Chapter II: Part 2

“Nineteen months. He died on the 23d of February, 1877--three weeks after the last letter that I ever got from him.”

“But how--but how did you never know?” said May, wildly.

“Was it not cruel? The despotism of the White Czar! Sometimes they would keep his letters for a year, sometimes they would let them come directly. They would not let me know for fear that I--ah, God!” She sprang to her feet with a sweep of her long robe, and shook her jewelled finger at the chandelier.

“Can you blame us that we kill and die for such a despotism, such a tyranny, as that?” Then suddenly, as she crossed by a sofa, she straightened up to her full height, like a wave cresting, poised a brief second, then fell in a heap--a graceful heap--her head resting on the sofa in her hands.

Then the young man had to seek, not to console her, but to calm her, to lift her from the floor, to bring her ice-water, a fan, a feather, pour oil and salt upon the wound, toilet-vinegar, or other salads. May never knew exactly what he did; but it was like consoling an equinoctial gale. Hardly had she got fairly calm, and sobbing comfortably, and sitting in a chair, and he beside her--and he remembered patting her clasped hands, as one does a spoiled child’s--when she would dash upright, upsetting the chair, and swear her vengeance on the cruel Czar.... And at this point in his reminiscences May winced a little; for he had by no means a distinct recollection that he had not sworn his vengeance on the Czar with hers. And, when you come to think of it, the Czar’s injuries to Mr. May cried not as yet for deeds of blood.

III.

DIDO AND ÆNEAS.

May repeated his visit of condolence every day for several weeks. At the end of that time the season at Baden-Baden was drawing to a close, and it became necessary that the countess should betake herself and her sorrowing heart to some other refuge. May knew this, and it troubled him.

For he now felt that he not only admired Mme. de Valska as a patriot, but that he loved her as an exceedingly beautiful and fascinating woman. Surely, here was the heroine of his youthful dreams--a life that were a poet’s ideal.

To link himself with her and her noble aims, to be a Byron without the loneliness, to combine fame in future history with present domestic bliss--what a career!

He loved the countess, he adored her; and he fancied that she deigned to be not indifferent to his devotion, to his sympathy. But--there was the shadow of the late count.

And the countess seemed much broken by his death. True, she no longer gave way to wild bursts of passion; she never wept; in fact, in Austin’s presence, she rarely mentioned him. But there was a sadness, a weak and lonely way about her, as if she could not live without her Serge’s protecting arm. It must have been a moral support, as he could have done but little from his Siberian mine; but, whereas she used to be brave, enterprising, facing the world alone, now she seemed helpless, confiding, less heroic, perhaps, but still more womanly. Austin only loved her the more for that And it emboldened him a little. After all, her husband had been dead a year and a half, though she had only known of it a few weeks. He determined to speak. Why should his life’s happiness--possibly hers--be wrecked upon a mere scruple of etiquette?

He took his opportunity, one day, when she spoke of Italy. (Now, that the count was dead, she seemed to think less of unhappy Poland, and more of unredeemed Italy; as was natural, she being a Cascadegli.) He took her hands at the same time, and begged that she would redeem him with Italy. His life, his fortune, were at her service, should she but give him the right to protect her, and fight her battles for her always. “I know,” he added earnestly, “how your heart still bleeds for your noble husband. But your duty is to your country, to yourself. And remember, though you heard of it but yesterday, the Count Polacco has been dead a year and a half.”

“Nineteen months,” sighed the countess, with a sob, going him four weeks better. And before he left the room they were engaged. He did not go to bed that night; but wandered in the moonlight, treading as on clouds. Favored young man!

In the morning, he noticed with delight that she had laid aside her long crape veil. Already, said she, her country called for her; she must recommence her labors, and the deep mourning would attract too much notice. May had vaguely fancied she would start at once for Milan or Warsaw, and after a few months’ delay he would meet her, and they would have a quiet marriage ceremony. But she explained to him that the true arena of her labors was in Paris. Here was the focus of conspiracies; here she must live and have a _salon_, and call together her devoted countrymen. Here she would need his protection, and, with his American passport, he could safely visit her oppressed fatherland, when events required action on the spot.

Obviously, as he recognized with joy, this plan made it necessary for them to be married immediately. But then he must speak to her of his uncle’s will. Not that it mattered much; he was quite ready to renounce fortune, even life, for her; but she must know that they would not be rich. It was a mere formality; but it must be done. So he told her of the curious will; and how, if he married before August the fourteenth, 1886, he was to lose all his uncle’s property, even to what remained of the celebrated Eclipse claret. But then, what was money? Particularly to them, who had no other aims than love and patriotism; both commodities not to be bought, or measured in sterling exchange or napoleons. But the countess seemed to attach much weight to May’s communication.

Money, alas! was in these sordid times necessary, even for patriotic revolutions. The wheels must be greased, even when Bucephalus drew the chariot. Still, this was not the essential. She was quite willing to share her small fortune with the man whom she loved; but how could she bear to ruin him--to make her alliance his sacrifice? Suppose he should ever repent his action? And here May began to make his oaths eternal; but she stopped him. Was there no other way? Could there be no escape, no legal device? Lawyers would do almost anything, if paid enough. But May shook his head, and pressed again her hand to his lips; and her dark eyes brimmed with tears.

