help you, remember that you were once my boy."
Anthony held out his hand quickly, his voice trembling.
"You are generous—generous as you have always been, but—I am all right."
They parted, Algarcife turning into a cross street. He walked slowly, and the harassed lines did not fade from his mouth. He seemed to have grown older within the last few months, and the fight he was making had bowed his shoulders and sown the seeds of future furrows upon his face.
At the corner he bought a box of sardines and a pound of crackers for Mariana, who liked a late supper. Then he crossed to The Gotham and ascended the stairs.
He found Mariana in a dressing-sack of pink flannel, sitting upon the bed, and engaged in manufacturing an opera-bonnet out of a bit of black gauze and a few pink rose-buds. She was trying it on as he entered, and, catching sight of him, did not remove it as she raised her hand warningly. "Tell me if it is becoming before you kiss me," she commanded, pressing her thimble against her lips.
Anthony drew back and surveyed her.
"Of course it is," he replied; "but what is it, anyway?"
Mariana laughed and leaned towards him.
"A bonnet, of course; not a coal-scuttle or a lamp-shade."
Then she took it from her head and held it before her, turning it critically from side to side.
"Don't you think it might have a few violets against the hair, just above the left temple? I am sure I could take some out of my last summer's hat."
She left the bed and stood upon a chair, to place the bonnet in a box upon the top of the wardrobe. "As a scientific problem it should interest you," she observed. "I created it out of nothing."
Anthony caught her as she descended from the chair.
"As a possible adornment for your head it interests me still more," he replied.
"Because you haven't been married long enough to discover what an empty little head it is?"
"Because it is the dearest head in the world, and the wisest. But what a thriftless house-keeper, not to have set the table!" A door had been cut into his study, and he glanced through. "Do you think you are still
"I forgot it," said Mariana; "but there isn't any bread, so you must go after it. Oh, you didn't get sardines again, did you? I said potted ham—and it is really a very small chicken they sent us."
"Well, no matter. It might have been a chop. By the way, I met Mr. Speares—"
"Father Speares," corrected Mariana.
"Mr. or Father, he's a nice old chap, isn't he?"
"He's a saint," said Mariana. Then she grew serious. "If you could have gone into the Church—honestly, I mean—how pleased he would have been, dearest."
"Yes; but I couldn't, you know, and if I had I could not have married you. He is High Church, you see. Celibacy is his pet institution."
Mariana colored. "Then I am glad you didn't." She flung herself upon him; then, drawing back, added, wistfully, "But you wouldn't have been poor."
"Do you find it so hard?"
"I hate it—for you. You work so hard. And I can't help you."
"My beloved!"
"I mind it most for you. But, of course, I feel badly when the washer-woman comes and there isn't any money—and I should like to have some gloves—"
"You shall have them, my darling. Why didn't you tell me?"
Mariana leaned upon his breast and swept her loosened hair across his arm. "It doesn't matter very much," she answered. "If I were starving and you kissed me I should forget it." And she added, with characteristic inconsequence: "Only I haven't been out for several days because I didn't have any."
"You shall have them to-morrow. Is there anything else, dearest?"
"Nothing!" laughed Mariana.
She went to the mirror and began coiling her hair. From the glass her eyes met Anthony's, and she threw him a smiling glance.
"I have been reading one of your books," she said, pointing with the brush; "there it is."
Anthony lifted the volume from the bureau and grew serious. "Mill?" he observed. "It is a good start. Every woman should know political economy. I am glad it interests you."
"I haven't gone beyond the first page yet," returned Mariana, putting up both hands to fluff her aureole, and pausing to run her fingers over her eyebrows in the attempt to narrow them. "There was something in the first page about 'a web of muslin,' and, somehow, it suggested to me the idea of making that bonnet. Odd, wasn't it? And I am so glad I read it, for I am sure I should never have thought of the bonnet otherwise—and it is becoming."
"But you like Mill?"
"Oh yes," said Mariana; "I find him very suggestive."
Anthony and Mariana founded their life together upon well-worn principles. They accepted in its entirety the fallacy that love is a self-sustaining force, independent of material conditions.
"So long as we love each other," Mariana declared, "nothing matters."
And Anthony upheld this declaration. To Algarcife those first months of intimate association were inexpressibly fresh and inspiriting. That acute sense of nearness to Mariana supplied what had been a void in his existence, and he looked back upon the time he had spent without her as a colorless stretch of undifferentiated days.
And yet, with a feminine presence beside him, work was less easy. In the evenings, when Mariana followed him to his study and seated herself in a rocking-chair beneath the lamplight, he sometimes experienced a vague recognition of its inappropriateness. He found the old absorption to have grown intractable, and the creak of Mariana's rocker, or the low humming of her voice, was sufficient to surprise in him that repressed irascibility from which he had never been able to shake himself free. Even in the midst of his passionate delight in her, a profound melancholy would seize him at times, and he would find the cravings of his intellectual nature harassed by the superficial tenor of his daily employment. Again, as Mariana sat in the lamplight, her swift fingers busy with some useless bit of millinery, he would regard her with a sudden tightening
Then, again, the instinct for solitude, which his years of study had intensified, would reawaken, and the creaking of the rocker would act as an irritant upon his nerves.
It was at such a moment that Mariana had looked up and spoken, the bright inflection of her voice aggravating the interruption.
"Anthony!"
Algarcife turned towards her, his pen raised as if in self-defence.
"When did you begin to love me?"
The pen was lowered, Algarcife smiled. "In the beginning," he answered; then he frowned, his tone grew captious. "I can't, Mariana," he protested—"I really can't. I must get this work over."
"You are always working."
"Heaven knows, I am! If I weren't, we would starve."
"It is horrible to be poor."
"We don't improve matters by exclaiming over them. On the contrary, you will prevent my getting this article off to-night, and we will be a few dollars the poorer."
"You never talk to me. You are always working."
She spoke pettishly, with an impulse to exasperate.
"Mariana!"
Mariana threw aside her work and clasped her hands.
Suddenly her head was lowered, and the mellow lamplight irradiated across the pallor of her face.
"Of course I know you are working for me," she said, "but I had rather have less labor and more love."
"I love you as much when I am working for you as when I am shouting it in your ear."
"But I like to hear it."
"I love you. Now be quiet."
Mariana came and leaned over him. She put her arms about his shoulders and rested her head upon them. There was a sob in her voice. "Let me help you," she said. "It is so hard to sit still and do nothing, while you are killing yourself. Let me help you."
Anthony turned and caught her, and she lay limp and motionless in his embrace. He kissed her with sudden passion.
"You help me by living," he said, "by breathing, by being near me, by giving yourself to me unreservedly. Without you I lived but half a life—without you, now that I have had you, I should go to pieces—absolutely. I love you as a man loves once in a thousand years. But we must live, and I must work."
He released her and went back to his writing, while Mariana, in passionate elation, picked up Mill's Political Economy, and fell to studying.
It was shortly after this that she sought to turn her own talents to financial results. With this end in view she invested her pocket-money in a yard or so of white linen and a mass of colored silks, and wove a garland of nasturtiums around a centre-piece intended to decorate a dinner-table. When it was finished she was
"More than I am going to let you work for," replied Algarcife. "Your eyes have been red ever since you started that confounded table-cover. It is the very last."
Mariana placed one finger to her lips, and then applied it lightly to the iron she held in her hand. "I do hope I won't scorch it," she observed. "Oh, do give me that blanket! It must be ironed on a blanket to make the flowers stand out. Aren't they natural?"
She lifted her heated face and glanced at him for approbation.
"I feel like plucking them," returned Algarcife. "Don't tire yourself. Good-bye." And he passed into the next room and closed the door.
Mariana ironed the centre-piece, wrapped it in yellow tissue-paper, and carried it to an exchange for women's work around the corner. It was placed in a glass-case amid a confusion of similar articles, where it languished for the space of several months. At the end of that time she redeemed it.
The failure of the enterprise precipitated an attack of hysteria, which spent itself in Anthony's arms and left her resigned and exhausted.
"I can't do anything to help you," she observed, hopelessly. "I hoped to clear at least fifteen dollars from that centre-piece, and, instead, I lost five. I shall always be an encumbrance."
"You are my beloved counsellor."
"My love isn't of much use, and you never take my advice."
"But I like to listen to it."
Mariana rested her head upon his shoulder and closed her eyes.
"I am only a luxury," she said, "like wine or cigars, but it wouldn't be pleasant to dispense with me, would it?"
"It would be death."
She sighed contentedly, her hand wandered across his brow. There was a faint, magnetic force in her finger-tips which left a burning sensation like that caused by a slightly charged electric current.
"I made you marry me, you know," she remarked, complacently, "so I am glad you don't regret it."
"Nonsense," remonstrated Algarcife, his lips upon her hair, the warm contact of her body inducing a sense of nearness. "I married you by force. I quite took your breath away. If you had resisted, I should have had you whether or no."
"Oh, but I did make you," returned Mariana. "But there was nothing else to do. I couldn't possibly have gone home, and I did love you so distractedly."
"As you do now."
"As I do now. Of course I must have known that rushing to you that night with the letter was just like a proposal of marriage."
"It was, rather," concluded Algarcife.
"But you needn't have married me unless you wanted to," urged Mariana. "There was Mr. Paul—"
Anthony laughed. "I was a vicarious sacrifice," he declared, "to insure the peace of Mr. Paul."
The next day Algarcife received an unexpected sum of money, and they agreed to celebrate their rising fortunes by a night at the opera. It was "Tannhauser," and Mariana craved music.
"I am afraid it is improvident," Anthony, whom the
And they went. Mariana wore her freshest gown and the little bonnet with the knot of violets above the left temple. She was in her gayest mood, which was only dampened in a slight degree by the odor of the benzine clinging to her newly cleaned gloves.
As she leaned against the railing in the fifth gallery, gazing plaintively down into the pit, she looked subtle and seductive—like a creation in half-tones, swept by fugitive lights and shadows. The pallor of her face was intensified, her radiant lips compressed, and the green flame in her glance scintillated beneath luxurious lashes. Anthony, fastening upon her contented eyes, wondered at the singular charm which she radiated. Small, slight, insignificant, and charged with imperfections as she was, her very imperfections possessed the fascination of elusiveness. Her radiance was intensified in the memory by the plainness succeeding it; the sensitive curve of her nostrils was heightened in effect by the irregularity of feature, and the angular distinctness of the bones of her chin emphasized the faint violet shadows suffusing the hollows. Had her charm been less impalpable it would have lost its power. The desire of beauty might have satiated itself in a dozen women, or of amativeness in a dozen others, but Mariana fascinated instinctively, and her spell was without beginning in a single attribute and without end in possession.
As she sat there in the fifth gallery, drinking with insatiable thirst the swelling harmony, her emotional nature, which association with Algarcife had somewhat subdued, was revivified, and she pressed Anthony's responsive hand in exaltation. The music reverberating round her brought in its train all those lurid dreams
"Oh, if it would last," she said—"if it would last!"
But it did not last, and when it was over Mariana pressed her hand to her brow like one in pain. The return to reality jarred upon her vibrant nerves, and she became aware of shooting throbs in her temples, and of the depressing moisture in the atmosphere.
