Chapter 5

As the late guest dropped into his seat, the interrupted conversation regathered and flowed again. Barney Ryan said nothing. He never spoke while eating, and rarely talked when women were present. Genevieve too was quiet, responding with a gently absent smile, when her cavalier, turning upon her his cold and expressionless steely-blue eyes, addressed to her some short regulation remark on the weather, or the boredom of his journey across the plains. The phlegmatic calm of his demeanor remained intact even under the coquettish onslaughts of Mrs. Peck and Mrs. Wheatley, who extracted from him with wheedling perseverance his opinions on the State, the climate, and the country. Lord Hastings replied with iron-bound and unsmiling brevity, his wide cold glance resting with motionless attention upon the painted physiognomy of Mrs. Peck and the broad and buxom one of Mrs. Wheatley, and his head turning with dignified difficulty in his exceedingly high and tight collar, as one and the other assailed him with queries. Meanwhile the object of his journey, slowly moving her great fan of white ostrich feathers, looked across the table at Faraday and made a little surreptitious _moue_.

The conversation soon became absorbed by the two married ladies, Faraday, and Lord Hastings. Only the Ryans were silent, Genevieve now and then throwing a lazy sentence into the vortex of talk, and Mrs. Ryan being occupied in lending a proud ear to the coruscations of wit that sparkled around the board, or in making covert gestures to the soft-footed Mongols, who moved with deft noiselessness about the table. Eddie Ryan, like his father, rarely spoke in society. In the glare of the chandelier he sat like a strange uncomfortable guest, taking no notice of any one. Toward the end of the feast he conversed in urgent whispers with his mother--a conversation which ended in her surreptitiously giving him her keys under the edge of the table. Before coffee, Eddie left, on the plea of an important engagement, retiring through the drawing-room, softly jingling the keys.

After this dinner, when Lord Hastings's presence had banished all his doubts, when the young Englishman's attractive appearance had impressed itself upon his jealous eye, and Genevieve's gentle indifference had seemed to him but a modest form of encouragement. Faraday found but little time to pay visits to the hospitable home of Barney Ryan.

The family friend that they had all so warmly welcomed and taken to their hearts withdrew himself quietly but firmly from their cheerful circle. When, at rare intervals, he did drop in upon them, he pleaded important business engagements as the reason of his inability to accept their numerous invitations to dinners and theater parties. After these mendacious statements he would wend a gloomy way homeward to his Pine Street boarding-house, and there spend the evening pretending to read, and cursing the fate which had ever brought him within the light of Genevieve's _beaux yeux_. The fable of being the family friend was quite shattered. Faraday had capitulated.

Nearly two months after the dinner, when rumors of Genevieve Ryan's engagement to Lord Hastings were in lively circulation, Faraday called at the lion-guarded mansion on California Street, and, in answering to his regulation request for the ladies, received the usual unintelligible Chinese rejoinder, and was shown into the gold drawing-room. There, standing in front of a long mirror, looking at her skirts with an eye of pondering criticism, was Miss Genevieve, dressed to go out. She caught sight of him in the glass, turned abruptly, and came forward, a color in her face.

"Is that you?" she said, holding out her hand. "I am so glad. I thought it was somebody else." Having thus, with her customary candor, signified to Faraday that she was expecting Lord Hastings, she sat down facing him, and said, abruptly, "Why haven't you been here for so long?"

Faraday made the usual excuses, and did quail before her cold and steady eyes.

"That's rather funny," she said, as he concluded "for now you're used to your new position, and it must go more easily, and yet you have less time to see your friends than you did at first."

Faraday made more excuses, and wondered that she should take a cruel pleasure in such small teasing.

"I thought p'r'aps," she said, still regarding him with an unflinching scrutiny, her face grave and almost hard, "that you'd begun to find us too Western, that the novelty had worn off, that our ways were too--too--what shall I say?--too wild and woolly."

A flush of anger ran over Faraday's face. "Your suppositions were neither just nor true," he said, coldly.

