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                        THE TRUTH ABOUT TRISTREM VARICK

                                    A NOVEL

                                BY EDGAR SALTUS

                     AUTHOR OF "MR. INCOUL'S MISADVENTURE"


CHICAGO, NEW YORK, AND SAN FRANCISCO:
BELFORD, CLARKE & CO.
PUBLISHERS.

COPYRIGHT, 1888, BY
EDGAR SALTUS

TROW'S
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
NEW YORK.


               TO MY MASTER
    THE PHILOSOPHER OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
            EDUARD VON HARTMANN
         THIS ATTEMPT IN ORNAMENTAL
              DISENCHANTMENT
           IS DUTIFULLY INSCRIBED

    _New York, 15th February, 1888_


     "_Truth is not always in white satin like a girl on her
     wedding-day. And when it is of mud and of blood, when it
     offends the nostrils, so much the worse; I, for one, will not
     sprinkle it with ottar of rose. Besides, I am not here to tell
     fairy tales and pastorals._"




THE TRUTH ABOUT TRISTREM VARICK.




I.


It is just as well to say at the onset that the tragedy in which
Tristrem Varick was the central figure has not been rightly understood.
The world in which he lived, as well as the newspaper public, have had
but one theory between them to account for it, and that theory is that
Tristrem Varick was insane. Tristrem Varick was not insane. He had,
perhaps, a fibre more or a fibre less than the ordinary run of men; that
something, in fact, which is the prime factor of individuality and
differentiates the possessor from the herd; but to call him insane is
nonsense. If he were, it is a pity that there are not more lunatics like
him.

It may be that the course of conduct which he pursued in regard to his
father's estate served as basis to the theory alluded to. At the time
being, it created quite a little stir; it was looked upon as a piece of
old-world folly, an eccentricity worthy of the red-heeled days of
seigneurial France, and, as such, altogether out of place in a
money-getting age like our own. But it was not until after the tragedy
that his behavior in that particular was brought up in evidence against
him.

The facts in the case were these: Tristrem's father, Erastus Varick, was
a man of large wealth, who, when well on in the forties, married a girl
young enough to be his daughter. The lady in question was the only child
of a neighbor, Mr. Dirck Van Norden by name, and very pretty is she said
to have been. Before the wedding Erastus Varick had his house, which was
situated in Waverley Place, refurbished from cellar to garret; he had
the parlor--there were parlors in those days--fitted up in white and
gold, in the style known as that of the First Empire. The old Dutch
furniture, black with age and hair-cloth, was banished. The walls were
plastered with a lime cement of peculiar brilliance. The floors of the
bedrooms were carpeted with rugs that extended under the beds, a novelty
in New York, and the bedsteads themselves, which were vast enough to
make coffins for ten people, were curtained with chintz patterns
manufactured in Manchester to frighten children. In brief, Erastus
Varick succeeded in making the house even less attractive than before,
and altogether acted like a man in love.

After three years of marriage, Tristrem was born and Mrs. Varick died.
The boy had the best of care and everything that money could procure. He
was given that liberal education which usually unfits the recipient for
making so much as his bread and butter, and at school, at college, and
when he went abroad his supply of funds was of the amplest description.
Shortly after his return from foreign lands Erastus Varick was gathered
to his fathers. By his will he bequeathed to Tristrem a Panama hat and a
bundle of letters. The rest and residue of his property he devised to
the St. Nicholas Hospital. The value of that property amounted to seven
million dollars.

Now Dirck Van Norden had not yet moved from the neighborhood to a better
place. Tristrem was his only grandson, and when he learned of the tenor
of the will, he shook his fist at himself in the looking-glass and
swore, in a bountiful old-fashioned manner which was peculiar to him,
that his grandson should not be divested of his rights. He set the
lawyers to work, and the lawyers were not long in discovering a flaw
which, through a wise provision of the legislature, rendered the will
null and void. The Hospital made a bold fight. It was shown beyond
peradventure that from the time of Tristrem's birth the intention of the
testator--and the intention of a testator is what the court most
considers--had been to leave his property to a charitable institution.
It was proved that he had made other wills of a similar character, and
that he had successively destroyed them as his mind changed in regard to
minor details and distributions of the trust. But the wise law was
there, and there too were the wise lawyers. The decision was made in
accordance with the statute, and the estate reverted to Tristrem, who
then succeeded in surprising New York. Of his own free will he made over
the entire property to the account of the Hospital to which it had been
originally devised, and it was in connection with that transfer that he
was taxed with old-world folly. But the matter was misunderstood and
afterward forgotten, and only raked up again when the press of two
continents busied itself with his name. At that time he was in his
twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year.

He was slender, of medium height, blue of eye, and clear-featured. His
hair, which was light in color, he wore brushed upward and back from the
forehead. When he walked, it was with a slight stoop, which was the more
noticeable in that, being nearsighted, he had a way of holding his chin
out and raising his eyebrows as though he were peering at something
which he could not quite discern. In his face there was a charm that
grew and delighted and fastened on the beholder. At the age of
twenty-six he would have been recognized by anyone who had known him as
a boy. He had expanded, of course, and a stoop and dimness of vision had
come with years; but in his face was the same unmistakable, almost
childish, expression of sweet good-will.

His school-days were passed at Concord. When he first appeared there he
looked so much like a pretty girl, in his manner was such gentleness,
and his nature was found to be so vibrant and sensitive, that his
baptismal name was promptly shortened into Trissy. But by the time he
reached the fourth form it was lengthened back again to its rightful
shape. This change was the result of an evolution of opinion. One day
while some companions, with whom he happened to be loitering, scurried
behind a fence, he stopped a runaway horse, clinging to the bridle
though his arm had been dislocated in the earliest effort. Another time,
when a comrade had been visited, unjustly it appeared, with some
terrible punishment--five hundred lines, perhaps, or something equally
direful--Tristrem made straight for the master, and argued with him to
such effect that the punishment was remitted. And again, when a tutor
asked how it was that there was no W in the French language, Tristrem
answered, "Because of Waterloo."

Boys are generous in their enthusiasms; they like bravery, they are not
deaf to wit, but perhaps of all other things they admire justice most.
And Tristrem seemed to exhale it. It is said that everyone has a
particular talent for some one thing, whether for good or evil, and the
particular talent which was accorded to Tristrem Varick was that of
appreciation. He was a born umpire. In disputes his school-fellows
turned to him naturally, and accepted his verdict without question. When
he reached the altitudes which the Upper School offers, no other boy at
St. Paul's was better liked than he. At that time the form of which he
was a member--and in which, parenthetically, he ranked rather low--was
strengthened by a new-comer, a turbulent, precocious boy who had been
expelled from two other schools, and with whom, so ran the gossip, it
would go hard were he expelled again. His name was Royal Weldon, and on
his watch, and on a seal ring which he wore on his little finger, he
displayed an elaborate coat-of-arms under which for legend were the
words, _Well done, Weldon_, words which it was reported an English king
had bawled in battle, ennobling as he did so the earliest Weldon known
to fame.

Between the two lads, and despite the dissimilarity of their natures, or
perhaps precisely on that account, there sprang up a warm friendship
which propinquity cemented, for chance or the master had given them a
room in common. At first, Tristrem fairly blinked at Weldon's precocity,
and Weldon, who was accustomed to be admired, took to Tristrem not
unkindly on that account. But after a time Tristrem ceased to blink and
began to lecture, not priggishly at all, but in a persuasive manner that
was hard to resist. For Weldon was prone to get into difficulties, and
equally prone to make the difficulties worse than they need have been.
When cross-questioned he would decline to answer; it was a trick he had.
Now Tristrem never got into difficulties, except with Latin prosody or a
Greek root, and he was frank to a fault.

It so happened that one day the headmaster summoned Tristrem to him. "My
dear," he said, "Royal is not acting quite as he should, is he?" To this
Tristrem made no reply. "He is a motherless boy," the master continued,
"a poor motherless boy. I wish, Tristrem, that you would use your
influence with him. I see but one course open to me, unless he does
better--" Tristrem was a motherless boy himself, but he answered bravely
that he would do what he could. That evening, as he was battling with
the platitudes of that Augustan bore who is called the Bard of Mantua,
presumably because he was born in Andes--Weldon came in, smelling of
tobacco and drink. It was evident that he had been to town.

Tristrem looked up from his task, and as he looked he heard the step of
a tutor in the hall. He knew, if the tutor had speech with Weldon, that
on the morrow Weldon would leave the school. In a second he had seated
him before the open dictionary, and in another second he was kneeling at
his own bedside. Hardly had he bowed his head when there came a rap at
the door, the tutor entered, saw the kneeling figure, apologized in a
whisper, and withdrew.

When Tristrem stood up again, Weldon was sobered and very pale.
"Tristrem--" he began, but Tristrem interrupted him. "There, don't say
anything, and don't do it again. To-morrow you had better talk it over
with the doctor."

Weldon declined to talk it over with anyone, but after that he behaved
himself with something approaching propriety. Two years later, in
company with his friend, he entered Harvard, from which institution he
was subsequently dropped.

Tristrem meanwhile struggled through the allotted four years. He was not
brilliant in his studies, the memorizing of abstruse questions and
recondite problems was not to his liking. He preferred modern tongues to
dead languages, an intricate fugue was more to his taste than the
simplest equation, and to his shame it must be noted that he read
Petrarch at night. But, though the curriculum was not entirely to his
fancy, he was conscientious and did his best. There are answers that he
gave in class that are quoted still, tangential flights that startled
the listeners into new conceptions of threadbare themes, totally
different from the usual cut and dried response that is learned by rote.
And at times he would display an ignorance, a stupidity even, that was
fathomless in its abysses.

After graduation, he went abroad. England seemed to him like a rose in
bloom, but when autumn came and with it a succession of fogs, each more
depressing than the last, he fled to Italy, and wandered among her
ghosts and treasuries, and then drifted up again through Germany, to
Paris, where he gave his mornings to the Sorbonne and his evenings to
orchestra-stalls.




II.


It was after an absence of nearly five years that Tristrem Varick
returned to the States. He had wearied of foreign lands, and for some
time previous he had thought of New York in such wise that it had grown
in his mind, and in the growing it had assumed a variety of attractive
attributes. He was, therefore, much pleased at the prospect of renewing
his acquaintance with Fifth Avenue, and during the homeward journey he
pictured to himself the advantages which his native city possessed over
any other which he had visited.

He had not, however, been many hours on shore before he found that Fifth
Avenue had shrunk. In some unaccountable way the streets had lost their
charm, the city seemed provincial. He was perplexed at the discovery
that the uniform if depthless civility of older civilizations was rarely
observable; he was chagrined to find that the _minutiæ_ which, abroad,
he had accepted as a matter of course, the thousand trifles which
amount, after all, to nothing particularly indispensable, but which
serve to make mere existence pleasant, were, when not overlooked,
inhibited by statute or custom.

In the course of a week he was surprised into reflecting that, while no
other country was more naturally and bountifully favored than his own,
there was yet no other where the art of living was as vexatiously
misunderstood.

Of these impressions he said nothing. His father asked him no questions,
nor did he manifest a desire for any larger sociological information
than that which he already possessed. His grandfather was too irascible
for anyone to venture with in safety through the shallows of European
refinements, and of other relatives Tristrem could not boast. Few of his
former friends were at once discoverable, and of those that he
encountered some had fallen into the rut and routine of business life,
some had married and sent in their resignations to everything but the
Humdrum, and some passed their days in an effort to catch a train.

For the moment, therefore, there was no one to whom Tristrem could
confide his earliest impressions, and in a month's time the force of
these impressions waned; the difference between New York and Paris lost
much of its accent, and in its place came a growing admiration for the
pluck and power of the nation, an expanding enthusiasm for the stretch
and splendor of the land.

During the month that followed, an incident occurred which riveted his
patriotism forever. First among the friends and acquaintances whom
Tristrem sought on his return was Royal Weldon. Outwardly the handsome,
turbulent boy had developed into an admirable specimen of manhood, he
had become one on whom the feminine eye likes to linger, and in whose
companionship men feel themselves refreshed. His face was beardless and
unmustached, and into it had come that strength which the old prints
give to Karl Martel. In the ample jaw and straight lips was a message
which a physiognomist would interpret as a promise of successful
enterprise, whether of good or evil. It was a face which a Crusader
might have possessed, or a pirate of the Spanish main. In a word, he
looked like a man who might be a hero to his valet.

Yet, despite this adventurous type of countenance, Weldon's mode of life
was seemingly conventional. Shortly after the removal from Harvard, his
father was mangled in a railway accident and left the planet and little
behind him save debts and dislike. Promptly thereupon Royal Weldon set
out to conquer the Stock Exchange. For three years he grit his teeth,
and earned fifteen dollars a week. At the end of that period he had
succeeded in two things. He had captured the confidence of a prominent
financier, and the affection of the financier's daughter. In another
twelvemonth he was partner of the one, husband of the other, and the
taxpayer of a house in Gramercy Park.

Of these vicissitudes Tristrem had been necessarily informed. During the
penury of his friend he had aided him to a not inconsiderable extent;
though afar, he had followed his career with affectionate interest, and
the day before Weldon's wedding he had caused Tiffany to send the bride
a service of silver which was mentioned by the reporters as "elegant"
and "chaste." On returning to New York, Tristrem naturally found the
door of the house in Gramercy Park wide open, and it came about that it
was in that house that his wavering patriotism was riveted.

This event, after the fashion of extraordinary occurrences, happened in
a commonplace manner. One Sunday evening he was bidden there to dine. He
had broken bread in the house many times before, but the bread breaking
had been informal. On this particular occasion, however, other guests
had been invited, and Tristrem was given to understand that he would
meet some agreeable people.

When he entered the drawing-room, he discovered that of the guests of
the evening he was the first to arrive. Even Weldon was not visible; but
Mrs. Weldon was, and, as Tristrem entered, she rose from a
straight-backed chair in which she had been seated, and greeted him with
a smile which she had copied from a chromo.

Mrs. Weldon was exceedingly pretty. She was probably twenty-two or
twenty-three years of age, and her intellect was that of a girl of
twelve. Her manner was arch and noticeably affected. She had an
enervating way of asking unnecessary questions, and of laughing as
though it hurt her. On the subject of dress she was very voluble; in
brief, she was prettiness and insipidity personified--the sort of woman
that ought to be gagged and kept in bed with a doll.

She gave Tristrem a little hand gloved with _Suède_, and asked him had
he been at church that morning. Tristrem found a seat, and replied that
he had not. "But don't you like to go?" she inquired, emphasizing each
word of the question, and ending up with her irritating laugh.

"He does," came a voice from the door and Weldon entered. "He does, but
he can resist the temptation." Then there was more conversation of the
before-dinner kind, and during its progress the door opened again, and a
young girl crossed the room.

She was dressed in a gown of canary, draped with madeira and fluttered
with lace. Her arms and neck were bare, and unjewelled. Her hair was
Cimmerian, the black of basalt that knows no shade more dark, and it was
arranged in such wise that it fell on either side of the forehead,
circling a little space above the ear, and then wound into a coil on the
neck. This arrangement was not modish, but it was becoming--the only
arrangement, in fact, that would have befitted her features, which
resembled those of the Cleopatra unearthed by Lieutenant Gorringe. Her
eyes were not oval, but round, and they were amber as those of leopards,
the yellow of living gold. The corners of her mouth drooped a little,
and the mouth itself was rather large than small. When she laughed one
could see her tongue; it was like an inner cut of water-melon, and
sometimes, when she was silent, the point of it caressed her under lip.
Her skin was of that quality which artificial light makes radiant, and
yet of which the real delicacy is only apparent by day. She just lacked
being tall, and in her face and about her bare arms and neck was the
perfume of health. She moved indolently, with a grace of her own. She
was not yet twenty, a festival of beauty in the festival of life.

At the rustle of her dress Tristrem had arisen. As the girl crossed the
room he bethought him of a garden of lilies; though why, for the life of
him, he could not have explained. He heard his name mentioned, and saw
the girl incline her head, but he made little, if any, acknowledgment;
he stood quite still, looking at her and through her, and over her and
beyond. For some moments he neither moved nor spoke. He was unconscious
even that other guests had come.

He gave his hand absently to a popular novelist, Mr. A. B. Fenwick
Chisholm-Jones by name, more familiarly known as Alphabet, whom Weldon
brought to him, and kept his eyes on the yellow bodice. A fair young
woman in pink had taken a position near to where he stood, and was
complaining to someone that she had been obliged to give up cigarettes.
And when the someone asked whether the abandonment of that pleasure was
due to parental interference, the young woman laughed shortly, and
explained that she was in training for a tennis tournament. Meanwhile
the little group in which Tristrem stood was re-enforced by a new-comer,
who attempted to condole with the novelist on the subject of an
excoriating attack that one of the critics had recently made on his
books, and suggested that he ought to do something about it. But of
condolence or advice Mr. Jones would have none.

"Bah!" he exclaimed, "if the beggar doesn't like what I write let him
try and do better. I don't care what any of them say. My books sell, and
that's the _hauptsache_. Besides, what's the use in arguing with a
newspaper? It's like talking metaphysics to a bull; the first you know,
you get a horn in your navel." And while the novelist was expressing his
disdain of all adverse criticism, and quoting Emerson to the effect that
the average reviewer had the eyes of a bug and the heart of a cat,
Tristrem discovered Mrs. Weldon's arm in his own, and presently found
himself seated next to her at table.

At the extreme end, to the right of the host, was the girl with the
amber eyes. The novelist was at her side. Evidently he had said
something amusing, for they were both laughing; he with the complacency
of one who has said a good thing, and she with the appreciation of one
accustomed to wit. But Tristrem was not permitted to watch her
undisturbed. Mrs. Weldon had a right to his attention, and she exercised
that right with the pertinacity of a fly that has to be killed to be got
rid of. "What do you think of Miss Finch?" she asked, with her stealthy
giggle.

"Her name isn't Finch," Tristrem answered, indignantly.

"Yes it is, too--Flossy Finch, her name is; as if I oughtn't to know!
Why, we were at Mrs. Garret and Mlle. de l'Entresol's school together
for years and years. What makes you say her name isn't Finch? I had you
here on purpose to meet her. Did you ever see such hair? There's only
one girl in New York----"

"It _is_ black," Tristrem assented.

"Black! Why, you must be crazy; it's orange, and that dress of hers----"

Tristrem looked down the table and saw a young lady whom he had not
noticed before. Her hair, as Mrs. Weldon had said, was indeed the color
of orange, though of an orange not over-ripe. "I thought you meant that
girl next to Royal," he said.

"That! Oh! that's Miss Raritan."

Mrs. Weldon's voice had changed. Evidently Miss Raritan did not arouse
in her the same enthusiasm as did Miss Finch. For a moment her lips lost
their chromo smile, but presently it returned again, and she piped away
anew on the subject of the charms of Flossy Finch, and after an
interlude, of which Tristrem heard not one word, she turned and
cross-questioned the man on her left.

The conversation had become very animated. From Royal's end of the table
came intermittent shrieks of laughter. The novelist was evidently in his
finest form. "Do you mean to tell me," Miss Finch asked him across the
table, "do you mean to say that you don't believe in platonic
affection?"

"I never uttered such a heresy in my life," the novelist replied. "Of
course I believe in it; I believe in it thoroughly--between husband and
wife."

At this everyone laughed again, except Tristrem, who had not heard, and
Mrs. Weldon, who had not understood. The latter, however, felt that Miss
Finch was distinguishing herself, and she turned to Tristrem anew.

"I want you to make yourself very agreeable to her," she said. "She is
just the girl for you. Don't you think so? Now promise that you will
talk to her after dinner."

"Talk metaphysics to a bull, and the first thing you know--the first
thing you know--I beg your pardon, Mrs. Weldon, I didn't mean to say
that--I don't know how the stupid phrase got in my head or why I said
it." He hesitated a moment, and seemed to think. "H'm," he went on, "I
am a trifle tired, I fancy."

Mrs. Weldon looked suspiciously at the glasses at his side, but
apparently they had not been so much as tasted; they were full to the
rim. She turned again to the guest at her left. The dinner was almost
done. She asked a few more questions, and then presently, in a general
lull, she gave a glance about her. At that signal the women-folk rose in
a body, the men rising also, to let them pass.

Tristrem had risen mechanically with the others, and when the ultimate
flounce had disappeared he sat down again and busied himself with a cup
of coffee. The other men had drawn their chairs together near him, and
over the liqueurs were discussing topics of masculine interest and
flavor. Tristrem was about to make some effort to join in the
conversation, when from beyond there came the running scale that is the
prelude to the cabaletta, _Non più mesta_, from Cenerentola. Then,
abruptly, a voice rang out as though it vibrated through labyrinths of
gold--a voice that charged the air with resonant accords--a voice
prodigious and dominating, grave and fluid; a voice that descended into
the caverns of sound, soared to the uttermost heights, scattering notes
like showers of stars, evoking visions of flesh and dazzling steel, and
in its precipitate flights and vertiginous descents disclosing
landscapes riotous with flowers, rich with perfume, sentient with
beauty, articulate with love; a voice voluptuous as an organ and
languorous as the consonance of citherns and guitars.

Tristrem, as one led in leash, moved from the table and passed into the
outer room. Miss Raritan was at the piano. Beyond, a group of women sat
hushed and mute; and still the resilient waves of song continued. One by
one the men issued noiselessly from the inner room. And then, soon, the
voice sank and died away like a chorus entering a crypt.

Miss Raritan rose from the piano. As she did so, Weldon, as it becomes a
host, hastened to her. There was a confused hum, a murmur of applause,
and above it rose a discreet and prolonged _brava_ that must have come
from the novelist. Weldon, seemingly, was urging her to sing again. The
women had taken up anew some broken thread of gossip, but the men were
at the piano, insisting too. Presently Miss Raritan resumed her seat,
and the men moved back. Her fingers rippled over the keys like rain. She
stayed them a second, and then, in a voice so low that it seemed hardly
human, and yet so insistent that it would have filled a cathedral and
scaled the dome, she began a ballad that breathed of Provence:

    "O Magali, ma bien aimée,
    Fuyons tous deux sous la ramée
    Au fond du bois silencieux...."

When she had finished, Tristrem started. The earliest notes had sent the
blood pulsing through his veins, thrilling him from finger-tips to the
end of the spine, and then a lethargy enveloped him and he ceased to
hear, and it was not until Miss Raritan stood up again from the piano
that he was conscious that he had not been listening. He had sat near
the entrance to the dining-room, and when the applause began afresh he
passed out into the hall, found his coat and hat, and left the house.

As he walked down Irving Place he fell to wondering who it was that he
had heard complain of being obliged to give up cigarettes, not on
account of parental interference but because of a tournament. Yet, after
all, what matter did it make? Certainly, he told himself, the Weldons
seemed to live very well. Royal must be making money. Mrs.
Weldon--Nanny, as Royal called her--was a nice little thing,
somewhat--h'm, somewhat--well, not quite up to Royal. She looked like
that girl in Munich, the girl that lived over the way, only Mrs. Weldon
was prettier and dressed better, much better. Du hast die schönsten
Augen. Munich wasn't a bad place, but what a hole Innsprück was. There
was that Victoria Cross fellow; whatever became of him? He drank like a
fish; it must have caught him by this time. H'm, he _would_ give me the
address of his shoemaker. I ought to have taken more from that man in
Paris. Odd that the Cenerentola was the last thing I should have heard
there. The buffo was good, so was the contralto. _She_ sings much
better. What a voice! what a voice! Now, which was the more perfect, the
voice or the girl? Let me see, which is the better fulfilled, the odor
of the lily or the lily itself? Tulips I never cared for.... That is it,
then. I wonder, though----

Tristrem had reached the house in Waverley Place. He let himself in with
a latch-key, and went to his room. There he sat a while, companioned
only by his thoughts. Before he fell asleep, his patriotism was riveted.
A land that could produce such a specimen of girlhood outvalued Europe,
Asia, and Africa combined--aye, a thousand times--and topped and
exceeded creation.




III.


Among the effects and symptoms of love, there is an involuntary action
of the mind which, since the days of Stendhal, has been known as
crystallization. When a man becomes interested in a woman, when he
pictures her not as she really is, but as she seems to him--as she ought
to be, in fact--he experiences, first, admiration; second, desire;
third, hope; and, behold, love or its counterfeit is born.

This crystallization affects the individual according to his nature. If
that nature be inexperienced, unworn--in a word, if it be virginal, its
earliest effects are those of a malady. On the other hand, if the nature
on which it operates has received the baptism of fire, its effect is
that of a tonic. To the one it is a fever, to the other a bugle-call. In
the first instance, admiration is pursued by self-depreciation, desire
is pinioned before conventional obstacles, and hope falters beneath a
weight of doubt. In the second, admiration, desire, and hope are fused
into one sentiment, the charm of the chase, the delight of the
prospective quarry. As an example, there is Werther, and there is also
Don Juan.