"I am faint," she complained. "I must have something—anything."
"It is all that clashing and banging," responded Anthony. "What a relief silence is!"
They bought ale and cheese and crackers from a grocery at the corner, and carried the parcels to their room. Mariana let down her hair, put on her dressing-gown, and threw herself upon the hearth-rug. She felt weak and hungry. "If there were only a fire," she lamented regretfully, stretching her hands towards the register; after which she opened the paper-bags and ate ravenously.
In the night she awoke with a start and a sob. She reached out moaningly in the darkness. Her hands were trembling and the neck of her gown was damp
Anthony struck a match, lighted the candle, and looked at her. He laid a cool hand upon her forehead.
"What is it?" he asked. "Are you nervous? Have you been dreaming?"
"No, no," cried Mariana, rolling her head upon the pillow, "but I want music. I want art. There is so much that is beautiful, and I want something."
She wept hysterically. Anthony got up and made her a cup of tea, which she could not drink because it was smoked.
But on the morrow she was herself again. As she was arranging her hair she laughed and chattered gayly, and the effect of the previous evening was shown only in a tendency to break into song. Before drinking her coffee she turned to the piano and trilled an Italian aria, the fingers of one hand wandering over the key-board in a careless accompaniment.
During the day her buoyancy was unfailing. She took up her studies zealously, and the morning devoted to Mill was rich in results. Her acuteness of apprehension was a continual marvel to Algarcife's steadier perception, and he regarded with deference the quickness with which she grasped the general drift of unstudied social problems. An exaggerated example of feminine intuition he ascribed unhesitatingly to a profundity of intellectual ability. That Mariana was adapting herself to his theories of life, he recognized and accepted. There was relief in the thought that his influence over her was weightier than the appeal of her art. With adolescent egotism, he convinced himself that he was shaping and perfecting a mental energy into channels other than the predestined ones; and while Mariana was matured into a palpitant reflection of his own image, he believed that he was liberating an intellect enthralled by superficialities. But,
One evening in March, Mr. Nevins gave a supper in his studio.
Anthony had come in that morning looking somewhat perplexed. "Nevins wants us to-night," he said to Mariana, "and I couldn't get out of it."
Mariana looked up eagerly from her practising. "Oh, it is the 'Andromeda,'" she replied. "He said he would celebrate it. So it has been accepted."
"But it hasn't been. It is the rejection he is celebrating. He told me so. I feel sorry for the fellow, so I said we would go."
"Of course we will!" exclaimed Mariana. "But I'm afraid he'll be gloomy."
"On the contrary, he has just come off a spree, and has a patch over his left eye. His hilarity is positively annoying. He and Ardly are smashing everything in their rooms. The pitcher went as I passed."
"Oh, it is his way of expressing feeling," returned Mariana, sympathetically. "Listen to this new air. It goes tra la la, tra—"
Anthony cut her short.
"My dear girl, I'm in an awful hurry. Would you mind being quiet awhile?" And he entered his study, closing the door after him. Mariana left the piano and sat with folded hands looking down into the street below. A fine rain was falling, and the streets were sloppy with a whitish slime. The women that passed held their skirts well above their ankles, revealing all shapes and varieties of feet. She noticed
Mariana yawned and sighed. She would have liked to go back to the piano and bang a march or some stirring strain of martial music, but she recalled Anthony's injunction and yawned again. She remembered suddenly that her practising had become uncertain of late, and that Anthony's objection seemed to lie like a drawn sword between her and her art. An involuntary smile crossed her lips, that she who had pledged herself to the pursuit of music had also given herself to a man to whom Wagner was as Rossini. She dwelt upon her changed conditions almost unconsciously. It was not that her devotion to art had cooled since her marriage, but that something was forever preventing the expression of it. That Anthony regarded it as one of the trivialities of life, she saw clearly, and there was an aggrieved note in her regret. To her, in whom the artistic instinct was bone of her bone and blood of her blood, the sacrifice of a professional career was less slight than Algarcife believed, and in the depths of her heart there still lurked the hope that in time Anthony's impassioned opposition to a stage life would wear itself out. When the moment came, she dreamed of a final reinspiration of the slumbering fires of her ambition. Now, as she sat beside the window, she became aware of the awakening. Once again she allowed her mind to hover above the distant future and to illuminate its neutral canvas with garish colors. In the future anything and everything was possible. Some weeks ago Signor Morani had sent for her and offered her tuition, and she had accepted. "If you achieve success you can repay me," he had said, adding, with philosophic
Mariana, in a burst of gratitude, had wept upon his shoulder, and he had smiled as he patted her prostrate head.
"Remember," he said, "that you are an artist first, and a wife and mother afterwards, and you will succeed."
Sitting beside the window and staring at the expressionless tenements across the way, she laughed with soft insistence at the professor's warning. What a consuming force was love, that it had destroyed her old mad longing for the stage! Was it all love, or was it only the love of Anthony?
Then before her, in the train of her thoughts, the sentiments of her life were limned vividly, and she remembered the young highwayman whose picture she had seen. She saw the bold, Byronic countenance, with the shadow of evil upon the lips and the uncultured eyes. She recalled the blur by which the printer had obscured the chin, and she felt again the tremor with which she had awaited the sentence of the court. She thought of Edgardo, the romantic tenor, of his impassioned arias, and then of his fat and immobile face, of his red-cheeked German wife, to whom he was a faithful husband, and of his red-cheeked German children, to whom he was a devoted father. She laughed again as she remembered the tears with which she had bedewed her pillow, and the spasm of jealousy in which she had mentally attacked the prima donna. Last of all she thought of Jerome Ardly, as she had seen him upon the night of her arrival, sitting in indolent discussion of his dinner, the Evening Post spread out upon his knee. She experienced in memory the thrill which had seized her at his voice. She remembered how strong and masterful he had looked with the glow of heart disease, which she had thought the glow of health, upon his face. Then her thoughts
In the next room she knew that Anthony was at work, that he had probably, for the time being, forgotten her existence. The knowledge caused her a twinge of pain, and she went to the door, opened it, and looked in.
Algarcife glanced up absently.
"You don't wish anything, do you?" he inquired, and she saw that an irritable mood was upon him, "I can't be interrupted."
"It is nothing," answered Mariana as she closed the door, but she felt a sudden tightening of the heart, and, as she gathered up several loose sheets of music lying upon the floor, she thought, with a spasm of regretful pain, of the practising she had given up. "He does not know," she said, and a few tears fell upon the key-board.
That night, when she was dressing for Nevins's supper, she noticed that there was a faint flush in her cheeks and her hands were hot.
"We lead such a quiet life," she said, laughing, "that a very little thing excites me."
Algarcife, who was shaving, put down his razor and came towards her. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and she noticed that he looked paler and more haggard than usual.
"Look here, Mariana," he began, "don't talk too much to Nevins; I don't like it."
Mariana confronted him smilingly.
"You are positively the green-eyed monster himself," she said. "But why don't you say Ardly, and come nearer the truth? I was in love with him once, you know."
"Hush!" said Anthony, savagely; "you oughtn't to joke about such things; it isn't decent."
"Oh, it didn't go as far as that!" returned Mariana, with audacity.
"How dare you!" exclaimed Algarcife, and they flung themselves into each other's arms.
"How absurd you are!" said Mariana, looking up. "You haven't one little atom of common-sense—not one."
Then they finished dressing, lowered the lights, and went down-stairs.
Mr. Nevins greeted them effusively. He was standing in the centre of a small group composed of Miss Freighley, Mr. Sellars, and Mr. Paul, and the patch above his left eye, as well as his general unsteadiness, bore evidence to his need of the moral suasion to which Mr. Paul was giving utterance. In a corner of the room the "Andromeda" was revealed naked to her friends as well as to her enemies, and at the moment of Anthony's and Mariana's entrance Mr. Ardly was engaged in crowning her with a majestic wreath of willow.
He looked up from his task to bestow a morose greeting.
"We have invited you to weep with us," he remarked. "The gentle pronoun 'us,' which you may have observed, is due, not to my sympathetic nature, but to the fact that I have lost a wager upon the rejected one to Mr. Paul—"
"Who is also among the prophets," broke in Mr. Nevins, with a declamatory wave of his hand. "For behold, he prophesied, and his prophecy it came to pass! For he spake, saying, 'The "Andromeda," she shall be barren of honor, and lo! in one hour shall she be made desolate, and her creator shall put dust upon his head and rend his clothes, yet shall it avail not—'"
"Shut up, Nevins!" roared Ardly, seating himself at the table beside Mariana. "As if everybody didn't know that Mr. Paul's prophecy was obliged to come to pass! Did you ever see a pessimist who wasn't infallible as a soothsayer? It beats a special revelation all hollow."
"Please don't be irreverent," remonstrated Mariana. "I am sure I am awfully sorry about the 'Andromeda,' and I believe that if Mr. Nevins had taken my advice and lightened those shadows—"
"Or mine, and lengthened that thigh," broke in Ardly.
"Or mine, and shortened the fingers," added Miss Freighley.
"Or mine, and never painted it," in a savage whisper from Algarcife.
Mr. Nevins silenced the quartet with promptness. "Hang it all!" he exclaimed, crossly; "between most of your suggestions for art's sake, and Mr. Paul's suggestions for decency's sake, there wouldn't be a blamed rag of her left."
"On the contrary," commented Mr. Paul, "an additional rag or two would be decidedly advantageous."
Mariana raised her finger, with an admonishing shake of the head.
"Out upon you for a Philistine!" she said. "I haven't heard such profanity since I showed my colored mammy a 'Venus de Milo,' and her criticism was, 'Lor', child! nakedness ain't no treat to me!'"
Mr. Nevins laughed uproariously, and filled Mariana's glass, while Algarcife glared from across the table.
"I should like to paste that motto in every studio in New York," returned Mr. Paul. "It was the healthful sentiment of a mind undepraved by civilization."
"What a first-rate censor you would make!" smiled Ardly, good-naturedly—"the fitting exponent of a
Mr. Paul bore the charge with gravity. "Yes, I keep my eyes well open," he responded, complacently.
Algarcife leaned across the table, and discussed woman's suffrage with Miss Ramsey. Mariana flushed and smiled, and glanced from Nevins to Ardly and back again.
Mr. Sellars, who had been engrossed by his salad, took up the cue.
"Oh, the world isn't to blame if we see it through a fog!" he said. "Excellent salad."
"Thanks," drawled Mr. Nevins, amicably. "I cut it up, and Ardly made the dressing. The cutting up is the part that tells."
"But why didn't you bring it to me?" asked Mariana. "I should have liked to help you." Then she raised her glass. "Health to 'Andromeda' and confusion to her enemies!"
There followed a wild clashing of glasses and a series of hoarse hurrahs from Mr. Nevins. After which Mariana was borne tumultuously to the piano, where she sang a little French song about love and fame.
Then Mr. Sellars sang an Irish ballad, and Nevins volunteered the statement that, after hearing Ardly, anybody who didn't mistake his nose for his mouth would be a relief.
"You don't listen," protested Ardly. "We have an excellent system," he explained. "We sometimes spend a musical evening, and when Nevins sings I look through the portfolio for my pieces, and when I sing he looks for his."