"Oh, I don't know," she continued, with a careless movement of her head, and speaking in the high, indifferent tone that a woman adopts when she wishes to be exasperating; "you needn't get mad. Lots of Eastern people feel that way. They come out here and see us constantly, and make friends with us, and then go back and laugh at us, and tell their friends what barbarians we are. It's customary, and nothing to be ashamed of."

"Do you suppose that I am that sort of an Eastern person?" asked Faraday, quietly.

"I don't know," she said, doubtfully. "I didn't think you were at first, but now----"

"But now you do. Why?"

"Because you don't come here any more," she said, with a little air of triumph. "You're tired of us. The novelty is over and so are the visits."

Faraday arose, too bitterly annoyed for speech. Genevieve, rising too, and touching her skirts with arranging hand, continued, apparently unconscious of the storm she was rousing:

"And yet it seems odd that you should find such a difference. Lord Hastings, now, who's English, and much more conventional, thinks the people here just as refined and particular as any other Americans."

"It's evident," said Faraday, in a voice roughened with anger, "that Lord Hastings's appreciation of the refinement of the Americans is only equaled by your admiration for the talents of the English."

"I do like them," said Genevieve, dubiously, shaking her head, as if she was admitting a not entirely creditable taste, and looking away from him.

There was a moment's silence. Faraday fastened his eyes upon her in a look of passionate confession that in its powerful pleading drew her own back to his.

"You're as honest as you are cruel," he said, almost in a whisper.

She made no reply, but turned her head sharply away, as if in sudden embarrassment. Then, in answer to his conventionally murmured good-byes, she looked back, and he saw her face radiant, alight, with the most beautiful smile trembling on the lips. The splendor of this look seemed to him a mute expression of her happiness--of love reciprocated, ambition realized--and in it he read his own doom. He turned blindly round to pick up his hat; the door behind him was opened, and there, handsome, debonair, fresh as a May morning, stood Lord Hastings, hat in hand.

"I hope you're not vexed, Miss. Ryan," said this young man, "but I'm very much afraid I'm just a bit late."

After this Faraday thought it quite unnecessary to visit Barney Ryan's "palatial mansion" for some time. Genevieve's engagement would soon be announced, and then he would have to go and offer his congratulations. As to whether he would dance at her wedding with a light heart--that was another matter. He assured himself that she was making a splendid and eminently suitable marriage. With her beauty and money and true simple heart she would deck the fine position which the Englishman could give her. He wished her every happiness, but that he should stand by and watch the progress of the courtship seemed to him an unnecessary twisting of the knife in the wound. Even the endurance of New England human nature has its limits, and Faraday could stand no more. So he refused an invitation to a tea from Mrs. Ryan, and one to a dinner and another to a small musical from Miss. Ryan, and alone in his Pine Street lodgings, for the first time in his life, read the "social columns" with a throbbing heart.

One Saturday afternoon, two weeks from the day that he had last seen Genevieve, he sat in his room trying to read. He had left the office early, and though it was still some hours before dark, a heavy unremitting rain had enveloped the afternoon in a premature twilight. The perpetual run of water from a break in the gutter near his window sounded drearily through the depressing history of the woes and disappointments of David Grieve. The gloom of the book and the afternoon was settling upon Faraday with the creeping stealthiness of a chill, when a knock sounded upon his door, and one of the servants without acquainted him with the surprising piece of intelligence that a lady was waiting to see him in the sitting-room below.

As he entered the room, dim with the heavy somberness of the leaden atmosphere, he saw his visitor standing looking out of the window--a tall, broad-shouldered, small-waisted striking figure, with a neat black turban crowning her closely braided hair. At his step she turned, and revealed the gravely handsome face of Genevieve Ryan. He made no attempt to take her hand, but murmured a regulation sentence of greeting; then, looking into her eyes, saw for the first time that handsome face marked with strong emotion. Miss. Ryan was shaken from her phlegmatic calm; her hand trembled on the back of the chair before her; the little knot of violets in her dress vibrated to the beating of her heart.

