Chapter II (1)

The Doctor had had an unusually busy day of it. But he curtailed his after-dinner nap in order to glance through the Law Intelligence records of the month of February, 1899. There was much in the case to which Mrs. Rosval had referred that went far toward justifying the “strained relations” she had hinted at. And it is the duty of the medical profession to rally at the war-cry of the outraged Proprieties. But, when alone and unobserved, doctors have many points in common with mere men. And as this Doctor stepped into his brougham he said, “Women are very hard! In all human probability the man was innocent.” He said again, “Women are hard!” as he creaked up the hotel staircase.

He found her in the sick-room. She had changed her dress for something that gave out no assertive silken rustle in answer to her movements, something that draped the charming contour of her figure--she had a charming figure--with soft, quiet folds, like the wings of a dun hawkmoth. That fell composure still walled her in as with ramparts of steel. She held the bed-curtain back as the Doctor stooped over the livid, discolored face upon the pillow. She took a linen cloth from the nurse, and deftly, lightly wiped away the froth and mucus that had gathered about the cracked and bleeding lips. But the hand that rendered these offices was as steady as though it had been carved out of white marble.

Disturbed from his lethargy by the invasion of candlelight upon his haggard eyelids and the Doctor’s bass murmur in his ear, the sick man began to talk a little. For the most part it was mere gabble, but some sentences were plain. He moaned piteously for a barber, because he was unshaven. Rosval had always been foolishly vain of his personal appearance. And he damned the one glass of bad water, to the imbibition of which he attributed his disease, promising, if he got well, never to drink any more. To do him credit, he had never been addicted to that particular form of liquid refreshment. The Doctor inferred as much from his diagnosis--and from the faint sarcastic quiver of Mrs. Rosval’s white lips. Then the tongue of the man ceased wagging--but the burning head began to thresh to and fro upon the pillow, and the claw-like hands to scratch at the bed-clothes in a fresh access of the maddening enteric irritation. Alleviating measures proved as effective as alleviating measures generally do prove; the head went on rolling, and the crooked talons continued to tear. All at once they were quiet. Mrs. Rosval had laid her hand upon the clammy forehead--about as tenderly, to all appearance, as she would have laid it upon the back of a chair. And the man was still. She placed the other hand beside the first--the drawn lines about the nostrils relaxed, the clenched teeth parted, the breast rose and fell with the indrawing and outgoing of a sigh of relief. And the man slept. So soundly that she moved from him presently, without disturbing him, and passed into the room adjoining, where the Doctor and the nurse were holding a whispered confabulation.

There would be no need to send in another professional attendant, the nurse said, now that the patient’s wife had arrived. She possessed a remarkable ability for nursing, and extraordinary self-command. She shrank from nothing--not even the most repugnant duties of the sick-chamber. The nurse had met in her time with ladies who took things coolly; but this lady really surprised her.

The Doctor was in the act of shaking his head--not from side to side, but up and down--a gesture which expressed indulgent tolerance of the nurse’s surprise while it repudiated the notion of his entertaining any on his own account--when he jumped. For a calm, quiet voice at his elbow said:

“You told me that Mr. Rosval was dangerously ill. Is he dying?”

The nurse had vanished into the carbolic-laden atmosphere of the Chamber of Horrors.

“My dear madam, your husband is in the Hands----” So the Doctor was beginning, when the obvious inappropriateness of the stereotyped formula stopped him short. Then he admitted that the condition of the man in the other room was very precarious. That he could not, when not in _articulo mortis_, be said to be dying--but that, toward the small hours of the morning, he might attain to a pitch of prostration closely allied to that condition. And that nothing could be done for him but to give him milk and medicine regularly, and---- The Doctor would have ended “and trust in Providence,” but for obvious reasons he thought better of it. Then he went away, feeling quite certain in his own mind that Mrs. Rosval would be a widow before twenty-four hours were over.

That lady, meanwhile, returning to the sick-room, had persuaded the fagged nurse to go and lie down. She understood how to do all that was necessary, she whispered, and would call the attendant if any change occurred. Then she sat down at the foot of the bed, and prepared to keep her vigil with unshaken fortitude. The sleeping woman in the next room breathed heavily, the sounds of rolling wheels and jarring voices grew less and less--then all fell quiet. About three hours before the dawn the sleeper awakened. The hollow eyes no longer turned on her with the blind, glassy stare of delirium. There was reason in Rosval’s look, and memory.

He seemed to beckon, and she came near. She had to stoop to catch the moaning whisper that asked: “How--did you--come here?”

She answered steadily, “They sent for me.”

“They’d not have--if _I_ had known!” Rosval gasped.

“If I annoy you,” said Mrs. Rosval, with icy tolerance, “I can go!” She turned, meaning to call the nurse; but a claw-like hand went weakly out and caught at her skirts. The grasp was no stronger than that of a newborn child, but, just for that it _was_ so feeble, it held her.

“You’ll not go! Three years--you’ve treated me--like a leper! Never would--listen to what I’d got to say. But now ... I--tell you, she--sat on--my knee and--kissed me! Before I knew it--and then--the husband came in! A plant, by Gad!”

Mrs. Rosval said, “You must not talk. The Doctor says you are not to talk,” and busied herself with the bottles and glasses that occupied a little stand near the bedside.

Rosval condemned the Doctor. Mrs. Rosval measured out his medicine, raised his head with professional skill, and offered him the glass. He clenched his teeth, and defied her with gaunt eyes across the brim.

