THE IVORY SERIES

Each, 16mo, gilt top, 75 cents

AMOS JUDD. By J. A. Mitchell
Editor of “Life”
IA. A Love Story. By Q
[Arthur T. Quiller-Couch]
THE SUICIDE CLUB
By Robert Louis Stevenson
IRRALIE’S BUSHRANGER
By E. W. Hornung
A MASTER SPIRIT
By Harriet Prescott Spofford
MADAME DELPHINE
By George W. Cable
ONE OF THE VISCONTI
By Eva Wilder Brodhead
A BOOK OF MARTYRS
By Cornelia Atwood Pratt

Other Volumes to be announced

A BOOK OF MARTYRS

When first they mixed the Clay of Man and clothed

His Spirit in the Robe of Perfect Beauty,

For Forty Mornings did an evil Cloud

Rain Sorrows over him from Head to Foot;

And when the Forty Mornings passed to Night,

There came one Morning-Shower—one Morning-Shower

Of Joy—to Forty of the Rain of Sorrow!

And though the better Fortune came at last

To seal the Work, yet every Wise Man knows

Such Consummation never can be here!

From the Persian of Jàmi.

A BOOK OF MARTYRS

BY
CORNELIA ATWOOD PRATT

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK, 1896

Copyright, 1896, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOK BINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

NOTE

Of the stories in this volume, “Witherle’s Freedom” and “Serene’s Religious Experience” were first published in The Century Magazine; “A Consuming Fire,” “Hardesty’s Cowardice” and “The Honor of a Gentleman” in Harper’s Weekly; “At the End of the World” in The Independent. Thanks are due the publishers of these periodicals for permission to reprint the stories here.

CONTENTS

WITHERLE’S FREEDOM

His little world was blankly astonished when Witherle dropped out of it. His disappearance was as his life had been, neat, methodical, well-arranged; but why did he go at all?

He had lived through thirty-seven years of a discreetly conducted existence with apparent satisfaction; he had been in the ministry for fifteen years; he had been married nearly as long; he was in no sort of difficulty, theological, financial, or marital; he possessed the favor of his superiors in the church, the confidence of his wife, and he had recently come into a small fortune bequeathed him by a great-aunt. Every one regarded him as very “comfortably fixed”—for a minister.

Of all the above-enumerated blessings he had divested himself methodically, as a man folds up and lays aside worn garments. He resigned his charge, he transferred his property to his wife, and wrote her a farewell note in which he said, in a light-hearted way which she mistook for incoherence, that she would never see him again. These things done, he dropped out of the sight of men as completely as a stone fallen into a pond.

His friends speculated and investigated, curiously, eagerly, fearfully, but to no purpose. What was the motive? Where had he gone? Had he committed suicide? Was he insane? The elders of the church employed a detective, and the friends of his wife took up the search, but Witherle was not found. He had left as little trace whereby he could be followed as a meteor leaves when it rushes across the sky.

Presently, of course, interest in the event subsided; the church got a new minister; Witherle’s wife went back to her own people; the world appeared to forget. But there was a man of Witherle’s congregation named Lowndes who still meditated the unsolved problem at odd moments. He was a practical man of affairs, with the psychological instinct, and he found the question of why people do the things that they do perennially interesting. Humanity from any point of view is a touching spectacle; from a business standpoint it is infinitely droll. Personally Lowndes was one of the wholesome natures for whom there are more certainties than uncertainties in life, and he felt for Witherle the protecting friendliness that a strong man sometimes has for one less strong. He advised him as to his investments on week-days, and listened patiently Sunday after Sunday, as the lesser man expounded the mysteries of creation and the ways of the Creator, sustained by the reflection that Witherle was better than his sermons. He did not consider him an interesting man, but he believed him to be a good one. When Witherle was no longer at hand, Lowndes counselled and planned for his wife, and otherwise made himself as useful as the circumstances would permit. He felt sorry for Witherle’s wife, a nervous woman to whom had come as sharp an upheaval of life as death itself could have brought about, without the comfort of the reflection that the Lord had taken away.

Fate, who sometimes delivers the ball to those who are ready to play, decreed that, in May, about a year after Witherle’s disappearance, Lowndes should be summoned from the Pennsylvania village where he lived to one of the cities of an adjoining State. His business took him along the dingy river-front of the town. Crossing a bridge one evening toward sunset, he stopped idly to note the shifting iridescent tints that converted the river for the hour into a heavenly water-way between the two purgatorial banks lined with warehouses and elevators black with the inexpressibly mussy and depressing blackness of the soot of soft coal. His glance fell upon a coal-barge being loaded at the nearest wharf. He leaned over the rail, wondering why the lines of the figure of one of the workmen looked familiar to him. The man seemed to be shovelling coal with a peculiar zest. As this is a species of toil not usually performed for the love of it, his manner naturally attracted attention. While Lowndes still stood there pondering the problematical familiarity of his back, the man turned. Lowndes clutched the rail. “By Jove!” he said, excitedly, for he saw that the features were the features of Witherle. Their expression was exultant and illuminated beyond anything ever vouch-safed to that plodding gospeller. Moving along the bridge to a point just above the barge, he took out his watch and looked at it. It was nearly six o’clock.

The next fifteen minutes were exciting ones for Lowndes. His mind was in a tumult. It is no light matter to make one’s self the arbiter of another man’s destiny; and he knew enough of Witherle to feel sure that the man’s future was in his hands. He looked down at him dubiously, his strong hands still clutching the rail tensely. For a minute he felt that he must move on without making his presence known, but even as he resolved, the clocks and whistles clamorously announced the hour.

When the men quitted their work, the man whom Lowndes’s eyes were following came up the stairs that led to the bridge. As he passed, Lowndes laid a hand lightly on his shoulder.

“How are you, Witherle?” he said.

The man stared at him blankly a second, recoiled, and his face turned livid as he shook off the friendly hand. The other men had passed on, and they were alone on the bridge.

“I’m a free man,” said Witherle, loudly, throwing back his shoulders. “Before God, I’m a free man for the first time in my life. What do you want with me?”

“Don’t rave,” said Lowndes, sharply. “I sha’n’t hurt you. You couldn’t expect me to pass you without speaking, could you?”

“Then you weren’t looking for me?” asked Witherle, abjectly.

“I have business on hand.” Lowndes spoke impatiently, for he did not enjoy seeing his old friend cower. “I am here for the Diamond Oil Co. I was crossing the bridge just now, when I saw a man down there shovelling coal as if he liked it; and I delayed to look, and saw it was you. So I waited for you. That is all there is of it. You needn’t stop if you don’t wish.”

Witherle drew a deep breath. “My nerves aren’t what they were,” he said, apologetically. “It played the mischief with them to—” He left the sentence hanging in the air.

“If you weren’t going to like the results, you needn’t have gone,” observed Lowndes, in an impartial tone. “Nobody has been exactly able to see the reasons for your departure. You left the folks at home a good deal stirred up.”

“What do they say about me there?”

Lowndes hesitated. “Most of them say you were crazy. Your wife has gone back to her people.”

“Ah!”

Lowndes looked at the man with a sudden impulse of pity. He was leaning against the rail, breathing heavily. His face was white beneath the soot, but in his eyes still flamed that incomprehensible ecstasy. He was inebriate with the subtle stimulus of some transcendent thought. But what thought? And what had brought him here? This creature, with his sensitive mouth, his idealist’s eyes, his scholar’s hands, black and hardened now but still clearly recognizable, was at least more out of place among the coal-heavers than he had been in the pulpit. Lowndes felt mightily upon him the desire to shepherd this man back to some more sheltered fold. The highways of existence were not for his feet; not for his lips the “Song of the Open Road.” He did not resist the desire to say, meditatively:

“You have no children——”

“God in His mercy be praised for that one blessing!” Witherle muttered. But Lowndes went on as if he did not hear:

“But you might think of your wife.”

“I have thought of her—too much. I thought about everything too much. I am tired of thinking,” said Witherle. “I wonder if you understand?”

“Not in the least.”

Witherle looked about him restlessly. “Come where we can talk—down there on that pile of boards. I think I’d like to talk. It is very simple when once you understand it.”

He led the way to the opposite end of the bridge, and down an embankment to a lumber-pile at the water’s edge. Up the river the May sun had gone down in splendor, leaving the water crimson-stained. Witherle sat down where he could look along the river-reaches.

“Hold on a minute, Witherle. Don’t talk to me unless you are sure you want to.”

“That’s all right. There’s nothing much to tell. I don’t seem to mind your understanding.”

Witherle was silent a minute.

