“J’ai perdu via tourterelle,

Je veux aller apres elle.”

I.

It had been the old familiar story, in its most hackneyed version.

She was nineteen; he was three or four and twenty, with an income just sufficient to keep him in bread and cheese, and for prospects and position those of an art-student in a land of money-grubbers. And her parents, who were wise in their generation, wouldn’t hear of a betrothal; whilst the young people, who were foolish in theirs, hadn’t the courage of their folly. And so—the usual thing happened. They vowed eternal constancy—“If it can’t be you, it sha’n’. be anyone!”—and said good-bye.

He left his native hemisphere, to acquire technique in the schools of Paris; and she, after an interval of a year or two, married another man.

Yet, though in its letter their tale was commonplace enough, the spirit of it, on his side at least, was a little rare. I suppose that most young lovers love with a good deal of immediate energy; but his love proved to be of a fibre that could resist the tooth of time. At any rate, years went their way, and he never quite got over it; he was true to that conventional old vow.

This resulted in part, no doubt, from the secluded, the concentrated, manner of his life, passed aloof from actuality, in a studio au cinquiÈme, alone with his colour-tubes and his ideals; but I think it was due in part also to his temperament. He was the sort of man of whom those who know him will exclaim, when his name comes up, “Ah yes—the dear fellow!” Everybody liked him, and all laughed at him more or less. He was extremely simple-minded and trustful, very quiet, very modest, very gentle and sympathetic; by no means without wit, nor altogether without humour, yet in the main disposed to take things a trifle too seriously in a world where levity tempered by suspicion is the only safe substitute for a wholesome, whole-souled cynicism. Though an uncompromising realist in his theories, I suspect that down at bottom he was inclined to be romantic, if not even sentimental. His friends would generally change the subject when he came into the room, because to the ordinary flavour of men’s talk he showed a womanish repugnance. In the beginning, on this account, they had of course voted him a prig; but they had ended by regarding it as a bothersome little eccentricity, that must be borne with in view of his many authentic virtues.

For the rest, he had a sweet voice, a good figure and carriage, a clean-cut Saxon face, and a pleasing, graceful talent, which, in the course of time, fostered by industry, had brought him an honourable mention, several medals, then the red ribbon, and at last the red rosette.

He was what they call a successful man; and he had succeeded in a career where success carries a certain measure of celebrity: yet it was a habit of his mind to think of himself as a failure. This was partly because he had too just a realising sense of the nature of art, to fancy that success in art—success in giving material form to the visions of the imagination—is ever possible; an artist might be defined as one whose mission it is to fail. At all events, neither medals nor decorations could blind him to the circumstance that there was a terrible gulf between what he had intended and what he had accomplished, between the great pictures of his dreams and the canvasses that bore his signature. But in thinking of himself as a failure, I am sure he was chiefly influenced by the recollection that he had not been able to marry that dark-eyed young American girl twenty years before.

At first it had changed life to a sort of waking nightmare for him. He had come abroad with a heart that felt as if it had been crushed between the upper and the nether millstones. His ambition was dead, and his interest in the world. He could not work, because he could see no colour in the sky, and nothing but futility in art; and he could not play,—he could not throw himself into the dissipations of the Quarter, and so benumb his hurt a little with immediate physical excitements,—because pleasure in all its forms had lost its savour. Then a kindly Providence interposed, and ordained that he should drink a glass of infected water, or breathe a mouthful of poisoned air, and fall ill of typhoid fever, and forget; and when he was convalescent, and remembered again, he remembered this: that she had sworn on her soul to be constant to him. Whereupon he said, “I will work like twenty Trojans, and annihilate time, and earn money, and go home with an assured position; and then her parents can have no further pretext for withholding their consent.” In this resolution he found great comfort.

He had been working like twenty Trojans for about a twelvemonth, when he got the news of her marriage to the other man.

It chanced to reach him (in a letter from a friend, saying it would be celebrated in a fortnight) on the very day of its occurrence; and that, by a pleasant coincidence, was his birthday. In a fit of cynical despair he asked a lot of his schoolfellows, and a few, ladies of the neighbourhood, to dine with him; and they feasted and made merry till well into the following morning, when, for the first and almost the only time in his life, he had to be helped home, drunk. His drunkenness, though, was perhaps not altogether to be regretted. It kept him from thinking; and for that particular night it was conceivably better, on the whole, that he should not think.