“No! No milk--no doctor’s stuff. I’ve been going to the devil--for three years past,” proclaimed the sinner, feebly. “Why not go--at once--and have done with it?” Then he fell back heavily on the pillow.

Mrs. Rosval summoned the nurse. The nurse could do nothing. For the moribund was obdurate, and every fresh manifestation of obduracy drove not one, but half a gross of nails into his coffin. That casket was fast progressing toward completion, when Mrs. Rosval conceived a desperate idea. The execution of it cost her a severe struggle. Stooping down, she whispered to the sinking man:

“Jack!”

His faded eyes rolled in their sunken sockets until they rested on her. He said with difficulty:

“Well?”

“What will make you take it?”

Something like a gleam of cunning came into the face. The answer came:

“Kiss me!”

She battled with herself for a moment silently, and then, bending closer, touched his forehead with her lips.

“That isn’t all! You must say: ‘_I forgive you!_’”

“I can’t!”

“All--right, then!”

Silence ensued. The angles of the features were growing pinched and sharp; a bluish shade was creeping about the mouth. She cast a glance of scorn at her own reflection, caught in a mirror that hung against the opposite wall, and said the words:

“I forgive you! Isn’t that enough?”

“Not quite. ‘_I love you--and----_’”

The voice was getting very faint.

“I love you--dear--and----”

“And ‘_I take you back!_’”

“I take you back.” Her iron fortitude was broken. She said it with a sob, and gathered the weak head to her bosom, being the kind of woman who does not do things by halves.

* * * * *

A month later the Doctor received a check. It was a handsome check, enclosed with the thanks and compliments of Mr. and Mrs. Rosval, on leaving London.

“Carried him off with her into the country,” said the Doctor, tapping his teeth with a paper-knife as he closed the volume of the _Daily Telegraph_ which contained the case “Ffrench _v._ Ffrench; Rosval cited.” “In other words, taken him back. And in all human probability the man was guilty. Women are very weak!”

THE MAN WHO COULD MANAGE WOMEN

Or thought he could. Which comes to the same thing. His name was Yethill, and he was a Junior Captain in the R. A.

Yethill belonged to the New School; he was a specimen of the latest military development of the age. By their smoked spectacles shall ye know Yethill and his peers; by the right foot, which is broadened by the lathe; by the right thumb, which is yellowed with acids and sticky with collodion; by the hard-bitten, pragmatical, theoretical, didactic way of treating all mysteries in heaven--a locality which is interesting only in virtue of the opportunities afforded to trick aviators--and earth, in which mines may be dug, and upon which experiments may be carried on. These men wake themselves in the morning, and heat their shaving water by means of electrical machines of their own invention. They carry kodaks in their bosoms, and are, in the matter of imparting information, human volcanoes continually in eruption.

Yethill was not behind his fellows in this respect. When he had said his little say upon the Theory of Wireless Photophony, the Detection of Subterranean Mines by the K Rays, and the irresponsibility of the bedbug in connection with beri-beri; when he had told the Head of the Electrical Department how many watts are equivalent to a horse-power, and explained to the Colonel, who is sinfully proud of his men, that the employment of the uneducated inferior in warfare will cease with the century, and that the army of the future will consist entirely of officers, he would drop his voice to a confidential whisper and control his elbows. He talked heliographically as a rule, and if a man were left to listen to him--he could, as a rule, clear the Mess smoking-room in ten minutes from the start--he would dilate at length upon his best-loved hobby, the art of managing women.

* * * * *

Yethill was no Adonis. He had a knobby, argumentative head, a harlequin set of features, each separate one belonging to a different order and period of facial architecture; and a figure which was not calculated, as his tailor observed with bitterness, to do justice to a good cut. But it was wonderful to hear him talk in that conquering, masterful way of his. He had an appalling array of statistics to prove that the majority of marriages were miserable; that life, connubially speaking, was dust and ashes in the mouths of nineteen Benedicts out of twenty. But the darkest hour presaged the dawn. Let the man about to marry, let the already-married, but adopt the Yethill system of sweetheart-and-wife breaking, and thenceforth all would be well. And thousands of voices arising from the uttermost ends of the civilized earth would hail with one accord Yethill as their deliverer.

Then came an essay on the New Art of Courtship.

“To a man,” Yethill would say, jerking his knee and stammering a little, as his custom was when excited, “who is a reasonable being, the woman he loves is a woman--only spelt with a big ‘W’; the woman he likes is a woman spelt in the ordinary way; and the woman he doesn’t like is a mere creature of the female sex. To a woman,” Yethill would continue, “who is, nineteen times out of twenty, a perfectly unreasonable being;--the man she loves is a demi-god; the man she doesn’t love is a man;--and the man she dislikes is a gorilla. She quite overlooks the fact that in every individual human male these three may be found united. And man is weak enough to humor her. So that out of so many marriages that take place, a majority--a frightful majority--are founded upon illusions. And the subsequent state of conjugality may be called a state of evolution, in which these primary illusions, after undergoing a process of disarrangement and disintegration, are finally reduced to impalpable powder, and the Bed Rock of Reality is laid bare. We know what happens after that!”

The listening man generally knew enough to grunt an affirmative. And Yethill would, with many weird facial jerks and twitches, go on to explain the system.

