Chapter 20

And thus speaking, she tripped, with very much the reputed grace of a fairy, toward the far end of the room, and standing a-tiptoe, groped at the obscure shelves, with a resultant crash of falling china.

"Oh, but my lovely cups!" said Cynthia, in dismay. "I had forgotten they were up there: and now I have smashed both of them, in looking for my mirror, sir, and trying to prettify myself for you. And I had so fancied them, because they had not their like in England!"

She looked at the fragments, and then at Musgrave, with wide, innocent hurt eyes. She was honestly grieved by the loss of her quaint toys. But Musgrave, in his sturdy, common-sense way, only laughed at her seriousness over such kickshaws.

"I am for an honest earthenware tankard myself!" he said, jovially, as the two went in to supper.

THE HIGH COST OF CONSCIENCE

_BY BEATRICE RAVENEL_

From _Harper's Magazine_

"Any woman who can accept money from a gentleman who is in no way related to her--" Miss Fowler delivered judgment.

"My dear Aunt Maria, you mean a gentleman's disembodied spirit," Hugh's light, pleasant tones intervened.

"A legacy, Maria, is not quite the same thing. Mr. Winthrop Fowler's perfect intonation carried its usual implication that the subject was closed.

"---- is what I call an adventuress," Miss Fowler summed up. She had a way of ignoring objections, of reappearing beyond them like a submarine with the ultimate and detonating answer. "And now she wants to reopen the matter when the whole thing's over and done with. After three years. Extraordinary taste." She hitched her black-velvet Voltaire arm-chair a little away from the fire and spread a vast knitting-bag of Chinese brocade over her knees. "I suppose she isn't satisfied; she wants more."

"Naturally. I cannot imagine what other reason she could have for insisting on a personal interview," her brother agreed, dryly. He retired into the _Transcript_ as a Trappist withdraws into his vows. A chastened client of Mr. Fowler's once observed that a half-hour's encounter with him resulted in a rueful of asphyxiated topics.

Miss Maria, however, preferred disemboweling hers, "I shouldn't have consented," she snapped. "Hugh, if you would be so good as to sit down. You are obstructing the light. And the curtain-cord. If you could refrain from twisting it for a few moments."

Hugh let his long, high-shouldered figure lapse into the window-seat. "And besides, we're all dying to know what she looks like," he suggested.

"Speak for yourself, please," said Miss Fowler, with the vivacity of the lady who protests too much.

"I do, I do! Good Lord! I'm just as bad as the rest of you. All my life I've been consumed to know what Uncle Hugh could have seen in a perfectly obscure little person to make him do what he did. There must have been something." His eyes travelled to a sketch in pencil of a man's head which hung in the shadow of the chimneypiece, a sketch whose uncanny suggestion might have come from the quality of the sitter or merely from a smudging of the medium. "Everything he did always seemed to me perfectly natural," he went on, as though conscious of new discovery. "Even those years when he was knocking about the world, hiding his address. Even when he had that fancy that people were persecuting him. Most people did worry him horribly."

A glance flashed between the two middle-aged listeners. It was a peculiar glance, full of a half-denied portent. Then Miss Fowler's fingers, true to their traditions, loosened their grip on her needles and casually smoothed out her work.

"I have asked you not to speak of that," she mentioned, quietly.

"I know. But of course there was no doubt at all that he was sa--was entirely recovered before his death. Don't you think so, sir?"

His uncle laid down the paper and fixed the young man with the gray, unsheathed keenness that had sent so many witnesses grovelling to the naked truth. "No doubt whatever. I always held, and so did both the physicians, that his lack of balance was a temporary and sporadic thing, brought on by overwork--and certain unhappy conditions of his life. There has never been any such taint in our branch of the family."

"No-o, so they say," Hugh agreed. "One of our forebears did see ghosts, but that was rather the fashion. And his father, that old Johnnie over the fireplace--you take after him, Aunt Maria--he was the prize witch-smeller of his generation, and he condemned all the young and pretty ones. That hardly seems well-balanced."

