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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Village Ophelia and Other Stories
+by Anne Reeve Aldrich
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Village Ophelia and Other Stories
+
+Author: Anne Reeve Aldrich
+
+Release Date: February 8, 2005 [EBook #14978]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A VILLAGE OPHELIA AND OTHER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Amy Cunningham and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Some words which appear to be typos are printed
+thus in the original book. A list of these possible misprints follows:
+  enthuiasms
+  fragant
+  increduously
+  insistance
+  trival]
+
+
+A VILLAGE OPHELIA
+
+BY
+ANNE REEVE ALDRICH
+
+
+NEW YORK:
+_W. Dillingham Co., Publishers_,
+MDCCCXCIX.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+A VILLAGE OPHELIA
+
+A STORY OF THE VERE DE VERE
+
+A LAMENTABLE COMEDY
+
+AN AFRICAN DISCOVERY
+
+AN EVENING WITH CALLENDER
+
+
+
+
+A VILLAGE OPHELIA
+
+
+On the East end of Long Island, from Riverhead to Greenport, a distance
+of about thirty miles, two country roads run parallel.
+
+The North road is very near the Sound and away from the villages; lonely
+farm-houses are scattered at long intervals; in some places their number
+increases enough to form a little desolate settlement, but there is
+never a shop, nor sign of village life. That, one must seek on the South
+road, with its small hamlets, to which the "North roaders," as they are
+somewhat condescendingly called, drive across to church, or to make
+purchases.
+
+It was on the North road that I spent a golden August in the home of
+Mrs. Libby. Her small gray house was lovingly empaled about the front
+and sides by snow-ball bushes and magenta French-lilacs, that grew
+tenderly close to the weather-worn shingles, and back of one sunburnt
+field, as far as the eye could see, stretched the expanse of dark,
+shining scrub-oaks, beyond which, one knew, was the hot, blue glitter of
+the Sound.
+
+Mrs. Libby was a large iron-gray widow of sixty, insatiably greedy of
+such fleshly comforts as had ever come within her knowledge--soft
+cushions, heavily sweetened dishes, finer clothing than her neighbors.
+She had cold eyes, and nature had formed her mouth and jaw like the
+little silver-striped adder that I found one day, mangled by some
+passing cart, in the yellow dust of the road. Her lips were stretched
+for ever in that same flat, immutable smile. When she moved her head,
+you caught the gleam of a string of gold beads, half-hidden in a crease
+of her stout throat. She had still a coarsely handsome figure, she was
+called a fine looking woman; and every afternoon she sat and sewed by
+the window of her parlor, dressed in a tight, black gown, with
+immaculate cuffs about her thick wrists. The neighbors--thin, overworked
+women, with numerous children--were too tired and busy to be envious.
+They thought her very genteel. Her husband, before his last illness, had
+kept a large grocery store in a village on the South side of the Island.
+It gave her a presumptive right to the difference in her ways, to the
+stuff gown of an afternoon, to the use of butter instead of lard in her
+cookery, to the extra thickness and brightness of her parlor carpet.
+
+For days I steeped my soul in the peace and quiet. In the long mornings
+I went down the grassy path to the beach, and lay on the yellow sands,
+as lost to the world as if I were in some vast solitude. I had had a
+wound in my life, and with the natural instinct of all hurt creatures, I
+wanted to hide and get close to the earth until it healed. I knew that
+it must heal at last, but there are certain natures in which mental
+torture must have a physical outcome, and we are happier afterward if we
+have called in no Greek chorus of friends to the tragedy, to witness and
+sing how the body comported itself under the soul's woe. But there is no
+sense of shame when deep cries are wrenched from the throat under the
+free sky, with only the sea to answer. One can let the body take half
+the burden of pain, and writhe on the breast of the earth without
+reproach. I took this relief that nature meant for such as I, wearing
+myself into the indifference of exhaustion, to which must sooner or
+later ensue the indifference brought by time. Sometimes a flock of small
+brown sandbirds watched me curiously from a sodden bank of sea-weed,
+but that was all.
+
+This story is not of myself, however, or of the pain which I cured in
+this natural way, and which is but a memory now.
+
+One gray morning a white mist settled heavily, and I could see but a
+short distance on the dark waters for the fog. A fresh access of the
+suffering which I was fighting, the wildness of my grief and struggles,
+wore me out, so that I fell asleep there on the rough sand, my mouth
+laid against the salty pebbles, and my hands grasping the sharp,
+yielding grains, crushed as if some giant foot had trodden me into the
+earth.
+
+I was awakened by a soft speculative voice. "Another, perhaps," I
+thought it said. Starting up, I saw standing beside me a thin, shrinking
+figure, drenched like myself by the salt mist. From under a coarse, dark
+straw hat, a small, delicate face regarded me shyly, yet calmly. It was
+very pale, a little sunken, and surrounded by a cloud of light, curling
+hair, blown loose by the wind; the wide sensitive lips were almost
+colorless, and the peculiar eyes, greenish and great-pupiled, were
+surrounded by stained, discolored rings that might have been the result
+of weary vigils, or of ill-health. The woman, who was possibly thirty,
+must once have been possessed of a fragile type of beauty, but it was
+irretrievably lost now in the premature age that had evidently settled
+upon her.
+
+Struggling to a sitting posture, I saw that the thick white fog had
+closed densely, and that the woodland back of us was barely
+distinguishable. We too seemed shut in, as in a room. "You live at Mrs.
+Libby's," said the young woman, after a moment's hesitation. "I am Agnes
+Rayne. I hope I did not frighten you."
+
+"No," I replied, brushing the sand from my damp clothing as I rose. "I
+am afraid if you had not come by fortunately, I should have had a
+thorough wetting. Can we get home before the storm begins?"
+
+"You would not have taken cold down here on the beach," she remarked,
+turning and looking out to sea. It seemed strangely to me as if those
+odd eyes of hers could pierce the blinding mist. "I will not go back
+with you. I have just come."
+
+Whatever she did or said that might have seemed rude or brusque in
+another, was sweet and courteous from her manner. "Very well," I said.
+Then I paused,--my desire to meet her again was absurdly keen. Stepping
+closer to her side, I extended my hand. "Will you come to see me, Miss
+Rayne? I am very lonely, and I should be so--grateful."
+
+She touched my fingers lightly with a chilly little hand, yet she never
+looked at me as she replied, "Yes, some day."
+
+As I plodded heavily through the wet sand, I was irresistibly impelled
+to turn my head. She was merely standing exactly as I left her, thin
+and straight, in the black gown that clung closely to her slender limbs,
+with the mass of light hair about her shoulders.
+
+Drenched as I was, when I reached home, with the large warm drops of the
+storm's beginning, I stopped in the sitting-room a moment before going
+to my room. The smell of ironing scented the house, but Mrs. Libby was
+resting placidly in the rocking-chair, her feet on a cushioned stool.
+She was eating some peaches, tearing them apart from the stone with
+strong, juice-dropping fingers, and dipping them in a saucer of coarse
+sugar before she devoured them.
+
+"Mrs. Libby, who is Agnes Rayne?" I asked.
+
+"She is old Martin Rayne's daughter, up to the corner. Seen her down to
+the beach, I expect. Speak to you? Did? Well, she's as queer as Dick's
+hat-band, as folks say 'round here. Some say she's crazy--love-cracked,
+I guess she is." Mrs. Libby paused to kill a fly that ventured too near
+her saucer on the table at her side, with a quick blow of the fleshy
+hand. I used to turn away when Mrs. Libby killed flies. "Oh! _I_ d'know!
+She's just queer. Don't commess with anybody, nor ever go to meetin'.
+The minister called there once; he ain't ever been again, nor told how
+he was treated, that's sure. They live queer, too. She don't ever make
+pies, ner p'serves, ner any kind of sauce. 'N' old Martin, he's childish
+now. He always was as close-mouthed as a mussel. Nobody ever knew
+whether he liked such goin's on or not."
+
+I went up the high, narrow stairs, thoughtfully to my small room under
+the eaves, dark with the storm, and smelling of must and dampness. I
+smiled a little. It was more than probable that these people would count
+slight eccentricity in a lady--and this was undoubtedly a lady, whatever
+her birth and surroundings--as madness. After dinner I stood by the
+window a long time. Through the network of apple-boughs, I could see
+the road. Mrs. Libby, coming heavily into the sitting-room, divined my
+thoughts.
+
+"If you're wondering how Agnes gets home, she goes cross-lots, right
+through the scrub-oak 'n' poison ivy 'n black-b'ries, 'f she's in a
+hurry. She ain't afraid o' rain; like's not, she stays down to the shore
+the whole 'durin' day."
+
+"I suppose the people here talk about her."
+
+"Most of 'em have too much to do to talk," replied Mrs. Libby, smoothing
+down her shining bands of hair before the hanging glass, and regarding
+her reflected large, white face and set smile, with dull satisfaction
+and vanity. "They're used to her now."
+
+One glaring afternoon within the week, I sat out on the tiny porch, idly
+watching a fat spider throw his ropes from the box-bush to the step. I
+had been sitting there for three hours, and only one creaking farm-wagon
+had passed, and two dirty brown-legged children. The air was breathless
+and spicy, and in the rough clearing opposite, the leaves seemed to
+curve visibly in the intense heat. Did anything ever happen here? It
+seemed to me as much out of the range of possible happenings as the
+grave.
+
+"There's Agnes coming," said Mrs. Libby, inarticulately. She held
+between her lips some ravellings and bits of thread, and she was sitting
+by the open window, laboriously pushing her needle through a piece of
+heavy unbleached cloth.
+
+The young woman who came swaying delicately along the path, with
+something of the motion of a tall stalk of grass in the wind, wore a
+scanty white gown, which defined almost cruelly the slenderness of form,
+that seemed to have returned to the meagre uncertainty of young
+childhood. To-day, her light hair was strained back from her wide
+forehead, and knotted neatly under the brim of her rough straw hat. She
+looked much older as she stood before me in the golden light.
+
+"Will you come home with me this afternoon?" she asked directly. "It is
+not far; perhaps it might amuse you."
+
+I consented gladly. As we walked along the narrow paths that skirted the
+roadside together, she turned to me, a sudden flush burning on her thin
+face. "I am afraid you think I am very cruel to bring you out this hot
+afternoon, but it is so long since I have talked to any one--so long! I
+have read your books, and then I said last night to myself: 'If I do not
+go over it all to some one--tell it aloud, from beginning to end--put it
+into words, I shall go mad. She is a woman who could understand.' Yes,
+when I saw your hands on the beach that day, all bruised inside, and on
+one a little cut, where you had wrenched at the sand and stone before
+you slept, I knew you were my escape. I am abject, but think of the
+years I have been dying, here, if you despise me."
+
+"No," I said, "it is not abject. Sometimes in one's life comes a crisis,
+when one must snatch at some remedy, or else die, or go mad. If there
+is not then something in us that makes us believe in a future, we, of
+course, die; but I could never think it a cure myself, merely to be free
+of the body, because I believe in the soul's immortality, and the body
+is such a diversion! Once rid of it, with all its imperious clamor to be
+fed and warmed--nothing but utter freedom to think--the grave has never
+appealed to me as an escape. Madness is a shade better, perhaps; but
+then that depends on the form of the illusion. For me the body has got
+to work out the soul's agony. For you, words may bring relief. Try--try
+anything that suggests itself."
+
+"Do not think you will hear anything new. It will bore you. Are you
+willing to listen?"
+
+"I am indeed," I replied. We had come to a lonely farm-house, its roofs
+moss-grown and sunken, the grass knee-high about it. There was hardly a
+sign of life about the place, though I could see an aged man smoking a
+pipe peacefully in the shade of an apple tree at the back. Everything
+wore an air of melancholy, desertion and loneliness.
+
+My companion lifted the gray gate's rusty latch. The grass was crushed
+enough to form a path to the front door, which stood open. She led the
+way into a large, low room off the little hall. The floor was bare.
+There was a large table in the centre, heaped with books, and some
+withering flowers stood in a glass. A couple of common chairs, a
+mattress, on which was thrown an antique curtain of faded blue as a
+drapery; on the white-washed wall, a tiny and coquetish slipper of
+yellowish silk, nailed through the sole. This was all the furnishing.
+
+She stood looking around at the barrenness curiously, trying perhaps to
+see it with the eyes of a stranger. "This is my room," she said, "and
+the very walls and floor are saturated with my sufferings." She went
+restlessly to the window, and threw open the broken blind. As the
+radiance of the afternoon flooded the place with light, I seemed to see
+it and its wasting occupant, here in this horrible desolation, in the
+changing seasons, when the window gave on the bitter rigors of blue and
+white winter mornings, the land choked with snow, on the golden blur of
+autumn, on the tender mists of April, draping the earth, and forever the
+cry of the waves on the shore haunting the air. That there was nothing
+of the mad woman about her, that she had retained reason in such a
+place, in such a room, with an eating grief to bear, impressed me as one
+of the marvels of the brain's endurance, with which nature sometimes
+surprises us. It seemed to me that this might be the hour of partial
+deliverance to the poor soul who had evidently lived and died so much.
+
+"Why have you stayed here?" I asked. She had now taken the chair
+fronting me. We were stiffly seated as if for a business interview. I
+had a desire to take the poor figure in my arms, but I felt as if she
+were as intangible as a spirit. When mental pain has devoured the body,
+as physical pain so often does, there is something thrice as ethereal
+about the wreck.
+
+"What difference could it make?" she asked in her slightly husky voice,
+with faint surprise. "It is only the old love-story of a village girl
+you will hear. My mother was different from these people, but I had
+never known anything beside this life, except books. Of course you can
+understand how much else than love the man brought me. I was quite
+beautiful then. Does it not seem strange that it could have been true! I
+burst into real blossom for him--like Aaron's rod, was it not? And now
+you see, I am only the bare rod."
+
+She dropped her lids and looked down at herself calmly. The warmth had
+curled the short hairs into a light halo around her forehead, the little
+neck was bent, she had folded her hands in her lap. The piteous
+child-like chest and limbs revealed by the tight white gown, brought
+tears to my eyes. There was something solemn, terrible, in this virginal
+decay.
+
+"All that I was to be, was forced into growth at once. He made me a new
+self; he was in a sense creator, teacher, parent, friend, idol, lover.
+He was the world I have not known; he taught me that I could myself
+write, create. I was nearer madness in those days than now, for when he
+threw himself here--" She rose and pointed to the floor near the
+table--"here on these boards at my feet, and begged me to listen to his
+love, to be his wife--I, his wife!--it was as strange, as unreal as a
+vision.--I had a month." She did not raise her sweet, level voice, but
+the eyes that she fixed on mine were dilated to blackness, and her face
+was illumined with an inexpressible light of triumph. "I had one great
+month of life. Even you cannot have had more in all your years of the
+world than I in my month! And then he returned to his work again. He
+was very busy, you understand, a great man, even then, in the world of
+letters. He could not come to see me, could not leave; but he wrote
+every day. He will never put into his book such words as he wrote me; he
+gave me more than he has ever given the world. It may have his books. I
+have read them, but I have his very soul in these letters!
+
+"I told you he made me believe that I could write. 'What was I, what was
+I,' I used to ask myself, 'to be lifted from this to his height?' And
+then I had a secret, which began in that thought. I wrote a novel. It is
+eight years back now. I never mentioned it in my letters. I knew it was
+good, as good as his own work. He would be so proud! He talked of
+publishing-houses, books, authors. I had not forgotten one word. I sent
+it to a house, one of the largest and best, and it was accepted. It is
+strange, but I was not at all surprised. Somehow I had never doubted it
+would be accepted. And then I went to the city alone for a day. I had
+only a little time; it seemed to me the greatest act of my life to be
+there, where he was, yet not to see him! But you see I had planned it
+all in those long nights when the autumn storms would not let me sleep.
+The rain would dash against this window, and half awake, I would see
+myself when he should come, with my head against his arm, saying, 'I
+have been making something for you. Guess.' And then he would laugh and
+say, 'Perhaps--is it a cake for my tea, home-darling? Is it--is it a
+cover for my writing-table? No, you do not sew. Tell me.' And then I
+should say proudly. 'It is nothing of that kind. It is a book, and the
+people whom you think such good judges say it must be a success!' I saw
+it again as I was coming down the stairs from the publisher's office.
+They had praised my work until the blood seemed all in my head and made
+me dizzy, and the sounds of Broadway confused my country ears.
+
+"At home that dusk my letter stood against the mantel as I came in
+here. I laughed when I saw the post-mark, to think I had been there. I
+laid it against my cheek softly where his hand had touched it, writing
+my name. It so prolonged the pleasure--you know--you are a woman like
+that. And at last I read it here." She posed herself unconsciously by
+the table. "It said, 'Have I loved you? I do not know. Curse me, and
+forget me. I am to be married to-day.'"
+
+A pin from my hair fell to the bare floor and broke the silence with its
+frivolous click. The tears were raining down my cheeks. She did not look
+at me now. She stood grasping the table with one tense hand, her white
+face thrown a little back. Just as she had stood, I knew, eight
+purgatorial years ago.
+
+The story was done. She sank into the chair.
+
+"And the book?" I asked at length.
+
+She roused from her reverie. "Oh! yes, the book. It had no purpose to
+live for, you see. I sent for it, cancelled the agreement. They wrote to
+me twice about it, but I was firm; there was no reason why I should
+trouble. I have everything I want," and again her voice trailed into
+silence.
+
+I looked about the strange, bare room, at the strange, slender figure,
+and I rose and folded her about with my arms; but she struggled in my
+embrace. "No, no, do not touch me!" she cried sharply, in a tone of
+suffering. My hands fell from her, and I knelt abashed at her side. "Oh!
+please forgive me. I cannot be touched. I hate it. You have been so
+good," she said, with compunction, regarding me with a certain remorse.
+I was not aggrieved at being repulsed. As I resumed my seat, I said,
+"You have only one life to live; snatch at least what you can out of the
+years. Take my wisdom. You have the book yet? Good. Come back with me;
+we will get it published. Open your heart, make one effort at living:
+you can but fail. Come away from the sound of the waves and the wind
+through the scrub-oaks; from this room and its memories. Be what you
+might have been."
+
+For the first time she faintly smiled. She shook her head. "I told you I
+was like Aaron's rod. See for yourself. The power of thought or interest
+in everything else has withered and wasted like my face and body. My
+days are almost as irresponsible as a child's now. I have gone back to
+the carelessness of a little girl about the conditions of life. It was
+once, and once only for me. But you have given me relief, or rather I
+have given myself relief this afternoon. And now, will you leave me? I
+am so glad to have said it all over, and yet, since I have done it, I
+cannot bear to see you."
+
+The peculiarity of her voice and manner, of which I have spoken, that
+made all her words sweet and gentle, however unconventional they might
+be, left me unoffended.
+
+"Perhaps you are right;" I said, "yet I wish you would try my way." She
+did not make any reply, and I left her standing with downcast eyes by
+the door.
+
+Mrs. Libby still sat sewing by the window when I returned. "Have a
+pleasant time?" she asked, a gleam of curiosity in her cold eyes. "Seems
+to me you didn't stay long."
+
+"No, not very long."
+
+"See that queer room of hers? Folks ain't asked into it much. They said
+she took the minister right in there when he called. Kitchen table piled
+up with books, 'n papers, books 'round on the floor, 'n' a mattress
+a-layin' in a corner. Some of the boys peeked in one day when she was
+down to the beach, 'n' told all 'round how it looked. And a white shoe
+onto the wall. I expect it must be one o' hers she used to wear. It was
+before I moved over from South side, but Mrs. Hikes says she had the
+flightiest clothes when he was courtin' her. Her mother left her some
+money, I guess, any way, 'n' there wasn't anything too rich, ner too
+good, ner too foreign for her to wear. 'N' look at her now! Well, it's
+'long toward tea-time. You look tired."
+
+I was indeed very tired. I could not assimilate the strange impressions
+I had received. That night the moon-light streamed broadly into my
+window through the apple-boughs that showed black shadows on the floor.
+About midnight I opened my eyes suddenly. Mrs. Libby in a much-frilled
+night-dress was shaking my shoulder vigorously.
+
+"You'll have to get up. Agnes Rayne's dyin', 'n' she's took a notion to
+see you. They've sent Hikeses' boy after you; bleedin' at the lungs is
+all I can get out of him. The Hikeses are all dumb as a stick of
+cord-wood."
+
+She sat down heavily on my bed, and put a pillow comfortably to her back
+while I dressed. Hikeses' boy sat waiting for me in the porch whistling
+under his breath. He was the tallest and lankiest of them all, and like
+some ghostly cicerone, he never spoke, but led the way through the dewy
+grass into the white, glorious moonlight, and kept a few yards ahead of
+me in the dusty road until we reached the Rayne farmhouse.
+
+Through the windows I saw a dim light, and figures moving. I pushed open
+the door without knocking. A doctor, young and alert, had been summoned
+from the village, and the dull light from a kerosene lamp, set hastily
+on the table, touched his curly red hair as he knelt by the mattress. An
+old white-bearded man sat huddled in one of the shadowy corners, weeping
+the tears of senility, and a tall, dust-colored woman, whom I rightly
+took to be Mrs. Hikes, stood stolidly watching the doctor. Outside the
+crickets were singing cheerily in the wet grass.
+
+"Oh, yes, so glad you've come," murmured the doctor as he rose.
+
+Then I stepped closer to the little figure lying in the old blue
+curtain, that was stiffened now with blood. The parted lips were gray;
+the whole face, except the vivid eyes, was dead. The night-dress was
+thrown back from the poor throat and chest, stained here and there with
+spots of crimson on the white skin, that seemed stretched over the small
+bones. I stooped beside her, in answer to an appealing look. She could
+not lift the frail, tired hand that lay by her, its fingers uncurled,
+the hand of one who, dying, relinquishes gladly its grasp on life. The
+hands of the strong, torn from a world they love, clench and clutch at
+the last; it is an involuntary hold on earth. The doctor moved away. The
+whining sobs of the old man became more audible. I put my ear to her
+cold lips.
+
+"His letters ... the letters ... and ... my book ... I told you of, take
+them. Here, in the closet ... by ... the chimney...."
+
+I could hardly distinguish the faint whispers. I raised my hand
+impatiently, and the old man stopped moaning. Mrs. Hikes and the doctor
+ceased speaking in low undertones. Only a great moth, that had fluttered
+inside the lamp chimney thudded heavily from side to side.
+
+"Yes, yes. What shall I do with them?"
+
+She did not speak, and seeing her agonized eyes trying to tell mine, I
+cried aloud, "Give her brandy--something. She wants to speak. Oh, give
+her a chance to speak!"
+
+The doctor stepped to my side. He lifted the wrist, let it fall, and
+shook his head. "Don't you see?" he said. I looked at the eyes, and saw.
+
+Some days later I went to the lonely house. The old man was sitting in a
+loose, disconsolate heap in his seat by the apple-tree. The tears rolled
+down the wrinkles into his beard, when I spoke of his daughter.
+
+"There were some letters and papers she wished me to have," I said. In
+the closet by the chimney. "If you are willing--"
+
+The old man shuffled into the house, and threw open the blinds of the
+darkened room. Some one had set the books in neat piles on the table;
+the chairs were placed against the wall. The drapery had been washed and
+stretched smoothly across the mattress. There were two or three dark
+stains on the floor that could not be washed out. The slim little
+slipper still decked the wall.
+
+I looked up at the door by the chimney. "Here's the key," said the old
+man, brokenly. "I found it to-day under the mattress." I tried it, but
+it did not turn in the lock. I was hardly tall enough to reach it. The
+old man fetched me a chair on which I stood, and after a moment or two I
+felt the rusty lock yield. The little door gave and opened.
+
+Nothing was there, nothing but the dust of years that blackened my
+fingers, as I put in my hand, unconvinced by my sense of sight.
+
+"Are you sure no one has been here, no one who could open the closet?"
+
+"Nobody," he proclaimed in the cracked tone of extreme age. "She must
+have wandered when she told you that. People wander when they are dying,
+you know. Her mother--but that was long ago." He tapped the key
+thoughtfully on the mantel. "You see how the lock stuck, and the door. I
+don't expect Agnes had it open for years. I expect she wandered, like
+her mother." He peered vaguely in at the empty space, and then turned to
+me. "I forget a great deal now. I'm getting an old man, a very old man,"
+he said, in an explanatory tone.
+
+"But did you know she had letters somewhere, a pile of papers? You
+remember her getting letters, do you not, letters from her lover?"
+
+He looked up at me apologetically, with dim, watery blue eyes. "I don't
+expect I remember much," he confessed. "Not of later years. I could tell
+you all about things when I was a boy, but I can't seem to remember much
+that's happened since mother died. That must have been along about
+twenty years ago. I'm all broken down now, old--very old. You see I am a
+very old man."
+
+I left him shutting the room into darkness, and passed out into the
+sunlight, sorely perplexed.
+
+Mrs. Libby was baking when I returned, and the air of the kitchen was
+full of the sweet, hot smell that gushed from the oven door she had just
+opened. She stood placidly eating the remnants of dough that clung to
+the pan.
+
+"Mrs. Libby," said I, sinking down on the door-step, "what was the name
+of Agnes Rayne's lover? You told me once you could not remember. Will
+you try to think, please?"
+
+"Well, I was talking to Mrs. Hikes after the fun'r'l," said Mrs. Libby,
+still devouring the dough. "He boarded to the Hikeses', you see, 'n' she
+had it as pat as her own," and then Mrs. Libby mentioned calmly a name
+that now you can hardly pass a book-stall without reading, a name that
+of late is a synonym for marvellous and unprecedented success in the
+literary world. I had met this great man at a reception the winter
+before; let me rather say, I had stood reverently on the outskirts of a
+crowd of adorers that flocked around him. I looked so fixedly at Mrs.
+Libby that her smile broadened.
+
+"Don't know him, do you?" she queried.
+
+"I think I have met him," I replied. "Was he engaged to Agnes Rayne?"
+
+Mrs. Libby waited to pierce a loaf of cake with a broom splint. She ran
+her thick fingers carefully along the splint and then turned the brown
+loaf on to a sieve.
+
+"Mrs. Hikes says she don't believe a word of it. Folks think he just
+courted her one spell that summer, not real serious, just to pass the
+time away, you might say, like many another young man. Mrs. Hikes says,
+she never heard of him writin' to her, or anything, 'n' if he had, old
+Hawkins that brings the mail couldn't have kep' it, any more'n he could
+keep the news he reads off postal cards. They talked enough first about
+her being love-cracked, but there wa'n't any signs of it I could hear,
+excep' her trailin' 'round the beach, 'n' looking wimbly, 'n' not doin'
+jus' like other folks. She never _said_ a word to anybody. Might 'a'
+been it turned her some," said Mrs. Libby, thoughtfully, rolling the
+flour in white scales from her heavy wrists. "Might 'a' been she was
+queer any way--sending off to the city for white silk gowns, 'n' things
+to wear in that old rack of boards, jus' because she was bein' courted.
+Most would 'a' kep' the money 'gainst their fittin' out. I guess that
+was all there was, jus' a little triflin', 'n' she took it in earnest.
+Well, it don't make any difference now," she concluded coolly, as she
+turned to her sink of baking-dishes.
+
+I sat listening stupidly to her heavy tread, to the cheery clash of the
+tins as she washed and put them in place. To never know any more! Yet
+after all, I knew all that could be known, strangely enough. Then, with
+a long shiver, I remembered the small closet beside the chimney with its
+empty, dusty shelves.
+
+"Mrs. Libby," said I, rising, "I think I will go back to the city
+to-morrow."
+
+
+
+
+A STORY OF THE VERE DE VERE.
+
+
+The landlord called it an apartment-house, the tenants called their
+three or four little closets of rooms, flats, and perhaps if you or I
+had chanced to be in West ---- Street, near the river, and had glanced
+up at the ugly red brick structure, with the impracticable fire-escape
+crawling up its front, like an ugly spider, we should have said it was a
+common tenement house.
+
+Druse, however, had thought it, if a trifle dirty, a very magnificent
+and desirable dwelling. The entrance floor was tesselated with diamonds
+of blue and white; there was a row of little brass knobs and
+letter-boxes, with ill-written names or printed cards stuck askew in the
+openings above them. Druse did not guess their uses at first, how
+should she? She had never in all her fifteen years, been in the city
+before. How should one learn the ways of apartment-houses when one had
+lived always in a little gray, weather-beaten house, on the very
+outskirts of a straggling village in Eastern Connecticut?
+
+It happened like this. One day, Tom, the fourth of the nine hungry and
+turbulent children, sent to the store on an errand, returned, bringing a
+letter. A letter, that was not a circular about fertilizers, or one of
+those polite and persuasive invitations to vote for a certain man for a
+town office, which penetrated even to the Hand's little gray kennel of a
+house toward election-time, was such a rarity that Mrs. Hand forgot the
+bread just done in the oven, and sank down wearily on the door-step to
+read it.
+
+"Well, you ain't a-goin'," she said to Drusilla, who stood quite
+patiently by, with a faint color in her pale face. "No, sir, you ain't
+a-goin' one step. She was too stuck-up to come here when she was alive,
+'n' you ain't a-goin' to take care of her children dead, 'n' that's the
+end of it."
+
+Druse made no reply. She never did. Instead, she bent her thin, childish
+back, and pulled the burning bread out of the oven.
+
+None the less, Druse went.
+
+It was all Pop's work. Pop was meek and soft; he cried gently of a
+Sunday evening at church, the tears trickling down the furrowed
+leather-colored skin into the sparse beard, and on week-days he was wont
+to wear a wide and vacuous smile; yet somehow, if Pop said this or that
+should be, it was,--at least in the little house on the edge of the
+village.
+
+And Pop had said Druse should go. For after all, the case is hard, even
+if one _is_ occupying a lofty position to rural eyes as a carpenter in
+"York," with a city wife, who has flung her head contemptuously at the
+idea of visiting his ne'er-do-weel brother; the case is hard, no matter
+how high one's station may be, to be left with three motherless
+children, over-fond of the street, with no one to look after them, or
+make ready a comfortable bit of dinner at night. And so, considering
+that Elviry was fourteen, and stronger than Druse, any way, and that
+John Hand had promised to send a certain little sum to his brother every
+month, as well as to clothe Druse, Druse went to live in the fourth flat
+in the Vere de Vere.
+
+Perhaps that was not just the name, but it was something equally
+high-sounding and aristocratic; and it seemed quite fitting that one of
+the dirty little cards that instructed the postman and the caller,
+should bear the pleasing name, "Blanche de Courcy." But Druse had never
+read novels. Her acquaintance with fiction had been made entirely
+through the medium of the Methodist Sunday School library, and the
+heroines did not, as a rule, belong to the higher rank in which, as we
+know, the lords and ladies are all Aubreys, and Montmorencis, and
+Maudes, and Blanches. Still even Druse's untrained eye lingered with
+pleasure on the name, as she came in one morning, after having tasted
+the delights of life in the Vere de Vere for a couple of weeks. She felt
+that she now lived a very idle life. She had coaxed the three children
+into a regular attendance at school, and her uncle was always away until
+night. She could not find enough work to occupy her, though, true to her
+training, when there was nothing else to do she scrubbed everything
+wooden and scoured everything tin. Still there were long hours when it
+was tiresome to sit listening to the tramping overhead, or the quarrels
+below, watching the slow hands of the clock; and Druse was afraid in the
+streets yet, though she did not dare say so, because her bold, pert
+little cousins laughed at her. She was indeed terribly lonely. Her uncle
+was a man of few words; he ate his supper, and went to sleep after his
+pipe and the foaming pitcher of beer that had frightened Druse when she
+first came. For Druse had been a "Daughter of Temperance" in East Green.
+She had never seen any one drink beer before. She thought of the poem
+that the minister's daughter (in pale blue muslin, tucked to the waist)
+had recited at the Temperance Lodge meeting. It began:
+
+  "Pause, haughty man, whose lips are at the brim
+  Of Hell's own draught, in yonder goblet rare--"
+
+She wished she had courage to repeat it. She felt if Uncle John could
+have heard Lucinda recite it--. Yet he might not think it meant him; he
+was not haughty, although he was a carpenter, and the beer he drank out
+of one of the children's mugs. But it troubled Druse. She thought of it
+as she sat one afternoon, gravely crotcheting a tidy after an East Green
+pattern, before it was time for the children to be back from school. It
+was a warm day in October, so warm that she had opened the window,
+letting in with the air the effluvia from the filthy street, and the
+discordant noises. The lady in the flat above was whipping a refractory
+child, whose cries came distinctly through the poor floors and
+partitions of the Vere De Vere.
+
+Suddenly there was a loud, clumsy knock at the door. She opened it, and
+a small boy with a great basket of frilled and ruffled clothes, peeping
+from under the cover, confronted her.
+
+"Say, lady," he asked, red and cross, "Is yer name De Courcy?"
+
+"No, it ain't," replied Druse. "She's the back flat to the right, here.
+I'll show you," she added, with the country instinct of "neighboring."
+
+The boy followed her, grumbling, through the long narrow hall, and as
+Druse turned to go, after his loud pound on the door, it suddenly flew
+open. Druse stood rooted to the ground. A dirty pink silk wrapper, with
+a long train covered with dirtier lace, is not a beautiful garment by
+full daylight. Yet to untrained eyes it looked almost gorgeous,
+gathered about the handsome form. Miss De Courcy had failed to arrange
+her hair for the afternoon, and it fell in heavy black folds on her
+shoulders, and her temples were bandaged by a white handkerchief.
+Perhaps it was not strange that Druse stood and gazed at her. The dark,
+brilliant eyes fixed themselves on the slight, flat-chested little form,
+clad in brown alpaca, on the pale hair drawn straight back from the pale
+face, and arranged in a tight knob at the back of the head.
+
+A whim seized the fair wearer of the negligée. "Come in and sit down, I
+want to talk to you. There, leave the clothes, boy. I'll pay your mother
+next time," and she pushed the boy out, and drew the young girl in with
+easy audacity.
+
+Druse looked around the room in bewilderment. It was not exactly dirty,
+but things seemed to have been thrown in their places. The carpet was
+bright, and much stained, rather than worn; hideous plaques and plush
+decorations abounded. A crimson chair had lost a leg, and was pushed
+ignominiously in a corner of the tiny room; a table was crowded with
+bottles and fragments of food, and a worn, velvet jacket and
+much-beplumed hat lay amongst them. A ragged lace skirt hung over the
+blue sofa, on one corner of which Miss De Courcy threw herself down,
+revealing a pair of high heeled scarlet slippers. "Sit down," she said,
+in a rather metallic voice, that ill accorded with the rounded curves of
+face and figure. "I've got a beastly headache," pushing up the bandage
+on her low brow. "What did you run for, when I opened the door? Did your
+folks tell you not to come in here, ever?"
