Chapter 5

"Why, Brassfield, how are you?" he exclaimed. "Heard you'd got back. Sorry I couldn't meet you in New York. Got my telegram, I suppose?"

"I just called," said Amidon, "to see Miss Waldron."

"Oh, yes!" said the little man; "nothing but her, now. But she isn't here. Hasn't been for over a week. Nobody here but me. Can't you stay a while? Say, 'Gene, we put Slater through the lodge while you were gone, and he knows he's in, all right enough. Bulliwinkle took that part of yours in the catacombs scene, and you ought to have heard the bones of the early Christians rattle when he bellered out the lecture. 'Here, among the eternal shades of the deep caves of death, walked once the great exemplars of our Ancient Order!' Why, it would raise the hair on a bronze statue. And when, in the second, they condemned him to the Tarpeian Rock, and swung him off into space in the Chest of the Clanking Chains, he howled so that the Sovereign Pontiff made 'em saw off on it, and take him out--and he could hardly stand to receive the Grand and Awful Secret. Limp as a rag! But impressed? Well, he said it was the greatest piece of ritualistic work he ever saw, and he's seen most of 'em. Go to any lodges in New York?"

"No," said Amidon, who had never joined a secret order in his life, "and do you think we ought to talk these things out here?"

"No, maybe not," said the Joiner; "but nobody's about, you know. Come in, can't you?"

"No, I must really go, thank you. By the way," said Florian, "where does Miss--er--I must go, at once, I think!"

"Oh, I know how it is," went on his unknown intimate; "nothing but Bess, now. Might as well bid you good-by, and give you a dimit from all the clubs and lodges, until six months after the wedding. You'll be back by that time, thirstier than ever. By the way, that reminds me: the gang's going to give you a blow-out at the club. Kind of an _Auld lang syne_ business, 'champagny-vather an' cracked ice,' chimes at midnight, won't go home till morning, all good fellows and the rest of it. Edgington spoke to you about it, I s'pose?"

"Only in a general way," replied Amidon, wondering who and what Edgington would turn out to be. "I don't know yet how my engagements will be----"

"Oh, nothing must stand in the way of that, you know," the little man went on. "Why, gad! the tenderest feelings of brotherly---- Oh, you don't mean it! But I mustn't keep you. Bessie told me that the plans for your house have come. She's got 'em over there, now. I say, old man, I envy you your evening. Like two birds arranging the nest. Sorry you can't come in; but, good night. And, say! Your little strawberry blonde is in town! Wouldn't that jar you?"

"Heavens!" ejaculated Amidon. "How am I ever to get through with this?"

The genuine agony in Florian's tones fixed the attention of the little man, and seemed to arouse some terrible suspicion.

"Why, 'Gene," said he, "you don't mean that there's anything in this blonde matter, do you, that will---- By George! And she's a sister of one of the most prominent A. O. C. M.'s of Pittsburg--and you remember our solemn obligation!"

"No," said Amidon, "I don't!"

"What! You don't!"

"No!" said Florian. "I've forgotten it!"

"Forgotten it!" said his questioner, recoiling as if in horror. "Forgotten it! And with the sister of the Past Sovereign Pontiff of Pittsburg Lodge No. 863! I tell you, Brassfield, I don't believe it. I prefer to think you're bughouse! Cracked! Out of your head! But, 'Gene," added his unknown brother, in a stage-whisper, "if there has been anything between you and anything comes up, you know, Jim Alvord, for one, knowing and understanding your temptations--for the strawberry blondes are the very devil--will stand by you until the frost gathers six inches deep on the very hinges of---- Say, Mary's coming in at the side door. Good night! Keep a stiff upper lip; stay by Bess, and I'll stay by you, obligation or no obligation. 'F. D. and B.', you know: death, perhaps, but no desertion! So long! See you to-morrow."

