Part 9

“That’s because you don’t know Miss Walton!” exclaimed Agnes warmly, evidently fretted by such conduct towards you.

“On the contrary,” answered my mother, speaking coolly and evenly, “I presume I have known Miss Walton longer and better than any one else in this room; and I remember when her views of honesty were such that her ideal was personified by a pair of embezzlers.”

You had been meeting her gaze across the table as she spoke, but now you dropped your lids, hiding your eyes behind their long lashes; and nothing but the color receding from your cheeks, leaving them as white as your throat and brow, told of what you felt.

“Oh, say something,” appealed Agnes to me in a whisper. “Anything to divert the”—

“And I really think,” went on Mrs. Polhemus, smiling sweetly, with her eyes on you, “that if you were as thoroughly honest with us as, a moment ago, you were insistent on the world’s being, you would confess to a _tendresse_ still felt for that particular form of obliquity.”

I shall recall the moment which followed that speech if it shall ever fall to me to sit in the jury-box and pass judgment on a murderer, for I know that had I been armed, and my mother a man, I should have killed her; and it taught me that murder is in every man’s heart. Yet I was not out of my head, but was curiously clear-minded. Though allusion to my shame had hitherto always made me dumb, I was able to speak now without the slightest difficulty; I imagine because the thought of your pain made me forget my own.

“Which is better, Mrs. Polhemus,” I asked, with a calmness I marveled at afterwards, “to love dishonesty or to dishonestly love?”

“Is this a riddle?” she said, though not removing her eyes from you.

“I suppose, since right and wrong are evolutionary,” I rejoined, “that every ethical question is more or less of a conundrum. But the thought in my mind was that there is only nobility in a love so great that it can outlast even wrongdoing.” Then, in my controlled passion, I stabbed her as deeply as I could make words stab. “Compare such a love, for instance, with another of which I have heard,—that of a woman who so valued the world’s opinion that she would not get a divorce from an embezzling husband, because of the social stigma it involved, yet who remarried within a week of hearing of her first husband’s death, because she thought that fact could not be known. Which love is the higher?”

The color blazed up in my mother’s cheeks, as she turned from you to look at me, with eyes that would have killed if they could; and it was her manner, far more than even the implication of my words, which told the rest of the table that my nominally impersonal case was truly a thrust of the knife. A moment’s appalling pause followed, and then, though the fruit was being passed, the hostess broke the terrible spell by rising, as if the time had come for the ladies to withdraw.

When, later, the men followed them, Agnes intercepted me at the door, and whispered, “Oh, doctor, it was magnificent! I was so afraid Maizie would break down if—I never dreamed you could do it so splendidly. You’re almost as much of a love as papa! It will teach the cat to let Maizie alone! Now, do you want to be extra good?”

“So long as you don’t want any more vitriol-throwing,” I assented, smiling. “Remember that a hostess deserves some consideration.”

“I told Mrs. Granger that you did it at my request, and there wasn’t a woman in the room who didn’t want to cheer. We all love Maizie, and hate Mrs. Polhemus; and it isn’t a bit because you geese of men think she’s handsome and clever, either. Poor Maizie wanted to be by herself, and went out on the veranda. I think she’s had time enough, and that it’s best for some one to go to her. Won’t you slip out quietly?”

I nodded, and instantly she spoke aloud of the moon, and we went to the French window on the pretense of looking at it, where, after a moment, I left her. At first I could not discover you, the vines so shadowed your retreat; and when I did, it was to find you with bowed head buried in your arms as they rested on the veranda rail. The whole attitude was so suggestive of grief that I did not dare to speak, and moved to go away. Just as I turned, however, you looked up, as if suddenly conscious of some presence.

“I did not intend to intrude, Miss Walton, and don’t let me disturb you. I will rejoin”—

“If you came out for the moonlight and quiet, sit down here,” you said, making room for me.

I seated myself beside you, but made no reply, thinking your allusion to quiet perhaps voiced your own preference.

“It seems needless,” you began, after a slight pause, “to ignore your kindness, even though it was veiled. I never felt so completely in another’s power, and though I tried to—to say something—to strike back—I couldn’t. Did my face so betray me that you knew I needed help?”