That night when Mariana went up to her room she was in exuberant spirits. In a whirl of energy she pirouetted before the mirror. Then she stopped suddenly, grew white, and swayed forward.
"I can't stand excitement," she said, and before
For several weeks after this she was nervous and unstrung. She grew hollow-eyed, the shadows deepened, and her sunniness of temper gave place to an unaccustomed melancholy. She had learned that a new life was quickening within her, and she experienced a blind and passionate fear of inevitable agony. She feared herself, she feared suffering, and she feared the fate of the unborn life. One evening she threw herself into Anthony's arms. "It is the inevitableness," she said. "If I knew that it might not happen, I could bear it better. But nothing can prevent it, and I am afraid—afraid."
Algarcife grew white. "I am afraid for you," he answered.
"And the child? We shall be responsible for it. The thought maddens me. We are so poor, and it seems to me that it is wrong. I feel as if I had committed a sin—as if I were forcing something into the world to fight with poverty and discomforts. It may even hate us for bringing it. I almost hope it will die."
"We will make it a happy child."
"But doesn't it frighten you?"
Algarcife smiled. "Not as much as you do, you bodiless bit of eccentricity."
"All the same, I feel as if it were a sin," said Mariana. "Mill says—"
Anthony laughed aloud and caught her to him. "So you are turning my own weapons upon me," he said. "For the sake of domestic harmony, don't quote Mill to me, Mariana."
In the autumn the child was born. Mariana, dissolved in nervous hysteria in the beginning, rallied when the time drew on, and faced the final throes triumphantly. For several months beforehand she sat and waited with desperate resignation. Her existence, hedged in by the four walls of her room and broken only by the strolls she took with Algarcife after night-fall, exasperated her resentment against social enactments, and she protested bitterly.
"A woman is treated as if she were in disgrace," she said, "and forced to shun the light, when, in reality, she is sacrificing herself for the continuance of the race, and should be respected and allowed to go about in a right and natural manner. I believe all this indecency started with those old scriptural purifications, and I wish it hadn't."
But when the days passed, her lamentations gave place to serenity of speech, and her expression became almost matronly. Dramatically she was stifling her Æsthetic aversion and adjusting herself to her part.
When it was over, and she lay still and etherealized among the pillows, she was conscious only of an infinite restfulness. It was as if the travail through which she had passed had purged her of all capacity for sensation, and the crying of the new-born child fell upon her ear like the breaking of faint and far-off waves of sound.
From Anthony's caress she turned with a gesture of annoyance, and, in a vague association of ideas, she
Some one came across the room and laid a bundle upon the bed beside her, but she did not look at it. Then her hand was lifted and a glass put to her lips, and the faint odor of chloroform which hung about her faded before the fresher odor of digitalis. The child cried at her side, and the first sensation she felt was one of irritation.
"Take it away," she said, fretfully, and fainted.
With her returning vigor, Mariana's normal nature reasserted itself. The first day that she was able to sit propped up among the pillows she had the child brought to her, and looked at it critically, half in curiosity, half in tenderness.
"Did you ever see one with quite such a screwed-up face?" she inquired, dubiously, of the nurse who hovered about.
"Plenty, ma'am; most of 'em are like that—all puckers and wrinkles."
"It might be a thousand years old," continued Mariana, "or a hickory-nut." Then she added: "I don't feel as if it belonged to me at all. I don't care for it in the least."
"That'll come."
"I hope so," answered Mariana, "and I am sorry that it is a girl. It will have so much to bear. I wonder if I looked like that when I was a baby. I declare, it is positively green. What is the matter with it?"
"Just the shadow from the blind, ma'am."
The baby lay upon its back, with half-closed, indistinguishable eyes, slobbering over one red fist. It looked old and wizened, as if oppressed by the understanding that it had entered upon the most perilous of mundane transmigrations. It had cried only once, and that was upon its entrance into the predestined conditions. There was something almost uncanny in its imperturbability, suggesting, as it did, that it had been awed into silence by the warning finger of fate.
"Poor little thing," said Mariana. She leaned over it and stroked the smooth, round head, from which the soft hair was rubbing off, leaving it preternaturally bald. "What a mite!" She encircled it within the curve of her arm and lay looking up at the ceiling. "How strange it all is!" she thought. "It was only yesterday that I was a child myself—and now my first and last and only born is here alive." Then she frowned. It seemed inexplicable to her that women went on travailing and giving birth. That a woman who had once known the agony of maternity should consent to bear a second or third or fourth child struck her as ridiculous. She closed her eyes and laughed. Suddenly she felt a clammy clutch upon her finger and looked down. The baby's eyes were open, and it was staring straight ahead at the cloud of dust
Mariana smiled.
"Its eyes are blue!" she cried, "just like turquoises. Look, nurse! Oh, my dear, poor, ugly little baby!"
A rush of tenderness choked her words, and she lay silent and rapt, her hand responding to the weak grasp upon her finger. In some way she felt changed and tremulous. That invincible instinct of motherhood, which was a forced and abnormal product of her temperament, pulsed from her heart to her answering veins. She experienced in its fulness the sense of guardianship upon which rests the first intuitive recognition of the maternal responsibility. Her emotion welled forth to meet the appeal of the helplessness beside her, and she extended her fragile arm as if in the act of giving shelter. When Algarcife came in some hours later he found her lying asleep, her hand still upon the small, soft head of the child. In the noonday light the intense, opaline pallor of her face was startling.
In quick alarm he leaned over her, listening for the rise and fall of her breathing. It came softly, with a still insistence, like the ripple of a faint wind upon rose leaves. The heavy lashes resting upon her cheeks accentuated the entire absence of color, and the violet tones rising in the shadows of mouth and chin lent to her face the look of one in a trance or in death. It was as if the scarlet current in her blood had, by some necromancer's magic, been transfused from pale violets. Her gown was open at the throat, and he marked the same bloodlessness and hints of bluish shadows in her cold breast. He saw it also in the fragile curve of her uncovered arm and in the marble-like beauty of her hands.
"Mariana," he whispered.
She turned slowly towards him and unclosed her eyes.
"Give me something," she said; "brandy—a great deal."
He brought it to her and raised her on his arm as she drank it.
"I was dreaming," she said, fretfully. "I dreamed that I was falling—falling past the earth, past millions of worlds—past a great many apple orchards, and they were all in bloom. But, somehow, I never reached the bottom. There wasn't any bottom."
"You are stronger now?" he questioned, almost wistfully.
"Not a bit," returned Mariana, peevishly. "I am so—so—so weak." Then she laughed softly. "Do you know that brandy makes me think of my childhood, and a great goblet of mint-julep, with the crushed ice all frosted on the glass. My father was famous for his mint-juleps. I wish I had one now."
"Shall I make it for you?"
"Oh, it wouldn't be the same! I should never like one that didn't have the ice frosted on the glass." She grew weakly reminiscent. "Once, when I was a little child," she said, "I was dressed up in a nice white frock and red sash, and sent out on the sidewalk to play, and I grew tired and wandered off and got lost. I went a long way, and at last I came to the city almshouse. I was going up the steps when I looked into a bar-room across the way, and saw a gentleman with a very red face drinking a toddy. I went over and asked him if he were related to my father, and he said he supposed not, but he took me in behind the screen and sat me upon a table and offered me a taste of toddy, and I said, 'No, thank you. I have plenty of that at home.'"
Then she turned over and went to sleep, while Algarcife sat beside her and held her hand. His gaze ravished her with its fierce tenderness. His life and heart and brain seemed bound up and enshrined in the
His glance fell upon the child in the hollow of her arm, and he bent to look at it. He was conscious of no feeling for it as his own, but of a general feeling of pity for it as a helpless animal. He supposed the other would come later, and in the meantime Mariana was sufficient.
Then, as he sat there, a harassed look crept into his eyes, and he frowned impatiently. Mariana's illness had entirely exhausted the small fund he had accumulated, and he knew that the next few years would bring a hand-to-hand, disastrous conflict with want. For himself he cared little, but for Mariana and the child he experienced a blind and bitter disgust at his own impotence. Working night and day, as he did, and preserving his hold upon the Bodley College, which was at best an uncertain reef, he knew that he could manage to wring from the world but a bare subsistence. He felt resentful of the fact that all his knowledge, all his years of study, all his scientific value would weigh for nothing in the struggle for bread against a moderate capacity for fulfilling the dictates of other men. This ruthless waste of energy exasperated him in its inevitable assault upon his theories of
With a returning gentleness he loosened Mariana's hand and went back to his work.
When Mariana grew strong enough to wear a blue wrapper and sit in a rocking-chair beside the window, she began working upon dainty garments for the baby.
One day, Miss Ramsey, coming in on her way up-stairs, found her tearing up a linen petticoat to make night-slips for the baby, whom she had called "Isolde."
Miss Ramsey remonstrated. She had been a faithful servitor during Mariana's convalescence, and she felt that she had earned the right to interpose. "My dear Mariana," she said, "what are you doing? Cotton at ten cents a yard would do equally well."
"But I couldn't make the little thing sleep in cotton," answered Mariana, "and I haven't any money, so I cut up a few of my things. It must be well cared for. I really couldn't have a child that wasn't nice and clean."
Miss Ramsey smiled.
"Do you think," she asked, "that it would know the difference between cotton and linen? Besides, I've always heard that cotton was more healthful."
Mariana threaded her needle and bent her head.
"It is in the blood," she returned. "My grandmother couldn't bear to be touched by anything but silk. She lived upon her plantations and owned a great many slaves, and she could afford it. Everything, from her night-caps to her chemises, was made of soft white silk. I have one of her chemises, and it is all hand-sewed, with a fall of real lace around the bosom. My mother inherited the taste, and she never wore cotton stockings, even when she couldn't afford meat but twice a week. I am just like her, only she was proud of it and I am ashamed of it."
"But you have overcome it," said Miss Ramsey.
Mariana laughed.
"I can't. Anthony says luxury is bred in my bone, but then he doesn't even care for comforts. I believe he had just as soon eat turnip-salad on a plain deal table as sweetbreads on Irish damask."
"Life teaches us the pettiness of such things," said Miss Ramsey. "When one isn't sure one will get a dinner at all, one is not apt to worry about the possible serving. By-the-way, Mr. Nevins wants to paint the baby when it gets a little larger."
Mariana looked delighted.
"Of course he shall," she said; then she took the child from the nurse's arms and gave it into Miss Ramsey's. "Feel how light she is," she continued. "I know she isn't very pretty, but she is beautifully formed—nurse says so—and did you ever see one with quite so much expression?"
Miss Ramsey held it upon her knee, patting its flexible back with one timid hand. "I really believe it notices things," she said. "It is looking straight at you."
"Of course it does," Mariana answered. "Of course it knows its own blessed little mamma—doesn't it, Isolde?"
The child whimpered and squirmed upon Miss Ramsey's knee.
"Take it, nurse," said Mariana. "It doesn't look nice when it cries."
A week later Mr. Speares came, and was introduced to the baby as it lay in its crib. He leaned over it in the helpless inattention of a man who has a mortal terror of a human being during the first stages of its development.
"It looks very pleasant," he said, finally.
Mariana lifted the child and held it against her shoulder. Had Mr. Nevins seen her in her light-blue gown, with the soft look in her eyes, he would have seized the opportunity and used it to advantage.