+
+"Why, no, ma'am!" said Druse, raising her blue, flower-like eyes
+wonderingly.
+
+"Oh! well," responded Miss De Courcy, with a hoarse little laugh of
+amusement. "I thought they might have--thought maybe they objected to
+your making 'cquaintances without a regular introduction, you know.
+Haven't been here long, have you?"
+
+"No," said Druse, looking down at her tidy, with a sudden homesick
+thrill. "No, I--I come from East Green, Connecticut. I ain't got used to
+it here, much. It's kind o' lonesome, days. I s'pose you don't mind it.
+It's different if you're used to it, I guess."
+
+Somehow Druse did not feel as timid as usual, though her weak little
+voice, thin, like the rest of her, faltered a trifle, but then she had
+never called on a lady so magnificently dressed before.
+
+"Yes, I'm pretty well used to it by this," replied Miss De Courcy, with
+the same joyless little laugh, giving the lace skirt an absent-minded
+kick with her red morocco toe. "I lived in the country before--when I
+was little."
+
+"You did!" exclaimed Druse. "Then I guess you know how it is at first.
+When you think every Friday night (there ain't been but two, yet)
+'There, they're gettin' ready for Lodge meetin';' and every Sunday
+evenin' 'bout half-past seven: 'I guess it's mos' time for the Meth'dis'
+bell to ring. I must get my brown felt on, and--'"
+
+"Your what?" asked Miss De Courcy.
+
+"My brown felt, my hat, an'--oh! well, there's lots o' things I kind o'
+forget, and start to get ready for. An' I can't sleep much on account of
+not having Bell an' Virey an' Mimy to bed with me. It's so lonesome
+without 'em. The children here won't sleep with me. I did have Gusty one
+night, but I woke her up four times hangin' on to her. I'm so used to
+holding Mimy in! Oh! I guess I'll get over it all right, but you know
+how it is yourself."
+
+Miss De Courcy did not reply. She had closed her eyes, and now she gave
+the bandage on her head an angry twich. "_Oh_, how it aches!" she said
+through her shut teeth. "Here, give me that bottle on the stand, will
+you? It'll make it worse, but _I_ don't care. My doctor's medicine
+don't seem to do me much good, but I sort of keep on taking it," she
+said to Druse, grandly as she poured out a brownish liquid into the
+cloudy glass that the good little housekeeper had eyed dubiously, before
+giving it to her.
+
+Miss De Courcy's doctor evidently believed in stimulants; a strong odor
+of Scotch whiskey filled the room.
+
+"It smells quite powerful, does'nt it?" she said. "It has something in
+it to keep it, you know. It's very unpleasant to take," she added,
+rolling up her brown eyes to Druse's compassionate face.
+
+"I do' know as it would do you any good, prob'ly it wouldn't," said
+Druse shyly, shifting the glass from one hand to the other, "but I used
+to stroke Ma's head lots, when she had a chance to set down, and it
+ached bad."
+
+Miss De Courcy promptly stretched herself at full length, and settled
+her feet comfortably in the lace skirts, in which the high, sharp heels
+tore two additional rents, and pulled the bandage from her forehead.
+
+"Go ahead," she said, laconically. Druse dragged a chair to the side of
+the couch, and for some minutes there was silence--that is, the
+comparative silence that might exist in the Vere De Vere--while she
+deftly touched the burning smooth flesh with her finger tips.
+
+Miss De Courcy opened her eyes drowsily. "I guess I'm going to get a
+nap, after all. You're doing it splendid. You'll come and see me again,
+won't you? Say, don't tell your folks you was here to-day, will you?
+I'll tell you why. I--I've got a brother that drinks. It's awful. He
+comes to see me evenings a good deal, and some daytimes. They'd be
+afraid he'd be home, 'n' they wouldn't let you come again. He's cross,
+you see 'n' they'd never--let you come again 'f you--"
+
+Miss De Courcy was almost overpowered by sleep. She roused herself a
+moment and looked at Druse with dull pleading. "Don't you tell 'em,
+will you? Promise! I want you to come again. A girl isn't to blame if
+her father--I mean her brother--"
+
+"Yes, ma'am, I'll promise, of course I will," said Druse hastily, her
+thin little bosom swelling with compassion. "I won't never let 'em know
+I know you, if you say so. No, ma'am, it's awful cruel to blame you for
+your brother's drinkin'. I've got some pieces about it at home, about
+folkses' families a-sufferin' for their drinkin'. I'd like to come again
+if you want me. I'm afraid I ain't much company, but I could stroke your
+head every time you have a headache. It's awful nice to know somebody
+that's lived in the country and understands just how it is when you
+first--"
+
+Druse looked down. The doctor's remedy was apparently successful this
+time, for with crimson cheeks and parted lips, Miss Blanche De Courcy
+had forgotten her headache in a very profound slumber. Druse gazed at
+her with mingled admiration and pity. No wonder the room seemed a
+little untidy. She would have liked to put it to rights, but fearing she
+might waken her new friend, who was now breathing very heavily, she only
+pulled the shade down, and with a last compassionate glance at the
+victim of a brother's intemperance, she picked up her crocheting and
+tip-toed lightly from the room.
+
+After that life in the Vere De Vere was not so dreary. Druse was not
+secretive, but she had the accomplishment of silence, and she kept her
+promise to the letter. Druse could not feel that she could be much
+consolation to so elegant a being. Miss De Courcy was often _distraite_
+when she brought her crocheting in of an afternoon, or else she was
+extremely, not to say boisterously gay, and talked or laughed
+incessantly, or sang at the upright piano that looked too large for the
+little parlor. The songs were apt to be compositions with such titles
+as, "Pretty Maggie Kelly," and "Don't Kick him when He's Down," but
+Druse never heard anything more reprehensible, and she thought them
+beautiful.
+
+Sometimes, quite often indeed, her hostess had the headaches that forced
+her to resort to the doctor's disagreeable remedy from the black bottle,
+or was sleeping off a headache on the sofa. Miss De Courcy did not seem
+to have many women friends. Once, it is true, two ladies with brilliant
+golden hair, and cheeks flushed perhaps by the toilsome ascent to the
+fourth floor, rustled loudly into the parlor. They were very gay, and so
+finely dressed, one in a bright green plush coat, and the other in a
+combination of reds, that Druse made a frightened plunge for the door
+and escaped, but not before one of the ladies had inquired, with a peal
+of laughter, "Who's the kid?" Druse had flushed resentfully, but she did
+not care when her friend told her afterward, with a toss of the head,
+"_They're_ nothing. They just come here to see how I was fixed."
+
+After a little Druse offered timidly to clean up the room for her, and
+quite regularly then, would appear on each Wednesday with her broom and
+duster, happy to be allowed to bring order out of chaos.
+
+"Well, you are a good little thing," Miss De Courcy would say, pulling
+on her yellow gloves and starting for the street when the dust began to
+fly. She never seemed to be doing anything. A few torn books lay about,
+but Druse never saw her open them. She had warned Druse not to come in
+of an evening, for her brother might be home in a temper. Druse thought
+she saw him once, such a handsome man with his hair lightly tinged with
+gray; he was turning down the hall as Druse came wearily up the stairs,
+and she saw him go in Miss De Courcy's room; but then again when Gusty
+was sick, and she had to go down at night and beg the janitress to come
+up and see if it were the measles, there was a much younger man, with
+reddened eyes, from whose glance Druse shrank as she passed him, and he
+certainly reeled a little, and he also went in Miss De Courcy's door,
+and from motives of delicacy she did not ask which was he,--though she
+felt a deep curiosity to know. Not that Miss De Courcy refrained from
+mentioning him. On the contrary, she told heart-rending incidents of his
+cruelty, as she tilted back and forth lazily in her rocking-chair, while
+Druse sat by, spellbound, her thin hands clasped tightly over the work
+in her lap, neglecting even the bon-bons that Miss De Courcy lavished
+upon her.
+
+One morning there was a cruel purple mark on the smooth dark skin of
+Miss De Courcy's brow, and the round wrist was red and swollen. Druse's
+eyes flashed as she saw them. "I expect I'm as wicked as a murderer,"
+she said, "for I wish that brother of yours was dead. Yes, I do, 'n' I'd
+like to kill him!" And the self-contained and usually stoical little
+thing burst into passionate tears, and hid her face in Miss De Courcy's
+lap.
+
+A dark flush passed over that young lady's face, and something glittered
+in the hard blue eyes. She drew Druse tight against her heart, as though
+she would never let her go, and then she laughed nervously, trying to
+soothe her. "There, there, it ain't anything. They're all brutes, but I
+was ugly myself last night, 'n' made him mad. Tell me something about
+the country, Druse, like you did the other day--anything. I don't care."
+
+"Do you wish you was back there, too?" asked homesick Druse, wistfully.
+Druse could no more take root in the city than could a partridge-berry
+plant, set in the flinty earth of the back-yard.
+
+"Wish I was back? Yes, if I could go back where I used to live," said
+Miss De Courcy with her hoarse, abrupt little laugh. "No, I don't
+either. Folks are pretty much all devils, city or country."
+
+Druse shivered a little. She looked up with dumb pleading into the
+reckless, beautiful face she had learned to love so well from her humble
+tendings and ministerings. She had the nature to love where she served.
+She had no words to say, but Miss De Courcy turned away from the
+sorrowful, puzzled eyes of forget-me-not blue, the sole beauty of the
+homely, irregular little face.
+
+"I was only a-joking, Druse," she added, smiling. "Come, let's make some
+lemonade."
+
+But Druse did not forget these and other words. She pondered over them
+as she lay in her stifling little dark bedroom at night, or attended to
+her work by day, and she waged many an imaginary battle for the
+beautiful, idle woman who represented the grace of life to her.
+
+The fat janitress sometimes stopped to gossip a moment with Druse.
+
+"Ever seen Miss De Courcy on your floor?" she asked, one day, curiously.
+
+"Yes, ma'am, I--I've seen her," replied Druse, truthfully, the color
+rising to her pale cheeks.
+
+"O Lord!" ejaculated the janitress, heaving a portentous sigh from the
+depths of her capacious, brown calico-covered bosom, "if I was the owner
+of these here flats, instead of the old miser that's got 'em, wouldn't I
+have a clearin' out! Wouldn't I root the vice and wickedness out of some
+of 'em! Old Lowder don't care what he gits in here, so long's they pay
+their rent!"
+
+Druse did not reply. She felt sure that the janitress meant Miss De
+Courcy's drunken brother, and she was very glad that "old Lowder" was
+not so particular, for she shuddered to think how lonely she should be
+were it not for the back flat to the right. Even the janitress, who
+seemed so kind, was heartless to Miss De Courcy because she had a
+drunken brother!
+
+Druse began to find the world very, very cruel. The days went on, and
+the two lives, so radically unlike, grew closer entwined. Druse lost
+none of her stern, angular little ways. She did not learn to lounge, or
+to desire fine clothing. If either changed, an observer, had there been
+one, might have noticed that Miss De Courcy did not need as much
+medicine as formerly, that the hard ring of her laugh was softened when
+Druse went by, and that never an oath--and we have heard that ladies of
+the highest rank have been known to swear under strong
+provocation--escaped the full red lips in Druse's presence.
+
+One morning Druse went about the household duties with aching limbs and
+a dizzy head. For the first since she had acted as her uncle's
+housekeeper, she looked hopelessly at the kitchen floor, and left it
+unscrubbed: it was sweeping day, too, but the little rooms were left
+unswept, and she lay all the morning in her dark bedroom, in increasing
+dizziness and pain. For some days she had been languid and
+indisposed, and now real illness overcame her; her head was burning, and
+vague fears of sickness assaulted her, and a dread of the loneliness of
+the black little room. She dragged herself down the hall. Miss De Courcy
+opened the door. Her own eyes were red and swollen as with unshed tears.
+She pulled Druse in impetuously.
+
+"I'm so glad you're come. I--Why, child, what is the matter with you?
+What ails you, Druse?"
+
+She took Druse's hot little hand in her's and led her to the mirror.
+Druse looked at herself with dull, sick eyes; her usually pallid face
+was crimson, and beneath the skin, purplish angry discolorations
+appeared in the flesh.
+
+"I guess I'm goin' to be sick," she said, with a despairing cadence. "I
+expect it's somethin' catchin'. I'll go home. Let me go home."
+
+She started for the door, but her limbs suddenly gave way, and she
+fell, a limp little heap on the floor.
+
+Miss De Courcy looked at her a moment in silence. Her eyes wandered
+about the room, and fell on a crumpled letter on the table. She paused a
+moment, then she turned decisively, and let down the folding-bed that
+stood in the corner by day. She lifted the half-conscious Druse in her
+strong young arms, and laid her on the bed. It was only a few minutes'
+work to remove the coarse garments, and wrap her in a perfumed, frilled
+nightdress, that hung loosely on the spare little form. Miss De Courcy
+surveyed the feverish face against the pillows anxiously. Druse half
+opened her dull eyes and moaned feebly; she lifted her thin arms and
+clasped them around Miss De Courcy's neck. "Ain't you good!" she said
+thickly, drawing the cool cheek down against her hot brow.
+
+"I'm going for the doctor, Druse," said Miss De Courcy, coaxingly. "Now,
+you lay right still, and I'll be back in no time. Don't you move;
+promise, Druse!"
+
+And Druse gave an incoherent murmur that passed for a promise.
+
+The doctor, who lived on the corner, a shabby, coarse little man, roused
+her from a fevered dream. He asked a few questions perfunctorily, turned
+the small face to the light a moment, and cynically shrugged his
+shoulders.
+
+"Small-pox," was his laconic remark, when he had followed Miss De Courcy
+into the next room.
+
+"Then she's going to stay right here," said that young woman firmly.
+
+"Well, I guess _not_" replied the doctor, looking her over. "How about
+your own complexion if you take it?" he added, planting a question he
+expected to tell.
+
+Miss De Courcy's remark was couched in such forcible terms that I think
+I had better not repeat it. It ought to have convinced any doctor
+living that her complexion was her own affair.
+
+"Oh! that's all right," replied the man of science, unoffended, a tardy
+recognition of her valor showing through his easy insolence. "But how
+about the Board of Health, and how about me? She's better off in a
+hospital, any way. You can't take care of her," with a scornful glance
+at the draggled finery and striking hat. "What do you want to try it
+for? I can't let the contagion spread all over the house, you know; how
+would you get anything to eat? No, it's no use. She's got to go. I'm not
+going to ruin my reputation as a doctor, and--"
+
+Miss De Courcy smiled sweetly into the doctor's hard, common face. She
+drew a purse from her pocket, and selected several bills from a roll
+that made his small eyes light up greedily, and pressing the little
+packet into his not too reluctant fingers, she remarked significantly,
+as she sat down easily on the top of a low table:
+
+"You're mistaken about what's the matter with her, doctor. She's got
+the chicken-pox. You just look at her again as you go out, and you'll
+see that I am right. But it's just as well to be careful. You might mail
+a note for me when you go out, and my wash-woman will buy things for me,
+and bring them up here to the door. I'll swear I won't go out till you
+say I may, or till you take me to the hospital. And then, as you go
+along, you can step into the front flat left, and tell her uncle she's
+took bad with chicken-pox. He's got a lot of young ones, and he'll be
+glad enough to let me do it, see? And of course, chicken-pox is quite
+serious sometimes. I should expect to pay a doctor pretty well to bring
+a patient out of it," she added, with a placid smile.
+
+The doctor had turned, and was looking with deep interest at a chromo on
+the wall.
+
+"I'll take another look at her. I may have been mistaken, doctors
+sometimes are--symptoms alike--and--m--m--you can get that letter ready
+for me to mail."
+
+Strange days and nights ensued. Druse had a dim knowledge of knocks at
+the door at night, of curses and oaths muttered in the hall, of Miss De
+Courcy's pleading whispers, of a final torrent of imprecations, and then
+of a comparative lull; of days and nights so much alike in their fevered
+dull monotony that one could not guess where one ended and another
+began; of an occasional glimpse that melted into the general delirium,
+of Miss De Courcy's face, white, with heavy, dark-ringed eyes, bending
+over her, and of Miss De Courcy's voice, softened and changed, with
+never a harsh note; of her hand always ready with cooling drink for the
+blackened, dreadful mouth. Yes, in the first few days Druse was
+conscious of this much, and of a vague knowledge that the rocking ship
+on which she was sailing in scorching heat, that burnt the flesh from
+the body, was Miss De Courcy's bed; and then complete darkness closed
+in upon the dizzy little traveller, sailing on and on in the black,
+burning night, further and further away from the world and from life.
+
+How could she guess how many days and nights she sailed thus? The ship
+stopped, that was all she knew; but still it was dark, so dark; and then
+she was in a strange land where the air was fire, and everything one
+touched was raging with heat, and her hands, why had they bandaged her
+hands, so that she could not move them?
+
+"I can't see," said Druse, in a faint, puzzled whisper. "Is it night?"
+
+And Miss De Courcy, bending over the bed, haggard and wan, and years
+older in the ghostly gray dawn, said soothingly:
+
+"Yes, Druse, it's night," for she knew Druse would never see the light
+again.
+
+"Miss De Courcy!"
+
+"Yes, Druse."
+
+"I expect I've kept your brother out all this time. I hope he won't be
+mad."
+
+"No, no, Druse; be quiet and sleep."
+
+"I can't sleep. I wish it would be morning. I want to see you, Miss De
+Courcy. Well, never mind. Somehow, I guess I ain't goin' to get better.
+If what I've had--ain't catchin'--I suppose you wouldn't want to--to
+kiss me, would you?"
+
+Without hesitation, the outcast bent her face, purified and celestial
+with love and sacrifice; bent it over the dreadful Thing, loathsome and
+decaying, beyond the semblance of human form or feature, on the
+bed,--bent and kissed, as a mother would have kissed.
+
+The gray dawn crept yet further into the room, the streets were growing
+noisier, the Elevated trains rushed by the corner, the milkmen's carts
+rumbled along the Avenue, the sparrows twittered loudly on the
+neighboring roofs. And yet it seemed so solemnly silent in the room.
+"Well, now!" said Druse, with pleased surprise, "I didn't expect you
+would. What a long time it is gettin' light this mornin'. To think of
+you, a-takin' care of _me_, like this! An' I ain't never done a thing
+for you excep' the headaches and sweepin', an' even that was nicer for
+me than for you. I knew you was awful good, but I never knew you was
+religious before, Miss De Courcy. Nobody but folks that has religion
+does such things, they say. I wish I could remember my prayers. Ain't it
+strange, I've forgot them all? Couldn't you say one? Just a little one?"
+
+And Miss De Courcy, her face buried in her hands, said, "Lord, have
+mercy upon us," and said no more.
+
+"Thank you," said Druse, more feebly, and quite satisfied. "We won't
+forget each other, an' you'll promise to come by'm'by. Won't you? I'll
+be so pleased when you come!"
+
+"Yes, Druse," whispered Miss De Courcy, "I promise."
+
+And then the terrible form that had been Druse sat up in bed with a
+mighty effort, and turned its sightless eyes joyfully toward Miss De
+Courcy's tear-stained face.
+
+"It's morning! I can see you!" it said, and fell back into the faithful
+arms and upon the faithful breast.
+
+And so Druse, not having lived and died in vain, passed away forever
+from the Vere De Vere.
+
+
+
+
+A LAMENTABLE COMEDY.
+
+
+I stood one July noon on the platform of the desolate station at
+Wauchittic, the sole passenger waiting for the stage. The heat was
+quivering in the air. I watched the departing train, whirling like a
+little black ball down the narrow yellow road, cut between the green
+fields, and was vaguely glad that I was not going to the end of the
+Island on it. This was somewhere near the middle, and it was quite far
+enough from civilization.
+
+The village, like so many Long Island villages, was distant from the
+railroad. Only one or two farm-houses were in sight. There was hardly a
+sound in the hot noonday air, now that the train had gone, except the
+whistling of a cheerful station agent, who sat in the window of the
+little oven-like Queen Anne structure, in his shirt sleeves, looking out
+at me with lively interest. I had sought for a quiet country place in
+which to finish my novel, the book which would decide beyond doubt
+whether I had a future as a writer, or whether I was doomed to sink to
+the level of the ordinary literary hack, for into it I had put, I knew,
+all that was my best.
+
+As I looked absently down the track, I reviewed the past winter months,
+the long days and evenings spent at my desk in the stuffy little
+lodgings to which I was limited by my narrow income, interrupted
+frequently by invasions on various pretexts of the ill-fed chambermaid,
+who insisted on telling me her woes, or by my neighbor from the next
+room, the good little spinster, who always knocked to ask if she might
+heat a flat-iron at my grate when I was in the midst of a bit of minute
+description. She would sit down, too, would poor withered Miss Jane, in
+my little rocking-chair to wait while the iron heated, and she said she
+often told the landlady she did not know how I could write, I had so
+many interruptions.
+
+I had come to a place now, I thought, trying to quell the sense of
+loneliness that oppressed me, as I looked around at the expanse of
+stunted wood and scrub-oaks, where I could be perfectly undisturbed. If
+the farmer's family with whom I was to board, were noisy or intrusive,
+one could take one's writing materials and go--well, somewhere--into the
+woods, perhaps. I was only twenty-two, and I was sanguine.
+
+I saw a cloud of white dust down the road--nothing more, but the
+station-agent, with a certainty born of long experience, shouted
+encouragingly: "Thar she comes!" and presently I found myself in a
+large, sombre and warm conveyance, very like the wagon known to the New
+York populace familiarly, if not fondly, as "the Black Maria."
+
+The driver was a tow-headed lad of sixteen, so consumed with blushes
+that, out of pity, I refrained from questions, and sat silently enduring
+the heat behind the black curtains, while we traversed, it seemed to me,
+miles of dusty, white road, bordered by ugly, flat fields, or dwarf
+woods and undergrowth, before we stopped at a smart white farm-house.
+The farmer's wife, hearing our approach, stood on the little porch to
+welcome me. Mrs. Hopper gave a peculiar glance at my begrimed person and
+face, and I followed her up the narrow stairs with an odd, homesick
+sinking of the heart, seized by a momentary pang of that "nostalgia of
+the pavement," felt oftener by the poor than rich dwellers of the city,
+in exile. Perhaps I loved New York in an inverse ratio to what I had
+suffered in it. All the miseries of hope deferred, unremitting labor,
+and unnumbered petty cares attendant upon a straightened income, were
+forgotten, and I yearned for its ugly, midsummer glare, even its
+unsavory odors, and my stifling little chamber "_au troisième_" as I
+surveyed the tiny bare room, with its blue and gray "cottage set," its
+white-washed walls, hung with a solitary engraving of Lincoln and his
+Cabinet. It was not a beautiful spot, truly, yet I thought dubiously, as
+I drank in the silence, it might be a very good place in which to bring
+to an end the sufferings of my heroine, who had agonized through several
+hundred pages of manuscript.
+
+"I expect you're tired," said Mrs. Hopper, sitting down carefully on the
+edge of the feather-bed to which I was condemned. "It's a pretty quiet
+place here--ain't much of a village, but then you said you wanted a
+quiet place to write in. I guess you'll be s'prised--there's another
+orther here. Maybe you know him, his name's Longworth, John Longworth?
+Don't! Why, he lives to New York! No, he ain't right here in the house,
+he's across the street to the Bangses', but you'll see him," she said,
+encouragingly. "It'll be awful pleasant for you two orthers to get
+acquainted. The Bangses don't keep cows, an' every night at milkin'
+time, over he comes to get a glass o' warm milk; guess he likes to talk
+to our men-folks. Old Bangs ain't much comp'ny for anybody, let alone a
+writer. He's got a man with him to wait on him; a kind o' nurse, I
+b'lieve. He was near dead before he came here, though he looks pretty
+smart now--had a fever. Some of the folks here hev got it around he was
+out of his head, a man so, a-settin' around out o' doors, writin' from
+mornin' till night. Lord, how mad it made the Bangses!" Mrs. Hopper
+indulged in an abrupt retrospective laugh of enjoyment. "They was so set
+up, havin' a writer there, an' Mary Bangs was pretty well taken down
+when I told her we was a-goin' to have one here. She acted as if she
+didn't b'lieve there was more'n one orther to New York, an' that was Mr.
+Longworth," continued Mrs. Hopper, regarding me with a proprietor's
+pride, as I removed my hat and hung it on a nail driven in the wall. I
+smiled as I reflected that I, too, should doubtless be looked on with
+suspicion as a fit subject for a straight-jacket, if I, an able-bodied
+young woman, should sit "out o' doors" with my writing, while my
+presumable betters were working.
+
+"Well, I guess I'll go down now," said Mrs. Hopper, after a brief pause,
+in which she examined my gown. "I expect you want y'r dinner. We live a
+good piece from the store, Miss Marriott an' any time if you should get
+out of ink, don't make any bones of asking for it. We've got some right
+here in the house, an' you're as welcome to it as if you was my own
+daughter."
+
+I was glad to find, at dinner, that the family consisted of Mr. and Mrs.
+Hopper only, with the exception of a couple of farm-hands, whose
+lumbering tread down the back-stairs wakened me each morning about four.
+I found Mr. Hopper a tall, bent old man, with meek, faded blue eyes, and
+a snowy frill of beard. He had an especially sweet and pathetic voice,
+with a little quaver in it, like a bashful girl's.
+
+He laid down his knife and fork, and looked at me with an air of gentle
+inquiry, as I took my seat at the table. "Mrs. Hopper tells me you're a
+literary," he said at length. I'm afraid I replied, "Yes?" with the
+rising inflection of the village belle, nothing else occurring to me to
+say.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Hopper, softly, pushing back his chair, and rising to
+leave the table, "it's in our fam'ly some too. And in Ma's. One o' my
+uncles and one o' her brothers." He shuffled out of the room with a
+placid smile, as Mrs. Hopper said, deprecatingly, but with conscious
+pride, "La, pa, Jim never wrote more'n two or three pieces."
+
+For a few days I took a vacation. I wandered about the "back lots," down
+to the mill-dam, up and down the lonely, winding street where all the
+prim houses--and they were very far apart--wore a desolate, closed
+look, as though the inhabitants were away, or dead. I grew accustomed to
+my environments; the little bedroom began to seem like home to me. On my
+way to the post-office some one passed me on the sandy, yellow patch, a
+man clothed after the manner of civilization, whose garments, cut by no
+country tailor, were not covered by overalls. I knew it must be "the
+other orther." None of the males in Wauchittic appeared in public,
+except on Sunday, save in overalls. It would have been, I think,
+considered unseemly, if not indecent.
+
+The man was young, with a worn, delicate face, marked by ill-health, and
+though I had studiously avoided the yard near "milkin' time," in spite
+of Mrs. Hopper's transparent insistance each evening on my going out to
+see the brindled heifer, I think my indifferent glance was assumed, for
+though John Longworth, so far as I knew, had not his name inscribed on
+the records of fame, and was probably a penny-a-liner on a third-rate
+newspaper, I had the instinct of fellow-craft, that is, alas! strongest
+in the unknown and ardent young writer. He walked feebly, and his
+brilliant eyes were haggard and circled, as though by long illness. I
+saw him drive by nearly every afternoon, accompanied by his nurse, a
+good-humored young fellow, who helped him tenderly into the carriage,
+and drove, while he lay back with the irritated expression that the
+sense of enforced idleness and invalidism gives a man in the heyday of
+youth. Mrs. Hopper, who was loquacious to a degree, told me long stories
+of his parents' wealth, of the luxuries brought down with him, and of
+the beautiful pieces of furniture he had had sent down for his room, for
+his physician had recommended him to an absolutely quiet place for the
+entire summer. She burned with an irrepressible desire to have me make
+the acquaintance of this son of wealth and literature, either from the
+feminine proclivity for match-making, or because, possibly, she thought,
+having an intense reverence for writers, that our conversation would be
+of an edifying and uncommon character. I fear she was disappointed, for
+on the occasion of our first meeting,--I believe Mr. Longworth came to
+see Mrs. Hopper on some trifling business, and I happened to be writing
+on the front porch,--our remarks were certainly of the most commonplace
+type, and I saw a shade of disappointment steal across her face, as she
+stood by triumphantly, having accomplished her wish to "get us
+acquainted."
+
+Mr. Longworth overtook me the next day, as I was returning listlessly,
+toward noon, from a long walk, my arms full of glowing St. John's wort,
+the color of sunset. Back of me lay the long stretch of flat road, and
+the fields on either side were scorched with the sun. The heat was
+intolerable. Mr. Longworth would carry the flowers for me, and I
+resigned them, knowing that nothing is more distasteful to a man than to
+be treated like an invalid. And the bunch was really a heavy burden,--I
+had gathered such an enormous armful, together with some tender creepers
+of blackberry vine. We chatted of the place, of the people, and I found
+that my companion had a keen sense of humor. As we neared the house,
+after a moment's hesitancy, I asked him to come and rest on the little
+porch, where a couple of splint rockers and a palm-leaf fan invited one
+to comfort and coolness. He accepted the invitation with alacrity,
+though he chose to sit on the wooden steps, while I tilted lazily back
+and forth, overcome by the noonday lull and heat.
+
+He looked so boyish when he took off his hat, with the dark little curls
+falling over his forehead, that I thought he could not be older than I.
+The walk had perhaps been more than he could bear, for he was so pale
+that I could not help saying, "Pardon me, Mr. Longworth, but you look
+so ill. Will you let me give you a glass of wine?" I had brought a
+little with me. He looked slightly annoyed, but he answered gayly,
+
+"I suppose Mrs. Hopper has been telling you I am a confirmed invalid.
+Indeed I am almost well now, and I need Wilson about as much as I need a
+perambulator, but I knew if I did not bring him, my mother would give up
+Bar Harbor, and insist on burying herself with me, either here or at
+some other doleful spot, stagnation having been prescribed for me. Oh,
+well, I don't mind the quiet," he continued, leaning his broad shoulders
+against the pillar, and pulling at a bit of the St. John's wort, for he
+had thrown it down in a straggling heap on the floor of the porch. "I'm
+at work on--on a book," he said with a boyish blush.
+
+"Yes," I replied, smiling. "Mrs. Hopper told me that there was 'an
+orther,' in Wauchittic."
+
+"And that was what Mrs. Bangs told me the other day!" he declared
+audaciously. And then we both laughed with the foolish gaiety of youth,
+that rids itself thus of embarrassment.
+
+"It is my first book," he confessed.
+
+"And mine," I said.
+
+Our eyes met a little wistfully, as if each were striving to read
+whether the other had gone through the same burning enthuiasms for work,
+the same loving belief in its success, the same despondent hours when it
+seemed an utter failure, devoid of sense or interest, and then, somehow,
+we felt suddenly a mutual confidence, a sense that we knew each other
+well, the instant _camaraderie_ of two voyagers who find that they have
+sailed the same seas, passed through the same dangers, and stopped at
+the same ports.
+
+I heard Mrs. Hopper open the hall-door, caught a glimpse of her looking
+out at us with satisfaction on her face, warm from the kitchen fire,
+and heard her close it, with much elaboration, and, tip-toe heavily
+away.
+
+"Yes, this is my first book," he went on, as though we had not paused.
+"Of course I have had experience in writing before, magazine sketches,
+and that sort of thing, and beside that, I once had a mania for
+newspaper work, and much to my mother's horror, I was really a reporter
+on one of the city papers--_The Earth_."
+
+"Circulation guaranteed over 380,000," I continued, rather ashamed of my
+flippancy, although he laughed.
+
+"Exactly. Well, after a time I had an offer to go on the editorial staff
+of the _Eon_, through a friend who has influence with the management,
+and it was just then I was taken ill with this typhoid fever that has
+left me the wreck you see," he said, with a whimsically sad smile. "That
+is not the worst, though," he went on, a shadow falling over his
+upturned face, "I cannot explain it, although my doctor pretends to. I
+had written--oh! say half-a-dozen chapters of this book before my
+sickness. As soon as I began to be convalescent, I wanted to amuse
+myself by going on with it. I had my plot roughly blocked out, my
+characters were entirely distinct in my mind, yet when I took up my pen
+again, I found I could not write connectedly. It was simply horrible. I
+shall never forget that day. Of course I imagined I should never write
+again. I sent for two or three doctors, announced that I had paresis,
+and was told that it was madness for a man who had been as ill as I to
+attempt any sort of literary work for weeks, if not months. But the
+sense that I absolutely could not write preyed upon me. I used to do a
+little each day in spite of their orders, but it is only now that I am
+beginning to feel the confusion of ideas lessening, and the ability to
+present them coherently growing Even yet I only write disconnected parts
+of the chapters I had planned. It is--oh! what is that pet word of
+phrenologists? _continuity_, that I have not at my command. I suppose
+you cannot quite understand the agony of such an experience, never
+having gone through it. Only yesterday I tore up thirty pages of
+manuscript, and had more than half a mind to burn the whole thing. It is
+only the consideration of the possibly great loss to the literary world
+that withholds me, you know," he said with a half bitter laugh, throwing
+down the ruins of the flowers he had pulled to pieces with his thin,
+nervous hands, and rising.
+
+"But I've been an unconscionable bore, even for a valetudinarian, and I
+believe they are privileged to tax people's amiability. I hope I havn't
+tired you so that you will forbid my coming again. I will promise not to
+talk about myself next time," he said, as he turned to go down the path.
+
+I wondered what his book was like, as I lazily watched him cross the
+street in the noonday sun, and then I remembered with a twinge of
+conscience that I had hardly written a thousand words since I came. This
+soft air, redolent of spicy midsummer odors, seemed to produce an
+invincible indolence, even of thought. After the struggles of the past
+winter, I was feeling the reaction in utter relaxation of will and
+purpose. I wondered, were I in Mr. Longworth's place, would I ever write
+again, from the mere love of it? Was the end, even if that end were
+success, worth the pain of attaining it? And then, fearing to question
+myself further, I went to my room and began to write.
+
+Late July was very beautiful in Wauchittic. From the ocean, a dozen
+miles distant, was wafted the faintest suggestion of the odor of the
+sea, the wide fields of lush pasture seemed to drink the sun. All night
+the murmur of the little stream falling over the mill-dam, filled the
+dark hours with soft whispers. The low woods, with their glittering
+leaves of the scrub-oak, tempted me, and I discovered fairy glades in
+their depths, where the grass was thin and pale, and strong ferns grew
+about the roots of the trees. Sometimes Mr. Longworth would accompany me
+on my trips of exploration, and, happy in our youth and the gladness of
+summer, and forgetful of strict conventionality, we would spend long
+mornings together, writing and reading in an especially cosy spot at the
+edge of the woods back of the farm. Mr. Longworth was growing so strong
+that Wilson's position was almost entirely a sinecure, and he spent most
+of his time lounging in the one village store, relating remarkable
+stories of New York to a circle of open-mouthed idlers. Day by day, I
+watched the lessening pallor and the growing health of Mr. Longworth's
+face, and saw him visibly gain strength. He could carry all the rugs and
+books and writing materials to our sylvan sanctum without fatigue, and
+he was so boyishly proud of his health that he used to exhaust himself
+with too long walks, for which I administered lectures that he always
+received submissively. One warm morning we had spent an hour in writing.