“Your face told nothing, it seemed to me.”

“But that makes it positively uncanny. Over and over again you appear to divine my thoughts or moods. Do you?”

“Little more than any one can of a person in whom one is interested enough to notice keenly.”

“Yet no one else does it with me. And several times, when we have caught each other’s eyes, we have—at least I have felt sure that you were laughing with me, though your face was grave.”

“Who was uncannily mind-reading then?”

“An adequate _tu quoque_,” you said, laughing; then you went on seriously; “Still, to be frank, as now I think we can be, I have never made any pretense that I wasn’t very much interested in you—while you—well—till very lately, I haven’t been able to make up my mind that you did not actually—no, not dislike—for I knew that you—I could not be unconscious of the genuine esteem you have made so evident—yet there has always been, until the last two weeks, an indefinable barrier, of your making, as it appeared to me, and from that I could only infer some—I can give it no name.”

“Were there no natural barriers to a friendship between a struggling writer and Miss Walton?”

“Surely you are above that!” you exclaimed. “You have not let such a distinction—Oh no, for it has not stood in the way of friendship with the Blodgetts.”

A moment’s silence ensued, and then you spoke again: “Perhaps there was a motive that explains it. Please don’t reply, if it is a question I ought not to put, but after your confidence of last week I feel as if you had given me the privilege to ask it. I have always thought—or rather hoped—that you cared for Agnes? If”—

“And so you married me to her in the novel,” I interrupted, in an effort to change the subject, dreading to what it might lead.

You laughed merrily as you said, “Oh, I’m so glad you spoke of that. I have often wondered if you recognized the attempted portrait,—which now I know is not a bit of a likeness,—and have longed to ask you. I never should have dared to sketch it, but I thought my pen name would conceal my criminality; and then what a fatality for you to read it! I never suspected you were the publisher’s reader. What have you thought of me?”

“That you drew a very pleasant picture of my supposed mental and moral attainments, at the expense of my ambition and will. My true sympathy, however, went out to the girl whom you offered up as a heart-restorer for my earlier attachment.”

“I’m thankful we are in the shadow,” you laughed, “so that my red cheeks don’t show. You are taking a most thoroughgoing revenge.”

“That was the last thought in my mind.”

“Then, my woman’s curiosity having been appeased, be doubly generous and spare my absurd blushes. I don’t know when I have been made to feel so young and foolish.”

“Clearly you are no hardened criminal, Miss Walton. Usually matchmakers glory in their shame.”

“Perhaps I should if I had not been detected, or if I had succeeded better.”

“You took, I fear, a difficult subject for what may truly be called your maiden experiment.”

“Did I not? And yet—You see I recognized potentialities for loving in you. You can—Ah, you have suggested to me a revenge for your jokes. Did you—were you the man who coined the phrase that my eyes were too dressy for the daytime?”

“Yes,” I confessed guiltily, “but”—

“No, don’t dare to try to explain it away,” you ordered. “How could you say it? We can never be friends, after all.”

Though you spoke in evident gayety, I answered gravely: “You will forgive me when I tell you that it was to parry a thrust of Mrs. Polhemus’s at you, and I made a joke of it only because I did not choose to treat her gibe seriously. I hoped it would not come back to you.”

“Every friend I have has quoted it, not once, but a dozen times, in my presence. If you knew how I have been persecuted and teased with that remark! You are twice the criminal that I have been, for at least my libel was never published. Yet you are unblushing.”

We both sat silent for a little while, and then you began: “You interrupted a question of mine just now. Was it a chance or a purposed diversion? You see,” you added hastily, “I am presuming that henceforth we are to be candid.”

“I confess to an intention in the dodging, not because I feared the question, for a simple negative was all it needed, but I was afraid of what might follow.”

“I hoped, after the trust of the other day—You do not want to tell me your story?”

“Are there not some things that cannot be put into words, Miss Walton? Could you tell me your story?”

“But mine is no mystery,” you replied. “It has been the world’s property for years. Why, your very help to-night proves that it is known to you,—that you know, indeed, facts that were unknown to me.”

“Facts, yes; feelings, no.”

