Part 12

“Hello!” exclaimed the banker. “Where are you bound for?”

“I presume for the same destination you are,” Mr. Whitely replied. “I am going up to see Miss Walton, and if Mrs. Blodgett cannot give me a night’s hospitality, I shall go to the hotel.”

“Plenty of room at My Fancy, and I’ll guarantee your welcome,” promised Mr. Blodgett pleasantly. “Here’s the doctor going up for a bit of nursing.”

Much to my surprise, my former employer entered the compartment, and, offering me his hand, sat down by the lounge I was stretched upon. “You’ve had a serious illness,” he remarked, with a bland attempt at sympathy.

I only nodded my head.

“I hope you will recover quickly, for you are needed in the office,” he went on.

I could not have been more surprised if he had struck me, though I did not let it appear in my face.

“Whitely’s been trying to go it alone on his editorials, and the papers have all been laughing at him,” chuckled Mr. Blodgett. “Just read us your famous one, Whitely,—that one about The Tendency of Modern Art, with the original Hebrew from Solomon you put in.”

I saw my employer redden, and in pity for his embarrassment I said, “I do not think I shall ever come back to the office, Mr. Whitely.”

“Why not?” he exclaimed. “You committed an unwise action, but business is business, and I see no cause why we need let a single mistake terminate a relation mutually profitable.”

“I have learned the lesson that one cannot sell one’s honesty without wronging other people, and I shall never do it again.”

“This is purely sentimental”—he began.

Mr. Blodgett, however, interrupted by saying, “Now don’t go to exciting the doctor, for he’s to sleep on the trip. Besides, I’ve got something in mind better than the job he’s had under you, Whitely. Come and have a smoke, and leave him to nap a bit.”

They left me, and I set to puzzling over many questions: how you would greet me at My Fancy; how you would welcome Mr. Whitely; what was the meaning of his friendliness towards me; and what new kindness Mr. Blodgett had in store for me. Finally I fell asleep, to be awakened only when we reached our destination.

Agnes met us at the station, and at the house Mrs. Blodgett gave me the warmest of welcomes, but not till I came downstairs before dinner did you and I meet. Your greeting was formal, yet courteous and gracious as of old, almost making me question if our last two interviews could be realities.

Before the dinner was finished Mrs. Blodgett ordered me to the divan on the veranda, and sent dessert and fruit out to me. You all joined me when the moment came for coffee and cigars; but the evening was cloudy and rather breezy, and presently Mrs. Blodgett said it was too cold for her, and suggested a game of whist indoors. “You must stay out here,” she told me, “but if you feel cool be sure to use the shawl.”

You turned and said to Mr. Whitely, “You will play, I hope?” and he assented so eagerly that it was all I could do to keep from laughing outright when you continued, “Agnes and Mr. Whitely will make your table, Mrs. Blodgett, so I will stay here and watch the clouds.” The whole thing was so palpably with an object that I felt at once that you wished to see me alone, to learn if I had anything more to say concerning Mr. Whitely; and as I realized this, I braced myself for the coming ordeal.

For a few moments you stood watching the gathering storm, and then took a chair by the divan on which I lay.

“Are you too honorable,” you began,—and though I could not see your face in the darkness, your voice told me you were excited,—“to pardon dishonorable conduct in others? For I have come to beg of you forgiveness for a wrong.”

“Of me, Miss Walton?”

“Last April,” you went on, “Mrs. Blodgett brought me a book and asked me to read it. A few paragraphs revealed to me that it was something written by an old friend of mine. After reading a little further, I realized for the first time that I was violating a confidence. Yet though I knew this, and struggled to close the book, I could not, but read it to the end. Can you forgive me?”

“Oh, Miss Walton!” I protested. “Why ask forgiveness of me? What is your act compared to the wrong”—

“Hush, Don,” you said gently, and your use of my name, so long unheard, told me in a word that the feeling of our childhood days was come again. “Tell me you forgive me!” you entreated.

“I am not the one to forgive, Maizie.”