"Collaterals on the distaff side," Mr. Fowler put in hastily. "If you would read Mendel--"

"Mendel? I have read about him." He raised the forefinger of his right hand. "Very suggestive. If your father was a black rabbit"--he raised the forefinger of his left--"and your mother was a white rabbit, then your male children would be"--he raised all the other fingers and paused as though taken aback by the size of the family--"would be blue guinea-pigs, with a tendency to club-foot and astigmatism, but your female children might only be rather clumsy tangoists with a weakness for cutting their poor relations. That's all I remember, but I _do_ know that because I studied the charts."

"Very amusing," said Mr. Fowler, indulgently.

Hugh flushed.

"I am sure it can't be that way." Miss Maria flapped her knitting over. "But everything has changed since my day, and _not_ for the better. The curtain-cord."

"Beg pardon," muttered Hugh. His mind went on churning nonsense. "There are two days it is useless to flee from--the day of your death and the day when your family doesn't care for your jokes.

"For a joke is an intellectual thing, And a _mot_ is the sword of an angel king.

"Good old Blake. Why do the best people always see jokes? Why does a really good one make a whole frozen crowd feel jolly and united all of a sudden?" He pondered on the beneficence of the comic spirit. Hugh was a born Deist. It gave him no trouble at all to believe that since the paintings of Velasquez and the great outdoors which he had seen, were beautiful, so much the more beautiful must be that God whom he had not seen. It seemed reasonable. As for the horrors like Uncle Hugh's affair--well, they must be put in for chiaroscuro. A thing couldn't be all white without being blank. The thought of the shadows, however, always made him profoundly uncomfortable, and his instinct right-about-faced to the lighter surface of life. "Anyhow," he broke silence, "the daughter of Heth must be game. Three to one, and on our native heath."

He looked appraisingly about the room, pausing at the stiff, distinguished, grey-haired couple, one on either side of the fire. The effect was of a highly finished genre picture: the rich wainscot between low book-shelves, the brooding portraits, the black-blue rug bordered by a veiled Oriental motive, the black-velvet cushions that brought out the watery reflections of old Sheraton as even the ancient horsehair had not done; the silver candlesticks, the miniatures, and on the mantel those two royal flower-pots whose precarious existence was to his aunt a very fearful joy. Even the tortoise-shell cat, sprawled between the two figures like a tiny tiger-skin, was in the picture. It was a room that gently put you into your place. Hugh recalled with a faint grin certain meetings here of philanthropic ladies whose paths had seldom turned into the interiors of older Beacon Street. The state of life to which it had pleased their Maker to call them, he reflected, would express itself preferably in gilding and vast pale-tinted upholstery and pink bibelots--oh, quite a lot of pink. This place had worried them into a condition of disconcerted awe.

He tried to fancy what it was going to do to the unbidden, resented guest. A queer protest against its enmity, an impulse to give her a square deal, surged up in him from nowhere. After all, whatever else she might be, she was Uncle Hugh's girl. Like all the world, Hugh loved the dispossessed lover. He knew what it felt like. One does not reach the mature age of twenty-four without having at least begun the passionate pilgrimage. His few tindery and tinselly affairs suspected of following the obvious formula: three parts curiosity, three parts the literary sense, three parts crude young impulse, one part distilled moonshine. The real love of his life had been Uncle Hugh.

He sprang up with an abruptness to which his elders seemed to be used. He stopped before a brass-trimmed desk and jerked at the second drawer. "Where are those letters, sir?"

"You mean--"

"Yes, the one you wrote her about the money, and her answer. You put them with his papers, didn't you? Where's the key?"

The older man drew from his waistcoat pocket a carved bit of brass. "What do you want with them?" he asked, cautiously.

"I want to refresh my memory--and Aunt Maria's." He took out a neat little pile of papers and began to sort them intently. "Here they are on top." He laid out a docketed envelope on the desk. "And here are the essays and poems that you wouldn't publish. I considered them the best things he ever did."

"You were not his literary executor," said his uncle, coldly. Another stifled glance passed between the seniors, but this time Miss Maria made no effort to restore the gloss of the surface. She sat idle, staring at the papers with a sort of horror.

"Put them back," she said. "Winthrop, I do think you might burn them. If you keep things like that too long the wrong people are sure to get them."

