Chapter 6

"But not alone. Anne, do you remember what you said ... this morning? That you were going to pack the days full? And you can't do that without some one to help you. And Ridgeley won't help. Anne, let me do it. Let me take you away from here ... away from Ridgeley. We will go where we can hear the temple bells. We'll ride through the desert ... we'll set our sails for strange harbors. We'll love until we forget everything, but the day, the hour,--the moment! And when the time comes for endless dreams...."

"Christopher...."

"Anne, listen."

"You mustn't say things like that to me ... you must not...!"

"I must. I want you to have happiness. We'll crowd more in to a few short months than some people have in a lifetime. And you have a right to it."

"Would it be happiness?"

"Why not? In a way we are all pushing death ahead of us. Who knows that he will be alive to-morrow? There's this arm of mine ... there's every chance that I'll have trouble with it. And an automobile accident may wreck a honeymoon. You've as much time as thousands who are counting on more."

The lightning flashed and showed the birches writhing.

"But afterward, Christopher, _afterward_...?"

"Well, if it is Heaven, we'll have each other. And if it is Hell ... there were Paolo and Francesca ... and if it is sleep, I'll dream eternally of you! Anne ... Anne, do you love me enough to do it?"

"Christopher, please!"

But the storm was upon them--rain and wind, and the thunder a cannonade. Christopher, brought at last to the knowledge of its menace, picked Anne up in his arms, and ran for shelter. When they reached the house, they found Ridgeley there. He was stern. "It was a bad business to keep her out. She's afraid of storms."

"Were you afraid?" Christopher asked her, as Ridgeley went to look after the awnings.

"I forgot the storm," she said, and did not meet his eyes.

VI

Lying awake in her wide bed, Anne thought it over. She was still shaken by Christopher's vehemence. She had believed him her friend, and had found him her lover--and oh, he had brought back youth to her. If he left her now, how could she stand it--the days with no one but Jeanette Ware, and the soul-shaking knowledge of what was ahead?

And Ridgeley would not care--much. In a week be swallowed up by his work....

She tried to read, but found it difficult. Across each page flamed Christopher's sentences.... "We'll ride through the desert.... We'll set our sails for strange harbors...."

Was that what the old man had meant at the circus.... "What you think is evil--cannot be evil"? Would Christopher give her all that she had hoped of Ridgeley? If she lived to be eighty, she and Ridgeley would--jog. Was Christopher right--"You'll have more happiness in a few months than some people in a lifetime?"

She heard her husband moving about in the next room, the water booming in his bath. A thin line of light showed under his door.

She shut her book and turned out her lamp. The storm had died down and the moon was up. Through the open window she could see beyond the garden to the grove of birches.

Hitherto, the thought of the little grove had been as of a sanctuary. She was aware, suddenly, that it had become a place of contending forces. Were the guardian angels driven out...?

_But there weren't any guardian angels_! Ridgeley had said that they were silly. And Christopher didn't believe in them. She wished that her mother might have lived to talk it over. Her mother had had no doubts.

The door of her husband's room opened, and he was silhouetted against the light. Coming up to the side of her bed, he found her wide-eyed.

"Can't you sleep, my dear?"

"No."

"I don't want to give you anything."

"I don't want anything."

He sat down by the side of the bed. He had on his blue bathrobe, and the open neck showed his strong white throat. "My dear," he said, "I've been thinking of what you said this morning--about my lack of belief and the effect it has had on yours. And--I'm sorry."

"Being sorry doesn't help any, does it, Ridgeley?"

"I should like to think that you had your old faiths to--comfort you."

She had no answer for that, and presently he said, "Are you warm enough?" and brought an extra blanket, because the air was cool after the storm, and then he bent and kissed her forehead. "Shut your eyes and sleep if you can."

But of course she couldn't sleep. She lay there for hours, weighing what he had said to her against what Christopher had said. Each man was offering her something--Christopher, life at the expense of all her scruples. Ridgeley, the resurrection of burnt-out beliefs.

