Part 9

"Three pair back, ma'am," said the woman, who appeared like a cook, actual, past, or potential. "But he's not in. There's no telling how soon he will come. What name did you say? Drastus what? Sibbie-mole? Oh no, ma'am. Beg pardon. I listened as far as Drastus, and answered because it's such a curious name. Ours name is Fenton. But, let's see. What manner of young man might yours be? Like a foreigner, with a large nose and black eyes, and plays the fiddle, and wears his hair long? Dear me, ma'am, the very same! His room's three pair back. You wish to wait for him? This way, then, ma'am."

Emmie, in whom all processes of thought had stopped in amazement, followed the landlady as best she could up three flights of dark stairs, and entered through the door flung open for her.

They stood in a little room that received the day through a sky-light. Emmie dropped, sitting on the edge of the narrow bed and knotted her little gloved fingers together in silence. She was so pale that the landlady felt alarmed and asked if she were feeling ill. She shook her head, and continued looking about fearfully and in wonder.

There was little to see, nothing that might not have belonged to any one in the wide world as well as to that boy; not one of these sordid appurtenances reminded her of him, except the music on the table--but any fiddler might have just such music.

She rose to her feet as if jerked by a hidden string, and walked stiffly towards the door, saying, "It is evidently not the one. This one's name is Drastus Fenton, you say. The one I seek is Dorastus Sibbemol. Good-morning, ma'am."

But near the door she stopped, her eyes widening upon an object set upright in the corner--a black wooden box, very old, scarred and worm-eaten, mournfully resembling a child's coffin.

She went back to the bed, and limply leaned against the wall. She stared over at the box, with its peculiar wrought-iron hinges and handle.

"Has he been here long?" she asked, faintly, at last, of the blowzy woman who was looking at her with some concern, and at the same time, in view of the lady's respectability, trying to smooth down her untidy hair.

She thought a moment and judged he might have been there half a year.

Emmie wrung her hands in an aimless way. She felt little of pain as yet, or indignation; only vague throes and convulsions of change, a working of all the atoms in heart and brain trying to adjust themselves to something new.

"And he is poor!" she murmured.

"Well," said the landlady, exculpatingly, "we are all poor folks here, ma'am. He mostly pays his rent--I don't ask much, but when he's behind I'm not hard on him. He's a good lad," she went on, and as she was a sizable woman, after a gesture of deferential apology she took a seat, to support her in her view of lingering to angle with information until she caught a little enlightenment. "A good lad, but that proud! He thinks he'll be as rich as a dook some day, with his little fiddle!" She shook her head in compassion and chuckled fatly over a household joke of long standing. "He's all right in his head, ma'am, except on that point. A poor lad that plays in the streets is none so likely to pick up a fortune. And such tunes as he plays! I've always been told I'd an uncommon ear for a catch, but to catch head or tail of them is beyond me!"

"He plays in the streets!"

"Yes, poor Dook--come rain, come shine. Sometimes he has a good day, sometimes a bad one; but times is hard--it's not very good at best. He's not one of them pretty-impudent Italian boys with wheedling brown velvet eyes. He looks too scornful, and despises folks more than is for his own good. I have felt hurt at it myself, ma'am, and I may say I'm not touchy. When I've known that he was a bit hard up and he looked hollow, and I've asked him in neighborly to have a bite with us, he has answered me almost as if he hated me for it--and gone hollow."

His mother drew in her breath sharply.

"Might you be a friend of his?" asked the landlady. "Once when he was sick abed, and I came up to say a good word, he got sociabler than usual, and spoke of a lady, a lady of quality, who'd heard him play--I thought likely it was before he came here with his coat so seedy--a lady who thought he was very fine. Perhaps I don't understand about fiddle-playing, and he is all he says. Might you be the lady?"

"Yes, yes, yes!" said Emmie, scarcely knowing what she said.

