Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

AN EPISODE
IN THE
Doings of the Dualized.

“The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous.”

—Coleridge.

By Eveleen Laura Mason,

Brookline, Mass.

1898.

CHAPTER I.

This was the way it happened. Like all beginnings of things, the roots were in the dark. Ethelbert Daksha came of a family in which girls counted for a big half of all that was bright and interesting.

The Dakshas were a delightful family every way, except, perhaps, in the matter of money-wealth. That seemed constitutionally lacking, because you will see yourself that people who take great interest in devising ways of spending money, and very little in devising ways of getting it to spend, in the constitution of things are lacking in money-wealth. But they had everything else except money, and their chief thought in regard to that lack was an amiable perplexity that it seemed to be such a desideratum in affairs of society. There was a big but exhausted English property on the mother’s side; and this strain of high English blood was mixed with a dash of hard-headed German culture and a few drops from the veins of a Spanish dame, lady-mother of the Hidalgos. So, you see, when, ninety years before, a discontent with something in the Old World society had set the elder Daksha down on American soil, various European nationalities were transplanted to root as best might be in American civilization. In addition to all this, as faith in all things high, bounded brightly in the Daniel O’Connell blood which coursed through Daniel Daksha’s veins, it was very natural that his daughter Ethelbert, considering as she did that all nationalities were equally admirable for different virtues, should be greatly astonished that there should be quarrels between those of different countries, when the blood of four nations coursed so amicably in her own veins. If ever there were a girl who, in the nature of things was a typical American, it was Ethelbert Daksha, with the race-drift of Europe, Asia and Africa in her individual veins, as our nation carries it in its aggregated citizenship.

Mr. Daksha recognized all this. He was one of the dreamers who work, at whose feet life lays its crown of success; although so far his many admirable schemes for regenerating society had made him at once the most serviceable and the most impecunious of mortals. He had abundant means, but little money; and while it might be stretching a point to say the Dakshas cultivated a life of beauty on a little oatmeal, yet it would give a hint at the way in which beauty was cultivated in that simple home, where oatmeal was the chief of their diet; that is, if you leave out of the reckoning the best periodicals and old writings of all climes and ages. These things were really the chief of their diet, and had much to do with the fact that they, like the old lady who lived on the hill, were scarce ever quiet concerning the topic of the ideal order of society which is soon coming to our nation, and through us to the world.

Life among the Dakshas was like a bit of Greek art transplanted to the robust civilization of this country, which is trying so hard to assimilate its many diverse elements. The theory of the elegant Greeks was: “What the spirit wills, the body must.” This theory had been practicalized more or less fully by O’Connell, who knew no law stronger than that of the necessities, which he deemed were laid on him as liberator of his people. The same theory had been the impelling power of the Spanish proverb which, translated, reads: “In his own soul, and not in that of another, must the principle of one’s actions be established.” While the German element, which fills the veins of England’s crowned family, in quick response to the same idea, cried out: “Let every man hear for himself, and hearing, then speak.”

So as you may well suppose, the theory that spirit is master and body is only the good servant to do the spirit’s bidding, met some rebuffs as the Dakshas lived it out midst that portion of the newly rich who devote their energies to saving—not MAN, but money. And so much were the Dakshas in love with their beautiful ideals that but for their good common sense they would have become domineering dogmatists; and thus, properly, would have made themselves greatly disliked, and therefore, incapacitated for service.

About forty odd years before this episode the heads of the Daksha family had settled themselves to the recognition that the inordinate frenzy for money-making which was deluging its possessors, would insure many low tragedies in high (?) life; and to the recognition that society was becoming but like a witch’s caldron with its seethe and bubble of toil and trouble, and with its inodorous stench of poison things, flung into it by the witches and wizards, as they carry out their passion-dance on the old Harry’s pavilion.

Of course the Dakshas had their opinion of this besotted high (?) life, with its stimulation of that excitement which wrecks nerve and brain. But they did not presume to force the virtues of self-culture on persons whose highest dream of success was TO INCREASE THEIR CHANCES FOR THIS INDULGENCE IN HIGH OLD TIMES, and who were more than willing to pay for them, with the after years of that disease, remorse and reek of ill-fame in which “the name of the wicked rots.”

Whatever they might choose to do with their knowledge, the fact remained that the younger Dakshas knew that they, by inheritance, were rooted in different purposes and back-history than such as this, which reveals itself in these forms of faith-breaking, love-outraging, humanity-destroying bewilderments. So when this other kind of girls and boys, with their mothers and fathers flying around in society’s whirligig, flitted about them, the Dakshas thought steadily on the truth as they knew it; and “hearing for themselves, then spoke,” thus giving their companions a chance to catch on at any point of spiritual contact which they found available.

So the roots of Ethelbert Daksha’s life had gathered force and fibre in wisdom religions known in ancient America, Europe, Asia and Africa; and the might of this force was now annealed in her nature, and was forming into a unified strength of character, which to the ignorant seemed like a thing of very different quality.

Reginald Grove altogether misunderstood Ethel when first they met; for he did not so much as know that there were girls in the world with character-roots so deep and far-reaching. There were two things he recognized at sight, but character was not one. He knew money when he saw it, and he thought he knew poverty, too. His father belonged to the class of people who laugh at “blood,” and worship money. His blood was made up of such things as a man who lays the reins on the neck of his impulses can get into his veins, if in his early days his father strikes a “money lead” and he “a society life”; but then he had a mother, too, and there came in the difference.

Since he was seventeen years old Reginald had bought all the high-priced things that our fast civilization has to offer in exchange for “soul,” and now the ashes of that past were beginning to grit between his teeth; for he had a sweet memory of peace, purity and of an harmonious-purpose which glinted across his mind angelically as the remains of what had been his baby guesses at real manhood. But this dream, and the sainted mother who had inspired it, had both been devastated by the ignorant animalism of the elder Grove. So when the mother-spirit was released from earth’s control, little Regie’s waiting eyes turned to his father; and watching, he perceived that his father’s shrewd bargaining instincts resulted in increased wealth, which made it possible for him to sow a big crop of gilded misery, and still to pay his son’s bills, while he did likewise; and that doing all this he was yet flattered as a millionaire. So you see, beloved as was his mother’s memory and distinct as had been her teachings to his baby mind, they became but “woman’s notions” when contradicted by his father’s practices, and by the licensing laws of paternal government which assure young men they may sin freely, and yet be wealthy and wise; and healthy, too, if nostrums will make them so.

For a time Reginald believed this, seeing the nation’s fathers had by license laws practically declared it. And as the wisdom of the nation’s mothers had been placed under silence as deep as the grave, “no cause or impediment being shown to forbid the banns” between his soul and corruption, he rushed on in the paths prepared for feet like his. But lately he did not feel very healthy; and as for his wealth, he feared that was getting a bit rickety, and his wisdom was hardly at par.

So these were Reginald’s character “roots.” But it was the one little radical, or true-life fibre, which vibrated with a thrill when he first met Ethelbert Daksha. At the instant, it seemed to him as though the mirage which ever floated up from the fens of his unrecorded life, was swept away by a breath from over the jasper walls of the eternal city. That curious look out of Ethelbert’s eyes, so all-comprehending, pitiful and yet unmoved, held him, as his mother’s eyes had always done in the past; and he had not a word to say. He felt as such men feel when conscious of the moral distance between their private lives and the lives of sweet girl acquaintances.

As usual he waited for Ethelbert to speak; but as is not usual she, recognizing his moral state, did not come down and hunt round for something to say on its level. “The great gulf fixed,” was fixed. She did not try to cross it; so she escaped falling and floundering therein, for her pains. Ethelbert believed not in self-abnegation, but in self-expression. She believed it right to stand squarely on her own fair heights; that from there, with the hand next her heart placed in Jehovah’s, she could give her brain-inspired right hand to brother man and then lift!

“An Englishman dares be silent,” they say, and Ethelbert’s English quality was in the ascendant, when Reginald looked at her, wishing to know if those mother-eyes were backed by a brain filled with mother wit and wisdom. He met silence, and went away from that party with an unsatisfied hunger in his soul, which proved that that abused thing was not dead yet.

After that they met casually often; and Ethelbert, who “pondered all these things in her heart,” which are brought by “ministering spirits to those who are heirs of salvation,” knew Reginald better than as if they for years had talked much self-disguising trash together.

One summer afternoon when she was sitting on the balcony of the Daksha home he passed and raised his hat, and she bowed in return, with the thought in mind and eyes, “that man is inherently a good man.” And he saw it, and halted, and then with direct purpose, crossed the street and seated himself on the step, asking no permission.

“Miss Ethelbert, you always make me wish I were a boy five years old,” he said.

“I wish you were,” said Ethelbert.

This was sudden for Reginald; for though he was willing to recognize the failure he had made of manhood, Ethelbert’s businesslike way of accepting the idea was not flattering, and he was used to flattery.