She shivered a bit under the blanket. It would be heavenly to hear the temple bells--with youth beside her. To drink the wine of life from a brimming cup. But all the time she would be afraid, nothing could take away that fear.--Nothing, nothing, _nothing_.

She was glad that her husband was awake. The thin line of light still showed beneath his door. It would be dreadful to be alone--in the dark. At last she could stand it no longer. She got out of bed, wrapped herself in a robe that lay at the foot of it, and opened the door.

"May I leave it open?"

As her husband turned in his chair, she saw his hand go quickly, as if to cover the paper on which he was writing. "Of course, my dear. Are you afraid?"

"I am always afraid, Ridgeley. Always--"

She put her hands up to her face and began to cry. He came swiftly toward her and took her in his arms. "Hush," he said, "nothing can hurt you, Anne."

VII

When she waked in the morning, it was with, the remembrance of his tenderness. Well, of course he was sorry for her. Anybody would be. But Christopher was sorry, too. And Christopher had something to offer her--more than Ridgeley--yes, it was more--

She was half afraid to go down-stairs. Christopher would be at breakfast on the porch. Jeanette would be there, pouring coffee, and perhaps Ridgeley if he had no calls. And Christopher would talk in his gay young voice--and Ridgeley would read the newspaper, and she and Christopher would make their plans for the day--

She rose and began to dress, but found herself suddenly panic-stricken at the thought of the plans that Christopher might make. If they motored off together, he would talk to her as he had talked in the grove of birches--of the temple bells, and of the desert, and the strange harbors--and how could she be sure that she would be strong enough to resist--and what if she listened, and let him have his way?

She decided to eat her breakfast in bed, and rang for it. A note came up from Christopher. "Don't stay up-stairs. Ridgeley left hours ago, and I shan't enjoy my toast and bacon if you aren't opposite me. I have picked a white rose to put by your plate. And I have a thousand things to say to you--"

His words had a tonic effect. Oh, why not--? What earthly difference would it make? And hadn't Browning said something like that--"_Who knows but the world may end to-night_?"

She was not sure that was quite the way that Browning had put it, and she thought she would like to be sure--she could almost see herself saying it to Christopher.

So she went into her husband's room to get the book.

Ridgeley's books were on the shelf above his desk. They had nothing to do with his medical library--that was down-stairs in his office, and now and then he would bring up a great volume. But he had a literary side, and he had revealed some of it to Anne in the days before he had been too busy. His Browning was marked, and it was not hard to find "The Last Ride." She opened at the right page, and stood reading--an incongruous figure amid Ridgeley's masculine belongings in her sheer negligee of faint blue.

She closed the book, put it back on the shelf, and was moving away, when her eyes were caught by two words--"For Anne," at the top of a sheet of paper which lay on Ridgeley's desk. The entire page was filled with Ridgeley's neat professional script, and in a flash the gesture which he had made the night before returned to her, as if he were trying to hide something from her gaze.

She bent and read....

Oh, was this the way he had spent the hours of the night? Searching for words which might comfort her, might clear away her doubts, might bring hope to her heart?

And he had found things like this: "_My little sister, Death_," said good St. Francis; ... "_The darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as day; the darkness and light to thee are both alike_..." "_Yea, though I Walk through the Valley of the Shadow_ ..." These and many others, truths which had once been a part of her.

She read, avidly. Oh, she had been thirsty--for this! Hungry for this! And _Ridgeley_--! The tears dripped so that she could hardly see the lines. She laid her cheek against the paper, and her tears blistered it.

She carried it into her room. Christopher's note still lay on her pillow. She read it again, but she had no ears now for its call. She rang for her maid. "I shall stay in bed and write some letters."

She wrote to Christopher, after many attempts. "We have been such good, _good_ friends. And we mustn't spoil it. Perhaps if you could go away for a time, it would be best for both of us. I am going to believe that some day you will find great happiness. And you would never have found happiness with me, you would have found only--fear. And I know now what the old man meant about the beads--'What you think is evil--cannot be evil.' Christopher, death isn't evil, if it isn't the end of things. And I am going to believe that it is not the end ..."

