Chapter 2

"Mrs. Wagner," said Mr. Bailey, turning to her, gravely, "I'm not paying the least attention to him, and I am eager to hear how the grandfather got out of it."

"The _grandfather!_" exclaimed Nora, "why I had no idea of telling his story. It was the two girls I was interested in--or at least, in one of them; but that is just like a man. He--"

She allowed her feather fan to fall in her lap and looked up helplessly. "But come to think of the other side, his story _would_ be worth telling, wouldn't it? It must have been a rather trying situation for him, too."

She took the fan up again, and waved it before her, thoughtfully. "I wonder why I never thought of that before. I have always rather blamed him for developing his granddaughter's one sad defect. I thought he should have guarded her against it. And--I do wonder if it is because I am a woman that I never before thought how very difficult it must have been for him?"

"No doubt, no doubt," said her husband, dryly. "But now that we have shed a few tears over our mental shortcomings and lack of breadth of sympathy in overlooking the sad predicament of the doughty General, proceed. The umpire sleepeth apace, and I've got to have my shy at the charming Midge before we've done with her," and he shut his paper-knife with a wicked little click.

"You can see how it would be," Nora began again, quite gravely, and the gentlemen both smiled. "You can see how it would be. The granddaughter was made to feel that she was in the way--was a burden. Her mother would urge her to become indispensable to the old General. To read to him, talk brightly to him, sing and play for him, watch his moods and meet them cleverly. It was all done as a race for his affections. Julia raced with her, setting her beauty and the other great fact that she was the child of his old age over against the entertaining qualities of her rival."

Mr. Bailey drew his handkerchief across his brow and looked helplessly perplexed, while Cuthbert responded with a dreary shake of the head.

"It is a clear case of 'The Lady or the Tiger,' yet, so far as I can see," said he. "Who got there, Bailey?"

Mr. Bailey smiled despairingly, and shook his head, but said nothing.

"It went on like that day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year," continued Nora, looking steadily in front of her and shivering a little, "until they were both young ladies. The General gave a party to present them both to society at the same time. His granddaughter tried to make him feel that he was repaid for the expense and trouble by the display of her exceptional powers as a conversationalist--Julia, by the display of her neck and shoulders, her exquisite rose-leaf face, and her childishly pretty manners. This sort of rivalry would have been well enough, no doubt, if it had not been for the fact that from childhood up to this culmination there had been a dash of bitterness in it, an un-der-current of antagonism; and poor Midge had always been the main sufferer, because she was very sensitive and she was made to feel that all she received was taken from her aunt Julia. To stand first with her father, Julia would do almost anything; and the ingenuity with which she devised cruel little stabs at Midge was simply phenomenal. To be absolutely necessary to him became almost a mania with his granddaughter."

"If this thing goes on much longer, I am going to have a fit," Cuthbert announced, placidly.

"The girl you judge so harshly, poor child, had a great many of them," said Nora, with an inflection in her voice that checked a laugh on Mr. Bailey's lips. "Fits of depression, fits of anger, fits of sorrow, fits of shame and of indignation with herself and with others. For there were times when she stooped to little meannesses which her sensitive soul abhorred. If intense effort resulted, after all, in failure, envy of her successful rival grew up in her heart; and, sometimes, if it were carefully cultivated by the pruning hook of sarcasm or an unkind look of triumph, she would say or do a mean or underhand thing, and then regret it passionately when it was too late."

Cuthbert gave a grunt of utter incredulity.

"Regretted it so little she'd do it again next day," he grumbled. Nora went steadily on.

"It grew to be the one spring and impulse of her whole nature--the necessity of her existence--to stand _first_ with the ruling spirit wherever she was, whoever it might be. At school I have known her to sit up all night to make sure that she would be letter-perfect in her lessons the following morning. Not because she cared for her studies so much as because she _must_ feel that she stood first in the estimation of her teachers. And then, too, her grandfather would know and be proud of her. It got to be nature with her (I do not know how much of the tendency may have been born in her) to need to stand on the top wherever she was. (It has always seemed to me that the conditions surrounding her were quite enough to explain this characteristic without an appeal to a possible heredity of which I can know nothing.) Even where we boarded, although she disliked the women and looked down upon the young men, she made them all like her, and even went the length of allowing one young fellow to ask her to marry him simply because she saw that he was interested in me."

"Humph! She--" began Cuthbert, but his wife held up her hand to check him, and did not pause in her story.

"Up to that time she had not given him a thought, and she was very angry when he finally asked the great question. She thought that he should have known that such a girl as she was could not be for a man of his limitations. She felt insulted. She flew up stairs and cried with indignation. 'The mere idea!' she said to me. 'How dared he! The common little biped!' I told her that she had encouraged him, and had brought unnecessary pain upon him as well as regret upon herself. Then she was angry with me. By and by she put her hand out in the darkness and took mine and pressed it. Then she said, 'Nora, it _was_ my fault; but--but--' and then she began to sob again. 'But, Nora, I don't--know--why--I--did--it--and,' there was a long pause. 'And, beside, I _thought_ he was in love with you,'" she sobbed out.

