CHAPTER IV

THE QUALITY OF MERCY

That night I went to my bedroom and pulled open the top of an old-fashioned desk standing in the corner. Except for this desk there was not another unnecessary piece of furniture in the apartment, for I like a cell-like place to sleep. I consider that fresh air and a clear conscience ought to be the chief adjuncts--for a cluttered-up, luxurious bedroom always reminds me of Camille--and tuberculosis.

"And all this fuss about a few little faded wisps of paper!"

I sat down before the desk, after I had loosed my hair--which is that very, very black, that is the Hibernian accompaniment to blue eyes--and had slipped my slippers on.

"You have put me to considerable trouble to-day, Lady Frances."

Her portrait was hanging there--a small, cabinet-sized picture, in a battered gold frame. Her lover had succeeded in making her face on canvas very beautiful--with the exaggerated beauty of eyes and mouth which all portraits of that period show. Her brow was fine and thoughtful, irradiating the face with intelligence, yet I never looked at her without having a feeling that I was infinitely wiser than she.

Isn't it queer that we have this feeling of superiority over the people in old portraits--just because they are dead and we are living? We open an ancient book of engravings, and say: "Poor little Mary Shelley! Simple little Jane Austen! Naughty little Nell Gwynne!"--There's only one pictured lady of my acquaintance who smiles down my latter-day wisdom as being a futile upstart thing. I can't pity her! Oh, no! Nor endure her either, for she's Mona Lisa!

I had always had this maternal protectiveness in my attitude toward Lady Frances Webb, and to-night it was so keen that I could have tucked her in bed and told her fairy tales to soothe away the trembling fright she must have endured all that day. Instead of doing this, however, I satisfied myself with reading some of the letters over again. Isn't it a pity that above every writing-desk devoted to inter-sex correspondence there is not a framed warning: "Beyond Platonic Friendship Lies--Alimony!"

Anyway, Lady Frances and James Christie tried the medium ground for a while. Over in a large pigeonhole, far away from the rest, was a packet of letters tied with a strong twine. They were the uninteresting ones, because they were _muzzled_. The handwriting was the same as that of the others--dainty, last-century chirography, as delicate and curling as a baby's pink fingers--but I never read them, for I don't care for muzzled things. Gossip about Lady Jersey--Marlborough House--the cold-blooded ire of William Lamb--all this held but little charm--compared with the other.

"Not you--not to-night," I decided, pushing them aside quickly. "I've got to have good pay for my pains of this day!"

I sought another compartment, where a batch huddled together--a carefully selected batch. They were as many, and as clinging in their contact with one another, as early kisses. I took up the first one.

"Dear Big Man"--it began.

"It has been weeks and weeks now since I have seen you! If it were not that you lived in that terrible London and I in this lonely country, I should be too proud to remind you of the time, for I should expect you to be the one to complain.

"Surely it is because of this that I now hate London so! It keeps this knowledge of separation--this sense of dreary waiting--from burning into your heart, as it does into mine!

"There you are kept too busy to think--but here I can do nothing else!--Or perhaps I am quite wrong, and it is not a matter of London and Lancashire, after all, but the more primal one of your being a man, and my being a woman! _Do_ I love the more? I wonder? And yet, I don't think that I care much! I am willing to love more abjectly than any woman ever loved before--if you care for me just a little in return."

(I always felt _very_ wise and maternal at this point.)

"You were an awful goose, Lady Frances!" I said. "This is a mistake that _I_ have never made!"

"Still, I am tormented by thoughts of you in London," the letter kept on. "I think of you--there--as a lion. It presses down upon me, this recollection that you are James Christie, the great artist, and the only release from the torture is when I go alone into the library and sit down before the fire. The two chairs are there--those two that were there that day--and then I can forget about the lion. 'Jim--Jim!' I whisper--'just my _lover_!'

"Then your face comes--it has to come, or I could never be good! Your rugged face that speaks of great forests which have been your home--the fierce young freedom which has nurtured you--and the glorious uplift you have achieved above all that is small and weak!