The great system was, like all other wonderful discoveries, involved in a very simple plan of procedure. It consisted only in reversing the accepted order of things. A man, supposedly desirous of getting married, recognizing in himself the existence of the trinity above mentioned, should assert the existence of the third person from the very outset--suppress the demi-god, show the gorilla. Let the woman you were about to make your wife see the worst of you before you showed her the best. Let her pass through the burning fiery furnace before you admitted her into the Paradise that is the reward of proved devotion. Let her know what bullying meant before you took to petting--blame her weaknesses before you praised her virtues. Under this _régime_ there would be no illusions to commence with; and married life, instead of being full of disappointments, would be replete with delightful surprises. Your wife married you, believing you to be a gorilla.

“There’s the weak point,” the listener would interpolate. “What woman, unless a lunatic of sorts, _would_ marry a gorilla?”

Yethill would not hear of this objection. He was always deaf when you came to it. He would pound on--dilate on the surprise and joy with which she found that she had married a man, and the rapture with which she would greet the final discovery that she had got hold of a demi-god.

“It sounds splendid,” the other men would say, “but it won’t wash. Look here, I’m going to take Miss So-and-So up to a Gaiety _matinée_ to-morrow. To follow up your system I ought to call for her in my worst clothes, be surly on the way to the station, and neglectful in the tunnels. I ought to dump her into her stall like a sack, go out to ‘see a man’ between every act, and take it for granted that she doesn’t want cool tea and warm ices. You know that’d never do! She’d give me the bag to-morrow. And she’d be right!”

But Yethill hearkened not. There was excitement at the Arsenal, and much babbling in barracks, the day on which it was publicly made known that Yethill contemplated giving an object-lesson in support of his great system very shortly.

The object was Miss Sallis.

Miss Sallis was a fluffy little pink-and-white girl, the daughter of a retired Admiral, who lived near the Dockyard.

Men had dined with Miss Sallis, and played tennis with Miss Sallis, and flirted with Miss Sallis, during several seasons past. Some of them had asked for her hand--she wore fives in gloves--and had not got it. Thus, Yethill’s announcement was received with a certain degree of risibility. No bets were made upon the chances of Yethill’s getting her, the odds against his acceptance were too tremendous. Yethill proposed. He mentioned that his prospects of advancement in the Service were not very promising; that his scientific pursuits would have to be relinquished if he were to set up an establishment on even a moderate scale, and that he did not intend to relinquish those pursuits; that there were several hereditary diseases in his family; that, while bestowing upon the lady he honored with the offer of his hand a regard which justified his proposal, he should not have made that proposal had the lady been poor--with other statements of equal candor. A more wonderful proposal was never made.

What was more wonderful still, Miss Sallis accepted him! He bought her a ring, containing three small fragments of petrified red-currant jelly, embedded in fifteen-carat gold; and when she asked him to put it on her finger said, “Oh, rot!” and wouldn’t. He spent a certain amount of time with his betrothed, but invariably carried a scientific work in his pocket, wherein he might openly take refuge when the primrose paths of love proved wearisome. He forbade her to dance with other men, and did not dance with her himself. He snubbed her when she asked questions about his camera, his lathe, his batteries, and tried timidly to be interested in magnets and inductors, acids and cells, because they interested _him_. He carried out his system thoroughly. If Miss Sallis _had_ any illusions about Yethill he bowled the poor little thing over, right and left, like ninepins, long before the wedding day.

With the loss of her illusions went some of her good looks. She made a pretty-looking little bride. With her fluffy pale hair, her pink nose, and her pink eyelids, a not remote resemblance to an Angora kitten was traced in her. She was married in a traveling-gown, without any bridesmaids; and after the wedding-breakfast Captain and Mrs. Yethill drove home to their lodgings on the Common. The wedding-trip had been abandoned--from no lack of money, but because Yethill said he had had enough of traveling, and the custom of carrying a bride away, as if in triumph, to the accompaniment of rice and slippers, was “guff.” He certainly played the gorilla as if to the manner born. The poor little woman loved him; he loved her. But as his skull was made of seven-inch armor-plate, he went on knocking it against his system. He had got used to the gorilla-business, and couldn’t leave it off. Yet, out of his wife’s sight and hearing, he was a doting husband. The Duke in the _Story of Patient Griseldis_ must have been a man of Yethill’s stamp.

Mrs. Yethill, as time went on, began to be a walking manifestation of the effects of the system. She lost her gaiety and her pink cheeks; her smile became nervous and her dress dowdy. The little vanities, the little weaknesses, the little affectations, which had helped to make Miss Sallis charming, had been bullied out of Mrs. Yethill’s character until it was as destitute of any blade of verdure as a skating-rink. She had proved herself the most patient, loving, tolerant of wives; but Yethill went on trying her. She stood the trials, and he invented new tests--exactly as if she had been a Government bayonet or a regulation sword-blade. A bright man Yethill!

They were called upon, and returned visits, at intervals. A taste for society was one of the tendencies which were to be chastened. Female friends were prohibited, as being likely to sow the seed of incipient rebellion against the system.

“I don’t care, Tom, if I have you!” said Mrs. Yethill, patting her gorilla, who, mindful of his own tenets, was careful not to exhibit any appreciation of her attention. But he made up for it by boasting that evening in the smoking-room, until those who hearkened with difficulty prevented themselves from braining him with legs of chairs. Their wives would have commended them for the deed. Yethill had not many admirers about this period.