She, for herself, would be willing to suffer him as her adorer, to trust him as her knight, her follower, as he once had proposed before. And, by that arrangement, he would not lose the fortune. But what would the world say--the cold and heartless world? And she looked at May imploringly, as if for advice.

And May had to admit, in answer, that the world would be likely to make itself as disagreeable as usual under similar circumstances--particularly, now that the unhappy count was dead, and could no longer defend his heroic consort from the spite of petty spirits. The moral support was something, after all. May had true Boston reverence for what the world said; and it never occurred to him that even a heroine, who had braved two emperors, might brave its verdict.

For some moments neither spoke. What was there to say? But the silence grew oppressive; and at last she broke it with a cry.

“Farewell, then,” said she.

But at this May broke out with a round oath. Farewell it should never be. What cared he for his uncle’s fortune, or for the estate in Brookline, when his future lay in Poland? He would have a little left; he could win more by his own exertions. For a moment his impetuosity almost overbore her resistance. But then the Paris _salon_ was a necessity; and half of her own estate and all of poor Polacco’s had been seized by foreign despots. She would think it over. She would give him an answer that night. And then there came a lover’s parting; and May went back to his hotel, not wholly desperate, and got the engagement-ring he had ordered, and sent it to her. It was of small diamonds; but then there was a necklace, sent from Paris, of perfect Oriental pearls. A woman could afford to get engaged once a month, for such a necklace.

And he had gone back that evening, and he had found a letter. The countess had gone, leaving the note behind her. It was edged with deep black; and May took it now from his pocket-book, yellow and worn, with a smile that would have been cynical had it not been slightly nervous.

“_Très-cher!_” it began, “I cannot bear” (it was all in French, but we will make clumsy English of the countess’s delicate phrase, as did May, when he read it now) “that your love for me should be your ruin. It is too late for me to deny that you also have my heart; I can only fly. Otherwise my woman’s weakness would destroy either you or myself. I shall go by the morning train to Frankfurt, where I shall stop two days. If you do not wish to betray me, seek not my refuge out. I shall keep the ring as a pledge” (she says nothing about the necklace, it occurred to May, at this late date)--“a pledge that I shall be faithful to you, as, I hope, you to me. For what are six or seven years?” (At her age! thought May, with a shudder.) “I will devote them to my unhappy countrymen.” (_Compatriotes_ was the original, which may be feminine.) “But wait for me until you are free; and perhaps, who knows? my Italy redeemed! I will join you, and be one with you forever. Meantime you will travel, possibly forget me! But on the fourteenth of August, 1886, you will be at home. _On that day you will hear from me!_”

May laid the letter down and shuddered. This was most unquestionably the fourteenth day of August in the year eighteen hundred and eighty-six. He seized nervously the glass of claret; but, as he raised it to his lips, looked through the blinds, in the direction of the house. His second glass of claret fell unheeded to the floor.

A carriage was standing before the front door, and beside it stood a footman in livery.

Scene Third

THE ADMINISTRATION

I.

THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS.

The three years following May’s unhappy affair with the Countess Polacca de Valska had been uneventful. He had not plunged again into foreign parts, but became a student of the barbarities of civilization. He saw what is termed the world, particularly that manifestation of it which attains its most perfect growth in London and Paris. Perhaps it would be too much to say that he forgot the Countess de Valska, but certainly his feelings toward that unhappy fair one underwent certain modifications. And as he was in the meantime in the receipt of some twenty thousand a year from the estate of the late John Austin, he by degrees became more reconciled to the extremely practical view the cruel countess had taken of their duties in relation to that gentleman’s will.

He very often wondered as to who might be the residuary legatee. It would be a wild freak, that he was sure of. It was quite on the cards for Uncle Austin to have provided that, since his nephew did not want the money, it might go to the devil for all he cared--or to the Total Abstinence Society.

It is more sad to say that, as time went by, certain metaphysical doubts as to the objective reality of the Cascadegli and the Siberian mine began to obtrude themselves. Faith of the most stubborn description remained to him, so far as the countess’s Paris salon and her beautiful self was concerned, but he failed to see the necessary connection between Trouville, Baden-Baden, Italia Irredenta, and the Parisian police. And Serge had removed himself, for an encumbrance, in a singularly accommodating way.

But May was a man of his word; and he looked forward, at first eagerly, and afterward with mingled emotions, to their promised next meeting in Brookline, Mass.

The woman Byron might have married was not the wife for Talleyrand. And May’s volcanic or Byronic age had passed, and he was in the tertiary period. Taking her for all she said she was, she wouldn’t do in society, and he doubted that she was all she said she was.

However, it gave him no serious trouble until after his acquaintance with the beautiful Mrs. Terwilliger Dehon. Youth has a long future ahead of it, and a young man of twenty-seven easily discounts obligations maturing only in six years. But when May was thirty, and well launched in London society--whether it was the charms of Mrs. Dehon aforesaid, or the vanishing of youthful heroism and that increase of comfort which attends middle life--a political heroine like the Countess Polacca de Valska no longer seemed to him the ideal consort for a man of his temperament.

