A ROD OF IRON

It is all very well to be suddenly called back to town by telegram on important business, but suppose the business is wholly fictitious—what are you going to do with yourself when you get there? Especially if you have your own reasons for not wanting Business to know that you have returned before the appointed time, and consequently are shy about appearing in clubs and places where it would be likely to get wind of your presence? And if, moreover, your apartment has been closed and all the servants sent off on a holiday?

That is a fair example of the mean way sordid detail has of encroaching on the big things of life and destroying what little pleasure we might take in their dramatic value. When he arrived in New York James had the chastened, exalted feeling of one who has just passed a great and disagreeable crisis and got through with it, on the whole, very tolerably well. What he wanted most was to return to the routine of his old life and, so far as was possible, drown the nightmare recollection in a flood of work. Instead of which he found idleness and domestic inconvenience staring him in the face. He also saw that he was going to be lonely. He walked through the dark and empty rooms of his apartment and reflected what a difference even the mute presence of a servant would make. He longed whole-heartedly for Stodger—for Stodger since we last saw him has been promoted into manhood by nature and into full-fledged chauffeurhood—with the official appellation of McClintock, if you please—by James. With Stodger, who still retained jurisdiction over his suits and shoes, James was accustomed, when they were alone together, to throw off his role of employer and embark on technical heart-to-heart talks on differential gears and multiple-disc clutches and kindred intimate subjects. But Stodger was tasting the joys of leave of absence on full pay, James knew not where.

He sought at first to beguile the hours with reading. He selected a number of works he had always meant to read but never quite got around to: a novel or two of Dickens, one of Thackeray, one of Meredith, "The Origin of Species," Carlyle's "French Revolution," "The Principles of Political Economy" and "Tristram Shandy." Steadily his eyes sickened of print; by the time he came to Mill his brain refused to absorb and visions of the very things he wished most to be free from hovered obstinately over the pages. "Tristram Shandy" was even more unbearable; he conceived an insane dislike for those interminable, ineffectual old people and their terrestrial-minded creator. At last he flung the book into the fireplace and strode despairingly out into the streets.

Oh, Beatrice—would she never send him word, put things definitely in motion, in no matter what direction? Oh, this confounded brain of his; would it never stop trying to re-picture old scenes, revive dead feelings, animate unborn regrets? What had he done but what he should have done, what he could not help doing, what it had been written that he should do since the first moment when thoughts above those of a beast were put into man's brain? Oh, the curse of a brain that would not live up to its own laws, but continually kept flashing those visions of outworn things across his eyes—not his two innocent physical eyes, which saw nothing but what was put before them, but that redoubtable, inescapable, ungovernable inward sight which, as he remembered some poet had said, was "the bliss of solitude." The bliss of solitude—how like a driveling ass of a poet!...

The next day he gave up and went back to his office as usual, saying that he had returned from his vacation a few days ahead of time in order to transact some business that had come up unexpectedly. Just what the business was he did not explain; he was now the head of McClellan's New York branch and did not have to explain things.

So the hours between nine and five ceased to be an intolerable burden, and the hours from five till bedtime could be whiled away at the club in discussing the baseball returns. He could always find some one who was willing to talk about professional baseball. He remembered how he had once similarly talked golf with Harry....

That left only the night hours to be accounted for, and sleep accounted for most of them, of course. Sometimes. At other times sleep refused to come and nothing stood between him and the inmost thoughts of his brain, or worse, the thoughts that he did not think, never would think, as long as a brain and a will remained to him.... Such times he would always end by turning on the light and reading. They gave him a feeling like that of which he had spoken to Beatrice about being caught in a trap, deepened and intensified; a feeling to be avoided at any price.

At last he heard, not indeed from Beatrice, but from Aunt Selina. "Beatrice arrives New York noon Thursday; for Heaven's sake do something," she telegraphed. James knew what that meant, and thanked Aunt Selina from the bottom of his heart. No scandal—nothing that would reflect on the family name! So Beatrice had determined not to accede to his last request; she was bent on rushing madly into her Tommy's arms, perhaps at the very station itself? Oh, no, nothing of that sort, if you please; he would be at the station himself to see to it.