Now Tristrem Varick had never known a mother, sisters he had none, the
feminine had been absent from his life, but in his nature there was an
untarnishable refinement. During his student-days at Harvard, and
throughout his residence abroad, there had been nothing of that which
the French have agreed to denominate as _bonnes fortunes_. Such things
may have been in his path, waiting only to be gathered, but, in that
case, certain it is that he had passed them by unheeded. To use the
figurative phrase, he was incapable of stretching his hand to any woman
who had not the power of awakening a lasting affection; and during his
wanderings, and despite, too, the example and easy morals of his
comrades, no such woman having crossed his horizon, he had been innocent
of even the most fugitive liaison. Nevertheless, the morning after the
dinner in Gramercy Park, crystallization had done its work. He awoke
with the surprise and wonder of an inexperienced sensation; he awoke
with the consciousness of being in love, wholly, turbulently, absurdly
in love with a girl to whom he had not addressed a single word.

The general opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, there are, after
all, very few people who know what love really is. And among those that
know, fewer there are that tell. A lexicographer, deservedly forgotten,
has defined it as an exchange of fancies, the contact of two epiderms.
Another, wiser if less epigrammatic, announced it as a something that no
one knew what, coming no one knew whence, and ending no one knew how.
But in whatever fashion it may be described, one thing is certain, it
has been largely over-rated.

In the case of Tristrem Varick it appeared in its most perfect form. The
superlative is used advisedly. Love has a hundred aspects, a thousand
toilets. It may come at first sight, in which event, if it be enduring,
it is, as Balzac has put it, a resultant of that prescience which is
known as second sight. Or, it may come of the gradual fusion of two
natures. It may come of propinquity, of curiosity, of sympathy, of
hatred. It may come of the tremors of adolescence, the mutual attraction
of one sex for the other; and, again, it may come of natural selection,
of the discernment which leads a man through mazes of women to one in
particular, to the woman who to him is the one woman in the world and
manacles him at her feet. If Tristrem Varick had not met Miss Raritan,
it is more than probable that he never would have known the meaning of
the word.

When the first surprise at the discovery waned, delight took its place.
He saw her amber eyes, he recalled as she had crossed the room the
indolent undulation of her hips, he breathed the atmosphere of health
which she exhaled, and in his ears her voice still rang. The _Non più
mesta_ of her song seemed almost a promise, and the _O Magali_ an
invitation. He recalled the movement of her lips, and fell to wondering
what her name might be. At first he fancied that it might be Stella; but
that, for some occult reason which only a lover would understand, he
abandoned for Thyra, a name which pleasured him awhile and which he
repeated aloud until it became sonorous as were it set in titles. But
presently some defect presented itself, it sounded less apt, more suited
to a blue-eyed daughter of a viking than to one so _brune_ as she.
Decidedly, Thyra did not suit her. And yet her name might be something
utterly commonplace, such as Fanny, for instance, or Agnes, or Gertrude.
But that was a possibility which he declined to entertain. When a girl
is baptized, the mother, in choosing the name, should, he told himself,
think of the lover who will one day pronounce it. And what had her
mother chosen? It would be forethought indeed if she had selected Undine
or even Iseult; but what mother was ever clairvoyant enough for that?

He thought this over awhile and was about to give the query up, when
suddenly, without an effort on his part, he was visited by a name that
announced her as the perfume announces the rose, a name that pictured
and painted her, a name that suited her as did her gown of canary, a
name that crowned her beauty and explained the melancholy of her lips.
"It is Madeleine," he said, "it can be nothing else."

And into the syllables he threw the waving inflection of the French.

"It is Madeleine," he continued, "and when I see her I will tell in what
way I divined it."

The possibility that she might be indifferent to such homage did not,
for the moment, occur to him. He was loitering in the enchanted gardens
of the imagination, which have been visited by us all. It was the
improbable that fluttered his pulse.

Hitherto the life of Tristrem Varick had been that of a dilettante.
There had been no reason why he should work. His education had unfitted
him for labor, and his tastes, if artistic, were not sufficiently
pronounced to act as incentives. He handled the brush well enough to
know that he could never be a painter; he had a natural understanding of
music, its value was clear to him, yet its composition was barred. The
one talent that he possessed--a talent that grows rarer with the
days--was that of appreciation, he could admire the masterpieces of
others, but creation was not his. A few centuries ago he would have made
an admirable knight-errant. In a material age like our own, his _raison
a'être_ was not obvious. In a word, he was just such an one as his
father had intended he should be, one whose normal condition was that of
chronic pluperfect subjunctive, and who, if thrown on his own resources,
would be helpless indeed.

In some dim way he had been conscious of this before, and hitherto he
had accepted it, as he had accepted his father's attitude, as one
accepts the inevitable, and put it aside again as something against
which, like death, or like life, it is useless to rebel. After all,
there was nothing particularly dreadful about it. An inability to be
Somebody was not a matter of which the District Attorney is obliged to
take cognizance. At least he need do no harm, and he would have wealth
enough to do much good. It was in thoughts like these that hitherto he
had found consolation. But on this particular morning he looked for them
anew, and the search was fruitless. Not one of the old consolations
disclosed the slightest worth. He stood before himself naked in his
nothingness. The true knowledge of his incompetence had never come home
to him before--but now it closed round him in serried arguments, and in
the closing shut out all hope of her. Who was he, indeed, to pretend to
such a girl?

To win her, he told himself, one must needs be a conqueror, one who has
coped with dangers and could flaunt new triumphs as his lady's due. Some
soldier bearing a marshal's baton back from war, some hero that had
liberated an empire or stolen a republic for himself, some prince of
literature or satrap of song, someone, in fact, who, booted and spurred,
had entered the Temple of Fame, and claimed the dome as his. But he!
What had he to offer? His name, however historical and respected, was an
accident of birth. Of the wealth which he would one day possess he had
not earned a groat. And, were it lost, the quadrature of the circle
would not be more difficult than its restoration. And yet, and
yet--though any man she could meet might be better and wiser and
stronger than he, not one would care for her more. At least there was
something in that, a tangible value, if ever there were one. There was
every reason why she should turn her back, and that one reason, and that
one only, why she should not. But that one reason, he told himself, was
a force in itself. The resuscitation of hope was so sudden that the
blood mounted to his temples and pulsated through his veins.

He left the bed in which his meditations had been passed. "They say
everything comes to him who waits," he muttered, and then proceeded to
dress. He took a tub and got himself, absent-mindedly, into a morning
suit. "I don't believe it," he exclaimed, at last, "the world belongs to
the impatient, and I am impatient of her."

Tristrem was in no sense a diplomatist. In his ways there was a candor
that was as unusual as it is delightful; yet such is the power of love
that, in its first assault, the victim is transformed. The miser turns
prodigal, the coward brave, the genius becomes a simpleton, and in the
simpleton there awakes a Machiavelli. Tristrem passed a forenoon in
trying to unravel as cruel a problem as has ever been given a lover to
solve--how, in a city like New York, to meet a girl of whom he knew
absolutely nothing, and who was probably unaware of his own existence.
He might have waited, it is true--chance holds many an odd trick--but he
had decided to be impatient, and in his impatience he went to Gramercy
Park and drank tea there, not once, but four afternoons in succession,
an excess of civility which surprised Mrs. Weldon not a little.

That he should make an early visit of digestion was quite in the order
of things, but when that visit was repeated again and again, Mrs.
Weldon, with a commingling of complacency and alarm, told herself that,
in her quality of married woman, such persistence should be discouraged.
But the opportunity for such discouragement did not present itself, or
rather, when it did the need of discouragement had passed. Tristrem
drank tea with her several times, and then disappeared abruptly. "He
must have known it was hopeless," she reflected, when a week went by
unmarked by further enterprise on his part. And then, the intended
discouragement notwithstanding, she felt vaguely vexed.

In the tea-drinking Tristrem's object, if not apparent to Mrs. Weldon,
was perfectly clear to himself. He desired to learn something of Miss
Raritan, and he knew, if the tea-drinking was continued with sufficient
endurance, not only would he acquire, from a talkative lady like his
hostess, information of the amplest kind, which after all was secondary,
but that in the course of a week the girl herself must put in an
appearance. A dinner call, if not obligatory to him, was obligatory to
her, and on that obligation he counted.

To those who agree to be bound by what the Western press calls
etiquette, there is nothing more inexorable than a social debt. A woman
may contest her mantua-maker's bill with impunity, her antenuptial
promises may go to protest and she remain unestopped; but let her leave
a dinner-call overdue and unpaid, then is she shameless indeed. In this
code Tristrem was necessarily learned. On returning to Fifth Avenue he
had marvelled somewhat at noting that laws which applied to one sex did
not always extend to the other, that civility was not exacted of men,
that politeness was relegated to the tape-counter and out of place in a
drawing-room; in a word, that it was not good form to be courteous, and
not ill-bred to be rude.

While the tea-drinking was in progress he managed without much
difficulty to get Mrs. Weldon on the desired topic. There were spacious
digressions in her information and abrupt excursions into irrelevant
matter, and there were also interruptions by other visitors, and the
consequent and tedious exchange of platitude and small-talk. But after
the fourth visit Tristrem found himself in possession of a store of
knowledge, the sum and substance of which amounted to this: Miss Raritan
lived with her mother in the shady part of the Thirties, near Madison
Avenue. Her father was dead. It had been rumored, but with what truth
Mrs. Weldon was not prepared to affirm, that the girl had some intention
of appearing on the lyric stage, which, if she carried out, would of
course be the end of her socially. She had been very much ruin after on
account of her voice, and at the Wainwarings the President had said that
he had never heard anything like it, and asked her to come to Washington
and be present at one of the diplomatic dinners. Personally Mrs. Weldon
knew her very slightly, but she intimated that, inasmuch as the
government had once sent Raritan _père_ abroad as minister--in order
probably to be rid of him--his daughter was inclined to look down on
those whose fathers held less exalted positions--on Mrs. Weldon herself,
for example.

It was with this little store of information that Tristrem left her on
the Thursday succeeding the dinner. It was meagre indeed, and yet ample
enough to afford him food for reflection. During the gleaning many
people had come and gone, but of Miss Raritan he had as yet seen
nothing. The next afternoon, however, as he was about to ascend Mrs.
Weldon's stoop for the fifth time in five days, the door opened and the
girl on whom his thoughts were centred was before him.

Throughout the week he had lived in the expectation of meeting her, it
was the one thing that had brought zest to the day and dreams to the
night; there was even a little speech which he had rehearsed, but for
the moment he was dumb. He plucked absently at his cuff, to the palms of
his hands there came a sudden moisture. In the vestibule above, a
servant stood waiting for Miss Raritan to reach the pavement before
closing the door, and abruptly, from a barrel-organ at the corner, a
waltz was thrown out in jolts.

The girl descended the steps before Tristrem was able to master his
emotion.

"Miss Raritan," he began, hastily, "I don't suppose you remember me. I
am Mr. Varick. I heard you sing the other night. I have come here every
day since in the hope of----; you see, I wanted to ask if I might not
have the privilege of hearing you sing again?"

"If you consider it a privilege, certainly. On Sunday evening, though, I
thought you seemed rather bored." She made this answer very graciously,
with her head held like a bird's, a trifle to one side.

Tristrem gazed at her in a manner that would have mollified a tigress.
"I was not bored. I had never heard anyone sing before."

"Yet your friend, Mr. Weldon, tells me that you are very fond of music."

"That is exactly what I mean."

At this speech of his she looked at him, musingly. "I wish I deserved
that," she said.

Tristrem began again with new courage. "It is like anything else, I
fancy. I doubt if anyone, ignorant of difficulties overcome, ever
appreciates a masterpiece. A sonnet, if perfect, is only perfect to a
sonneteer. The gallery may applaud a drama, it is the playwright who
judges it at its worth. It is the sculptor that appreciates a
Canova----"

They had reached the corner where the barrel-organ was in ambush. A
woman dragging a child with Italy and dirt in its face followed them,
her hand outstretched. Tristrem had an artful way of being rid of a
beggar, and after the fumble of a moment he gave her some coin.

"--And the artist who appreciates rags," added Miss Raritan.

"Perhaps. I am not fond of rags myself, but I have often caught myself
envying the simplicity which they sometimes conceal. That woman, now,
she may be as pleased with my little gift as I am to be walking with
you."

"I thought it was my voice you liked," Miss Raritan answered, demurely.

Tristrem experienced a mental start. A suspicion entered his mind which
he chased indignantly. There was about the girl an aroma that was
incompatible with coquetry.

"You would not, I am sure, have me think of you in the _vox et præterea
nihil_ style," he replied. "To be candid, I thought that very matter
over the other night." He hesitated, as though waiting for some
question, but she did not so much as look at him, and he continued
unassisted. "I thought of a flower and its perfume, I wondered which was
the more admirable, and--and--I decided that I did not care for tulips."

"But that you did care for me, I suppose?"

"Yes, I decided that."

Miss Raritan threw back her head with a movement indicative of
impatience.

"I didn't mean to tell you," he added--"that is, not yet."

They had crossed Broadway and were entering Fifth Avenue. There the
stream of carriages kept them a moment on the curb.

"I hope," Tristrem began again, "I hope you are not vexed."

"Vexed at what? No, I am not vexed. I am tired; every other man I
meet--There, we can cross now. Besides, I am married. Don't get run
over. I am going in that shop."

"You are _not_ married!"

"Yes, I am; if I were a Harvard graduate I would say to Euterpe. As it
is, Scales is more definite." She had led him to the door of a milliner,
a portal which Tristrem knew was closed to him. "If you care to come and
see me," she added, by way of _congé_, "my husband will probably be at
home." And with that she opened the door and passed into the shop.

"I can imagine a husband," thought Tristrem, with a glimmer of that
spirit of belated repartee which Thackeray called cab-wit, the
brilliancy which comes to us when we are going home, "I can imagine a
husband whose greatest merit is his wife."




IV.


The fact that few days elapsed before Tristrem Varick availed himself of
Miss Raritan's invitation, and that thereafter he continued to avail
himself of it with frequence and constancy, should surprise no one.
During the earliest of these visits he met Miss Raritan's mother, and
was unaccountably annoyed when he heard that lady address her daughter
as Viola. He had been so sure that her baptismal name was Madeleine that
the one by which he found she was called sounded false as an alias, and
continued so to sound until he accustomed himself to the syllables and
ended by preferring it to the Madeleine of his fancy. This, however, by
the way. Mrs. Raritan was a woman who, in her youth, must have been very
beautiful, and traces of that beauty she still preserved. When she spoke
her voice endeared her to you, and in her manner there was that
something which made you feel that she might be calumniated, as good
women often are, but yet that she could never be the subject of gossip.
She did not seem resolute, but she did seem warm of heart, and Tristrem
felt at ease with her at once.

Of her he saw at first but little. In a city like New York it is
difficult for anyone to become suddenly intimate in a household, however
cordial and well-intentioned that household may be. And during those
hours of the winter days when Miss Raritan was at home it was seldom
that her mother was visible. But it was not long before Tristrem became
an occasional guest at dinner, and it was in the process of breaking
bread that a semblance of intimacy was established. And at last, when
winter had gone and the green afternoons opposed the dusk, Tristrem now
and then would drop in of an evening, and in the absence of Miss Raritan
pass an hour with her mother. Truly she was not the rose, but did she
not dwell at her side?

Meanwhile, Miss Raritan's attitude differed but little from the one
which she had first adopted. She treated Tristrem with exasperating
familiarity, and kept him at arm's length. She declined to see him when
the seeing would have been easy, and summoned him when the summons was
least to be expected. He was useful to her as a piece of furniture, and
she utilized him as such. In the matter of flowers and theatres he was a
convenience. And at routs and assemblies the attention of an heir
apparent to seven million was a homage and a tribute which Miss Raritan
saw no reason to forego.

In this Tristrem had no one but himself to blame. He had been, and was,
almost canine in his demeanor to her. She saw it, knew it, felt it, and
treated him accordingly. And he, with the cowardice of love, made little
effort at revolt. Now and then he protested to Mrs. Raritan, to whom he
had made no secret of his admiration for her daughter, and who consoled
him as best she might; but that was all. And so the winter passed and
the green afternoons turned sultry, and Tristrem was not a step further
advanced than on the day when he had left the girl at the milliner's. On
the infrequent occasions when he had ventured to say some word of that
which was nearest his heart, she had listened with tantalizing
composure, and when he had paused for encouragement or rebuke, she would
make a remark of such inappositeness that anyone else would have planted
her there and gone. But Tristrem was none other than himself; his nature
commanded and he obeyed.

It so happened that one May morning a note was brought him, in which
Miss Raritan said that her mother and herself were to leave in a day or
two for the country, and could he not get her something to read on the
way. Tristrem passed an hour selecting, with infinite and affectionate
care, a small bundle of foreign literature. In the package he found room
for Balzac's "Pierrette" and the "Curé de Tours," one of Mme. Craven's
stupidities, a volume of platitude in rhyme by François Coppée, a copy
of De Amicis' futile wanderings in Spain--a few samples, in fact, of the
_pueris virginibusque_ school. And that evening, with the bundle under
his arm, he sought Miss Raritan.

The girl glanced at the titles and put the books aside. "When we get in
order at Narragansett," she said, "I wish you would come up."

Had she kissed him, Tristrem could not have revelled more. "There are
any number of hotels," she added, by way of douche.

"Certainly, if you wish it, but--but----"

"Well, but what?"

"I don't know. You see--well, it's this way: You know that I love you,
and you know also that you care for me as for the snows of yester-year.
There is no reason why you should do otherwise. I don't mean to
complain. If I am unable to make you care, the fault is mine. I did
think--h'm--no matter. What I wanted to say is this: there is no reason
why you should care, and yet----. See here; take two slips of paper,
write on one, I will marry you, and, on the other, Put a bullet through
your head, and let me draw. I would take the chance so gladly. But that
chance, of course, you will not give. Why should you, after all? Why
should I give everything I own to the first beggar I meet? But why
should you have any other feeling for me than that which you have? And
yet, sometimes I think you don't understand. Any man you meet could be
more attractive than I, and very easy he would find it to be so; but no
one could care for you more--no one----"

Miss Raritan was sitting opposite to him, her feet crossed, her head
thrown back, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. One arm lay along the back
of the lounge which she occupied, the other was pendant at her side. And
while he still addressed her, she arose with the indolence of a panther,
crossed the room, picked up a miniature from a table, eyed it as though
she had never seen it before and did not particularly care to see it
again, and then, seating herself at the piano, she attacked the _Il
segreto per esser felice_, the brindisi from "Lucrezia Borgia."

In the wonder of her voice Tristrem forgot the discourtesy of the
action. He listened devoutly. And, as he listened, each note was an
electric shock. _Il segreto per esser felice_, indeed! The secret of
happiness was one which she alone of all others in the world could
impart. And, as the measures of the song rose and fell, they brought him
a transient exhilaration like to that which comes of champagne, dowering
him with factitious force wherewith to strive anew. And so it happened
that, when the ultimate note had rung out and the girl's fingers
loitered on the keys, he went over to her with a face so eloquent that
she needed but a glance at it to know what he was seeking to say.

With a gesture coercive as a bit, she lifted one hand from the keys and
stayed his lips. Then, she stood up and faced him. "Tristrem," she
began, "when I first saw you I told you that I was married to my art.
And in an art such as mine there is no divorce. It may be that I shall
go on the stage. After all, why should I not? Is society so alluring
that I should sacrifice for it that which is to me infinitely
preferable? If I have not done so already it is because of my mother.
But should I decide to do so, there are years of study before me yet. In
which case I could not marry, that is self-evident, not only because I
would not marry a man who would suffer me to sing in public--don't
interrupt--but also because--well, you told me that you understood the
possibilities of the human voice, and you must know what the result
would be. But even independent of that, you said a moment ago that I did
not love you. Well, I don't. I don't love you. Tristrem, listen to me. I
don't love you as you would have me. I wish I did. But I like you. I
like you as I can like few other men. Tristrem, except my mother, I have
not a friend in the world. Women never care for me, and men--well, save
in the case of yourself, when their friendship has been worth the
having, it belonged to someone else. Give me yours."

"It will be hard, very hard."

Miss Raritan moved from where she had been standing and glanced at the
clock. "You must go now," she said, "but promise that you will try."

She held her hand to him, and Tristrem raised it to his lips and kissed
the wrist. "You might as well ask me to increase my stature," he
answered. And presently he dropped the hand which he held and left the
house.

It was a perfect night. The moon hung like a yellow feather in the sky,
and in the air was a balm that might have come from fields of tamaris
and of thyme. The street itself was quiet, and as Tristrem walked on,
something of the enchantment of the hour fell upon him. On leaving Miss
Raritan, he had been irritated at himself. It seemed to him that when
with her he was at his worst; that he stood before her dumb for love,
awkward, embarrassed, and ineffectual of speech. It seemed to him that
he lacked the tact of other men, and that, could she see him as he
really was when unemotionalized by her presence, if the eloquence which
came to him in solitude would visit him once at her side, if he could
plead to her with the fervor with which he addressed the walls, full
surely her answer would be other. She would make no proffer then of
friendship, or if she did, it would be of that friendship which is born
of love, and is better than love itself. But as he walked on the
enchantment of the night encircled him. He declined to accept her reply;
he told himself that in his eagerness he had been abrupt; that a girl
who was worth the winning was slow of capture; that he had expected
months to give him what only years could afford, and that Time, in which
all things unroll, might yet hold this gift for him. He resolved to put
his impatience aside like an unbecoming coat. He would pretend to be but
a friend. As a friend he would be privileged to see her, and then, some
day the force and persistence of his affection would do the rest. He
smiled at his own cunning. It was puerile as a jack-straw, but it seemed
shrewdness itself to him. Yes, that was the way. He had done wrong; he
had unmasked his batteries too soon. And such batteries! But no matter,
of his patience he was now assured. On the morrow he would go to her and
begin the campaign anew.

He had reached the corner and was on the point of turning down the
avenue, when a hansom rattled up and wheeled so suddenly into the street
through which he had come, that he stepped back a little to let it pass.
As he did so he looked in at the fare. The cab was beyond him in a
second, but in the momentary glimpse which he caught of the occupant, he
recognized Royal Weldon. And as he continued his way, he wondered where
Royal Weldon could be going.

The following evening he went to dine at the Athenæum Club. The house in
Waverley Place affected him as might an empty bier in a tomb. The bread
that he broke there choked him. His father was as congenial as a
spectre. He only appeared when dinner was announced, and after he had
seated himself at the table he asked grace of God in a low, determined
fashion, and that was the end of the conversation. Tristrem remembered
that in the infrequent vacations of his school and college days, that
was the way it always had been, and being tolerably convinced that that
was the way it always would be, he preferred, when not expected
elsewhere, to dine at the club.

On entering the Athenæum on this particular evening, he put his hat and
coat in the vestiary and was about to order dinner, when he was accosted
by Alphabet Jones.

"I say, Varick," the novelist exclaimed--(during the winter they had
seen much of each other), "do you know who was the originator of the
cloak-room? Of course you don't--I'll tell you; who do you suppose now?
Give it up? Mrs. Potiphar! How's that? Good enough for Theodore Hook,
eh? Let's dine together, and I'll tell you some more."

"Let's dine together" was a formula which Mr. Jones had adopted.
Literally, it meant, I'll order and you pay. Tristrem was aware in what
light the invitation should be viewed, he had heard it before; but,
though the novelist was of the genus _spongia_, he was seldom tiresome,
often entertaining, and moreover, Tristrem was one who would rather pay
than not. As there were few of that category in the club, Mr. Jones made
a special prey of him, and on this particular evening, when the ordering
had been done and the dinner announced, he led him in triumph to the
lift.

As they were about to step in, Weldon stepped out. He seemed hurried and
would have passed on with a nod, but Tristrem caught him by the arm. Of
late he had seen little of him, and it had seemed to Tristrem that the
fault, if fault there were, must be his own.

"I caught a glimpse of you last night, didn't I, Royal?" he asked.

Weldon raised his eyebrows for all response. Evidently he was not in a
conversational mood. But at once an idea seemed to strike him. "I dare
say," he answered, "I roam about now and then like anyone else. By the
way, where are you going to-night? Why not look in on my wife? She says
you neglect her."

"I would like it, Royal, but the fact is I am going to make a call."

"In Thirty-ninth Street?"

Tristrem looked at him much as a yokel at a fair might look at a wizard.
He was so astonished at Weldon's prescience that he merely nodded.