Young men have their time for falling in love with comédiennes upon the stage; and then they turn to the comédiennes of real life. Only in the latter case it is to be noted that they ever prefer the heroines of a tragedy.

It was on the very evening before all advice became superfluous, that he confided his troubles to Tom Leigh, and asked his advice. Tom Leigh advised him that “he was in a devil of a hole.”

“But what am I to do?” said May. “I am bound to meet her--in five years.”

“Perhaps she won’t come,” said Tom. But Austin shook his head. If she didn’t come, there was May Austin--but he checked himself. He had never spoken of his cousin to Tom Leigh. She was doubtless married ere this; and if she wasn’t, he preferred her to the countess.

“Perhaps her husband ain’t dead,” suggested the resourceful Tom. But May smiled, bitterly. “I guess he’s dead enough--much as ever he was.”

“Then I don’t see but what you’ll have to stand the breach of promise suit,” Tom concluded, with a grin. In these misfortunes, truly, there is something pleasant to our best friends. We know that Messrs. Winkle and Tupman must have chuckled in secret over even Bardell vs. Pickwick. But the idea was unspeakably awful to our fastidious hero. Moreover, he darkly imagined that the countess had other resources than a breach of promise suit.

This was on the evening before the hunt; on that epochal brink of their first meeting. And on the next day all this talk became superfluous; as superfluous as for Falstaff to demand the time of day.

II.

A LEAD OF HEARTS.

Mrs. Terwilliger Dehon--ah, Mrs. Dehon! Great heavens! why had they not met earlier--before she had sacrificed herself upon Terwilliger’s commonplace altars--before her radiant youth had been shrouded in tragedy?

The Russo-French police may be successfully evaded, but not so the laws of society. Naught but misery could he see in store for them both--one long life-agony of divided souls.

Of course, it took some time before this dismal prospect lay fairly out before them. At their first meeting there was nothing sadder in sight than the purple hills of Exmoor and the clear cascade of Bagworthy Water; and their talk was broken only by the cheerful yelp of hounds. And there had been fortune, too, in this; fortune we call fate, when fortune turns out ill. He had hardly seen her at the Cloudsham meet, and but just knew who she was. Thither he had gone with his friends, the Leighs, to see the red deer hunted in his ancient lair; and as he stood there, snuffing with his horse the sea-breeze that came up from Porlock Bay, immaculate in coat and patent-leathers, she had ridden up with a fat and pursy citizen beside her. This stall-fed citizen was horse-back on another square-built brute, and it was very Psychecide to call the wretch her husband. A Diana, by heaven! thought he; and, indeed, she sat her horse as any goddess might, and clothed her own riding-habit as the moon her covering of cloud.

“Who’s that?” said he to Tom Leigh.

“That’s the girl that married old Dehon,” said Tom. “She did it----”

But when or how she did it Austin never knew, for just then there was a joyous baying from the hounds, and whish! they scampered downward, skirting hanging Cloudsham Wood. Unluckily, they were at the wrong end of the field, and before they reached the steep bit of gorsy moor that overlooks the valley everyone else who meant to ride had disappeared in the cover of the forest. She reined in her beautiful horse on the very brink, and looked up the valley over Oare Hill; May stood a few yards below and looked down the valley in the direction of Porlock. Then she looked down the valley to Porlock, and May looked up the valley to Oare Hill. And their eyes met.

Her beautiful eyes glanced quickly off, like a sunbeam from a single eyeglass. She turned, as if in sudden decision, and sped like an arrow over the high moor. May’s eyes followed her; and his soul was in his eyes, and his body went after the soul. One dig of the spurs nigh unseated him, as if his spirited horse scorned such an incitement to chivalric duty; and so, for some twenty minutes on end they rode, May neither gaining nor losing, and both out of sight of the rest of the hunt. Now and then the cry of hounds came up from the forest-valley on the right, and May fancied he heard below a crashing as of bushes; but he had faith in his guiding goddess and he took her lead.

The high winds whistled by his head, and there were blue glimpses of the sea and wide gray gleams of misty moorland; but the soft heather made no sound of their mad gallop, and May was conscious of nothing else save the noble horse before him and the flutter of the lady’s riding-habit in the wind. Now the earth that rushed beneath was yellow with the gorse, now purple with the heather; here, he would sail over a turf-bank, there, his horse would swerve furiously from the feeling of an Exmoor bog; where she would ride, he would ride. This he swore to himself; but she rode straight, and he could make no gain. At the top of the moor, almost on the ridge of Dunkery Beacon, was a narrow cart-path, fenced six feet high in ferny turf, after the usual manner of Devonshire lanes. May saw it and exulted; this was sure to turn her, till she found a gate at least.

But his beautiful chase rode up the gentle inner incline and sailing over the lane like a bird, was lost to sight upon the other side.

“By heavens!” swore May to himself. “She means to kill herself.”

He rode at it and cleared the six-foot width of lane successfully; but his horse could not bunch his legs upon the narrow bank beyond. He rolled down it, and May over his head into a bank of heather.