“Why do you wish it?” he said after knocking his teeth, not agreeably, with the head of his cane and gazing at her combatively.

“So that you could cleave to the right. You are so old in your habits now, so undeveloped in the practice of judgment, and—oh, there is Bertha! Come right up here, Bertha. I was sitting here looking for you. Yes, you can have the newly cut lawn grass for your rabbits; but I want to see you first. I have saved the papers for you. Now, Mr. Grove, this is one of my friends, Bertha Gemacht; and Bertha, this is one of my friends, Reginald Grove.”

Reginald had risen to his feet under this speech, the words of which are only recorded. The cool, helpful look which she turned on him in view of his moral mismanagement, and which was not in the least altered as she looked from him to Bertha, and from Bertha to him again, was as new to him as it was irritating and fascinating. For Bertha was to him a hard-looking woman as she laid her sack for holding the grass, down, and turned on him a look cowed, yet angry, and with another mixed expression indescribable.

There was a little odor of whiskey about Bertha, and so there was about Reginald; and Ethelbert’s senses were as keen in one case as they were in the other; but she noticed that while Bertha seemed not in the least surprised that such a man as Reginald was found in a nice lady’s company, he was plainly indignant at seeing Bertha there; and that he watched them with disapprobation while they leaned over an illustrated paper together.

“Now I would like you to read an account of the two women who took a homestead of one hundred and sixty acres; and for seven years worked it so well and wisely that they now have a delightful, valuable home, and have since added three other women to the household: women who had lost hope of happiness and honor, but are now becoming healthy and self-sustained by work,—honest, skillful work. Of course one has to have health in order to have nice clear brains.”

“O Bertha, did you read and understand the health journal I loaned you? And did you think, after all the facts I told you, that you would better still sometimes use whiskey and—”

“Indeed, Miss Daksha, I have not taken more than—”

“Bertha,” Ethelbert interrupted. “Of course you will drink whiskey all you choose. I was only wishing you would choose not to drink it at all. Do you think rum drinking makes people healthy, wealthy and wise?”

Bertha’s face had lighted up under the idea which had lately been brought to her by this friend, whose unvarying recognition of Bertha’s individuality, and of the fact that she could make of herself just such a woman as she chose to make, had opened a world of dignified possibilities before her. Her large eyes, which often had the look of an angry animal brought to bay, had now in them a puzzled, wondering look, full of startled expectancy.

“Do you think I am healthier than you are?” said Ethelbert. Bertha nodded eagerly. “Would you wish to be like me?”

“O Gott in Himmel! Would I not!” said Bertha, and she threw her old apron over her head; and the wild conflict within broke forth in a tempest of sobs.

Reginald sat down on the steps with his back to them both, and looked out on the evening clouds; and Ethelbert, in that sharp fellowship with suffering which is part of the price paid by those whose soul-sight gives them redemptive power with the tempted and fallen, steadied herself under the pangs of the sudden remorse that had struck the heart of the man and of the woman anear.

“There Bertha, now listen,” said she presently. “Let us, you and I, not do anything which will in the least harm the pure river of life, which, flowing through our veins, comes first from Jehovah, the fount of all life. See, Bertha!”

The girl uncovered her eyes, and awe-struck, looked at Ethelbert as she bared her arm and showed the blue tracery there, and on her hand, adding: “See, the beautiful stream in the little river-beds here, flows on, and up through this big artery in my throat, over my brain. And Bertha,” she paused, and with a dramatic but perfectly unaffected gesture full of regnant poise, and with a light in her eyes never seen on sea or land, she said again, slowly: “And, Bertha, brain rules here! What the spirit wills, this body must. So my brain has commanded that nothing shall be put into my blood which shall send poisonous elements maddeningly up to the throne of reason. But Bertha, if you think it is wise to do as you do, you may have some good cause for it, that I know nothing about. Tell me, am I mistaken in my ideas? Shall I go with you where you went this afternoon, and put into my veins all that you did into yours?”

“Gott bewahr! Oh, don’t say, don’t think of such things of your veins!” cried Bertha, almost throwing her arms round Ethelbert.

Reginald sprang to his feet and looked at poor Bertha with a loathful vindictiveness hard to describe.

“Is it too bad for me? Oh, then, it must be too bad for you,” said Ethelbert, with a pain intense in her tone. “You cut me to the heart just so when you violate your blood with things of horror. It is good German blood, and part of it flows in my veins, and all of it came from the great Fountain of Life who ‘made of one blood all nations of the earth,’ and who, in this, our beloved country, is gathering up all the nations of the earth into the life of this Republic’s inheritance. It is for women to secure to our nation a heritage better than golden crowns.”

Ethelbert’s grey eyes were fixed on a floating cloud, and, absorbing into herself the doings of the beautiful world above, she broke up her reverie; and turning, looked at Bertha, saying explainingly: “You see yourself, Bertha, I mean that my parents and grandparents might have forgotten that I was coming to inherit their blood and their brains, and might have carelessly filled the fountain of their life with poison-loving elements. Now, if they had done so, what do you suppose I would now do about it myself?”

“I’ll tell you what you would do about it,” interrupted Reginald. “You would have thought it the best blood in the land, madame, and would have scorned that girl as much as you scorn me, to whom you are reading this lesson over her shoulders. She don’t understand a word you’ve said; but do you think I am a fool?”

“No,” said Ethelbert simply.

Bertha looked after him as he walked off a few steps.

“Is that man your friend?” she said sharply. “I understand not all your speaking words, but full well I know your wisdom in the thought of it, and well I know that the body is as a beast if the spirit shall not command what it will do. He thinks me a fool—too much fool to talk your wisdom-words. I are not fool. I choose this day. This head shall say, ‘No more of beer and oder tings to my body. It has said so before this time, many days, but now, the body must!’ Now then, I, Bertha, ask you: Do you think I am a fool?”

“No,” said Ethelbert.

“Well, I shall be a fool if I steals away my brains some more.”

“I think you will never do that any more. Brain force can be lost and wasted; or it can be treasured up, englobed delightsomely. Now, Bertha, take this rosebud and try to live as healthfully and sweet as roses do. Bertha, gather up your grass for the rabbits, and make the little things clean and happy, and then you can read your papers tonight, and come and get some more. Here is a pencil, so you can mark any little place you don’t quite understand, and I will tell you about it. Good-night.”

“Good-night, Miss Daksha,” said Bertha, looking back enviously at Reginald, who stood striking the rosebush with his cane, and not yet dismissed.

“You can’t put that rose together again,” said Ethelbert.

“Who cares?” said he roughly. For, as Ethelbert would not flatter him, he unconsciously proposed not to flatter her. You see he had felt full of the ashes of the past; and those ashes, like a volatile alkali, needed only an acid admixture to ensure a sudden fermentation of soul. The truths which had seemed so sweet to Bertha had been acid to him, and a foam of wrath was choking him as he sputtered: “Who cares?”

“That is the question,” said Ethelbert, gathering up the shattered rose: “Who cares?”

He gave the bush another cut with his cane; for the fermentation of ideas within was quite unendurable. He had always supposed that women were made on purpose to flatter men, and he had always had so much of it that he was sick of it; but now when he cared a good deal to be thought well of, he felt it was a bit hard to be made to think of himself as he had been made to think all that morning. He had until now thought Ethelbert particularly attractive, because she was so bright; but now he thought her brightness was so overmuch of a good thing as to be perfectly detestable. The same hand that in wanton cruelty was whacking to pieces those exquisite moss rosebuds, would willingly have whacked out of existence all the high human tests of character which had stripped his soul bare before his gaze. Something of this, but not very clearly defined, made him hit the bush again as he looked at Ethelbert, who, free from a suggestion of reproof or sentiment of any kind, repeated: “Who cares?”

“I don’t,” said Reginald; and after a pause: “Do you?”

“Do I care that I can’t put the rose together again? I don’t aspire to do that; yet I do very much care to have all the power I can possibly obtain with which to arrest the destruction of beautiful life and orderly happiness.”

“Oh, yes, much you care to make a fellow happy,” said Reginald sullenly. “Look at the cold-blooded way you sat there and talked to that miserable thing about me.” And after waiting again, he said with the combativeness of a man opposed by silence, when instead he longed for a quarrel: “Now this is all very well, Miss Daksha, but you know that if you noticed—noticed—well, as you might say—if you smelt whiskey on her (now you’ve got it), if you smelt whiskey on her, you could—you are sharp enough to notice—anything, in fact,” said he, stumbling on under her steady uplifted eyes, “Aren’t you?”

“I notice many things,” said Ethelbert, like a little truthful child.

He hit the rosebush again. “You are a queer girl,” he said. “You have no respect for a man’s feelings.”

“What are those things?”

“What things?”

“A man’s feelings, I believe you called them,” said Ethelbert.