"You can save yourself the trouble then--I happened to meet Miss Raritan
this afternoon. She is dining at the Wainwarings. Look in at Gramercy
Park." And with that he turned on his heel and disappeared into the
smoking-room.

"Didn't I hear Weldon mention Miss Raritan?" Jones asked, when he and
Tristrem had finished the roast. "There's a girl I'd like to put in a
book. She has hell in her eyes and heaven in her voice. What a heroine
she would make!" he exclaimed, enthusiastically; and then in a complete
change of key, in a tone that was pregnant with suggestion, he added,
"and what a wife!"

"I don't understand you," said Tristrem, in a manner which, for him, was
defiant.

Whether or not Jones was a good sailor is a matter of small moment. In
any event he tacked at once.

"Bah! I am speaking in the first person. I don't believe in matrimony
myself, I am too poor. And besides, I never heard of but one happy
marriage, and that was between a blind man and a deaf-mute. Though even
then it must have been difficult to know what the woman thought. Now, in
regard to Miss Raritan, half the men in the city are after her, _pour le
bon motif, s'entend_; but when a girl has had the _dessus du panier_ at
her feet, no fellow can afford to ask her to take a promenade with him
down the aisle of Grace Church, unless he has the Chemical Bank in one
pocket and the United States Trust Company in the other. _Et avec ça!_"
And Jones waved his head as though not over-sure that the coffers of
those institutions would suffice.

"I don't see what that has to do with it," Tristrem indignantly
interjected.

"Isn't that odd now?" was Jones' sarcastic reply. "Dr. Holmes says that
no fellow can be a thorough-going swell unless he has three generations
in oil. And mind you, daguerreotypes won't do. There are any number of
your ancestors strung along the walls of the Historical Society, and how
many more you may have in that crypt of yours in Waverley Place, heaven
only knows. Imprimis, if you accept Dr. Holmes as an authority, you are
a thorough-going swell. In the second place, you look like a Greek
shepherd. Third, you are the biggest catch in polite society. Certainly
it's odd that with such possibilities you should see no reason for not
marrying a girl who will want higher-stepping horses than Elisha's, and
who, while there is a bandit of a dressmaker in Paris, will decline to
imitate the lilies of the field. Certainly----"

"I never said anything about it, I never said anything about marrying or
not marrying----"

"Oh, didn't you? I thought you did." And Jones leaned back in his chair
and summoned a waiter with an upward movement of the chin. "Bring
another pint of this, will you."

"I think I won't take anything more," said Tristrem, rising from the
table as he spoke. "It's hot in here. I may see you down-stairs." And
with that he left the room.

Mr. Alphabet Jones looked after him a second and nodded sagaciously to
himself. "Another man overboard," he muttered, as he toyed with his
empty glass. "_Ah! jeunesse, jeunesse!_"




V.


Tristrem descended the stair and hesitated a moment at the door of the
smoking-room. Near-by, at a small table, two men were drinking brandy.
He caught a fragment of their speech: it was about a woman. Beyond,
another group was listening to that story of the eternal feminine which
is everlastingly the same. Within, the air was lifeless and heavy with
the odor of cigars, but in the hall there came through the wide portals
of the entrance the irresistible breath of a night in May.

Tristrem turned and presently sauntered aimlessly out of the club and up
the avenue. Before him, a man was loitering with a girl; his arm was in
hers, and he was whispering in her ear. A cab passed, bearing a couple
that sat waist-encircled devouring each other with insatiate eyes. And
at Twenty-third Street, a few shop-girls, young and very pretty, that
were laughing conspicuously together, were joined by some clerks, with
whom they paired off and disappeared. At the corner, through the
intersecting thoroughfares came couple after couple, silent for the most
part, as though oppressed by the invitations of the night. Beyond, in
the shadows of the Square, the benches were filled with youths and
maidens, who sat hand-in-hand, oblivious to the crowd that circled in
indolent coils about them. The moon had not yet risen, but a leash of
stars that night had loosed glowed and trembled with desire. The air was
sentient with murmurs, redolent with promise. The avenues and the
adjacent streets seemed to have forgotten their toil and to swoon
unhushed in the bewitchments of a dream of love.

Tristrem found himself straying through its mazes and convolutions.
Whichever way he turned there was some monition of its presence. From a
street-car which had stayed his passage he saw the conductor blow a kiss
to a hurrying form, and through an open window of Delmonico's he saw a
girl with summer in her eyes reach across the table at which she sat and
give her companion's hand an abrupt yet deliberate caress.

Tristrem continued his way, oppressed. He was beset by an insidious
duscholia. He felt as one does who witnesses a festival in which there
is no part for him. The town reeked with love as a brewery reeks with
beer. The stars, the air, the very pavements told of it. It was
omnipresent, and yet there was none for him.

He tried to put it from him and think of other things. Of Jones, for
instance. Why had he spoken of Viola? And then, in the flight of fancies
which surged through his mind, there was one that he stayed and
detained. It was that he must see her again before she left town. He
looked at his watch: it lacked twenty minutes to ten, and on the impulse
of the moment he hailed a passing 'bus. It was inexplicable to him that
the night before she should have let him go without a word as to her
movements. It seemed to be understood that he was to come again to wish
her a pleasant journey. And when was he to come if not that very
evening? Surely at the time she had forgotten this engagement with the
Wainwarings, and some note had been left for him at the door. And if no
note had been left, then why should he not ask for her mother or wait
till she returned? A bell rang sharply through the vehicle and aroused
him from his reverie. He glanced up, and saw the driver eyeing him
through the machicoulis of glass. It was the fare he wanted, and as
Tristrem deposited it in the box he noticed that the familiar street was
reached.

In a few moments he was at the house. On the stoop a servant was
occupied with the mat.

"Is, eh, did----"

"Yes, sir," the man answered, promptly. "Miss Raritan is in the parlor."

In the surprise at the unexpected, Tristrem left his hat and coat, and
pushing aside the portière, he entered the room unannounced. At first he
fancied that the servant had been mistaken. Miss Raritan was not at her
accustomed place, and he stood at the door-way gazing about in
uncertainty. But in an instant, echoing from the room beyond, he caught
the sound of her voice; yet in the voice was a tone which he had never
heard before--a tone of smothered anger that carried with it the accent
of hate.

Moved by unconscious springs, he left the door-way and looked into the
adjoining room. A man whom at first he did not recognize was standing by
a lounge from which he had presumably arisen. And before him, with both
her small hands clinched and pendent, and in her exquisite face an
expression of relentless indignation, stood Miss Raritan. Another might
have thought them rehearsing a tableau for some theatricals of the
melodramatic order, but not Tristrem. He felt vaguely alarmed: there
came to him that premonition without which no misfortune ever occurs;
and suddenly the alarm changed to bewilderment. The man had turned: it
was Royal Weldon. Tristrem could not credit his senses. He raised his
hand to his head: it did not seem possible that a felon could have told
a more wanton lie than he had been told but little over an hour before;
and yet the teller of that lie was his nearest friend. And still he did
not understand; surely there was some mistake. He would have spoken, but
Weldon crossed the room to where he stood, and with set teeth and
contracted muscles fronted him a second's space, and into his eyes he
looked a defiance that was the more hideous in that it was mute. Then,
with a gesture that almost tore the portière from its rings, he passed
out into the hall and let the curtain fall behind him.

As he passed on Tristrem turned with the obedience of a subject under
the influence of a mesmerist; and when the curtain fell again he started
as subjects do when they awake from their trance.

The fairest, truest, and best may be stricken in the flush of health;
yet after the grave has opened and closed again does not memory still
subsist, and to the mourner may not the old dreams return? However acute
the grief may be, is it not often better to know that affection is safe
in the keeping of the dead than to feel it at the mercy of the living?
We may prate as we will, but there are many things less endurable than
the funeral of the best-beloved. Death is by no means the worst that can
come. Whoso discovers that affection reposed has been given to an
illusory representation; to one not as he is, but as fancy pictured him;
to a trickster that has cheated the heart--in fact, to a phantom that
has no real existence outside of the imagination, must experience a
sinking more sickening than any corpse can convey. At the moment, the
crack of doom that is to herald an eternal silence cannot more appal.

Tristrem still stood gazing at the portière through which Weldon had
disappeared. He heard the front door close, and the sound of feet on the
pavement. And presently he was back at St. Paul's, hurrying from the
Upper School to intercede with the master. It was bitterly cold that
morning, but in the afternoon the weather had moderated, and they had
both gone to skate. And then the day he first came. He remembered his
good looks, his patronizing, precocious ways; everything, even to the
shirt he wore--blue, striped with white--and the watch with the crest
and the motto _Well done, Weldon_. No, it was ill done, Weldon, and the
lie was ignoble. And why had he told it? Their friendship, seemingly,
had been so stanch, so unmarred by disagreement, that this lie was as a
dash of blood on a white wall--an ineffaceable stain.

If there are years that count double, there are moments in which the
hour-glass is transfixed. The entire scene, from Tristrem's entrance to
Weldon's departure, was compassed in less than a minute, yet during that
fragment of time there had been enacted a drama in epitome--a drama
humdrum and ordinary indeed, but in which Tristrem found himself bidding
farewell to one whom he had never known.

He was broken in spirit, overwhelmed by the suddenness of the disaster,
and presently, as though in search of sympathy, he turned to Miss
Raritan. The girl had thrown herself in a chair, and sat, her face
hidden in her hands. As Tristrem approached her she looked up. Her
cheeks were blanched.

"He told me you were at the Wainwaring's," Tristrem began. "I don't
see," he added, after a moment--"I don't understand why he should have
done so. He knew you were here, yet he said----"

"Did you hear what he said to me?"

Tristrem for all response shook his head wonderingly.

The girl's cheeks from white had turned flame.

"He has not been to you the friend you think," she said, and raising her
arm to her face, she made a gesture as though to brush from her some
distasteful thing.

"But what has he done? What did he say?"

"Don't ask me. Don't mention him to me." She buried her face again in
her hands and was silent.

Tristrem turned uneasily and walked into the other room, and then back
again to where she sat; but still she hid her face and was silent. And
Tristrem left her and continued his walk, this time to the dining-room
and then back to the parlor which he had first entered. And after a
while Miss Raritan stood up from her seat and as though impelled by the
nervousness of her companion, she, too, began to pace the rooms, but in
the contrary direction to that which Tristrem had chosen. At last she
stopped, and when Tristrem approached her she beckoned him to her side.

"What did you say to me last night?" she asked.

"What did I say? I said--you asked me--I said it would be difficult."

"Do you think so still?"

"Always."

"Tristrem, I will be your wife."

A Cimmerian led out of darkness into sudden light could not marvel more
at multicolored vistas than did Tristrem, at this promise. Truly they
are most hopeless who have hoped the most. And Tristrem, as he paced the
rooms, had told himself it was done. His hopes had scattered before him
like last year's leaves. He had groped in shadows and had been conscious
only of a blind alley, with a dead wall, somewhere, near at hand. But
now, abruptly, the shadows had gone, the blind alley had changed into a
radiant avenue, the dead wall had parted like a curtain, and beyond was
a new horizon, gold-barred and blue, and landscapes of asphodels and
beckoning palms. He was as one who, overtaken by sleep on the banks of
the Styx, awakes in Arcadia.

His face was so eloquent with the bewitchments through which he roamed
that, for the first time that evening, Miss Raritan smiled. She raised a
finger warningly.

"Now, Tristrem, if you say anything ridiculous I will take it back."

But the warning was needless. Tristrem caught the finger, and kissed her
hand with old-fashioned grace.

"Viola," he said, at last, "I thank you. I do not know what I can do to
show how I appreciate this gift of gifts. But yet, if it is anything, if
it can bring any happiness to a girl to know that she fills a heart to
fulfilment itself, that she dwells in thought as the substance of
thought, that she animates each fibre of another's being, that she
enriches a life with living springs, and feels that it will be never
otherwise, then you will be happy, for so you will always be to me."

The speech, if pardonably incoherent, was not awkwardly made, and it was
delivered with a seriousness that befitted the occasion. In a tone as
serious as his own, she answered:

"I will be true to you, Tristrem." That was all. But she looked in his
face as she spoke.

They had been standing, but now they found seats near to each other.
Tristrem would not release her hand, and she let it lie unrebellious in
his own. And in this fashion they sat and mapped the chartless future.
Had Tristrem been allowed his way the marriage would have been an
immediate one. But to this, of course, Miss Raritan would not listen.

"Not before November," she said, with becoming decision.

"Why, that is five months off!"

"And months are short, and then----"

"But, Viola, think! Five months! It is a kalpa of time. And besides," he
added, with the cogent egotism of an accepted lover, "what shall I do
with myself in the meantime?"

"If you are good you may come to the Pier, and there we will talk
edelweiss and myosotis, as all engaged people do." She said this so
prettily that the sarcasm, if sarcasm there were, was lost.

To this programme Tristrem was obliged to subscribe.

"Well, then, afterward we will go abroad."

"Don't you like this country?" the girl asked, all the stars and stripes
fluttering in her voice, and in a tone which one might use in reciting,
"Breathes there the man, with soul so dead?"

"I think," he answered, apologetically, "that I do like this country. It
is a great country. But New York is not a great city, at least not to my
thinking. Collectively it is great, I admit, but individually not, and
that is to me the precise difference between it and Paris. Collectively
the French amount to little, individually it is otherwise."

"But you told me once that Paris was tiresome."

"I was not there with you. And should it become so when we are there
together, we have the whole world to choose from. In Germany we can have
the middle ages over again. In London we can get the flush of the
nineteenth century. There is all of Italy, from the lakes to Naples. We
can take a doge's palace in Venice, or a Cæsar's villa on the Baia. With
a dahabieh we could float down into the dawn of history. You would look
well in a dahabieh, Viola."

"As Aida?"

"Better. And that reminds me, Viola; tell me, you will give up all
thought of the stage, will you not?"

"How foolish you are. Fancy Mrs. Tristrem Varick before the footlights.
There are careers open to a girl that the acceptance of another's name
must close. And the stage is one of them. I should have adopted it long
ago, had it not been for mother. She seems to think that a Raritan--but
there, you know what mothers are. Now, of course, I shall give it up.
Besides, Italian opera is out of fashion. And even if it were otherwise,
have I not now a lord, a master, whom I must obey?"

Her eyes looked anything but obedience, yet her voice was melodious with
caresses.

And so they sat and talked and made their plans, until it was long past
the conventional hour, and Tristrem felt that he should go. He had been
afloat in unnavigated seas of happiness, but still in his heart he felt
the burn of a red, round wound. The lie that Weldon had told smarted
still, yet with serener spirit he thought there might be some
unexplained excuse.

"Tell me," he asked, as he was about to leave, "what was it Weldon
said?"

Miss Raritan looked at him, and hesitated before she spoke. Then
catching his face in her two hands she drew it to her own.

"He said you were a goose," she whispered, and touched her lips to his.

With this answer Tristrem was fain to be content. And presently, when he
left the house, he reeled as though he had drunk beaker after flagon of
the headiest wine.




VI.


After a ten-mile pull on the river, a shandygaff of Bass and champagne
is comforting to the oarsman. It is accounted pleasant to pay a patient
creditor an outlawed debt. But a poet has held that the most pleasurable
thing imaginable is to awake on a summer morning with the consciousness
of being in love. Even in winter the sensation ought not to be
disagreeable; yet when to the consciousness of being in love is added
the belief that the love is returned, then the bleakest day of all the
year must seem like a rose of June.

Tristrem passed the night in dreams that told of Her. He strayed through
imperishable beauties, through dawns surrounded by candors of hope. The
breath of brooks caressed him, he was enveloped in the sorceries of a
sempiternal spring. The winds, articulate with song, choired to the
skies ululations and messages of praise. Each vista held a promise. The
horizon was a prayer fulfilled. He saw grief collapse and joy enthroned.
From bird and blossom he caught the incommunicable words of love. And
when from some new witchery he at last awoke, he smiled--the real was
fairer than the dream.

For some time he loitered in the gardens which his fancy disclosed,
spectacular-wise, for his own delight, until at last he bethought him of
the new duties of his position and of the accompanying necessity of
making those duties known to those to whom he was related. Then, after a
breakfast of sliced oranges and coffee, he rang for the servant and told
him to ask his father whether he could spare a moment that morning. In a
few minutes the servant returned. "Mr. Varick will be happy to see you,
sir," he said.

"What did he say?" Tristrem asked; "what were his exact words?"

"Well, sir, I said as how you presented your compliments, and could you
see him, and he didn't say nothing; he was feeding the bird. But I could
tell, sir; when Mr. Varick doesn't like a thing, he looks at you and if
he does, he doesn't."

"And he didn't look at you?"

"No, sir, he didn't turn his 'ead."

"H'm," said Tristrem to himself, as he descended the stairs, "I wonder,
when I tell him, whether he will look at me." And the memory of his
father's stare cast a shadow on his buoyant spirits.

On entering the room in which Mr. Varick passed his mornings, Tristrem
found that gentleman seated at a table. In one hand he held a
bronze-colored magazine, and in the other a silver knife. In the window
was a gilt cage in which a bird was singing, and on the table was a
profusion of roses--the room itself was vast and chill. One wall was
lined, the entire length, with well-filled book-shelves. In a corner was
a square pile of volumes, bound in pale sheep, which a lawyer would have
recognized as belonging to the pleasant literature of his profession.
And over the book-shelves was a row of Varicks, standing in the upright
idleness which is peculiar to portraits in oil. It was many years since
Tristrem had entered this room; yet now, save for the scent of flowers
and the bird-cage, it was practically unchanged.

"Father," he began at once, "I would not have ventured to disturb you
if--if--that is, unless I had something important to say." He was
looking at his father, but his father was not looking at him. "It is
this," he continued, irritated in spite of himself by the complete
disinterestedness of one whose son he was; "I am engaged to be married."

At this announcement Mr. Varick fluttered the paper-knife, but said
nothing.

"The young lady is Miss Raritan," he added, and then paused, amazed at
the expression of his father's face. It was as though unseen hands were
torturing it at will. The mouth, cheeks, and eyelids quivered and
twitched, and then abruptly Mr. Varick raised the bronze-colored
magazine, held it before his tormented features, and when he lowered it
again his expression was as apathetic as before.

"You are ill!" Tristrem exclaimed, advancing to him.

But Mr. Varick shook his head, and motioned him back. "It is nothing,"
he answered. "Let me see, you were saying----?"

"I am engaged to Miss Raritan."

"The daughter of----"

"Her father was Roanoke Raritan. He was minister somewhere--to England
or to France, I believe."

While Tristrem was giving this information Mr. Varick went to the
window. He looked at the occupant of the gilt cage, and ran a thumb
through the wires. The bird ruffled its feathers, cocked its head, and
edged gingerly along the perch, reproving the intrusive finger with the
scorn and glitter of two eyes of bead. But the anger of the canary was
brief. In a moment Mr. Varick left the cage, and turned again to his
son.

"Nothing you could do," he said, "would please me better."

"Thank you," Tristrem answered, "I----"

"Are you to be married at once?"

"Not before November, sir."

"I wish it were sooner. I do not approve of protracted engagements. But,
of course, you know your own business best. If I remember rightly, the
father of this young lady did not leave much of a fortune, did he?"

"Nothing to speak of, I believe."

"You have my best wishes. The match is very suitable, very suitable. I
wish you would say as much, with my compliments, to the young lady's
mother. I would do so myself, but, as you know, I am something of an
invalid. You might add that, too--and--er--I don't mean to advise you,
but I would endeavor to hasten the ceremony. In such matters, it is
usual for the young lady to be coy, but it is for the man to be pressing
and resolute. I only regret that her father could not know of it. In
regard to money, your allowance will have to be increased--well, I will
attend to that. There is nothing else, is there? Oh, do me the favor not
to omit to say that I am much pleased. I knew Miss Raritan's father."
Mr. Varick looked up at the ceiling, and put his hand to his mouth. It
was difficult to say whether he was concealing a smile or a yawn. "He
would be pleased, I know." And with that Mr. Varick resumed his former
position, and took up again the magazine.

"It is very good of you," Tristrem began; "I didn't know, of course--you
see, I knew that if you saw the young lady--but what am I calling her a
young lady for?" he asked, in an aside, of himself--"Miss Raritan, I
mean," he continued aloud, "you would think me fortunate as a king's
cousin." He paused. "I am sure," he reflected, "I don't know what I am
talking about. What I say--is sheer imbecility. However," he continued,
again, "I want to thank you. You have seen so little of me that I did
not expect you would be particularly interested, I--I----"

He hesitated again, and then ceased speaking. He had been looking at his
father, and something in his father's stare fascinated and disturbed his
train of thought. For the moment he was puzzled. From his childhood he
had felt that his father disliked him, though the reason of that dislike
he had never understood. It was one of those things that you get so
accustomed to that it is accepted, like baldness, as a matter of course,
as a thing which had to be and could not be otherwise. To his
grandfather, who was at once the most irascible and gentlest of men, and
whom he had loved instinctively, from the first, with the unreasoning
faith that children have--to him he had, in earlier days, spoken more
than once of the singularity of his father's attitude. The old
gentleman, however, had no explanation to give. Or, if he had one, he
preferred to keep it to himself. But he petted the boy outrageously,
with some idea of making up for it all, and of showing that he at least
had love enough for two.

And now, as Tristrem gazed in his father's face, he seemed to decipher
something that was not dislike--rather the contented look of one who
learns of an enemy's disgrace, a compound of malice and of glee.

"That was all I had to say," Tristrem added, with his winning smile, as
though apologizing for the lameness of the conclusion. And thereupon he
left the room and went out to consult a jeweller and bear the tidings to
other ears.

For some time he was absurdly happy. His grandfather received the
announcement of the coming marriage with proper enthusiasm. He laughed
sagaciously at Tristrem's glowing descriptions of the bride that was to
be, and was for going to call on the mother and daughter at once, and
was only prevented on learning that they had both left town.

"But I must write," he said, and write he did, two elaborate letters,
couched in that phraseology at once recondite and simple which made our
ancestors the delightful correspondents that they were. The letters were
old-fashioned indeed. Some of the sentences were enlivened with the
eccentricities of orthography which were in vogue in the days of the
_Spectator_. The handwriting was infamous, and the signature on each was
adorned with an enormous flourish. They were not models for a Perfect
Letter Writer, but they were heartfelt and honest, and they served their
purpose very well.

"And, Tristrem," the old gentleman said, when the addresses had been
dried with a shower of sand and the letters despatched, "you must take
her this, with my love. I gave it to your mother on her wedding day, and
now it should go to her." From a little red case he took a diamond
brooch, set in silver, which he polished reflectively on his sleeve.
"She was very sweet, Tristrem, your mother was--a good girl, and a
pretty one. Did I ever tell you about the time----"

And the old gentleman ran on with some anecdote of the dear dead days in
which his heart was tombed. Tristrem listened with the interest of those
that love. He had heard the story, and many others of a similar tenor,
again and again, but, somehow, he never heard them too often. There was
nothing wearisome to him in such chronicles; and as he sat listening,
and now and then prompting with some forgotten detail, anyone who had
happened on the scene would have accounted it pleasant to watch the
young fellow and the old man talking together over the youth of her who
had been mother to one and daughter to the other.

"See!" said Tristrem at last, when his grandfather had given the brooch
into his keeping. "See! I have something for her too." And with that he
displayed a ruby, unset, that was like a clot of blood. "I shall have it
put in a ring," he explained, "but this might do for a bonnet-pin;" and
then he produced a green stone, white-filmed, that had a heart of
oscillating flame.

Mr. Van Norden had taken the ruby in his hand and held it off at arm's
length, and then between two fingers, to the light, that he might the
better judge of its beauty. But at the mention of the bonnet-pin he
turned to look:

"Surely, Tristrem, you would not give her that; it's an opal."

"And what if it is?"

"But it is not lucky."

Tristrem smiled blithely, with the bravery that comes of
nineteenth-century culture.

"It's a pearl with a soul," he answered, "that's what it is. And if
Viola doesn't like it I'll send it to you."

"God forbid," Mr. Van Norden replied; "if anyone sent me an opal I would
swear so hard that if the devil heard me he'd go in a corner and cross
himself."

At this threat Tristrem burst out laughing, and the old gentleman,
amused in spite of himself at the fantasy of his own speech, burst out
laughing too.

Then there was more chat, and more reminiscences, and much planning as
to how Tristrem should best assume the rank and appanages of the married
state. Tristrem dined with his grandfather that evening, and when Mr.
Van Norden started out to his club for a game of whist, Tristrem
accompanied him as far as the club door.

When they parted, Tristrem was in such spirits that he could have run up
to Central Park and back again. "Divinities of Pindar," he kept
exclaiming--a phrase that he had caught somewhere--"divinities of
Pindar, she is mine."