+I had grown tired, and throwing down my pen and pad, I left Mr.
+Longworth still at work, and strayed out into the field in the sun.
+There had been no rain for days, and the locusts filled the air with
+their _zeeing_. The wide field was dotted with golden patches of the
+arnica blossom, or yellow daisy, as the farmers called it. I wandered
+through the hot, knee-high grass, picking handfuls of the broad yellow
+suns, then childishly threw them away, and pulled others, with great
+heads of sweet red clover, and spears of timothy too. I was so happy. My
+whole being was filled with causeless peace and gladness. From time to
+time I glanced back to the shade of the oak trees, to the tall, slender
+figure, with the dark head bent over the white sheets of manuscript, and
+I sang softly a little song for very joy of my life. I looked up to the
+deep, cloudless sky, around at the wide stretch of green in the golden
+sunlight, then almost unconsciously back once more to the edge of the
+woods, where the spread rugs made a tiny home fit for the heart of
+summertide. Nor did I guess, even then, which was the dominant note of
+this wonderful chord that my life had unconsciously struck. I knew only
+that the world was far more beautiful than I had ever dreamed, and still
+singing under my breath the little cadence that seemed to fit the day, I
+wandered slowly back, leaving a path crushed between the tall, sun-faded
+grasses as I went.
+
+Mr. Longworth laid down his work as I approached. A strange, absurd
+shyness possessed me, after the weeks of strengthening friendship and
+simple good-fellowship, but I held out the great bunch of daisies
+playfully to him, as I seated myself on the pile of rugs. He reached
+his hand for them eagerly, and buried his face in their sunny depths.
+
+His eyes shone feverishly with his stress of work, and his thin cheeks
+were flushed. "You look tired," I said. "You should not write so long."
+
+Thus far, though we had often jested about it, we had never read each
+other portions of our work.
+
+"When I get mine half done," I had said, when he begged me to read him a
+chapter.
+
+"When I can manage to make a chapter run smoothly to its end," he had
+replied laughing, in turn, but now to-day, urged by some necessity for
+an absorbing topic into which I could plunge, losing my restlessness, I
+insisted that he should read fragments, at least, to me.
+
+He demurred at first. "I have told you how stupid it sounds, these
+disconnected bits, little descriptions, detached conversations.
+Sometimes I think I shall never use them after all." He fingered the
+pages absently.
+
+"No, read it to me as it is," I begged. "I must hear it. I understand,
+of course, how it is written."
+
+And so, yielding to my entreaties, he read, while I leaned back against
+the tree trunk, listening at first critically, and interested, perhaps,
+because it was his work, then with clasped hands and shortening breath,
+leaning forward that I might lose no word. A little squirrel scampered
+through the undergrowth back of us, and far in another field I could
+hear Mr. Hopper's quavering voice, as he called to the haymakers.
+Sometimes a leaf rustled, falling to the ground, but it was very quiet.
+
+At last he laid down the leaves, and fixed his dark eyes eagerly on my
+face, as if he would read my thoughts, but my eyes were full of tears,
+and they were selfish tears. "My poor book!" I said, with a tender
+contempt for it.
+
+"Do you mean--?" he began increduously.
+
+"I mean that this is wonderful, and that I know I shall never write
+again," I said. "I do not know how it is, but I can read by the light of
+your book that you have genius, and that I am a failure. It is well that
+something brought it home to me before I wasted any more time." I meant
+to speak bravely, but I knew more than this. I knew that, with all my
+air-castles shattered, with the knowledge that to him literature was a
+pastime, while to me it meant livelihood, I gloried more in his success
+than I should in my own, that I was glad that he, and not I, was to have
+fame; and in the tumult of new emotions against which I struggled, my
+lip quivered, I turned aside my head, and felt, but I did not see, the
+hand that touched mine, thrilling me so that I drew away.
+
+"Miss Marriott--Kate--"
+
+"No, no," I cried, facing him with my cheeks crimson, and speaking
+rapidly, "I want you to let me send a few pages for a reading to Mr.
+----, the editor of ----'s Magazine; he is a friend of mine; he has been
+so good to me. You say you have no publisher in view. I am certain he
+will take this when it is finished, and you know what that means; it
+will make your reputation, and--"
+
+"Ah, but you see, these are only fragments," he said, sadly, regaining
+his composure. "Suppose I am never able to weave them properly into the
+plot? You cannot know how discouraged I am sometimes."
+
+"Will you not let me send them?" I asked eagerly. "It is quite true that
+they are only fragments, but no one could write such things and then
+fail of success in elaborating; it is impossible. Come, let us go, it is
+nearly dinner-time," I went on, not giving him time to speak, as I began
+gathering up the books and rugs. "No, do not talk of my book; it is
+over. It was only a fancy of mine. I ought to have known I could not
+really write, and it came to me clearly this morning--so clearly! If you
+will let me be godmother to yours, that will be a little consolation," I
+said laughing, and having now his consent to send his MSS. to Mr. ----,
+I hurried him homeward, talking gaily of indifferent topics, and
+avoiding the tender, questioning eyes that sought my own.
+
+That there was bitterness in the realization that I had miserably
+failed, that my novel was stupid and lacked the elements of interest, I
+cannot deny. Why I had not seen it all before, I can never understand,
+but this morning, as I compared it with the brilliant and strange play
+of fancy that characterized Mr. Longworth's work, I felt it keenly and
+conclusively. In the long afternoon hours I spent that day alone with my
+manuscript, I learned to face calmly the fact that I must go back to
+newspaper work without the vestige of a hope that I should ever write a
+readable novel. What it meant to me to arrive at this conclusion no one
+will understand who has not had the same hopes and the same downfall,
+yet through those hours in the little white-washed bed-room, with the
+locust boughs tapping against the window, the memory that I strenuously
+put away of that warm clasp, of the new tenderness in the voice that had
+called me by my name, softened the sharp pangs of disappointment; and
+he, at least, would not fail as I had done.
+
+Toward sunset I laid away my dead book, and went down to the
+sitting-room where Mrs. Hopper sat placidly mending. She looked a trifle
+anxiously at my reddened eyelids. "Feel well?" she queried, plying the
+needle swiftly. "You mustn't let things prey onto your mind," she
+admonished, "or you won't get your money's worth of good out of the
+place, and besides, Lord! what is there worth worryin' over, any how?
+Money ain't worth it, and love ain't worth it," she declared, with a
+keen glance at me. "But, there, what _is_ the use of tellin anybody
+that? I worried some before I married Pa. I guess it's natural. I
+thought, thinks I, 'Mary Ann Bishop, he's years older'n you, 'n' he's
+weakly, 'n' there ain't much doubt but what you'll be left a relic'. Now
+look, that was ten years ago, and Pa ain't no more out o' slew 'n' he
+was then. 'N' then I thought, 'There, he's had one wife.' (Pa was a
+widower.) ''N' I expect he'll be always a-comparin' of us.' It ain't
+happened once, at least, not out loud, an' oh! how good he was to that
+woman! It didn't seem as if he _could_ be as good to his second. It was
+all over the place," said Mrs. Hopper laying down "Pa's" calico shirt,
+and speaking in low and impressive tones, as befits the subject of
+death, "how he bought her a bran-new wig two weeks before she died, an'
+he let her be buried in that wig, that cost over thirty dollars! An' as
+for a stone! Well, there, he went over to Gilsey's marble-yard to New
+Sidon, 'n' picked out a sixty-dollar tomb, 'n' never asked 'm to heave
+off a cent! An' that man, Miss Marriott," said Mrs. Hopper, "he'd do
+just as well by me as ever he done by her, 'n' I'm contented, 'n' I'm
+happy. I can tell you, I'm a believer in marriage," she said, with a
+proud smile, as she rose to get tea.
+
+Mr. Longworth brought over a neat package of manuscript that evening,
+which I sent, with a letter to Mr. ----. We sat talking on the porch,
+watching the moon rise and flood the dew-wet fields with a tide of white
+radiance. Occasionally we heard Mr. or Mrs. Hopper in the lamp-lit
+sitting-room making brief comments on neighborhood gossip, or the crops,
+and then Mrs. Hopper would go on silently sewing, and "Pa," his white
+head bent over a "Farmer's Almanac," made long and painful calculations
+on a scrap of paper in which he seemed to get much mysterious assistance
+from the almanac.
+
+Without, the cool night air touched my face gently. My head was burning
+and fevered with the day's emotions, but I felt the infinite peace of
+the evening calming me.
+
+"No," I said firmly, "indeed I have decided wisely, Mr. Longworth. I am
+going back to my old work cheerfully, and shall never think again of
+my--my disappointment. I believe I can easily get work on my old paper,
+the "_Courier_," and I have been offered an editorial position on a new
+fashion paper, beside my weekly letter to the "_Red Cañon Gazette_.'"
+Naturally I did not tell him that I had spent all my savings of a year
+on this planned vacation, when I was to finish the book that should
+reimburse me.
+
+"You shall not go back to that wretched drudgery," said Mr. Longworth,
+in his impetuous, nervous manner. "Do not imagine you are ever to do it
+again. Tell me," he said, lowering his voice, and leaning toward me so
+that he could see my face, shaded by the vine-hung trellis. "Could you
+be happy--"
+
+We heard Mr. Hopper moving around the room uneasily, and instinctively
+Mr. Longworth paused.
+
+"Ma," said the old man, a trifle reproachfully, "I'm afraid you don't
+try to make it cheerful for them young folks. Why don't you go out and
+set for a spell? I guess _I'll_ go."
+
+"Stay where you are, Joseph," said Mrs. Hopper, in loud tones of
+disapproval, that were wafted through the open window to us. "Did _we_
+want the old folks forever runnin' after us before _we_ was married?"
+Mr. Longworth tried not to steal a mirthful glance at me, but he found
+it hard to resist. "Oh! pshaw, Ma," replied the old man gently. "There
+ain't none of that goin' on. He ain't a marryin' man," and we heard his
+slippered feet pattering softly over the oil-clothed entry, and his mild
+face beamed on us through the net door, which he held open for a moment
+before he came out and seated himself in the rocking-chair.
+
+"Well, now, this _is_ comfortable," he said, with a cheerfully social
+air. "I can tell you this is a night for authors. Here's a chance for
+poetry!" with a wave of his thin, weather-worn hand toward the peaceful
+fields. "Made any this evenin'?" he inquired. "Ain't? well, I guess
+you'll never come across a more inspirin' night," he said, with some
+disappointment. "I expected likely you'd have some you could say right
+off. Fer a plain farmer, I don't s'pose there's anybody fonder'n I am of
+verses," he said, musingly. "I b'lieve I told ye 'twas in our family. I
+wish you could have met my uncle, Mis' Marriot, died on his
+ninety-second birthday, and had writ a long piece on each birthday for a
+matter of forty year. That ther man was talented, I tell ye. There
+wasn't no occasion he couldn't write a piece onto. Why, the night Ma and
+me was married (we was married in Ma's sister's parlor) we hadn't more'n
+turned 'round from the minister, 'n before anybody had a chance t'
+congratulate us, uncle, he steps right up in front of us, an' sez he:
+
+  'Now you are married, an' man an' wife
+  May you live happy this mortial life,
+  An' when your days on this earth is o'er
+  May you both meet together on the evergreen shore.'
+
+"It come to him, jus' come to him that minute, like a flash," said the
+old man, reflectively, the pathos of his sweet, tremulous voice lending
+unspeakable melody to the preposterous stanza.
+
+Mr. Hopper had evidently settled himself for the remainder of the
+evening, and after a time Mr. Longworth bade us good-night, and went
+across to the Bangs homestead.
+
+All that night I tossed about on my uncomfortable feather-bed, or
+rather, when I found I could not sleep, I rose after a time, and wrapped
+in my dressing-gown, I sat by my tiny window, watching the shadows of
+the wind-blown locust-boughs on the moonlit grass below, full of the
+dreams which are the stuff that romances are made of, and which, though
+I had often used them as "material," I had never known myself before;
+shy and tender dreams they were, that glorified that summer night, and
+kept me wakeful until dawn.
+
+The next day and the next I was ill and feverish, so ill that I could
+not rise. Mr. Longworth brought for me great bunches of choice flowers,
+for which he must have sent Wilson to the next town of New Sidon, and a
+dainty basket of fruit. The third day I rose and dressed toward noon,
+and weak as I felt, I decided to walk down to the post-office, for I
+thought perhaps the air would do me good, and beside, the mail was never
+brought up until after dark, and I longed to find if Mr. ---- had
+written me as I expected, about the manuscript. I knew he would be very
+prompt with me.
+
+I found several letters in the box for me, and eagerly scanning the
+envelopes, I discovered the well-known buff tint, with the red device of
+a female figure with a book clasped to the breast, that is the livery
+of "----'s Magazine." I tore it open, reading as I slowly walked. Mr.
+---- had written as follows, in his hurried hand:
+
+
+"OFFICE OF ----'s MAGAZINE.
+
+"MY DEAR MISS MARRIOTT:
+
+"I return the MSS. you sent us, and I have no hesitation in saying that
+your friend is a genius. In fact, I was so chained by the somewhat wild
+and singular style that I sat up most of Tuesday night to go through it
+myself.
+
+"Of course in their present disconnected state, the fragments are quite
+unavailable to us, but when worked into a story, they ought to make a
+success. I hope we shall have the first reading of the completed book. I
+understand it is the work of a beginner, but it bears none of the marks
+of the novice, and I can but think we have discovered the 'coming
+American novelist.'
+
+"By the way, how is your own book coming on?
+
+"Yours in haste,
+
+"---- ----."
+
+I had walked on some distance from the post-office as I read this, for
+Mr. ----'s chirography was almost undecipherable, even to one accustomed
+to it. I was just folding the letter to replace it in the envelope, when
+I heard heavy footsteps hurrying behind me. I turned my head and saw
+Wilson, quite red in the face with trying to overtake me. "Beg pardon,
+Miss," he said, touching his hat, "I saw you coming out of the office,
+and--I'd like to speak to you a minute, if I may."
+
+"What is it?" I asked, somewhat surprised. I stepped back from the path,
+and Wilson stooped down awkwardly, and picked a twig from a low bush
+that grew by the fence. "Well," he began, drawing a long breath, "I've
+been thinking it over, and I've made up my mind to tell you. I expect I
+ought to have done it before, but my orders was so strict, and--you see
+I'm saving up to get married, and a man hates to lose a good place,--but
+that's neither here nor there, Miss, the truth is, I ain't Mr.
+Longworth's nurse, and I ain't his valley neither. I'm--I'm his
+attendant."
+
+"Well, what of it?" I said, with some irritation. How could Wilson's
+absurd distinctions matter to me? What did I care whether he called
+himself valet, or nurse, or attendant?
+
+To his credit, be it said that there was no tone of half-exultation,
+almost pardonable after my manner of annoyance, as he went on. His
+heavy, spatulate finger-tips were stripping the little twig bare of its
+leaves. As he continued, I fixed my lowered eyes on that bit of alder. I
+remember every tiny, bright brown knot on it, and how one worm-eaten
+leaf curled at its edges.
+
+"You see," said Wilson, clumsily, "I mean I was his attendant up to the
+Retreat. It was a real high-toned place, and they did not take any
+dangerous ones, only folks like him. His people ain't the kind that
+stand for price. They've got plenty, and they don't care what they pay.
+I dare say you've been in his father's store many a time,--Longworth &
+Whittles, one of the biggest and best dry-goods stores on Sixth avenue.
+The old gentleman's rolling in gold, and there ain't a nicer lady in New
+York City than Mrs. Longworth. You see, it was this way. Young Mr.
+Longworth didn't like business, and they sent him abroad to be educated,
+and when he come back he just fooled around and went out a good deal,
+and finally, he got in with some literary folks. One of his friends took
+him to their receptions, and he got it into his head he was going to be
+a writer. His folks didn't care, they'd have paid a publisher any price
+to take his books if it would have done any good; but finally he took to
+shuttin' himself up in his room day and night, writin' all the time,
+and it told on him pretty well, for I guess he'd never wrote anything
+but cheques before. And then he'd burn it up as fast as he wrote, and
+not eat, and not come out o' that room for days at a time. He kept
+a-saying it would be all right if it would only fit together but that's
+just where it is, it don't any of it fit together. And now he just
+writes over and over the same things he wrote a year ago. He don't know
+it, he burns 'em up, and then he thinks it's all different. He got so
+bad the doctors said he'd be better up to Dr. Balsam's Retreat, where
+they could kind of soothe him down, and make him think his health was
+out of order, and get his mind off his writing, but he did have a pretty
+bad fever up there, an' ever since he thinks he was editor or somethin'
+on some paper, and he can tell it off straight as a string. He's all
+right about everything else, and if you didn't know about it, you'd
+think he was just what he says, sure enough."
+
+"It's pretty near killed his mother. Seems funny; a young fellow with
+nothing to do but spend money, getting it into his head to write books!
+Well, they said I wasn't to tell anybody, and I _ain't_ told anybody but
+you, and I thought as you was a writer, and pretty busy, I guessed you
+wouldn't want to waste your time over his book. They say, folks do, that
+it's first-rate, as far as it goes; but you see it don't never get any
+farther, and it never will. I thought I'd better tell you about it,"
+said Wilson, his plebeian, kindly face crimson with a delicate pity that
+would have done honor to an aristocrat, and still working assiduously at
+the little twig, "I knew you was a genuine writer yourself, and it
+seemed a pity for you to take up your valuable time helpin' him on,
+about something that can't amount to anything."
+
+May he be forgiven that gentle falsehood!
+
+I looked for a moment at the wide-spread field and distant woodland,
+lying green in the peaceful sunshine, at the place grown so dear to me,
+that now whirled before my eyes. Far down the road a heavy farm-wagon
+creaked its way toward us, in a cloud of white dust.
+
+"You did quite right to tell me, Wilson," I said, turning to go. "No one
+shall hear of it from me."
+
+I looked down at the buff envelope from "----'s Magazine," which I had
+crushed in my hand, and smoothed it out mechanically, as I went on in
+the increasing heat.
+
+It was only August, but my summer was over.
+
+
+
+
+AN AFRICAN DISCOVERY.
+
+
+"Of course it is very curious; but if you'll pardon me, my dear fellow,
+you might as well tell me you had found a philosopher's stone."
+
+Still, the rough glass phial, with odd metal bands around its neck, had
+a fascination for me. I picked it up again, and tilted it idly back and
+forth in my hand, watching the slimy brown fluid, the color of
+poppy-juice, slip along its sides.
+
+Hilyard smoked on imperturbably. The color mounted under his bronzed
+skin up to the light rings of his hair; there was a momentary angry
+flash in his pale blue eyes, but it was only for an instant.
+
+"Perhaps you would like to try it, since you are so skeptical," he said,
+grimly.
+
+"Thanks, I have no wish to poison myself, and I have no doubt it is a
+poison; but what I do doubt is the remarkable qualities you claim for
+it. How did you come across the vile stuff, anyway?"
+
+Hilyard stretched himself comfortably in his chair, and took his beloved
+pipe from his handsome mouth. "Oh! well, you know," he said, lazily, "I
+don't claim to be a Stanley by any means, but I did go a good bit into
+Africa. I wasn't bent on discovering anything, and I loafed around, and
+shot big game when there was any to shoot, and I learned some odd things
+from those devils of witch-doctors, as well as a few on my own account.
+You remember my old craze for medicine and chemistry?"
+
+"I fell in with a tribe of savages who interested me immensely. The art
+of torture was brought to a perfection among them that would have made
+the persecutors of the Inquisition turn green with envy. It was refined
+torture, such as one would not expect to see save among those who
+possessed mental powers equal to their cruelty. No decapitations, no
+stranglings, among these delicate fiends, I can assure you; nor were
+they satisfied with a day's torment, that should culminate in death.
+Captives were kept for weeks, frequently for months: the wounds made by
+one day's torture were dressed at night, and stimulating drink given to
+keep up the strength, that they might endure for a longer period. It was
+the custom to deliver prisoners or offenders to the family of the chief
+or king for the first day's torment; then down through the various
+nobles, or what corresponded to the aristocracy (and I assure you the
+class distinctions were as closely drawn as in May-Fair), until, if the
+unfortunate possessed a fine physique, it was not unusual for almost
+every family in the tribe to have had a day's amusement with him; and it
+was considered a point of honor not to actually take life, but rather
+let it spend itself to the last drop, in agonies undreamed of among what
+we call the civilized, while to invent some new and horrible form of
+torture conferred an honor upon the discoverer such as we give men who
+have made some wonderful advance in art or science.
+
+"'How could I endure such sights?' Oh! well, one gets hardened to
+anything, you know, and to tell the truth, I was in search of a new
+sensation, and I found it. I watched with as much fascination as the
+savages--no, more--for it was new to me and old to them. Oh! come,
+Lewis, you needn't draw off your chair; and that reproving,
+Sunday-school expression is rather refreshing from a man who upholds
+vivisection. I tell you candidly that there is nothing on earth
+comparable to the fearful, curious combination of pleasure and horror
+with which one watches torture one is powerless to stop. It is morbid,
+and probably loathsome. No. It is not morbid, after all; it is natural,
+and not a diseased state of mind. Have you never seen a sweet little
+child, with a face like an angel, pull the wings from a butterfly, or
+half kill a pet animal, and laugh joyfully when it writhed about? I
+have. The natural man loves bloodshed, and loves to hurt men and
+creatures. It is bred in the bone with all of us, only, as far as the
+body is concerned, this love is an almost impotent factor in modern
+civilization, for we have deified the soul and intellect to such an
+extent, that it is them we seek to goad and wound, when the lust of
+cruelty oppresses us, since they have grown to be considered the more
+important part; and we know, too, that the embittered soul avenges
+itself upon its own body, so that we strike the subtler blow. What we
+call teasing, is the most diluted form of the appetite. Well, this is
+wide of the mark, I suppose. At any rate, my dusky friends, presumably
+having no sensitive souls to attack, did their very best with their
+enemies' bodies, and as I was saying, theirs was no mean accomplishment
+in that line.
+
+"I am not going to wound your susceptibilities by describing some of the
+functions which I have witnessed under that blazing sun. I will only
+tell you that during one especial occasion of rejoicing, a feast was
+given after a victory over a neighboring tribe, when the bound captives
+were piled together in black, shining heaps, that had a constant
+vermicular movement, each human pile guarded by a soldier. The chief at
+whose right hand I sat, being filled with joy, as well as rather too
+much drink, began boasting to me of the glories of his tribe, of his
+possessions, of the valor of his warriors, and above all of the great
+wisdom and learning of his medicine-man, who was beyond all wizards, and
+upon whom witchcraft was powerless, and who prepared a poison for such
+of the chief's enemies as it was not expedient to openly destroy; and
+this poison, he explained to me, was of a secret and mysterious nature,
+and unknown to any other tribe.
+
+"My curiosity was somewhat aroused, and I questioned him, whereupon he
+told me that the drug, being tasteless, was given in food or drink, and
+that the victim was seized with a terrible and immeasurable sadness and
+depth of despair, in which life appeared too horrible to endure, and
+which the unfortunate always ended by seizing a weapon of some sort and
+killing himself; and the chief, being of an inquiring mind, had caused
+the poison to be administered to a man who was carefully guarded and
+allowed no weapon.
+
+"'And what did he do?' I queried, for the chief assured me that the drug
+itself did not produce death, but only caused an irresistible desire for
+it.
+
+"The chief did not reply in words, but with a meaning smile, pointed to
+a vein on his black wrist, and set his sharp, pointed teeth against it,
+in a way that was a reply.
+
+"I was anxious to see for myself, naturally, suspecting some
+hocus-pocus, so I ventured to be respectfully dubious.
+
+"The chief was in an amiable mood; he bade me visit his tent with my
+servant at moon-rise, and he would prove that this was no lie, but the
+truth.
+
+"When we went out, it was about eleven o'clock, and the surrounding
+jungle was full of the horrible noises of an African night; the wail of
+the small lemur, that sounds like the death-moan of a child; the more
+distant roar of the lion in the black depths of the forest, too thick
+for the moonlight to ever penetrate; the giant trees of the bombax
+around the encampment, wreathed with llianes and parasitical poison
+vines that cast fantastic shadows on the ground, white with the
+perfectly white moonlight of the tropics, that reminds one of the
+electric light in its purity of ray and the blackness of the shadows
+that contrast with it.
+
+"Noiselessly my black servant and I proceeded to the chief's enclosure.
+His slaves permitted us to pass, by his orders, and we found ourselves
+in his tent, where he sat in grave silence on a pile of skins, the flare
+of a torch revealing fitfully the ugly face of the medicine-man,
+crouched with due humility on the earthen floor at his master's feet.
+After an exchange of compliments, his highness informed me that he had
+ordered one of his female slaves to be brought, that the poison had
+already been administered without her knowledge, and he also briefly
+remarked, as a proof of his clemency, that it was fortunate for her that
+the white man had doubted the drink, as otherwise she would have been
+given over to torture, since she had proved unfaithful to her lord, the
+chief having bestowed her on one of his sentries, whom she had betrayed
+with a soldier.
+
+"As he spoke sounds were heard outside, and, between two guards, the
+unfortunate woman was dragged into the tent. It was not lawful for her
+to address the chief, so she stood, panting, dishevelled, but silent, in
+the yellow torchlight. Her hair was nearly straight and hung in tangles
+on her beautiful shoulders; without so much as a girdle for covering,
+she felt no shame, but only looked about with rolling, terrified eyes,
+the picture of a snared animal.
+
+"No one spoke. She stood swaying from side to side, her beautiful figure
+pliant as grass.
+
+"Finally, with a long moan, she threw herself at the chief's feet. He
+regarded her impassively, and she gathered herself into a sitting
+posture, rocking to and fro, her head buried in her arms."
+
+"And you made no remonstrance?" I said.
+
+"The poison had already been administered, my dear Lewis," said Hilyard.
+"And beside, it was in the interest of science. It really seemed a
+shame to pick out such a beautiful creature; they are so rare in those
+tribes," he continued, regretfully.
+
+"Well, we sat there, perfectly mute, for about half an hour, I suppose.
+The chief was almost as impassive as an Englishman. I have seen the
+Almehs in Cairo, but I have never seen real poetry of motion--mind more
+completely expressed by matter--than that woman's body translating the
+anguish she endured; languor turning to deep weariness, weariness to
+agony, agony to despair. There was not a note in the gamut of mental
+suffering that she left unstruck--that savage, whom one would not guess
+possessed a mind. There came a pause. She looked about with a wild,
+fixed purpose in her eyes; like a panther she leaped on me with her
+sinuous body, in a second she had snatched the knife from my belt, and
+had fallen on the earthen floor, her head almost severed from the trunk
+by the violence of the blow she had struck at her throat with the keen
+blade. The chief made a sign to the guards who had brought her in (one
+of whom, by the way, was her deceived husband) to remove the body, and
+then he inquired, with some satisfaction, if I believed in the drug.
+
+"I was about to leave on the morrow for the coast, and I begged with all
+humility for the formula, or what answered for it, of the medicine-man,
+who shook his head decidedly.
+
+"From a corner of the tent he produced a small wicker cage, in the
+bottom of which lay coiled a snake of a bright orange yellow color,
+whose very triangular head showed it to be an especially venomous
+variety of the _naja_ species.
+
+"Muttering a few words and crooning to it after the manner of
+snake-charmers, it presently became lethargic, and he seized it by the
+neck and poured a few drops from an earthen bottle down its throat; then
+he dropped its tawny coils into its cage again, and placed the cage in
+front of me. Soon the serpent roused. It glided frantically about its
+cage; like a trail of molten gold was its color. Suddenly it coiled upon
+itself in a spiral, and _stung itself to death_!
+
+"After the most profound praise and flattery, and the present of a
+little glass medicine dropper which I chanced to have with me, and a
+small quantity of arsenic, which he tested with very satisfactory
+results, on a dog, he gave me a portion of the drug, but I'm sorry to
+say I could not prevail on the old scoundrel to give or sell the secret
+of its composition," concluded Hilyard regretfully, lifting the phial
+with tenderness. "I've tried to analyze it myself, and I sent it to a
+celebrated chemist, but the ingredients completely defy classification,
+and tests seem powerless to determine anything except that they are
+purely vegetable," he said, shaking the liquid angrily, and then rising
+to lock it in his cabinet.
+
+I, too, rose with a shudder, half-believing, half-sceptical, yet none
+the less with a strong distaste for the memory of the story I had just
+heard. I left Hilyard arranging the shelf of his cabinet, and opening
+the long French window I walked out on the lawn.
+
+Under the elm I saw Mrs. Mershon, Amy's aunt, with whom we were all
+staying. Kate Mershon was idly tossing a tennis-ball into the air, and
+making ineffectual strokes at it with a racquet, and at Mrs. Mershon's
+feet sat Amy, reading, the golden sunlight resting tenderly on her head,
+and bringing out the reddish tones of her hair. We were to be married in
+a month, and she looked so beautiful in the peace and quiet of the
+waning day, that I wished we two were alone that I might take her in my
+yearning arms and raise that exquisite colorless face to my lips. She
+never seemed so lovely as when contrasted with Kate's mature, sensual
+beauty, dark and rich as the Creole, and completely devoid of that touch
+of the pure and heavenly without which no woman's face is perfect to me.
+Amy was brilliant, full of raillery at times, but in the depths of
+those great clear eyes, like agates, in the candor of that white face,
+like a tea-rose, one read the beautiful chastity of soul in whose
+presence passion becomes mixed with a reverence that sanctifies it.
+
+Later that evening, when the drawing-room was gay with light and music,
+and Kate was singing one of Judie's least objectionable songs, with a
+verve and grace of gesture that the prima donna herself need not have
+despised, Amy and I went out on the moonlit lawn, leaving Hilyard
+leaning over the piano, and Mrs. Mershon sleeping peacefully in a
+corner. We strolled up and down the gravelled path in a silence more
+pregnant than words, and I felt my darling's hands clasped on my arm,
+and heard her gown sweep the little pebbles along the walk.
+
+Something brought to my mind the conversation with Hilyard, and I half
+thought to repeat it, but the night seemed too peaceful to sully by
+telling a tale of such horrors, and beside, I fancied Amy disliked
+Hilyard, although he had been intimate with the family for years, and in
+fact, he and Amy had almost grown up together; but he had been
+travelling for three years, and since his return Amy declared that he
+had grown cynical and hard, and altogether disagreeable, and as I really
+liked him, although our ideas on most subjects were radically opposed, I
+thought I would not connect him, in Amy's mind, with an unpleasant
+story.
+
+I looked down into the delicate face lifted to mine, and pressed a
+fervent kiss on the cream-white cheek. There was usually, even in her
+tenderest moments, a certain virginal shrinking from a caress that was
+an added charm, but to-night she moved closer to my side, and even
+touched her lips to mine shyly, an occurrence so rare that I trembled
+with joy, realizing as never before, that this sweet white flower was
+all my own. I wanted to kiss her again, and with more fervor, upon the
+mouth, but for her I had the feeling that I could not guard her, this
+dear blossom of purest whiteness, too jealously. I would no more have
+permitted myself, during our betrothal, to give her a very ardent
+caress, the memory of which, however harmless it might seem to the
+majority of affianced people, might cause her a troubled thought, than I
+would have permitted a stranger to kiss my sister. Her maiden shyness
+was a bloom which I did not wish to brush off. I took her hand in my own
+as we turned to retrace our steps to the house, and stood looking down
+at her in the wonderful September moonlight. She seemed a vestal virgin,
+in her long, clinging dress of white wool, with a scarf thrown about her
+head and throat.
+
+Within, Kate had finished her selections from opera and bouffe, and out
+into the soft evening drifted her rich contralto in the yearning strains
+of the "Blumenlied."
+
+  "I long to lay in blessing
+  My hands upon thy hair,
+  Praying that God may preserve thee
+  So pure, so bright, so fair!"
+
+I bent over and touched my lips to Amy's forehead reverently. "God keep
+you, my snow-flower!" I whispered. And then we went silently in
+together.
+
+The next day was so fine that Mrs. Mershon decided to drive over to the
+neighboring town in the afternoon for some shopping, and Hilyard,
+needing some simple chemicals for an experiment, which he hoped to find
+there at the chemist's, accompanied her. Kate and Amy and I had intended
+to go to a friend's for tennis, but at luncheon I received a telegram
+calling me to the city on urgent business. We were only a half hour's
+trip out, but I thought I might be detained until too late for dinner,
+so promising to return as early in the evening as possible, I hurried
+off.
+
+On arriving in New York, I found the affair which had threatened to be
+a prolix one, only demanded a few minutes' attention from me. I strolled
+into the Club; there chanced to be no one there whom I cared to see; the
+city was hot and ill-smelling, and I decided I could not do better than
+surprise Amy by returning earlier than she expected, and accordingly I
+took the first train out, walking up from the station.
+
+The little villa looked quite deserted as I approached. I wondered if
+Amy and Kate had gone to the Waddells' without me. I went to the side
+door, and hearing voices in the library, I went softly into the back
+drawing-room, with the foolish, boyish thought that I would walk in
+suddenly and interrupt an exchange of confidences which I should pretend
+to have overheard. I do not know what impelled me to play such an
+antiquated, worn-out trick; however, I was just advancing into the room
+through the wide-open but curtained doorway, when a chance sentence
+made me pause, struck as by a blow in the face. Through an interstice,
+left by an ill-adjusted fold of the portière, I had a glimpse of the
+room. My betrothed, in one of her favorite white negligées, was
+stretched on the Turkish divan by the open fireplace, filled now with an
+enormous bowl of flowers. Her arms were raised above her head, and there
+was an enigmatic smile on her lips; her face had the sleepy wisdom of
+the Sphinx. Kate was crouched on the floor by her side, listening
+eagerly. Now and then she would say: "Oh! how clever you were!" "So he
+never guessed." "Yes, yes, and then, what did he say then?" urging her
+on with a feverish greed for details, which my affianced did not disdain
+to impart lazily, the faint, contemptuous smile always upon the pink
+lips I had not ventured to kiss with ardor.