It was extraordinary how much getting back to work had benefited him. He was no longer subject to the dreadful fits of depression that had made his idleness a torment. Only keep going, only have something to occupy hands and mind during every waking hour, and all would yet be well. Beatrice and all that she implied had only to be kept out of his mind to be rendered innocuous; all that was needed to keep her out was a little will power, and he had plenty of that. As for the sleeping hours—well, he had come to have rather a dread of the night time. No doubt some simple medical remedy, however, would put that all right—sulphonal, or something of the sort. He would consult a doctor. No unprescribed drugs for him—no careless overdose, or anything of that sort, no indeed! The time had yet to come when James Wimbourne could not keep pace with the strong ones of the earth and walk with head erect under all the burdens that a malicious fate might heap upon him.

In such a vein as this ran his thoughts as he walked from his apartment to the station that Thursday morning. It was a cool day in early September; a fresh easterly breeze blew in from the Sound bringing with it the first hint of autumn and seeming to infuse fresh blood into his veins. As he walked down Madison Avenue even the familiar sounds of the city, the clanging of the trolley cars, the tooting of motor horns, the rumbling of drays, even the clatter of steam drills or rivet machines seemed like outward manifestations of the life he felt surging anew within him. Was it not indeed something very like a new life that was to begin for him to-day, this very morning? Not the kind of new life of which the poets babbled, no youthful dream, but something far solider and nobler, a mature reconstruction, a courageous gathering together, or rather regathering—that made it all the finer—of the fragments of an outworn existence. That was what human life was, a succession of repatchings and rebuildings. He who rebuilt with the greatest promptness and courage and ingenuity was the best liver.

Viewed in this broad and health-bringing light the last months of his life appeared less of a failure than he had been wont to think. He became able to look back on this year of destiny-fighting as, if not actually successful, better than successful, since it led on to better things and gave him a chance to show his mettle, his power of reconstruction. He had made a mistake, no doubt; but he was willing to recognize it as such and do his best to rectify it. Beatrice and he were not cut out for team-mates in the business of destiny-fighting; it had become evident that they could both get on better alone. Well, at last they had come to the point of parting; to the point, he hoped, of being able to part like fellow-soldiers whose company is disbanded, in friendship and good humor, without recrimination or any of that detestable God-forgive-you business....

He wished the newsboys would not shout so loud; their shrill uncanny shrieks interrupted his line of thought, in spite of himself. It didn't matter if they were calling extras; he never bought extras. Or was it only a regular edition? They might be announcing the trump of doom for all one could understand.

It was too bad that Beatrice had not arrived at anything like his own state of sanity and calmness. This business of eloping—oh, it was so ludicrous, so amateurish! That was not the way to live. He hoped he might be able to make her see this. It would be easier, of course, if Tommy were not at the station; one could not tell what arrangements a woman in her condition might make. But he did not fear Tommy; there would be no scene. A few firm words from him and they would see things in their proper light. He pictured himself and Beatrice repairing sanely and amicably to a lawyer's office together;—"Please tell us the quickest and easiest way to be divorced...."

As he approached Forty-second Street the traffic grew heavier and noisier. He could not think properly now; watching for a chance to traverse the frequent cross streets took most of his attention. And those newsboys—! Why on earth should those newspaper fellows send out papers marked "Late Afternoon Edition" at half-past eleven in the morning? Oh, it was an extra, was it? A fire on the East Side, no doubt, two people injured—he knew the sort of thing. If those newspaper fellows would have the sense only to get out an extra when something really important had happened somebody might occasionally buy them.

Seeing that he had plenty of time he walked slowly round to the Forty-second Street entrance instead of going in the side way. He observed the great piles of building and rebuilding that were going on in the neighborhood, and compared the reconstruction of the quarter to his own case. He wondered why they delayed in making the Park Avenue connecting bridge—such an integral part of the scheme. If he had shilly-shallied like that, a nice mess he would have made of his life! He gazed up at the great new front of the station and bumped into a stentorian newsboy. Everywhere those confounded newsboys—!