He came near her, with red passion-flushes patching his face like Satan’s finger-prints; and stood angrily looking at her. And then he slashed the air close to her with his cane; but he might as well have shot glances of rage at a lily-cup, in the hope of arresting the sweet aura it exhaled. He turned angrily away. “Well, I can just believe you,” he said. “You neither know nor care what feelings are. You care more about that old rose.”

“That depends,” said Ethelbert. “I care for the rose because it is sweet, orderly life. If a man’s feelings are the same, I care just as much for them. But character is not a question of feeling. It is a question of wise action.”

He muttered a passionate oath, and hit the bush again. For the devils were “rending him,” and “that kind goeth not out, except by prayer and fasting.” He was not much of a praying man; and as for fasting, his habitual diet and incessant brandy quaffing did not come under that head, nor produce those calming results. Added to this, three months had passed since Ethelbert Daksha had seemed to him as no woman had ever seemed to him before; and in those three months he had been afraid to approach acquaintanceship, because of the infinite distance between them. This distance he, with all his unpublished record of demoralization, had decency enough to recognize. And now he had a feeling akin to hatred toward Ethelbert, that she should have the impudence to know anything of him except what his “good clothes,” not bad-featured face, and his hitherto very silent tongue might have told.

He forgot that he was living in this new age in which something like occult powers are given to the “pure in heart,” who, seeing God, who is All, and in all, necessarily must see the truth as to the conditions which fill society. His spiritual and intuitional faculties were not dead, but sealed up, and enswathed in cerements of flesh. And so, as he now himself realized, he had nothing but a man’s feelings, hot, blind and passionate, to oppose to the percipient intelligence, that, cool and pure, looked steadily into the seething caldron of his heart.

“If a man’s feelings are orderly, beautiful life, I care just as much for them,” she said again slowly. And as he stood before the Virgin Mother grace in her, an ineffable longing for purity and new creation took possession of him. He covered his eyes and sat down on the steps.

“Mine were beautiful when I was three years old,” he said, “orderly, beautiful life. O good God, yes, they were!” It was a cry of remorse to his Creator, and Ethelbert understood it so.

“I believe that readily, Reginald,” she said, simply; “and I have limitless reverence for them; they were as sweet as this bud.” He took from her hand the exquisite moss-covered wonder, and sat looking at it, while Ethelbert laid the mutilated rose, with its upgathered petals, on a book in her lap.

“You mean that is about what my life is worth now,” said he, pointing at the leaves and torn blossom.

“You choose to do it yourself,” said Ethelbert.

“Who cares?” was the angry response, for he had often sentimentalized with girls over his ruined hopes, and had so led up to sweet flirtations; but Ethelbert’s remark and the level look of her eyes, nipped that sort of a thing in the bud; and his “ugly” was rising at about the rate of ten degrees a second, when she said: “I do.”

“On your honor, do you?” he asked huskily.

“On honor, yes, I care,” she said. He looked white and kept the bud in his hand. She wished to help him, but she did not wish to preach nor sentimentalize.

“You have abused this rosebud fearfully,” rising and examining one on the bush. “You have shattered the rose and the leaves. Here is a bud which you have marred, but—” she stooped to examine it more closely; “but I see it is not beyond the power of performing good uses still and of opening to mature life.”

These kind of analogies were not exactly in his line of thought, but somehow as with her he looked at this bud, with one side of the moss stripped off and the wound on the outer leaf, he became very sorry for the little Reginald Grove who buried his mother, and afterwards so badly mismanaged himself. For the moment he felt that all he had ever possessed which was worth caring about, was what he had had when, environed by mother-love, he grew up in her smiles. It was a presence about Ethelbert which made that time seem so valuable. He looked up at the simple house, and then at Ethelbert’s dainty but inexpensive dress. The fragrance of the rose seemed intoxicating with its story of possible redemption. Yet every instinct of his better nature told him it was impossible that his life could ever blend with Ethelbert’s, while also his best instincts, with an exigency of strong desire, demanded just that union. He was in a torture of soul, comparable with nothing he had ever before experienced. Suddenly he remembered his wealth, but it seemed only an abject thing. Yet presently, for some reason, he said: “Do you care for wealth?”

“Immensely,” said Ethelbert.

He looked up at her as though he could not believe his ears; but in his heart there was a hope, broken by doubt and darkened by disappointment; a hope that all-conquering wealth could win even her, but a disappointment in her if this could so be. After a moment he stumbled on, saying: “I—I somehow don’t see much good in it. After you have eaten all you can, and have drunken more than—than you ought, and made a fashion-block of yourself, and so on; in fact, you know money can’t give you back whatever there was in those old days,” said Reginald, motioning toward the rose; “it can’t make the now impossible possible.”

“That depends,” said Ethelbert. “Money could make the now impossible possible to many people.”

He looked at her with that same compound expression on his countenance; for you know this man, who had never grown to real manhood, being much bigger outside than he was in,—this man had for years stood on guard against the many girls whom he fancied wished to marry his money. So he said, with a dash of the Grove suspicious shrewdness: “Is there anything now impossible to you that it could make possible?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her with lowering lights in his eyes.

“Do you want that thing very much?”

“I have set myself to obtain it.”

“How much would you give?” said he, his heart beating thickly, and yet he could not look at her because of the mingled sense of victory and disappointment.

“I shall give my life for it,” she said quietly. “I have settled that.”

And while he was looking at her, utterly dazed as to her meaning, Judge Elkhorn threw himself from his horse and eagerly came up to Ethelbert, who received him with more alacrity than her still manner usually exhibited.

Now Judge Elkhorn was a man head and shoulders above his fellows in much that makes average manhood. He was very wealthy, too; and Reginald thought of both these facts as he watched Ethelbert and the judge; and forty thousand fiends took hold of him within.

The judge, intent on the object of his visit, had at first given that casual bow and glance with which one habitually recognizes the presence of a fellow-being; but the look on Reginald’s countenance arrested his notice, so that the two men for a moment faced each other with a well-defined stare; and during this moment Reginald’s countenance perceptibly grew more red, lowering, and akin to the bulldog character of expression, and Judge Elkhorn’s more self-poised.

The next moment Reginald arose with an impulse to get away; but as Ethelbert had at the very same moment set forward two cane chairs, he seated himself composedly with a set to his jaw that was not lost to the notice of his hostess.

The judge preserved silence with the air of a man who recognizes the fact that it was perfectly in order that the first visitor should take his departure; and an air that reminded one that he was suppressing all knowledge of the fact that this man’s presence was a very questionable advantage to the lady favored with it.

Ethelbert, instead of running to the rescue and disguising these men’s characters from one another and herself by a flood of small talk, sat thinking faithfully on Reginald’s very best qualities, and looking at the moss rosebud which he held by the stem in such a way as to conceal from the eye the flower which was under his half-closed hand. And when she seated herself a trifle nearer him than to the judge, Reginald recognized the gentle influence, and with an impulse of some kind, pinned the bud on his coat lapel.

The judge seemed absolutely entranced with the sunset clouds opposite him. His gaze was extremely abstracted, and when he turned it toward Ethelbert, Reginald really felt that his presence was honestly forgotten, as the judge, evidently taking up his last conversation with Ethelbert, said: “Miss Daksha, you are supported in your ingenious theory by Augustin, as well as others. Augustin says: ‘A knowledge of the truth is equal to the task both of discerning and confuting all false assertions and erroneous arguments, though never before met with, if only they may be freely brought forward.’ I have reconsidered my attempt to dissuade you from the (as I thought) quixotic undertaking on which you have set your heart. I was astonished at the self-confidence with which you virtually promise to give help to the struggling, counsel to the doubtful, light to the blind, hope to the despondent, and refreshment to the weary. But I perceive you propose to do this, not by dictating to others, but by simply setting forth the law of your own mind, and leaving it to the reasonableness or lack of reasonableness of those about you to act upon it for themselves. There! Have I stated this as you explained your plan to me in our delightful conversation?” said the judge, turning his eyes, with their hard will-power, upon Ethelbert.

“Admirably,” said Ethelbert.

“Do you read Petrarch?”

“Why, really, no, I do not,” said Ethelbert in surprise at herself. “I suppose I have not yet gotten to it.”

“I wondered whether it was your memory of that great author, or whether it were the wonderful reception of profoundest truth which blesses pure souls in all ages, bringing ever to the intelligent worker those few fundamentals which relate to our moral natures. See, I copied this for you, that you might perceive not only that I was wrong in being against you, but that you have Petrarch on your side.”

And he passed her a bit copied from “De Vita Solitaria,” which is substantially as quoted from Ethelbert’s own expression.

“You remember,” said the judge, “you had said it was your own purpose to accumulate wisdom and employ all your acquirements and understanding in just the manner which would best ensure benefit to the people of this now nearly twenty-first century, and would help to solve the especial problems of our conglomerate American society. Petrarch substantially says the same of his efforts for his people in his epoch.”