“I did wrong, and I ask your pardon,” you begged humbly. “Yet I’m not sorry in the least, and I should do it again,” you instantly added, laughing merrily at your own perverseness. Then in a moment you were serious again, saying, “I never received the letters or the photograph, Donald. My uncle confesses that he put them in the fire.” And before I could speak, a new thought seized you, for you continued sadly, “I shall never forgive myself for my harshness and cruelty when you were so ill.”

“That is nothing,” I replied, “since all our misunderstandings are gone. Why, even my debt, Maizie, ceases now to be a burden; in the future it will be only a joy to work.”

“Donald!” you exclaimed. “You don’t suppose I shall let you pay me another cent!”

“I must.”

“But I am rich,” you protested. “The money is nothing to me. You shall not ruin your career to pay it. I scorn myself when I think that I refused to see you that night, and so lost my only chance of saving you from what followed. My cowardice, my wicked cowardice! It drove you to death’s door by overwork, to give me wealth I do not know how to spend. You parted with your library that I might let money lie idle in bank. I forced you to sell your book—your fame—to that thief. Oh, Donald, think of the wrong it has done already, and don’t make it do greater!”

“Maizie, you do not understand”—

“I understand it all,” you interrupted. “You must not—you shall not—I won’t take it—I”—

“For his sake!”

“But I love him, too!” you pleaded. “Don’t you see, Donald, that it was never the money,—that was nothing; but they told me his love—and yours, for they said you had known all the time—was only pretense, a method by which you might continue to rob me. And I came to believe it,—though I should have known better,—because, since you never wrote, it seemed to me you had both dropped me out of your thoughts as soon as you could no longer plunder me. Even then, scorning you,—like you in your feeling over my neglect of your letters,—I could not help loving you, for those Paris and Tyrol days were the happiest I have ever known; and though I knew, Don, that I ought to forget you, as I believed you had forgotten me, I could not do so. I have never dared to speak in public of either of you, for fear I should break down. Try as I might, I could not help loving you both as I have never loved any one else. That I turned you away from my house was because I did not dare to meet you,—I knew I could not control myself. After the man took the message, I sobbed over having to insult you by sending it by a servant. But for my want of courage—had I seen you as I ought—If I had only understood, as your journal has made me,—had only known that my name was on his lips when he died! No money could pay for what he gave to me. Could he ask me now for twice the sum, it would be my pleasure to give it to him, for I love him dearly, and”—

“If you love him, Maizie, you will let me clear his name as far as lies within my power.”

For an instant you were silent, and then said softly, “You are right, Donald, we will clear his name.”

I took your hand and touched it to my lips. “To hear you speak of him”—I could go no further, in my emotion.

There was a pause before you asked, “Donald, do you remember our talk here last autumn?”

“Every word.”

You laughed gayly. “I want you to know, sir,” you asserted, with a pretense of defiance, “that I don’t believe in love, because I have never found any that was wholly free from self-indulgence or self-interest. And I still think”—

Just then Mrs. Blodgett joined us, and inquired, “Have you told Rudolph, Maizie?”

“Yes.”

“I went to see how you were the moment I heard of your illness,” she said, with a certain challenge in her voice, “and I found that book lying on your desk just where you stopped writing from weakness. I read it, and I took it to Maizie.”

“It was kismet, I suppose,” was all I could say, too happy to think of criticism, and instantly her manner changed and she wiped her eyes.

“I had to do it,” she sobbed.

“You have been too good to me,” I answered, rising and taking her hand.

“There, there,” she continued, steadying herself. “I didn’t come out to behave like this, but to tell you to go to bed at once. I’m going to your room to see that everything is right for our invalid, but don’t you delay a minute after I’m gone,” and she disappeared through the doorway.

I turned to you and held out my hand, bidding you, “Good-night, Maizie,” and you took it, and replied, “Goodnight, Don.” Then suddenly you leaned forward, and, kissing my forehead, added, “God keep you safe for me, my darling.”

I took you in my arms, and gave you back your kiss twofold, while saying, “Good-night, my love.”

XXVI

A man does not willingly spread on paper the sweetest and tenderest moments of his life. When half crazed with grief and illness I might express my suffering, much as, in physical pain, some groan aloud; but the deepest happiness is silent, for it is too great to be told. And lest, my dears, you think me even less manly than I am, I choose to add here the reason for my writing the last few pages of this story of my love, that if you ever read it you may know the motive which made me tell what till to-night I have kept locked in my heart.