And Amidon walked from the house of his unfamiliar chum, knowing that his sweetheart but once seen was waiting in her unknown home for him to come to her, and had as a basis for conversation the plans for their house. He could imagine her with the blue-prints unrolled, examining them with all a woman's interest in such things, and himself discussing with her this house in which she expected him to place her as mistress. And the position she thought she held in his heart--vacant, or---- He leaned against a fence, in bewilderment approaching despair. His mind dwelt with horror on the woman whom he could think of only under the coarse appellation of the strawberry blonde. Was there a real crime here to take the place of the imagined putting away of Brassfield? Brassfield! The very name sickened him. "Strawberry blondes, indeed!" thought Florian; and "Brassfield, the perjured villain!" Certain names used by the little man in the wrong house came to him as having been mentioned in the notes of the professor and the judge. Alvord, the slangy little chap who took so familiar an attitude toward him--this was the judge's "ministerial" friend! Yet, had there not been mention of "ritualistic work" and "Early Christians" in his conversation? And this woman of whom he spoke,--it took no great keenness of perception to see that the "strawberry blonde" must be the "child of six or eight years" whom he had called "Daisy," and sometimes "Strawberry!" Here was confirmation of Alvord's suspicion, if his allusion to the violation of an "obligation" expressed suspicion. Here was a situation from which every fiber of Amidon's nature revolted, seen from any angle, whether the viewpoint of the careful banker and pillar of society, or that of the poetic dreamer waiting for his predestined mate.

In a paroxysm of dread, he started for the hotel. Then he walked down the street toward the railway station, with the thought of boarding the first train out of town. This resolve, however, he changed, and I am glad to say that it was not the thought of the fortune of which Judge Blodgett had spoken that altered his resolution, but that of the letter which greeted his return to consciousness as Florian Amidon, and the image of the dark-eyed girl with the low voice and the strong figure, who had written it, and who waited for him, somewhere, with the roll of plans. So he began searching again for the house with the white columns; and found it on the next corner beyond the one he had first tried.

Elizabeth sat in a fit of depression at the strangeness of Mr. Brassfield's conduct--a depression which deepened as the evening wore on with no visit from him. She sprang to her feet and pressed both hands to her bosom, at the ring of the door-bell, ran lightly to the door and listened as the servant greeted Mr. Brassfield, and then hurried back to her seat by the grate, and became so absorbed in her book that she was oblivious of his being shown into the room, until the maid had retired, leaving him standing at gaze, his brow beaded with sweat, his face pale and his hands unsteady. The early Christian had entered on his martyrdom.

XI

THE FIRST BATTLE, AND DEFEAT

From Camelot to Cameliard The way by bright pavilions starred, In arms and armor all unmarred, To Guinevere rode Lancelot to claim for Arthur his reward.

Down from her window look't the maid To see her bridegroom, half afraid-- In him saw kingliness arrayed: And summoned by the herald Love to yield, her woman's heart obeyed.

From Cameliard to Camelot Rode Guinevere and Lancelot-- Ye bright pavilions, babble not! The king she took, she keeps for king, in spite of shame, in spite of blot! --_From Cameliard to Camelot_.

It is a disagreeable duty (one, however, which you and I, madam, discharge with a conscientiousness which the unthinking are sometimes unable to distinguish from zeal) to criticize one's friends. The task is doubly hard when the animadversion is committed to paper, with a more or less definite idea of ultimate publication. I trust, beloved, that we may call Mr. Florian Amidon a friend. He is an honest fellow as the world goes, in spite of the testimony of Simeon Woolaver regarding the steers; and he wishes to do the right thing. In a matter of business, now, or on any question of films, plates or lenses, we should find him full of decision, just and prompt in action. But (and the disagreeable duty of censure comes in here) there he stands like a Stoughton-bottle in a most abject state of woe, because, forsooth, he possesses the love of that budding Juno over there by the grate, and knows not what to do with it! What if he _doesn't_ feel as if he had the slightest personal acquaintance with her? What if the image of another, and the thought----? But look with me, for a moment, at the situation.