Reginald was turning over in his mind something which echoed down from babydom. He remembered a little book among his mother’s choice few, with letters on the back. Did he not in childhood spell out the letters there P-E-T-R-A-R-C-H? And what else was it he “knew about the old fellow”? Oh, he had an idea now. He dimly remembered many talks with his mother; but he thought he would let these people talk on with their high themes, while he sat pulling out his mustache and getting a word or two together in such good form as would show this snob whom he was.

“All I have to say then, is,” commenced the little Captain Grove coolly, “Petrarch is rather coming up in reputation when he finds himself able to keep up with the thoughts of Miss Daksha. I knew old Pete; he was one of my mother’s favorites. You know he was mashed on a girl called ‘Laura.’”

A merry peal from Ethelbert quite cleared the atmosphere; but, in the sharp, bright handling of the subject that followed, Reginald felt himself completely stranded again. So he had shrewdness enough to retire on his laurels, and to take his departure at a moment when a pretty little sentiment as to his arrested development along very nice lines of life, had quite taken possession of Mrs. Daksha, as well as of the rest.

He walked direct from this visit to a bookstore and inquired for Petrarch’s works, much to the amazement of the man who had hitherto supplied him with another style of literature. And then in his room in his hotel he recommenced an acquaintance with that author, or his mother, or with the moss rosebud which he had placed at his elbow, in a vase, or with Miss Ethelbert, or with himself. With which, or with how many of these he recommenced an acquaintance that evening, it would have been hard for him to say. But when he arose from the long half-reverie he was in a new frame of mind; and, too, he fancied he had stolen a march on Miss Daksha in regard to at least one book.

CHAPTER II.

After dinner Reginald seated himself in the office of his hotel. There were the usual number of men about the place, talking and smoking, and watching the women who passed through the office now and then. Hotel life, with its ordinary distractions of seeing and being seen, and newsmongering and time-killing, was rather a bore to Reginald. But he had had little idea of anything else, unless it were a big house on something of the same plan of social divertisement and high hilarity. He had had spells of the blues, of course, in which he longed for something indefinable; and now that his nerves and health were breaking down pretty fast, he had these blues more often than ever. His regular cure for these attacks was a visit to the bar, and then a couple of cigars after it, then more blues, and then more cigars; so, of course, a permanent removal of the cause and the effect did not seem very likely to be secured.

There were one or two women at his hotel, acquaintances of his, who had led the life of dressing, dining, party-going and evening dancing or riding, for an indefinite number of years; women who had tried every popular watering-place in the summer and many southern resorts in the winter, and who were getting stout and flashy, both as to diamonds and general effect; women who had money enough not to need to marry, and knowledge enough of the general quality of some of the men about them, not to care to marry; and such a general sense of loneliness and dissatisfaction with the dullness, staleness, flatness and unprofitableness of life, as made them not to care to live, and quite too keen a certainty of a life to come, to at all desire to risk embarking on that unknown sea on which diamonds and dinners, whist and mature old flirtations, could not be taken as cargo.

Reginald had often wondered as he sat and talked nothing by the hour to these women, whether he or they were the most utter failures and bores. When this problem got too deep for him, he usually went to the bar; in fact, the bar was his grand resort, most of the time. But when these same questions presented themselves to these women, very few of them went to the bar or had the bar brought to them. They usually set to thinking, and then sometimes cried themselves so sick that their suppers were sent up to their rooms and eaten with the salt of tears.

Now the difference in these cases of inanity was, that while the first useless mortal drowned himself in liquor and the second in tears, the result was the inebriation and steady animalization of the faculties of the one, while the other certainly escaped being classed with those who never ate bread in sorrow, and knows not the unseen powers.

The boarders said that there had been what they called “tender passages” in history, between Mrs. Mancredo and Reginald. She had soft Italian eyes, which had cried many passionate hours, but they were always cooled off and black-leaded up; and then with a little pink to make the tear-stain pinker still, Mrs. Mancredo never looked much the worse for the honest but baffled scrutiny which she had made of life in general and her own in particular. But on the reverse, she looked just so much the better, as she was for the time less hard and world encrusted.

At these times, if Reginald had not been too recently to his throne of consolation, the bar, he felt quite impressed by the element of womanliness which was visible in her tear-brightened eyes.

On the evening after he had ventured on Ethelbert’s fuller acquaintance, and had had that ethical and æsthetic conversation, and the interesting tête-a-tête with the rosebud, Petrarch and himself, Mrs. Mancredo had had a good long cry, so-called.

For a young bride had arrived at the hotel, wife of an invalid person; and in the good gossip after dinner, Mrs. Mancredo had chatted about herself (apparently) to this young bride, until she knew all the past history of the girl, and had a pretty clear forecast of her future history as well. Then she commenced with being very sorry for the pretty, ingenuous young thing, and more sorry for herself because of the years in which she was an unenviable wife, and still more sorry for herself in her present mature womanhood. So when she came down to supper she had her pretty round chin well up in the air, while her heavily leaded eyelashes drooped under the languor of her hard weeping. She had that strange sort of expectancy of something better, new, and more satisfactory at last, which sometimes follows on a new discovery of the great disproportion between human aspirations and the ordinary objects, which are palmed off upon them as satisfactory food.

She glanced toward Reginald as she passed his table, and inwardly ejaculated “Horrid thing! Eternally eating, whenever he stops wine-bibbing and smoking long enough.” And then with a flutter and flow of drapery, she permitted the waiter to adjust the paraphernalia of the occasion, as with a flashing of finger-rings and twittering of the pendants in her ears, and heaving of the laces under the diamonds at her breast, she proceeded to practically assert the always conceded fact that she was a splendid-looking woman. Three or four newcomers recognized the fact, and the old habitués were as loyal as ever. She saw all that, while she read and reread the bill of fare, and while the patient John brushed off imaginary crumbs, and did many useless things to remind her he still lived, and lived but to serve. Then—“Oh, anything,” was her order. He had expected that would be all, but he was obliged to wait just the same for its utterance.

Mrs. Mancredo meanwhile had not for a moment lost sight of the fact that Reginald had not once glanced toward her; and also that, though he had not changed his dress otherwise, the moss rosebud which he had worn before was gone now. She began to get up a theory about that rosebud. She had before never seen him with a buttonhole bouquet. Once when he had asked her for a flower he had only held it for a while; he hadn’t worn it. In a polite sort of a way, one time with another, she had snubbed Reginald often; but all the same, if he was going to wear rosebuds, she was going to know why and whence. So she watched him. He was not even reading his paper; he was eating, not without interest in the good things before him: he was not enough far gone in his new love for that. But he was so abstracted that he—oh, horrors!—he had deliberately, firmly, kept his clutch on his knife and fork, and, having struck the butt of the handle of each squarely down on the table, he held them points upwards in the air, while he industriously masticated his food and glared, unconscious, into the abysmal beyond.

“There’s his lineage well defined,” said she to herself, determinedly watching him; till he with a start looked directly at her, and she holding his eye, with a quick gesture imitated his attitude, stare and all; and then sinking back in her chair, fanned herself in a pantomimic swoon.

He shook his head across the dining-hall, signifying that he had an account to settle, for that manœuvre. And when he had picked at a grape or two for dessert, she significantly moved back the empty chair at her emptily table, and he came over and sat down with her.

She sniffed the air as he approached.

“I smell a moss rosebud,” said she, raising her fibbingly black eyelashes and fibbing lips towards him.

Reginald had been getting quite bright that afternoon, and he answered to her direct gaze: “You have a perfect nose.” And just as she took in the compliment he went on, explanatorily, “a double-barrelled, back-action nose; a burglarious, lock-picking nose, that can shoot round three spiral staircases, down a back hall and unlock a door, all for the purpose of getting at a moss rosebud that you saw pinned on my lapel two hours ago, and which you don’t see there now! Do you know why you don’t see it there now? I’ll tell you. It is because it is in a little vase beside a copy of Petrarch’s works up in my room.”

Now she dropped her eyes and pushed her chair back.

“All right, my poetical friend. I believed all your parables till you came to a ‘copy of Petrarch’; but there are limits,” said she, and she looked at him in a way which, with the accompanying words and intonation, would have meant in a man’s mouth, “You are lying, and I know it and you know it.”

Reginald had always taken a good deal of this sort of thing from the sort of women produced by society (?), some of whom think it persiflage, and some of whom habitually talk that way because of the habitual state of unfaith in men, which, with or without cause, fills their minds and hearts.

Reginald had never at any time in his life liked this; for with all his arrest of high manhood, no man could truly accuse him of lying, or of dishonor along that line toward males. And as a boy he never did lie to his mother, and as a son he had never lied to his father; and when these jocular accusations first began to meet him from pretty girls’ lips, he disliked them much. But when he saw all the fellows had to take it, he began to think that was “high style,” and that, after all, may be, if women took it for granted that the fellows lied and were bad, and yet still petted them and invited them to their homes, badness might, after all, not be badness, nor lying be lying; and that, may be, one thing was as good as another, all through the catalogue. At any rate, that women seemed to think so and that no one fellow could stand against this tide, even if he wanted to do so. But he always disliked this thing just the same, and never saw the wit of it.