“It is very simple,” he said again. “This is the way I think about it. Either you do the things you want to do in this world or else you don’t. I had never done what I wanted until I left home. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody by coming away in that style, and I don’t think that I did. I’d rather not be selfish, but life got so dull. I couldn’t stand it. I had to have a change. I had to come. The things you have to do you do. There was a Frenchman once who committed suicide and left a note that said: ‘Tired of this eternal buttoning and unbuttoning.’ I know how he felt. I don’t know how other men manage to live. Perhaps their work means more to them than mine had come to mean to me. It was just dull, that was all, and I had to come.”

Lowndes stared. Truly it was delightfully simple. “Why, man, you can’t chuck your responsibilities overboard like that. Your wife——”

“When I was twenty-one,” interrupted Witherle, “I was in love. The girl married somebody else. Before I met my wife she had cared for a man who married another woman. You see how it was. We were going to save the pieces together. As a business arrangement that sort of thing is all right. I haven’t a word to say against it. She is a good woman, and we got on as well as most people, only life was not ecstasy to either of us. Can’t you see us tied together, snaking our way along through existence as if it were some gray desert, and we crawling on and on over the sand, always with our faces bent to it, and nothing showing itself in our way but the white bones of the men and women who had travelled along there before us—grinning skulls mostly? Can’t you see it?”

Looking up, he caught an expression in Lowndes’s eyes the meaning of which he suspected. “Oh, you needn’t be afraid,” he added, hastily, “that this is insanity. It’s only imagination. That’s the way I felt. And my work was only another long desert to be toiled through—with the Sphinx at the end. I wasn’t a successful preacher, and you know it. I hadn’t any grip on men. I hadn’t any grip on myself—or God. I couldn’t see any use or any meaning or any joy in it. The whole thing choked me. I wanted a simpler, more elemental life. I wanted to go up and down the earth and try new forms of living, new ways of doing things, new people. Life—that was what I wanted; to feel the pulse of the world throb under my touch, to be in the stir, to be doing something. I was always haunted by the conviction that life was tremendous if only you once got at it. I couldn’t get at it where I was. I was rotting away. So when that money was left me it came like a godsend. I knew my wife could live on that, and I didn’t think she’d miss me much, so I just came off.”

“And you like it?”

The man’s eyes flamed. “Like it? It’s great! It’s the only thing there is. I’ve been from Maine to California this year. I wintered in a Michigan lumber-camp—that was hell. I was a boat-hand on the Columbia last summer—that was heaven. I worked in a coal-mine two months—a scab workman, you understand. And now I’m at this. I tell you, it is fine to get rid of cudgelling your brains for ideas that aren’t there, and of pretending to teach people something you don’t know, and take to working with your hands nine hours a day and sleeping like a log all night. I hadn’t slept for months, you know. These people tell me about themselves. I’m seeing what life is like. I’m getting down to the foundations. I’ve learned more about humanity in the last six months than I ever knew in all my life. I believe I’ve learned more about religion. I’m getting hold of things. It’s like getting out on the open sea after that desert I was talking about—don’t you see? And it all tastes so good to me!” He dropped his head into his hands, exhausted by the flood of words he had poured rapidly out.

Lowndes hesitated long before he spoke. He was reflecting that Witherle’s exaltation was pathological—he was drunk with the air of the open road.

“Poor little devil!” he thought. “One might let alone a man who finds ecstasy in being a coal-heaver; but it won’t do.”

“Life is big,” he admitted, slowly; “it’s tremendous, if you like; it’s all you say—but it isn’t for you. Don’t you see it is too late? We’re all of us under bonds to keep the world’s peace and finish the contracts we undertake. You’re out of bounds now. You have got to come back.”

Witherle stared at him blankly. “You say that? After what I’ve told you? Why, there’s nothing to go back for. And here—there is everything! What harm am I doing, I’d like to know? Who is hurt? What claims has that life on me? Confound you!” his wrath rising fiercely, “how dare you talk like that to me? Why isn’t life for me as well as for you?”

This Witherle was a man he did not know. Lowndes felt a little heart-sick, but only the more convinced that he must make his point.

“If you didn’t feel that you were out of bounds, why were you afraid of me when I came along?”

The thrust told. Witherle was silent. Lowndes went on: “Bread isn’t as interesting as champagne, I know, but there is more in it, in the long run. However, that’s neither here nor there—if a man has a right to his champagne. But you haven’t. You are mistaken about your wife. She was all broken up. I don’t pretend to say she was desperately fond of you. I don’t know anything about that. But, anyhow, she had made for herself a kind of life of which you were the centre, and it was all the life she had. You had no right to break it to pieces getting what you wanted. That’s a brutal thing for a man to do. She looked very miserable, when I saw her. You’ve got to go back.”

Witherle turned his head from side to side restlessly, as a sick man turns on the pillow.

“How can I go back?” he cried, keenly protesting. “Don’t you see it’s impossible? I’ve burned my ships.”

“That’s easy enough. You went off in a fit of double consciousness, or temporary insanity, or something like that, and I found you down here. It will be easy enough to reinstate you. I’ll see to that.”

“That would be a lie,” said Witherle, resolutely.

Lowndes stared at him curiously, reflecting upon the fastidiousness with which men pick and choose their offenses against righteousness, embracing one joyously and rejecting another with scorn.

“Yes; so it would. But I have offered to do the lying for you, and you are off your head, you know.”

“How?” demanded Witherle, sharply.

“Any man is off his head who can’t take life as it comes, the bad and the good, and bear up under it. Suicide is insanity. You tried to commit suicide in the cowardliest way, by getting rid of your responsibilities and saving your worthless breath. Old man, it won’t do. You say you’ve learned something about religion and humanity—come back and tell us about it.”

Witherle listened to his sentence in silence. His long lower lip trembled.

“Anything more?” he demanded.

“That’s all. It won’t do.”

The man dropped his head into his hands and sat absolutely still. Lowndes watched the river growing grayer and grayer, and listened to the lapping of the water against the lumber, remembering that one of the poets had said it was a risky business tampering with souls, and matter enough to save one’s own. The reflection made him feel a little faint. What if Witherle had a right to that life in spite of everything—that life for which he had given all?

Witherle lifted his head at last. “You are sure my wife was broken up over it?” he demanded, despairingly.

“Sure.”

Witherle cast one longing glance across the darkening river to the black outlines of the barge. There, ah, even there, the breath of life was sweet upon his lips, and toil was good, and existence was worth while.

“I thought no soul in the world had a claim on me. Curse duty! The life of a rat in a cage!” he cried. “Oh, Lord, I haven’t the head nor the heart for it!”

The words were bitter, but his voice broke with compliance. He rose to his feet and stretched out his arms with a fierce gesture, then dropped them heavily by his side.

“Come on,” he said.

Lowndes, watching him with that curious, heart-sickening sympathy growing upon him, was aware that he had seen the end of a soul’s revolt. Rightly or wrongly, Witherle’s freedom was over.

SERENE’S RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE; AN INLAND STORY

Serene and young Jessup, the school-teacher, were leaning over the front gate together in the warm summer dusk.

“See them sparkin’ out there?” inquired Serene’s father, standing at the door with his hands in his pockets, and peering out speculatively.

“Now, father, when you know that ain’t Serene’s line.”

It was Mrs. Sayles who spoke. Perhaps there was the echo of a faint regret in her voice, for she wished to see her daughter “respectit like the lave”; but “sparkin’” had never been Serene’s line.

“Serene wouldn’t know how,” said her big brother.

“There’s other things that’s a worse waste o’ time,” observed Mr. Sayles, meditatively, “and one on ’em’s ’Doniram Jessup’s ever-lastin’ talk-talk-talkin’ to no puppus. He’s none so smart if he does teach school. He’d do better on the farm with his father.”

“He’s more’n three hundred dollars ahead, and goin’ to strike out for himself, he says,” observed the big brother, admiringly.

“Huh! My son, I’ve seen smart young men strike out for themselves ’fore ever you was born, and I’ve seen their fathers swim out after ’em—and sink,” said Mr. Sayles, oracularly.

Outside the June twilight was deepening, but Serene and the school-teacher still leaned tranquilly over the picket-gate. The fragrance of the lemon-lilies that grew along the fence was in the air, and over Serene’s left shoulder, if she had turned to look, she would have seen the slight yellow crescent of the new moon sliding down behind the trees.

They were talking eagerly, but it was only about what he had written in regard to “Theory and Practice” at the last county examination.

“I think you carry out your ideas real well,” Serene said, admiringly, when he had finished his exposition. “’Tisn’t everybody does that. I know I’ve learned a good deal more this term than I ever thought to when I started in.”