"That was the whole story," said Cuthbert, resentfully. "She simply wanted to supplant you and--"

"Yes, that _was_ the whole story, as you say, dear," said his wife, gently; "but the poor girl could not help it. And--and she did not understand it herself at all."

"You make me provoked, Nora," said Cuthbert, almost sharply. "She wasn't a fool. She tried the same game on me a year or two later; but that time it didn't work. She even went the length of talking ill of you to me--saying little cutting things--when she found I had utterly succumbed to your attractions. I have to laugh yet when I think of it,--that is, when it don't make me too angry to laugh,--how I gave her a good round talking to." He laughed now at the recollection.

"She must have taken me for her delightful old grandparent the way I lectured her. But when I remembered how loyal you were to her, it just made my blood boil and I told her so."

Mr. Bailey shifted his position and began to contemplate giving a verdict emphatically against the absent lady, when Nora checked him by a wave of her fan.

"Yes, I know she did, Cuthbert, and I know everything you said to her. You were very cruel--if you had understood, as you did not and do not yet. She came and told me all about it." Cuthbert Wagner gave a low, incredulous whistle, and even Mr. Bailey looked sceptical.

"She came back from that drive with you the most wretched girl you ever saw. Her humiliation was pitiful to see. Her self-reproach was touching and real. I believe she would have killed herself if I had seemed to blame her."

Cuthbert snapped out:

"Humph! Very likely; and gone and done the same thing again the next day."

"Possibly that is true--if there had been a next day with a new temptation that was too strong for her on the shore where she landed after death If--"

"If the Almighty had shown a preference for some one else, hey?" asked Mr. Bailey, flippantly.

"No doubt, no doubt," acquiesced Nora. "But suppose you had a weak leg and it gave way at a critical moment--say just when you were entering an opera box to greet a lady. Suppose it dropped you in a ridiculous or humiliating manner. You would rage and be distressed, and make up your mind not to let it occur again, except in the seclusion of your own apartments; but--well, it would be quite as likely to serve you the same trick the following week, in church."

"The illustration does not strike me as quite fair," said Mr. Bailey, judicially.

"Good, Ned! Don't let her argue you into an interest in that little cat. She was simply a malicious little--"

"Wait, then," said Nora, ignoring her husband's outburst and looking steadily at Margaret Mintem's new judge, who was showing signs of passing a sentence no less severe than if it were delivered by Cuthbert Wagner himself.

"Suppose we take your memory. Are there not some names or dates that _will_ drop out at times and leave you awkwardly in the lurch?"

"Well, rather," said Mr. Bailey, disgustedly. This was his weak spot.

"Now, don't you see that a person who has a perfect memory might be as unfair to you as you are to my old school friend in her little moral weakness--if we may call it by so harsh a term as that? That was her one vulnerable spot. It may have been born in her. That I do not know; but I insist that it _was_ trained and drilled into her as much as her arithmetic or her catechism were, and with a result as inevitable. She loathed her fault, but it was too strong for her. Her resolution to conquer it dropped just short of success very often, indeed; and oh! how it did hurt her when she realized it and thought it all over, for her motives were unusually pure, and her moral sense was really very high indeed."

"Moral sense was a little frayed at the edges, I think."

"Don't, Cuthbert. You are such a cruelly severe judge. I know Mr. Bailey is on my side, now, and will think you very unfair. He does not mean to be, I assure you, Mr. Bailey, and if she had not spoken ill of me he would see the case fairly. But what _are_ you thinking?"

"That it is a rather big question. That I--that I have overstayed my time. I just came over to ask you to dine with us next Thursday. My mother has some friends and wants you to meet them. May I leave my judicial decision open until then?"

"Certainly. Pray over it," said Cuthbert, rising; "and if you don't come out on my side, openly,--as I know you are in your mind,--buy a wire mask. I won't have any dodging."

"Come early. There is a secret to tell," laughed Mr. Bailey as he withdrew, and then he blushed furiously. "Mother's secret," he added, as he closed the door behind him.

The evening of the dinner the Wagners were later than they had intended to be, and Mrs. Bailey took Nora aside and said quite abruptly:

"I've got to pop it at you rather suddenly. Why didn't you come earlier? The lady whom Ned is to marry is here, and it is for her I have given the dinner. Ned went to your house to tell you last week, but his heart failed him. He said you were all in such a gale of nonsense that he concluded to wait. It is a very tender subject with him, I assure you. His case is quite hopeless. He is madly in love, and I am very much pleased with his choice. She seems as nearly perfect as they ever are, and she is unusually talented. But here is Ned now. I have told her all about it, my son, come and be congratulated."