"Look at her eyes," she said. "Is she like Anthony used to be?"
Mr. Speares examined it critically. "I don't observe it," he replied; "but I don't suppose its features are quite formed as yet. It will be easier to trace a likeness later on."
Mariana laughed and smoothed the long dress with her frail, blue-veined hand. "The nurse says it is like me," she returned, good-humoredly. "I say it is like Anthony, and Anthony says it is like the original primate."
"I am getting old," said Mariana. She was sitting before the mirror, and as she spoke she rose and leaned forward in closer inspection. "This line," she added, dolefully, rubbing her forehead, "is caused by the laundress, this by the departure of the nurse, and this by the curdling of the baby's milk."
Anthony crossed over and stood behind her. "I would give my right arm to smooth them away," he said.
Mariana fastened the collar of her breakfast sacque and looked back at him from the glass. She did not reply. Not that she would not have liked to say something affectionate, but that she felt the effort to be pleasant to be physically beyond her. Her life of the last few weeks had taught her that demonstrative expressions are an unnecessary waste of energy.
There was a rap at the door, and she opened it and took the milk-bottle from the dairy-man. After setting a cupful upon the little gas-stove, she raised the window and placed the remainder upon the fire-escape. "I am afraid," she remarked, "that I will have to try one of those innumerable infant foods. One can never be sure that the milk is quite fresh."
Anthony tied a cravat which was particularly worn, put on a coat which was particularly shiny across the shoulders, and went into the adjoining room to set the table. He boiled the coffee, took in the baker's rolls from a tray on the threshold, and put on a couple of eggs. Then he called Mariana.
She came, sat down at the table, and lifted the coffee-pot. She looked hollow-eyed and haggard, and her hand shook slightly. "I am so weak," she said, fretfully. "I can't get my strength. I just go dragging about."
Anthony looked at her in sudden pain. "If there were a speculating devil around who took stock in souls," he said, "I am sure we might offer him an investment. People are fools to think there is any happiness without money."
"Or any decency," added Mariana. Then the baby cried, and she took it up and brought it to the table, holding it upon her knee as she ate. Her appetite failed, and she pushed her plate away.
"The egg is so white," she said, pettishly, "I can't eat it." Then her voice choked. "I—I sometimes wish I were dead," she added, and went to pour the baby's milk into its bottle.
Mariana's strength did not return. As the months passed she grew more listless, her pallor deepened, and the shadows under her eyes darkened to a purplish cast. The incessant round of minor cares clouded her accustomed sunniness of temper, and her buoyant step gave place to a languid tread. It was as if the inexorable hand of poverty had crushed her beneath its weight.
Algarcife, coming in from his more systematic employment, would marvel vaguely at her unresponsiveness. His tenderness would recoil in pained surprise as he felt her indifference to his caress, and her long silences while he sat beside her. "Mariana," he would begin, "won't you talk to me?" and Mariana would rouse herself with a start. "But what is there to say?" she would ask, and sink back into stillness. It was, perhaps, impossible for him to understand that at such times she was but undergoing the inevitable reaction from long months of physical and mental suffering—
One day, as he came in to luncheon, he found her playing with the baby, a flash of brightness upon her face.
He looked at her and smiled.
"It is company for you, isn't it, dearest?"
Mariana's smile passed.
"I don't have time to think about that part," she returned. "I am always working. When I've got her all nice and fresh, and laid her on the bed, she begins to cry for her bottle. Then, while I am heating the milk, she cries to be walked, and, by the time the bottle is ready, she is so red in the face she can't drink it, and she spills it all over herself. Then I begin and go through it all again."
"What a little beast she is," said Algarcife, surveying the baby with parental displeasure. "What a pity she isn't a Japanese! Japanese babies never cry." Then he grew serious. "I sometimes wonder how you stand it," he added. "Here, give me the little devil!"
Mariana rescued the baby's rattle from its throat and laid it in the crib. It screamed, and she took it up again.
"There is a good deal in having to," she replied.
Algarcife walked to the window and stood looking down into the street. His brow was gloomy. Suddenly he faced her. "Are you sorry that you married me, Mariana?"
Mariana did not impulsively negative the question, as he had half expected. She even appeared to consider it. Then she slowly shook her head.
"I should have been more unhappy if I hadn't," she answered.
"It would have been a confounded sight better if you had never seen me."
But Mariana put the child down and fell into his outstretched arms.
"No, no," she said; "but I am tired—so tired."
Anthony picked her up and laid her on the bed. Then he threw a shawl over her. "I am going to take an hour off and discipline your tyrant," he said. "Go to sleep." He lifted the baby and went towards the door. "You aren't such a black-hearted chap, after all, are you, Isolde?"
The baby cuddled against his shoulder, and he passed into the next room, closing the door after him.
Mariana lay upon the bed and thought. Her eyes were wide open, and she stared fixedly at the ceiling, watching the fluctuations of light that chased across its plastered surface. It was a relief to be absolutely alone, to be freed from the restraint which the presence of another thinking entity necessitated. She drew the shawl closer about her and pressed her cheek upon the pillow. The contact of the cotton was exciting to her fevered flesh. In the dim train of association it brought back to her an illness in her childhood, and she recalled her first sensations of headache and fatigue. They had come upon her as she was playing in an open meadow, and, before toiling to the house, she had stopped beside the reedy brook and knelt to drink, while the cool, fresh notes of the bobolinks sounded about her. She remembered it all now as she lay amid the noise of the city. The roar of the elevated road was silenced, and she heard the bobolinks again. She saw the emerald sweep of the wheat fields, undulating in golden lights and olive shadows. She saw the stagnant ice pond, with the overhanging branches of willows and the whir of the parti-colored insects. She smelt the pungent sweetness of the wild rose and the subtle odor of the trumpet-flower, glowing amid its luxuriant foliage like a heart of fire.
Then she raised her head and surveyed the room in
With a stifled sob she turned from it all, pressing her face against the pillow. The heritage of yearning for vivid beauty and sharp, sweet odors surged upon her. "I can't be poor!" she cried, passionately. "I can't be poor!"
But as the spring came, Mariana regained something of her old vigor, and it was in April of that year that Mr. Nevins painted the portrait which was exhibited some six months later, and with which began his rising fortunes. It represented her in the blue wrapper, holding the sleeping Isolde upon her knee, that soft and pensive stillness in her eyes. Within a couple of months after its appearance, Mr. Nevins had received orders for similar portraits from a dozen mothers, and had taken his position in the art world as the popular baby specialist.
Mariana had enjoyed the portrait and the sittings. They diverted her thoughts from the groove of the ordinary and gratified to a small extent her social instinct. When it was finished, and Mr. Nevins no longer came, she relapsed into listlessness. It was the friction of the outside world she needed. Hers was not the nature to develop through stagnation. In barren soil she wilted and grew colorless, while at the touch of sunshine she expanded and put forth her old radiance.
Anthony, watching her, would become oppressed at
"She is a woman ruined," he said, bitterly, and he said it with a dull aching in his heart. To him Mariana, emaciated and unresponsive, was still the Mariana to be possessed and held with burning desire. The small clashes of temper, the long silences, the apparent indifference, had been powerless to weaken the force of his love. It was still indomitable.
One night, upon going to his room, he found her in her night-gown kneeling on the hearth-rug. From her breathing he knew that she was asleep, and it was a moment before he aroused her. In the dim light she resembled a marble figure of prayer, her cheek resting upon her hand, the lashes fallen over the violet circles beneath her eyes.
Beside the bed, the baby lay in its little crib, the restless fists lying upon its breast, a fine moisture shining like dew upon the infantile face. He stood looking at it, a thrill shooting into his heart. For the first time he realized with acuteness a positive feeling for the child—realized that it was his as well as Mariana's, that it had a claim upon him other than the claim of Mariana, that he was not only the husband of a woman, but the father of a child.
Bending over the crib, he touched with one finger the crumpled rose-leaf hands, with the soft indentation around the wrist as if left by a tightly drawn cord.
He smiled slightly. Then he crossed over and kissed
"I have really been asleep," she said.
"You were so tired," answered Algarcife, and his voice was limpid with tenderness. "It kills me that you should work so, Mariana."
Mariana rested against him for an instant. Then she went to the crib, and, raising the baby's head, smoothed its pillow. As she laid it down again she pressed the cover carefully over its arms; then, throwing herself into bed, she fell asleep with a sigh.
With the closing session, Algarcife lost his position at the Bodley College. He had published, for a mere pittance, a series of articles upon the origin of sex, and, as a result, he was requested to deliver his resignation to the principal of the institution. A man holding such views, it was argued, was an unsuitable instructor for sixty-one young women. So the instructorship was transferred to a divinity student who was casually looking into science, and Algarcife was dismissed.
Upon receiving his dismissal, he descended into the street and walked slowly homeward. His first sensation was one of anger—blind anger against the blindness of the universe. It seemed incredible that a premium should be set upon commonplaceness, that modern civilization should demand of a man that he shape his mind by an artificial process after the minds of semi-savage ancestors. Was thought to be forever prostrate beneath the feet of superstition? Was all boldness of inquiry, all mental advancement along other than given lines, to be branded in the nineteenth century by the odium theologicum as it had been branded in the time of Bruno?
Then there followed a wave of personal bitterness which in its turn was succeeded by a flood-tide of indifference.
Going home, he found Mariana in nervous despair. The baby, who had been unwell for several days, had been suddenly threatened with convulsions. Upon the doctor's arrival, he had predicted a dangerous teething,
"I am so miserable," said Mariana, moistening a towel to remove the traces of milk that she had upset upon her wrapper. "What can we do?" With a feverish gesture she brushed her heavy and disordered hair from her brow and shook her head helplessly. "Monday is the first of June," she added.
Anthony listened almost stolidly. When he spoke there was a dogged decision in his voice. "The money must be had," he answered. "God knows, I believe I'd steal it if I'd half a chance!"
"Then we'd all go to prison," remarked Mariana, ruefully, as she measured the coffee into the coffee-pot.
Algarcife smiled with a quick sense of humor. "At any rate, a livelihood would be insured," he returned. "Honest industry is the only thing that goes a-begging in this philanthropic century." Then, as Mariana returned to the baby, he drank his coffee in silence and went out. As a beginning, he secured an order to write hygienic articles for a Sunday newspaper. Then he called upon Father Speares and found that he was out of town, and even in his desperation was conscious of a sensation of relief at the thought that Father Speares was beyond appeal. But the sensation was reactionary, and, upon consulting the weather bulletin and finding that a change in temperature was expected, he wrote a letter, which he left at the clergyman's house.
"How is Isolde?" he asked of Mariana an hour later.
Mariana smiled and raised her finger warningly. "Much brighter to-day," she answered, "and sleeping sweetly."
Anthony bent over the crib, holding his breath as he watched the child. He noticed that she looked thinner; the blue veins showed in a delicate tracery upon the
Mariana, serious and careworn, leaned upon the opposite side.
"What do you think?" she whispered.
"Only a little pale," he replied; "all children are when teething, I suppose."
They went into the next room and sat down, leaving the door ajar.