There she sits, so attentive to her book (is it the _Rubaiyat_? Yes!) that his entrance has not attracted her notice--not at all! One shapely patent-leather is stretched out to the fender, and the creamy silk of the gown happens to be drawn back so as to show the slender ankle, and a glimpse of black above the leather. The desire for exactness alone compels a reference to the fact that the boundary lines of this silhouetted black area diverge perceptibly as they recede from the shoe. It is only a detail, but even Florian notices it, and thinks about it afterward. Her face is turned toward the shadows up there by the window, her eyes looking at space, as if in quest of Iram and his Rose, or Jamshyd and his Sev'n-ring'd Cup, or the solution of the Master-knot of Human Fate. The unconscious pose showing the incurved spine, and the arms and shoulders glimpsing through falls of lace at sleeve and corsage, would make the fortune of the photographer-in-ordinary to a professional beauty. And yet that man Amidon stands there like a graven image, and fears to rush in where an angel has folded her wings for him and rests!

He knows that he is expected to claim some of the privileges of the long-absent lover. He has some information as to their nature. His eyes ought to apprise him (as they do us, my boy!) of their preciousness. He is not without knowledge concerning past conduct of that type which, beginning in hard-won privileges, ripens into priceless duties, not to discharge which is insult all the more bitter because it is not to be mentioned. It is not to be denied that the tableau appeals to him; and because another woman has lately touched him in a similar way, he stands there and condemns himself for that! There is small excuse for him, I admit, sir. Her first token of his presence should have been a kiss on the snowy shoulder. You suggest the hair? Well, the hair, then, though for my part, I have always felt---- But never mind! Had it been you or I in his place----

Yes, my dear, this digression is becoming tedious. Let us proceed with the story.

Elizabeth rose with a little start of surprise, a little flutter of the bosom, and came forward with extended hands. He took them with a trembling grasp which might well have passed as evidence of fervor.

"Ah, Eugene," said she, holding him away, "it has seemed an age!"

"Yes," said he truthfully, "an eternity, almost."

"Sit down by the fire," said she, in that low voice which means so much. "You are cold."

"I am a little cold," he replied. "I must have remained outside too long."

"Y-e-s?" she returned; and after a long pause: "It doesn't seem to take long--sometimes. And the wind is in the east."

Now, when a bride-elect begins to deal in double meanings of this sort with her fiance, the course of true love is likely to be entering on a piece of rough road-bed.

"How did you find Estelle when you called?"

Estelle? Estelle? Estelle! Nothing in Blodgett and Blatherwick's notes about Estelle. "A whole directory of names," as Judge Blodgett had said, but no Estelle. The world full of useless people--a billion and a half of them--and not an Estelle at poor Amidon's call in this time of need. Hence this long hiatus in the conversation.

"Really, Miss--er--a--my dear, I haven't had time to call on any one."

"It will be a little hard to explain," said she after a silence, "to my prospective bridesmaid and dearest friend, that you were so long in New York and could not call. It is not quite like you, Eugene."

He was sitting where he could see her well, and because she looked into the fire a good deal, he found himself gazing fixedly at her. Her manifold perfections filled him with the same feeling of astonishment experienced by that beggar who awoke in the prince's chamber, clothed in splendor, and with a royal domain in fee.

(Personally, I regard the domain which spread itself before Amidon, as imperial.)

As she pronounced her gentle reproof, her eyes turned to his, and he started guiltily.

"No," he confessed, "it was not the right thing. You must forgive me, won't you?"

"I hope," said she, smiling, "I may be able to do more than that: maybe I shall be so fortunate as to get you Estelle's forgiveness."

"Thank you," he said; and then seeking for safer ground: "Haven't you something for us to look over--some plans or something?"

"'Or something'!" she repeated with a ripple of laughter.

It was the first time he had heard this laugh; and Marot's lines ran through his mind:

"Good God! 'twould make the very streets and ways Through which she passes, burst into a pleasure! * * * * * * No spell were wanting from the dead to raise me, But only that sweet laugh wherewith she slays me!"