"Wait a bit. I haven't seen them for years, not since you published the collected works--with Hamlet left out." The young man lifted a worn brown-morocco portfolio tied with a frazzled red ribbon. "And here"--his voice dropped--"here is It--the letters he wrote to her and never sent. It was a sort of diary, wasn't it, going on for years? What a howling pity we couldn't print that!"

"Hugh!"

"Don't faint, Aunt Maria. You wouldn't catch me doing anything so indecent. But suppose Dante's dear family had suppressed the _Vita Nuova_. And it ought to be one of the most extraordinary human documents in the world, perfectly intimate, all the bars down, full of those flashes of his. Just the man, _ipsissimus_, that never happened but that once. Uncle Winthrop, don't you think that I might read it?"

"Do you think so? I never did."

"Oh, if you put it up to me like that! Of course I can't. But what luck that he didn't ask you to send it to her--supposing she's the wrong kind--wasn't it ..." His voice trailed off, leaving his lips foolishly open. "You don't mean--he did?"

"Yes, at the end, after you had left the room," said Mr. Fowler, firmly.

"And you--didn't? Why not?"

"As you said, for fear she was the wrong kind"

"It was too much to hope that she would be anything else," his aunt broke in, harshly. "Shut your mouth, Hugh; you look like a fool. Think what she might have done with them--she and some of those unspeakable papers."

"Oh, I see! I see!" groaned the young man. "But how awful not to do the very last thing he wanted! Did you ever try to find out what kind of a person she was?"

"She took the money. That was enough," cried Miss Fowler. "She got her share, just as though she had been his legal wife."

Hugh gave her a dazed look. "You don't mean that she was his illegal one? I never--"

"Oh no, no!" Mr. Fowler interposed. "We have no reason to think that she was otherwise than respectable. Maria, you allow most unfortunate implications to result from your choice of words. We know very little, really."

"He met her in Paris when he gave that course of lectures over there. We know that much. And she was an American student--from Virginia, wasn't it? But that was over twenty years ago. Didn't he see her after that?"

"I am sure he did not."

"She wasn't with him when he was knocking about Europe?"

"Certainly not. She came home that very year and married. As her letter states, she was a widow with three children at the time of his death."

"I have always considered it providential that he didn't know she was a widow," observed Miss Maria, primly.

Her nephew shot her a look that admitted his intermittent amusement in his aunt Maria, but definitely gave her up. He carefully leaned the portfolio inside the arm of the sofa that neighboured the desk, and picked up the long envelope.

"A copy of my letter," said Mr. Fowler.

To his sister, watching him as he watched Hugh, came the unaccountable impression that his sure and chiselled surface covered a nervous anxiety. Then Miss Maria, being a product of the same school, dismissed the idea as absurd.

Hugh raised bewildered eyes from the letters. "I can't exactly remember," he said. "I was so cut up at the time. Did I ever actually read this before or was I merely told about it? I went back for Midyear's, you know, almost at once. I know my consent was asked, but--"

"You--did not see it."

"And you, Aunt Maria, of course you knew about it!"

"Certainly," said Miss Fowler, on the defensive. "As usual in business matters, your uncle decided for me. We have been accustomed to act as a family always. To me the solidarity of the family it more than the interest of any member of it."

"Oh, I know that the Fowler family is the noblest work of God." The young man looked from one to the other as he might have regarded two strangers whose motives it was his intention to find out. "I've been brought up on that. But what I want to know now is the whyness of this letter."

"What do you mean?" Mr. Fowler's voice cut the pause like a trowel executing the middle justice on an earthworm.

"Why--why--" Hugh began, desperately. "I mean, why wasn't the money turned over to her at once--all of it?"

"It is customary to notify legatees."

"And she wasn't even a legatee," added Miss Maria, grimly. He never made a will."

"No," said Hugh, with an ugly laugh, "he merely trusted to our promises."

There was a brief but violent silence.

"I think, Winthrop," Miss Maria broke it, "that instead of questioning the propriety of my language, you might do well to consider your nephew's."