He was actually in the station before he had any suspicion. There was about the usual number of people in the great waiting-room, but there seemed to be more hurrying than usual. He saw one or two people dart across the space, and observed that they did not disappear into the train gates.... Had he or had he not caught the word "wreck" on one of those flaunting headlines in the street? He turned off suddenly to a news stand and bought a paper.

There it all was, in black and white—or rather red and white. Red letters, five inches high.

Train 64, the Maine Special, had run through an open switch and turned turtle somewhere near Stamford. Fifteen reported killed, others injured. No names given.

The Maine Special. Beatrice's train.

He knew that he must devote all his efforts at this juncture to keep himself from thinking. Until he knew, that was. He did not even allow himself to name the thoughts he was afraid of giving birth to. Anxiety, hope, fear, premonition, horror, satisfaction, pity—he must put them all away from him. There was no telling what future horrors he might be led into if he gave way ever so little to any one of them. The one thing to do now was to find out.

This was not so easy. He went first to the bulletin board where the arrivals of trains were announced, and found a small and anxious-eyed crowd gazing at the few uninforming statements marked in white chalk. There was nothing to be learned from them. He spoke to an official, who was equally reticent, and spoke vaguely of a relief train.

"Do you mean to say there's no way of finding out the names of those killed before the relief train comes in?" he asked.

"We can't tell you what we don't know!" replied the man, already too inured to such questions to show feeling of any sort. He then directed James to the office of the railroad press agent, on the eighth floor.

James started to ask another question, but was interrupted by a young woman who hurried up to the official. She held a little girl of seven or eight by the hand, and the eyes of both were streaming with tears. The sight struck James as odd in that cold, impersonal, schedule-run place, and he swerved as he walked off to look at them. He turned again abruptly and went his way, stifling an involuntary rise of a feeling which might have been very like envy, if he had allowed himself to think about it....

And no one else had even noticed the two.

He found no one in the press office except a few newspaper reporters who sat about on tables with their hats balanced on the backs of their heads. They eyed him suspiciously but said nothing. An inner door opened and a young man in his shirtsleeves, a stenographer, entered the room bearing a number of typewritten flimsies. The reporters pounced upon these and rushed away in search of telephones.

James asked the young man if he could see Mr. Barker, the agent.

The young man said Mr. Barker was busy, and asked James what paper he represented.

James said none.

On what business, then, did James want to see Mr. Barker?

To learn the fate of some one on the Maine Special.

A friend?

A wife.

The stenographer dropped his lower jaw, but said nothing. He immediately opened the inner door and led James up to an older man who sat dictating to a young woman at a typewriter. He was plump and clean-shaven and very neat about the collar and tie; James did not realize that this was the agent until the younger man told him so.

"My dear sir," replied Mr. Barker to James' question, "I know absolutely no more about it than you do. If I did, I'd tell you. The boys have been hammering away at me for the past hour, and I've given 'em every word that's come in. These two names are all I've got so far." He handed James a flimsy.

James' eye fell upon the names of two men, both described as traveling salesmen. He went back to the outer office and sat down to think. It was, of course, extremely improbable that Beatrice had been killed. There had been, say, two hundred people on the train, of whom fifteen were known to have died—something like seven and a half per cent. Two of these were accounted for; that left thirteen. He wondered how long it would be before those thirteen names came in.

The room began to fill up again; the reporters returned and new recruits constantly swelled their number. From their talk James gathered why there was such a dearth of detailed news. The wreck occurring during the waking hours of the day had been learned, as far as the mere fact of its occurrence was concerned, and published within half an hour after it had happened. It naturally took longer than this to do even the first work of clearing the wreckage and the compiling of the lists of dead and injured would require even more time. With the results that interested friends and relations, learning of the wreck but none of its particulars, were rushing pell-mell to headquarters to get the first news. One young man described in vivid terms certain things he had just witnessed down in the concourse.

"Best sob stuff in months," was his one comment.

Just then one of their number, a slightly older man and evidently a leader among them, emerged from the inner office.

"What about it, Wilkins?" they greeted him in chorus. "Slip it, Wilkins, slip it over! Give us the dope! Any more stiffs yet? Come on, out with it—no beats on this story, you know...."