The teacher was visibly pleased. He was a slight, wiry little fellow, with alert eyes, a cynical smile, and an expression of self-confidence, which was justifiable only on the supposition that he had valuable information as to his talents and capacity unknown to the world at large.

“I think you have learned a good deal of me,” he observed, condescendingly; “more than any of the younger ones. I have taken some pains with you. It’s a pleasure to teach willing learners.”

At this morsel of praise, expressed in such a strikingly original manner, Serene flushed and looked prettier than ever. She was always pretty, this slip of a girl, with olive skin, pink cheeks, and big, dark eyes, and she always looked a little too decorative, too fanciful, for her environment in this substantial brick farm-house, set in the midst of fat, level acres of good Ohio land. It was as if a Dresden china shepherdess had been put upon their kitchen mantel-shelf.

Don Jessup stooped and picked a cluster of the pink wild rosebuds, whose bushes were scattered along the road outside the fence, and handed them to her with an admiring look. Why, he scarcely knew; it is as involuntary and natural a thing for any one to pay passing tribute to a pretty girl as for the summer wind to kiss the clover. Serene read the momentary impulse better than he did himself, and took the buds with deepening color and a beating heart.

“He gives them to me because he thinks I look like that,” she thought with a quick, happy thrill.

“Yes,” he went on, rather confusedly, his mind being divided between what he was saying and a curiosity to find out if she would be as angry as she was the last time if he should try to kiss the nearest pink cheek; “I think it would be a good idea for you to keep on with your algebra by yourself, and you might read that history you began. I don’t know who’s going to have the school next fall. Now, if I were going to be here this summer, I——”

“Why, Don,” Serene interrupted him, using the name she had not often spoken since Adoniram Jessup, after a couple of years in the High School, had come back to live at home, and to teach in their district—“why, Don, I thought your mother said you were going to help on the farm this summer.”

Adoniram smiled, a thin-lipped, complacent little smile.

“Father did talk that some, but I’ve decided to go West—and I start to-morrow.”

To-morrow! And that great, hungry West, which swallows up people so remorselessly! Something ailed Serene’s heart; she hoped he could not hear it beating, and she waited a minute before saying, quietly:

“Isn’t this sort of sudden?”

“I don’t like to air my plans too much. There’s many a slip, you know.”

“You’ll want to come to the house and say good-by to the folks, and tell us all about it?” As he nodded assent, she turned and preceded him up the narrow path.

“When will you be back?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Maybe never. If I have any luck, I’d like the old people to come out to me. I’m not leaving anything else here.”

“You needn’t have told me so,” said Serene to herself.

“Father, boys, here’s Don come in to say good-by. He’s going West to-morrow.”

“Well, ’Doniram Jessup! Why don’t you give us a s’prise party and be done with it?”

Don smiled cheerfully at this tribute to his secretive powers, and sitting down on the edge of the porch, began to explain.

Serene glanced around to see that all were listening, and then slipped quietly out through the kitchen to the high back porch, where she found a seat behind the new patent “creamery,” and leaning her head against it, indulged in the luxury of a few dry sobs. Tears she dared not shed, for tears leave traces. Though “sparkin’” had not been Serene’s line, love may come to any human creature, and little Serene had learned more that spring than the teacher had meant to impart or she to acquire.

When the five minutes she had allotted to her grief were past she went back to the group at the front of the house as unnoticed as she had left them. Her father was chaffing Jessup good-naturedly on his need of more room to grow in, and Don was responding with placid ease. It was not chaff, indeed, that could disturb his convictions as to his personal importance to the development of the great West. Presently he rose and shook hands with them all, including herself—for whom he had no special word—said a general good-by, and left them.

“He’s thinking of himself,” thought Serene a little bitterly, as she watched him go down the yard; “he is so full of his plans and his future he hardly knows I am here. I don’t believe he ever knew it!”

To most people the loss of the possible affection of Don Jessup would not have seemed a heavy one, but the human heart is an incomprehensible thing, and the next six weeks were hard for Serene. For the first time in her life she realized how much we can want that which we may not have, and she rebelled against the knowledge.

“Why?” she asked herself, and “why?” Why should she have cared, since he, it seemed, did not? Why couldn’t she stop caring now? And, oh, why had he been so dangerously kind when he did not care? Poor little Serene! she did not know that we involuntarily feel a tenderness almost as exquisite as that of love itself toward whatever feeds the fountain of our vanity.

Presently, tired of asking herself, she turned to asking Heaven, which is easier. For we cannot comfortably blame ourselves for the inability to answer our own inconvenient inquiries, but Heaven we can both ask and blame. Serene had never troubled Heaven much before, but now, in desperation, she battered at its portals night and day. She did not pray, you understand, to be given the love which many small signs had taught her to believe might be hers, the love that, nevertheless, had not come near to her. Though young, she was reasonable. She instinctively recognized that when we cannot be happy it is necessary for us to be comfortable, if we are still to live. So, after a week or two of rebellion, she asked for peace, sure that if it existed for her anywhere in the universe, God held it in His keeping, for, now, no mortal did.

She prayed as she went about her work by day; she prayed as she knelt by her window at evening, looking out on the star-lit world; she prayed when she woke late in the night and found her room full of the desolate white light of the waning moon, and always the same prayer.

“Lord,” said Serene, “this is a little thing that I am going through. Make me feel that it is a little thing. Make me stop caring. But if you can’t, then show me that you care that I am not happy. If I could feel you knew and cared, I think I might be happier.”

But in her heart she felt no answer, and peace did not come to fill the place of happiness.

In our most miserable hours fantastic troubles and apprehensions of the impossible often come to heap themselves upon our real griefs, making up a load which is heavier than we can bear. Serene began to wonder if God heard—if He was there at all.

Her people noticed that she grew thin and tired-looking, and attributed it to the fierce hot weather. For it was the strange summer long remembered in the inland country where they lived as the season of the great drought. There had been a heavy snowfall late in April; from that time till late in August no rain fell. The heat was terrible. Dust was everywhere. The passage of time from one scorching week to another was measured by the thickening of its heavy inches on the highway; it rose in clouds about the feet of cattle in the burnt-up clover-fields. The roadside grass turned to tinder, and where a careless match had been dropped, or the ashes shaken from a pipe, there were long, black stretches of seared ground to tell the tale. The resurrection of the dead seemed no greater miracle than these blackened fields should shortly turn to living green again, under the quiet influence of autumn rains.

And now, in the early days of August, when the skies were brass, the sun a tongue of flame, and the yellow dust pervaded the air like an ever-thickening fog, a strange story came creeping up from the country south of them. “Down in Paulding,” where much of the land still lay under the primeval forest, and solitary sawmills were the advance-guards of civilization; where there were great marshes, deep woods, and one impenetrable tamarack swamp, seemed the proper place for such a thing to happen if it were to happen at all. The story was of a farmer who went out one Sunday morning to look at his corn-field, forty good acres of newly cleared land, ploughed this year only for the second time. The stunted stalks quivered in the hot air, panting for water; the blades were drooping and wilted like the leaves of a plant torn up from the ground. He looked from his blasted crop to the pitiless skies, and, lifting a menacing hand, cursed Heaven because of it. Those who told the story quoted the words he used, with voices awkwardly lowered; but there was nothing impressive in his vulgar, insensate defiance. He was merely swearing a shade more imaginatively than was his wont. The impressive thing was that, as he stood with upraised hand and cursing lips, he was suddenly stricken with paralysis, and stood rooted to the spot, holding up the threatening arm, which was never to be lowered. This was the first story. They heard stranger things afterward: that his family were unable to remove him from the spot; that he was burning with an inward fire which did not consume, and no man dared to lay hand on him, or even approach him, because of the heat of his body.

It was said that this was clearly a judgment, and it was much talked of and wondered over. Serene listened to these stories with a singular exultation, and devoutly trusted that they were true. She had needed a visible miracle, and here was one to her hand. Why should not such things happen now as well as in Bible days? And if the Lord descended in justice, why not in mercy? The thing she hungered for was to know that He kept in touch with each individual human life, that He listened, that He cared. If He heard the voice of blasphemy, then surely He was not deaf to that of praise—or agony. She said to herself, feverishly, “I must know, I must see for myself, if it is true.”

She said to her father: “Don’t you think I might go down to Aunt Mari’s in Paulding for a week? It does seem as if it might be cooler down there in the woods,” and her tired face attested her need of change and rest. He looked at her with kindly eyes.

“Don’t s’pose it will do you no great harm, if your mother’ll manage without you; but your Aunt Mari’s house ain’t as cool as this one, Serene.”