"The doctor was here again," began Mariana, playing with the folds of her gown. "June is the dangerous month—he says so."
Algarcife raised his eyes and looked at her.
"I wrote to Father Speares to-day," he said.
For a moment Mariana was silent, a flush rising to her brow. Then she rose and came over to his side, putting her arms about his neck.
"My poor love," she murmured. Anthony drew her down upon the sofa beside him.
"It was tough," he said, slowly, "but—how I hate to tell you, Mariana!—there is something else."
Mariana flinched sharply.
"Surely he has not refused?" she exclaimed.
"He is away, but the College has given me notice."
Mariana did not answer, but she grew white and her lips trembled. Then she flung her arms out upon the sofa and laid her head upon them. Her sobs came short and fast.
"Mariana!"
She lifted her head and choked back her tears, sitting cold and stiff beside him.
"If it were only ourselves," she said; "but the baby—what will become of the baby?"
There was a strained note of cheerfulness in Algarcife's voice.
"Don't cry," he said, laying his hand upon her shoulder. "I must get the money. Father Speares
Mariana rested her head upon his arm and looked up at him.
"How ill you look!" she said. "My poor boy!"
Then the baby cried, and she went back to it. As Algarcife rose from the sofa, he was seized with a sudden swimming in his head, and, to steady himself, leaned against the mantel. The objects in the room seemed to whirl in a tangle before him, and his vision was obscured by a vaporous fog, while a tumultuous ringing sounded in his ears. But in a moment it passed, and he was himself again.
"Biliousness," he remarked, and started out in search of stray journalistic work. He found it easier to obtain than he had supposed, and, with his usual precision of method, calculated that by working fifteen hours a day he might, provided the supply of work continued, make up the amount which he would lose with the loss of the Bodley College.
After a week of such work, he became optimistic in mind and correspondingly depressed in body. "If my brains didn't get so sluggish," he said to Mariana, "the work would be nothing; but caffeine will remedy that." And he returned to the use of the drug, silencing Mariana's remonstrances with a laugh.
"My dear girl, if I didn't take something to keep me awake, I'd fall asleep in my chair at ten o'clock, and the subscribers to the evening issue would never learn the hygienic value of regular hours and a sufficient amount of recreation."
"But you will wreck yourself," urged Mariana.
"Nonsense. This caffeine is going to take Isolde and yourself to the country."
"And you?"
"I—oh, don't worry about me! I am all right."
And he would begin work with a pretence of alacrity,
It was an afternoon shortly after this that Mariana came to him flushed and expectant.
"Signor Morani sent for me," she explained. "I left Isolde with a daughter of the laundress and went. He has offered me an engagement in a comic opera."
Algarcife started and looked up.
"It seems that the manager heard me sing one day when I was at my lesson. He liked my dramatic power, Signor Morani says. At any rate, one of his troupe has given out, and he offers me the part."
"But, Mariana—"
Mariana did not look at him, but went rapidly on, as if waiving possible objections.
"We need the money. It might take Isolde away—and it is a chance. I am so young, you see—and—"
"Mariana!" cried Algarcife, sharply. There was a note in his voice which caused her to shrink away as if he had struck her. "Mariana," he put out his hand in protest, "you shall not do it. I will not let you. I could not bear it."
Mariana tapped her foot upon the floor impatiently. "I believe it is a child's part," she said.
"You shall not do it," he said, passionately.
Mariana turned her eyes upon him.
"But the money?"
"Oh, we will arrange it. I will leave The Gotham and take a room down-town, and you and Isolde shall go."
"Very well," said Mariana, sullenly, and left the room.
The next few days brought a wave of heat, and Algarcife made arrangements to send Mariana and the child away. He gave notice at The Gotham, and
So Mariana continued her packing with nervous hands. She was divided between anxiety for Anthony and anxiety for the child, and she was profoundly depressed on her own account.
"If it wasn't for Isolde, I wouldn't go a step," she declared, standing before a trunk into which she was putting cans of baby's milk. "I feel as if I could weep gallons of tears—only I haven't time."
Miss Ramsey, who was rocking Isolde, smiled encouragingly. "The change will do you good," she responded, "and I am sure you need it. You are quite ghastly."
Mariana sighed and looked at herself in the glass. "I suppose so," she remarked, a little wistfully. "I might be thirty."
And she went on packing. "Of course we may not leave for weeks," she explained, "and yet I feel driven. The uncertainty is horrible."
But Algarcife, coming in at dusk, found her more cheerful. She kissed him with something of her old warmth, and talked almost animatedly while he ate his supper.
"I shall miss you so," she said, "and yet I do wish we could get off. Isolde has been very fretful all day, and is badly broken out with heat. She has just fallen asleep."
After supper Mariana went to bed, and Anthony returned to work. He had an article to do upon the moral effects of the bicycle, which was to be handed in
He had been writing some hours, and it was twelve o'clock when the door opened and Mariana came in. She was barefooted and in her night-gown. Her face shone gray in the lamplight, and there were heavy circles under her eyes. She spoke rapidly.
"The baby is ill," she said. "You must find a doctor. She can't breathe."
In an instant Algarcife had passed her and was bending over the crib. The child was lying upon its back, staring with a mute interrogation at vacancy. There was a purple tinge over its face, and its breath came shortly.
"In a moment," said Anthony, and, taking up his hat, went out.
Within half an hour he returned, followed by the doctor, a well-meaning young fellow, fresh from college and wholly in earnest.
He looked at the child, spoke soothingly to Mariana, wrote a prescription, which he himself had filled at the nearest druggist's, gave a multitude of directions, sat an hour, and departed with the assurance that he would return at daybreak.
"She looks easier now," said Anthony, with a nervous tremor in his voice. "It must have been the heat."
Mariana, with tragic eyes, was fanning the little,
| "Ba! ba! black sheep. Where yo' lef' yo' lamb? |
| Way down yonder in de val-ley. |
| De birds an' de butterflies a-peckin' out its eyes, |
| An' de po' little thing cries: 'Mammy.'" |
As Algarcife looked down upon the small and motionless body, he felt a sudden tightening of his heart. The infantile hands, with their waxen look of helplessness, caused him to draw his breath as he turned away, and to wonder how Mariana could sit there hour after hour, crooning the negro song and waving to and fro the palm-leaf fan.
And yet her figure in its pallid outline against the dim light was photographed upon his brain, and it was Mariana at that moment that he loved with the love more abundant, and that in the after-years he found it hardest to forget.
He saw her with the reddish glow from the night-lamp upon her profile, her drooping body in the shadow, the fixed look of pain upon her face softened by the look which fell upon the sick child. He saw the child lying mute and motionless, the wide eyes staring, the small hands folded, the soft rings of flaxen hair wet and dark with perspiration, and the moisture lying upon the fragile little chest which the gown left bare; and he saw it all shadowed and lightened by the wavings of Mariana's fan.
Beyond this he saw the homely and disordered room, the articles dropped hastily as if in the start of sudden anxiety, the half-packed trunk with the piles of clothes upon the floor beside it, the tiny socks with the impress of the feet just learning to stand, the battered India-rubber doll with the crocheted frock of bright-hued worsteds, and at Mariana's hand the medicines which the doctor had left.
All these things were one with Mariana and himself. They were the heritage of their marriage, the memories which must always be inviolate—memories that could be shared by none other, could be undone by no stretch of time. In that atmosphere of common pain, which is more powerful both to sever and to unite than the less trenchant atmosphere of joy, he felt his heart leap into an invisible communion with the heart of Mariana. At that moment he was conscious of an additional sense-perception in the acuteness of his sympathy. He returned to his desk and took up his pen. The articles must be finished, and yet between himself and the unwritten page rose the vision of the still room, the pallid woman, and the sick child. The wavings of Mariana's fan seemed to obscure the light, and in his nervous tension he convinced himself that he heard the difficult breathing of a dying child—his child and Mariana's.
He swallowed an added dose of caffeine and looked at the page before him. The last written words stared him in the face and seemed so alien to his present train of thought as to have emanated from another person. He wondered what that other person's completion of the sentence would have been.
"Optimism is the first duty of the altruist." What in thunder had that to do with the effects of the bicycle? And what beastly rot it was. One might as well state that to be comfortable is the first duty of the damned.
"Optimism is the first duty of the altruist." He wrote on with the feeling that he was existing as an automaton, that while his hand was executing the result of some reflex action, his thinking entity was in the still room behind the closed door.
But with the absence of personality his senses were rendered doubly acute, and he seemed to see the rhythm of the atmospheric waves about him, while his ears were responsive to every sound in the night without—hearing them, not in a confused discord, but in distinct differentiation of note and key. Once his gaze encountered the grinning skull above the mantel, and, to his giddy senses, it seemed to wink with its hollow sockets. He found himself idly wondering if the skull had caught the trick of winking from its former accompaniment of flesh, and was forced to pull his thoughts together with a jerk. Then there came one of those sudden attacks of vertigo to which he had become subject, and he laid aside his pen and closed his eyes. "Too much caffeine," he muttered. But when it passed he went on again.
As the day broke he finished his articles, placed them in envelopes, stamped and addressed them, and rose to his feet. He blew out the lamp, and the faint odor of heated oil caused him a sensation of nausea. Crossing to the window, he raised the shade and stood inhaling the insipidity of atmosphere which is the city imitation of the freshness of a country morning. Without, a sombre, neutral-toned light flooded the almost deserted streets. In the highest heaven a star was still visible, and the vaguest herald of dawn flaunted itself beyond the chimney-pots.
As he lifted the shade he noticed that his hand trembled and that his head was unusually light. That massive sense of loneliness which the transition hour from darkness to day begets in the on-looker oppressed him with the force of an estrangement of hope. Such an
He turned away and opened the door softly.
The night-lamp was still burning, but the beginning of the morrow washed with a faint grayness the atmosphere. The objects he had dwelt upon the night before were magnified in size, and in an instant the unpacked trunks, the rubber doll, and the bottles of medicine obtruded themselves upon his vision.
Mariana was still sitting as he had left her, waving to and fro the palm-leaf fan. He wondered vaguely if she had sat thus since midnight. Then he laid his hand upon her shoulder.
"Mariana, you must lie down." And as he stooped nearer he saw that the child was dead.
For the next six weeks Anthony was forced to listen to the distracted self-accusations of Mariana. When the little white coffin had been carried to Greenwood and laid in the over-grown plot beside the graves of Algarcife's parents, to be shadowed by the storied urns that redounded to the honor of a less impoverished generation, Mariana returned, and, throwing herself upon the floor, refused consolation.
"I want nothing," she said—"nothing, nothing. What could comfort me?"
At Anthony's protestations of love and grief she lifted dull and scornful eyes, wherein the triumph of motherhood showed supreme over all other emotions.
"How can you know?" she asked, between tearless sobs. "You did not nurse her, and hold her in your arms night and day; you did not bathe her while she laughed at the bubbles; you did not put on her little dresses and socks. Oh, my baby! my baby! I want my baby!"
Then she would rise and pace up and down in a sudden frenzy of despair, clinching her hands at her own impotence, tearing her wounds asunder with remorseless recollections. It was as if she found satisfaction in thus inflicting upon herself the added agony of recalling the minor details of her loss—in voicing the keenest passion of her grief.