The word “parables,” somehow, too, this evening, struck him worse than it would if she had said “lies”; for “parables,” as they were taught him at his mother’s knee, were “beautiful words of life”; and besides, “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” was getting to be a fact which he was illustrating in himself.

While he thought of these things he looked so glowering that Mrs. Mancredo said, lightly, “Now what ails you?”

“How many times in a week, on the average, do you suppose you tell us fellows that we lie?”

“Well, the times I tell you so, compared with the times you do it, are so infinitesimally small that a body could not be to the trouble of reckoning them,” said she lazily.

He looked at her seriously. “Do you think men lie?” he said.

She answered him in blank amazement: “Why, of course, child!”

“All men?”

“Might except a deaf mute or two, if you like.”

“Will you except me?”

“Did you say except or accept?”

“I certainly said except. At this point in our conversation I could not ask you to accept me, for I can’t imagine what a woman would ever want of a liar.”

She shrugged her shoulders and ejaculated: “Hobson’s choice as for that!”

She looked as pretty as though she were being real good; in fact, she looked a great deal prettier. There was an impishness about her with which Reginald was more fully en rapport than he was with high goodness. True, she expressed disbelief in him, even on the one point on which he could somewhat justly value himself; but she looked “sort of loving” out of her eyes all the time; and Reginald had never resisted that kind of flattery.

And so they sat looking at one another; he a silly slave to her wiles, and crushing back the honest longing he had had for her approbation of his best virtue; and she, a slave to the conditions imposed on disfranchised womanhood, and crushing back her longing for his recognition of her individuality and her right to be of sound use to the world,—practical, sound use. She could not accuse him of deflection from that virtue which woman is taught to most strenuously hold herself, and man’s breach of which most cruelly afflicts her. So she accused him of lying,—a slave’s vice,—which he, not being a slave, need not lean toward. Thus they played at cross-purposes, neither helping the other out of the social tangle.

When he rose from the table it was with an angry perplexity.

“What in the mischief has set her to believe that I am such a liar?” he said to himself.

And as she went up toward her pretty private parlor she was thinking to herself: “He is as truthful a fellow, as far as his words and promises go, as I happen to know. But his fickle passions are what I despise him for. He really thinks I doubt that he has the rosebud and the poem on his table. I as good as saw them when he said it. But that means another love; and that is what he was gazing at, with his knife and fork in the air like a farmer. I’ve got the idea now. They were farmer’s people when he was twelve or so. He of course had that habit then, and he was thinking of his early boyhood and fell back into those rough ways. This new love, this rosebud flame, has something to do with old times. She can’t be a very young girl, then.”

And so soliloquizing, each within self, they walked up the broad stairway together.

“Your rosebud took you to boyhood, didn’t it?” she asked, turning square upon him at the landing, and facing him as he stood on the step below.

“It is no use saying yes or no; you don’t believe me,” said he, with a blunt boy-directness that seemed to touch her.

“You great goose!” she said. “Of course I believe you.”

“You said you didn’t.”

“Well, what of that?”

“A good deal of it,” said he, indignantly. “I believe you when you tell me a thing.”

“More goose you!”

He stood and looked at her like one dazed. He was trying so hard that day to bring his life to firmer foundations; and she stood there laughing at him as though lies and truths were all jokes together. “Good heavens, what do you mean! Do you mean that you lie?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean; always do,” said she.

“Then you are lying now?”

“Of course.”

“Oh, then, if you are lying when you say that you lie, you would be telling the truth then; only if you are telling the truth when you say you lie, then you are lying.”

“You need to go to sleep and clear your head,” said she coolly.

“Look here now, tell me once, are you truthful?”

“Yes, I am full of truths of one kind and another: oppressively full. I should like to unload.”

“And yet you say you are a liar?”

“Oh, yes. Now let us go right over and over it again and again; it is only quarter past eleven,” said she, laughing at his eagerness.

“You call this a great joke, don’t you?” with passionate intensity.

“Perfectly convulsing,” she answered, with a look as if her patience was about gone, and as if, should he dare to browbeat her any longer with that look in his eyes, she would establish her claim to a new line of ability. This possibility was so evident on her countenance that he said:

“I believe if you can lie like this, you can do anything.”

“I seem to feel some undeveloped ability stirring within me myself,” said she; “nothing of course in the chewing, drinking, sweltering animalism line. But let us say some skillful, intellectual achievement, which might rid the world of a few thousands like yourself, and make room for a new race,” said she with a deliberate consideration that had in it the savoir-faire of a society woman, wrought up beyond much more endurance of the life she had been forced to lead,—a life now coming in sight of the convincing truths of this liberalizing age.

Poor Reginald stood actually aghast. His lower jaw had fallen and his eyes protruded, as, with his third finger pointed to his breast, he stammered: “Me! Rid the world of such as me? What have you against me?”

She looked at him with fury suppressed; and at last, when she had controlled herself enough to speak, said, in a low tone, full of the sense of insult and degradation which our false social conditions have forced on thinking womanhood: “I have just that against you, which you would have against me, if my character, through and through, was a facsimile of yours. Sir, that is what I have against you!”

He looked at her dumb. “I don’t understand, I—”

“Oh, well, take the night to it! Think your life over, every step of the way up, since you have entered young hoodlumism; and just fancy that a twin sister of yours had kept with you all the way, step by step, in all your paths—where would she—”

Reginald had leaned against the balustrade perfectly white. “You are a very fiend,” he said; and then he pulled up stairs as a man gropes who has been struck by blindness.

Mrs. Mancredo was frightened. She wanted to help him up. “You—you’ve done enough,” he said thickly, without looking at her. And she went into her parlor and he went up to the next flight.

When Reginald had closed and locked his door and mechanically thrown himself on a sofa, he lay there for some time—not thinking, yet not unconscious. The room had been quite shut up, and the bud, now half opened, had filled the air with its exquisite fragrance. He sensed this fragrance, and, in the half stupor which had come to him, he felt the presence of tender, soothing hands passing, not over his head, but near the very brain substance within his head. His mind seemed reëchoing the speech he had made about Petrarch’s Laura, on which he had prided himself. And as it repeated itself, there were withdrawn all gross elements, until the spiritualized worship which Petrarch had for his paragon of true virtue, seemed to enswathe his being with a heavenly marvel of pure love. A mellifluous rapture of mind, all separate from the senses, overflowed his highest being; and then, as clearly as ever he felt the sun’s rays, he felt his own mother’s presence, and knew, or thought he knew, that he was falling down and down serenely into her care, with an ecstasy of the annihilation of self, and all self-burdens.

The next morning Mrs. Mancredo took an early breakfast, and then stayed in the parlor a while, looking about. She breakfasted three times that morning, and then asked if any one had seen Mr. Grove. It was discovered that no one had. Then Mrs. Mancredo, remembering how he had groped up stairs, followed the matter through. The result was, they found him insensible in his room, and one glance at him told it was no inebriate’s sleep.

CHAPTER III.

A partial paralysis had befallen Reginald Grove. At his first stage of consciousness, Mrs. Mancredo noticed that when a servant in clearing the room took up the withered rosebud, his heavy gaze followed it. She replaced it, and then bending over him said: “Do you want to see her?”

The eagerness of his attempt to respond showed his wish. Mrs. Mancredo ordered her carriage for a drive past the gardens of the town, on the lookout for moss roses.

“She must be a widow,” she was saying to herself, when her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of a rosebush, much beaten down on the side next the house-steps; and on the other, in the full glory of its mossy beauty.

“Turn round, John, and go slowly back, and then come to this spot and on, till I tell you to stop.”

As they passed the house the second time, Mrs. Mancredo had a good view of the roses, and of a young woman whose every nervous motion meant purpose, watering the bush. Mrs. Mancredo stopped the carriage and descended. On approaching Miss Daksha she looked at her steadily a moment, and then presented her card.

“I came—I came to look at your moss roses, and to talk about them. What has happened to this bush?” she said abruptly.

“It has been abused.”

“Did you ever live on a farm?” said Mrs. Mancredo then, after a long pause.

Ethelbert turned and looked at her, and then drawing chairs into the shade, said with a strange, sweet smile: “No, I never did. Now please sit here and I’ll sit with you, and you shall tell me what you really want to know.”

Mrs. Mancredo was a bit overwhelmed; but she sat, and wheeling her guns, said as suddenly as possible: “Reginald Grove wants to see you.”

“Is he ill?”

“You know him, then?”

“Why don’t you say whatever you have to say?” said Ethelbert simply.

“If I did, I should say that you gave him a rosebud and loaned him a volume of Petrarch’s ‘De Vita Solitaria,’ and that he loves you, and is sick, paralyzed, dying!—and wants to see you,” she said with Italian impetuosity, leaning more and more toward Ethelbert, trying to shock the secret out of her, with each added word. “You know him, you gave him the rosebud—the book?”