+
+I did not know that I was listening, as I stood there, panting for
+breath, my hand clutched against my throat, lest I should groan in my
+agony. Phrase by phrase, I heard the whole dreadful story, told,
+without the shadow of regret or repentance, by the woman in whom I
+believed as I believed in Heaven, told with cynical laughter instead,
+and impatient contempt of the innocence, sullied years ago by
+Hilyard--the friend I trusted and loved. I could draw to-day exactly the
+pattern of that portière, the curling leaves of dull crimson, the
+intricate tracery of gold thread.
+
+"And Lewis?" suggested Kate, at length.
+
+Amy rolled her head restlessly on the pillow. The soft golden hair was
+loosened from its pins, and fell over the slender shoulders. "Oh! well,
+one must marry, you know," she said, indifferently.
+
+I moved away silently and unnoticed. I went to brush my hair aside from
+my wet forehead, and noticed, parenthetically, that my hand was soiled
+with blood, where my nails had bitten the palm. With the death of love
+and faith in me had come an immense capacity for cunning, concealment
+and cruelty, the trinity of power that abides in certain beasts. Came
+also a dull purpose, growing each moment in strength.
+
+I do not remember that I felt a single throe of expiring love, the love
+that had filled my heart to the brim. An immeasurable nausea of disgust
+overcame me, to the exclusion of other ideas, a fixed sense that a thing
+so dangerous in its angelic disguise, so poisonous and loathsome, must
+not remain on earth; this jest of Satan must be removed lest it
+contaminate all with whom it came in contact. Yet did there live any
+being uncontaminated already? Were not all vile, even as she was vile?
+My brain reeled. Surely to the eyes of any beholder, she was the
+incarnation of purity! That which animated me was not a personal sense
+of grievance so much as the inborn, natural desire one feels to
+exterminate a pest, to crush a reptile, the more dangerous that it
+crawls through flowers to kill. As I have said, I felt power for
+strategy, unknown to my nature before, rising in me. Certain ideas were
+suggested to me, on which I acted with coolness and promptness. I felt
+like a minister of God's will, charged with destruction. It no longer
+remained for me to decide what to do: some power dwelling in me impelled
+me, against which I could not, even if I would, have struggled.
+
+I went to my room, still unobserved, washed my face and hands, and
+looking in the mirror, saw my face reflected, calm and placid, unmarked
+by the last half-hour. I descended the stairs, and came in by the porch.
+
+Amy sprang up from the couch as I entered, gaily humming a tune. It
+chanced to be the song to which we had listened the night before:
+
+  "I fain would lay in blessing,"--
+
+She drew her loose tea-gown about her, and tried to gather up the
+unfastened masses of golden hair, with a charming blush.
+
+"Lewis!" she exclaimed. "Where did you come from? How you frightened
+me!"
+
+"Well, you see, after all, I was not detained so long, and I thought if
+I hurried back, we might go to the Waddells'! I heard nothing of you, so
+I just ran up to get off the city dust concluding you had gone on
+without me. In fact, I was starting over there, when I thought you might
+be in here, so I came back--and found you. But it's rather late to go,
+don't you think?" said I. I had retreated to the window and stood with
+my back studiously turned, while my betrothed repaired the ravages made
+in her toilet by her siesta.
+
+"Yes, indeed," said Kate, "It is too late by far, and so hot! Let us be
+lazy until dinner. Do you want to read to us while we embroider? I know
+you do!" and going to the book-case, she brought one of Hamerton's
+books which I had been reading aloud to them the day before.
+
+Amy had quietly disappeared, and came down in an incredibly short time
+in a fresh, simple gown, with her work in her hand. I read until dinner,
+or rather until it was time to dress, and then I laid the book aside,
+and went up-stairs with the rest. Hilyard and Mrs. Mershon might return
+at any time. I stole downstairs, and into the room devoted to Hilyard's
+chemical experiments. Fool! I had forgotten to bring a cup or bottle
+with me. I looked hurriedly around the bare room, and discovering a
+broken bottle on a shelf, I took the key of the cabinet from its place
+and unlocked it.
+
+Yes, there in the corner stood the rough glass bottle, with the metal
+around it. I removed the stopper, and having no idea of the amount
+necessary to produce the desired result, poured out several
+tablespoonfuls, filling up the phial from the faucet at the rough sink
+in one corner of the room. I replaced the phial, locked the cabinet,
+and concealing the broken bottle in my dressing-gown, lest I should meet
+one of the servants, I retraced my steps to my own room. I was not
+wholly credulous of its marvellous properties, although Hilyard was not
+given to boasting or lying--except to women--but I believed it at least
+to be a poison, and I believed that it defied analysis, as he said.
+
+I took from my drawer a pocket flask of sherry, and emptying all but a
+wine glass, I added the drug, first tasting and inhaling it, to make
+sure it had neither perceptible flavor nor odor. Then I locked the flask
+in my dressing-case as the dinner-bell rang.
+
+We were a merry party that night. Mrs. Mershon went to sleep as usual in
+the easy-chair in the corner, but Hilyard was gayer than I had seen him
+for weeks. A capital mimic, he gave us some of his afternoon's
+experiences in the little country town, occasionally rousing Mrs.
+Mershon with a start by saying, "Isn't that so, Aunt?" and she, with a
+corroborative nod and smile, would doze off again. Cards were suggested,
+but, mindful of my hand, its palm still empurpled and scarified, I
+suggested that Kate sing for us instead, and we kept her at the piano
+until she insisted that Amy should take her place.
+
+Amy was tired, she declared, and indeed, the rose-white face did look
+paler than its wont, but she went to the piano and sang Gounod's "Ave
+Maria," and two or three airs from Mozart. She always sang sacred music.
+Then she sank into a chair, looking utterly fatigued.
+
+"There, Amy," I exclaimed, "I have just the thing for you. I went into
+Lafitte's to-day to order some claret down, and he insisted on filling a
+flask with some priceless sherry for me. I'll bring you a glass." Amy
+protested, "indeed she did not need it, she should be better to-morrow,"
+with a languid glance from those clear eyes; but I ran up to my room,
+and returned with the flask.
+
+"Just my clumsiness," I said, ruefully looking at the flask, "I uncorked
+it, to see if it were really all he said, and I've spilled nearly the
+whole of it."
+
+"Oh! come now, Lewis," laughed Hilyard, "Is that the best story you can
+invent?"
+
+I laughed too, as I brought a glass, and poured out all that remained.
+Hilyard, I had managed, should hold the glass, and as I assumed to
+examine the flask, he carried the wine to Amy. Not that I wished, in
+case of future inquiries, to implicate him, but I felt a melodramatic
+desire that he should give his poison to Amy with his own hand: the wish
+to seethe the kid in its mother's milk.
+
+I watched her slowly drain the glass, without one pang that I had given
+her death to drink. I experienced an atrocious satisfaction in feeling
+that no chance whim had deterred her from consuming it all. I took the
+flask to my room again, saying that I had forgotten a letter from my
+mother, which I wished Amy to read, as it contained a tender message for
+her.
+
+As I stood alone in my room a fear overcame me that I had been a
+credulous fool. Suppose the whole story of the drug were a fabrication,
+what a farce were this! Who ever heard of a poison with so strange an
+effect? True, but who had ever heard of chloroform a century ago? Let it
+go that he was a discoverer, and I the first to profit by it. I would
+take this ground, at least until it was disproved; time enough then to
+devise other means.
+
+Amy's room was next to mine; on the other side slept--and soundly, too,
+I would wager--her aunt. Indeed, our rooms connected by a door, always
+locked and without a key, of course. By a sudden impulse I took out my
+bunch of keys. Fortune favored me; an old key, that of my room at
+College, not only fitted perfectly, but opened it as softly as one
+could wish, and the door itself never creaked. Locking it again, I went
+into Amy's room through the hall. A low light was burning. I looked
+about anxiously. Would she find the necessary means at hand without
+arousing the household? It must be. Suicide must be quite apparent, and
+the instrument must be suggested by its presence, without any search.
+
+Among the trinkets in the large tray on her bureau, lay a tiny dagger
+with a sheath. I remembered the day Hilyard gave it to her. The rainy
+day when we were all looking over his Eastern curiosities, and she had
+admired it, and he had insisted on her accepting it. The handle was of
+carved jade, representing a lizard whose eyes were superb rubies, and a
+band of uncut rubies ran around the place where the little curved blade
+began. Ah! that was it! The very stones made one dream of drops of
+blood. I laid it carelessly on the bureau, at the edge of the tray. If
+she noticed its displacement, she would think the maid had been looking
+at it, and the very fact of her picking it up and laying it among her
+other trinkets would bring it to her thoughts when she awoke, with mind
+set on death. _His_ poison, _his_ dagger--what fitness! Heaven itself
+was helping me, and approving my ridding earth of this Lamia whose blood
+ran evil.
+
+When I gave Amy the letter, she took it languidly, saying she would read
+it in her room; she was going to bed; the wine had made her drowsy; and
+the others, too, declaring themselves worn with the great heat of the
+day, we bade each other good-night, and the house was soon silent.
+
+I undressed on going to my room, since, in case of certain events, it
+would be to my interest to appear to have just risen from bed, and I
+even lay down, wrapped in my dressing-gown, and put out my light. I
+almost wondered that I felt no greater resentment and rage at Hilyard,
+yet my sense of justice precluded it. As well blame the tree around
+which the poison vine creeps and clings. I looked deeper than would the
+world, which doubtless, judging from the surface, would have condemned
+him rather than her, had all been known. She of the Madonna face and the
+angel smile, anything but wronged? Never! The world would have acquitted
+her triumphantly had she committed all the sins of the Borgias. For
+myself, alas! I had heard her own lips condemn her, when, led by wanton
+recklessness, or the occult sense of sympathy, she had talked to her
+cousin this afternoon. Hilyard? Yes, it had chanced to be Hilyard, but
+she, and not he, was most to blame. Hers was not a sin wept over and
+expiated by remorse and tears; it was the soul, the essence of being,
+that was corrupt to the very core in her. Had madness seized me when I
+listened? I know not. I know I lay calmly and quietly, certain only
+that it was well she was to die, certain that, if this failed, she must
+die in another way before night came again, pitying neither her nor
+myself in the apathy which held me, believing myself only the instrument
+of some mighty power which was directing me, and against whose will I
+could not rebel, if I wished.
+
+For some time I could hear my betrothed moving about in her room; then
+all was quiet, and she had doubtless lain down to sleep. By the
+moonlight that filled my room I consulted my watch after a little while,
+feeling that I had lost all sense of time, and found that it was half
+past twelve, and that we had been upstairs over an hour. I concluded it
+would hardly be safe to open the door yet; she might not be asleep. For
+another half hour I lay patiently waiting. My mind was not excited, and
+I reviewed rather the trifling events of my few hours in the city than
+what had transpired since.
+
+At last I rose, and in the dead quiet I moved softly to the connecting
+door. I knew that it was concealed in Amy's room by a heavy portière,
+and as it opened on my side, I had only to hide myself behind the
+curtain's folds--as once before on that previous day, alas!--and,
+unguessed by her, watch her at my ease.
+
+The key moved gently in the lock; the lock yielded; a moment more and I
+had pulled a tiny fold of the curtain aside, and commanded a full view
+of the silent room. It was flooded with moonlight, and as light as day.
+The bed was curtained, after the English fashion, but I fancied I could
+hear a slight rustle of the coverings, as though one were roused, and
+stirring restlessly. So light was the room that I could discern the
+articles on the bureau and dressing-table. A branch of a great elm,
+which grew at the side of the house, stretched across one window, and
+its leaves, dancing in the night-breeze, made an ever-changing pattern
+in shadow on the carpet. Did ever accepted lover keep such a tryst as
+mine before? And she, just waking from her first sleep behind the
+delicate white curtains of that bed, her tryst was with death, not with
+love.
+
+From the grove back of the house came a whip-poor-will's plaintive song,
+pulsing in a tide of melody on the moonlit air. Was it a moan from the
+bed, half-coherent and hopeless in cadence? Heaven grant that she waken
+no one until it is too late, I thought fervently. I heard her step from
+the bed. Once I would have hidden my eyes as devoutly as the pagan
+blinded himself lest he should see Artemis, on whom it was desecration
+to look, but now I hesitated no more to gaze on her than on any other
+beautiful hateful thing which I should crush. Her loveliness stirred
+neither my senses nor my compassion; both were forever dead, I knew, to
+woman. Full in the stream of moonlight she stood, the soft, white folds
+of her nightdress enveloping her from the throat to the small feet they
+half hid. Her eyes were wide open, she was awake.
+
+She remained for some moments by the window, meditating, apparently. She
+talked to herself rapidly and in low undertones. What would I have given
+to be able to hear all she thus said! Her expression was one of deep
+mental agony, and I began to feel a growing confidence. How can words
+express the hideousness of the change of countenance, the indescribable
+horror and distress of a creature that is being pressed closer and
+closer toward a yawning gulf of blackness from which there is no escape?
+How relate the outward signs of an inward terror at which we can but
+vaguely guess? Would that I could have penetrated to the depths of that
+soul for one instant to realize completely the bitterness of the dregs
+it was draining! She advanced to the middle of the room; she stretched
+out both arms with a gesture of horror and despair. A long, convulsive
+shudder shook her from head to foot. Her eyes filled with the unearthly
+fear of one who sees walls closing in on her, of one bound, who sees
+flames creeping closer and closer. In one instant I could see her pass
+the line dividing mere mental anguish from insanity; the unmistakable
+light of madness shone in her glance. With a cry of delight she seized
+the little dagger. She was rushing down the corridor like the wind.
+Should I follow her? I hesitated a moment. I heard a long, low cry of
+mental agony; all the sounds of a house aroused from slumber by some
+dreadful calamity.
+
+Had she gone to Hilyard's room, to die on his threshold? It was silent
+once more, except for the exclamations from the different bed-chambers,
+and the hurrying sounds of footsteps down the corridor. Then I, too,
+following the rest of the household, entered the room of death. Amy sat
+curled up on the side of the bed, laughing like a pleased child at the
+red stream that trickled from Hilyard's breast among the light bed
+coverings, and dripped slowly to the floor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Although I am never gay any more, I am not unhappy, for I am more than
+satisfied with the effect of Hilyard's African drug. It is true that it
+did not fulfill with accuracy all that he claimed for it; perhaps I gave
+an overdose, or too little. If that is the case, he suffered for not
+having been more exact. He should have mentioned, in telling his little
+story, the amount necessary. However, as I say, I have no reason to find
+fault with its results in this case.
+
+In looking over the effects of the deceased for Mrs. Mershon, I
+concluded that I should probably meet with no occasion to use the little
+glass phial again, and as the drug seemed to be rather uncertain in its
+ultimate effect, I decided, after some reflection, to throw it away, and
+accordingly I emptied it out of the laboratory window on the flower-bed
+beneath. I half expected to see the rose-bushes wither under it, but it
+only shone slimily on the leaves for a while, and then was washed off by
+a timely shower.
+
+My friends have not tormented me with condolences, for as one of them
+wrote me, the grief that had befallen me was beyond the reach of human
+consolation. There are few indeed who lose a friend by death, and a
+betrothed wife by madness, in one terrible night. My fidelity, it is
+said, is most pathetic, to her who is hopelessly lost to me, for though
+years have passed by, I am still so devoted to her memory, that no other
+woman has claimed a moment of my attention. And my sister who is rather
+sentimental in her expressions, declares that the love I had for Amy
+drained my nature dry. I think she is possibly right.
+
+
+
+
+AN EVENING WITH CALLENDER.
+
+
+The room was filled with a blue haze of tobacco smoke, and I had made
+all of it, for Callender, it seemed to me, had foresworn most of his old
+habits. He used not once to lie back languidly in a lounging-chair,
+neither smoking, nor talking, nor drinking punch, when a chum came to
+see him. Indeed, after the first effervescence of our meeting, natural
+after a separation of four years, had subsided, I found such a different
+Tom Callender from the one who had wrung my hand in parting on the deck
+of the _Marius_, that I had indulged in sundry speculations, and I
+studied him attentively beneath half-closed lids, as I apparently
+watched the white rings from my cigar melt into the air.
+
+Where, precisely, was the change? It was hard to say. The long, thin
+figure was nerveless in its poses; the slender brown hand that had had
+a characteristic vigor, lying listlessly open on the arm of his chair,
+no longer looked capable of a tense, muscular grasp of life; the
+slightly elongated oval of the face, with its complexion and hair like
+the Japanese, was scarcely more hollowed or lined than before, but it
+had lost that expression of expectation, which is one of the distinctive
+marks of youth in the face. He had been politely attentive to my
+experiences in Rio Janeiro, with which I have no doubt I bored him
+unutterably, but when I asked about old friends, or social life, he
+lapsed into the indifference of the man for whom such things no longer
+exist: reminiscence did not interest him. I asked him about the plays
+now on at the leading theatres--he had not seen them; about the new
+prima donna--he had not heard her. Finally I broke a long silence by
+picking up a book from the table at my side. "Worth reading?" I asked,
+nibbling at it here and there. (It was a novel, with "Thirty-fifth
+thousand" in larger letters than the title on the top of its yellow
+cover.) As I spoke, a peculiar name, the name of a character on the leaf
+I was just turning, brought suddenly to my mind one of the few women I
+had known who bore it.
+
+"By the way, Callender," I said animatedly, striking down the page that
+had recalled her with my finger, "What has become of your little
+blue-stocking friend? Don't you know--her book was just out when I
+sailed,--'On Mount Latmos,'--'On Latmos Top,'--what was it?"
+
+A dark flush burnt its way up to the black, straight hair.
+
+"She is--dead," Callender replied, with a hopeless pause before the
+hopeless word.
+
+"Dead!" I echoed, unable to associate the idea of death with the
+incarnation of life that I remembered.
+
+Callender did not reply. He rose, with the slight limp so familiar to me
+in the past, but which I noticed now as if I had never seen it before,
+and went to a desk at the far end of the spacious room. I smoked on
+meditatively. It was odd, I thought, that chance had guided me straight
+as an arrow, to the cause of the change in my friend. One might have
+known, though, that he, the misogynist of our class, would have come to
+grief, sooner or later, over a woman. They always end by that.
+
+I heard him unlocking a drawer, turning over some papers, and presently
+he limped back to his chair, bringing a heavy envelope. He took from it
+a photograph, which he gave to me in silence. Yes, that was she, yet not
+the same--oh! not the same--as when I had seen her the few times four
+years ago. These solemn eyes were looking into the eyes of death, and
+the face, frightfully emaciated, yet so young and brave, sunk in the
+rich masses of hair. It was too pitiful.
+
+Callender had taken a package of manuscript from the envelope; the long
+supple fingers were busy among the leaves, and he bent his head to see
+the numbered pages. At last, having arranged them in order, he leaned
+back again in his chair, holding the papers tenderly in his hand. There
+was nothing of the _poseur_ in Callender; his childlike simplicity of
+manner invested him with a touching dignity even though he owned himself
+vanquished, where another man would have faced life more bravely, nor
+have held it entirely worthless because of one narrow grave which shut
+forever from the light a woman who had never loved him.
+
+"I think you would like to read this," he said at length. "And I would
+like to have you. To her, it cannot matter. I wanted to marry her,
+toward the end, so I could take care of her.--She was poor, you
+know--but she would not consent. She left me this, without any message.
+I knew her so well, she thought it would be easier for me to forget
+her; but now I shall never forget her."
+
+He gave me the little package of leaves, whose rough edges showed that
+they had been hurriedly cut from a binding, and then he fell again into
+his old lethargic attitude. I am not an imaginative man, but a faint
+odor from the paper brought like a flash to my mind the brilliant,
+mutinous face, radiant with color and life, that I had seen last across
+a sea of white shoulders and black coats at a reception a few weeks
+before I went to South America. The writing was the hurried, illegible
+hand of an author. I thought grimly that I had probably chanced upon a
+much weakened and Americanized Marie Bashkirtseff, for though I had only
+been home a few weeks, it goes without saying that I had read a part at
+least of the ill-fated young Russian's dairy. Yet in the presence of the
+grief-stricken face, outlined against the dark leather chair-back, I
+felt a pang of shame at a thought bordering on levity. There was indeed
+one likeness: both were the unexpurgated records of hearts laid
+ruthlessly bare; both were instinct with life: in every line one could
+feel the warm blood throbbing.
+
+A few of the pages of this journal, which I copy word for word from the
+manuscript lying before me, I give the reader. Call the dead writer an
+egotist, if you will: wonder at Callender's love for this self-centred
+nature; I think she was an artist, and as an artist, her experience is
+of value to art.
+
+
+"_December_--18--.
+
+"I have just torn out some pages written a year or so ago. A diary of
+the introspective type is doubtless a pandering to egotism, but I have
+always detested that affectation which ignores the fact that each person
+is to him or herself the most interesting soul--yes, and body--in the
+universe, and now there is nothing of such infinite importance to me as
+this. I fear I shall never write again. All thought or plan, in prose
+or verse, seems dead in me: broken images and pictures that are wildly
+disconnected float through my tired mind. I have driven myself all day.
+I have been seated at my desk, with my pen in my hand, looking blankly
+at the paper. No words, no words! Just before my first book went to
+press, I overworked. I was in a fever; poems, similes, ran through my
+excited hours. I could not write fast enough. In that mental debauch I
+believe that I squandered the energy of years, and now I can conceive no
+more. If I could only sleep, perhaps I could write. Oh! long, long
+nights, crowded with the fearful acceleration of trival thoughts crushed
+one upon another, crowding so fast. 'My God,' I pray, 'Let me sleep,
+only sleep,' and conquered by this abject need, this weariness
+unutterable, I am fain to believe that this gift, common to the brute
+and slave, is better than anything my mind can gain for me, and there
+is nothing so entirely desirable in all the world as a few hours'
+oblivion.
+
+What a dream came to me this Autumn! The doctor had given me an opiate.
+At first it had no effect. I tossed as restlessly as before on my hard
+bed, sighing vainly for the sleep that refused to come. The noises in
+the street vexed me. The light from an opposite window disturbed my
+tired eyes. At last, I slept. Oh! the glow, the radiance unspeakable of
+that dream! I was in a long, low room. A fire leaped on the hearth, as
+though it bore a charmed life. Upon the floor was laid a crimson carpet.
+There were great piles of crimson mattresses and cushions about the
+room, the ceiling was covered with a canopy of red silk, drawn to a
+centre, whence depended a lantern, filling the room with a soft rosy
+twilight. The mantel was a bank of blood-red roses, and they also
+bloomed and died a fragant death in great bowls set here and there about
+the floor. And in the centre of this glowing, amorous room was a great
+couch of red cushions, and I saw myself there, in the scented warmth,
+one elbow plunged in the cushions, with a certain expectation in my
+face. It was very quiet. Far down an echoing, distant corridor I heard
+footsteps, and I smiled and pushed the roses about with my foot, for I
+was waiting, and I knew that soft foot-fall drawing nearer, nearer. My
+heart filled the silence with its beating. I looked about the room. Was
+it ready? Yes, all was ready. The very flowers were waiting to be
+crushed by his careless feet. The fire had died to a steady ardent glow.
+How close the steps were drawing! A moment more--
+
+I opened my eyes suddenly. I heard a door shut loudly, the sounds of
+boots and clothing flung hurriedly down came through the thin partition,
+and I knew that the lodger in the next room had tramped heavily up the
+stairs, and was hastening to throw his clumsy body on the bed.
+
+Elsie was breathing softly by my side, and my incredulous, disappointed
+eyes saw only the reflection on the ceiling, like two great tears of
+light, and I slept no more until the morning.
+
+I read this, and it sounds coherent. Perhaps I have been needlessly
+alarmed, perhaps the fear that is so terrible that I have not written it
+lest it seems to grow real, is only a foolish fear. I must write, I must
+make myself a name. To bring him that, in lieu of dower, would be
+something; but poor, unknown, and of an obscure birth.--Will I not have
+earned a short lease of happiness, if I achieve fame for his sake?
+
+I will barter all for one week,--no, one day--of happiness. I do not
+wish to grow old, to outlive my illusions. Only a short respite from
+cares and sorrow, a brief time of flowers, and music, and love, and
+laughter, and ecstatic tears, and intense emotion. I can so well
+understand the slave in the glorious "_Un nuit de Cléopatre_," who
+resolved a life-time into twelve hours, and having no more left to
+desire, drank death as calmly as it were a draught of wine.
+
+
+_January_, 9, 18--.
+
+"Elsie, my poor little sister, is ill. Only a childish ailment, but I
+have not written for three days, and she has lain, feeble and languid,
+in my arms, and I have told her stories. We have moved again, and here,
+thank God! the furniture, and the carpets and the paper do not swear at
+each other so violently. I say, thank God! with due reverence. I am
+truly and devoutly grateful for the release from that sense of unrest
+caused by the twisted red and green arabesques on the floor. Here all is
+sombre. The walls are a dull shade, the carpet neutral, the furniture
+the faded brocatelle dedicate to boarding-houses; but it is not so bad.
+The golden light lies along the floor, and is reflected on my 'Birth of
+Venus' on the wall. Above my desk is a small shelf of my best-loved
+books,--loved now; perhaps I shall destroy them next year, having
+absorbed all their nutriment, even as now, 'I burn all I used to
+worship. I worship all I used to burn.' Under the bookrack is a copy of
+Severn's last sketch of Keats, the vanquished, dying head of the slain
+poet, more brutally killed than the world counts. The eyes are closed
+and sunken; the mouth, once so prone to kiss, droops pitifully at the
+corners; the beautiful temples are hollow. Underneath I have written the
+words of de Vigny, the words as true as death, if as bitter: 'Hope is
+the greatest of all our follies.' I need no other curb to my mad dreams
+than this.
+
+"It has been cold, so cold to-day. I left Elsie asleep, and went to the
+office of the ---- Magazine with an article I wrote a month or so ago.
+The truth is, Elsie should have a doctor, and I have no money to pay
+him. I was almost sure Mr. ---- would take this. He was out, and I
+waited a long time in vain, and finally walked back in the wind and
+blowing dust, chilled to the heart. I wished to write in the afternoon,
+but I was so beaten with the weather that I threw myself on the bed by
+Elsie to try to collect my thoughts. It was no use. I found my eyes and
+mind wandering vaguely about the room. I was staring at the paper frieze
+of garlanded roses, and the ugly, dingy paper below it of a hideous
+lilac. What fiend ever suggested to my landlady the combination of
+crimson roses and purplish paper? How I hate my environments! Poverty
+and sybaritism go as ill together as roses and purple paper, but I have
+always been too much given up to the gratification of the eyes and of
+the senses. How well I remember in my first girlhood, how I used to fill
+bowls with roses, lilacs and heliotrope, in the country June, and
+putting beneath my cheek a little pillow, whose crimson silk gave me
+delight, shut my eyes in my rough, unfinished little room, and the vales
+of Persia and the scented glades of the tropics were mine to wander
+through. Yes, a dreamer's Paradise, for I was only sixteen then, and
+untroubled by any thoughts of Love; yet sometimes Its shadow would enter
+and vaguely perplex me, a strange shape, waiting always beyond, in the
+midst of my glowing gardens, and I sighed with a prescient pain. How
+have I known Love since those days? As yet it has brought me but two
+things--Sorrow and Expectation. In that fragmentary love-time that was
+mine, I well remember one evening after he left me, that I threw myself
+on the floor, and kissing the place where his dear foot had been set, I
+prayed, still prostrate, the prayer I have so often prayed since. I
+begged of God to let me barter for seven perfect days of love, all the
+years that He had, perhaps, allotted to me. But my hot lips plead in
+vain against the dusty floor, and it was to be that instead; he was to
+leave me while love was still incomplete. But I know we shall meet
+again, and I wait. He loved me, and does not that make waiting easy?
+
+"My book _must_, it _shall_ succeed. It shall wipe out the stain on my
+birth, it shall be enough to the world that I am what I am. To-night I
+shall write half the night. No, there is Elsie. To-morrow, then, all
+day. I shall not move from the desk. Oh! I have pierced my heart, to
+write with its blood. It is an ink that ought to survive through the
+centuries. Yet if it achieve my purpose for me, I care not if it is
+forgotten in ten years.
+
+
+"_February_ 12, 18--.
+
+"I have seen him to-day, the only man I have ever loved. He loves me no
+more. It is ended. What did _I_ say? I do not remember. I knew it all,
+the moment he entered the room. When he went, I said: 'We shall never
+meet again, I think. Kiss me on the lips once, as in the old days.'
+
+"He looked down at me curiously. He hesitated a moment--then he bent and
+kissed my mouth. The room whirled about me. Strange sounds were in my
+ears; for one moment he loved me again. I threw myself in a chair, and
+buried my face in my hands. I cried out to God in my desperate misery.
+It was over, and he was gone--he who begged once for a kiss, as a slave
+might beg for bread!
+
+"And now in all this world are but two good things left me, my Art and
+little Elsie. Oh! my book, I clung to it in that bitter moment, as the
+work which should save my reason to live for the child."
+
+
+"_February_ 18, 18--
+
+"I have written continuously. I drugged myself with writing as if it
+were chloral, against the stabs of memory that assaulted me. There will
+be chapters I shall never read, those that I wrote as I sat by my desk
+the day after the 12th, the cold, gray light pouring in on me, sometimes
+holding my pen suspended while I was having a mortal struggle with my
+will, forcing back thoughts, driving my mind to work as though it were
+a brute. I conquered through the day. My work did not suffer; as I read
+it over I saw that I had never written better, in spite of certain pains
+that almost stopped my heart. But at night! ah! if I had had a room to
+myself, would I have given myself one moment of rest that night? Would I
+not have written on until I slept from fatigue?
+
+"But that could not be. Elsie moved restlessly; the light disturbed her.
+For a moment I almost hated her plaintive little voice, God forgive me!
+and then I undressed and slipped into bed, and so quietly I lay beside
+her, that she thought I slept. I breathed evenly and lightly--I ought to
+be able to countefeit sleep by this, I have done it times enough.
+
+"Well, it is of no avail to re-live that night. I thought there was no
+hope left in me, but I have been cheating myself, it seems, for it
+fought hard, every inch of the ground, for survival that night, though
+now I am sure it will never lift its head again.
+
+"And now, as I said, there is nothing left in all earth for me but my
+sister and my Art. "_Poëte, prends ton luth_."
+
+
+"_May_ 10, 18--.
+
+"My book is a success, that is, the world calls it a success; but in all
+the years to come he will never love me again, therefore to me it is a
+failure, having failed of its purpose, its reason for being. What does
+he care for the fame it has brought me, since he no longer loves me?
+
+"Had it only come a year ago!
+
+"I went to see Mrs. ---- to-day, and I started to hear his voice in the
+hall, as I sat waiting in the dim drawing-room. He was just going out,
+having been upstairs, Mrs. ---- said, to look at the children's fernery;
+and I, as I heard that voice, I could have gone out and thrown myself at
+his feet across the threshold, those cadences so stole into my heart and
+head, bringing the old madness back. I had one of the sharp attacks of
+pain at the heart, and Mrs ---- sent me home in the carriage. Elsie is
+in the country, well and strong. I am so glad. These illnesses frighten
+her sorely. I am perhaps growing thin and weak, but I cannot die, alas!
+Let the beauty go. I no longer care to preserve it.
+
+"When I reached home, I lay in the twilight for some time on the sofa,
+not having strength to get up to my room. There is, there can be, no
+possible help or hope in my trouble, no fruition shall follow the
+promises Spring time held for me.
+
+"Oh, God! if there be a God! but why do I wish to pray? Have I not
+prayed before, and not only no answer was vouchsafed, but no sensation
+of a listening Power, a loving Presence, assuaged my pain. Yet, human or
+brute, we must make our groans, though futile, when we are in the grasp
+of a mortal agony.
+
+
+"_June_ 20, 18--.
+
+"I have been thankless. I have been faithless. Let me bless God's name,
+for He has heard my prayer at last, and he will let me die--very soon.
+
+"It was so cool in the doctor's office this morning. The vines about the
+window made lovely shadows on the white curtains and the floor. The
+light was soft. His round, ruddy German face was almost pale as he
+stammered out technical terms, in reply to my questions.
+
+"'Oh, Mees!' he said, throwing up his fat hands. 'You ask so mooch! Den,
+if I frighten you, you faints, you gets worse. No, no, I will not have
+it!'
+
+"But at last, reassured by my calmness, he told me, as I leaned on the
+back of his high office chair. A month more, or perhaps two. Not very
+much pain, he thought. But certain. And I, faithless, have believed the
+good God did not listen when I prayed!
+
+"Little Elsie is safe and happy with our aunt. Already she seldom talks
+of me. Yet I have had her, my care, my charge, for almost six years.
+Children soon forget. There will be a little money for her education,
+and Aunt wishes to adopt her. There is nothing that I need grieve to
+leave behind.
+
+"If he had still loved me, if it were circumstance that kept our lives
+apart, I could send for him then; but to die in arms that held me only
+out of compassion--glad to relinquish their burden as soon as might
+be--no, I must go without seeing his face again.
+
+"And to-night I can only feel the great gladness that it is to be.
+Suppose I knew that there were twenty-five more such years as these!
+Suppose it should be a mistake, and I had to live!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I looked from these last written words to the photograph. My eyes were
+blurred, but Tom only leaned back, motionless as before, apathetic as
+before.
+
+"How long--" I began, tentatively.
+
+"She lived a week after that," Callender replied, in his dry,
+emotionless voice.
+
+"And the man?"
+
+"He was my brother," replied Callender. "She never saw him again. He
+married Miss Stockweis about a month after."
+
+I thought of Ralph Callender, cold, correct, slightly bored, as I have
+always known him, of Miss Stockweis, a dull, purse-proud blonde.
+
+I seized the poor little photograph and raised it reverently to my lips.
+
+"Forgive me, Tom," I said, slightly abashed. (I never could control my
+impulses.) "The best thing you can do is to thank God for her death.
+Think of a woman like that--"
+
+"Thank you," said Tom wearily. "Yes, I _am_ glad."
+
+And then I grasped the thin brown hand in my own for a moment, and felt
+it respond faintly to my clasp.
+
+We sat as quietly as before in the cheerful, smoke-filled room, I
+puffing slightly at my Ajar, and Tom's sleepless eyes fixed absently on
+the wall; and then presently I went to the window and watched the dull
+gray dawn creep over the still sleeping city.
+
+"Well, here's another day," I said with a sigh, turning back to the
+room. "I must go, old fellow."
