To
Helen.

I

The quiet of the morning was punctuated by a housemaid who, aware that the master was astir, was singing, for his benefit, “Jesus loves me,” in a treble of irritating insistence. Already the carriage had arrived, and as Gonfallon drew on his gloves he wondered by what token he should recognize the sister of his wife. He had the vaguest memory of her, a slip of a girl who years before had sat opposite him at dinner, the eyes lowered, the hair in pendent plaits. And as his thoughts went back to earlier days, Ruth called to him from the floor above, “If you don’t see her at once, ask the captain: she is in his charge.”

Gonfallon was not a whit more unselfish than the best of us, yet that morning, his routine upset, his coffee undigested, the paper barely skimmed, and, paramount of all, Ruth’s neuralgia which forced him to the wharf alone, made him conscious that, momentarily, for all of him, in the captain’s charge the girl might remain.

But he assented smilingly, as was his wont; and when, after a long sweep down the Avenue and a brisk drive through hideous little streets, he caught a sniff of salt water, his equanimity returned, and as the carriage rolled into the domed and creaking peninsula the momentary annoyance was forgot.

Already the Bourgogne was in the offing, and Gonfallon had but a few moments in which to kick his heels before the great ship was moored and the gangplank let down. As the vessel swung round he had gazed up at the faces that lined the rail, trusting to his own intuition to recognize the girl unprompted; but as yet among the passengers he saw no one that in any way resembled the shy little maid whom he had come to meet.

“H’m,” he mused, “I dare say she has recognized me and is too timid to make a sign.” And, reflecting that after all, in view of his cloth, it would be more dignified to make inquiry of someone than to stand staring women out of countenance, he descended in the caverns of memory and recovered a sentence in French.

“Where is the purser to be found?” he asked of an official at his side.

“Le voilà,” the man answered, not over-suavely, and nodded towards an individual bebraided with gold who stood within hailing-distance.

Gonfallon turned to the person thus designated, and presently succeeded in catching his eye. “Would you be good enough⁠—” he began, and, as the purser leaned forward the better to catch his speech, Gonfallon added, “I am looking for Miss Bucholz.”

The purser lifted his arms and assumed an expression of the civilest and most amiable perplexity. “Really, sir, I regret, perhaps⁠—” And as he shrugged his shoulders and bowed, as who should say, “It is a grief that I cannot serve you,” a young man dressed Piccadilly-fashion touched him on the arm.

“I beg pardon: Dr. Gonfallon, I believe. My name is Mr. Yarde. Miss Bucholz is yonder.”

And as Gonfallon, in obedience to the summons, turned again, he heard the purser, presumably to a sympathetic ear, exclaim, “Ah, çà! Does he think I have his Miss Bucholz in my pocket?”

But Gonfallon had no opportunity of meditating on the variation of demeanor which is peculiar to the French: a moment or two later the guide which Providence or his sister-in-law had sent, had led him through coils of descending passengers to a corner of the deck, which, so nearly as his vision permitted him to discern, was occupied by but one person, a pouting, good-looking lad, such as one may see any day at Eton during term-time, who stood leaning against the back of a steamer-chair in such a manner that only the head and shoulders were visible.

“Here,” said the guide, greatly to Gonfallon’s astonishment, “here is your quest.⁠—Miss Bucholz, can I be of further assistance?”

Immediately the pout disappeared, and a hand gloved in suede was extended. “Is Ruth not with you?”

And then for the first time Gonfallon realized that he was in the presence of her whom he sought.

“Yes,” he answered⁠—“no, I mean. She is at the house⁠—” In amusement at his own surprise, he smiled a little. “I have a carriage, though⁠—”

The girl turned to the young man who had introduced himself as Mr. Yarde. “You may go,” she said, abruptly, and to her lips the pout returned.

The young man made as would he speak, but evidently he thought better of it, and, raising his hat, took himself off. As he moved away, Gonfallon glanced at him, and as he glanced there bubbled within him that unmotived, instinctive dislike of which antipathy is born.

“Detestable little cad!” the girl muttered, and issued from her barricade.

Gonfallon eyed her curiously. Whatever manner of gown she wore was covered by an ulster. On her head was a sailor-hat, about her neck was a high white collar, the ends bent, and beneath it was a scarf such as is worn by men. She was worse than pretty. In her skin was the hue of that white rose which has a sulphur heart. Her features had the surety of an intaglio, her head was small, the brow low; in her hair, which was short and curled, was the glisten of gold-leaf shown to the sun. Her eyes were of porcelain-blue, the under lids retreating and shorter than the upper. The effect of her mouth, now that the pout had gone, was that of lips untouched and unaware of love. In height she was a trifle taller than the average New York girl. She held herself with the erectness of one accustomed to the saddle. And when again she spoke, Gonfallon felt the charm of that undulant intonation which is the sweetest heritage of English speech.

“Father, I suppose, was too busy to meet me, was he not?” she asked.

Too busy, indeed! Gonfallon thought of the sodden mortal he had seen the week before ambling down a side-street, the estray of millions and of health, and then, remembering that Claire was as yet uninformed of the successive disasters in which he had foundered, he nodded cheerily and smiled.

“Yes, yes, of course. Ruth would have come too, but she is a martyr⁠—no, but really a martyr, you know.” For a second he paused, as though in some dumb fashion he might console the girl for the absence of those she loved. “You had a pleasant trip, I hope?” he added. “If you will come with me I will put you in the carriage and see to your traps. Have you the keys?”

An hour later, without further incident necessary of record, the house was reached, and Gonfallon, leaving the girl to her sister’s ministrations, went to his study to sandpaper an address for the morrow. But, whether because his routine had been disturbed, or because he was personally out of trim, certain it is that he felt in no mood for the chastening of homilies that noon. For a little while he still fingered the manuscript, striving to coerce his thoughts, until, conscious of the futility of the endeavor, he abandoned further effort and lounged back into the past.

At the time contemporaneous to the episodes with which these pages have to deal, Christopher Gonfallon was in his fortieth year. Across his forehead was a sabre-cut which thought had dealt, near the temples was a suspicion of gray, on either side of his nostrils were the beginnings of furrows, but otherwise the years had been gentle. In his face and bearing was the fragrance of the fields. He wore no beard, his lip was unmoustached. His eyes were of that green-black which is noticeable in dysodile coal. His profile suggested sensitiveness, the full-face strength. Lavater would not have praised his chin. At first sight you would have taken him for a maker of songs and of laws, but his coat betrayed him. By profession he was an ecclesiastic, a priest of the Episcopal Church.

On the conferment of orders he had accepted a call at Bronx, a somnolent New England hamlet, and there during an entire decade he had wasted his fervors on a collection of cattle, surreptitiously beloved the while by a procession of parochial maids.

Throughout the parish, however, there was at most but one person capable of appreciating the imageries of his speech, and that person, the Countess of Cinq-Cygne, was deaf. To this lady his subsequent and metropolitan success was indirectly due.

The countess, born a Chisolm-Jones, lived in a great stone house that overlooked the village and patches of the surrounding country as well. And this stone house each summer and autumn she was accustomed to populate with detachments and reinforcements of guests. The winter she passed in meditation, though not, presumably, of the count. For de Cinq-Cygne, who had enjoyed the formidable reputation of being the handsomest member of the Jockey, had, after marrying the heiress of Bronx, as the countess was known in her youth, and promenading her through the Tuileries, returned with her to the New England hamlet from which he one day disappeared companioned by his wife’s nearest friend. It was rumored that he had returned to the Tuileries and the Jockey Club. But from the countess no mention of him could be wrung. After Sedan she put on black, and it was taken for granted that the count had fallen with the eagle and the imperial bees. Of the fate of the companion of his flight her kinsfolk never asked.

During the last months of winter Gonfallon was a frequent guest at the house on the hill. The countess was too infirm to attend services with any satisfaction to herself, but she was devout, and the visits of the pastor were grateful to her. She was appreciative, and, despite her encroaching deafness, pleasant and intelligent of speech. She had a smile of singular indulgence, and, though her beauty was that of a city raised from the ground, still, you divined among the vestiges the seductions of earlier charm. By repute she had been indeed a belle; and as for her manner, time had coped with it in vain: she was still the high-bred woman who had shown the pinchbeck maréchales and marchionesses of the Tuileries how to walk, and who, when the Emperor on learning that her baptismal name was Helen had exclaimed, “Ah that I were Paris!” had answered, “Sire, you are France.”

Of connections she had many, yet of relations but one, a nephew, Mr. A. B. Fenwick Chisolm-Jones by name, familiarly known as Alphabet, a young gentleman of literary promise which thus far he had failed to fulfil. To the aunt in the sultriness of the summer months the nephew came, and with him anyone else who could be lured that way. But in the winter the great house was almost uninhabited; and so it came about that in the soundless dusks the one man in the village who could speak English correctly was made welcome there and at home.

The countess, as has been intimated, was devout. In the old cosmogony she had the amplest faith. To her, heaven was just beyond the stars, and hell beneath the ferrule of her crutch. To the truth of any miracle she would have testified on oath. Had anyone so much as hinted before her that the precepts of the synoptic gospels were due to Socrates and the Socratics, she would have routed the blasphemer with the sign of the cross. It was rumored that in youth she had been less orthodox. But with age religion held her like a vice; it was her ultimate refuge; and as Gonfallon penetrated its abysses he fell to wondering whether his own creed might not be as futile as was hers. Yet to argue with her would have been profitable as the chiding of a river. As a consequence, he held his peace, perplexed at times, but endeavoring in the saddle, in long stretches over bleak, unfrequented roads, to starve his thoughts into submission and sponge his mind of doubt.

Meanwhile, the tenor of his discourses remained unchanged. Long since he had discovered that to move his congregation he needed not spirituality of metaphor, but powder and shot; and yet, through that obstinacy which inhibits the poet from writing to the crowd, he continued to preach, not to his listeners, but to the lintels above. And to them his lessons bore no trace of the dogmatic. Now and then would come a warning, but the detached and terrible maledictions in which the provincial divine delights were never voiced by him. It was to souls he did not see he spoke, and in his speech were exhortations to virtue and pictures of the perfect peace of conscience at rest. His weapons were parables; the groundwork of his instruction was built on compassion. Did he plead, it was for patience, for abnegation of self; did he exhort, it was to charity, to forgiveness of sin.

Christopher Gonfallon did not preach to the lintels wholly in vain. One green afternoon in June, while he was engaged with the litany, a little man, rather stout, rather pompous, yet shrewd of eye, an individual unknown to the villagers, entered the church and dropped into the first convenient pew, the which, thereupon, apparently interested him no further. During the services he remained apathetic; during the sermon that followed he did not once take his eyes from the preacher. And when, to the accompaniment of the usual “Let your light so shine,” the warden handed him, tentative fashion, the plate, that gentleman was bewildered at the receipt, not of the fraction of a dollar which he had expected, but of the most majestic contribution which he had as yet borne to the rail.

In a village a bit of gossip seems rather to permeate the air than to circulate from mouth to mouth: it reaches the sojourner whether he will it or not. Before teatime that evening everyone in Bronx knew that the little man was Bucholz the monopolist, a visitor, with his daughters, at the house on the hill, piloted there, it was rumored, by the countess’s nephew, Alphabet Jones.

To the house on the hill that evening Christopher Gonfallon was bidden. In summer it was the custom of the countess not to sup, but to dine; and when the doors of the semi-baronial hall were thrown open and a servant announced that her ladyship was served, Gonfallon discovered that it was his privilege to lead to the repast one of the two daughters of the monopolist alluded to. She was, he presently observed, a very fetching young woman. Her skin was eburnean in its clarity, her eyes of iserine, and in her features something there was that suggested a pastel of a politer age, an Eve on a fan. Across the table her sister sat, an undeveloped slip of a girl, at whom Gonfallon glanced but once. It was to the elder that he gave his attention, and it took him but a moment to perceive that that attention was not thrown away. She was breezy of speech, though not of manner, and she was garmented in a mode and texture which her neighbor did not remember to have remarked before. When he addressed her, he detected her thought running just in advance of his own, completing it as it were with little embroideries of home manufacture; and when in turn she led the talk, she seemed, in comparison to his parochial dames and damsels, the visitant from a larger world. Beside her he felt himself the rustic: for a little space he fancied that he must seem awkward, a fancy which did not tend to an increase of confidence, and when, later on, he journeyed over the yellow road to the parsonage, he noted with a pang of mortification that unconsciously he had been envying the easy assurance of Alphabet Jones.