"You have asked me a thousand times why I love you, but I have never known what to say--because I love you for so many things--until now, when I have nothing but memories--and the ever-present sight of your absent face. And now I don't know why I love you, but I know what I love best about you. Shall I tell you--though of course you know already! It is not your talent--wonderful as it is--for there have been other artists; nor your terrible charm with its power to lure women away from duty--for England is full of fascinating men; nor your sweetness--and I think the first time I saw you smile I sounded the depths of this--it is not any of these, dear heart! Not any of these! I love best the strength of you which you use to control the charm--the untamed force of your personality which makes your talent seem just an incident--and the big, _big_ virility of you!

"Do you think for a moment that you look like an artist? Half-civilized you? Why, you are a woodsman, dear love--but not a hunter! You could never kill living things for the joy of seeing them die!

"You look as if you had spent all your life in the woods, doing hard tasks patiently--a woodcutter, or a charcoal burner! Ah, a charcoal burner! A man who has had to grip life with bared hands and wrest his bread from grudging circumstances. This is what you are, Jim, to my heart's eyes. You are a primal creature--simple-souled, great-bodied, and your mind is given over to naked truth.

"But all the time you are a famous artist--and London's idol! Your studio in St. James's Street is the lounging-place for curled darlings! The hardest task that your hands perform is over the ugly features of a fat duchess!--How can you, Jim? Why don't you come away? You are a man first, an artist afterward--and it is the man that I love!

"And, Jim, _do_ you know how much I love you? Do you know how your face leads me on?--It is your face I must have now, darling. _Portrait of the Artist, by Himself_, is a title I have often smiled over, wondering how a man could be induced to paint his own features, but now I know! It is always because some woman has so clamorously demanded it--a woman who loved him! What else can so entirely satisfy--and when will you send it to me?"

When I came to the end I was sorry, for I had such a way of getting en rapport with her sentiments that I eyed the next express wagon I passed, eagerly, to see if it could possibly be bringing the _Portrait of the Artist, by Himself_!

And on this occasion I reread a portion of the letter.

"Your face--your rugged face--or I could never be good!"

The picture of a rugged face was haunting me, and after a moment a sudden thought came to me.

"Why, that's what _I_ should like!"

I had the grace to feel ashamed, of course, especially as I recalled how mother and Guilford had tormented me that afternoon to know why I wouldn't marry--and I found the answer in this sudden discovery. Still, that didn't keep me from pursuing the subject.

"A rugged face--great forests--fierce freedom--glorious uplift!--Oh, Man! Man! Where are you--and where is your great forest?--That's exactly what I want!"

I turned back to the desk, after a while, and still allowing my mind to circle away from the business at hand somewhat, I drew out another letter. It was short--and troubled. The dear, little, lady-like writing ran off at a tangent.

"Yes, I have seen the picture! Next to Murillo's _Betrothal of St. Catherine_,--the face is the loveliest thing I have ever seen on canvas.

"Of course it is idealized--yet so absurdly _like_ that they tell me all Mayfair is staring! This talk--this stirring-up of what has been sleeping--will make it a thousand times harder for us ever to see each other, yet I am glad you did it!

"They are saying--Mayfair--that your 'making a pageant of a bleeding heart' is as indelicate as Caroline Lamb's _Glenarvon_! If people are going to be in love wickedly at least they ought not to write books about it--nor paint pictures of it!... Oh, beloved, let us pray that we may always keep bitterness out of our portraits of each other!"

The letter burned my fingers, for the pen marks were quick and jagged--like electric sparks--and I felt the pain that had sent them out; so I turned back to others of the batch--others that I knew almost by heart, yet always found something new in.

"I don't know that it's such an enviable state, after all, this being in love," I mused. "It seems to me it consists of--quite a mixture! But, of course, it will take Heaven itself to solve the problem of a thornless rose!"

I ran my finger over the edges of the improvised envelopes, heavily sealed and bearing complicated foreign stamping. There were dozens of them--many only the common garden variety of love-letters, long-drawn out, confidential, reminiscent or hopeful, as the case might be--and a few which sounded at times almost light-hearted.

"When I say that I think of you all the time I am not so original as my critics give me credit for being, dear heart," she wrote in one. "Nothing else in the annals of love-making is so trite as this, but when I explain how persistently your image is before me, how intricately woven with every thought of the future--how inseparably linked with every vision of happiness--you will know that mine is no light nor passing attachment.

