One elating, blue and white April
morning saw a cheerful company of
six assembling in a railroad-station
waiting-room. There were the
manager of the tour, Duprez—gray-haired
in comparative youth, at once care-worn
and accommodating looking—the foreign
stamp on him not entirely obliterated by
the stamp of the country; and his wife, the
popular Pearl Wharton-Duprez, whose habit of
facing the world as an audience must have found
its way into her features; she was recognizable
at sight for a singer. Her brilliant face, while
not precluding the possibility of a heart, suggested
less remotely a temper.
There was one Milen Odiesky, gripping a black
violin-box; who listened to a hilarious conversation
he but half understood, with a fixed
smile, revealing a marked division between his
two broad, white front teeth,—disagreeable, for
some reason, though he might pass for handsome
in a dark, hairy, Oriental way.
Then there was one who at first glance looked
in the group as if he must be an aquaintance
come to see them off. He was tall and proportionately
broad, with stalwart shoulders, a deep
chest, and a big neck; superlatively well groomed
and dressed. The gloss of his silk hat was not
broken by the wilfulness of one hair. He carried
himself a trifle more than erect, and swept
his limited horizon with a calm, kingly eye.
His face was close-shaven, a smooth coppery
rose, shading easily into the color of his close-cropped
hair. His features were of the rather
thick, round, good-natured type, and time was
beginning to divide up his face into heavier
masses than occur in the forties; but these facts
did not prevent his presence on the whole from
impressing an observer with the sense that he
looked at something really very fine. This was
Bronson, whose name on the program would
occupy the most room: the great Bronson, Anthony,
the tenor of long sustained fame—sustained,
indeed, so long that these appearances
in parts that knew him only by that fame had
now been projected.
Then there was a little plump woman, the one
who kept the others laughing; and she carried,
besides what one is accustomed to see on the arms
of travelers, all the things she had forgotten to
put into her trunk; among which were an
alarm-clock, a sponge-bag, a pink flannel dressing-sacque,
and a little image of the Virgin. She
bubbled on, in a voice as impossible to forget or
mistake for another's as her face; which face,
however, was not pretty, but so faithfully reflected
a nature as to be memorable for its want
of all malice, concealment, or suspicion. It was
not that her features were child-like which accounted
for her face bringing to mind a child's,
but that it shared some quality inclining one on
shortest acquaintance, without fear of rebuff, to
treat its winsome, unsevere, uncritical owner
familiarly and affectionately. She was not
pretty, but certainly her dark-edged, misty,
pale blue eyes, with their capacity in the same
measure for humor and sentiment, under eyebrows
sympathetically working with her
thoughts, and lids stained a tender bistre, had
an attaching sweetness; and the clear spaces of
her face, the forehead and temples, something
cool and rare, like the stamp of talent; while
just beside her ear, where a faint lock of silken
black hung an inch or so down a soft, sallow
cheek, was a spot creating an instant desire to
kiss it. This was Miss Nevers, the pianiste;
Nevers, they briefly called her in speaking of
her, pronouncing the name like an English one;
Marie-Aimée they called her in speaking to her,
all excepting Odiesky, who did not yet know
her well enough; except, too, the sixth member
of the party, who could never take it into his
head to do so. The latter was a homely, thin
man, neither young nor old, of the name of Snell,
who was engaged to play common accompaniments,
and tune the pianos. He stood near the
others, but only ventured a smile where they
laughed.
Yet he with the rest, as they trooped to the
train, was conscious of a lift to his spirits. The
tour was a turning the back upon the old and
known. It had the charm of beginnings; it
opened to life, with this new combination, new
possibilities. Hard work and wearing travel
were a certainty in the prospect, but it showed
nevertheless like a holiday, enlivened by daily
change of scene, faces, food.
Beside these general justifications of a reasonable
elation on starting, there was excuse
for the festive jollity which made people turn to
look after our friends as they progressed down
the platform—the stately Bronson now carrying
a bulging rubber sponge-bag, impossible to
conceal—in the brilliant artistic auspices under
which these musical peregrinations were undertaken,
and the discovery, now that the artists
were come together en troupe, that they severally
brought elements promising uncommon
liveliness and fun.
About five years had passed since the laurel-laden
return of the Duprez Concert Company,
when Marie-Aimée one morning, rather earlier
than it is customary to make a call, rang
the door-bell of a certain large impressive
house.
Whether the explanations were hurry in
dressing or absence of mind, she looked, on this
occasion, somewhat as if her clothes, as the
saying is, had been thrown at her. The velvet
of her little bonnet needed brushing; and her
little gloves, alas, mending. She wore no veil,
and wisps of her hair had been blown on end.
But this effect of disorder culminated in her face
itself, where the colors were out of their places;
her cheeks being pale, her poor small nose and
her eyelids red. She had grown stouter since
our last sight of her, and on this day was carrying
herself so without pride or heed as to look
fairly round-shouldered.
As she stood waiting, she must have forgotten
that she was in a public street, or else felt bad
beyond caring; two or three times she openly
mopped her eyes. When, however, she faced
the tall butler who opened the door, she appeared
to have nothing worse the matter with
her than a bad head-cold. She asked if Miss
Cheriton were in, gave her card, and was shown
into a vast hushed drawing-room. There, as
soon as she had been left alone, she looked at
herself in the mirror; after which she chose a
seat with its back to the windows. She had
occupied this but a moment, when, lest the
thoughts stealing back upon her should drive
her again to tears, she crossed over to the grand-piano
glimmering in the half-light with liquid
reflections of gilt moldings, brocade, and palms.
She lifted the lid to peer at the name of the
maker, and tried its tone with a scarce audible
chord. Then she took up piece after piece of
the music in the rack, questioning it as to Miss
Cheriton's title to her high reputation as an
amateur pianist.
On hearing a rustle, she hurriedly laid down
the music, and got up, her heart rushing. Miss
Cheriton had shaken hands, with expressions of
pleasure in making her aquaintance, had offered
her a seat, and taken one, before Marie-Aimée
had been able to do more than clear her throat.
Miss Cheriton had allotted her a seat well in
the lights; her curiosity about this caller could
do no less; wherefore Marie-Aimée's reddened
eyes at first refused a square encounter. But
shortly, while Miss Cheriton was forcing a dullish
conversation, Marie-Aimée forgot herself, and
looked Miss Cheriton in the face; full as interested
as she in the looks of the other at close
range.
Marie-Aimée saw a well-grown young woman
of eight or nine and twenty; faultlessly dressed
in a fawn colored cloth matching her perfectly
arranged abundant hair. Her face was entirely
fine, if a little cold. She gave an impression of
great self-poise; she could be imagined to have
always thought and decided for herself, and had
the fortune to see everything go as she wished,
which no doubt she laid to the firm and just
management she looked so capable of exercising.
She had a beautiful calm complexion and calm
dark-blue eyes, which weighed you thoughtfully,
and would with difficulty, you fancied,
alter their conclusions about you. But at least,
Marie-Aimée felt with relief and hope, they were
windows into a mind where there was room to
breathe.
She began abruptly, in a suggestive pause occurring
in Miss Cheriton's small talk, "You must
be wondering what brought me."
The expression of Miss Cheriton's face, her
only answer to this, signified that though she
hoped she had not seemed to be wondering
rudely, she would in effect be pleased to know.
Marie-Aimée picked at her glove. "It is
this. I was told that I had been making mischief.
And I came, wishing if possible to remedy
it."
Miss Cheriton's eyebrows moved upward just
enough to start a ripple in the beautiful smoothness
of her forehead, and she waited, her eyes inquiring
of Miss Nevers' troubled face; in their
depths had flashed a prevision of what might be
coming.
"I know I talk a dreadful lot," Marie-Aimée
burst forth in disgust, "I tell everything I
know. I can't keep to myself even stories that
are against myself. Whatever is on my heart,
I say it. I have been making a dreadful fool of
myself—which is bad enough, but I feel worse
about having given annoyance to others....
