CHAPTER III. (2)

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With the first heavy snows of December a little daughter was given to Agnes Ashe.

On New Year’s Day her husband proposed to read aloud to her a book “some of the Club fellows were talking about last night.” The pale face flushed nervously when he undid the wrapping paper.

It was one of the “happenings” we persist in classing among singular coincidences, although they are of daily occurrence, that he should have selected that particular novel for their entertainment on the holiday he proposed to devote entirely to his convalescent wife.

“The Story of Walter King” had not been sent, as one might suppose would have been natural, to Mr. Rowland of Boston.

“He would guess instantly how matters are,” Agnes reasoned. “I am still too proud to run that risk.”

She took the MS. instead to a New York publisher in whose discretion she could trust, told him of her whim to establish a new reputation which should owe nothing to past gains, and left the story with him. In a week it was accepted and in the printer’s hands. When Baby Agnes—upon whom the mother bestowed the Scotch pet-name of “Nest”—was born, new editions were selling as fast as the press could turn them out.

It was evident, said critics, that the fresh, nervous novel was from the hand of a young writer, skilled in the use of language but unhackneyed by the need of furnishing “pot-boilers.” It was as evident, said readers, that the unknown author had fed the pen directly from his heart, and that personal experience had had much to do with the make-up of the “live book.”

Agnes had held no communication with the discreet publisher since the contract was signed. She had not corrected the proof-sheets, or had an advance copy of the work. There was, therefore, literal truth in her reply to Barton’s query—“Have you read it?”

“I have not even seen the book that I recollect. Who is the author?”

“John C. Hart”—turning to the title page. “What else has he done?”

“The name sounds familiar. Or, perhaps it may be that I am thinking of Professor John S. Hart. You are very kind to think of getting a new book for me! trebly kind to offer to read it to me.”

“It is little enough I can do for the best wife in Christendom!” stooping to kiss her and then Baby Nest asleep in her crib beside Agnes’ reclining chair.

The languid mother, grateful for his society and loverly attentions, was more like his ideal wife than Agnes had been since the eve of her birthday, when he had almost forgotten (through her fault) that he was a gentleman. No explanations had followed the ugly scene. They had met at breakfast the next morning as if the fracas had not occurred, but then and thereafter he had missed something from his married life. Had he tried to analyze the vague, ever present discomfort, he would have said that his wife was always on guard. No surprise of abrupt or rough speech betrayed her into a show of temper or wounded feeling. No overflow of tenderness elicited a confession of answering devotion. When questioned, she was frank in declaring that she loved him, and sought to make him happy in his home and content with her. She was never sad in his sight. Domestic and society duties were cheerfully performed, she was always ready to go out with him when he desired it and gave him her company at home conscientiously. There was the sore spot! He could not prove that her love and duty were perfunctory, but he never got away from the irritating suspicion that they were. Had she been miserable, pettish, or fretfully exacting, it would have accorded better with his creed of the absolute dependence of a woman upon her lord. In plain English—which, however, he would have been ashamed to put into words in any language—it irked him that his mental and moral barometer could not set the weather for his household. There was a something back of Agnes’ even temper and equable spirits he could not touch and that told him she was sufficient unto herself. Into this she seemed to retire as into the cleft of a rock when the matrimonial horizon threatened storm.

There was no one to tell him of mornings spent in the library, or of the work done during the evenings he passed at the club. He ought to have been gratified at her smiling aquiescence in his apologetic representation of the business necessity laid upon a man to mingle socially with “the fellows.” Some women made it preciously disagreeable for husbands who acted upon this compulsion, but his wife was never lonely by day or night. If he came home at eleven o’clock, she was in the library, reading or knitting beside a glowing fire, ready to receive him and to listen with interest to club stories or incidents. If he stayed out after midnight, she went to bed like a sensible Christian and slept soundly.

What could be more exemplary and satisfactory? He had a model wife. Would sulks, tears, and chidings have been more to his taste? This conclusion reached, he would berate himself for “an unreasonable dog”—and go on missing something he could not define.

An odd conceit came to Agnes as the full, manly voice began “The Story of Walter King”—a fancy that won a smile from her at first, and terrified her when she could not shake it off. She was the unsuspected mother of a foundling. In secret and in fear, she had laid the new-born baby at a stranger’s door. He had cared for, fostered, and clothed it, and on this New Year’s Day, her husband had ignorantly adopted the waif and led it, a beautiful child, to her, bespeaking her admiration for it.

For her own baby! the thing born of her soul, the express image of her thought, the bright, glorious darling in whom, and with whom, and by whom, she had lived all these weary, weary months! Her husband would introduce these two to one another! Was her left hand a stranger to her right? Was her heart alien to the blood leaping from it?

She could have laughed and cried hysterically, could have snatched the book from the unconscious reader and covered it with tears and kisses. She must touch and hold it once, if but for a minute, or the strained heart-strings would part.