“It’s different, anyhow,” said the girl, and went away to write a postal-card to Aunt Mari and to pack her valise.

When she set out, in a day or two, it was with as high a hope as ever French peasant maid took on pilgrimage to Loretto. She hoped to be cured of all her spiritual ills, but how, she hardly knew. The trip was one they often made with horses, but Serene, going alone, took the new railroad that ran southward into the heart of the forests and the swamps. Her cousin Dan, with his colt and road-cart, met her at the clearing, where a shed beside a water-tank did duty for town and station, and drove her home. Her Aunt Mari was getting dinner, and, after removing her hat, Serene went out to the kitchen, and sat down on the settee. The day was stifling, and the kitchen was over-heated, but Aunt Mari was standing over the stove frying ham with unimpaired serenity.

“Well, and so you thought it would be cooler down here, Serene? I’m real glad to see you, but I can’t promise much of nothin’ about the weather. We’ve suffered as much as most down here.”

Serene saw her opportunity.

“We heard your corn was worse than it is with us. What was there in that story, Aunt Mari, about the man who was paralyzed on a Sunday morning?”

“Par’lyzed, child? I don’t know as I just know what you mean.”

“But he lived real near here,” persisted Serene—“two miles south and three east of the station, they said. That would be just south of here. And we’ve heard a good deal about it. You must know, Aunt Mari.”

“Must be old man Burley’s sunstroke. That’s the only thing that’s happened, and there was some talk about that. He’s a Dunkard, you know, and they are mightily set on their church. Week ago Sunday was their day for love-feast, and it was a hundred an’ seven in the shade. He hadn’t been feelin’ well, and his wife she just begged him not to go out; but he said he guessed the Lord couldn’t make any weather too hot for him to go to church in. So he just hitched up and started, but he got a sunstroke before he was half-way there, and they had to turn round and bring him home again. He come to all right, but he ain’t well yet. Some folks thinks what he said ’bout the weather was pretty presumpshus, but I dunno. Seems if he might use some freedom of speech with the Lord if anybody could, for he’s been a profitable servant. A good man has some rights. I don’t hold with gossipin’ ’bout such things, and callin’ on ’em ‘visitations’ when they happen to better folks than me—why, Serene! what’s the matter?” in a shrill crescendo of alarm, for the heat, the journey, and the disappointment had been too much for the girl. Her head swam as she grasped the gist of her aunt’s story, and perceived that upon this simple foundation must have been built the lurid tale which had drawn her here, and for the first time in her healthy, unemotional life she quietly fainted away.

When she came to herself she was lying on the bed in Aunt Mari’s spare room. The spare room was under the western eaves, and there were feathers on the bed. Up the stairway from the kitchen floated the pervasive odor of frying ham. A circle of anxious people, whose presence made the stuffy room still stuffier, were eagerly watching her. Opening her languid eyes to these material discomforts of her situation, she closed them again. She felt very ill, and the only thing in her mind was the conviction that had overtaken her just as she fainted—“Then God is no nearer in Paulding than at home.”

As the result of closing her eyes seemed to be the deluging of her face with water until she choked, she decided to reopen them.

“Well,” said Aunt Mari, heartily, “that looks more like. How do you feel, Serene? Wasn’t it singular that you should go off so, just when I was tellin’ you ’bout ’Lishe Burley’s sunstroke? I declare, I was frightened when I looked around and saw you. Your uncle would bring you up here and put you on the bed, though I told him ’twas cooler in the settin’-room. But he seemed to think this was the thing to do.”

“I wish he’d take me down again,” said Serene, feebly and ungratefully, “and” (after deliberation) “put me in the spring-house.”

“What you need is somethin’ to eat,” said Aunt Mari with decision. “I’ll make you a cup of hot tea, and” (not heeding the gesture of dissent) “I don’t believe that ham’s cold yet.”

Serene had come to stay a week, and a week accordingly she stayed. The days were very long and very hot; the nights on the feather-bed under the eaves still longer and hotter. She had very little to say for herself, and thought still less. There is a form of despair which amounts to coma.

“Serene’s never what you might call sprightly,” observed Aunt Mari in confidence to Uncle Dan’el, “but this time, seems if—well, I s’pose it’s the weather. Wonder if I’ll ever see any weather on this earth to make me stop talkin’?” It was a relief all around when the day came for her departure.

“I’ll do better next time, Aunt Mari,” said Serene as she stepped aboard the train; but she did not greatly care that she had not done well this time.

When the short journey was half over, the train made a longer stop than usual at one of the way stations. Then, after some talking, the passengers gradually left the car. Serene noticed these things vaguely, but paid no attention to their meaning. Presently a friendly brakeman approached and touched her on the shoulder.

“Didn’t you hear ’em say, Miss, there was a freight wreck ahead, and we can’t go on till the track is clear?”

“How long will it be?” asked Serene, slowly finding the way out of her reverie.

“Mebbe two hours now, and mebbe longer. I’ll carry your bag into the depot, if you like,” and he possessed himself of the shiny black valise seamed with grayish cracks, and led the way out of the car.

The station at Arkswheel is a small and grimy structure set down on a cinder bank. Across the street on one corner is a foundry, and opposite that a stave-factory with a lumber-yard about it. In the shadow of the piled-up staves, like a lily among thorns, stands a Gothic chapel, small, but architecturally good. Serene, looking out of the dusty window, saw it, and wondered that a church should be planted in such a place. When, presently, although it was a week-day, the bell began to ring, she turned to a woman sitting next to her for an explanation.

“That’s the church Mr. Bellington built. He owns the foundry here. They have meeting there ’most any time. ’Piscopal, it is.”

“I don’t know much about that denomination,” observed Serene, sedately.

“My husband’s sister-in-law that I visit here goes there. She says her minister just does take the cake. They think the world an’ all of him.”

Serene no longer looked interested. The woman rose, and walked about the room, examining the maps and time-tables. By and by she came back and stopped beside Serene.

“If we’ve got to wait till nobody knows when, we might just as well go over there and see what’s goin’ on—to the church, I mean. Mebbe ’twould pass the time.”

Inside the little church the light was so subdued that it almost produced the grateful effect of coolness. As they sat down behind the small and scattered congregation, Serene felt that it was a place to rest. The service, which she had never heard before, affected her like music that she did not understand. The rector was a young man with a heavily lined face. His eyes were dark and troubled, his voice sweet and penetrating. When he began his sermon she became suddenly aware that she was hearing some one to whom what he discerned of spiritual truth was the overwhelmingly important thing in life, and she listened eagerly. This was St. Bartholomew’s day, it appeared. Serene did not remember very clearly who he was, but she understood this preacher when, dropping his notes and leaning over his desk, he seemed to be scrutinizing each individual face in the audience before him to find one responsive to his words.

He was not minded, he said, to talk to them of any lesson to be drawn from the life of St. Bartholomew, of whom so little was known save that he lived in and suffered for the faith. The one thought that he had to give had occurred to him in connection with that bloody night’s work in France so long ago, of which this was the anniversary, when thousands were put to death because of their faith.

“Such things do not happen nowadays,” he went on. “That form of persecution is over. Instead of it, we have seen the dawning of what may be a darker day, when those who profess the faith of Christ have themselves turned to persecute the faith which is in their hearts. Faith—the word means to me that trust in God’s plans for us which brings confidence to the soul even when we stand in horrible fear of life, and mental peace even when we are facing that which we cannot understand. We persecute our faith in many ingenious ways, but perhaps those torture themselves most whose religion is most emotional—those who are only sure that God is with them when they feel the peace of His presence in their hearts. A great divine said long ago that to love God thus is to love Him for the spiritual loaves and fishes, which He does not mean always to be our food. But for those who think that He is not with them when they are unaware of His presence so, I have this word: When you cannot find God in your hearts, then turn and look for Him in your lives. When you are soul-sick, discouraged, unhappy; when you feel neither joy nor peace, nor even the comfort of a dull satisfaction in earth; when life is nothing to you, and you wish for death, then ask yourself, What does God mean by this? For there is surely some lesson for you in that pain which you must learn before you leave it. You are not so young as to believe that you were meant for happiness. You know that you were made for discipline. And the discipline of life is the learning of the things God wishes us to know, even in hardest ways. But He is in the things we must learn, and in the ways we learn them. There is a marginal reading of the first chapter of the revised version of the Gospel of St. John which conveys my meaning: ‘That which hath been made was life in Him, and the life [or, as some commentators read, and I prefer it, simply life] was the light of men.’ That is, before Christ’s coming the light of men was in the experience to be gained in the lives He gave them. And it is still true. Not His life only, then, but your life and mine, which we know to the bitter-sweet depths, and whose lessons grow clearer and clearer before us, are to guide us. Life is the light of men. I sometimes think that this, and this only, is rejecting Christ—to refuse to find Him in the life He gives us.”

