Part 6

At the outset of his journey, his impatience to reach the end of it was so great, the progress of the steamer had seemed exasperatingly slow. But as they began to near New York, a vague dread of what might await him there, a vague recoil from the potential and the unknown, made him almost wish that the throbbing of the engines were not so rapid. A cloud of dismal possibilities haunted his imagination, filling it with a strange chill and ache. He had never paused before to think of the many things that had had time to happen in twenty years; and now they assailed his mind in a mass, and appalled it. Even the preliminary business of discovering her whereabouts, for instance, might prove difficult enough; and then——-? In matters of this sort, at any rate, it is the next step which costs. In twenty years what ties and affections she might have formed, that would make him a necessary stranger to her life, and leave no room for him in her heart. He was jealous of a supposititious lover (he had lived in France too long to remember that in America lovers are not the fashion), of supposititious children, supposititious interests and occupations: jealous and afraid. And of course it was always to be reckoned with as in the bounds of the conceivable, that she might be disconsolate for the loss of Mr. Merrow: though this, for some reason, seemed the least likely of the contingencies he had to face. Mr. Merrow, he knew, had been a cotton-broker; he had always fancied him as a big, rather florid person, with a husky voice: capable perhaps of inspiring a mild fondness, but not of a character to take hold upon the deeper emotional strands of Pauline’s nature.

His nervousness increased inordinately after the pilot came aboard. He marched rapidly backwards and forwards on the deck, scarcely conscious of what he was saying to Miss Goddard, who kept pace with him. She laughed presently—her deep contralto laughter; and then he inquired very seriously whether he had said anything absurd.

“Don’t you know what you said?” she exclaimed.

“I—I don’t just remember. I was thinking of something else,” he confessed, knitting his brows.

“Well, that’s not very complimentary to me, now, is it? Still, if you can say such things without knowing it, I suppose I must forgive you. I asked you what you thought was the best short definition of life, and you said a chance to make mistakes.”

“I never could have said anything so good if I had had my wits about me,” he explained.

Countless old memories and associations were surging up within him now; and as he leaned over the rail and gazed into the murky waters of the New York Bay, the European chapters of his life became a mere parenthesis, and the text joined itself to the word at which it had been interrupted when he was four and twenty. Sorry patriot though he might be, he was still made of flesh and blood; and he could not approach the land of his childhood, his youth, his love and loss, without some stirrings of the heartstrings besides those that were evoked by the prospect of meeting her. His other old companions would no doubt be dead or scattered; or they would have forgotten him as he, indeed, till yesterday had forgotten them. Anyhow, he would not attempt to look them up. He knew that he should feel an alien among his own people; he would not heighten the dreariness of that situation by ferreting out former intimates to find himself unrecognized, or by inquiring about them to be told that they were dead. He hadn’t very clearly formulated his positive intentions, but they probably lay in his sub-consciousness, brief and to the point, if somewhat short-sighted and unpractical: he would do his wooing as speedily as might be, and bear his bride triumphantly over-sea, to his home in Paris.

He bade Miss Goddard good-bye on the dock, whilst his trunks were being rifled by the Custom House inspector.

“Now, mind, you are to come to Minneapolis,” she insisted, as her hand lay in his, returning its pressure; and he could perceive a shade of earnestness behind the smile that lighted up her eyes.

“Good-bye, good-bye,” he answered, fervently, moved all at once by a feeling he would have had some difficulty in naming. “I may surprise you by turning up there one of these days.”

Then her hand was withdrawn, and she disappeared in a hackney-carriage. He went back to the task of getting his luggage examined, with a sense of having been abandoned by his last friend.

“What fortitude it must require to live here,” was the reflection that made him shake his head, as he drove over the rough paving-stones, through the dirty, ignoble streets, to his hotel. It struck him as more depressing still, when he emerged from the sordid tangle of the lower town into the smug rectangularity of the upper. He was sure that Pauline would be glad enough to exchange it all for the airy perspectives, the cleanliness, the gay colours, the variety of Paris. Of course he would have to give up his bachelor chambers overlooking the Luxembourg. He would rent, or buy, or even build, a proper house for her, in the quarter of the Etoile, or near the Parc Monceau.

