Chapter 6

For him the love light of his marriage had been dead so long! No, not dead; nothing so dignified, so tragic. Burnt down, smoldered; suffocated by the hateful dust of the commonplace. There was a touch of contempt in the effort with which he dismissed the matter from his mind and turned back to his work. And yet, he stopped a moment longer to think, for him life without the light of love fell so far below its best achievement!

The front of his desk was covered with the papers in mathematics over which he had spent his evenings for more than a week. Most of them had been corrected and graded, with the somewhat full comment or elucidation here and there which had made his progress slow. He examined a half-dozen more, and then in sheer mental revolt against the subject, slipped them under the rubber bands with others of their kind and dropped the neat packages out of his sight into one of the drawers of the desk. Wayland's book on Greece, the fruit of eighteen months' sojourn there, had come through the mail on the same day when the calculus papers had been handed in, and he had read it through at once, not to be teased intolerably by its invitation. He had mastered the text, avid through the long winter night, but he picked it up again now, and for a little while studied the sumptuous illustrations. How long Wayland had been away from Vaucluse, how much of enrichment had come to him in the years since he had left! He himself might have gone also, to larger opportunities--he had chosen to remain, held by a sentiment! The professor closed the book with a little sigh, and taking it to a small shelf on the opposite side of the room, stood it with a half-dozen others worthy of such association.

Returning, he got together before him the few Greek authors habitually in hand's reach, whether handled or not, and from a compartment of his desk took out several sheets of manuscript, metrical translations from favorite passages in the tragedists or the short poems of the Anthology. Like the rest of the Vaucluse professors--a mere handful they were,--he was straitened by the hard exactions of class-room work, and the book which he hoped sometime to publish grew slowly. How far he was in actual miles from the men who were getting their thoughts into print, how much farther in environment! Things which to them were the commonplaces of a scholar's life were to him impossible luxuries; few even of their books found their way to his shelves. At least the original sources of inspiration were his, and sometimes he felt that his verses were not without spirit, flavor.

He took up a little volume of Theocritus, which opened easily at the Seventh Idyl, and began to read aloud. Half-way through the poem the door opened and his wife entered. He did not immediately adjust himself to the interruption, and she remained standing a few moments in the centre of the room.

"Thank you; I believe I will be seated," she said, the sarcasm in her words carefully excluded from her voice.

He wondered that she should find interest in so sorry a game. "I thought you felt enough at home in here to sit down without being asked," he said, rising, and trying to speak lightly.

She took the rocking-chair he brought for her and leaned back in it without speaking. Her maroon-colored evening gown suggested that whoever planned it had been somewhat straitened by economy, but it did well by her rich complexion and creditable figure. Her features were creditable too, the dark hair a little too heavy, perhaps, and the expression, defined as it is apt to be when one is thirty-five, not wholly satisfying. In truth, the countenance, like the gown, suffered a little from economy, a sparseness of the things one loves best in a woman's face. Half the sensitiveness belonging to her husband's eyes and mouth would have made her beautiful.

"It is a pity the Barkers have such a bad night for their party," Cowart said.

"The reception is at the Fieldings';" and again he felt himself rebuked.

"I'm afraid I didn't think much about the matter after you told me the Dillinghams were coming by for you in their carriage. Fortunately neither family holds us college people to very strict social account."

"They have their virtues, even if they are so vulgar as to be rich."

"Why, I believe I had just been thinking, before you came in, that it is only the rich who have any virtues at all." He managed to speak genially, but the consciousness that she was waiting for him to make conversation, as she had waited for the chair, stiffened upon him like frost.

He cast about for something to say, but the one interest which he would have preferred to keep to himself was all that presented itself to his grasp. "I have often thought," he suggested, "that if only we were in sight of the Gulf, our landscape in early summer might not be very unlike that of ancient Greece." She looked at him a little blankly, and he drew one of his books nearer and began turning its leaves.

"I thought you were correcting your mathematics papers."

"I am, or have been; but I am reading Theocritus, too."

"Well, I don't see anything in a day like this to make anybody think of summer. The dampness goes to your very marrow."

"It isn't the day; it's the poetry. That's the good of there being poetry."

She skipped his parenthesis. "And you keep this room as cold as a vault." Not faultfinding, but a somewhat irritating concern for his comfort was in the complaint.

She went to the hearth and in her efficient way shook down the ashes from the grate and heaped it with coal. A cabinet photograph of a girl in her early teens, which had the appearance of having just been put there, was supported against a slender glass vase. Mrs. Cowart took it up and examined it critically. "I don't think this picture does Arnoldina justice," she said. "One of the eyes seems to droop a little, and the mouth looks sad. Arnoldina never did look sad."