Mr. Bronson came to see me yesterday evening."
She paused, as after a piece of news. Miss
Cheriton waited in silence, her face expressing
nothing beyond polite attention.
"And he said that my doing as I have been
doing made a lot of gossip, which inevitably
reached you, and was calculated to give you a
mistaken impression of our relations in the
past——" Marie-Aimée's voice stuck.
After a moment, "Please, please, don't be distressed,"
murmured Miss Cheriton; and as if
her uneasiness at the sight of tears had made her
restless, left her seat, and went to stand beside
the mantle-piece, leaning on it with one elbow,
ornaments at choice within reach, to pick up
and play with.
Marie-Aimée laughed through a sob. "You
see? Was there ever such a fool? And this is
the way I have been ever since I heard of his
engagement. But I want you to understand,
Miss Cheriton, that that's just me. How can he
help it, unhappy man, if I am made this way?
I have cried like a pump. I have cried upon
the shoulder of every one who would stand it.
But I had no right, no possible right, to lament
in the highways like that. It was only—when
my heart was full, I let it run over. But I never
in the least meant it as a reproach to anyone,—any
more, put it this way, than a sunflower
going draggled and crazy at sunset. But he
told me last night I made him ridiculous. Oh,
he was gentle. For all that, the things he said
troubled me horribly; and I made up my mind,
after he had left, to come directly to you and
explain, so that if reports have vexed you, you
should not mind them after this."
Miss Cheriton said quietly, not looking at
Marie-Aimée, but at an ivory Chinaman she
held: "It is not necessary, Miss Nevers. I did
indeed hear something, but I did not give it
much thought."
Upon which Marie-Aimée, as if these words
had contained all the encouragement necessary,
proceeded eagerly, "We never, never were engaged.
You will believe me, whatever you may
hear. We merely have been friends for years.
I had known him slightly a long time already,
when we went on a tour together, with Madame
Wharton-Duprez. It was then we became such
chums.... Mercy on me, that tour! Shall
I ever forget it? Will any of us?" She
smiled, with a sudden drenched reflection of
sunshine on her tear-bedabbled face.
"I know!" Miss Cheriton smiled too. "Mr.
Bronson has spoken of it to me."
"Has he?" asked Marie-Aimée, brightening
still further, rainbow-like, and immediately at
greater ease with Miss Cheriton, from a responsiveness
she felt in her smile when the ever fertile
subject of the tour was broached, dear in its
time to Anthony Bronson's heart. "That's good.
For it will in part explain.... Don't you
agree with me that laughing together makes
a stronger bond than even weeping? Well, on
that tour, what we did best and chiefly, was to
laugh. Did he ever tell you——" She dropped
her voice like a person having something good
to relate, and fun played over her face in ripples,
"the adventure of the water-melon? Yes, of
course! I suppose he has told you everything.
And the adventure of the face-wash and the
curling-irons? And the night of the great thunderstorm?
Oh, make him tell you that one. It
is incredible, the number of things, and the description
of things, that happened to us in those
six months. It was as if we had been a sort of
lightening-rod attracting all the incongruous,
ludicrous, delicious happenings that should have
been distributed over the country. Or else, it
is that we were in a disposition of mind to find
everything funny. Of course, it may have been
that. But still—imagine our arriving once at
a little place where we had never been heard of.
There is a mistake. And no one expects us.
And there is no hotel. And it ends in our being
obliged to sleep in the empty jail, we women, a
dovecote of a jail, with just two wee cells; oh,
slumbers of sweetness and safety, after our many
nights in strange hostelries. No need for once
to look under the bed for burglars; and the men
in a barn. Odiesky didn't get the hayseed out
of his hair that season. And imagine—imagine
having along with you a man who has a nightmare
every time he drops off to sleep. A poor
Mr. Snell who went with us was like that, and
we used to run into one another in the lobbies,
in curl-papers, at dead of night, flying to knock
him up, he made such awful, such blood-curdling
sounds, which could be heard all over the hotel.
It is unkind to laugh at an infirmity, but the
sounds he made, could you have heard them,
would excuse me to you. And imagine—but
try to—imagine the six of us, six people who
feel themselves not a little famous, going fourteen
miles in a single-seated wagon, that, or
miss our connection, and complications without
end. I don't believe I stopped laughing the
whole way. You see it? We two, the grace
and beauty of the party, enthroned upon the
laps of ces messieurs—no other way, no other
way possible, none. Wharton-Duprez in the
arms of her own husband; and Odiesky astride
the horse, postilion, having to drive; and
poor little Snell on the floor with his knees over
the dash-board; and the danger at any moment
of the wagon breaking down——" She pieced
out that fourteen-mile long ecstasy of merriment
with more of a singularly rich, unaffected laugh,
in the midst of which her face fell blankly serious,
and she held up, as if she had never seen
it before, the hand which in the heat of her description
she had been waving.
"Will you look at my glove?" she said;
promptly closing which parenthesis she continued,
"As I was saying, it may have been
that circumstances really justified us, or our
mood, which was exceptional. For myself, I
never enjoyed myself so much. Oh, I was impressionable
then, and ready to be pleased.
Every day a new place, every night a new
triumph. It was Mr. Bronson's triumph, but his
glory fell upon us all. We lived in an atmosphere
of success; and people were so nice to us,
we were entertained everywhere like king and
court. It was then, you see, when we were together
from morning until night, we grew to
know each other so well. And, you know him,
you know how kind he would be to a little person
traveling as I was doing; kind does not
express it, and thoughtful and considerate. And
you know the charming companion that he is,
even-tempered, easy-going, good fellow. And
in traveling like that you know the thousand
little services a man can render you, and, among
artists, the good turns. He, you will have discovered,
has not a touch of that queer jealousy
so common among artists.
"But there was even more than all that. Before
the end of our engagement, Wharton-Duprez
had taken the most cattish dislike to me;
I have never known why. And everything that
woman could do to make things uncomfortable
for me she took pains to do, even, will you believe
it, contriving that my luggage should be left
behind, and I forced to appear on the stage in
the filthiest little coal-begrimed traveling-suit—at
the fag end of the season, you understand.
Ferdinand, her husband, did not dare to say a
word. It would have been past endurance for
me then, had it not been for Mr. Bronson's invariably
showing himself my friend, and keeping
her within limits. I had reason to be grateful
to him, you see. I should have had to be a
monster not to become devoted to him. You
can put yourself in my place, can't you? And
then, add to everything else his singing. Never,
never, never, to me, has there been anything
like it."
Miss Cheriton bowed her head, slowly, in
agreement.
"If with all your heart ye truly seek me," murmured
Marie-Aimée, looking as if she listened
to a voice singing in her memory.
"In manly worth and honor clad," murmured
the other, likewise.
"It opens a door, doesn't it," Marie-Aimée
spoke low, as if they had entered a church, "into
a world where it is all beautiful, calm, eternal—
the only world—where whoever breathes its
air must worship and must love; just his mere
voice, when it is what I call his ballad-voice,
doesn't it contain all romance? Moonlight,
boats on lonely seas, lattices with roses; and
when it is his anthem-voice, it contains, doesn't
it, all aspiration, cathedrals, matin-bells, archangel's
choirs——"
Again Miss Cheriton nodded dreamily; then,
raising her eyes, which in listening she had
dropped, forgot the one of whom they were
speaking for interest in the face of the speaker,
who looked ahead with eyes which clearly did
not see what was before them, but the cloudy
white pillars, one might have surmised, and dim
glimmering splendors of some temple of Music
and Love.
Marie-Aimée swept her hand across her forehead.
"And I," she continued, raising her
voice in a tone of plaintive exculpation, "I was
born mad for music! A voice has power over
me like a spell. And I am flesh and blood!
And so——" she ended feebly, "do you
wonder?"