Harpies!

The outer door opened and two women burst into the room. The first of them, a tall, stout, good-featured Jewess, clothed in deep mourning, was wildly gasping and beating her hands on her breast.

"Can any of you tell me about a young man called Lindenbaum?" she asked between her sobs. "Lindenbaum—a young man—on Car fifty-six he was! Has anything been heard of him—anything?"

The reporters promptly told her that nothing had. She sank into a chair, covered her face with her hands and burst into an uncontrollable fit of weeping. The younger woman, evidently her daughter, stood by trying to comfort her. At length the other raised her veil and wearily wiped her eyes. James studied her face; her sunken eyes no less than her black clothes gave evidence of an older sorrow. Moved by a sudden impulse he went over and spoke to her, telling her that her son was in all probability safe and basing his assurance on the calm mathematical grounds of his own reasoning. The woman did not understand much of what he said, but the quiet tones of his voice seemed to comfort her. She rose and started to go.

"Thank you," she said to James, "you're a nice boy.—Oh, I do hope God will spare him to me—only nineteen, he is, and the only man I have left, all I have left...."

Sob stuff!

Scarcely had the door closed behind her when a business man of about forty-five, prosperous, well-dressed and unemotional-looking, came in and asked if the name of his daughter was on the list of the dead. Some one said it was not.

"Thank God," said the man in a weak voice. He raised his hand to his forehead, closed his eyes and fell over backward in a dead faint. When he came to he had to be told that the names of only three of the dead were as yet known.

These were the first of a long series of scenes such as James would not have thought possible off the stage. He had never seen people mastered by an overwhelming anxiety before; it was interesting to learn that they acted in such cases much as they were generally supposed to. Anxiety, he reflected, was perhaps the most intolerable emotion known to man. Yet as he sat there calmly waiting for the arrival of the relief train he could have wished that he might have tasted the full horror of it.... No, that was mere hysteria, of course. But there was something holy about such a feeling; it was like a sort of cleansing, a purifying by fire.... Was it that his soul was not worthy of such a purifying? Oh, hysterics again!

But the purifying of others went on before his eyes as he sat trying not to think or feel and reading the bulletins as they came out from the inner office. Grotesquely unimportant, those bulletins, or so they must seem to those concerned for the fate of friends!

"General Traffic Manager Albert S. Holden learned by telegram of the accident to Train 64 near Stamford this morning and immediately hurried to Stamford by special train. Mr. Holden will conduct an investigation into the causes of the accident in conjunction with Coroner Francis X. Willis of Stamford."

"One young woman among the injured was identified as Miss Fannie Schmidt of Brooklyn. She was taken to the Stamford hospital suffering from contusions."

"Patrick F. McGuire, the engineer of Train 64 which ran through an open switch near Stamford this morning, has been in the employ of the Company for many years. He was severely cut about the face and head. He has been engineer of the Maine Special since the 23rd of last May, prior to which he had worked as engineer on Train 102. He began his service in the Company in 1898 as fireman on the Naugatuck Division...."

"Vice-President Henry T. Blomberg gave out in New Haven this morning the following statement concerning the accident at Stamford...."

"Whew!" exclaimed a reporter, issuing suddenly from a telephone booth near James, "this is some story, believe me!" He took off his hat and wiped his forehead. He was a young man and looked somewhat more like a human being than the others.

"Oh, you'd call this harrowing, would you?" said James.

"Well," said the other apologetically, "I've only been on the job a few months and this human interest stuff sort of gets me. This is the first big one of the kind I've been on. I guess there's enough human interest here to-day for any one, though!"

"There doesn't seem to be enough to inconvenience you," observed James. "Not you, so much, but—" with a wave toward the reporters' table—"those—the others."

The young man laughed slightly. "Oh, you can stand pretty near anything after you've been on the job for a while! You see, when you're on the news end of a thing like this you don't have time to get worked up. When you're hot foot after every bit of stuff you can get, and have to hustle to the telephone to send it in the same minute, so's not to get beaten on it, you don't bother about whether people have hysterics or not. You simply can't—you haven't got time! That's why these fellows all seem so calm—it's business to them, you see. They're not really hard-hearted, or anything like that. Gosh, it's lucky for me, though, that I'm here on business, if I have to be here at all!"