“Do you appreciate the subtilty of the compliment? You really care for such valueless and indefinable things as feelings?”

“Yes.”

“A bargain, then, while you are in this mood of giving something for nothing. Question for question, if you choose.”

“You can tell your secrets?”

“To you, yes, for you have told me your greatest.”

“Then, with the privilege of silence for both, begin.”

“Ah, you begin already to fear the gimlet! Yes. Nothing is to be told that—There again we lack a definition, do we not? Never mind. We shall understand. You knew her in Germany?”

“Yes.”

“And she—You wear a mask, at moments even merry-faced, but now and again I have surprised a look of such sadness in your eyes that—Is that why you came to America? She”—

“No. She was, and is, in so different a class, that I never”—

“You should not allow that to be a bar! Any woman”—

“But even more, there are other claims upon me, which make marriage out of the question.”

“And this is why you have resigned reputation for money-making? Is there no escape? Oh, it seems too cruel to be!”

“You draw it worse than it is, Miss Walton, forgetting that I told you of my happiness in loving.”

“You make me proud to feel that we are friends, Dr. Hartzmann,” you said gently. “I hope she is worthy of such a love?”

I merely nodded; and after a slight pause you remarked, “Now it is only fair to give you a turn.”

I had been pondering, after my first impulsive assent, over my right to win your confidence, with the one inevitable conclusion that was so clear, and I answered, “I have no questions to ask, Miss Walton.”

“Then I can ask no more, of course,” you replied quietly, and at once turned the conversation into less personal subjects, until the time came for our return to My Fancy.

When we parted in the upper hall, that evening, you said to me, “I always value your opinion, and it usually influences me. Do you, as your speech to-night implied, think it right to go on loving baseness?”

“It is not a question of right and wrong, but only whether the love remains.”

“Then you don’t think it a duty to crush it out?”

“No. All love is noble that is distinct from self.”

You held out your hand. “I am so glad you think so, and that you spoke your thought. You have done me a great kindness,—greater far than you can ever know. Thank you, and good-night.”

Good-night, Maizie.

XX

_March 11._ When I left My Fancy, after my visit, Agnes had nothing but praise for me. “I was certain that you and Maizie would be friends if you ever really knew each other,” she said triumphantly. Unfortunately, our first meeting in the city served only to prove the reverse. In one of my daily walks up-town, I met you and Agnes outside a shop where you had been buying Christmas gifts for the boys of your Neighborhood Guild. You were looking for the carriage, about which there had been some mistake, and I helped you search. When our hunt was unsuccessful, you both said you would rather walk than let me get a cab, having been deterred only by the growing darkness, and not by the snow. So chatting merrily, away we went, through the elfin flakes which seemed so eager to kiss your cheeks, till your home was reached.

“If we come in, will you give us some tea?” asked Agnes.

“Tea, cake, chocolates, and conversation,” you promised.

“I am sorry,” I said, “but I cannot spare the time.”

I thought you and Agnes exchanged glances. “Please, Doc—” she began; but you interrupted her by saying proudly, “We must not take any more of Dr. Hartzmann’s time, Agnes. Will you come in?”

“No,” replied Agnes. “I’ll go home before it’s any darker. Good-night.”

I started to walk with her the short distance, but the moment we were out of hearing she turned towards me and cried, “I hate you!” As I made no reply, she demanded impatiently, “What makes you behave so abominably?” When I was still silent she continued: “I told you how Maizie felt, and I thought it was all right, and now you do it again. It’s too bad! Well, can’t you say something? Why do you do it?”

“There is nothing for me to say, Miss Blodgett,” I responded sadly.

“You might at least do it to please me,” she persisted, “even if you don’t like Maizie.”

I made no answer, and we walked the rest of the distance in silence. At the stoop, however, Agnes asked, “Will you go with me to call on Maizie, some afternoon?”

I shook my head.

“Not even to please mamma and me?” she questioned.

Again I gave the same answer, and without a word of parting she left me and passed through the doorway. From that time she has treated me coldly.

Another complication only tended to increase the coldness, as well as to involve me with Mrs. Blodgett. In December, Mr. Blodgett came into Mr. Whitely’s office and announced, “I’ve been taking a liberty with your name, doctor.”