The Bucholz family disappeared noiselessly as they had arrived; and when the stifle of summer disappeared as well, one of that family was still remembered in Bronx. Now and then, in some leaf-bound quietude that was stirred if at all but by the call of some ruffian bawling to the cows, Gonfallon had caught himself wishing for the wider spheres that lay beyond the hills and musing through fringes of melancholy on the desolateness of his life. Thus far the feminine had been apart from his existence. In the first fervors of the calling which he had adopted, the celibacy of the priesthood in the Mother Church had seemed to him obligatory on whomso devoted his energies to Christ, and unprompted he had paraphrased a familiar dictum⁠—a cleric married is a cleric marred. As an adolescent he had been of too shy and vibrant a nature to consort in comfort with the combustible maidens of the Massachusettsian town in which his boyhood had been passed, and at the university the mysticism of the spirit had dulled the virility of the flesh. But now the first fervors had gone. He had weighed the Mother Church; her laws had no hold on him. The mysticism with which he had spurned the earth had faded like spilt wine; while of his energies, nothing, apparently, had resulted. In his pastorate he was not disliked, but he was not appreciated. His predecessor had been oafish as his charges, and by that very oafishness the good will of the parish had been won⁠—he had been of themselves; whereas Gonfallon was of a clay so fine that they felt him above them, a fact which in itself was a reproach. Moreover, he was a bachelor: save his mother, their womenfolk had no one to receive them did they perpetrate a contribution-party, and about the stove in the village store the misdeeds of unmarried divines to which the press gave prominence had been chuckled over with envious and suspicious glee.

Presently the summer spent itself, the stifle departed; but before the earliest frost had used its palette on the leaves there came an invitation from the metropolis beyond. The Church of Gethsemane⁠—nicknamed that of the Holy Bilk⁠—that edifice which from the corner of Fifty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue projects sheer up into carolling azure the brownest and steepest of steeples, was in need of a new incumbent. The former rector⁠—an exegete and eschatologist of more than passing note, a scholar possessed of rare controversial ability, and, parenthetically, English by birth, a man whose mere attitude and manner were pervasive with a seduction so alluring that through it depopulated pews had been repeopled and filled⁠—suddenly had come to grief. In spite of the wage, ten thousand a year paid quarterly and in advance, he had managed to run up a hillock of debts which if not fabulous in size had been noisy and unseemly of utterance. At the initial clamor there had been a hush, then a murmur and an effort to suffocate the scandal in its cradle, but inarticulate whispers floated the facts abroad, the rector vanished, and Gethsemane, dubbed there and then the Church of the Holy Bilk, witnessed a procession of clerics ascending and descending the pulpit stair. But apparently no one of them had more than momentarily pleased. Then a call, prompted by Bucholz, had been voiced in Gonfallon’s ears. If he hesitated, not even his mother knew it. The dust of Bronx he shook from him. He came, he preached, and when the benediction was given, the rectorship was his.

At the hour when that intelligence was conveyed to him he escaped into solitude and with a finger beat a tattoo on his teeth. During that tattoo his thoughts went forward and back. He reviewed the negligent years, he interrogated the future. Behind him were bundles of baseless appearances, the mysticism which had shrouded his youth, the akosmism into which Berkeley had led him, then the long halt, the lintels of the village church; but now Fifth Avenue lay at his feet, beyond were the insignia of the episcopate, while in him pulsed that strength which brings the strophium to the conqueror. And as he peered at the stranger that was himself, anyone who had chanced that way would have discerned, not a man, but an aim. That day he called on Bucholz, and, not finding him at home, gave an hour to his daughter Ruth.

Gonfallon’s metropolitan success was immediate. He made no attempt to theorize with history; he did not meddle with Paul; the expounding of the gospels he left to others. With a set of people that fancied themselves in possession of advanced views and were still in the Middle Ages, he achieved the impossible: he not only consoled, he flattered, he persuaded and fascinated as well. In a word, he detained attention, not with home truths, however, but with issues and questions which few have energy enough to probe for themselves, and of which everyone wishes to be informed. And therewith he could be austere, stern even, and he could wield an epigram like a glaive. He was in earnest, too.

It was towards the close of a political contest that he first donned the rector’s gown. On that occasion the President happened to be in the middle aisle. Gonfallon, however, with an apposite text for foreword, took up the question at once. For three-quarters of an hour he held the most indifferent congregation in New York with the topic for which they cared the least. And at the close, with a gesture that swept the church, “Not politics,” he cried, “but religion is the nation’s soul.” It was in this wise that the congregation was won.

Incidentally he did not neglect Bucholz, nor yet Bucholz’ daughter. The girl was shyly willing; as for Gonfallon, he was wholly in love. The dream of celibacy faded, as dreams ever do. He asked, and with sweet reluctance it was given. His mother, who had migrated with him from Bronx, departed to the Massachusettsian homestead; and after the brief honeymoon he settled down to his pastorate charge.

Meanwhile, Bucholz’ younger daughter, Claire, had been sent abroad in search of masters of foreign arts and tongues; and abroad for four years she remained⁠—in fact, until Bucholz, caught in a mousetrap which that arch-hunter Jerolomon had set for him, saw the amassments of his own booty, twenty million at least, evaporate in a night. Six weeks later Claire landed in New York.

And now, the morning of her arrival, as Gonfallon lounged back through the past, the episodes of his career paraded unsummoned before him. He saw himself on the singing sands of the Beverly coast, he saw the elms of the village street, he heard the unprompted prayers of his youth and the sound of his own voice vibrating for the first time through the aisles of Gethsemane. Faces long forgotten returned to him and smiled. Incidents that were trivial ousted others that were grave⁠—the trick the countess had of polishing the handle of her crutch, the vividness of certain dreams, one in particular that had haunted him, sporadically, for years⁠—the idea that he had ascended the pulpit in pajamas and was unable to hide⁠—the tennis-match in which Ruth had played, and which, a sunstroke and a check of perspiration aiding, had resulted in the neuralgia which kept her to her room.

At the thought of her he drew a breath that resembled a sigh. For Ruth, in her enforced seclusion, seemed to have resigned herself to invalidism and the matter-of-fact. The breeziness which had won him to her had gone, gone too the impromptu of her speech, the savors that had so allured. Three years of marriage, and in place of the sensitive, high-strung girl there was a languid woman who each day at stated intervals consumed a furtive pill. His love for her, that love which he had accounted measureless, and which in the earliest transports of the unexpected had thrown him at her feet, impelling him in the belief there was none that could fill his life as she, and prompting him in the utterance, Non hodie solum, sed in aeternum te adorabo⁠—that love which in the possibilities of its expansion had seemed a contingent of the infinite had narrowed into an unsuggestive bond. Where is the Vandal that invented marriage? Gonfallon put to himself no such query. Unquestionably he was happy in his household; but to the happiest of households there comes a moment of regret.

II

Claire transplanted took root at once. It was only now and then, in a bow not from the neck but from the waist, in an intonation, in a haphazard phrase, that you divined the foreign-bred girl. A month had not spent itself before she was in possession of a list. Each day was marked by scrawls from people she had met no one knew how or when. In the evening and in the late afternoons the sitting-room of the rectory, a room which Gonfallon in the earliest awkwardness of prosperity had fitted in that lovable Latin fashion which excludes everything but the necessary and inhibits every adornment introduced for ornament’s sake⁠—the bare tableless sitting-room, with its infrequent chairs and pedestalled lamps, was peopled with guests astonished enough to find themselves in so sedate a home. Mrs. Manhattan, on the wing from Newport to New Jersey, had happened in twice, a signal mark of favor from one as socially occupied as she. And with her, or without her, yet inevitably in her train, were other ladies of lesser note⁠—Miss Nevers, for instance, a young woman who had preferences for everybody and attractions for none; Miss Pickett, whom Claire had encountered in that vague region which is known as Abroad; Mrs. Usselex, a parishioner of Gonfallon’s, the bride of a year, more familiarly known as Eden; the Pondirs, mère et fille, recruiting, as usual, for their musicales; Miss Raritan, with whom scandal had been busy and who ignored that scandal as only the virtuous may; the Duchesse de la Dèche, born a Wainwaring, very fetching in her widow’s weeds, now courted, it was rumored, by Mr. Incoul. And with these ladies there was a contingent of men⁠—Dugald Maule, a young lawyer who dreamed of the bench, famous for the art with which he abandoned a sweetheart and preserved her good will; Harry Tandem, a youth of such lively taste in dress that the previous winter on asking Nicholas Manhattan to suggest a costume that he might wear to the Amsterdams’ fancy-ball he had been answered, “Go as you are, Harry; you are fancy enough as it is;” George Rerick, a young man so vacuous of expression that he had been nicknamed It; Trement Yarde, Claire’s fellow-passenger on the voyage over, a scion of the house of Yarde and Company, bankers; and, last and least, Alphabet Jones the novelist.

The sudden infatuation of these people for his sister-in-law was a phenomenon which Christopher Gonfallon was at a loss to explain. Everything about her, the innocence of her eyes, the purity of her lips, the atmosphere which she exhaled, everything, even to the ripple of her laugh, seemed at variance with such as they. That she should be admired was a thing which he accepted as a matter of course: she was, he had already discovered, admirable in manifold respects. But she was not a catch; the recent disasters of her father must have bespattered her not a little; she was not, never had been, and in all probability never would be, in what is colloquially known as the swim; and yet, seemingly, without an effort on her part, a bouquet of the flowers of the upper four was claiming her as its own. Truly he could not make it clear. Now and then on returning to the rectory he had loitered a second at the sitting-room door, surprised at the murmur of voices, the hum of a conversation that seemed to flutter from ear to ear, interrupted, if at all, by a laugh, or the click of a fan furled suddenly; and through it he would catch Claire’s intonation, undulatory yet vibrant as a child’s, and he would see her, behind the teacups, in her face the flush of the rose, in her expression the guilelessness of one too young to be aware of wrong.

Once only, on the impulse of the moment, he had ventured in, but his cloth must have jarred, for immediately there had been an escape, delayed only by Mrs. Manhattan’s superior tact, which had led him into a corner and forced him into platitudes on the subject of the Bond of Hope, a benevolent institution for deserving poor, over which as rector he presided.

Ah, yes, the Bond of Hope was doing famous work. And even as he asserted it he remembered a smothered scandal of the month before⁠—Ah, yes, the Bond of Hope indeed! But as he smiled assuringly he caught in Mrs. Manhattan’s congratulations an inflection which told him she was not the fool she looked; and when Mrs. Manhattan had taken her Directoire coat away and the other visitors had departed, he himself had lingered, refreshed by Claire’s limpid smile, the guilelessness of her face.

Guileless she was⁠—so guileless, so pure and chaste of face and way, that a day or two later, when Gonfallon, outwearied with the effort of setting new thoughts into archaic frames, dropped his pen, determining, if need were, that he would exhume a sermon from the package he had brought from Bronx, the charm was upon him. Already he had discerned in her something of the confidence of a flower, a flexibility which a passing wind might disarray, that innocence which a breath will tarnish and which it was for him who stood quasily in loco parentis to preserve unsullied by the world. For a moment he pondered on the possibility of mating her to some earnest young cleric, Mr. Qualms, for instance, one of his own assistants, a recent graduate of Trinity, a sturdy servant of Christ who possessed a look of feverish determination and trousers that bagged at the knee. Yet, somehow, the idea seemed incongruous and unpleasant; this thought took a tangential flight, and he fell to musing as to what Claire could have in common with her guests and they with her.

So far as the feminine element was concerned, little there was to be said. Mrs. Manhattan was indeed a butterfly of fashion⁠—rather mature and stout, but still a butterfly⁠—yet did she not each Sunday occupy a pew that fronted the pulpit, under the very drippings of the sanctuary as were, and was not her husband warden of the church? Miss Nevers, he understood, had been taxed with inconsequences; but society he knew to be censorious. Besides, was she not the originator of the Girls’ Friendly Aid Association?⁠—and, moreover, when after some sudden peroration he had extended his arm, with that gesture with which all New York was familiar, and asked the congregation, as though it embodied a unit, Are you one of those miserable sinners? he had watched Miss Nevers and marked that not so much as an eyelid had quivered at the taunt. With Miss Pickett no fault whatever could be found: her attendance at communion had the exactitude of an eclipse. And so far as the duchess was concerned, albeit on marrying a Frenchman she had renounced the Episcopal Church, was there not, poor, errant lamb, a chance of winning her back to the fold?

But of the men he was by no means so sure. Jones, certainly, apart from the ribaldry of his fiction and a mania he had for collecting plots, was harmless as a strawberry festival, and an old friend to boot. Maule was of a different class: he had a coarse mouth, and his reputation was sour. Rerick was not a bit better. Tandem he dismissed with an epithet⁠—popinjay. But Yarde detained his thoughts. Concerning him he had obtained information⁠—information which the young man’s appearance refuted, for he was fragrant, colorful, and grateful to the eye, evidence, however, which Gonfallon was not inclined to accept in his favor. And in declining he was logical; for if Satan be not seductive how can he ever enthrall?

