The Golden House

XXIV

The whole landscape was golden, the sea was silver, on that October morning. It was the brilliant decline of the year. Edith stood with Jack on the veranda. He had his grip-sack in hand and was equipped for town. Both were silent in the entrancing scene.

The birds, twittering in the fruit-trees and over the vines, had the air of an orchestra, the concerts of the season over, gathering their instruments and about to depart. One could detect in the lapse of the waves along the shore the note of weariness preceding the change into the fretfulness and the tumult of tempests. In the soft ripening of the season there was peace and hope, but it was the hope of another day. The curtain was falling on this.

Was life beginning, then, or ending? If life only could change and renew itself like the seasons, with the perpetually recurring springs! But youth comes only once, and thereafter the man gathers the fruit of it, sweet or bitter.

Jack was not given to moralizing, but perhaps a subtle suggestion of this came to him in the thought that an enterprise, a new enterprise, might have seemed easier in May, when the forces of nature were with him, than in October. There was something, at least, that fell in with his mood, a mood of acquiescence in failure, in this closing season of the year, when he stood empty-handed in the harvest-time.

“Edith,” he said, as they paced down the walk which was flaming with scarlet and crimson borders, and turned to look at the peaceful brown house, “I hate to go.”

“But you are not going,” said Edith, brightly. “I feel all the time as if you were just coming back. Jack, do you know,” and she put her hand on his shoulder, “this is the sweetest home in the world now!”

“It is the only one, dear;” and Jack made the statement with a humorous sense of its truth. “Well, there's the train, and I'm off with the other clerks.”

“Clerk, indeed!” cried Edith, putting up her face to his; “you are going to be a Merchant Prince, Jack, that is what you are going to be.”

On the train there was an atmosphere of business. Jack felt that he was not going to the New York that he knew—not to his New York, but to a city of traffic; down into the streets of commercial enterprise, not at all to the metropolis of leisure, of pleasure, to the world of clubs and drawing-rooms and elegant loiterings and the rivalries of society life. That was all ended. Jack was hurrying to catch the down-town car for the dingy office of Fletcher & Co. at an hour fixed.

It was ended, to be sure, but the struggle with Jack in his new life was not ended, his biographer knows, for months and years.

It was long before he could pass his club windows without a pang of humiliation, or lift his hat to a lady of his acquaintance in her passing carriage without a vivid feeling of separateness from his old life. For the old life—he could see that any day in the Avenue, any evening by the flaming lights—went by in its gilded chariots and entrancing toilets, the fascinating whirl of Vanity Fair crowned with roses and with ennui. Did he regret it? No doubt. Not to regret would have been to change his nature, and that were a feat impossible for his biographer to accomplish. In a way his life was gone, and to build up a new life, serene and enduring, was not the work of a day.

One thing he did not regret in the shock he had received, and that was the absence of Carmen and her world. When he thought of her he had a sense of escape. She was still abroad, and he heard from time to time that Mavick was philandering about from capital to capital in her train. Certainly he would have envied neither of them if he had been aware, as the reader is aware, of the guilty secret that drew them together and must be forever their torment. They knew each other.

But this glittering world, to attain a place in which is the object of most of the struggles and hungry competition of modern life, seemed not so real nor so desirable when he was at home with Edith, and in his gradually growing interest in nobler pursuits. They had decided to take a modest apartment in town for the winter, and almost before the lease was signed, Edith, in her mind, had transformed it into a charming home. Jack used to rally her on her enthusiasm in its simple furnishing; it reminded him, he said, of Carmen's interest in her projected house of Nero. It was a great contrast, to be sure, to their stately house by the Park, but it was to them both what that had never been. To one who knows how life goes astray in the solicitations of the great world, there was something pathetic in Edith's pleasure. Even to Jack it might some day come with the force of keen regret for years wasted, that it is enough to break a body's heart to see how little a thing can make a woman happy.

It was another summer. Major Fairfax had come down with Jack to spend Sunday at the Golden House. Edith was showing the Major the view from the end of the veranda. Jack was running through the evening paper. “Hi!” he cried; “here's news. Mavick is to have the mission to Rome, and it is rumored that the rich and accomplished Mrs. Henderson, as the wife of the minister, will make the Roman season very gay.”

“It's too bad,” said Edith. “Nothing is said about the training-school?”

“Nothing.” “Poor Henderson!” was the Major's comment. “It was for this that he drudged and schemed and heaped up his colossal fortune! His life must look to him like a burlesque.”