"'Or something!'" she repeated, I say; "it might just as well be the profiles of a new pipe-line survey, for all the interest you take in it. I oughtn't to look at them with you; but come, they're over here on the table."

Somehow, this lady's air required the deferential offer of his arm; and somehow, the deference seemed to please her. So he felt that the tension was lessened as she turned over the blue-prints. Moreover, in matters of architecture he felt at home--if he could only steer clear of any discussion of the grounds. He had no idea of the location of these.

Soon their heads were close together over the plans. A dozen times her hair brushed his lips, two or three times his fingers touched the satin skin of her arms and shoulders, and all the time he felt himself within the magic atmosphere which enwraps so divine a maiden, as odorous breezes clothe the shores of Ceylon. Her breath, the faint sweet perfume in her hair, the soft frou-frou of her skirts, the appealing lowness of her voice--all these wrought strongly on Florian; and when she leaned lightly upon him as she reached past him for one of the sheets, he felt (I record it to his credit) as if he must take her to his arms, and complete the embrace she had involuntarily half begun. But the feeling that she was, after all, a strange young girl, and was revealing herself to him altogether under a mistake as to his identity, restrained him.

She did not lean against him any more. There were some little improvements in the plans which had occurred to Elizabeth, especially in the arrangement of kitchen, pantry and laundry.

"I'll have the architect come and see you about these," said Amidon.

"What!" said she, in apparent astonishment--"from Boston?"

"Ah--well," he stammered, "I didn't know--that is---- Yes, from Boston! We want these matters as you want them, you know, if it were from Paris or Calcutta. And I think there should be some provision for prism-glass to light up the library. It could be cut in right there on that north exposure; don't you think so?"

"Oh, yes, and what an improvement it will be!" she replied. "And may I have all the editions of Browning I want, even if I couldn't explain what _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came_ means?"

"Oh, does that point puzzle you?" exclaimed Florian, greeting the allusion to Browning as the war-horse welcomes the battle. "Then you have never chanced to run across the first edition of Child's _Scottish Ballads_. You get the story there, of Childe Roland following up the quest for his sister, shut up by enchantment in the Dark Tower, in searching for which his brothers--Cuthbert and Giles, you remember, and the rest of 'The Band'--had been lost. He must blow a certain horn before it, in a certain way--you know how it goes, 'Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set!' It's quite obvious when you know the story, and not a bit of an enigma. The line in _Lear_ shows that the verses must have been commonly sung in Shakespeare's time----"

The girl was looking at him with something like amazement; but her answer referred to the matter of his discourse.

"Yes," said she, "I can see now how the 'Dark Tower' lightens up. I must read it again in the light of this explanation of yours. Shall we read it together, soon?"

"Oh, by all means!" said he. "Only I warn you I never tire when I find any one who will study Browning with me. I tried to read _The Ring and the Book_ with a dear friend once, and reading my favorite part, 'Giuseppe Caponsacchi,' as I raised my eyes after that heartbreaking finale, 'O, great, just, good God! Miserable me!' I saw she was dozing. Since then, I read Browning with his lovers only----"

"Yes, you are right in that. But, Eugene," she exclaimed, "you said to me many times that his verse was rot, that Nordau ought to have included him in his gallery of degenerates, that he is muddy, and that there isn't a line of poetry in his works so far as you have been able to dig into them. And you cited _Childe Roland_ as proof of all of this! And you never would listen to any of Browning, even when we almost quarreled about it! Now, if that was because---- Why, it was----!"

She paused as if afraid she might say too much. Florian, who had rallied in his literary enthusiasm, collapsed into his chronic state of terror. Even in so impersonal a thing as Browning, the man who does not know what his habits are takes every step at his peril.

"Oh, _that_ that I said!" he stammered. "Yes--yes. Well, there _are_ obscurities, you know. Even Mr. Birrell admits that. But on the whole, don't you agree with me?"