His mood of cynical recklessness lasted for a month or two. He celebrated the wedding—faisait la noce, as the local idiom runs—in a double sense, and with feverish diligence. For a moment it seemed a toss-up what would become of him: whether he would sink into the condition of a chronic noceur, or return to the former decent tenor of his way. It happened, however, that he had no appetite for alcohol, and that bad music, bad air, evil communications, gaslight, and late hours failed to afford him any permanent satisfaction: whilst, as for other women,—who that has savoured nectar can care for milk and water?—who that has lost a rose can be consoled with an artificial flower? This was how he put it to himself All the women he knew on the right bank of the Seine were, to his taste, mortally insipid; those whom he knew on the left were stuffed with sawdust.

And the consequence was that one morning he went to work again; and in spite of the dull pain in his heart, he worked steadily, doggedly, from day to day, from year to year, scarcely noting the progress of time, in the absorbed and methodical nature of his life, till presently he had turned forty, and was what they call a successful man. Of course the dull pain in his heart had softened gradually into something that was not entirely painful; into something whose sadness was mixed with sweetness, like plaintive music; but her image remained enshrined as an idol in his memory, and I doubt if ever a day passed without his spending some portion thereof in worship before it. He never walked abroad, either, through the Paris streets, without thinking, “What if I should meet her!” (It would be almost inevitable that she should some time come to Paris.) And at this prospect his heart would leap and his pulses quicken like a boy’s. For art and love between them had kept him young; it had indeed never struck him to count his lustres, or to reflect that in point of them he was middle-aged. Besides, he lived in a country whose amiable custom it is to call every man a lad until he marries. Regularly once a year, in the autumn, he had sent a picture to be exhibited at New York, in the hope that she might see it.

He gave his brushes to be washed rather earlier than usual this afternoon, and went for a stroll in the garden of the Luxembourg. The air was languorous with the warmth and the scent of spring; in the sunshine the marble queens, smiling their still, stony smile, gleamed with a thousand tints of rose and amethyst, as if they had been carved of some iridescent substance, like mother-of-pearl. The face of the old palace glowed with mellow fire; the sleek, dark-green foliage of the chestnut-trees was tipped here and there with pallid gold; and in the deep shade of the allÉes underneath innumerable children romped vociferously, and innumerable pairs of lovers sentimentalised in silence. Of course they were only mock lovers, students and their Étudiantes; but one could forget that for the moment, and all else that is ugly, in the circumambient charm.

He took a penny chair by and by, and sat down at the edge of the terrace, and watched the dance of light and shadow on the waters of the fountain, and thanked Heaven for the keen, untranslatable delight he was able to feel in the beauty of the world. He drank it in with every sense, as if it were an ethereal form of wine; but no wine was so delicious, no wine could have penetrated and thrilled and stimulated him as it did. It was a part of his philosophy,—I might almost say an article of his religion,—to count his faculty for deriving exquisite pleasure from every phase of the beautiful as in some sort a compensation for many of the good things of life that he had missed; and yet, in one way at least, so far from serving as a compensation, it only added to his loss. In the presence of whatever was beautiful, under the spell of it, he always longed with intensified pain for her. And now presently, as he had done in like circumstances countless times before, he sighed for her, inwardly: “Ah, if she were here! If we could enjoy it all together!”—I dare say, poor man, it was a little ridiculous at his age; but he did not see the humour.

He pictured her to himself, her slender figure, her white, eager face, with its penumbra of brown hair, soft as smoke, and its dark eyes, deep and luminous, as if pale fires were burning infinitely far within them. He heard her voice, low and melodious, and her crisp, girlish laughter. And she smiled upon him, a faint, sad smile, that was full of tenderness and yearning and regret. He took her hands, her warm little rosy hands, and marvelled over them, as he caressed them. They were like images in miniature of herself, so sensitive, so fragile, so helpless-seeming, yet possessed of such amazing talents: for when he watched them leaping above the ivory keys of her piano, invariably striking the right note with the right degree of stress and the right interval of time (although to an uninitiated witness their movement must have appeared quite wanton), he wondered at them as a pair of witches.