Christopher went into town before lunch, and later Anne sat alone on the stone bench in her grove of birches. They were serene and still in the gold of the afternoon. Yet last night they had writhed in the storm. She, too, had been swept by a storm.... She missed her playmate--but she had a sense of relief in the absence of her tempestuous lover.

Ridgeley came home that night with news of Christopher's sudden departure. "He found telegrams. He told me to say 'good-bye' to you."

"I am sorry," Anne said, and meant it. Sorry that it had to be--but being sorry could not change it.

After dinner Ridgeley had a call to make, and Anne went up to bed. But she was awake when her husband came in, and the thin line of light showed. She waited until she heard the boom of water in his bath, and then she slipped out of bed and opened the door between. She was propped up in her pillows when he reappeared in his blue bathrobe.

"Hello," he called, "did you want me?"

"Yes, Ridgeley."

He came in. "Anything the matter?"

"No. I'm not sick. But I want to talk."

"About what?"

"This--" She showed him the paper with its caption, "For Anne."

"Ridgeley, did you write it because I was--afraid?" her hand went out to him.

His own went over it. "I think I wrote it because I was afraid."

"You?"

His grip almost hurt her. "My dear, my dear, I haven't believed in things. How could I ... with all the facts that men like me have to deal with? But when I faced ... losing you...! love's _got_ to be eternal..."

"Ridgeley."

"I won't ... lose you. Oh, I know. We've grown apart. I don't know how a man is going to help it ... in this darned whirlpool.... But you've always been right ... here.... I've felt I might ... have you, if I ever had time ..." his voice broke.

"And I thought you didn't care."

"I was afraid of that, and somehow I couldn't get ... back ... to where we began. I was always thinking I would.... And then this came....

"I always hated to kill the things that you believed, Anne. I thought I had to be honest ... that it would be better for you to face the truth.... But which one of us knows the Truth? Not a man among us. And I came across this ... '_Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die_....' We are all fools--the wisest of us...."

She held out her arms to him, and he gathered her close. She felt that it had been a thousand years since she had prayed, yet she heard herself speaking.... And when he laid her back upon her pillows, she was aware that together they had approached some height from which they would never again descend.

"I'll leave the door open," he said, as he left her. "I shall be reading, and you can see the light."

It seemed as if the light from his room flooded the world. The four posts of her bed once more were tipped with shining saints! She turned on her pillow--beyond the garden, the grove of white birches was steeped in celestial radiance.

"_My little sister, Death_," said good St. Francis.

With her hand under her cheek, she slept at last, as peacefully as a child.

THE EMPEROR'S GHOST

I

I had not known Tom Randolph a week before I was aware that life was not real to him. All his world was a stage, with himself as chief player. He dramatized everything--actions, emotions, income. Thus he made poverty picturesque, love a thing of the stars, the day's work a tragedy, or, if the professors proved kind, a comedy. He ate and drank, as it were, to music, combed his hair and blacked his boots in the glare of footlights; made exits and entrances of a kind unknown to men like myself who lacked his sense of the histrionic.

He was Southern and chivalric. His traditions had to do with the doffed hat and the bent knee. He put woman on a pedestal and kept her there. No man, he contended, was worthy of her--what she gave was by the grace of her own sweet charity!

It will be seen that in all this he missed the modern note. As a boy he had been fed upon Scott, and his later reading had not robbed him of his sense of life as a flamboyant spectacle.

He came to us in college with a beggarly allowance from an impoverished estate owned by his grandfather, a colonel of the Confederacy, who after the war had withdrawn with his widowed daughter to his worthless acres. In due time the daughter had died, and her child had grown up in a world of shadows. On nothing a year the colonel had managed, in some miraculous fashion, to preserve certain hospitable old customs. Distinguished guests still sat at his table and ate ducks cooked to the proper state of rareness, and terrapin in a chafing-dish, with a dash of old sherry. If between these feasts there was famine the world never knew.