“Can you see well?” she interrupted the reader to ask. The calm tone surprised herself and lent her courage to carry out her stratagem. “Does the light fall right for you? In her anxiety to exclude draughts and the snow glare, Mrs. Ames may have made it too dark for well people. Is the type pretty clear?”

She put out her hand and drew the volume from his. The sight of familiar paragraphs and names was as if the child had laughed, in happy recognition, into her eyes. She passed her fingers lovingly over the page, stroked the binding, raised the open book to her lips, and gave it back reluctantly.

“The smell of newly printed pages is delicious to me,” she said, trying to laugh. “Sweeter than new-mown hay.”

“They have brought it out in good style,” observed Barton carelessly. “One gets no slipshod literature from that house. Their imprint is a title of intellectual nobility.”

Agnes smiled brightly in assent, turned her cheek to the cushioned back of her chair, and closed her eyes to keep the happy tears from slipping beneath the lids. Was the time close at hand in which she could safely acknowledge her offspring? To screen the fact of her maternity from possible premature discovery she had refrained from so much as looking upon or speaking of the bantling for these long weeks. Providence had put this opportunity of honorable recognition before her. How should she seize it?

A thought struck her like an icebolt. What would Barton say, even in this auspicious hour, to the systematic concealment practiced before and since the advent of the adopted child? Would he throw it from him as he would a snake? She pictured the possibility of virtuous horror in the regards turned upon her, the aversion a moral man feels for a lost woman. Deception—even untruth might be forgiven; the deliberate disregard of his expressed wish that his wife should never again put sentiment or feeling of hers into print would be construed into absolute crime. He held the desire for literary renown on the part of a woman to be a fault that unsexed her. In a young girl the ambition might spring from the unrest of an unfilled heart, mistaken, but pardonable as a blunder of ignorance. A wife’s heart, thoughts, and hands should be full of home and home loves, or she did not deserve her high and blessed estate.

She felt, now, that she could never make him understand how the side of her nature which he saw and knew was bettered and elevated by the healthful action of its twin, to which he was a stranger. She had “put herself into the book,” but not in the lower and vulgar sense in which the reviewers had used the phrase. The aspirations with which others could not intermeddle—least of all, the husband who so grossly misjudged her, the fancies that beguiled Time of heaviness and drew the soreness from her heart while she dallied with them—were there. Her ideals were her real companions; her dream children her only confidants.

The things which are seen are temporal; the things which are not seen are eternal.

The author who is not made, but born; the idealist whose brain creations are to him almost visible and tangible, while he communes with them—can, of all men, enter most joyfully into the meaning of the sweet mysticism uttered by the Creator of things temporal and things eternal.

It was a snowy day; transient glimmers of white light, shed from thinner clouds, were the precursors of thicker falls of soundless flakes. There was no wind, and as Agnes watched the storm between the slightly parted blinds, a curtain of purest lace seemed unfolding and wavering earthward. The hush of a great holiday enwrapped the city. Baby Nest slumbered peacefully amid billows of lawn and wool; the strong, mobile features of the husband she loved and feared more than any other living mortal darkened and lightened like the snow clouds, with the progress of the story. He read well, and threw unusual spirit into the present task.

Agnes hearkened, with a growing sense of unreality. The disowned child pressed nearer and closer, gazed appealingly into her face, cooed love words in her ear, covered with kisses the hands with which the hapless mother was constrained to hold it aloof from the heart that yearned to take it in.

Sometimes Barton’s voice sounded a great way off, and she confused his utterances with the winged ideas she had formulated into human language. Was she thinking it all out? or was he enunciating what she had thought through the languorous summer days and cool autumn evenings? She used to wonder, amusedly, what he supposed she did during the many hours she spent in solitude. He never asked, but if he had deemed the matter worthy of speculation, he might have reasoned that a woman who did not make her own clothes and had no taste for fancy work, whose house was well appointed and not large, and whose health was good must, with two servants to do housework and cooking, have much time upon her hands.

“How do women occupy themselves who keep plenty of servants and do not write, paint, or study anything in particular?” asked the young son of a woman who kept house, wrote books, painted pictures, and studied with her children.

“They make a profession of horacide!” answered the mother.

Barton lowered the book so abruptly that his wife started and clasped her hands involuntarily. She was very weak.

“I should like to know this man!”

“What man?”

“The fellow who wrote this book! He is a New York lawyer—that is plain. His insight of legal chicanery and his apt use of technical law terms show that, if his clever reasoning did not. A Columbia graduate, too! I’ll go bail for that. And a society man. By George! that narrows the case down pretty well. I don’t know a man at the city bar, though, who has sufficient literary skill to turn out such a piece of work as this. ‘John C. Hart’ is a pseudonym, of course—but there may be a meaning in it.”