They were on common ground now, and he could speak without constraint. "I hadn't observed that it looked sad. She seems somehow to have got a good deal older since September."

"She is maturing, of course." All a mother's pride and approbation, were in the reserve of the speech. To have put more definitely her estimate of the sweet young face would have been a clumsy thing in comparison.

Lindsay's countenance lighted up. He arose, and standing by his wife, looked over her shoulder as she held the photograph to the light. "Do you know, Gertrude," he said, "there is something in her face that reminds me of Stella?"

"I don't know that I see it," she answered, indifferently, replacing the photograph and returning to her chair. The purpose which had brought her to the room rose to her face. "I stopped at the warehouse this afternoon," she said, "and had a talk with father. Jamieson really goes to Mobile--the first of next month. The place is open to you if you want it."

"But, Gertrude, how should I possibly want it?" he expostulated.

"You would be a member of the firm. You might as well be making money as the rest of them."

He offered no comment.

"It is not now like it was when you were made professor. The town has become a commercial centre and its educational interests have declined. The professors will always have their social position, of course, but they cannot hope for anything more."

"It is not merely Vaucluse, but the South, that is passing into this phase. But economic independence has become a necessity. When once it is achieved, our people will turn to higher things."

"Not soon enough to benefit you and me."

"Probably not."

"Then why waste your talents on the college, when the best years of your life are still before you?"

"I am not teaching for money, Gertrude." He hated putting into the bald phrase his consecration to his ideals for the young men of his State; he hated putting it into words at all; but something in his voice told her that the argument was finished.

There was a sound of carriage wheels on the drive. He arose and began to assist her with her wraps. "It is too bad for you to be dependent on even such nice escorts as the Dillinghams are," he solaced, recovering himself. "We college folk are a sorry lot."

But when she was gone, the mood for composition which an hour before had seemed so near had escaped him, and he put away his books and manuscript, standing for a while, a little chilled in mind and body, before the grate and looking at the photograph on the mantel. While he did so the haunting likeness he had seen grew more distinct and by degrees another face overspread that of his young daughter, the face of the sister he had loved and lost.

With a sudden impulse he crossed the room to an old-fashioned mahogany secretary, opened its slanting lid, and unlocking with some difficulty a small inner drawer, returned with it to his desk. Several packages of letters tied with faded ribbon filled the small receptacle, but they struck upon him with the strangeness of something utterly forgotten. The pieces of ribbon had once held for him each its own association of time or place; now he could only remember, looking down upon them with tender gaze, that they had been Stella's, worn in her hair, or at her throat or waist. Simple and inexpensive he saw they were. Arnoldina would not have looked at them.

Overcoming something of reluctance, he took one of the packages from its place. It contained the letters he had found in her writing-table after her death, most of them written after she had come to Vaucluse by her stepmother and the friends she had left in the village. He knew there was nothing in any of them she would have withheld from him; in reading them he was merely taking back something from the vanished years which, if not looked at now, would perish utterly from earth. How affecting they were--these utterances of true and humble hearts, written to one equally true and good! His youth and hers in the remote country village rose before him; not now, as once, pinched and narrow, but as salutary, even gracious. He could but feel how changed his standards had become since then, how different his measure of the great and the small of life.

Suddenly, as he was thus borne back into the past, the old sorrow sprang upon him, and he bowed before it. The old bitter cry which he had been able to utter to no human consoler swept once more to his lips: "Oh, Stella, Stella, you died before I really knew you; your brother, who should have known and loved you best! And now it is too late, too late."

He sent out as of old his voiceless call to one afar off, in some land where her whiteness, her budding soul, had found their rightful place; but even as he did so, his thought of her seemed to be growing clearer. From that far, reverenced, but unimagined sphere she was coming back to the range of his apprehension, to comradeship in the life which they once had shared together.

He trembled with the hope of a fuller attainment, lifting his bowed head and taking another package of the letters from their place. Her letters! He had begged them of her friends in his desperate sense of ignorance, his longing to make good something of all that he had lost in those last two years of her life. What an innocent life it was that was spread before him; and how young,--oh, how young! And it was a happy life. He was astonished, after all his self-reproach, to realize how happy; to find himself smiling with her in some girlish drollery such as used to come so readily to her lips. He could detect, too, how the note of gladness, how her whole life, indeed, had grown richer in the larger existence of Vaucluse. At last he could be comforted that, however it had ended, it was he who had made it hers.

He had been feeding eagerly, too eagerly, and under the pressure of emotion was constrained to rise and walk the floor, sinking at last into his armchair and gazing with unseeing eyes upon the ruddy coals in the grate. That lovely life, which he had thought could never in its completeness be his, was rebuilt before his vision from the materials which she herself had left. What he had believed to be loss, bitter, unspeakable even to himself, had in these few hours of the night become wealth.