The landlady looked much interested. "Well, now, I thought as much, for I don't think he's any one in the world belonging to him. He's a good lad, ma'am," she said again, with a good-natured impulse to make hay for a fellow-creature while this, possibly a sun, was shining. "He deserves better than he gets, if I do say it. He works at them music-books for hours sometimes, at night, till the man below is fit to go mad. But I tell him I can't put out a lodger that pays more frequent than he, and when I speak to Drastus he says he'll leave, though he should have to sleep on the pavement--he must play when he pleases. He says that it's because he can't play as other fiddle-men do, from a book and in a particular way, that he can't get nothing to do but play in the streets. So he must learn, and learn he will, and he scrapes away like a meeting of cats on the roof. I'm sorry he's out, ma'am. What did you want with him, now? Couldn't I give your message--or must you wait yourself?"

"I will wait--I will wait."

"He may not be home till night. He sometimes even--"

"Oh, leave me, my good woman!" moaned Emmie. "What else can I do but wait?"

And the landlady, taking pity on what seemed to her an inordinate perturbation of spirit, left the visitor to herself, returning now and then to listen, and bringing up once an inquiry from the coachman.

Emmie remained sitting on the edge of the bed. After a time she rose and looked with pointless minuteness at everything in the room, opening every drawer and reading every paper. She found all her letters tied in a bundle and wrapped in a silk neckerchief of her own, old, and that she had never missed. He had few possessions, and they made the heart sick to pore over.

The light faded off the dull glass overhead. With chilled fingers she felt for the candle and lighted it. The landlady, coming up at dark, insisted on bringing her a cup of tea. The good creature had so disciplined her curiosity concerning the history implied in this gentlewoman's presence here that her delicacy now in endeavoring to discover was touching. Yet it went unrewarded. She stayed for the satisfaction of seeing the lady, who she thought looked fairly ill, refresh herself; and when it was delayed, tried by example to institute in the atmosphere that cheerfulness which is conducive to a better appetite--until asked again, with an imploring glance from eyes like a shot dove's, to go, for the sake of pity to go.

Emmie now took down the few clothes she had seen on the hooks, with a vague idea that they required mending. She spread them out over her lap one by one, and passed her hand mechanically over the threadbare places where the black was green, over certain fringes about the holes, her heart feeling extraordinarily large and empty and silent. The rings on her cold hand glittered in the stroking movement, four rich rings with various stones, Gregory's gifts. Four--but she had five children.

She stretched herself suddenly on the bed with her face in the old coat, the chill of the room slowly seizing upon her as she lay. She prayed in a distant, half-conscious way, without the least illusion that such words could persuade any one, for God to unmake everything that had happened to her, to let her have died, and Dorastus too, at his very birth; for them to have both been lying in the remote Dutch God's-acre these many years. For one fleeting moment memory gave back to her perfect an impression never before recalled. She seemed to have been roused from a stupor deeper than sleep; her eyes dwelt without wonder on what she thought to be a cathedral, with colored windows ablaze--it dwindled, until it was a mere night-light glimmering. Then shadowy people placed a little bundle in her arms. She tingled as an instrument whose every string is touched, a coolness rippled from her head to her feet, she knew a state never known before or since, a sense of unlimited wealth, a tenderness ineffable, a trembling outgoing of all her being to this handful of life. She heaved a great, faint sigh, and with effort unspeakable bent till her lips were pressed as to a warm rose-leaf. She sank to sleep, weak unto death, but blissfully happy--waking stronger and in a different mood.

She wished she might not have waked, but been buried with her poor first baby in her arms, having ceased to be in the single moment wherein she completely loved it. Nothing that had happened to her since then seemed to her sweet; all was sicklied through by the consciousness of a crime gone before and daily confirmed, a woman's most monstrous, miserable crime--not loving enough. Nothing could make her withered, yellowed, cheapened life right now--she should have died at that moment. She said this over and over again to the powers that hear us, until all meaning had faded from it. She started, with a sense of something going out--she thought it must be the candle and she should be left in the dark. She sat up, frightened and freezing.