It was perhaps from the colonel that Randolph had learned to make poverty picturesque. His clothes were old and his shoes were shabby. But his strength lay in the fact that he did not think of himself as poor. He had so much, you see, that the rest of us lacked. He was a Randolph. He had name, position, ancestry. He was, in short, a gentleman!

I do not think he looked upon any of us as gentlemen, not in the Old Dominion sense. He had come to our small Middle-Western college because it was cheap and his finances would not compass education anywhere else.

In an older man his prejudices would have been insufferable, but his youth and charm made us lenient. We contented ourselves with calling him "Your Highness," and were always flattered when he asked us to his rooms.

His strong suit was hospitality. It was in his blood, of course. When his allowance came he spent it in giving the rest of us a good time. His room was as shabby as himself--a table, an ink-spotted desk, a couch with a disreputable cover, a picture of Washington, a half-dozen books, and a chafing-dish.

The chafing-dish was the hump and the hoof of his festivities. He made rarebits and deviled things with an air that had been handed down from generations of epicures. I can see him now with his black hair in a waving lock on his forehead, in worn slippers and faded corduroy coat, sitting on the edge of the table smoking a long pipe, visualizing himself as the lord of a castle--the rest of us as vassals of a rather agreeable and intelligent sort!

It was perfectly natural that he should stage his first love-affair, and when he was jilted that he should dramatize his despair. For days after Madge Ballou had declared her preference for Dicky Carson, Randolph walked with melancholy. He came to my rooms and sat, a very young and handsome Hamlet, on my fire-bench, with his chin in his hand.

"Why should she like Dicky best?"

"She has no imagination."

"But Dicky's a--beast--"

"With a fat bank-account."

"Money wouldn't count with Madge."

"I'm not so sure--"

"Women are not like that, MacDonald."

I saw, as he went on with his arguments, that she had become to him an Ophelia, weakly led. Women in his lexicon of romance might be weak but never mercenary. I think he finally overthrew her in his mind with "_Get thee to a nunnery!_" I know that he burned her picture; he showed me the ashes in a silver stamp-box.

He had, of course, his heroes--there were moments when unconsciously he aped them. It was after a debate that the boys began to call him "Bonaparte." He had defended the Little Corporal, and in defending him had personified him. With that dark lock over his forehead, his arms folded, he had flung defiance to the deputies, and for that moment he had been not Tom Randolph but the Emperor himself.

He won the debate, amid much acclaim, and when he came down to us I will confess to a feeling, which I think the others shared, of a soul within his body which did not belong there. Tom Randolph was, of course, Tom Randolph, but the voice which had spoken to us had rung with the power of that other voice which had been stilled at St. Helena!

The days that followed dispelled the illusion, but the name clung to him. I think he liked it, and emphasized the resemblance. He let his hair grow long, sunk his head between his shoulders, was quick and imperious in his speech.

Then came the war. Belgium devastated, France invaded. Randolph was fired at once.

"I'm going over."

"But, my dear fellow--"

"There's our debt to Lafayette."

With his mind made up there was no moving him. The rest of us held back. Our imaginations did not grasp at once the world's need of us.

But Randolph saw himself a Henry of Navarre--_white plumes_; a Richard of the Lion Heart--_crusades and red crosses_; a Cyrano without the nose--"_These be cadets of Gascony_--"

"You see, MacDonald," he said, flaming, "we Randolphs have always done it."

"Done what?"

"Fought. There's been a Randolph in every war over here, and before that in a long line of battles--"

He told me a great deal about the ancient Randolphs, and the way they had fought on caparisoned steeds with lances.

"War to-day is different," I warned him. "Not so pictorial."

But I knew even then that he would make it pictorial. He would wear his khaki like chain armor.

He gave us a farewell feast in his room. It was the season for young squirrels, and he made us a Brunswick stew. It was the best thing I had ever tasted, with red peppers in it and onions, and he served it with an old silver ladle which he had brought from home.

While we ate he talked of war, of why men should fight--"for your own honor and your country's."

There were pacifists among us and they challenged him. He flung them off; their protests died before his passion.

"We are men, not varlets!"