Hugh half-tendered the letter. "You're so confoundedly clever. Uncle Winthrop. You--you just put the whole thing up to the poor woman. I can't pick out a word to show where you said it, but the tone of your letter is exactly this, 'Here's the money for you, and if you take it you're doing an unheard-of thing.' _She_ saw it right enough. Her answer is just defence of why she has to take it--some of it. She's a mother with three children, struggling to keep above water. She's a human animal fighting for her young. So she takes, most apologetically, most unhappily, a part of what he left her, and she hates to take that. It's the most pitiful thing--"

"Piteous," corrected Miss Maria, in a tone like a bite.

Mr. Fowler laid the tips of his fingers very delicately on his nephew's knee. "Will you show me the place or places where I make these very damaging observations?"

"That's just it. I can't pick them out, but--"

"I am sure that you cannot, because they exist only in your somewhat--shall we say, lyrical imagination? I laid the circumstances before the woman and she acted as she saw fit to act. Hugh, my dear boy, I wish that you would try to restrain your--your growing tendency to excitability. I know that this is a trying day for all of us."

"O Lord, yes! It brings it all back," said Hugh, miserably. "I'm sorry if I said anything offensive sir, but--" He gave it up. "You know I have a devil, sometimes." He gave a half-embarrassed laugh.

"Offensive--if you have said anything offensive?" Miss Fowler boiled over. "Is that all you are going to say, Winthrop? If so--"

Mr. Fowler lifted a warning hand. The house door was opening. Then the discreet steps of Gannett came up the hall, followed by something lighter and more resilient.

"At least don't give me away to the lady the very first thing," said Hugh, lightly. He shoved the papers into the drawers and swung it shut. His heart was beating quite ridiculously. He would know at last--What wouldn't he know? "Uncle Hugh's girl, Uncle Hugh's girl," he told himself, and his temperamental responsiveness to the interest and the mystery of life expanded like a sea-anemone in the Gulf Stream.

Gannett opened the door, announced in his impeccable English, "Mrs. Shirley," and was not.

* * * * *

A very small, very graceful woman hesitated in the doorway. Hugh's first impression was surprise that there was so little of her. Then his always alert subconsciousness registered:

"A lady, yes, but a country lady; not _de par le monde_. Pleasantly rather than well dressed; those veils are out." He had met her at once with outstretched hand and the most cordial, "I am glad to see you, Mrs. Shirley." Then he mentioned the names of his aunt and uncle. He did not dare to leave anything to Aunt Maria.

That lady made a movement that might or might not have been a gesture of recognition. Mr. Fowler, who had risen, inclined his handsome head with a polite murmur and indicated a chair which faced the light. Mrs. Shirley sat, instead, upon the edge of the sofa, which happened to be nearer. With her coming Hugh's expansiveness had suffered a sudden rebuff. A feeling of dismal conventionality permeated the room like a fog. He plumbed it in vain for the wonder and the magic that ought to have been the inescapable aura of Uncle Hugh's girl. Was this the mighty ocean, was this all? She was a little nervous, too. That was a pity. Nervousness in social relations was one of the numerous things that Aunt Maria never forgave.

Then the stranger spoke, and Hugh's friendliness went out to the sound as to something familiar for which he had been waiting.

"It is very good of you to let me come," she said.

"But she must be over forty," Hugh told himself, "and her voice is young. So was his always." It was also very natural and moving and not untinged by what Miss Fowler called the Southern patois. "And her feet are young."

Mr. Fowler uttered another polite murmur. There was no help from that quarter. She made another start.

"It seemed to me--" she addressed Miss Fowler, who looked obdurate. She cast a helpless glance at the cat, who opened surprising topaz eyes and looked supercilious. Then she turned to Hugh. "It seemed to me," she said, steadily, "that I could make you understand--I mean I could express myself more clearly if I could see you, than I could by writing, but--it is rather difficult."

The overheated, inclement room waited. Hugh restrained his foot from twitching. Why didn't Aunt Maria say something? She was behaving abominably. She was still seething with her suppressed outburst like a tea-kettle under the cozy of civilization. And it was catching.