“I spoke to him for the first time yester-morn. I have seen him several times. I gave him the rosebud; I did not loan him the book.” She laid her cool hand on this woman’s burning hot hand, saying: “He is nothing to me more than any and every human being is. Any child five years old, with beautiful possibilities, is more interesting.”

“Then why pin a rosebud on his coat?”

“He pinned it there as a sort of symbol of his lost sweet childhood, which he wishes he could regain, and which I think he could.”

“O, this is stupidity!” said Mrs. Mancredo in quick Italian. “We all know that can never be done! What is he, that he should have his childhood back again, more than I should—more than thousands? No! he has made his bed, and there he shall lie upon it, a paralyzed idiot, for what I know. He is a bad man! Do you understand what that means? And he is a rich bad man, and his visits to this simple house and to you mean no good! Do you understand that?”

“I understand you,” said Ethelbert, rising and looking down upon her visitor, “but you don’t understand me, and cannot. Till you have known me a long while, you will misinterpret everything I say or do.”

“How old are you?” was the next angry question.

“Ages old. I am able to help you and this sick friend of yours. I am sorry for your trouble,” said Ethelbert, with a divine pity in her voice and look, and an uplifting power going forth like a cooling shadow displacing the glare and scorch of passion; until, in the cool of it, the tears which, unshed, had burned Mrs. Mancredo’s eyes ever since she had seen Reginald groping upstairs the night before his shock, came forth, relieving her spirit.

Then altogether perplexed, but believing Ethel’s every word, she said: “Can you come down to the hotel and see if you can ease him? The doctor says that his paralysis comes from the ‘functional disorder of the nervous centers,’ whatever all-that-is.”

“That is hemiplegia,” said Ethelbert, “and means ‘I strike one-half,’—so he is paralyzed on one side. If that is it, one corner of his mouth will be drawn a little, and one cheek will look in a sort, withered and drooping. If it is that, his mind will be curious.”

“You are a cold-blooded thing, any way,” said Mrs. Mancredo, frightened and angry.

Ethelbert opened her eyes reflectively.

“Forgive me,” said the excitable woman, “and get into my carriage and come now.”

“In a minute,” said Ethelbert; and in about that time she came back with her hat and her mother, whom she introduced, saying:

“My mother will go, too.” And cutting some fresh roses she followed the two elder ladies into the carriage, and they drove away to the hotel.

Reginald was awake when they entered; and Ethelbert had given the flowers to Mrs. Mancredo, who walked with them to the sick man. He smiled that strange half smile, which was contradicted by the paralyzed muscles on the other side of his mouth. “He will get on in a way, you know,—in a way,” said the physician. “He will perhaps be talking and about again, in a way, you know,—in a way.”

“I found her, Reginald, she is here,” said Mrs. Mancredo, and she motioned to Miss Daksha to approach. A look of heavenly rapture overspread his countenance. In a strange, full voice he cried out: “My mother!”

With an exclamation the physician started forward, but fell back, as Ethelbert said all motherly: “Yes, Reginald.”

He looked at her with consuming eagerness. “You have been gone so long,” he said, a little thickly. “Where is Cousin Alitza?”

A muffled shriek from Mrs. Mancredo thrilled through the room.

“You know what he means!” asserted Ethelbert, looking at Mrs. Mancredo, who, with a perfectly bloodless face and a shrinking, stealthy step, approached. Reginald Grove looked at her puzzled, and then said fretfully, lifting his eyes to Ethelbert: “You have all been gone so long; see how she has grown.”

There was an oppressive hush of bewilderment. The doctor was held back by the unmoved air with which Ethelbert kept her post, giving way to her as if she were the physician of the occasion in whom he trusted. She stood, gently stroking Reginald’s head. He raised his other hand and patted hers languidly, as a pleased child would do, and so presently fell asleep. Then the other physicians came in, and a little apart discussed the case, perplexed.

“He called you Alitza. Your card was marked Corrinne,” said Ethelbert; and after scarce a moment’s halt Mrs. Mancredo said with truthful rapidity: “I am—I was—Alitza Corrinne Roccoca, his cousin. I have seen him but twice since I was seventeen, until I met him in this city. He loved me when we were children; he hated me when I was older. He never dreamed that Mrs. Mancredo was—is—Alitza.”

Ethelbert was silent; she was thinking of his perplexed words: “You have all been away so long; see how she has grown,” and of the childlike manner in which he had clung to her and called her “mother.” She remembered a curious case of mental-aberration of which she had read. “Doctors,” she said, “your patient’s mind has become blank, back to the time before his mother’s death. Don’t you see? He thinks I am his mother; and his mother passed away when he was five years old. He is a child again; that is all.”

“Yes, but a paralyzed one,” said the physicians.

CHAPTER IV.

The doctor motioned them all to come with him to an adjoining room. And then Mrs. Mancredo told all she knew about the rosebud which had become associated in Reginald’s mind with his early life, and of the conversation which had taken place between them the night of his attack, adding:

“I was in the family when he was a little fellow, before auntie died. We parted after that, and only met a few times when I was a tall, thin, sallow girl; and—and he did not know me when we met again here at this hotel this summer, in my robust maturity. He isn’t quick, Reginald isn’t, and I’ve puzzled him my share, one way and another. He has been getting in a bad way, poor Regie, and here’s the end of it.”

And to this the doctors agreed. This was the end of poor Reginald Grove; and as his fate seemed settled, the older Mr. Grove, when he arrived, accepted the statement that Reginald was a wrecked man, body and mind. And when Mrs. Mancredo had made herself known to Mr. Grove on his arrival, in a softened state of feeling toward both the father and son she found herself promising more in the way of help and responsibility than she at first realized, or afterwards wanted to perform. And the elder Grove (deeply interested in speculations in Mexico, and interested in his own approaching third marriage) was well content to turn this responsibility over to Mrs. Mancredo, with (it was popularly said) the promise of all the money necessary for Reginald’s needs or fancies. It was not until Mr. Grove had steamed away to Mexico that Mrs. Mancredo really began to look about her; and then she did it with some disgust at her own stupidity, as she was pleased to name the sympathy that had overwhelmed her and swept her on to undertake, in an indefinite way, all that the care of Reginald involved.

One warm day in the late fall she brought Reginald in her carriage down to the Dakshas. He was urgent to go there every day, and was often brought down and placed in a long-chair out on their piazza, where, with his volume of Petrarch (from which he was inseparable) he passed many pleasant hours. His facial disfigurement was not as marked as at first. But he was paralyzed through one arm and leg, and the sense of taste, touch and smell seemed deadened. His hearing and his sight were not perceptibly injured, and the childlike alertness of his questions seemed to show that the gray matter of the brain, like a galvanic battery, still generated the electric current sufficiently to produce and accumulate nervous force for the few demands which the partially deadened coarser part of the brain now made upon it. There was evinced by Reginald an utter deadness to the passions of fear, desire, etc. The central ganglia, which serves to do the drudgery of the brain, leaving the gray matter free for higher, more difficult kinds of work, was injured; thus overthrowing the balance of power between the highest meditative, spiritual faculties, and the seat of those practical faculties which insure energetic daily activities.

It was as if the partial paralysis which had befallen Reginald Grove had sent a partial sleep to the abused and overtaxed faculties of his animal being; while the higher hemisphere of his brain, so long crippled by inaction, now arousing from that lethargy of disuse, put forth dormant strength. Whether true or not, this was Ethelbert’s theory of the case, and her study of developments confirmed her in it. He was, in a sense, helpless and forceless; yet the childlike, placid clearness of his ideals, and the exhalation of sentiment in view of nature’s beauties, were so inherently clear-cut and rare, that, broken and disorganized though he was, Reginald Grove was now a less disagreeable person to Ethelbert than he had been on his first tumultuous visit. He was seldom pettish or unmanageable when with Ethelbert; but to Mrs. Mancredo his talk was unendurable. She called him a miserable fellow, blaming him passionately to Ethelbert.

“But I don’t think he is miserable,” said Ethelbert, in her quiet way. “He was miserable, when in other moments he loathed himself for his self-mismanagement. He acted like a soul in torment the first time he was here; and I fancy he was not then at his worst.”

“I am sure I can’t understand your notions. Do you mean, you think he is less miserable than before?” said Mrs. Mancredo, looking toward Reginald, who sat reading the book from which he was inseparable, as a very little child reads. The sight of that book made her wild with nervousness. There seemed something uncanny in the way he had identified himself with the personages and ideas there. And his numerous polyglot questions asked in regard to things she could not explain, and his weird, childlike shrewdness of imagination as to some unseen world of mind and spirit, were getting to be the horrible thing to Mrs. Mancredo.