His quickened thought moved on from plane to plane. He scanned the present conditions of his life, and saw with clarified vision how good they were. What it was given him to do for his students, at least what he was trying to do for them; the preciousness of their regard; the long friendship with his colleagues; the associations with the little community in which his lot was cast, limited in some directions as they might be; the fair demesne of Greek literature in which his feet were so much at home; his own literary gift, even if a slender one; his dear, dear child.

And Gertrude? Under the invigoration of his mood a situation which had long seemed unamenable to change resolved itself into new and simpler proportions. The worthier aspects of his home life, the finer traits of his wife's character, stood before him as proofs of what might yet be. His memory had kept no record of the fact that when in the first year of his youthful sorrow, sick for comfort and believing her all tenderness, he had married her, to find her impatient of his grief, nor of the many times since when she had appeared almost wilfully blind to his ideals and purposes. His judgment held only this, that she had never understood him. For this he had seldom blamed her; but to-night he blamed himself. Instead of shrinking away sensitively, keeping the vital part of his life to himself and making what he could of it alone, he should have set himself steadily to create a place for it in her understanding and sympathy. Was not a perfect married love worth the minor sacrifices as well as the supreme surrender from which he believed that neither of them would have shrunk?

He returned to his desk and began to rearrange the contents of the little drawer. Among them was a small sandalwood box which had been their mother's, and which Stella had prized with special fondness. He had never opened it since her death, but as he lifted it now the frail clasp gave way, the lid fell back, and the contents slipped upon the desk. They were few: a ring, a thin gold locket containing the miniatures of their father and mother, a small tintype of himself taken when he first left home, and two or three notes addressed in a handwriting which he recognized as Wayland's. He replaced them with reverent touch, turning away even in thought from what he had never meant to see.

By and by he heard in the distance the roll of carriages returning from the Fieldings' reception. He replenished the fire generously, found a long cloak in the closet at the end of the hall, and waited the sound of wheels before his own door. "The rain has grown heavier," he said, drawing the cloak around his wife as she descended from the carriage. Something in his manner seemed to envelop her. He brought her into the study and seated her before the fire. She had expected to find the house silent; the glow and warmth of the room were grateful after the chill and darkness outside, her husband's presence after that vague sense of futility which the evening's gayety had left upon her.

"I suppose I ought to tell you about the party," she said, a little wearily; "but if you don't mind, I will wait till breakfast. Everybody was there, of course, and it was all very fine, as we all knew it would be. I hope you've enjoyed your Latin poets more."

"They are Greek, dear," he said. "I have been making translations from some of them now and then. Some day we will take a day off and then I'll read them to you. But neither the party nor the poets to-night. See, it is almost two o'clock."

"I knew it must be late. But you look as fresh as a child that has just waked from sleep."

"Perhaps I have just waked."

They rose to go up-stairs. "I will go in front and make a light in our room while you turn off the gas in the hall."

He paused for a moment after she had gone out and turned to a page in the Greek Anthology for a single stanza. Shelley's translation was written in pencil beside it:

Thou wert the morning star among the living, Ere thy fair light had fled; Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus giving New splendor to the dead.

The Perfect Year

BY ELEANOR A. HALLOWELL

When Dolly Leonard died, on the night of my _débutante_ party, our little community was aghast. If I live to be a thousand, I shall never outgrow the paralyzing shock of that disaster. I think that the girls in our younger set never fully recovered from it.

It was six o'clock when we got the news. Things had been jolly and bustling all the afternoon. The house was filled with florists and caterers, and I had gone to my room to escape the final responsibilities of the occasion. There were seven of us girl chums dressing in my room, and we were lolling round in various stages of lace and ruffles when the door-bell rang. Partly out of consideration for the tired servants, and partly out of nervous curiosity incited by the day's influx of presents and bouquets, I slipped into my pink eider-down wrapper and ran down to the door. The hall was startlingly sweet with roses. Indeed, the whole house was a perfect bower of leaf and blossom, and I suppose I did look elfish as I ran, for a gruff old workman peered up at me and smiled, and muttered something about "pinky-posy"--and I know it did not seem impertinent to me at the time.

At the door, in the chill blast of the night, stood our little old gray postman with some letters in his hand. "Oh!" I said, disappointed, "just letters."

The postman looked at me a trifle queerly--I thought it was my pink wrapper,--and he said, "Don't worry about 'just letters'; Dolly Leonard is dead!"

"Dead?" I gasped. "Dead?" and I remember how I reeled back against the open door and stared out with horror-stricken eyes across the common to Dolly Leonard's house, where every window was blazing with calamity.

"Dead?" I gasped again. "Dead? What happened?"