Silence, while Marie-Aimée turned her face
wholly from the light. But even while she
made application of her little damp pocket-handkerchief,
a stealing sense warmed her in all
her woe that she had somehow made a friend of
Miss Cheriton. The exemplary piece of tranquility
there felt drawn to her; something communicated
this unimaginable fact directly to her
heart; and it melted her, as the hint of kindness
always did, and inclined her now verily to
make no more circumstances about it, but show
her whole heart in abandoned frankness, repeating
just once more the fault she was here to
confess. But simultaneously with gratitude for
that liking, rose in Marie-Aimée the need to repay
it greatly; whence a caution to herself to
proceed more than ever guardedly with the
truth.
"And after we were come back," she took up
again, "we naturally continued seeing a great
deal of each other. I won't say we would not
have done so from choice, but it was inevitable,
too. Our profession threw us together, concerts,
rehearsals; he used, besides, to bring every
bit of new music to learn at my house, with me
to play it over for him. And so on, for years;
and to me, I tell it frankly, that light-hearted,
unconventional comradeship of ours gave its
principal charm to life. In the last year I have
seen less of him, and latterly very much less.
He was not singing much, he was under treatment
for his throat, and often out of town
by his doctor's directions. I missed him, but
I am busy from morning until night, the week
round, work and a thousand things. I thought
nothing of it. Do old friends need to see
each other constantly to be assured nothing is
changed? Then I hear of his engagement to
you. I am thunderstruck! For never, never,
never, had I dreamed of such a possibility.
You see my folly? He was not bound to me
by any promise, or by what you would call
a moral obligation. There never had been any
question of our marrying, not even at the beginning
when we first got home, not even in my
own mind—" Native honesty and poor human
nature would not permit but that she should
add, though in a tone that made little of it—"
any definite, immediate, formulated idea of it.
My poor sweet mother was living then, a sufficient
reason against it. And when she was no
longer there, all had got into a groove, and remained
as it had been. And it seemed natural.
I have nothing but what I earn. He was having
bothers about money. He put all his in a
mine, you know. We called ourselves poor
working-people. But still! There it is! That's
where you discover my bird's brain. That's
me! The way I am! I flatly refused to believe
it, and when I saw him again, I did not
even ask. But I daresay I looked as he had
never seen me look. Then he himself told me
of it, as one tells such a thing to an old friend.
And the past stood suddenly in a new light;
and I saw clearly, in a flash, that just this and
nothing else was to have been expected. And
I knew that it was altogether the most fortunate
thing that could happen to him; and,
after the first, I acquiesced.
"Only, I followed my nature in making the
outcry of one who has received a wound and is
bleeding dreadfully. I have no dignity, Miss
Cheriton. Discretion and I have never so much
as been acquainted. I go around with my heart
in my face, I forget my face, you see, in thinking
of what has befallen me. And I run into
some sympathetic woman who is fond of me,
and she cries out 'Marie-Aimée, my poor child,
what is the matter with you?' and I bend feebly
upon her shoulder, and tell. And then I suppose
she goes off and tells too. Hence, you see,
the ground of Mr. Bronson's remonstrances with
me yesterday evening. And in consequence of
them I am here. I didn't know what else to do,
Miss Cheriton. I hope it was best. And you
do see, don't you? I have made the whole
thing plain? I have made it all right? You
know how he is, and now you have seen how I
am, the inference will be simple! And I beg
both your pardons. Oh, he is right, he is quite
right, to feel put out with me, but not—" she
forced a little watery smile, as she rose to take
her leave—"not because it has ever seemed so
terribly to a great singer's discredit that, when
the whole world goes after him, among them
should be a silly woman who does not manage
to conceal her grande passion. It only makes
him like Mario and others; you must not let it
trouble you, Miss Cheriton. You must think
of me in a thought of the same strain you bestow
upon the thousands of photographs of him that
have been sold in the course of his career, and
are cherished and given places of honor in young
ladies' rooms; and the sentimental follies
school girls have committed in the way of sending
him flowers and notes. Let these tributes
to him merely increase your pride of possession.
He is free from all blame, all, that is what I
have wished you to feel assured of, or all—" she
put out her hand in farewell—"except just a
little, little bit. You don't mind? A little bit
he certainly was to blame, though I suppose it
can be laid to the account of his modesty, in
not taking it home to himself that he could not
be so nice, so consistently, persistently dear and
nice to a person, without her falling to stupidly
adoring him."
She stopped, and stood, vaguely shaking her
head, prolonging her faint, watery, bitter-sweet
smile; and would have withdrawn her hand, but
Miss Cheriton retained it, by a firmer pressure,
in the warm, kind clasp of hers. Marie-Aimée
lifted her eyes, touched and full of thanks, to
the fine calm eyes above her; and in their unclouded
light read Anthony Bronson's unqualified
exoneration, and that she herself had been
impartially examined, and now stood classed,
past appeal, among those soft, sweet, idiotic
women who will fall into unwarranted love with
any man of whom they see much, and are by
their own passion made incapable of discerning
the fact that he is not in love with them. The
glance was full of honest sympathy for a sorrow
so real; but it was not untinged with as much
contempt as would be implied in the prayer, "I
thank thee, my God, I am not as these women
are!" Under which Marie-Aimée humbly
bowed her head and waited but for the release
of her hand to go. But Miss Cheriton, whom
stiffness or delicacy kept from saying a word in
reference to what she had heard, yet found herself
utterly unwilling that her visitor should
leave so uncheered. Still holding her hand, she
told her, in a voice full of the suggestion of
sincerity, the deep pleasure she had always had
in hearing her; she amplified, tactfully, understandingly,
upon all she had discovered of exquisite
in her playing.
Marie-Aimée's face lightened a little; she had
never become callous to praise. Miss Cheriton
spoke of friends they had in common, from
whom she had heard so much of her, of a sort
that had long made it one of her most eager
wishes to know her. Whereupon Marie-Aimée,
as ever responsive, gave herself into Miss Cheriton's
hands, to be known. And the two were
shortly making acquaintance as they might have
done had they been presented to each other at
the house of those mutual friends. One could
not have dreamed, to hear them, what had gone
before. They talked of music mostly, and musicians,
wholly forgetful of time. To illustrate
some point, Marie-Aimée went to the piano and
played a bar or two; after which, as she would
have risen, Miss Cheriton entreated against it;
and when Marie-Aimée, who never resisted,
asked what she should play, suggested a composition
of Miss Nevers' own, which the latter
had imagined so obscure, she said, as to be almost
her only secret. And she found, to her
astonishment, that Miss Cheriton, whether
moved by genuine musical congeniality, or a
vulgarer curiosity, had procured everything
ever published of Marie-Aimée's. Afterwards,
Miss Cheriton took the place at the piano of
Marie-Aimée urgent. Then Marie-Aimée begged
leave, and supplanted her, to show how a different
sequence of chords would be better; and
the woman of talent and the woman of cultivation
spent a long hour, delightful to both; in
the course of which Miss Cheriton found the
quaint enthusiasm for Marie-Aimée felt by her
innumerable friends accounted for; and Marie-Aimée
came to disdain, as paltry praise, the
definition "very fine girl" which one was accustomed
to hear joined to the name of Kate
Cheriton.
Smiting her brow, aghast, at the recollection
of an appointment missed, Marie-Aimée jumped
to her feet. By running she might still be in
time to apologize. They shook hands again,
warmly; and Marie-Aimée said, all her heart in
her voice, "I hope you will be very happy."
In the street, Marie-Aimée, as she hurried
along, could think of nothing but Miss Cheriton.
She would send her as a wedding-gift the French
great-grandmother's rococo cross, the choicest
bit of jewelry she owned.
Her heart might have been so much dusty,
worm-eaten wood; remarking its astonishing
lightness and insensibility, she reverted in
thought, almost flippantly, to the horrors besetting
her when she left home that morning.
