Part 7

It was about two weeks after this that Cahill began to realize just how deeply in love he was with Edith Minot. She had interested him from the first, and her very dissimilarity from most of the society girls he knew, the nobility and seriousness of her nature beneath a rather cold and conventional manner, and the young purity of her presence had struck him as being the finest and most attractive things he had ever seen. He had been with her a great deal in the two weeks she had spent with his sister, and he had had a great many opportunities of finding out just how superior she was to most girls, how witty and clever she could be, and what native dignity and fine simplicity of character she possessed, and how sincere and truthful she was. They had gone together to teas and receptions, and small dances, and the numerous post-Easter weddings, and the fact that she was his sister’s guest made it very easy for him to see a great deal of her without any gossip or talk. But delightful as all that had been, he was glad now that she was going back in a few days to her own people, and that he could go down in a decently short time and tell her what he could not tell her in his father’s house and which he had found so hard to withhold. The uncertainty in which he was as to whether she cared for him or not made him restless and very properly despondent, although he sometimes fancied that she was less cold to him than to the others, and that if she talked with him about certain things of particular interest to her, it was because she valued his opinion and friendship. And he was much pleased and very flattered when she appealed to him about her different schemes, and was even ready to sacrifice their last day to the college settlement.

“I really must go to Tyler Street to-day,” Miss Minot had said. “It’s my last chance. I have been very selfish, and have been having entirely too good a time. Why, I haven’t even seen my boys or heard the Prima Donna Contessa!” She turned and smiled at Cahill as she spoke. “By the way,” she continued, “why don’t you and Louise come with me and hear her sing? I have sent her a note telling her to meet me at the settlement at four o’clock, and I know she will be only too pleased to sing for us. It is quite wonderful, you know.”

“Of course we will go,” assented Miss Cahill briskly, while her brother aquiesced cheerfully, if less enthusiastically. It occurred to him that it would be as well for him not to be alone with Miss Minot any more, if he intended to hold to his resolution of not speaking just yet.

It was rather late when they started for the settlement, and by the time they had walked down Tyler Street from Kneeland--they left the carriage at the corner of Kneeland--they found that it was quite four and time for a club, the members of which were enthusiastically crowding around the door waiting for permission to enter, and playing leap-frog and tag and imperilling life and limb by walking on the spiked iron fence in their frantic attempts to see in the windows. But when they caught sight of Miss Minot they stopped playing and jumped down from the fence and threw away their shinny sticks, and began to all talk at once at her, and to tell her what they had been doing during the winter, and that they hadn’t been absent from school but twice or ten times, or not at all, as the case happened to be, and they all seemed to have had a surprising number of deadly diseases, of which fact they were inordinately proud; and there were several still on the waiting list, who wanted her to intercede for them to have their names put in the club books, so they could go in and have a good time with the others; to all of which, and a great deal more, she listened sympathetically and interestedly. And as she stood so, the eager, softened expression on her face, laughing and talking with the children crowding around her, the boys grabbing at her hands and the little girls touching shyly the gown she wore, it seemed to Cahill that he had never seen her quite so lovely and lovable. He felt an amused sort of jealousy as he saw her run lightly up the steps with her slim hands held tightly by two very dirty and very affectionate little boys, with the rest swarming after her and hemming her in; and when the front door was finally opened and she and his sister disappeared with them into the rooms beyond, he felt rather aggrieved and out of it.

He found himself in a narrow little hall and was just wondering what he should do with his hat and stick, when she came out from the inner room, closing the door behind her. She was laughing in a breathless, pleased way, and her face had a little flush on it as she turned to him.

“Please take off my coat,” she gasped, leaning against the balustrade of the steep little stairs. “I’m going to amuse them until the Prima Donna comes--she isn’t here, at least I don’t see her anywhere. Louise is playing for them now.” Cahill could just catch the sounds of a piano above the shrill laughter of the children. They were quite alone in the little hallway, and as he bent down to take off her coat, a sudden, wild impulse overcame him. He forgot everything except that he loved her and must tell her so, and he held her tightly while he spoke rapidly and earnestly. It suddenly seemed preposterous to him that he could have dreamed of waiting another week to find out whether she loved him or not; she must tell him then and there, he said, quick, before anyone came. And although she did not, in fact, tell him anything at all, he was so content with her eyes as she turned toward him that, bending down, he gave her one quick kiss after another.

And then the sound of the piano ceased and they heard a scramble of running feet at the door, which was thrown open by Miss Cahill.

“Where are you? come in!” she cried.

As Cahill and Miss Minot went into the room beyond, a girl came slowly down the stairs which they had just left. Her face was pitifully white and drawn, and there was a scared, surprised look in her eyes which was not good to see. When she reached the lowest step she stopped thoughtfully, leaning heavily against the stairs’ rail.