He came forward shyly enough for a man of his years and experience, and took Nora's hand in a helpless way. But Cuthbert relieved matters at once by a hearty "Well, it is splendid, old fellow. I'm delighted. I--"

"But before the others come down," broke in Mr. Bailey, as if to get away from the subject, "I want to get my discharge papers in that case you plead before me last week. It lies heavy on my soul, for I am very sorry to say, Mrs. Wagner, that I am compelled to give judgment against you and your client. I think she was--I'm with Cuthbert this time. She impresses me as almost without redeeming qualities. I do not wish to make her acquaintance. I am sure that I could never force myself to take even a passing interest in that sort of a moral acrobat. Really, the lovely but selfish Julia would be my choice in a team of vicious little pacers like that. I'm sure I should detect your friend's fatal weakness in her every action. I should be unable to see anything but the hideous green-eyed monster even in the folds of her lace gowns or the coils of her shining hair. He would appear to me, ghost-like, peering over her shoulder in the midst of her most fascinating conversation. I should feel his fangs and see the glitter of his wicked eyes while I tried to say small nothings to her, and--"

"Oh, not at all," protested Nora. "You would never detect it at all unless she happened to be fighting for your esteem or admiration where she felt that odds were against her. She--"

"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Wagner, but I am quite sure that I should. Envy is to me the very worst trait in the human character. I could more easily excuse or be blinded to anything else. I _know_ that I should detect it at once. I always do--especially in a woman."

"Certainly. Anybody could. You know very well, Nora, that I saw--" began Cuthbert quite gleefully; but as a salve to her wounded feelings Mr. Bailey added in a tone of conciliation to Nora:

"However, I shall agree to let you test me some day. Present your friend to me, _incog._, and I'll wager--oh, _anything_ that I shall read her like a book on sight. I'm a splendid judge of a woman. Always was from childhood. I'm sure that I should feel creepy the moment I saw the brilliant but envious granddaughter of the unfortunate old warrior. And by the way, _he_ continues to be the one for whom you have enlisted my sympathy. I wonder that he was able to live two weeks in the same house with such a--"

"Cat," said Cuthbert, with a vicious jab at a paper-weight which represented a solemn-looking Chinese god in brocade trousers. He was just turning to enter into a cheerful and elaborate statement of his side of the controversy, as Mrs. Bailey swept down the room with her son's betrothed upon her arm, smiling and happy.

"Margaret Mintern!" exclaimed Nora, in dismay, and then--

"I am so glad to see you again, dear, and to be able to congratulate you, instead of some fair unknown, upon the fact that you are to have so dear a friend of ours for a husband. We think everything of Mr. Bailey. He is Bert's best friend and--"

Cuthbert had turned half away in utter confusion when he saw the ladies coming down the room, and feigned an absorption in the rotund Chinese deity which he had never displayed for the one of his own nation. But he bowed now, and mumbled some inarticulate sounds as he looked, not at the future Mrs. Bailey, but at the ridiculously happy face of her lover, whose usually ready tongue was silent as he hung upon the lightest tone of the brilliant woman beside him. As they passed into the dining-room, Nora managed to say to her husband:

"Thank heaven we did not mention her name to him, and he evidently does not suspect. Pull yourself together and stumble through your part the best you can, dear, without attracting his attention. And then you know that he and you agree perfectly about the--cat," she added wickedly, and then she smiled quietly as she took her seat next to the blissful lover and the relentless judge of the school friend of her youth.

THE LADY OF THE CLUB.

"Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides, Your loop'd, and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel; That thou may'st shake the super flux to them, Show the heavens more just."

Shakespeare.

I.

The old and somewhat cynical saying, that philosophers and reformers can bear the griefs and woes of other people with a heroism and resignation worthy of their creeds, would have fitted the case of Roland Barker only when shorn of the intentional sting of sarcasm. It is, nevertheless, true that even his nobly-gifted nature, his tender heart, and his alert brain sometimes failed to grasp the very pith and point of his own arguments.

He was a wealthy man whose sympathies were earnestly with the poor and unfortunate. He believed that he understood their sufferings, their ambitions, and their needs; and his voice and pen were no more truly on the side of charity and brotherly kindness than was his purse.

It was no unusual thing for him to attend a meeting, address a club, or take part in a memorial service, where his was the only hand unused to toil, and where he alone bore all expense, and then--after dressing himself in the most approved and faultless manner--become the guest of honor at some fashionable entertainment. Indeed, he was a leader in fashion as well as in philosophy, and at once a hero in Avenue A and on Murray Hill.