Surely, if it were possible that with Tony's marriage
brought as close as a visit to his intended
brought it, she should feel as she felt, she might
still hope to put on a good face about it to the
world.
In this mood she went about a good part of
that day; and talked to some with so much of a
return to her old spirit that they disguised their
surprise by a greater cheerfulness than really
their mystification allowed them to feel. Meeting
an old aquaintance who put on the face of
a sympathizer to say, "My dear, I did feel for
you when I heard of his engagement, you know
whose I mean," she looked as if not sure she
understood; and the old aquaintance, after a
searching look at her, dropped her mournfulness,
to proceed, "It seems to be a fine thing for
Bronson, this marriage. I hear that Miss
Cheriton will be a millionaire. People exaggerate,
you think? But she has bought a superb
place out of town?"
By the late afternoon, that curious, unseasonable,
baseless good cheer was wearing off, like
the effects of wine, and the world, through its
fading fumes, was returning to look like the
world of yesterday. Weariness was overtaking
her; but her heart had not recommenced its
clamorous aching; it was only a little sick, when
she went into a music-store for a score she
needed. She was looking this over, with her
eyes rather than her mind, when her attention
became fixed in memory upon that expression
of Miss Cheriton's face from which she had
judged her mission successful—Tony cleared.
Suddenly, as in the middle of the night she had
sometimes known that in a letter sent off there
was a word misspelled, she felt that triumph of
confidence in Miss Cheriton's eyes not to have
been the work of her own explanations. She
herself had been fully explained to Miss Cheriton
before ever she set foot in her house. How
could it have been otherwise?
Marie-Aimée's ghost-seeing eyes became fixed
upon nothingness. She sat so a long time, her
chin dropped in dolorous absorption; a figure
which struck discomfort in the beholder. Another
woman buying music bent over the counter
and whispered to the clerk, who whispered
back, and both stole glances at the unconscious,
rigid, dumpy profile, stamped with tragedy, of
the well-known pianiste, whose most intimate
sorrow had become town-talk.
She went out at last into the hubbub of the
streets, which seemed a cruelty of men, under
the gorgeous sunset sky, which seemed a cruelty
of Heaven's, and, as much as a great heaviness
would allow, hurried home and to bed and the
dark. It was no use! no use! Though Tony's
conduct to her admitted of the face she had put
on it to Miss Cheriton, and though the world's
jury, upon full evidence, might have acquitted
him, he not being the last shade of black, she
herself knew, and something of incorruptible
justice in the bottom of her heart would not let
her blink it, that she had been badly, badly
treated. But that was not the most woeful,
that she should have been badly treated, or that
she must live her days hereafter without him;
but that he, Tony, should have been capable of
doing this thing to her, to her, who would have
shed her blood for him, and he knew it.
In the days following, as she went about her
crowded occupations, she did not, as she had
allowed herself to do before, seek relief in speaking
of what weighed upon her heart. But human
strength did not suffice to keep the matter
out of her face; her cheek was leaden, her eyes
were in a fog.
But it was useless now, her avoiding Anthony
Bronson's name. She had spoken too much before.
Besides, too many remembered the soft,
radiant, enamored face with which she had been
used to beam up at him in those earliest days
after their return from touring, and down upon
which he had benignantly beamed, like a big,
gratified idol. Furthermore, this gossip concerning
persons so well known had too many
of the elements which ensure a thing being
repeated till everyone knows. Reports of
"scenes" made by Marie-Aimée were still
spreading after she had placed the seal upon
her lips; and those who got them last did not
know that they were old news; and as it was the
least interested in her personally who last became
au fait of her affairs, some among them
took the view that little Nevers was disgracing
herself; which sentiment once in the air, certain
of Marie-Aimée's closer friends saw the matter
more nearly in that light, experienced a reaction
from too complete sympathy with her.
One heard it said with a touch of impatience,
"Some one ought to talk to Marie-Aimée!"
Even those who loved her most, this, as it
seemed, insistent and protracted harping upon
an unfortunate attachment at last came near
disgusting. And she did receive scoldings and
lectures, of which she abjectly owned the justice;
and she tried to keep herself more out of
sight. Only so far as the necessity to earn a
living made it imperative did she go about.
Wherefore some whose invitations she refused
said, "Nevers is moping. It is a pity she can't
behave like the rest who have to suffer from
the fickleness of man!"
A critical, less friendly attitude of the world
toward her was beginning at last, through her
dismal preoccupation, to penetrate her heart
with its novel chill, and make the city where
she had always lived seem not like home any
more. She looked about, bewildered, for escape.
The day of the Bronson-Cheriton wedding,
too, was close at hand; but before it had
arrived, there descended upon her from a distance
a stern older married sister, whom rumors
at last had aroused.
No one saw Marie-Aimée after the coming of
this sister. To everyone's astonishment, in the
busiest time of the season, Marie-Aimée's rooms
were empty of her. It was thought that the
sister had carried her off to keep her under surveillance:
till it became known from Marie-Aimée
herself, writing to her old friends, that
she was in a convent of the Sacred Heart, hundreds
of miles removed, and there proposed to
remain until she had become free from the
faintest taint of the folly that had made her a
scandal and a laughing-stock,—yes, if she remained
there until she died. Her time was profitably
spent in study, and the giving of piano-lessons
to the young girls receiving their education
in the holy house. And she enjoyed the
inestimable privilege, accorded to her by the
Mother Superior, of weeping as much as she
pleased.
To that little portion of the busy world-in-general
which concerned itself with her, one
may be sure it seemed very soon after her disappearance
that it began to be said Nevers
might be looked for again. Already? Yet,
when one had grumbled that love, after all,
does not last very long, he made calculations,
and these told him that three years and more
had slipped past since the tragico-comic retreat
of the poor crossed-in-love. Certainly, something
may be expected of three years.
She was really coming back? There was excitement.
She was coming, no longer any doubt
of it; there was glee, there was expanding of
the heart. She was come; there was a rush
to see her. Affection accounted for much of
this; for the rest, curiosity to see the result of
her three years. But when she had been seen,
delight knew no reserve; each felt as if he had
won a bet.
A movement arose, as a breeze comes up, and
gradually gained force, till it resulted in a concert
given for Marie-Aimée, a testimony of the
regard felt for her, and the joy at her return.
The occasion was made a magnificent one; the
house was crowded, and contained such a proportion
of personal friends of Marie-Aimée that
the affair took the character of a huge family
festivity. But the applause resounding when
Marie-Aimée herself appeared to perform her
little task at the piano was in excess of all the
rest. In the sound, in the faces, in the air, one
felt "How she is beloved!"
She came forward in the childlike manner one
remembered of her, with that adorable absence
of self-consciousness which touches more than
grace, bowing from side to side with the moved
air which infallibly moves, half in tears, yet
smiling. To gratify her faithful, she had gone
into hearty extravagance, and appeared wonderfully
encased in a warm delicious pink, worthy
of the event, much of it rustling off far from her
heels, not much of it at all troubling her dimpled
arms and shoulders. She held her sweet little
black head on one side, like a tender bird; it
looked as if dragged over by the weight of a big
rose in her hair. And the people could not be
satisfied with clapping their hands. The public
was for the occasion become romantic, and, as
much as the artist, was applauding the woman
who had loved and, by this token, triumphed
over a villainous deserter. They kept it up ad
absurdum, intoxicated by the noise they made,
more and more touched by their own loyalty to
the old favorite, wishing to proclaim it still more
loudly; and so expressing at last, it is sad to
say, far more than any one felt. But it had
been a goodly demonstration, and all thought
better of themselves when finally those who
were eager to hear the playing began hushing,
and silence gradually came about.
Then she played, and it was to many what
they were pleased to call a revelation. It was
at all events a fresh, delicate, inspirating, moving
music. There were those who listened with
eyes upturned, and thought of sunrise upon
Eden; there were those who nodded surprise
and commendation, and spoke of technique.