He turned over the pages of the Directory that the hotel-clerk condescendingly pointed out to him, and found that Mr. Morrow’s address had been twenty-something in a street that had no name, but only a number and a point of the compass to serve for one; and that seemed to him in thorough keeping with the unimaginative, business-like character of the deceased cotton-broker. Pauline, in her widowhood, would very likely have moved away. It was too late to make a call to-day, being nearly dinner-time (he had forgotten that in New York it is not forbidden to call after dinner), but he would write her a little note, informing her of his arrival, and proposing to come to-morrow in the forenoon. On the corner of the envelope he would put “Please forward,” to anticipate the event of her having moved. Then he could leave it to destiny and the post-office authorities to do the rest. III

THE Fifth Avenue reached out in an endless straight line before him, the prose of its architecture being obscured by the gathering twilight, and punctuated monotonously by the street-lamps. Attached to one of these he found a letter-box presently, and into it he dropped the note that he had written. “Does Mrs. Merrow—Pauline Lake that was—remember Henry Aigrefield? And if so, may he call upon her to-morrow at eleven?” That was how, after destroying a dozen sheets of paper, he had at last contrived to phrase his message.

He walked slowly up the long Avenue, cut at right angles, and at fixed intervals of two hundred feet, by streets that looked enough like one another to suggest the notion that they had all been cast in the same dreary mould, and furnished to the municipality ready-made; past the innumerable coffee-coloured houses, with their damnable iteration of rigid little doorsteps; and he wondered at the purblind complacency of a people who could honestly regard this as among the finest thoroughfares of the world. The region he was traversing reminded him of certain melancholy acres in the south of London, where the city-clerk has his humble, cheerless home: it was such a neighbourhood grown rich and pretentious, but in nowise mellowed or beautified.

Would she live in one of these insignificant boxes of brown stone? “26, E. 51,” the address he had read in the Directory, sounded sufficiently unpromising. It had been Mr. Merrow’s house, and Mr. Morrow had been a practical New Yorker. But the interior? He pictured the interior as entirely lovely and delightful, for, in the nature of things, the interior would owe its character to Mr. Merrow’s wife. A good distemper on the walls, something light in key, yet warm—brick-dust, or a pearly, rosy gray; simple, graceful chairs and tables; a few good pictures, numberless good books in good bindings: over all the soft glow of candlelight; and in the midst of all, giving unity and meaning to it all, a lady, a tall slender lady, in a black gown, with a pale serious face, dark eyes full of sleeping fire, and above her white brow a rich shadow of brown hair. She was reading, her head bent a little, her feet resting on a small tabouret of some dull red stuff that lent depth to the bottom of the picture, while the candlelight playing upon her hair, upon her cheek and throat, upon the ivory page of her book and the hand that held it, made the upper and middle portions radiant. After twenty years how little changed she was! Her face had lost nothing of its girlish delicacy, its maiden innocence, it had only gained a quality of firmness, of seriousness and strength. He found a woman where he had left a child, but the woman was only the child ripened and ennobled. As the door opened to admit him, she raised her eyes, puzzled for a moment, not seeing who he was; but then, suddenly, she stood up and moved towards him, calling his name, very low, very low, so that it fell upon his ears like a note of music. And his heart pounded suffocatingly, and he trembled deliciously in all his limbs.

Why, he began to ask himself now, why, after all, should he put off till to-morrow the realisation of this great joy? If it was unconventional to pay a call in the evening, she, who had never been a stickler for the conventionalities, would forgive it to the ardour and the impatience of his passion, He had waited for her twenty years; that was long enough, without adding to it another interminable period of twelve hours. Anyhow, there could be no harm in his ringing the bell of No. 26, E. 51, and inquiring whether she still lived there, and, if not, whither she had gone. Thereby a further saving of precious hours might be effected; and—and he would do it.