The postman eyed me with quizzical fatherliness. "Ask your mother," he answered, reluctantly, and I turned and groped my way leaden-footed up the stairs, muttering, "Oh, mother, mother, I don't _need_ to ask you."

When I got back to my room at last through a tortuous maze of gaping workmen and sickening flowers, three startled girls jumped up to catch me as I staggered across the threshold. I did not faint, I did not cry out. I just sat huddled on the floor rocking myself to and fro, and mumbling, as through a mouthful of sawdust: "Dolly Leonard is dead. Dolly Leonard is dead. Dolly Leonard is dead."

I will not attempt to describe too fully the scene that followed. There were seven of us, you know, and we were only eighteen, and no young person of our acquaintance had ever died before. Indeed, only one aged death had ever disturbed our personal life history, and even that remote catastrophe had sent us scampering to each other's beds a whole winter long, for the individual fear of "seeing things at night."

"Dolly Leonard is dead." I can feel myself yet in that huddled news-heap on the floor. A girl at the mirror dropped her hand-glass with a shivering crash. Some one on the sofa screamed. The only one of us who was dressed began automatically to unfasten her lace collar and strip off her silken gown, and I can hear yet the soft lush sound of a folded sash, and the strident click of the little French stays that pressed too close on a heaving breast.

Then some one threw wood on the fire with a great bang, and then more wood and more wood, and we crowded round the hearth and scorched our faces and hands, but we could not get warm enough.

Dolly Leonard was not even in our set. She was an older girl by several years. But she was the belle of the village. Dolly Leonard's gowns, Dolly Leonard's parties, Dolly Leonard's lovers, were the envy of all womankind. And Dolly Leonard's courtship and marriage were to us the fitting culmination of her wonderful career. She was our ideal of everything that a girl should be. She was good, she was beautiful, she was irresistibly fascinating. She was, in fact, everything that we girlishly longed to be in the revel of a ballroom or the white sanctity of a church.

And now she, the bright, the joyous, the warm, was colder than we were, and _would never be warm again_. Never again ... And there were garish flowers down-stairs, and music and favors and ices--nasty shivery ices,--and pretty soon a brawling crowd of people would come and _dance_ because I was eighteen--and still alive.

Into our hideous brooding broke a husky little voice that had not yet spoken:

"Dolly Leonard told my big sister a month ago that she wasn't a bit frightened,--that she had had one perfect year, and a perfect year was well worth dying for--if one had to. Of course she hoped she wouldn't die, but if she did, it was a wonderful thing to die happy. Dolly was queer about it; I heard my big sister telling mother. Dolly said, 'Life couldn't always be at high tide--there was only one high tide in any one's life, and she thought it was beautiful to go in the full flush before the tide turned.'"

The speaker ended with a harsh sob.

Then suddenly into our awed silence broke my mother in full evening dress. She was a very handsome mother.

As she looked down on our huddled group there were tears in her eyes, but there was no shock. I noticed distinctly that there was no shock. "Why, girls," she exclaimed, with a certain terse brightness, "aren't you dressed yet? It's eight o'clock and people are beginning to arrive." She seemed so frivolous to me. I remember that I felt a little ashamed of her.

"We don't want any party," I answered, glumly. "The girls are going home."

"Nonsense!" said my mother, catching me by the hand and pulling me almost roughly to my feet. "Go quickly and call one of the maids to come and help you dress. Angeline, I'll do your hair. Bertha, where are your shoes? Gertrude, that's a beautiful gown--just your color. Hurry into it. There goes the bell. Hark! the orchestra is beginning."

And so, with a word here, a touch there, a searching look everywhere, mother marshalled us into line. I had never heard her voice raised before.

The color came back to our cheeks, the light to our eyes. We bubbled over with spirits--nervous spirits, to be sure, but none the less vivacious ones.

When the last hook was fastened, the last glove buttoned, the last curl fluffed into place, mother stood for an instant tapping her foot on the floor. She looked like a little general.

"Girls," she said, "there are five hundred people coming to-night from all over the State, and fully two-thirds of them never heard of Dolly Leonard. We must never spoil other people's pleasures by flaunting our own personal griefs. I expect my daughter to conduct herself this evening with perfect cheerfulness and grace. She owes it to her guests; and"--mother's chin went high up in the air--"I refuse to receive in my house again any one of you girls who mars my daughter's _débutante_ party by tears or hysterics. You may go now."

We went, silently berating the brutal harshness of grown people. We went, airily, flutteringly, luminously, like a bunch of butterflies. At the head of the stairs the music caught us up in a maelstrom of excitement and whirled us down into the throng of pleasure. And when we reached the drawing-room and found mother we felt as though we were walking on air. We thought it was self-control. We were not old enough to know it was mostly "youth."