Marie-Aimée was one of those persons about
whom all who know them talk. She offered
opportunity for it, certainly, by herself talking;
her manner of being and her ways were fertile
in food for comment; but her modest ray of
fame was also accountable, being felt to brighten
all who could claim sufficient nearness to her to
know her affairs.
Had she changed? was the capital question
in the discussions of her following upon her return.
Most said not in the least, except, the
presumption was, toward Bronson. She was
open-hearted as ever, merry once more as she
had used to be when her star first rose among
them. She was still the one that so lent herself
to be loved and gently, almost enviously,
laughed at. But if she were changed, as some
maintained, it was for the better. She looked
younger, rested; her face was clear and untroubled
now. If, after the first, one missed
something in her, she explained that it was her
old faults.
"When I began to see glimmering ahead of
me in the distance a triumphal re-entrance
among you," she held forth to a little group, "I
began to prepare for it. I tried to fit myself
better to please you. For the bon Dieu's sake,
I had tried to obtain a clean soul; but for the
world's sake—your sake, my dears—I tried
to become thin! I did gymnastics, I walked, I
dosed myself, I gave up eating everything I
liked, and you see the result? Honor my beautiful
shape, will you? and do not press upon
me sponge-cake and plum-cake, as you used to
do. Then I became orderly. Haven't you noticed?
All my buttons there, all my hooks and
eyes. And every little spot at once rubbed out
with cologne. When did you know such things
of me before? But look at my head! I tell
you I hunt up mirrors expressly to see myself
in them; and I set my bonnet straight, and
tuck in my loose ends. Then I became prudent.
I always think before I act, now, and before I
speak, and before I spend my money. And
punctual! I catch trains, and I keep appointments.
I look at my watch, like the rest of
you, and see that it is time to go, and I go. I
no longer, like some one I remember, sit down
and play and play and play, or talk and talk
and talk, till it is dinner time, and I have to be
invited. And then I am not a chatter-box now,
no, not what you could call a chatter-box."
Her joy at being again among her old friends
softened and won them; and no less did the
humility of her attitude toward the past. In
regard to that she was shame-faced, apologetic,
reformed.
So much of the story of her exile filtered
through those who received it at first hand, that
a legend of it was before long public property;
and such a character was given the event,
Marie-Aimée's own view perhaps initially tinging
it for all, that, without fear of being thereby
unacceptable, the multitude of those who stood
with Marie-Aimée on a footing of good-humored
comradeship neglected, even in speaking to her,
to disguise their familiarity with what concerned
her. It was common, on the ground of a perfect
understanding with her, and a supposition
of at least some small degree of that enmity
which often succeeds love and takes satisfaction
in hearing of Fortune's disparaging turns
on the ex-beloved, to entertain her with late accounts
of Bronson. And though she merely
listened, as she would have done to anything
well-intentioned, her unoffended air left a feeling
that encouragement had not been wanting. One
irresponsible, feather-brained youth, of the baritone
variety, reached such recklessness, while regaling
her with good stories as they stood waiting
for her cab, as to inquire, "Have you heard
the latest joke about old Bronson?" He
brought his lips near her ear, and breathed
through a chuckle: "They say it takes two
years and seven months to get over being in
love with Bronson, but if you marry him it
doesn't take so long!" And as he laughed
heartily, she let her bright laugh ring out companionably
alongside of his. Having got into
her cab, she repeated the joke carefully over to
herself, to apprehend the point of it.
It was not to have been expected that the
peculiar extreme enthusiasm for Marie-Aimée,
with the exaggerated form of tribute to her,
should continue long unabated. Still, with discretion
on her part, it might have had the ordinary
length of such things. As it was, alas, there
soon seemed occasion to believe that the public
mind is ruled by the law of reaction: By so
much as the public had gone beyond rational
appreciation, it seemed now threatening to fall
below it.
Those who watched Marie-Aimée's fortunes
with most interest, with a sinking of the spirit
began to note a decrease in her social popularity.
As they witnessed this trifling evidence of it and
that, these lifted their eyebrows and pushed out
their chins, with the expression which one interprets,
"But what can be done about it?"
Whenever there was reference to her now, it
seemed to bring about in the atmosphere a
vague fall of temperature. A just appreciable
effect of disappointment, disapproval, regret,
followed the long-loved name.
Those fondest of her could scarcely be brought
to speak of it; when they did speak, it was not
frankly and openly, as everyone had used to
discuss her affairs once, shaking the head
amusedly. They talked in dreary undertones,
and ended asking each other "Now, can you
understand it?"
Presently, she was by certain ones avoided,
because of an awkwardness they felt in meeting
her, with a consciousness of what were best not
mentioned—disagreeable to those accustomed
to dealings with her of a perfect candor. When
met, she was at best in these days indifferent
fun, preoccupied, unlike herself, with little to
say.
At last, as an increasing coldness takes a definite
pattern of frost, certain persons refrained
from calling upon her, explaining privately that
they had heard it said that it was possible to
come upon Anthony Bronson in her little drawing-room.
This refraining did not signify by
any means in all a wish to express condemnation;
on the part of most it really expressed a
good-humored wish not to be in the way.
It was as winter was waning, that, reversing
somewhat the order of the day, one who had
never called on her resolved to do so. With her
clothes and her hair and her eyes full of March,
she ascended to Miss Nevers' little flat. The
door was opened by Marie-Aimée herself, who
stood looking up, uncertain, inquiring.
"I fear you do not remember me," the visitor
said. "May I come in?"
"Your voice," Marie-Aimée faltered, "is familiar
—but the light—the light is behind
you. Do, I pray, come in."
She hurried ahead into the drawing-room,
which was unexpectedly light, from the reflection
upon its ceiling of the snow on lower
neighboring roofs. She turned and looked at
the visitor who was entering; she uttered an
exclamation, unfollowed by any word.
"I see you have recalled me," said the visitor.
"Mrs. Bronson? Kate Cheriton that was?"
"Take a seat, I pray!" said Marie-Aimée
faintly.
Mrs. Bronson looked around her for once.
Though her eye confessed no more scrutiny than
accords with good breeding, it missed little in
the tiny room, warm-colored, crowded, a bit
untidy, but genially so, as where a pair of evening
gloves and a crumpled play-bill lay on a
chair, and a lace bonnet saddled a green bronze
lion. The walls were covered with gimcracks
and pictures, among which in profusion photographs
of the celebrated, overscrawled with
their various calligraphies. The piano stood
open, littered with music; a tea-table, ready
for service, the kettle steaming, was drawn close
to the fire; a faint smell of macaroons mingled
in the air with the smell of violets, whereof a big
double handful was fading in a bowl. A well-worn
leather chair, deep and wide, patriarchal,
was on one side of the fire-place; and, suggestively
at its elbow, matches and an ash-tray.
In this seat, after her casual circular glance,
Mrs. Bronson quietly arranged herself; and
Marie-Aimée took the rocker on the opposite
side of the fire. She dropped back in it, leaning,
and loosely folded her hands; which no sooner
had she done, than she sat upright, and moved
forward to the edge of her chair.
There was a longer silence than is often suffered
by persons of the world. To attempt
"carrying off" anything whatsoever was not in
Marie-Aimée's moyens.
"Do you know why I have come, Miss Nevers?"
Mrs. Bronson asked.
Marie-Aimée regarded her with eyes as steady
as they were inwardly frightened. Her whole
face expressed what one had never expected to
see in it, something very near hostility; its like
could be imagined in the look of a tame animal
uncertain whether harm is meant to its young.
"I judge you have come here to find Mr.
Bronson," she answered, "I expect him at any
moment."
It was plain there would be no delicate fencing
this afternoon.
Mrs. Bronson shook her head, and laughed in
spite of herself at this unheard-of directness.
"Oh, no! I scarcely think he will come to-day,
I mentioned at lunch that I should call on you."