Thereafter, for several days, he lived, as all true lovers do, on air
and the best tenderloins he could obtain.




VII.


One morning Tristrem found the sliced oranges companied by a note from
Her. It was not long, but he read it so often that it became lengthy in
spite of the writer. The cottage, it informed him, which had been taken
for the summer, was becoming habitable. As yet but one of the hotels,
and that the worst, was prepared for guests. In a fortnight, however,
the others would begin to open their doors, and meanwhile if, in the
course of the week, he care to run up, there was a room in the cottage
at his disposal.

"In the course of the week," soliloquized Tristrem; "h'm--well, this
afternoon is in the course of it, and this afternoon will I go."

Pleasured by the artfulness of his own sophistry, he procured a
provision of _langues dorées_, a comestible of which she was fond, found
at Tiffany's the ruby and opal set in accordance with orders already
given, and at two o'clock boarded the Newport express.

The train reached New London before Tristrem had so much as glanced at a
volume which he held in his hand. He had little need of anything to
occupy his thoughts. His mind was a scenario in which he followed the
changes and convolutions of an entertainment more alluring than any that
romancer or playwright could convey. He was in that mood which we all of
us have experienced, in which life seems not only worth living, but a
fountain of delight as well. Were ever fields more green or sky more
fair? And such a promise as the future held! In his hearing was a choir
of thrushes, and on his spirit had been thrown a mantle so subtle, yet
of texture so insistent, that no thought not wholly pure could pierce
the woof or find a vantage-ground therein. He was in that mood in which
one feels an ascension of virtues, the companionship of unviolated
illusions, the pomp and purple of worship, a communion with all that is
best, a repulsion of all that is base--that mood in which hymns mount
unsummoned from the heart.

He was far away, but the Ideal was at his side. The past was a mirror,
mirroring nothing save his own preparation and the dream of the coming
of her. And now she had come, fairer than the fairest vision and desire
that ever visited a poet starving in a garret. To be worthy of her, even
in the slightest measure, what was there that he would leave undone? And
as the train brought him to his journey's end, he repeated to himself,
gravely and decorously, and with the earnestness and sincerity of the
untried, the grave covenants of the marriage pact.

On descending at the station he remembered, for the first time, that he
had omitted to send Miss Raritan an avant-courier in the shape of a
telegram. It is one of the oddities of hazard that, in turning down one
street instead of turning up another, a man's existence, and not his own
alone, but that of others also, may seem to be wholly changed thereby.
The term _seem_ is used advisedly, for, with a better understanding of
the interconnection of cause and effect, chance has been outlawed by
science, and in the operations of consistent laws the axiom, "Whatever
will be, Is," has passed to the kindergarten. Tristrem thought of this
months afterward. He remembered then, that that morning he had started
out with the intention of sending a telegram from the club, but on the
way there he had thought of the chocolate which Viola preferred, and,
after turning into Broadway to purchase it, he had drifted into
Tiffany's, and from there he had returned to Waverley Place, the message
unsent and forgotten. He recalled these incidents months later, but for
the moment he merely felt a vague annoyance at his own neglect.

There was a negro at the station, the driver of a coach in whose care
Tristrem placed himself, and presently the coach rattled over a road
that skirted the sea, and drew up at the gate of a tiny villa. On the
porch Mrs. Raritan was seated, and when she recognized her visitor she
came down the path, exclaiming her pleasure and welcome. It was evident
at once that she had been gratified by her daughter's choice.

"But we didn't expect you," she said. "Viola told me you would not come
before Saturday. I am glad you did, though; as yet there's hardly a soul
in the place. Viola has gone riding. It's after seven, isn't it? She
ought to be back now. Why didn't you send us word? We would have met you
at the train."

They had found seats on the porch. Tristrem explained his haste,
apologizing for the neglect to wire. The haste seemed pardonable to Mrs.
Raritan, and the attendant absent-mindedness easily understood. And so
for some moments they talked together. Tristrem delivered his father's
message, and learned that Mr. Van Norden's letters had been received.
Some word was even said of the possibility of a September wedding. And
then a little plot was concocted. Dinner would be served almost
immediately, so soon, in fact, as Viola returned. Meanwhile, Tristrem
would go to his room, Mrs. Raritan would say nothing of his arrival,
but, when dinner was announced, a servant would come to his door, and
then he was to appear and give Viola the treat and pleasure of a genuine
surprise.

This plan was acted on at once. Tristrem was shown to the room which he
was to occupy, and proceeded to get his things in order. From his
shirt-box, which, with his valise, had already been brought upstairs, he
took the ring, the brooch, the pin, and placed them on the mantel. Then
he found other garments, and began to dress. In five minutes he was in
readiness, but as yet he heard nothing indicative of Viola's return. He
went to the window and looked out. Above the trees, in an adjacent
property, there loomed a tower. The window was at the back of the house;
he could not see the ocean, but he heard its resilient sibilants, and
from the garden came the hum of insects. It had grown quite dark, but
still there was no sign of Viola's return.

He took up the volume which he had brought with him in the cars. It was
the _Rime Nuove_ of Carducci, and with the fancies of that concettist of
modern Rome he stayed his impatience for a while. There was one octave
that had appealed to him before. He read it twice, and was about to
endeavor to repeat the lines from memory, when through the open window
he heard the clatter of horses' hoofs, the roll of wheels; it was
evident that some conveyance had stopped at the gate of the villa. Then
came the sound of hurrying feet, a murmur of voices, and abruptly the
night was cut with the anguish of a woman's cry.

Tristrem rushed from the room and down the stairs. Through the open door
beyond a trembling star was visible, and in the road a group of
undistinguished forms.

"She's only fainted," someone was saying; "she was right enough a minute
ago."

Before the sentence was completed, Tristrem was at the gate. Hatless,
with one hand ungloved and the other clutching a broken whip, the habit
rent from hem to girdle, dust-covered and dishevelled, the eyes closed,
and in the face the pallor and contraction of mortal pain, Viola Raritan
lay, waist-supported, in her mother's arms.

"Help me with her to the house," the mother moaned. Then noticing
Tristrem at her side, "She's been thrown," she added; "I knew she would
be--I knew it----"

And as Tristrem reached to aid her with the burden, the girl's eyes
opened, "It's nothing." She raised her ungloved hand, "I--" and swooned
again.

They bore her into a little sitting-room, and laid her down. Mrs.
Raritan followed, distraught with fright. In her helplessness, words
came from her unsequenced and obscure. But soon she seemed to feel the
need of action. One servant she despatched for a physician, from another
a restorative was obtained. And Tristrem, meanwhile, knelt at the girl's
side, beating her hand with his. It had been scratched, he noticed, as
by a briar, and under the nails were stains such as might come from
plucking berries that are red.

As he tried to take from her the whip, that he might rub the hand that
held it too, the girl recovered consciousness again. The swoon had
lasted but a moment or so, yet to him who watched it had been unmeasured
time. She drew away the hand he held, and raising herself she looked at
him; to her lips there came a tremulousness and her eyes filled.

"My darling," Mrs. Raritan sobbed, "are you hurt? Tell me. How did it
happen? Did the horse run away with you. Oh, Viola, I knew there would
be an accident. Where are you hurt? Did the horse drag you?"

The girl turned to her mother almost wonderingly. It seemed to Tristrem
that she was not yet wholly herself.

"Yes," she answered; "no, I mean--no, he didn't, it was an accident, he
shied. _Do_ get me upstairs." And with that her head fell again on the
cushion.

Tristrem sought to raise her, but she motioned him back and caught her
mother's hand, and rising with its assistance she let the arm circle her
waist, and thus supported she suffered herself to be led away.

Tristrem followed them to the hall. On the porch a man loitered, hat in
hand; as Tristrem approached he rubbed the brim reflectively.

"I saw the horse as good as an hour ago," he said, "I was going to
Caswell's." And with this information he crooked his arm and made a
backward gesture. "It's down yonder on the way to the Point," he
explained. "As I passed Hazard's I looked in the cross-road--I call it a
road, but after you get on a bit it's nothing more than a cow-path, all
bushes and suchlike. But just up the road I see'd the horse. He was
nibbling grass as quiet as you please. I didn't pay no attention, I
thought he was tied. Well, when I was coming back I looked again; he
wasn't there, but just as I got to the turn I heard somebody holloaing,
and I stopped. A man ran up and says to me, 'There's a lady hurt
herself, can't you give her a lift?' 'Where?' says I. 'Down there,' he
says, 'back of Hazard's; she's been thrown.' So I turned round, and sure
enough there she was, by the fence, sort of dazed like. I says, 'Are you
hurt, miss?' and she says, 'No,' but could I bring her here, and then I
see'd that her dress was torn. She got in, and I asked her where her hat
was, and she said it was back there, but it didn't make no difference,
she wanted to get home. And when we were driving on here I told her as
how I see'd the horse, and I asked if it wasn't one of White's, and she
said, 'Yes, it was,' and I was a-going to ask where she was thrown, but
she seemed sort of faint, and, sure enough, just as we got here away she
went. I always says women-folk ought not to be let on horse-back, she
might have broke her neck; like as not----"

"You have been very kind," Tristrem answered, "very kind, indeed."

During the entire scene he had not said a word. The spectacle of Viola
fainting on the roadside, the fear that she might be maimed, the trouble
at her pallor--these things had tied his tongue; and even now, as he
spoke, his voice was not assured, and a hand with which he fumbled in
his waistcoat trembled so that the roll of bills which he drew out fell
on the porch at his feet. He stooped and picked it up.

"If Mrs. Raritan were here, she would thank you as I do," he continued.
"I wish--" and he was about to make some present, but the man drew back.

"That's all right, I don't want no pay for that."

"I beg your pardon," Tristrem answered, "I know you do not. Tell me, are
you married?"

The man laughed.

"Yes, I am, and I got the biggest boy you ever see. He's going on four
years and he weighs a ton."

"I wish you would do me a favor. Let me make him a little present."

But even to this the man would not listen. He was reluctant to accept so
much as thanks. Having done what good he could, he was anxious to go his
way--the sort of man that one has to visit the seashore to find, and
who, when found, is as refreshing as the breeze.

As he left the porch, he looked back. "Here's the doctor," he said, and
passed on into the night.

While the physician visited the patient, Tristrem paced the sitting-room
counting the minutes till he could have speech with him, himself. And
when at last he heard the stairs creak, he was out in the hall, prepared
to question and intercept. The physician was most reassuring. There was
nothing at all the matter. By morning Miss Raritan would be up and
about. She had had a shock, no doubt. She was upset, and a trifle
nervous, but all she needed was a good night's rest, with a chop and a
glass of claret to help her to it. If sleep were elusive, then a
bromide. But that was all. If she had been seventy a tumble like that
might have done for her, but at nineteen! And the doctor left the house,
reflecting that were not educated people the most timorous of all, the
emoluments of his profession would be slight.

Whether or not Miss Raritan found the chop and claret sufficient, or
whether she partook of a bromide as well, is not a part of history. In a
little while after the physician's departure a servant brought word to
Tristrem that for the moment Mrs. Raritan was unable to leave her
daughter, but if he would have his dinner then, Mrs. Raritan would see
him later. Such was the revulsion of feeling that Tristrem, to whom, ten
minutes before, the mere mention of food would have been distasteful,
sat down, and ate like a wolf. The meal finished, he went out on the
porch. There was no moon as yet, but the sky was brilliant with the
lights of other worlds. Before him was the infinite, in the air was the
scent of sea-weed, and beyond, the waves leaped up and fawned upon the
bluffs. And as he stood and watched it all, the servant came to him with
Mrs. Raritan's apologies. She thought it better, the maid explained, not
to leave Miss Raritan just yet, and would Mr. Varick be good enough to
excuse her for that evening?

"Wait a second," he answered, and went to his room. He found the jewels,
and brought them down-stairs. "Take these to Miss Raritan," he said, and
on a card he wrote some word of love, which he gave with the trinkets to
the maid. "_La parlate d'amor_," he murmured, as the servant left to do
his bidding, and then he went again to his room, and sat down at the
window companioned only by the stars. From beyond, the boom and
retreating wash of waves was still audible, and below in the garden he
caught, now and then, the spark and glitter of a firefly gyrating in
loops of gold, but the tower which he had noticed on arriving was lost
in the night.

It was in that direction, he told himself, that the accident must have
occurred. And what was it, after all? As yet he had not fully
understood. Had the horse stumbled, or had he bolted and thrown her? If
he had only been there! And as his fancy evoked the possibilities of
that ride, he saw a terrified brute tearing along a deserted road,
carrying the exquisite girl straight to some sudden death, and, just
when the end was imminent, his own muscles hardened into steel, he had
him by the bit and, though dragged by the impetus, at last he held him,
and she was safe. She was in his arms, her own about his neck, and were
he a knight-errant and she some gracious princess, what sweeter guerdon
could he claim?

But one thing preoccupied him. In the vertiginous flight she had lost
something--her whip, no, her hat--and it was incumbent on him to restore
it to her. Very softly, then, that he might not disturb her, he opened
the door. The house was hushed, and in a moment he was on the road. He
could see the tower now; it was illuminated, and it seemed to him odd
that he had not noticed the illumination before. It was that way, he
knew, back of Hazard's, and he hurried along in the direction which the
man had indicated. The insects had stilled their murmur, and the sky was
more obscure, but the road was clear.

He hurried on, and as he hurried he heard steps behind him, hurrying
too. He turned his head; behind him was a woman running, and who, as she
ran, cast a shadow that was monstrous. In the glimpse that he caught of
her he saw that she was bare of foot and that her breast was uncovered.
Her skirt was tattered and her hair was loose. He turned again, the face
was hideous. The eyes squinted, lustreless and opaque, the nose was
squat, the chin retreated, the forehead was seamed with scars, and the
mouth, that stretched to the ears, was extended with laughter. As she
ran she took her teeth out one by one, replacing them with either hand.
And still she laughed, a silent laughter, her thin lips distorted as
though she mocked the world.

Tristrem, overcome by the horror of that laughter, felt as agonized as a
child pursued. There was a fence at hand, a vacant lot, and across it a
light glimmered. Away he sped. In the field his foot caught in a
bramble; he fell, and could not rise, but he heard her coming and, with
a great effort just as she was on him, he was up again, distancing her
with ever-increasing space. The light was just beyond. He saw now it
came from the tower; there was another fence, he was over it; the door
was barred; no, it opened; he was safe!

In the middle of the room, circular as befits a tower, was a cradle, and
in the cradle was a little boy. As Tristrem looked at him he smiled; it
was, he knew, the child of the man to whom he had spoken that evening.
One hand was under the pillow, but the other, that lay on the coverlid,
held Viola's hat. He bent over to examine it; the fingers that held it
were grimy and large, and, as he looked closer, he saw that it was not a
child, but the man himself. Before he had an opportunity to account for
the delusion he heard the gallop of feet and a thunder at the door. It
was she! He wheeled like a rat surprised. There was a lateral exit,
through which he fled, and presently he found himself in a corridor that
seemed endless in extension. The man evidently had left the cradle and
preceded him, for Tristrem saw him putting on a great-coat some distance
ahead. In his feverish fright he thought, could he but disguise himself
with that, he might pass out unobserved, and he ran on to supplicate for
an exchange of costume; but when he reached the place where the man had
stood he had gone, vanished through a dead wall, and down the corridor
he heard her come. He could hear her bare feet patter on the stones. Oh,
God, what did she wish of him? And no escape, not one. He was in her
power, immured with her forevermore. He called for help, and beat at the
walls, and ever nearer she came, swifter than disease, and more
appalling than death. His nails sank in his flesh, he raised a hand to
stay the beating of his heart, and then at once she was upon him,
felling him to the ground as a ruffian fells his mistress, her knees
were on his arms, he was powerless, dumb with dread, and in his face was
the fetor of her breath. Her eyes were no longer lustreless, they
glittered like twin stars, and still she laughed, her naked breast
heaving with the convulsions of her mirth. "I am Truth," she bawled, and
laughed again. And with that Tristrem awoke, suffocating, quivering, and
outwearied as though he had run a race and lost it.

He sat awhile, broken by the horror of the dream. The palms of his hands
were not yet dry. But soon he bestirred himself, and went to the door;
the lights had been extinguished; he closed it again, and, with the aid
of some candles, he prepared for bed. He would have read a little, but
he was fatigued, tired by the emotions of the day, and when at last he
lay down it was an effort to rise again and put out the candle. How long
he lay in darkness, a second, an hour, he could not afterward recall; it
seemed to him that he had drowsed off at once, but suddenly he started,
trembling from head to foot. He had heard Viola's voice soaring to its
uttermost tension. "Coward," she had called. And then all was still. He
listened, he even went to the door, but the house was wrapped in
silence.

"Bah!" he muttered, "I am entertaining a procession of nightmares." And
in a few moments he was again asleep.




VIII.


At dawn he awoke refreshed. The sun rose from the ocean like an indolent
girl from a bath. Before the house was astir he was out of doors
exploring the land. He strolled past the row of hotels that front the
sea, and pausing a moment at the Casino, fragrant then, and free of the
stench of drink that is the outcome of the later season, he wondered how
it was that, given money, and possibly brains, it was necessary to make
a building as awkward as was that. And then he strayed to the shore,
past the tenantless bath-houses, and on through the glories of the
morning to the untrodden beach beyond.

As he walked, the village faded in the haze. The tide was low and the
sand firm and hard. The waves broke leisurely in films and fringes of
white, gurgling an invitation to their roomy embrace. And when the
hotels were lost in the distance and the solitude was murmurous with
nature alone, Tristrem, captivated by the allurements of the sea, went
down into the waves and clasped them to him as lovers clasp those they
love.

The sun was well on its amble to the zenith before he returned to the
cottage. His hostess, he found, had not yet appeared, and as breakfast
seemed to be served in that pleasant fashion which necessitates nothing,
not even an appetite, Tristrem drank his coffee in solitude. And as he
idled over the meal he recalled the horrors of the night, and smiled.
The air of the morning, the long and quiet stroll, the plunge in the
sea, and the after-bath of sunlight that he had taken stretched full
length on the sand, had dissipated the enervating emotions of dream and
brought him in their stead a new invigoration. He was about to begin the
dithyrambs of the day before, when the servant appeared, bearing a
yellow envelope, and a book in which he was to put his name. He gave the
receipt and opened the message, wonderingly.

"_Please come to town_," it ran, "_your father is dying.--Robert
Harris._"

"Your father is dying," he repeated. "H'm. Robert Harris. I never knew
before what the butler's first name was. But what has that to do with
it? There are times when I am utterly imbecile. Your father is dying.
Yes, of course, I must go at once. But it isn't possible. H'm. I
remember. He looked ghastly when I saw him. I suppose--I ought to--good
God, why should I attempt to feign a sorrow that I do not feel? It is
his own fault. I would have--But there, what is the use?"

He bit his nail; he was perplexed at his absence of sensibility. "And
yet," he mused, "in his way he has been kind to me. He has been kind;
that is, if it be kindness in a father to let a son absolutely alone.
After all, filial affection must be like patriotism, ingrained as an
obligation, a thing to blush at if not possessed. Yet then, again, if a
country acts like a step-mother to its children, if a father treats a
son as a guardian might treat a ward, the ties are conventional; and on
what shall affection subsist? It was he who called me into being, and,
having done so, he assumed duties which he should not have shirked. It
was not for him to make himself a stranger to me; it was for him to
teach me to honor him so much, to love him so well that at his death my
head would be bowed in prostrations of grief. I used to try to school
myself to think that it was only his way; that, outwardly cold and
undemonstrative, his heart was warm as another's. But--well, it may have
been, it may have been. After all, if I can't grieve, I would cross the
continent to spare him a moment's pain. It was he, I suppose, who told
Harris to wire. Yes, I must hurry."

He called the servant to him. "Can you tell me, please, when the next
train goes?" But the servant had no knowledge whereon to base a reply.
She suggested, however, that information might be obtained at an inn
which stood a short distance up the road. He scribbled a few lines on a
card, and gave it to the woman. "Take that to Miss Raritan, please, will
you?" he said, and left the house.

At the inn a very large individual sat on the stoop, coatless, a straw
covering of a remoter summer far back on his head, and his feet turned
in. He listened to Tristrem with surly indifference, and spat profusely.
He didn't know; he reckoned the morning train had gone.

"Hay, Alf," he called out to the negro who had taken Tristrem from the
station the night before, and who was then driving by, "when's the next
train go?"

"'Bout ten minutes; I just took a party from Taylor's."

"Thank you," said Tristrem to the innkeeper, who spat again by way of
acknowledgment. "Can you take me to the station?" he asked the negro;
and on receiving an affirmative reply, he told him to stop at Mrs.
Raritan's for his traps.

As Tristrem entered the gate he saw Viola's assistant of the preceding
evening drive up, waving a hat.

"I got it," the man cried out, "here it is. First time it ever passed a
night out of doors, I'll bet. And none the worse for it, either." He
handed it over to Tristrem. "I dreamt about you last night," he added.

"That's odd," Tristrem answered, "I dreamed about you." The man laughed
at this as had he never heard anything so droll. "Well, I swan!" he
exclaimed, and cracked his whip with delight. His horse started. "Here,"
he said, "I near forgot. Whoa, there, can't you. This goes with the
hat." And he crumpled a handkerchief in his hand, and tossing it to
Tristrem, he let the horse continue his way unchecked.

The hat which the man had found did not indeed look as though it had
passed a night on the roadside. Save for an incidental speck or two it
might have come fresh from a bandbox. Tristrem carried it into the
cottage, and was placing it on the hall-table when Mrs. Raritan
appeared.

"I am so sorry," she began, "Viola has told me----"

"How is she? May I not see her?"

"She scarcely slept last night."

Tristrem looked in the lady's face. The lids of her eyes were red and
swollen.

"But may I not see her? May I not, merely for a moment."

"She is sleeping now," Mrs. Raritan answered; "perhaps," she added, "it
is better that you should not. The doctor has been here. He says that
she should be quiet. But you will come back, will you not? Truly I
sympathize with you."

Mrs. Raritan's eyes filled with tears, but to what they were due, who
shall say? She seemed to Tristrem unaccountably nervous and distressed.

"There is nothing serious the matter, is there?" he asked, anxiously.
And at the question, Mrs. Raritan almost choked. She shook her head,
however, but Tristrem was not assured. "I _must_ see her," he said, and
he made as would he mount the stair.

"Mr. Varick! she is asleep. She has had a wretched night. When you are
able to come back, it will be different. But if you care for her, let
her be."

The protest was almost incoherent. Mrs. Raritan appeared beside herself
with anxiety.

"Forgive me," said Tristrem, "I did not mean to vex you. Nor would I
disturb her." He paused a second, dumbly and vaguely afflicted. "You
will tell her, will you not?" he added; "tell her this, that I wanted to
see her. Mrs. Raritan, my whole life is wrapped up in her." He hesitated
again. "You are tired too, I can see. You were up with her last night,
were you not?"

Mrs. Raritan bowed her head.

"You must forgive me," he repeated, "I did not understand. Tell me," he
continued, "last night I awoke thinking that I heard her calling. Did
she call?"

"Call what?"

"I thought--you see I was half, perhaps wholly asleep, but I thought I
heard her voice. I was mistaken, was I not?"

"Yes, you must have been."

The negro had brought down the luggage, and stood waiting at the gate.

"You will tell her--Mrs. Raritan--I love her with all my heart and
soul."

The lady's lips quivered. "She knows it, and so do I."

"You will ask her to write."

"Yes, I will do so."

Tristrem took her hand in his. "Tell her from me," he began, but words
failed him, it was his face that completed the message. In a moment more
he was in the coach on his way to the station.

There was a brisk drive along the sea, a curve was rounded, and the
station stood in sight. And just as the turn was made Tristrem caught
the shriek of a whistle.

"There she goes," the negro exclaimed, "you ought to have been spryer."

"Has the train gone?" Tristrem asked.

"Can't you see her? I knew you'd be late." The man was insolent in his
familiarity, but Tristrem did not seem to notice it.

"I would have given much not to be," he said.

At this the negro became a trifle less uncivil. "Would you ree-ly like
to catch that train?" he asked.

"I would indeed."

"Is it worth twenty-five dollars to you?"

Tristrem nodded.

"Well, boss, I tell you. That train stops at Peacedale, and at Wakefield
she shunts off till the mail passes. Like as not the express is late. If
I get you to Kingston before the Newport passes, will you give me
twenty-five?"

"If I make the connection I will give you fifty."

"That's talking. You'll get there, boss. Just lay back and count your
thumbs."

