"The Debatable Land": A Novel

[Illustration: Front Cover]

THE FOLLOWING IS A LIST OF TWELVE AMERICAN NOVELS PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS DURING 1901, WRITTEN FOR THE MOST PART BY NEW AMERICAN WRITERS, AND DEALING WITH DIFFERENT PHASES OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LIFE.

"EASTOVER COURT HOUSE." By HENRY BURNHAM BOONE and KENNETH BROWN.

"THE SENTIMENTALISTS." By Arthur Stanwood Pier.

"MARTIN BROOK." By MORGAN BATES.

"A VICTIM OF CIRCUMSTANCES." By GERALDINE ANTHONY.

"DAYS LIKE THESE." By EDWARD W. TOWNSEND.

"WESTERFELT." By WILL N. HARBEN.

"THE MANAGER OF THE B & A." By VAUGHAN KESTER.

"THE SUPREME SURRENDER." By A. MAURICE LOW.

"THE STRENGTH OF THE HILLS." By FLORENCE WILKINSON.

"LET NOT MAN PUT ASUNDER." By BASIL KING.

"WHEN LOVE IS YOUNG." By Roy ROLFE GILSON.

"THE DEBATABLE LAND." By ARTHUR COLTON.

"The Debatable Land"

A Novel

_By Arthur Colton_

[Illustration]

New York and London Harper & Brothers Publishers 1901

Copyright, 1901, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._

To

R.H. Loines

"For the Debatable Land, being that portion of ground which, lying between two countries, belongeth to neither, does of all regions abound most in disturbance, adventures, even legends, and, as men say, in warlocks and witches. Thus the astute German, Hermantius, significantly calleth the region of youth a debatable land, and seeketh to illustrate time by space."--_The Dictionary of Devices_.

Contents

Part I

Chapter Page

I. "_Hinter die Kirche blühe die blaue Blume der Zufriedenheit_" 3

II. _Of Thaddeus Bourn and his Purposes_ 11

III. _Of Morgan Map and his Purposes_ 24

IV. _In which Thaddeus uses the term "Moral Justification"_ 32

V. _Introducing Hamilton and Saint Mary's Organ_ 41

VI. _Introducing Gard Windham and the Brotherhood of Consolation_ 56

VII. _Introducing Moselle and Mavering_ 71

VIII. _Of Mrs. Mavering, and of the Philosophy of the Individual_ 85

IX. _Of Estates in Happiness_ 99

X. _Of Spring in Hamilton--Of Thaddeus's Opportunity to be Candid_ 118

XI. _The Whirlpool--Mr. Paulus's Reminiscences of Women_ 135

Part II

XII. _Antietam_ 149

XIII. _In which Appears a General of Division, and one of "the Brethren"_ 164

XIV. _In which Mavering Concludes that Cavalry Officers as a Class are Eccentric and Deep_ 181

XV. _Treats of the Distribution of Tracts in the Valley of the Shenandoah_ 192

XVI. _Which Discloses one Daddy Joe, and Disposes of an Evangelist_ 207

XVII. _On the Question of the Exact Location of the Divinity which is Ultimately Called Worth While_ 223

XVIII. _In which there is Discovered a Compunction_ 235

XIX. _In which Windham Drops Out of the Fight--and Mavering Remarks on Human Adaptability_ 253

XX. _Treats of Further Incidents in the House with the White Door_ 264

XXI. _In which We Go Down the River and Return_ 274

XXII. _Of Mavering, who Disappears--Of the Gray Poet--Of Morgan, Who Appears Once More_ 286

XXIII. _The End_ 307

Part I

"The Debatable Land"

Chapter I

"Hinter die Kirche blühe die blaue Blume der Zufriedenheit."--MEISTER ECKHART.

Widow Bourn's house stood behind the church, and blue flowers grew contentedly on the sloping green, shy fancies of a maiden spring that never lasted out a summer's experience. New England churches have not that air of nestling comfort which seemed to Meister Eckhart so sweet a symbol. They crown the hills with square frames and sharpened steeples, churches militant, plate-mailed in clapboards, with weather-vane aimed defiantly into the wind. Their doors are closed, their windows shuttered against all days of the week saving one. But Widow Bourn found the proximity comfortable. The church militant faced the issues of the spirit for her, and subdued them. She plodded through her Bible, drawing contentment from texts that meant no such matter, seeing in the ecclesiast's despondency only reflections connected here and there with sermons. "It is a pleasant thing to stand on the shore when other people are in the floods," the melancholy Roman poet remarked, meaning that it _would be_, because it was something his ever-journeying spirit in the waste seas of thought rendered impracticable for himself.

A gate opened from the widow's garden on the sloping green. Heavy-scented lilacs, purple and white, hung over it, and followed the fence at fragrant intervals. Lilacs crowded along the garden walls, pushed against green pillars of the porch and drooped luxurious heads at the windows. Lilacs are tropical and anti-puritan; they belong with the chuckle of lutes over low casements, and liquid voices speaking a vowelled tongue. Widow Bourn was pleasant-tempered, placid, possessed of a stillness, a certain dignity, and a frame not overpadded, but comfortable.

The Bourns were early settlers in Hagar. The settlers were still feeling their way in the wilderness beyond the Connecticut, sensible farmers who bargained for whole mountain ranges and valleys of the magnificent savage, and recorded the transaction in minutes of the town-meeting. The magnificent savage commonly declared that his heart was great; he would sell the lands from the crooked lake to the joining of swift rivers to his white brothers, who marked the boundaries inferred from the sachem's oratory, and omitted to comment on the humor of it in minutes of the town-meeting. When the first Simon Bourn piled hewn beams for his cabin and ran his plough around stumps of trees that had furnished the beams there were few cabins in the neighborhood, and the town-meeting was held fifteen miles away. The last Simon Bourn ran his plough along the same hill-side, not dodging the same stumps, but the hill-side still drew up stones out of its inner perversity to check his plough. He found the slope of his life, like the slope of his ancestral fields, unfertile, shallow-soiled. The five generations of Bourns had accumulated and transmitted this opinion of their lives and hilly fields, that on the whole they were not justified.

Simon died in the early fifties and was buried in Hagar's hemlocked graveyard. Oddly enough, he seemed to regret it. Widow Bourn associated herself with this regret, but regret has commonly an element of interrupted possibilities in it, and these must have lain the rather in Nellie, a yellow-headed, long-limbed, swift-footed maiden whose level gray eyes had in them a certain challenge and accusation, and whose years were ten.

"Don't let Nellie forget me," he said, and the graver carved on his tombstone, "Remember Me." Simon perhaps intended it only for Nellie, but that did not prevent its forcing the passer to "remember" him, who never knew him and did not care about it. "Simon Bourn--Born ----, Died ----. Remember," in raised letters on a white tombstone, stared out of the green gloom of the hemlocks. So the Elder Hamlet desired, "Remember Me." "Remember thee, poor ghost?" Why remember? Go your ways, Simon Bourn, and trouble us not. It might have struck the public as egotistic, which was only a pathetic impulse pointing to Nellie, if the public had not been in the habit of accepting epitaphs of all kinds with a tolerance born of experience.

One could understand the exception Simon made in favor of Helen from his opinion and feeling about the world he left--that it was not on the whole justified--could understand it in this way, that there was something in her young gravity and impetuous faith which seemed to isolate whatever she looked at. To be considered and remembered by her seemed important. It lifted one out of triviality. In Hagar she was a pronounced, a separate person. Hagar itself was compact of varieties, but Helen was intense in conception and direct in action to surprise Hagar. She ran away with Morgan Map to the Hamilton County Fair, and came back in the gray dawn, white-lipped with weariness. A neighbor or two had sat up with Widow Bourn to prevent her worrying. It was a gratifying success. The widow slept by the fire. Morgan was eighteen then, but the Maps were somewhat out of the reach of Hagar's opinion. She smote Mr. Paulus with a paint-brush across the face for interfering with her painting designs on cows and cats. They were not his cows and cats. That question in ethics threw Hagar into excited division, and it was not remembered whose cows and cats they were. She was sent to Miss Savage's School in Wimberton; muttering rumors of her crossed the Cattle Ridge. At sixteen she was thrown by one of the Sanderson horses, a red-eyed, ugly breed of racers; and Joe Sanderson, then aged nine, ran at the horse and shot a barbed arrow into its hide, out of his bitter wrath and love of Nellie; and Nellie lay a twelvemonth and more on her back to cure her spine. These are but instances of enterprise. Whatever stood the challenge or test of worth and reality in her eyes was apt to be a cause of sudden valor or unreckoned devotion.

The accident was in 1858, the year after Squire Map's wife died, whose name was once Edith Lorn. There was a great funeral in Hagar, and carriages from down the Wyantenaug Valley as far as Hamilton. There was an explosion then, too, in the Map family regarding property. Gerald and Morgan were supposed to have announced their independence on the strength of their majority and inheritance. The squire took to himself a grudge against the world where sons are unfilial, friends betray, and love falls from negation to negation, and began that lonely life which lasted twenty years, shut in and brooding in the square house on the hill half a mile out on the Cattle Ridge road. Gerald Map came no more to Hagar, but Morgan was seen at times. He rode up from Hamilton the day after Helen's fall, talked with the doctor, went up-stairs and kissed her cheek, and departed, silent to Widow Bourn's murmured remonstrance. "He shouldn't do that!"

Helen said: "Oh, that's all right," indifferently, and Widow Bourn fell to extracting comfort from the situation. If a honey-bee extracts anything from anywhere, it is honey; she may not extract anything. There was a comfort in knowing where Helen was the day long; not that the widow's comfort had ever been seriously long disturbed, but Helen quiescent was more comfortable than Helen active, in process of silent loading or sudden discharge. One could consider her clothes at leisure, not in heated endeavor to have one dress for Sunday without a lateral or perpendicular rip. Everything in the balm of the widow's temperament took the soft flow of slow waters, as Simon's plaintive discontent had long before to her ears come to resemble Ecclesiastes. Helen was more difficult to adapt herself to, because Helen grew and changed. Now, the growth and change seemed for the time to have ceased. She was no less mysterious; but a mystery which is constant and presents the same inscrutable face, and not always another and another, is more comfortable. Helen's life, after cataracts and restless seeking, seemed to have flowed into a dark pool, and lay there reflecting clouds, patches of stars, and the edges of dim forests.

The similitudes of young maidens and varied flowers, the happy possibilities in that comparison, were discovered of earliest poets. Out of the best of intentions there has come to us so far only the conviction that Helen did not resemble the blue violets growing behind the church in Hagar. As for Simon's epitaph, it outlasts the story and is still to be read. One may lean over the wall of the cemetery, say, at twilight, when the shadow of Windless Mountain is wide over Hagar, and read it to-day, note its stiff insistence, and suit one's self with reflections on man and nature and the purport of things. An issue will be observed to lie between Simon's epitaph and the solemn, fading mountain, an issue distinct and inclusive.

Chapter II

Of Thaddeus Bourn and his Purposes

There was given to the Bourns, then, of old, natures sloping to the Northern side, or they had taken that tendency from experience. Thaddeus Bourn, that elder brother of Simon, who left Hagar so long ago as when Quincy Adams was President, and became a civil flower of society in the city of Hamilton, was a spontaneous variation or reaction from the type. One heard that he had made a fortune airily, and lost it. He surely married another, lost part of that, and his wife of a year or two, who died and surprised him into regretting her with some sincerity. He became an official of the Hamilton County Bank, and floated on in middle life, buoyant, carrying an aroma of old fashions, a flower in his buttonhole, a tall hat, a silver-headed cane. His eyes had wrinkles about them, his cheeks were thin, his foot light. All these were evident elements in the total of Thaddeus, but the total itself was not a sum, but a harmony. To keep the seamy side of life turned down, and its sheen always in the sun, not only was Thaddeus's practice and theory, but he belonged to a distinct school in the practice of the art, which might be called the pseudo-classic.

He sat by Helen's bed half a day, and talked to her as to a grown lady, and was gracious and fluent. He brought the best flowers of his worldliness, and jingled all his silver bells to please her.

"Not a finer pair of eyes in Hamilton!" he said to the widow. "Positively she must not have a crick in her back. On my word, impossible."

"We are taught to submit," said the widow, perhaps placidly, at any rate patiently. Thaddeus mounted the stairs with a wrinkled smile.

"Sheep! That woman is a sheep! Helen, my dear, your back will be as straight as my cane, I give you my word."

Nellie's lean hands, on the coverlet, and face, with its bacchante spread of hair above her head on the pillow, were losing their brown tan in the passage of slow weeks. The delicate creeping pallor and helplessness beckoned Thaddeus to something tender, but he took council with wisdom.

"Uncle Tad," she said, "why do you about always feel good?"

"Well, well, I haven't cracked my spine. Never cracked anything but my heart and reputation--a--both of them like old varnish, on my word. Very good, varnish them again. I have"--Thaddeus used his gold eye-glasses gracefully to punctuate, emphasize, distinguish, for illustration, for ornament--"I have the opinion that to feel agreeable and to be agreeable are two habits that one cultivates like a garden. The first is a vegetable, the second a flower. You see? Exactly. In point of fact they are the fruit and flower of the same plant. A--a figure of speech, Nellie. If you kindly wouldn't look at me like the Angel of Judgment. A--look at the ceiling. Thank you."

Thaddeus delicately unfolded his theory of the conduct of life, Nellie's grave eyes now and then confusing him with mute challenge.

To his experience, then, there were two classes of people--those who were more or less pleased with the world, and those who more or less were not. Both personally and morally it was better to be in the former class. Personally, for instance, one lived longer; morally, one, for instance, in point of fact, kept in better relations with Providence. Now this satisfaction was to be compassed partly by a certain inward insistence on feeling agreeable--"When I buy a pair of glasses of a seller of glasses, personally, I buy a pair that--a--slightly idealize"--partly by surrounding one's self by, in point of fact, a judicious selection of circumstances. Circumstances were, in the main, people. One surrounded one's self with--that is, one sought and lived among--agreeable people, and these were found commonly among such as had circumstances already agreeable. Selfishness was a word to keep on good terms with by understanding its nature, and making one's own share of it intelligent. Enlightened selfishness was the root of society. Good society really consisted of people who had the time and took the pains to be pleasant and entertaining, in order to have pleasure and entertainment about them. This was the sensible and experienced thing in the matter of the pursuit of happiness.

"Nellie"--Thaddeus's voice took a note of gravity--"you'll let me have an interest in your pursuit. Some time"--the wrinkles of his smile shot out around his eyes--"I'll explain to you how it is a case of enlightened selfishness. Between you and me, I'm growing old, but ordinarily I deny it."

It is possible that Nellie understood very little of Thaddeus's doctrine, saw no distinct consequences whatever, and was only caught by little gleaming points of illustration. The charm of Thaddeus's talk lay in its opalescent effect, and this had much to do with gesture and expression; so that "good society" may have been to her a phrase of the haziest quality, except as it might mean a pair of slightly idealized eye-glasses, rimmed with gold, and pointed at one in a manner to absorb attention; "happiness," a certain wrinkled smile; and the "pursuit" of it an endeavor to smile in that way. Thaddeus thought his doctrine likely to suffer much translation. He could not follow its vanishing nor guess what would happen to it.

It was a period of brooding and slow change for Helen. At such times, one remembers, the soul was a highway for processional shadows. They have no names in language. Only here and there one finds a thing said of them that is touched with recollection; their voices are heard at times in blown drifts of music; hints are given that it is not a solitary experience.