"You mean you're glad you don't know any one on the train?"

"Oh, Lord yes, that—but I'm glad I have something to keep me busy, as long as I'm here. If I were just standing round, watching, say—gosh, I wouldn't answer for what I'd do! I'd probably have hysterics myself, just from seeing the others!"

This gave James something more to think about.

He saw now that he had misjudged the reporters; even these harpies gave him something to envy. If one was going to feel indifferent at a time like this it would be well to feel at least an honest professional indifference.... But that was not all. Had not this young man admitted that the mere sight of such suffering would have stirred him to the depths if he did not have his business to think of, and that without being personally concerned in the accident? While he himself, with every reason to suffer every anxiety in this crucial moment, was quite the calmest person in the room, able to lecture a hysterical mother on the doctrine of chances! Was he dead to all human feeling?

There was a moment of calm in the room, which was broken by the entrance of a tall blonde young man—a college undergraduate, to all appearances.

"Can any of you tell me if Car 1058 was on the Maine Special?" he asked the reporters.

No one had heard of Car 1058. Research among the bulletins failed to reveal any mention of it.

"What's the name of the person you're interested in?" asked some one. "We might be able to tell you something."

"Oh, it wasn't any person," the young man explained; "it was my dog I was looking for. I've found he was shipped on Car 1058. A water spaniel, he was. I don't suppose you've heard anything?"

A moment of silence followed this announcement, and then one of the reporters began to laugh. There was nothing funny about it, of course, except the contrast. They all knew it was by the merest accident that Fannie Schmidt's contusions had been flashed over the wires rather than the fate of the water spaniel.

The youth flushed to the roots of his yellow hair.

"Oh, yes, it's very funny, of course," he said, and stalked out of the room. But there shone another light in his eyes than the gleam of anger.

"Say, there's copy in that," observed one reporter, and straightway they were all busy writing.

James had smiled with the others, but his merriment was short-lived. This indeed was the finishing stroke. That young fellow actually was more concerned about his dog....

The relief train was due to arrive at 1:30, and shortly before that hour there was a general adjournment to the concourse. A crowd had already gathered before the gate through which the survivors would presently file. James looked at the waiting people and shuddered slightly. He preferred not to wait there.

Passing by a news stand he bought the latest extra. It was curious to see the contents of those press agent flimsies transcribed on the flaring columns as the livest news obtainable. Well, all that would be changed shortly.... His own name caught his eye; a paragraph was devoted to telling how he had waited in the station, and why. "Mr. Wimbourne was entirely calm and self-contained," the item ended. Calm and self-contained. And those people took it for a virtue!...

The gates were opened to allow the friends of passengers on the ill-fated train to pass through to the platform. The reporters were unusually silent as James walked by. James knew what their silence meant, and writhed under it.

The platform was dark and chilly. Like a tomb, almost.... The idea was suggestive, but his heart was stone against it. The thought of seeing Beatrice walking up the platform in a moment was enough to check any possible indulgence of feeling. That was the way such things always had been rewarded, with him. He could not remember having entertained one such emotional impulse in the past that had not led him into fresh misery.

He had waited nearly two hours and there was absolutely no indication as to whether Beatrice had suffered or not. He had telephoned several times to his flat, to which the servants had lately returned, and to his office and had learned that no word had been received at either place. That meant nothing. Five names of people killed had been received when he left the press office, and hers was not among them. But the number of dead was said to be larger than was at first expected; it would probably reach into the twenties. Part of one Pullman, it appeared, had been entirely destroyed by fire, and several people were believed to have perished in it. There was no telling, of course, till the train came in. The chances were still overwhelmingly in favor of Beatrice's safety, of course....

One torment had been spared him: Tommy had not turned up. There would be no scene; he would not have to look on while his wife and her lover, maddened by the pangs of separation and suspense, rushed into each other's arms.... Ah, no; he would not deceive himself. His relief at Tommy's absence was really due to the fact that he had been spared the sight of some one genuinely and whole-heartedly anxious about Beatrice's fate.