But he went on blindly. Can one ever forget how he crowed over having cured Mrs. Yethill of a tendency toward jealousy, of the vague and indiscriminating kind? The prescription consisted in posting to himself letters highly scented and addressed in a variety of feminine scrawls. Yethill was good at imitating handwriting!--and he absented himself from the domestic hearth for several days together whenever there was a recurrence of the symptoms. The method wrought a wonderful cure; but Mrs. Yethill began to grow elderly from about this period. You could hardly have called her a young woman, when the baby came, and brought his mother’s lost youth back to her, clenched in one pudgy hand. The vanished roses fluttered back and perched upon her thin cheekbones again. She was heard to laugh. Her husband, who secretly adored her, and who had continued to stick to the system more from a desire for _her_ glorification than his own, feared a retrogression. So he thought out a new torture or two, and put them into active application. He sneered at the puerilities of nursery talk. He downcried the beauty and attainments of the baby when she praised them. He pooh-poohed her motherly fears, when the ailments inseparable from the joyous period of infancy overtook his heir. This was the last straw laid upon Mrs. Yethill’s aching shoulders. The downfall of the great system followed.

In this way. His wife came into his workshop one morning. The workshop was forbidden ground, and Yethill dropped the negative he was developing, and turned to stare. He saw that she was very pale, and that her lips were bitten in. He heard her say that there was something the matter with baby, and she wanted the doctor.

Solely in the interests of his wife whom he esteemed above all living women, Yethill refused to allow the doctor to be sent for. The child was as right as a trivet. Women were always worrying. She was to get away with her nonsense, and leave him in peace. With more to the same effect. She drooped her head, and went away obediently, only to return in half an hour, with another version of the same prayer upon her lips. Would he--would he come and look for himself? Yethill was thoroughly annoyed. Yethill refused. Yethill went on, stubbornly, dabbling with his negatives, until right from overhead--baby’s nursery was above the workshop--Yethill had never heard a woman scream like that before.... Something like an ice-bolt shot down his spine. He dashed up to the nursery, and looked in. The sight he saw there sent him tearing across the Common, a hatless, coatless man, to the Doctor’s house.

When the Doctor came he said he could be of no use; he ought to have been called in an hour ago. And Yethill, hearing this fiat, and meeting his wife’s eyes across the table, felt the system totter to its foundations.

He found himself wondering at her for taking baby’s end so quietly; but he had schooled her to endure silently. There were no tears--he had always jeered at tears. The Doctor took him aside before he left.

“You must treat your wife with kindness--and consideration, Yethill,” said the Doctor, “or I won’t answer for the consequences!”

As if Yethill needed to be told to be kind or considerate! As if Yethill had never loved--did not love--the late Miss Sallis! He planned a revelation for her without delay. He would take her in his arms; kiss her, and tell her that her time of trial was overpast; give her her meed of praise for her heroism, her meed of sympathy for her grief--and his. And he would own that he had made a mistake in the matter of baby deceased. And she would forgive--as she always had forgiven.

As he decided this, she came into the room. She was quite composed. She carried something behind her. She spoke to him very quietly in a dull, strange, level voice--so strange a voice that, just as he was about to open his arms and say, “Annie!” in the voice he had been saving up for the Day of Revelation, the gesture and the word wouldn’t come.

“Tom,” said Mrs. Yethill, “what should you say if I told you that I had made up my mind to kill myself?”

She brought her hand from behind her; it held one of Yethill’s revolvers. She had been very much afraid of these lethal instruments in the early days of her marriage, but under the system had learned to clean them, and even drew the cartridges. But the thing she held wasn’t loaded, Yethill was quite sure of that. It sealed up the fountain of his admiring tenderness to have her treat him to commonplace, vulgar heroics. It put her out of drawing, and Yethill out of temper.

She asked again:

“What would you say if I told you I mean to kill myself?”

Yethill ran his armor-plated head against the last wall. He answered brutally:

“I should tell you, if you were such a fool as to threaten such a thing, to do it, and have done with it!”

She said, “Very well!”--and did it.

* * * * *

When people came running in, they found something--perhaps it was the system--scattered on the walls, on the floor, everywhere. And Yethill was howling, and beating his seven-inch skull against heavy pieces of furniture, and calling on Annie to come back. But she had escaped, and was in no hurry; and he hadn’t the pluck to follow her out of the world and apologize.

“Was she mad?” somebody asked the Doctor; and the Doctor said:

“No; but she might have become so if she had lived much longer with a lunatic!”

“You mean----?”

“I mean,” said the Doctor, “that Yethill has been suffering from dementia for years. I mean that he will see the inside of a Lunatic Asylum in six months from date.”

But the Doctor was wrong. He did--in three!

OBSESSED

Andrew Fenn is known to the world as an art critic and essayist of unerring instinct and exquisite refinement, a writer of charming _vers de société_, and teller of tales supposedly designed for children, but in reality more appreciated by children of a larger growth. He is much sought after, but little to be found, unless one has the _entrée_ to his pleasant, roomy old house in Church Street, Chelsea, where he lives in the midst of his library--the whole house is a library--his etchings and Japanese curios. He is less of a traveler than he used to be; getting old, he says, and lazy, content with old friends, soothed by old pipes, fortified by old wine--he has a supreme _goût_ in wines--and nourished by excellent cookery.