Serene heard no more. What else was said she did not know. She had seized upon his words, and was applying them to her own experiences with a fast-beating heart, to see if haply she had learned anything by them that “God wanted her to know.” She had loved unselfishly. Was not that something? She had learned that despair and distrust are not the attitudes in which loss may be safely met. She had become conscious in a blind way that the world was larger and nearer to her than it used to be, and she was coming to feel a sense of community in all human suffering. Were not all these good things?

When the congregation knelt for the last prayer, Serene knelt with them, but did not rise again. She did not respond even when her companion touched her on the shoulder before turning to go. She could not lift her face just then, full as it was of that strange rapture which came of the sudden clear realization that her life was the tool in the hands of the Infinite by which her soul was shaped. “Let me be chastened forever,” the heart cries in such a moment, “so that I but learn more of thy ways!”

Some one came slowly down the aisle at last, and stopped, hesitating, beside the pew where she still knelt. Serene looked up. It was the rector. He saw a slender girl in unbecoming dress, whose wild-rose face was quivering with excitement. She saw a man, not old, whose thin features nevertheless wore the look of one who has faced life for a long time dauntlessly—the face of a good fighter.

“Oh, sir, is it true what you said?” she demanded, breathlessly.

“It is what I live upon,” he answered, “the belief that it is true.” And then, because he saw that she had no further need of him, he passed on, and left her in the little church alone. When at length she recrossed the street to the station, the train was ready, and in another hour she was at home.

They were glad to see her at home, and they had a great deal to tell that had happened to them in the week. They wondered a little that she did not relate more concerning her journey, but they were used to Serene’s silences, and her mother was satisfied with the effect of the visit when she observed that Serene seemed to take pleasure in everything she did, even in the washing of the supper-dishes.

There were threatening clouds in the sky that evening, as there had often been before that summer, but people were weary of saying that it looked like a shower. Nevertheless, when Serene woke in the night, not only was there vivid lightning in the sky, and the roll of distant but approaching thunder, but there was also the unfamiliar sound of rain blown sharply against the roof, and a delicious coolness in the room. The long drought was broken.

She sat up in her white bed to hear the joyous sound more clearly. It was as though the thunder said, “Lift up your heart!” And the rapturous throbbing of the rain seemed like the gracious downpouring of a needed shower on her own parched and thirsty life.

AN INSTANCE OF CHIVALRY

Applegate entered his door that night with a delightful sense of the difference between the sharp November air without and the warmth and brightness within, but as he stood in the little square hall taking off his overcoat, this comfortable feeling gave way to a heart-sick shrinking of which he was unashamed. He was a man of peace, and through the closed door of the sitting-room came the sound of voluble and angry speech. The voice was that of Mrs. Applegate.

Reluctantly he pushed open the door. It was a pretty quarrel as it stood. At one end of the little room, gay with light and color, was Julie, leaning on the mantel. She wore a crimson house-dress a trifle low at the throat, which set off vividly her rich, dark beauty. Undoubtedly she had beauty, and a singular, gypsy-like piquancy as well. It did not seem to matter that the gown was slightly shabby. She was kicking the white fur hearth-rug petulantly now and then to punctuate her remarks.

Dora, with her book in her lap, sat in a low chair by the lamp. Dora was a slender, self-possessed girl of fifteen, in whose cold, young eyes her step-mother had read from the first a concentrated and silent disapproval which was really very exasperating.

“It’s the first time that woman has set foot in this house since I’ve been the mistress of it,” Julie was saying, angrily. “Maybe she thinks I ain’t fine enough for her to call on. Lord! I’d like to tell her what I think of her. It was her business to ask for me, and it was your business to call me, whether she did or not. Maybe you think I ain’t enough of a lady to answer Mrs. Buel Parry’s questions. I’d like to have you remember I’m your father’s wife!”

Dora’s head dropped lower in an agony of vicarious shame. How, her severe young mind was asking itself, could any woman bear to give herself away to such an appalling extent? To reveal that one had thwarted social ambitions; to admit that one might not seem a lady—degradation could go no farther in the young girl’s eyes.

“What’s the matter, Dora?” asked Applegate, quietly, in the lull following Julie’s last remark.

“Mrs. Parry came to the door to ask what sort of a servant Mary Samphill had been. Mamma was in the kitchen, teaching the new girl how to mould bread, and I answered Mrs. Parry’s questions. She did not ask for any one.”

“I say it was Dora’s business to ask her in and call me. Whose servant was Mary Samphill, I’d like to know. Was she Dora’s?”

Applegate crossed the room to the open fire and stretched his chilled fingers to the flame.

“Aren’t you a little unreasonable, Julie?” he inquired, gently. “If Mrs. Parry didn’t ask for you, I don’t quite see what Dora could do but answer her questions.”

“Me unreasonable? I like that! Mrs. Buel Parry came to this house to see me, but Dora was bound I shouldn’t see her. Dora thinks”—she hesitated a moment, choking with her resentment—“she thinks I ain’t Mrs. Parry’s kind, and she was going to be considerate and keep us apart. Oh, yes! She thinks she knows what the upper crust wants. If I’m not Mrs. Parry’s sort, I’d like to know why. You thought I was your sort fast enough, John Applegate!” and Julie threw back her dark head with a gesture that was very fine in its insolence. “I guess if Mrs. Parry and Mrs. Otis and that set are company for you, they’re company for me. Of course you take Dora’s side. You always do. I can tell you one thing. When I was Frazer MacDonald’s wife I had some things I don’t have now, for all you think you’re so fine. MacDonald never would have stood by and seen me put upon. If folks wasn’t civil to his wife, he knew the reason why. I might have done better than marry you—I might——”

Julie stopped to take breath.

“Do you think I can make Mrs. Parry call on you if she doesn’t want to, Julie?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“What is the good of marrying a man who can’t do anything for you?” she demanded. “It isn’t any more than my due she should call, and you know it. She was thick enough with your first wife. And me to be treated so after all I’ve done for you and your children. I give you notice I’m going to Pullman to-morrow, and I’m going to stay till I get good and ready to come back. Maybe you’ll find out who makes this house comfortable for you, John Applegate. Maybe you will.”

And with this Julie slipped across the room—she could not be ungraceful even when she was most violent—and left it, shutting the door with emphasis.

There was deep silence between Applegate and his daughter for a little while. Why should either speak when there was really nothing to say?

“Supper is on the table, father,” observed Dora, at last. “There is no use in letting it get any colder,” and still in silence they went to their meal.

Julie MacDonald, born Dessaix, was the daughter of a French market-gardener and of a Spanish woman, the danseuse of a travelling troupe, who, when the company was left stranded in an Indiana town, married this thrifty admirer. The latter part of Julie’s childhood was passed in a convent school, whence she emerged at fifteen a rabid little Protestant with manners which the Sisters had subdued slightly but had not been able to make gentle. She learned the milliner’s trade, which she practised until, at twenty-two, she married Frazer MacDonald, a gigantic, red-haired Scotch surveyor.

A few years after their marriage MacDonald went West, intending to establish himself and then send for Julie, whom he left meanwhile with her sister, the wife of a well-to-do mechanic living in Pullman. His train was wrecked somewhere in Arizona and the ruins took fire. MacDonald was reported among those victims whose bodies were too badly burned for complete identification, and though Julie refused to believe it at first, when the long days brought no tidings she knew in her heart that it was true.

She established herself at her old trade in one of the county towns of the Indiana prairie country, where she worked and prospered for three years before John Applegate asked her to marry him.

At the convent they had tried to teach her to worship God, but abstractions were not in Julie’s line. Respectability was more tangible than righteousness, and deference to the opinion of the world an idea she could grasp. The worship of appearances came to be Julie’s religion. Nothing could be more respectable than John Applegate, who was a hardware dealer and one of Belleplaine’s leading merchants, and she accepted him with an almost religious enthusiasm.

The hardware business in a rich farming country is a good one. And then, in her own very unreasonable way, Julie was fond of Applegate.

“A little mouse of a man, yes,” she said to herself, “but such a good little mouse! I’ll have my way with things. When MacDonald was alive he had his way. Now—we’ll see.”