The negro snapped his whip, and soon Tristrem was jolted over one of the
worst and fairest roads of New England, through a country for which
nature has done her best, and where only the legislator is vile. One
hamlet after another was passed, and still the coach rolled on.

"We'll get there," the negro repeated from time to time, and to
encourage his fare he lashed the horses to their utmost speed. Peacedale
was in the distance; Wakefield was passed, and in a cloud of dust they
tore through Kingston and reached the station just as the express
steamed up.

"I told you I'd do it," the negro exclaimed, exultingly. "I'll get
checks for your trunks."

A minute or two more, and the checks were obtained; the negro was
counting a roll of bills, and in a drawing-room car Tristrem was being
whirled to New York.

For several hours he sat looking out at the retreating uplands,
villages, and valleys. But after a while he remembered the scantiness of
his breakfast, and, summoning the porter, he obtained from him some food
and drink. By this time the train had reached New Haven, and there
Tristrem alighted to smoke a cigarette. He was, however, unable to
finish it before the whistle warned him that he should be aboard again.
The porter, who had been gratified by a tip, then told him that there
was a smoking compartment in the car beyond the one in which he had sat,
and, as the train moved on, Tristrem went forward in the direction
indicated.

The compartment was small, with seats for two on one side, and for
three, or for four at most, on the other. As Tristrem entered it he saw
that the larger sofa was occupied by one man, who lay out on it, full
length, his face turned to the partition. Tristrem took a seat opposite
him, and lit a fresh cigarette. As he smoked he looked at the reclining
form of his _vis-à-vis_. About the man's neck a silk handkerchief had
been rolled, but one end had come undone and hung loosely on the
cushion, and as Tristrem looked he noticed that on the neck was a wound,
unhealed and fresh, a line of excoriation, that neither steel nor shot
could have caused, but which might have come from a scratch. But, after
all, what business was it of his? And he turned his attention again to
the retreating uplands and to the villages that starred the route.

When the cigarette was done, he stood up to leave the compartment. But
however quietly he had moved, he seemed to arouse his neighbor, who
turned heavily, as though to change his position. As he did so, Tristrem
saw that it was Royal Weldon, and that on his face was a bruise. He
would have spoken, for Weldon was looking at him, but he recalled the
wanton lie of the week before, and as he hesitated whether to speak or
pass on, Weldon half rose. "Damn you," he said, "you are everywhere."
Then he lay down, turning his face again to the wall, and Tristrem,
without a word, went to the other car and found his former seat.

Two hours later he reached his home. He let himself in with a latch-key,
and rang the bell. But when Harris appeared he knew at once, by the
expression which the butler assumed, that he had come too late.

"When did it happen?" he asked.

"It was last evening, sir; he came in from his drive and inquired for
you, sir. I said that you had gone out of town, and showed him the
address you left. When I went to hannounce dinner, sir, he was sitting
in his arm-chair with his hat on. I thought he was asleep. I sent for
Dr. McMasters, sir, but it was no use. Dr. McMasters said it was the
'art, sir."

"You have notified my grandfather, have you not?"

"Yes, sir, I did, sir; Mr. Van Norden came in this morning, and left
word as how he would like to see you when you got back, sir."

"Very good. Call Davis, and get my things from the cabman."

"Yes, sir; thank you, sir. I beg pardon, sir," he added, "would you wish
some dinner? There's a nice fillet and a savory."




IX.


The morning after the funeral Tristrem received a letter from Mrs.
Raritan, and a little later a small package by express. The letter was
not long, and its transcription is unnecessary. It was to the effect
that on maturer consideration Viola had decided that the engagement into
which she had entered was untenable. To this decision Mrs. Raritan felt
herself reluctantly obliged to concur. It was not that Mr. Varick was
one whom she would be unwilling to welcome as her daughter's husband. On
the contrary, he was in many respects precisely what she most desired.
But Viola was young; she felt that she had a vocation to which marriage
would be an obstacle, and in the circumstances Viola was the better
judge. In any event, Mr. Varick was requested to consider the decision
as irrevocable. Then followed a few words of sympathy and a line of
condolence expressive of Mrs. Raritan's regret that the breaking of the
engagement should occur at a time when Tristrem was in grievous
affliction.

In the package were the jewels.

Tristrem read the letter as though he were reading some accusation of
felony levelled at him in the public press. If it had been a meteor
which had fallen at his feet he could not have wondered more. Indeed, it
was surprise that he felt. It was not anger or indignation; they were
after-comers. For the moment he was merely bewildered. It seemed to him
incredible that such a thing could be. He read the letter again, and
even examined the post-mark. At first he was for starting at once for
Narragansett. If he could but see Viola! The excuse about a vocation was
nonsense. Had he not told her that if she insisted on going on the
stage, he would sit in the stalls and applaud. No, it was not that; it
was because--After all, it was his own fault; if he had been unable to
make himself beloved, why should the engagement continue? But had an
opportunity been given him? He had not had speech with her since that
evening when she had drawn his face to hers. No, it could not be that.

He bowed his head, and then Anger came and sat at his side. What had he
done to Destiny that he should be to it the play-thing that he was? But
she; she was more voracious even than Fate. No, it was damnable. Why
should she take his heart and torment it? Why, having given love, should
she take it away? He was contented enough until he saw her. Why had she
come to him as the one woman in the world, luring him on; yes, for she
had lured him on? Why had she made him love her as he could never love
again, and just when she placed her hand in his,--a mist, a phantom, a
reproach? Why had she done so? Why was the engagement untenable?
Untenable, indeed, why was it untenable? Why--why--why? And in the
increasing exasperation of the moment, Tristrem did a thing that, with
him, was unusual. He rang the bell, and bade the servant bring him
drink.

It was on the afternoon of that day that he learned the tenor of his
father's will. It affected him as a chill affects a man smitten with
fever. He accepted it as a matter of course. It was not even the last
drop; the cup was full as it stood. What was it to him that he had
missed being one of the richest men in New York in comparison to the
knowledge that even had he the mines of Ormuz and of Ind, the revenue
would be as useless to him as the hands of the dead? Was she to be
bought? Had she not taken herself away before the contents of the will
were reported? He might be able to call the world his own, and it would
avail him nothing.

The will left him strangely insensible, though, after all, one may
wonder whether winter is severer than autumn to a flower once dead.

But if the will affected Tristrem but little, it stirred Dirck Van
Norden to paroxysms of wrath. "He ought to have his ghost kicked," he
said, in confidential allusion to Erastus Varick. "It's a thing that
cries out to heaven. And don't you tell me, sir, that nothing can be
done."

The lawyer with whom he happened to be in consultation said there were
many things that could be done. Indeed, he was reassuringly fecund in
resources. In the first place, the will was holographic. That, of
course, mattered nothing; it only pointed a moral. Laymen should not
draw up their own wills. For that matter, even professionals should be
as wary of so doing as physicians are of doctoring themselves. And the
lawyer instanced legal luminaries, judges whose _obiter dicta_ and
opinions _in banco_ were cited and received with the greatest respect,
and yet through whose wills, drawn up, mark you, by their own skilled
hands, coaches and tandems had been driven full speed. In regard to the
will of the deceased there was this to be said, it would not hold water.
Chapter 360, Laws of 1860, declares that no person having a husband,
wife, child, or parent, shall by his or her last will and testament,
devise or bequeath to any benevolent, charitable, scientific, literary,
religious, or missionary society, association, or corporation, in trust
or otherwise, more than one-half part of his or her estate.

"But he devised the whole."

"Yes, so he did; but in devising it he overlooked that very wise law. My
opinion in the matter is this. When, may I ask, was your grandson born?"

"He was born on the 10th of June, 1859."

"Exactly. The late Mr. Varick determined, on the birth of your grandson,
that the property should go over. His reasons for so determining are
immaterial. Rufus K. Taintor, the ablest man, sir, that ever sat on the
bench or addressed it, drew up the will at that time in accordance with
instructions received. Some years later, Taintor died of apoplexy, and
he died, too, as you doubtless remember, after the delivery of that
famous speech in the Besalul divorce case. Well, sir, what I make of the
matter is this. The late Mr. Varick, relying on Taintor's ability, and
possessing possibly some smattering of law of his own, recopied the will
every time the fancy took him to make minor alterations in the general
distribution of the trust. Consequently his last will and testament,
having been made since the passage of the law of 1860, is nugatory and
void as to one-half the bequest, and your grandson may still come in for
a very pretty sum."

"He ought to have it all," said Mr. Van Norden, decidedly.

"I don't dispute that, sir, in the least--and my opinion is that he
will get it. This will is dated five days previous to Mr. Varick's
demise. Now, according to the law of 1848, Chapter 319, and, if I
remember rightly, Section 6, no such bequest as the deceased's is valid
in any will which shall not have been made and executed at least two
months before the death of the testator. That, sir, I consider an
extremely wise bit of legislation. The law of 1860, which I quoted,
vitiates the will as to one-half the bequest; the law of 1848 does away
with the will altogether. Practically speaking, your son-in-law might
just as well have died intestate. Though, between ourselves, if Mr.
Varick had not been ignorant of these laws, and had not, in consequence
of his ignorance, made a disposition of certain private documents the
contents of which are easily guessed, your grandson would have merely a
_prima facie_ right to have the will set aside; for, if you remember,
these laws were passed only to provide for the possible interests of a
surviving husband, wife, or _child_."

He emphasized the last word, and, as his meaning grew clear to Mr. Van
Norden, that gentleman got very red in the face. He rang the bell.

"Thank you, sir," he said. "I shall be indebted if you will send me your
account. And I shall be particularly indebted if you will send it at
your very earliest convenience. Henry, get this--this--get this
gentleman his hat and see him to the street."

Unfortunately for those that practise, there are a great many more
lawyers in New York than one. And before the last will and testament of
Erastus Varick came up for probate, Mr. Van Norden experienced slight
difficulty in retaining another attorney to defend Tristrem's interests.
The matter, of course, was set down for a hearing, and came up on the
calendar three months later.

Of the result of that hearing the reader has been already informed, and
then it was that Tristrem was taxed with old-world folly.




X.


In years gone by it had been Mr. Van Norden's custom to pass the heated
term at Rockaway. But when Rockaway became a popular resort, Mr. Van
Norden, like the sensible man that he was, discovered that his own house
was more comfortable than a crowded hotel. This particular summer,
therefore, he passed as usual in New York, and Tristrem, who had moved
to his house, kept him company. June was not altogether disagreeable,
but in July the city was visited by a heat at once insistent and
enervating. In August it was cooler, as our Augusts are apt to be; yet
the air was lifeless, and New York was not a nosegay. During these
months Tristrem was as lifeless as the air. In his first need of
sympathy he had gone to the irascible and kind-hearted old gentleman and
told him of the breaking of the engagement, and, he might have added, of
his heart, though in the telling he sought, with a lover's fealty, to
palliate the grievousness of the cruelty to which he had been subjected.

"It is this way," he said; "Viola, I think, feels that she does not know
me sufficiently well. After all, we have seen but little of each other,
and if she accepted me, it was on the spur of the moment. Since then she
has thought of it more seriously. It is for me to win her, not for her
to throw herself in my arms. That is what she has thought. She may seem
capricious; and what if she does? Your knowledge of women has, I am
sure, made you indulgent."

"Not in the least," Mr. Van Norden answered. And then, for the time
being, the subject was dropped.

It was this semi-consolatory view which Tristrem took of the matter
after the effect of the first shock had lost its force. But when he
received the bundle of letters, together with the Panama hat, which,
through some splendid irony, had been devised to him in the only clause
of the will in which his name was mentioned, it was as though a flash
had rent the darkness and revealed in one quick glare an answer to the
enigma in which he groped.

The letters were few in number--a dozen at most--and they were tied
together with a bit of faded ribbon. They were all in the same hand, one
and all contained protestations of passionate love, and each was signed
in full, Roanoke Raritan. The envelope which held them was addressed to
Mrs. Erastus Varick.

It was then that he saw the reason of his disinheritance, and it was
then that he understood the cause of Viola's withdrawal. It was evident
to him that Mrs. Raritan possessed either thorough knowledge of the
facts, or else that she had some inkling of them which her feminine
instinct had supplemented into evidence, and which had compelled her to
forbid the banns. There were, however, certain things which he could not
make clear to his mind. Why had Mrs. Raritan treated him with such
consideration? She had known from the first that he loved her daughter.
And after the engagement, if she wished it broken, why had she allowed
Viola to invite him to the Pier?

These things were at first inexplicable to him. Afterward he fancied
that it might be that Mrs. Raritan, originally uninformed, had become so
only through the man whom he had believed was his father, after the
announcement of the engagement had been made to him, and possibly
through some communication which had only reached her after his sudden
death. This explanation he was inclined to accept, and he was
particularly inclined to do so on recalling the spasm which had agitated
the deceased when he had come to him with the intelligence of the
engagement, and the nervous excitement which Mrs. Raritan displayed on
the morning when he left for town.

This explanation he accepted later--but in the horror of the situation
in which he first found himself his mind declined to act. He had never
known his mother, but her fame he had cherished as one cherishes that
which is best and most perfect of all. And abruptly that fame was
tarnished, as some fair picture might be sullied by a splash and
splatter of mud. And as though that were insufficient, the letters which
devastated his mother's honor brought him a hideous suspicion, and one
which developed into certainty, that his father and the father of the
girl whom he loved were one and the same.

It is not surprising, then, that during the summer months Tristrem was
as lifeless as the air he breathed. His grandfather noticed the
change--he would have been blind indeed had he not--and he urged him to
leave New York. But at each remonstrance Tristrem shook his head with
persistent apathy. What did it matter to him where he was? If New York,
instead of being merely hot and uncomfortable, had been cholera-smitten,
and the prey of pest, Tristrem's demeanor would not have altered. There
are people whom calamity affects like a tonic, who rise from misfortune
refreshed; there are others on whom disaster acts like a soporific, and
he was one of the latter. For three months he did not open a book, the
daily papers were taken from him unread, and if during that time he had
lost his reason, it is probable that his insanity would have consisted
in sitting always with eyes fixed, without laughing, weeping, or
changing place.

But after the hearing in the Surrogate's Court there was a change of
scene. The will was set aside, and the estate, of which Tristrem had
taken absolutely no thought whatever, reverted to him. It was then that
he made it over in its entirety to the institution to which it had been
originally devised; and it was in connection with the disposal of the
property, a disposal which he effected as a matter of course, and as the
only right and proper thing for him to do, that he enjoyed a memorable
interview with his grandfather.

He had not spoken to Mr. Van Norden about the letters, and the old
gentleman, through some restraining sense of delicacy, had hesitated to
question. Besides, he was confident that the estate would be Tristrem's,
and thus assured, it seemed unnecessary to him to touch on a matter to
which Tristrem had not alluded, and which was presumably distasteful to
him. But when he learned what Tristrem had done, he looked upon the
matter in a different light, and attacked him very aggressively the next
day.

"I can understand perfectly," he said, "that you should decline to hold
property on what you seem to regard as a legal quibble. But I should be
very much gratified to learn in what your judgment is superior to that
of the Legislature, and why you should refuse that to which you had as
clear and indefeasible a claim as I have to this fob on my waistcoat. I
should be really very much gratified to learn----"

Tristrem looked at his grandfather very much as though he had been asked
to open a wound. But he answered nothing. He got the letters and placed
them in the old gentleman's hand.

Mr. Van Norden glanced at one, and then turned to Tristrem. It was
evident that he was in the currents of conflicting and retroacting
emotions. He made as though he would speak, yet for the time being the
intensity of his feelings prevented him. He took up the letters again
and eyed them, shaking his head as he did so with the anger of one
enraged at the irreparable, and conscious of the futility of the wrath.

In the lives of most men and women there are moments in which they are
pregnant with words. The necessity of speech is so great that until the
parturition is accomplished they experience the throes of suffocation.
If no listener be at hand, there are at least the walls. Mr. Van Norden
was standing near to Tristrem, but that he might be the better assured
of his attention, he caught him by the arm, and addressed him in abrupt,
disjointed sentences, in a torrent of phrases, unconnected, as though
others than himself beat their vocables from his mouth. His words were
so tumultuous that they assailed the gates of speech, as spectators at
the sight of flame crowd the exits of a hall, and issue, some as were
they hurled from catapults, others, maimed, in disarray.

He was possessed of anger, and as sometimes happens off the stage, his
anger was splendid and glorious to behold. And Tristrem, with the thirst
of one who has drunk of thirst itself, caught the cascade of words, and
found in them the waters and fountains of life.

"These letters----But how is it possible? God in Heaven----! But can't
you see?--the bare idea is an infamy. Your mother was as interested in
Raritan as--as----It's enough to make a mad dog blush. It was just a few
months before you were born----Bah! the imbecility of Erastus Varick
would unnerve a pirate. I know he was always running there, Raritan was,
but anyone with the brain of a wooden Indian would have
understood----Why, they were here--they came to me, all three of them,
and because I knew her father----And precious little thanks I got for my
pains. He said he would see the girl in her grave first. He would have
it that Raritan was after her for her money. It's true he hadn't a
penny--but--what's that got to do with it? The mischief's done. She must
have sent these letters to your mother to return to Raritan just before
she married that idiot Wainwaring. Your mother was her most intimate
friend--they were at school together at Pelham Priory. Raritan, I
suppose, was away. Before he got back, your mother--you were born, you
know, and she died. She had no chance to return them. That imbecile of a
father of yours must have found the letters, and thought----But how is
such a thing possible? Good God! he ought to be dug up and cowhided. And
it was for this he left you a Panama hat! And it was for this you have
turned over millions to an institution for the shelter of vice! It was
for this----See here, since Christ was crucified, a greater stupidity,
or one more iniquitous, has never been committed."

In the magnificence of his indignation, Mr. Van Norden stormed on until
he lacked the strength to continue. But he stormed to ravished and
indulgent ears. And when at last he did stop, Tristrem, who meanwhile
had been silent as a mouse, went over to the arm-chair into which, in
his exhaustion, he had thrown himself, and touched his shoulder.

"If he did not wish me to have the money," he said, "how could I keep
it? How could I?" And before the honesty that was in his face the old
man lowered his eyes to the ground. "I am gladder," Tristrem continued,
"to know myself his son than to be the possessor of all New York. But
when I thought that I was not his son, was that a reason why I should
cease to be a gentleman. Though I lost everything else, what did it
matter if I kept my self-respect?"

He waited a moment for an answer, and then a very singular thing
happened. From Dirck Van Norden's lowered eyes first one tear and then a
second rolled down into the furrows of his cheek. From his throat came a
sound that did not wholly resemble a sob and yet was not like to
laughter, his mouth twitched, and he turned his head aside. "It's the
first time since your mother died," he said at last, but what he meant
by that absurd remark, who shall say?

For some time Tristrem lingered, lost in thought. It was indeed as he
had said. He was gladder to feel again that he was free to love and free
to be loved in return than he would have been at holding all New York in
fee. As he rose from the nightmare in which he suffocated he did not so
much as pay the lost estate the compliment of a regret. It was not that
which had debarred him from her, nor was it for that that she had once
placed her hand in his. He was well rid of it all, since in the riddance
the doors of his prison-house were unlocked. For three months his heart
had been not dead but haunted, and now it was instinct with life and
fluttered by the beckonings of hope. He had fronted sorrow. Pain had
claimed him for its own, and in its intensity it had absorbed his tears.
He had sunk to the uttermost depths of grief, and, unbereft of reason,
he had explored the horrors of the abyss. And now in the magic of the
unforeseen he was transported to dazzling altitudes, to landscapes from
which happiness, like the despot that it is, had routed sorrow and
banished pain. He was like one who, overtaken by years and disease,
suddenly finds his youth restored.

His plans were quickly made. He would go to Narragansett at once, and
not leave until the engagement was renewed. He had even the cruelty to
determine that his grandfather should come to the Pier himself, and
argue with Mrs. Raritan, if argument were necessary.

"I have so much to say," he presently exclaimed, "that I don't know
where to begin."

"Begin at the end," his grandfather suggested.

But Tristrem found it more convenient to begin in the middle. He led the
old gentleman into the rhyme and reason of the rupture, he carried him
forward and backward from old fancies to newer hopes. He explained how
imperative it was that with the demolition of the obstacle which his
father had erected the engagement should be at once renewed; he blamed
himself for having even suggested that Viola was capricious; he mourned
over the position in which she had been placed; he pictured Mrs.
Raritan's relief when she learned of the error into which she had
wandered; and after countless digressions wound up by commanding his
grandfather to write an explanation which would serve him as a passport
to renewed and uninterruptable favor.

"Certainly--certainly," Mr. Van Norden cried, with the impatience of one
battling against a stream. "But even granting that your father wrote to
Mrs. Raritan, which I doubt--although, to be sure, he was capable of
anything--don't you see that you are in a very different position to-day
than you would have been had you not--had you not----"

"You mean about the money?"

"Why, most assuredly I mean about the money," the old gentleman cried,
aroused to new indignation by the wantonness of the question.

At this Tristrem, with the blithe confidence of a lover, shook his head.
"You don't know Viola," he answered. "Besides, I can work. Other men
do--why shouldn't I?"

"And be able to marry when you are ready for the grave. That's nonsense.
Unless the young lady is a simpleton, and her mother a fit subject for
Bedlam, don't tell them that you are going to work. And what would you
work at, pray? No, no--that won't do. You are as fitted to go into
business as I am to open a bake-shop."

"I might try stocks," said Tristrem, bravely.

"So you might, if you had the St. Nicholas money to start with. And even
then you would have to lose two fortunes before you could learn how to
make one. No, if you have not six or seven millions, you will, one of
these days--and the later the day the better for me--you will have a few
hundred thousand. It is paltry enough in comparison to the property
which you threw out of the window, but, paltry or not, it's more than
you deserve. Meanwhile, I will----There, don't begin your nonsense
again, sir. For the last three months you have done nothing but bother
the soul out of me. Meanwhile, if you don't accept what I care to give,
and accept it, what's more, with a devilish good grace, I'll--I'll
disinherit you myself--begad I will. I'll leave everything I have to the
St. Nicholas. It's a game that two can play at. You have set the
fashion, and you can abide by it. And now I would be very much indebted
if you would let me get some rest."

Therewith the fierce old gentleman looked Tristrem in the eyes, and
grasping him by the shoulder, he held him to him for a second's space.




XI.


When Tristrem reached Narragansett he had himself driven to an hotel,
where he removed the incidental traces of travel before venturing to
present himself at the villa. It was a glorious forenoon, and as he
dressed, the tonic that was blown to him through the open window
affected his spirits like wine. The breeze promised victory. He had been
idle and dilatory, he told himself; but he was older, the present was
his, and he felt the strength to make it wholly to his use. The past
would be forgotten and put aside; no, but utterly, as Nature
forgets--and in the future, what things might be!

    "O Magali, ma bien aimée,
    Fuyons tous deux, tous de--ux----"

The old song came back to him, and as he set out for the villa he hummed
it gayly to himself. The villa was but the throw of a stone from the
hotel, and in a moment he would be there. He was just a little bit
nervous, and he walked rapidly. As he reached the gate his excitement
increased. In his breast was a tightening sensation. And then at once he
stopped short. On the door of the cottage hung a sign, bearing for
legend, "To Let--Furnished."

"But it is impossible," he exclaimed, "they were to be here till
October."

He went up and rang the bell. The front windows were closed and barred.
The porch on which he stood was chairless. He listened, and heard no
sound. He tried the door--it was locked.

"But it is impossible," he kept repeating. "H'm! 'To let--furnished; for
particulars apply to J. F. Brown, at the Casino.' Most certainly, I
will--most certainly," and monologuing in the fashion that was peculiar
to him, he went down the road again, mindful only of his own perplexity.

On reaching the Casino he found that he would have no difficulty in
seeing the agent. Mr. Brown, the door-keeper told him, was "right in
there," and as he gave this information he pointed to a cramped little
office which stood to the left of the entrance.

"Is this Mr. Brown?" Tristrem began. "Mr. Brown, I am sorry to trouble
you. Would you be good enough to tell me about Mrs. Raritan's cottage.
I----"

"For next summer? Nine hundred, payable in advance."

"I didn't mean about the price. I meant--I was told that Mrs. Raritan
had taken it until October----"

"So she did. You can sublet for the balance of the season."

"Thank you--yes--but Mrs. Raritan hasn't gone away, has she?"

"She went weeks ago. There's nothing the matter with the cottage,
however. Drainage excellent."

"I have no doubt. But can you tell me where Mrs. Raritan went to?"

"I haven't the remotest idea. Lenox, perhaps. If you want to look at the
cottage I'll give you the key."

"I should think----Really, I must apologize for troubling you. Didn't
Mrs. Raritan leave her address?"

"If she did, it wasn't with me. When do you want the cottage for?"