If he had not reckoned his own years, or marked their action upon himself, it is certain that he had treated her with no less forbearance. She came back to him always the same; always the girl of nineteen whom he had left behind him nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Ah, if she were only with him now, here in the quaint old garden of the Luxembourg! How complete and unutterable his joy would be! He would lead her beside the great basin of the fountain, where the goldfishes flashed like flames; and they would stop before the statues of the queens, and tell over for each other the romantic histories of those dead royal ladies; and how much warmer the sunshine would be, how much greener the earth, how much sweeter the fragrance of the air! By and by they would enter the museum, where he would show her that picture of his which the State had honoured him by buying, and which, he had received a whispered promise, should some day find its way into the Louvre. Afterwards they would saunter down the Boulevard, past the Castle of Cluny, across the bridge, into the open space before Notre Dame. And all the while they would talk, talk, talk, making up for the time that they had lost; and their wounds would be healed, and their hearts would be at rest. It was strange, he thought, that she had never come abroad. All Americans come sooner or later, and one is perpetually running across those one happens to know.

He had never run across her, however, though he had never left off expecting to do so. This very afternoon, for instance, how entirely natural it would seem to meet her. The annual irruption of his country-people had begun; thousands of them were in Paris at this moment: why not she among them? And she would certainly not come to Paris without visiting the Luxembourg; and to-day was a perfect day for such a visit; and—if he should look up now....

He looked up, holding his breath for a second, almost thinking to see her advancing towards him. Surely enough, somebody was advancing towards him, standing before him there in the path, making signals to him. But, as the mists of his day-dream cleared away, he perceived that it was only the old woman come to take his penny for the chair.

He went home, a very lonely man in a very empty world.

It felt cold to him now; the sky had grown gray. He had a fire kindled in his drawing-room, and sat dejectedly before it through the twilight. After a while his servant brought in the lamps, at the same time handing him a parcel that had come from his bookseller’s. The parcel was wrapped in an old copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald; and he spread it out, and glanced at it listlessly. It always filled him with a vague sort of melancholy to look at an old newspaper; on the day of its appearance the life that it recorded, the joys and pains, had seemed of so great importance, such instant interest; and now they mattered as little, they were as much a part of ancient history, as the lives and the joys and the sorrows of the CÆsars. His eye fell presently upon a column headed Obituary; and there he read of the death of Samuel Merrow. He turned the paper up hurriedly to discover its date; November of last year; quite six months ago. Samuel Merrow had died at New York, six months ago; and Samuel Merrow was her husband.

II

There were not many passengers on the steamer; at this season the current of travel ran in the opposite direction. There was a puffy little white-haired, important man, who accosted him on the deck, the second day out, and asked whether it was his first visit abroad that he was returning from. He reflected for a moment, and answered yes; for though he had lived abroad half a lifetime, he had crossed the ocean only once before. He was too shy to enter upon an explanation, so he answered yes. Then the puffy man boasted of the immense numbers of voyages he had made. “Oh, I know Europe!” he declaimed, and told how his business—he described himself as “buyer” for a firm of printing-ink importers—took him to that continent two or three times a year. He had an inquiring mind, and a great facility for questioning people. “Excuse me, Mr. Aigrefield,” he said (he had learned our friend’s name from the passenger-list) “but what does that red button in your buttonhole mean? Some society you belong to?”

Aigrefield, concealing what he suffered, again sought refuge in an ambiguous yes; but he slunk away to his cabin, and put the “red button” in his box: it was absurd to wear the insignia of a French order outside of France.

Then, of course, the ship’s company was completed by a highly intelligent lady in eyeglasses, who lay in a deck-chair all day, and read Mr. Pater’s Mariys (the volume lasted her throughout the voyage); a statistical clergyman, returning from his vacation, a mine of practical misinformation; a couple of Frenchmen, travelling no one could guess why, since they seemed quite cast-down and in despair about it; a half-dozen Hebrews, travelling one couldn’t help knowing wherefore, since they discussed “voollens” and prices and shipments at the tops of their cheerful voices; and the inevitable young Western girl, travelling alone. For the first time in twenty years, almost, he had descended from the cloud he lived in, and was rubbing against the actualities of the earth.