As for Applegate, he was just an average, unheroic, common-place man, such stuff as the mass of people are made of. Having decided to remarry for the sake of his children, he committed the not-uncommon inconsistency of choosing a woman who could never be acceptable to them and who suited himself entirely only in certain rare and unreckoning moods which were as remote from the whole trend of his existence as scarlet is from slate-color. But he found this untamed daughter of the people distinctly fascinating, and, with the easy optimism of one whose eyes are blinded by beauty, assured himself that it would come out all right.

His little daughter kissed him dutifully and promised to try to be a good girl when he told her he was going to bring a new mamma home, a pretty, jolly mamma, who would be almost a play-mate for her and Teddy, but secretly she felt a prescience that this was not the kind of mamma she wanted.

A few weeks after his marriage her father found her one day shaking in a passion of childhood’s bitter, ineffectual tears. With great difficulty he succeeded in getting an explanation. It came in whispers, tremblingly.

“Papa, she—she says bad words! And this morning Teddy said one too. Oh, Papa”—the sobs broke out afresh—“how can he grow up to be nice and how am I going to get to be a lady—a lady like my own mamma—if nobody shows us how?”

Applegate dropped his head on his chest with a smothered groan. For himself he had not minded the occasional touches of profanity—to do her justice, they were rare—with which Julie emphasized her speech, for they had only seemed a part of the alien, piquantly un-English element in her which attracted him, but when Dora looked up at him with his dead wife’s eyes he could not but acknowledge the justice of her tragic horror of “bad words.”

“What have I done?” he asked himself as the child nestled closer, and then, “What shall I do?” for he found himself face to face with a future before whose problems he shrank helplessly.

One does not decide upon the merits of falcons according to the traditions of doves, and it would be quite as unjust to judge Julie Applegate from what came to be the standpoint of her husband and his children. There is no doubt that she made life hideous to them, but this result was accidental rather than intentional. There are those to whom the unbridled speech of natures without discipline is as much a matter of course as the sunshine and the rain. If to Applegate and Dora it was thunder-burst and cyclone, whose was the blame?

And if one is considering the matter of grievances, Julie certainly had hers. Most acute of all, she had expected to acquire a certain social prominence by her marriage, but was accorded only a grudging toleration by the circle to which the first Mrs. Applegate had belonged. This was the more grinding from the fact that in Belleplaine, as in all small towns of the great Middle-West, social distinctions are based upon personal quality and not upon position.

Then, there was Dora. From Julie’s point of view tempers were made to lose, but Dora habitually retained hers with a dignity which, while it endeared her to her father, only exasperated his wife. Julie developed an inordinate jealousy of the girl, and the love of the father and daughter became a rod to scourge them. With the most pacific intentions in the world it was impossible to divine what would or what would not offend Julie.

On the occasion of the family quarrel recorded, Julie departed for Pullman, according to her threat, and for a few days thereafter life was delightfully peaceful. Dora exhibited all sorts of housewifely aptitudes and solicitudes, the wheels of the household machinery moved smoothly, and the domestic amenities blossomed unchecked.

Julie had been gone a week, a week of golden Indian summer weather, when one day, as Applegate was leaving the house after dinner, he was met by the telegraph boy just coming in. He stopped at the gate and tore the message open. It was from Julie’s brother-in-law, Hopson, and condensed in its irreverent ten words a stupefying amount of information. Applegate stared at it, unable to understand.

“MacDonald has come alive. Claims Julie. High old times. Come.”

He crushed the yellow paper in his hands, and turning back, sat down heavily upon the steps of the veranda, staring stupidly ahead of him. If this were true, what did it mean to him? Out of the hundred thoughts assailing him one only was clear and distinct. It meant that he was free!

He turned the telegram over in his fingers, touching it with the look of one who sees visions.

Free. His home—his pretty home—his own again, with Dora, who grew daily more like her mother, as his little housekeeper. Free from that tempestuous presence which repelled even while it attracted. Free from the endless scenes, the tiresome bickerings, the futile jealousies, the fierce reproaches and the fierce caresses, both of which wearied him equally now. He had scarcely known how all these things which he bore in silence had worn and weighed upon him, but he knew at last. The measure of the relief was the measure of the pressure also. The tears trickled weakly down his cheeks, and he buried his face in his hands as if to hide his thankfulness even from himself. The prospect overwhelmed him. No boy’s delight nor man’s joy had ever been so sweet as this. When he looked up, the pale November sunlight seemed to hold for him a promise more alluring than that of all the May-time suns that ever shone—the promise of a quiet life.

As he accustomed himself to this thought, there came others less pleasant. The preeminently distasteful features of the situation began to raise their heads and hiss at him like a coil of snakes. He shrank nervously from the gossip and the publicity. This was a hideous, repulsive thing to come into the lives of upright people who had thought to order their ways according to the laws of God and man. It was only Julie’s due to say she had intended that. But it had come and must be met. Julie was MacDonald’s wife, not his—not his. The only thing to be done was to accept the situation quietly. He knew that his own compensation was ample—no price could be too great to pay for this new joy of freedom—but he shivered a little when he thought of Julie with her incongruous devotion to the customary and the respectable. It would hurt Julie cruelly, but there was no one to blame and no help for it. And MacDonald could take her away into the far new West and make her forget this miserable interlude. He knew that for MacDonald, who was of a different fibre from himself, Julie’s charm had been sufficient and enduring. Whatever might be the explanation of his long absence, Applegate did not doubt that the charm still endured. And, in the end, even they themselves would forget this unhappy time which was just ahead of them, and its memory would cease to seem a shame and become a regret, whose bitterness the passing years would lessen tenderly.

Having thus adjusted the ultimate outcome of the situation to suit the optimism of his mood, Applegate drew out his watch and looked at it. He had just time to make the necessary arrangements and catch the afternoon train for Chicago.

He telegraphed to Hopson, and as he left the train that evening he found the man awaiting him. The two shook hands awkwardly and walked away together in silence. It was only after they had gone a block or two that Hopson said:

“Well, I’m glad you’ve got here. We’ve been having a picnic up at the house. Julie’s been having the hysterics and MacDonald—you never knew MacDonald, did you?”

Applegate listened politely. He had a curious feeling that Julie and her hysterics were already very far away and unimportant to him, but he did not wish to be so brutal as to show this.

“When did MacDonald return and where has he been?” he asked, gravely.

“He got here yesterday. He says he had a shock or something in that accident—anyhow, he just couldn’t remember anything, and when he come to he didn’t know who he was, nor anything about himself, and all his papers and clothes had been burnt, so there was nothing to show anybody who he was. He could work, and he was all right most ways. Says he was that way till about six months ago, when a Frisco doctor got hold of him and did something to his head that put him right. He has papers from the doctor to show it’s true. His case attracted lots of attention out there. Of course he wrote to Julie when he came to himself, but his letters went to our old address and she never got them. So then he started East to see about it. He says he’s got into a good business and is going to do well.”

There was a long silence. Presently Hopson began again, awkwardly:

“I don’t know how you feel about it, but I think Julie’d ought to go back to him.”

Applegate’s heart began to beat in curious, irregular throbs; he could feel the pulsing of the arteries in his neck and there was a singing in his ears.

“Of course Julie agrees with you?” he said, thickly.

“Well, no; she don’t. That’s what she wanted me to talk to you about. She can’t see it but one way. She says he died, or if he didn’t it was the same thing to her, and she married you. She says nobody can have two husbands, and it’s you who are hers. I told her the law didn’t look at it that way, and she says then she must get a divorce from MacDonald and remarry you. MacDonald says if she brings suit on the ground of desertion he will fight it. He says he can prove it ain’t been no wilful desertion. But probably he could be brought round if he saw she wouldn’t go back to him anyhow. MacDonald wouldn’t be spiteful. But he was pretty fond of Julie.”

Applegate had stopped suddenly in the middle of Hopson’s speech. Now he went forward rapidly, but he made no answer. Hopson scrutinized his face a moment before he continued:

“Julie says you won’t be spiteful either. She says maybe she was a little hasty in what she said just before she came up here. But you know Julie’s way.”

“Yes,” said Applegate, “I know Julie’s way.”

Hopson drew a breath of relief. He had at least discharged himself of his intercessory mission.

“I tell Julie she’d better put up with it and go with MacDonald. The life would be more the sort of thing she likes. But her head’s set and she won’t hear to anything Henriette or I say. You see, that’s what Julie holds by, what she thinks is respectable. And it’s about all she does hold by.” He hesitated, groping blindly about in his consciousness for words to express his feeling that this passionate, reckless nature was only anchored to the better things of life by her fervent belief in the righteousness of the established social order.

“Julie thinks everything of being respectable,” he concluded, lamely.

“Is it much farther to your house?” asked Applegate, dully.

“Right here,” answered Hopson, pulling his key from his pocket.