The candle was burning quietly. Then, as she scrutinized the shadows ahead, loath to stir, she became aware of her rings having grown loose, they were in danger of dropping off; of her clothes having grown loose, they let the cold in under them; she felt a prickling at the temples, as if it were the gray creeping through her hair; she felt her features becoming pinched and old, beauty dropping from them like a husk. She wanted to cry then with a childish self-pity, but no tears would come; she did not know how to start the flood that she longed for to relieve her. She felt that she could only have screamed.

She got up to rid herself of this congealment, and paced the room from corner to corner with sweeping black gown that told of the dusty things it had that day brushed.

Company had come to the man below; they were making a great deal of very jolly noise. The candle guttered drearily; a reek of warm cabbage climbed up the stairway to her nostrils. She looked up on hearing a soft tapping--the black sky-light was spattered with silver tears, like a pall.

She walked up and down, waiting and listening, everything taking more and more the quality of a dream wherein the most unnatural things grow ordinary. She had felt with a numbed sort of cowardly loathing that every moment brought her nearer to a black stream of realizing grief and remorse into which willy-nilly she must descend; but now it seemed in accordance with every known law that she should be here, destined to go on walking so forever, never arriving, nor anything ever changing. She heard herself say aloud in a light, indifferent tone, "He will never come. He will never come."

For a moment she remembered Gregory, whose image seemed to rise out of the dim past: Gregory in the warm light of the hotel coffee-room, where dinner was set on a little table for three, dinner with wine-glasses of two shapes, and fruit and confectionery in crystal dishes. The thought worked upon her as a sweet smell in sea-sickness. All that had to do with Gregory seemed of negative importance; let him wait and wonder and worry. She felt hard-hearted towards him and all prosperous things.

A burst of voices reached her through the floor; they were rough and hoarse, their mirth had turned to wrangling. It was so horribly lonely here! If they were suddenly possessed to climb the stairs, to burst in upon her! There was a crash of glass--she screamed; then a laugh--she shuddered--and the noise grew less. She breathed again, but, feeling her knees weaken, went back to the bed, and sat listening in fascination for the murmuring sounds to develop again into a quarrel.

Suddenly, without the warning of gradually approaching sounds she had prepared herself for, she heard footsteps just outside.

She knew them. An impulse to flee seized her. She looked about for a place to hide in, a place to get through, to jump from. She could not bear to see him, she felt as a murderess whose victim's ghost is upon her. His image flashed before her, pinched with hunger and cold, worn, embittered with disappointment, terrible with its long unrequited love turned to hatred--gray, with glassy eyes.

She looked wildly, but she could not move. Besides, it was too late, a hand was on the door.

As it opened, a deep stillness fell upon her, a suspension of all.

A spell seemed to snap with his coming into the range of the candle-light; it was as to a child locked all night in a graveyard the cock-crow that lays the ghosts and heralds the day. She took a feeble breath and her heart gave a warm little throb. The very face! only, a young man's face rather than a boy's, thinner and bolder than ever, but, thank Heaven! not pathetic, not heart-breaking--but with red where red should be, with living light in the eyes.

He held his violin; he was meanly clad, and his woollen muffler was of a cheap and dismal tint no mother would have chosen for him.

He looked in surprise at the lighted candle, and quickly cast his eyes about, frowning to see who had taken this liberty. He caught sight of her, blinked and narrowed his eyes, to distinguish.

She could not make a sound, or bring a vestige of expression to her face, or lift the pale little hands from her black lap--but sat transfixed under his questioning stare.

He took a few steps, uttered a jubilant shout, and dashed towards her with outstretched arms--But he stopped before reaching her. He gave a glance around the horrible little room, a glance at her face with the eyes full of stern sadness, of reproach for the many, many lies he had told her. Abruptly he turned his back to her and dropped on his knees beside the table, saying furiously in disjointed syllables as he pressed his working face against his arms. "You won't understand! You never understand anything! I think sometimes that you are a fool!"