Tristrem had not the courage to question more. He turned despondently
from Mr. Brown, and passing on through the vestibule, reached the
veranda that fronts the sea. In an angle a group of violinists were
strumming an inanity of Strauss with perfect independence of one
another. Beyond, on the narrow piazza, and on a division of the lawn
that leaned to the road, were a number of small tables close-packed with
girls in bright costumes and men in loose flannels and coats of
diverting hues. At the open windows of the restaurant other groups were
seated, dividing their attention between the food before them and the
throng without. And through the crowd a number of Alsatians pushed their
way, bearing concoctions to the thirstless. The hubbub was enervating,
and in the air was a stench of liquor with which the sea-breeze coped in
vain.

Tristrem hesitated a second, and would have fled. He was in one of those
moods in which the noise and joviality of pleasure-seekers are jarring
even to the best-disposed. While he hesitated he saw a figure rising and
beckoning from a table on the lawn. And as he stood, uncertain whether
or no the signals were intended for him, the figure crossed the
intervening space, and he recognized Alphabet Jones.

"Come and have a drink," said that engaging individual. "You're as
solemn as a comedian. I give you my word, I believe you are the only
sober man in the place."

"Thank you," Tristrem answered; "I believe I do not care for anything. I
only came to ask----By the way, have you been here long?"

"Off and on all summer. It's a good place for points. You got my card,
didn't you? I wanted to express my sympathy at your bereavement."

"You are very kind; I----"

"But what's this I hear about you? You've bloomed out into a celebrity.
Everybody is talking about you--everybody, men, women, and children,
particularly the girls. When a fellow gives away a fortune like that!
_Mais, tu sais, mon cher, c'est beau, c'est bien beau, ça._" And to
himself he added, "_Et bien bête._"

Already certain members of immediate groups had become interested in the
new arrival, and it seemed to Tristrem that he heard his name
circulating above the jangle of the waltz.

"I am going to the hotel," he said. "I wish you would walk back with me.
I haven't spoken to a soul in an age. It would be an act of charity to
tell me the gossip." Tristrem, as he made this invitation, marvelled at
his own duplicity. For the time being, he cared for the society of
Alphabet Jones as he cared for the companionship of a bum-bailiff. Yet
still he lured him from the Casino and led him up the road, in the hope
that perhaps without direct questioning he might gain some knowledge of
Her.

As they walked on Jones descanted in the arbitrary didactic manner which
is the privilege of men of letters whose letters are not in capitals,
and moralized on a variety of topics, not with any covert intention of
boring Tristrem, but merely from a habit he had of rehearsing ready-made
phrases and noting their effect on a particular listener. This exercise
he found beneficial. In airing his views he sometimes stumbled on a good
thing which he had not thought of in private. And as he talked Tristrem
listened, in the hope that he might say something which would permit him
to lead up to the subject that was foremost in his mind. But nothing of
such a nature was touched upon, and it was not until the cottage was
reached that Tristrem spoke at all.

"The Raritans have gone, I see," he remarked, nodding at the cottage as
he did so.

"Yes, I see by the papers that they sailed yesterday."

"You don't mean to say they have gone to Europe. I thought--I heard they
were going to Lenox."

"If they were, they changed their plans. Miss Raritan didn't seem up to
the mark when she was here. In some way she reminded me of a realized
ideal--the charm had departed. She used to be enigmatical in her beauty,
but this summer, though the beauty was still there, it was no longer
enigmatical, it was like a problem solved. After all, it's the way with
our girls. A winter or two in New York would take the color out of the
cheeks of a Red Indian. _Apropos de bottes_, weren't you rather smitten
in that direction?"

"And you say they have gone abroad?" Tristrem repeated, utterly
unimpressed by the ornateness of the novelist's remarks.

"Yes, sir; and were it not that our beastly Government declines to give
me the benefit of an international copyright, I should be able to go and
do likewise. It's enough to turn an author into an anarchist. Why, you
would be surprised----"

Jones rambled on, but Tristrem no longer listened. The position in which
he found himself was more irritating than a dream. He was dumbly
exasperated. It was his own inaction that was the cause of it all. If he
had but bestirred himself sooner! Instead of struggling against that
which every throb of his heart convinced him was false, he had dawdled
with the impossible and toyed with apostils of grief. At the first
obstacle he had turned aside. Where he should have been resolute, he had
been weak. He had taken mists for barriers. A child frightened at its
own shadow was never more absurd than he. And Viola--it was not
surprising that the color had deserted her cheeks. It was no wonder that
in his imbecile silence she had gone away. It was only surprising that
she had not gone before. And if she had waited, might it not be that she
waited expectant of some effort from him, hoping against hope, and when
he had made no sign had believed in his defeat, and left him to it.
There was no blame for her. And now, if he were free again, that very
liberty was due not to his own persistence, but to chance. Surely she
was right to go. Yet--yet--but, after all, _it was not too late_.
Wherever she had gone he could follow. He would find her, and tell her,
and hold her to him.

Already he smiled in scenes forecast. The exasperation had left him.
Whether he came to Narragansett or journeyed to Paris, what matter did
it make? The errand was identical, and the result would be the same. How
foolish of him to be annoyed because he had not found her, in garlands
of orange-blossoms, waiting on a balcony to greet his coming. The very
fact of her absence added new weight to the import of his message. Yes,
he would return to town at once, and the next steamer would bear him to
her.

And then, unconsciously, through some obscure channel of memory, he was
back where he had once been, in a _Gasthof_ in the Bavarian Mountains.
It was not yet dusk. Through the window came a choir of birds, and he
could see the tender asparagus-green of neighborly trees. He was seated
at a great, bare table of oak, and as he raised from it to his lips a
stone measure of beer, his eyes rested on an engraving that hung on the
wall. It represented a huntsman, galloping like mad, one steadying hand
on the bridle and the other stretched forward to grasp a phantom that
sped on before. Under the picture, in quaint German text, was the
legend, _The Chase after Happiness_. "H'm;" he mused, "I don't see why I
should think of that."

"That's the gist of it all," Jones was saying. "It's the fashion to rail
against critics. I remember telling one of the guild the other day not
to read my books--they might prejudice him in my favor; but in
comparison to certain publishers the average reviewer stands as a
misdemeanant does to a burglar. No, I have said it before and I say it
again, until that copyright law is passed, the Government is guilty of
nothing less than compounding a felony."

Of what had gone before Tristrem had not heard a single word, and these
ultimate phrases which reached him were as meaningless as
church-steeples. He started as one does from a nap, with that shake of
the head which is peculiar to the absent-minded. He was standing, he
discovered, at the entrance to the hotel at which he lodged.

"Don't you agree with me?" Jones asked. "Come and lunch at the Casino.
You will get nothing here. Narragansett cookery is as iniquitous as the
legislature. Besides, at this hour they give you dinner. It is tragic,
on my word, it is."

"Thank you," Tristrem answered, elusively. "I have an appointment
with--with a train." And with this excuse he entered the hotel, and as
soon after as was practicable he returned to town.

It was, he learned, as Jones had said. Mrs. Raritan and Miss Raritan
were passengers on a steamer which had sailed two days before. It was
then Friday. One of the swiftest Cunarders was to sail the following
morning, and it seemed not improbable to Tristrem that he might reach
the other side, if not simultaneously with, at least but a few hours
after the arrival of the Wednesday boat. Such preparations, therefore,
as were necessary he made without delay. As incidental thereto, he went
to the house in Thirty-ninth Street. There he learned, from a squat
little Irishwoman who came out from the area and eyed him with
unmollifiable suspicion, that, like the Narragansett cottage, the house
was to let. The only address which he could obtain from her was that of
a real-estate agent in the lower part of the city. Thither he posted at
once. Yet even there the information which he gleaned was meagre. The
house was offered for a year. During that period, the agent understood,
Mrs. Raritan proposed to complete her daughter's musical education
abroad; where, the agent did not know. The rental accruing from the
lease of the house was to be paid over to the East and West Trust Co.
Further than that he could say nothing. Thereupon Tristrem trudged
hopefully to Wall Street; but the secretary of the East and West was
vaguer even than the agent. He knew nothing whatever on the subject of
Mrs. Raritan's whereabouts, and from his tone it was apparent that he
cared less. There is, however, an emollient in courtesy which has
softened greater oafs than he, and that emollient Tristrem possessed.
There was in his manner a penetrating and pervasive refinement, and at
the gruffness with which he was received there came to his face an
expression of such perplexity that the secretary, disarmed in spite of
himself, turned from his busy idleness and told Tristrem that if Mrs.
Raritan had not left her address with him she must certainly have given
it to the lawyer who held the power of attorney to collect the rents and
profits of her estate. The name of that lawyer was Meggs, and his office
was in the Mills Building.

In the Mills Building Tristrem's success was little better. Mr. Meggs,
the managing clerk announced, had left town an hour before and would not
return until Monday. However, if there was anything _he_ could do, he
was entirely at Tristrem's disposal. And then Tristrem explained his
errand anew, adding that he sailed on the morrow, and that it was
important for him to have Mrs. Raritan's address before he left. The
clerk regretted, but he did not know it. Could not Mr. Meggs send it to
him?

"He might cable it, might he not?" Tristrem suggested. And as this plan
seemed feasible, he gave the clerk a card with a London address scrawled
on it, and therewith some coin. "I should be extremely indebted if you
would beg Mr. Meggs to send me the address at once," he added; and the
clerk, who had read the name on the card and knew it to be that of the
claimant and renouncer of a great estate, assured him that Mr. Meggs
would take great pleasure in so doing.

After that there was nothing for Tristrem to do but to return to his
grandfather's house and complete his preparations. He dined with Mr. Van
Norden that evening, and a very pleasant dinner it was. Together they
talked of those matters and memories that were most congenial to them;
Mr. Van Norden looking steadily in the past, and Tristrem straight into
the future. And at last, at midnight, when the carriage came to take
Tristrem to the wharf--for the ship was to sail at so early an hour in
the morning that it was deemed expedient for the passengers to sleep on
board--as Tristrem took leave of his grandfather, "Bring her back soon,"
the old gentleman said, "bring her back as soon as you can. And,
Tristrem, you must take this to her once more, with an old man's love
and blessing."

Whereupon he gave Tristrem again the diamond brooch that had belonged to
his daughter.




XII.


The journey over was precisely like any other, except in this, that, the
tide of travel being in the contrary direction, the number of cabin
passengers was limited. Among them there was no one whom Tristrem had
met before; yet, after the second day out, there were few whom his
appearance and manner had not attracted and coerced into some overture
to better acquaintance. Of these his attention was particularly claimed
by an Englishman who sat next to him at table, and a young lady who
occupied the seat opposite to his own. In the eyes of the latter was the
mischievous look of a precocious boy. She was extremely pretty; blonde,
fair, with a mouth that said Kiss me--what the French call a _frimousse
frottée de champagne_; and her speech was marked by great vivacity. She
was accompanied by an elderly person who appeared at table but once, and
who during the rest of the voyage remained bundled in shawls in the
ladies' cabin, where refreshments were presumably brought her.

It was rumored that this young lady was an ex-star of the Gaiety, and
more recently a member of a burlesque troupe that had disbanded in the
States. It was added--but then, are not ill-natured things said about
everybody? You, sir, and you, madam, who happen to read this page, have
never, of course, been spoken of other than with the greatest respect,
but what is said of your neighbor? and what have you said yourself?

Tristrem, unaffected by the gossip of the smoking-room, to which,
indeed, he lent but an inattentive ear, allowed the young lady to march
him up and down the deck and, as was his wont, permitted himself to be
generally made use of. Yet if the elderly person in the ladies' cabin
had exacted of him similar attentions, the attentions would have been
rendered with the same prompt and diligent willingness. He was not a
good listener, although he seemed one, but there was a breeziness in the
young lady's conversation which helped him not a little to forget the
discomforts of ocean travel. He walked with her, in consequence, mile
after mile, and when she wearied of that amusement, he got her
comfortably seated and, until she needed him again, passed the time in
the smoking-room.

It was there that he became acquainted with the Englishman who sat next
to him at table. His name, he learned, was Ledyard Yorke. He was an
artist by profession, and in the course of a symposium or two Tristrem
discovered that he was a very cultivated fellow besides. He seemed to be
well on in the thirties, and it was evident that there were few quarters
of the globe with which he was not familiar. He was enthusiastic on the
subject of French literature, but the manufactures of the pupils of the
Beaux Arts he professed to abominate.

"The last time I was at the Salon," he said, one evening, "there were in
those interminable halls over three thousand pictures. Of these, there
were barely fifty worth looking at. The others were interesting as
colored lithographs on a dead wall. There was a Manet or two, a Moreau,
and a dozen or more excellent landscapes, but the rest represented the
apotheosis of mediocrity. The pictures which Gérôme, Cabanel,
Bouguereau, and the acolytes of those pastry-cooks exposed were stupid
and sterile as church doors. What is art, after all, if it be not an
imitation of nature? To my thinking, the greater the illusion, the
nearer does the counterfeit approach the model. And look at the nymphs
and dryads which those hair-dressers present. In the first place, nymphs
and dryads are as overdone as the assumption of Virgins and the loves of
Leda. Besides they were not modern, but even if they were, fancy a girl
who lives in the open air in her birthday costume, and who, exposed to
the sun, to say nothing of the wind, still preserves the pink and white
skin of a baby--and a skin, mind you, that looks as though it had been
polished and pinched by a masseur; however, place a dozen of them
lolling in conventional attitudes in a glade, or represent them bathing
in a pond, and although the sun shines on them through the foliage, be
careful not to get so much as the criss-cross of a shadow on their
bodies, smear the whole thing with cold cream, label one 'Arcadia,' and
the other 'Nymphs surprised,' and you have what they call in France the
_faire distingué_."

There was nothing particularly new in what Mr. Yorke had to say, and if,
like the majority of men whose thoughts run in a particular channel, he
was apt to be dogmatic in his views, he yet possessed that saving
quality, which consists in treating the subject in hand not as were it a
matter of life and death, but rather as one which is as unimportant as
the gout of a distant relative. And it was in the companionship of this
gentleman, and that of the young lady alluded to, that Tristrem passed
the six days which separated him from the Irish coast.

On the day preceding the debarcation he was in great and expectant
spirits, but as the sun sank in the ocean his light-heartedness sank
with it. During dinner his charming _vis-à-vis_ rallied him as best she
might, but he remained unresponsive, answering only when civility made
it necessary for him to do so. It is just possible that the young lady
may have entertained original ideas of her own on the subject of his
taciturnity, but, however that may be, it so happened that before the
meal was done Tristrem went up on deck, and seeking the stern of the
ship, leaned over the gunwale.

So far in the distance as his eyes could reach was a trail of glistening
white. On either side were impenetrable wastes of black. In his ears was
the sob of water displaced, the moan of tireless discontent, and
therewith the flash and shimmer of phosphorus seemed to invite and tell
of realms of enchanted rest beneath. And, as Tristrem watched and
listened, the sibilants of the sea gurgled in sympathy with his
thoughts, accompanying and accentuating them with murmurs of its own.
Its breast was bared to him, it lay at his feet, open-armed as though
waiting his coming, and conjuring him to haste. "There is nothing
sweeter," it seemed to say, "nothing swifter, and naught more still. I
feed my lovers on lotus and Lethe. There is no fairer couch in the world
than mine. A sister's kiss is not more chaste. I am better than fame,
serener than hope; I am more than love, I am peace. I am unforsakable,
and I never forsake."

And as the great ship sped on in fright, it almost seemed to Tristrem
that the sea, like an affianced bride, was rising up to claim and take
him as her own. Many months later, he thought of the sensation that he
then experienced, the query that came to his mind, he knew not how or
whence, whether it were not better perhaps--and then the after-shudder
as he started back, wondering could it be that for the moment he was
mad, and telling himself that in a few hours, a few days at most, he
would be with Her. And what had the sea to do with him? Many months
after he thought of it.

And as he still gazed at the tempting waters, he felt a hand touch his
own, rest on, and nestle in it. He looked around; it was his charming
_vis-à-vis_ who had sought him out and was now looking in his face. She
did not speak; her eyes had lost their mischief, but her mouth framed
its message as before. Awkwardly as men do such things, Tristrem
disengaged his hand. The girl made one little effort to detain it, and
for a moment her lips moved; but she said nothing, and when the hand had
gone from her, she turned with a toss of the head and disappeared in the
night.

Soon after, Tristrem turned, too, and found his way to the smoking-room.
In some way the caress which he had eluded had left a balm. He was as
hopeful as before, and he smiled in silent amusement at the ups and
downs of his needless fears. In a corner of the room was Yorke.

"I have been looking at the sea," he said, as he took a seat at his
side; "it is captious as wine."

"You are a poet, are you not?" Yorke spoke not as though he were paying
a compliment, but in the matter-of-fact fashion in which one drummer
will say "Dry goods?" to another.

"No; I wish I were. I have never written."

"It's a popular prejudice to suppose that a poet must write. The
greatest of all never put pen to paper. What is there left to us of
Linus and Musæus? Siddartha did not write, Valmiki did not know how. The
parables of the Christ were voiced, not written. Besides, the poet
feels--he does not spend a year, like Mallarmé, in polishing a sonnet.
De Musset is certainly the best example of the poet that France has to
offer; with him you always catch the foot-fall of the Muse--you feel, as
he felt, the inspiration. And all the more clearly in that his verses
limp. He never would have had time to express himself if he had tried to
sand-paper his thoughts. Don't you suppose that Murillo was a poet?
Don't you suppose that Guido was? Don't you think that anyone who is in
love with beauty must be? I say beauty where I might say the ideal. That
is the reason I thought you a poet. You have in your face that constant
preoccupation which is distinctive of those who pursue the intangible."

"I am not pursuing the intangible, though," Tristrem answered, with a
little sententious nod.

"Ah, who shall say? We all do. I am pursuing it myself, though not in
the sense that I attribute to you. Did you ever read Flaubert's
_Tentation_? No? Well, fancy the Sphinx crouching at sunset in the
encroaching sand. In the background is a riot of color, and overhead a
tender blue fading into salmon and the discreetest gray. Then add to
that the impression of solitude and the most absolute silence. In the
foreground flutters a Chimera, a bird with a dragon's tail and the
rainbow wings of a giant butterfly. The Sphinx is staring at you, and
yet through and beyond, as though her eyes rested on some inaccessible
horizon. Cities crumble, nations rise and subside, and still that
undeviating stare! And in her face the unroutable calm of fabulous
beauty. I want those eyes, I want that face. You never heard the duo
which Flaubert gives, did you? It runs somewhat this way: The motionless
Sphinx calls: 'Here, Chimera, rest a while.'

"The Chimera answers: 'Rest? Not I.'

"_The Sphinx._ Whither goest thou in such haste?

"_The Chimera._ I gallop in the corridors of the labyrinth. I soar to
the mountain-tops. I skim the waves. I yelp at the foot of precipices. I
cling to the skirt of clouds. With my training tail I sweep the shores.
The hills have taken their curve from the form of my shoulders. But
thou--I find thee perpetually immobile, or else with the end of thy claw
drawing alphabets in the sand.

"_The Sphinx._ I am guarding my secret, I calculate and I dream.

"_The Chimera._ I--I am joyous and light of heart. I discover to man
resplendent perspectives, Utopias in the skies, and distant felicities.
Into his soul I pour the eternal follies, projects of happiness, plans
for the future, dreams of fame, and the vows of love and virtuous
resolutions. I incite to perilous journeys, to great undertakings. It is
I that chiselled the marvels of architecture. It is I that hung bells on
the tomb of Porsenna, and surrounded with an orchalc wall the quays of
the Atlantides. I seek new perfumes, larger flowers, and pleasures
unenjoyed. If anywhere I perceive a man whose mind rests in wisdom, I
drop from space and strangle him.

"_The Sphinx._ All those whom the desire of God torments, I have
devoured."

Yorke had repeated these snatches from the duo in French. He had
repeated them well, bringing out the harmony of the words in a manner
which in our harsher tongue would have been impossible. And now he felt
parched, and ordered some drink of the steward.

"It is the face of that Sphinx that I want," he continued. "If I were a
composer I would put the duo itself to music. I know of no prose more
admirable. I have the scene on canvas, all of it, that is, except the
Sphinx's face, and that, of course, is the most important. I want a face
that she alone could possess. I may find it, I may not. At all events,
you see that just at present I too am in pursuit of the intangible. But
there, tell me of the artist who is not. It is true, you go to the
Academy, and in the Cleopatras and Psyches you recognize the same Mary
Jane who the day before offered herself as model to you. My Sphinx,
however, was not born in Clapham. Nor does she dwell in Pimlico. But,
apropos to Pimlico, I have a fancy that that little friend of yours is
on her way to St. John's Wood."

"What little friend?"

"Why, the girl that sits opposite. And what's more to the point, she's
in love with you. _Tous mes compliments, c'est un vrai morceau de roi._"

At this Tristrem blushed in spite of himself. She might have been the
Helen for whom the war of the world was fought; she might have been
Mylitta or Venus Basilea, and still would she have left him unimpressed.
He would not have recognized the divinity--he bowed but to one.

"You remind me," said Yorke, who had watched his expression--"you remind
me of De Marsay, who did not know what he did to the women to make them
all fall in love with him. There is nothing as fetching as that. And
there is nothing, at least to my thinking, that compares with that charm
which a woman in love exhales to her lover. It is small matter whether
the woman is the daughter of an earl or whether she is a cocotte. There
are, I know, people who like their claret in decanters, but so long as
the wine is good, what does the bottle matter?

    "'_Aimer est le grand point, qu' importe la maitresse?
    Qu' importe le flacon, pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse_?'"

"De Musset was drunk when he wrote that," said Tristrem. "But whether he
was drunk or sober, I don't agree with him. I don't agree with him at
all. It is the speech of a man who can think himself in love over and
over again, and who discovers in the end that through all his affairs he
has loved no one but himself."

All of which Mr. Yorke pooh-poohed in the civilest manner, and when
Tristrem had finished his little speech, expounded the principles of
love as they are formulated in the works of a German metaphysician,
supporting them as he did so with such clarity and force of argument
that Tristrem, vanquished but unconvinced, left him in disgust.

The next day they were at Liverpool. In the confusion that is incidental
to every debarcation Tristrem had had no opportunity of exchanging a
word with his _vis-à-vis_. But in the custom-house he caught sight of
her, and went forward to bid her good-bye.

"Good-bye," she answered, when he had done so, and putting out her hand,
she looked at him with mischievous eyes. "Good-bye," she repeated,
lightly, and then, between her teeth, she added, "Imbecile that you
are!"

Though what she may have meant by that, Tristrem never understood.




XIII.


It was under cover of a fog of leprous brown striated with ochre and
acrid with smoke that Tristrem entered London. In allusion to that most
delightful of cities, someone has said somewhere that hell must be just
such another place. If the epigrammatist be right, then indeed is it
time that the rehabilitation of the lower regions began. London is
subtle and cruel, perhaps, and to the meditative traveller it not
infrequently appears like an invocation to suicide writ in stone. But
whoso has once accustomed himself to its breath may live ever after in
flowerful Arcadias and yet dream of its exhalations with regret. In
Venice one may coquette with phantoms; Rome has ghosts and memories of
her own; in Paris there is a sparkle that is headier than absinthe;
Berlin resounds so well to the beat of drums that even the pusillanimous
are brave; but London is the great enchantress. It is London alone that
holds the secret of inspiring love and hatred as well.

Tristrem sniffed the fog with a sensation of that morbid pleasure which
girls in their teens and women in travail experience when they crave and
obtain repulsive food. Had he not hungered for it himself? and did she
not breathe it too?

The journey from Euston Square to the hotel in Jermyn Street at which he
proposed to put up, was to him a confusion of impatience and
anticipation. He was sure of finding a cablegram from Mrs. Raritan's
attorney, and was it not possible that he might see Viola that very
night? In Jermyn Street, however, no message awaited him. Under the
diligent supervision of a waiter who had the look and presence of a
bishop he managed later to eat some dinner. But the evening was a blank:
he passed it twirling his thumbs, dumbly irritated, incapable of action,
and perplexed as he had never been before.