"This is not a very conventional thing to do," she said, with her usual ignoring of all preamble, "but I can't help that. I had something to talk to you about, Mr. Faraday, and as you would not come to see me, I had to come to see you."

"What is it that you wanted to see me about?" asked Faraday, standing motionless, and feeling in the sense of oppression and embarrassment that seemed to weigh upon them both the premonition of an approaching crisis.

She made no answer for a moment, but stood looking down, as if in an effort to choose her words or collect her thoughts, the violets in her dress rising and falling with her quickened breathing.

"It's rather hard to know how to say--anything," she said at length.

"If I can do anything for you," said the young man, "you know it would always be a happiness to me to serve you."

"Oh, it's not a message or a favor," she said, hastily. "I only wanted to say something"--she paused in great embarrassment--"but it's even more queer more unusual, than my coming here."

Faraday made no response, and for a space both were silent. Then she said, speaking with a peculiar low distinctness:

"The last time I saw you I seemed very disagreeable. I wanted to make sure of something. I wanted to make sure that you were fond of me--to surprise it out of you. Well--I did it. You are fond of me. I made you show it to me." She raised her eyes, brilliant and dark, and looked into his. "If you were to swear to me now that I was wrong I would know you were not telling the truth," she said, with proud defiance. "You love me."

"Yes," said Faraday, slowly, "I do. What then?"

"What then?" she repeated. "Why do you go away--go away from me?"

"Because," he answered, "I am too much of a man to live within sight of the woman I love and can never hope for."

"Can never hope for?" she exclaimed, aghast. "Are you--are you married?"

The sudden horror on her face was a strange thing for Faraday to see.

"No," he said, "I am not married."

"Then, did she tell you that you never could hope for her?" said Miss. Genevieve Ryan, in a tremulous voice.

"No. It was not necessary. I knew myself."

"You did yourself a wrong, and her too," she broke out, passionately. "You should have told her, and given her a chance to say--to say what she has a right to say, without making her come to you, with her love in her hand, to offer it to you as if she was afraid you were going to throw it back in her face. It's bad enough being a woman anyway, but to have the feelings of a woman, and then have to say a thing like this--it's--it's--ghastly."

"Genevieve!" breathed Faraday.

"Why don't you understand?" she continued, desperately. "You won't see it. You make me come here and tell it to you this way. I may be badly mannered and unconventional, but I have feelings and pride like other women. But what else could I do?"

Her voice suddenly broke into soft appeal, and she held out her hands toward him with a gesture as spontaneous in its pleading tenderness as though made by a child. Faraday was human. He dashed away the chair that stood between them and clasped the trembling hands in his.

"Why is it," she asked, looking into his face with shining troubled eyes--"why is it you acted this way? Was it Lord Hastings? I refused him two weeks ago. I thought I'd marry him once, but that was before I knew you. Then I waited for you, and you didn't come, and I wrote to you, and you wouldn't come. And so I had to come and tell you myself, and it's been something dreadful."

Faraday made no response, but feeling the smooth hands curled warm inside his, he stood listening to those soft accents that issued with the sweetness that love alone lends to women's voices from lips he had thought as far beyond his reach as the key of the rainbow.

"Do you think it was awful for me to do it?" she queried, in whispering anxiety.

He shook his head.

"Well," she said, laughing a little and turning her head half away, as her former embarrassment began to reassert itself over her subsiding nervousness, "I've often wished I was a man, but if it's always as awful as that to propose to a person, I'm quite content to be a woman."

GIDEON'S KNOCK

BY

MARY HALLECK FOOTE

Written for THE SPINNERS' BOOK OF FICTION

_All Rights Reserved_

BY A curious coincidence, whenever George Fleming was translated to a wider berth, it was my luck to succeed him in the job he had just quitted. This had happened more than once, in the chances and changes that befall the younger men in the mining profession, before we began to jolly each other about it--always at long range.

When I heard he had resigned from the Consolidated Resumption, to everybody's surprise, at a time of great prosperity to the mine, I hailed my chance and congratulated myself that I should speedily be asked to fill his place: and I was!