This was spoken without the hint of a sneer,
yet Marie-Aimée flushed.
"You are quite mistaken if you think he
makes love to me," she blurted out, her breath
coming quick.
Mrs. Bronson lifted her hand in deprecation.
"And you are mistaken, my dear Miss Nevers,
if you think I have come to make a vulgar scene
about him. I am here, and solely, because I
like you!"
Marie-Aimée stared, doubt in her eyes; then,
expressing wonder by the faintest possible effect
of a shrug, looked down in her lap, all her face
slowly relaxing to a plaintive look of trouble.
Her lips composed themselves to lines of such
stiff stillness, it might be guessed that if she
tried to speak they would tremble; she picked
at the folds of her tea-gown, readjusting them,
smoothing the fabric across her knees.
"I don't believe you have any idea how much
I felt myself attracted to you that single time
we met, Miss Nevers. You made my conquest
completely, and I am not one who takes fancies.
Though you are so contrary to all I am, it
seemed to me I understood you better than all
the others did, just as I had always felt that I
appreciated your work more truly at its worth.
I don't know what I would not have given to
have you for a friend."
Marie-Aimée put out her hands, to stop her,
her kindness at that moment hurt so much.
But Mrs. Bronson went on eagerly. "You are
not made right for this low world. Your very
virtues have the effect of faults, and bring calamity
upon you. There you are, one piece of
honesty, lovingness, unselfishness; and the consequence,—you
have no chance among us who
are nothing of the sort. Being as you are would
be all right in a world peopled with angels, but
here——!"
Marie-Aimée, with a deepening look of dejection
and a vast returning softness, slowly shook
her head; rather as if she were trying to make
these notions of herself fit into place, than in
denial of what she heard.
"And now I find you doing something dreadfully
foolish," Mrs. Bronson continued, with a
remonstrative mother's persuasive inflections,
"something, I am afraid, which will prove the
deadliest mistake. I cannot resist the impulse
to come and warn you of it, to try to drag you
back into the safe path—all, I do assure you,
because I so sincerely like and respect and admire
you. Of those in question, believe me, it
is you, you, who are the one I care about."
There was a pause. Marie-Aimée sat as if
considering a proposition; but in reality she
was only groping after thoughts among emotions.
She made a gesture of resignation, casting
up her hands and letting them drop again.
"Well? I am listening, but is it not likely that
I know already all you are intending to say?"
"No, no, it is not possible!" Mrs. Bronson
said emphatically. "You cannot see clearly for
yourself, else you would have turned back long
ago. Mind you, I know how easy it will be for
you to misunderstand me in this. Almost necessarily,
you will imagine that it is myself I have
principally in view, that I am jealous, perhaps,
or anxious about appearances, concerned in the
figure I myself cut in all this. But you would
be wrong. To all that I am highly indifferent.
Jealous! For jealousy there must be some remnant
of the folly of fondness. And, for the rest,
I refuse to grant that anything Mr. Bronson
does can either lift or lower me. No, what he
chooses to do affects me not at all. But for you,
I tell you, I am sorry."
"If it is as you say," said Marie-Aimée, regaining
a little life, "you need be troubled about
nothing. It is all so much simpler than one
thinks, than, I find, one is willing to think. Because
once or twice a caller has found him here,
a caller likewise, it has been taken for granted
that he spends I don't know how much of his
time with me, which is particularly false and
unfair. He comes from time to time; I will be
quite honest, perhaps once or twice in the week,
when he happens to be in town. Then we try
over music, and I tell him the gossip of the
world which used to be his as well as mine, and
we laugh together as we used to do. You know
that I always had a knack of cheering him. And
I give him tea, and let him smoke, and that is
all. And is it not truly innocent enough?"
"I believe you perfectly, Miss Nevers. And
for that you are willing to give up all that I
know you are losing?"
Marie-Aimée repeated her little French gesture
of resignation. "When it comes to contending
with the evil mind of the world, how can one
hope to do it? I used to believe in the world,
I loved it. I have lately discovered it to be
such that I care very little what I lose with it.
Its good opinion? I don't want it any more!"
"Quite right, Miss Nevers. You are as right
as possible in valuing the opinion of the world
lightly. Still, the loss of all that comes to make
life pleasant, from being on good terms with it,
is serious. There should be something to counterbalance
it, in that for the sake of which one
renounces it. And you, will you tell me what
you are getting? You are ruining your life,
Miss Nevers, no other word serves, for a man
who is perfectly willing to let you do it, for the
satisfaction he derives from his occasional afternoons
here of gossip and tea, music and smoke."
Marie-Aimée kept her eyes unflinchingly upon
Mrs. Bronson's, eyes full of resentment and denial,
but she was too moved now to speak.
"He spoiled the best years of your life," Mrs.
Bronson went on, her nostrils sharpening till
their edges were white, a cold fire in her eyes.
"Oh, how well I see now, now that I know him
better, what his conduct would be with you.
But when the moment came in which it was convenient,
he set you aside without one second's
hesitation. You patiently take the broken
pieces of your life out of sight, you manage to
put them together again, you reappear bravely
patched up, poor child; oh, I saw you. To me,
you were pathetic—and again, because it is
convenient, just a little bit convenient, he takes
you up, calmly, to break you into pieces a second
time."
"You don't understand him!" burst forth
Marie-Aimée, in her tone the deepest hopelessness
that the other ever could understand.
"I don't understand him? I don't?"
"No, no, no!"
"Then you think three years of marriage
not instructive?" Mrs. Bronson asked rapidly.
"Or do you think him complicated? The
truth is, he is as simple as simplicity. Suppose
a man with one instinct, one motive, heretofore
and forever: to do that which is at the moment
easiest and pleasantest and most profitable for
himself, and you have him. But you must,
to have him exact, accommodate this tendency
with a brain the most elementary; and
must suppose his objects always of the lowest
and most ordinary: little common satisfactions,
material or mental, good wine and
cigars, or the flattery of some woman's silly
admiration. And, for I will do him justice,
you must accommodate it with a constitution
completely healthy, like a prize animal's, without
any more viciousness than he has imagination.
For the rest, ideas?" continued the
coldly indignant woman, reaching a fearful
fluency, "he has none. All the fine things which
his singing brings to our minds have no existence
in himself. Talent? I do you the credit,
Miss Nevers, to suppose you with me in the
secret of his musical talent. Talent he has
none, nor ever had any, nor the least real love
or appreciation of music. But a God-given
voice he had, and an instinct for using it to perfection
which he shares with nightingales and
mocking-birds; and, besides these, what you
call a presence, combined with an enormous
vanity and an equal hatred of hard work!"
"Why do you say all this to me?" gasped
Marie-Aimée, choking.
"Because I cannot conceive but that you
misrepresent him to yourself, but that you still
have illusions about him. If I were removed
to-morrow, do you imagine he would by any
chance marry you? If my removal left him
wealthy, he would not marry at all; if it left
him poor, you can be sure he would not marry
you."
After another gesture of warding off, Marie-Aimée,
shuddering, buried her face in her hands,
as if blinding herself might deaden hearing too.
Mrs. Bronson at once accorded the respite for
which this action seemed to entreat. She sat
in silence, critically regarding the top of Marie-Aimée's
bent head, as if one could hope to see
through it into her brain.
"Can you tell me that all this is not so?" she
asked at last, heat and anger conspicuously absent
from her voice, speaking in that reasonable
tone of debate which seems to lay a compulsion
of reasonableness upon others. The question
sounded genuine, as if, for plain human curiosity's
sake, she would like to know if there could
be two points of view about Anthony.