+
+There was no reply. Startled, I bent over the chair, and looked in the
+face, scarcely more ivory-white than before. And then I saw that for
+Callender there would be no more days.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Village Ophelia and Other Stories
+by Anne Reeve Aldrich
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Village Ophelia and Other Stories
+by Anne Reeve Aldrich
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Village Ophelia and Other Stories
+
+Author: Anne Reeve Aldrich
+
+Release Date: February 8, 2005 [EBook #14978]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A VILLAGE OPHELIA AND OTHER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Amy Cunningham and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Some words which appear to be typos are printed
+thus in the original book. A list of these possible misprints follows:
+  enthuiasms
+  fragant
+  increduously
+  insistance
+  trival]
+
+
+A VILLAGE OPHELIA
+
+BY
+ANNE REEVE ALDRICH
+
+
+NEW YORK:
+_W. Dillingham Co., Publishers_,
+MDCCCXCIX.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+A VILLAGE OPHELIA
+
+A STORY OF THE VERE DE VERE
+
+A LAMENTABLE COMEDY
+
+AN AFRICAN DISCOVERY
+
+AN EVENING WITH CALLENDER
+
+
+
+
+A VILLAGE OPHELIA
+
+
+On the East end of Long Island, from Riverhead to Greenport, a distance
+of about thirty miles, two country roads run parallel.
+
+The North road is very near the Sound and away from the villages; lonely
+farm-houses are scattered at long intervals; in some places their number
+increases enough to form a little desolate settlement, but there is
+never a shop, nor sign of village life. That, one must seek on the South
+road, with its small hamlets, to which the "North roaders," as they are
+somewhat condescendingly called, drive across to church, or to make
+purchases.
+
+It was on the North road that I spent a golden August in the home of
+Mrs. Libby. Her small gray house was lovingly empaled about the front
+and sides by snow-ball bushes and magenta French-lilacs, that grew
+tenderly close to the weather-worn shingles, and back of one sunburnt
+field, as far as the eye could see, stretched the expanse of dark,
+shining scrub-oaks, beyond which, one knew, was the hot, blue glitter of
+the Sound.
+
+Mrs. Libby was a large iron-gray widow of sixty, insatiably greedy of
+such fleshly comforts as had ever come within her knowledge--soft
+cushions, heavily sweetened dishes, finer clothing than her neighbors.
+She had cold eyes, and nature had formed her mouth and jaw like the
+little silver-striped adder that I found one day, mangled by some
+passing cart, in the yellow dust of the road. Her lips were stretched
+for ever in that same flat, immutable smile. When she moved her head,
+you caught the gleam of a string of gold beads, half-hidden in a crease
+of her stout throat. She had still a coarsely handsome figure, she was
+called a fine looking woman; and every afternoon she sat and sewed by
+the window of her parlor, dressed in a tight, black gown, with
+immaculate cuffs about her thick wrists. The neighbors--thin, overworked
+women, with numerous children--were too tired and busy to be envious.
+They thought her very genteel. Her husband, before his last illness, had
+kept a large grocery store in a village on the South side of the Island.
+It gave her a presumptive right to the difference in her ways, to the
+stuff gown of an afternoon, to the use of butter instead of lard in her
+cookery, to the extra thickness and brightness of her parlor carpet.
+
+For days I steeped my soul in the peace and quiet. In the long mornings
+I went down the grassy path to the beach, and lay on the yellow sands,
+as lost to the world as if I were in some vast solitude. I had had a
+wound in my life, and with the natural instinct of all hurt creatures, I
+wanted to hide and get close to the earth until it healed. I knew that
+it must heal at last, but there are certain natures in which mental
+torture must have a physical outcome, and we are happier afterward if we
+have called in no Greek chorus of friends to the tragedy, to witness and
+sing how the body comported itself under the soul's woe. But there is no
+sense of shame when deep cries are wrenched from the throat under the
+free sky, with only the sea to answer. One can let the body take half
+the burden of pain, and writhe on the breast of the earth without
+reproach. I took this relief that nature meant for such as I, wearing
+myself into the indifference of exhaustion, to which must sooner or
+later ensue the indifference brought by time. Sometimes a flock of small
+brown sandbirds watched me curiously from a sodden bank of sea-weed,
+but that was all.
+
+This story is not of myself, however, or of the pain which I cured in
+this natural way, and which is but a memory now.
+
+One gray morning a white mist settled heavily, and I could see but a
+short distance on the dark waters for the fog. A fresh access of the
+suffering which I was fighting, the wildness of my grief and struggles,
+wore me out, so that I fell asleep there on the rough sand, my mouth
+laid against the salty pebbles, and my hands grasping the sharp,
+yielding grains, crushed as if some giant foot had trodden me into the
+earth.
+
+I was awakened by a soft speculative voice. "Another, perhaps," I
+thought it said. Starting up, I saw standing beside me a thin, shrinking
+figure, drenched like myself by the salt mist. From under a coarse, dark
+straw hat, a small, delicate face regarded me shyly, yet calmly. It was
+very pale, a little sunken, and surrounded by a cloud of light, curling
+hair, blown loose by the wind; the wide sensitive lips were almost
+colorless, and the peculiar eyes, greenish and great-pupiled, were
+surrounded by stained, discolored rings that might have been the result
+of weary vigils, or of ill-health. The woman, who was possibly thirty,
+must once have been possessed of a fragile type of beauty, but it was
+irretrievably lost now in the premature age that had evidently settled
+upon her.
+
+Struggling to a sitting posture, I saw that the thick white fog had
+closed densely, and that the woodland back of us was barely
+distinguishable. We too seemed shut in, as in a room. "You live at Mrs.
+Libby's," said the young woman, after a moment's hesitation. "I am Agnes
+Rayne. I hope I did not frighten you."
+
+"No," I replied, brushing the sand from my damp clothing as I rose. "I
+am afraid if you had not come by fortunately, I should have had a
+thorough wetting. Can we get home before the storm begins?"
+
+"You would not have taken cold down here on the beach," she remarked,
+turning and looking out to sea. It seemed strangely to me as if those
+odd eyes of hers could pierce the blinding mist. "I will not go back
+with you. I have just come."
+
+Whatever she did or said that might have seemed rude or brusque in
+another, was sweet and courteous from her manner. "Very well," I said.
+Then I paused,--my desire to meet her again was absurdly keen. Stepping
+closer to her side, I extended my hand. "Will you come to see me, Miss
+Rayne? I am very lonely, and I should be so--grateful."
+
+She touched my fingers lightly with a chilly little hand, yet she never
+looked at me as she replied, "Yes, some day."
+
+As I plodded heavily through the wet sand, I was irresistibly impelled
+to turn my head. She was merely standing exactly as I left her, thin
+and straight, in the black gown that clung closely to her slender limbs,
+with the mass of light hair about her shoulders.
+
+Drenched as I was, when I reached home, with the large warm drops of the
+storm's beginning, I stopped in the sitting-room a moment before going
+to my room. The smell of ironing scented the house, but Mrs. Libby was
+resting placidly in the rocking-chair, her feet on a cushioned stool.
+She was eating some peaches, tearing them apart from the stone with
+strong, juice-dropping fingers, and dipping them in a saucer of coarse
+sugar before she devoured them.
+
+"Mrs. Libby, who is Agnes Rayne?" I asked.
+
+"She is old Martin Rayne's daughter, up to the corner. Seen her down to
+the beach, I expect. Speak to you? Did? Well, she's as queer as Dick's
+hat-band, as folks say 'round here. Some say she's crazy--love-cracked,
+I guess she is." Mrs. Libby paused to kill a fly that ventured too near
+her saucer on the table at her side, with a quick blow of the fleshy
+hand. I used to turn away when Mrs. Libby killed flies. "Oh! _I_ d'know!
+She's just queer. Don't commess with anybody, nor ever go to meetin'.
+The minister called there once; he ain't ever been again, nor told how
+he was treated, that's sure. They live queer, too. She don't ever make
+pies, ner p'serves, ner any kind of sauce. 'N' old Martin, he's childish
+now. He always was as close-mouthed as a mussel. Nobody ever knew
+whether he liked such goin's on or not."
+
+I went up the high, narrow stairs, thoughtfully to my small room under
+the eaves, dark with the storm, and smelling of must and dampness. I
+smiled a little. It was more than probable that these people would count
+slight eccentricity in a lady--and this was undoubtedly a lady, whatever
+her birth and surroundings--as madness. After dinner I stood by the
+window a long time. Through the network of apple-boughs, I could see
+the road. Mrs. Libby, coming heavily into the sitting-room, divined my
+thoughts.
+
+"If you're wondering how Agnes gets home, she goes cross-lots, right
+through the scrub-oak 'n' poison ivy 'n black-b'ries, 'f she's in a
+hurry. She ain't afraid o' rain; like's not, she stays down to the shore
+the whole 'durin' day."
+
+"I suppose the people here talk about her."
+
+"Most of 'em have too much to do to talk," replied Mrs. Libby, smoothing
+down her shining bands of hair before the hanging glass, and regarding
+her reflected large, white face and set smile, with dull satisfaction
+and vanity. "They're used to her now."
+
+One glaring afternoon within the week, I sat out on the tiny porch, idly
+watching a fat spider throw his ropes from the box-bush to the step. I
+had been sitting there for three hours, and only one creaking farm-wagon
+had passed, and two dirty brown-legged children. The air was breathless
+and spicy, and in the rough clearing opposite, the leaves seemed to
+curve visibly in the intense heat. Did anything ever happen here? It
+seemed to me as much out of the range of possible happenings as the
+grave.
+
+"There's Agnes coming," said Mrs. Libby, inarticulately. She held
+between her lips some ravellings and bits of thread, and she was sitting
+by the open window, laboriously pushing her needle through a piece of
+heavy unbleached cloth.
+
+The young woman who came swaying delicately along the path, with
+something of the motion of a tall stalk of grass in the wind, wore a
+scanty white gown, which defined almost cruelly the slenderness of form,
+that seemed to have returned to the meagre uncertainty of young
+childhood. To-day, her light hair was strained back from her wide
+forehead, and knotted neatly under the brim of her rough straw hat. She
+looked much older as she stood before me in the golden light.
+
+"Will you come home with me this afternoon?" she asked directly. "It is
+not far; perhaps it might amuse you."
+
+I consented gladly. As we walked along the narrow paths that skirted the
+roadside together, she turned to me, a sudden flush burning on her thin
+face. "I am afraid you think I am very cruel to bring you out this hot
+afternoon, but it is so long since I have talked to any one--so long! I
+have read your books, and then I said last night to myself: 'If I do not
+go over it all to some one--tell it aloud, from beginning to end--put it
+into words, I shall go mad. She is a woman who could understand.' Yes,
+when I saw your hands on the beach that day, all bruised inside, and on
+one a little cut, where you had wrenched at the sand and stone before
+you slept, I knew you were my escape. I am abject, but think of the
+years I have been dying, here, if you despise me."
+
+"No," I said, "it is not abject. Sometimes in one's life comes a crisis,
+when one must snatch at some remedy, or else die, or go mad. If there
+is not then something in us that makes us believe in a future, we, of
+course, die; but I could never think it a cure myself, merely to be free
+of the body, because I believe in the soul's immortality, and the body
+is such a diversion! Once rid of it, with all its imperious clamor to be
+fed and warmed--nothing but utter freedom to think--the grave has never
+appealed to me as an escape. Madness is a shade better, perhaps; but
+then that depends on the form of the illusion. For me the body has got
+to work out the soul's agony. For you, words may bring relief. Try--try
+anything that suggests itself."
+
+"Do not think you will hear anything new. It will bore you. Are you
+willing to listen?"
+
+"I am indeed," I replied. We had come to a lonely farm-house, its roofs
+moss-grown and sunken, the grass knee-high about it. There was hardly a
+sign of life about the place, though I could see an aged man smoking a
+pipe peacefully in the shade of an apple tree at the back. Everything
+wore an air of melancholy, desertion and loneliness.
+
+My companion lifted the gray gate's rusty latch. The grass was crushed
+enough to form a path to the front door, which stood open. She led the
+way into a large, low room off the little hall. The floor was bare.
+There was a large table in the centre, heaped with books, and some
+withering flowers stood in a glass. A couple of common chairs, a
+mattress, on which was thrown an antique curtain of faded blue as a
+drapery; on the white-washed wall, a tiny and coquetish slipper of
+yellowish silk, nailed through the sole. This was all the furnishing.
+
+She stood looking around at the barrenness curiously, trying perhaps to
+see it with the eyes of a stranger. "This is my room," she said, "and
+the very walls and floor are saturated with my sufferings." She went
+restlessly to the window, and threw open the broken blind. As the
+radiance of the afternoon flooded the place with light, I seemed to see
+it and its wasting occupant, here in this horrible desolation, in the
+changing seasons, when the window gave on the bitter rigors of blue and
+white winter mornings, the land choked with snow, on the golden blur of
+autumn, on the tender mists of April, draping the earth, and forever the
+cry of the waves on the shore haunting the air. That there was nothing
+of the mad woman about her, that she had retained reason in such a
+place, in such a room, with an eating grief to bear, impressed me as one
+of the marvels of the brain's endurance, with which nature sometimes
+surprises us. It seemed to me that this might be the hour of partial
+deliverance to the poor soul who had evidently lived and died so much.
+
+"Why have you stayed here?" I asked. She had now taken the chair
+fronting me. We were stiffly seated as if for a business interview. I
+had a desire to take the poor figure in my arms, but I felt as if she
+were as intangible as a spirit. When mental pain has devoured the body,
+as physical pain so often does, there is something thrice as ethereal
+about the wreck.
+
+"What difference could it make?" she asked in her slightly husky voice,
+with faint surprise. "It is only the old love-story of a village girl
+you will hear. My mother was different from these people, but I had
+never known anything beside this life, except books. Of course you can
+understand how much else than love the man brought me. I was quite
+beautiful then. Does it not seem strange that it could have been true! I
+burst into real blossom for him--like Aaron's rod, was it not? And now
+you see, I am only the bare rod."
+
+She dropped her lids and looked down at herself calmly. The warmth had
+curled the short hairs into a light halo around her forehead, the little
+neck was bent, she had folded her hands in her lap. The piteous
+child-like chest and limbs revealed by the tight white gown, brought
+tears to my eyes. There was something solemn, terrible, in this virginal
+decay.
+
+"All that I was to be, was forced into growth at once. He made me a new
+self; he was in a sense creator, teacher, parent, friend, idol, lover.
+He was the world I have not known; he taught me that I could myself
+write, create. I was nearer madness in those days than now, for when he
+threw himself here--" She rose and pointed to the floor near the
+table--"here on these boards at my feet, and begged me to listen to his
+love, to be his wife--I, his wife!--it was as strange, as unreal as a
+vision.--I had a month." She did not raise her sweet, level voice, but
+the eyes that she fixed on mine were dilated to blackness, and her face
+was illumined with an inexpressible light of triumph. "I had one great
+month of life. Even you cannot have had more in all your years of the
+world than I in my month! And then he returned to his work again. He
+was very busy, you understand, a great man, even then, in the world of
+letters. He could not come to see me, could not leave; but he wrote
+every day. He will never put into his book such words as he wrote me; he
+gave me more than he has ever given the world. It may have his books. I
+have read them, but I have his very soul in these letters!
+
+"I told you he made me believe that I could write. 'What was I, what was
+I,' I used to ask myself, 'to be lifted from this to his height?' And
+then I had a secret, which began in that thought. I wrote a novel. It is
+eight years back now. I never mentioned it in my letters. I knew it was
+good, as good as his own work. He would be so proud! He talked of
+publishing-houses, books, authors. I had not forgotten one word. I sent
+it to a house, one of the largest and best, and it was accepted. It is
+strange, but I was not at all surprised. Somehow I had never doubted it
+would be accepted. And then I went to the city alone for a day. I had
+only a little time; it seemed to me the greatest act of my life to be
+there, where he was, yet not to see him! But you see I had planned it
+all in those long nights when the autumn storms would not let me sleep.
+The rain would dash against this window, and half awake, I would see
+myself when he should come, with my head against his arm, saying, 'I
+have been making something for you. Guess.' And then he would laugh and
+say, 'Perhaps--is it a cake for my tea, home-darling? Is it--is it a
+cover for my writing-table? No, you do not sew. Tell me.' And then I
+should say proudly. 'It is nothing of that kind. It is a book, and the
+people whom you think such good judges say it must be a success!' I saw
+it again as I was coming down the stairs from the publisher's office.
+They had praised my work until the blood seemed all in my head and made
+me dizzy, and the sounds of Broadway confused my country ears.
+
+"At home that dusk my letter stood against the mantel as I came in
+here. I laughed when I saw the post-mark, to think I had been there. I
+laid it against my cheek softly where his hand had touched it, writing
+my name. It so prolonged the pleasure--you know--you are a woman like
+that. And at last I read it here." She posed herself unconsciously by
+the table. "It said, 'Have I loved you? I do not know. Curse me, and
+forget me. I am to be married to-day.'"
+
+A pin from my hair fell to the bare floor and broke the silence with its
+frivolous click. The tears were raining down my cheeks. She did not look
+at me now. She stood grasping the table with one tense hand, her white
+face thrown a little back. Just as she had stood, I knew, eight
+purgatorial years ago.
+
+The story was done. She sank into the chair.
+
+"And the book?" I asked at length.
+
+She roused from her reverie. "Oh! yes, the book. It had no purpose to
+live for, you see. I sent for it, cancelled the agreement. They wrote to
+me twice about it, but I was firm; there was no reason why I should
+trouble. I have everything I want," and again her voice trailed into
+silence.
+
+I looked about the strange, bare room, at the strange, slender figure,
+and I rose and folded her about with my arms; but she struggled in my
+embrace. "No, no, do not touch me!" she cried sharply, in a tone of
+suffering. My hands fell from her, and I knelt abashed at her side. "Oh!
+please forgive me. I cannot be touched. I hate it. You have been so
+good," she said, with compunction, regarding me with a certain remorse.
+I was not aggrieved at being repulsed. As I resumed my seat, I said,
+"You have only one life to live; snatch at least what you can out of the
+years. Take my wisdom. You have the book yet? Good. Come back with me;
+we will get it published. Open your heart, make one effort at living:
+you can but fail. Come away from the sound of the waves and the wind
+through the scrub-oaks; from this room and its memories. Be what you
+might have been."
+
+For the first time she faintly smiled. She shook her head. "I told you I
+was like Aaron's rod. See for yourself. The power of thought or interest
+in everything else has withered and wasted like my face and body. My
+days are almost as irresponsible as a child's now. I have gone back to
+the carelessness of a little girl about the conditions of life. It was
+once, and once only for me. But you have given me relief, or rather I
+have given myself relief this afternoon. And now, will you leave me? I
+am so glad to have said it all over, and yet, since I have done it, I
+cannot bear to see you."
+
+The peculiarity of her voice and manner, of which I have spoken, that
+made all her words sweet and gentle, however unconventional they might
+be, left me unoffended.
+
+"Perhaps you are right;" I said, "yet I wish you would try my way." She
+did not make any reply, and I left her standing with downcast eyes by
+the door.
+
+Mrs. Libby still sat sewing by the window when I returned. "Have a
+pleasant time?" she asked, a gleam of curiosity in her cold eyes. "Seems
+to me you didn't stay long."
+
+"No, not very long."
+
+"See that queer room of hers? Folks ain't asked into it much. They said
+she took the minister right in there when he called. Kitchen table piled
+up with books, 'n papers, books 'round on the floor, 'n' a mattress
+a-layin' in a corner. Some of the boys peeked in one day when she was
+down to the beach, 'n' told all 'round how it looked. And a white shoe
+onto the wall. I expect it must be one o' hers she used to wear. It was
+before I moved over from South side, but Mrs. Hikes says she had the
+flightiest clothes when he was courtin' her. Her mother left her some
+money, I guess, any way, 'n' there wasn't anything too rich, ner too
+good, ner too foreign for her to wear. 'N' look at her now! Well, it's
+'long toward tea-time. You look tired."
+
+I was indeed very tired. I could not assimilate the strange impressions
+I had received. That night the moon-light streamed broadly into my
+window through the apple-boughs that showed black shadows on the floor.
+About midnight I opened my eyes suddenly. Mrs. Libby in a much-frilled
+night-dress was shaking my shoulder vigorously.
+
+"You'll have to get up. Agnes Rayne's dyin', 'n' she's took a notion to
+see you. They've sent Hikeses' boy after you; bleedin' at the lungs is
+all I can get out of him. The Hikeses are all dumb as a stick of
+cord-wood."
+
+She sat down heavily on my bed, and put a pillow comfortably to her back
+while I dressed. Hikeses' boy sat waiting for me in the porch whistling
+under his breath. He was the tallest and lankiest of them all, and like
+some ghostly cicerone, he never spoke, but led the way through the dewy
+grass into the white, glorious moonlight, and kept a few yards ahead of
+me in the dusty road until we reached the Rayne farmhouse.
+
+Through the windows I saw a dim light, and figures moving. I pushed open
+the door without knocking. A doctor, young and alert, had been summoned
+from the village, and the dull light from a kerosene lamp, set hastily
+on the table, touched his curly red hair as he knelt by the mattress. An
+old white-bearded man sat huddled in one of the shadowy corners, weeping
+the tears of senility, and a tall, dust-colored woman, whom I rightly
+took to be Mrs. Hikes, stood stolidly watching the doctor. Outside the
+crickets were singing cheerily in the wet grass.
+
+"Oh, yes, so glad you've come," murmured the doctor as he rose.
+
+Then I stepped closer to the little figure lying in the old blue
+curtain, that was stiffened now with blood. The parted lips were gray;
+the whole face, except the vivid eyes, was dead. The night-dress was
+thrown back from the poor throat and chest, stained here and there with
+spots of crimson on the white skin, that seemed stretched over the small
+bones. I stooped beside her, in answer to an appealing look. She could
+not lift the frail, tired hand that lay by her, its fingers uncurled,
+the hand of one who, dying, relinquishes gladly its grasp on life. The
+hands of the strong, torn from a world they love, clench and clutch at
+the last; it is an involuntary hold on earth. The doctor moved away. The
+whining sobs of the old man became more audible. I put my ear to her
+cold lips.
+
+"His letters ... the letters ... and ... my book ... I told you of, take
+them. Here, in the closet ... by ... the chimney...."
+
+I could hardly distinguish the faint whispers. I raised my hand
+impatiently, and the old man stopped moaning. Mrs. Hikes and the doctor
+ceased speaking in low undertones. Only a great moth, that had fluttered
+inside the lamp chimney thudded heavily from side to side.
+
+"Yes, yes. What shall I do with them?"
+
+She did not speak, and seeing her agonized eyes trying to tell mine, I
+cried aloud, "Give her brandy--something. She wants to speak. Oh, give
+her a chance to speak!"
+
+The doctor stepped to my side. He lifted the wrist, let it fall, and
+shook his head. "Don't you see?" he said. I looked at the eyes, and saw.
+
+Some days later I went to the lonely house. The old man was sitting in a
+loose, disconsolate heap in his seat by the apple-tree. The tears rolled
+down the wrinkles into his beard, when I spoke of his daughter.
+
+"There were some letters and papers she wished me to have," I said. In
+the closet by the chimney. "If you are willing--"
+
+The old man shuffled into the house, and threw open the blinds of the
+darkened room. Some one had set the books in neat piles on the table;
+the chairs were placed against the wall. The drapery had been washed and
+stretched smoothly across the mattress. There were two or three dark
+stains on the floor that could not be washed out. The slim little
+slipper still decked the wall.
+
+I looked up at the door by the chimney. "Here's the key," said the old
+man, brokenly. "I found it to-day under the mattress." I tried it, but
+it did not turn in the lock. I was hardly tall enough to reach it. The
+old man fetched me a chair on which I stood, and after a moment or two I
+felt the rusty lock yield. The little door gave and opened.
+
+Nothing was there, nothing but the dust of years that blackened my
+fingers, as I put in my hand, unconvinced by my sense of sight.
+
+"Are you sure no one has been here, no one who could open the closet?"
+
+"Nobody," he proclaimed in the cracked tone of extreme age. "She must
+have wandered when she told you that. People wander when they are dying,
+you know. Her mother--but that was long ago." He tapped the key
+thoughtfully on the mantel. "You see how the lock stuck, and the door. I
+don't expect Agnes had it open for years. I expect she wandered, like
+her mother." He peered vaguely in at the empty space, and then turned to
+me. "I forget a great deal now. I'm getting an old man, a very old man,"
+he said, in an explanatory tone.
+
+"But did you know she had letters somewhere, a pile of papers? You
+remember her getting letters, do you not, letters from her lover?"
+
+He looked up at me apologetically, with dim, watery blue eyes. "I don't
+expect I remember much," he confessed. "Not of later years. I could tell
+you all about things when I was a boy, but I can't seem to remember much
+that's happened since mother died. That must have been along about
+twenty years ago. I'm all broken down now, old--very old. You see I am a
+very old man."
+
+I left him shutting the room into darkness, and passed out into the
+sunlight, sorely perplexed.
+
+Mrs. Libby was baking when I returned, and the air of the kitchen was
+full of the sweet, hot smell that gushed from the oven door she had just
+opened. She stood placidly eating the remnants of dough that clung to
+the pan.
+
+"Mrs. Libby," said I, sinking down on the door-step, "what was the name
+of Agnes Rayne's lover? You told me once you could not remember. Will
+you try to think, please?"
+
+"Well, I was talking to Mrs. Hikes after the fun'r'l," said Mrs. Libby,
+still devouring the dough. "He boarded to the Hikeses', you see, 'n' she
+had it as pat as her own," and then Mrs. Libby mentioned calmly a name
+that now you can hardly pass a book-stall without reading, a name that
+of late is a synonym for marvellous and unprecedented success in the
+literary world. I had met this great man at a reception the winter
+before; let me rather say, I had stood reverently on the outskirts of a
+crowd of adorers that flocked around him. I looked so fixedly at Mrs.
+Libby that her smile broadened.
+
+"Don't know him, do you?" she queried.
+
+"I think I have met him," I replied. "Was he engaged to Agnes Rayne?"
+
+Mrs. Libby waited to pierce a loaf of cake with a broom splint. She ran
+her thick fingers carefully along the splint and then turned the brown
+loaf on to a sieve.
+
+"Mrs. Hikes says she don't believe a word of it. Folks think he just
+courted her one spell that summer, not real serious, just to pass the
+time away, you might say, like many another young man. Mrs. Hikes says,
+she never heard of him writin' to her, or anything, 'n' if he had, old
+Hawkins that brings the mail couldn't have kep' it, any more'n he could
+keep the news he reads off postal cards. They talked enough first about
+her being love-cracked, but there wa'n't any signs of it I could hear,
+excep' her trailin' 'round the beach, 'n' looking wimbly, 'n' not doin'
+jus' like other folks. She never _said_ a word to anybody. Might 'a'
+been it turned her some," said Mrs. Libby, thoughtfully, rolling the
+flour in white scales from her heavy wrists. "Might 'a' been she was
+queer any way--sending off to the city for white silk gowns, 'n' things
+to wear in that old rack of boards, jus' because she was bein' courted.
+Most would 'a' kep' the money 'gainst their fittin' out. I guess that
+was all there was, jus' a little triflin', 'n' she took it in earnest.
+Well, it don't make any difference now," she concluded coolly, as she
+turned to her sink of baking-dishes.
+
+I sat listening stupidly to her heavy tread, to the cheery clash of the
+tins as she washed and put them in place. To never know any more! Yet
+after all, I knew all that could be known, strangely enough. Then, with
+a long shiver, I remembered the small closet beside the chimney with its
+empty, dusty shelves.
+
+"Mrs. Libby," said I, rising, "I think I will go back to the city
+to-morrow."
+
+
+
+
+A STORY OF THE VERE DE VERE.
+
+
+The landlord called it an apartment-house, the tenants called their
+three or four little closets of rooms, flats, and perhaps if you or I
+had chanced to be in West ---- Street, near the river, and had glanced
+up at the ugly red brick structure, with the impracticable fire-escape
+crawling up its front, like an ugly spider, we should have said it was a
+common tenement house.
+
+Druse, however, had thought it, if a trifle dirty, a very magnificent
+and desirable dwelling. The entrance floor was tesselated with diamonds
+of blue and white; there was a row of little brass knobs and
+letter-boxes, with ill-written names or printed cards stuck askew in the
+openings above them. Druse did not guess their uses at first, how
+should she? She had never in all her fifteen years, been in the city
+before. How should one learn the ways of apartment-houses when one had
+lived always in a little gray, weather-beaten house, on the very
+outskirts of a straggling village in Eastern Connecticut?
+
+It happened like this. One day, Tom, the fourth of the nine hungry and
+turbulent children, sent to the store on an errand, returned, bringing a
+letter. A letter, that was not a circular about fertilizers, or one of
+those polite and persuasive invitations to vote for a certain man for a
+town office, which penetrated even to the Hand's little gray kennel of a
+house toward election-time, was such a rarity that Mrs. Hand forgot the
+bread just done in the oven, and sank down wearily on the door-step to
+read it.
+
+"Well, you ain't a-goin'," she said to Drusilla, who stood quite
+patiently by, with a faint color in her pale face. "No, sir, you ain't
+a-goin' one step. She was too stuck-up to come here when she was alive,
+'n' you ain't a-goin' to take care of her children dead, 'n' that's the
+end of it."
+
+Druse made no reply. She never did. Instead, she bent her thin, childish
+back, and pulled the burning bread out of the oven.
+
+None the less, Druse went.
+
+It was all Pop's work. Pop was meek and soft; he cried gently of a
+Sunday evening at church, the tears trickling down the furrowed
+leather-colored skin into the sparse beard, and on week-days he was wont
+to wear a wide and vacuous smile; yet somehow, if Pop said this or that
+should be, it was,--at least in the little house on the edge of the
+village.
+
+And Pop had said Druse should go. For after all, the case is hard, even
+if one _is_ occupying a lofty position to rural eyes as a carpenter in
+"York," with a city wife, who has flung her head contemptuously at the
+idea of visiting his ne'er-do-weel brother; the case is hard, no matter
+how high one's station may be, to be left with three motherless
+children, over-fond of the street, with no one to look after them, or
+make ready a comfortable bit of dinner at night. And so, considering
+that Elviry was fourteen, and stronger than Druse, any way, and that
+John Hand had promised to send a certain little sum to his brother every
+month, as well as to clothe Druse, Druse went to live in the fourth flat
+in the Vere de Vere.
+
+Perhaps that was not just the name, but it was something equally
+high-sounding and aristocratic; and it seemed quite fitting that one of
+the dirty little cards that instructed the postman and the caller,
+should bear the pleasing name, "Blanche de Courcy." But Druse had never
+read novels. Her acquaintance with fiction had been made entirely
+through the medium of the Methodist Sunday School library, and the
+heroines did not, as a rule, belong to the higher rank in which, as we
+know, the lords and ladies are all Aubreys, and Montmorencis, and
+Maudes, and Blanches. Still even Druse's untrained eye lingered with
+pleasure on the name, as she came in one morning, after having tasted
+the delights of life in the Vere de Vere for a couple of weeks. She felt
+that she now lived a very idle life. She had coaxed the three children
+into a regular attendance at school, and her uncle was always away until
+night. She could not find enough work to occupy her, though, true to her
+training, when there was nothing else to do she scrubbed everything
+wooden and scoured everything tin. Still there were long hours when it
+was tiresome to sit listening to the tramping overhead, or the quarrels
+below, watching the slow hands of the clock; and Druse was afraid in the
+streets yet, though she did not dare say so, because her bold, pert
+little cousins laughed at her. She was indeed terribly lonely. Her uncle
+was a man of few words; he ate his supper, and went to sleep after his
+pipe and the foaming pitcher of beer that had frightened Druse when she
+first came. For Druse had been a "Daughter of Temperance" in East Green.
+She had never seen any one drink beer before. She thought of the poem
+that the minister's daughter (in pale blue muslin, tucked to the waist)
+had recited at the Temperance Lodge meeting. It began:
+
+  "Pause, haughty man, whose lips are at the brim
+  Of Hell's own draught, in yonder goblet rare--"
+
+She wished she had courage to repeat it. She felt if Uncle John could
+have heard Lucinda recite it--. Yet he might not think it meant him; he
+was not haughty, although he was a carpenter, and the beer he drank out
+of one of the children's mugs. But it troubled Druse. She thought of it
+as she sat one afternoon, gravely crotcheting a tidy after an East Green
+pattern, before it was time for the children to be back from school. It
+was a warm day in October, so warm that she had opened the window,
+letting in with the air the effluvia from the filthy street, and the
+discordant noises. The lady in the flat above was whipping a refractory
+child, whose cries came distinctly through the poor floors and
+partitions of the Vere De Vere.
+
+Suddenly there was a loud, clumsy knock at the door. She opened it, and
+a small boy with a great basket of frilled and ruffled clothes, peeping
+from under the cover, confronted her.
+
+"Say, lady," he asked, red and cross, "Is yer name De Courcy?"
+
+"No, it ain't," replied Druse. "She's the back flat to the right, here.
+I'll show you," she added, with the country instinct of "neighboring."
+
+The boy followed her, grumbling, through the long narrow hall, and as
+Druse turned to go, after his loud pound on the door, it suddenly flew
+open. Druse stood rooted to the ground. A dirty pink silk wrapper, with
+a long train covered with dirtier lace, is not a beautiful garment by
+full daylight. Yet to untrained eyes it looked almost gorgeous,
+gathered about the handsome form. Miss De Courcy had failed to arrange
+her hair for the afternoon, and it fell in heavy black folds on her
+shoulders, and her temples were bandaged by a white handkerchief.
+Perhaps it was not strange that Druse stood and gazed at her. The dark,
+brilliant eyes fixed themselves on the slight, flat-chested little form,
+clad in brown alpaca, on the pale hair drawn straight back from the pale
+face, and arranged in a tight knob at the back of the head.
+
+A whim seized the fair wearer of the negligee. "Come in and sit down, I
+want to talk to you. There, leave the clothes, boy. I'll pay your mother
+next time," and she pushed the boy out, and drew the young girl in with
+easy audacity.
+
+Druse looked around the room in bewilderment. It was not exactly dirty,
+but things seemed to have been thrown in their places. The carpet was
+bright, and much stained, rather than worn; hideous plaques and plush
+decorations abounded. A crimson chair had lost a leg, and was pushed
+ignominiously in a corner of the tiny room; a table was crowded with
+bottles and fragments of food, and a worn, velvet jacket and
+much-beplumed hat lay amongst them. A ragged lace skirt hung over the
+blue sofa, on one corner of which Miss De Courcy threw herself down,
+revealing a pair of high heeled scarlet slippers. "Sit down," she said,
+in a rather metallic voice, that ill accorded with the rounded curves of
+face and figure. "I've got a beastly headache," pushing up the bandage
+on her low brow. "What did you run for, when I opened the door? Did your
+folks tell you not to come in here, ever?"