This evening the dearest woman in the world came to me, as I sat at my desk in the old library, and asked, “Are you busy, Donald?”

“I am reading the one hundred and forty-seventh complimentary review of my History of the Moors, and I am so sick of sweets that your interruption comes as an unalloyed pleasure.”

“Am I bitter or acid?” she asked, leaning over my shoulder and arranging my hair, which is one of her ways of pleasing me.

“You are my exact opposite,” I said gravely.

“How uncomplimentary you are!” she cried, with a pretense of anger in her voice.

“An historian must tell the truth now and then, for variety’s sake.”

“Then tell me if you are too engaged to spare me a minute. Any other time will do.”

“You are seriously mistaken, because no other time will do. And nothing about me is ever engaged, as regards you, except my affections, and they are permanently so.”

“I’ve come to ask a great favor of you.”

“Out of the question; but you may tell me what it is.”

“Ah, Donald, say you will grant it before I tell you?”

“Concealment bespeaks a guilty conscience.”

“But sometimes you are so funny and obstinate about things!”

“That is what Mr. Whitely used to say.”

“Don’t mention that wretch’s name to me! To think of that miserable little Western college making him an LL. D. because of your book!”

“Never mind, Maizie; here’s a letter I received an hour ago from Jastrow, which tells me the University of Leipzig is going to give me a degree.”

“That he should steal your fame!”

“My Moor is five times the chap my Turk was.”

“But you might have had both!”

“And gone without you? Don’t fret over it, my darling.”

“I can’t help”—

She always ends this vein by abusing herself, which I wouldn’t allow another human being to do, and which I don’t like to hear, so I interrupted: “Jastrow says he’ll come over in March to visit us, and threatens to bring the manuscript of his whole seventeen volumes, for me to take a final look at it before he sends it to press.”

“The dear old thing!” she said tenderly. “I love him so for what he was to you that I believe I shall welcome him with a kiss.”

“Why make the rest of his life unhappy?”

“Is that the way it affects you?”

“Woman is born illogical, and even the cleverest of her sex cannot entirely overcome the taint. After you give me a kiss I bear in mind that I am to have another, and that makes me very happy. But if you kiss Jastrow, the poor fellow will go back to Germany and pine away into his grave. Even his fifty-two dialects will not satisfy him after your labial.”

“Oh, you silly!” she exclaimed; but, my dears, I think she is really, in her secret heart, fond of silliness, for she leaned over and—There, I’ll stop being what she called me.

“We’ll give him a great reception,” she continued, “and have every one worth knowing to meet him.”

“He is the shyest of beings.”

“How books and learning do refine men!” she said.

“I am afraid they do make weaklings of us.”

“Will you never get over the idea that you are weak?” she cried; for it is one of her pet superstitions that I am not.

“You’ll frighten me out of it if you speak like that.”

“You are—well—that is really what I came to ask for. Just to please your own wife, you will, Donald, won’t you?”

“The distinction between ‘will’ and ‘won’t’ is clearly set forth in a somewhat well-known song concerning a spider and a fly.”

“Oh, you bad boy!”

“Adsum.”

“I’m really serious.”

“I never was less so.”

“I should not have become your wife if I had dreamed you would be such a brute!”

“You’ll please remember that I never asked you to marry me.”

She laughed deliciously over the insult, and after that I could not resist her.

“You have,” I said, “a bundle in your left hand, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a blue ribbon, which you sedulously keep from my sight, but of which I caught a glimpse as you entered.”

“And you’ve known it all this time! Perhaps you know too what I want?”

“Last spring,” I answered, “I knocked at the door of your morning-room twice, and receiving no response, I went in, to find you reading something that you instantly hid from sight. There were on the lounge, I remember, a sheet of tissue paper and a blue ribbon. I suspect a connection.”

“Well?”

“My theory is that you have some really improper book wrapped in the paper, and that is why you so guiltily hide it from me.”

“Oh, Donald, it gives me such happiness to read it!”