Monthly or even more often thereafter Thaddeus left his club and familiar pavements behind him, and travelled up the Wyantenaug Valley in a dull, noisy train, even through that winter when the cold wind swept down from Windless Mountain under the pines and piled drifts more than commonly along the Windless Mountain road. "Personally" he took no interest in the columned avenues of pines, the deep white ravine, the black, tinkling stream, the groined architecture of ice. He liked well enough the scents and balm of the country spring, the lilacs and the hill winds in summer, but he liked better his pavements and club. It argued a highly enlightened selfishness, a refined nicety of calculation, such pains to be agreeable. If we charge him with calculation, it is only to admire the refinement of it, and refer the charge to his doctrine. For if the confession that he was secretly growing old meant that he foresaw life would come presently to seem a little vacant, without the intimate interest it once had, and his house on Shannon Street be visited perhaps by ghosts that would not always take pains to be agreeable, it would seem to show a skill in the pursuit of happiness, an eye for a blind trail, not unworthy of the doctrine. To foresee coming changes, what provision the soul would need in a year or two more when middle life was past and the strong pull of the ebbing tide beginning to be felt, to disguise from it the consequences of sixty years, and so to persuade it gently, without force or argument, to continue to idealize and feel agreeable, were a fine bit of diplomacy. For it was not merely a matter of carrying Helen away to Shannon Street to start there a fresh stream of interest, but Helen must take an interest in him; they were to find each other lovable, if the choicest result were to come; and Helen was here somewhat difficult. The stream of interest was started for him. He felt it strongly when the first year was gone and Hamilton was at its wintry busiest. But it was difficult to be seen that she would pursue happiness with consistency.

It was the spring of the year '60 when she saw the green world once more, and summer before she walked free of the garden. The lilacs hung heavily and seemed almost to drip with thick perfume. Thrush, oriole, and bobolink were pursuing happiness and warbling their success. Thaddeus was there, and chirped in rivalry.

"But your mother would rather have something to submit to."

"Oh no, Thaddeus," protested the widow, mildly.

"You like the Lord to do you an injury. It makes a pretty item on the balance-sheet."

"How can you say so?"

"My good sister!" Thaddeus raised despairing hands. "You consist entirely of negatives. There is no positive opinion that can be attributed to you. I give you a character and you deny it. You escape definition. Personally, I doubt your existence. I believe you're a myth."

Still the widow murmured, peacefully, "Oh no, Thaddeus," knitting and rocking.

Thaddeus watched Nellie's face for signs of happiness, and the widow denied with safety and assurance. It was no trouble, except to fit her denials to the form of the attack. Thaddeus saw the loss of his rapier thrusts of fine casuistry sometimes with passing irritation.

He went down to the post-office after supper, to Mr. Paulus, the postmaster, one with whom he had gone forth on such balmy evenings, more than forty years past, and done things from which their elders had inferred disastrous careers. The postmaster was stout now, with grizzled hair cut Quakerly, ponderously grave, except that his left eyelid drooped and twitched. It was the one place on his wide face where the old spirit of demonry hinted of itself, and spoke of the days of the consulship of Tad and Pete. Without doubt the world was degenerate, and had lost its breed of noble bloods. Alas, Tad and Pete, once sworn and faithful, of one ideal together; now each in the eyes of the other was an exquisite absurdity, and all the young were degenerate, except Nellie. "Pete, she's doing well, poor little ghost, on my word."

"She'll bust out pretty soon then. Been loadin' up now goin' on two year."

"I shall take her to Hamilton. She's a racer, boy. Smacked you with a paint-brush! God bless her! I should think she did. In point of fact, it served you right. You roasted Starr Atherton's litter of pigs yourself, I recollect distinctly, and turned out a postmaster. Respectable profession. I've nothing against it."

"I didn't mean to."

"Didn't mean to which? Fatheaded thing to try to do anyhow. I told you--I precisely stated the probable result. I said, any pig of that size would squeal loud enough to wake a congregation. And Starr Atherton was out in the yard before he saw the fire, with a picture in his mind already of himself pursuing Peter Paulus, pig-stealer."

Mr. Paulus twitched his eyelid and reverted to the other subject.

"Hamilton! Well--maybe she won't. She might remember your position in society now. She might gunpowder the mayor an' let it go at that. What's in will out, that's what I say--what's in will out. Now, as to paintin' cats--"

"I beg your pardon! It is even said they were not your cats."

"As to smackin' faces with paint-brushes--anybody say it wasn't my face?"

Thaddeus leaned forward eagerly.

"What was the color?"

"Well--the paint was green, but there must've been some white on the brush. It appeared to be streaked."

Thaddeus settled his glasses, rested his chin on his cane, and studied the postmaster's face. There were vast vacant spaces on it, where, it seemed, one could keep on smacking green paint a long while and not lose interest.

"What's in will out," repeated Mr. Paulus, heavily. "What's in will out."

Up the hill as far as the church Thaddeus thought of the post-office as compared to the Wyantenaug Club, in what respects the post-office had good points; from the church across the sloping green, where in the dusk the pale flowers glimmered against the grass, he thought of Mr. Paulus's face smitten with paint; and so of Nellie, a slim, white ghost, with eyes that sometimes looked wistfulness after nameless things, and sometimes seemed to watch only the slow march of dreams. At the lilac gate he stopped. Some one stood a moment squarely in the little doorway, filling it with his shoulders, then turned half back and leaned against the jamb.

"Morgan Map, by--a-mm." The light shone across the profile in the door. The Maps were men of shoulders and stature, Morgan the largest of the three; hair and brows of a Celtic yellow with a glint of red in them, a face of cliffs and caverns, bones of length and massiveness. "Picts, Scots, Caractacus. Vercingetorix," Thaddeus murmured. "My education was faulty. It seems to me he should be painted blue and carry a club."

He plucked a lilac and sniffed it, leaning on the gate, looking at Morgan contemplatively and at the placid knitting widow beyond.

"If I let that damned brute jockey me, it's funny."

The militant church with its starward steeple and weather-vane telling confidently to all men which way the night winds of heaven blew, the shining windows and doorways, the scent of lilacs and the glimmer of white flowers on the grass, the rounded billows of the hills, Windless Mountain and the Cattle Ridge dark against southern and northern skies, the Four Roads, the meadows east where one knew the Mill Stream was crooning to itself--Hagar, by dusk at least, was much the same as in the consulship of Tad and Pete, now forty years later when Tad and Pete had come to consider each other exquisite absurdities. Even after another forty years, is there any change in Hagar at dusk? You cannot see how the charcoal-burners have cut along the Cattle Ridge. Tad and Pete have gone where one hopes for their sakes everything is not a solemnity. But we were speaking of Hagar when the night drops low, when the hills seem to draw near and listen, and something is said to the stars, which they admit, about past and future being foolish endeavors of language to say "now." There seems to be a background and foreground everywhere. And in the foreground things appear to be hourly critical and important.

Morgan turned into the room and shut the door. Thaddeus dropped the lilac promptly and opened the gate.

"I seem to object to his shutting that door." He walked up the garden path, tapping the ground briskly with his cane, seeming to have in mind things critical and important.

Chapter III

Of Morgan Map and his Purposes

Early frosts in October turned the maples into pillars of fire; followed a long Indian summer, hazy, even-footed, thoughtful days; as if after making ready this ceremonial purple and red and gold, gold brown of the meadows, blue and gold of aster and golden-rod by roadsides and meadow edges, veiled purple of the sweet fern in high pastures, the year remembered that it was not a pageantry of entry and advance, but of departure, and walked after the banners in recessional mood. In November red and yellow leaves had flickered past the windows and were raked into heaps on the village green.

Helen kicked through the leaves, scattering them with a dry rustle. "I'm as fit as can be, Morgan."

"Don't jump the fence."

"I hadn't thought of it. It's the very thing."

"Wait."

She stopped and looked at him.

"Better not," said Morgan, dryly. Helen made a face, put one foot on the low rail of the picket fence, jumped and plunged through the lilacs, picked up her hat and swung into the path. Morgan stood still outside the gate. "Then you'll have to come out again and go through."

His yellow eyebrows met over his eyes. Helen flushed, hesitated--"Don't be an idiot," and then laughed. "I'll come if you don't mind my thinking you're an idiot."

"I don't mind your saying you think so."

She came outside the gate, looking interested. Morgan leaned his back to its post and smiled approval on Windless Mountain.

"Why not?"

"Oh, because you don't think so. You think I want you to do what I tell you. That's very true; I do. Why shouldn't you?"

The question involved a series of other questions, linked and secret. Helen fell to looking, too, at Windless Mountain, which seemed to be brooding as well over its constitutional phenomena, whose causes were ages ago and deep in the earth, its relations with other creatures such as winds, clouds, the regular and the drifting stars.

She did do as Morgan said, whenever he said anything; at least, she had almost always. When one was Morgan and not a girl, and seven years older, and able to dare all things and do them--(to carry a person on his shoulder miles, for instance, across the Cattle Ridge, together with the game-bag, when a person was tired, and begging not to be disgraced for a baby, and would not have shed a tear for a gold crown and a bushel of diamonds)--of course it was right and necessary that such a one should be worshipped and obeyed. Morgan broke into her thoughts.

"Is it fixed when you go to Hamilton?"

"After Christmas. Do you know, I believe uncle doesn't like you."

"Oh, well, that's all right. I'll forgive him till he feels better."

To fear nothing, to count no costs, to be unlimited! The two years seemed as long as lifetimes, since that summer when things happened; and Morgan was still Morgan. He had never cared who was angry with him, or who liked or disliked him. Helen had longed not to care and been bitterly driven to do so always. She struggled to imitate him. In the face of sudden danger, attack of angry game-preserver or owner of posted stream, or any crisis of the woods when the partridge whirred or the fox broke into the open, Morgan's face would not flush nor his hand tremble; but he only seemed to gather his brows and centre himself on the subject, while little Nellie wondered and worshipped. So he stood for an ideal of effectiveness and freedom from the tyranny of circumstances, which to her small experience and large deduction seemed visibly to bend aside before and around him, from the tyranny of other people's opinions, which he cared so little about that they turned into harmless murmurs behind him instead of planting themselves monumentally in front.

For at times this world appeared to exist for opposition only, in iron battle order, bristling with spears, stolid, reasonless, forbidding. It was a caste system, a privileged aristocracy of one's elders, the dead-line of an old régime. Morgan walked through it promptly. "People," he said, "pretend a lot more than they are, most of 'em. My dad doesn't so much."

But freedom seems not to be an end in itself, only an opportunity to do things differently. It has its own régime, its tyranny of devotions, heroisms, and heroes, military, imperial.

That Morgan proposed a Napoleonic career for himself--reasonably such, for he was no dreamer--that he proposed to dominate, to break through limits and oppositions, to drive a path through the jam of men wide enough for his shoulder muscles to work in, was merely his own candid statement. And regarding Thaddeus, his expression sprang equally from candor. A man's dislike for him was a poor reason for disliking that man. To carry malice was to carry a load. A man was an engine for covering ground and arriving at ends, and malice was burned-out slack. Resentments of old hostilities and memories of old loves were slack, likes and dislikes mostly whims. Mankind was various and whimsical, and few were such as discarded futilities and went on, which was lucky for the few.

"You're very sure of yourself, Morgan."

"Aren't you as sure of me, Nellie? You used to be. Well," he said, slowly, "you see, if Thaddeus Bourn tried to take a fall out of me, he'd want to be subtle, and then it would be all up with him, for I shouldn't understand it."

"Why should he want to take a fall out of you?"

"If he doesn't, why should I mind his disliking me?"

"Wouldn't you mind being disliked by anybody, until they did something, really?"

"Not much."

"Oh! Not by me?"

"I'd rather be disliked by the United States. Besides, that's foolish."

"Oh, I don't know. It's funny, I have an opinion of you that's miles long. It isn't exactly an opinion, either."

Morgan smiled again with approval on Windless Mountain.

"If you're going to be subtle I sha'n't understand it," meaning possibly it was the privilege of girls to have half-grown ideas that they could not describe. A man had business with only such as he could handle, put to the use of resolve, statement, or persuasion. If he was unable to express his mind completely, it was because there was rubbish in his mind. But between himself and Windless Mountain, he did not object to Helen's having an opinion of him that was not exactly an opinion.

Any one could have an understanding with Windless, that eclectic philosopher, with his feet deep in the earth, fertile loins, jovial belly, the chest of a wrestler, and the gray, scarred head of a prophet. On his flanks were chuckling little rivulets, nesting birds, and all kinds of flitting incident. From a distance you might see his forehead lifted to abstractions, pale-blue, spiritual things. Whatever you said to him, he had an answer to your liking. Whatever your philosophy, somewhere about him he felt much the same. If you hated an enemy, there was a trifle of ice, a certain ambient glacier that once ground him badly, of whom he had no loving remembrance and the grooves whereof were on his bones. He was no moralist. The liar and the thief could find companionship there, the outcast existences more deserted, the murderer note the hawk risen red and screaming from the thicket, and admit a spirit that bettered his own. Only if you were not content in finding a likeness in detail, and wished to look straight to his scarred forehead, you would probably do well to be candid and take your time. What you got from him would be no special advice, but an assurance that he understood you, and there would be something in his manner of understanding that would meet the case and be enough. If it was a moral influence, it lay in bringing you to see the relations of things in size and quality, and in making your own directions more evident.

* * * * *

"I like Windless best," said Helen, dreamily. "He's the nicest person there is."

"It would be no joke to have him in your way."

They turned into the garden and up the path between brown, withered flower-beds.

"I jumped the fence, anyway, Morgan. It would be idiotic to hurt myself. I won't do it again."

"The point was, you didn't mind the colonel."

"I'm on a furlough. Take me up Windless again."

"Not if you're on a furlough."

Chapter IV

In which Thaddeus uses the term "Moral Justification"

In the early days of Squire Map's seclusion he had not yet made the hermit of himself that Hagar was familiar with later. Men have said that he never went outside the village after the fall of '58, at least never to Hamilton. The grooves where his bitterness ran plainly deepened as the stream wore them year by year; possibly the gradual noting how his withdrawal made no empty place among busy men, how feigning friends who had turned enemies and rebellious sons went their way and prospered, helped to widen and darken the shadow of his misanthropy. He had been a lawyer, a politician, and made his stir in his day. In 1860 he was a gray, grim gentleman in a long coat and tall, black hat, with a caverned, bony face and large frame, whom it was not considered wisdom to address without good reason, but who was seen often enough about the village.

And it was not so strange as to startle Widow Bourn in her halcyon calm when he knocked at her door one afternoon, and entered, doffing his tall hat.

"I hope I don't disturb you, Mrs. Bourn." The widow signified her unruffled comfort and hoped he would sit down.

"With your permission, I will do so."

Followed a pause while the widow pursued her knitting, and the squire's reddish, bushy eyebrows drooped and gathered, while he studied a patch of sunlight on the floor.

"I recollect that my son Morgan and your daughter Nellie were once quite inseparable, a companionship regarded as singular, considering the difference in ages, not common between a young man, approximately, and a child. It was, however, I believe, a fact."

"Morgan was always fond of Nellie."

The widow hoped secretly that, whatever he intended to say, he would continue to put it in the form of statements with which it was no trouble to agree.

"I am told he has been here of late--in fact, frequently."

That also was true. The widow wondered why people were afraid of Squire Map. He was a very comfortable person to talk with.

"Sickness or misfortune is not, if I understand his character, a thing that ordinarily interests my son Morgan. I need not point out to you that young people of a certain age are apt to give much attention to the subject of marriage."