As he thought of Yarde his perplexity increased. He was welcomed from one end of Fifth Avenue to the other. Outwardly he was not ill-behaved, a little effeminate perhaps, but not actually offensive, and yet about him was an atmosphere which Gonfallon could not breathe. It seemed to him that beneath the affectations of a peacock he concealed the beak and talons of a bird of prey⁠—the sort of man that ought to have the danger-signal hoisted wheresoever he went. But still, if Claire chose to receive him, what manner of complaint could be made? Because he himself happened to be of the cloth there was little reason why he should expect his wife’s sister to be exclusive as a nun. Were the girl under any other roof than his own, no form of remonstrance could be voiced. Nevertheless he felt that some remonstrance should be forthcoming. That afternoon he had seen Yarde’s brougham at the door; he had seen it there the day previous, and the day before that. He felt vexed at Claire, at himself⁠—the more so, perhaps, in that he was unable to put his finger on the exact cause of the vexation and display it guardian-wise to her. The only plank that drifted to him seemed to inhibit speech. Claire was so evidently innocent-minded that did he venture to warn her, either she would not understand, in which case explanations would be impossible, or in comprehending she might feel herself aggrieved. In consequence, but one course seemed open to him⁠—to speak to Ruth and ask her to catechise the girl in his stead.

Despite the lancinating neuralgia which imprisoned her for days at a stretch, Ruth preserved the disposition of a sundial: it was only serene hours of which she took count. There was nothing dolent in her tone; her manner, if languider than before, was unwarped by pain. About her husband, the parish, everything in fact, down to the minutiae of domestic economy, she was still alert. The servants adored her. In moments when the agony of her temples was acute enough to turn each individual hair above them red, when a pang would scatter through the cheekbones, loiter under the teeth, and then distend in zigzags and spirals through every nerve of the face, a moan might come from her, but never a complaint. Dr. McMasters, who attended her⁠—a physician who had passed his prime among the poor, and whom the resuscitation of a stockjobber encountered by chance had lifted from the purlieus of Abingdon Square to the precincts of Fifth Avenue⁠—expressed full confidence in her recovery; but meanwhile he marvelled not alone at her self-control, but at the solicitude which she was able to maintain in those of his indigent patients whom he had not the heart to abandon, and whose sufferings, if less acute than her own, poverty rendered more poignant. In these, as in many others, Ruth’s interest was unrelaxing, and her assistance life. While as to her pleasures, the which indeed had become scanty of late, the greatest, the uniquest of all was the touch of her husband’s hand. To her he was always the perfect lover whose charm had won her heart and the attention of all New York. She was proud of him as only a woman can be whose love has idealized a man into something more than flesh. And when, with the selfishness of those who know themselves adored, he would come to her in some momentary depression, it was joy to her to encourage him anew. To her individualism rarely an allusion did she make, and then so casually that you would have thought her discussing the momentary malaise of some stranger whose indisposition rumor had brought to her, or else so hopefully that you expected on the morrow to find her with health restored. Indeed, she was self-abnegatory, fretting only at the imprisonment which kept her from her husband’s side, supervising from her chair everything, even to the coal in the cellar, and in her darkened room clairvoyant as a nyctalope and weariless in thoughts and devices for him.

And this evening as he entered the room, “Chris!” she murmured, “it is so good of you!”

In her smile, in her gesture, in the expression which her lips took on, there was an ambient gratitude, a welcome, and a delight.

“You are better, are you not?”

“All day I thought if I could only get away from the pain; but see, you come, and the wish is fulfilled. Yes, I am better now. And you? Were you at the Bond today?”

“I was; and as I came from it I saw Yarde’s brougham at the door. What does Claire have him for?”

“Really, Chris, it is not her fault. He insists on coming. But if you object I will speak to her.”

“It is she that should object, not you, nor I.”

“Yes, Chris, it is for us. Claire!⁠—why, she is a child yet: anyone can see that. Besides, she does not like him: she told me so.”

“H’m! she has an odd way of showing it, then.”

“Do you know, Chris, she really does dislike him? When she met him in Paris, she was taken, oh! just a little, as a girl might be⁠—it appears that there are no young men in Paris⁠—and so, as he seemed nice and agreeable, she was a little flattered, and, I suppose, just a little bit pleased as well. It is so easy to please a young girl! Well, from what she told me, he did not act right. He met Miss Pickett, Claire even introduced him, and then, how ever it came about I don’t know, but the attention which he had previously given to Claire he bestowed on her friend. He sees his mistake now, that is evident; but Claire will have none of him.”

“She has him here every day.”

“Chris, really, I think she hates him. She admitted as much the other night. When he comes here she snubs him. On the ship she was barely civil.”

“He hasn’t enough reputation to last overnight. Jones told me any number of things about him. It is an outrage that he should pursue her here. As for hating him, that’s all stuff and nonsense: she is too sweet-tempered to hate anyone. Besides, even if she did, it would only show that she was dead in love with him.”

“That is not like you, to be cynical.” And into Ruth’s face a sudden sadness came.

“There, sweetheart, forgive me. I am irritated today. I would not vex you: you know that. I will speak to Claire myself.” As he spoke, he took her hand in his, and Ruth, comforted by the caress and by the title, smiled anew.

“Yes, Chris, speak to her; and I will speak to her too.”

For a while husband and wife sat together, discussing matters of common interest, the illness of the bishop, the condition of Ruth’s father, the possibility that before the winter set in she herself would be able to assume the duties in the sphere to which she had been called; and when at last he rose to go, she declared that every ill had vanished. When a woman loves a man, his mere presence is a tonic.

As Gonfallon descended the stair, however, his thoughts were not of his wife. The brougham which had stood before the rectory that afternoon had in departing carried his fancy afar. It had roamed in and out of the possibilities of that young man’s career, and it had not roamed with approval.

According to Jones, Trement Yarde was hardly such an one as a young girl should know. Among women he had the reputation of a freebooter; the men, Jones asserted, were more lenient. But, then, are not men always that? Provided their own family be secure from attack, at deeds of a certain kind they were apt to wink, and approvingly too. Moreover, though the young man had a number of zeros behind him, those zeros were fronted with figures. The house of Yarde and Co. was, with that of Usselex, foremost in the Street. Of course the men were lenient⁠—and the women as well. Gonfallon was not a fool. He knew that everything, virtue, genius, beauty⁠—everything can be talked away, but never wealth. He had not lived under the shadow of the Bleeckers for nothing. But now, as he descended the stair, even that was forgot. One thing was present with him⁠—his antipathy to Yarde, and the warning he must give. That young man, he decided, might disport himself wheresoever he listed, but Claire he should not approach. And with this decision, to which, since his conversation with Ruth, he made certain the girl would concur, he entered the room where she sat.

Claire was lounging on one of those sofas in which the occupant can fall asleep without being preached to. At Gonfallon’s entrance she looked up, and a book which she held fell from her. Her head was on one cushion and her feet on another.

Leïlah swinging in a hammock in a garden of Ispahan was less clothed, perhaps, but not more indolent, than she. At sight of her he seemed to catch some echo of ghuzlas and cithars. From above the lamplight shuttled her curls. On one ankle which the negligent fold of her frock disclosed, glittered a gold thread, the clockwork of the stocking. As he approached there came to greet him the clean odor of acorns and of pines.

Suddenly the curtain must have claimed his attention, for for a moment he busied himself with it. Then he turned again to where she lay.

“Did you ride this morning?” he asked, and, without waiting for an answer, he added at once, “You don’t get this Indian summer over there, do you? H’m. Rather close, though, don’t you think? By the way,”⁠—he had been talking at the wall, but now he looked at her⁠—“by the way, Claire, whose trap was that at the door this afternoon? Rather neat, I thought.”

And Claire, with that inappositeness which constitutes one of the crimes which the law cannot reach, murmured from the tips of her lips, “I say, would you mind lowering that wick?”

Gonfallon did as he was bidden, adding, as he moved to the lamp, “That brougham, I mean. The man on the box had two pair of reins; I counted them.”

“Is Ruth coming down?”

“I think not. She is expecting McMasters. Whose affair did you say it was?”

“The brougham, you mean?⁠—bottle-green, with yellow wheels? Yarde’s, I fancy.”

“Ah, yes⁠—that young fellow that crossed in the steamer with you. I thought⁠—h’m⁠—however⁠—Claire, do you know he is not at all the kind of a man for you to know? Someone happened to speak of him the other day. To oblige Ruth and myself, I wish the next time he calls you would send word you are not visible. You see⁠—”

The girl interrupted him with a yawn: “It was that lamp over there I meant.” And as she spoke she covered her mouth with her hand.

“You see, Claire,” Gonfallon continued, after he had attended to her behest⁠—“you see, while I presume that this young man is not in any way personally offensive, yet, er⁠—well, he is not of a class that we care to have you associate with.”

“Ah?”

“Not of that class at all.”

Claire raised herself a little on the lounge and looked up at Gonfallon. “And what class is it that you prefer?” she asked.

“H’m. Well, Claire, this Mr. Yarde is notoriously a loose fish. It is unnecessary that I should particularize; but we prefer that you only see men whose intentions are honorable.”

Claire laughed. “There aren’t any,” she answered, and let her head fall back on the cushion.

III

For a moment Gonfallon stared, open-mouthed, astonished as a yokel at a thimble-rigger. And as Claire picked up the book which she had dropped at his entrance, he stood quite still, groping among the obscurities of her speech. But it was impossible, he told himself, that a girl so fragrant of innocence should wittingly make a remark as paradoxically unanswerable as was that. It was a mistake; he had not heard her words aright, or else she had uttered them as a child utters haphazard a phrase caught up and retained. But something in her attitude, the manner in which she turned the page, the carriage of her head, the abandonment of the body, the indiscretion of a foot uptilted on a cushion, the contraction of the underlip betokening a smile suppressed and suggestive of merriment aroused not by the book she held but by some picture which memory had just disclosed⁠—these things, intercepted in a glance, revealed a Claire unknown and wholly undivined.

Noiselessly as he had entered he turned and left the room. Across the hall was his study; and as he sank on the ample lap of an easy-chair in which it was his custom to scaffold his homilies, suddenly his pulse was stirred. At the moment he made no attempt to dominate, he sat in wonder at himself, the will refractory and perverse. But presently he was on his feet again, his teeth set, and in his eyes that expression which the horseman has when he masters with curb and with knee.

On the mantel before him was a mirror, a convenience serviceable on those occasions when, surprised by some unawaited visit, it was necessary to filch a reflection for the adjustment of neckcloth or of hair. But now in the surprise at a visitant such as he had never encountered before he fronted the mirror, his teeth still set, the jaw unrelaxed; and as he stood the rumor of the inward conflict moved his lips. “Ah, Tartuffe!” he muttered, “is it for this you toiled?”

In his ears a ripple of laughter still rang, a laugh that was sylvan, the laugh of a young faun made merry by the sorceries of spring. “Ah, Tartuffe!” he repeated. And still the ripple continued, insistent, insinuating, jubilant in wantonness, clear and heady as the upper notes of a flute. “Is it for this?”

With the grimace of a hound at a vagabond he glared at his image. He was angered and distraught at the intussusception of a presence more terrible than that which Luther outfaced in his cell. “Do you think,” he cried in menace at himself, “do you think that I have fear of you?” At the unanswering mirror he raised his hand. “What have you to do with her, or she with you?” And as his arm fell again to his side some fume of disgust must have mounted to his brain, for he added, in a murmur, “I am as a Jesuit: I argue with myself.”

“Did you call, Chris?”

Gonfallon turned with a start of a subject awakening from a trance. In the doorway was Ruth.

“Did you call?” she repeated.

He blinked, but made no answer. And Ruth, gazing at him from the doorway, one hand on the woodwork, the other upholding the curtain, her eyes full of interrogations, her lips just parted, her head nimbused with the jonquil of her hair, had about her a suggestion of that grace with which Boucher pleasured the Pompadour. To one as myope as her husband, the lines that extended from the edge of the nostril, the circles that shadowed the cheekbones like inverted circumflexes over an i, were unperceived. Through the saffron shade of the lamp she appeared younger, more tentative, than she had for months, and in her voice which now seemed to reach him across inordinate distances was the caress he had loved so well. But he was still imprisoned in himself. He shook his head and blinked as one does who passes from darkness into light.

“No,” he said, at last, “no⁠—”

“Oh, Chris, you are composing your sermon! Forgive me: I did not mean to interrupt.”

With a finger she threw him an apology and a kiss. The curtain fell again, and she was gone.

Sermon, indeed! The sermon was in that patient face that just had disappeared. He sat down again on the chair, and let his thoughts roam back again to Bronx and the wooing of his wife. When first she had put her hand in his it was as though life were fulfilled to its tips: he had conceived no greater earthly joy than the possibility of calling her his own, to his after-days she had brought the blithest airs, and now, after three years of marriage, if nothing remained save that friendship which is born of love and which the fabulist has declared to be better than love itself, if of the ardors which he had believed inextinguishable only cinders remained, was the fault his own? Surely he had been sincere. It is a maxim in law that against a promise to do something in the future no charge of fraud can lie. And if the maxim hold good in law, why not in love as well? When before God and man he had promised to love her always, had he not as fully intended to keep that promise as the honest trader does who makes a note? If bankruptcy intervene and the note be protested, it is humiliating, no doubt, but conscience at least is undisturbed. And yet an elenchicism such as this one with which, as was his duty, he would have dulled the remorse of any parishioner who had come to him in similar strait, left him rudderless and derelict. Truly the advice we give is rarely that to which we hold. Gonfallon sounded its sophistry with a sneer. He would have given hope itself to be able to touch Ruth’s hand and feel again the electricity which it had once communicated, that spasm which in days gone by had seized him between the shoulder-blades and gone pulsing down the spinal cord, leaving him during the moment that followed quasi-dumb, and ineffectual of speech; indeed he would have given much could the old thrill have outlasted satiety, and, though it were through the very force of love that satiety had been begot, he wondered could the fault be nature’s, not his own.