His household staff consists but of an elderly valet and butler, and a housekeeper-cook. She has been in her master’s service twenty years, and is beginning to grow handsome, Andrew is wont to say. Certainly, if her master speaks the truth, she must have been, when comparatively young, extraordinarily unlovely, this most excellent of women. Even now she infallibly reminds the casual beholder of an antique ecclesiastical gargoyle much worn by weather. Her name is Ladds. She has never been married, but respect for the position of authority she occupies in Andrew’s household universally accords her brevet rank. She might have occupied another, and more important position, if----

“Yes,” Andrew says, when he is disposed to tell the story--and he often does tell it to intimate friends, leaning back on the library divan, after a cosy dinner, holding his gray beard in one big fist, still brown with tropical sunshine--“Ladds is an excellent creature. She might have married me, might Ladds!”

We invariably chorus astonishment. Then some of Ladds’ famous coffee comes in, and Andrew gets up to hunt for precious liquors, and, having found them, continues:

“I came _very_ near marrying her--once.”

Somebody growls: “Good job you pulled up in time!”

Andrew rounds on the somebody. “_I_ didn’t pull up. _She_ did. Refused me!”

There is a general howl.

“I am telling you men the truth,” Andrew says, pulling the gray beard. “Fifteen years ago I was infatuated with that woman. She possessed my every thought; she dominated me, like----”

“Like a nightmare!”

“Apposite illustration,” says Andrew, nodding. “_Like_ a nightmare. It was just about the time I published my book, _Studies of the Human Grotesque in Art, Ancient and Modern_. You remember, some of you, I was keen on the subject--had been for years. And I was a traveler and collector in those days: I’d got together a wonderful show of illustrative subjects. You won’t see many of ’em now. I gave them to the Smoketown Mechanical Institute afterward.”

He pulls at his long cherrystick, and blows a cloud of Latakia, and goes on:

“I’d the whole house full. Peruvian idols, Aztec picture writings, Polynesian and Maori war masks; Chinese and Japanese, Burmese and Abyssinian, Hindu and Persian monstrosities of every kind; Egyptian, Carthaginian, Babylonian, Druidical, Gothic---- Well, well! I’m thoroughgoing, and when I do a thing I do it thoroughly. It’s enough to say that every variety of libel upon the human face and form that human ingenuity or depravity has ever perpetrated, I’d carefully collected and brought together here.”

He waves his hand, with a curious cabalistical ring upon it that once belonged, it is said, to Eliphas Lévi, who had it from Albertus Magnus. But this may be mere report.

“I worked hard, and drank a great deal of coffee,” says Andrew, “so much that my old housekeeper began to be afraid something mysterious was the matter with me. She expostulated at last, and I explained. Then she got interested in the book; she was an intelligent woman, poor dear old soul, and she got specially interested in that section of the work which deals with the Grotesque in Nature. Everything in humanity that is purely grotesque--not deformed, unnatural, outrageous, but purely quaint and bizarre--I piled into those chapters. The work is illustrative, you know, as well as descriptive, and the queer photographs and engravings that scientific friends had contributed to this particular portion of it absolutely fascinated the dear old lady.

“‘To be sure, Master Andrew’ (she had known me from my knickerbocker and peg-top days), ‘but them are queer folk. And, my heart alive!’--she uttered a sharp scream--‘if that picture isn’t the exact moral of Jane Ladds!’

“I glanced over her shoulder. It _was_ a portrait of Jane, certainly--a rude little wood cut of the sixteenth century, purporting to be a portrait of a female jester, attached, in her diverting capacity, to the Court of Mary Tudor, during the latter part of her reign, and mentioned by name in some of the accounts of the Royal household as ‘Jeanne la Folle.’ Unless the long-dead delineator of her vanished charms has shamefully belied them, Jeanne must have been one of the most grotesquely hideous specimens of womanhood that ever existed. Judge, then, whether the exclamation of my housekeeper awakened my interest, excited my curiosity, or left me apathetic and unmoved!”

We are silent. Our interest, our curiosity, are urging us to hurry on the conclusion of Andrew’s story.

“You may suppose that I bombarded my housekeeper with questions. What? Did a living counterpart of the sixteenth-century joculatrix exist in the nineteenth? What was her station in life? Where was she to be found? In reply, I elicited the fact that Jane Ladds was a countrywoman of my own, the daughter of a wheelwright living in the village of Wickham, in Dorsetshire, where I myself had first seen the light. Jane was some half dozen years my junior, it appeared. My mother had once taken her into her service as under-scullerymaid, but in a casual encounter with the last new baby (my brother Robert, now commanding his battery of the Royal Horse Artillery at Jelalabad), Jane’s facial eccentricities had produced such a marked effect (resulting in convulsions) that the unfortunate _protégée_ had been hastily dismissed. Since when she had kept house for her father, and was probably keeping it still; there not being, said my housekeeper, the slightest human probability that any potential husband would endeavor to interfere with the wheelwright’s domestic arrangements.” There comes a twinkle into Andrew’s brown eyes.

“‘No man would be mad enough!’ the old lady said. Judge of her surprise when I turned upon her and ordered her to write--write at once to Dorsetshire, ascertain whether Jane was still alive, still available, willing to take service, under an old acquaintance, in a bachelor’s London establishment? Stunned as she was, my housekeeper obeyed. The wages I instructed her to offer were good. An answering letter arrived within the space of a week, announcing Jane Ladds’ willingness to accept the offered situation. The letter was nicely written. I read and reread it with morbid excitement. I looked forward to the day of the writer’s arrival with an excitement more morbid still. At last the day came, and the woman....”

We inspire deep breaths, and unanimously cry, “Go on!”