The train crawled noiselessly into the station. James posted himself near the inner end of the platform, so as to be sure not to miss her. Soon groups began to file by of people laughing and crying and embracing each other, as unconscious to appearances as children. How many happy reunions, how many quarrels and misunderstandings mended forever by an hour or two of intense suffering!... No, that was a foolish thought, of course.

Presently he saw her, or rather a hat which he recognized as hers, moving up the platform. He braced himself and walked forward with lowered eyes, trying to think of something felicitous to say. He dared not look up till she was quite near. At last he raised a hand toward her, opened his mouth to speak, and found himself staring into the face of a perfectly strange woman.

The mischance unnerved him. He lost control of himself and darted aimlessly to and fro through the crowd for a few moments, like a rabbit. Then he rushed back to the gate and stood there watching till the last passenger had left the platform and white shrouded things on wheels began to appear.

He saw a uniformed official and addressed him, asking where he could find a complete list of the dead and injured. The man silently handed him a paper. James ran his eyes feverishly down the list of names. There it was—Wim—no, no, Wilson. Her name was not there. He raised his eyes questioningly to the official.

"No, that list is not complete," said the man.

He led James away to one or two other uniformed officials, and then to a man who was not in uniform. At length it was arranged; James was to take the first train for Stamford. Some one gave him a pass.

But before he went he telegraphed to Bar Harbor. It was necessary to have conclusive proof that Beatrice was on the train. As he recrossed the concourse, now converted into a happy hunting ground for the reporters, he caught sight of Mrs. Lindenbaum, the anxious mother. She was alone, but the expression on her face left no doubt as to how the day had turned out for her. He stopped and spoke to her:

"Your son is all right, is he?"

"Yes!" She turned toward him a face fairly transfigured with joy. "He wasn't hurt at all—just scratched a little by broken glass. He and my daughter have just gone to telephone to some people.... What do you think—he was the first one in his car to break open a window and let the smoke out! He reached up with his umbrella and smashed it open—that was how he got out. And he dragged out three people who were unconscious...." She stopped and laughed. "You must excuse me—I'm foolish!"

"Not at all," replied James. "I'm so glad—" He started to move on, but the woman stopped him, suddenly remembering.

"But what about—I do hope—" she began.

"No," said James quietly. "I'm sorry to say my news is bad." He had little doubt now as to the verdict, but bad—! Was it? Oh, was it?

It was early evening before he returned. His expedition had been painful in the extreme, but wholly without definite results. There had been one or two charred fragments of clothing that might or might not have been.... It was too horrible to think much about.

He knew for certain no more than when he started out, but conviction was only increased, for all that. What was there left to imagine but what that heap of cinders suggested? There was just one other chance, one bare possibility; Beatrice might not have left Bar Harbor, at any rate not on that train. The answer to his telegram would settle that.

He found the yellow envelope awaiting him on the hall table. He lifted it slowly and paused a moment before opening it, wondering if he could trust himself to hope or feel anything in this final instant of uncertainty. Anything! Any human feeling to break this shell of indifference....

No use. Something in his brain refused to work.

He tore open the envelope. "Beatrice left last night on the seven o'clock ferry; nothing more known. Please wire latest news," he read.

Well, that settled it, at any rate. He knew what the facts were; now he had only to bring himself face to face with them. Yet still he found himself dodging the issue, letting his thoughts wander into obscure by-paths. His brain was strangely lethargic, his heart more so, if possible, than in the station this morning. It was not that he felt bitter or cruel; he explained the situation to the maid, as she served him his dinner, with great tact and consideration, and afterward arranged certain matters of detail with all his usual care and foresight. It was only when he looked into himself that he met darkness.

Uncle James, who was in town on business, dropped in during the evening. James told him the results of his labors and watched the first hopefulness of his uncle's face freeze gradually into conviction.

"I see, I see," said Uncle James at last. "There's nothing more to be done, then? Any use I can be, in any way—"

"Thank you," replied James gravely, "there's nothing more to be done."