I wrote him on the spot a playful letter, alluding to my long, stern chase and begging him to hold on this time till I could shake him by the hand; I had come to have a personal sentiment toward him apart from the natural desire to meet face to face the author of my continued advancement. But to this letter I received no word of reply.

His silence haunted me, rather--I thought about him a good deal while I was closing up my affairs in other directions before taking over the Consolidated Resumption. Meanwhile the company's cashier, Joshua Dean, a man of trust but small initiative, was filling the interregnum.

I found him living alone in the manager's house with the Flemings' Chinese cook as man of all work. The Resumption has never tolerated a boarding-house or a village or compound within sight of its official windows. Its first manager was a son of the chief owner, who built his house in the style of a gentleman's country-seat, small but exclusive and quite apart from the work. I liked the somber seclusion of the place, planted deep with trees of about twenty years' growth, showing their delicate, changing greens against the darker belt of pines. But its aspect increased, if anything, that uneasy sensation, like a cold wind in my back, which I still had in thinking of Fleming.

I had driven out to dine with Dean on the evening of my arrival. It was the last week in January; there had been much rain already for the foot-hills. Wet sprays from the untrimmed rose hedges disputed my passage through the inner gate. Discolored pine-needles lay in sodden drifts on the neglected grass. The hydrant leaked frozen puddles down the brick-paved walk. Mounting the veranda steps I laid my hand on the knocker, when an old Chinese servant popped his head out at a side-door and violently beckoned me in that way.

Dean, as I knew, had made his home with the Flemings for some time before their departure. After a few talks with him and a survey of the house I decided we might venture to continue the arrangement without getting in each other's way. It was a house peculiarly adapted to a _solitude à deux_. There was no telephone nearer than the office. I argued that Fleming was a man who could protect himself from frivolous intrusions, and his wife could have had but little in common with her neighbors in the village.

He had resigned on account of her health, I was told. It must have been a hasty flitting or an inconclusive one. The odd, attractive rooms were full of their belongings still. We two casual bachelors with our circumspect habits could make no impression on the all but speaking silence of those empty rooms. They filled me at times with a curious emotion of sadness and unrest.

Joshua seldom talked of the Flemings, though I knew he received letters from them. That he was deeply attached to their memory, hoarded it and brooded over it, I could not doubt. I even suspected some jealous sentiment on his part which made it hard for him to see me using their chairs, planting myself amongst their cushions and investigating their book-shelves. I thought it strange they had left so many things behind them of a personal nature. They seemed to have ceased to care for what most of us rolling stones are wont to cling to. Their departure had something unspeakable in it--akin to sudden death, or a sickness of the heart that made life indifferent to them.

"They must have loved this room!" I said to him one evening. It was during the black rains of February--Dean and I with our chairs to the fire, waiting for the Eastern mail. The night watchman's orders were to stop for it if the trains were anywhere near on time. At this storm season the Westbound was frequently behind and the road to town a quagmire. We never looked for Fahey--he was the man I found there as night watchman--before eight o'clock. It had rained and snowed off and on since the month began. In the dark, low rooms the fire burned all day. The dining-room, which had blue-green walls in imitation of Flemish tapestry and weathered-oak furniture, was darkened still more by the pines that gave a cloistered look to the view from our back windows into a small, square court, high-walled and spread with pine-needles. The rooms we used were two small ones united, done in white and yellow and with slim curtains which we could crush back upon the rods; but even there one could not see to read by daylight. This continuous, arctic gloom added, no doubt, to the melancholy spell of the house, which nevertheless charmed me, and held me almost with a sense of impalpable presences sharing with Joshua and me our intimate, wistful seclusion. If I was happy, in a luxuriously mournful sort of way, I knew that he was not--that he grieved persistently over something that cast a greyness over his thoughts in keeping with the atmosphere. I knew that he knew without any names whom I meant whenever I spoke of _they_.