The eager American prematurely began to swear before his head struck the ground; and before his one moderate oath was finished, he was upon his horse and off again. Mrs. Dehon had not even turned round upon his disaster; but May was none the less attracted to her by that. What was mortal mishap to a spirit wrecked like hers? Why should she?

They were riding down hill now; and she was riding a little more carefully, favoring her horse. But May cared neither for his horse nor his neck by this time. Straight down the hill he rode; and by the time they reached the Lynn he had gained the quarter-mile he lost. Here she had pulled up her horse, and he pulled up his at a courteous distance; and both sat still there, in the quiet valley; and the noise of their horses’ breathing was louder than the rustle of the wind in the old ash-trees around them.

May wondered if his pilot was at fault; but hardly had the thought crossed his mind before they heard again the music of the hounds, at full cry; and far up, two or more miles away, toward the Countisbury road, they saw the stag. Though so far off, he was distinctly visible, as he paused for one moment on the brow of the black moor, outlined against the blue sky; then he plunged downward, and the hounds after him, and May’s horse trembled beneath him; and May wondered why his goddess was not off.

But instead of riding down to meet the hunt, along the valley of the East Lynn, by Oare Church and Brendon, she turned and rode up in the direction of Chalk-water. May followed; and hardly had they left the Lynn and gone a furlong up the Chalk-water Combe, when she struck sharp to the right, breasting the very steepest part of Oare Oak Hill. If she knew that he was behind her, she did not look around; and May again had all that he could do to keep his guide in sight.

And now the event proved her skilful venery. For as they crested Oare Oak Hill, and the long bare swell of the moor rolled away before them, the sharp cry of the hounds came up like sounds of victory in the valley just below. Well had Diana known that either way of the Lynn would be too full of his enemies for the now exhausted deer to take. It must make for Bagworthy Water. Long ere they had ridden down the Lynn to the meeting of the streams, the hunt would have passed; but now, as they looked across and along the lonely Doone Valley, they saw the full pack far down at their feet, close by the foaming stream.

Then May could see his leader whip her horse, as if she would open the gap between them; and he set his teeth and swore that he would overtake her, this side the death. And he gained on her slowly, and the purple and yellow patches mingled to a carpet as they whirled by him, and he felt the springing of his horse’s haunches like the waves of a sea; and below them, hardly apace with them, was the hunt and the cry of hounds. Down one last plunging valley--no, there was another yet to cross, a deep side-combe running transversely, its bottom hid in ferns. But the hounds were now abreast of them, below, and there was no time to ride up and around. May saw her take it; and as she did, a great shelf of rock and turf broke off and fell into the brook below. He saw her turn and wave him back; it was the first notice she had taken of him; and he rode straight at the widened breach and took it squarely, landing by her side. Then, without a word, they dashed down, alongside of the slope, and there, in upper Bagworthy Waters, found the deer at bay, and the hounds; but of the hunt no sign, save Nicholas Snow, the huntsman, with reeking knife. He had already blooded his hounds; and now he sat meditatively upon a little rock by the stream, his black jockey-cap in his hands, looking at the body of the noble stag, now lifeless, that had so lately been a thing of speed and air. A warrantable deer it was, and its end was not untimely.

May pushed his panting horse up nearer hers. She was sitting motionless, her cheeks already pale again, her eyes fixed far off upon the distant moor. “Mrs. Dehon!” said he, hat in hand.

The faintest possible inclination of her head was his only response.

“I have to thank you for your lead,” said May.

For one moment she turned her large eyes down to him. “You ride well, sir,” said she.

When the M. D. H. and others of the hunt came up, they found these two talking on a footing of ancient friendship. The slot was duly cut off and presented to Mrs. Dehon; and many compliments fell to our hero’s share, for all of which May gave credit to the beautiful huntress beside him.

Tom Leigh cocked his eye at this, but did not venture to present him to her after that twenty-mile run. It were throwing the helve after the hatchet, to present the man after the heart. And thus it happened that to her our hero was never introduced.

When Mr. Dehon arrived, some hours later, Tom Leigh led him up. “Mr. Dehon,” said he, “I think that you should know my particular friend, Mr. Austin May.” And Tom Leigh cocked his eye again.

May looked at the pursy little old man, and felt that his hatred for him would only be buried in his enemy’s grave. But his enemy was magnanimous, and promptly asked them both to dinner, which May did not scruple to accept.

III.

PERSEUS AND ANDROMEDA.

Austin May fell devoutly in love with Mrs. Dehon. This was without doubt the _grande passion_ of his life. And it was hopeless.

He was just at the age when such affairs are sternest realities to modern men. He was beyond the uncertainty of youth, and before the compromises and practicalities of middle life. And there was something about Gladys Dehon to make a man who cared for her ride rough-shod, neck or nothing, over all things else. All the world admired her; would have loved her had it dared. There was no daring about it in Austin’s case; his audacity was not self-conscious; he simply followed her as he had followed her over combe and beacon on that Exmoor day.