Marie-Aimée raised her face, all sickened protest
and repudiation. "Everything you have
said, and have made to sound so heinous, might,
differently worded, fit perfectly into one's description
of a nice normal boy. And is a boy
unworthy of one's love? Say that Anthony
Bronson remained all his life a boy, and who
will contradict you? It is the same nature,
that reaches out so simply toward what pleases
him, that wants what it wants without thought
of afterwards. But you must add to this, in
his case, that sort of native kingliness of the
great, who have never a doubt but theirs is the
first right, and that others will be glad to yield
for them. He has never meant to hurt anyone,
one could not be further from cruel. He
merely, in order to go where he would be, must
drive steadily onward. He would be sorry if
his wheels crushed anything, but that it should
stop him could never enter his brain. Call it
an incapacity, it is that of most strong, healthy
big boys."
"It must have likewise characterized arboreal
man."
"Don't, Mrs. Bronson!" Marie-Aimée cried,
and rose whole-heartedly at last to the encounter,
bringing to bear the most piercing of her
arguments, "He is not happy now! He wants
things as much as ever, but he no longer can
get what he wants. He can't sing any more.
His voice is gone. You think he doesn't care,
but he does, indeed, he does! He feels so dreadfully
out of it. The public is ungrateful. His
friends are not yours, they scarcely any longer
seem his own; your friends are not his; Everything
has turned out wrong. Don't sneer at
him. Nothing can brighten his life to what it
was before. And he feels helpless against it,
just as the boy we were speaking of would feel.
Oh, he is blue—blue! You have not made him
happy!"
"Has he made me happy?"
"He has meant to!" Marie-Aimée said earnestly.
"Your quarrel is with his whole manner
of being. One must take him as he is."
"Yes! And whatever he is is to be enough,
so he thinks in his calm Jovian babyhood. How
could he but satisfy any woman? How should
any but feel honored to be his servant and worshipper?
the great, heavy, self-pleased, all-sufficient
Male!"
"You married him!"
"You are right. My stupidity deserves exactly
what I have got. But I didn't come here
to speak of myself, or to complain of him. It
has been vulgar enough, as it is. I beg your
pardon and I beg you to believe, Miss Nevers,
that I speak to no one—no one, I assure you—as
I have spoken to you. I go my way, with
my chin high, my eyes well above the heads of
the scandal-mongering crowd. It was by accident
I discovered his renewed visits to you; and
the brazenness, the heartlessness of it, revolted
even me, prepared for anything, God knows, in
the way of calm, colossal selfishness. My first
thought was the most common one—that he
acted from pique, that his vanity could not quite
stand having it blazed abroad that you had recovered.
But I know him better than that,
after all. I am just. It was simpler. It was
nothing more than a big dog wanting to be
petted. He felt in need of consolation, sympathy,
condolence, some one to talk to about
me—oh, I know it—and never stopping a
moment to think of you, poor woman, he turned
to the quarter where he felt surest of getting it.
But what puzzles me beyond everything is that
he should have guessed right. Pardon me,
Marie-Aimée, but in those three years at the
convent, what were you doing? You seem to
have wasted your time. What was that far-spread
anecdote that you had come out because
it was all over, lived down, you were cured, immune?
Did others make up this fable, or did
you?"
"Ah, don't speak of it! I was in good
faith."
"You really thought it was all done with?
You honestly felt sure of yourself?"
"But certainly! More than sure! How
otherwise would I have come back?"
"And then?"
"Then at the rehearsal for Mrs. MacDougal's
charity concert I met him again. He had consented
to sing, you remember, but afterwards
withdrew. And I had scarcely more than seen
him, when the three years might as well not
have been. But to whom—dear me, to whom
am I saying this?"
Mrs. Bronson leaned forward till she could
touch Marie-Aimée's knee. "It's all right," she
said gently. "Don't mind because it's I. I can
understand," and as she saw tears springing into
Marie-Aimée's eyes, she patted the knee, and
murmured in her most soothing note, "You
poor darling!"
"Oh, you needn't pity me at all!" Marie-Aimée
laughed harshly through her tears.
"When I think that I might—that there could
have been the possibility—that those three
years should so have changed me, that I should
have grown so cold and dry-hearted, and proud
of my dry-hearted coldness, and supposed it a
virtue, and called it morality, that when he
turned to his old comrade for a little cheer
against the thickening shadows, the fast-coming
gray hairs, the lost voice, the domestic misères,
I might have refused, I am glad and grateful
for the ill-name and the snubs that may follow
me the rest of my life because I didn't." Whereupon
her voice came utterly to wreck; she subsided
into soft unrestrained weeping.
Mrs. Bronson with a distressed frown left her
seat for the corner of a divan which was nearer
Marie-Aimée. After listening helplessly a moment,
fidgeting, embarrassed by her life-habit
of undemonstrativeness, she put out her hands,
quick as darting swallows, and enclosed one of
Marie-Aimée's, pressing it, stroking it, murmuring,
"Don't! Don't! You are a dear!"
Without a word Marie-Aimée turned her wet
face to kiss the cheek of the consoler. Mrs.
Bronson pressed closer to her; and the two sat
crushed against each other with interlocked,
hands—and so, silently drifted into a different
relation. It was as if the thoughts of their
blood had communed through their hands, and
there were no need more to conceal anything.
"Imagine," Marie-Aimée said, in a voice
cracked with rueful laughter, "that when I was
in the convent I had reached the point of believing
that it was one of the laws of nature
which was being accomplished in me! I said
that love was like a plant, and if it got
neither sunshine nor rain, it perished. I was
not in the least happy over it, you know. But
I became philosophical about it, and was glad,
as one might be over something one owned
which was not beautiful, but had a practical
use. When I went into that place, you know,
I honestly believed I should never come out of
it again; and I used to read his old letters, and
pore upon photographs of him, and play over
and over all the music associated with him.
"But one day I found them flatly wearying
me. I shall never understand it! I could picture
seeing him again, meeting him in company
with you at his side, and not minding. I could
picture meeting him again, free, and anxious
that all should be as before, and I could be calm
over it, inclined, if anything, to refuse. I was
worn out, I suppose. I imagined it was my
illusion about him which had worn out. I
judged him! But in the same breath I judged
myself, as likewise incapable of any but shallow
feelings; and I despised us both equally, and
forgave him, as one forgives offences one no
longer suffers from. And so, foolhardily, I
come forth again. And when I see him, all I
know is that it is he, the same one, who was all
the romance of life to me once; that the same
door is still open between our eyes through
which we come and go familiarly into each other.
All that I had thought dead and buried comes
to life again. And I know that I may go into a
convent for twenty years, that I might be buried
and dust as many more, but when Anthony
Bronson comes by, and we are face to face again,
it will be all as nothing. And the marvel is that
though it can only mean a return to suffering, I
can only be glad. Isn't it strange?"
"Oh, yes!" Mrs. Bronson pressed one of her
hands across her tearless eyes; her cheek was
pale. "Strange, and beautiful. But terrible
too!"
She got up abruptly, as if to escape an oppression
from the atmosphere down on Marie-Aimée's
level; she made a motion with her
head as if to disengage it; and walking to the
window, stood looking out across the snowy
roofs and the steeples, to the dull distance, the
bank of purplish dun hanging at the horizon
over the enormous city, her eyes full of gloomy
distances too.
In the long silence ensuing there developed
small homely noises of tea-making, over yonder,
near the fire.
"But it's all really wasted!" Mrs. Bronson
exclaimed unexpectedly, as if in expostulation
with herself as much as with Marie-Aimée, "I
know it! You saw him again, he had grown
older, it shocked you. His hair had turned—it
is his time of life—it saddened you. You
say he has lost his voice. That is a manner of
speaking; nothing is wrong with his throat.
But he has never cared to sing since he was
married. A little careful practice, and he could
sing very acceptably still—I won't say in public,
but for his own pleasure—if he cared anything
for music, and for that of others who have
had a cult for his singing. You have thought
him blue, and it has moved you. I understand
it. But do believe me that he is a little bit of
a humbug. Why should he be so blue? Everything
is his own fault. Do you really believe
that I have never tried? He is blue when he
is with you, just because it will move you. He
is not so very blue when among others. I can
imagine circumstances, with which you would
have nothing to do, you, nor music, nor the
past, but simple, sordid, material circumstances,
in which he would be perfectly happy, perfectly
content—"
She had said this staring out of the window.