But he felt her soft icy hands tremble about his head, he felt her fluttering breath in his neck. She was kneeling beside him, saying in choked whispers in the intervals of lifting her poor lips from his wet face, "Don't speak!--Don't speak!"

She was straining him to her with a passionate tenderness never shown another being, raining on him the sweetest kisses.

Both fell to crying as if their hearts would break.

CHLOE, CHLORIS, AND CYTHEREA

To make you acquainted by sight with young Chloris: she was a tall girl, a trifle meagre in outline, but not disagreeably so; she had light reddish-brown hair, and a sprinkling of freckles on a peachy skin, and those eyes with dead-leaf spots in them; altogether an air of openness and intelligent goodness that had quickly thrown the newly introduced off the question--was she pretty? But she was pretty, too, at her hours.

On this day she had shut out the sun by means of the green Venetian blinds, and her room, like a submerged crystal chamber, was full of a watery light; she herself, white clothed, made a fair green-shadowy nymph in the dim green atmosphere.

This was her first hour of complete conscious content. So rich was she in content that she had set herself to perusing a volume of the driest essays, a present for a diligent girl graduate.

This sense of life unfolding like a normal flower and becoming the perfection of a rose was too much for the grateful heart to contemplate at its ease; some great demonstration towards God must follow on such contemplation. And Chloris in her security putting it off until bedtime, sat reading about the discipline of the will, the happy blood all the while keeping up in her veins a pleasant undercurrent babbling of other matters. Two hours more and the summer sun would be reaching its glorious haven, the cool flow in with the darkness, and time take up again that sweet scanning of the lines of her idyl....

After reading the same passage some seven times, Chloris let her book lie a moment in her lap. How marvellous, how simple, how natural, how exquisite! Truly like the coming up of a flower. First, they were children together, fair-dealing, unquarrelsome playmates; then, schoolboy and schoolgirl, always good unsentimental friends; and finally, time, passing over them, slowly turned them to lovers; for this, no question, was whither they were tending: quiet, undemonstrative, unjealous, faithful, devoted lovers, presently married people, and by and by, God pleasing, tenants of one same grave. And this sweetness in the heart, this best of all earthly goods, God granted it to the humblest of his creatures! Why, then, were so many dissatisfied with this dear earth? Why were some on it interested in the discipline of the will? Ah, this summer, so endearingly begun, to be ended so--and Chloris, in a confusion of bliss, almost as if to give herself a countenance towards herself, took up her book again, finding moonlight and wild azaleas and whippoorwills between the lines, a dappled, singing shingle, a golden beach, velvet winds from over sea.

The sunshine crept off the window-square; a sadness instantly invaded the room; Chloris jumped up to open the blinds. Time to dress! Then she did her hair as painstakingly as ably, put on a just-ironed white gown with a violet figure, and stood at the glass weighing the question of a velvet band around the neck. A fateful sound already was dawning on the distance outside, but she did not as yet hear it. Too hot! She tossed the velvet ribbon in the top bureau-drawer so unconcernedly as if not, at that moment, the Parcæ had been tangling the skein of her life, and wondered idly if any one describing her would call her pretty. She thought, in conscience, not; but of a charming appearance, she hoped any one would.

At this point penetrated to her brain a sound of voices out on the road beyond the lawn and the hedge. She looked between the curtains.

Two ladies, unknown to her, were slowly sauntering past in the direction of the beach; one, near middle age, in a darkish gown; the other, young, in light colors of a distinctly fashionable tone; this latter carried over her shoulder a very large, fluffy, and, as it showed even at this distance, inexpressibly costly parasol. She turned her face a moment on the ancient vine-overclambered country-house, from one window of which peeped Chloris, looked it up and down and across, and turned away, making, Chloris supposed, some comment upon it to her companion.