"If I give you one foolish example of this will it bore you? I've written you before, I believe, that this spring I have been outdoors all the time--riding or driving about the country, because the mad restlessness of thinking about you drives me out. In this house, in these gardens, _you_ are so constantly present that I can do nothing but remember--then I go away, hoping to forget--and what happens?--I go into a castle--a place where you have never been, perhaps--and before I can begin talking with any one, or think of any sensible thing to say the thought comes to me: 'How well the figure of my lover would fit in with all this grandeur! How naturally and easily he would swing through these great rooms!'

"Then, early some mornings I ride into the village--past cottages that look so humble and happy that I feel my heart stifling with longing to possess one of them--and _you_! 'How happy I could be living there,' I think, 'but--how tremendously tall and stalwart Jim would look coming in through this low doorway, as I called him to supper!'

"Then I spend hours and hours planning the real home I want us to have, dear love of mine. I don't care much whether it is a castle or a cottage, just so it has you in it--and all around it must be the sight of distant hills! These for _your_ artist's soul!

"You and a hundred distant hills, Jim! Then days--and nights, and nights and days--and summers and winters of joy!

"Some time this will come to pass--it must--and we shall call it heaven! And we shall rejoice that we were strong to keep the faith through the days of trial and longing so that we could reach it and be worthy of it.

"And, when this shall come, I can never know fear again--fear that London will make you cease to love me--that some other woman may gain possession of you--that the artist in you may crush out and starve the lover. There will be but one thought of fear then, and that will be that you may die and leave me, but this will not be hopeless, for I too can die!

"Oh, do you remember that first day--that wonderful, anguished, bewildering first day--then that night when I kissed you? When I think of sickening fear I always remember that time. Two weeks before the London newspapers had chronicled your visit to Colmere Abbey 'to paint the portrait of the novelist, Lady Frances Webb,' but you were deceiving the newspapers, for you had lost your power to paint!

"It was quite early in the morning of that eighth or ninth day of blessed dalliance, when the canvas still showed itself accusingly bare, that you threw down your brush and declared you were going back to London, 'because--because Colmere Abbey had robbed your hands of their power.'

"And what did I do when you told me this terrible thing? I said, wickedly and without shame, 'Would you go away and leave me all alone in idleness?'

"'Idleness?' you repeated, pretending not to understand.

"'Neither can I do any work--since you came to Colmere!'

"You stood quite still beside the easel for a breathless moment, then:

"'Do _I_--keep _you_--from working?' you asked.

"Your face tried to look sorry and amazed, but the triumph showed through and glorified your dear eyes.

"'Then certainly I must go away--at once--to-day,' you kept on, but you came straight across the room and placed your hands upon my shoulders. 'Just this once--just one time, sweetheart, then I'll go straight away and never see you again!'

"And that night, true to your promise, you did go away, but I followed you to the gates--and when I saw horses ready saddled there to take you away from me, the high resolves I had made came fluttering to earth. I put my hands up to your face and kissed you. During all the giddy joy of that day's confessional I had kept from doing this, but--not when I saw you leaving!

"'I wish that this kiss could mark your cheek--and let all the world know that you are mine,' I whispered, shivering against you in that first madness of fear over losing you.

"'You've made a mark!' you laughed fondly. 'A mark that I shall carry all the days of my life.'

"But I was still fearful.

"'You may know that you are marked, but how will the world--how will other women know that you are mine?'

"'The world shall know it,' you declared, brushing back my hair and kissing me again. 'There will never be another woman in my life--and some day, when I can paint your portrait, it will certainly know then. To me you are so very beautiful.'"

Another letter was just a note, addressed to London, and evidently written in great haste to catch a delayed post-bag.

"Oh, my dear, that orange tree of ours--that you and I planted together that day--is putting out tiny blossoms! Do you suppose it is a happy omen, Jim? How I have worked with it through this dreary winter--and now to think that it is blooming!

"Your dear hands have touched it! It is a living thing which can receive my caresses and repay their tenderness by growing tall and strong and beautiful--like you. Do you wonder that I love it?

"When you come again I shall take you out to see it, and we shall walk softly up to the shelf where it stands--so carefully, to keep from jarring a single leaf--and we shall separate the branches, still very carefully, to look down at the little new stems. And, Jim--Jim--the blossoms will be like starry young eyes looking up at us! The pink, faintly-showing glow will be as delicate as a tiny cheek, when sleep has flushed it--and the petals will close over our fingers with all the clinging softness of a helpless little clutch!