Nobody laughed at him. It showed his power over us that none of us laughed. We simply sat there and listened while he told us what he thought of us.

At last one who was braver than the rest cried out: "Go to it, Bonaparte!"

In a sudden flashing change Randolph hunched his shoulders, set his slouched hat sidewise low on his brows, wrapped the couch-cover like a cloak about him. His glance swept the room. There was no anger in it, just a sort of triumphant mockery as he gave the famous speech to Berthier.

"They send us a challenge in which our honor is at stake--a thing a Frenchman has never refused--and since a beautiful queen wishes to be a witness to the combat, let us be courteous, and in order not to keep her waiting, _let us march without sleeping as far as Saxony--_!"

I can't tell you of the effect it had on us. We were gripped by the throats, and the room was so still that we heard ourselves breathe. Four of the fellows left next day with Randolph. I think he might have taken us all if we had not been advised and held back by the protests of our professors, who spoke of war with abhorrence.

II

Three years later I saw him again, in France. Our own country had gotten into the fight by that time, and I was caught in the first draft. I had heard now and then from Randolph. He had worked for nearly three years with the Ambulance Corps, and was now fighting for democracy with his fellows.

We had been shivering in the rain for a week in one of the recaptured French towns when a group of seasoned officers were sent to lick us into shape. Among the other officers was Randolph, and when he came upon me he gave a shout of welcome.

"Good old MacDonald--at last!"

I'll confess that his "at last" carried a sting, and I remember feeling the injustice of our equal rank, as I set his years of privation and hardship against my few weeks in a training camp.

He was very glad to see me, and the very first night he made me a Brunswick stew. This time there were no squirrels, but he begged young rabbits from the old couple who had once been servants in the château where we were billeted. They had trudged back at once on the retirement of the Boches, and were making the best of the changed conditions.

There was, of course, no chafing-dish, and the stew was cooked in an iron pot which hung over an open fire in the ancient kitchen. Before they sold the rabbits the old people had made one condition:

"If we may have a bit for mademoiselle--?"

"For mademoiselle?"

"She is here with us, monsieur. She had not been well. We have been saving the rabbits for her."

Randolph made the grand gesture that I so well remembered.

"My good people--if she would dine with us--?"

The old woman shook her head. She was not sure. She would see.

Perhaps she said pleasant things of us, perhaps mademoiselle was lonely. But whatever the reason, mademoiselle consented to dine, coming out of her seclusion, very thin and dark and small, but self-possessed.

I have often wondered what she thought, in those first moments of meeting, of Randolph, as with a spoon for a sceptre, the manner of a king, he presided over the feast. She spoke very good English, but needed to have many things explained.

"Do gentlemen cook in your country?"

Randolph sketched life as he had known it on his grandfather's plantation--negroes to do it all, except when gentlemen pleased.

She drew the mantle of her distaste about her. "Black men? I shouldn't like it."

Well, I saw before the evening ended that Randolph had met his peer. For every one of his aristocratic prejudices she matched him with a dozen. And he loved her for it! At last here was a lady who would buckle on his armor, watch his shield, tie her token on his sleeve!

He sat on the edge of the table in his favorite attitude--hunched-up shoulders, folded arms. His hair was cut too short now for the dark lock, but even without it I saw her glance at him now and then in a puzzled fashion, as if she weighed some familiar memory.

But it was one of the peasants who voiced it--the old man carrying away the remains of the stew muttered among the shadows to his wife:

"C'est Napoleon."

Mademoiselle caught her breath. "Oui, Gaston." Then to me, in English: "Do you see it?"

"Yes. We called him that at school."

"Bonaparte?"

"Yes."

She was thin and dark no longer--illumined, the color staining her cheeks. "Oh, if he were here--to save France!"

I protested. "An emperor against an emperor?"

"He was a great democrat--he loved the common people. For a little while power spoiled him--but he loved the people. And the Bourbons did not love them--Louis laughed at them--and lost his head. And Napoleon never laughed. He loved France--if he had lived he would have saved us."

Out of the shadows the old woman spoke. "They say he will come again."