Algarcife, writing in the adjoining room and wrung by a tortured brain, would listen to her unsteady tread as she walked ceaselessly back and forth, until the
To his more self-contained nature the violence of Mariana's grief was like the searing of the bleeding sores in his own heart. To avoid that cry of stricken motherhood he would have given the better portion of his life—to have been deaf to that impulsive expression of a pain he felt but could not utter he would have damned his soul.
And when, during the first few days, Mariana gathered together all the scattered little garments, and brooded over them with the passion of irremediableness, he would cry aloud out of his own bitterness,
"Put them away! If you love me, Mariana, hide them."
But Mariana, in the selfishness of loss, would glance at him with reproachful eyes, and turn to stroke the rubber doll in its bright-hued dress, and the half-worn socks with the impress of restless feet.
In the night she would start from a troubled sleep with corroding self-questionings. "Make a light," she would say, fretfully, sitting up and staring into the gloom. "Make a light. The darkness stifles me. I can't breathe."
Then, when the flame of the candle would flare up beside her, she would turn upon Anthony the blaze of her excited eyes, and play upon the sheet with feverish fingers. The loss of sleep which these spasms entailed upon Algarcife was an additional drain upon his wrecking system, and sometimes in sheer exhaustion he would plead for peace.
"Mariana, only sleep. Lie still, and I will fan you—or shall I give you bromide?"
But the hot questions would rush upon him and he would answer them as he had answered such questions for the past six weeks.
"Was it my fault? Could I have done anything? Was it taken away because I didn't want it to come?"
"Mariana!"
"Do you remember that I said I hoped it would die? You knew they were idle words, didn't you? You knew that I didn't mean it?"
"Of course, my dearest."
"But somebody told me once that for every idle word we would be held to account. Is this the account?"
"Hush."
For a moment she would lie silent, and then, rising again, the torrent would come.
"Perhaps if I had not left the window open that first warm day. And I did not send for the doctor at once. I thought it was only fretful. Perhaps—"
"You could have done nothing."
"I did not know. I was so ignorant. I should have studied. I should have asked questions."
Then she would turn towards him, laying her hot hand upon his arm.
"Tell me that it was not my fault. Tell me—tell me!"
"It was not. It was not."
"But I want her so. I want to feel her. I want to feel her soft and warm in my arms. Oh, my baby!"
And so the summer nights would wear away.
But as time went on a reactionary lethargy pervaded her. Her vitality being spent, she was left limp and devoid of energy. For hours she would lie motionless in the heated room, the afternoon sun, intensified by the reflected glare of pressed brick, streaming upon her, and she would appear to be indifferent to both heat and glare. From Algarcife she turned with an avoidance which was almost instinctive. When he touched her she shrank into silence, when he spoke she met his words with lethargic calm. It was as if the demands he made upon her
"I suppose I love you," she said one day, in answer to his questions. "I think I do, but I don't feel it. I don't feel anything. I only want to forget."
"Not to forget me, Mariana?"
Mariana shook her head impatiently.
"Do you know," she continued, "that the thought of feeling makes me positively sick? I haven't any left, and I don't like it in other people. I am tired of it all."
"And of me?"
"I don't know. I think not, but I oughtn't to have married you."
"Mariana!"
"It would have been much better. You said so yourself once. But love is so strange. It makes people do such absurd things."
Algarcife did not reply. There was resentment in the look he bent upon her. He had not learned that even a woman in love is not a woman always in love—that love, in common with all other conditions, is subject to the forces which attract and repel, and that its equilibrium is maintained by a logical adjustment of opposites. To him Mariana's alienation betokened a fundamental failing in her nature, and with the thought he experienced a dull anger.
"I have felt so much in my life," continued Mariana, "that my capacity for sensations is lying fallow. The lack of ice in my tea and the heat in my room are of more importance than the excesses of affection. Were you ever that way?"
For a moment Algarcife did not reply; then he said, "You are very uncomfortable?"
"Yes."
"When we leave The Gotham it will be still worse. That room on Fourth Street is hellish."
"No doubt."
"How will you stand it?"
Mariana interlaced her fingers with impatient weariness and yawned.
"I don't know. As I stand it now, I suppose. We are poorer than ever, aren't we?"
"Poorer than ever."
She fingered her gown softly. "I suppose I shouldn't have bought this mourning," she said. "What a pity!"
When Anthony had gone she went out upon the fire-escape and looked down into the street below. The cry of a vender rolling his cart of over-ripe melons came up to her, and she followed his figure with curious intentness. From some indefinable cause, the vender suggested Signor Morani to her mind, and she recalled his warning, as she had recalled it in a different mood that rainy evening over a year ago. She realized now that Anthony's objection to her accepting Signor Morani's offer was still a canker within her heart. There remained, and there would always remain, the possibility that had she overruled his objection and entered into the engagement, Isolde might have been sent from the city, and might now be playing in some country meadow. The possibility, facing her as it did in all its ghastliness, produced a gnawing remorse, as invincible as a devil's thrust.
Upon this followed the conception that her marriage had doomed to failure not only her own life, but Anthony's; and there came a passionate regret for the part she had played in drawing him from his isolated abstraction into the turmoil of life and its passions. She blamed herself that she had gone to him that night, carrying the letter in her hand. She blamed herself that she had not resisted the appeal of her love, and, with a sudden pang, she realized all that the change had meant to him—the book that remained unwritten, the treadmill of uncongenial toil, the
And above it all there rose the desire to escape, to be freed from it forever. "If he had never seen me!" she cried, passionately. "If he had never seen me!" Then colorless adumbrations of her own past blocked her horizon—and she confronted the ashes of her aspirations. She saw those illuminated dreams of her girlhood—the ideals which had crumbled at the corroding touch of care. She saw the demand for power which had been thwarted, the ambitions which had been undone, the cry for life more abundant which had been forced back upon her quivering lips. She saw herself walking day after day with empty arms along the way she had carried the child. She saw herself a drag upon her own existence and upon the existence of the man for whom she thought a love she had no power to feel. She saw the stretch of those monotonous and neutral-toned years, saw the sordid fight for bread, saw her sense of joy and beauty blunted, saw the masculine brain that was fitted to grasp universal laws decaying in the atmosphere of vulgar toil. And, woven and interwoven in her thoughts, was the knowledge that the affection to be invigorated by deprivations and to rise triumphant over poverty was not hers—that the love which in happier surroundings might have shown
Down on the sidewalk below a ragged urchin was turning somersaults in the shade. Suddenly, with a howl of delight, he pounced upon a half-rotten peach which a passer-by had thrown into the gutter. Mariana smiled faintly, left the fire-escape, and went in-doors.
A week later they gave up The Gotham and moved into the room on Fourth Street. Algarcife made an attempt to sell the greater part of his library before moving, but the price offered was merely nominal, and at the last moment his heart misgave him. So he hired a dilapidated van, and the books were transported to the new lodgings and stacked along the south wall.
When the hour came for their departure, it was with a feeling of despair that he took Mariana's bag and descended for the last time the steps of The Gotham. A black finality seemed looming beyond their destination.
At the entrance, Mr. Nevins, with tears in his eyes, grasped Anthony's hand, and Miss Ramsey fell upon Mariana's neck.
Mariana laughed a little desperately.
"It reminds me of the time I saw a family move to the poor-house," she said; "only their friends weren't quite so affectionate."
"But you will come back," insisted Mr. Nevins. "Surely you will come back when things look a little brighter."
"Which will be when the flames of spontaneous combustion illuminate this planet," remarked Ardly, cynically, but his eyes were sad as they rested upon Mariana.
"Or when a relation dies," said Mr. Nevins.
"How we shall miss you!" said Miss Ramsey.
Here Mr. Paul, who had sauntered up as if by chance, drew Algarcife aside.
"If you had only told me," he said, dryly. "I have a few thousands in bank, and I—"
Anthony caught his hand, but his voice was choked and he could only shake his head. Then Mariana said good-bye, and they left the house and ascended the steps to the platform of the elevated road.
As Mariana took her seat, she turned to the window and watched the little fire-escape upon the fourth story until The Gotham was lost to sight. Then she raised her veil and wiped a tear-drop from her eyelashes.
When the door was unlocked and she entered the new room, a fit of restlessness seized her. The barrenness of existence struck her with the force of a blow, and, with a swift return of impulse, she cried out in rebellion. The stale odor of cooking, which rose from the apartment below, the dustiness of the floor, the blackened ceiling, the hard and unyielding bed, gave her a convulsive shudder.
"I cannot bear it," she said. "I cannot bear it."
Algarcife left the window, where he had been standing, and came towards her. Between himself and Mariana a constraint had been growing, and he recalled suddenly the fact that their old warmth of intercourse had chilled into an indifferent reserve.
"It is bad," he said. "I am very sorry."
Mariana took off her hat and veil and laid them in one of the bureau drawers. The drawer creaked as she opened it, and the sound jarred upon Anthony's
"You can hardly think that I enjoy it," he added. "An existence composed of two-thirds nerves and one-third caffeine is hardly rose-color."
He looked gray and haggard, and the hand which he raised trembled slightly.
"Hardly," returned Mariana, shortly.
Both felt an instinctive desire to vent their wretchedness in words, and yet each felt an almost passionate pity for the other. The very pity emphasized the aggravation from which they suffered, and it was by a process of reflex action that, when goaded by thoughts of each other, they would strike out recklessly.
"No," repeated Mariana; "but it seems to be a case where two, instead of lessening the misery, increase the discomforts."
Immediately after supper she went to bed, tossing restlessly for hours because the mattress was uneven, the sheets coarse, and the lamp, by which Anthony worked, shining in her face.
When she finally fell asleep, it was with a sob of revolt.
Mariana's restlessness did not pass with the passing days. It developed until it gathered the force of a malady, and she lived in persistent movement, as if impelled by an invisible lash. As her aversion to their lodgings became more pronounced, her powers of endurance increased, and through the long, hot days she was rarely in-doors. Algarcife often wondered where she spent the morning and afternoon hours, but the constraint between them had strengthened, and he did not ask her. When breakfast was over, he would see her put on her hat, take her shabby black parasol, and go out into the street. At luncheon she would return, looking flushed and warm, as if from exercise in the summer sun; but when they had risen from the table she would move uneasily about, until, at last, she would turn in desperation and go out again. He seldom sought to detain her. Indeed, her absence was almost a relief, and he found it less difficult to work when the silence was unbroken by impetuous footsteps and the rustle of skirts.
Once he said: "It is too hot for you this afternoon."
And she answered: "No, I will go to a square."
He was silent, and she left in sudden haste.
That she walked miles in that fearful weather, driven on by sheer inability to rest, he realized pityingly. Occasionally he would go to the window as she descended the stairs, and the sight of the fragile, black-robed figure, making its rapid way through the fierce sunshine, would cause him a spasmodic contraction of
"I am late," she said one day in September, coming in with more brightness than usual. "Have you had luncheon?"
"I waited for you," responded Anthony.
As she laid aside a roll of music she carried, he saw that it was the score of a light opera.
"You have been to Signor Morani's?" he asked.
"Yes, I have been taking lessons again."
Anthony glanced dubiously round.
"And you have no piano," he said. "You will miss it."