The house, indeed, appeared in no particular different to the multitude that he had left behind him; but he could have embraced the Irish maid-servant who opened the door for him, because to both of his questions she answered yes. Yes, Mrs. Merrow lived here; and yes, she was at home. Would he walk into the parlour, please, and what name should she say? Lest the name should get perverted in its transmission, he equipped her with his card. Then he sat down in the “parlour” to await his fate.

It was a bare room, and, by the glare of the gas that lighted it, he saw that the influence of Mr. Merrow had penetrated at least thus far beyond his threshold. The floor was covered by a carpet in the flowery taste of 1860. The chairs were upholstered in thick, hot-hued plush, with a geometric pattern embossed upon it. A vast procession of little vases and things in porcelain, multiplied by the mantel-mirror and the pier-glass, shed an added forlornness on the spaces they were meant to decorate, but only cluttered up, Pauline’s domain, he concluded, would be above stairs.

The door swung open after a few minutes, and he rose, with a sudden heart-leap, to greet her. But no—it was only a fat, uninteresting-looking woman (a visitor, a sister-in-law, he reasoned swiftly) come to make Pauline’s excuses, probably, if she kept him waiting. He noticed that the fat lady was in mourning; and that confirmed his guess that she would prove to be a relative of the late Mr. Merrow. She wore her hair in a series of stiff ringlets (“bandelettes” I believe they are technically called) over a high, sloping forehead; the hair was thin and stringy, so that, he told himself, her brother had no doubt been bald. Two untransparent eyes gazed placidly out of the white expanses of her face; and he thought, as he took her in, that she might serve as an incarnation of all the dulness and platitude that he had felt in the air about him from the hour of his landing in New York.

However, he stood there, silent, making a sort of interrogative bow, and waiting for her to state her business.

She had seemed to be studying him with some curiosity, of a mild, phlegmatic kind, from which he argued that perhaps she was not wholly unenlightened about his former relation to her brother’s widow. But now he experienced a distinct spasm of horror, as she threw her head to one side, and, opening her lips, remarked lymphatically, in a resigned, unresonant voice, “Well, I declare! Is that you, Harry Aigrefield? Why, you’re as gray as a rat!”

He sank back into his chair, overwhelmed by the abrupt disenchantment; and he understood that it was reciprocal. IV

He sat, inert, amid the pieces of his broken idol, for perhaps a half hour, and chatted with Mrs. Merrow of various things. She asked him if he was still as crazy about painting pictures as he used to be: to which he answered, with a hollow laugh, that he feared he was. Well, she said, playfully, she presumed there always had to be some harum-scarum people in the world; and added that “Sam” had “simply coined money” as a cotton-broker, and left her very well off. He had died of pneumonia, following an attack of the “grip.”

“I suppose it seems kind of funny to you, getting back to America after so many years?” she queried, languidly “Things are considerably changed.”

He admitted that this was true, and bade her good-night. She went with him to the door, where she gave him an inelastic handshake, accompanied by an invitation to call again.

In his bedroom at the hotel he sat before his window till late into the night, smoking cigarettes, and trying to pull himself together. The last lingering afterglow of his youth had been put out; and therewith the whole colour of the universe was altered. He felt that he had reversed the case of the bourgeois gentilhomme, and been dealing in bad poetry for twenty years,—in other words, making a sentimental ass of himself; and his chagrin at this was as sharp as his grief over his recent disillusion.

Samuel Merrow was dead, but so was Pauline Lake; or perhaps Pauline Lake, as he had loved her, had never existed outside of his own imagination. At any rate, Henry Aigrefield was dead, dead as the leaves of last autumn; and this was another man, who wore his clothes and bore his name.

He glanced at his looking-glass, and he saw indeed, as he had lately been reminded, that this new, respectable-appearing, middle-aged personage was “as gray as a rat,”—though he did not like the figure better for its truth. It required several hours of hard mental labour to get the necessary readjustment of his faculties so much as started. The past had ceased to be the most important fraction of time for him; the present and the future had become of moment.