People could tell him little about her, save that she had been very poor and very proud, and was very beautiful. Gladys Darcy--that had been her name--last of a broken family of Devon and of Ireland. She had neither sister nor brother, only a broken-down father, long since sold out of his Household captaincy. She had sold herself to Terwilliger Dehon, the rich speculator; and she was his, as a cut diamond might have been his; bought with his money, shining in his house, and he no more within her secret self than he might have been within the diamond’s brilliant surface. And two months after the wedding her old father had died and made the sacrifice in vain. Then she became the personage that the world knew as the “beautiful Mrs. Dehon.” May used to dream and ponder about her, long hours of nights and days; and he fancied that something about her life, her lonely bringing-up, her father’s precepts, had made her scornfully incredulous of there being such a thing as the novelist’s love in life. She had been a greater nature than her father, and all mankind had been nothing to her as compared with even him. Too early scorn of this world’s life prepares the soul for evil compromises.

Her character, her nature, she expressed in no way whatever. She had neither intimate friends, charitable occupations, tastes, follies, nor faults. She shone with a certain scornful glitter of splendor, but even of old Dehon’s millions she was not prodigal. She never flirted; she never looked at one man long enough for that. Her one occupation was hunting, and she rode to hounds in a way to jar the nerves of every M. F. H. in England.

Tom Leigh was afraid of her; and when they were asked for a week’s visit that autumn, in their box in Leicestershire, refused to go. May went. And if there was a man of whom she was not utterly unconscious, he surely was the one. Perhaps there was something about his way that she liked. For, with neither much speech, delay, nor artifice, our hero made his heart and soul up into a small packet and threw them into her deep eyes; and when she looked at him, he had them; and when she looked away, they were gone. And this he did perfectly frankly and directly, but without spoken words. The world saw it as clearly as did she, and liked him none the less for it. He was quite incapable of any effort to conceal it; old Terwilliger might have seen it had he been so minded. Possibly he did, and the knowledge lent an added value to his chattel in the old stockbroker’s mind. Mrs. Dehon herself treated May with perfect simplicity, but with an infinite gentleness, as the moon-goddess might have looked upon Endymion.

This state of things got to be perfectly well known to the world. Such things always are well known to the world; nothing is more striking than the perfect openness with which our heart-histories are revealed in modern life, except perhaps the ease with which those most intimately concerned maintain a polite and unembarrassed appearance of utter ignorance upon the subject. All the world loves a lover, particularly a hopeless one; and it was quite the _mot d’ordre_ of society that year for people to ask Mrs. Dehon and the handsome American to their houses together.

And Mrs. Dehon? Well, before the coming of spring she felt a great and trustful friendship for this incidental castaway upon the waters of her troubled life. May afterward remembered that she told him many things about herself; and she had spoken of herself to no one else before, her own father included. She even let him see a little of her heart. And it is an axiom that he who sees ever so little of a woman’s heart has but to take it. Seeing is possession. This is the wisdom of the fair Melusine, and other wise old mediæval myths.

It is needless to say that May had absolutely forgotten the Countess de Valska; more completely than even she had forgotten the Siberian mausoleum of her Serge. If May thought of her once in that year, it was to dismiss her memory with a curse for his own folly, and a mental oath that no Trouvillian countess would part him, should his way ever be clear to Gladys Darcy. He would not recognize the hated name of Dehon, even in his thoughts.

In his despair, he confided in Tom Leigh again. Tom saw no reason to change his previous opinion. The hole seemed if anything deeper, now that two were in it. “I don’t see but what you’ve got to escape the countess, bring Serge to life, kill old Terwilliger, and thus give her two years’ mourning,” said he. “Why the deuce didn’t you find her out first?” he added, ruefully. “Old Terwilliger only married her eighteen months ago.”

“I don’t know,” said May. “Why don’t you invent his railway schemes, and discover his Cornish mines?”

“True,” assented Tom. “Old Dehon always does get in on the ground floor. However,” he added, brightening up, “if you can marry her, you’ll get her and his money, too.”

“Damn his money,” said May.

Tom looked shocked, and changed the subject, and May’s heart continued so to bleed internally that soon Gladys Dehon’s marble brow would soften to pity as she saw him wane. Meantime Terwilliger’s capon-lined stomach waxed apace, and even his digestion was to all appearance unimpaired.

Now, it is probable that ours is the first civilization known to history where this state of things could exist, be mutually known, and continue in tranquil permanency. But it does--that is, it nearly always does--and it is a credit, after all, to our teaching and our times that it does so. The ancient Perseus cut Andromeda’s chains, and departed with her by the next P. and O. steamer they could signal; the modern one sits down on the strand beside her, and he and Andromeda die to slow music--that is, in case either should chance to die before the malady is cured. And Andromeda’s master relies on the strength of his chains and on Perseus’s good bringing-up, and is not wholly displeased at the situation. Particularly for a sly old stock-broker like Terwilliger Dehon, whose idea of values is based on the opinion of the street, a Perseus to his Andromeda is half the fun. The world, on the whole, approves the situation; but the husband Dehon is not a popular character, and it likes the Perseus better. Not, of course, that it is willing to condone anything improper, particularly on the part of Andromeda.