The next morning his Odyssey began. He cabled to Mr. Meggs, and saw the
clerk put beneath the message the cabalistic letters _A. P._ And then,
in an attempt to frighten Time, he had his measure taken in Saville Row
and his hair cut in Bond Street. But in vain--the day dragged as though
its wheels were clogged. By noon he had exhausted every possible
resource. Another, perhaps, might have beguiled the tedium with drink,
or cultivated what Balzac has called the gastronomy of the eye, and
which consists in idling in the streets. But unfortunately for Tristrem,
he was none other than himself. The mere smell of liquor was distasteful
to him, and he was too nervous to be actively inactive. Moreover, as in
September there are never more than four million people in London, his
chance of encountering an acquaintance was slight. Those that he
possessed were among the absent ten thousand. They were in the country,
among the mountains, at the seaside, on the Continent--anywhere, in
fact, except in the neighborhood of Pall Mall. And even had it been
otherwise, Tristrem was not in a mood to suffer entertainment. He had
not the slightest wish to be amused. Wagner might have come to Covent
Garden from the grave to conduct Parsifal in person and Tristrem would
not have so much as bought a stall. He wanted Miss Raritan's address,
and until he got it a comet that bridged the horizon would have left him
incurious as the dead.

On the morrow, with his coffee, there came to him a yellow envelope. The
message was brief, though not precisely to the point "_Uninformed of
Mrs. Raritan's address_," it ran, and the signature was _Meggs_.

For the first time it occurred to Tristrem that Fate was conspiring
against him. It had been idiocy on his part to leave New York before he
had obtained the address; and now that he was in London, it would be
irrational to write to any of her friends--the Wainwarings, for
instance--and hope to get it. He knew the Wainwarings just well enough
to attend a reception if they gave one, and a slighter acquaintance than
that it were idle to describe.

Other friends the girl had in plenty, but to Tristrem they were little
more than shadows. There seemed to be no one to whom he could turn.
Indeed he was sorely perplexed. Since the hour in which he learned that
his father and Viola's were not the same he had been possessed of but
one thought--to see her and kneel at her feet; and in the haste he had
not shown the slightest forethought--he had been too feverishly
energetic to so much as wait till he got her address; and now in the
helter-skelter he had run into a _cul-de-sac_ where he could absolutely
do nothing except sit and bite his thumb. The enforced inactivity was
torturesome as suspense. In his restlessness he determined to retrace
his steps; he would return to New York, he told himself, learn of her
whereabouts, and start afresh. Already he began to calculate the number
of days which that course of action would necessitate, and then
suddenly, as he saw himself once more on Fifth Avenue, he bethought him
of Alphabet Jones. What man was there that commanded larger sources of
social information than he? He would cable to him at once, and on the
morrow he would have the address.

The morrow dawned, and succeeding morrows--a week went by, and still no
word from Jones. A second week passed, and when a third was drawing to a
close and Tristrem, outwearied and enervated, had secured a berth on a
returning steamer, at last the answer came--an answer in four
words--"_Brown Shipley, Founders' Court_." That was all, but to
Tristrem, in his over-wrought condition, they were as barbs of flame.
"My own bankers!" he cried; "oh, thrice triple fool! why did I not think
of them before?" He was so annoyed at his stupidity that on his way to
the city his irritation counterbalanced the satisfaction which the
message brought. "Three whole weeks have I waited," he kept telling
himself--"three whole weeks! H'm! Jones might better have written. No, I
might better have shown some common-sense. Three whole weeks!"

He was out of the cab before it had fairly stopped, and breathless when
he reached the desk of the clerk whose duty it was to receive and
forward the letters of those who banked with the house.

"I want Mrs. Raritan's address," he said--"Mrs. R. F. Raritan, please."

The clerk fumbled a moment over some papers. "Care of Munroe, Rue
Scribe," he answered.

"Thank God!" Tristrem exclaimed; "and thank you. Send my letters there
also."

That evening he started for Paris, and the next morning he was asking in
the Rue Scribe the same question which he had asked the previous
afternoon in Founders' Court. There he learned that Mrs. Raritan had
sent word, the day before, that all letters should be held for her until
further notice. She had been stopping with her daughter at the Hôtel du
Rhin, but whether or not she was still there the clerk did not know. The
Rue Scribe is not far from the Place Vendôme, in which the Hôtel du Rhin
is situated, and it took Tristrem a little less than five minutes to get
there. The concierge was lounging in her cubby-hole.

"Madame Raritan?" Tristrem began.

"_Partie, m'sieu, partie d'puis hier--_"

And then from Tristrem new questions came thick and fast. The concierge,
encouraged by what is known as a white piece, and of which the value is
five francs in current coin, became very communicative. Disentangled
from layers of voluble digression, the kernel of her information
amounted to this: Mrs. Raritan and her daughter had taken the Orient
Express the day before. On the subject of their destination she declared
herself ignorant. Suppositions she had in plenty, but actual knowledge
none, and she took evident pleasure in losing herself in extravagant
conjectures. "_Bien le bonjour_," she said when Tristrem, passably
disheartened, turned to leave--"_Bien le bonjour, m'sieu; si j'ose
m'exprimer ainsi._"

The Orient Express, as Tristrem knew, goes through Southern Germany into
Austria, thence down to Buda-Pest and on to Constantinople. That Viola
and her mother had any intention of going farther than Vienna was a
thing which he declined to consider. On the way to Vienna was Stuttgart
and Munich. In Munich there was Wagner every other night. In Stuttgart
there was a conservatory of music, and at Vienna was not the Opera
world-renowned? "They have gone to one of those three cities," he told
himself. "Viola must have determined to relinquish the Italian school
for the German. H'm," he mused, "I'll soon put a stop to that. As to
finding her, all I have to do is go to the police. They keep an eye on
strangers to some purpose. Let me see--I can get to Stuttgart by
to-morrow noon. If she is not there I will go to Munich. I rather like
the idea of a stroll on the Maximilien Strasse. It would be odd if I met
her in the street. Well, if she isn't in Munich she is sure to be in
Vienna." And as he entered the Grand Hôtel he smiled anew in dreams
forecast.

Tristrem carried out his programme to the end. But not in Stuttgart, not
in Munich, nor in Vienna either, could he obtain the slightest
intelligence of her. In the latter city he was overtaken by a low fever,
which detained him for a month, and from which he arose enfeebled but
with clearer mind. He wrote to Viola two letters, and two also to her
mother. One of each he sent to the Rue Scribe, the others to Founders'
Court. When ten days went by, and no answer came, he understood for the
first time what the fable of Tantalus might mean, and that of Sisyphus
too. He wrote at length to his grandfather, describing his Odyssey, his
perplexities, and asking advice. He even wrote to Jones--though much
more guardedly, of course--thanking him for his cable, and inquiring in
a post-scriptum whether he had heard anything further on the subject of
the Raritans' whereabouts. These letters were barely despatched when he
was visited by a luminous thought. The idea that Viola intended to
relinquish Italian music for that of Wagner had never seemed to him
other than an incongruity. "Idiot that I am!" he exclaimed; "she came
abroad to study at Milan, and there is where she is. She must have left
the Orient Express at Munich and gone straight down through the Tyrol."
And in the visitation of this comforting thought Tantalus and Sisyphus
went back into the night from which they had come; in their place came
again the blue-eyed divinity whose name is Hope.

It is not an easy journey, nor a comfortable one, from Vienna to Milan,
but Hope aiding, it can be accomplished without loss of life or reason.
And Hope aided Tristrem to his destination, and there disappeared. In
all Milan no intelligence of Viola could be obtained. He wrote again to
her. The result was the same. "I am as one accursed," he thought, and
that night he saw himself in dream stopping passers in the street,
asking them with lifted hat had they seen a girl wonderfully fair, with
amber eyes. He asked the question in French, in German, in Italian,
according to the nationality of those he encountered, and once, to a
little old woman, he spoke in a jargon of his own invention. But she
laughed, and seemed to understand, and gave him the address of a
lupanar.

He idled awhile in Milan, and then went to Florence, and to Rome, and to
Naples, crossing over, even, to Palermo; and then retracing his steps,
he visited the smaller cities and outlying, unfrequented towns.
Something there was which kept telling him that she was near at hand,
waiting, like the enchanted princess, for his coming. And he hunted and
searched, outwearied at times, and refreshed again by resuscitations of
hope, and intussusceptions of her presence. But in the search his nights
were white. It was rare for him to get any sleep before the dawn had
come.

Early in spring he reached Milan again. He had written from Bergamo to
the Rue Scribe, asking that his letters should be forwarded to that
place, and among the communications that were given him on his arrival
was a cablegram from New York. _Come back_, it ran; _she is here_. It
was from his grandfather, Dirck Van Norden, and as Tristrem read it he
trembled from head to foot. It was on a Tuesday that this occurred, and
he reflected that he would just about be able to get to Havre in time
for the Saturday steamer. An hour later he was in the train bound for
Desenzano, from which place he proposed to go by boat to Riva, and
thence up to Munich, where he could catch the Orient Express on its
returning trip to France.




XIV.


When the boat entered the harbor it was already night. Tristrem was
tired, but his fatigue was pleasant to him. His Odyssey was done. New
York, it is true, was many days away, but he was no longer to wander
feverishly from town to town. If he was weary, at least his mind was at
rest. Riva is on the Austrian frontier, and while the luggage was being
examined Tristrem hummed contentedly to himself. He would get some
dinner at the hotel, for he was hungry as he had not been in months. At
last he would have a good night's rest; there would be no insomnia now.
In the magic of a cablegram that succube had been exorcised forever. On
the morrow he would start afresh, and neither stop nor stay till the
goal was reached. It was no longer vague and intangible--it was full in
sight. And so, while the officers were busy with his traps, he hummed
the unforgotten air, _O Magali, ma bien aimée_.

The hotel to which he presently had himself conveyed stands in a large
garden that leans to the lake. It is a roomy structure, built
quadrangularwise. On one side is a little châlet. Above, to the right
and left, precipitous cliffs and trellised mountains loom like
battlements of Titan homes. The air is very sweet, and at that season of
the year almost overweighted with the scent of flowers. In spite of the
night, the sky was visibly blue, and high up in the heavens the moon
glittered with the glint of sulphur.

As the carriage drew up at the door there was a clang of bells; an
individual in a costume that was brilliant as the uniform of a
field-officer hastened to greet the guest; at the threshold was the
Oberkellner; a few steps behind him the manager stood bowing
persuasively; and as Tristrem entered, the waiters, hastily marshalled,
ranged themselves on either side of the hall.

"Vorrei," Tristrem began, and then remembering that he was no longer in
Italy, continued in German.

The answer came in the promptest English.

"Yes, my lord; will your lordship dine at _table d'hôte_? Du, Konrad,
schnell, die Speise-karte."

Tristrem examined the bill of fare which was then brought him, and while
he studied the contents he heard himself called by name. He looked up,
and recognized Ledyard Yorke, his companion of months before on the
outward-bound Cunarder, who welcomed him with much warmth and
cordiality.

"And whatever became of Miss Tippity-fitchet? You don't mean to say you
did not see her again? Fancy that! It was through no fault of hers,
then. But there, in spite of your promise, you didn't so much as look
_me_ up. I am just in from a tramp to Mori; suppose we brush up a bit
and have dinner together?" He turned to the waiter. "Konrad, wir speisen
draussen; verschaffen Sie 'was Monkenkloster."

"Zu Befehl, Herr Baron."

Half an hour later, when the brushing up was done and the Monkenkloster
was uncorked, Tristrem and Yorke seated themselves in an arbor that
overhung the lake.

"It's ever so much better here than at _table d'hôte_," Yorke began. "I
hate that sort of business--don't you? I have been here over two months,
but after a week or so of it I gave up promiscuous feeding. Since then,
whenever I have been able, I have dined out here. I don't care to have
every dish I eat seasoned with the twaddle of cheap-trippers. To be
sure, few of them get here. Riva is well out of the beaten track. But
one _table d'hôte_ is just like another, and they are all of them
wearying to the spirit and fatiguing to digestion. Look at that water,
will you. It's almost Venice, isn't it? I can tell you, I have done some
good work in this place. But what have you been doing yourself?"

"Nothing to speak of," Tristrem answered. "I have been roaming from
pillar to post. It's the second time I have been over the Continent, and
now I am on my way home. I am tired of it; I shall be glad to be back."

"Yes you were the last person I expected to meet. If I remember rightly,
you said on the steamer that you were to be on this side but a short
time. It's always the unexpected that occurs, isn't it? By the way, I
have got my sphinx."

"What sphinx?"

"I thought I told you. I have been looking for years for a certain face.
I wanted one that I could give to a sphinx. The accessories were
nothing. I put them on canvas long ago, but the face I never could
grasp. Not one of all that I tried suited me. I had almost given it up;
but I got it--I got it at last. I'll show it to you to-morrow."

"I am afraid----You see, I leave very early."

"I'll show it to you to-night, then; you must see it. If I had had it
made to order it could not suit me better. It came about in such an odd
way. All winter I have been at work in Munich. I intended to remain
until June, but the spring there is bleaker than your own New England.
One morning I said to myself, Why not take a run down to Italy? Two days
later, I was on my way. But at Mori, instead of pushing straight on to
Verona, I drove over here, thinking it would be pleasanter to take the
boat. I arrived here at midnight. The next morning I looked out of the
window, and there, right in front of me, in that châlet, was my sphinx.
Well, the upshot of it was, I have been here ever since. I repainted the
entire picture--the old one wasn't good enough."

"I should like to see it very much," said Tristrem, less from interest
than civility.

"I wish you had come in time to see the original. She never suspected
that she had posed as a model, and though her window was just opposite
mine, I believe she did not so much as pay me the compliment of being
aware of my existence. There were days when she sat hour after hour
looking out at the lake, almost motionless, in the very attitude that I
wanted. It was just as though she were repeating the phrase that
Flaubert puts in the Sphinx's mouth, 'I am guarding my secret--I
calculate and I dream.' Wasn't it odd, after all, that I should have
found her in that hap-hazard way?"

"It was odd," Tristrem answered; "who was she?"

"I don't know. French, I fancy. Her name was Dupont, or
Duflot--something utterly _bourgeois_. There was an old lady with her,
her mother, I suppose. I remember, at _table d'hôte_ one evening, a
Russian woman, with an 'itch' in her name, said she did not think she
was comme il faut. 'She is comme il _m'en_ faut,' I answered, and
mentally I added, 'which is a deuced sight more than I can say of you,
who are comme il n'en faut pas.' The Russian woman was indignant at her,
I presume, because she did not come to the public table. You know that
feeling, 'If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for you.' But my
sphinx not only did not appear at _table d'hôte_, she did not put her
foot outside of the châlet. One bright morning she disappeared from the
window, and a few days later I heard that she had been confined. Shortly
after she went away. It did not matter, though, I had her face. Let me
give you another glass of Monkenkloster."

"She was married, then?"

"Yes, her husband was probably some brute that did not know how to
appreciate her. I don't mean, though, that she looked unhappy. She
looked impassible, she looked exactly the way I wanted to have her look.
If you have finished your coffee, come up to my little atelier. I wish
you could see the picture by daylight, but you may be able to get an
idea of it from the candles." And as Mr. Yorke led the way, he added,
confidentially, "I should really like to have your opinion."

The atelier to which Yorke had alluded as "little" was, so well as
Tristrem could discern in the darkness, rather spacious than otherwise.
He loitered in the door-way until his companion had lighted and arranged
the candles, and then, under his guidance, went forward to admire. The
picture, which stood on an easel, was really excellent; so good, in
fact, that Tristrem no sooner saw the face of the sphinx than to his
ears came the hum of insects, the murmur of distant waters. It was Viola
Raritan to the life.

"She guarded her secret, indeed," he muttered, huskily. And when Yorke,
surprised at such a criticism, turned to him for an explanation, he had
just time to break his fall. Tristrem had fallen like a log.

As he groped back through a roar and turmoil to consciousness again, he
thought that he was dead and that this was the tomb. "That Monkenkloster
must have been too much for him," he heard Yorke say, in German, and
then some answer came to him in sympathetic gutturals. He opened his
eyes ever so little, and then let the lids close down. Had he been in a
nightmare, he wondered, or was it Viola? "He's coming too," he heard
Yorke say. "Yes, I am quite right now," he answered, and he raised
himself on his elbow. "I think," he continued, "that I had better get to
my room."

"Nonsense. You must lie still awhile."

For the moment Tristrem was too weak to rebel, and he fell back again on
the lounge on which he had been placed, and from which he had half
arisen. Was it a dream, or was it the real? "There, I am better now," he
said at last; "I wonder, I----Would you mind ordering me a glass of
brandy?"

"Why, there's a carafon of it here. I thought you had had too much of
that wine."

Some drink was then brought him, which he swallowed at a gulp. Under its
influence his strength returned.

"I am sorry to have put you to so much trouble," he said collectedly to
Yorke and to a waiter who had been summoned to his assistance; "I am
quite myself now." He stood up again and the waiter, seeing that he was
fully restored, withdrew. When the door closed behind him, Tristrem went
boldly back to the picture.

It was as Yorke had described it. In the background was a sunset made of
cymbal strokes of vermilion, splattered with gold, and seamed with
fantasies of red. In the foreground fluttered a chimera, so artfully
done that one almost heard the whir of its wings. And beneath it
crouched the Sphinx. From the eyrie of the years the ages had passed
unmarked, unnoticed. The sphinx brooded, motionless and dumb.

With patient, scrutinizing attention Tristrem looked in her eyes and at
her face. There was no mistake, it was Viola. Was there ever another
girl in the world such as she? And this was her secret! Or was there a
secret, after all, and might he not have misunderstood?

"Tell me," he said--"I will not praise your picture; in many respects it
is above praise--but tell me, is what you said true?"

"Is what true?"

"What you said of the model."

"About her being in the châlet? Of course it is. Why do you ask?"

"No, not that, tell me--Mr. Yorke, I do not mean to be tragic; if I seem
so, forgive me and overlook it. But as you love honor, tell me, is it
true that she had a child in this place?"

"Yes, so I heard."

"And you say her name was----"

"Madame Dubois--Dupont--I have forgotten; they can tell you at the
bureau. But it seems to me----"

"Thank you," Tristrem answered. "Thank you," he repeated. He hesitated a
second and then, with an abrupt good-night, he hurried from the atelier
and down the corridor till he reached his room.

Through the open window, the sulphur moon poured in. He looked out in
the garden. Beyond, half concealed in the shadows, he could see the
outline of the châlet. And it was there she had hid! He pressed his
hands to his forehead; he could not understand. For the moment he felt
that if he could lose his reason it would be a grateful release. If only
some light would come! He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped
his face. And then suddenly, as he did so, he caught a spark of that for
which he groped. The room turned round, and he sank into a chair.

Yes, he remembered, it was at Bergamo, no, at Bologna. Yes, it was at
Bergamo, he remembered perfectly well. He had taken from one of his
trunks a coat that he had not worn since he went into mourning. It had
been warm that day, and he wanted some thinner clothing. He remembered
at the time congratulating himself that he had had the forethought to
bring it. And later in the day he had taken from the pocket a
handkerchief of a smaller size than that which he habitually used. He
had looked at it, and in the corner he had found the Weldon crest. As to
how it had come in his possession, he had at the time given no thought.
Weldon, in one of his visits, might have left it at Waverley Place, or
he himself might have borrowed it when dining at Weldon's house. He was
absent-minded, he knew, and apt to be forgetful, and so at the time he
had given the matter no further thought. After all, what incident could
be more trivial? But now the handkerchief, like a magician's rug,
carried him back to Narragansett. As well as he could remember, the last
occasion on which he wore that coat was the day on which the butler's
telegram had summoned him to town. Then, on learning of his father's
death, he had put on other things, of sombrer hue. Harris, without
rummaging in the pockets, had folded the coat and put it away. And it
had remained folded ever since till the other day at Bologna--no, at
Bergamo.

That morning at Narragansett, when he was hurrying into the cottage, the
man who had aided Viola home the preceding evening drove up with her
hat, with this very handkerchief, and the story of a dream. Aye, and his
own dream. So this was Truth. She had pursued him, indeed. He could feel
her knees on his arms, her fetid breath in his face. But this time it
was not a nightmare. It was the real.

Yes, it was that. One by one he recalled the incidents of the
past--incidents on which his mind loathed to dwell, rebelling against
its own testimony until he coerced the shuddering memories to his will.
There were the numberless times in which he had encountered Weldon
coming in or leaving her house, almost haunting it with his presence.
There was that wanton lie, and the unexplained and interrupted scene
between them. It was then, perhaps, that he had first shown the demon
that was in him. And then, afterward, was that meeting on the cars--he
with a bruise on his cheek and a gash on his neck. Why was Viola's whip
broken, if it were not that she had broken it on his face? Why did the
nails of her ungloved hand look as though they had been stained with the
juice of berries? Why, indeed, if it were not that she had sunk them in
his flesh. Why had he heard her calling "Coward" to the night? It was
for this, then, that the engagement had been broken; it was for this
that she had hidden herself abroad.

For the first time since his boyhood, he threw himself on the bed and
sobbed aloud. To stifle his grief he buried his face in the pillow, and
bit it with his teeth. It was more than grief, it was anguish, and it
refused to be choked. But presently it did leave him. It left him
quivering from head to foot, and in its place came another visitor. An
obsession, from which he shrank, surged suddenly, and claimed him for
its own. In a combat, of which his heart was the one dumb witness, he
battled with it. He struggled with it in a conflict that out-lasted
hours; but presumably he coped in vain. The next morning his face was
set as a captive's. In a fortnight he was in New York.




XV.


The return journey was unmarked by incident or adventure. Nothing less
than a smash-up on the railway or the wrecking of the ship would have
had the power to distract his thoughts. It may even be that his mind was
unoccupied, empty as is a vacant bier, and yet haunted by an
overmastering obsession. The ordinary functions of the traveller he
performed mechanically, with the air and manner of a subject acting
under hypnotic suggestion. One who crossed the ocean with him has since
said that the better part of the time the expression of his face was
that of utter vacuity. He would remain crouched for hours, in the same
position, a finger just separating the lips, and then he would start
with the tremor of one awakening from a debauch.

Mrs. Manhattan, who was returning with spoils from the Rue de la Paix,
asked him one afternoon, as he happened to descend the cabin-stair in
her company, where he had passed the winter.

"Yes, indeed," Tristrem answered, and went his way unconcernedly.

Mrs. Manhattan complained of this conduct to Nicholas, her husband,
alleging that the young man was fatuous in his impertinence.

"My dear," returned that wise habitué of the Athenæum, "when a man gives
away seven million, it is because he has forgotten how to be
conventional."

It was on a Sunday that the ship reached New York, and it was late in
the afternoon before the passengers were able to disembark. Tristrem had
his luggage passed, and expressed to his grandfather's house, and then,
despite the aggressive solicitations of a crew of bandits, started
up-town on foot. In the breast-pocket of his coat he carried a purchase
which he had made in Naples, a fantastic article which he had bought,
not because he wanted it, but because the peddler who pestered him with
wares and offers happened to be the best-looking and most unrebuffably
good-natured scoundrel that he had ever encountered. And now, at
intervals, as he walked along, he put his hand to the pocket to assure
himself that it was still in place. Presently he reached Broadway. That
thoroughfare, which on earlier Sundays was wont to be one of the
sedatest avenues of the city, was starred with globes of azure light,
and its quiet was broken by the passing of orange-colored cars. On the
corner he stopped and looked at his watch. It was after seven. Then,
instead of continuing his way up-town, he turned down in the direction
of the Battery. His head was slightly bent, and as he walked he had the
appearance of one perplexed. It was a delightful evening. The sky was as
blue as the eyes of a girl beloved. The air was warm, and had the street
been less noisy, less garish, and a trifle cleaner it might have been an
agreeable promenade. But to Tristrem the noise, the dirt, the glare, the
sky itself were part and parcel of the non-existent. He neither saw nor
heeded, and, though the air was warm, now and then he shivered.

It seemed to him impossible that he should do this thing. And yet, since
that night at Riva, his mind had been as a stage in which it was in
uninterrupted rehearsal. If it were unsuccessful, then come what sorrow
could. But even though its success were assured, might not the success
be worse than failure, and viler to him than the most ignoble defeat?
Meditatively he looked at his hand; it was slight as a girl's.

"I cannot," he said, and even as he said it he knew that he would. Had
he not said it ten thousand times of times before? It was not what he
willed, it was what he must. He was in the lap of a necessity from
which, struggle as he might, he could not set himself free. He might
make what resolutions he chose, but the force which acted on him and in
him snuffed them out like candles. And yet, what had he done to fate
that it should impel him to this? Why had he been used as he had? What
wrong had he committed? For the past twelvemonth his life had been a
continuous torture. Truly, he could have said, "no one save myself, in
all the world, has learned the acuity of pain. I alone am its
depository."

"And yet," he mused, "perhaps it is right. Long ago, when I was
comparing my nothingness to her beauty, did I not know that to win her I
must show myself worthy of the prize? She will think that I am when I
tell her. Yes, she must think so when it is done. But will it be done? O
God, I cannot."