To Ruth he had brought his firstfruits, and in the bringing he had deemed them imperishable as the apples of the Hesperides. He had revelled in the offering of them; he had laid them glistening at her feet; he had marvelled at the blossoms with which she crowned the gift; he had thought them both enduring as the stars; he would have staked his soul that their twin hearts made one would mount, inseparate, into those realms no eye has scanned, but which the gracious Christ, his Master, has vouchsafed to whomso does believe in Him. These things had been the securest tenets of his marriage-pact. And then, as sometimes happens with those mated over-hastily, he awoke one day to the knowledge that it was the woman he had loved, not the individual⁠—the bottle, not the wine.

Of sweeter than she, one fairer and more gentle, a woman kindlier, juster, yet more debonair, it was not within his power to conceive. She was still to him admirable in each respect, a woman whom as sister he would have adored, as another’s sister he would have envied, but who as wife left him as marble is, unmalleable, and chilling to the touch. Where had the emotions gone? Where were the roses of the yesteryear? Where was the vision he had sought to clasp? Though the flutter of her kiss still hovered, ambient, in the air, he told himself that her love had departed like his own, that between them but one thing subsisted⁠—the sanctity of the marriage-vow, unbreakable by either. Of her, in that regard, he had, of course, no fear. And it was perhaps that very confidence, that security and facility in love, that had brought him to his present pass. Whoso has nothing to desire has nothing left to dread. But for himself he had trembled indeed. Claire had exhaled an atmosphere headier than the headiest breath of spring. There was about her an attraction, undiscerned till that night, but which, latent perhaps for days gone by, had suddenly enveloped and coerced him with its force. But now that too was gone.

Ah, yes, it was gone indeed; and he cracked the joints of his fingers in testimony to his deliverance from its spell. For a second he had been weaker, more unstable than water; and now, as he smiled a trifle grimly at the remembrance, he bethought him of the legends of the saints, of Saint Anthony, Saint Dominick, Saint Maur. It was a disaster which overtook all men. But it needed strength to combat⁠—he would have added faith, but something choked the utterance down⁠—it needed strength; and that strength was his. Again he smiled. He would have no need to cope again. Yet, for the moment, he wondered what sudden invocation of the flesh could have oppressed him so. Nothing, he could have sworn, in connection with that girl that lay sprawled on the sofa across the hall. No, it was not that: it was one of those ills which had afflicted and would continue to afflict many another more steadfast than he. Besides, independent of that, what had he of all men to do with such a thing? aside from his cloth, were not his temples gray? and, save spectacles, what better guarantee against love can there be?

In thought he had really tried to trick himself, but in an instant he was at the mirror again. At school, at the seminary, even so recently as the preceding summer, he had been spoken of as That Handsome Gonfallon. And as he sprang from his seat he remembered a bit of gossip that had been brought him, an anecdote culled in the vestibule of the church, a conversation overheard and apposite to the infatuation of his parishioners, in which the first speaker was reported to have said something about Dr. Gonfallon’s congregation, while the second, interrupting, had interjected a remark unreportable here.

But now, as he stood again before the glass, it was as though it pictured not the present alone but the past as well. He saw a lithe, dark-eyed lad, clear of feature and of mind, hurrying to some distant goal, arrested by a mirror that showed him back not youth, but age.

Through the window a moon luminous as sulphur shone. Beyond, the spires of Gethsemane pierced the night. The street was quiet. From afar came the accent of the Elevated, rushing, dragon-wise, in midair, lulling the neighborhood with the strain of its incessant surge. After a dusk in dead rose, the sky had become visibly blue.

And as he stood, interviewing the night, determining that the pulses should subside with years, from the hall came the rustle of a dress. For a second’s space he clutched at the wainscot. The glass gave him forty years, his blood nineteen. Then at once he was at the door, drawing the curtain on its rings aside.

“H’m,”⁠—he affected a little cough, and held himself as though an accident had brought him there⁠—“h’m, Claire, is that you? I thought you had gone to bed.”

“Going,” the girl answered, negligently, and yawned as she spoke. “One has to come to New York to go to bed early.”

Then, something that he could not afterwards explain, some one of those unanalyzed causes that transform the gentle to the brute, claimed him as its own. His cloth, his vows, the rectory itself, everything, even to the presence of Ruth on the floor above, vanished as had they never been. With a spring his arm was about her neck, his lips were on hers, the odor of her hair, of her face, the moisture of her mouth, were his, and just as he strove to clasp her closer yet, with an undulant movement the girl slipped from his embrace.

“There, don’t hurt a fellow,” she exclaimed; and as she retreated, smiling yet breathless, to a step beyond his reach, she added, with her faun-like ripple, “I say, Chris, you seem to like the breed.”

From strength to weakness there is but a kiss. During the moments that followed, Gonfallon felt as were he astride a runaway horse. At first, as he plunged through unimagined thickets, striving as best he could with knee and curb to stay the flight, a stirrup went, then another; the beast had got its head, and as with ever-increasing speed it bore him over quagmires, obstacles, and intervales, at last his own brain caught fire, and he urged with incitements of spur and of whip. In the distance was everything he had held most dear, the route was strewn with his illusions, gone were his unprompted vows, the truths that had been savors of life unto life fell from him undetained, the white assumptions of conscience at rest vanished with retiring landmarks. And, still in fancy propelled, suddenly he discerned a sense of that freedom which is the synonyme of joy. It was good to feel one’s self untrammelled, delivered of the compunctions of the herd; with every breath he drew came a foretaste of larger life, his lungs expanded with fresh odors, beyond was a new horizon, brutally beautiful, wholly solid, dreamless and real, and in it, fairer than the desire of a fallen god, was Claire, her arms outstretched.

IV

The morrow was a blank. Gonfallon attended to his duties with the air of a somnambulist. In the morning at the meeting of the Church-Workers, in the afternoon at the Friendly Aid, the echo of Claire’s laughter rippled through the tidings which it was his office to proclaim; and when the last rite had been performed he shook from him a young licentiate who fain would have passed a moment in Christian converse, and strode out into the gathering dusk and on to the outlying regions of the Park.

Above him was a sky of zinc. Beyond, to the west, the sun had slashed the horizon with belts of amber and agonizing green. The air was chill: he raised the collar of his coat, and as he hurried on unimpressed, unobservant even of the salutations of acquaintances whom he chanced to encounter, never yet had he felt more averse to his cloth. Yet did he relinquish it, what was there left? He was too old to begin life afresh: he lacked that energy which permits and even forces some men to turn from one calling to another; he had a wife to support, and down in a Massachusettsian village was his mother dependent on his wage. Truly it was easier to keep up a brave face and draw ten thousand per annum than to pull a wry one and advertise in the papers for an occupation suited to a man of scholarly attainments. If Bucholz had not gone under, there, indeed, would be a different guitar: he could have leaned on him, he could have entered, if need were, into his employ. As it was, instead of the opulence which Ruth might one day have inherited, it seemed not improbable that he would be called upon to contribute to Bucholz’ support. Not later than the previous day a whisper, a breeze that loiters, had told him that his father-in-law passed his hours in extracting, and not painlessly, either, small loans from former companions of his banditti-days.

No, that dream had gone. There was no one to whom he could turn. However unfitted he might be, the pastorate was a refuge still. Yet, even supposing, for argument’s sake, he relinquished it and another cleric mounted the pulpit in his stead, would the congregation be bettered by the change? He knew his parishioners through and through. Half of them were superstitious as ballads, the other half sceptical as himself. There were those who sat very erect and said “Amen” to impress their neighbors, and there were those who allowed themselves to be impressed thereby; there was a collection of boys and girls to whom the church was indeed a meetinghouse, there was also an assortment of neurosthenes; and did he leave these people, in what manner would their salvation be affected?

The mere query was puerile. He shrugged his shoulders in annoyance at himself. Eastward, a splatter of stars, some livid, some as lights seen through canvas slit, betokened the advance of night. He turned, and, musing still, retraced his steps. When he reached the rectory his eyes were eager and his face was flushed.

The hall was silent, the sitting-room untenanted. He put his hat and coat aside, and ascended the stair. To the left was Claire’s room, the door ajar. At the threshold he lingered a moment and listened. Then, hearing no sound, he pushed the door and entered in.

On the sofa some raiment was strewn⁠—a gown, a petticoat, a corset; from the latter a white string hung pendent, the steel tip idling on the floor. At his feet a rose had fallen. On a table beneath the gas-jets utensils were scattered, instruments for the hands in stained ivory, brushes with silver backs, quaint little boxes, curious of form, a rumpled sachet, stamped Cordova leather, four bonnet-pins, a curling-iron, and a collar. In the air was the aroma which women exhale.

Beyond was a bed, the coverlet smooth as an anapest, surmounted by monogrammed pillows. It was white, virginal as its owner, alluring as spring; and as Gonfallon gazed at it the flush on his face increased. “What am I doing here?” he mused, and held his head as one who listens, fearful of surprise. From afar came the rumble of the Elevated, but the house itself was dumb. For a moment he loitered, his eyes fumbling the counterpane, his pulse fluttering like a bird ensnared, and presently, as he stole from the room, he was conscious of that elation of spirit which had visited him in his youth when on the Beverly sands he had crouched close, yet never close enough, to the swoon and the surge of the sea.

That evening Gonfallon broke bread in solitude. Claire had been bidden somewhere⁠—to Miss Pickett’s, the housemaid thought; and Ruth, whom neuralgia had seized again, was lying in darkness, waiting the release of sleep. By his plate was a telegram, which he pushed aside, his thoughts occupied with other things; but when the maid removed the dishes he opened it and read the message it contained:

“We are sorely visited,” it ran. “The Bishop entered into rest this noon. Your brother in Christ,

The yellow slip fell from him undetained. It was so pregnant with intimations that the restless current of his thought was changed. For the time being he forgot all things, even to Claire, and sat, one finger just separating the lips, staring after the retreating past and far out into the chartless morrow. The bishop he had known well. He was one of the few whom he had really revered, a man simple and sincere, earnest for the best, indulgent to the worst, a man who had but one creed, Charity, but one text, Goodwill⁠—a man whose face was so luminous with spiritual reflections that whoso saw him thought he truly walked with God. And now he was gone. The grave would open and close again: tomorrow he would be forgot.

“I wonder,” mused Gonfallon, “that He who made space for the infinite and eternity for time should not have created a being capable of mounting sheerly to some fringe of His mantle of stars, instead of a groping phantom incompetent to leave behind so much as a shadow on a wall. I wonder⁠—”

And as he mused he was visited by an idea which at first he repulsed and then beckoned back. It was that however ephemeral life might be, it was yet clothed with radiant possibilities. Throughout the length and breadth of the diocese there was no ecclesiastic more prominent than himself: it was he who would be nominated for the bishopric. While he still mused, the door opened, and Claire appeared.

“Did you miss me, Chris?”

She was in street-costume, a trim skirt, a cloth jacket descending to her waist, her hands cased in suede, her face unveiled, and on her head a low-crowned hat of felt.

“Did you miss me, Chris?”

As she spoke, her lips parted as a flower opens to the sun: he could see the edges of her teeth, and in the lamplight they seemed to reflect the rose of her mouth and tongue.

“And Ruth? Is she no better?”

Her hat she removed and tossed pin-pierced aside. Her jacket she had already unbuttoned, and as she raised her arm to divest herself of it Gonfallon sprang to her aid.

“There, let me help you,” he said.

As he caught at the sleeve, he touched her wrist. From her hair came the clean smell of acorns and of pines that had greeted him the night before; and as he bent to aid her, there was a cleft in her neck which might have tempted a saint.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” he added.

“Thanks, put it anywhere. Oh, didn’t you? I have a key, you know. Pickett came in this afternoon and wanted me to dine with her: her people have gone to Lakewood, and she was alone. What of Ruth?”

She had turned to Gonfallon, who stood, her jacket in his hand. At the question he made a gesture indicative of discouragement.

“Give it me,” she continued. “I will go to her now.” And as she stretched her hand, Gonfallon caught it in his own.

“Sit with me a moment, Claire.”

“I might have a cigarette, don’t you think? Pickett,”⁠—and she ushered a memory with the ripple of her laugh⁠—“Pickett was afraid to have me smoke, on account of the servants.”

She moved from him and drew out a case, a toy of fair gold, on the mirror-like surface of which she glanced at her own reflection.