In the dust and confusion of his wreck, only one thing was entirely clear: he couldn’t stand New York. But the question where to go was as large as the circumference of the earth. Straight back to Paris? Or what of that other region he had heard so much about during the past few days, the West? By and by the form of Miss Lillian Goddard began to move refreshingly in and out among his musings; he pictured the smile with which she would welcome him, if, by chance, he should turn his steps towards Minneapolis. It was a smile that seemed to promise a hundred undefined pleasantnesses, and it warmed his heart. “If I should go to Minneapolis——” he began; then he sat stockstill in his chair for twenty minutes; and then he got up with the air of a man who has taken a vigorous resolve.

As he undressed, he hummed softly to himself a line or two of his favourite poet,—

“That shall be to-morrow,

Not to-night:

I must bury sorrow

Out of sight.”

A LIGHT SOVEREIGN. I.

THE cause of the uproar proved to be simple enough.

Emerging into the Bischofsplatz, from the street that I had followed, I found a great crowd gathered before the Marmorhof, shouting, “Death to Conrad!” and “Where is Mathilde?” with all the force of its collective lungs. The Marmorhof was the residence of Prince Conrad, brother to the reigning Grand Duke Otto—reigning, indeed, but now very old and ill, and like to die. The legitimate successor to the throne would have been Otto’s grand-daughter, Mathilde, the only surviving child of his eldest son, Franz-Victor, who had been dead these ten years. But the Grand Duke’s brother, Conrad, was covetous of her rights; covetous, and, as her friends alleged, unscrupulous. For a long while, it was said, Mathilde had been in terror of her life. Conrad was unscrupulous, and, were she but out of the way, Conrad would come to reign. Rumour, indeed, whispered that he had made three actual attempts to compass her death: two by poison, one by the dagger, each, thanks to some miracle, unsuccessful. But, a fortnight since, upon the first supervention of fatal symptoms in the malady of poor old Otto, Mathilde had mysteriously disappeared. Her whereabouts unknown, all X———was in commotion.

“She has fled and is in hiding,” surmised some people, “to escape the designs of her wicked uncle.”

“No,” retorted others, “but he, the wicked uncle himself, has kidnapped and sequestered her, perhaps even made away with her. Who can tell?”

As an inquiring stranger, the situation interested me, and, from the top of a convenient doorstep, I gazed now upon this deep-voiced Teutonic mob with a good deal of curiosity.

It must have numbered upwards of a thousand individuals, compact in its centre and near the palace, but scattering towards its edges; a sea of faces, of pale, frowning faces; a surging, troubled sea. Young men’s faces for the most part; many of them beardless. “Students from the University,” I guessed.

My own station was at the outskirts of the assemblage, the station of a casual spectator. Sharing my door-step with me were a couple of sharp-faced priests, two or three prettyish young girls—bareheaded, presumably escaped from some of the neighbouring shops—and a young man with a pointed black beard, rather long black hair, and a broad-brimmed, soft felt hat, who somehow looked as if he might be a member of that guild to which I myself belonged, the ancient and questionable company of artists.

To him I addressed myself for information.... “Students, I suppose?”

“Yes, their leaders are students. The students and the artisans of the town are of the princess’s party. The army, the clergy, and the country folk are for the prince.” He had discerned from my accent that I was a foreigner: whence, doubtless, the fulness of his answer.

“It seems a harmless mob enough,” I suggested. “They make a lot of noise, to be sure; but that breaks no bones.”

“There’s just the point,” said he. “The princess’s friends fight only with their throats. Otherwise the present complication might never have arisen.”

Meanwhile the multitude continued to shout its loudest; and for Conrad, on the whole, the quarter-hour must have been a bad one.

Presently, however, the call of a bugle wound in the distance, and drew nearer and nearer, till the bugler in person appeared, gorgeous in uniform, mounted upon a white horse, advancing slowly up the Bischofsplatz, towards the crowd, trumpeting with all his might.

“What is the meaning of that?” I asked.

“A signal to disperse,” answered my companion. “He looks like a major-general, doesn’t he? But he’s only a trumpet-sergeant, and he’s followed at a hundred yards by a battalion of infantry. His trumpet-blast is by way of warning. Disperse! Or, if you tarry, beware the soldiery!”

“His warning does not seem to pass unheeded,” I remarked.