The highly intelligent lady “knew who he was,” as she told him sweetly, and would speak of nothing but art, in her highly intelligent way. If he had had more humour, her perfervid enthusiasms, couched in an extremely rudimental studio-slang (she talked a vast deal of values and keys, of atmosphere and light, of things being badly modelled or a little “out”)—if he had had more humour, all this might have amused him; but he was, as we have said, somewhat too literally inclined; and the cant of it jarred upon him, and made him sick at heart. Her formula for opening up a topic, “Now, Mr. Aigrefield, tell me, what do you think of...” became an obsession, that would descend upon him in the dead of night, making him dread the morrow. All these people, he remarked, Mr. Aigrefielded him unpityingly. He wished the English language had, for the use of his compatriots (in England they seem to get on well enough without forever naming names) a mode of address similar to the French monsieur.

But the solitary young Western girl he liked. She had made her first appeal to his eye, through her form and colour; but when he came to know her a little he liked her for her spirit. She was tall, with a strong, supple figure, a face picturesque in the discreet irregularity of its features, a pair of limpid gray eyes, a fresh complexion, and an overhanging ornament of warm brown hair. She was much given to smiling, also,—a smile that played in lovely curves about lips, if anything, a thought too full, a semitone too scarlet,—whence he inferred that she had an amiable disposition, a light heart, and an easy conscience. Hearing her speak, he observed that her voice was of a depth, smoothness, and rotundity, that atoned in great measure for the occidental quality of her accent. At all events, he was drawn to her: they walked the deck a good deal together, and often had their chairs placed side by side. He philosophised her attraction for him by saying, “She is a force of nature, she is fresh and simple.” The “buyer” for the firm of printing-ink importers had struck him as fresh, indeed, but not as simple; the lady who read Mr. Pater, as simple but not fresh; the Hebrew gentlemen, even the unhappy Frenchmen, if you will, as natural forces: but the Western girl combined these several advantages in her single person, and so she became his favourite amongst his shipmates.

Her name was Lillian Goddard; she lived in Minneapolis, where, as she informed him, her father was a judge. She had been abroad nearly a year, had passed the winter in Rome, could speak a little Italian, a little French, and an immense deal of American. I have described her as young, and I hope it will not be considered an anachronism when I add that her age was twenty-six.

She was tremendously patriotic, and appeared shocked and grieved when she learned that he had remained continuously absent from his country for a score of years.

“Why, the more I saw of Europe, the more I loved dear old America,” she declared, in her deep voice.

She was just as homesick as she could be, she said, and couldn’t get back to Minneapolis fast enough. Did he know the West?—and again she appeared shocked at discovering the profundities of his ignorance concerning it. Oh, he must certainly see the West. No American could begin to appreciate his country till he had seen the West. The people out there were so alive, so go-ahead; and they took such an interest in all forms of culture too, in literature, music, painting, the drama. “Why, look at the big magazines,—they depend for their circulation on the West.” And then, the homes of the West! “Oh, if I lived in Europe, I should lose my faith in human nature. Western people are so warmhearted. I’m afraid you’re awfully unpatriotic, Mr. Aigrefield.”

He reminded her that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel; and anyhow, he pleaded, it was too much to expect of one small man that he should be patriotic for a continent. But she shook her head at his perversity, and guessed he’d be proud enough of his Continent if he had seen it, and insisted that he must come to Minneapolis, and look round.

He liked her amazingly. As their voyage grew older, he found himself taking a greater and greater pleasure in her propinquity; looking forward with something akin to eagerness to meeting her on deck, as he accomplished his morning toilet; and recalling fondly their commerce of the day, as he turned in at night. Besides, the charm of her strong, irregular beauty grew upon him, and he said to her, smiling, “When I come to Minneapolis you must let me try a portrait of you.”

“Ah, then you are really coming?” she demanded, striving to fix him in a pious resolution.

He laughed vaguely, and she protested, “Oh, shame, Mr. Aigrefield, now you are wriggling out!”

He felt that she was sweet and sound and honest: direct, vigorous, bracing: he wondered if indeed she might not owe these qualities, in some part, to her native Western soil; and he admitted that the West was beginning to take a place in his affections. Heretofore, it had been a mere geographical abstraction for him, and one he would have shrunk from realising through experience. He imagined the colouring would be hard, the action violent, the atmosphere raw and rough.

“Well, whether I really come or not, I am sure I should really like to,” he said now.

“That’s such an innocent desire,” she cried, with a touch of mockery. “I don’t think it would be selfish to indulge it.”