+
+"Why, no, ma'am!" said Druse, raising her blue, flower-like eyes
+wonderingly.
+
+"Oh! well," responded Miss De Courcy, with a hoarse little laugh of
+amusement. "I thought they might have--thought maybe they objected to
+your making 'cquaintances without a regular introduction, you know.
+Haven't been here long, have you?"
+
+"No," said Druse, looking down at her tidy, with a sudden homesick
+thrill. "No, I--I come from East Green, Connecticut. I ain't got used to
+it here, much. It's kind o' lonesome, days. I s'pose you don't mind it.
+It's different if you're used to it, I guess."
+
+Somehow Druse did not feel as timid as usual, though her weak little
+voice, thin, like the rest of her, faltered a trifle, but then she had
+never called on a lady so magnificently dressed before.
+
+"Yes, I'm pretty well used to it by this," replied Miss De Courcy, with
+the same joyless little laugh, giving the lace skirt an absent-minded
+kick with her red morocco toe. "I lived in the country before--when I
+was little."
+
+"You did!" exclaimed Druse. "Then I guess you know how it is at first.
+When you think every Friday night (there ain't been but two, yet)
+'There, they're gettin' ready for Lodge meetin';' and every Sunday
+evenin' 'bout half-past seven: 'I guess it's mos' time for the Meth'dis'
+bell to ring. I must get my brown felt on, and--'"
+
+"Your what?" asked Miss De Courcy.
+
+"My brown felt, my hat, an'--oh! well, there's lots o' things I kind o'
+forget, and start to get ready for. An' I can't sleep much on account of
+not having Bell an' Virey an' Mimy to bed with me. It's so lonesome
+without 'em. The children here won't sleep with me. I did have Gusty one
+night, but I woke her up four times hangin' on to her. I'm so used to
+holding Mimy in! Oh! I guess I'll get over it all right, but you know
+how it is yourself."
+
+Miss De Courcy did not reply. She had closed her eyes, and now she gave
+the bandage on her head an angry twich. "_Oh_, how it aches!" she said
+through her shut teeth. "Here, give me that bottle on the stand, will
+you? It'll make it worse, but _I_ don't care. My doctor's medicine
+don't seem to do me much good, but I sort of keep on taking it," she
+said to Druse, grandly as she poured out a brownish liquid into the
+cloudy glass that the good little housekeeper had eyed dubiously, before
+giving it to her.
+
+Miss De Courcy's doctor evidently believed in stimulants; a strong odor
+of Scotch whiskey filled the room.
+
+"It smells quite powerful, does'nt it?" she said. "It has something in
+it to keep it, you know. It's very unpleasant to take," she added,
+rolling up her brown eyes to Druse's compassionate face.
+
+"I do' know as it would do you any good, prob'ly it wouldn't," said
+Druse shyly, shifting the glass from one hand to the other, "but I used
+to stroke Ma's head lots, when she had a chance to set down, and it
+ached bad."
+
+Miss De Courcy promptly stretched herself at full length, and settled
+her feet comfortably in the lace skirts, in which the high, sharp heels
+tore two additional rents, and pulled the bandage from her forehead.
+
+"Go ahead," she said, laconically. Druse dragged a chair to the side of
+the couch, and for some minutes there was silence--that is, the
+comparative silence that might exist in the Vere De Vere--while she
+deftly touched the burning smooth flesh with her finger tips.
+
+Miss De Courcy opened her eyes drowsily. "I guess I'm going to get a
+nap, after all. You're doing it splendid. You'll come and see me again,
+won't you? Say, don't tell your folks you was here to-day, will you?
+I'll tell you why. I--I've got a brother that drinks. It's awful. He
+comes to see me evenings a good deal, and some daytimes. They'd be
+afraid he'd be home, 'n' they wouldn't let you come again. He's cross,
+you see 'n' they'd never--let you come again 'f you--"
+
+Miss De Courcy was almost overpowered by sleep. She roused herself a
+moment and looked at Druse with dull pleading. "Don't you tell 'em,
+will you? Promise! I want you to come again. A girl isn't to blame if
+her father--I mean her brother--"
+
+"Yes, ma'am, I'll promise, of course I will," said Druse hastily, her
+thin little bosom swelling with compassion. "I won't never let 'em know
+I know you, if you say so. No, ma'am, it's awful cruel to blame you for
+your brother's drinkin'. I've got some pieces about it at home, about
+folkses' families a-sufferin' for their drinkin'. I'd like to come again
+if you want me. I'm afraid I ain't much company, but I could stroke your
+head every time you have a headache. It's awful nice to know somebody
+that's lived in the country and understands just how it is when you
+first--"
+
+Druse looked down. The doctor's remedy was apparently successful this
+time, for with crimson cheeks and parted lips, Miss Blanche De Courcy
+had forgotten her headache in a very profound slumber. Druse gazed at
+her with mingled admiration and pity. No wonder the room seemed a
+little untidy. She would have liked to put it to rights, but fearing she
+might waken her new friend, who was now breathing very heavily, she only
+pulled the shade down, and with a last compassionate glance at the
+victim of a brother's intemperance, she picked up her crocheting and
+tip-toed lightly from the room.
+
+After that life in the Vere De Vere was not so dreary. Druse was not
+secretive, but she had the accomplishment of silence, and she kept her
+promise to the letter. Druse could not feel that she could be much
+consolation to so elegant a being. Miss De Courcy was often _distraite_
+when she brought her crocheting in of an afternoon, or else she was
+extremely, not to say boisterously gay, and talked or laughed
+incessantly, or sang at the upright piano that looked too large for the
+little parlor. The songs were apt to be compositions with such titles
+as, "Pretty Maggie Kelly," and "Don't Kick him when He's Down," but
+Druse never heard anything more reprehensible, and she thought them
+beautiful.
+
+Sometimes, quite often indeed, her hostess had the headaches that forced
+her to resort to the doctor's disagreeable remedy from the black bottle,
+or was sleeping off a headache on the sofa. Miss De Courcy did not seem
+to have many women friends. Once, it is true, two ladies with brilliant
+golden hair, and cheeks flushed perhaps by the toilsome ascent to the
+fourth floor, rustled loudly into the parlor. They were very gay, and so
+finely dressed, one in a bright green plush coat, and the other in a
+combination of reds, that Druse made a frightened plunge for the door
+and escaped, but not before one of the ladies had inquired, with a peal
+of laughter, "Who's the kid?" Druse had flushed resentfully, but she did
+not care when her friend told her afterward, with a toss of the head,
+"_They're_ nothing. They just come here to see how I was fixed."
+
+After a little Druse offered timidly to clean up the room for her, and
+quite regularly then, would appear on each Wednesday with her broom and
+duster, happy to be allowed to bring order out of chaos.
+
+"Well, you are a good little thing," Miss De Courcy would say, pulling
+on her yellow gloves and starting for the street when the dust began to
+fly. She never seemed to be doing anything. A few torn books lay about,
+but Druse never saw her open them. She had warned Druse not to come in
+of an evening, for her brother might be home in a temper. Druse thought
+she saw him once, such a handsome man with his hair lightly tinged with
+gray; he was turning down the hall as Druse came wearily up the stairs,
+and she saw him go in Miss De Courcy's room; but then again when Gusty
+was sick, and she had to go down at night and beg the janitress to come
+up and see if it were the measles, there was a much younger man, with
+reddened eyes, from whose glance Druse shrank as she passed him, and he
+certainly reeled a little, and he also went in Miss De Courcy's door,
+and from motives of delicacy she did not ask which was he,--though she
+felt a deep curiosity to know. Not that Miss De Courcy refrained from
+mentioning him. On the contrary, she told heart-rending incidents of his
+cruelty, as she tilted back and forth lazily in her rocking-chair, while
+Druse sat by, spellbound, her thin hands clasped tightly over the work
+in her lap, neglecting even the bon-bons that Miss De Courcy lavished
+upon her.
+
+One morning there was a cruel purple mark on the smooth dark skin of
+Miss De Courcy's brow, and the round wrist was red and swollen. Druse's
+eyes flashed as she saw them. "I expect I'm as wicked as a murderer,"
+she said, "for I wish that brother of yours was dead. Yes, I do, 'n' I'd
+like to kill him!" And the self-contained and usually stoical little
+thing burst into passionate tears, and hid her face in Miss De Courcy's
+lap.
+
+A dark flush passed over that young lady's face, and something glittered
+in the hard blue eyes. She drew Druse tight against her heart, as though
+she would never let her go, and then she laughed nervously, trying to
+soothe her. "There, there, it ain't anything. They're all brutes, but I
+was ugly myself last night, 'n' made him mad. Tell me something about
+the country, Druse, like you did the other day--anything. I don't care."
+
+"Do you wish you was back there, too?" asked homesick Druse, wistfully.
+Druse could no more take root in the city than could a partridge-berry
+plant, set in the flinty earth of the back-yard.
+
+"Wish I was back? Yes, if I could go back where I used to live," said
+Miss De Courcy with her hoarse, abrupt little laugh. "No, I don't
+either. Folks are pretty much all devils, city or country."
+
+Druse shivered a little. She looked up with dumb pleading into the
+reckless, beautiful face she had learned to love so well from her humble
+tendings and ministerings. She had the nature to love where she served.
+She had no words to say, but Miss De Courcy turned away from the
+sorrowful, puzzled eyes of forget-me-not blue, the sole beauty of the
+homely, irregular little face.
+
+"I was only a-joking, Druse," she added, smiling. "Come, let's make some
+lemonade."
+
+But Druse did not forget these and other words. She pondered over them
+as she lay in her stifling little dark bedroom at night, or attended to
+her work by day, and she waged many an imaginary battle for the
+beautiful, idle woman who represented the grace of life to her.
+
+The fat janitress sometimes stopped to gossip a moment with Druse.
+
+"Ever seen Miss De Courcy on your floor?" she asked, one day, curiously.
+
+"Yes, ma'am, I--I've seen her," replied Druse, truthfully, the color
+rising to her pale cheeks.
+
+"O Lord!" ejaculated the janitress, heaving a portentous sigh from the
+depths of her capacious, brown calico-covered bosom, "if I was the owner
+of these here flats, instead of the old miser that's got 'em, wouldn't I
+have a clearin' out! Wouldn't I root the vice and wickedness out of some
+of 'em! Old Lowder don't care what he gits in here, so long's they pay
+their rent!"
+
+Druse did not reply. She felt sure that the janitress meant Miss De
+Courcy's drunken brother, and she was very glad that "old Lowder" was
+not so particular, for she shuddered to think how lonely she should be
+were it not for the back flat to the right. Even the janitress, who
+seemed so kind, was heartless to Miss De Courcy because she had a
+drunken brother!
+
+Druse began to find the world very, very cruel. The days went on, and
+the two lives, so radically unlike, grew closer entwined. Druse lost
+none of her stern, angular little ways. She did not learn to lounge, or
+to desire fine clothing. If either changed, an observer, had there been
+one, might have noticed that Miss De Courcy did not need as much
+medicine as formerly, that the hard ring of her laugh was softened when
+Druse went by, and that never an oath--and we have heard that ladies of
+the highest rank have been known to swear under strong
+provocation--escaped the full red lips in Druse's presence.
+
+One morning Druse went about the household duties with aching limbs and
+a dizzy head. For the first since she had acted as her uncle's
+housekeeper, she looked hopelessly at the kitchen floor, and left it
+unscrubbed: it was sweeping day, too, but the little rooms were left
+unswept, and she lay all the morning in her dark bedroom, in increasing
+dizziness and pain. For some days she had been languid and
+indisposed, and now real illness overcame her; her head was burning, and
+vague fears of sickness assaulted her, and a dread of the loneliness of
+the black little room. She dragged herself down the hall. Miss De Courcy
+opened the door. Her own eyes were red and swollen as with unshed tears.
+She pulled Druse in impetuously.
+
+"I'm so glad you're come. I--Why, child, what is the matter with you?
+What ails you, Druse?"
+
+She took Druse's hot little hand in her's and led her to the mirror.
+Druse looked at herself with dull, sick eyes; her usually pallid face
+was crimson, and beneath the skin, purplish angry discolorations
+appeared in the flesh.
+
+"I guess I'm goin' to be sick," she said, with a despairing cadence. "I
+expect it's somethin' catchin'. I'll go home. Let me go home."
+
+She started for the door, but her limbs suddenly gave way, and she
+fell, a limp little heap on the floor.
+
+Miss De Courcy looked at her a moment in silence. Her eyes wandered
+about the room, and fell on a crumpled letter on the table. She paused a
+moment, then she turned decisively, and let down the folding-bed that
+stood in the corner by day. She lifted the half-conscious Druse in her
+strong young arms, and laid her on the bed. It was only a few minutes'
+work to remove the coarse garments, and wrap her in a perfumed, frilled
+nightdress, that hung loosely on the spare little form. Miss De Courcy
+surveyed the feverish face against the pillows anxiously. Druse half
+opened her dull eyes and moaned feebly; she lifted her thin arms and
+clasped them around Miss De Courcy's neck. "Ain't you good!" she said
+thickly, drawing the cool cheek down against her hot brow.
+
+"I'm going for the doctor, Druse," said Miss De Courcy, coaxingly. "Now,
+you lay right still, and I'll be back in no time. Don't you move;
+promise, Druse!"
+
+And Druse gave an incoherent murmur that passed for a promise.
+
+The doctor, who lived on the corner, a shabby, coarse little man, roused
+her from a fevered dream. He asked a few questions perfunctorily, turned
+the small face to the light a moment, and cynically shrugged his
+shoulders.
+
+"Small-pox," was his laconic remark, when he had followed Miss De Courcy
+into the next room.
+
+"Then she's going to stay right here," said that young woman firmly.
+
+"Well, I guess _not_" replied the doctor, looking her over. "How about
+your own complexion if you take it?" he added, planting a question he
+expected to tell.
+
+Miss De Courcy's remark was couched in such forcible terms that I think
+I had better not repeat it. It ought to have convinced any doctor
+living that her complexion was her own affair.
+
+"Oh! that's all right," replied the man of science, unoffended, a tardy
+recognition of her valor showing through his easy insolence. "But how
+about the Board of Health, and how about me? She's better off in a
+hospital, any way. You can't take care of her," with a scornful glance
+at the draggled finery and striking hat. "What do you want to try it
+for? I can't let the contagion spread all over the house, you know; how
+would you get anything to eat? No, it's no use. She's got to go. I'm not
+going to ruin my reputation as a doctor, and--"
+
+Miss De Courcy smiled sweetly into the doctor's hard, common face. She
+drew a purse from her pocket, and selected several bills from a roll
+that made his small eyes light up greedily, and pressing the little
+packet into his not too reluctant fingers, she remarked significantly,
+as she sat down easily on the top of a low table:
+
+"You're mistaken about what's the matter with her, doctor. She's got
+the chicken-pox. You just look at her again as you go out, and you'll
+see that I am right. But it's just as well to be careful. You might mail
+a note for me when you go out, and my wash-woman will buy things for me,
+and bring them up here to the door. I'll swear I won't go out till you
+say I may, or till you take me to the hospital. And then, as you go
+along, you can step into the front flat left, and tell her uncle she's
+took bad with chicken-pox. He's got a lot of young ones, and he'll be
+glad enough to let me do it, see? And of course, chicken-pox is quite
+serious sometimes. I should expect to pay a doctor pretty well to bring
+a patient out of it," she added, with a placid smile.
+
+The doctor had turned, and was looking with deep interest at a chromo on
+the wall.
+
+"I'll take another look at her. I may have been mistaken, doctors
+sometimes are--symptoms alike--and--m--m--you can get that letter ready
+for me to mail."
+
+Strange days and nights ensued. Druse had a dim knowledge of knocks at
+the door at night, of curses and oaths muttered in the hall, of Miss De
+Courcy's pleading whispers, of a final torrent of imprecations, and then
+of a comparative lull; of days and nights so much alike in their fevered
+dull monotony that one could not guess where one ended and another
+began; of an occasional glimpse that melted into the general delirium,
+of Miss De Courcy's face, white, with heavy, dark-ringed eyes, bending
+over her, and of Miss De Courcy's voice, softened and changed, with
+never a harsh note; of her hand always ready with cooling drink for the
+blackened, dreadful mouth. Yes, in the first few days Druse was
+conscious of this much, and of a vague knowledge that the rocking ship
+on which she was sailing in scorching heat, that burnt the flesh from
+the body, was Miss De Courcy's bed; and then complete darkness closed
+in upon the dizzy little traveller, sailing on and on in the black,
+burning night, further and further away from the world and from life.
+
+How could she guess how many days and nights she sailed thus? The ship
+stopped, that was all she knew; but still it was dark, so dark; and then
+she was in a strange land where the air was fire, and everything one
+touched was raging with heat, and her hands, why had they bandaged her
+hands, so that she could not move them?
+
+"I can't see," said Druse, in a faint, puzzled whisper. "Is it night?"
+
+And Miss De Courcy, bending over the bed, haggard and wan, and years
+older in the ghostly gray dawn, said soothingly:
+
+"Yes, Druse, it's night," for she knew Druse would never see the light
+again.
+
+"Miss De Courcy!"
+
+"Yes, Druse."
+
+"I expect I've kept your brother out all this time. I hope he won't be
+mad."
+
+"No, no, Druse; be quiet and sleep."
+
+"I can't sleep. I wish it would be morning. I want to see you, Miss De
+Courcy. Well, never mind. Somehow, I guess I ain't goin' to get better.
+If what I've had--ain't catchin'--I suppose you wouldn't want to--to
+kiss me, would you?"
+
+Without hesitation, the outcast bent her face, purified and celestial
+with love and sacrifice; bent it over the dreadful Thing, loathsome and
+decaying, beyond the semblance of human form or feature, on the
+bed,--bent and kissed, as a mother would have kissed.
+
+The gray dawn crept yet further into the room, the streets were growing
+noisier, the Elevated trains rushed by the corner, the milkmen's carts
+rumbled along the Avenue, the sparrows twittered loudly on the
+neighboring roofs. And yet it seemed so solemnly silent in the room.
+"Well, now!" said Druse, with pleased surprise, "I didn't expect you
+would. What a long time it is gettin' light this mornin'. To think of
+you, a-takin' care of _me_, like this! An' I ain't never done a thing
+for you excep' the headaches and sweepin', an' even that was nicer for
+me than for you. I knew you was awful good, but I never knew you was
+religious before, Miss De Courcy. Nobody but folks that has religion
+does such things, they say. I wish I could remember my prayers. Ain't it
+strange, I've forgot them all? Couldn't you say one? Just a little one?"
+
+And Miss De Courcy, her face buried in her hands, said, "Lord, have
+mercy upon us," and said no more.
+
+"Thank you," said Druse, more feebly, and quite satisfied. "We won't
+forget each other, an' you'll promise to come by'm'by. Won't you? I'll
+be so pleased when you come!"
+
+"Yes, Druse," whispered Miss De Courcy, "I promise."
+
+And then the terrible form that had been Druse sat up in bed with a
+mighty effort, and turned its sightless eyes joyfully toward Miss De
+Courcy's tear-stained face.
+
+"It's morning! I can see you!" it said, and fell back into the faithful
+arms and upon the faithful breast.
+
+And so Druse, not having lived and died in vain, passed away forever
+from the Vere De Vere.
+
+
+
+
+A LAMENTABLE COMEDY.
+
+
+I stood one July noon on the platform of the desolate station at
+Wauchittic, the sole passenger waiting for the stage. The heat was
+quivering in the air. I watched the departing train, whirling like a
+little black ball down the narrow yellow road, cut between the green
+fields, and was vaguely glad that I was not going to the end of the
+Island on it. This was somewhere near the middle, and it was quite far
+enough from civilization.
+
+The village, like so many Long Island villages, was distant from the
+railroad. Only one or two farm-houses were in sight. There was hardly a
+sound in the hot noonday air, now that the train had gone, except the
+whistling of a cheerful station agent, who sat in the window of the
+little oven-like Queen Anne structure, in his shirt sleeves, looking out
+at me with lively interest. I had sought for a quiet country place in
+which to finish my novel, the book which would decide beyond doubt
+whether I had a future as a writer, or whether I was doomed to sink to
+the level of the ordinary literary hack, for into it I had put, I knew,
+all that was my best.
+
+As I looked absently down the track, I reviewed the past winter months,
+the long days and evenings spent at my desk in the stuffy little
+lodgings to which I was limited by my narrow income, interrupted
+frequently by invasions on various pretexts of the ill-fed chambermaid,
+who insisted on telling me her woes, or by my neighbor from the next
+room, the good little spinster, who always knocked to ask if she might
+heat a flat-iron at my grate when I was in the midst of a bit of minute
+description. She would sit down, too, would poor withered Miss Jane, in
+my little rocking-chair to wait while the iron heated, and she said she
+often told the landlady she did not know how I could write, I had so
+many interruptions.
+
+I had come to a place now, I thought, trying to quell the sense of
+loneliness that oppressed me, as I looked around at the expanse of
+stunted wood and scrub-oaks, where I could be perfectly undisturbed. If
+the farmer's family with whom I was to board, were noisy or intrusive,
+one could take one's writing materials and go--well, somewhere--into the
+woods, perhaps. I was only twenty-two, and I was sanguine.
+
+I saw a cloud of white dust down the road--nothing more, but the
+station-agent, with a certainty born of long experience, shouted
+encouragingly: "Thar she comes!" and presently I found myself in a
+large, sombre and warm conveyance, very like the wagon known to the New
+York populace familiarly, if not fondly, as "the Black Maria."
+
+The driver was a tow-headed lad of sixteen, so consumed with blushes
+that, out of pity, I refrained from questions, and sat silently enduring
+the heat behind the black curtains, while we traversed, it seemed to me,
+miles of dusty, white road, bordered by ugly, flat fields, or dwarf
+woods and undergrowth, before we stopped at a smart white farm-house.
+The farmer's wife, hearing our approach, stood on the little porch to
+welcome me. Mrs. Hopper gave a peculiar glance at my begrimed person and
+face, and I followed her up the narrow stairs with an odd, homesick
+sinking of the heart, seized by a momentary pang of that "nostalgia of
+the pavement," felt oftener by the poor than rich dwellers of the city,
+in exile. Perhaps I loved New York in an inverse ratio to what I had
+suffered in it. All the miseries of hope deferred, unremitting labor,
+and unnumbered petty cares attendant upon a straightened income, were
+forgotten, and I yearned for its ugly, midsummer glare, even its
+unsavory odors, and my stifling little chamber "_au troisieme_" as I
+surveyed the tiny bare room, with its blue and gray "cottage set," its
+white-washed walls, hung with a solitary engraving of Lincoln and his
+Cabinet. It was not a beautiful spot, truly, yet I thought dubiously, as
+I drank in the silence, it might be a very good place in which to bring
+to an end the sufferings of my heroine, who had agonized through several
+hundred pages of manuscript.
+
+"I expect you're tired," said Mrs. Hopper, sitting down carefully on the
+edge of the feather-bed to which I was condemned. "It's a pretty quiet
+place here--ain't much of a village, but then you said you wanted a
+quiet place to write in. I guess you'll be s'prised--there's another
+orther here. Maybe you know him, his name's Longworth, John Longworth?
+Don't! Why, he lives to New York! No, he ain't right here in the house,
+he's across the street to the Bangses', but you'll see him," she said,
+encouragingly. "It'll be awful pleasant for you two orthers to get
+acquainted. The Bangses don't keep cows, an' every night at milkin'
+time, over he comes to get a glass o' warm milk; guess he likes to talk
+to our men-folks. Old Bangs ain't much comp'ny for anybody, let alone a
+writer. He's got a man with him to wait on him; a kind o' nurse, I
+b'lieve. He was near dead before he came here, though he looks pretty
+smart now--had a fever. Some of the folks here hev got it around he was
+out of his head, a man so, a-settin' around out o' doors, writin' from
+mornin' till night. Lord, how mad it made the Bangses!" Mrs. Hopper
+indulged in an abrupt retrospective laugh of enjoyment. "They was so set
+up, havin' a writer there, an' Mary Bangs was pretty well taken down
+when I told her we was a-goin' to have one here. She acted as if she
+didn't b'lieve there was more'n one orther to New York, an' that was Mr.
+Longworth," continued Mrs. Hopper, regarding me with a proprietor's
+pride, as I removed my hat and hung it on a nail driven in the wall. I
+smiled as I reflected that I, too, should doubtless be looked on with
+suspicion as a fit subject for a straight-jacket, if I, an able-bodied
+young woman, should sit "out o' doors" with my writing, while my
+presumable betters were working.
+
+"Well, I guess I'll go down now," said Mrs. Hopper, after a brief pause,
+in which she examined my gown. "I expect you want y'r dinner. We live a
+good piece from the store, Miss Marriott an' any time if you should get
+out of ink, don't make any bones of asking for it. We've got some right
+here in the house, an' you're as welcome to it as if you was my own
+daughter."
+
+I was glad to find, at dinner, that the family consisted of Mr. and Mrs.
+Hopper only, with the exception of a couple of farm-hands, whose
+lumbering tread down the back-stairs wakened me each morning about four.
+I found Mr. Hopper a tall, bent old man, with meek, faded blue eyes, and
+a snowy frill of beard. He had an especially sweet and pathetic voice,
+with a little quaver in it, like a bashful girl's.
+
+He laid down his knife and fork, and looked at me with an air of gentle
+inquiry, as I took my seat at the table. "Mrs. Hopper tells me you're a
+literary," he said at length. I'm afraid I replied, "Yes?" with the
+rising inflection of the village belle, nothing else occurring to me to
+say.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Hopper, softly, pushing back his chair, and rising to
+leave the table, "it's in our fam'ly some too. And in Ma's. One o' my
+uncles and one o' her brothers." He shuffled out of the room with a
+placid smile, as Mrs. Hopper said, deprecatingly, but with conscious
+pride, "La, pa, Jim never wrote more'n two or three pieces."
+
+For a few days I took a vacation. I wandered about the "back lots," down
+to the mill-dam, up and down the lonely, winding street where all the
+prim houses--and they were very far apart--wore a desolate, closed
+look, as though the inhabitants were away, or dead. I grew accustomed to
+my environments; the little bedroom began to seem like home to me. On my
+way to the post-office some one passed me on the sandy, yellow patch, a
+man clothed after the manner of civilization, whose garments, cut by no
+country tailor, were not covered by overalls. I knew it must be "the
+other orther." None of the males in Wauchittic appeared in public,
+except on Sunday, save in overalls. It would have been, I think,
+considered unseemly, if not indecent.
+
+The man was young, with a worn, delicate face, marked by ill-health, and
+though I had studiously avoided the yard near "milkin' time," in spite
+of Mrs. Hopper's transparent insistance each evening on my going out to
+see the brindled heifer, I think my indifferent glance was assumed, for
+though John Longworth, so far as I knew, had not his name inscribed on
+the records of fame, and was probably a penny-a-liner on a third-rate
+newspaper, I had the instinct of fellow-craft, that is, alas! strongest
+in the unknown and ardent young writer. He walked feebly, and his
+brilliant eyes were haggard and circled, as though by long illness. I
+saw him drive by nearly every afternoon, accompanied by his nurse, a
+good-humored young fellow, who helped him tenderly into the carriage,
+and drove, while he lay back with the irritated expression that the
+sense of enforced idleness and invalidism gives a man in the heyday of
+youth. Mrs. Hopper, who was loquacious to a degree, told me long stories
+of his parents' wealth, of the luxuries brought down with him, and of
+the beautiful pieces of furniture he had had sent down for his room, for
+his physician had recommended him to an absolutely quiet place for the
+entire summer. She burned with an irrepressible desire to have me make
+the acquaintance of this son of wealth and literature, either from the
+feminine proclivity for match-making, or because, possibly, she thought,
+having an intense reverence for writers, that our conversation would be
+of an edifying and uncommon character. I fear she was disappointed, for
+on the occasion of our first meeting,--I believe Mr. Longworth came to
+see Mrs. Hopper on some trifling business, and I happened to be writing
+on the front porch,--our remarks were certainly of the most commonplace
+type, and I saw a shade of disappointment steal across her face, as she
+stood by triumphantly, having accomplished her wish to "get us
+acquainted."
+
+Mr. Longworth overtook me the next day, as I was returning listlessly,
+toward noon, from a long walk, my arms full of glowing St. John's wort,
+the color of sunset. Back of me lay the long stretch of flat road, and
+the fields on either side were scorched with the sun. The heat was
+intolerable. Mr. Longworth would carry the flowers for me, and I
+resigned them, knowing that nothing is more distasteful to a man than to
+be treated like an invalid. And the bunch was really a heavy burden,--I
+had gathered such an enormous armful, together with some tender creepers
+of blackberry vine. We chatted of the place, of the people, and I found
+that my companion had a keen sense of humor. As we neared the house,
+after a moment's hesitancy, I asked him to come and rest on the little
+porch, where a couple of splint rockers and a palm-leaf fan invited one
+to comfort and coolness. He accepted the invitation with alacrity,
+though he chose to sit on the wooden steps, while I tilted lazily back
+and forth, overcome by the noonday lull and heat.
+
+He looked so boyish when he took off his hat, with the dark little curls
+falling over his forehead, that I thought he could not be older than I.
+The walk had perhaps been more than he could bear, for he was so pale
+that I could not help saying, "Pardon me, Mr. Longworth, but you look
+so ill. Will you let me give you a glass of wine?" I had brought a
+little with me. He looked slightly annoyed, but he answered gayly,
+
+"I suppose Mrs. Hopper has been telling you I am a confirmed invalid.
+Indeed I am almost well now, and I need Wilson about as much as I need a
+perambulator, but I knew if I did not bring him, my mother would give up
+Bar Harbor, and insist on burying herself with me, either here or at
+some other doleful spot, stagnation having been prescribed for me. Oh,
+well, I don't mind the quiet," he continued, leaning his broad shoulders
+against the pillar, and pulling at a bit of the St. John's wort, for he
+had thrown it down in a straggling heap on the floor of the porch. "I'm
+at work on--on a book," he said with a boyish blush.
+
+"Yes," I replied, smiling. "Mrs. Hopper told me that there was 'an
+orther,' in Wauchittic."
+
+"And that was what Mrs. Bangs told me the other day!" he declared
+audaciously. And then we both laughed with the foolish gaiety of youth,
+that rids itself thus of embarrassment.
+
+"It is my first book," he confessed.
+
+"And mine," I said.
+
+Our eyes met a little wistfully, as if each were striving to read
+whether the other had gone through the same burning enthuiasms for work,
+the same loving belief in its success, the same despondent hours when it
+seemed an utter failure, devoid of sense or interest, and then, somehow,
+we felt suddenly a mutual confidence, a sense that we knew each other
+well, the instant _camaraderie_ of two voyagers who find that they have
+sailed the same seas, passed through the same dangers, and stopped at
+the same ports.
+
+I heard Mrs. Hopper open the hall-door, caught a glimpse of her looking
+out at us with satisfaction on her face, warm from the kitchen fire,
+and heard her close it, with much elaboration, and, tip-toe heavily
+away.
+
+"Yes, this is my first book," he went on, as though we had not paused.
+"Of course I have had experience in writing before, magazine sketches,
+and that sort of thing, and beside that, I once had a mania for
+newspaper work, and much to my mother's horror, I was really a reporter
+on one of the city papers--_The Earth_."
+
+"Circulation guaranteed over 380,000," I continued, rather ashamed of my
+flippancy, although he laughed.
+
+"Exactly. Well, after a time I had an offer to go on the editorial staff
+of the _Eon_, through a friend who has influence with the management,
+and it was just then I was taken ill with this typhoid fever that has
+left me the wreck you see," he said, with a whimsically sad smile. "That
+is not the worst, though," he went on, a shadow falling over his
+upturned face, "I cannot explain it, although my doctor pretends to. I
+had written--oh! say half-a-dozen chapters of this book before my
+sickness. As soon as I began to be convalescent, I wanted to amuse
+myself by going on with it. I had my plot roughly blocked out, my
+characters were entirely distinct in my mind, yet when I took up my pen
+again, I found I could not write connectedly. It was simply horrible. I
+shall never forget that day. Of course I imagined I should never write
+again. I sent for two or three doctors, announced that I had paresis,
+and was told that it was madness for a man who had been as ill as I to
+attempt any sort of literary work for weeks, if not months. But the
+sense that I absolutely could not write preyed upon me. I used to do a
+little each day in spite of their orders, but it is only now that I am
+beginning to feel the confusion of ideas lessening, and the ability to
+present them coherently growing Even yet I only write disconnected parts
+of the chapters I had planned. It is--oh! what is that pet word of
+phrenologists? _continuity_, that I have not at my command. I suppose
+you cannot quite understand the agony of such an experience, never
+having gone through it. Only yesterday I tore up thirty pages of
+manuscript, and had more than half a mind to burn the whole thing. It is
+only the consideration of the possibly great loss to the literary world
+that withholds me, you know," he said with a half bitter laugh, throwing
+down the ruins of the flowers he had pulled to pieces with his thin,
+nervous hands, and rising.
+
+"But I've been an unconscionable bore, even for a valetudinarian, and I
+believe they are privileged to tax people's amiability. I hope I havn't
+tired you so that you will forbid my coming again. I will promise not to
+talk about myself next time," he said, as he turned to go down the path.
+
+I wondered what his book was like, as I lazily watched him cross the
+street in the noonday sun, and then I remembered with a twinge of
+conscience that I had hardly written a thousand words since I came. This
+soft air, redolent of spicy midsummer odors, seemed to produce an
+invincible indolence, even of thought. After the struggles of the past
+winter, I was feeling the reaction in utter relaxation of will and
+purpose. I wondered, were I in Mr. Longworth's place, would I ever write
+again, from the mere love of it? Was the end, even if that end were
+success, worth the pain of attaining it? And then, fearing to question
+myself further, I went to my room and began to write.
+
+Late July was very beautiful in Wauchittic. From the ocean, a dozen
+miles distant, was wafted the faintest suggestion of the odor of the
+sea, the wide fields of lush pasture seemed to drink the sun. All night
+the murmur of the little stream falling over the mill-dam, filled the
+dark hours with soft whispers. The low woods, with their glittering
+leaves of the scrub-oak, tempted me, and I discovered fairy glades in
+their depths, where the grass was thin and pale, and strong ferns grew
+about the roots of the trees. Sometimes Mr. Longworth would accompany me
+on my trips of exploration, and, happy in our youth and the gladness of
+summer, and forgetful of strict conventionality, we would spend long
+mornings together, writing and reading in an especially cosy spot at the
+edge of the woods back of the farm. Mr. Longworth was growing so strong
+that Wilson's position was almost entirely a sinecure, and he spent most
+of his time lounging in the one village store, relating remarkable
+stories of New York to a circle of open-mouthed idlers. Day by day, I
+watched the lessening pallor and the growing health of Mr. Longworth's
+face, and saw him visibly gain strength. He could carry all the rugs and
+books and writing materials to our sylvan sanctum without fatigue, and
+he was so boyishly proud of his health that he used to exhaust himself
+with too long walks, for which I administered lectures that he always
+received submissively. One warm morning we had spent an hour in writing.