But Austin May stood the passive rôle for precisely twelve months; and then he made up his mind that something would have to break. He hoped it might be the neck of old Terwilliger; but Providence seldom spoils a dramatic situation by so simple a denouement. And, to tell the truth, considering the way the three rode to hounds, it was much more likely to be his own or Gladys’s. One thing was sure: their triangular relations were too strained to continue. He came to this conclusion after one precisely similar day upon Exmoor, a year after their first meeting; except that upon this occasion the deer took to the sea below Glenthorne and was drowned, and he and Gladys rode homeward side by side in silence.

Accordingly, that night Austin May wrote a letter; and in the morning showed Terwilliger a telegram from America, took his departure, shook hands hard with old Terwilliger, barely touched the slender fingers of his wife, but, when he did so, left the letter in her hand. May kept no copy of this letter; but he remembered it very well. It ran as follows:

“GLADYS:

“I must not stay in England any more. I cannot bear it. I know that
you are unhappy, and I must go where, at least, I shall not see it.
Nor can I trust myself with you after our ride of yesterday.

“Remember always that, wherever I am, I am always and only yours.
This is a very strange thing to say; but I think there are times when
men and women should show each other their hearts, however much the
truth may shock the prudes and pedants. And I do very much wish to
say that if ever you are free, I ask you to marry me.

“It is a sad thing that the circumstances of your wedded life are
such that I can say these things to you and not offend you. But you
have shown me enough of your heart for this.

“I go now into Asia. A trivial duty will call me to my family home
for one day, on August 14, 1886. Then, if I do not hear of you there,
I shall disappear again. After that I shall write you once a year.

“Good-by,

“A. M.”

Scene Fourth

THE FINAL ACCOUNTS

I.

ÆNEAS AND CAMILLA.

Poor Austin! A boy’s love feeds on the romance of hopelessness, flourishes apace in the shadow of despair; it delights in patient waiting, in faithful fidelity, in lapses of years; but a man’s is peremptory, immediate, uncompromising. Some secret instinct bids a Romeo to contemplate a tragedy with cheerfulness; and ten to one that his years of gloom change, as they fall behind him, to “_un joli souvenir_.” But a man, middle-aged, knows when he wants his Dulcinea, and he wants her here and now. No glamour of blighted affections can make up for the hard facts of life to him.

When a middle-aged man can’t get the woman he wants, there are three recognized and respectable courses open to him. He works a little harder, plays a good deal harder, or he marries someone else. The last was out of the question for a man so consumed by the fires of passion as Austin May, but the fuel of his heart was transformed into nervous energy of the entire system. He plunged again, like a rocket, into a rapid and circuitous course of travel and adventure; and, after a brilliant career through the remote East, descended, like a burned-out stick, some fifteen months later, in San Francisco. Thence he went home.

The fact was, he wanted rest. His heart was tired of throbbing, his head weary with thinking. And all his mad adventure had only tired the body, had made him sleep at night, nothing more. He had been through the world again, but Gladys Dehon was all of it to him. He thought of her now with a certain dull pain--less madly, more hopelessly, than in England the two years before.

He could not bear to go back to his home. He went to Boston, and he saw his lawyers; but he did not go out to Brookline. This he vowed he would not do until that day when he had promised Gladys he would be there. He did not forget that he had promised the countess, too; but he was no longer so much troubled by the countess. He would kill her, if necessary.

Meantime, he went to pass the winter in New York. He had himself elected a member of two fashionable clubs. He followed the hounds in Long Island and in Jersey. He went to dinners and he danced at Germans, albeit with an aching heart. He renaturalized himself; he made friends with his countrymen, and he studied his countrywomen. He got himself once more _désorienté_ in American society. He observed what respect was everywhere shown to the VanDees, and how little, comparatively, one thought of the McDums. He found that civilization was pitched on a higher scale, financially, than he had supposed. Thirty thousand a year was none too much for a man to marry on. Now, Austin had not over twenty thousand, even if he fulfilled the hard conditions of his uncle’s will.

He took an interest in yachting, and gave orders for a cutter that was to beat the prevailing style of sloop. He also imported a horse or two, and entered one of them at Sheepshead Bay. He had a luxuriously furnished flat, near Madison Square. He went to St. Augustine in the spring, with the VanDees, and while there was introduced to Georgiana Rutherford. He saw her afterward in New York, and early in June he asked her to marry him.

Miss Rutherford was a young lady of supreme social position, great wealth, and beauty. She had for two years been the leading newspaper belle of New York society. Her movements, her looks, her dresses, the state of her health, the probable state of her affections--everything about her, to the very dimples in her white shoulders--had been chronicled with crude precision in the various metropolitan journals having pretensions to _haut ton_ (for high tone is not a good translation), and had thence been eagerly copied throughout the provincial weeklies of the land. Miss Rutherford was absolutely a person to be desired.