“I saw them,” she said, softly and tremulously to herself. “I saw them, and there is no possibility of a mistake. I don’t understand anything about it--how it has happened--but it was _he_--it was _he_! If she loves him--and she does love him--I saw it in her face, there is but one thing for me to do--there is no other way now.” She put both hands on the banister and swayed slightly toward it in her effort to control herself. “She has been everything to me, has done everything for me. And if I love him--and I _do_ love him!--there is a million times more necessity for me to do it.” Her lips worked painfully and silently for a moment.

An instant later she had crossed the narrow passageway, and throwing open the door, stood there smiling faintly, with the hurt, frightened look still on her pale face. Miss Minot was the first to see her. She moved toward her, swiftly catching both the girl’s hands in her own, and dragging her forward to where Cahill and his sister were standing.

“The Prima Donna Contessa!” she said, gayly. “May I introduce Miss Cahill, Mr. Cahill----” but she stopped suddenly, for she saw Cahill take a step forward while a dull red suffused his face.

“You!” he said--“you!” His voice sounded an octave higher than usual and there was a queer, excited ring to it.

The girl drew back in a puzzled, half-offended way. But Cahill left his sister’s side and crossed quickly to where the girl was standing.

“Great heavens!--you!--aren’t you--?” he began, but the girl interrupted him quickly.

“Excuse me,” she said, in a politely distant tone.

“Don’t pretend--” he began again with a curious insistance in his voice; and then he stopped, putting his hand heavily on the back of a chair near him and looking at Miss Minot and the girl standing beside her. An agony of apprehension took hold upon him.

The girl made a little gesture of surprise and turned proudly and indifferently to Miss Minot.

“I don’t think I understand,” she said quietly to her.

The nonplussed, vacant look on her face made Cahill hesitate. He looked fixedly at her. The red had left his face now and it showed a strange pallor. He was just conscious of the cold, astonished look on Miss Minot’s face, and that his sister was staring blankly at him. He pulled himself together sharply.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, with slow difficulty. “I have made a stupid mistake--I thought--” he stopped and drew a sharp breath.

The girl’s eyes met his steadily for a moment, and then she smiled again slightly.

“Oh, certainly,” she said, easily. “I have reminded so many people of so many other people that I am getting quite used to it! Resemblances are so often deceiving.”

Cahill looked at her in a curiously relieved way.

“And here we are, standing talking,” she ran on, “while the children are waiting to sing! They have learned some very pretty Easter hymns. You shall hear them.”

She spoke rapidly and directly to Cahill as though she wished to prevent him from talking, and her voice sounded strained and monotonous. She went over to the piano quickly and seated herself, and presently, when the children had got through their songs, she began to sing alone, and that evening both Miss Minot and Miss Cahill agreed enthusiastically that she had never sung like that before, and that if the director of the Grand Opera had heard her he would have signed a contract with her on the spot.

Miss Minot was rather disappointed that Cahill did not seem more impressed.

“I don’t believe you enjoyed it half as much as I thought you would,” she said, reproachfully to him. It was late, and they were just leaving the drawing-room, but he had held her back for an instant while the others passed on into the big hall.

“And isn’t she lovely and a great artist?” she insisted.

Cahill looked down at the severely beautiful face beside him, and for an instant the feeling of dread and apprehension which had swept over him that afternoon returned with redoubled force. He felt again the sudden, awful shock the sight of that girl’s face had been to him, the intense relief on discovering his mistake. He realized acutely and for the first time just how impossible it would ever be to tell her of that episode in his life which the girl’s face had recalled, and which he had once felt impelled to tell his father, and he determined to make up to her in every way that a man can, for his silence. The possibility which had faced him for a moment, of losing her, had made her inexpressibly dear to him, and in that instant he had realized passionately all that the loss of her would mean to him. He had felt unutterably glad that the danger had been averted and that she need never know. He did not mean to deceive her, but as he held her hand and looked at her, he had but one thought, one fierce desire--to keep that look of trust and happiness forever on her earnest and beautiful face. He leaned forward slightly.

“How can I tell anything about any other woman when _you_ are there?” he said, argumentatively, smiling at her. “You didn’t expect me to take much interest in the _timbre_ of her voice or her trill when you had just told me----”

“Oh, yes--I know--I never told you anything,” objected the girl, laughing and drawing away her hands. “And you were so dramatic--so curious when you met her, that if I had--known you longer, I think absolutely I would have demanded an explanation. Isn’t that what they say in books--‘demand an explanation?’”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what they say in books. No book ever told me anything about _this_!”

The girl turned her shining, happy eyes upon him.