“Oh, they’re a chicken-hearted lot, these friends of the princess,” he assented contemptuously.

Already the mob had begun to melt. In a few minutes only a few stragglers in knots here and there were left, amongst them my acquaintance and myself.

He was a handsome young fellow, with a thin dark face, bright brown eyes, and a voice so soft that if I had heard without seeing him, I should almost have supposed the speaker to be a woman.

“We, too, had better be off,” said he.

“And prove ourselves also chicken-hearted?” queried I.

“Oh, discretion is the better part of valour,” he returned.

“But I should like to see the arrival of the military,” I submitted.

“Ha! Like or not, I’m afraid you’ll have to now,” he cried. “Here they come.”

With a murmurous tramp, tramp, they were pouring into the Bischofsplatz from the side streets leading to it.

“We must take to our heels, said my young man.

“We were merely on-lookers,” said I.

“Conscious innocence,” laughed he. “Nevertheless, we had better run for it.”

And, with our fellow loiterers, we began ignominiously to run away. But before we had run far we were stopped by the voice of an officer.

“Halt! Halt! Halt, or we fire!”

As one man we halted. The officer rode up to us, and, with true military taciturnity, vouchsafed not a word either in question or explanation, but formed us in ranks of four abreast, and surrounded us with his men. Then he gave the command to march. We were, perhaps, two dozen captives, all told, and a good quarter of our number were women.

“What are we in for now?” I wondered aloud.

“Disgrace, decapitation, deprivation of civil rights, or, say, a night in the Castle of St. Michael, at the very least,” replied my friend, shrugging his shoulders.

“Ah, that will be romantic,” said I, feeling like one launched upon a life of adventure. II

He was right We were marched across the town and into the courtyard of the Castle of St Michael. By the time we got there, and the heavy oaken gates were shut behind us, it was nearly dark.

“Here you pass the night,” announced our officer. “In the morning—humph, we will see.”

“Do you mean to say they are going to afford us no better accommodation than this?” I demanded.

“So it seems,” replied the dark young man. “Fortunately, however, the night is warm, the skies are clear, and to commune with the stars is reputed to be elevating for the spirit.”

Our officer had vanished into the castle, leaving us a corporal and three privates as a guard of honour. We, the prisoners, gathered together in the middle of the courtyard, and held a sort of impromptu indignation meeting. The women were especially eloquent in their complaints. Two of these I recognized as having been among my neighbours of the door-step, and we exchanged compassionate glances. The other four were oldish women, who wore caps and aprons, and looked like servants.

“Cooks,” whispered my comrade. “Some good burghers will be kept waiting for their suppers. Oh, what a lark!”

Our convention finally broke up with a resolution to the effect that, though we had been most shabbily treated, there was nothing to be done.

“We must suffer and be still. Let us make ourselves as comfortable as we can, and seek distraction in an interchange of ideas,” proposed my mate. He seated himself upon a barrel that lay lengthwise against the castle wall, and motioned to me to place myself beside him.

“You are English?” he inquired, in an abrupt German way.

“No, I am American.”

“Ah, it is the same thing. A tourist?”

“You think it is the same thing?” I questioned sadly. “You little know. But——yes, I am a tourist.”

“Have you been long in X———?”

“Three days.”

“For heaven’s sake, what have you found to keep you here three days?”

“I am a painter. The town is paintable.”

“Still life! Nature morte!” he cried. “It is the dullest little town in Christendom. But I’m glad you are a painter. I am a musician—a fiddler.”

“I suspected we were of the same ilk,” said I.

“Did you, though? That was shrewd. But I, too, seemed to scent a kindred soul.”

“Here is my card. If we’re not beheaded in the morning, I hope we may see more of each other,” I went on, warming up.

He took my card, and, by the light of a match struck for the occasion, read aloud, “Mr. Arthur Wainwright,” pronouncing the English name without difficulty. “I have no card, but my name is Sebastian Roch.”

“You speak English?” was my inference. “Oh, yes, I speak a kind of English,” he confessed, using the tongue in question. He had scarcely a trace of a foreign accent.

“You speak it uncommonly well.”