+I had grown tired, and throwing down my pen and pad, I left Mr.
+Longworth still at work, and strayed out into the field in the sun.
+There had been no rain for days, and the locusts filled the air with
+their _zeeing_. The wide field was dotted with golden patches of the
+arnica blossom, or yellow daisy, as the farmers called it. I wandered
+through the hot, knee-high grass, picking handfuls of the broad yellow
+suns, then childishly threw them away, and pulled others, with great
+heads of sweet red clover, and spears of timothy too. I was so happy. My
+whole being was filled with causeless peace and gladness. From time to
+time I glanced back to the shade of the oak trees, to the tall, slender
+figure, with the dark head bent over the white sheets of manuscript, and
+I sang softly a little song for very joy of my life. I looked up to the
+deep, cloudless sky, around at the wide stretch of green in the golden
+sunlight, then almost unconsciously back once more to the edge of the
+woods, where the spread rugs made a tiny home fit for the heart of
+summertide. Nor did I guess, even then, which was the dominant note of
+this wonderful chord that my life had unconsciously struck. I knew only
+that the world was far more beautiful than I had ever dreamed, and still
+singing under my breath the little cadence that seemed to fit the day, I
+wandered slowly back, leaving a path crushed between the tall, sun-faded
+grasses as I went.
+
+Mr. Longworth laid down his work as I approached. A strange, absurd
+shyness possessed me, after the weeks of strengthening friendship and
+simple good-fellowship, but I held out the great bunch of daisies
+playfully to him, as I seated myself on the pile of rugs. He reached
+his hand for them eagerly, and buried his face in their sunny depths.
+
+His eyes shone feverishly with his stress of work, and his thin cheeks
+were flushed. "You look tired," I said. "You should not write so long."
+
+Thus far, though we had often jested about it, we had never read each
+other portions of our work.
+
+"When I get mine half done," I had said, when he begged me to read him a
+chapter.
+
+"When I can manage to make a chapter run smoothly to its end," he had
+replied laughing, in turn, but now to-day, urged by some necessity for
+an absorbing topic into which I could plunge, losing my restlessness, I
+insisted that he should read fragments, at least, to me.
+
+He demurred at first. "I have told you how stupid it sounds, these
+disconnected bits, little descriptions, detached conversations.
+Sometimes I think I shall never use them after all." He fingered the
+pages absently.
+
+"No, read it to me as it is," I begged. "I must hear it. I understand,
+of course, how it is written."
+
+And so, yielding to my entreaties, he read, while I leaned back against
+the tree trunk, listening at first critically, and interested, perhaps,
+because it was his work, then with clasped hands and shortening breath,
+leaning forward that I might lose no word. A little squirrel scampered
+through the undergrowth back of us, and far in another field I could
+hear Mr. Hopper's quavering voice, as he called to the haymakers.
+Sometimes a leaf rustled, falling to the ground, but it was very quiet.
+
+At last he laid down the leaves, and fixed his dark eyes eagerly on my
+face, as if he would read my thoughts, but my eyes were full of tears,
+and they were selfish tears. "My poor book!" I said, with a tender
+contempt for it.
+
+"Do you mean--?" he began increduously.
+
+"I mean that this is wonderful, and that I know I shall never write
+again," I said. "I do not know how it is, but I can read by the light of
+your book that you have genius, and that I am a failure. It is well that
+something brought it home to me before I wasted any more time." I meant
+to speak bravely, but I knew more than this. I knew that, with all my
+air-castles shattered, with the knowledge that to him literature was a
+pastime, while to me it meant livelihood, I gloried more in his success
+than I should in my own, that I was glad that he, and not I, was to have
+fame; and in the tumult of new emotions against which I struggled, my
+lip quivered, I turned aside my head, and felt, but I did not see, the
+hand that touched mine, thrilling me so that I drew away.
+
+"Miss Marriott--Kate--"
+
+"No, no," I cried, facing him with my cheeks crimson, and speaking
+rapidly, "I want you to let me send a few pages for a reading to Mr.
+----, the editor of ----'s Magazine; he is a friend of mine; he has been
+so good to me. You say you have no publisher in view. I am certain he
+will take this when it is finished, and you know what that means; it
+will make your reputation, and--"
+
+"Ah, but you see, these are only fragments," he said, sadly, regaining
+his composure. "Suppose I am never able to weave them properly into the
+plot? You cannot know how discouraged I am sometimes."
+
+"Will you not let me send them?" I asked eagerly. "It is quite true that
+they are only fragments, but no one could write such things and then
+fail of success in elaborating; it is impossible. Come, let us go, it is
+nearly dinner-time," I went on, not giving him time to speak, as I began
+gathering up the books and rugs. "No, do not talk of my book; it is
+over. It was only a fancy of mine. I ought to have known I could not
+really write, and it came to me clearly this morning--so clearly! If you
+will let me be godmother to yours, that will be a little consolation," I
+said laughing, and having now his consent to send his MSS. to Mr. ----,
+I hurried him homeward, talking gaily of indifferent topics, and
+avoiding the tender, questioning eyes that sought my own.
+
+That there was bitterness in the realization that I had miserably
+failed, that my novel was stupid and lacked the elements of interest, I
+cannot deny. Why I had not seen it all before, I can never understand,
+but this morning, as I compared it with the brilliant and strange play
+of fancy that characterized Mr. Longworth's work, I felt it keenly and
+conclusively. In the long afternoon hours I spent that day alone with my
+manuscript, I learned to face calmly the fact that I must go back to
+newspaper work without the vestige of a hope that I should ever write a
+readable novel. What it meant to me to arrive at this conclusion no one
+will understand who has not had the same hopes and the same downfall,
+yet through those hours in the little white-washed bed-room, with the
+locust boughs tapping against the window, the memory that I strenuously
+put away of that warm clasp, of the new tenderness in the voice that had
+called me by my name, softened the sharp pangs of disappointment; and
+he, at least, would not fail as I had done.
+
+Toward sunset I laid away my dead book, and went down to the
+sitting-room where Mrs. Hopper sat placidly mending. She looked a trifle
+anxiously at my reddened eyelids. "Feel well?" she queried, plying the
+needle swiftly. "You mustn't let things prey onto your mind," she
+admonished, "or you won't get your money's worth of good out of the
+place, and besides, Lord! what is there worth worryin' over, any how?
+Money ain't worth it, and love ain't worth it," she declared, with a
+keen glance at me. "But, there, what _is_ the use of tellin anybody
+that? I worried some before I married Pa. I guess it's natural. I
+thought, thinks I, 'Mary Ann Bishop, he's years older'n you, 'n' he's
+weakly, 'n' there ain't much doubt but what you'll be left a relic'. Now
+look, that was ten years ago, and Pa ain't no more out o' slew 'n' he
+was then. 'N' then I thought, 'There, he's had one wife.' (Pa was a
+widower.) ''N' I expect he'll be always a-comparin' of us.' It ain't
+happened once, at least, not out loud, an' oh! how good he was to that
+woman! It didn't seem as if he _could_ be as good to his second. It was
+all over the place," said Mrs. Hopper laying down "Pa's" calico shirt,
+and speaking in low and impressive tones, as befits the subject of
+death, "how he bought her a bran-new wig two weeks before she died, an'
+he let her be buried in that wig, that cost over thirty dollars! An' as
+for a stone! Well, there, he went over to Gilsey's marble-yard to New
+Sidon, 'n' picked out a sixty-dollar tomb, 'n' never asked 'm to heave
+off a cent! An' that man, Miss Marriott," said Mrs. Hopper, "he'd do
+just as well by me as ever he done by her, 'n' I'm contented, 'n' I'm
+happy. I can tell you, I'm a believer in marriage," she said, with a
+proud smile, as she rose to get tea.
+
+Mr. Longworth brought over a neat package of manuscript that evening,
+which I sent, with a letter to Mr. ----. We sat talking on the porch,
+watching the moon rise and flood the dew-wet fields with a tide of white
+radiance. Occasionally we heard Mr. or Mrs. Hopper in the lamp-lit
+sitting-room making brief comments on neighborhood gossip, or the crops,
+and then Mrs. Hopper would go on silently sewing, and "Pa," his white
+head bent over a "Farmer's Almanac," made long and painful calculations
+on a scrap of paper in which he seemed to get much mysterious assistance
+from the almanac.
+
+Without, the cool night air touched my face gently. My head was burning
+and fevered with the day's emotions, but I felt the infinite peace of
+the evening calming me.
+
+"No," I said firmly, "indeed I have decided wisely, Mr. Longworth. I am
+going back to my old work cheerfully, and shall never think again of
+my--my disappointment. I believe I can easily get work on my old paper,
+the "_Courier_," and I have been offered an editorial position on a new
+fashion paper, beside my weekly letter to the "_Red Canon Gazette_.'"
+Naturally I did not tell him that I had spent all my savings of a year
+on this planned vacation, when I was to finish the book that should
+reimburse me.
+
+"You shall not go back to that wretched drudgery," said Mr. Longworth,
+in his impetuous, nervous manner. "Do not imagine you are ever to do it
+again. Tell me," he said, lowering his voice, and leaning toward me so
+that he could see my face, shaded by the vine-hung trellis. "Could you
+be happy--"
+
+We heard Mr. Hopper moving around the room uneasily, and instinctively
+Mr. Longworth paused.
+
+"Ma," said the old man, a trifle reproachfully, "I'm afraid you don't
+try to make it cheerful for them young folks. Why don't you go out and
+set for a spell? I guess _I'll_ go."
+
+"Stay where you are, Joseph," said Mrs. Hopper, in loud tones of
+disapproval, that were wafted through the open window to us. "Did _we_
+want the old folks forever runnin' after us before _we_ was married?"
+Mr. Longworth tried not to steal a mirthful glance at me, but he found
+it hard to resist. "Oh! pshaw, Ma," replied the old man gently. "There
+ain't none of that goin' on. He ain't a marryin' man," and we heard his
+slippered feet pattering softly over the oil-clothed entry, and his mild
+face beamed on us through the net door, which he held open for a moment
+before he came out and seated himself in the rocking-chair.
+
+"Well, now, this _is_ comfortable," he said, with a cheerfully social
+air. "I can tell you this is a night for authors. Here's a chance for
+poetry!" with a wave of his thin, weather-worn hand toward the peaceful
+fields. "Made any this evenin'?" he inquired. "Ain't? well, I guess
+you'll never come across a more inspirin' night," he said, with some
+disappointment. "I expected likely you'd have some you could say right
+off. Fer a plain farmer, I don't s'pose there's anybody fonder'n I am of
+verses," he said, musingly. "I b'lieve I told ye 'twas in our family. I
+wish you could have met my uncle, Mis' Marriot, died on his
+ninety-second birthday, and had writ a long piece on each birthday for a
+matter of forty year. That ther man was talented, I tell ye. There
+wasn't no occasion he couldn't write a piece onto. Why, the night Ma and
+me was married (we was married in Ma's sister's parlor) we hadn't more'n
+turned 'round from the minister, 'n before anybody had a chance t'
+congratulate us, uncle, he steps right up in front of us, an' sez he:
+
+  'Now you are married, an' man an' wife
+  May you live happy this mortial life,
+  An' when your days on this earth is o'er
+  May you both meet together on the evergreen shore.'
+
+"It come to him, jus' come to him that minute, like a flash," said the
+old man, reflectively, the pathos of his sweet, tremulous voice lending
+unspeakable melody to the preposterous stanza.
+
+Mr. Hopper had evidently settled himself for the remainder of the
+evening, and after a time Mr. Longworth bade us good-night, and went
+across to the Bangs homestead.
+
+All that night I tossed about on my uncomfortable feather-bed, or
+rather, when I found I could not sleep, I rose after a time, and wrapped
+in my dressing-gown, I sat by my tiny window, watching the shadows of
+the wind-blown locust-boughs on the moonlit grass below, full of the
+dreams which are the stuff that romances are made of, and which, though
+I had often used them as "material," I had never known myself before;
+shy and tender dreams they were, that glorified that summer night, and
+kept me wakeful until dawn.
+
+The next day and the next I was ill and feverish, so ill that I could
+not rise. Mr. Longworth brought for me great bunches of choice flowers,
+for which he must have sent Wilson to the next town of New Sidon, and a
+dainty basket of fruit. The third day I rose and dressed toward noon,
+and weak as I felt, I decided to walk down to the post-office, for I
+thought perhaps the air would do me good, and beside, the mail was never
+brought up until after dark, and I longed to find if Mr. ---- had
+written me as I expected, about the manuscript. I knew he would be very
+prompt with me.
+
+I found several letters in the box for me, and eagerly scanning the
+envelopes, I discovered the well-known buff tint, with the red device of
+a female figure with a book clasped to the breast, that is the livery
+of "----'s Magazine." I tore it open, reading as I slowly walked. Mr.
+---- had written as follows, in his hurried hand:
+
+
+"OFFICE OF ----'s MAGAZINE.
+
+"MY DEAR MISS MARRIOTT:
+
+"I return the MSS. you sent us, and I have no hesitation in saying that
+your friend is a genius. In fact, I was so chained by the somewhat wild
+and singular style that I sat up most of Tuesday night to go through it
+myself.
+
+"Of course in their present disconnected state, the fragments are quite
+unavailable to us, but when worked into a story, they ought to make a
+success. I hope we shall have the first reading of the completed book. I
+understand it is the work of a beginner, but it bears none of the marks
+of the novice, and I can but think we have discovered the 'coming
+American novelist.'
+
+"By the way, how is your own book coming on?
+
+"Yours in haste,
+
+"---- ----."
+
+I had walked on some distance from the post-office as I read this, for
+Mr. ----'s chirography was almost undecipherable, even to one accustomed
+to it. I was just folding the letter to replace it in the envelope, when
+I heard heavy footsteps hurrying behind me. I turned my head and saw
+Wilson, quite red in the face with trying to overtake me. "Beg pardon,
+Miss," he said, touching his hat, "I saw you coming out of the office,
+and--I'd like to speak to you a minute, if I may."
+
+"What is it?" I asked, somewhat surprised. I stepped back from the path,
+and Wilson stooped down awkwardly, and picked a twig from a low bush
+that grew by the fence. "Well," he began, drawing a long breath, "I've
+been thinking it over, and I've made up my mind to tell you. I expect I
+ought to have done it before, but my orders was so strict, and--you see
+I'm saving up to get married, and a man hates to lose a good place,--but
+that's neither here nor there, Miss, the truth is, I ain't Mr.
+Longworth's nurse, and I ain't his valley neither. I'm--I'm his
+attendant."
+
+"Well, what of it?" I said, with some irritation. How could Wilson's
+absurd distinctions matter to me? What did I care whether he called
+himself valet, or nurse, or attendant?
+
+To his credit, be it said that there was no tone of half-exultation,
+almost pardonable after my manner of annoyance, as he went on. His
+heavy, spatulate finger-tips were stripping the little twig bare of its
+leaves. As he continued, I fixed my lowered eyes on that bit of alder. I
+remember every tiny, bright brown knot on it, and how one worm-eaten
+leaf curled at its edges.
+
+"You see," said Wilson, clumsily, "I mean I was his attendant up to the
+Retreat. It was a real high-toned place, and they did not take any
+dangerous ones, only folks like him. His people ain't the kind that
+stand for price. They've got plenty, and they don't care what they pay.
+I dare say you've been in his father's store many a time,--Longworth &
+Whittles, one of the biggest and best dry-goods stores on Sixth avenue.
+The old gentleman's rolling in gold, and there ain't a nicer lady in New
+York City than Mrs. Longworth. You see, it was this way. Young Mr.
+Longworth didn't like business, and they sent him abroad to be educated,
+and when he come back he just fooled around and went out a good deal,
+and finally, he got in with some literary folks. One of his friends took
+him to their receptions, and he got it into his head he was going to be
+a writer. His folks didn't care, they'd have paid a publisher any price
+to take his books if it would have done any good; but finally he took to
+shuttin' himself up in his room day and night, writin' all the time,
+and it told on him pretty well, for I guess he'd never wrote anything
+but cheques before. And then he'd burn it up as fast as he wrote, and
+not eat, and not come out o' that room for days at a time. He kept
+a-saying it would be all right if it would only fit together but that's
+just where it is, it don't any of it fit together. And now he just
+writes over and over the same things he wrote a year ago. He don't know
+it, he burns 'em up, and then he thinks it's all different. He got so
+bad the doctors said he'd be better up to Dr. Balsam's Retreat, where
+they could kind of soothe him down, and make him think his health was
+out of order, and get his mind off his writing, but he did have a pretty
+bad fever up there, an' ever since he thinks he was editor or somethin'
+on some paper, and he can tell it off straight as a string. He's all
+right about everything else, and if you didn't know about it, you'd
+think he was just what he says, sure enough."
+
+"It's pretty near killed his mother. Seems funny; a young fellow with
+nothing to do but spend money, getting it into his head to write books!
+Well, they said I wasn't to tell anybody, and I _ain't_ told anybody but
+you, and I thought as you was a writer, and pretty busy, I guessed you
+wouldn't want to waste your time over his book. They say, folks do, that
+it's first-rate, as far as it goes; but you see it don't never get any
+farther, and it never will. I thought I'd better tell you about it,"
+said Wilson, his plebeian, kindly face crimson with a delicate pity that
+would have done honor to an aristocrat, and still working assiduously at
+the little twig, "I knew you was a genuine writer yourself, and it
+seemed a pity for you to take up your valuable time helpin' him on,
+about something that can't amount to anything."
+
+May he be forgiven that gentle falsehood!
+
+I looked for a moment at the wide-spread field and distant woodland,
+lying green in the peaceful sunshine, at the place grown so dear to me,
+that now whirled before my eyes. Far down the road a heavy farm-wagon
+creaked its way toward us, in a cloud of white dust.
+
+"You did quite right to tell me, Wilson," I said, turning to go. "No one
+shall hear of it from me."
+
+I looked down at the buff envelope from "----'s Magazine," which I had
+crushed in my hand, and smoothed it out mechanically, as I went on in
+the increasing heat.
+
+It was only August, but my summer was over.
+
+
+
+
+AN AFRICAN DISCOVERY.
+
+
+"Of course it is very curious; but if you'll pardon me, my dear fellow,
+you might as well tell me you had found a philosopher's stone."
+
+Still, the rough glass phial, with odd metal bands around its neck, had
+a fascination for me. I picked it up again, and tilted it idly back and
+forth in my hand, watching the slimy brown fluid, the color of
+poppy-juice, slip along its sides.
+
+Hilyard smoked on imperturbably. The color mounted under his bronzed
+skin up to the light rings of his hair; there was a momentary angry
+flash in his pale blue eyes, but it was only for an instant.
+
+"Perhaps you would like to try it, since you are so skeptical," he said,
+grimly.
+
+"Thanks, I have no wish to poison myself, and I have no doubt it is a
+poison; but what I do doubt is the remarkable qualities you claim for
+it. How did you come across the vile stuff, anyway?"
+
+Hilyard stretched himself comfortably in his chair, and took his beloved
+pipe from his handsome mouth. "Oh! well, you know," he said, lazily, "I
+don't claim to be a Stanley by any means, but I did go a good bit into
+Africa. I wasn't bent on discovering anything, and I loafed around, and
+shot big game when there was any to shoot, and I learned some odd things
+from those devils of witch-doctors, as well as a few on my own account.
+You remember my old craze for medicine and chemistry?"
+
+"I fell in with a tribe of savages who interested me immensely. The art
+of torture was brought to a perfection among them that would have made
+the persecutors of the Inquisition turn green with envy. It was refined
+torture, such as one would not expect to see save among those who
+possessed mental powers equal to their cruelty. No decapitations, no
+stranglings, among these delicate fiends, I can assure you; nor were
+they satisfied with a day's torment, that should culminate in death.
+Captives were kept for weeks, frequently for months: the wounds made by
+one day's torture were dressed at night, and stimulating drink given to
+keep up the strength, that they might endure for a longer period. It was
+the custom to deliver prisoners or offenders to the family of the chief
+or king for the first day's torment; then down through the various
+nobles, or what corresponded to the aristocracy (and I assure you the
+class distinctions were as closely drawn as in May-Fair), until, if the
+unfortunate possessed a fine physique, it was not unusual for almost
+every family in the tribe to have had a day's amusement with him; and it
+was considered a point of honor not to actually take life, but rather
+let it spend itself to the last drop, in agonies undreamed of among what
+we call the civilized, while to invent some new and horrible form of
+torture conferred an honor upon the discoverer such as we give men who
+have made some wonderful advance in art or science.
+
+"'How could I endure such sights?' Oh! well, one gets hardened to
+anything, you know, and to tell the truth, I was in search of a new
+sensation, and I found it. I watched with as much fascination as the
+savages--no, more--for it was new to me and old to them. Oh! come,
+Lewis, you needn't draw off your chair; and that reproving,
+Sunday-school expression is rather refreshing from a man who upholds
+vivisection. I tell you candidly that there is nothing on earth
+comparable to the fearful, curious combination of pleasure and horror
+with which one watches torture one is powerless to stop. It is morbid,
+and probably loathsome. No. It is not morbid, after all; it is natural,
+and not a diseased state of mind. Have you never seen a sweet little
+child, with a face like an angel, pull the wings from a butterfly, or
+half kill a pet animal, and laugh joyfully when it writhed about? I
+have. The natural man loves bloodshed, and loves to hurt men and
+creatures. It is bred in the bone with all of us, only, as far as the
+body is concerned, this love is an almost impotent factor in modern
+civilization, for we have deified the soul and intellect to such an
+extent, that it is them we seek to goad and wound, when the lust of
+cruelty oppresses us, since they have grown to be considered the more
+important part; and we know, too, that the embittered soul avenges
+itself upon its own body, so that we strike the subtler blow. What we
+call teasing, is the most diluted form of the appetite. Well, this is
+wide of the mark, I suppose. At any rate, my dusky friends, presumably
+having no sensitive souls to attack, did their very best with their
+enemies' bodies, and as I was saying, theirs was no mean accomplishment
+in that line.
+
+"I am not going to wound your susceptibilities by describing some of the
+functions which I have witnessed under that blazing sun. I will only
+tell you that during one especial occasion of rejoicing, a feast was
+given after a victory over a neighboring tribe, when the bound captives
+were piled together in black, shining heaps, that had a constant
+vermicular movement, each human pile guarded by a soldier. The chief at
+whose right hand I sat, being filled with joy, as well as rather too
+much drink, began boasting to me of the glories of his tribe, of his
+possessions, of the valor of his warriors, and above all of the great
+wisdom and learning of his medicine-man, who was beyond all wizards, and
+upon whom witchcraft was powerless, and who prepared a poison for such
+of the chief's enemies as it was not expedient to openly destroy; and
+this poison, he explained to me, was of a secret and mysterious nature,
+and unknown to any other tribe.
+
+"My curiosity was somewhat aroused, and I questioned him, whereupon he
+told me that the drug, being tasteless, was given in food or drink, and
+that the victim was seized with a terrible and immeasurable sadness and
+depth of despair, in which life appeared too horrible to endure, and
+which the unfortunate always ended by seizing a weapon of some sort and
+killing himself; and the chief, being of an inquiring mind, had caused
+the poison to be administered to a man who was carefully guarded and
+allowed no weapon.
+
+"'And what did he do?' I queried, for the chief assured me that the drug
+itself did not produce death, but only caused an irresistible desire for
+it.
+
+"The chief did not reply in words, but with a meaning smile, pointed to
+a vein on his black wrist, and set his sharp, pointed teeth against it,
+in a way that was a reply.
+
+"I was anxious to see for myself, naturally, suspecting some
+hocus-pocus, so I ventured to be respectfully dubious.
+
+"The chief was in an amiable mood; he bade me visit his tent with my
+servant at moon-rise, and he would prove that this was no lie, but the
+truth.
+
+"When we went out, it was about eleven o'clock, and the surrounding
+jungle was full of the horrible noises of an African night; the wail of
+the small lemur, that sounds like the death-moan of a child; the more
+distant roar of the lion in the black depths of the forest, too thick
+for the moonlight to ever penetrate; the giant trees of the bombax
+around the encampment, wreathed with llianes and parasitical poison
+vines that cast fantastic shadows on the ground, white with the
+perfectly white moonlight of the tropics, that reminds one of the
+electric light in its purity of ray and the blackness of the shadows
+that contrast with it.
+
+"Noiselessly my black servant and I proceeded to the chief's enclosure.
+His slaves permitted us to pass, by his orders, and we found ourselves
+in his tent, where he sat in grave silence on a pile of skins, the flare
+of a torch revealing fitfully the ugly face of the medicine-man,
+crouched with due humility on the earthen floor at his master's feet.
+After an exchange of compliments, his highness informed me that he had
+ordered one of his female slaves to be brought, that the poison had
+already been administered without her knowledge, and he also briefly
+remarked, as a proof of his clemency, that it was fortunate for her that
+the white man had doubted the drink, as otherwise she would have been
+given over to torture, since she had proved unfaithful to her lord, the
+chief having bestowed her on one of his sentries, whom she had betrayed
+with a soldier.
+
+"As he spoke sounds were heard outside, and, between two guards, the
+unfortunate woman was dragged into the tent. It was not lawful for her
+to address the chief, so she stood, panting, dishevelled, but silent, in
+the yellow torchlight. Her hair was nearly straight and hung in tangles
+on her beautiful shoulders; without so much as a girdle for covering,
+she felt no shame, but only looked about with rolling, terrified eyes,
+the picture of a snared animal.
+
+"No one spoke. She stood swaying from side to side, her beautiful figure
+pliant as grass.
+
+"Finally, with a long moan, she threw herself at the chief's feet. He
+regarded her impassively, and she gathered herself into a sitting
+posture, rocking to and fro, her head buried in her arms."
+
+"And you made no remonstrance?" I said.
+
+"The poison had already been administered, my dear Lewis," said Hilyard.
+"And beside, it was in the interest of science. It really seemed a
+shame to pick out such a beautiful creature; they are so rare in those
+tribes," he continued, regretfully.
+
+"Well, we sat there, perfectly mute, for about half an hour, I suppose.
+The chief was almost as impassive as an Englishman. I have seen the
+Almehs in Cairo, but I have never seen real poetry of motion--mind more
+completely expressed by matter--than that woman's body translating the
+anguish she endured; languor turning to deep weariness, weariness to
+agony, agony to despair. There was not a note in the gamut of mental
+suffering that she left unstruck--that savage, whom one would not guess
+possessed a mind. There came a pause. She looked about with a wild,
+fixed purpose in her eyes; like a panther she leaped on me with her
+sinuous body, in a second she had snatched the knife from my belt, and
+had fallen on the earthen floor, her head almost severed from the trunk
+by the violence of the blow she had struck at her throat with the keen
+blade. The chief made a sign to the guards who had brought her in (one
+of whom, by the way, was her deceived husband) to remove the body, and
+then he inquired, with some satisfaction, if I believed in the drug.
+
+"I was about to leave on the morrow for the coast, and I begged with all
+humility for the formula, or what answered for it, of the medicine-man,
+who shook his head decidedly.
+
+"From a corner of the tent he produced a small wicker cage, in the
+bottom of which lay coiled a snake of a bright orange yellow color,
+whose very triangular head showed it to be an especially venomous
+variety of the _naja_ species.
+
+"Muttering a few words and crooning to it after the manner of
+snake-charmers, it presently became lethargic, and he seized it by the
+neck and poured a few drops from an earthen bottle down its throat; then
+he dropped its tawny coils into its cage again, and placed the cage in
+front of me. Soon the serpent roused. It glided frantically about its
+cage; like a trail of molten gold was its color. Suddenly it coiled upon
+itself in a spiral, and _stung itself to death_!
+
+"After the most profound praise and flattery, and the present of a
+little glass medicine dropper which I chanced to have with me, and a
+small quantity of arsenic, which he tested with very satisfactory
+results, on a dog, he gave me a portion of the drug, but I'm sorry to
+say I could not prevail on the old scoundrel to give or sell the secret
+of its composition," concluded Hilyard regretfully, lifting the phial
+with tenderness. "I've tried to analyze it myself, and I sent it to a
+celebrated chemist, but the ingredients completely defy classification,
+and tests seem powerless to determine anything except that they are
+purely vegetable," he said, shaking the liquid angrily, and then rising
+to lock it in his cabinet.
+
+I, too, rose with a shudder, half-believing, half-sceptical, yet none
+the less with a strong distaste for the memory of the story I had just
+heard. I left Hilyard arranging the shelf of his cabinet, and opening
+the long French window I walked out on the lawn.
+
+Under the elm I saw Mrs. Mershon, Amy's aunt, with whom we were all
+staying. Kate Mershon was idly tossing a tennis-ball into the air, and
+making ineffectual strokes at it with a racquet, and at Mrs. Mershon's
+feet sat Amy, reading, the golden sunlight resting tenderly on her head,
+and bringing out the reddish tones of her hair. We were to be married in
+a month, and she looked so beautiful in the peace and quiet of the
+waning day, that I wished we two were alone that I might take her in my
+yearning arms and raise that exquisite colorless face to my lips. She
+never seemed so lovely as when contrasted with Kate's mature, sensual
+beauty, dark and rich as the Creole, and completely devoid of that touch
+of the pure and heavenly without which no woman's face is perfect to me.
+Amy was brilliant, full of raillery at times, but in the depths of
+those great clear eyes, like agates, in the candor of that white face,
+like a tea-rose, one read the beautiful chastity of soul in whose
+presence passion becomes mixed with a reverence that sanctifies it.
+
+Later that evening, when the drawing-room was gay with light and music,
+and Kate was singing one of Judie's least objectionable songs, with a
+verve and grace of gesture that the prima donna herself need not have
+despised, Amy and I went out on the moonlit lawn, leaving Hilyard
+leaning over the piano, and Mrs. Mershon sleeping peacefully in a
+corner. We strolled up and down the gravelled path in a silence more
+pregnant than words, and I felt my darling's hands clasped on my arm,
+and heard her gown sweep the little pebbles along the walk.
+
+Something brought to my mind the conversation with Hilyard, and I half
+thought to repeat it, but the night seemed too peaceful to sully by
+telling a tale of such horrors, and beside, I fancied Amy disliked
+Hilyard, although he had been intimate with the family for years, and in
+fact, he and Amy had almost grown up together; but he had been
+travelling for three years, and since his return Amy declared that he
+had grown cynical and hard, and altogether disagreeable, and as I really
+liked him, although our ideas on most subjects were radically opposed, I
+thought I would not connect him, in Amy's mind, with an unpleasant
+story.
+
+I looked down into the delicate face lifted to mine, and pressed a
+fervent kiss on the cream-white cheek. There was usually, even in her
+tenderest moments, a certain virginal shrinking from a caress that was
+an added charm, but to-night she moved closer to my side, and even
+touched her lips to mine shyly, an occurrence so rare that I trembled
+with joy, realizing as never before, that this sweet white flower was
+all my own. I wanted to kiss her again, and with more fervor, upon the
+mouth, but for her I had the feeling that I could not guard her, this
+dear blossom of purest whiteness, too jealously. I would no more have
+permitted myself, during our betrothal, to give her a very ardent
+caress, the memory of which, however harmless it might seem to the
+majority of affianced people, might cause her a troubled thought, than I
+would have permitted a stranger to kiss my sister. Her maiden shyness
+was a bloom which I did not wish to brush off. I took her hand in my own
+as we turned to retrace our steps to the house, and stood looking down
+at her in the wonderful September moonlight. She seemed a vestal virgin,
+in her long, clinging dress of white wool, with a scarf thrown about her
+head and throat.
+
+Within, Kate had finished her selections from opera and bouffe, and out
+into the soft evening drifted her rich contralto in the yearning strains
+of the "Blumenlied."
+
+  "I long to lay in blessing
+  My hands upon thy hair,
+  Praying that God may preserve thee
+  So pure, so bright, so fair!"
+
+I bent over and touched my lips to Amy's forehead reverently. "God keep
+you, my snow-flower!" I whispered. And then we went silently in
+together.
+
+The next day was so fine that Mrs. Mershon decided to drive over to the
+neighboring town in the afternoon for some shopping, and Hilyard,
+needing some simple chemicals for an experiment, which he hoped to find
+there at the chemist's, accompanied her. Kate and Amy and I had intended
+to go to a friend's for tennis, but at luncheon I received a telegram
+calling me to the city on urgent business. We were only a half hour's
+trip out, but I thought I might be detained until too late for dinner,
+so promising to return as early in the evening as possible, I hurried
+off.
+
+On arriving in New York, I found the affair which had threatened to be
+a prolix one, only demanded a few minutes' attention from me. I strolled
+into the Club; there chanced to be no one there whom I cared to see; the
+city was hot and ill-smelling, and I decided I could not do better than
+surprise Amy by returning earlier than she expected, and accordingly I
+took the first train out, walking up from the station.
+
+The little villa looked quite deserted as I approached. I wondered if
+Amy and Kate had gone to the Waddells' without me. I went to the side
+door, and hearing voices in the library, I went softly into the back
+drawing-room, with the foolish, boyish thought that I would walk in
+suddenly and interrupt an exchange of confidences which I should pretend
+to have overheard. I do not know what impelled me to play such an
+antiquated, worn-out trick; however, I was just advancing into the room
+through the wide-open but curtained doorway, when a chance sentence
+made me pause, struck as by a blow in the face. Through an interstice,
+left by an ill-adjusted fold of the portiere, I had a glimpse of the
+room. My betrothed, in one of her favorite white negligees, was
+stretched on the Turkish divan by the open fireplace, filled now with an
+enormous bowl of flowers. Her arms were raised above her head, and there
+was an enigmatic smile on her lips; her face had the sleepy wisdom of
+the Sphinx. Kate was crouched on the floor by her side, listening
+eagerly. Now and then she would say: "Oh! how clever you were!" "So he
+never guessed." "Yes, yes, and then, what did he say then?" urging her
+on with a feverish greed for details, which my affianced did not disdain
+to impart lazily, the faint, contemptuous smile always upon the pink
+lips I had not ventured to kiss with ardor.