From what in the apparently stolid, noncommittal old Reginald, this spirit of occult divination of the purposes, powers and results of Petrarch’s struggles, had evolved itself, she could not fancy. And she was getting so nervous at the steady illumination of his eyes that she would have given half she was worth to have removed from her memory all knowledge of his existence. Whether he had become absolutely foolish, or uncannily wise and weird, she did not know. But her refuge was Ethelbert; and Reginald’s unaltered fancy for calling Ethelbert “mother,” seemed to favor Mrs. Mancredo’s dawning hope of a way to get rid of him helpfully. And as she so thinking stood there, down in the garden, looking back at him up on the piazza, he called out: “Mother! mother!” and they both walked quickly to him.

“Let’s have a nice read about ‘of such is the kingdom of heaven,’ and about the poor boy out of whom the devils were cast. I want to know about those mighty works, and how power did them.”

Mrs. Mancredo, with an ignorant person’s horror of what may result from irregularity of mental action, felt it was awful that a man who had lost the gustatory appetites which render nice food a pleasure to the palate, should yet, as Ethelbert said, feast on the high thoughts and things of the unseen realms. For Ethelbert believed he did not think in the sense of concentrating attention; but, instead, she believed his mind simply reflected back to his attention what passed in the realms of life above and anear him, as a lake reflects all that shadows itself upon its surface; and this she explained to Mrs. Mancredo, adding:

“It is for this reason that I wish he could be always cared for by some discerning person, who, dwelling unmoved in that beautiful realm which now has hold on his mind, and who, reading his very thought, would thus sustain him at peace there, as a student under these angelic teachers, and so educate him for a real manhood which he would thus yet attain. Do you understand?”

“No, I don’t understand,” was the blunt response. “All I know is, he has played out his little play on the stage of life, and has made a tragedy or farce of it, common enough in this age. He makes me wild with nervousness sometimes. What do you want me to do with him, for heaven’s sake?”

“You are right. It is for heaven’s sake that I want you to do it; for there is a heaven, and it belongs on earth,” said Ethel, slowly. “I believe it is only the organs at the base of his brain which are exhausted; and as they are nearly deadened, he seems like a fool to people who can only use their lower brain, which is the seat of the senses and passions—but—”

“Do you mean that as I am not alert on those spiritual planes which arouse themselves in this ghostly way with him, and as he cannot use his common-sense faculties, which are alert enough in me, I probably seem to him to be as much of an idiot as he to me seems to be?”

“I mean you have no common ground to meet upon just now. Not, however, that you are unspiritual, but because your nature is so closely knitted up, that you act and think as a well-constructed entity, dealing with entities, not with fragments.”

“Well, we never did have any common ground,” said Mrs. Mancredo, just as Judge Elkhorn came on the scene. And then her mind took hold of the fact that if she could not get along with Reginald as a whole, she certainly did not want to deal with the ghastly fragments of him which seemed left. And this she told Ethel.

“He never has been mentally whole,” said Ethel. “He is gathering up his fragments;” said Ethel. “Don’t you want to help him?”

Then Mrs. Mancredo gave Judge Elkhorn a crude version of the story, appealing from Ethel to him, concerning the whole business, in a way which some women have; not because they are going to act on the advice they may receive, but because they understand themselves better after hearing themselves “talk out the whole problem.”

Judge Elkhorn was a bright man in many regards, and had had an ambition to electrify the world with a theory which would give a new basis for action in reforms; but in dealing with such a case as this, he had certain serious limitations. For he prided himself on never going beyond the common-sense recognition of objects which he could taste, touch, feel, smell and see. But here was Reginald with the common-sense plane of mind (that is, the plane of mind on which practical people live externally and meet each other) terribly damaged, and with three out of five sense-avenues to knowledge, shut up. And yet Miss Ethelbert claimed he was living in a rather select sort of world of his own, after a tranquil fashion; not devoid of certain startling gleams of intelligence, nay, wisdom. But as for an unseen world, and “an education beyond the grave,” Judge Elkhorn was pleased to say, “he hoped he had left all faith in that sort of thing along with fear of spooks and the dark.” He was willing to call Reginald’s state “a curious phenomenon.” For the rest, he would have liked to have relegated this man to the obscurity of some asylum. For if he disliked Reginald when he was well (?) and obtrusively at home on Ethelbert’s balcony the day they first met, he disliked him vastly more now that he, as a child, was ensconced on Ethelbert’s attention.

Judge Elkhorn thought the whole thing preposterous; and notwithstanding his fine humanitarian theories for helping misery in the mass, he would have liked to take prompt steps to hinder its being served up in individual cases, in polite society. He quite laid down the law on this subject to Miss Daksha, and interposed his particular likes and dislikes as if they were the code of the Medes and Persians. Ethel let him proceed. But she held to her faith in the final rehabilitation of Reginald, and expressed it.

So, in language of his own, Judge Elkhorn at last reassured her that her concern for this case was really unfitting.

“Who being judge?” said she.

“I shall have to be judge of your conduct, if you desire to retain my friendship and respect.”

“But that is not my desire. My desire is to get Reginald Grove well,” she said quietly, holding Judge Elkhorn steady in the light of her self-directing intelligence, until, without more words, he himself saw that he had supposed her general friendliness for him was identified with an enfeebling dependence on his approbation.

Then—

“Mrs. Mancredo, what will you do for this man?” Ethel cheerily asked.

“What can I do?”

“You could take Reginald away from the hotel-life which you dislike, and which you find so injurious to both of you; and you could get a nice, rightly adjusted home. And then, from the pure potencies of your splendid being, you could second nature’s recuperative forces in him; and they, unthwarted and assisted thus by you, will build him up again into health of body, by giving him a new affluence of mind. Then mind will recreate the body. To accomplish this would perhaps take years of real mothering-wit and wisdom. But—”

“Years, Ethelbert? I should be an old woman by that time, near my fifties. What is a woman worth then? And what would this rejuvenated young scholar care for me? I mean—this is nonsense; and yes, what would I be by that time?”

“You would be a woman who at least would have achieved one defined object in life. You are now sick of existence. Money spending, dressing, dining, and days spent in wishing that things and men were different, have given your active imagination and non-concentrated powers no comfort for years past. Neither could you get much good by running up and down the world, trying to get an audience to listen to your theories. Absolute, concentrated personal work, done well, on the spot you stand on, will not fatigue you any more than does the toil of mere self-exhibit and self-protection from the inroads of others on your property and yourself. You say twelve years hence you will be a woman in the fifties, if you give these years to work. How old will you be twelve years hence if you don’t?”

“There are always asylums and skilled people,” she suggested, trembling with alarm, not so much at the work, as at undertaking to settle herself to a twelve-years’ job for him. She was very pale, and looked toward the man with a shrinking, like that in the eyes of a dumb creature being led at last to the altar of final sacrifice.

“Yes,” said Ethelbert, “there are always asylums; and they are getting fuller and fuller of people who know so ill how to deal with time, that fearing, faltering and fightings have landed them there to die, while their friends outside, fearing, faltering and fighting against their fears, soon need asylums, too. This man’s trembling intellect would be ruined by a few months in the average insane asylum. You say you would be an old woman at fifty if you tried to save that man; tell me, then, what will you be if you don’t?”

“Mother! mother! please call little Alitza; she can read me the story of the little leaden soldier; he didn’t fight well; he fell in the gutter.”

Of course that was Reginald’s voice speaking out in good English this time, which was enfibred by the childish ring of a perfectly carefree mind, when it is filled with blithe imaginings.

Judge Elkhorn looked at him with startled attention, and Mrs. Mancredo shuddered, half whispering: “We used to read ‘Comte d’Andersen’ in the French, with his mother. He was such a pretty little fellow, and took up French so easily. I learned it, too, though Italian was my baby tongue. My father was French. O dear, my life has amounted to nothing after all my efforts!”

“How would it do, then, to cease efforts, and in a home be easily useful?”

“It would make a scandal.”

Ethelbert unconsciously drew herself up, till it seemed as if the universe did not contain air enough to fill her expanding lungs as she said:

“‘Don’t talk of scandal. Needs break through stone walls. Take counsel of your own soul, though all the world should be scandalized thereby.’” And then, turning at the repeated call for “mother,” she went to Reginald, who could not be satisfied without a caressing touch of her health-giving hand. But then, contented, he went on with his reading, caring for the attention only as a petted child cares for an accustomed endearment which is hourly, perhaps, received.

Yet Judge Elkhorn looked not incapable of striking the paralyzed creature. But the Italian, with an instant’s sharp scrutiny, saw only in the act that Diana-like integrity of purpose, which like a light reflected, beautified her own face, too, with the mother-tenderness that filled Ethelbert’s being, as she said:

“Will you go to Alitza’s house, or stay with mother?”

“Of course I shall stay with my mother. Alitza may come when she chooses,” said the invalid again in English. And Elkhorn, with arms high folded, looked on, forgetful of all else but the simple intelligent purpose which made radiant these workers. Was it that passion by them had been triturated into the high potency of a god-like vigor, which was sent now through the earth to bring redemption to universal man, and (at their hands) to this individual, by the way?