“Try one,” she added, and extended the case.

“No, Claire, I do not smoke, nor should you. But there,” he continued, hastily, for on the girl’s lips a sudden pout had appeared. “Do as you will.”

“What’s gone wrong? The ten commandments are gayer than you, sir.” And to her lips, from which the pout had retreated, a smile returned.

“You were not annoyed at me last night, were you, Claire?” And as the girl, answering nothing, stood gazing at him, her virginal eyes a trifle dilated, her lips just parted, her head drawn back, he added, huskily, “You know I love you,” and hesitated⁠—for encouragement, perhaps, or else rebuke.

Then, as she seemed about to move from him, he detained her with a gesture that was at once an apology and a plea, the gesture of a mendicant accustomed to rebuff. “Claire, let me tell you. I know, none better, that it is wrong for me to speak to you as I do. I have no excuse. Yet when you came⁠—see, it is but a month ago⁠—you brought a gladness and a sorcery. At first I did not understand, but last night it was as a sense recovered: I knew that all my life I had hungered for you. You were the odor of a feast at which I had longed to sit, the shadow of a hope which I had dreamed to claim. Claire, listen to me. It is not years that make our age: I was old at twenty, I am young today, and it is youth that loves best and most. Let me love you. There, I will ask nothing in return, but I have such need of you! Each emotion I compressed expands to you, every illusion that I lost you can restore. You are to me the fulfilment of an anterior promise, the requital of an earlier mistake. Were I free I would speak to you less gravely, but I am bound as never Tantalus was. I can ask nothing, I can take nothing, I can only give. And there the misery of it is; for my power of giving is slight indeed. Were I master of fate instead of slave, and had you a wish, like a spaniel that wish should nestle at your feet. But this is idle speech; forgive it me. The fact remains, I love you, not alone with all my heart, but as no other has loved you yet, as no other can love you now.”

The initial phrases of this address had come from Gonfallon haltingly, but as he warmed to the work they fell from him in rounded periods, as they were wont to when he preached. And that magnetism which was in him, the electricity which he diffused and which had made him what he was, the foremost ecclesiastic in the largest of provincial cities, seemed now to be coercing the girl, despite herself, to his mood. Her eyes drooped, her lips were compressed, in her cheeks the color rose and subsided, vacillating as it were with retroacting and contending currents. And Gonfallon, as he scanned her face, felt an exultant throb. With a movement of the arm that would have encircled an oak he caught her in his embrace. The jacket had gone from her, the gold toy had disappeared. For a second that was an eternity he was conscious of her emollient mouth on his, his fingers intertwisted with her own. In that second he really lived⁠—perhaps he really loved.

Undulantly she disengaged and freed herself. She stooped for her jacket, and when she stood up again there was no sign of vacillation in her face. The back of her hand she drew across her lips, but whether to brush away the kiss that had been placed on them, or the smile that hovered in their moisture, Gonfallon was unable to decide. She had retreated a little, and he made a step to her, but as he moved she retreated yet farther away.

“Claire⁠—” he murmured.

“Oh, I say, Chris,” she interrupted, “drop all that.” The curtain parted, and she had gone.

In a second he was in the hall, but already she had reached the floor above, and, foreseeing the futility of pursuit, he entered his study and threw himself on a chair.

For a while he sat palpitant in alternations of elation and remorse. His path, doubtless, was straight, but it was by no means clear. The mystic penumbra of accepted tenets was still about him, yet through them shone the wonder of landscapes undivined. He was as one who awakes at dawn and finds the night still there. And as he alternately detained and dismissed now elation, now regret, he was aware of that confusion of purpose which visits those that puzzle over a problem they are in haste to solve. The signification of his own attitude was that which stirred him most. At the moment it seemed to him impossible that he should have acted to the girl as he had, and not impossible alone, but cowardly as well. Of the two, was not he the stronger? was it not for him to guide, to protect her, if need be, even from herself? And yet, without even the excuse of celibacy, without receiving from her so much of an invitation as can be conveyed in the quiver of an eyelid, he had performed the most ignoble role that man can play. Had it been love that had impelled him, some excuse might there be. But it was not that. Love would have slit his lips to the ears rather than let him touch her own. There would have been no elation then, no remorse, only an abandonment in spirit, the escape of a dream that might have come true, and then oblivion which is the novitiate of death. But no; it was not that. He needed no one to prompt him that in his heart were none of those choirs which love awakes; not a hymn had been summoned, not a harmony evoked. No, it was not that; it was the beast that is in us all, lashed down, kept cowering and hidden in the deepest cavern of our being, till in the inadvertent moment it leaps into light and claims its prey at last.

Through the silence of the house he heard a door open and another shut. From above, overhead, came the faint fall of moving feet. She had left Ruth, he knew; she had gone to her room. Now she had latched the door; now she was at the window, he heard the shutters close. The footfalls seemed to cross the room, and for the moment he pictured her standing as he had seen her once, before the glass, her arms raised, the fingers interlocked behind her head. What was it, after all, he wondered, that had impressed him so? It was not the refinement of her nature: there were times when he thought her almost coarse. Her mind was a rendezvous of platitudes; and as for her beauty, he could have sent a prayerbook skimming from the pulpit and in whatever aisle of Gethsemane it chanced to fall would be a girl fairer, more feminine, more appetizing yet, than she. But would there, though?

An almost imperceptible footfall from the room above aroused him from his revery. The sound was fainter than before; the feet that stirred were unshod, stockingless perhaps. Their faint tinkle ushered a fresh vision into the chambers of his mind: he saw her in a fabric so delicate of texture that it could be drawn through a ring, a garment immaterial as a moonbeam, her neck uncovered, and about her half-closed eyes and red moist lips the subtle smile of a faun.

In anger at himself he sprang to his feet. On the table before him was a heap of the manufactures of rationalist, of sophist, and of sage. Every one of those who have taken the nimbus from a god and pointed to an eternal grave had left a textbook there. For some time they had been accumulating on back bookshelves; but the day before, with some sermon in view, he had got them within reach. It is good to be valiant in the pulpit, it is good to confute; and the privilege of demolishing any doctrine that conflicts with Christianity, particularly when there is not the slightest danger of being answered back, is a pleasure in itself. But each time Gonfallon had handled a materialist, zest in his own creed declined. An Englishman, Clifford, who described the universe as an immense Sir Roger de Coverley, in which the dancers were atoms and the ballroom space, had the power to take him into an abyss so dank that the candle of faith was snuffed. A Frenchman, Flavet, had shown him the provenance of the parables. In Assyro-Accadian myth, Schrader, a German, had displayed to him the fabric of the Pentateuch.

An idle task, Voltaire has said, an idle task it is, this pulling down of enchanted castles. It is better far to examine truths than lies. But where are the truths? Gonfallon had asked himself the same thing not once, but many times. As yet no answer had been vouchsafed.

And now, in anger at himself, in an effort to banish Claire, he picked up the book that lay nearest to his hand. “Comprends,” it shouted at him, “comprends que tu portes ton paradis et ton enfer en toi-même.”

“Perhaps,” he muttered.

He put the book down and took another. It happened to be one of Renan’s melodious fumisteries; and as he opened it a phrase jumped out and stabbed him in the eyes: “La vertu est une suprême illusion.”

“Perhaps,” he repeated.

A third volume, a summary of German metaphysics, lay within reach. “The heavens are void,” it insisted. “There has been nothing, there is nothing, there will be nothing, save a constant evolution, a continuous development, with death for a goal.”

“Nothing?”

He left the table and its blasphemies, and turned to the window. His anger had gone, his thoughts of Claire as well, and in their train seemed to have departed the strength⁠—or the weakness, was it?⁠—which had visited him the preceding night. Yet as he looked up into the taciturn sky, something must have rebelled within him; for he groaned to the stars, “O Chaos, take that Nothing back and give us Satan in its stead!”

V

Decidedly the days were shorter. As Gonfallon let himself in with a latchkey, it was barely five, yet already night had come. The hall was dark; and as he drew off his gloves, straightening and folding them methodically as was his custom, he told himself that Jane must have forgotten the gas.

From the sitting-room came a murmur, and through the portiere a thread of light. “It is Ruth,” he reflected. For that morning she had appeared at breakfast, declaring that she had rested well, and that for the time being at least she was free of pain. “It is Ruth and some visitor,” he reflected⁠—Mr. Qualms, perhaps⁠—and he made to enter the room, but at once he drew back. The glimpse which he caught had shown him not Ruth, but Claire, and at her side Trement Yarde. They were standing a little apart from each other, their backs turned to the door, and for a moment Gonfallon hesitated, his hand on the curtain’s fringe.

Since the preceding night he had not seen the girl. She had breakfasted, as she usually did, in her room, and, shortly after the morning meal, matters connected with the bishop’s decease had demanded his presence abroad, detaining him until now.

And as he hesitated, Yarde, who had been speaking in a monotone, pitched his voice in higher keys. Gonfallon’s fingers tightened on the fringe. He hated the man, he hated his looks, the cut of his coat, his intonation, everything, even to his manner and the trick he had of contemplating his fingernails.

“This is the third time I have asked you,” Gonfallon heard him say.

“If it is the last,” Claire answered, “there must be luck in odd numbers, after all.”

“You are decided, then?”

“Fully.”

“Very good. It remains to me⁠—there, listen a moment, won’t you?”

During the pause that followed Gonfallon fancied the young man eying the polished tips of his fingers.

“It is this. Some day you may be in need of assistance. If you are, believe me, there is no one to whom you can turn more readily than to me. You know where I live, and, parenthetically, I can assure you that the walls of my apartment are dumb⁠—”

“Leave the room.”

The command reached Gonfallon with the resonance of a bell.

“Certainly, since you wish it. In fact, I was on the point of doing so. Save at your invitation, I will not venture to enter it again.”

It was evident that Yarde had turned. Gonfallon dropped the fringe, and groped back into the shadows.

“I am sorry to have annoyed you,” the young man added. He had reached the threshold, and Gonfallon moved yet farther away.

“If you do not leave I will ring.”

“And I must assure you,” he continued, “that I would not have made this suggestion had I not⁠—unless, h’m, well⁠—I saw my father this afternoon. He is in Wall Street, you know. Good night, Miss Bucholz.”

There was a rush of light, the curtain fell again, the front door opened and closed.

Gonfallon still stood in the darkness, one arm extended along the wall, the other pendent at his side. His head was bent, his eyes fixed on the stair. From the adjoining room came the sound of Claire’s uneasy tread: she seemed to be pacing the room, restless as a panther is, lashing the furniture with her skirt.

What manner of girl was she, that Yarde should permit himself such a speech? And what manner of man was he, that he should suffer such a speech to pass unpunished? Gonfallon’s hand clinched, and the arm which had extended along the wall he raised in anger. But it was himself he could have struck: he was humiliated at his own attitude. He knew, none better, that it had been his duty to interrupt, to protect, and to force that libertine from the door.

And Claire! He heard her cross the room again, and felt that the indignity was smarting still. If she had repulsed the man at first, might it not be because of him?

He left the shadows; in a moment he was with her. The promenade had ceased: she had thrown herself on a lounge, and sat, her feet crossed, her virginal eyes upturned and pensive.

“I saw that man Yarde go out,” he began, abruptly. “What was he doing here?”

Claire lowered her eyes from the ceiling to the wall. “Really,” she answered; “I took no note of his action. He spoke of the weather, I believe, and⁠—let me see; oh, yes, he quoted a passage from Horace, which if I understood I would repeat, and⁠—and asked after you. Ruth seems better today, doesn’t she?”

Gonfallon’s breath came quicker. The change in Claire, a change which since the preceding night was greater than that of an August displaced by March, the flippancy of her indifference, the enervations of the day, the conflicts with himself, the conversation overheard and uninterpreted, the unexplained presence of a man whom he loathed and whom he could give himself no valid reason for loathing⁠—these things had put him in a state of irritation which is comparable only to that which comes of a sudden depletion of force. But of the inward ferment there was little if any outward show. He eyed her narrowly, his lip austere.

“At your age, Ruth would have felt herself contaminated by such a man,” he said, at last, and paused expectant of some reply.

But Claire answered nothing. Her eyes had gone up again to the ceiling. From beneath her skirt a patent-leather shoe, narrow and pointed, moved in and out.

“Did you not hear me?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered, with her negligent drawl⁠—“yes, I heard; but you see, Chris, customs have changed since the fall of Troy.”

To this Gonfallon feigned assent, his lip austerer than before.

“Very true,” he said. “Yet, if I may not admonish you, it is at least my duty to inform your father that you receive a ruffian to insult you in my house.”

“Ah!” As though battle were imminent, she straightened herself. Her expression had lost its flippancy; it had become frosty and brilliant. “Do you know, I thought you were listening? In regard to father, do as you like; only don’t tell him you mistook his daughter for⁠—”

The speech unfinished was like a bugle blown through the crimson of an autumn eve. It was harmonious, it was inspiring, but it jarred. It awoke Gonfallon from a trance. Claire’s eyes were no longer pensive; they had the chill and glitter of steel. And now as she laughed her voice was hard and metallic as her eyes.