"Quite," said she dryly; "if I understand you."

There was an implied doubt as to her understanding of his position, and the only thing made clear was that the drawbridge was up again. So Florian began talking of the plans. He grew eloquent on ventilators, bath-rooms, and plumbing. He drew fine and learned distinctions between styles.

"The colonial," said he, "is not good unless indulged in in great moderation. Now, what I like about this is the way in which ultra-colonialism is held in check, and modified in the direction of the Greek ideal. Those columns, supporting the broad portico, hark back to the Parthenon, don't they? I like that taste and flavor of the classic."

She listened in much the same wondering way in which she had regarded him at the beginning of his outburst on Browning. Was it possible that, after all, this lover of hers, whose antecedents were so little known, but whose five years of successful life in Bellevale had won for him that confidence of his townsmen in which she had partaken, was, after all, possessed of some of those tastes in art and literature, the absence of which had been the one thing lacking in his character, as it appeared to her? It would seem so. And yet, why had he concealed these things from her, who so passionately longed for intellectual companionship? Somehow, resentment crept into her heart as she looked at him, and there was something in his attitude which was not frank and bold, as she liked to see a man--but this would not do. He was so lovely in his provision for the future, and surely his conversation disclosed that he had those tastes and that knowledge!

"I think the moon must be letting me look at its other side to-night," said she. "Have you been saving up the artist and poet in you, to show them to me now?"

"Oh, no," said he, "not at all--why, any one knows these little things. Now let's go through the arrangement of the chambers; shall we?"

"Not to-night, if you please. Let us sit by the fire again. It will be a grand house, dear. Sometimes I think, too grand for Bellevale; and quite often I feel, too grand, too elegant--for me."

"Who then," answered Florian, who saw his conversational duty, a dead-sure thing, and went for it there and then, "who then could have such a house, or ought to have it, if not you?"

The girl looked questioningly, pathetically at him, as if she missed something of the convincing in his words.

"To deny that you feel so--felt so about it when you gave orders for the building, would be foolish," said she at last. "And it was very dear of you to do it. But once a man, having a little gem which he thought of perfect water, placed it in a setting so large and so cunningly wrought that nobody ever saw the little stone, unless it was pointed out to them."

"He saw it," said Florian, "whenever he wanted to--and no setting can be too beautiful for a moon-stone."

He felt that he was rallying nobly.

"Really," he thought, "I am getting quite ardent. And under different circumstances, I could be so in the utmost good faith; for I know she's as good and true as she is queenly and beautiful. But after all, it is duty, only, and----"

"In such a house," she went on, "people may live a little closer than acquaintances, or not quite so close, as the case may be, with their lives diluted by their many possessions."

"Yes?" said he expectantly.

"Before it comes to that," she burst forth, her eyes wide and her hands clasped in her lap, "I want to die! I could gather the fagots for the fire, and cuddle down by it on a heap of straw by the roadside, with the man I love; and if I knew he loved me, he might beat me, and I would bear it, and be happy in his strength--far happier than in those chambers you spoke of a moment ago, with an acquaintance who merely happened to be called a husband! I would rather walk the streets than that!"

Now, a lovers' quarrel requires lovers on both sides. Had Amidon really been one, this crisis would have passed naturally on to protestation, counter-protestation, tears, kisses, embraces, reconciliation. But all these things take place through the interplay of instincts, none of which was awakened in Florian. So he sat forlorn, and said nothing.

"I am going to let you go home, now," said she, rising. "I gave out the date of the wedding, as you requested, the day after you went away. If it were not for that, I should ask you to wait a while--until the house is finished--or even longer. As it is, you mustn't be surprised if I say something surprising to you soon."

"I--I assure you----" began Amidon. "Good night, my----"

He had schooled himself for this farewell, and remembering what Madame le Claire had told him, had decided on a course of action. The two had walked out into the hall and he had put on his top-coat. Now he went bravely up to her and stooped to kiss her.