Uncle James rose to go and then hesitated. "Well, there it is," he said; "it's just got to be faced, I suppose. A major sorrow—the great blow of a lifetime. Not many of us are called upon to bear such great things, James. I never have been, and never shall, now. We feel less sharply as we grow older.... It's a great sorrow, a great trial—but I can't help feeling, somehow, that it's also a great chance.... But I'm only harrowing you—I'm sorry." He turned and went out without another word.

Presently James wandered into the bedroom that had once been hers. He turned on all the lights as if in the hope that illuminating the places she had been familiar with would bring the memory of her more sharply to his mind. Yes, it all seemed very natural; he would not say but what it made death less terrible. The fact that her chair was in its accustomed place before her dressing table did somehow make it easier to remember the events of that afternoon. He sat down before the dressing table. There was little on it to bring an intimate recollection of her to his mind; most of her small possessions she had naturally taken away with her to Bar Harbor. He opened a drawer and discovered nothing but a small box of hairpins.

He took them out and handled them gently for a moment. Hairpins! Even so, they brought her back more vividly than anything had yet done—the soft dark hair sweeping back from the forehead, the lovely arch of her nose, and all the rest of it.... He supposed she ought to seem aloof and unapproachable, now that she was dead, but it was not so at all. He remembered her only as feminine and appealing. She certainly had been very beautiful. And of all that beauty there remained only—hairpins. The fact of human mortality pressed suddenly down on him. Some time, a few days or a few decades hence, he would cease to exist, even as Beatrice, and nothing would remain of him but—Not hairpins, indeed, but hardly anything more substantial. A society pin, a little gold football, a few papers bearing his signatures in McClellan's files....

Poor Beatrice!

A feeling touched his heart at last; one of pity. Poor Beatrice! Fate had treated her harshly, far beneath her deserts. She had sinned.... Had she? It was not for him to settle that; she had been human, even as he. She had been frail; leave it at that. The strongest of us are weak at times. Only most of us are given a chance to regain our strength, pull ourselves together after a fall, make something out of ourselves at last. This opportunity had been denied Beatrice. Surely it was hard that she should be cut off thus in the depth of her frailty, at the lowest ebb of all that was good in her. The weakest deserved better than that.

So he sat meditating on the tragedy of her life as he might, in an idle mood, have brooded over the story of a lovely and unhappy queen of long ago, some appealing, wistful figure of the past with whom he had nothing in common but mortality. The sense of his own detachment from the story of his wife's life struck him at last and roused him to fresh pity. He went into his dressing room and fetched the photograph of her that he had thought it advisable to keep on his bureau. He stood it up on her dressing table and sat down again to study it. Poor Beatrice! It was pathetic that she, so young, so beautiful, so lonely, should be unmourned, since his feeling could not properly be described as mourning....

"Poor Beatrice," he murmured, "is pity all I can feel for you?"

A bell sounded somewhere, the front door bell. He scarcely noticed it.

No, there was one person to mourn her, of course—Tommy. The thought of him sent a sudden shudder through him. Tommy! He wondered if he could bring himself to be decent to Tommy in case he should turn up.... Just like him, the nauseous little brute!

No, that thought was unworthy of him. What particular grudge had he against Tommy? Hitherto he had not even taken the trouble to despise Tommy, and surely there was no point in beginning now. No, he must be decent to Tommy, if the occasion should arise.

But that Tommy should be chief mourner! Poor Beatrice!...

Presently he roused himself with a slight start. He did not wish to grudge his wife what slight homage he could pay her, but he felt that he had perhaps gone far enough. One felt what one could; harping over things was merely morbid. He rose and quietly left the room.

The lights in the hall seemed dim and low. A gentle glow shone through the living room door. That was odd; he thought he remembered turning out the light in the room before he left it. Then he became aware of a sentence or two being spoken in a low voice in that room, and the next moment one of the servants walked out of the door and into the hall.

He brushed past her, wondering who could have arrived at this time of night. At the door he stopped, strained his eyes to pierce the half-gloom and became aware of a figure standing before him, a silent, black-robed figure, full of a strange portent....

Aunt Selina.