“For what kindness am I indebted now?” I inquired.

“I’m a member of the Philomathean,” he said,—“not because I’m an author, or artist, or engineer, or scientist, but because I’m a big frog in my own puddle, and they want samples of us, provided we are good fellows, just to see what we’re like. I was talking with Professor Eaton in September, and we agreed you ought to be one of us; so we stuck your name up, and Saturday evening the club elected you.”

“I can’t afford it”—I began; but he interrupted with:—

“I knew you’d say that, and so didn’t tell you beforehand. I’ll bet you your initiation fee and a year’s dues against a share of R. T. common that you’ll make enough out of your membership to pay you five times over.”

“How can I do that?”

“All the editors and publishers are members,” he replied, “and to meet them over the rum punch we serve on meeting nights is worth money to the most celebrated author living. Then you’ll have the best club library in this country at your elbow for working purposes.”

“I don’t think I ought, Mr. Blodgett.”

He was about to protest, when Mr. Whitely broke in upon us, saying, “Accept your membership, Dr. Hartzmann, and the paper shall pay your initiation and dues.”

I do not know whether Mr. Blodgett or myself was the more surprised at this unexpected and liberal offer. Our amazement was so obvious that Mr. Whitely continued: “I think it’ll be an excellent idea for the paper to have a member of its staff in the Philomathean, and so the office shall pay for it.”

“Whitely,” observed Mr. Blodgett admiringly, “you’re a good business man, whatever else you are!”

“I wish, Blodgett,” inquired Mr. Whitely, “you would tell me why I have been kept waiting so long?”

“Many a name’s been up longer than yours,” replied Mr. Blodgett in a comforting voice. “You don’t seem to realize that the Philomathean’s a pretty stiff club to get into.”

“But I’ve been posted for over three years, while here Dr. Hartzmann is elected within four months of his proposing.”

“Well, the doctor has the great advantage of being a sort of natural Philomath, you see,” Mr. Blodgett explained genially. “He was born that way, and so is ripe for membership without any closet mellowing.”

“But my reputation as a writer is greater than Dr.”—began Mr. Whitely; but a laugh from Mr. Blodgett made him halt.

“Oh come, now, Whitely!”

“What’s the matter?” asked my employer.

“Once St. Peter and St. Paul stopped at a tavern to quench their thirst,” said Mr. Blodgett, “and when the time came to pay, they tossed dice for it. Paul threw double sixes, and smiled. Peter smiled back, and threw double sevens. What do you suppose Paul said, Whitely?”

“What?”

“‘Oh, Peter, Peter! No miracles between friends.’”

“I don’t follow you,” rejoined Mr. Whitely.

Mr. Blodgett turned and said to me, “I’m going West for two months, and while I’m gone the Twelfth-night revel at the Philomathean is to come off. Will you see that the boss and Agnes get cards?” Then he faced about and remarked, “Whitely, I’d give a big gold certificate to know what nerve food you use!” and went out, laughing.

When I took the invitations to Mrs. Blodgett, I found you all with your heads full of a benefit for the Guild, to be given at your home,—a musical evening, with several well-known stars as magnets, and admission by invitation as an additional attraction. Mrs. Blodgett said to me in her decisive way, “Dr. Hartzmann, the invitations are five dollars each, and you are to take one.”

I half suspected that it was only a device to get me within your doors, though every society woman feels at liberty to whitemail her social circle to an unlimited degree. But the fact that the entertainment was to be in your home, even more than my poverty, compelled me to refuse to be a victim of her charitable kindness or her charitable greed. I merely shook my head.

“Oh, but you must,” she urged. “It will be a delightful evening, and then it’s such a fine object.”

“Do not ask it of Dr. Hartzmann,” you protested, coming to my aid. “No one”—

“I’m sure it’s very little to ask,” remarked Mrs. Blodgett, in a disappointed way.

“Mrs. Blodgett,” I said, in desperation, “for years I have denied myself every luxury and almost every comfort. I have lived at the cheapest of boarding-houses; I have walked down-town, rain or shine, to save ten cents a day; I have”—I stopped there, ashamed of my outbreak.