“That was the reason I asked you why you had tears in your eyes, when I surprised you that day. Your happiness was most enviable!”

“Men never understand women!”

“Deo gratias.”

“But I love it.”

“I don’t like to hear you express such sentiments for so erotic a book.”

“Oh, don’t apply such a word to it!” she cried, in a pained voice.

“A word,” I explained, “taken from the Greek _erotikos_, which is derived from _erao_, meaning ‘I love passionately.’ It is singularly descriptive, Maizie.”

“If it means that, I like it, but I thought you were insulting my book.”

“Almost five years ago,” I remarked, “a volume was stolen from my room, which I have never since been able to recover. Now a woman of excessive honesty calmly calls it hers.”

“You know you don’t want it.”

“I want it very much.”

“Really?”

“To put it in the fire.”

“Don!”

“Once upon a time a most bewitching woman wrote a story, and in a vain moment her husband asked her to give it to him. She”—

“But, my darling, it was so foolish that I had to burn it up. Think of my making the heroine marry that creature!”

“Since you married the poor chap to the other girl, there was no other ending possible. If the book were only in existence, I think Agnes and her husband would enjoy reading it almost as much as I should.”

“How silly I was! But at least the book made you write the ending which prevented me from accepting him that winter. What a lot of trouble I gave my poor dear!”

“I met the ‘poor dear’ yesterday, looking very old and unhappy despite his LL. D.”

“Oh, you idiot!” she laughed. And she must like imbeciles, too, for—well, I’m not going to tell even you how I know that she’s fond of idiots.

“Why do you suppose he’s unhappy?” she asked.

“My theory is that he’s miserable because he lost—lost me.”

“I’m so glad he is!” joyously asserted the tenderest of women.

“Nevertheless,” I resumed, “it was a book I should have valued as much as you do that one in tissue paper, and you ought not to have burned it.”

“I am very sorry I did, Donald, since you would really have liked it,” she said, wistfully and sorrowfully. “I should have thought of your feelings, and not of mine.”

This is a mood I cannot withstand. “Dear heart,” I responded, “I have you, and all the books in the world are not worth a breath in comparison. What favor do you want me to do?”

“To write a sort of last chapter—an ending, you know—telling about—about the rest.”

“Have you forgotten it?”

“I? Never! I couldn’t. But I want to have it all in the book, so that when Foster and Mai are older they can read it.”

“I have no intention of sharing, even with our children, my under-the-rose idyl with the loveliest of girls. And when the children are older, they’ll be far more interested in their own heart secrets than they are in ours.”

“Still, dear,” she pleaded, “they may hear from others some unkind and perverted allusions to our story; for you know what foolish things were said at the time of our marriage.”

“If I remember rightly, some one—was it my mother or Mr. Whitely?”—

“Both,” she answered.

“—spread it abroad that I had trapped an heiress into marriage by means of an alias.”

“Wasn’t it a delicious version!” she laughed merrily. “But no matter what’s ever tattled in the future, if Foster and Mai have your journal, they will always understand it.”

“Maizie,” I urged, “if you let those imps of mischief read of our childish doings in this old library, they’ll either finish painting the plates in Kingsborough, or burn the house down in trying to realize an Inca of Peru at the stake.”

“But I won’t read them those parts,” she promised; “especially if you write a nice ending, which they’ll like.”

“Won’t it do to add just a paragraph, saying that our fairy godmamma found and gave you the journal, and that then we ‘lived happily ever after’?”

“No, Donald,” she begged. “I want the whole story, to match the rest.”

“Five years ago I knew the saddest and most dejected of fellows, whose misery was so great that he wailed it out on paper. But now I know only the happiest of mortals, and he cannot write in the lugubrious tone of yore—unless a lady of his acquaintance will banish him from her presence or do something else equally joy-destroying.”

“Are you trying to bribe me into giving you a rest from my presence for a time?”

“Undoubtedly,” I assented. “It’s a fearful strain to live up to you, and it is beginning to tell on me.”

“If I didn’t know you were teasing, I should really be hurt. But I should like to ask you one thing.”

“And that is?”