“My writing table was piled high with books--I couldn’t see her until she came round the corner,” says Andrew, “and stood by my chair. She wore her Sunday clothes--Wickham taste inclines to garments of many colors. In silence I contemplated one of the finest examples of the Animated Grotesque it had ever been my fortune to look upon. Her hair was then red--the brightest red. Her nose was not so much a nose as a pimple. Her mouth was the oddest of buttons. Her forehead a ponderous coffer of bone, overhanging and overshadowing the other features. She was lengthy of arm, short of leg, dumpy of figure. She did not walk--she waddled; she did not sit--she squatted. Her smile was a gash, her curtsy the bob of an elder-pith puppet. She was, as she is now, unique. You are all familiar with her appearance. Search your memories for the moment when that appearance dawned upon you first, intensify your surprise, quadruple your sensations of delight--add to these, imagine yourself dominated by a fascination, weird, strange--inexplicable. In a word----”

Andrew’s pipe is out; he is gesticulating excitedly, and his eyes have an odd gleam under his shaggy brows.

“She took possession of me. I had her constantly about me. She brought me everything I wanted. I was never tired of gloating over my new-found treasure. Every accent of her voice, every odd contortion of her features, every awkward movement of her body was a fresh revelation to me. All this while I was working at my book. It was said afterward, in the newspapers, that the entire work, especially the closing chapters on the Human Grotesque, had been written in a fever of enthusiasm. The reviewer never knew how rightly he had guessed. Some of the theories I propounded and proved were curious. That Ugliness is in reality the highest form of Beauty--beauty in the abstract--was one of the mildest. I believed it when I wrote it; for I was madly, passionately infatuated with the ugliest woman I had ever seen--my parlor maid, Jane Ladds!”

We hang upon his words so that our pipes go out, and our whisky and sodas stand untasted at our elbows.

“Yes,” says Andrew, drawing a long, hard breath, “she possessed my thoughts--dominated me--waking and sleeping. I had the queerest of dreams, in which, with a joy that was anguish, a rapture that was horror, I saw myself attending crowded assemblies with my wife, Jane Fenn, _née_ Ladds, upon my arm. She wore my mother’s diamonds, a _décolletée_ gown from Worth’s; and as we moved along together, sibilant whispers sounded in my ears, and astonished eyes said as plainly, ‘_What_ an ugly woman!’

“Then would come other visions ... Jane at the head of my table ... Jane rocking the cradle of our eldest born--an infant who strongly resembled his mother ... Jane here, Jane there--Jane everywhere!... My nerves, you will guess, must have been in a very queer state.

“All the time Jane Ladds would be deftly moving about me, dusting my books and curios, or going on with her sewing, or, to the utter stupefaction of my housekeeper, I had issued orders that she should sit in the window, where my glance might dwell upon her whenever I lifted my head from my work. Late, late into the small hours, when the sky began to gray toward the dawning, and the ink in my stand got low, she used to keep me company. Not the faintest shadow of impropriety could attach to the association in any sane mind. My housekeeper thought it queer, but nothing more.

“She had--she has--very large, very rough, very red hands. I used to imagine myself kissing one of those hands when I should ask her to be my wife, and conjure up the grotesque smile of shy delight with which she would accept the unheard-of honor. The temptation to snatch and kiss that awful hand became so powerful that it cost me more effort than I can explain to resist its ceaseless promptings. And I would chuckle as I looked at it, and at the bizarre countenance that bent over the stocking that was in process of being darned--Jane’s peculiar, shuffling gait seemed to have a peculiarly wearing effect on stockings--and wonder, _if she knew_, how she would look, what she would say? Then she would thread her needle, or bite the end of her worsted.... That hand! that hand! The struggle between the masterful impulse to seize and kiss it, and the shuddering desire not to do anything of the kind, would, upon these occasions, be perfectly indescribable. And--one day--the very day that saw the completion of my book--I yielded!”

“Yes?” we cry, interrogatively. All our eyes are rounded, all our mouths wide open.

“She saw some of my papers flutter to the carpet as I pushed back my chair,” Andrew continues, “and obligingly crossed the room, stooped and gathered them up. A kind of mist came over my eyes, and when it cleared away, she was there--by my side--holding the written sheets out to me. That hand! I must--I must! Before the poor creature could hazard a guess at my intentions, I seized it--I kissed it--with a resounding smack. I cried deliriously, ‘Jane, will you be my wife? I adore you, Jane!’”

“And what did she do? What did she say?...”

“I’m coming to that! She drew away from me, and turned very white, and her poor red hands trembled, and her little button features twitched absurdly with the effort she made to keep from crying. But, as I seized her hands, and went on with my wild asseverations and protestations--Heaven only knows what I said!--the absurdity of the whole thing came on her, and she burst out laughing wildly. Then I caught the infection, and followed suit. Once I began, I couldn’t stop. I was shaken like a rag in the wind--torn, possessed by seven devils of risibility. But I went on raging, all through it, that she must marry me! At last she tore herself away, and ran out of the room, breathlessly to burst upon my housekeeper with the information that ‘Master was mad, and wanted the doctor.’ And she was not far wrong, for by the time he came I was fit for nothing but to be carried to bed. Twenty-four hours later I was raving in brain fever. Seven weeks that red-hot torture lasted, and then I came to myself, and found that through all the delirium and fever I had been patiently, uncomplainingly, tenderly nursed by poor Jane....”

Andrew’s voice grows a little husky as he nears the finish.