“There, Chris,” she added, in lighter tone; “I am not one of your congregation yet.”

She had arisen, and was about to pass him by, but something in his face seemed to detain her steps. Through one of those influences occult yet recognized, her lips took on their former sweetness, her eyes glowed, and she smiled.

“Claire⁠—” he murmured, and would have caught and held her, perhaps, but a voice in the hall, unheard by him, must have alarmed her: she eluded him, and disappeared in the dining-room beyond.

“Mr. Bucholz, sir, and can he see you?” It was Jane the housemaid, angular as a hendecagon and prim as a Puritan Sunday.

Gonfallon started. He was as an aeronaut dropped from colorless ether into some dank moraine.

“He says it’s most important,” the woman added, and patted her apron flat.

As yet he was not wholly himself; the variety and multiplicity of emotions had not had the effect of a sedative; but he nodded gravely enough, and presently he caught a whiff of alcohol: Mr. Bucholz was before him.

“Take a seat,” said Gonfallon, mechanically.

“Thanks, I’ve just had one.”

The tone in which he spoke arrested attention. For a second Gonfallon eyed him suspiciously. Could it be that Claire⁠—But no; such a supposition was absurd.

“Gonfallon, I want a moment with you. Are you busy?” Mr. Bucholz spoke with the air of one to whom the possible occupation of his host was a matter of no importance.

To Gonfallon’s hands came a sudden moisture. “No,” he replied.

Mr. Bucholz had a forehead that was wide yet low, the forehead of a murderer. His face was thin, his body obese. Since his disasters his complexion had assumed the hue of a brandied cherry. He looked shabby, and he was unshorn. His manner was a compound of alternate pompousness and jocularity. To Gonfallon he was revolting. To Jane, and possibly to others, it was a matter of wonder that such a man could be the father of a girl like Claire.

“You are well, I hope?” Gonfallon added.

At this Mr. Bucholz laughed aloud; but his laugh was nervous, yet unsonorous as a muffled bell⁠—a laugh that came wholly from within, a laugh which frightened and which chilled.

“See here, parson, I want you to do something for me⁠—something⁠—how shall I put it? Well, let us call it ad majorem Dei gratiam. That is technical, is it not?”

“And concise.”

“And concise, as you say. By the way, I think I will change my mind. Suppose you sit down too.”

Mr. Bucholz found a seat, and Gonfallon, relieved of his sudden panic, followed suit.

“You remember,” Mr. Bucholz continued, “that when Jerolomon got me in that corner everything went. Twenty million; not a penny less. The place at Irvington, the house on Fifth Avenue, the yacht, the stable, stocks, bonds, all the tra-la-la of wealth, evaporated in a night. I lost my grip. The few hundred thousand that remained followed in a fortnight. The last fifty-dollar bill I could call my own I dropped in a bucket-shop. Curious, isn’t it?” And Mr. Bucholz put his hand to his head and for the moment seemed to lose himself in thought.

“Well?”

“Ah, yes.” And Mr. Bucholz looked up again. “Well, after that, as you know, Usselex gave me his gold-business. It was good of Usselex, for I had squeezed him once myself. Jerolomon, I have reason to believe, suggested it to him. However, it was four thousand a year⁠—just the salary I paid the gardener who did picturesque geometry for me at Irvington: why, you get almost three times as much yourself. Or rather,” he added, in an undertone, as though reflecting on the point of the speech, “or rather I got it for you. But that’s as may be. A week ago I learned, accidentally as I then thought, that Jerolomon was engineering another corner in wheat. I went to him and asked a loan. He laughed at me. I told him he had taken everything I had. ‘Bucholz,’ he answered, ‘I took back at compound interest what you once took from me. I am not lending money today: I am paying off old scores. Good morning to you.’ And he turned on his heel. In the course of the afternoon I got ten thousand dollars: I went in and bought. Yesterday the market fell: the ten thousand were wiped out.”

“Dear me!”

“And now,” continued Bucholz, “that ten thousand must be repaid.”

“Of course it must be. Only⁠—”

“Only you haven’t got it, I suppose. Not even ad majorem Dei gratiam. Well, sir, you have got to get it.”

As he spoke, he rose from his seat and fronted his host. His face had changed. Up to this it had conveyed the varying shades of indifference, apathy, and disgust, but now it was resolute, it expressed a determination menacing and inflexible as a bayonet, and of which Gonfallon seemed to feel the point and the chill.

“You have got to get it,” he repeated, “and before Saturday at that.”

And as Gonfallon made no answer, Bucholz bent over him until his face almost touched his listener’s ear. “I put Usselex’ name on the check,” he whispered, and drew himself up.

“You⁠—you say you put Usselex’ name on the check?”

And as Bucholz nodded encouragingly, invitingly even, to the dawn of understanding which he discerned breaking in Gonfallon’s eyes, the latter cowered in his chair. “Why, that is forgery!” he gasped.

“Be still,” hissed Bucholz; “be still.” Then, seeing that the shot had told, he nodded again, and added, with a negligent, musing air, “Yes, that, I believe, is what it is called.” He laughed a little⁠—or was it a laugh?⁠—a sound that had in it the ghoulish mock of the graphophone, a tone that runs cracked and thin, like a man’s laughter, as Swinburne puts it, heard in hell, far down.

Gonfallon still cowered in his chair. Bucholz assumed a graver mien, and, affecting to ignore his son-in-law’s attitude, monologued at the wall. “There was a time,” he said⁠—“but bah! what is the use? Why, I couldn’t turn a block that someone didn’t rush to me with hands outstretched: ‘Oh, my dear Mr. Bucholz, how are you?’ Today the same people⁠—and to every man jack of them I have been of use⁠—the very same ones, people whom I lifted not out of the dust alone, but out of the mud, will not loan me a dollar. After all, they are only human, I suppose. What is that line in the catechism? However, that is not to the point. I am sorry about it all, but it was not for myself I worked, it was for Ruth and for Claire. It was for them I made myself rich, respected, famous even. It was for them I got into that trap of Jerolomon’s. It was for them I did this thing. Ruth you can always look after, but Claire⁠—well, I used to think she would be the richest girl in the land. The hope of a parvenu, you will say. I grant it; but it was for her I cared, for her and for Ruth, not for myself.”

“I can do nothing,” said Gonfallon. In his eyes was the look of one who has sounded an abyss. “No, nothing. The very utmost I could raise would not cover a quarter of the⁠—the⁠—”

“Forgery is the word, but theft will do.”

“Of the amount,” he continued, in a dogged effort to pass the interruption unheeded. “And there is no one to whom I could go,” he added, reflectively, “save perhaps to Nicholas Manhattan. And if I went to him I would have to explain; which of course is impossible.”

“Not impossible in the least,” said Bucholz, very gravely; “not impossible in the least. I don’t see at all why you should say so. Nothing could be more proper. Mr. Manhattan is your parishioner; he is even a warden, isn’t he? I haven’t the pleasure of knowing him personally, and yet I am quite sure that he wouldn’t let a trifle like ten thousand weigh with him if he knew your good repute and that of Gethsemane was concerned.”

“My good repute! My good repute has nothing to do in the matter.”

“You are mistaken, dear boy; it has. When I am promenading a striped suit through the corridors of Sing Sing, it were facetious indeed did my son-in-law continue to officiate in the Church of the Holy Bilk⁠—I mean Gethsemane. Your parishioners in whom you have instilled so well all the beautiful precepts of Christian charity will show you the difference between theory and practice. Not an atom of charity will you get from them. Why, dear boy, you might just as well begin to pack up at once. If this thing gets out, never will they let you preach again. Really they won’t. I think you can take my word for that⁠—Why, Claire, where did you spring from?”

Unobserved by either, the girl had entered the room. To her father’s query she made no direct answer; she hastened towards him and gave him a fleeting caress.

Then, turning to Gonfallon, “Ruth wants you,” she explained.

“Can she have heard?” he wondered. He scanned her face; it was untroubled, and as she spoke, her voice assured.

“She has not heard,” he decided, and, waving at Bucholz, “I will be back presently,” he said.

“Saturday is the first of the month,” that gentleman announced. “The bank-account will be balanced then.”

But Gonfallon had already left the room. As he ascended the stair, he felt as though it were giving way beneath him. On each side were threatening hands. Yet above no haven was discernible, while below was an abyss.

“Of us two,” he muttered, “the nobler still is he;” and then, mentally, he bolted at the eccentricity of his own thought. “I am daft,” he told himself.

The stair, however, did not give way beneath him, the threatening hands did not detain his steps; he reached his wife in safety and sank in a chair at her side.

“Were you busy, Chris?” she asked. “I could have waited. It is merely a line from Mrs. Manhattan: she wants us all to dine with her on the 12th. I, of course, cannot go. But you will take Claire, will you not?”

“No, no,” he answered, impatiently. The 12th, indeed! He would be in little mood for dining then. “No,” he repeated. “Send a regret.”

“But, Chris, Claire will want to go. Do⁠—”

“Then let her go alone: as for me⁠—” He halted abruptly: an expression in Ruth’s face warned him that he was betraying an obsession of which no sign should be conveyed. “I am tired,” he added, inconsequently.

“Chris, you work so hard⁠—”

To this, with a despondent air, he assented remotely.

“And a little gayety will do you good. Besides⁠—”

“If I could only get away,” he thought. “Is there no place where I can hide?”

“It is one of your duties to go about among your parishioners. I believe it is even a canon in ecclesiastical law.” Ruth laughed as she spoke, and gave her husband a look in which pride and love commingled.

“There,” he said, “do as you will.”

After all, what did it matter? When the time came, Mrs. Manhattan would expect neither him nor Claire. And through his thoughts but one thing fluttered⁠—the longing for a place to hide.

“That is sweet of you, Chris. I will write to Mrs. Manhattan at once.⁠—Come in.”

Someone had rapped on the door, and in a moment Jane entered. “A letter for you, sir,” she said, and extended a note on a salver.

Instinctively he shuddered. It was about that accursed check, he knew. But the superscription reassured him. “It’s from Jones,” he mumbled, and tore the envelope apart.

“Dear Gonfallon,” it ran⁠—“I have just received a telegram from Bronx. My aunt is dying. She begs you to come to her. I go down in the eight-o’clock train. Will you not meet me at the Grand Central?

“It is there,” thought Gonfallon, “there that I can hide.” He turned to the servant and handed the note to Ruth.

“Is anyone waiting? Very good. Tell him to say to Mr. Jones that I will be there.”

He stood up, and added, in an undertone, “Tell Mr. Bucholz⁠—” But whatever message he had wished to send was lost.

“He’s gone, sir,” the woman interrupted.

And Ruth, intent on the note, murmured, as Jane withdrew, “To think that it was in her house we met! It seems but yesterday to me.”

“I must hurry,” said Gonfallon: “it is seven now.”

VI

It was midnight when the train halted at Bronx. During the journey Jones had been loquacious and Gonfallon dumb. To the one the illness of the countess represented an eternal farewell to the exigencies of syndicates and publishers; to the other, a refuge from the scandal with which New York would presently resound.

Jones, enveloped in an Inverness, wandered out into voluptuous anticipations of wealth to be. “I can go to Constantinople,” he confided to his companion, “or, like Stevenson, I can sail the Southern seas. I can lounge in Quaritch’s, or on the Grand Canal. I can go to Ecuador and foment a revolution. I can turn Buddhist and penetrate Tibet. From an editor’s chair I can bombard my friends and caress my enemies. I will have time to be noble, to be just, and to forgive. I can disappear as though the earth had swallowed me, or I can write a book to please myself. I can live, as Baudelaire wanted to, in a grot of basalt surrounded by slaves whose sole duty it will be to discover the secret of my immense ennui. Like Flaubert, I can call to a chimera to lift me on its wings. Like the Chimera, I can whisper to the Sphinx, ‘O Unknown, I am amorous of thine eyes.’ On the fingers of my sweethearts I can put the crystallized essence of banknotes. I can even pay my debts⁠—some of them, at least. I can⁠—”

And while Jones rambled on, discounting his inheritance in advance, Gonfallon’s thoughts had also taken him afar. In the abruptness of the departure he had no time to make so much as an effort to stay the approaching joust; and now, as he tormented himself with its possibilities, some breath of the philosophies to which the preceding night had been given rose to him, graciously as a balm. “Whatever will be, is,” he mused. “No one can combat the inevitable. If it is written that Bucholz is to founder in the mire and bespatter us all with the mud, no act of mine can prevent it.” But, even as his fancy was comforted, abruptly before him the reef to which he was veering loomed, and in the wreck which it menaced he saw the bishopric gone forever, Gethsemane lost as well. He saw himself a wanderer in unfamiliar parishes, the pulpit loaned on trial, the subsidence in some Western town, and then that most terrible trial of all, the attempt to begin life anew.

