Part 5

‘I sat down where you have just been sitting, and leaned my chin on my hands as I made you do. I felt excited and disturbed. The full significance of the next step dawned on me in all its depth and meaning. I was carried along by my agitated thoughts, and found myself looking at myself in the glass. I was struck, as anyone is at such a moment, by the strangeness of my own face caught with some controlling emotion on it. I seemed outside and apart from my usual self. As the consciousness of observing myself came to me, I began to look more as I usually do when I casually glance in the glass, to tie my scarf, for instance. Then I fell to speculating on that other fellow that I had seen when he was unawares. I suppose it is a common experience, this meeting with oneself. I must have been quite deeply absorbed, when, gradually, I saw over my left shoulder a shadow--no, not a shadow, but a semblance of a face. There was a sort of golden halo or fringe of golden hair over a pair of smiling red-brown eyes. I caught myself smiling involuntarily in response. The eyes were above the level of my own, as if a woman were standing there looking over my shoulder and meeting my eyes in the glass. Mabel’s eyes are dark. _Her_ eyes were a red-brown. I could not see her face--not that it was hidden, but it was as if the eyes were so absorbing that they blotted out all else. This lasted for some minutes, then I turned to see what was behind me that would produce such an illusion. There was nothing there that could be twisted or warped into any semblance of a face. I took the same position again, my chin on my hands, my elbows on the table. It was some time before I could get the vision--not till my thoughts began to wander; then I saw those strange, beautiful eyes again, and the fluffy golden hair, and not till I moved my head did they disappear. The eyes smiled at me; the vision seemed warm and human--not in the faintest degree ghostly, except that somehow I couldn’t see much but the eyes. As I say, I was driven by curiosity to turn round, and she vanished. I failed to call her to me again that night, and the next, and for some days; then she came again. I had sat here for hours waiting for her. I was determined to see what would come of it. I used to spend whole evenings here alone, waiting. When, at last, she did come, she came smiling, warm, human; and this time I saw her mouth--a large, mobile mouth, less smiling than the eyes, but most lovely. She came again and again. Once I put my hand behind me suddenly--that was a mistake. She vanished, and it was many evenings after that before she came again. The next time, strangely enough, I could see her more distinctly than ever. Her eyes were not smiling; maybe that was why I could see the rest of her face better. Then I discerned how beautiful she was. Her chin was a perfect oval, and it terminated in a lovely point below her gracious mouth; it was distractingly beautiful. My left hand was hanging by my side, and I could distinctly feel her draperies brushing tremulously against it. You will have the same sensation if you let this scarf brush across your hand--so. This silent drama went on for some weeks. I neglected everything for her. One day Mabel sent for me, and told me she had noticed my abstraction and had drawn her own conclusions, and that, if I were willing, she would like to discontinue the engagement. Willing! I felt like a knave; I was humiliated; I suffered, but I could say nothing. It was a different thing to sit and smile into those red-brown eyes of my vision, and to meet Mabel’s dark, truthful ones, and not to be able to explain anything to her; to feel that for her there was no explanation; to know that I was submerged in a stream of life of which she had no part. Then Mabel’s greatness saved me. She saw my suffering, and she did not press me for any explanation, but told me frankly that she must consider our relations as having reverted to their old standing--we must be only as friends; that she herself saw that her interests were more and more tending toward work among the poor, and her imagination absorbed in plans for the general welfare, rather than in the idea of making one man’s home supremely happy, as it undoubtedly should be made. That was about it. It was noble of her, wasn’t it? I had no choice but to accept her decision. That I wished for that very decision was bitterness to me. I see now that even then I wanted the selfish comfort of being a martyr. Mabel is the noblest woman alive; she has become my saint, instead of my wife.’

‘But you have your phantom eyes left,’ said Mark, dryly.

‘Yes, she came again that night. In my exultant humiliation I was rash: I closed my hand on the drapery that fluttered against it. I closed my hand. The smiling eyes grew large with surprise and alarm, and the face vanished--I held in my hand this scarf.’

There was silence. Then Rob continued:

‘I have sat here every night since then, often till after midnight: the face has never come back. For a while I expected to see the scarf vanish. I held it tightly for most of the night, and finally went to sleep with it wrapped closely around my arm and hand. It did not vanish--I have ceased to fear that. I know that somehow or other it has taken its material form for me, and however it came, it came from someone, and I shall meet her, whoever she is; wherever she is, she is mine. She will become mine, she waits for me. I shall carry this scarf across the sea; I shall travel with it till I meet her; she will recognize it and me; the scarf is my credential; no matter where we meet, I shall know her by her red-brown eyes and pointed chin; she will know this’--and he fluttered the full length of the scarf in the air. It shimmered and doubled on itself, and coiled and shifted in sentient evolutions as it fell again to his knee.