Mariana shook her head, and pushed away her tea with a gesture of disgust. "But I practise at Signor Morani's. He lets me use one of his rooms."
He noticed that she spoke cheerfully, and that a wave of her lost freshness had returned to her face. The instantaneous effect of her moods upon her appearance
In a moment she spoke again.
"It is a part that I have been studying," she continued, "and I must commit the words to memory."
He picked it up. It was a serio-comic opera, entitled, "La SorciÈre."
"Morani says that my voice has developed during the long rest. He was surprised when I sang."
"Was he?" asked Anthony, absently. He was wondering dully what would be the end of Mariana's ambitions—if there was any end for ambitions other than obliteration. Had fate anything to offer more durable than dust and ashes?
Mariana glanced about her and her face clouded. "It is that horrible cabbage again," she complained. "I believe those people down-stairs do nothing but fry cabbage. It makes me ill."
Anthony was recalled from his abstraction with a sense of annoyance.
"It seems to me," he retorted, sharply, "that, in our condition, to worry over a grievance of that order would be refreshing—when one's heels are hanging over the verge of starvation, it is a relief to be allowed to smell some one else's dinner."
"That depends upon what the dinner consists of," Mariana rejoined. "I may be reduced to living on dry bread, but I hope you will spare me the fried cabbage."
"You speak as if I had reduced you to this state for my own gratification." His temper was getting the better of him, and, with a snap, he set his teeth and was silent.
The mental distress, the stimulants he had used to spur a jaded brain into action, and his failing health had left him a prey to anger. An unexpected interruption, a jarring sound, a trivial mishap, were sufficient
Mariana replied tartly.
"I am sure I don't see how my objection to living upon fried cabbage could reflect upon you. I did not know you cared for it."
"You know I do not. But I don't see why you should make a fuss about a wholesome article of food."
"It is not wholesome. It is exceedingly indigestible."
"At any rate, it belongs to your neighbors. You aren't forced to eat it."
"No, but you implied that the time would come when I'd be glad to. I merely said it never would."
"Then let the cabbage be damned," said Algarcife.
"Gladly," responded Mariana, and they said no more.
Algarcife selected a manuscript from his desk and went out. He felt as if his nerves had quickened into ramifying wires through which a current of electricity was passing. He was not angry with Mariana. He was angry with no one, but he was racked by the agony of diseased sensibilities, and, though rationally he endeavored to be sympathetic in his bearing to his wife, his rational nature seemed ploughed by the press of his nerves, and for the first time in his life he found self-restraint beyond his grasp.
As he ascended the steps of the newspaper office where he was to leave the manuscript, he ran against a man whom he knew and who stared at him in astonishment.
"My God, Algarcife, you are a ghost! What have you been doing?"
"Wrestling with Providence," returned Algarcife, shortly. "Hardly a becoming job."
"Well, take my advice and leave off at the first round. If you don't mind the comparison, you bear
"No doubt. But that Egyptian has a damned sight the best of it. He lived three thousand years ago."
And he passed on.
It was several nights after this that he started from a heavy sleep to find that Mariana had left his side. Rising upon his elbow, he glanced about the room, and saw her white-robed form revealed in nebulous indistinctness against the open window. Her head was resting upon her clasped hands and she was looking out into the night.
"Mariana," he said.
Her voice came with a muffled sound from the obscurity.
"Yes."
"What are you doing?"
The white figure stirred slightly.
"Thinking," she answered.
"Don't think. It is a confounded mistake. Go to sleep."
"I can't sleep. It is so hot."
"Lie down and I will fan you."
"No."
Algarcife turned over wearily, and for a time there was silence.
Suddenly Mariana spoke, her voice wavering a little.
"Anthony—are you asleep?"
"No."
Again she was silent, and again her voice wavered as it rose.
"I have been thinking about—about how poor we are. Will it ever be better?"
"I cannot say. Don't think of it?"
"But I must think of it. I am trying to find a way out of it. Is there any way?"
"None that I know of."
Mariana half rose and sat down again.
"There is one," she said, "and I—"
"What do you mean?" Algarcife demanded, starting up.
Her voice came slowly.
"I mean that I am—that it is better—that I am—going away."
For a moment the stillness seemed tangible in its oppressiveness. Mariana's head had fallen upon her hands, and as she stared at the electric light on the opposite corner she heard Anthony's heavy breathing. A moth circled about the ball of light, showing to her fixed gaze like some black spirit of evil hovering above a planet.
Algarcife's tones fell cold and constrained.
"To leave me, you mean?"
"It is the only way."
"Where will you go?"
Something that was not grief and yet akin to it choked Mariana as she answered.
"I have an offer. The one that—that I told you of. It is an excellent opening—so Morani says. The company goes abroad—next week. And I know the part."
"And you wish to go?" His voice hurt her with its absence of color.
She lifted her hands and let them fall in her lap. Her gaze left the electric light, where the moth was still revolving in its little orbit.
"It is not choice," she replied; "it is necessity. What else is there to do—except starve? Can we go on living like this day after day, you killing yourself with work, I a drag? It is better that I should go—better for us both."
He hesitated a moment as if in thought, and when he spoke it was with judicial calm.
"And would you have gone—a year ago?"
She was silent so long that he would have repeated the question, but at his first word the answer came with a wave of self-abasement.
"I—I suppose not."
And that was all.
During the next few days the subject of Mariana's decision was not mentioned. Both felt a constraint in alluding to it, and yet both felt the inevitableness of the final hour. Anthony's pride had long since sealed his lips over the expressions of an unwished-for affection, and Mariana had grown chary of words.
But both went quietly along their daily lives, Anthony working at his desk while Mariana gathered together her shabby garments and made ready for the moment which by word and look they both ignored.
Then at last, when the night before her going came, Mariana spoke. They had just risen from the supper-table and the slipshod maid of work had carried off the unemptied tray. Mariana had eaten nothing. Her face was flushed, and she was moving excitedly about the room.
"I go to-morrow," she began, feverishly.
Algarcife looked up from a book through which he was searching for a date.
"So you have decided?" His lips twitched slightly and the veins upon his forehead contracted.
Mariana shook out a night-gown which she had taken from a drawer, folded it carefully, and laid it in the trunk.
"There is nothing else to do," she replied, mechanically, as if she were fencing with fate from a corner into which she had been driven.
Algarcife closed the book and rose to his feet. He pressed his hand upon his eyes to screen them from the glare of light. Then he moistened his lips before speaking.
"Do you realize what it means?" he asked.
Mariana lowered her head into the trunk and her voice sounded from among the clothes.
"There is nothing else to do," she repeated, as mechanically as before.
"I hope that it will be for your happiness," said Algarcife, and turned away. Then he went towards her in sudden determination.
"Is there anything that I can help you about?"
Mariana stood up and shook her head. "I think not," she answered. "Signor Morani calls for me to-morrow at six."
Algarcife sat down, but the old sensation of dizziness came upon him and he closed his eyes.
"Have you a headache?" asked Mariana. "The tea was very bad. Shall I make you a cup?"
He shook his head and opened a book, but she crossed to his side and laid her hand upon his shoulder.
"It may not be for long," she said. "If I am successful—"
He flinched from her touch and shook her hand off almost fiercely. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips white.
"The room is so warm," he said, "it makes me dizzy. I'll go out."
And he went down-stairs.
Mariana stood where he had left her and looked down upon the pile of unpacked garments. A tear glistened upon her lashes, but it was a tear of impersonal sorrow and regret. For herself she was conscious only of a dulness of sensation, as if her usually vital emotions had been blunted and rendered ineffectual. In a mute way, as she stood there, she realized an almost tragic pity, but it was purely mental, and she recalled calmly the fact that a separation, which six months ago would have seared her soul with agony,
But, for all that, a tear glistened upon her lashes as she looked down upon the unpacked clothes.
"O God! if you would only make a miracle!" she said—"if you only would!"
Her glance fell upon the desk where Anthony's work was lying. She saw the freshly written page upon which the ink was not dry. She lifted the pen in her fingers and felt the thick cork handle which was stained and indented by constant use. She sighed and turned slowly away.
The next afternoon, in hat and veil, with a small black satchel in her hand, she stood waiting for Signor Morani. Her trunk had already been carried down, and the carriage was turning the corner. She spoke lightly, dreading silence and dreading an accent of seriousness. "It is cooler," she said. "I hope a change is coming."
Then, as the carriage stopped beside the pavement below, she held out her hands. They shook slightly.
"Good-bye," she said.
"I hope you will be happy."
"And you. It will be easier for you."
"Good-bye."
She raised her veil, her eyes shining.
"Kiss me."
He kissed her, but his lips were cold, and there was no pressure upon hers.
She lowered her veil and went out. Algarcife stood at the window and heard her footsteps as she descended the stairs. He saw her leave the house, pause for an instant to greet Signor Morani, give the black bag into his hands, and enter the carriage. As she sat down, she leaned out for an instant and glanced up to where he stood. Then the carriage started, turned the corner, and was gone.
Still he did not leave the window. He stood motionless, his head bent, looking down into the heated streets, across which were stretching the slanting shadows from the west. A splash of scarlet, like the impress of a bloody hand, projected above the jagged line of tenement roofs, while a film of rising smoke obscured its lurid distinctness. He felt that complete sense of isolation, that loss of connection with the chain of humanity which follows a separation from one who has shared with us, night and day, the commonplaces of existence. The past and future seemed to have clashed together and shattered into the present.
In the street below men and women were going homeward from the day's work. He noticed that they wore, one and all, an aspect of despair, as if passing automatically along the endless round of a treadmill. He felt a vague wonder at the old, indomitable instinct of the preservation of self which seemed so alien to his mood. Situated as he was above it all, humanity assumed to his indifferent eyes a comic effect, and he found himself laughing cynically at the moving figures
He remembered suddenly that he had eaten nothing all day, and, turning from the window, drank a cup of tea which had been left upon the table. The continual use of stimulants, in exciting his nervous system, had made sleep impossible, and he felt as if a furnace blazed behind his eyeballs. He sat down, staring blankly at the opposite wall. In the corner, upon a heap of books, the skull and cross-bones had been thrown, and they caught his glance and held it with a curious fascination. They seemed to typify his own life, those remnants of dry bones that had once supported flesh and blood. He regarded himself impersonally, as he might once have regarded a body for dissection. He saw that he had passed the zenith of his physical and mental power, and that from this day forth it would mean to him retrogression or stagnation. He saw that the press of untoward circumstances had forced his intellect from its natural orbit into a common rut from which there was no side-track of escape. He weighed his labors, his knowledge, his impassioned aims for truth, and, in the balance with a handful of dust, he found them wanting. He stirred the ashes heaped where once had been a vital passion, and he found a wasted skeleton and dry bones. He looked at his thin and pallid hand, and it seemed to him as incapable of work as the hand of one palsied.
Before his tragic eyes, the years of his past stood marshalled, and, one and all, they bore the badge of failure.
As he rose from his chair in sudden desperation, the recurring faintness seized him and he steadied himself against the open drawer of the bureau. Looking into it as he turned away, he saw some loose articles which Mariana had forgotten—a bit of veiling, a single stocking, and a tiny, half-worn sock of pink worsted. He closed the drawer and turned hastily away.