The widow felt a twinge of discomfort. It was but slight. She objected that Nellie was young, hardly more than a child.

"In apprehension of the future, then, Mrs. Bourn, I have to say that I doubt whether any young woman will find the happiness that is due her in such an intimate relation with my son Morgan. I more than doubt it."

The widow dropped her knitting and stared helplessly.

"That is perhaps all I have to say, Mrs. Bourn. I apprehend something of the character of your daughter Nellie. Her good looks are remarkable, her disposition and intelligence even more interesting. That may not be my only motive in coming here. Whatever the motive, I beg you to believe the warning is entirely candid."

The widow felt herself in the shadow of a vague distress, painfully called upon to say something appropriate. She murmured that Nellie was going to live with her uncle that winter. The squire raised his hedge of eyebrows suddenly.

"In Hamilton?"

With her uncle Thaddeus, the elder brother of Simon. He had taken so much interest in Nellie.

The squire mused. Yes. Could Mrs. Bourn, if Mr. Thaddeus Bourn again visited Hagar, contrive to suggest to him personally that his former friend, Gerald Map, remembered him with pleasure and would be under obligation to Mr. Bourn if he, Mr. Thaddeus Bourn, would call upon him, Gerald Map?

The squire then took his leave. He came upon Morgan himself crossing the green with his gun and hunting-dog. They faced each other and stopped. Mr. Paulus from the post-office below the hill observed them.

"Resemblin'," he remarked, "two rams that's goin' to butt lightnin' out of themselves in a minute."

"You still visit Hagar, then?" said the squire, his voice muttering thunder.

"Quite often."

The trick of the gathered eyebrows was curiously common to both. The squire took his time.

"You intend to marry Miss Helen Bourn?"

"I've been figuring on that for seven years. You haven't found me changing my mind. I intend to do it."

"I intend to prevent it, Morgan."

"In Nellie's interest, sir?"

"I regard it as in her interest."

"I mean, is that your interest in it?"

"I shall not say."

"I didn't feel encouraged to think it was an interest in me. But it's natural to ask."

"Quite natural."

The squire walked a few steps, stopped and looked back, his eyebrows drooping over their melancholy caves. "I take no interest in your success in any direction. I shall be measurably interested in your failures. Whenever you have a failure to report, and are inclined to report it personally, I shall be glad to see you."

"That's an odd offer, sir." Morgan swung his gun over his shoulder. "I never saw any real need of a row, and I don't yet. And I don't pretend to understand the mixture now."

The squire went his way without answering. Morgan looked after him, then at his hunting-dog sniffing among the heaps of fallen leaves, at Windless Mountain, and found nothing suggestive. He walked slowly towards the Bourn house.

Ordinarily a man spent his time better in understanding his own purposes than the purposes of other men. On the whole, they were more easily thrust aside than understood. That was Morgan's settled conviction or characteristic. He did not mean to make an exception in favor of the squire. At the same time, "take an interest in your failures" had an odd sound, and inviting him to come and report them was a bit cool, if he only wanted to gloat over them. Hardly in "dad's" style, anyway. "Gloating" was a futile occupation. The way the squire had taken that row had been futile enough. But the question was whether he could really do anything to make a nuisance of himself. It not appearing how he could, Morgan concluded to shake off the subject, quickened his pace, and whistled to his dog.

Mr. Paulus remarked, despondently, from his philosophic distance, "I most thought they'd do some buttin'."

His despondency led to reminiscence. "Seems to me folks ain't so lively as when I was a boy. The town's runnin' down."

He stood in his shirt-sleeves, though there was a bleakness in the wind that hinted of December. The bare branches of the maples creaked, and the dead leaves fled up the road in a whirl of dust.

* * * * *

It was late in December when Thaddeus came to Hagar again, a Hagar of gray, frozen roads, little patches of dry, drifted snow, and nights falling early. Mr. Paulus sat by a lamp in the rear of the half-lit store, out of sorts with rheumatism and by reason of human nature. It was five o'clock. Thaddeus entered with an air of happy secrecy, planted himself, white-skinned, wrinkled, smiling, before Mr. Paulus's red-and-round-faced gloom.

"Pete, I've been to see Gerald Map. Upon my word! Singular interview, which I shall not tell you anything about."

"Ain't no need," grumbled Mr. Paulus. "Been agreein' on your epitaphs, an' it's about time. Like to make epitaphs for all the danged fools in town myself, an' fit the corpses to the dates."

Thaddeus sat down carefully, and wiped his glasses with snowy handkerchief, leaning forward to the light; adjusted them, leaned back, and rubbed his hands softly.

"Pete, when you've made up your mind about something, it's a satisfaction to happen on--a--unexpectedly--a moral justification of it. It really is."

"Don't want one. Wouldn't have no use for it. After those folks'd seen their epitaphs I'd writ 'em, if they didn't do what was decent--"

"A--I was referring," Thaddeus insinuated, "to myself."

"You were!" Mr. Paulus reflected, dropped his eyelid, and grew a shade more cheerful. "Moral justification! Well--I caught Cummings's boy stealin' plug tobacco th' other day. An' he said he wanted it for Halligan. Guess he did. Likely Halligan give him three cents for a five-cent plug. He looked the picture of virtue, anyhow; said he never chawed: he wa'n't up to no such viciousness. Moral justification! It's a good thing."

Thaddeus smiled absently, pursed his lips, and was silent.

"Pete," he said at last, "how does green paint feel?"

Mr. Paulus's gloom faded away, and his interest, his love of life, came gently back.

"Wet," he said, thoughtfully. "Gets stiff after dryin'."

"Ah," murmured Thaddeus, "exactly."

* * * * *

A few days later Helen and Thaddeus took their way down the Wyantenaug Valley to Hamilton, and left Hagar to the wintry hills and Widow Bourn to her own manner of content.

Chapter V

Introducing Hamilton and Saint Mary's Organ

Hamilton took its name from a little English hamlet. The statesman was a coincidence. It lies in a bend of the Wyantenaug River, which hardly ripples on the piers of its docks, ten miles from the sea and at the head-water of the river's navigation. Its colonial memories gather about the Common where the first settlers built their church and cluster of shingled houses, and about the docks where ships from the South Seas used to come in at flood-tide, from the capes and the Indian Ocean, from the West Indies and from England, whalers, too, and many fishing-smacks. The Common is half a mile from the docks. The old church stands in the centre of it. Century elms and oaks are scattered about, not planted in regular rows; but wherever it had seemed to be a good place for a tree, there the tree had grown. On the south side, or Main Street, are the courthouse and city hall; on the east side, or Charles Street, are the Constitution and Wyantenaug clubs and a church with twin steeples; on the north side, or James Street, square brick and stuccoed residences, with lawns, and sometimes a silent fountain or solitary marble statue, such as that dancing faun which appears to dislike its occupation; on the west side, or Academy Street, there are stores and a hotel, but farther up Academy Street are the law-school buildings, farther still the academy itself, founded in the reign of William and Mary, where from of old the Latin declensions were learned with the aid of a ferule and curiously called "humane letters."

All the flat, green meadows that once stretched west and south from near by the Common as far as the river are filled with brick blocks and industry now--stores, factories, and tenements. Two railroads run in subways to the station and bridge at the bend in the river. Jamaica, India, and Academy streets follow the old meadow roads, along which merchants in tie-wigs used to drive leisurely to the docks, where a leisurely ship or two would be lying, and there examine their consignments. North and east of the Common in the angle between Main and Academy streets lies the section in which those for the most part used to live who maintained mahogany tables and were able to exercise choice as to where they would live. Shannon Street runs from the northwest corner of the Common diagonally northeastward, crossing three irregular openings, miscalled squares, where muddles of streets came together, and monuments have been erected to commemorate two wars and a distinguished judge. It ends in Temple Square, which marks its exclusiveness, and at the same time admits the aristocracy of Shannon Street by having no other entrance than Shannon Street. The houses about the square are much alike, stuccoed, severe, with small porches, pillars, and iron fences close to the sidewalk. The centre of the square has a high iron fence about it, gates with scrollwork, which are commonly shut.

* * * * *

The house of Thaddeus faced on Philip's Road and Shannon Street, not far from the monument to the War of 1812, the two streets meeting at dull angles in front. There was more of it on Philip's Road, but it was numbered with Shannon Street, because to live on Shannon Street was a better principle. The street signs of Philip's Road at different times had been changed to "Pequot Avenue," with a view to euphony and a securer social position, but the commissioners were not persistent enough, and nature was against them. The name hinted it once to have been an Indian trail, or at least that some person had said so; and whether this person was truthful and informed was forgotten, too. The chronicles but mentioned the tradition. The road showed a certain furtive vagrancy, running from the theatre at the corner of the fair grounds barbarously and disorderly through two blocks, otherwise of a shape without reproach, and shying away from the law school--an instinct of untamed nature. It approached Shannon Street gradually with sullen suspicion, caught sight of the monument of 1812, plunged suddenly across, ran riot through a number of blocks, and escaped into the open country. So that Thaddeus's house was numbered on Shannon Street.

Charles Street ran by it on the west, and so past Saint Mary's Church directly to the Common. Helen looked first from the west window of her room on Charles Street and saw bare boughs of maple-trees shining in the cold moonlight, and across the way a long row of glimmering vestibules and curtains; then from the south window, and saw a house with a large, glowing window beyond a vacant space of lawn, over it the apse at the rear of a church, with two small steeples, and farther on and up the big steeple and gilded cross glittering in the mist of the moon. A lady walked past and past the glowing window. The room within looked warm, mellow, peaceful, but she seemed restless. Once she stopped and even seemed to gaze up at Helen, but her face was in shadow. Helen thought she was tall and had thick hair.

Some one was playing the organ in Saint Mary's, a sombre mutter and deep breathing underneath, wild voices calling and crying above. More voices gathered; they struggled, strained, shrieked reproach, and wailed for pity, till one by one they were hushed and only the measured breathing went on.

In the morning Thaddeus said: "You've done very well. I've heard that the two things most worth while in Hamilton now are to see Mrs. Mavering and hear Gard Windham's playing. Personally--" Thaddeus poised his coffee-cup, "as regards Mrs. Mavering, I believe that to be correct. As regards the other, it has sometimes seemed to me that it was not exactly--a--civilized; that, in point of fact, it appeared to be at times--it might be said to be at times--a kind of description of society among the fallen angels--an objectionable subject for comment so public, I should say, distinctly. It appears, I might say, to lack restraint--a--good taste. I seem to see a person in impossible garments dancing on the roof of Saint Mary's with great impatience, and stating his distress in strong language. Personally, therefore, I wish Gard Windham would keep his spectres out of my back yard, and--my dear Helen! I beg of you, don't look at me in such a--a--vast manner. Mr. Windham is considered a remarkable musician."

"I saw him too, Uncle Tad."

"On my word! Where?"

"On the roof. He was acting that way you said."

"Well, bless my soul!"

Thaddeus walked down-town thoughtfully. "She'll run off after one of Gard Windham's ghosts the next thing. No more than likely. She has an imagination that's as honest as the bank and the finest pair of eyes, my word, in Hamilton."

In the afternoon Morgan came with his trotting stallion, Consul, and drove her by Philip's Road to the fair grounds to show his paces on the track. The day was cold, dry, blue, and still, but on the track the speed made a rush of air against her face. The fair grounds were empty, the track with a patch of snow here and there, the stands staring from thousands of empty seats.

The great horse lengthened his stride. He was all power and ease. Such controlled crescendo of speed seemed to mean deep reserves. There was a thrill in the sense of those reserves.

"Do you like it, Nellie?"

"It's glorious!"

"Of course you like it. Hold hard."

"You're the right stuff, Nell," he said at Thaddeus's door.

Morgan's commendations of her had always been rare enough to be thrilling. Her head sang with "Morgan, Morgan," the victorious, the controlling. The sound of Consul's hoofs, the rush of wind in her face, the flying objects, had been only expressions of the beat and rush of his will. The sense of him was overwhelming. It surprised her to find that Thaddeus appeared smaller than ordinary, more frail and artificial. He seemed to be chattering things without significance. It was the contrast with Morgan's immense genuineness and direct speech, and because to have one's mind filled with Morgan was to be forced imperiously to look at things in Morgan's way, which was an absolute way. It brought one to despise decorations, mannerisms, whatever did not come to the point and justify itself; to summon all vague emotion and half-formed ideas of one's own to pay their way or admit bankruptcy and disappear; to expect other people to meet one with the same solidity of surface. Conversation, according to Morgan, which consisted of an exchange of intuitions, was a kind of inflated currency; the bulk of it was irredeemable; there might be a bullion fact or two behind, but to try to do business on the basis of it was futile. A man might either pay good coin or counterfeit for purposes of his own, but why play ducks and drakes with himself? Thaddeus Bourn, by an odd inconsistency, was a business man of some acumen, who outside of that chose to pretend to be a child with strings of beads, and had nothing visible to gain by it. A sentimentalist was the most irritating of men, who wasted his time pretending to be more of a fool than he was.

So that Helen became engaged in judging Thaddeus severely, silently, under Morgan's principles.

"Helen," said Thaddeus, using an interpretative eye-glass, "permit me to say you're exceedingly young, delightfully young. I am pleased that you enjoyed your drive. Our friend Morgan is an interesting barbarian. In course of time, no doubt, you will see the advantages of civilization."

"What do you mean, Uncle Tad?" she said, pursuing cash values.

"There is a kind of barbarism," continued Thaddeus, "which refuses to be civilized, and, in point of fact, eats the missionary. It finds the missionary in that capacity good, and goes its way with--with congratulation. It is striking; really, there is an impressive simplicity about it; but, dear me, you know it will never do. It's a little--isn't it a little obtuse? At least, my dear--at least, one might be allowed to doubt whether--it does not seem so, personally, to the missionary."

Thaddeus could hardly have hoped to dissipate any dominant sense of Morgan from Helen's mind with such fugitive sayings. He was probably testing, considering. "We are all egoists, my dear, except a few women. Morgan is the primitive and aboriginal egoist. He is--a--aggressive, carnivorous. I am a social egoist; your father, who wished, with emphasis, to be remembered, was, pardon me, a regretful egoist; your mother is a contented and unaggressive egoist. And so every one has, so to speak, a class. It is no reproach; it is nature, my dear--law. Why pretend to escape? But," he concluded, with grace and precision, "there is a choice, and in matters of choice I always take pleasure in pointing out to you the advantages of civilization."

Morgan still headed the march of Helen's dreams. The same moon, a little fuller than the night before, laying a thicker wash of silver, hung over the apse of Saint Mary's. She looked from her window at the roofs where the organ player's spectre had seemed to be dancing then, mistily, wildly, to the storm of sound below. The friendly window was dim, which the lady had walked past and past, restless, tall, thick-haired.

How strong and wonderful was Morgan! What more could there be under the moon and stars than the will to dare and the power to do? Helen had no name for the spell. Only of late had she thought of it in detail. In old times the word "Morgan" itself expressed the whole subject. It described the beginning and the end of things.

The organ began to breathe somewhere behind the stained windows that were just glimmering. It seemed to be laying the foundations of its temple of sound on the undermost bed-rock. Now it was lifting the walls, and one gathered and knew gradually how vast was the weight of the masonry; how the power beneath that raised it foot by foot was vaster still; how sure of itself was the power beneath, for certainly it only used one hand to force that steady climb of masonry; the other ran along, chiselling designs, gargoyles, pale statues in niches, sweeping a series of half-circles and filling them with deep-sea and warmest sunset color till, lo! it was a rose window.