“Well, when I was convalescent, and knew that I owed my life to her devotion, it seemed to me that only one reparation was possible for the wrong I had done Jane. It was a hard thing to do--the madness being over--the morbid impulse that had swayed me being no longer in the ascendant. But I did it! You may have noticed”--he clears his husky throat--“that is, those among you who have spoken to Ladds--_that she has a singularly sweet voice_--a voice curiously out of keeping with her personality. Well, when she thanked me for my ‘kindness’ and--refused me, I might, supposing my eyes had been shut, have fancied that I was listening to a beautiful woman. She had been ‘marked out by the Lord’ to lead a lonely life, she said. When she was a young girl it used to make her cry when the lads went by _her_, ‘wi’ their vaices turned away,’ and the girls laughed when she put on a ribbon or a flower. But she got used to it; and she quite understood that I was trying to make up--like a gentleman as I was;--(a mighty poor kind of gentleman, I felt)--‘for summat as I’d said when I didn’t know what I was a-saying!’ Crazy people had queer ideas, and the village ‘softy’ had once taken it into his head that he was in love with Jane.... And she thanked me for sticking to my word now that I was well, and she’d be my faithful servant always and for ever, Amen! Years have passed since then.... Well, she has kept her word. I hope, when the end of everything comes for me, that honest, tender, devoted heart will be beating by my pillow. I hope----”

Andrew breaks off abruptly, and gets up and wishes us all good night.

A VANISHED HAND

“_Why_,” Daymond wrote, “_do you imagine that I shall despise you for this confession? None but a whole-souled, high-hearted woman could have made it! You have said you love me, frankly; and I say in return that had the fountains of my heart not been hopelessly dried up at their sources, they must have sprung forth gladly at such words from you. But the passion of love, dear friend, it is for me no more to know; and I hold you in too warm regard to offer you, in exchange for shekels of pure Ophir gold, a defaced and worthless coinage!”_

As Daymond penned the closing words of the sentence, the last rays of the smoky-red London sunset were withdrawn. Only a little while ago he had replenished the fire with fresh logs; but they were damp, and charred slowly, giving forth no pleasant flame. He struck a match and lighted a taper that stood upon his writing table. It created a feeble oasis of yellow radiance upon the darkness of the great studio, and the shadow of Daymond’s head and shoulders bending above it, was cast upward in gigantesque caricature upon the skylight, reduced to frosty white opacity by a burden of March snow.

Daymond poised the drying pen in white, well-kept fingers, and read over what he had written. Underlying all the elegance of well-modeled phrases was the sheer brutality of rejection, definitely expressed. His finely strung mental organization revolted painfully at the imperative necessity of being cruel.

“She asks for bread,” he cried aloud, “and I am giving her a stone!” The lofty walls and domed roof of his workshop gave back the words to him, and his sensitive ear noted the theatrical twang of the echo. Yet the pang of remorse that had moved him to speech was quite genuine.

“_You have heard my story_,” he wrote on.

A great many people had heard it, and had been bored by it; but, sensitive as Daymond’s perceptions were, he was not alive to this fact.

“_Seventeen years ago, while I was still a student dreaming of fame in a draughty Paris studio, I met the woman who was destined--I felt it then as I know it now--to be the one love of my life. She was an American, a little older than myself. She was divinely beautiful to me--I hardly know whether she was really so or not. We gave up all, each for each. She left husband, home, friends, to devote her life to me. I_----”

He paused, trying to sum up the list of his own sacrifices, and ultimately left the break, as potent to express much, and went on:

“_Guilty as I suppose we were, we were happy together--how happy I dare not even recall. Twenty-four months our life together lasted, and then came the end. It was the cholera year in Paris; the year which brought me my first foretaste of success in Art, robbed me of all joy in life.... She died. Horribly! suddenly! And the best of me lies buried in her grave!_”

The muscles of his throat tightened with the rigor that accompanies emotion; his eyelids smarted. He threw back his still handsome head, and a tear fell shining on the delicately scented paper underneath his hand. He looked at the drop as it spread and soaked into a damp little circle, and made no use of the blotting paper to remove the stain. If any crudely candid observer had told Daymond that he dandled this desolation of his--took an æsthetic delight in his devotion to the coffined handful of dust that had once lived and palpitated at his touch, he would have been honestly outraged and surprised. Yet the thing was true. He had made his sorrow into a hobby-horse during the last fifteen years of honest regret, of absolute faithfulness to the memory of his dead mistress. It gratified him to see the well-trained creature dance and perform the tricks of the _haute école_. He was aware that the romance of that past, which he regretted with such real sincerity, added something to the glamour of his achieved reputation, his established fame, in the eyes of the world. The halo which it cast about him had increased his desirability in the eyes of the great lady who, after affording him numberless unutilized opportunities for the declaration of a sentiment which her large handsome person and her large handsome property had inspired in many other men, had written him a frank, womanly letter, placing these unreservedly at his disposal.... And Daymond, in his conscious fidelity and unconscious vanity, must perforce reply wintrily, nipping with the east wind of non-reciprocity the mature passion tendrils which sought to twine themselves about him. It was a painful task, though the obligation of it tickled him agreeably--another proof of the inconsistency of the man, who may be regarded as a type of humanity; for we are all veritable Daymonds, in that the medium which gives us back to our own gloating eyes day by day is never the crystal mirror of Truth, but such a lying glass as the charlatans of centuries agone were wont to make for ancient Kings and withered Queens to mop and mow in.