"Yes, they loved it," he said, answering my exclamation. "They made it, somehow, as character is said to shape its own set of features."

"Had they lived here long?"

"For a mine house, yes. It was, of course, a home. They had no other."

"A happy one?" I ventured.

"Can any one be called happy who has the gift of strong feeling, and two children at stake, in this world?" I had never heard him speak with such bitterness.

"But to have any one to feel for--that is life," I said. "I wish I had more of it myself."

"Life, then, is not happiness."

I left him the last word, and sitting so, both silent, we heard a screen-door at the kitchen-end blow to with a bang and a clatter of tinware that sent the blood to my face in wrath. I said something--about Jim and his fly-doors (Jim believed that flies or their ghosts besieged that house all winter)--when the old heathen himself came boiling into the room like a whole United States mail service delayed.

"Hoo! Heap bad ou'si'! Heap snow!" he panted, wiping drops from the lock of the mail-pouch with his apron.

My wrath increased, because once more Fahey had got past the front door with the mail, whereas each night I had promised myself to waylay him and change his roundabout method of delivery. "If I live till tomorrow," I said crossly, "I'll see if he can't climb those steps and hand us the bag himself."

Jim stood listening. "We might be at dinner," Joshua suggested.

"What's the matter with knocking?--what is the knocker for?" It struck me, as I spoke, that I had not heard the sound of the knocker since the day Jim stayed my own hand and shunted me in at the side; it seemed he must have practised the same vigilance with subsequent comers, for I could not recall one person who had entered the house announced by the brass lion's head on the door.

"_He_ no lock!" Jim planted himself in front of me; his voice quavered nervously. "All time I _un_-lock! Fi' 'tlock whistle blow--I go quick! Nobody wait. I all time run."

"Why should you run? What is the knocker for?" I repeated. At this I stepped past him startling him somewhat, and hurled open the front door. I had heard our coy watchman going down the path.

"Tomorrow night, Fahey," I shouted, "you bring the bag in this way. Knock, man! There's the knocker--see?"

Jim looked at me with eyes aghast. He gathered himself for speech, breathing deeply.

"Mis' Oth' (my name is Othet), I tell you: Long time-_long_ time, no man knock flon' do'. In this house, no good. No good knock. Sometime some-come-you no man see!" He lowered his voice to a rapid whisper, spreading his yellow palms tremulously. "You tell man come knock flon' do'--I go 'way. Too much bad thing!"

Muttering to himself he retreated. "Now what has he got on his mind do you suppose? Could you make out what he was driving at?"

Dean smiled, a non-committal smile. "It would be rather awkward for us, wouldn't it, if Jim should leave? We are too far from the coast for city servants in winter. I doubt if any of the natives could be persuaded to stay in this house alone."

"You think Jim would leave if I made Fahey knock at that door every night?"

Joshua answered me obliquely. "If I could ever quote anything straight, I would remind you of a saying in one of George Eliot's novels that 'we've all got to take a little trouble to keep sane and call things by the same names as other people.' Perhaps Jim doesn't take quite trouble enough. I have difficulty sometimes myself to find names for things. I should like to hear you classify a certain occurrence I have in mind, not unconnected, I think, with Jim's behavior tonight. I've never discussed it, of course. In fact, I've never spoken of it before." He smiled queerly. "It's very astonishing how they know things."

"The menials?"

He nodded. "Jim was in the house at the time. No one knows that he heard it,--no one ever told him. But he is thinking of it tonight just as I am. He's never forgotten it for a moment, and never will."

Joshua dragged the charred logs forward and stooped amid their sparks to lay a fresh one with its back to the chimney. Then he rose and looked out; as he stood in the door, I could hear the hissing of fine snow turning to rain and the drenched bamboo whipping the piazza posts; over all, the larger lament of the pines, and, from the long rows of lights in the gulch, the diapason of the stamp-heads thundering on through the night.

"'Identities of sensation,'" said Joshua, quoting again as he shut the door, "are strong with persons who live in lonely places! Jim and I have lived here too long."