"We will be very happy for a little while, but, because I am savage and resentful over our delayed joy, I shall cry on your shoulder and say it's cruel--_cruel_--that you and I have only this plant to love together."

After this came two or three more, like it, then I reached for one which brought a misty wetness to my eyes. The lover was gone--quite gone--and the woman had seemed to feel that they would meet no more.

... "At other times I remember all the months which have gone by since then--and the miles of dark water which roll between your land and mine. God pity the woman who has a lover across the sea!

"_Am_ I sorry that I sent you away? You ask me this--yet how can you! How many letters I have written, bidding you, nay _begging_ you to come back--how many times have I dropped them into the post-bag in the hall--then, after an hour's thought, have run in terror and snatched them out again!

"I am trying so hard to be good! Can I hold out--just a little while longer? I am going to die young, remember, and that is the one hope which consoles me! It used to be that I shrank from the medical men who told me this--who told me with their pitying eyes and grave looks--but now I welcome their gravity. Sir Humphrey Davy has written a letter to my husband, advising him to send me off to Italy for this incoming winter--but I shall not go! 'I fear that dread phthisis in the rigor of English cold,' he writes--but for me it can not come too soon!

"... Yet all the time the knowledge haunts me that our lives are passing! I can not bear it! I spend the hours out in the garden--where the sun-dial tells me--all _silently_--of the day's wearing on.

"Since you went away I can not listen to the sound of the clock in the hall. That chime--that holy trustful chime--'O Lord, our God, be Thou our Guide,' shames the unholy prayer on my lips.

"Then the clock ticks, ticks, ticks--all day--all night--on, and on, and on--to remind me of our hearts' wearying beats! Does this thought ever come to madden you? That our hearts have only so many times to throb in this life--and when we are apart every pulsation is wasted?"

I thrust this letter back into its place--then hastily closed down the desk. The sensation of reading a thing like that is not pleasant. She had written with an awful, _awful_ pain in her heart--and she had lived before the days of anesthetics!

"Women don't feel things like that--now," I muttered, as I crossed the room and lowered the curtain. "They--they have too many other things to divert them, I suppose!"

I knew, however, that I was judging everybody by myself, and certainly _I_ had never known an awful hurt like that.

"Why, I could listen to a _taximeter_ tick--for a whole year--while Guilford was away from me, and I don't believe it would make me nervous for a sight of him."

I was considerably disgusted with myself for my callousness as I came to this conclusion, however, and I sat down in the window, overlooking the tiny strip of rose-garden to think it out. Presently I crossed the room again to the desk.

_"I'm_ not going to jest at scars--even if I haven't felt a wound!" I decided, once and for always.

I opened the desk then and gathered up the letters, packet by packet, tying them into one big bundle.

"Publish these--heart-throbs!"

I was so furious that I could have gagged Uncle Lancelot if he had opened his mouth--which he didn't dare do! In this respect he and grandfather are very much like living relatives. They'll argue with you through ninety-nine years of indecision, but once you've made up your mind irrevocably they close their lips into a sullen silence--saving their breath for "I told you so!"

"I don't see how anybody could have thought of such blasphemy!" I kept on. "It would be like a vivisection! That's what people want though, nowadays--they won't have just a book! They want to be present at a clinic!--They want to see others' hearts writhe--because they have no feelings of their own!"

Then, after my thoughts had had time to get away from the past up into the present and project themselves, somewhat spitefully, into the future, I made another decision, slamming the desk lid to accentuate it.

"I shall not publish them myself--nor ever give anybody else a chance to publish them!" I declared. "By rights they are not really mine! I am just their guardian, because Aunt Patricia couldn't take them on her journey with her--and some day I shall take them on a journey with me. To Colmere Abbey--that dream-house of mine! That's the thing to do! And burn them on the hearth in the library, where she likely burned his--if she did burn them! Of course I can't run the risk of what the next generation might do!"

This last thought tormented me as I fell asleep.

"No, I can not hand those letters down to my daughters," I decided drowsily, being in that hazy state where the mind traverses unheard-of fields--unheard-of for waking thought--and queer little twisting decisions come. "They would _never_ be able to understand!"

I was aroused by this hypothesis into sudden wakefulness.

"Of course they could not understand--me or my feelings!" I muttered, sitting up in bed and facing the darkness defiantly. "They _could_ not--if--_if_ they were Guilford's daughters, too!"