When they had disappeared from sight, Chloris, still at the window, musing on that face seen a moment, heard a leisurely jingling, and saw pass at a walking pace an empty shining carriage, drawn by two superb bays, driven by a man in livery.

"It must be their turn-out," she concluded her wondering. "Who can they be but the people that were to move into the Beauregard cottage?"

Then, as there was time to spare before tea, she sat down in the window. Shortly, was a lively jingling, a trampling, and the shining carriage bowled swiftly by on its way back from the beach; on its cushions, two ladies under a broad lacy parasol; a mighty cloud of dust running after it, never to over-take.

Almost at the same moment Chloris saw Him, half the subject of her idyl, coming across the lawn.

She went to meet him.

"Who are the arrivals?" she asked at once.

And here was pronounced, for the first time before Chloris, the name of Cytherea.

"Cytherea, Damon? Who is Cytherea? Where does she come from? Do you know her?"

"Very slightly," answered the young man; "I have met her in town. She had told me she thought of coming here for the summer, but I supposed it was conversation. I had completely forgotten, until I saw her this afternoon. She is entranced with everything! You can never see our poky little old place in its true light: you must get a description of it from her, Chloris. She will find it deadly dull before the end of a week; but for the moment she imagines quiet to be all she wants. She has been working like a slave at doing the proper thing in town."

"She has brought her style with her, I see."

"They are inseparable. She arrived yesterday on the late train, and you should see the change already in the Beauregard."

"You have been there, then?"

"Just a moment. They called to me from the veranda. They were having tea. Fancy their bringing down a grand-piano!"

"Does she play much?"

"I don't know. Very probably. She looks as if she might."

"Oh, no, Damon! There you mistake. She looks as if she mightn't. She is very pretty, but I will vouch for it she can't play--"

"Perhaps the cousin is the pianist. We shall see. I said you would call on them this evening."

"I, Damon? The instant they arrive? Why did you say that? Why should I call before they have had time to breathe?"

"Do you mind? I am so sorry. They asked me to come, and I half promised. It is likely to be somewhat slow for them here if we stand on ceremony. You will like them, I am sure."

"You are sure? No doubt I shall. But to-night seems rather--instantaneous, if you don't mind. You will excuse me to them, and I will wait till they get a little more settled."

"Settled! They have brought down an army of servants. The house looks as if they had lived in it for a month."

"Make what excuse for me you please, then."

"You won't come, Chloris?"

"I think not. Not this evening. Go by yourself, and tell me all the great changes to-morrow. She will be much better pleased to see you than me, anyway."

"Why do you say that?"

"Her face, my dear boy! She can't play the piano, to speak of, and she greatly prefers men to women."

"Perhaps you do her an injustice--"

"Have I said anything disparaging? I signalled two virtues, I think. You don't really mind my not going, Damon? I had intended to write letters this evening, and mend table-cloths and read to father."

When, shortly after tea, Damon had gone, Chloris tried to return herself into a truthful person by reading an hour to her father, and adding a dozen stitches to a delicate darn, and writing a note, which, when finished, she tore up. In order, as far as possible, with her conscience, she seated herself at the piano, a poor, tin-voiced instrument, tired of the sea-air. No one so well as Chloris, accustomed to its senile vagaries, could make the worn thing discourse music; her greatest successes on it were old-time compositions written in the day of spinet and harpsichord, minuets with a sprinkling of grace-notes, things not sonorous or profound. To-night, playing for no one's praise, she plunged haphazard into the melodies most sympathetic at the moment, stormy and subtle, melancholy and intricate and modern. It was Chloris's one proud gift, this effectiveness at the piano.

Her father and his elderly sisters took themselves off to bed on the stroke of ten. Chloris remained on the adjustable stool, relieved at their going. She took up her playing again, without trying now to keep her eyes dry.