“How unutterably silly of me,” she said, breathlessly. “For a moment you said she was so like someone, and she had told me her story, I hardly know what I thought--imagined.” She spoke in little, broken pauses, and as she finished she laid her hand timidly on Cahill’s arm. “You said she reminded you of----”

The young man laughed happily. “The mere idea!” he said, touching her hands softly, and then he added lightly, as they moved toward the door: “What she reminded me of was an episode in my life that happened long ago and which was very uninteresting and unimportant.”

HER DECISION

Miss Eva Hungerford was having a _mauvais quart-d’heure_, or to speak more exactly, _une mauvaise demi-heure_. She was lying in a long chair near her dressing-table, the pale-green satin cushions tucked closely around her, and her hands held tightly over her eyes to keep out any ray of sunlight that might enter the spectrally darkened room.

She was thinking hard. Once, when she partially emerged from her abstraction, she decided with reproach that she could not remember to have thought so hard for so long a time since leaving college, though in the meanwhile she had written a tragedy and a small volume of sonnets. The occasion called for thought. In half an hour he was to be there, and she had understood from his manner the evening before that she must have an answer ready for him.

It was all very tiresome. She had warded him off so far, but that could not go on forever. She had felt a little frightened; he had looked at her in a way she had never imagined he could look, and she had been devoutly thankful that just then her “most intimate friend” (even authors have “intimate friends”) had come in with her brother to make arrangements about a coaching party for the following Saturday. But she could not hope for a much longer reprieve. There was a note in his voice that she could not mistake, as he asked her when he could see her alone. She wondered now why she had told him at half-past four the next day. Why had she not said next week, or after she got back from Mexico, or any other time more remote than the present?

“Yes,” she acknowledged to herself, “I was afraid: and not of him but of myself. That is the humiliation of it. What was it I read in Ruskin? That it all ends with Tom, Dick, or Harry? I don’t believe it. At any rate, I shall not give up my career for any man.”

Miss Hungerford always spoke of her “career” to her friends with a sad sort of expression, as if it cut her off from them in some unexplainable way, and made her not of this world. Unconsciously she enjoyed the mingled admiration and awe of the less ambitiously intellectual of her “set” when they heard that she was really going to college. When she came home at vacations they gave her afternoon receptions and luncheons, because, though of course they never breathed it to her, they had met with a flat failure when they tried to get their brothers and masculine friends to come for dinner-dances and “small and earlies.”

“Why, she’s awfully pretty!” they would exclaim when the men pleaded engagements.

“She’s terribly clever, isn’t she?” they would ask, warily. “Why, of course, Eva Hungerford is just too bright for anything, but she never makes one feel it. She doesn’t take a mean delight in showing off one’s ignorance. She talks just like we do,” they would declare, and the brothers would smile peculiarly and vanish.

But even her warmest friends admitted that she was carrying things too far when, at the end of her college career she announced her intention of taking a course in old English at Oxford, and then of going to France to study the literature.

“No, I am not going over in the Winthrop’s yacht, nor am I going coaching with them through Ireland,” she would explain. “I do not mean to travel much. I intend to study seriously. Of course, I shall take my summers off and enjoy myself, but I have a serious end in view, which I must not lose sight of.”

Miss Hungerford had a rather classic face, and looked like a true Spartan when she would say that. Her friends would be either dumb with admiration at such explanations or, sometimes, the more venturesome would try to lure her from her purpose. But she only looked with pity on such attempts.

She was away two years, and although she had tried to keep up with her friends, on returning she found a great many of them married and more or less occupied with affairs which had no part in her life. This saddened her very much and made her more than ever determined to pursue her “career.” She had very few difficulties to contend with. There had been one slight interruption. While in Paris the young Comte de la Tour, whom she had first met at the American minister’s, had taken up a great deal of her time. When he proposed, she had refused him so calmly that she felt justified in admiring herself. She was rather mortified, however, on thinking it over, to find that for a whole month afterward she had not been able to fix her mind on anything serious, and had accepted a great many invitations out. This taught her a lesson. She had discovered that “to be serious, to do her best work, men must not divert her thoughts.” She wrote that down in her commonplace book, so that it would be a perpetual warning to her.

When she got home, her mother and father were delighted to find her no more changed. They had feared the worst from her letters. Her mother, hearing that old English script was very hard on the eyesight, had, after a good cry, resigned herself to glasses. She was intensely relieved to find that there was no occasion for her resignation, and in her happiness to find that Beowulf had not injured her daughter’s vision, herself helped to select a teak desk and bookcases for a “private study” for her. She even sanctioned an edition in pomona green and gold, of the French tragedy and sonnets. These books were not as much reviewed as Miss Hungerford had thought they would be, but her friends admired them intensely and generally came to her with them, that she might write her name on the title-page.