“I suppose, Dr. Hartzmann,” retorted Agnes, with no attempt to conceal the irritation she felt toward me, “that the Philomathean is one of your ten-cent economies?”

Before I could speak you changed the subject, and the matter was dropped,—I hoped for all time. It was, however, to reappear, and to make my position more difficult and painful than ever.

At Mrs. Blodgett’s request, made that very day, I sent you an invitation to the Philomathean ladies’ day. It was with no hope of being there myself, since my editorial duties covered the hours of the exhibition; but good or bad fortune aided me, for Mr. Whitely asked me for a ticket, and his absence from the office set me free. The crowd was great, but, like most people who try for one thing only, I attained my desire by quickly finding you, and we spent an enjoyable hour together, studying the delicious jokes and pranks of our artist members. The truly marvelous admixture of absurdity and cleverness called out the real mirth of your nature, and our happiness and gayety over the pictures strangely recalled to me our similar days spent in Paris and elsewhere. You too, I think, remembered the same experience, for when we had finished, and were ascending the stairs to the dining-room, you remarked to me, “I never dreamed that one could be so merry after one had ceased to be a child. For the last hour I have felt as if teens were yet unventured lands.”

I confess I sought a secluded spot in an alcove, hoping still to keep you to myself; but the project failed, for when I returned from getting you an ice, I found that Mr. Whitely had joined you. The pictures, of course, were the subject of discussion, and you asked him, “Are all the other members as clever in their own professions as your artists have shown themselves to be?”

“The Philomathean is made up of an able body of men,” replied Mr. Whitely in a delightfully patronizing tone. “Some few of the very ablest, perhaps, do not care to be members; but of the second rank, you may say, broadly speaking, that it includes all men of prominence in this city.”

“But why should the abler men not belong?”

“They are too occupied with more vital matters,” explained my employer.

“Yet surely they must need a club, and what one so appropriate as this?”

“It is natural to reason so,” assented the would-be member. “But as an actual fact, some of the most prominent men in this city are not members,” and he mentioned three well-known names.

The inference was so unjust that I observed, “Should you not add, Mr. Whitely, that they are not members either because they know it is useless to apply, or because they have applied in vain; and that their exclusion, though superficially a small affair, probably means to them, by the implication it carries, one of the keenest mortifications of their lives?”

“You mean that the Philomathean refuses to admit such men as Mr. Whitely named?” you asked incredulously.

I smiled. “The worldly reputation and the professional reputation of men occasionally differ very greatly, Miss Walton. We do not accept a man here because his name appears often in the newspapers, but because of what the men of his own calling know and think of him.”

“And of course they are always jealous of a man who has surpassed them,” contended Mr. Whitely.

“There must be something more against a man than envy of his confrères to exclude him,” I answered. “My loyalty to the Philomathean, Miss Walton, is due to the influence it exerts in this very matter. Errors are possible, but the intention is that no man shall be of our brotherhood who is not honestly doing something worth the doing, for other reasons than mere money-making. And for that very reason, we are supposed, within these walls, to be friends, whether or not there is acquaintance outside of them. We are the one club in New York which dares to trust its membership list implicitly to that extent. Charlatanry and dishonesty may succeed with the world, but here they fail. Money will buy much, but the poorest man stands on a par here with the wealthiest.”

“You make me envious of you both,” you sighed, just as Mrs. Blodgett and Agnes joined us.

“What are you envying them?” asked Agnes, as she shook hands with you,—“that they were monopolizing you? How selfish men are!”

“In monopolizing this club?”

“Was that what you envied them?” ejaculated Mrs. Blodgett. “I for one am glad there’s a place to which I can’t go, where I can send my husband when I want to be rid of him.” Then she turned to Mr. Whitely, and with her usual directness remarked, “So they’ve let you in? Mr. Blodgett told me you would surely be rejected.”

Mr. Whitely reddened and bit his lip, for which he is hardly to be blamed. But he only bowed slightly in reply, leaving the inference in your minds that he was a Philomath. How the man dares so often to—

The striking clock tells me it is later than I thought, and I must stop.

Good-night, dear heart.

XXI