They entered a crude little parlor whose carpet was too gaudy, and whose plush furniture was too obviously purchased at a bargain, but its air was none the less heavy with tragedy. A single gas-jet flickered in the centre of the room. On one side a great, broad-shouldered fellow sat doggedly with his elbows on his knees and his face buried in his hands. There was resistance in every line of his figure. On the sofa opposite was Julie in her crimson dress. As she lifted her face eagerly, Applegate noticed traces of tears upon it. Mrs. Hopson, who had been moving about the room aimlessly, a pale and ineffective figure between these two vivid personalities, came to a standstill and looked at Applegate breathlessly. For a moment no one spoke. Then Julie, baffled by the eyes she could not read, sprang to her feet and stretched out her hands with a vehement gesture.

“John Applegate, you’ll put me right! You will. I know you will. I can’t go back to him! How can I?” Her hungry eyes scrutinized his still, inexpressive face.

“John, you aren’t going to turn me off?” Her voice had a despairing passion in it. “You won’t refuse to marry me if I get the divorce? Good God! You can’t be such a devil. John! oh, John!”

Applegate sat down and looked at her apathetically. He was not used to being called a devil. Somehow it seemed to him the term was misapplied.

“Don’t take on so, Julie,” he said, quietly. The room seemed to whirl around him, and he added, with a palpable effort:

“I’ll think it over and try to do what is best for both of us.”

At that MacDonald lifted his sullen face from his hands for the first time and glanced across at the other man with blood-shot eyes. Then he rose slowly, his great bulk seeming to fill the room, and walking over to Applegate’s chair stood in front of it looking down at him. His scrutiny was long. Once Applegate looked up and met his eyes, but he was too tired to bear their fierce light and dropped his own lids wearily.

MacDonald turned from him contemptuously and faced his wife, who averted her head.

“Look at me, Julie!” he cried, appealingly. “I am better worth it than he is. Good Lord! I don’t see what you see in him. He’s so tame! Let him go about his business. He’s nobody. He don’t want you. Come along with me and we’ll lead a life! You shall cut a dash out there. I can make money hand over fist. It’s the place for you. Come on!”

For a moment Julie’s eyes glittered. The words allured her, but her old gods prevailed. She threw out her arms as if to ward off his proposal.

“No, no,” she said, shrilly. “I cannot make it seem right. You were dead to me, and I married him. One does not go back to the dead. If I am your wife, what am I to him? It puts me in the wrong these two years. I cannot have it so, I tell you. I cannot have it so!”

Applegate felt faint and sick. Rising, he groped for the door. “I must have air,” he said to Hopson, confusedly. “I will come back in a minute.”

Once outside, the cool November night refreshed him. He dropped down upon the doorstep and threw back his head, drinking in long breaths as he looked up at the mocking stars.

When he found at last the courage to ask himself what he was going to do, the answer was not ready. The decision lay entirely in his hands. He might still be free if he said the word; and as he thought of this he trembled. He had always tried to be what his neighbors called a straight man, and he wanted to be straight in this also. But where, in such a hideous tangle, was the real morality to be found? Surely not in acceding to Julie’s demands! What claim had she upon the home whose simple traditions of peace and happiness she had trampled rudely under foot? Was it not a poor, cheap convention of righteousness which demanded he should take such a woman back to embitter the rest of his days and warp his children’s lives? He rebelled hotly at the thought. That it was Julie’s view of the ethical requirement of her position made it all the more improbable that it was really right. Surely his duty was to his children first, and as for Julie, let her reap the reward of her own temperament. The Lord God Himself could not say that this was unjust, for it is so that He deals with the souls of men.

It seemed to him that he had decided, but as he rose and turned to the door a new thought stabbed him so sharply that he dropped his lifted hand with a groan.

Where had been that sense of duty to his children, just now so imperative, in the days when he had yielded to Julie’s charm against his better judgment? Had duty ever prevailed against inclination with him? Was it prevailing now?

High over all the turmoil and desperation of his thoughts shone out a fresh perception that mocked him as the winter stars had mocked. For that hour at least, the crucial one of his decision, he felt assured that in the relation of man and woman to each other lies the supreme ethical test of each, and in that relation there is no room for selfishness. It might be, indeed, that he owed Julie nothing, but might it not also be that the consideration he owed all womankind could only be paid through this woman he had called his wife? This was an ideal with which he had never had to reckon.

He turned and sat him down again to fight the fight with a chill suspicion in his heart of what the end would be.

Being a plain man he had only plain words in which to phrase his decision when at last he came to it.

“I chose her and I’ll bear the consequences of my choice,” he said, “but I’ll bear them by myself. His aunt will be glad to take Teddy, and Dora is old enough to go away to school.” Then he opened the door.

Hopson and his wife had left the little parlor. Julie on the sofa had fallen into the deep sleep of exhaustion. MacDonald still sat there, with his head in his hands, and to him Applegate turned. At the sound of his step the man lifted his massive head and shook it impatiently.

“Well?” he demanded.

“The fact is, Mr. MacDonald, Julie and I don’t get along very well together, but I don’t know as that is any reason why I should force her to do anything that don’t seem right to her. She thinks it would be more”—he hesitated for a word—“more nearly right to get a divorce from you and remarry me. As I see it now, it’s for her to say what she wants, and for you and me to do it.”

MacDonald looked at him piercingly.

“You know you’d be glad of the chance to get rid of her!” he exclaimed, excitedly. “In Heaven’s name, then, why don’t you make her come to me? You know I suit her best. You know she’s my sort, not yours. She’s as uncomfortable with you as you with her, and she’d soon get over the feeling she has against me. Man! There’s no use in it! Why can’t you give my own to me?”

“I can’t say I don’t agree with you,” said Applegate, and the words seem to ooze painfully from his white lips, “but she thinks she’d rather not, and—it’s for her to say.”

A CONSUMING FIRE

He is a man who has failed in this life, and says he has no chance of success in another; but out of the fragments of his failures he has pieced together for himself a fabric of existence more satisfying than most of us make of our successes. It is a kind of triumph to look as he does, to have his manner, and to preserve his attitude toward advancing years—those dreaded years which he faces with pale but smiling lips.

If you would see my friend Hayden, commonly called by his friends the connoisseur, figure to yourself a tall gentleman of sixty-five, very erect still and graceful, gray-headed and gray-bearded, with fine gray eyes that have the storm-tossed look of clouds on a windy March day, and a bearing that somehow impresses you with an idea of the gracious and pathetic dignity of his lonely age.

I myself am a quiet young man, with but one gift—I am a finished and artistic listener. It is this talent of mine which wins for me a degree of Hayden’s esteem and a place at his table when he has a new story to tell. His connoisseurship extends to everything of human interest, and his stories are often of the best.

The last time that I had the honor of dining with him, there was present, besides the host and myself, only his close friend, that vigorous and successful man, Dr. Richard Langworthy, the eminent alienist and specialist in nervous diseases. The connoisseur evidently had something to relate, but he refused to give it to us until the pretty dinner was over. Hayden’s dinners are always pretty, and he has ideals in the matter of china, glass, and napery which it would require a woman to appreciate. It is one of his accomplishments that he manages to live like a gentleman and entertain his friends on an income which most people find quite inadequate for the purpose.

After dinner we took coffee and cigars in the library.

On the table, full in the mellow light of the great lamp (Hayden has a distaste for gas), was a bit of white plush on which two large opals were lying. One was an intensely brilliant globe of broken gleaming lights, in which the red flame burned strongest and most steadily; the other was as large, but paler. You would have said that the prisoned heart of fire within it had ceased to throb against the outer rim of ice. Langworthy, who is wise in gems, bent over them with an exclamation of delight.

“Fine stones,” he said; “where did you pick them up, Hayden?”

Hayden, standing with one hand on Langworthy’s shoulder, smiled down on the opals with a singular expression. It was as if he looked into beloved eyes for an answering smile.