+
+I did not know that I was listening, as I stood there, panting for
+breath, my hand clutched against my throat, lest I should groan in my
+agony. Phrase by phrase, I heard the whole dreadful story, told,
+without the shadow of regret or repentance, by the woman in whom I
+believed as I believed in Heaven, told with cynical laughter instead,
+and impatient contempt of the innocence, sullied years ago by
+Hilyard--the friend I trusted and loved. I could draw to-day exactly the
+pattern of that portiere, the curling leaves of dull crimson, the
+intricate tracery of gold thread.
+
+"And Lewis?" suggested Kate, at length.
+
+Amy rolled her head restlessly on the pillow. The soft golden hair was
+loosened from its pins, and fell over the slender shoulders. "Oh! well,
+one must marry, you know," she said, indifferently.
+
+I moved away silently and unnoticed. I went to brush my hair aside from
+my wet forehead, and noticed, parenthetically, that my hand was soiled
+with blood, where my nails had bitten the palm. With the death of love
+and faith in me had come an immense capacity for cunning, concealment
+and cruelty, the trinity of power that abides in certain beasts. Came
+also a dull purpose, growing each moment in strength.
+
+I do not remember that I felt a single throe of expiring love, the love
+that had filled my heart to the brim. An immeasurable nausea of disgust
+overcame me, to the exclusion of other ideas, a fixed sense that a thing
+so dangerous in its angelic disguise, so poisonous and loathsome, must
+not remain on earth; this jest of Satan must be removed lest it
+contaminate all with whom it came in contact. Yet did there live any
+being uncontaminated already? Were not all vile, even as she was vile?
+My brain reeled. Surely to the eyes of any beholder, she was the
+incarnation of purity! That which animated me was not a personal sense
+of grievance so much as the inborn, natural desire one feels to
+exterminate a pest, to crush a reptile, the more dangerous that it
+crawls through flowers to kill. As I have said, I felt power for
+strategy, unknown to my nature before, rising in me. Certain ideas were
+suggested to me, on which I acted with coolness and promptness. I felt
+like a minister of God's will, charged with destruction. It no longer
+remained for me to decide what to do: some power dwelling in me impelled
+me, against which I could not, even if I would, have struggled.
+
+I went to my room, still unobserved, washed my face and hands, and
+looking in the mirror, saw my face reflected, calm and placid, unmarked
+by the last half-hour. I descended the stairs, and came in by the porch.
+
+Amy sprang up from the couch as I entered, gaily humming a tune. It
+chanced to be the song to which we had listened the night before:
+
+  "I fain would lay in blessing,"--
+
+She drew her loose tea-gown about her, and tried to gather up the
+unfastened masses of golden hair, with a charming blush.
+
+"Lewis!" she exclaimed. "Where did you come from? How you frightened
+me!"
+
+"Well, you see, after all, I was not detained so long, and I thought if
+I hurried back, we might go to the Waddells'! I heard nothing of you, so
+I just ran up to get off the city dust concluding you had gone on
+without me. In fact, I was starting over there, when I thought you might
+be in here, so I came back--and found you. But it's rather late to go,
+don't you think?" said I. I had retreated to the window and stood with
+my back studiously turned, while my betrothed repaired the ravages made
+in her toilet by her siesta.
+
+"Yes, indeed," said Kate, "It is too late by far, and so hot! Let us be
+lazy until dinner. Do you want to read to us while we embroider? I know
+you do!" and going to the book-case, she brought one of Hamerton's
+books which I had been reading aloud to them the day before.
+
+Amy had quietly disappeared, and came down in an incredibly short time
+in a fresh, simple gown, with her work in her hand. I read until dinner,
+or rather until it was time to dress, and then I laid the book aside,
+and went up-stairs with the rest. Hilyard and Mrs. Mershon might return
+at any time. I stole downstairs, and into the room devoted to Hilyard's
+chemical experiments. Fool! I had forgotten to bring a cup or bottle
+with me. I looked hurriedly around the bare room, and discovering a
+broken bottle on a shelf, I took the key of the cabinet from its place
+and unlocked it.
+
+Yes, there in the corner stood the rough glass bottle, with the metal
+around it. I removed the stopper, and having no idea of the amount
+necessary to produce the desired result, poured out several
+tablespoonfuls, filling up the phial from the faucet at the rough sink
+in one corner of the room. I replaced the phial, locked the cabinet,
+and concealing the broken bottle in my dressing-gown, lest I should meet
+one of the servants, I retraced my steps to my own room. I was not
+wholly credulous of its marvellous properties, although Hilyard was not
+given to boasting or lying--except to women--but I believed it at least
+to be a poison, and I believed that it defied analysis, as he said.
+
+I took from my drawer a pocket flask of sherry, and emptying all but a
+wine glass, I added the drug, first tasting and inhaling it, to make
+sure it had neither perceptible flavor nor odor. Then I locked the flask
+in my dressing-case as the dinner-bell rang.
+
+We were a merry party that night. Mrs. Mershon went to sleep as usual in
+the easy-chair in the corner, but Hilyard was gayer than I had seen him
+for weeks. A capital mimic, he gave us some of his afternoon's
+experiences in the little country town, occasionally rousing Mrs.
+Mershon with a start by saying, "Isn't that so, Aunt?" and she, with a
+corroborative nod and smile, would doze off again. Cards were suggested,
+but, mindful of my hand, its palm still empurpled and scarified, I
+suggested that Kate sing for us instead, and we kept her at the piano
+until she insisted that Amy should take her place.
+
+Amy was tired, she declared, and indeed, the rose-white face did look
+paler than its wont, but she went to the piano and sang Gounod's "Ave
+Maria," and two or three airs from Mozart. She always sang sacred music.
+Then she sank into a chair, looking utterly fatigued.
+
+"There, Amy," I exclaimed, "I have just the thing for you. I went into
+Lafitte's to-day to order some claret down, and he insisted on filling a
+flask with some priceless sherry for me. I'll bring you a glass." Amy
+protested, "indeed she did not need it, she should be better to-morrow,"
+with a languid glance from those clear eyes; but I ran up to my room,
+and returned with the flask.
+
+"Just my clumsiness," I said, ruefully looking at the flask, "I uncorked
+it, to see if it were really all he said, and I've spilled nearly the
+whole of it."
+
+"Oh! come now, Lewis," laughed Hilyard, "Is that the best story you can
+invent?"
+
+I laughed too, as I brought a glass, and poured out all that remained.
+Hilyard, I had managed, should hold the glass, and as I assumed to
+examine the flask, he carried the wine to Amy. Not that I wished, in
+case of future inquiries, to implicate him, but I felt a melodramatic
+desire that he should give his poison to Amy with his own hand: the wish
+to seethe the kid in its mother's milk.
+
+I watched her slowly drain the glass, without one pang that I had given
+her death to drink. I experienced an atrocious satisfaction in feeling
+that no chance whim had deterred her from consuming it all. I took the
+flask to my room again, saying that I had forgotten a letter from my
+mother, which I wished Amy to read, as it contained a tender message for
+her.
+
+As I stood alone in my room a fear overcame me that I had been a
+credulous fool. Suppose the whole story of the drug were a fabrication,
+what a farce were this! Who ever heard of a poison with so strange an
+effect? True, but who had ever heard of chloroform a century ago? Let it
+go that he was a discoverer, and I the first to profit by it. I would
+take this ground, at least until it was disproved; time enough then to
+devise other means.
+
+Amy's room was next to mine; on the other side slept--and soundly, too,
+I would wager--her aunt. Indeed, our rooms connected by a door, always
+locked and without a key, of course. By a sudden impulse I took out my
+bunch of keys. Fortune favored me; an old key, that of my room at
+College, not only fitted perfectly, but opened it as softly as one
+could wish, and the door itself never creaked. Locking it again, I went
+into Amy's room through the hall. A low light was burning. I looked
+about anxiously. Would she find the necessary means at hand without
+arousing the household? It must be. Suicide must be quite apparent, and
+the instrument must be suggested by its presence, without any search.
+
+Among the trinkets in the large tray on her bureau, lay a tiny dagger
+with a sheath. I remembered the day Hilyard gave it to her. The rainy
+day when we were all looking over his Eastern curiosities, and she had
+admired it, and he had insisted on her accepting it. The handle was of
+carved jade, representing a lizard whose eyes were superb rubies, and a
+band of uncut rubies ran around the place where the little curved blade
+began. Ah! that was it! The very stones made one dream of drops of
+blood. I laid it carelessly on the bureau, at the edge of the tray. If
+she noticed its displacement, she would think the maid had been looking
+at it, and the very fact of her picking it up and laying it among her
+other trinkets would bring it to her thoughts when she awoke, with mind
+set on death. _His_ poison, _his_ dagger--what fitness! Heaven itself
+was helping me, and approving my ridding earth of this Lamia whose blood
+ran evil.
+
+When I gave Amy the letter, she took it languidly, saying she would read
+it in her room; she was going to bed; the wine had made her drowsy; and
+the others, too, declaring themselves worn with the great heat of the
+day, we bade each other good-night, and the house was soon silent.
+
+I undressed on going to my room, since, in case of certain events, it
+would be to my interest to appear to have just risen from bed, and I
+even lay down, wrapped in my dressing-gown, and put out my light. I
+almost wondered that I felt no greater resentment and rage at Hilyard,
+yet my sense of justice precluded it. As well blame the tree around
+which the poison vine creeps and clings. I looked deeper than would the
+world, which doubtless, judging from the surface, would have condemned
+him rather than her, had all been known. She of the Madonna face and the
+angel smile, anything but wronged? Never! The world would have acquitted
+her triumphantly had she committed all the sins of the Borgias. For
+myself, alas! I had heard her own lips condemn her, when, led by wanton
+recklessness, or the occult sense of sympathy, she had talked to her
+cousin this afternoon. Hilyard? Yes, it had chanced to be Hilyard, but
+she, and not he, was most to blame. Hers was not a sin wept over and
+expiated by remorse and tears; it was the soul, the essence of being,
+that was corrupt to the very core in her. Had madness seized me when I
+listened? I know not. I know I lay calmly and quietly, certain only
+that it was well she was to die, certain that, if this failed, she must
+die in another way before night came again, pitying neither her nor
+myself in the apathy which held me, believing myself only the instrument
+of some mighty power which was directing me, and against whose will I
+could not rebel, if I wished.
+
+For some time I could hear my betrothed moving about in her room; then
+all was quiet, and she had doubtless lain down to sleep. By the
+moonlight that filled my room I consulted my watch after a little while,
+feeling that I had lost all sense of time, and found that it was half
+past twelve, and that we had been upstairs over an hour. I concluded it
+would hardly be safe to open the door yet; she might not be asleep. For
+another half hour I lay patiently waiting. My mind was not excited, and
+I reviewed rather the trifling events of my few hours in the city than
+what had transpired since.
+
+At last I rose, and in the dead quiet I moved softly to the connecting
+door. I knew that it was concealed in Amy's room by a heavy portiere,
+and as it opened on my side, I had only to hide myself behind the
+curtain's folds--as once before on that previous day, alas!--and,
+unguessed by her, watch her at my ease.
+
+The key moved gently in the lock; the lock yielded; a moment more and I
+had pulled a tiny fold of the curtain aside, and commanded a full view
+of the silent room. It was flooded with moonlight, and as light as day.
+The bed was curtained, after the English fashion, but I fancied I could
+hear a slight rustle of the coverings, as though one were roused, and
+stirring restlessly. So light was the room that I could discern the
+articles on the bureau and dressing-table. A branch of a great elm,
+which grew at the side of the house, stretched across one window, and
+its leaves, dancing in the night-breeze, made an ever-changing pattern
+in shadow on the carpet. Did ever accepted lover keep such a tryst as
+mine before? And she, just waking from her first sleep behind the
+delicate white curtains of that bed, her tryst was with death, not with
+love.
+
+From the grove back of the house came a whip-poor-will's plaintive song,
+pulsing in a tide of melody on the moonlit air. Was it a moan from the
+bed, half-coherent and hopeless in cadence? Heaven grant that she waken
+no one until it is too late, I thought fervently. I heard her step from
+the bed. Once I would have hidden my eyes as devoutly as the pagan
+blinded himself lest he should see Artemis, on whom it was desecration
+to look, but now I hesitated no more to gaze on her than on any other
+beautiful hateful thing which I should crush. Her loveliness stirred
+neither my senses nor my compassion; both were forever dead, I knew, to
+woman. Full in the stream of moonlight she stood, the soft, white folds
+of her nightdress enveloping her from the throat to the small feet they
+half hid. Her eyes were wide open, she was awake.
+
+She remained for some moments by the window, meditating, apparently. She
+talked to herself rapidly and in low undertones. What would I have given
+to be able to hear all she thus said! Her expression was one of deep
+mental agony, and I began to feel a growing confidence. How can words
+express the hideousness of the change of countenance, the indescribable
+horror and distress of a creature that is being pressed closer and
+closer toward a yawning gulf of blackness from which there is no escape?
+How relate the outward signs of an inward terror at which we can but
+vaguely guess? Would that I could have penetrated to the depths of that
+soul for one instant to realize completely the bitterness of the dregs
+it was draining! She advanced to the middle of the room; she stretched
+out both arms with a gesture of horror and despair. A long, convulsive
+shudder shook her from head to foot. Her eyes filled with the unearthly
+fear of one who sees walls closing in on her, of one bound, who sees
+flames creeping closer and closer. In one instant I could see her pass
+the line dividing mere mental anguish from insanity; the unmistakable
+light of madness shone in her glance. With a cry of delight she seized
+the little dagger. She was rushing down the corridor like the wind.
+Should I follow her? I hesitated a moment. I heard a long, low cry of
+mental agony; all the sounds of a house aroused from slumber by some
+dreadful calamity.
+
+Had she gone to Hilyard's room, to die on his threshold? It was silent
+once more, except for the exclamations from the different bed-chambers,
+and the hurrying sounds of footsteps down the corridor. Then I, too,
+following the rest of the household, entered the room of death. Amy sat
+curled up on the side of the bed, laughing like a pleased child at the
+red stream that trickled from Hilyard's breast among the light bed
+coverings, and dripped slowly to the floor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Although I am never gay any more, I am not unhappy, for I am more than
+satisfied with the effect of Hilyard's African drug. It is true that it
+did not fulfill with accuracy all that he claimed for it; perhaps I gave
+an overdose, or too little. If that is the case, he suffered for not
+having been more exact. He should have mentioned, in telling his little
+story, the amount necessary. However, as I say, I have no reason to find
+fault with its results in this case.
+
+In looking over the effects of the deceased for Mrs. Mershon, I
+concluded that I should probably meet with no occasion to use the little
+glass phial again, and as the drug seemed to be rather uncertain in its
+ultimate effect, I decided, after some reflection, to throw it away, and
+accordingly I emptied it out of the laboratory window on the flower-bed
+beneath. I half expected to see the rose-bushes wither under it, but it
+only shone slimily on the leaves for a while, and then was washed off by
+a timely shower.
+
+My friends have not tormented me with condolences, for as one of them
+wrote me, the grief that had befallen me was beyond the reach of human
+consolation. There are few indeed who lose a friend by death, and a
+betrothed wife by madness, in one terrible night. My fidelity, it is
+said, is most pathetic, to her who is hopelessly lost to me, for though
+years have passed by, I am still so devoted to her memory, that no other
+woman has claimed a moment of my attention. And my sister who is rather
+sentimental in her expressions, declares that the love I had for Amy
+drained my nature dry. I think she is possibly right.
+
+
+
+
+AN EVENING WITH CALLENDER.
+
+
+The room was filled with a blue haze of tobacco smoke, and I had made
+all of it, for Callender, it seemed to me, had foresworn most of his old
+habits. He used not once to lie back languidly in a lounging-chair,
+neither smoking, nor talking, nor drinking punch, when a chum came to
+see him. Indeed, after the first effervescence of our meeting, natural
+after a separation of four years, had subsided, I found such a different
+Tom Callender from the one who had wrung my hand in parting on the deck
+of the _Marius_, that I had indulged in sundry speculations, and I
+studied him attentively beneath half-closed lids, as I apparently
+watched the white rings from my cigar melt into the air.
+
+Where, precisely, was the change? It was hard to say. The long, thin
+figure was nerveless in its poses; the slender brown hand that had had
+a characteristic vigor, lying listlessly open on the arm of his chair,
+no longer looked capable of a tense, muscular grasp of life; the
+slightly elongated oval of the face, with its complexion and hair like
+the Japanese, was scarcely more hollowed or lined than before, but it
+had lost that expression of expectation, which is one of the distinctive
+marks of youth in the face. He had been politely attentive to my
+experiences in Rio Janeiro, with which I have no doubt I bored him
+unutterably, but when I asked about old friends, or social life, he
+lapsed into the indifference of the man for whom such things no longer
+exist: reminiscence did not interest him. I asked him about the plays
+now on at the leading theatres--he had not seen them; about the new
+prima donna--he had not heard her. Finally I broke a long silence by
+picking up a book from the table at my side. "Worth reading?" I asked,
+nibbling at it here and there. (It was a novel, with "Thirty-fifth
+thousand" in larger letters than the title on the top of its yellow
+cover.) As I spoke, a peculiar name, the name of a character on the leaf
+I was just turning, brought suddenly to my mind one of the few women I
+had known who bore it.
+
+"By the way, Callender," I said animatedly, striking down the page that
+had recalled her with my finger, "What has become of your little
+blue-stocking friend? Don't you know--her book was just out when I
+sailed,--'On Mount Latmos,'--'On Latmos Top,'--what was it?"
+
+A dark flush burnt its way up to the black, straight hair.
+
+"She is--dead," Callender replied, with a hopeless pause before the
+hopeless word.
+
+"Dead!" I echoed, unable to associate the idea of death with the
+incarnation of life that I remembered.
+
+Callender did not reply. He rose, with the slight limp so familiar to me
+in the past, but which I noticed now as if I had never seen it before,
+and went to a desk at the far end of the spacious room. I smoked on
+meditatively. It was odd, I thought, that chance had guided me straight
+as an arrow, to the cause of the change in my friend. One might have
+known, though, that he, the misogynist of our class, would have come to
+grief, sooner or later, over a woman. They always end by that.
+
+I heard him unlocking a drawer, turning over some papers, and presently
+he limped back to his chair, bringing a heavy envelope. He took from it
+a photograph, which he gave to me in silence. Yes, that was she, yet not
+the same--oh! not the same--as when I had seen her the few times four
+years ago. These solemn eyes were looking into the eyes of death, and
+the face, frightfully emaciated, yet so young and brave, sunk in the
+rich masses of hair. It was too pitiful.
+
+Callender had taken a package of manuscript from the envelope; the long
+supple fingers were busy among the leaves, and he bent his head to see
+the numbered pages. At last, having arranged them in order, he leaned
+back again in his chair, holding the papers tenderly in his hand. There
+was nothing of the _poseur_ in Callender; his childlike simplicity of
+manner invested him with a touching dignity even though he owned himself
+vanquished, where another man would have faced life more bravely, nor
+have held it entirely worthless because of one narrow grave which shut
+forever from the light a woman who had never loved him.
+
+"I think you would like to read this," he said at length. "And I would
+like to have you. To her, it cannot matter. I wanted to marry her,
+toward the end, so I could take care of her.--She was poor, you
+know--but she would not consent. She left me this, without any message.
+I knew her so well, she thought it would be easier for me to forget
+her; but now I shall never forget her."
+
+He gave me the little package of leaves, whose rough edges showed that
+they had been hurriedly cut from a binding, and then he fell again into
+his old lethargic attitude. I am not an imaginative man, but a faint
+odor from the paper brought like a flash to my mind the brilliant,
+mutinous face, radiant with color and life, that I had seen last across
+a sea of white shoulders and black coats at a reception a few weeks
+before I went to South America. The writing was the hurried, illegible
+hand of an author. I thought grimly that I had probably chanced upon a
+much weakened and Americanized Marie Bashkirtseff, for though I had only
+been home a few weeks, it goes without saying that I had read a part at
+least of the ill-fated young Russian's dairy. Yet in the presence of the
+grief-stricken face, outlined against the dark leather chair-back, I
+felt a pang of shame at a thought bordering on levity. There was indeed
+one likeness: both were the unexpurgated records of hearts laid
+ruthlessly bare; both were instinct with life: in every line one could
+feel the warm blood throbbing.
+
+A few of the pages of this journal, which I copy word for word from the
+manuscript lying before me, I give the reader. Call the dead writer an
+egotist, if you will: wonder at Callender's love for this self-centred
+nature; I think she was an artist, and as an artist, her experience is
+of value to art.
+
+
+"_December_--18--.
+
+"I have just torn out some pages written a year or so ago. A diary of
+the introspective type is doubtless a pandering to egotism, but I have
+always detested that affectation which ignores the fact that each person
+is to him or herself the most interesting soul--yes, and body--in the
+universe, and now there is nothing of such infinite importance to me as
+this. I fear I shall never write again. All thought or plan, in prose
+or verse, seems dead in me: broken images and pictures that are wildly
+disconnected float through my tired mind. I have driven myself all day.
+I have been seated at my desk, with my pen in my hand, looking blankly
+at the paper. No words, no words! Just before my first book went to
+press, I overworked. I was in a fever; poems, similes, ran through my
+excited hours. I could not write fast enough. In that mental debauch I
+believe that I squandered the energy of years, and now I can conceive no
+more. If I could only sleep, perhaps I could write. Oh! long, long
+nights, crowded with the fearful acceleration of trival thoughts crushed
+one upon another, crowding so fast. 'My God,' I pray, 'Let me sleep,
+only sleep,' and conquered by this abject need, this weariness
+unutterable, I am fain to believe that this gift, common to the brute
+and slave, is better than anything my mind can gain for me, and there
+is nothing so entirely desirable in all the world as a few hours'
+oblivion.
+
+What a dream came to me this Autumn! The doctor had given me an opiate.
+At first it had no effect. I tossed as restlessly as before on my hard
+bed, sighing vainly for the sleep that refused to come. The noises in
+the street vexed me. The light from an opposite window disturbed my
+tired eyes. At last, I slept. Oh! the glow, the radiance unspeakable of
+that dream! I was in a long, low room. A fire leaped on the hearth, as
+though it bore a charmed life. Upon the floor was laid a crimson carpet.
+There were great piles of crimson mattresses and cushions about the
+room, the ceiling was covered with a canopy of red silk, drawn to a
+centre, whence depended a lantern, filling the room with a soft rosy
+twilight. The mantel was a bank of blood-red roses, and they also
+bloomed and died a fragant death in great bowls set here and there about
+the floor. And in the centre of this glowing, amorous room was a great
+couch of red cushions, and I saw myself there, in the scented warmth,
+one elbow plunged in the cushions, with a certain expectation in my
+face. It was very quiet. Far down an echoing, distant corridor I heard
+footsteps, and I smiled and pushed the roses about with my foot, for I
+was waiting, and I knew that soft foot-fall drawing nearer, nearer. My
+heart filled the silence with its beating. I looked about the room. Was
+it ready? Yes, all was ready. The very flowers were waiting to be
+crushed by his careless feet. The fire had died to a steady ardent glow.
+How close the steps were drawing! A moment more--
+
+I opened my eyes suddenly. I heard a door shut loudly, the sounds of
+boots and clothing flung hurriedly down came through the thin partition,
+and I knew that the lodger in the next room had tramped heavily up the
+stairs, and was hastening to throw his clumsy body on the bed.
+
+Elsie was breathing softly by my side, and my incredulous, disappointed
+eyes saw only the reflection on the ceiling, like two great tears of
+light, and I slept no more until the morning.
+
+I read this, and it sounds coherent. Perhaps I have been needlessly
+alarmed, perhaps the fear that is so terrible that I have not written it
+lest it seems to grow real, is only a foolish fear. I must write, I must
+make myself a name. To bring him that, in lieu of dower, would be
+something; but poor, unknown, and of an obscure birth.--Will I not have
+earned a short lease of happiness, if I achieve fame for his sake?
+
+I will barter all for one week,--no, one day--of happiness. I do not
+wish to grow old, to outlive my illusions. Only a short respite from
+cares and sorrow, a brief time of flowers, and music, and love, and
+laughter, and ecstatic tears, and intense emotion. I can so well
+understand the slave in the glorious "_Un nuit de Cleopatre_," who
+resolved a life-time into twelve hours, and having no more left to
+desire, drank death as calmly as it were a draught of wine.
+
+
+_January_, 9, 18--.
+
+"Elsie, my poor little sister, is ill. Only a childish ailment, but I
+have not written for three days, and she has lain, feeble and languid,
+in my arms, and I have told her stories. We have moved again, and here,
+thank God! the furniture, and the carpets and the paper do not swear at
+each other so violently. I say, thank God! with due reverence. I am
+truly and devoutly grateful for the release from that sense of unrest
+caused by the twisted red and green arabesques on the floor. Here all is
+sombre. The walls are a dull shade, the carpet neutral, the furniture
+the faded brocatelle dedicate to boarding-houses; but it is not so bad.
+The golden light lies along the floor, and is reflected on my 'Birth of
+Venus' on the wall. Above my desk is a small shelf of my best-loved
+books,--loved now; perhaps I shall destroy them next year, having
+absorbed all their nutriment, even as now, 'I burn all I used to
+worship. I worship all I used to burn.' Under the bookrack is a copy of
+Severn's last sketch of Keats, the vanquished, dying head of the slain
+poet, more brutally killed than the world counts. The eyes are closed
+and sunken; the mouth, once so prone to kiss, droops pitifully at the
+corners; the beautiful temples are hollow. Underneath I have written the
+words of de Vigny, the words as true as death, if as bitter: 'Hope is
+the greatest of all our follies.' I need no other curb to my mad dreams
+than this.
+
+"It has been cold, so cold to-day. I left Elsie asleep, and went to the
+office of the ---- Magazine with an article I wrote a month or so ago.
+The truth is, Elsie should have a doctor, and I have no money to pay
+him. I was almost sure Mr. ---- would take this. He was out, and I
+waited a long time in vain, and finally walked back in the wind and
+blowing dust, chilled to the heart. I wished to write in the afternoon,
+but I was so beaten with the weather that I threw myself on the bed by
+Elsie to try to collect my thoughts. It was no use. I found my eyes and
+mind wandering vaguely about the room. I was staring at the paper frieze
+of garlanded roses, and the ugly, dingy paper below it of a hideous
+lilac. What fiend ever suggested to my landlady the combination of
+crimson roses and purplish paper? How I hate my environments! Poverty
+and sybaritism go as ill together as roses and purple paper, but I have
+always been too much given up to the gratification of the eyes and of
+the senses. How well I remember in my first girlhood, how I used to fill
+bowls with roses, lilacs and heliotrope, in the country June, and
+putting beneath my cheek a little pillow, whose crimson silk gave me
+delight, shut my eyes in my rough, unfinished little room, and the vales
+of Persia and the scented glades of the tropics were mine to wander
+through. Yes, a dreamer's Paradise, for I was only sixteen then, and
+untroubled by any thoughts of Love; yet sometimes Its shadow would enter
+and vaguely perplex me, a strange shape, waiting always beyond, in the
+midst of my glowing gardens, and I sighed with a prescient pain. How
+have I known Love since those days? As yet it has brought me but two
+things--Sorrow and Expectation. In that fragmentary love-time that was
+mine, I well remember one evening after he left me, that I threw myself
+on the floor, and kissing the place where his dear foot had been set, I
+prayed, still prostrate, the prayer I have so often prayed since. I
+begged of God to let me barter for seven perfect days of love, all the
+years that He had, perhaps, allotted to me. But my hot lips plead in
+vain against the dusty floor, and it was to be that instead; he was to
+leave me while love was still incomplete. But I know we shall meet
+again, and I wait. He loved me, and does not that make waiting easy?
+
+"My book _must_, it _shall_ succeed. It shall wipe out the stain on my
+birth, it shall be enough to the world that I am what I am. To-night I
+shall write half the night. No, there is Elsie. To-morrow, then, all
+day. I shall not move from the desk. Oh! I have pierced my heart, to
+write with its blood. It is an ink that ought to survive through the
+centuries. Yet if it achieve my purpose for me, I care not if it is
+forgotten in ten years.
+
+
+"_February_ 12, 18--.
+
+"I have seen him to-day, the only man I have ever loved. He loves me no
+more. It is ended. What did _I_ say? I do not remember. I knew it all,
+the moment he entered the room. When he went, I said: 'We shall never
+meet again, I think. Kiss me on the lips once, as in the old days.'
+
+"He looked down at me curiously. He hesitated a moment--then he bent and
+kissed my mouth. The room whirled about me. Strange sounds were in my
+ears; for one moment he loved me again. I threw myself in a chair, and
+buried my face in my hands. I cried out to God in my desperate misery.
+It was over, and he was gone--he who begged once for a kiss, as a slave
+might beg for bread!
+
+"And now in all this world are but two good things left me, my Art and
+little Elsie. Oh! my book, I clung to it in that bitter moment, as the
+work which should save my reason to live for the child."
+
+
+"_February_ 18, 18--
+
+"I have written continuously. I drugged myself with writing as if it
+were chloral, against the stabs of memory that assaulted me. There will
+be chapters I shall never read, those that I wrote as I sat by my desk
+the day after the 12th, the cold, gray light pouring in on me, sometimes
+holding my pen suspended while I was having a mortal struggle with my
+will, forcing back thoughts, driving my mind to work as though it were
+a brute. I conquered through the day. My work did not suffer; as I read
+it over I saw that I had never written better, in spite of certain pains
+that almost stopped my heart. But at night! ah! if I had had a room to
+myself, would I have given myself one moment of rest that night? Would I
+not have written on until I slept from fatigue?
+
+"But that could not be. Elsie moved restlessly; the light disturbed her.
+For a moment I almost hated her plaintive little voice, God forgive me!
+and then I undressed and slipped into bed, and so quietly I lay beside
+her, that she thought I slept. I breathed evenly and lightly--I ought to
+be able to countefeit sleep by this, I have done it times enough.
+
+"Well, it is of no avail to re-live that night. I thought there was no
+hope left in me, but I have been cheating myself, it seems, for it
+fought hard, every inch of the ground, for survival that night, though
+now I am sure it will never lift its head again.
+
+"And now, as I said, there is nothing left in all earth for me but my
+sister and my Art. "_Poete, prends ton luth_."
+
+
+"_May_ 10, 18--.
+
+"My book is a success, that is, the world calls it a success; but in all
+the years to come he will never love me again, therefore to me it is a
+failure, having failed of its purpose, its reason for being. What does
+he care for the fame it has brought me, since he no longer loves me?
+
+"Had it only come a year ago!
+
+"I went to see Mrs. ---- to-day, and I started to hear his voice in the
+hall, as I sat waiting in the dim drawing-room. He was just going out,
+having been upstairs, Mrs. ---- said, to look at the children's fernery;
+and I, as I heard that voice, I could have gone out and thrown myself at
+his feet across the threshold, those cadences so stole into my heart and
+head, bringing the old madness back. I had one of the sharp attacks of
+pain at the heart, and Mrs ---- sent me home in the carriage. Elsie is
+in the country, well and strong. I am so glad. These illnesses frighten
+her sorely. I am perhaps growing thin and weak, but I cannot die, alas!
+Let the beauty go. I no longer care to preserve it.
+
+"When I reached home, I lay in the twilight for some time on the sofa,
+not having strength to get up to my room. There is, there can be, no
+possible help or hope in my trouble, no fruition shall follow the
+promises Spring time held for me.
+
+"Oh, God! if there be a God! but why do I wish to pray? Have I not
+prayed before, and not only no answer was vouchsafed, but no sensation
+of a listening Power, a loving Presence, assuaged my pain. Yet, human or
+brute, we must make our groans, though futile, when we are in the grasp
+of a mortal agony.
+
+
+"_June_ 20, 18--.
+
+"I have been thankless. I have been faithless. Let me bless God's name,
+for He has heard my prayer at last, and he will let me die--very soon.
+
+"It was so cool in the doctor's office this morning. The vines about the
+window made lovely shadows on the white curtains and the floor. The
+light was soft. His round, ruddy German face was almost pale as he
+stammered out technical terms, in reply to my questions.
+
+"'Oh, Mees!' he said, throwing up his fat hands. 'You ask so mooch! Den,
+if I frighten you, you faints, you gets worse. No, no, I will not have
+it!'
+
+"But at last, reassured by my calmness, he told me, as I leaned on the
+back of his high office chair. A month more, or perhaps two. Not very
+much pain, he thought. But certain. And I, faithless, have believed the
+good God did not listen when I prayed!
+
+"Little Elsie is safe and happy with our aunt. Already she seldom talks
+of me. Yet I have had her, my care, my charge, for almost six years.
+Children soon forget. There will be a little money for her education,
+and Aunt wishes to adopt her. There is nothing that I need grieve to
+leave behind.
+
+"If he had still loved me, if it were circumstance that kept our lives
+apart, I could send for him then; but to die in arms that held me only
+out of compassion--glad to relinquish their burden as soon as might
+be--no, I must go without seeing his face again.
+
+"And to-night I can only feel the great gladness that it is to be.
+Suppose I knew that there were twenty-five more such years as these!
+Suppose it should be a mistake, and I had to live!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I looked from these last written words to the photograph. My eyes were
+blurred, but Tom only leaned back, motionless as before, apathetic as
+before.
+
+"How long--" I began, tentatively.
+
+"She lived a week after that," Callender replied, in his dry,
+emotionless voice.
+
+"And the man?"
+
+"He was my brother," replied Callender. "She never saw him again. He
+married Miss Stockweis about a month after."
+
+I thought of Ralph Callender, cold, correct, slightly bored, as I have
+always known him, of Miss Stockweis, a dull, purse-proud blonde.
+
+I seized the poor little photograph and raised it reverently to my lips.
+
+"Forgive me, Tom," I said, slightly abashed. (I never could control my
+impulses.) "The best thing you can do is to thank God for her death.
+Think of a woman like that--"
+
+"Thank you," said Tom wearily. "Yes, I _am_ glad."
+
+And then I grasped the thin brown hand in my own for a moment, and felt
+it respond faintly to my clasp.
+
+We sat as quietly as before in the cheerful, smoke-filled room, I
+puffing slightly at my Ajar, and Tom's sleepless eyes fixed absently on
+the wall; and then presently I went to the window and watched the dull
+gray dawn creep over the still sleeping city.
+
+"Well, here's another day," I said with a sigh, turning back to the
+room. "I must go, old fellow."
+
+There was no reply. Startled, I bent over the chair, and looked in the
+face, scarcely more ivory-white than before. And then I saw that for
+Callender there would be no more days.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Village Ophelia and Other Stories
+by Anne Reeve Aldrich
+
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