Helen breathed fast, pressing her face to the cold pane. Something here, too, was strong!

She snatched a cloak, sped through halls, down stairs, through more halls and a back door, out into the moonlit yard. There was only a low iron fence to jump, and she was under the curve of the apse. A door stood half open in the corner where it joined the main building, and within was a swing-door which yielded noiselessly. It was quite dark there under the gallery, but a few gas-lights flickered in the chancel and shone on lower ranges of gilded organ-pipes, banked away beyond in a kind of transept, and on a choir screen that hid the organist. A few dusky figures could be made out sitting in pews here and there in the nave. Helen crept into a seat next a stone pillar that felt rugged and cool, and was pushed forward partly into the pew.

The building of the temple had ceased, its visionary masonry, carvings, and rose window vanished at a touch withdrawn. The organ was murmuring down among the old foundations of the world, communing with the beginnings of time, meditating to rise out of the deep with a new creation. Otherwise the church was so still that the air seemed heavy with the stillness.

A multitude of fleeting, flickering sounds broke out, like a burst of fireworks, the air full of shooting-stars, blown bubbles, and tinsel. There was a piping and dancing in the sunlight on delicate meadow grass, by pipers and dancers who could not conceivably grow old. Then a voice spoke suddenly among them. One could not tell where it came from or what it said. It was cold, sombre, indifferent. But it ceased and the dancing went on, more bacchanal now. There were perfumes, garlands on hot foreheads, shrieking and whirring of stringed instruments, high laughter, and swinging in circles. The loud, cold voice spoke again, and left no echoes or after-murmurs. Something more quiet followed, as if the memory of fear could not be quite put away, or remained in the form of an altered mood. People walked hand-in-hand. There was warm twilight and the ripple of a flowing river. After all, life was sweeter for seriousness, love best in the stillness and twilight. The cold, insistent voice rose, a stone pillar of sound, and all these things became complaining ghosts before its weightier reality. So that at length and in the end it remained alone, except for the mutter in the pit below, and there was no triumph in its victory, but it continued cold, sombre, indifferent, monotonous, heavy.

Some one beyond the pillar sighed in the darkness, and a hand fell on Helen's hand which gripped the edge of the seat. Helen started and whispered, "Oh, that was hateful!"

"I beg your pardon."

"He plays like anything, but--" She came out of her absorption to know that she had been whispering her thoughts into the darkness, and that the darkness had given forth an apology. A shadow the other side of the little stone pillar seemed to be leaning forward now and looking at her. A dress rustled.

"The music was sad, was it not?" and Helen whispered again:

"They tried all sorts of ways, and tried and tried, but it never was any use, and they gave up and died."

"Did it seem so clear? He's beginning again."

It was a kind of nocturne or slumber song, a rocking movement with a flute tone moving through a dimmer mist of harmonies, soothing here and there a restless chord. "Has He not made the night for your slumber, and darkened the earth for your sleep, and lit the earth softly with stars, and moved it among them as a child's cradle is rocked? Wake, then, if you may not sleep, but only to watch the moon rising and hear the croon of the sea. Murmur and motion, motion and murmur; but remember wonder, remember beauty, and let not anything persuade you from them. A moon and a sea be in your heart, a hush of an inner place. _Ora pro nobis_, and for the growth of flowers on ancient graves. _Requiescant in pace_, souls stately and dead. If the truth is a dream, then the dream is true, and therefore He made the night for your slumber, and darkened and lit the earth and moved it softly among stars, and gave to the moon its rising and to the sea its motion and murmur."

* * * * *

They went out by the swing-door together, passed from the shadow of the apse to the level yard, and stopped.

"I think your name is Helen Bourn," said the other. "Mine is Rachel Mavering. You will come to see me often. We are so near."

Chapter VI

Introducing Gard Windham and the Brotherhood of Consolation

One warm, rainy evening in the year '44, and in the great city that is flanked on either side by a river and a strait, Father Andrew plodded along an avenue of small shops, whose windows rested their chins on the wet sidewalk and blinked through steaming panes. His dingy umbrella dripped in the rain, and the skirts of his robe flapped against his white stockings. He had in his mind no more than presently the opening of the door in the brick wall of a cloister court, the sleepy roll of the vesper service, refection, complines, a little private, companionable prayer, such as ever seems to be heard kindly if one is trustful, and then the sleep which comes to tired saint and sinner alike with singular tolerance. Alas! one's fat legs became tired enough with climbing stairways, and the soul sore with its strained sympathies.

A lean, wet-haired boy, plodding past him, glanced up with large, drowsy-lidded eyes, and slid under his broad umbrella, making no comment. Father Andrew chuckled and sighed. Giving and taking were a simple incident, if giving were merely to carry an umbrella for two, taking merely to step under it, and charity were not charity but companionship.

"Where are you going?"

"I guess I'll go with you," after hesitating.

"But where did you come from?"

"Lappo's."

"And where's Lappo?"

"I don' know. He's dead."

Father Andrew chuckled and sighed again. Very likely he could not have decided himself, from any earthly information, where Lappo was. "Was it Lappo the fruit-seller? Yes, yes. And what is your name?"

"Gard Windham."

"Good--Well, well! A--mm--And Lappo wasn't your father? Who was?"

"I don' know."

"Anybody know?"

"I guess they don't."

"Well, what--that is, dear me! You don't say so! I mean, where'd he get you?"

"Got me to the Foundlings. Lappo"--speaking in the way of quiet conversation--"Lappo had fits."

"Yes, yes. Ga--"

"Gard Windham."

Father Andrew fell to patting one fat hand on the back of the other, which gripped the umbrella. It was his habit to pat one hand softly over the other whenever he was giving himself advice, or found himself driven to some conclusion which could not be soothed or softened by any more logical method. "Yes, yes. Dear me!" A life probably of unsanctioned origin. It was apt to be the reason for the closed door and the lost key.

They came to the door in the brick wall, and went from the street that murmured sadly with the rain, into the little paved court that murmured sadly with the rain.

Then Father Andrew sat down before the Father Superior, whose black eyes glowed and dreamed, and felt himself like a small particle of dust, happy in its humility.

"It is as you say," said the Superior. "A door is closed behind it. Consecration is sometimes the more complete."

Father Andrew murmured that it was, and thought of the refectory and a salad he knew of with peppers in it. He was used to thinking of salads when he should not be thinking of them. He was sorry for it, and knew that he had no claim to anything but humility.

"The face promises and threatens," mused the Superior. "How often is it that the highest that is spiritual is based on the strongest that is worldly."

The Superior was a man of symbols and analogies, swarthy of skin and large of frame, one whose conceptions came red from their furnace. Father Andrew's mind was nestled the rather in a certain padded placidity. Moreover, there was the salad, with its peppers. No doubt, if the Superior saw promises of a more than common consecration, and threatenings of peculiar importance in this young person without origin, it was a thing to be expected of the Superior's holy and profound discernment. The Superior's spiritual enterprise was ever extraordinary. He was of such as had from the beginning fought in the vanguard of the Church, and been her glory and adornment. For himself, Father Andrew discerned little further than to feel that his duty of distributing the brotherhood's charities would be easier if every one had the young person's native assurance. He felt that Providence, clearly with a purpose, had bestowed upon himself such limited insight wherewith to be content. It enabled him at least to admire the Superior without limit. He went his way to the salad and the peppers, and Gard remained in the house of the Brotherhood of Consolation.

* * * * *

It was a Catholic order, somewhat quiet in its ways. Not many of the brothers were like the Superior, whose faith was a yearning in the blood as fiery as young love, and for whom night-long struggles of prayer appeared to be a normal way of living. For the most part they seemed to be elderly men, keeping the rule without any apparent effort, but rather as something it would be an effort to vary from. Probably they were happier than most, in the shuffle of fate, manage to be. It would be difficult to show they were not. The monastery bell clinked at small intervals of the day and night, and slippered feet were ever going whispering down the corridors on the heels of the sliding moment, to place some office of performance or prayer accurately in its little division of time. And this method and regulation of hours, so old, so grown from measureless experience and minute knowledge of humanity, seemed to be a kind of setting or framework to keep in place, till their times came, the souls for whom atonement was accomplished; or for the others, to keep the saving of their souls in orderly process of accomplishment. The faces of all except the Superior looked something alike. They broke easily into smiles, but laughter seldom went beyond a happy chuckle.

The window of Gard's little cell looked over the court against the face of a dead wall that ended a block of uniform houses. The cloister covered two of the remaining sides, a brick wall ten feet high the fourth, and a thick wooden door led through this into the street. The court was asphalted, except for a strip under the dead wall, where one Brother Francis planted things hopefully every spring, and found entertainment all summer in the ill-advised efforts they made to grow.

It was Francis who taught Gard his Latin accidents, and later the writings of those dignified heathen, Cæsar and Tullius Cicero; later still his Greek, in which language appeared the writings of one Herodotus, and of others called "Fathers of the Church," of whom he might disbelieve Herodotus if he chose--an unnecessary distinction; he believed them all fervently. One of his vivid memories was the delivering before brothers Francis and Andrew, with violence and tears, the oration, "Tandem aliquando, Quirites," with indignation because both chuckled without intermission, and would not see the importance of condemning Catiline. Francis had general charge of the monastery school, which was filled and emptied daily through a special door on the avenue. But the scholars seldom went further than reading and writing, sums and fractions, and the lives of those saints who had had the more interesting adventures; so that, under the Superior's permission, to lead Gard into these high places of learning was a pleasure to which Francis surrendered himself, he feared, with sinful abandonment.

Music, Gard studied with one Brother Johannes, who played the little organ in the whitewashed chapel, all white except by the altar, where there was a distinction of gilded woodwork, silver candlesticks, and purple cloths, and so cold in winter that one's fingers were numb on the keys. He was an old, bowed-over man, Johannes, with frail, waxen hands, absent-minded, apt to forget his rule and be late, and not understand why the Superior persisted in modifying his discipline. He feared the Superior estimated his sins too lightly, and died in the year '52, when Gard was seventeen. Gard had to play the organ at offices after that, and to go daily three blocks up the avenue to the church of the Sacred Trinity, and take his lesson from Fritz Moselle, a mighty German from Strassburg, near the Rhine. He learned many things besides harmony and counterpoint of Fritz, who was a cosmopolitan, and believed not in the faith of man or woman; but he believed that art was the one country of the soul, and that in conduct it was the duty of every one to "do as he _verdammt_ please."

"Look you, _kleiner_! In de mass--yes. Some monk he haf art in him--Gott, yes! He found a place for his soul to live in. He know diese vorldt was a circus, und he vas a lil' boy und can't go. He mus' stay to home. Ach! he feel sad. Und by-and-by he compose music to a circus in hefen, vich vas de mass you play yesterday. Aber you mus' play de Bach fugue severe. Maybe you make a good monk, but you haf too much luxury in your bones to play de Bach fugue, _hein_? No? Play den, p'tit anchorite, und let each of your fingers be von of de Ten Commandments, or Gott! you don' play him not any." The organ at Trinity was quite another matter than the little one which wheezed plaintively in the brotherhood's whitewashed chapel.

Once a week he had to go to the Superior and be examined, and probably read a chapter of St. Augustine. It was a ceremony of indefinite length, for the Superior sometimes fell into a monologue, fervid as St. Augustine's, while walking to and fro; and Gard used to imagine the room full of spirits and misty angels, listening--all of them--breathless, astonished, and a little frightened; for there could not be any one who was not afraid of the Superior, unless it were the _bonus Deus_, and even He must be astonished. At length the great, swarthy man would lay his hand on Gard's head--a large hand, lean and strong, and vibrating with the throb and blast of the furnace that was in him.

"Oh, Infinite and Tender, if it is needed for the saving of this young soul, send him sorrow and pain, and let his grief be deep." And Gard would come away tingling like the bells of Trinity, which had a chime of twenty, and it made the bell-tower rock to play them hard. He never after lost the impression that those interviews, of all kinds of human experience, probably most resembled death and resurrection, and things likely to happen at the gate of the celestial city. He grew to something over a medium, slim height at this time, had drowsy eyelids, and wakeful gray eyes under them. He laughed with a bass voice, liked brothers Francis and Andrews, and Fritz Moselle, and worshipped the Superior, but preferred to dodge him. The preference was probably a sin, one which Brother Francis claimed to have prayed for in himself some twenty years without effecting. He discovered that the Superior, Francis, and Fritz Moselle had each severally a distinct point of view, and that you could tell beforehand in what direction their interpretations of anything would point. He found that he liked the organ in Trinity better than Cicero, and watching the throng of men and women, with bright colors in their hats, as he went to and from the brotherhood and Trinity, if not better, at least differently, than either. And in the year '55 he discovered that he was expected presently to take the vows, and awoke to the further fact that the idea filled him with melancholy. It resembled to him a sandy desert, with not an oasis in sight, not a palm-tree against the sky.

The children who followed the piper of Hamelin, the mariners of Odysseus who cocked their ears to the sirens, and other harkers to such instrumental enchantment, have reported experiences that are much alike. They heard, it seems, a high, thin fluting, ineffably sweet, which seemed to imply that just beyond those blue hills, or those white breakers, or a few turns of the next street, there lay an extraordinary region overrun with smiling probabilities; for there, whatever one dreamed of most was more than likely to be found, whether it was sugar-plums, or a girl in the brake with sunny hair, or a sword and shield, and a banner to follow withal.

But when Gard told Father Andrew that he would not take the vows, Father Andrew acted as if it were a new thing, and lifted his fat hands helplessly.

"Good--A--Dear me! That is, I mean why not?"

Then he patted Gard's hand with his soft palm, and chuckled and sighed.

"But it's true," Gard said. "I'll tell you why."

"The blessed--I mean, don't! Tell the Superior." And he scuttled away in alarm, murmuring, "I wish that boy didn't surprise me so."

It had not occurred to Gard, but evidently he must tell the Superior; and how could the Superior be made to understand about the high fluting, and that it said "Follow, follow," so that one needs must go; and all about the sugar-plums and the girl in the brake, and the banner and sword and shield? And, if not, what was there to tell the Superior, more than to make a bare statement of his rooted ingratitude, his incorrigibly evil nature, and his resolve to go? Probably there was not another such case in the history of orders, and he would be excommunicated. He knew the Superior had meant him to be peculiarly consecrated, and, because he had no origin back of the Foundlings' Hospital, had thought him a soul only the better fitted to be seized and sent heavenward powerfully. What right had he to interfere with the Superior's great purpose? Nevertheless, he set his mouth and knocked on the familiar door.

The Superior was pacing the room, as his habit was. It was a long, gray-walled room, containing a few chairs, a picture of the Annunciation, a writing-table with a crucifix over it, a bookcase with, by Gard's frequent counting, one hundred and twelve books, leaving out the controversial pamphlets. It was flooded with light from three large windows. The floor was uncarpeted.

Gard entered on the subject promptly.

"I've found I can't take the vows, father. I'm afraid you'll never forgive me."

The Superior stopped short; a spasm of pain crossed his face. Gard thought, "Now it's coming."

"Do I seem to you unforgiving?" he said, sadly. "Do you know, that sin of mine was pointed out to me thirty years ago, when I was your age. I imagined it was conquered. I'm afraid I have not watched for it of late years."

Gard was dumb with surprise. The Superior resumed his pacing.

"I have been hoping that you would come to me in this way of your own will. You will think it best, then, to leave the brotherhood--at least for a time? Have you any plans?"

"I would play in some church, father. There is Fritz Moselle."