It would not be fair to May to say that he was false to Gladys Dehon. His passion for her, too vehement, had fairly burned itself out. In the two years since he had left her, May’s heart had, as it were, banked its volcanic fires. However fissured were its ravined depths, the surface was at rest, and the lava-flood that concealed it was already cool. And a beautiful huntswoman who had ridden out of sight of her first husband, as had Gladys Dehon, was not at all the sort of person for middle-aged Austin May to marry and bring to Boston. These things he felt for some weeks before he proposed to Miss Rutherford, and she was precisely the sort of girl he saw was best. If old Uncle Austin had selected her himself, he could not have made a better choice. And well, thought May, he saw the motives of his kind old uncle’s will, and the wisdom born of much experience, and long consideration and a knowledge of Eclipse claret that had prompted it. A young man, if left to himself, would choose him a different wife for each three years of his life. It is only after he has run the gamut of all impossibilities that he settles down upon the proper thing. And this, at last, May felt assured that he had done.

May did not pretend to himself that he loved Georgiana Rutherford as he had loved Gladys Dehon. Even now, he was not blind to that. But he thought that she was pretty, and well-placed, and good style; and she had a large fortune, and a still larger family connection, all of the very best securities.

In fact, May, at least so far as he admitted to himself, did not do justice to the qualities of Miss Rutherford. Miss Rutherford was a very charming girl; much cleverer and much better educated, to say nothing of her style and beauty, than any embryo Gladys Dehon that May had ever seen. She was perfectly mistress of her own heart, as she was of her own fortune, and it was dangerous to present to her foreigners, lest they afterward shot themselves. They always went wild about her; much to Miss Rutherford’s discomfort. Some would besiege her; others would curse her; others, still, say evil things about her in the true Parisian manner. Miss Rutherford remained “more than usual calm” through it all.

She had the reputation of being a flirt, but it was not so. She tried her adorers, Portia-like, successively; the moment that they failed to reach a certain standard, it was entirely right and fair for her to drop them. Some of them would cry that they were hurt, and these she contemned from her very soul. She did not regard such matters as subjects for tears. Marriage was a step in life, like any other, and only deserved more serious consideration because it was final.

This was the woman whose love was to make heart-haven for Austin May; the serious, sober choice of his manhood, after all his boyish follies were past. He had told her very seriously and politely of his desire to marry her, one Sunday evening, on the piazza of a house at Newport. It was necessary for him to speak in a low tone, as the people of the house were not far off. She was silent for some seconds, and then he had kissed her.

But here came in the first really difficult thing to do in the whole proceeding. Not, indeed, the kissing her. But how was he to tell her of the countess and Gladys Dehon? And yet he must tell her, if only to explain the necessary delay in announcing their engagement. He looked at her in the light that came from the late sunset; how perfectly of the great world she was! He could not bear to lose her now; she was just such a wife as he would invent for himself, had she not existed. She was sitting silently, in a pose that was full of grace and training; much too finely bred to be blushing because he had kissed her. No man had ever kissed her before; and yet, when she deemed that the occasion had come when she could fitly let one do it, she no more blushed because she had so resolved than she would blush at entering a ball-room.

Then he pulled himself together, and told her very calmly the history of his life. She was greatly interested, and listened with attention and sympathy.

“Of course, you must be there--on August 14th, I mean.”

“And keep my word?”

“That,” said Miss Rutherford, “I must leave to you. You can’t keep your word with both of them.”

“After all,” said May, hopefully, “they may not come.”

“You surely do not expect them to cross the Atlantic in person to meet you?”

“Oh, no!” said May. “They won’t do that--but they may write or telegraph.” But May did not feel sure what Mme. Polacca de Valska might or might not do.

“At all events,” said she, “I think our engagement had better not come out until after the 14th of August.” And May felt constrained to admit that this was best.

“And I do not think that you had better see me until then.”

“What?” cried Austin.

But Miss Rutherford was firm. She would not have him with her every day unless she could tell people that they were engaged. What was she to say to the world if, after that 14th of August, he were to be engaged to Mrs. Dehon, for instance? This she delicately hinted; but, moreover, she told him she had promised to visit the Larneds, at Pomfret, and the Charles Mt. Vernons, at Beverly, and to spend three weeks with the Breezes, at Mount Desert, in August. He could not trail about after her; and it was only three months, after all. So May had consented, with an ill grace; and when she left, two days later, he found nothing better than to join VanKnyper on a yachting cruise. Then he had gone up on the Restigouche, salmon-fishing; and on the 12th of August he was in the Maine woods.

II.

THE IDYL OF ANTEROS.

In the leisure of the forest, Austin May reflected--for the first time comprehensively--upon his conduct of life. It seemed to him that the only sensible action of many wasted years was his getting engaged to Georgiana Rutherford; and yet, for the moment, it rather added to his perplexities. He felt convinced that Tom Leigh would say it put him in a greater hole than ever. Here was he engaged to three women at once, and all the engagements matured upon the fourteenth day of August proximo. Why is it that there is not such a thing as the making an assignment for the benefit of one’s heart’s creditors? He might then place himself in the hands of some respectable chaperone as assignee, and pay each of the contracting parties thirty-three per cent. Or he might even get a composition, or an extension at long time. Possibly the other two would assign their claims to Georgiana. If she were the sole creditor, he fancied that they might effect an arrangement. She certainly had the only lien on the few remaining assets of his hard-worked ventricles.