In his misery he moaned, dumbly and vaguely afflicted. In an effort to console himself he reflected that Jesus had been a vagabond too⁠—one who had not where to lay his head. Yet Jesus, he instantly remembered, had conquered the world, while he could not conquer himself.

Presently his thoughts deserted father for daughter, and as the train flashed through the night, something in the roll of the car seemed to echo the music of her voice. The irritation which had visited him in the afternoon faded, as irritation ever does. He closed his eyes: he was alone with her again, in his ears was the bubbling ripple of her laugh, his lips were on hers, his were the savors of her skin, his the wonders and caresses of her hair.

Yes, the poets were right: nothing in all the world imitated happiness more perfectly than did love. And if only that nightmare would disappear! If the memory of Bucholz and of his visit would vanish, life, full surely, would be a pleasant gift. But Bucholz declined to be dismissed. He surged like a partition between happiness and Claire. He dominated and appalled. It was all very well to rememorate the precepts of the masters, yet in the rememoration Gonfallon recalled that speech of the warrior Frederick, “Against the ills of the past or of the future philosophy is the best of remedies, but against the ills of the present it is without effect.” And as the train cleft the darkness he blamed himself for his cowardice, for his haste, for the weakness which had made him accept the first excuse for flight, and wished himself back in town, imploring aid there of Usselex, of Manhattan, of Jerolomon even, of anyone who had the power to throttle this thing at its birth. Again he groaned and writhed as Laocoön did.

“It is Wednesday,” he told himself: “by tomorrow noon I can be back in town. Cost what it may, I will get that money, and everything may yet be well. Surely Manhattan will not refuse; and if he does, and Jerolomon declines, then will I mortgage the homestead. H’m, it is odd I should have thought of that last. Meanwhile⁠—”

“Bronx!” The door before him had opened, and a brakeman was bawling in his face.

“We are punctual as a comet,” he heard Jones exclaim.

Gathering their traps, they descended into the night. At the station but one vehicle was discernible, and that, from a loutish driver who stood dandling his whip, they presently discovered was for them. “You ought to have come earlier,” he remarked, with the affectionate familiarity which is peculiar to the New-Englander. “It was sundown when she died.”

“Well,” said Jones, when they had seated themselves in the carriage, “she was a good woman, and a Christian. It’s deuced rough I couldn’t have got here in time. I was her favorite relative,” he added, meditatively. And with that he drew out a large cigar, which he lighted with infinite care.

Through the window Gonfallon gazed at the frostbitten road which he knew so well. Over there, to the right, was the parsonage he had occupied. And here, to the right, was Sever’s house. How small it looked! And as the carriage rattled over the ruts one after another, he recalled the names of retreating structures.

“Yes, indeed,” he answered; “yes, indeed.”

“A woman,” Jones continued, “who may have been misunderstood, as good women often are, but who was never the subject of gossip. I was in knickerbockers when her husband ran off, but I can see him now. He looked like a young emperor of old Rome. And from her never a murmur could be wrung. She did not so much as mention him, or her friend, even, who disappeared at the same time⁠—Mira Wheat her name was, the Admirable Miranda I remember she was called, a famous beauty, and a catch to boot. The count went down at Gravelotte, but what ever became of his travelling companion no one ever heard. It’s odd, those abrupt disappearances. You knew of the Besaluls, didn’t you? There’s a case in point. Besalul married a girl⁠—a Miss Forbush, I think: to all intents and purposes they were dead in love with each other. Two months afterwards, when Besalul, after bringing his wife home from some reception, was sitting in the parlor over the Post, the butler announced dinner. ‘Go upstairs,’ said Besalul, ‘and tell my wife.’ The butler went up and came down: Mrs. Besalul was undiscoverable. They searched the house. In her room were the mantle and bonnet which she had worn at the reception, but of the lady herself not a trace. The night changed to morning, and morning into noon, and still no sign of the absentee. No one had heard her leave the house, and it seemed impossible for her to have done so unobserved. Detectives were summoned, rewards were offered, but all in vain. Three or four years later, when she was practically forgotten, a friend of Besalul’s happened in journeying through France to stop at Toulouse, and while wandering about the town recognized my lady in a rose-garden. She had run off with a man with whom no one knew she was even acquainted.”

And Jones, flicking the ashes from his cigar, added, “I would have worked it up into a novel, but somehow it lacked the dramatic. I never seemed to get a climax. Ah! here we are.”

A servant, a pensioner rather, Rebecca Hays by name, a woman white of face and of hair, whom Gonfallon remembered well, met and led them into the hall. Grief or excitement seemed to have made her vague of speech. The lids of her eyes were watery and pink, her lips twitched spasmodically.

“Elle est devenue idiote,” Jones remarked. “I suppose we had better go up.”

And, motioning to the woman to precede them, the novelist, followed by the clergyman, mounted the creaking stair.

It was a large room which they presently entered, a room that leaned to the south. Across one wall was a stretch of tapestry, not Gobelins, but Gothic, and pictorial of the visit of the Magi. The angle was bare, the other walls cut by windows that gave on the valley below. The floor was of lacquered wood, the centre protected by a rug. Between the rug and the tapestry was a bed draped with curtains that fell from a panoply affixed to the ceiling above. On either side of the bed was a chest of oak. And on these chests candles had been placed.

Very reverently Gonfallon drew one of the curtains aside, and then, as he took one of the candles and held it aloft that he might see the better, Jones peered over his shoulder.

Death had dealt gently with the occupant of that bed. The hue of the skin was little different from what it had been, the folded hands not a whit more transparent than before. Even the expression of the face had not altered: in the elevation of the brow which death had not lowered, in the resignation of the mouth which it had been impotent to distort, the countess looked in the shroud as she had looked in life⁠—as though under her something had been killed, a hope, an illusion, or a dream.

“ ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ ” Gonfallon through sheer force of habit repeated, and turned to his companion; but Jones had already left him; he stood a little beyond, reading some paper which the white-haired woman who hovered in the doorway presumably had brought.

Ah, yes, the resurrection and the life! He let the curtain fall, and moved to a window. Save for the uncertain rustle of the paper which Jones was reading, the house was so still that one might have thought the countess had already elected it for her tomb. The air, too, was still. Gonfallon looked out into the shadows. To the left some leafless trees crossed their arms, beyond them others, blurred by the night, seemed to crouch in suspense, while beneath in the valley was the shimmer of a lake in which the hillside had turned upside down and the moonbeams danced with the ripples.

“The resurrection and the life, indeed! Where is the faith to which I clung? Gone are its flowers,” he mused, and with a finger beat a muffled tattoo on the windowpane. “Well do I remember the days when death to me was an illusion, a mask of the continuity of life. Now, what is it? At most a chasm into which the stars fall and nations disappear, a depth from which no spar returns, a silence from which no cry ascends. Is there in its darkness a flicker, an intimation even other than that of the ephemeralness of man? There may be. Yes, there may be, but to me no sign is vouchsafed. The countess who died steadfast in the unalterableness of her perfect faith must at the last have caught the flutter of angels’ wings. The grace which⁠—eh?”

“Read that.” And Jones, who had approached him, thrust a letter in his hand.

Gonfallon crossed the room to the candles and leaned on one of the chests. The paper which Jones had given him was undated, but evidently it was old: the ink had faded a little, the writing was not wholly legible, and from the paper itself came a faint odor of must and of decay. So nearly as Gonfallon could discern, it ran as follows:

“Should you, my dear nephew, survive me, as I trust you may, you will find by my will that your wants are provided for. In return for this, I wish to ask of you a last favor. In my bedroom, where this letter, should you ever receive it, will be given you, are two chests clamped with iron. These chests I beg you to carry, with Rebecca’s aid, to the dining-hall below. They contain nothing of value; merely a few odds and ends, mementos of my late husband, that are of interest to no one but myself. When I die, they can be burned, and no one will be the poorer. Take them, then, unopened, to the dining-hall: they are not too large to go in the fireplace, and by putting in one at a time they can be easily destroyed. I rely on you, Fenwick, to do as I bid.

And beneath, by way of postscriptum, though evidently of more recent date, was written⁠—

“Rebecca seems to be failing. If possible, get Dr. Gonfallon to assist.”

“Well?” said Jones.

Gonfallon had read the letter, and stood eying the superscription. “Well,” he answered, “there is a law, whether common or statute I am uncertain, but there is a law which inhibits just such a thing as this. To oblige your aunt is an easy matter. The question is⁠—”

“The law be blowed! The question is whether you will assist me. Whether or not the mementos consist in the frippery of a dead soldier, what does it matter, after all? My aunt speaks of her late husband: who knows what she meant? Women have odd circumlocutions. It is my duty to do as she bids, and do it I will.”

As he spoke he turned to one of the chests, and, removing the candles, drew it to the centre of the room. “See,” he added, “if it were packed with tracts it couldn’t be lighter.” And the gesture which he made was so cynical yet so sincere that Gonfallon, divining the uselessness of argument, nodded his assent.

“Now,” continued Jones, “if you will take one end I will take the other. Yet wait a second.” He left the room, and presently returned. “The way is clear. The sooner we get them down, the better.”

At once then, the chest between them, they moved out into the hall. From the floor above came the faint waver of a light. Beneath, a lamp was burning. As they moved, the flooring creaked; the great house was alive with echoes.

On the landing Jones stopped and lowered his end of the chest. “I will get a candle,” he said, as he did so. But his movement must have been ill calculated or over-abrupt⁠—both, perhaps⁠—for the added and unexpected weight which Gonfallon was then called upon to maintain found his fingers unprepared; the chest slipped from him and with the reverberation of thunder bounded down the giant stair. Barely had it started in its tumultuous descent before it seemed to leap sheer into the air and fall with a final crash on the floor below. Yet even in that infinitesimal space of time, above the reverberations soared the anguish of a woman’s cry; and for one second, leaning on the banister above them, in the uncertain flicker, both caught a glimpse of the white-haired retainer, her eyes dilated and mouth agape. Then, at once, you could have heard a lizard move.

“H’m,” muttered Jones, with an uncomfortable shrug; “let’s ask the other chest to be good enough not to be in such a hurry.”

“Look!” Gonfallon exclaimed; “it has either split in two or the lid has been wrenched open.”

The novelist extracted a monocle from his waistcoat and gazed into the shadows.

“Serves it right,” he answered, and leisurely descended the stair. “ ‘And of the remnants⁠—’ ” he continued, but midway in the quotation he halted. On the floor at his feet was something that sent a thrill down his spine, an object but a trifle larger than a Dutch cheese, one that had ossified and turned from dull red to dingy white, an unpleasant thing that had no business there.

He stooped and eyed it. Near the base was the rictus which the New-England lad cuts in the face of a pumpkin, and above it near the top was a fissure that resembled the signature of an axe. By it a scrap of paper had fluttered, and just beyond, the chest lay yawning and empty.

When Jones stood up again the paper was in his hand⁠—a square bit of parchment stamped with ensigns armorial, under which for legend ran the splendid device, Malgré tout. Beneath, three or four lines had been written.

“ ‘This,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘This is the head of Jean-Renest-Marie, Count of Cinq-Cygne, Seigneur of Dol, at one time second lieutenant in the 19th Dragoons. May God have mercy on his soul!’ ”

He tossed the paper in the chest, and turned to Gonfallon. The latter was livid. “What do you say to that?” he asked. And then, as his friend steadied himself against the wall, “I will wager,” he continued, “that a companion-piece is in the other chest, another memento like that on the floor, and another document couched perhaps somewhat as follows: ‘This is the head of Mira Almer Wheat, daughter of Arthur Percy Wheat, of New York, esquire;’ and for epitaph, ‘Wheat is not quickened except it die.’ ”

“Hush! for heaven’s sake, hush! Someone may hear you.”

“Bah! The servants sleep in the wing; in this part of the house there is no one but Rebecca⁠—an accomplice I presume, an imbecile I am sure. And to think,” Jones added, after a moment, “to think that for twenty years that aunt of mine should not only have jockeyed the world, but that each night of those twenty years those chests should have been on either side of her, the last things she saw before closing her eyes, the first she saw on awakening! Why, Gonfallon, they were with her sleeping or waking; they were in her dreams, in her nightmares; she had made the dead her life, revenge a sustenance. What a plot! Shade of Balzac, what a plot!”

“Jones,” expostulated Gonfallon, “you are indecent.”

“Ah! I am indecent, am I? Well, perhaps⁠—perhaps. But if you knew what a trade fiction is! Whoso enters there leaves every blush behind.”