‘I don’t know what to think; you must not ask me to say anything,’ said Mark, as he arose to go. ‘All I can say is, that you have gone into a realm where I cannot follow--my path lies near the earth.’

‘No, of course he could not say anything; what could he say?’ thought Rob; ‘but I am glad I told him.’

‘I don’t know what to think.’ said Mark to himself, as he went homeward. ‘Rob is as sane as I am; he is logical, given the premise, and why shouldn’t he see red-brown eyes--is there ever a minute when I cannot summon an inward vision of dark ones? Yes, is there ever a minute in my life when I am not conforming my acts, my thoughts, my very self, to a vision that is as unsubstantial as his own? What if the being whose eidolon he lives for is thousands of miles away? What if he saw her in spirit before he saw her in fact--does that mean so very much? Have I been able to banish the dark eyes, try as I did? And _he_ has fostered the vision of the red-brown eyes till he is as sure, yes, a thousand times more sure, of his title to them than I am of ever having a right to even touch the vaguest drapery that has brushed my hand as my love passed. He follows shadows of the unseen--_I_ follow the less substantial visions of the seen.’

* * * * *

Up and down on the deck of the outward-bound steamer walked Rob, happy, and with expectant eyes. He had a word for each new friend, as he passed, on deck or in the reading-room; but mostly he was walking and thinking. In Switzerland, he walked much, and always dined at the public table, and he could have told you in particulars about every other one at the table, especially as to the color of the eyes of the women. He enjoyed seeing multitudes of people; but when, on meeting a chance friend, he was asked to go in a party over some particular route, he was always going the other way. His fancy was like the wind, and he obeyed it as does the weather-cock.

In Italy he staid many weeks, always straying among crowds, dining in public, riding out to the villas, often standing on the Pincio watching the carriages as they went by, delighting in looking at the faces of the beautiful women. He strolled through galleries, less to see the pictures than to see those who looked at them. It seemed as if _she_ must be somewhere waiting for him with those smiling eyes. Had her garments but just brushed over this stone pavement? Had her hand rested for a moment on this delicate, fretted iron-work as she leaned over to see the crowd below? Had she watched last night’s glow as the sun had sent up those golden shafts behind that dome? Had she been in Venice, and watched the black gondolas as they slipped by in the night? Was it her voice that said, out of the darkness, as one of the shadows flitted, bat-like, across his path, ‘I could stay here forever, were I not driven by fate to further shores’?

There was no desolation in his search; it was only a searching and a waiting, and where-ever the scarf floated, there was his land--his home.

‘I am the Knight of the Immaterial,’ he said to someone who detained him; ‘I follow a thought.’

He began to buy trinkets such as women wear. His luggage took on new shapes. It had corners dedicated to strange bits of regally embroidered fabrics; to rings old and wonderful; to strings of delicious yellow pearls, numerous and small as sands of the shore, gathered on a string.

At Naples he thought to find her. At Castallamarie he looked for her in the orange garden. At Amalfi he expected to see her leaning on the wall to scan the blue waters.

In the reading-room at Athens he sat looking over the American papers. People were going in and out; some were reading, as if at their own club or at home. Fussy folks turned over all the papers, looking for something which wasn’t, and never would be, there. Men exchanged greetings and news in after-dinner leisure. At Rob’s side sat Drayton, our American Charge d’Affaires. He had an appointment later at a reception, and had come in to escort a party of people who had especial claims on his attention. Suddenly Rob leaned over, and said to him:

‘Who is that lady standing there at the end of the table with her fur cloak thrown back--the beautiful one standing by the old man--that Russian, with all those decorations or orders?’

‘That? why, that is Madame Dembevetskoi, the most beautiful woman in Athens. If she _is_ a Russian, it is a tie between her and the Venus de Milo.’

‘I want to know her.’

‘That is all right--Americans have every privilege; I will introduce you to her to-morrow.’

‘No, now; I must meet her now.’

‘Great Scott! that is too American; you ask too much.’

‘I ask just enough, and you will accede to my request.’

The two men looked at each other, then our functionary walked away with his diplomatic courtesy a little ruffled. A moment later he was introducing to Monsieur Dembevetskoi, ‘My friend, Monsieur Robert Dudley.’

In turn, Robert was presented to Madame. The diplomat, once in action, never flinched fire, and he now engaged the Russian in an absorbing conversation, while Madame Dembevetskoi, holding with one hand her gray fur wrap, which was slipping from her, stretched out her other hand, and said, breathlessly:

‘Oh, Monsieur Dudley, please give me back my scarf!’

PRINTED FOR WAY AND WILLIAMS BY R. R. DONNELLEY AND SONS CO AT THE LAKESIDE PRESS, CHICAGO FROM PLATES MADE BY THE DIAL PRESS: MDCCCXCV

Transcriber’s Note:

Variations in hyphenation have been retained as they appear in the original publication. Punctuation has been standardised.