"Moselle? Yes, your teacher. A curious instance. I remember him. Made up of a thousand fragments, shivered pieces of glass, from what have been faiths and systems of philosophy, and have had, perhaps, in their time a certain fragile beauty. He probably uses such terms as 'art' and 'cosmopolitanism' in connection with it. A curious, modern type. You will learn by observing such." There was a pause. Gard began to collect himself.

"When I said for a time," went on the Superior. "I meant that my hopes and your issues are in His hands, where they belong. You will write to me if you are in need."

He stood still a moment.

"There is one result of experience for one soul and another for another. 'As often as I have gone forth among men I have returned home less a man,' saith St. Thomas à Kempis; but the spirit of our time does not speak in this way. I suppose"--smiling--"it is only the young men who really hear what the spirit of the time says."

He put his hands on Gard's bowed head, and there was a long silence. Then Gard stammered something, and presently--somehow--got away and stood in the corridor alone. His eyes were full of blinding tears, and yet there was a sense of wild relief. The interview was over, and he had never seen the Superior so mild, so politely talkative.

The parting with the rest of the brotherhood was more of an ordeal. Brothers Andrew and Francis kissed his cheek and turned away. It seemed to him they looked suddenly old, and gray, and broken.

The cold, white corridor was full of ghosts of his own past hours and days staring reproachfully. He passed out through the cloister court, carrying his little bundle under his arm. The asphalt was wet with the mist. Francis's flower-bed had only a few crooked, brown, uncannily-shaped stalks, like dry mummies' hands thrust through the mould and clutching blindly. He opened the door in the brick wall of the court. The hinge was worn and the gate had been sagging lately. It grated as he closed it behind him.

Chapter VII

Introducing Moselle and Mavering

It was yet early in the afternoon. There was a hint of the sun overhead, a semi-luminous space in the thin mist, though the pavements were still wet. The two opposite currents of flowing humanity on the avenue mingled and jostled and dodged, with haste and with leisure, with good-humor and petulance.

The avenue as far as Trinity, and Gard in his black robe, knew each other very well. The policeman had nodded to him kindly for years, and of late had taken to touching his helmet. The avenue did not appear to see anything peculiar about him now, but it came to him with a shock, so that he knew of a certainty that the relations between them were quite changed. The policeman touched his helmet, the man at the newspaper booth his hat, but that was a mistake. Properly, he ought to stop and tell them it was a mistake, that he had put off consecration, declined reverence, and cast his lot with them and the avenue's democracy.

The sexton of Trinity was sweeping the steps. He took off his cap when Gard stopped to ask him where Moselle lived. "Two streets up, riverence," he said, "an' turn to your left; number sixty-siven, on'y it's rubbed out, riverence. Is it a bit o' music you're carryin', sor?"

Gard found where sixty-seven was rubbed out on a street door, and under direction climbed three narrow flights, to a narrow, top-story hall, with a skylight overhead and several doors, one with the grimy card of Fritz Moselle tacked upon it. He knocked. "_Herein!_ Come! Veil, _du lieber Himmel_! It's de lil' anchorite!"

The room which Moselle came storming across seemed to have been originally three rooms, but the partitions had been mainly cut away. There were two pianos, and two grates for coal fires. Floor and chairs and tables were a welter of sheet-music, beer-bottles, steins, books, flower-pots, cats, pipes, newspapers, and rumpled rugs. Moselle came through it like a loose meteor, bent on breaking chaos into smaller fragments; hair brushed back and yellowish, dingy with age, eyebrows and mustache that swelled and dropped like cataracts, weight to threaten floors, huge, fat fist, and porcelain pipe in mouth. He hugged Gard to his mighty belly, muttered and puffed hoarsely, and pulled him across the room to where a man in black had risen from his chair, who had a long jaw and aggressive chin, shaven bluish, a slouched hat on his head, a frock-coat, and was tall, gaunt and bony. He held out his hand.

"I'm glad to know you, Mr. Windham," he said, in a deep, drawling voice, with a certain winningness of smile.

"'Tis Shack Mavering. He knows about you, _kleiner_," cried Moselle, boisterous, explanatory. "'Tis a friend of Mephisto, der Faust-devil, und of me. Ha! Sit down. Vat iss dat?" pointing to Gard's bundle.

Gard dropped his bundle beside his chair. At the brotherhood was orderly calm, thoughtful silence, cool, clear walls, and whispering sound of slippered feet. Moselle at organ lessons in Trinity had never seemed so loose and free, broad, joyous, unlimited. Somehow Gard felt as if vacant spaces about his soul were growing warm and inhabited. He laughed, and knew no reason for it.

"I've left the brotherhood. I'm going to be--"

"Gott! Vat you going to be?"

Gard laughed again.

"I thought you might know, and if you did you'd be sure to tell me."

"So!" Moselle's face, when it dropped vivacity and took on gravity, fell into rugged, powerful lines. "Got no money?"

"No."

"Nor clothes of a human too much, nor plans, nor friends but old Fritz, nor knowledge of perversity? Good! All good! You will stay mit old Fritz some veek or more, und I vill get you a church-organ to play somevere. Good! _Hein?_ Shplendid! Shack!"--gesticulating over Gard--"look you at his head, his eyelid, his shape of der hair-line. Vat? It is super-sensuous Florentine, und de back of his head is Yankee, und so hard you not break him mit an axe. I say in all human variety is law, und device, und chain of causes, und you are mitout science to know not music itself haf more severe und mathematic system. Dat boy is at de end of his shtring of causes--at de end of his shtring. Ha!"

"End of his rope is the idiom," said Mavering, in solemn bass. "It means he's down on his uppers. You'd better attend to me and learn pure English. Your English is composite, mistaken, and slangy, and you are, in body and mind, an epitome of gross fatness, whom no science of human variety could classify."

The depth and solemnity of his voice, the funereal gravity of his long face, seemed burlesquely classical. His speech was flowing, and composed of structural sentences. Moselle waved his pipe joyously.

"_Continuez_, Shack! Heet her up! Advance! Boy, I gif you a lil' pipe and a lil' beer, but not much, um so you be not sick. My friend Shack is eloquent und foolish. Und ve tree vill talk now till to-morrow is gray."

The talk ran on. Already Gard seemed to himself not merely an hour, but days, weeks--a period which the clock could not understand or measure--away from the brotherhood. The country of ideas into which he had come was a loose republic, where no man knew the limits of his personality or his daring. He might loosen his belt and shout, if he chose. Here conversation was erratic and glancing, not necessarily an exchange of what one really thought; and yet, however obliquely from his meaning one spoke, there seemed to be less misunderstanding than among the brothers, with whom the guiding of the tongue to simple truth was a matter of searching conscience. And again, at times, both Moselle and Mavering would say things that seemed to Gard to meet the fact or question before them with a sharper recognition, a more instant candor. He admired and laughed in pure joy of the brave, new world that had such creatures in it, with unstraightened ideas that were free to dance in the sunbeam or dig in the mine, and forget whether they had or had not any connection with the soul's salvation. It was a kind of renaissance for him, a discovery of humanism and the pagan pleasure of mere living with vivacity of body and mind. Here on the threshold of his new life were two to greet him who were witty, kind, ironical, experienced, and seemed to be without care or fear. If, as Moselle had implied, there were something hard and critical in the back of his head, some reserve of judgment, something not plastic and receptive, but resistent and decisive, it did not trouble him now with criticisms or decisions, but let him bask and admire.

"Dey want an organist in Hamilton. It is Saint Mary's, a church Protestant Episcopal, called High Church, _videlicet_, protesting mit apologies, und cultured to beat de band, vich is an idiom obscure, my friend Shack. Vat band?"

"Brass band."

"Ach so! Vell, vat did I mean?"

"Your German mind was headed right, but went astray on a by-path of idiom. Saint Mary's culture is not in competition with a brass band in blue uniform, but aims at the highest orchestral and surpliced effects."

"Vell, a choir committee wrote me, anyhow, und I loss de letter. _Helas!_ I loss everyt'ing--my reputation, my bes' friends! I put 'em somevere und forget 'em. Vat did I do mit my letter?"

"I suppose it's in your pocket."

"Gott! So it is! Vell, dey vant an organist, und Saint Mary's--"

"Has a three-banked organ, and Hamilton is a sleepy place, good for your neophyte to sit down in and learn the alphabet of humanity. I know Saint Mary's."

"Ach! Plazes! So you do!" Moselle stopped short and looked at Mavering under overhanging, yellowish eyebrows. "Am I intruding--roping in your domestic circle, Shack?"

"I think likely. It's no circle. It's an incommensurable ratio. You know that."

"I know no more than you like, Shack," said Moselle, gently. "You haf no objections?"

"None at all."

"Vell," said Moselle, after a pause, "so it is."

"Mr. Windham," said Mavering, flowingly, "nature cast me for the part of the villain. She gave me the countenance of one reflecting darkness, a voice unfit for lighter remarks than 'I will be revenged!'--made me a lean and hungry Cassius, and bid me assassinate and betray. The inspired text has it that 'All the world's a stage.' It follows that every man is cast for a rôle, and if he tries to introduce anything not in character he appears to make a mess of it, the management docks his salary, and the public blights his career. I once tried to play a hero and a lover, and invited the conjunction of happy stars. It was no good. The notion of it, as you see, is causing this German monster to make a braying ass of himself."

"Ho! Ho!" Moselle chuckled, and puffed. "Der _kleiner_ don' know your stage und your Shakespeare. He shtare like a house afire."

"Oh, that's it."

"Vat is dat, Shack, a house afire? An idiom extravagant, confusing."

"It means he stares with breathless expectancy, with bewilderment and fear. I don't recommend the figure to your use. The conception of red conflagration and fire-bells is a Shakespearean flight, and you can't handle combination figures. You stick to a simple retail line of business for cash or you'll bust. You can't take risks and thirty days' credit for a meaning. The English language has no confidence in you. You aren't sound for the market. Mr. Windham, you will probably meet in Hamilton a Mrs. Mavering, who lives close by Saint Mary's, and who will say nothing whatever of me. If I were you I would cultivate her acquaintance, but imitate that particular reserve."

"Vell," said Moselle, gently, "das iss good, but don't fill de _kleiner_ mit bevilderment. He don' understand, und he take indigestion. Go buy de grocery und de beer, Shack, und ve make a dinner here, und to-morrow de _kleiner_ shall haf human clothes, und go to the theatre und see friend Shack arrested for his vickedness in de fif' act."

After a while the dusk began falling. When Mavering came back with bundles and a basket containing a hot shoulder of meat from the baker's, the long room was lit glimmeringly by a lamp or two. And Moselle declared finally, and referred especially to the beer and seasoned cheese, that he was in favor of the animal half of man.

"He develope his soul too fast. Let him vait, let him vait. For his shtomach und feet haf stood by him, his friends from old, so old, und maybe his soul don' do so. She act frisky, _hein_?"

Mavering said, "I'm something of a conservative myself. Man ate before he prayed and loved the way he ate, but we live in a radical age."

Then Moselle played dream music, with fluffy, floating things in it, on one of the pianos, as though he never ate anything heavier than lettuce, and was, in the verity of music, a fair maiden who walked in a green-and-white garden and was pure and slim as the lilies; a woodthrush in the distance sang a love song that was like a hymn, but never came into the garden, and finally each lily became the spirit of a lily, the woodthrush the memory of a song, and garden, maiden and all went up a silver moonbeam to the moon.

Moselle played on through the evening, and towards twelve Mavering rose and left. Half an hour later Moselle swung around on his piano-stool.

"Shack gone? _Kleiner, kleiner!_ your eyes are full mit damp shleep;" and he looked at Gard with his own eyes, grave and old and calm. "I denke you are more lofable als lofing, _kleiner_, an' for an artist de first's nodding, de last is all. '_Geliebt und gelebet_.' Aber one must _lieben_ in order to _leben_. '_Geliebt und gelebet_.' Ach! I haf so."

Gard slept in a room at the end of the hall, woke in the dawn, and lay waiting for the bell before matins. Then he remembered, and laughed aloud. But a throng of memories rose reproachfully. The chapel organ would be played badly now; Francis would drone all day in the schoolroom, but there would be no one for him to talk with about Cicero's beautiful adjectives; Brother Andrew would pat himself on the back of the hand, look wistfully down the corridor, trot away to the refectory, and find the salad uninteresting.

* * * * *

So Gard became organist at Saint Mary's in Hamilton, in the fall of '55, and in time a noted young person. In the immediate years that followed, the old life came to seem hardly more than a vivid dream, or a story told him by another man who had never left the brothers, but was still playing for offices and hurrying along white corridors. He had time on his hands, and read eagerly, and his rooms grew littered like Fritz Moselle's. He hardly knew what he was himself, except a kind of highway, along which the thoughts of other men, and emotions that he might claim his own since they came from nowhere in particular, travelled hastily. It was something additional to that sense common to humanity of existence as a hurried journey from the unknown to the unknown, his ignorance of his antecedents back of the Foundlings' Hospital. Yet he seemed to feel no curiosity about them. They had no claim upon him, those antecedents, and he had none to them that he cared to put forward. The past might bury its wrecks if it could. His name might be a clue, or it might be the effort of an inventive or reminiscent nurse. He never inquired and never knew, then or thereafter, but was content to have and possess it, as something that had floated ashore with him and served well the purposes of a name. After all, the mortal millions have their severance from each other ruled with not so great a difference in point of isolation, and with the same "salt, estranging sea." Each is for himself the centre of things; the currents of the deep swing round him; he is alone with his main issues.

Gard saw a place and repute slowly forming for him, and had almost come to see himself a citizen of Hamilton, the straight road of a quiet life stretching before him under a cool gray sky. Moselle, whom he went down into the greater city to see now and then, doubted that outcome.

One night in January he came down Charles Street towards the church. He had fallen into the habit of playing an hour or two in the latter part of the evening, and people in the neighborhood had accepted the custom. Some formed habits of their own to meet it, and went to their windows regularly about nine to hark whether he played that night. It was not an agreement, but the silent adaptation in close communities of habit to habit.

The snow was falling, blown by a keen wind, and the great side window of Mrs. Mavering's house glowed warmly through the sharp, slanting lines of the snow. It occurred to him that he would rather talk to Mrs. Mavering that night than summon only spectral visitations from Saint Mary's organ. At that moment Helen clung with warm fingers to Mrs. Mavering's hand, saying, "I shall call you Lady Rachel, because you're beautiful."

Chapter VIII

Of Mrs. Mavering, and of the Philosophy of the Individual

Helen put her forehead against the cold window.

"It's snowing. Do you think he'll play to-night? But he would if he knew we wanted to hear him, wouldn't he?"

"If he knew that we knew he knew it, he probably would."

The fire glowed and snapped, and reflected its varying mood on the andirons and the red-and-white tiles of the fireplace. Mrs. Mavering, garmented in black and dusky red, lay back in a deep chair, and the firelight played across her face and dress in a more subdued manner than on the tiles and andirons, as if it felt that was not the right place to be familiar and reckless.

"Why?"

"Men take great pains to be nice to us if they see their sacrifice is in the way to be appreciated. They would rather have the sacrifice appreciated than the service. Oh, it isn't like that, dear eyes!--not nearly so solemn!" Helen had come and curled herself at Mrs. Mavering's feet to consider this proposition. "If you always look at me so you'll frighten me out of all my little cynicisms, and I think them pretty."