“And if I do come, you will sit for me?”

“Oh, I’d do anything in such a cause—to make a patriot of you!”

At the outset of his journey, his impatience to reach the end of it was so great, the progress of the steamer had seemed exasperatingly slow. But as they began to near New York, a vague dread of what might await him there, a vague recoil from the potential and the unknown, made him almost wish that the throbbing of the engines were not so rapid. A cloud of dismal possibilities haunted his imagination, filling it with a strange chill and ache. He had never paused before to think of the many things that had had time to happen in twenty years; and now they assailed his mind in a mass, and appalled it. Even the preliminary business of discovering her whereabouts, for instance, might prove difficult enough; and then——-? In matters of this sort, at any rate, it is the next step which costs. In twenty years what ties and affections she might have formed, that would make him a necessary stranger to her life, and leave no room for him in her heart. He was jealous of a supposititious lover (he had lived in France too long to remember that in America lovers are not the fashion), of supposititious children, supposititious interests and occupations: jealous and afraid. And of course it was always to be reckoned with as in the bounds of the conceivable, that she might be disconsolate for the loss of Mr. Merrow: though this, for some reason, seemed the least likely of the contingencies he had to face. Mr. Merrow, he knew, had been a cotton-broker; he had always fancied him as a big, rather florid person, with a husky voice: capable perhaps of inspiring a mild fondness, but not of a character to take hold upon the deeper emotional strands of Pauline’s nature.

His nervousness increased inordinately after the pilot came aboard. He marched rapidly backwards and forwards on the deck, scarcely conscious of what he was saying to Miss Goddard, who kept pace with him. She laughed presently—her deep contralto laughter; and then he inquired very seriously whether he had said anything absurd.

“Don’t you know what you said?” she exclaimed.

“I—I don’t just remember. I was thinking of something else,” he confessed, knitting his brows.

“Well, that’s not very complimentary to me, now, is it? Still, if you can say such things without knowing it, I suppose I must forgive you. I asked you what you thought was the best short definition of life, and you said a chance to make mistakes.”

“I never could have said anything so good if I had had my wits about me,” he explained.

Countless old memories and associations were surging up within him now; and as he leaned over the rail and gazed into the murky waters of the New York Bay, the European chapters of his life became a mere parenthesis, and the text joined itself to the word at which it had been interrupted when he was four and twenty. Sorry patriot though he might be, he was still made of flesh and blood; and he could not approach the land of his childhood, his youth, his love and loss, without some stirrings of the heartstrings besides those that were evoked by the prospect of meeting her. His other old companions would no doubt be dead or scattered; or they would have forgotten him as he, indeed, till yesterday had forgotten them. Anyhow, he would not attempt to look them up. He knew that he should feel an alien among his own people; he would not heighten the dreariness of that situation by ferreting out former intimates to find himself unrecognized, or by inquiring about them to be told that they were dead. He hadn’t very clearly formulated his positive intentions, but they probably lay in his sub-consciousness, brief and to the point, if somewhat short-sighted and unpractical: he would do his wooing as speedily as might be, and bear his bride triumphantly over-sea, to his home in Paris.

He bade Miss Goddard good-bye on the dock, whilst his trunks were being rifled by the Custom House inspector.

“Now, mind, you are to come to Minneapolis,” she insisted, as her hand lay in his, returning its pressure; and he could perceive a shade of earnestness behind the smile that lighted up her eyes.

“Good-bye, good-bye,” he answered, fervently, moved all at once by a feeling he would have had some difficulty in naming. “I may surprise you by turning up there one of these days.”

Then her hand was withdrawn, and she disappeared in a hackney-carriage. He went back to the task of getting his luggage examined, with a sense of having been abandoned by his last friend.

“What fortitude it must require to live here,” was the reflection that made him shake his head, as he drove over the rough paving-stones, through the dirty, ignoble streets, to his hotel. It struck him as more depressing still, when he emerged from the sordid tangle of the lower town into the smug rectangularity of the upper. He was sure that Pauline would be glad enough to exchange it all for the airy perspectives, the cleanliness, the gay colours, the variety of Paris. Of course he would have to give up his bachelor chambers overlooking the Luxembourg. He would rent, or buy, or even build, a proper house for her, in the quarter of the Etoile, or near the Parc Monceau.