“They came into my possession in a singular way, very singular. It interested me immensely, and I want to tell you about it, and ask your advice on something connected with it. I am afraid you people will hardly care for the story as much as I do. It’s—it’s a little too rococo and sublimated to please you, Langworthy. But here it is:

“When I was in the West last summer, I spent some time in a city on the Pacific slope which has more pawnbrokers’ shops and that sort of thing in full sight on the prominent streets than any other town of the same size and respectability that I have ever seen. One day, when I had been looking in the bazaars for something a little out of the regular line in Chinese curios and didn’t find it, it occurred to me that in such a cosmopolitan town there might possibly be some interesting things in the pawn-shops, so I went into one to look. It was a common, dingy place, kept by a common, dingy man with shrewd eyes and a coarse mouth. Talking to him across the counter was a man of another type. Distinction in good clothes, you know, one is never sure of. It may be only that a man’s tailor is distinguished. But distinction in indifferent garments is distinction indeed, and there before me I saw it. A young, slight, carelessly dressed man, his bearing was attractive and noteworthy beyond anything I can express. His appearance was perhaps a little too unusual, for the contrast between his soft, straw-colored hair and wine-brown eyes was such a striking one that it attracted attention from the real beauty of his face. The delicacy of a cameo is rough,” added the connoisseur, parenthetically, “compared to the delicacy of outline and feature in a face that thought, and perhaps suffering, have worn away, but this is one of the distinctive attractions of the old. You do not look for it in young faces such as this.

“On the desk between the two men lay a fine opal—this one,” said Hayden, touching the more brilliant of the two stones. “The younger man was talking eagerly, fingering the gem lightly as he spoke. I inferred that he was offering to sell or pawn it.

“The proprietor, seeing that I waited, apparently cut the young man short. He started, and caught up the stone. ‘I’ll give you—’ I heard the other say, but the young man shook his head, and departed abruptly. I found nothing that I wanted in the place, and soon passed out.

“In front of a shop-window a little farther down the street stood the other man, looking in listlessly with eyes that evidently saw nothing. As I came by he turned and looked into my face. His eyes fixed me as the Ancient Mariner’s did the Wedding Guest. It was an appealing yet commanding look, and I—I felt constrained to stop. I couldn’t help it, you know. Even at my age one is not beyond feeling the force of an imperious attraction, and when you are past sixty you ought to be thankful on your knees for any emotion that is imperative in its nature. So I stopped beside him. I said: ‘It is a fine stone you were showing that man. I have a great fondness for opals. May I ask if you were offering it for sale?’

“He continued to look at me, inspecting me calmly, with a fastidious expression. Upon my word, I felt singularly honored when, at the end of a minute or two, he said: ‘I should like to show it to you. If you will come to my room with me, you may see that, and another;’ and he turned and led the way, I following quite humbly and gladly, though surprised at myself.

“The room, somewhat to my astonishment, proved to be a large apartment—a front room high up in one of the best hotels. There were a good many things lying about which obviously were not hotel furnishings, and the walls, the bed, and even the floor were covered with a litter of water-color sketches. Those that I could see were admirable, being chiefly impressions of delicate and fleeting atmospheric effects.

“I took the chair he offered. He stood, still looking at me, apparently not in haste to show me the opals. I looked about the room.

“‘You are an artist?’ I said.

“‘Oh, I used to be, when I was alive,’ he answered, drearily. ‘I am nothing now.’ And then turning away he fetched a little leather case, and placed the two opals on the table before me.

“‘This is the one I have always worn,’ he said, indicating the more brilliant. ‘That chillier one I gave once to the woman whom I loved. It was more vivid then. They are strange stones—strange stones.’

“He said nothing more, and I sat in perfect silence, only dreading that he should not speak again. I am not making you understand how he impressed me. In the delicate, hopeless patience of his face, in the refined, uninsistent accents of his voice, there was somehow struck a note of self-abnegation, of aloofness from the world, pathetic in any one so young.

“I am old. There is little in life that I care for. My interests are largely affected. Wine does not warm me now, and beauty seems no longer beautiful; but I thank Heaven I am not beyond the reach of a penetrating human personality. I have at least the ordinary instincts for convention in social matters, but I assure you it seemed not in the least strange to me that I should be sitting in the private apartment of a man whom I had met only half an hour before, and then in a pawnbroker’s shop, listening eagerly for his account of matters wholly personal to himself. It struck me as the most natural and charming thing in the world. It was just such chance passing intercourse as I expect to hold with wandering spirits on the green hills of paradise.

“It was some time before he spoke again.

“‘I saw her first,’ he said, looking at the paler opal, as if it was of that he spoke, ‘on the street in Florence. It was a day in April, and the air was liquid gold. She was looking at the Campanile, as if she were akin to it. It was the friendly grace of one lily looking at another. Later, I met her as one meets other people, and was presented to her. And after that the days went fast. I think she was the sweetest woman God ever made. I sometimes wonder how He came to think of her. Whatever you may have missed in life,’ he said, lifting calm eyes to mine, and smiling a little, ‘you whose aspect is so sweet, decorous, and depressing, whose griefs, if you have griefs, are the subtle sorrows of the old and unimpassioned’—I remember his phrases literally. I thought them striking and descriptive,” confessed Hayden—“‘I hope you have not missed that last touch of exaltation which I knew then. It is the most exquisite thing in life. The Fates must hate those from whose lips they keep that cup.’ He mused awhile and added, ‘There is only one real want in life, and that is comradeship—comradeship with the divine, and that we call religion; with the human, and that we call love.’

“‘Your definitions are literature,’ I ventured to suggest, ‘but they are not fact. Believe me, neither love nor religion is exactly what you call it. And there are other things almost as good in life, as surely you must know. There is art, and there is work which is work only, and yet is good.’

“‘You speak from your own experience?’ he said, simply.

“It was a home thrust. I did not, and I knew I did not. I am sixty-five years old, and I have never known just that complete satisfaction which I believe arises from the perfect performance of distasteful work. I said so. He smiled.

“‘I knew it when I set my eyes upon you, and I knew you would listen to me and my vaporing. Your sympathy with me is what you feel toward all forms of weakness, and in the last analysis it is self-sympathy. You are beautiful, not strong,’ he added, with an air of finality, ‘and I—I am like you. If I had been a strong man.... Christ!’

“I enjoyed this singular analysis of myself, but I wanted something else.

“‘You were telling me of the opals,’ I suggested.

“‘The opals, yes. Opals always made me happy, you know. While I wore one, I felt a friend was near. My father found these in Hungary, and sent them to me—two perfect jewels. He said they were the twin halves of a single stone. I believe it to be true. Their mutual relation is an odd one. One has paled as the other brightened. You see them now. When they were both mine, they were of almost equal brilliancy. This,’ touching the paler, ‘is the one I gave to her. You see the difference in them now. Hers began to pale before she had worn it a month. I do not try to explain it, not even on the ground of the old superstition. It was not her fault that they made her send it back to me. But the fact remains; her opal is fading slowly; mine is burning to a deeper red. Some day hers will be frozen quite, while mine—mine—’ his voice wavered and fell on silence, as the flame of a candle fighting against the wind flickers and goes out.

“I waited many minutes for him to speak again, but the silence was unbroken. At last I rose. ‘Surely you did not mean to part with either stone?’ I said.

“He looked up as if from a dream. ‘Part with them? Why should I sell my soul? I would not part with them if I were starving. I had a minute’s temptation, but that is past now.’ Then, with a change of manner, ‘You are going?’ He rose with a gesture that I felt then and still feel as a benediction. ‘Good-by. I wish for your own sake that you had not been so like my poor self that I knew you for a friend.’

“We had exchanged cards, but I did not see or hear of him again. Last week these stones came to me, sent by some one here in New York of his own name—his executor. He is dead, and left me these.

“It is here that I want your counsel. These stones do not belong to me, you know. It is true that we are like, as like as blue and violet. But there is that woman somewhere—I don’t know where; and I know no more of their story than he told me. I have not cared to be curious regarding it or him. But they loved once, and these belong to her. Do you suppose they would be a comfort or a curse to her? If—if—” the connoisseur evidently found difficulty in stating his position. “Of course I do not mean to say that I believe one of the stones waned while the other grew more brilliant. I simply say nothing of it; but I know that he believed it, and I, even I, feel a superstition about it. I do not want the light in that stone to go out; or if it should, or could, I do not want to see it. And, besides, if I were a woman, and that man had loved me so, I should wish those opals.” Here Hayden looked up and caught Langworthy’s amused, tolerant smile. He stopped, and there was almost a flush upon his cheek.

“You think I am maudlin—doting—I see,” he said. “Langworthy, I do hope the Lord will kindly let you die in the harness. You haven’t any taste for these innocent, green pastures where we old fellows must disport ourselves, if we disport at all. Now, I want to know if it would be—er—indelicate to attempt to find out who she is, and to restore the stones to her?”

Langworthy, who had preserved throughout his usual air of strict scientific attention, jumped up and began to pace the room.

“His name?” he said.

Hayden gave it.

“I know the man,” said Langworthy, almost reluctantly. “Did any one who ever saw him forget him? He was on the verge of melancholia, but what a mind he had!”

“How did you know him, Langworthy?” asked Hayden, with pathetic eagerness.