"I explained at the time, three years ago," Mrs. Shirley made the plunge, "why I took the--money at all." The hard word was out, and Hugh relaxed. "I don't know what you thought of me, but at the time it seemed like the mercy of Heaven. I had to educate the children. We were horribly poor. I was almost in despair. And I felt that if I could take it from any one I could take it from him ..."

"Yes," said Hugh, unhappily. The depression that dropped on him at intervals seemed waiting to pounce. He glanced at his uncle's judicial mask, knowing utterly the distaste for sentimental encounters that it covered. He detested his aunt's aloofness. He was almost angry with this little woman's ingenuousness that put her so candidly at their cynical mercy.

"But now," she went on, "some land we have that seemed worth nothing at the time has become very valuable. The town grew out in that direction. And my eldest boy is doing very well indeed, and my daughter is studying for a library position."

"The short and simple annals of the poor," sighed Hugh to Hugh.

"And so," said little Mrs. Shirley, with astounding simplicity, "I came to ask you please to take it back again." She gave an involuntary sigh of relief, as though she had returned a rather valuable umbrella. Mr. Fowl's eyeglasses dropped from his nose as his eyebrows shot up.

"Good Lord!" ejaculated Miss Maria with all the unexpectedness of Galatea. "You don't really mean it?" Her bag slid to the floor and the cat became thoroughly intrigued.

"Do I understand you to say"--Mr. Fowler's voice was almost stirred--"that you wish to return my brother's legacy to the family?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Shirley, "only, it wasn't a legacy. It was merely kindness that let me have it. You never can know how kind it was. But we can get on without it now."

Mr. Fowler cleared his throat. To Hugh his manner faintly suggested the cat busy with the yarn, full of a sort of devout curiosity. "Pardon me," he said, gently, "but are you sure--have you given this matter sufficient thought? The sum is a considerable one. Your children--"

"I have talked it over with them. They feel just as I do."

"A very proper feeling," said Miss Fowler, approvingly. "I must say that I never expected it. I shall add part of my share of it to the Marian Fowler Ward in the Home for Deficient Children. A most worthy charity. Perhaps I could interest you--"

"Oh, that would be lovely!" cried Mrs. Shirley. "Anything for children.... I've already spoken to my cousin, who is a lawyer, about transferring the securities back to you."

"I shall communicate with him at once," said Mr. Fowler. His court-room manner had bourgeoned into his best drawing-room blend of faintly implied gallantry and deep consideration. One almost caught Winter getting out of the lap of Spring. Then the three heads which had unconsciously leaned together suddenly straightened up and turned in the same direction.

Hugh stood almost over them. In one hand he held his aunt's knitting, which he had mechanically rescued from the cat. Now he drew out one of the ivory needles and snapped it into accurate halves. "This is atrocious!" he said, with care and precision. His voice shook. "I shall not touch a cent of it and"--he embraced his uncle and aunt in the same devastating look--"neither will you if you have any sense of decency."

"I think--"

"It doesn't matter remotely what you--we think sir. What matters is what Uncle Hugh thought." He turned to Mrs. Shirley with an extraordinary softening of tone. "Couldn't you keep it? When he died ... in the room over this"--with a little gasp her glance flew to the ceiling as though this topographical detail had brought her a sharp realization of that long-past scene--"he made us promise that you should have it, all of it. He felt that you needed it; he worried about it."

"Oh, how kind of him--how kind!" cried the little woman. The poignancy of her voice cut into his disappointment like a sharp ray of light. "Even then--to think of me. But don't you understand that he wouldn't want me to--to take anything that I felt I ought not to take?"

"That's the way out," rippled across Mr. Fowler's face. He was experiencing a variety of mental disturbances, but this came to the surface just in time for Hugh to catch it.

"Oh well," he murmured, wearily. "Only, none for this deficient child, thank you." He walked to the window and stood looking out into the blown spring green of the elm opposite. His ebbed anger had left a residuum of stubbornness. There was still an act of justice to be consummated and the position of grand-justicer offered a certain righteous attraction. As he reminded himself, if you put your will to work on a difficult action you were fain to commit, after a while the will worked automatically and your mind functioned without aid from you, and the action bloomed of itself. This kinetic process was a constant device of the freakish impulse that he called his devil. He deliberately laid the train.