He turned over the pages of the Directory that the hotel-clerk condescendingly pointed out to him, and found that Mr. Morrow’s address had been twenty-something in a street that had no name, but only a number and a point of the compass to serve for one; and that seemed to him in thorough keeping with the unimaginative, business-like character of the deceased cotton-broker. Pauline, in her widowhood, would very likely have moved away. It was too late to make a call to-day, being nearly dinner-time (he had forgotten that in New York it is not forbidden to call after dinner), but he would write her a little note, informing her of his arrival, and proposing to come to-morrow in the forenoon. On the corner of the envelope he would put “Please forward,” to anticipate the event of her having moved. Then he could leave it to destiny and the post-office authorities to do the rest.

III

THE Fifth Avenue reached out in an endless straight line before him, the prose of its architecture being obscured by the gathering twilight, and punctuated monotonously by the street-lamps. Attached to one of these he found a letter-box presently, and into it he dropped the note that he had written. “Does Mrs. Merrow—Pauline Lake that was—remember Henry Aigrefield? And if so, may he call upon her to-morrow at eleven?” That was how, after destroying a dozen sheets of paper, he had at last contrived to phrase his message.

He walked slowly up the long Avenue, cut at right angles, and at fixed intervals of two hundred feet, by streets that looked enough like one another to suggest the notion that they had all been cast in the same dreary mould, and furnished to the municipality ready-made; past the innumerable coffee-coloured houses, with their damnable iteration of rigid little doorsteps; and he wondered at the purblind complacency of a people who could honestly regard this as among the finest thoroughfares of the world. The region he was traversing reminded him of certain melancholy acres in the south of London, where the city-clerk has his humble, cheerless home: it was such a neighbourhood grown rich and pretentious, but in nowise mellowed or beautified.

Would she live in one of these insignificant boxes of brown stone? “26, E. 51,” the address he had read in the Directory, sounded sufficiently unpromising. It had been Mr. Merrow’s house, and Mr. Morrow had been a practical New Yorker. But the interior? He pictured the interior as entirely lovely and delightful, for, in the nature of things, the interior would owe its character to Mr. Merrow’s wife. A good distemper on the walls, something light in key, yet warm—brick-dust, or a pearly, rosy gray; simple, graceful chairs and tables; a few good pictures, numberless good books in good bindings: over all the soft glow of candlelight; and in the midst of all, giving unity and meaning to it all, a lady, a tall slender lady, in a black gown, with a pale serious face, dark eyes full of sleeping fire, and above her white brow a rich shadow of brown hair. She was reading, her head bent a little, her feet resting on a small tabouret of some dull red stuff that lent depth to the bottom of the picture, while the candlelight playing upon her hair, upon her cheek and throat, upon the ivory page of her book and the hand that held it, made the upper and middle portions radiant. After twenty years how little changed she was! Her face had lost nothing of its girlish delicacy, its maiden innocence, it had only gained a quality of firmness, of seriousness and strength. He found a woman where he had left a child, but the woman was only the child ripened and ennobled. As the door opened to admit him, she raised her eyes, puzzled for a moment, not seeing who he was; but then, suddenly, she stood up and moved towards him, calling his name, very low, very low, so that it fell upon his ears like a note of music. And his heart pounded suffocatingly, and he trembled deliciously in all his limbs.

Why, he began to ask himself now, why, after all, should he put off till to-morrow the realisation of this great joy? If it was unconventional to pay a call in the evening, she, who had never been a stickler for the conventionalities, would forgive it to the ardour and the impatience of his passion, He had waited for her twenty years; that was long enough, without adding to it another interminable period of twelve hours. Anyhow, there could be no harm in his ringing the bell of No. 26, E. 51, and inquiring whether she still lived there, and, if not, whither she had gone. Thereby a further saving of precious hours might be effected; and—and he would do it.

The house, indeed, appeared in no particular different to the multitude that he had left behind him; but he could have embraced the Irish maid-servant who opened the door for him, because to both of his questions she answered yes. Yes, Mrs. Merrow lived here; and yes, she was at home. Would he walk into the parlour, please, and what name should she say? Lest the name should get perverted in its transmission, he equipped her with his card. Then he sat down in the “parlour” to await his fate.