For the instant he felt as though he must turn to the passers and claim
their protection from himself. He had stopped again, and was standing
under a great pole that supported an electric light. In the globe was a
dim, round ball of red, and suddenly it flared up into a flame of the
palest lemon, edged with blue. "It is my courage," he said, "I have done
with hesitation now." He hailed and boarded a passing car. "Hesitation,
indeed!" he repeated. "As if I had not known all through that when the
time came there would be none!" He put his hand again to his
breast-pocket; it was there.

He had taken the seat nearest to the door, absently, as he would have
taken any other, and the conductor found it necessary to touch him on
the shoulder before he could extract the fare. He had no American money,
he discovered, and would have left the car had not the conductor finally
agreed to take his chances with a small piece of foreign gold, though
not, however, until he had bit it tentatively with his teeth. It was
evident that he viewed Tristrem with suspicion.

At Twentieth Street Tristrem swung himself from the moving vehicle, and
turned into Gramercy Park. He declined to think; the rehearsals were
over, he did not even try to recall the rôle. He had had a set speech,
but it was gone from him as the indecision had gone before. Now he was
to act.

He hurried up the stoop of Weldon's house and rang the bell, and as
there seemed to him some unnecessary delay, he rang again, not
violently, but with the assurance of a creditor who has come to be paid.
But when at last the door was opened, he learned that Weldon was not at
home.

As he went down the steps again there came to him a great gust and rush
of joy. He would go now, he had been fully prepared, he had tried his
best. If Weldon had been visible, he would not have hesitated. But he
had not been; that one chance had been left them both, and now, with a
certitude that had never visited his former indecisions, he felt it was
written that that deed should never be done. He gasped as one gasps who
has been nearly stifled. The obsession was gone. He was free.

In the street he raised his arms to testify to his liberty reconquered.
Yet, even as they fell again, he knew that he was tricking himself. A
tremor beset him, and to steady himself he clutched at an area-rail.
Whether he stood there one minute or one hour he could not afterward
recall. He remembered only that while he loitered Weldon had rounded the
corner, and that as he saw him approach, jauntily, in evening dress, a
light coat on his arm, his strength returned.

"Royal," he exclaimed, for the man was passing him without recognition.
"Royal," he repeated, and Weldon stopped. "I have come to have a word
with you."

The voice in which he spoke was so unlike his own, so rasping and
defiant, that Weldon, with the dread which every respectable householder
has of a scene at his own front door, motioned him up the steps. "Come
in," he said, mellifluously, "I am glad to see you."

"I will," Tristrem answered, in a tone as arrogant as before.

"I am sorry," Weldon continued, "Nanny----"

"I did not come to see your wife; you know it."

Weldon had unlatched the door, and the two men passed into the
sitting-room. There Weldon, with his hat unremoved, dropped in a chair,
and eyed his visitor with affected curiosity.

"I say, Trissy, you're drunk."

"I am come," Tristrem continued, and this time as he spoke his voice
seemed to recover something of its former gentleness, "I am come to ask
whether, in the purlieus of your heart, there is nothing to tell you how
base you are."

Weldon stretched himself languidly, took off his hat, stood up, and lit
a cigarette. "Have an Egyptian?" he asked.

"Do you remember," Tristrem went on, "the last time I saw you?"

Weldon tossed the match into an ash-receiver, and, with the cigarette
between his teeth, sprawled himself out on a sofa. "Well, what of it?"

"When I saw you, you had just contracted a debt. And now you can
liquidate that debt either by throwing yourself in the river or----"

"Charming, Triss, charming! You have made a _bon mot_. I will get that
off. Liquidate a debt with water is really good. There's the advantage
of foreign travel for you."

"Do you know what became of your victim? Do you know? She went abroad
and hid herself. Shall I give you details?"

For the first time Weldon scowled.

"Would you like the details?" Tristrem repeated.

Weldon mastered his scowl. "No," he answered, negligently. "I am not a
midwife. Obstetrics do not interest me. On the contra----"

That word he never finished. Something exploded in his brain, he saw one
fleeting flash, and he was dead. Even as he spoke, Tristrem had whipped
an instrument from his pocket, and before Weldon was aware of his
purpose, a knife, thin as a darning-needle and long as a pencil--a knife
which it had taken the splendid wickedness of mediæval Rome to
devise--had sunk into his heart, and was out again, leaving behind it a
pin's puncture through the linen, one infinitesimal bluish-gray spot on
the skin, and death.

Tristrem looked at him. The shirt was not even rumpled. If he had so
much as quivered, the quiver had been imperceptible, and on the knife
there was no trace of blood. It fell from his fingers; he stooped to
pick it up, but his hand trembled so that, on recovering it, he could
not insert the point into the narrow sheath that belonged to it, and,
throwing the bit of embroidered leather in a corner, he put the weapon
in his pocket.

"It was easier than I thought," he mused. "I suppose--h'm--I seem to be
nervous. It's odd. I feared that afterward I should collapse like an
omelette soufflée. And to think that it is done!"

He turned suspiciously, and looked at the body again. No, he could see
it was really done. "And so, this is afterward," he continued. "And to
think that it was here I first saw her. She came in that door there. I
remember I thought of a garden of lilies."

From the dining-room beyond he caught the glimmer of a lamp. He crossed
the intervening space, and on the sideboard he found some decanters. He
selected one, and pouring a little of its contents into a tumbler he
drank it off. Then he poured another portion, and when he had drunk that
too, he went out, not through the sitting-room, but through the hall,
and, picking up the hat which on entering he had thrown on the table, he
left the house.




XVI.


Several thousand years ago a thinker defined virtue as the agreement of
the will and the conscience. If the will were coercible the definition
would be matchless. Unfortunately it is not. Will declines to be
reasoned with; it insists, and in its insistence conscience, horrified
or charmed, stands a witness to its acts.

For a fortnight Tristrem had been married to an impulse against which
his finer nature rebelled. It was not that the killing of such a one as
Weldon was unjustifiable; on the contrary, it was rather praiseworthy
than otherwise. His crime was one for which the noose is too good. But
to Weldon, in earlier days, he had felt as to a brother; and though
affection may die, does it not leave behind it a memory which should
thereafter serve as a protecting shield? It had been the bonds of former
attachment, bonds long loosened, it is true, but of which the old
impress still lingered, that seemed to Tristrem to tie his hands. Then,
too, was the horror of such a thing. There is nothing, a Scandinavian
poet has said, more beautiful than a beautiful revenge; yet when a man
is so tender of heart that if it be raining he will hesitate to shoo a
persistent fly out of the window, it is difficult for that man, however
great the aggravation, to take another's life. Besides, the impulse
which had acted in Tristrem was not one of revenge. He had not the
slightest wish to take the law into his own hands. The glaive of
atonement was not one which he felt himself called upon to wield. That
which possessed him was the idea that until the world was rid of Weldon
there was a girl somewhere who could not look her own mother in the
face. And that girl was the girl whom he loved, a girl who apparently
had no other protector than himself.

In the rehearsals, it was this that had strung his nerves to acting
pitch. When it was done he proposed to go to her with a reverence even
greater than before, with a sympathy unspoken yet sentiable, and leave
her with the knowledge that the injury had been obliterated and the
shame effaced. For himself, whatever he may have hoped, he determined to
ask for nothing. It was for her he defied the law; he was her agent, one
whom she might recompense or not with her lithe white arms, but one to
whom she would at least be grateful. And how beautiful her gratitude
might be! Though she gave him nothing else, would not the thanks of her
eyes be reward enough? And then, as he worked himself up with the
thought of these things to acting pitch, then would come the horror of
it all, the necessity of taking the life of one who had been his nearest
friend, the dread of the remorse which attaches to death, the soiling of
his own hands. It was in this fashion that he had wavered between
indecision and determination, until, at last, stung by the cynicism of
Weldon's speech, there had come to him a force such as he had never
possessed before, and suddenly the deed had been done.

The possible arraignment that might follow the inquest, he had never
considered. It is said that the art of killing has been lost. The
tribunals, assizes, and general sessions have doubtless led somewhat to
its discouragement, and yet it must be admitted that the office of
police justice in one way resembles that of lover in the tropics--it is
not exactly a sinecure. Perhaps, nowadays, it is only the blunderers
that are detected; yet, however numerous they may or may not be,
Tristrem, without giving a single thought as to how such a thing should
be done and remain undetected, had had such chances in his favor that
Vidocq himself might have tried in vain to fasten the death of Weldon on
him. No one had seen him enter the house, no one had seen him leave it.
Even the instrument which he had used, and which he had bought
hap-hazard, as one buys a knick-knack, had served his end as cleanly as
a paralysis of the heart. It had not spilled a drop of blood.

As Tristrem walked on, he did not think of these things; the possibility
of detection had not troubled him, and now the probability that Weldon's
death would be attributed to natural causes brought him no satisfaction.
Of himself he gave no thought. He had wondered, indeed, that his
presence of mind had not deserted him; he had marvelled at his own calm.
But now his thoughts were wholly with Viola, and when he reached Fifth
Avenue he determined to go to her at once.

A vagabond hansom was loitering near, and with its assistance he
presently reached her door. Even as he entered, it was evident that she
was not alone. On putting his hat down in the hall he noticed two
others, and through the portière came the sound of voices. But he pushed
the curtain aside, and entered the room with the air of one to whom the
conventional has lost its significance. Yet, as he did so, he felt that
he was wrong. If he wished to see Viola, would it not have been more
courteous to her to get into evening dress than to appear among her
guests in a costume suitable only for the afternoon? Society he knew to
be a despot. Though it has no dungeons, at least it can banish, and to
those that have been brought up in its court there are no laws rigider
than its customs. Besides, was he in a mood to thrust himself among
those whose chiefest ambition was to be ornate? He was aware of his
mistake at once, but not until it was too late to recede.

Among those present he recognized a man who, though well on in life,
devoted his entire time to matters appertaining to the amusements of the
selectest circles. He was talking to a girl who, moist as to the lips
and eyes, looked as had she just issued from a vapor-bath. Near to her
was Mrs. Raritan. Tristrem noticed that her hair had turned almost
white. And a little beyond, a young man with a retreating forehead and a
Pall Mall accent sat, splendidly attired, talking to Viola.

Mrs. Raritan was the first to greet him, and she did so in the motherly
fashion that was her own. And as she spoke Viola came forward, said some
simple word, and went back to her former place.

"Come with me," said Mrs. Raritan, and she led him to an S in
upholstery, in which they both found seats. "And now tell me about
yourself," she added. "And where have you been?"

Truly it was pitiful. She looked ten years older. From a handsome,
well-preserved woman she had in a twelvemonth been overtaken by age.

"I have been in Europe, you know," Tristrem answered; "I wrote to you
from Vienna, and again from Rome."

"I am sorry," Mrs. Raritan replied; "the bankers are so negligent. There
were many letters that must have gone astray. Were you--you had a
pleasant winter, of course. And how is your grandfather?"

"I have not seen him. I am just off the ship."

At this announcement Mrs. Weldon looked perplexed.

"Is it possible that you only arrived this evening?" she asked.

"Yes, I wanted to see Viola. You know it is almost a year
since--since--I tried to find you both in Europe, but----"

"Mr. Varick, did I hear you say that you arrived from Europe to-day?" It
was the gentleman who devoted himself to the interests of society that
was speaking.

"Yes, I came on the Bourgogne."

"Was Mrs. Manhattan on board?"

Tristrem answered that she was, and then the gentleman in question
entered into an elaborate discourse on the subject of Mrs. Manhattan's
summer plans. While he was still speaking a servant informed the
vaporous maiden that her maid and carriage had arrived, and presently
that young lady left the room. Soon after the society agent disappeared,
and a little later the youth that had been conversing with Miss Raritan
took his splendor away.

As yet Tristrem had had no opportunity of exchanging a word with Viola.
To his hostess he had talked with feverish animation on the subject of
nothing at all; but as the adolescent who had been engaging Viola's
attention came to Mrs. Raritan to bid that lady good-night, Tristrem
left the upholstered S and crossed the room to where the girl was
seated.

"Viola," he began, but she stayed his speech with a gesture.

The young man was leaving the room, and it was evident from Mrs.
Raritan's attitude that it was her intention to leave it also.

"I am tired," that lady said, as the front door closed; "you won't
mind?" And Tristrem, who had arisen when he saw her standing, went
forward and bowed over her hand, and then preceded her to the portière,
which he drew aside that she might pass.

"Good-night, Mrs. Raritan," he said; "good-night, and pleasant dreams."

Then he turned to the girl. She, too, looked older, or, perhaps, it
would be more exact to say she looked more mature. Something of the
early fragrance had left her face, but she was as beautiful as before.

Her gold eyes were brilliant as high noon, and her cheeks bore an
unwonted color. She was dressed in white, her girdle was red with roses,
and her arms and neck were bare.

As Mrs. Raritan passed from the room, Tristrem let the portière fall
again, and stood a moment feasting his famished eyes in hers. At last he
spoke.

"_He_ is dead, Viola."

The words came from him very gravely, and when he had uttered them he
looked down at the rug.

"Dead! Who is dead? What do you mean?"

"He is dead," he repeated, but still he kept his eyes lowered.

"He! What he? What are you talking about?" She had left her seat and
fronted him.

"Royal Weldon," he made answer, and as he did so he looked up at her.

Her hands fluttered like falling leaves. An increased color mounted to
her cheeks, and disappearing, left them white. Her lips trembled.

"I do not understand," she gasped. And then, as her dilated eyes stared
into his own, he saw that she understood at last. Her fluttering hands
had gone to her throat, as though to tear away some invisible clutch.
Her lips had grown gray. She was livid.

"It is better so, is it not?" he asked, and searched her face for some
trace of the symptoms of joy. As he gazed at her, she retreated. Her
hands had left her throat, her forehead was pinioned in their grasp, and
in her eyes the expression of terrified wonder was seamed and obscured
by another that resembled hate.

"And it was you," she stammered, "it was you?"

"Yes," he answered, with an air of wonder that equalled her own;
"yes----"

"You tell me that Royal Weldon is dead, and that you--that you----"

"It was this way," he began, impelled, in his own surprise, to some form
of explanation. "It was this way--you see--well, I went to Riva. That
man that brought back your hat----Good God, Viola, are you not glad?"

She had fallen into a chair, and he was at her feet.

"Are you not glad?" he insisted. "Now, it will be----" But whatever he
intended to say, the speech remained uncompleted. The girl had drawn
from him as from an adder unfanged.

"Assassin!" she hissed. "Assassin!" she hissed again. "What curse----"

"Viola, it was for your sake."

She clinched her hand as though she sought the strength wherewith to
strike. And then the fingers loosened again. She moved still farther
away. The hatred left her eyes, as the wonder had done before. With the
majesty which Mary Stuart must have shown when she bade farewell to
England, to the sceptre, and to life, Viola Raritan turned to him again:

"I loved him," she muttered, yet so faintly that she had left the room
before Tristrem, who still crouched by the chair which she had vacated,
fully caught the import of her words.

"Viola!" he called. But she had gone. "Viola! No, no; it is impossible.
It is impossible," he repeated, as he rose up again; "it is impossible."

He staggered to the door and let himself out. And then, as the night-air
affects one who has loitered over the wine, he reeled.

In a vision such as is said to visit the ultimate consciousness of they
that drown, a riot of long-forgotten incidents surged to his mind. He
battled with them in vain; they were trivial, indeed, but in their
onslaught he saw that the impossible was truth.

With the aimlessness of a somnambulist, and reasoning with himself the
while, he walked down through Madison Avenue until he reached the
square. There, turning into Lexington, he entered Gramercy Park.
Presently he found himself standing at Weldon's door. "But what am I
doing here?" he mused. For a little time, he leaned against the rail,
endeavoring to collect his thoughts. Then, as an individual, coated in
blue and glistening as to his buttons, sauntered by, he seemed to
understand. He left the railing at which he had stood, and, circling the
park, set out in the direction of the river. As he reached Second
Avenue, a train of the elevated railway flamed about an adjacent corner,
and swept like a dragon in mid-air, on, beyond, and out of sight. To the
right was a great factory, and as Tristrem continued his way through the
unfamiliar street he wondered what the people in the train, what the
factory-hands, and the dwellers in the neighborhood would say if they
could surmise his errand. The river was yet some distance away. It was
such a pity, he told himself, such a pity, that he had not accepted the
invitation of the sea. That would have been so much better, so much
surer, and so much more discreet. And then he fell to wondering about
his grandfather, and his heart was filled with anguish. He would have
done anything to save that old man from pain. But it was too late now. A
gas-jet that lighted a wide and open door attracted his attention; he
looked in, the building seemed empty as a lecture-hall. After all, he
decided, perhaps that would be best.

Half an hour later, Tristrem Varick was the occupant of a room that was
not as large as one of the closets in his grandfather's house. The
furniture consisted of a wooden bench. The sole fixture was an apparatus
for drawing water. The floor was tiled and the upper part of the walls
was white; the lower, red. The room itself was very clean. There was no
window, and the door, which was of grated iron, had been locked from
without. From an adjoining cell, a drunken harlot rent the night with
the strain of a maudlin ditty.




XVII.


It was some little time before the powers that are could be convinced
that Tristrem Varick was guilty of the self-accused murder. It was not
that murders are rare, but a murder such as that was tolerably uncommon.
The sergeant who presided over the police-station in which Tristrem had
delivered himself up was a mild-mannered man, gentle of voice, and
sceptical as a rag-picker. He received Tristrem's statement without
turning a hair.

"What did you do it for?" he asked, and when Tristrem declined to enter
into any explanation, he smiled with affable incredulity. "I can, if you
insist," he said, "accommodate you with a night's lodging." And he was
as good as his word; but the cell which Tristrem subsequently occupied
was not opened for him until the sergeant was convinced that death had
really visited the precinct.

Concerning the form in which that death had come, there was at first no
doubt. Weldon had been found stretched lifeless on a sofa. The physician
who was then summoned made a cursory examination, and declared that
death was due to disease of the heart. Had Tristrem held his tongue,
that verdict, in all probability, would never have been questioned;
indeed, it was not until the minuter autopsy which Tristrem's statement
instigated that the real cause was discovered.

It was then that it began to be admitted that violence had been used,
but as to whether that violence was accidental or intentional, and if
intentional, whether or not it was premeditated, was a matter which,
according to our archaic law, twelve men in a pen could alone decide.
The case was further complicated by a question of sanity. Granting that
some form of manslaughter had been committed, was it the act of one in
full possession of his faculties, or was it the act of one bereft of his
senses?

Generally speaking, public opinion inclined to the latter solution.
Indeed, there seemed to be but one other in any way tenable, and that
was, that the blow was self-inflicted. This theory had many partisans.
The records, if not choked, are well filled with the trials of
individuals who have confessed to crimes of which they were utterly
guiltless. It was discovered that a recent slump in Wall Street had
seriously affected Weldon's credit. It was known that his manner of
living had compelled his wife to return to her father's house, and it
was shown that she had begun an action for divorce. It seemed,
therefore, possible that he had taken his own life in Tristrem's
presence, and that Tristrem, in the horror of the spectacle, had become
mentally unhinged.

In addition to this, there was against Tristrem--aside, of course, from
the confession--barely a scintilla of evidence. The very instrument
which was found on his person, and with which he declared the murder had
been committed, was said not to belong to him. A servant of Weldon's
thought she had once seen it in the possession of her late master. And
it was argued that Tristrem had caught it up when it fell from the hand
of the dead, and, in the consternation of the moment, had thrust it in
his own pocket. Moreover, as suicides go, there was in Weldon's case a
tangible excuse. He was on the edge of bankruptcy, and his matrimonial
venture was evidently infelicitous. His life was an apparent failure.
Many other men have taken their own lives for causes much minor.

The theory of suicide was therefore not untenable, and those who
preferred to believe that a murder had been really committed were at a
loss for a motive. Tristrem and Weldon were known to have been on terms
of intimacy. Tristrem had been absent from the country a number of
months, while Weldon had steadfastly remained in New York. During the
intervening period it was impossible to conjecture the slightest cause
of disagreement. And yet, no sooner did the two men have the opportunity
of meeting, than one fell dead, and the other gave himself up as his
murderer. And if that murder had been really committed, then what was
the motive?

This was the point that particularly perplexed the District Attorney. It
could not have been money. Tristrem had never speculated, and his
financial relations with Weldon were confined to certain loans made to
the latter, and long since repaid. Nor, through the whole affair, could
the sharpest ear detect so much as the rustle of a petticoat. Inasmuch,
then, as neither of the two great motor forces, woman and gold, was
discernible, it is small wonder that the District Attorney was
perplexed. To that gentleman the case was one of peculiar importance.
His term of office had nearly expired, and he ardently desired
re-election. Two wealthy misdemeanants had recently slipped through his
fingers--not through any fault of his own, but they had slipped, none
the less--and some rhetoric had been employed to show that there was a
law for the poor and a more elastic one for the rich. Now Tristrem's
conviction would be the finest plume he could stick in his hat. The
possessor of an historic name, a member of what is known as the best
society, an habitué of exclusive clubs--a representative, in fact, of
everything that is most hateful to the mob--and yet a murderer. No, such
a prize as that must not be allowed to escape. The District Attorney
felt that, did such a thing occur, he might bid an eternal farewell to
greatness and the bench.

But what was the motive of the crime? Long before that question, which
eventually assumed the proportions of a pyramid, was seriously examined,
it had been demonstrated that the wound from which Weldon had died was
not one that could have been self-inflicted. The theory of suicide was
thereupon and at once abandoned. And those who had been most vehement in
its favor now asserted that Tristrem was insane. What better evidence of
insanity could there be than the giving away of seven millions? But
apart from that, there were a number of people willing to testify that
on shipboard Tristrem's demeanor was that of a lunatic--moreover, did he
not insist that he was perfectly sane, and where was the lunatic that
ever admitted himself to be demented? Of course he was insane.

A committee, however, composed of a lawyer, a layman, and a physician,
visited Tristrem, and announced exactly the contrary. According to their
report, he was as sane as the law allows, and, although that honorable
committee did not seem to suspect it, it may be that he was even a
trifle saner. One of the committee--the layman--started out on his visit
with no inconsiderable trepidation. In after-conversation, he said that
it had never been his privilege to exchange speech with one gentler and
more courteous than that self-accused murderer.

Yet still the motive was elusive. In this particular, Tristrem hindered
everybody to the best of his ability. He was resolutely mute.

The attorney who was retained for the defence--not, however, through any
wish of Tristrem's--could make nothing of his client. "It is pathetic,"
he said; "he keeps telling me that he is guilty, that he is sane, that
he is infinitely indebted for my kindness and sympathy, _but that he
does not wish to be defended_. Sane? He is no more sane than the King of
Bavaria. Who ever heard of an inmate of the Tombs that did not want to
be defended? Isn't that evidence enough?"

It was possible, of course, to impugn the testimony of the committee,
but the attorney in this instance deemed it wiser to let it go for what
it was worth, while showing that Tristrem, if sane at the time of the
committee's examination, was insane at the time the crime, if crime
there were, was committed. It was his settled conviction that if
Tristrem would only explain the motive, it would be of such a nature
that the chances of acquittal would be in his favor. In this,
presumably, he was correct. But, in default of any explanation, he
determined that the only adoptable line of defence was the one already
formulated; to wit, that in slaying Weldon his client was temporarily
deranged.

Meanwhile he expressed his conviction to the grief-stricken old man by
whom he had been retained, and who himself had tried, unavailingly, to
learn the cause. Whether he divined, or not, what it really was, is a
matter of relative unimportance. In any event, he had discovered that on
leaving Weldon's house Tristrem, instead of giving himself up at once,
which he would have done had he at the time intended to do so at all,
had gone directly to Miss Raritan.

And one day he, too, went to her. "You can save him," he said.

He might as well have asked alms of a statue. He went again, but the
result was the same. And then a third time he went to her, and on his
knees, with clasped and trembling hands, in a voice broken and
quavering, he besought her to save his grandson from the gallows. "Come
to court," he pleaded; "if you will only come to court!"

"I will come," the girl at last made answer, "I will come to see him
sentenced."

Such is the truth about Tristrem Varick. In metropolitan drawing-rooms
it was noticed that since Miss Raritan's return from Europe the quality
of her voice had deteriorated. Mrs. Manhattan said that for her part she
did not approve of the French method.


THE END.




EDGAR SALTUS' WRITINGS


     "_Mr. Saltus is the prose laureate of pessimism._"--THE ARGUS.


_MR. INCOUL'S MISADVENTURE_

_THE ANATOMY OF NEGATION_

_THE PHILOSOPHY OF DISENCHANTMENT_

_BALZAC_


IN PREPARATION

_EDEN_






End of Project Gutenberg's The Truth About Tristrem Varick, by Edgar Saltus