He fell into a muse over the title page, knotting his brows and plucking at his lower lip while he scanned the name.

Agnes’ breath came quick; her head swam as in seasickness. She shook herself mentally and tried to speak as usual:

“It may be another case of George Eliot, alias Mary Anne Evans; or Charles Egbert Craddock, alias Miss Murfree.”

“Preposterous! There isn’t a feminine touch in the book. And no woman of the education and refinement of this writer could know anything of the scenes and motives he describes. Men can paint women faithfully. Women who try to depict men show us up as hybrids, creatures of their own sex disguised in masculine habiliments. Ready-made clothes at that, baggy at the knees and short at the wrists. I should not like, however, to know a woman who could write ‘The Story of Walter King.’”

“It does not impress me as coarse!” Agnes was nerved by instinctive resentment to say.

“Not a symptom of coarseness about it. But it is virile—and that your woman author ought never to be! Any man might be proud of having written this novel. Any true, modest woman would blush to be accused of it. You see the difference?”

I see the difference between the patient I left three hours ago, and the one I find here now!” interjected the nurse bluntly.

She had come in while Barton was speaking, and had her hand on Mrs. Ashe’s pulse.

“Tut! tut! tut!” she went on in grave vexation. “We shall have the doctor again if this sort of excitement goes on. Eyes glassy, pulse up, and, I venture to say, headache back of the eyes. Don’t deny it, Mrs. Ashe! I know the signs. Here’s your lunch—after which, we must have the room darkened and try to compose your nerves. It won’t do to have a throw-back at this late day.”

Barton carried off “The Story of Walter King” with him to the library, a little anxious, but more aggrieved. In common with the mighty majority of husbands, he resented Mrs. Gamp the more virulently because impotent against her tyranny.

“Thank Heaven that her time, like her infernal master’s, is short!” growled he, dropping into his easy-chair and throwing his legs over the foot-rest in lordly disdain of appearances. “I suppose women enjoy being hectored, or the sex would rise en masse against this order of haggish humbugs. Agnes didn’t dare peep a defense of herself, or of me. Great Scott! suppose I had been born a woman!”

He lighted a cigar and reopened his book. A luxurious, if lonely, lunch was served at half-past one. Wine and walnuts went with him into the library after the meal was eaten. The air was blue with fragrant smoke for the rest of the day. He did not take the nap he had promised himself as the chief delight of a lazy afternoon, until the last page of “The Story of Walter King” was devoured. Even after he had stretched himself upon the lounge and drawn the silken and eiderdown slumber-robe over him, he lay looking at the purring fire of sea-coal and listening to the muffled tinkle of sleigh-bells along Fifth Avenue, which was but a block distant—and thinking of the book that had enchained him so many hours. It had taken a powerful grip of his imagination and titillated his intellectual palate smartly. There were passages in it that recalled pertinent and pregnant sayings of his own relative to certain topics discussed in the fascinating pages; theories he had advanced and maintained; his very turns of speech were here and there.

Again he said, “I should like to know that man. He has a long head and sharp wits of his own. Immense knowledge of the world and human nature.” Without the least intention of being conceited he subjoined to the silent soliloquy: “If I had turned my attention to literature, I believe I could have written that book. But one man cannot be proficient in everything. The suggestion of feminine authorship is ridiculous. Poor Agnes is a sensible girl, but she is wide of the mark there.”

Here his thoughts wandered into the poppied plains of sleep.

Awaking from his siesta to find himself in the dark, he arose refreshed, and paid a dutiful call to his wife’s chamber before going out to dine at his club. The nurse met him upon the threshold and stepped out into the hall for a whispered colloquy. Both of her charges had been restless all the afternoon. The baby was colicky, Mrs. Ashe feverish and excited, although persisting that nothing ailed her.

“She has an exquisitely susceptible nervous organization,” she continued in the parrotlike lingo of the trained nurse. “We must really guard her more carefully in future. She was talking about that novel in her sleep just now—begging you not to take it away from her and all that, in quite a wild way. There is evidently cerebral excitement. Perhaps, as you are going out, it might be prudent to telephone the doctor to drop in toward bedtime.”

“Oh, a good sleep will set her up all right!” returned Barton slightingly. It did not suit his notions of marital rights to be interviewed and advised in a ghostly whisper without the precincts of his own room, by this pretentious hireling. “The book had nothing to do with her uncomfortable afternoon. It was probably the luncheon. I thought, when you brought it up, that it was more like a meal for a ditcher than for a delicate invalid.”

Pleased at administering this Roland for accumulated Olivers, he ran downstairs without attending to her protest, and whistled softly while equipping himself for the walk through the snow. The night was sharply cold; the drifts were as dry as dust. He laughed like a boy in plowing through them. The return to bachelor freedom was not bad, for a change, and there were sure to be a lot of prime fellows at the club on a stormy holiday night.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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