It was a bare room, and, by the glare of the gas that lighted it, he saw that the influence of Mr. Merrow had penetrated at least thus far beyond his threshold. The floor was covered by a carpet in the flowery taste of 1860. The chairs were upholstered in thick, hot-hued plush, with a geometric pattern embossed upon it. A vast procession of little vases and things in porcelain, multiplied by the mantel-mirror and the pier-glass, shed an added forlornness on the spaces they were meant to decorate, but only cluttered up, Pauline’s domain, he concluded, would be above stairs.

The door swung open after a few minutes, and he rose, with a sudden heart-leap, to greet her. But no—it was only a fat, uninteresting-looking woman (a visitor, a sister-in-law, he reasoned swiftly) come to make Pauline’s excuses, probably, if she kept him waiting. He noticed that the fat lady was in mourning; and that confirmed his guess that she would prove to be a relative of the late Mr. Merrow. She wore her hair in a series of stiff ringlets (“bandelettes” I believe they are technically called) over a high, sloping forehead; the hair was thin and stringy, so that, he told himself, her brother had no doubt been bald. Two untransparent eyes gazed placidly out of the white expanses of her face; and he thought, as he took her in, that she might serve as an incarnation of all the dulness and platitude that he had felt in the air about him from the hour of his landing in New York.

However, he stood there, silent, making a sort of interrogative bow, and waiting for her to state her business.

She had seemed to be studying him with some curiosity, of a mild, phlegmatic kind, from which he argued that perhaps she was not wholly unenlightened about his former relation to her brother’s widow. But now he experienced a distinct spasm of horror, as she threw her head to one side, and, opening her lips, remarked lymphatically, in a resigned, unresonant voice, “Well, I declare! Is that you, Harry Aigrefield? Why, you’re as gray as a rat!”

He sank back into his chair, overwhelmed by the abrupt disenchantment; and he understood that it was reciprocal.

IV

He sat, inert, amid the pieces of his broken idol, for perhaps a half hour, and chatted with Mrs. Merrow of various things. She asked him if he was still as crazy about painting pictures as he used to be: to which he answered, with a hollow laugh, that he feared he was. Well, she said, playfully, she presumed there always had to be some harum-scarum people in the world; and added that “Sam” had “simply coined money” as a cotton-broker, and left her very well off. He had died of pneumonia, following an attack of the “grip.”

“I suppose it seems kind of funny to you, getting back to America after so many years?” she queried, languidly “Things are considerably changed.”

He admitted that this was true, and bade her good-night. She went with him to the door, where she gave him an inelastic handshake, accompanied by an invitation to call again.

In his bedroom at the hotel he sat before his window till late into the night, smoking cigarettes, and trying to pull himself together. The last lingering afterglow of his youth had been put out; and therewith the whole colour of the universe was altered. He felt that he had reversed the case of the bourgeois gentilhomme, and been dealing in bad poetry for twenty years,—in other words, making a sentimental ass of himself; and his chagrin at this was as sharp as his grief over his recent disillusion.

Samuel Merrow was dead, but so was Pauline Lake; or perhaps Pauline Lake, as he had loved her, had never existed outside of his own imagination. At any rate, Henry Aigrefield was dead, dead as the leaves of last autumn; and this was another man, who wore his clothes and bore his name.

He glanced at his looking-glass, and he saw indeed, as he had lately been reminded, that this new, respectable-appearing, middle-aged personage was “as gray as a rat,”—though he did not like the figure better for its truth. It required several hours of hard mental labour to get the necessary readjustment of his faculties so much as started. The past had ceased to be the most important fraction of time for him; the present and the future had become of moment.

In the dust and confusion of his wreck, only one thing was entirely clear: he couldn’t stand New York. But the question where to go was as large as the circumference of the earth. Straight back to Paris? Or what of that other region he had heard so much about during the past few days, the West? By and by the form of Miss Lillian Goddard began to move refreshingly in and out among his musings; he pictured the smile with which she would welcome him, if, by chance, he should turn his steps towards Minneapolis. It was a smile that seemed to promise a hundred undefined pleasantnesses, and it warmed his heart. “If I should go to Minneapolis——” he began; then he sat stockstill in his chair for twenty minutes; and then he got up with the air of a man who has taken a vigorous resolve.

As he undressed, he hummed softly to himself a line or two of his favourite poet,—

“That shall be to-morrow,

Not to-night:

I must bury sorrow

Out of sight.”