Georgiana Rutherford! What a perfectly civilized creature she was. How well she would look at the end of the state dining-table in the Brookline house, with the épergne in front of her. Then how gracefully she would sweep out, at the head of the procession of ladies--Brookline ladies, with a guest or two from Boston or Jamaica Plains--and leave him and his friends to their bachelor-talk and cigars. But first, after being married, he had promised to take her up the Nile. May had already been up the Nile.

May slipped off the rock into the rushing river. He had got to thinking, in the absence of salmon, and forgotten his whereabouts. It was clumsy of him, he reflected, as his boots queaked soddenly campward. He was getting heavy, and slow, and middle-aged. And suddenly he felt a yearning for the wilds, for wilder wilds even than Aroostook County. He had been now for six years in high civilizations--Japan, India, England, or, at worst, the States. There were several dreams of his scheming-time not yet effected. Among others, a trip from Hudson’s Bay, in canoes, through the Great Slave lake to the Pacific. He was almost on the ground, with good guides and an outfit; why not start at once? But there was the fourteenth of August next to come, he reflected.

A strange wagon was in the camp when he got back; a single buckboard from the nearest settlement, and it bore a pretty girl. May had conversation with her. A veritable Lady of the Aroostook was she; not over-idealized, like the heroine of Mr. Howells. Really, she had a certain rudimentary charm. Suppose, thought May, I were to make her my dusky bride? For dusky, read freckled.

By Jove, thought May--an idea indeed. If he gave it out as such? If, in consideration of a trip to Boston, new bonnets, and a junket of quite Merovingian dimensions, she were to consent to go to Brookline and personate his bride, for that day only? How natural that he, at the very end of his eleven years, should have plunged into nature and married la première venue. It was just the thing, he felt assured his friends would say, that he was certain to do. Why, even the heroes of the Lady of Aroostook did as much. And even the Comtesse Polacca dei Cascadegli de Valska could have nothing to reply to such a living argument as this Maine girl would present. My wife--Mrs. Austin May. Gladys Dehon would scorn, but believe. And then, having nobly earned her reward, his salvatress might retire to her primitive forest decked with new fal-lals to astound the rustic breast.

But now, confound it, here as always, the cursed conventions rose in his way. The proprieties were ever his fatality, a very ghost of Banquo at the feast of life. Why had he been born in Boston? True, they had once saved him from the countess; but now they were to offer him a humble sacrifice to her unlovely years. For she came first chronologically, and she was certain to come first in fact.

May had no further ideas; and he had to leave his river at the height of the salmon season.

We have told how, on the 14th of August, he arrived at Brookline, true to his appointment with all three. He got to Boston late in the evening before, went to his club, passed a sleepless night, and took an early morning train for Brookline, as we have seen.

And, perhaps, as we have also seen, a much more awkward thing than this had happened. Austin May was there, ready to meet any one of them. The period of probation required by the will had elapsed.

But as May travelled up to the city in that hot weather, he had been wondering to himself which and how many of them he should see, and it had become very clear to him that he did not feel the least desire to see any one of the three.

His uncle’s will had well been justified. With shocked shamefacedness he thought of the countess, that Trouville heroine that he believed to be little better than an adventuress, a gambler, tracked by the police. And Mrs. Dehon--well, if Mrs. Dehon were to ride madly up that quiet Boston lawn, May felt sure that he should flee in terror. And Georgiana Rutherford--now that it came to the point, and after his three months’ consideration, May did not feel that he wished to marry even Georgiana Rutherford.

He gave little thought to his impending doom, still less thought of escaping it. He was as one who had been released eleven years upon parole, and must now give himself up to be shot. He even gave himself little curiosity as to whose the fatal bullet would prove to be. A man ordered out with a file of soldiers to be executed looks upon the levelled row of muzzles with an absolute impartiality. He was in the position of the celebrated d’Artagnan, who, having three duels in the Pré aux Clercs, and certain of being killed by Athos at 12, gave himself little anxiety about Porthos, who was to follow at 12.15, or Aramis, who was only due at 12.30.

But, as the day wore on, and the reaction followed the artificial strength given by many cigars, his state of mind had approximated to an abject and unreasoning terror. And in this mood he was, late in the afternoon, when he turned and saw, stationary before his front door, that carriage, with its footman in livery.

His one instinct was to conceal himself. Nervously he grabbed the heavy “Burton’s Anatomy;” the secret door swung open; the fountain in the lake began to play, and in a score of seconds May was hiding in its cool and watery depths.

III.

THE UNCERTAIN GLORY OF A NEW YORK GIRL.

When May emerged in the little grass island, screened safely by the play of falling waters, he was breathless with the run; and his heart pounded against his ribs with the violence of his emotions. The countess it unquestionably was. None but she would arrive in open carriage and pair and splendid livery. And May reckoned he would have to stay there, in the shelter of the fountain, until the light made his escape safe and possible. As for seeing her, that was out of the question. Had he still cared for Mrs. Dehon, he might have choked off the other one; but he had not pluck for it now. He had mildly hoped that Gladys and the countess might have arrived at the same time and settled it between them; but Allah had willed otherwise. It was damp and uncomfortable upon the little island, however, without even a cigar; and he did not dare go back to the pavilion.