Mrs. Mavering reminded one of something costly, like a vase upon which some master-workman had spent himself, careless of time, considering only line and curve, and how it might be made to glow from within and be more than worthy of the palace of the king; and as if afterwards, when the palace had been sacked, and fallen with ruin and wailing, and the vase had somehow escaped destruction, it had come to stand in the guarded corner of a museum. In this meaning Thaddeus had spoken of her as something to be seen rather than some one to know. Thaddeus's social instinct was quick, and sometimes accurate. He need not have been so mistaken, understood as implying the general facts of a period in Mrs. Mavering's life.

Helen demanded personality even of things. She inveterately accused persons of being persons, and brought them to her judgment bar to account for themselves. Thaddeus thought Mrs. Mavering should be looked at for art's sake, for the improvement of the tone of society; that an official sign, so to speak, was somewhere at hand, warning that no one was permitted to touch her humanly.

Helen had not seen the sign. They had met first in the dark and had been introduced by a sigh, and she had never been aware of the barrier with which Mrs. Mavering was observed to be surrounded. Only Mrs. Mavering was given to riddling. She acknowledged herself a person to Helen, stormed by her headlong admiration, but she never accounted for herself at the bar, or, as Helen stated it. "Whenever you say something, and I ask what you mean, you always act as if you didn't like what you meant, but you never say what it was." So far as our sayings come out of ourselves and ourselves out of our experience, if part of the experience were such that we wished to fly from that part of ourselves and could only flutter the more about it, supposing this to be Mrs. Mavering's case, her impulse to dodge Helen's bar of equity might be understood--and the fact, too, that she found herself ever provoking an arraignment. Helen had to dismiss case after case for lack of evidence, and because the defendant wanted to play something else. So that she only wondered now what Mrs. Mavering meant by "Men would rather have the sacrifice appreciated than the service," and whether one would naturally become difficult by being ten years older.

"I shall call you Lady Rachel, because you're beautiful," she said, and the organist of Saint Mary's stood outside the while and thought he would rather talk to Mrs. Mavering than call spectres from the peaks of his gilded organ-pipes that blown, desolate night.

Of course, one could not become beautiful like Mrs. Mavering--not in a hundred years. One's nose would not become straight, one's hair black and heapy, nor eyes change from gray to amber and brown; and in order to become as difficult it would be necessary to be married and have one's husband become unapparent without becoming dead. Mrs. Mavering was an arduous ideal. Helen doubted that she would ever achieve it.

"Then I must call you Sir Helen, because you're such a valiant knight, and always charging something, and driving a spear into the middle of an idea, as if it were a dragon. But my ideas are not honest, so they have no middles, and it only makes them look mussy."

"Then," said Helen, quickly, "if I'm a knight I choose to be in love with you. You're locked in a tower and I'm after an ogre, only I don't make out very well what he's doing. Of course, he growls and rages."

"I dare say he does."

"Well, then, Saint Denis Montjoie! It is a beautiful fight."

Gard was announced and presently came in. Mrs. Mavering said:

"Can you play a game? You haven't met Miss Bourn? She is pursuing an ogre around a tower. I am locked in the tower. She doesn't care whether I like being rescued or not. She isn't sure yet about the ogre, but thinks she needs one."

"I am a humble person; so is an ogre, isn't he?" said Gard. "Maybe I'd do. An ogre ought not to be proud."

"But he always is," said Helen, eagerly. "He keeps a tower to be proud in."

"Where is my tower, then?"

Helen hesitated. She had never seen him near before. He looked a little singular, not quite like other people, a little weary and very white-faced, a little impenetrable. She remembered all he had said to her through Saint Mary's organ, things sensitive and intimate.

The process of putting together two groups of impressions to make one personality is difficult, and one ought to have time. But he insisted on knowing where the tower was. "I don't know how to be an ogre without it," so that she said, hastily, "You must have one in the organ-loft," and was not at all sure that it meant anything, if it were not an entire mistake, and was glad when they sat down without calling for more explanations. She slid down to her old place by Mrs. Mavering and half listened to them, and half studied a problem, to see what was honestly true about it, or whether it had any middle.

When Helen was little, she used to compose parables and sermons, and sometimes wept to think how beautiful they were, and declaimed them to her mother, who had only one comment to make. It was, "Why, Helen!" Such was the parable of the Perfect Cat, who lived a life of absolute sinlessness. There was a sermon on David and Absalom--"Oh, Absalom, my son!" It was tearful at that point. But the moral was that Absalom was hung by his hair--a sorrowful incident. People should not make their children have long hair. "And I have asked you three times to-day, 'Mother, please, may I cut it off?' and you just said, 'Why, Helen!' and I'm not going to ask again. I'm going to put you in the closing prayer." So that now she put her conclusion into a sermon, to the effect that every one had a tower in which part of himself or herself was a proud ogre, and another part was a valiant knight who ought to eventually thrust a lance into the middle of the ogre to make him humble and social, or else dead, so that both together might become a perfect character before the benediction. Because a proper sermon was like a story, inasmuch as in the first part you made things look as badly as possible and talked about wickedness, so that everybody might become interested; and in the last part you talked about goodness and made goodness succeed after difficulty, so that everybody might become calm; and in the benediction you told everybody to be happy ever after.

"Do you read Emerson," Gard was saying to Mrs. Mavering--"the Massachusetts lecturer? He says, 'The Eden of God is bare and grand'; but I don't see anything more than a personal fancy in that. Anyway, the poets would be wrong in putting music in such an Eden. An organ is full of sin and sorrow. The pipes always seem to me to hold so many human emotions compressed and stowed away, like the genius in Solomon's bottle. Say one of them is a pure aspiration and one of them a snarling desire. You set the snarling desire chasing the pure aspiration, and you have one of the simple formulæ for expressing humanity. It isn't Eden."

"Oh, that's like my knight and ogre!" cried Helen. "Do you do sermons and parables? But you have the wrong one running away."

Gard looked surprised, and then laughed. "It was all going on round and round a tower, wasn't it? And if the tower were small you couldn't tell which was running away."

"But _they_ would know!" said Helen, triumphantly.

"But they might differ, or they might forget, on account of going so fast. Then they'd have to stop and ask the lady in the tower to straighten them out."

Helen looked puzzled, felt that the parable was too mixed to mean anything now, and suspected Gard of mixing it frivolously.

"The lady in the tower is too dizzy, you both run about so fast," said Mrs. Mavering. "But she thinks Helen would never run away."

"There's no chance for me to be proud in this tower," said Gard, and Helen murmured:

"It's all mixed up."

"Music, after all," said Gard, breaking a few moments' silence, "leaves you unsatisfied at your strongest. It is misty emotion. It has wings, but no feet. You seem to want something that has more grip and bite."

"That is heresy from you," said Mrs. Mavering.

"I've made a creed of heresy, you know. That Massachusetts lecturer preaches the creed, 'Every man his own issue, for conformity is death.' But I don't know whether he has said that conformity to the forms you have made yourself is as much death as conformity to those made by other men. I call myself a musician, and something keeps asking me, 'Is that all?' It seems to think it time I called myself something else."

"Then why not call yourself a still better musician?"

"Of course, one needn't stand still altogether. You become more skilful with your fingers and feet, and learn better how to render and interpret the emotions, musical ideas, more or less eccentric crotchets, of other men, the best of them dead. Their emotions are not so important, are they? Haven't we eyes of our own to see that grass is green? Oh yes, we compose. Have you seen my new book? It consists of a prelude, that is very bad, and highly praised by competent critics in journals; an offertory, in which Charity appears as despondent of the results of the collection--I'm conceited about that piece--and a symphony in five movements, which is a padded invalid. Room enough for improvement, you see. I might learn to symbolize a mood more accurately. It wouldn't make the mood any less futile. The point is really that it doesn't get you out of a rut, if you make the rut even a very good rut of its kind. The more you dig at it the deeper it grows. There is too much that you never see and never know. You take the shape of your mould. Do you know Dr. Holmes' 'Chambered Nautilus'? The nautilus made a larger shell for himself every time he changed, but the poet didn't comment on his making each shell of the same shape as the last. He was a stale conformer after all, that nautilus."

"Do you think he would have done better if he had tried to make a shell for himself like an oyster's or a crab's?"

"He wouldn't have done better in the matter of shells. But personally he would have gone up the scale of intelligence."

"He would have been very uncomfortable."

"Oh, it wasn't claimed that conformity was not comfortable. It was only said to be death."

"Didn't the nautilus have a very beautiful shell?" Mrs. Mavering spoke in a low voice. "If you ask me, I don't think human life is better than music. I think music is the better of the two." Gard seemed mutely to understand her, and was silent a moment as if to let the shadow pass, then said:

"Music is a little like the nautilus-shell, isn't it?--the venturous bark that flings its purple wings in gulfs enchanted, and all that. But isn't 'all that' rather a foolish thing to do forever? Purple wings in enchanted gulfs--it's a narrow experience when you come to think of it."

Gard rose to go, but stood a moment looking at the two, as if he wanted to fix the picture of them and carry it away; of the woman with heavy hair, in a black-and-red dress, who gave the impression of wearing jewelry and really wore none, and the girl in white with a blue band at her throat, slim hands that somehow looked so strong, and gray eyes that demanded candor and offered imaginations. The firelight played over them as if it were trying to illustrate the subject, saying, "This is worth while to understand."

"Do you know there's a war coming?" said Gard. "Trumpets and drums are in the air."

After that he went away, and through the blowing storm along Philip's road to his rooms, which looked out on the law school square. The front room was full of the traces and tokens of the six years past, indicating what the mental life then had been, but not very clearly what result had come out of it all. There were books in number and confusion, as if he did not care for them in a bookish way, but only as mines, clefts, or fissures where metals are sometimes to be found--and if found and dug out, the source has no more personal value. There were some lounging-chairs, a desk with a litter of sheet-music and scored manuscript.

Gard's face was whiter and thinner than of old. It was noticeably white, with heavy eyelids, and the peculiar curve of hair-line that Moselle once noticed. One might fancy a trace of the cloister in it, not in anything that could be called clerical, but in something that could be called isolated. If there is manifestation in all faces of the spirit within, it would have seemed to manifest a certain separateness; as if, having learned in the cloister, at the age when one takes fundamental impressions, that a man is nothing else noticeable than a soul alone, with the eternities watching and the one issue of its salvation before it, he had never been rid of that sense of things, but had only altered his conception of the issue, and so the terms of description and the method of pursuit. This sense of things, of life as a kind of personal adventure, a kind of fortune-hunting after an ideal of self-culture, an ambition for a mental career rather than one apparent outwardly to men, may have sprung from far back in his nature and been of precloistral origin, come slowly of late years to a theory. The peculiarity of his coming, as one dropped out of a darker cloud than most men come from into the light of consciousness, may have added to this dim sense of isolation, of adventure, of destiny experimenting more definitely with him, of eternities more watchful. Not that he compared himself in that way with other men. The comparison, if it had occurred to him, would not have seemed interesting, or bearing on the issue. To each belonged his independent adventure; each was at the same time an end to himself and a means to other people.

Such progress and pilgrimage had its own perils, excitements, and new landscapes opening unexpectedly.

The picture that remained in Gard's mind of Mrs. Mavering and Helen seemed to him significant of something--Helen looking up with question and appeal to the older woman, the coloring, the firelight. She had brave eyes, that girl. One ought to see more of women. Mrs. Mavering looked like a kind of imperial exile. He sat down at the piano and touched a key thoughtfully. They signified something, surely, if one could put it into form. He wondered what had become of Mavering. Fritz Moselle was growing apoplectic, and people were talking about war. If old orders were changing, it was probably time they changed.

Chapter IX

Of Estates in Happiness

"In point of fact," said Thaddeus, "I am proposing a partnership, to be entitled 'The Helen Banking and Brokerage Company,' organized to do business for a commission."

"I don't know that I understand," said Mrs. Mavering, slowly.

"We make investments at interest, speculate in futures, examine securities." He paused, seeking precision of phrase. "It is in terms of happiness. One pursues it--happiness. One sees fortunes in it lost and fortunes won. I find I have spent my own capital. I have to be content with a commission."

But then it was not evident that Mrs. Mavering need be in the same case. It would be poor taste to seem to assume it. "In point of fact," she suggested a hoarded wealth, an unknown, mysterious sum in reserve, rather than even poverty in respect to a future. But she might be allowed to express for herself the terms of her profit.

"I think I understand now," she said.

Her veil had little beads of moisture on it from the damp March wind that blew down Shannon Street in their faces. The gutters were slushy running streams, the elms shook their branches restlessly, as if full of the sweet pains of stirring sap and the coming birth of leaves.

"Acting," continued Thaddeus, "in behalf of the Helen estate, which I believe, I trust, will prove large, but is, I think, I fear--"

"You think uncertain?"

"Doubtless uncertain. There are elements of uncertainty. And in this matter I must confess myself only a man, a sad limitation. Mrs. Mavering; somewhat elderly, too; and so, one who feels he must husband his slender resources. I fear I depend very much on that commission. I fear the bankruptcy of that estate would be disastrous for me."

Mrs. Mavering drew her veil closer, and they walked on a few moments in silence. Then she ventured:

"Uncertain, of course; but you spoke of elements."

"I might mention, in regard to the nature of it at present, a certain impetuosity, a determination, a loyalty perhaps a little too inflexible. Flexibility is, so to speak, to have a good portion of one's capital near by for emergencies. I might mention, to speak technically, as a liability, a certain Morgan Map."

"But that," said she, hurriedly--"I mean. I know him only slightly, but Helen said--"

"You would wish me to convince you that he is liability rather than an asset."

"Why not convince her?"

"Ah, but there! Might it not--I have tested, I fear it would, I ask your better intuition--might not the attempt, if made seriously, defeat its end by rousing that loyalty, giving perhaps direction and opportunity to that--that inflexibility?"

"It might."

Thaddeus lifted a neatly gloved hand, and cane swinging between the fingers.

"To be flexible, to adapt oneself. There are so many doors, it is well not to be too absolutely one kind of key. I have heard a phrase, which appears to be a recent discovery--this phrase, 'The survival of the fittest.' It was explained to me, who am not profound, I confess. Dear me, no; nor a reader of new books. But I understood it to mean the survival of that which fits, the introduction of order by the elimination of the disorderly, of the--a--antagonistic, and so the final result of a race and a world to fit each other like hand and glove. A happy consummation."

"But Helen--"

"Exactly. Helen's ancestors--my own, too; how singular! They cultivated a characteristic--a tendency to martyrdom. I believe a certain Bourn was put to death in the sixteenth century for obdurate persistence in a proscribed opinion. Probably later, in New England, some of them were by their neighbors said to be 'sot.' My brother was an obdurately unhappy person."

"But this Morgan Map?"

"An aboriginal, an anachronism. He belongs in the primeval wilderness with other--pardon me--brutes. His father had a singular opinion of him--a--that reminds me; he had a very singular opinion, very singular."

Thaddeus mused a moment.

"Mrs. Mavering, will you dine with us on Wednesday?"

They came to the corner of Charles Street, and parted at Mrs. Mavering's door.

To obtain a small measure of happiness as a commission for managing another person's estate in the same kind of property! She wondered if Thaddeus were not really a wise man, who made a pretext of frivolity. He seemed to have definite theories of things. It might be his rapid and light manner was part of his wisdom and his theory, as if he had found it the part of wisdom not to look gravely and long at any phase of human life. Who knows what might be disclosed, for all depths are black and threatening. One should touch surfaces and slip away before the depths boil up. If Thaddeus had really attained skill and success, it was something to admire. For herself, she seemed to have failed. She had stirred the depths and had not found them on the whole pleasant.