“In your journal—well—of course I know that you were—that I am not—that your love made you think me what I never was in the least, Donald,” she faltered, “but still, perhaps—Do you remember what Mr. Blodgett said about his not giving Mrs. Blodgett for ten of the women he—? I hope you like my reality as much as your ideal.”

“Haven’t you changed your idea of me, Maizie?”

“Oh yes.”

“And therefore you don’t love me as much?”

“But that’s different, Donald,” she observed seriously.

“How?”

“Why, you treated me so strangely that, inevitably, I didn’t know what you were like; and though you interested me very much, and though your journal brought back my old love for you, still, what I did was more in pity and admiration and reparation than—and so I could fall deeper in love. While you, being so much in love already, and with such a totally different woman”—

“Only went from bad to worse,” I groaned. “Yes, I own up. My sin is one of the lowest man can commit. I have fallen in love with a married woman. And the strange thing about it is that you are not jealous of her! Indeed, I really believe that you are magnanimous enough to love her too, though it’s natural you should not like her as much as you do some others. But next August I’ll leave her and go to India to study for my new book.”

“The married woman will go too,” she predicted calmly.

“I shouldn’t dare risk her among those hill tribes.”

“And she won’t risk you where it isn’t safe for her to go.”

“I was only thinking of your lovely complexion,” I explained.

“Old mahogany is very fashionable,” she laughed.

“Can nothing make you stay at home?” I asked beseechingly.

“I wonder if there ever was a husband who did not love to tease his wife?”

“The divorce courts have records of many such unloving wretches.”

“What I want,” she told me, returning to her wish, “is to have you take it up just where you left off. Tell about your pneumonia, and how Mrs. Blodgett found your journal, but didn’t dare give it to me till the doctor was certain you would recover; and then tell of my sending you flowers and jellies and everything I could think of, by her, to help you get well. How”—

“I should have eaten twice as much and recovered much more quickly if she had only let me know from whom they really came,” I interjected in an aggrieved tone.

“And tell how I wouldn’t listen to that scoundrel till you should have a chance to justify yourself; how, the moment I had read your diary, I wrote and rejected him, and would not see him when he called; how he would not accept his dismissal, but followed me to the country; tell how dreadfully in the way he was that evening, till Mrs. Blodgett and Agnes and I trapped him into a game of whist”—

“You Machiavellis!”

“Tell all about my confession, and how we all spoiled you for those months at My Fancy. Oh, weren’t they lovely, Donald?”

“I thought so then.”

“But not now?”

“A gooseberry is good till you taste a strawberry. There was a good deal too much gooseberry, as I remember.”

“Then tell how the papers and people chattered about your assuming your true name; and how they gabbled when we were married,—and how, on our wedding day, we endowed the hospital ward”—

“Haven’t you made a slip in the pronoun?”

“I’ll box your ears if you even suggest it again; half of the money was what you earned—endowed the hospital ward in memory of _our_ dear father, and how happy we’ve been since.”

“You’ve made a mistake in the last pronoun, I’m certain.”

“You will write it to please me, Donald?”

“Oh, Maizie, I can’t. It’s all too dear to me.”

“Please, Don, try?”

“But”—

She interrupted my protest. “Donald,” she said, the tenderness in her face and voice softening her words, “before knowing that I loved you, you insisted that debt must be paid. Won’t you pay me now, dear?”

“I don’t merely owe you money, Maizie!” I cried. “I owe you everything, and I’m a brute to the most generous of women. Give me the book, dear heart.”

“You’ll make it nice, like the rest, won’t you?” she begged.

“I’ll try.” And then I laughingly added, “Maizie, you still have the technical part of story-telling to learn.”

“How?”

“I can’t write all you wish and make it symmetrical. In the first place, we don’t want to spend so much time on Whitely as to give him a fictitious value; and next, to be artistic, we must end with our good-night that evening.”

“Well, that will do, if you’ll only tell it nicely.”

And that, my dears, is why I write again of those old days, so distant now in time and mood. What is told here is shared with you only to please my love, and I ask of you that it shall be a confidence. And of Another I beg that each of you in time may find a love as strong as that told here; that each may be as true and noble as your mother, and as happy as your father.

Good-night, my children. Good-night, my love. May God be as good to you as he has been to me.