She turned, feeling Marie-Aimée at her elbow.
Marie-Aimée held toward her a cup of tea and
a piece of thin bread-and-butter. Mrs. Bronson
let her stand there, apparently not seeing these
things, while she searched her little shut over-clouded
face, which showed plainly enough a resolve
to say no more about it. "But to you, I
do believe, all this makes no difference!" Mrs.
Bronson pursued. "Let him be, let him do, what
he pleases, you will care just the same, just as
much. Are you completely a fool, my dear,
and blind as a mole, or—do you see more than
we do? That's what I can't make out. I beg
your pardon!"
She accepted the cup from her, and helped
herself to the bread, and took a seat on the
music-stool. She drew the gloves off her beautiful
milk-white hands liberally begemmed with
diamonds and sapphires, and mechanically
folded her bread. She tasted the tea, and continued
looking off out of the window. Marie-Aimée
brought a cup of tea for herself, and
stood in the window-place too, looking off,
drinking.
What Mrs. Bronson thought in her long stare
at the grave distance from which the light was
beginning to depart, she may, as her eye caught
the silhouette against it of the other woman's
meek, set profile, have perceived the futility of
saying. "You have a beautiful view," was her
next remark.
Marie-Aimée deplored its not being to-day at
its best; she described it by touches, when
finest. And they talked a while like parties to
the most ordinary call, of views, flats, and so
forth, but in intonations so curiously detached
and melancholy that they might have been
ghosts talking over a tragedy that had its end
three centuries ago.
Suddenly, over the roofs, flashed an arc of
light, splendid; strings of lamp-like jewels, red
and green and golden, publishing to earth and
sky the name of an actor and of a melodrama.
Mrs. Bronson looked at her watch, set down her
cup, and rose.
"So I shall go as I came," she said; "I had
thought I had such things to say to you, Miss
Nevers, so to the point, so irrefutable, that you
could not but listen to me. I thought that the
fact that it was I who came to you and said
them would have its weight. I meant, at a
pinch, Miss Nevers, to demand of you to leave,
at all events to break off relations with Anthony.
But now, see, I am going, and I have demanded
nothing. I am all adrift. You have taken me
out beyond my depth. You shall do as you
feel right. As for me, I don't know. I have
not a heart to lead me, as you have. I have only
my common share of hard worldly sense, and
you have made me feel that it might be unsafe
sometimes to trust it. Do as you please.
I don't know! I don't know! Perhaps it is
you who are right, you who love him, and all
we who are fools."
In Marie-Aimée's face, which her eyes were
intently interrogating as she spoke this, Mrs.
Bronson could not fail to read a perplexity equal
to her own, but coupled with a forlornness such
as her own nature could never match, no, not
if Fate should place her alone on a storm-beaten
rock in mid-ocean—as Marie-Aimée might have
been imagined standing, with that face. Marie-Aimée
drew in the air through her lips, till her
shoulders were lifted, and let it out in a great
sigh.
"Ah, we are poor things all!" Mrs. Bronson
agreed, with an echo of the sigh; and repeated
that gesture of pressing her hand to her eyes,
not to hide tears, but as part of an attempt to
concentrate the mental vision upon those mysteries
in life which offer the effect of blank impenetrable
walls. She tore away her hand almost
at once, her brief pantomime declaring the
uselessness of trying to understand anything,
verily, of all that happens in this sorrowful
world; and whether in mockery of it, or of herself,
or in the wish merely to effect a change in
the current of their thoughts, struck a startling,
brilliant chord on the piano under her hand;
and while it still vibrated, another, and another,
and executed a cadenza that seemed to laugh
aloud and shake fool's-bells.
"Do you remember," she sat fairly down before
the keyboard, and preluded while she talked,
"the last time? After that scene of blood and
tears, you poor sweet thing, how you played for
me, so dearly obliging as you were? And polonaises
and waltzes you played; as well as elegies
and nocturnes. And then I played and then
you played. You played and played, my dear,
till you had missed an engagement. I shall miss
one now if I don't hurry off instantly, but let
it be missed. I shall count it well done, if
you will sit down here a moment and play
for me."
"Oh," moaned Marie-Aimée, putting up the
ever-willing hands, like a martyr in prayer,
"don't ask me. And don't take it ill if I can't.
It's not the same thing any longer." She let
her head hang; "I haven't the heart for it to-night."
"I am a beast!" said Mrs. Bronson heartily,
and without adding a note further to the musical
phrase she was in the middle of, jumped
up, sick at herself. And feeling of so little
importance before depths of woe such as she
suspected near her that it mattered nothing
whether she apologized, she pressed Marie-Aimée's
hand with all her strength, and murmuring,
"I will take myself away," made haste
to be gone.
Mrs. Bronson was conscious of a vast relief,
by which she first learned in what suspense she
had been living, when a few days later she recognized
Marie-Aimée's hand-writing on a letter
to her. She read:
"I went, you see, after all. I am at my sister's,
to remain with her and the dear children
until I have thought further what I had better
do. You were right in wishing me to go, though
not perhaps for the reasons you gave. My
thoughts are not at all clear upon the subject of
the rightness or wrongness of what I was doing
then, or what I have done since. I felt sure I
was justified against the whole world, and even
now I find no good argument against it. Only,
it came home to me that I who used to love
everyone and have only feelings of kindness towards
others, was fast coming to hate everybody,
myself most, and it seemed a sufficient
sign. But you won't think that was quite all.
I did also think of you, who perhaps—which
of us knows her own heart?—care more than
you believe. Very likely not. But on the
barest possibility of the sort, how could I continue
obstinately fixed in my position?
"And now, lest the sympathy you showed me
be troubled on my account, I want you to be
sure that I shall not be unhappy. For one
thing, because there is something strangely compensating
in the assurance a person may gain
that the one she loves is never, to the edge of
doom, to lack the whole love of at least one
heart; and then, because I believe you will
grant a request I am about to make, oh, more
humbly and supplicatingly than pen and ink
can show: which is that you will try to see him
more truly, to discern what is good and lovable
in him; and that—I find it difficult. Yet
why? Let me seem brazen and indelicate, I
will finish. I have thought I divined that he is
a pensioner of yours, and sometimes a straightened
one. It cannot be but that you are by
nature as generous as you are kind, nothing else
would accord with your forehead and eyes. I
can only think that you have imagined things
about him, that his marriage perhaps was mercenary,
and this has been your revenge. Do
differently hereafter. Show him and yourself
this respect. Grudge him not the independence
and the honors that beseem the state of the lion
growing old. For, do not deceive yourself, he
has been great. Those upon whom God bestows
such a gift are marked for the reverence of
others.
"You will forgive my meddling and will do
what I ask? You asked me to go, and I went.
You could not demand it, nor can I demand
this. Yet let it be as a bargain between us,
will you?
"For your infinite kindness and gentleness
and generosity to myself, receive the assurance
of my utmost gratitude; and for the affection
you were so good as to say you feel
for me, a return of affection which is of sufficient
strength, I believe, to outlast all that
divides us.
Marie-Aimée."
Mrs. Bronson kissed the name, like a school-girl;
but glancing back over the letter could
not repress a laugh tinged with disdain as the
thought presented itself: "She wishes to provide
against his missing her. Oh, the poor
child, how well she knows him, after all!"
Rising to the noblest height of her nature, she
determined to set the figure of Anthony Bronson's
income, as near as her fortune permitted,
at what should represent her own estimate of
his loss in Marie-Aimée; at the same time reflecting
that very much less—but very much
less, indeed—would quite as effectually have
kept him from missing her overmuch.