Then he sat down beside his desk and bowed his head into his hands.
For a week after Mariana's departure Algarcife worked on ploddingly. He closed his eyes to actualities and allowed his overwrought mind no cessation from labor. It was as if all molecular motion in his brain had been suspended save that relating to the subject in hand, and he wrote with mechanical readiness journalistic essays upon the "Advantages of a Vegetable Diet" and "The Muscular Development of the Body." Then, upon trying to rise one morning, he found that his shattered system was turning in revolt, and that no artificial spur could sting his exhausted brain into action.
Through the long, hot day he lay relaxed and nerveless, conscious of the glare of the sunshine, but dreading to draw the shades, conscious of the closeness of the atmosphere, and conscious of a beating, like the strokes of an anvil, in his temples. When his dinner was brought he drank a cup of tea and sat up. Then he reached for a phial of morphia pellets which he kept in his desk, and, dissolving one in water, swallowed it. For a moment the temptation to take the contents of the phial at a dose assailed him, but, more from inability to venture a decisive step than from any mental determination, he laid the bottle aside. Action of any kind appeared intolerably irksome, and he waived with disgust the solution of the simple problem of his life.
As he fell back upon the bed, his glance passed over the pillow beside him, and he pictured to himself
The sunshine, blazing through the open window, accelerated the throbbing in his temples. In the morbid acuteness of his senses, the cries of the vegetable venders in the street below harassed his ears. Along his whole body there ran a quivering flame of fever, and his thoughts spun like a revolving globe. The morphia had not stilled the beating in his head. It had produced a sensation of sickness, which seemed but the physical accompaniment of his mental syncope.
He surveyed the books stacked against the opposite wall and wondered vaguely at the energy with which he had attacked those volumes upon whose covers the dust was now lying like a veil. He tried to arouse a memory of the old intellectual exhilaration with which he had grappled with and vanquished an unexplored
As he lay there, tossing restlessly upon the heated pillows, he reviewed unsympathetically his old pursuit of knowledge. What did it all mean? For what had he given his heritage of youth and manhood? For Truth. Granted, but what was Truth that he should follow it unswervingly until he passed from flesh and blood to a parcel of dry bones? How could he find it, and, finding, know it? That gray and ancient scepticism which had never appealed to him in health preyed now upon his wasting vitals. Since through the senses alone one could perceive, and the senses were but faulty instruments, what was perception worth? What were ideas but the figments produced by faculties which were at best deceptive? And in the infinite complexity of the self-sustaining reality, of what account were the abstractions of the finite intellect? In Truth itself, that all-pervading immateriality, were not the myriads of man's little truths ingulfed and lost? Were not true and false but symbols to express the differing relations of a great whole, as evolution and dissolution were symbols to express the recurring waves of a great force. As one man with his single hand barring the march of the seasons, was the man who by his single brain sought to hasten the advance of the Law which is Truth. And though he crumbled to dust, not one needful fact but would find its way into the moving world.
Stunned by despondency, he closed his eyes and groaned. In the absolute grasp of the futility of endeavor, he realized the lowest depths of human hopelessness.
And happiness? What was it but another symbol to signify the wistful yearning of the world? Where was it found? Not in love, which is the thirsting for a woman's spirit; not in passion, which is the burning for a woman's flesh. Did not bitterness follow upon the one, and upon the other satiety? His nature was deadened to the verge of obliviousness, and in his waning vitality the impulse of self-gratification had gone first. Physical desires shrank into decay, and mental ones passed with them. He wondered that he had ever sought in love other than calm reasonableness and a cooling presence. The emotion that sent scarlet thrills to his brain he analyzed with callousness. He remembered his mother as she lay upon the invalid's sofa, her Bible and a novel of Victor Hugo's upon the table beside her. He saw the placid beauty of her face, the slender, blue-veined hand which she laid upon his forehead when he went to her a wailing child; and it seemed to him that such a touch was the only touch of love with the power to console. Then he remembered Mariana's hand as she laid it upon her child and his, and he knew that the touch was the same. He thought of her as she sat beside the crib when the child lay dying. The passionate self-control about the mouth, the agony in her eyes, the tragic droop of her figure—these returned to soften him. He saw the black shadow of the palm-leaf fan, passing to and fro above the little bluish face, and he heard the labored breathing.
In sudden bitterness he opened his arms and cried aloud, "Mariana!"
Then the tears of weakness and despair stained the pillow where her head had lain.
When the twilight fell he rose, dressed himself with an effort, and descended the stairs. His limbs trembled as he moved, and, upon reaching the open air, he staggered and leaned for support against the red brick wall. Then he straightened himself, and wandered aimlessly from street to street. As he passed among men and women he was aware of a strange aloofness, as if the links connecting him with his kind had snapped asunder; and he felt that he might have been the being of another planet to whom earthly passions and fulfilments bore no palpable relation, but were to be considered with cosmic composure. The thought jarred upon him insistently that these moving men and women, whom he brushed in passing, were each stirred by an entity akin to that which in himself lay drugged. He realized that the condition of a mind without the attraction of physical desires is as chaotic as the condition of a world suddenly freed from the attraction of gravitation.
He looked at his fellow human beings with forced intentness. It struck him with an almost hysterical shock that they were of ludicrous shapes, and he laughed. Then he glanced at a carriage rolling along the street, and it appeared absurd that one mortal should sit upon four wheels while a fellow-mortal of a nobler build should draw him. He laughed again. As he did so he had a quick perception that delirium was approaching, and he stopped to swallow another pellet. He reeled slightly, and a boot-black upon the corner surveyed him with interest.
"Air yer drunk, mister?"
He laughed aloud. "Damned drunk," he responded, and walked on. Some hours later he found himself in Whitehall Street, passing the lighted windows of the Eastern Hotel. Beneath the station of the elevated road he came upon a stand, with the words "Cider and Root-Beer" flaming in red letters on a white
Down below the water lay black and cold, the slow breakers flecked with light foam. He saw a glimmer as of phosphorescence rise suddenly upon the waves, and, looking deeper, he saw the eternal stillness. Between the throbs of fever the passion for death seized him in a paroxysm, and mentally he felt the quiet waters stir beneath him and the quietness close over him. His hand fastened upon the iron chain between the pillars; then he drew back.
He remembered the row of acids upon a shelf in his room, and his assurance returned. With a sensation of luxuriousness he recalled the labels with the large "Poison!" above, and the inscription "Hydrocyanic Acid" stared him in the eyes. When he had made that collection for experimental purposes how little had he foreseen the experiment in which it would play a part. He sat down upon a bench and stared idly at the stream of passers-by, some lovers who went arm-in-arm, some husbands and wives who walked apart, some fathers and mothers who carried sickly children—all bound and burdened with the flesh. The fretful wail of a baby came to him and mingled mechanically with his train of thought. It seemed the frail treble in the great symphony of human woe.
Beyond the men and women he saw the black water
Gradually the fever starts grew less, and calmness came back to him. With a wave of regret he looked back upon his lost serenity, and lamented that it had failed him. He knew that in his mental upheaval the opposing elements in his nature had waged a combat. The scientific tenor of his mind had for the past few weeks been crushed out by the virulence of his nerves. That physical force which he had so long held enthralled had at last asserted its supremacy, and for the time his mind was under the sway of bodily weakness.
This duality of being occurred to him in perplexing inconsistency. Had he been a pure mentality, his life would have been one steep and victorious ascent towards knowledge. Were he but a physical organism, carnality would have satisfied his cravings. Then the remembrance that stronger than will or flesh is necessity arose and smote him into silence.
Many of the people had gone, but he still sat plunged in thought. A hatless woman, fresh from a midnight carousal, with a bleeding cut upon her lip, took the seat beside him, and he found a forlorn comfort in the contact with alien wretchedness. When she laid her head upon the back of the bench and fell asleep, he listened to her drunken snores calmly and without aversion. He became aware that his old kinship to humanity was at the moment restored, that, losing it with the loss of desire, it was regained in despair. Suddenly the head of the woman beside him rolled forward and rested against his shoulder. She stirred slightly, heaved a sigh of satisfaction, and returned to her ribald dreams, while he, in numbness and pain, found consolation in this forced sacrifice of comfort.
He did not move, and through the long night the drunken woman slept with her head upon his shoulder.
For the next few days he dragged out a methodical
At the beginning of the week, when his lodging bill was due, he carried by the armful a number of his books and pawned them for a nominal sum. Then he remembered his watch, and left that also. It was a heavy hunting-case of his father's, which he had always used from the nearness of the association, and as he laid it down something came into his throat. He opened the watch and took out the picture of his mother which was inside—a sketch in color, showing the lustrous Creole beauty in her first youth. Then he snapped the case and saw the initials "A. K. A." pass into the hands behind the counter.
Leaving the pawn-shop, he walked rapidly through the oppressive September sun until his limbs failed. Then turning with the throng of men that flowed into City Hall Square, he came to a sudden halt before the fountain. He was dazed and weakened, like a man who has recovered from a lapse into unconsciousness. The constant passing of the crowd bewildered him, and the sound of falling water in the fountain irritated him with the suggestion of thirst. He turned away and threw himself upon a bench beneath the shade of a tree. For an instant he closed his eyes, and when he opened them he found the scene before him to have intensified. The falling water sounded more distinctly, the sky was of a glaring blueness, and the dome of the World building glittered like a cloud of fire.
To his straining eyes the statue of Horace Greeley
"Damn you! It is a chance that I want," but his muscles faltered, and he fell back.
Then his glance wandered to the man beside him, a filthy vagrant with the smell of grease about his clothes. Did not he want his chance as well? And a few feet away a boy with a scowl on his lips and a bruise above his eye—why not a chance for him? Then a gray haze obscured his vision and the noise of the street was dulled into a monotone.
The throbbing in his temples grew faster, and as he sat there he knew that he had fought to the final gasp and that the end had come. In his physical downfall there was room for neither alarm nor regret. He was lost to all vaguer impressions than the trembling of his frame, the icy starts through his limbs, the burning of his eyes, and the inevitable beating in his temples. Beyond these things he neither knew nor cared.
With the instinct for solitude, he started and rose to move onward, when he saw that the earth was undulating beneath his feet and that the atmosphere was filled with fog. The dome of the World building reeled suddenly and clashed into the flaming sky. He heard the sound of brazen-tongued bells ringing higher and higher above the falling of the water, above the tread of passing feet, and above the dull, insistent din of the traffic in the streets.
Then his name was called and he felt a hand upon his arm.
"Why, Anthony!"
He looked up bewildered, but straightened himself and stood erect, straining at the consciousness that was escaping him.
"How are you, Mr. Speares?" he asked. His voice was without inflection.
Father Speares spoke with impassioned pity. "What are you doing? You are ill—a ghost—"
Algarcife steadied himself against the bench and said nothing.
"What does it mean? Your wife—where is she?"
Anthony's voice came slowly and without emotion. "I am alone," he answered.
A quick moisture sprang to the older man's eyes. He held out his hand. "Come with me," he said, fervently. "I am alone also. Come to my house."
Algarcife left the bench and took a step from him.
"No," he replied. "I—I am all right."
Then he staggered and would have fallen but for the other's sustaining arm.