Daymond pushed back his chair, and got up, and began to pace from end to end of the studio. The costly Moorish carpets muffled the falling of his footsteps, which intermittently sounded on the polished interspaces of the parqueted floor, and then were lost again in velvet silence. In the same way, his tall figure, with its thoughtfully bending head and hands clasped behind it, would be swallowed up among the looming shadows of tall easels or faintly glimmering suggestions of sculptured figures which here and there thrust portions of limbs, or angles of faces, out of the dusk--to appear again with the twilit north window for its background, or emerge once more upon the borders of the little island of tapershine. So he moved amid the works of his genius restlessly and wearily to and fro; and the incoherent mutterings which broke from him showed that his thoughts were running in the beaten track of years.

“If I could see her again--if our eyes and lips and hands and hearts might meet for even the fraction of a minute, as they used to do, it would be enough. I could wait then patiently through the slow decay of the cycles for the turning of the key in the rusty wards, and the clanking of my broken fetters on the echoing stone, and the burst of light that shall herald my deliverance from prison!...” He lifted his arms above his head. “Oh, my dead love, my dear love! if you are near, as I have sometimes fancied you were, speak to me, touch me--once, only once!...” He waited a moment with closed eyelids and outstretched hands, and then, with a dry sob of baffled longing, stumbled back to his writing table, where the little taper was flickering its last, and dropped into his armchair.

“And other women talk of love to me. What wonder I am cold as ice to them, remembering her!”

It was a scene he had gone through scores upon scores of times--words and gestures varying according to the pathetic inspiration of the moment. He knew that he was pale, and that his eyes were bleared with weeping, and he had a kind of triumph in the knowledge that the pain of retrospective longing and of present loneliness was so poignantly real and keen. Out of the blackness behind his chair at that moment came a slight stir and rustle--not the sough of a vagrant draught stirring among folds of tapestry, but an undeniably human sound. But half displeased with the suspicion that there had been a witness to his agony, he turned--turned and saw Her, the well-beloved of the old, old time, standing very near him.

Beyond a vivid sensation of astonishment, he felt little. He did not tremble with fear--what was there in that perfectly familiar face to fear? He did not fall, stammering with incoherent rapture, at her feet. And yet, a few moments ago, he had felt that for one such sight of her, returned from the Unknowable to comfort him--dragged back from the mysterious Beyond by his strong yearnings--he would have bartered fame, honor, and wealth--submitted his body to unheard-of tortures--shed his blood to the last heart’s drop. He had prayed that a miracle might be performed--and the prayer had been granted. He had longed--desperately longed--to look on her once more--and the longing was satisfied. And he could only stare wide-eyed, and gape with dropped jaw, and say stupidly:

“_You?_”

For answer she turned her face--in hue, and line, and feature, no one whit altered--so that the light might illumine it fully, and stood so regarding him in silence. Every pore of her seemed to drink in the sight of him;--her lips were parted in breathless expectancy. Every hair of the dark head--dressed in the fashion of fifteen years ago; every fold of the loose dress she wore--a garment he knew again; every lift and fall of her bosom seemed to cry out dumbly to him. There was a half-quenched spark glimmering in each of her deep eyes, that might have wanted only one breath from his mouth to break out into flame. Her hands hung clasped before her. It seemed as if they were only waiting for the signal to unclasp--for the outspread arms to summon him to her heart again. But the signal did not come. He caught a breath, and repeated, dully:

“You! It is you?”

She returned:

“It is I!”

The well-known tones! Recollection upsprang in his heart like a gush of icy waters. For a moment he was thrilled to the center of his being. But the smitten nerve chords ceased to vibrate in another moment, and he rose to offer her a chair.

She moved across and took it, as he placed it by the angle of the wide hearth; and lifted her skirts aside with a movement that came back to him from a long way off, like her tone in speaking--and, shading her deep gray eyes from the dull red heat with her white left hand, looked at him intently. He, having pushed his own seat back into the borders of the shadowland beyond the taper’s gleam and the hearth glow, looked back at her. That hand of hers bore no ring. When he had broken the plain gold link that had fettered it in time past, he had set in its place a ruby that had belonged to his mother. The ruby was on his finger now. He hid it out of sight in the pocket of his velvet painting coat, not knowing why he did so. And at that moment she broke the silence with:

“You see I have come to you at last!”

He replied, with conscious heaviness:

“Yes--I see!”

“Has the time seemed long?... We have no time, you know, where.... Is it many days since?...”

“Many days!”

“My poor Robert!... Weeks?... Months?... Not years?...”

“Fifteen years....”

“Fifteen years! And you have suffered all that time. Oh, cruel! cruel! If there was more light here, I might see your face more plainly. Dear face! I shall not love it less if there are lines and marks of grief upon it--it will not seem less handsome to me at forty than it did at twenty-five! Ah, I wish there was more light!” The old pettishly coaxing tones! “But yet I do not wish for it, lest it should show you any change in _me_!”

“You are not changed in the least.” He drew breath hard. “It might be yesterday----,” he said, and left the sentence unfinished.

“I am glad,” said the voice that he had been wont to recall to memory as wooingly sweet. “They have been kinder than I knew.... Oh! it has always been so painful to recall,” she went on, with the old little half shrug, half shudder, “that I died an _ugly_ death--that I was not pretty to look at as I lay in my coffin!...”

Daymond recoiled inwardly. That vanity, in a woman, should not be eradicated by the fact of her having simply ceased to exist, was an hypothesis never before administered for his mental digestion.