“Yes, yes, take him, keep him here,” said Mrs. Mancredo. “Do as he says, Miss Daksha. He is coming to seem such a dreadful responsibility—guarded by angels, that—”

“Oh, if this is the style of doing things which women are going to put on the world!” the judge exclaimed, “asylums and criminal courts will get to seem more devoted to miracle-working than the churches now are; and every idiot will become a center for spiritually scientific endeavor.”

“They never should have been anything less. In fact, idiots don’t belong. They are transgressions of law, as much as criminals. They, with hundreds of other things, are but the results of women’s unnatural relation to the university-education, which must be by her bestowed on man,” said Ethelbert, leading them away from proximity to Reginald. Because even though he seemed unobservant of what was going on about him, she thought that when he was not directly addressed he (as if in echo) heard what was said to or about him. This manner of dealing with him rendered his visible presence in this world of effects a means by which those who were about him in this world were partially introduced to the other.

The judge and Mrs. Mancredo stood drawn together, looking back at this alienated mentality. Then she half whispered:

“They say at the hotel that he ought to—well—not be at the hotel, no matter what big bills I am willing to pay, and all that. So many people are in a rickety mental condition themselves, that—instead of studying a case like this, Miss Ethel, as you do, it alarms them, and—and—well, I don’t know myself what it does to them—yes, and to me, too. I will confess I dislike sick men. And it sometimes seems to be not Reginald at all, but a ghost which has arisen out of his childhood—sort of waiting to have another try at what he can make of life.”

“Yet there are hundreds of such men everywhere, and we can’t afford to use our brains over them. Why should women spend their lives doing such jobs? Men choose to go the pace that kills, one way and another, and will not hear one word from women till they drop down dead weights on the shoulders of—”

Mrs. Mancredo broke forth into convulsive weeping. This was too much for Judge Elkhorn. He took sudden leave, assured of one thing: that was, that Mrs. Mancredo saw the cleansing work which would have to be done in society’s augean stables if women took up the business of turning these stables into ‘the home of the brave and the free.’ And he saw that the idea that she ought to save this man, now had a hold on Mrs. Mancredo, and he knew that when a strong woman thinks she ought to do a thing, the ship of state may as well clear its decks for an encounter from all the guns hitherto known or unknown in moral combat. For he had learned that women are constitutionally brave as well as educationally timid, and that they set no limits to their daring when once they enter the lists to do the thing that must be done.

After he was gone, Mrs. Mancredo stood watching Reginald’s happy, superintelligent look. Then—

“What have you done to him and to us all?” she said. “It is as if—as if we were watching by the hallowed dead.”

“I think it is wonderful myself,” said Ethelbert. “I have concluded that the core of Reginald’s nature is the love of truth; and that this core of his being has not yet been ruined by social abuses; and that this love of truth is a radical root, from which a resurrected life will arise. There is hope of a tree, though it be cut down, that it shall live again if the roots are healthy. The roots of his life are better than the visible growths that have appeared,” said Ethelbert.

“Oh, let me come here, too! Let us both come!” cried Mrs. Mancredo, after the strange, tremblant silence; “I can’t keep away from here. I am so much happier here than I have ever been in my life; I feel so broken up and stripped of everything, somehow. Let me fetch down a few things. You can crowd together a little and give me two rooms; or better still, throw out an addition across the house. You can make new parlors—so—with a veranda round them, and give Regie the sunny half, and—and take me in and educate me, too. You’ve tossed me all up, somehow. At the rate I am going on I shall be a selfish old woman at fifty, and have done neither Regie nor myself nor anyone any good. But really, you know, he don’t deserve a bit of this at my hands. Do you know the night he had the shock, I felt as though—as though—”

She stopped and looked at Ethelbert’s impassive face. “You have never asked me what there was between Regie and me,” she said. “Sharp as you are, you must have known I hated him. Well, yes,” hesitated Mrs. Mancredo, “in a sort, I hated him. Have you never wondered what there is between us? You don’t look as if you cared now.”

“I should be sorry to have anything between him and his best development, or you and yours. All the rest does not amount to much either way at this terrible social crisis,” said Ethelbert, as she gazed down the long ages which had been leading on to this stage of general social, chaotic development, which is but an outward sign of the particular state of the aggregated individual. “And instead of feeling frightened at wickedness, and planning a punitive reform, the simple thing to do is to recognize these conditions as stages at which the fomentation takes place, which always precedes clarification. A thorough clarification of society is at hand, the outcome of which will be, ‘the new order of the new age.’”

“I begin to think so myself,” said Mrs. Mancredo, after a long pause, in which she had watched the thought-gleams in Ethel’s eyes. Then, vexed at her own perplexity, she said uneasily:

“I wonder if anything would interest you that was not purely metaphysical or psychological? I mean—in fact—I want—that is—I wonder—

“Oh come, tell me. How far would your ideas of old-fashioned duty carry you? Would they make you interfere with another person’s business? Would they make you make a body tell you all she knew about herself, and make you bring a body right down to the grindstone of confession, and bind her to your dictatorial law of ways and means of repentance?”

Ethel laughed amiably, saying: “If you want to know my character, you would better glance at my life.”

But still, with an alarmed, distrustful, quizzical look, the outgrowth of her experiences, Mrs. Mancredo said at last:

“Do you think you can take better care of Reginald than I can?”

“I can do my duty better than you can do my duty, but I cannot do yours; but on my way to do mine, if you are with me you ought to get some view of what your duty is, as I shall get new views from you regarding my work. That seems to be the whole of the affair,” said Ethel, taking Mrs. Mancredo’s hand cordially.

“Is that so? Would you not dictate to me, nor talk to others about me, nor flinch from your duty if I neglected mine?”

“I only know,” said Ethelbert after a pause, “whatever comes to me to be done, I shall do, but I shall accommodate my actions to new circumstances which may arise, for I should be sorry to have anything come between Reginald and his best development, or between you and yours. The development of the individual is the point; all else is inconsiderable.”

“Now look at me,” said Mrs. Mancredo, taking her hand tightly, and looking her straight in the eyes. “Remember what you have said, for I shall not forget it. Listen: I am Reginald Grove’s wife.”

Ethel caught her breath, for this she had not foreseen.

“Now, then, how far will you practice your personal liberty principles? How much will you leave me in perfect freedom to choose my own duty? Remember, you have said you would be sorry to have anything come between Reginald and his best development, and me and mine, and that all the rest amounts to little either way.

“Now, then,” she continued, starting off again after a little pause, “if you don’t want anything to come between me and my best development, you will let me give up my life there at the hotel, and you will make the changes in your house that I suggest, and let me pay you the hotel prices, and bring along my carriage and servant John, and take me into the family on the ‘personal liberty principle’ with which you four heavenly mortals control or don’t control each other’s lives. And you will angelically mind your heaven-appointed business of evoking Regie’s lost angel, and leave me to evolve my own as best I can.”

By this time Ethelbert’s beryl eyes were looking into Mrs. Mancredo’s black ones, as if this arrangement were a simple plan for a lawn party.

“Why don’t you look disgusted at a woman who passes as rich Mr. Mancredo’s widow, and who is really Reginald Grove’s wife, and has never been any other man’s wife, nor anything like it, in any way to anybody!”

“Disgust must be too unpleasant a feeling to take on one’s self prematurely,” said Ethelbert, with her rare sweet smile, as she took Mrs. Mancredo’s hands in hers and sat looking way down through the turbulent surface of her eyes, into the sorrowful depths beneath; then: “When I learn all, I am sure I shall have reason to congratulate you, that with all your temptations and perplexities you have done so well.”

“How well?”

“I only know that you want nothing between you and your upward path; and that is well, absolutely well.”

“That is true; and I have never wanted any evil thing, and I really doubt if anyone really wants evil things. Shall I tell you my history now?” she continued.

“I don’t see why you should.”

“Have you no curiosity?”

“Not of that kind. I am curious to know just how Reginald’s brain looks, and if his tranquil, happy life is accumulating force in the superior brain faster than he is using it. I would like to see if recuperative energy can be stored up like money in a bank, ready for a heavy draft, and—”

“If you weren’t so interested in all that, you would be more interested in my affairs.”

“Yes, if I were not so much interested in life as a religiously-scientific-problem, I would be more interested in gossip, and would now bid you good-by, and immediately would set the town alive with a little romance; which, instead, you will tell me much later, and will tell the rest of the world when you choose.” And with a long grasp of the hand, Ethelbert moved away as she spoke.

“Don’t you care to know?” said Mrs. Mancredo, following her up.

“I don’t care to know anything except the resurrection-truth that you can still make your life as beautiful as you choose. You are thirty-five years old; you have forty-five years to live in this world,” said Ethelbert. “Think of that, and fashion circumstances accordantly with the result you would like to see.”

“Well, I declare, I never thought of that way of doing,” said Mrs. Mancredo, after a pause. Then: “Do you really mean to say that you take me on trust?”