Thaddeus's house was four-square, of a yellowish stucco, with a raised entrance and a windowed cupola. They built so, and so decorated within, when they endeavored to build decoratively, a half century or more ago; they impressed a generation following with a hunted, persistent sense that in some manner a marble mantel, a plaster ornament on the ceiling, an ormolu clock, a flowered carpet, and china figurines with neat stockings, were the types and accepted symbols of earthly splendor. Plush upholstery was a proper thing in Thaddeus's day, and Thaddeus had it. He desired the presence of that which was fit, accepted, not provocative of dispute.

And so his little dinner of five passed fitly. He manipulated Gard to the piano, Helen near by, Morgan in position to observe her, and Mrs. Mavering in position to observe all. He drew his chair near Mrs. Mavering and smiled a wrinkled smile of content. He felt creative with respect to the situation, a strategist who had securely arranged how the enemy should act.

"He will growl," he said to Mrs. Mavering, softly; "the bristles will rise on his spine. My dear Mrs. Mavering, a primary egotist is an impossible person out of the jungle."

Mrs. Mavering thought she could see why Morgan suggested to Thaddeus such terms as "primitive," "aboriginal." There was something rugged and rough-hewn evident in the first place, a massiveness of antediluvian bone, such as they dig from the clay banks of rivers. "We are all egotists," was Thaddeus's theory, "but the primary won't do." He is savage and solitary, too direct, too elemental. He jumps to his aim. He does not care, so he gets it, what happens in between. He does not care for minor points. But civilization is a system of minor points. He has no sympathy, cannot move from his footing an inch to take another point of view. Doubtless he will lie and betray, for they are minor points of method, and faith and truth are social products. At least, he will not notice what he may happen incidentally to step on, or what becomes of an opposition after it is sufficiently smashed. "Why," he asked, primitively, "why should I?"

But Mrs. Mavering thought all this seemed an airy structure, built on a theory which was very likely a prejudice.

Gard was playing something martial, with the shrilling of fifes, the mutter of drums in it, and the measured tramp of feet. He was looking at Helen to see if she knew what he meant, because one liked to look at her, no doubt; it seemed to justify itself; but more particularly because he had fancied of late that her face was a kind of magic mirror, such as enchanters used to raise upon by incantation their pictured prophecies, and that he was become able to summon to it the shadows and counterparts of his moods, and watch the brightening and darkening of himself in reflection.

When he would come from the organ-loft, find her with Mrs. Mavering in the dark under the gallery by the stone pillar, and the three go out across the yard to Mrs. Mavering's house, he always found that Helen's interpretations, however wide they might be from his own in point of verbal symbols and form of allegory, followed the mood with accurate detail. Only the mirror tended to add moral judgments, or to substitute the terms, right and wrong, for beautiful and ugly, for harmony and discord, and in that respect appeared to be inaccurate. Still, it enabled him to realize himself with curious vividness.

Helen's face was flushed. Presently Gard became absorbed and looked at it no longer. He was trying to get not merely the sound of the marching, the ripple of the flags, and the elation of the crowds, but something about devotion and the spirit of the nation shining like the sun on the faces of its soldiers. Mrs. Mavering, too, turned from Helen, and noticed how thickly Morgan's yellow eyebrows were knit above his eyes, which seemed to have a kind of green glare in them. They were fixed on Helen. A sudden memory shot through Mrs. Mavering's mind like a sharp pain--she shivered. Thaddeus noted it.

"Exactly," he murmured to her; "quite so."

Gard found his theme and began weaving it in among the drums and fifes, increasing it until drums, fifes, and flags seemed only like the surface ripple of a deep stream, so grave it was, so large and resolute, so brimmed with its purpose. Helen saw the success and bent forward. Morgan made a slight choking noise in his throat.

"Exactly," murmured Thaddeus; "quite so."

Gard finished abruptly and turned to Helen. "I don't suppose it's half true." He appeared to be continuing the subject, secure of her understanding it up to that point.

"Oh, why not?"

"It doesn't read like it in the newspapers," he said, and rose presently to go. Thaddeus, too, must run down to his club; would Mrs. Mavering forgive him and stay with Helen till he came back? Morgan took his leave with conventional phrases. And the three having each taken himself and his egoism away, Helen and Mrs. Mavering were left with Thaddeus's trim sea-coal fire, marble mantle, china figurines of the neat ankles, gilt chandeliers, and flowered carpet.

Helen took her favorite place at Mrs. Mavering's feet, and said, "Uncle Tad's fires always have company manners."

As for Morgan, Mrs. Mavering thought, he did not like to see that Helen could be moved by powers that he could not himself attain; perhaps neither knew nor cared what those powers were, only knew that he could not attain them. But Thaddeus's airy structure, his theory of the primitive, did not follow necessarily. Yet she felt that a certain atmosphere of animosity surrounded Morgan; he was either aggressively or indifferently hostile; or else it was because one felt his intention to dominate, and indifference whether the dominance were admitted with peace or in process of war.

"Don't you want to confess, Helen?"

"I'm always confessing, Lady Rachel."

"But about Morgan Map?"

"Oh, why, Morgan is--just Morgan, don't you see?"

"That sounds like a whole dictionary, but the words don't seem to be arranged."

"It's arranged by the alphabet," Helen laughed. "It begins with A, when I was born."

"I was wondering if it went through to Z."

"Oh! But, Lady Rachel, I don't think I know what you mean."

"Has he asked you to marry him?"

"Not that, of course not. But he said he was going to marry me."

"When? How long ago?"

"Oh, I don't remember."

"But what did you think about it?"

"Well, you see, Lady Rachel, I suppose I thought it was too good of him to believe, and I suppose I wondered if he wouldn't forget about it by-and-by. And do you know, he didn't--that is, I don't think so."

"But, you funny child, you don't tell me at all. Did you promise to marry him?"

"Promise! He never asked me to do that."

"Do you love him, dear?"

"Never asked me to do that, either."

"But, Helen, you dodge like a wild thing. If you don't love him and he expects you to marry him, you must tell him you won't."

"Why?" Helen rumpled her hair with swift hand. "There'd be a frightful fight. You see, Lady Rachel"--plaintively--"whenever I fight with Morgan I get so--so smashed. Don't you know, it makes your bones sore, and gives you a headache. Besides, Morgan always does what he means to do, and he knows all sorts of things, and if he means to marry me I suppose he will, and I suppose he knows--well, whether I love him or not. 'My word!' says Uncle Tad, 'I don't.'"

"Don't what?"

"Don't know, Lady Rachel. Suppose I said 'Morgan Map, I don't love you, there!' then he'd say, 'You do, too,' or else, 'That's my lookout,' or something, and what would I do then? Oh, yes, I'd say, 'Well, then, I won't marry you,' and he'd say, 'Much you know about it,' or if he was cross there'd be a fight, and I never get anything out of that. Isn't it funny, Uncle Tad doesn't like Morgan at all."

"I don't think," said Mrs. Mavering, slowly, "that I do, either, but it looks as if I ought not to say so. Do you mind?"

"Of course not. Morgan doesn't care who dislikes him, except me; and if I did, don't you see, it would be only one of the words in the dictionary."

"I think I begin to see. But I'm still wondering if there isn't one word left out."

"Why--But I don't know what you mean. What makes you so solemn, Lady Rachel? You bother and bother about Morgan, and he's not so worth while, not so--around in the dark as Gard Windham, who says things out of the middle of himself without talking at all, and you understand him, you don't know how, and it makes your hair tingle. Lady Rachel, listen! Let's go to the war."

"The war!"

"Didn't you know there is to be one? And Morgan's going to be a captain, or colonel, or something. He wouldn't let me, but we'd wait till he was gone, and then I'd only have to fight with Uncle Tad, and I wouldn't mind that."

Mrs. Mavering fell to wondering if there had ever been a time when she was like this herself, as bright and fearless; as little conscious or afraid of looming shadows. She thought she had not been quite like this. There must have been less will and more desire of ease. She thought she had loved a better man than Morgan Map, at least one more varied and peculiar, if not so poised and secure of himself; a strange man, restless and reckless. The two did not look alike; Jack was dark, long-jawed, and lean; but when she had noted Morgan knitting his yellow brows, and imagined there was an odd glint in his eyes, she had thought of one of Jack's moods, and shivered. Jack was never jealous. But there was some mark, something common to them both, that sent a searching chill, that seemed like a denial of all close comforts and small loving things. Or was it only her own weakness and fanciful fears, born of those past times when she had learned to be afraid of the next day?

Thaddeus was an airy theorist. Besides, he seemed to be mainly interested in his commission, which perhaps would not accrue if Helen went off with her capital of happiness independently. Searching through her experience, she was not sure how much that she found bore on the subject. It had not seemed a question of courage when she had first girded up her garments and followed where she was led. It had seemed inevitable. Jack's name was the whole dictionary, and there appeared to be no word entirely outside of it. And then the awakening; a series of chasms opening, the bright world breaking up, and sections of it tumbling down the black chasms. She seemed to see his face, with its large, mobile mouth, painted against Thaddeus's fireplace, as he had looked when he had left her that last day in the early morning; heard his laugh, and the echo in the empty hall of the door that had closed behind him.

"I'm afraid I have had almost enough of adventures. When I came back to live here I was very tired."

"Are you going to tell me?" said Helen, in an awed tone.

"Perhaps not everything. But you know I was born here, and my name was Ulic, and all that, till I was married. Mr. Mavering came to Hamilton when I was about your age, and I think he was looking for anything that would interest him, but not expecting it would interest him very long. He had a great deal of money then, but he has done all sorts of things with it, and I don't know that he has any now. I suppose he was engaged in what your uncle calls 'the pursuit of happiness,' and he seemed to be successful. He got so much amusement wherever he went, and his way of doing it was--some of it--expensive. But perhaps it cost me more than any one else, unless--but I don't know about that. He was very clever, and I thought him wonderful. I think he must have been a little extraordinary. I thought no one else had a lover who paid such compliments. He used to say, 'Life is a joke between God and the devil. You are a bright remark by the former, Rachel, and I am the latter's repartee.' He never tried to conceal anything about himself. Then we went adventuring. You see, my story turns on Jack's being so queer--at least, his coming to seems so to me. I couldn't like things and people that were evil and coarse, or like being always dragged into the danger of some kind of disgrace. You can't, if you have been taught to be scrupulous. But he did not seem to see differences between good and bad, and refined and coarse, or else he thought them petty differences. He liked almost anything except being dull. We went from place to place, and across the sea and back again. He was restless--and reckless. I think he was too reckless of me. Once we had a house at New Orleans, where the planters used to come and play cards, and there were queer women with very dark eyes, and some of the planters were quite old men. But one night one of the women killed a planter with a knife, on the stairs. Then we got out of a window on a back roof, and through alleys to the levee, and went up the river in the morning on a steamer. I don't know what it was all about--quite. But there were things that happened which I minded more than that. I used to be so tired, so afraid. Then I grew to be afraid of Jack, because I couldn't understand him, because whenever things were very black and horrible, or seemed so to me, he acted more amused and queer, as if it were all a kind of play in the theatre. And he did not grow worse through all this; he did not change at all; but I grew worse. I tried to be like him, but I couldn't. Of course, we knew a great many people, and sometimes were fashionable. Once in London we went to great balls and receptions. But Jack saw some Hindoo snake-charmers, and wanted to be one, and travel about in turbans and yellow cloth. I don't know why we didn't do that, but we came home soon after. And we quarrelled very miserably--that is, I did. Then the Ulics became excited about it. One night, or early in the morning, I woke up and heard some one very angry in the next room. Jack never became angry. It was another man. I don't know who it was. There was a struggle. I suppose Jack struck him, and he fell. I crept and opened the door. The window was open and Jack was dropping the man out of it into the area. Then he laughed to himself, and turned around and saw me." Mrs. Mavering's voice faltered, and she paused.

"It wasn't so much of an incident, only it was the last. After he left I began to shiver and sob, and I crept to the window and closed it. I thought he had killed him, but of course he hadn't. It was winter, and the snow was deep in the area. He dragged the man up the steps, held him by the collar against the railing, and brushed him and laughed. Then he took him away, holding him up by the arm. It was characteristic, for he never bore any person a grudge for any harm he may have done that person. Most people do. He doesn't bear me any grudge. I came back to Hamilton then.

"Forgive me for telling you my poor story. I thought when I began there might be something in it to tell you particularly, but I see there wasn't. And really it isn't much of a story, only a quantity of details.

"I suppose," she continued, slowly, after another pause, "that your uncle would class Jack with the half civilized, or belonging really to a past time, when everything was unsettled and everybody was adventurous. He calls Morgan Map a primary, or aboriginal. I suppose he would call Jack a secondary, or nomadic, and perhaps," with a little laugh, "he calls himself a tertiary. I wonder if there are any more degrees."

Helen sat very quietly, drooping her head, and did not smile. Without understanding, she felt as if a hand in the darkness had struck her, as if a vista had opened, and all along it were crouching melancholy shapes and strange fears with faces hidden.

When Thaddeus came back he stood a moment in the doorway, and smiled with wrinkled cheeks.

"You look," he said, "like Israel by the waters of Babylon."

Chapter X

Of Spring in Hamilton--Of Thaddeus's Opportunity to be Candid

In the open country the seasons are free, and work their will with spacious confidence. There is room between heaven and earth. Spring runs down the back of the mountain forest, and races the river; the heat of summer has reason, leisure, and is motherly of green things; autumn has its cornfields, leagues of yellow landscape, and the progress in cool order of harvest and death; winter its distances and long-drawn breath from the pole. Their functions there are customary, familiar, old. They can swing at large. They need not hesitate. But in city streets they go timidly, as if they fancied something in man and his civil doings not in the original regulations. They are conservative. An innovation was made, not so long ago, in their ancient memories; a creature containing an unknown chemical was developed and introduced. They seem to remember that objections were made at the time. It was said, "You never can tell what will come of it." And you never could. They never became used to or at ease with it. The innovation was even dissatisfied with nature, the ground-plan and mother of them all. He laid out cities to contradict her. He questioned, too, the wisdom of his creation, noted his own discordance, and went on to call his discontent divine.

And spring entered Hamilton. One felt something moist, warm, and sticky in the air, and knew what she was about, trying to make civil kisses out of her fructifying young enthusiasm, her tidal tenderness, and feeling embarrassed so that she made something moist, warm, and sticky. Baby green leaves were on the maples of Shannon Street and on the elms of the Common; rain was on the roofs at dawn, and the gutters flowed all day; busy citizen birds were notable on lawns, strayed songsters gurgling with happiness, or voicing spring longing in plaintive "pee-wees."

And Hamilton cared little about it. The Third Volunteers and a troop of militia cavalry were camped in the Fair grounds by the end of May, and people sat in the grand stands to see them drill. There were rows of neat, new tents, lines of men trying to keep step to a drum, bugle calls, cavalry charges, and turf cut to mud or dust. A blue sky was overhead whose peace was too deep and distant to be known, but one could infer it from the nearer peace of the white, drifting clouds. There was Lieutenant Map, with straps, visored cap, and sword, which Thaddeus thought should have been a club or javelin. "He'll not be suitably dressed till he's tattooed." Thaddeus even pursued and caught happiness in the situation, the changing pulse of the times. There were advantages to society in this panoply and thrill of war, which filled the eye and ear, entertained the thoughts, stirred the feelings to an interested activity. Society became more united, the units more sympathetic with each other. It was not good for banking; but for society, really, to sit in a grand-stand and watch extraordinary affairs go on in which society had such share and interest, was for society in the highest degree, in point of fact, inspiring. How brutal, how degrading, how primitive the Roman arenas! But here the higher feelings were enlisted. One saw battle-grounds imaginatively--their blood and dust idealized, made symbolic.