But scarcely had the room been arranged for hard work (Miss Hungerford had determined to spend the next few months in writing a curtain-raiser for Daly’s), when another and more serious interruption occurred.

She never knew just how it happened. Certainly she had never encouraged him, though she had sometimes suspected her mother of doing so, and assuredly Paul Stanhope in no way corresponded to her ideal hero. A few years ago she would not have admitted that she had a masculine ideal, but now, as she put another cushion under her shoulder, she was forced to admit to herself that she might have one. Stanhope was big and strong and handsome. So far he answered to her ideal. But was he intellectual? He drove a four-in-hand splendidly, but that was hardly an intellectual employment. Was he literary? She remembered that in speaking once of Matthew Arnold’s “Monody on the Death of Arthur Hugh Clough,” she had noticed a distinctly blank expression on his face, and that he had tried to turn the conversation. But Miss Hungerford had been too quick for him and had herself changed the subject. That was one of her best points, as she acknowledged to herself. She could adapt herself to the people she happened to be talking to. But could she do so for a lifetime? Miss Hungerford shuddered and pressed her hands more tightly over her eyes, as if to keep out the vision of a husband who did not appreciate allusions to the “Cumnor cowslips.”

Then in some way the phrase “Art is long” got into her head. She knew it, and was not afraid. She had said it to herself a thousand times to keep up her courage. She knew she was only beginning. Still she did think the critics might have noticed more positively that she was beginning. But nothing should turn her from her purpose. She was sure the American drama needed fresh material, fresh workers. She had studied French methods, and had determined to devote the rest of her life to adapting them to the American stage. Her youth would be well spent in regenerating our drama and elevating our literature, though she should not become famous until she was an old woman. Even with such high resolves for our country’s good, Miss Hungerford could not entirely relinquish all hope of becoming renowned.

“An old woman!” She jumped up and, drawing the silk curtains slightly, gazed at herself in the mirror. She leaned forward and breathed lightly on the glass, so that the reflection might be more soft and exquisite.

“It must be hard to lose one’s good looks!” she said, half aloud. Generally, when Miss Hungerford was tempted to be vain, she laid it all to an exalted, abstract love of the beautiful. Now she put her hands through her hair at each side and drew it down loosely, so that her face was half in shadow and altogether charming. And then she put it back suddenly, for she remembered that it had fallen down so once when she and Stanhope were riding together, and he had looked at her in a very openly admiring way. When he had next called she had worn it so, and his look and exclamation of delight when she had entered the room had warned her what risks she was running.

She turned impatiently from the mirror and picked up a book that her “most intimate friend” had sent her several days before. She had not read it, because she had found that it commenced with a very modern love scene, and she never read love scenes. Miss Hungerford, who had a taste for epigram, once told her friend that “the science of reading is to know how to skip,” and she usually skipped the _lui et elle_ dialogues, but if they occurred in a classic, and she felt that she had no right to omit anything (she was a very conscientious sort of person) she summoned all her fortitude to aid her in getting through. Now she opened the book and read a few pages. After all, it did not seem absolutely repulsive. She decided that she had not given the book a fair trial, and she noticed with some surprise that, curiously enough from the description of him, the hero of the story must resemble Paul Stanhope. But when she found that she was thinking of Stanhope she put the book down.

“I am certainly getting frivolous,” she thought severely.

“I will go up to my study. I can think better there.” As she passed her little French clock, she noticed with a slight shudder that it was twenty minutes after four. She stopped suddenly and rang a bell. “I will make it easy for both of us,” she decided; “I will order tea served as usual, and I will just tell him very calmly how impossible it is for me to take upon myself any other career than that of a student and writer. No one can possibly be sentimental over a tea-urn and champagne biscuits,” she thought with relief. When the man appeared she gave him instructions to bring in the tea-things at five precisely. “That will make our interview short and yet give me time to settle it all at once and forever,” she thought. “Afterward we can discuss every-day affairs, and I am sure he will recognize how wisely I have acted, and we can be very good friends,” and she passed slowly up the stairs to her particular den.

She felt stronger now, more certain of herself. The first sheets of her “curtain-raiser” were lying on her desk, and the sight of them encouraged her. For a moment a bewildering vision of a crowded theatre, a storm of applause, and herself, seated behind the curtains of a box, seeing, hearing her own piece, took possession of her. She even heard cries for the author, but of course her duty to herself and her family would prevent her appearing publicly as the writer of the play. She could see no objection, however, to being pointed out as “Miss Hungerford, you know, the brilliant young authoress.” Yes, life was a failure, art was everything! Nothing should ever come between her and her work.