On the evening of which I am about to tell you he had addressed a club of workingmen in their little dingy hall, taking as his subject "Realities of Life." He had sought to show them that poverty and toil are not, after all, the worst that can befall a man, and that the most acute misery dwells in palaces and is robed in purple.

He spoke with the feeling of one who had himself suffered--as, indeed, he had--from the unsympathetic associations of an uncongenial marriage. He portrayed, with deep feeling, the chill atmosphere of a loveless home, whose wealth and glitter and lustre could never thrill and enrapture the heart as might the loving hand-clasp in the bare, chill rooms where sympathy and affection were the companions of poverty.

I had admired his enthusiasm as he pictured the joy of sacrifice for the sake of those we love, and I had been deeply touched by his pathos--a pathos which I knew, alas, too well, sprang from a hungry heart--whether, as now, it beat beneath a simple coat of tweed or, as when hours later, it would still be the prisoner of its mighty longing, though clothed with elegance and seated at a banquet fit for princes.

The last words fell slowly from his lips, and his eyes were dimmed, as were the eyes of all about me. His voice, so full of feeling, had hardly ceased to throb when, far back in the little hall, arose a woman, thin and worn, and plainly clad, but showing traces of a beauty and refinement which had held their own and fought their way inch by inch in spite of poverty, anxiety, and tears. The chairman recognized her and asked her to the platform.

"No," she said, in a low, tremulous tone which showed at once her feeling and her culture--"no, I do not wish to take the platform; but since you ask for criticism of the kind speech we have just listened to, it has seemed to me that I might offer one, although I am a stranger to you all."

Her voice trembled, and she held firmly to the back of a chair in front of her. The chairman signified his willingness to extend to her the privilege of the floor, and there was slight applause. She bowed and began again slowly:

"I sometimes think that it is useless to ever try to make the suffering rich and the suffering poor understand each other. I do not question that the gentleman has tasted sorrow. All good men have. I do not question that his heart is warm and true and honest, and that he truly thinks what he has said; but"--and here her voice broke a little and her lip trembled--"but he does not know what real suffering is. He cannot. No rich man can." There was a movement of impatience in the room, and some one said, loud enough to be heard, "If she thinks money can bring happiness she is badly left."

There was a slight ripple of laughter at this, and even the serious face of Roland Barker grew almost merry for a moment. Then the woman went on, without appearing to have noticed the interruption:

"I do not want to seem ungracious, and heaven knows, no one could mean more kindly what I say; but he has said that money is not needed to make us happy--only love; and again he quotes that baseless old maxim, 'The love of money is the root of all evil.'" She paused, then went slowly on as if feeling her way and fearing to lose her hold upon herself: "I know it is a sad and cruel world even to the more fortunate, if they have hearts to feel and brains to think. To the unloving or unloved there must be little worth; but they at least are spared the agony that sits where love and poverty have shaken hands with death"--her voice broke, and there was a painful silence in the room--"where those who love are wrung and torn by all the thousand fears and apprehensions of ills that are to come to wife and child and friend. The day has passed when all this talk of poverty and love--that love makes want an easy thing to bear--the day has passed, I say, when sane men ought to think, or wise men speak, such cruel, false, and harmful words. He truly says that money without love cannot bring happiness; but that is only half the truth, for love with poverty can bring, does bring, the keenest agony that mortals ever bore."

There was a movement of dissent in the hall. She lifted her face a moment, contracted her lips, drew a long breath, and said:

"I will explain. Without the love, poverty were light enough to bear. What does it matter for one's self? It is the love that gives the awful sting to want, and makes its cruel fingers grip the throat as never vise or grappling-hook took hold, and torture with a keener zest than fiends their victims! Love and Poverty! _It is the combination that devils invented to make a hell on earth._"

All eyes were fastened on her white face now, and she was rushing on, her words, hot and impassioned, striking firm on every point she made.

"Let me give you a case. In a home where comfort is--or wealth--a mother sits, watching by night and day the awful hand of Death reach nearer, closer to her precious babe, and nothing that skill or science can suggest will stay the hand or heal the aching heart; and yet there is comfort in the thought that all was done that love and wealth and skill could do, and that it was Nature's way. But take from her the comfort of that thought. She watches with the same poor, breaking heart, but with the knowledge, now, to keep her company, that science might, ah! _could_, push back the end, could even cure her babe if but the means to pay for skill and change and wholesome food and air were hers. Is that no added pang? Is poverty no curse to her?--a curse the deeper for her depth of love? The rich know naught of this. It gives to life its wildest agony, to love its deepest hurt."

She paused. There was a slight stir as if some one had thought to offer applause, and then the silence fell again, and she began anew, with shining eyes and cheeks aflame. She swayed a little as she spoke and clutched the chair as for support. Her voice grew hoarse, and trembled, and she fixed her gaze upon a vacant chair: