He was neither at the window, nor in his bed, nor anywhere else to be seen, when I opened my eyes upon the world next morning; nor did any answer come when I called his name. I raised myself and saw outside the great branches of the wood, bathed from top to trunk in a sunshine that was no early morning’s light; and upon this, the silence of the house spoke plainly to me not of man still sleeping, but of man long risen and gone about his business. I stepped barefoot across the wooden floor to where lay my watch, but it marked an unearthly hour, for I had neglected to wind it at the end of our long and convivial evening—of which my head was now giving me some news. And then I saw a note addressed to me from John Mayrant.
“You are a good sleeper,” it began, “but my conscience is clear as to the Bombo, called by some Kill-devil, about which I hope you will remember that I warned you.”
He hoped I should remember! Of course I remembered everything; why did he say that? An apology for his leaving me followed; he had been obliged to take the early train because of the Custom House, where he was serving his final days; they would give me breakfast when ever I should be ready for it, and I was to make free of the place; I had better visit the old church (they had orders about the keys) and drive myself into Kings Port after lunch; the horses would know the way, if I did not. It was the boy’s closing sentence which fixed my attention wholly, took it away from Kill-devil Bombo and my Aunt Carola’s commission, for the execution of which I now held the clue, and sent me puzzling for the right interpretation of his words:—
“I believe that you will help your friend by that advice which startled me last night, but which I now begin to see more in than I did. Only between alternate injuries, he may find it harder to choose which is the least he can inflict, than you, who look on, find it. For in following your argument, he benefits himself so plainly that the benefit to the other person is very likely obscured to him. But, if you wish to, tell him a Southern gentleman would feel he ought to be shot either way. That’s the honorable price for changing your mind in such a case.”
No interpretation of this came to me. I planned and carried out my day according to his suggestion; a slow dressing with much cold water, a slow breakfast with much good hot coffee, a slow wandering beneath the dreamy branches of Udolpho,—this course cleared my head of the Bombo, and brought back to me our whole evening, and every word I had said to John, except that I had lost the solution which, last night, the triangle had held for me. At that moment, the triangle, and my whole dealing with the subject of monogamy, had seemed to contain the simplicity of genius; but it had all gone now, and I couldn’t get it back; only, what I had contrived to say to John about his own predicament had been certainly well said; I would say that over again to-day. It was the boy and the meaning of his words which escaped me still, baffled me, and formed the whole subject of my attention, even when I was inside the Tern Creek church; so that I retain nothing of that, save a general quaintness, a general loneliness, a little deserted, forgotten token of human doings long since done, standing on its little acre of wilderness amid that solitude which suggests the departed presence of man, and which is so much more potent in the flavor of its desolation than the virgin wilderness whose solitude is still waiting for man to come.
It made no matter whether John had believed in the friend to whom I intended writing advice, or had seen through and accepted in good part my manoeuvre; he had considered my words, that was the point; and he had not slept in his bed, but on it, if sleep had come to him at all; this I found out while dressing. Several times I read his note over. “Between alternate injuries he may find it harder to choose.” This was not an answer to me, but an explanation of his own perplexity. At times it sounded almost like an appeal, as if he were saying, “Do not blame me for not being convinced;” and if it was such appeal, why, then, taken with his resolve to do right at any cost, and his night of inward contention, it was poignant. “I believe that you will help your friend.” Those words sounded better. But—“tell him a Southern gentleman ought to be shot either way.” What was the meaning of this? A chill import rose from it into my thoughts, but that I dismissed. To die on account of Hortense! Such a thing was not to be conceived. And yet, given a high-strung nature, not only trapped by its own standards, but also wrought upon during many days by increasing exasperation and unhappiness while helpless in the trap, and with no other outlook but the trap: the chill import returned to me more than once, and was reasoned away, as, with no attention to my surroundings, I took a pair of oars, and got into a boat belonging to the lodge, and rowed myself slowly among the sluggish windings of Tern Creek.
Whence come those thoughts that we ourselves feel shame at? It shamed me now, as I pulled my boat along, that I should have thoughts of John which needed banishing. What tale would this be to remember of a boy’s life, that he gave it to buy freedom from a pledge which need never have been binding? What pearl was this to cast before the sophisticated Hortense? Such act would be robbed of its sadness by its absurdity. Yet, surely, the bitterest tragedies are those of which the central anguish is lost amid the dust of surrounding paltriness. If such a thing should happen here, no one but myself would have seen the lonely figure of John Mayrant, standing by the window and looking out into the dark quiet of the wood; his name would be passed down for a little while as the name of a fool, and then he would be forgotten. “I believe that you will help your friend.” Yes; he had certainly written that, and it now came to me that I might have said to him one thing more: Had he given Hortense the chance to know what his feelings to her had become? But he would merely have answered that here it was the duty of a gentleman to lie. Or, had he possibly, at Newport, ever become her lover too much for any escaping now? Had his dead passion once put his honor in a pawn which only marriage could redeem? This might fit all that had come, so far; and still, with such a two as they, I should forever hold the boy the woman’s victim. But this did not fit what came after. Perhaps it was the late sitting of the night before, and the hushed and strange solitude of my surroundings now, that had laid my mind open to all these thoughts which my reason, in dealing with, answered continually, one by one, yet which returned, requiring to be answered again; for there are times when our uncomfortable eyes see through the appearances we have arranged for daily life, into the actualities which lie forever behind them.
Going about thus in my boat, I rowed sleepiness into myself, and pushed into a nook where shade from some thick growth hid the boat and me from the sun; and there, almost enmeshed in the deep lattice of green, I placed my coat beneath my head, and prone in the boat’s bottom I drifted into slumber. Once or twice my oblivion was pierced by the roaming honk of the automobile; but with no more than the half-melted consciousness that the Replacers were somewhere in the wood, oblivion closed over me again; and when it altogether left me, it was because of voices near me on the water, or on the bank. Their calls and laughter pushed themselves into my drowsiness, and soon after I grew aware that the Replacers were come here to see what was to be seen at Udolpho—the club, the old church, a country place with a fine avenue—and that it was the church they now couldn’t get into, because my visit had disturbed the usual whereabouts of the key, of which Gazza was now going in search. I could have told him where to find it, but it pleased me not to disturb myself for this, as I listened to him assuring Kitty that it was probably in the cabin beyond the bridge, but not to be alarmed if he did not immediately return with it. Kitty, not without audible mirth, assured him that they should not be alarmed at all, to which the voice of Hortense supplemented, “Not at all.” They were evidently in a boat, which Hortense herself was rowing, and which she seemed to bring to the bank, where I gathered that Kitty got out and sat while Hortense remained in the boat. There was the little talk and movement which goes with borrowing of a cigarette, a little exclamation about not falling out, accompanied by the rattle of a displaced oar, and then stillness, and the smell of tobacco smoke.
Presently Kitty spoke. “Charley will be back to-night.”
To this I heard no reply.
“What did his telegram say?” Kitty inquired, after another silence.
“It’s all right.” This was Hortense. Her slow, rich murmur was as deliberate as always.
“Mr. Bohm knew it would be,” said Kitty. “He said it wouldn’t take five minutes’ talk from Charley to get a contract worth double what they were going to accept.”
After this, nothing came to me for several minutes, save the odor of the cigarettes.
Of course there was now but one proper course for me, namely, to utter a discreet cough, and thus warn them that some one was within earshot. But I didn’t! I couldn’t! Strength failed, curiosity won, my baser nature triumphed here, and I deliberately remained lying quiet and hidden. It was the act of no gentleman, you will say. Well, it was; and I must simply confess to it, hoping that I am not the only gentleman in the world who has, on occasion, fallen beneath himself.
“Hortense Rieppe,” began Kitty, “what do you intend to say to my brother after what he has done about those phosphates?”
“He is always so kind,” murmured Hortense.
“Well, you know what it means.”
“Means?”
“If you persist in this folly, you’ll drop out.”
Hortense chose another line of speculation. “I wonder why your brother is so sure of me?”
“Charley is a set man. And I’ve never seen him so set on anything as on you, Hortense Rieppe.”
“He is always so kind,” murmured Hortense again.
“He’s a man you’ll always know just where to find,” declared Kitty. “Charley is safe. He’ll never take you by surprise, never fly out, never do what other people don’t do, never make any one stare at him by the way he looks, or the way he acts, or anything he says, or—or—why, how you can hesitate between those two men after that ridiculous, childish, conspicuous, unusual scene on the bridge—”
“Unusual. Yes,” said Hortense.
Kitty’s eloquence and voice mounted together. “I should think it was unusual! Tearing people’s money up, and making a rude, awkward fuss that everybody had to smooth over as hard as they could! Why, even Mr. Rodgers says that sort of thing isn’t done, and you’re always saying he knows.”
“No,” said Hortense. “It isn’t done.”
“Well, I’ve never seen anything approaching such behavior in our set. And he was ready to go further. Nobody knows where it might have gone to, if Charley’s perfect coolness hadn’t rebuked him and brought him to his senses. There’s where it is, that’s what I mean, Hortense, by saying you could always feel safe with Charley.”
Hortense put in a languid word. “I think I should always feel safe with Mr. Mayrant.”
But Kitty was a simple soul. “Indeed you couldn’t, Hortense! I assure you that you’re mistaken. There’s where you get so wrong about men sometimes. I have been studying that boy for your sake ever since we got here, and I know him through and through. And I tell you, you cannot count upon him. He has not been used to our ways, and I see no promise of his getting used to them. He will stay capable of outbreaks like that horrid one on the bridge. Wherever you take him, wherever you put him, no matter how much you show him of us, and the way we don’t allow conspicuous things like that to occur, believe me, Hortense, he’ll never learn, he’ll never smooth down. You may brush his hair flat and keep him appearing like other people for a while, but a time will come, something will happen, and that boy’ll be conspicuous. Charley would never be conspicuous.”
“No,” assented Hortense.
Kitty urged her point. “Why, I never saw or beard of anything like that on the bridge—that is, among—among—us!”
“No,” assented Hortense, again, and her voice dropped lower with each statement. “One always sees the same thing. Always hears the same thing. Always the same thing.” These last almost inaudible words sank away into the silent pool of Hortense’s meditation.
“Have another cigarette,” said Kitty. “You’ve let yours fall into the water.”
I heard them moving a little, and then they must have resumed their seats.
“You’ll drop out of it,” Kitty now pursued.
“Into what shall I drop?”
“Just being asked to the big things everybody goes to and nobody counts. For even with the way Charley has arranged about the phosphates, it will not be enough to keep you in our swim—just by itself. He’ll weigh more than his money, because he’ll stay different—too different.”
“He was not so different last summer.”
“Because he was not there long enough, my dear. He learned bridge quickly, and of course he had seen champagne before, and nobody had time to notice him. But he’ll be married now and they will notice him, and they won’t want him. To think of your dropping out!” Kitty became very earnest. “To think of not seeing you among us! You’ll be in none of the small things; you’ll never be asked to stay at the smart houses—why, not even your name will be in the paper! Not a foreigner you entertain, not a dinner you give, not a thing you wear, will ever be described next morning. And Charley’s so set on you, and you’re so just exactly made for each other, and it would all be so splendid, and cosey, and jolly! And to throw all this away for that crude boy!” Kitty’s disdain was high at the thought of John.
Hortense took a little time over it “Once,” she then stated, “he told me he could drown in my hair as joyfully as the Duke of Clarence did in his butt of Malmsey wine!”
Kitty gave a little scream. “Did you let him?”
“One has to guard one’s value at times.”
Kitty’s disdain for John increased. “How crude!”
Hortense did not make any answer.
“How crude!” Kitty, after some silence, repeated. She seemed to have found the right word.
Steps sounded upon the bridge, and the voice of Gazza cried out that the stupid key was at the imbecile club-house, whither he was now going for it, and not to be alarmed. Their voices answered reassuringly, and Gazza was heard growing distant, singing some little song.
Kitty was apparently unable to get away from John’s crudity. “He actually said that?”
“Yes.”
“Where was it? Tell me about it, Hortense.”
“We were walking in the country on that occasion.”
Kitty still lingered with it. “Did he look—I’ve never had any man—I wonder if—how did you feel?”
“Not disagreeably.” And Hortense permitted herself to laugh musically.
Kitty’s voice at once returned to the censorious tone. “Well, I call such language as that very—very—”
Hortense helped her. “Operatic?”
“He could never be taught in those ways either,” declared Kitty. “You would find his ardor always untrained—provincial.”
Once more Hortense abstained from making any answer.
Kitty grew superior. “Well, if that’s to your taste, Hortense Rieppe!”
“It was none of it like Charley,” murmured Hortense.
“I should think not! Charley’s not crude. What do you see in that man?”
“I like the way his hair curls above his ears.”
For this Kitty found nothing but an impatient exclamation.
And now the voice of Hortense sank still deeper in dreaminess,—down to where the truth lay; and from those depths came the truth, flashing upward through the drowsy words she spoke: “I think I want him for his innocence.”
What light these words may have brought to Kitty, I had no chance to learn; for the voice of Gazza returning with the key put an end to this conversation. But I doubted if Kitty had it in her to fathom the nature of Hortense. Kitty was like a trim little clock that could tick tidily on an ornate shelf; she could go, she could keep up with time, with the rapid epoch to which she belonged, but she didn’t really have many works. I think she would have scoffed at that last languorous speech as a piece of Hortense’s nonsense, and that is why Hortense uttered it aloud: she was safe from being understood. But in my ears it sounded the note of revelation, the simple central secret of Hortense’s fire, a flame fed overmuch with experience, with sophistication, grown cold under the ministrations of adroitness, and lighted now by the “crudity” of John’s love-making. And when, after an interval, I had rowed my boat back, and got into the carriage, and started on my long drive from Udolpho to Kings Port, I found that there was almost nothing about all this which I did not know now. Hortense, like most riddles when you are told the answer, was clear:—
“I think I want him for his innocence.”
Yes; she was tired of love-making whose down had been rubbed off; she hungered for love-making with the down still on, even if she must pay for it with marriage. Who shall say if her enlightened and modern eye could not look beyond such marriage (when it should grow monotonous) to divorce?
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