Rachel and Helen agreed with him without difficulty. It seemed to Helen quite splendid and natural for Morgan to go to the war. And both thought the cavalry and the bugles made everything real. It was not so long before that one heard there was such a place as Sumter, and even yet the objections made to anybody's firing at it seemed a little difficult to grasp with sympathy. Was not a fort made to be fired at? A little while before they had been told to dislike abolitionists, and had done so. Now they were told to dislike secessionists, and did so; but both were abstract. But here, on the familiar Fair grounds, were visible men in earnest, who were to be shot at and possibly hit by individuals. It was another matter than abstract secessionists shooting at a fort that was not interesting in itself. So that Rachel and Helen waved their handkerchiefs, and Thaddeus rapped with his cane, while the dark-blue lines broke and reformed, the bugles sounded, drums beat, troops of horsemen swept by, and overhead the sky possessed another blue and the drifting clouds a different movement.

They came home by Philip's road. The maples on Philip's road spread leaves that had passed from babyhood into youth in the sunlight and soft, damp air. They found Gard sitting disconsolately on Mrs. Mavering's steps, in blue uniform. Thaddeus said, "There's another patriot whose clothes don't fit."

"I was afraid I'd have to leave before you came," Gard explained. "I've had a rapid day. Decided at one o'clock to enlist; enlisted at two; told the rector at three I wouldn't play his old organ a day longer; drew this outfit at four. It's five now. But the rector was game. He said if he was twenty years younger he wouldn't preach in his old pulpit any more. May I come in half an hour, Mrs. Mavering?"

Thaddeus settled his glasses. "Young man. I should have said you were too wise for a warrior. Are you aware that cold lead, taken suddenly in any quantity, is injurious to the system?"

"What system?"

"The physical system of the--a--person taking it."

"Is it?" said Gard. "But it might be a mental tonic."

They all went in except Thaddeus, who walked down the street, scenting the air with delicate nostril.

"I don't--that one--I don't seem to make him out."

"You see, Mrs. Mavering," said Gard, "there are only a few people I want to tell about anything I do--you and Helen, and Fritz Moselle, and some of the brothers. Now, Fritz Moselle will say, 'Vat for a fool of a musician! Aber, you nefer get so fat as me if you don' be contented.' Brother Francis will quote the Anabasis, and Andrew will give it up, and the Superior act like the Apocalypse. Now, what do you say?"

"I don't know. Every one else is thinking about one thing now. I should have said you would think about something different."

Gard kindled with the eagerness peculiar to him when on the track of an idea, or trying to state one that was clear to him but seemed to struggle against statement--a kind of tension and nervous thrill, like that of a hunting dog when the trail is hot.

"But going with the crowd is all right if it's going the way you want to go. And the more undistinguished from the mass you appear to be, the more you can keep a unit to yourself. I shouldn't like to be an officer, for then I'd be responsible for other men. But a private marches where he's ordered, and shoots according to prescription. So he can watch the big phenomenon all around him and feel it racing through his blood. Can't he? I can feel it already. Can't you? Of course. But I want to look it in the face. If a man had a chance to be a crusader in his time he'd be foolish to miss it. He'd miss the flavor of his time. I'd sooner decline the acquaintance of a Shakespeare."

He looked at Helen eagerly. She stood among the potted plants in the bay window, looking out. He had thought she would seem more interested. She must be interested. Any one who had seen her eyes light up suddenly and often would know that. He wondered what clue to some unexpected significance she was following now, that she seemed absent-minded among the potted plants. Every one had his or her personal solitary adventure. Helen, of course, had hers. One had to remember that.

"I play to-night the last time. Will you be under the gallery?"

Then he went away. And Helen, among the potted plants, followed a clue to this unexpected significance, that it did not seem to her splendid and natural for Gard, too, to go to the war. It seemed like the hand in the darkness from Rachel's story, the vista where melancholy shapes and fears crouched and hid their faces. She watched him go down Queen Mary Street towards the Common. Morgan Map, striding down from Philip's road, saw him come out, said to himself, referring to the uniform. "It's that organ player! Who next?"--looked up and saw Helen's profile above the plants in the window, and stopped. A moment later he turned and walked back.

In Saint Mary's, that night, the music did not seem to Helen to come down from choir loft as usual, and talk to her familiarly. She could not make it say anything. It stayed up among the organ-pipes; and below, among the pillars and aisles instead, the wind of a coming storm blowing in through the vestibule doors, half open--for the night was heavy and close--took its place, whispered, moaned, and wailed: "You've no idea how black it's growing. Shut the doors and hide." At least, she was only able to make the music say something about going away, and that "if people never meet again, never is a long, long time." She was glad when it was over, and Gard came around and under the gallery. They walked across the yard silently. The night had grown black, the branches tossed, and the leaves fluttered audibly in the darkness over them. They found Morgan walking to and fro in the edge of the light from Mrs. Mavering's window.

"Why, Morgan!"

And Gard saluted, "Lieutenant."

"I want to see you, Nellie. Are you going home?" Then to Gard and his uniform. "Isn't that rather sudden?"

"It's the latest fashion. I report at nine, they say. Good-night."

And Mrs. Mavering, mounting her steps, turned to watch Morgan and Helen, and noted that they, too, walked quite silently still, till they turned the corner in front of Thaddeus's house and disappeared.

Thaddeus sat in the little room behind the drawing-room. At the sound of the rising wind he went to the window, looked out uneasily, and listened. The wind was too loud for him to hear the organ, even if it still were going. But he heard the hall-door open, and so went back contentedly to his newspaper, in which it was stated that a certain officer, in bringing a Confederate flag from a hotel roof in Alexandria, was shot by the hotel-keeper, who in turn was shot by a person accompanying the said officer. Really, people acted with singular earnestness and energy nowadays. He laid down the paper. On the wall opposite, in the gilded oval frame, was the picture of Mrs. Thaddeus Bourn, not in reality a mythical person at all, and yet there was a certain indistinctness in Thaddeus's memory of her--a certain absence of salient points. She had not, perhaps, been characterized by earnestness and energy. But nowadays--

"Don't bother me, Morgan," said Helen, impatiently. They were in the drawing-room, not far from the curtained door.

"But we start next week--"

"That," murmured Thaddeus, "is not, in point of fact, such a bad idea."

"And now, Nellie, I think it would be better if every one knew what you are to me before I left. I'll tell you why I didn't want it before--"

"It's funny, but you never take the trouble to ask what you are to me."

There was a silence that suggested threats. As far as Thaddeus could make out she had seemed to speak quite coolly. "She won't lose her head. God bless her!" he thought; "but--a--I think I'll step into this."

"If you're going to be subtle," said Morgan, at last, with a new harshness and blare in his voice, "I sha'n't understand it. It's perfectly simple. I want you to tell your uncle--Well, then, I will."

Thaddeus pulled the curtain and went through.

"I beg pardon. I seem to be referred to."

Morgan turned where he stood. Helen sat in a low chair before the sea-coal fire, and did not look up or turn her head.

"I should have--if I had supposed the conversation was to be of such a private nature--I should have--a--signified my presence before. As it is, I take the opportunity to observe that your--a--importunity appears to be unpleasant to Helen, to request that you--a--leave her alone, and to state that--a--no engagement between you will ever exist with my consent or her mother's."

"It does exist."

"I doubt it. Have you, then, ever promised to marry him, Helen?"

"I don't remember I was ever asked to."

Something like a flame went across Morgan's face, left red spots on it, and a glare in his eyes.

"Helen!" The chandelier shook with his voice and step. Helen did not move or look at him. Thaddeus raised a deprecating hand. "I must beg you not to shout in my house." Morgan paused and concentrated. The natural thing to do, the simple instinct, would be, with one hand to crumple up this grinning old idiot--tall stock and curled hair and all--stuff him away somewhere, and carry off Helen into the windy night, with her white dress and blue ribbon around the throat. It seemed impossible, even in an artificial age, that slim creatures should dare to balk him. She stood up quickly, and he caught her closely about the shoulders with his arm.

"It's absolute nonsense--"

"Please let me go, Morgan. I don't want to fight."

"Tell your uncle you belong to me."

"No!"

"Helen, do as I say!"

"No!"

Thaddeus pointed at Morgan's arm.

"Will you kindly--thank you."

Helen fled, through hall and up the stairs, a shimmer of white skirts past the hall lamp; and in her room she leaned from the window and let the rain drive against her face. Mrs. Mavering's window threw a great bar into the night. Morgan's voice below seemed to fill the drawing-room, the hall, and came rolling up the stair after her, in muttering pursuit. She gave a half sob, listened a moment, and began to laugh.

"I'm glad Uncle Tad has that row."

"I remember," said Thaddeus, amiably, "I remember being--a--rejected once myself. It was unpleasant, very unpleasant."

"Do you think a thing of seven years is going to be thrown out like this? Do you think I'm a man to put up with this kind of business? Do you think I don't know Helen?"

"I think," said Thaddeus, "that you don't. My dear fellow, you have made a curious mistake, and yet--and yet quite logical. I am charmed to say, quite such as I should have predicted. You have treated a woman with a certain contempt. You couldn't help it. It expressed, if I may say so, the degree of your culture. Nevertheless, a mistake. Deference, deference--they like it. It belongs to them. It is--a--their accumulated inheritance. Seven years--at thirteen--but, my dear fellow, a child! You announce your intention to a growing girl, by whose--a--admiring worship it is received with awe. You suppose she continues to worship you in the same primitive manner. You suppose your ownership and property established, that it merely remains to dictate and receive. How simple, how--pardon me--characteristic! By the way, your father. I recollect, had a singular opinion of you. I am candid, you see. It appears to be your faculty--remarkably so--to invite candor. If I recollect, he thought, supposing you were in some way blown up or ground up into small fragments--some accident, some catastrophe--and then fitted together carefully--supposing, if I understood him, this process repeated sufficiently--you might--but I doubt it--a--paternal weakness. But as to the situation at present, I cannot conceal my--a--satisfaction."

Morgan glowered under reddish-yellow brows, and Thaddeus talked on with persistent amiability. So grim and forcible looked Morgan, so likely to be summary or primitive inaction, that it seemed to argue for Thaddeus a fine trust in the strength of social restraint, his continuing that airy, provocative speech.

"A distinction arises--a child, a woman. It arose in Helen, no doubt, during her sickness. You observed the distinction, I presume, but only from its effect on you. But, really, you know, it must have affected her. I have, in my time, studied the sex--a subject of delightful interest."

"I don't pretend to take interest in your delights." Morgan had grown cool.

"Quite so," murmured Thaddeus.

"Go ahead, and enjoy them. I suggest you don't interfere with me. I want Helen and will have her. There is a bond--"

"Allow me. Has been, perhaps, an understanding assumed."

"I'm not going to quibble with words."

"Exactly. Whatever there has been, or been assumed to be, quite clear, no longer is--is no longer assumed. I believe I speak with authority."

"I'm not going to quibble about your authority, either. You can flutter it as much as you please. I'll see Helen alone."

"Not to-night. A--a little flutter of authority. You leave next week? I shall not, perhaps, take the trouble to prevent your seeing Helen. I shall take the trouble to see that nothing comes of it. My dear boy, I'm extremely sorry. I don't like you. Your invitation to candor is irresistible."

Morgan laughed shortly, turned, and went into the hall. Thaddeus followed.

"Really, it's raining. Let me lend you--but a soldier, of course--what a blessing is youth! Exit!"--to the now closed outer door--"exit the primitive."

And so spring came to an end, with a warm rain murmuring on the roofs all night, soaking down the roots of the maples, driving part of the Third Regiment to sleep in the grand-stands. As in sleeping Hamilton no one knew another's dream, so almost as little by lamp-light or at dawn did any watcher truly imagine another's thought. Who shall escape the dungeon of himself? The policeman on the corner of Shannon Street and Philip's road, when Morgan rushed by him, sympathized with an apparent hurry to get out of the comfortless rain. Thaddeus, before his sea-coal fire, plotted such happy paths for Helen to walk in as an enlightened egoism showed would be best for Thaddeus. Helen let the rain drive in her face, and thought that, "if people never meet again, never will be a long, long time." Gard stood in the middle of his study, looked around him, whistled "The Campbells Are Coming," and called it clearing up. Books, music, piano, chairs, and memories of meditations--he thought he did not care much what became of them. There was a new time coming, and time it came. "This is no world to play with mammets and to tilt with lips. We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns." "The Campbells are coming--trala! trala!" Mrs. Mavering drew the rope of her long black hair over her shoulder, smoothed it on her knee, and thought of the terms "commission" and "estates in happiness." The braid was thick and glossy. It seemed hard if her own play were quite ended and story told. What, nothing more! Restlessness must come from overbrooding, or the new stir of the times. A woman's story ended too soon. What a melancholy noise the rain made!

Who shall escape the dungeon of himself, or look from its clouded windows through the clouded windows even of that one which lies nearest, where another prisoner strains to see?

Chapter XI

The Whirlpool.--Mr. Paulus's Reminiscences of Women.

The Third Regiment went its way. Visibly, it resembled swarms of bees when last seen clinging to the freight cars, or an excited picnic with ornamental bayonets, but to a larger contemplation rather a stream of sea-drift drawn into the suck and roar of a growing whirlpool. Men are noisy and cheerful, and seldom know their own pathos. But the streets of Hamilton seemed empty, though hardly fewer people went to and fro; in the faces of women here and there, there was a certain premonitory desolation.

Helen felt the emptiness to be extraordinary--unexpected; an emptiness between her and the sky; rooms mysteriously disfurnished; things that people said sounding hollow, as if the meaning of words had fallen away from beneath them; Saint Mary's at night became silent and dark, except for now and then a droning service without palaces or towers of sound.

"To what end," reflected Thaddeus, "am I a student of human nature in the subtle sex? If she doesn't miss that antediluvian brute. I'm an addled egg."

"We're dreadfully dull, Lady Rachel, aren't we?" said Helen. "Let's be Knights Hospitallers."

"What do you mean?"

"All the rest do is to scrape lint and read newspapers and potter. Why couldn't we enlist and be nurses?"

"I dare say we could."

"With white caps and big cuffs? Could we?"

Mrs. Mavering wondered at Helen's influence over her. She had watched it grow, with a half-amused curiosity. She had thought to be the girl's guide and helper, and that this new interest would be her reward upon Thaddeus's theory of commissions. But she had seemed more and more to be following, not leading; as if, in the actual onward game of life, experience, instead of a lamp before, were a lamp behind, darkening the path with the shadow of ourselves. To remember only made one irresolute. It was necessary to be young, or else to forget--at any rate, to be valiant. But had she not had enough of excitement, adventure, the ragged seams of things, variety and burlesque, and been soul-sick through it all, and fled at last from its noise and passions? She shook her head, not so much at Helen as at the other side of her own inner argument.

"Collars and cuffs, Lady Rachel! But you'd look beautiful!"

"That isn't what people want in nurses."

"It isn't? But it is! Why, if I were a man, and had you around looking like a remorseful queen who had just hung up her robe and crown on the hat-rack, and was trying to be humble with collars and cuffs, and all that, I'd get well if I were shot criss-cross. I'd say, 'This world is too fine to leave.'"

"How should you know what you would do?"

"Oh!" She hesitated, and drooped a little. "I think it was Gard said that." Then, with returned animation: "He was so funny, Lady Rachel. I asked him if he didn't think you were all that, and he only said, 'This world is too fine to leave; I think I'll stay quite a while.'"

It did not all seem to Mrs. M