He picked up the skull, and, turning it in his hand, half to it half to his shuddering companion, he continued in a lower tone, “I am not a whit worse than another, and yet the desire for exact representation is such that if I hold a girl in my arms I study her abandonment; does she weep, I seek a simile in her tears; in her smile is the possibility of a metaphor; I even count my own pulse. To one in my trade nothing imaginable comes amiss. When a fellow adopts letters he must analyze his own sensations. Has he an emotion, he detains it; a grief, he enjoys it; a pleasure, he torments it into a phrase. He lives not alone in his own individual skin, but in that of everyone he encounters. The expression of a face is significant as a panic on the Exchange. A bow in the street will tell him as much as a page of Montaigne. He is in pursuit of the evanescent, a seeker after the key of the little dramas we all of us live and all of us conceal. If need be, he will hold his own linen to the cackle of the public. He is the comedian of the pen: it is his duty to amuse, to entertain⁠—or else to hold his peace. No wonder the critics bark; though, to be sure, they have nothing better to do. No, a viler profession never was. I hate it, I love it. It sends you rummaging where you have no business to be, it burns your fingers, it destroys your eyesight, alienates your friends, bars you from the sunlight, and for reward it offers⁠—what? A back bookshelf and a reproach. Ah, Gonfallon, preach to your congregation, but not to me. No sermon ever delivered is worth one of my aspirations. Yet see, I am indecent no longer.” And, shoving the skull back in the chest, he murmured, with the grimace of an East-Side actor, “Alas! poor Yorick!”

“And now,” he added, “let us get these odds and ends away.”

VII

At the breakfast-table on the morrow Jones was taciturn and Gonfallon white. When a little before in the dim baronial hall the flames had lapped at the climax of three lives, there had come to them unawares one of those emotions that are as potent for good as the conglomerate precepts of sayers of sooth. It was not that sin had appalled, for that it always does: it was that forgiveness had been impossible to one they deemed a saint. And before their vision, as the drama unrolled, each had pictured it according to his nature, but both had dreamed.

To Gonfallon it had displayed another of the uncircuitable labyrinths of the human heart. To Jones it had been a document. Gonfallon had imagined the countess pleading with her husband, pleading with her friend, until forbearance had been warped and the deed was done. Jones had evoked the jealousy of a woman accustomed to reign; he had seen, as in a glass, the first suspicion, the affected cecity, the studied calm, the uncertainty, the vigilance, yet still the smile, the laughing yet observant eyes, then the accumulating trifles, some partial evidence, the lure, the surprise, the axe, and death.

Where Gonfallon had been perplexed at the absence of a tenet which he strove to hold paramount, that tenet which the Christ instilled, which turned the pagan into the knight, founded courtesy and banished the boor, charity to the failings of others and abnegation of self, where he had been perplexed at the absence of this sweetest virtue in one whom he thought little short of perfection itself, Jones had seen the artist in life, one who, having tried every means to retain supremacy and failing, had not hesitated to crush. And as both pondered on the two decenniums in which the countess, with her skulls in her bedchamber and her skeletons in the cellar, had fronted the world without once betraying her secret⁠—that secret which now was theirs⁠—“It is hideous,” thought Gonfallon: “It is great,” thought Jones. And both were wrong, and both were right.

And now, as they sat together, one was taciturn and the other white. Gonfallon broke his bread absently. Into the horrors through which he had strayed, there surged the lancinating dread of the scandal at home, and by way of accompaniment to his thoughts was the memory of Claire. Already he meditated some plan of escape. Truly the office for which he had been summoned was fulfilled, and was he not free to go?

“Jones,” he ventured, at last, “it is the same to you, is it not, if I leave today?”

At this the novelist started with the air of a man awakened abruptly, and Gonfallon felt himself called upon to address the question again.

“Absolutely,” Jones answered, as its meaning reached him, and at once relapsed into dream. Apparently, to him, everything had ceased to be.

Gonfallon left the room and interviewed the coachman. Then, his valise repacked, his preparations completed, he descended the stair and rejoined his host. But during his absence a mourner had come, a little old lady, her face full of wrinkles and benevolence, a friend of the deceased, and a former parishioner of his own. Jones, seemingly, was annoyed at the intrusion, for he sat gnawing his thumb, his face one great scowl.

“Oh, doctor!” the lady exclaimed, as Gonfallon entered, “is it not sad? What shall we ever do without her? And Mr. Jones! Oh, doctor, don’t let him sit there eating his tears; tell him that in the midst of life we are in death, tell him he should not grieve, tell him his dear aunt has gone to a better world, tell him⁠—”

“Gag that woman, can’t you?” Jones muttered in an aside to his friend; and, rising from his seat, he nervously paced the room.

At this the poor lady, anxious only to console, nay, even to distract, waded through the feeble channels of her thought till she encountered her son, a young man who was endeavoring to become one of the ten thousand lawyers with whom New York is blessed.

“And Alfred!⁠—Mr. Jones, the countess always liked him so much: she even promised to give him a case⁠—one of her tenants who kept sending her bills for repairs. Do you ever see him, Mr. Jones? He is very studious; he works I forget how many hours. But the law is slow, is it not?”

“And so is the turtle,” snarled Jones, “but it gets in the soup all the same.”

“Oh, Mr. Jones, you do say such encouraging things! I must write that to Alfred. He will value it coming from you. You know he is a great admirer of yours, Alfred is. I haven’t read any of your works myself, but he says they are great. Tell me, Mr. Jones, do you write, as he does, with a quill?”

And Jones, almost brutally, with a shrug of the shoulders that was tantamount to a slap in the face, answered, “No, madam, I write with my nerves,” and stalked from the room.

Gonfallon lingered a moment with the benevolent lady, and then, with a murmured apology, followed his host. Already the carriage had arrived, and on the porch was Jones.

“You will be back for the funeral, will you not?” he asked. “I would rather you officiated than the ignoramus that is here. Besides,” he added, “it would be more becoming.”

Gonfallon flicked from his sleeve a speck of dust. To the sensitive there are few things as contagious as irritation, and the irritation which Jones exhaled had not left him unruffled. But immediately he recovered himself. Because Jones happened to be vicious there was little reason why he should imitate him.

“I will be back, of course,” he answered, sedately. “But, Jones, if I were you I wouldn’t let this thing⁠—h’m, you know what I mean: it’s bad enough, in all conscience, and I can understand that you are upset, but⁠—”

“Upset? You think I am upset? Is that what you call it? I am in a rage beside which the anger of Achilles was a fleeting annoyance. Upset, indeed! Gonfallon, this morning⁠—no, let me begin aright, last night I was imbecile enough to build the usual castle in Castile: I had a right to, hadn’t I? I was my aunt’s favorite relative. She had forty⁠—fifty thousand a year. With an income like that, and strict economy, a man can go far. I intended to. I saw myself in Tahiti, in Japan, at the same time even. There is not an inviting shore in the world that I did not propose to visit⁠—in my own yacht at that, and with a picked orchestra in the forecastle. And this morning, before I was so much as able to get the taste of last night out of my mouth, Tapling turned up⁠—”

“The attorney, you mean?”

“Yes, the attorney; and, from what I could squeeze out of him, that dear aunt of mine, for whom I am guilty of compounding a felony, has left me this⁠—this cemetery and eighteen hundred a year to keep it up with. Eighteen hundred a year, Gonfallon; fancy the infamy of that!”

“And the rest?”

Jones gave his head the shake which a bull gives at a toreador. “To the devil⁠—to some other Jones⁠—to you, perhaps. As if I cared. It’s gone: that’s the end of it.”

“I am sorry; really I am. I can understand⁠—”

“Yes,” replied Jones, “I am sorry too.” He paused and gazed at the points of his patent-leather shoes. His anger seemed to have spent itself.

“You have no plans, have you?” Gonfallon asked, as a servant appeared with his valise.

“No,” Jones answered, pensively. “No; for the moment, none at all. I may stay in the country and raise hexameters, or return to town and dabble in experimental physiology. But as for Tahiti and Japan, I must give them up. Hereafter I can travel, as I have hitherto, on the map.⁠—Well, I am sorry you have to go. Remember me to your wife.”

“And now,” murmured Gonfallon, as the carriage swept down the hill, “to the rescue.”

VIII

But for that day the rescue was of necessity postponed. Shortly after leaving Bronx the train in which Gonfallon was seated hesitated and halted, barricaded by the derailment of the Boston Express. And there between open fields for four mortal hours Gonfallon sat and twirled his thumbs. Instead of arriving in town at noon, the encroachments of dusk had begun before the station was reached.

As he drove to the rectory he weighed the feasibility of bearding Usselex in his house or of waylaying Manhattan at his club. On Jerolomon no attempt could be made, for that vulture took wing each night to an eyry on the Palisades whither pursuit were futile. The cab moved slowly; a stream of carriages was descending from the Park, and suddenly the rumble of the Avenue was punctuated by a stroke of brass, the trailing cry of a horn, and a coach swept by displaying for a second’s space a panorama of high hats, smart bonnets, and grooms the arms folded, impassible, correct. In its wake came a landau, the panel decorated with a coat of arms that was haughtier than a closed crown, and for occupant a brewer’s mistress. And behind it, interrupted by drays and hansoms, came traps from the stables of Robinson, of Madden, Dunwoodie, Forbush, and Attersol, men whose signatures could ransom popes, to whose daughters princes offered their hands, not the left either, but both, and whose wives could not find houses large enough for the plenitude and atrocities of their taste.

These people Gonfallon passed on his way to the rectory, and as the cab turned into Fifty-Second Street an omnibus lumbered by, and in it he caught a glimpse of Bleecker Bleecker, the richest man out of mythology, who sat caressing his chin, his coat-collar turned up, and in his face that vacuity which only omnipotence can bring.

It was to these people that each Sunday he spoke. At their marriages he officiated; when death came among them, so did he. It was he that baptized their children, it was he that gave them Bread and Wine at the Supper of Our Lord, it was he that counselled and that warned. He was their spiritual guide, their friend as well, one whom they welcomed and feasted and in whose converse they took delight. Yet did he in the direness of his distress go to any one of them now, what metamorphoses might he not encounter, interest changed to apathy, cordiality to rebuff, and, for climax, the door! As he stepped from the cab there came to him the giddiness of a sudden fall. On one side he saw the frayed coat of the mendicant priest, and in it an outcast that was himself; on the other gleamed the rochet, the satin robe, the insignia of the episcopate. It was for him to choose; and as he let himself into the rectory, about the muscles of his jaw there seemed to rise the stamp of that force which is known as Will.

“That money shall be got,” he muttered, “ay, though I dig it from the earth with my teeth.” And as he threw his coat from him, raging at the pusillanimity which had sent him careering over the country, losing him hours of which each moment was a treasure, and determining that, however late it might be, he would not sit himself down until the means of intercepting that forgery were obtained, his eye fell on a telegram that lay awaiting him on the table. “More about the bishop, I suppose.” And thereat he opened it with a stab of the thumb.

“God will reward you,” it ran. “I have only thanks.” And for signature⁠—Bucholz.

Gonfallon read the message twice, gazing at it the while with the air and attitude of a lunatic who thinks himself the proprietor of the asylum in which he dwells. For the moment it even occurred to him that Bucholz through some sympathetic intussusception might have divined the current of his thought and was expressing in advance his gratitude for the effort about to be made in his behalf.

“He is mad,” he muttered. “What can he mean?”

“Chris!”

Rumpling the telegram, he turned.

“Chris!” From the floor above, Ruth’s voice descended, and as he looked he saw the jonquil of her hair.

“Yes,” he answered, “in a moment.” And presently, the telegram in his pocket, his gloves withdrawn and folded, he mounted, still perplexed, to where she stood. “He is mad,” he kept repeating.

“Oh, Chris, I am so glad you are come! I hardly expected you today.” As she spoke, her voice wavered, as though she too were thinking of other things.

“Your father has been here, has he not?” he asked, abruptly.

“No,” she replied; “no one has been here. Is she better?”

Evidently she was referring to the countess, and by way of answer Gonfallon made a vague gesture. But the question seemed to have slipped from her, and to the gesture she gave no heed. She turned and appeared to listen.

“What can he mean?” he repeated to himself. “What new abomination is he at?”

“Come with me,” she continued, and motioned him to her room.

“I must go to him,” he thought, “or I must write.” But he followed her, and when he found a seat he added, aloud, “She died before we got there.”

“Ah!”

“Yes; and I must get back for the funeral⁠—that is, if I can manage it. How is your head?”

“Oh, as for my head!⁠—” And she made a movement as though her head and she were separate, as were it a thing that existed only when other things ceased to be. She went to the door and closed it, and then at once, still standing, she turned to where he sat.

In her attitude, in the expression of her eyes, was a fixidity so unusual that mentally Gonfallon gasped. For the time being Bucholz passed from his thoughts and the telegram was forgot. “She knows all,” he reflected. “Claire has confessed.” But of the inward perturbation his face gave no sign, and for the moment, as the earlier danger sank in sight of this newer one, he told himself, “If she believes it, she will leave me.”

“Yes,” he repeated, “she died before we got there. I suppose I should have remained; but the bishop, you know⁠—” and thereat he nodded, as though the death of that prelate had absolved him from every tie. And as he nodded he eyed her, prepared at the first accusation to affect an appearance of speechless indignation under cover of which he could not only stalk from the room but slam the door as well.

Her lips trembled; she shook her head, almost absently it seemed to him, and one hand which had detained the fold of her gown she now raised, and, drawing it palm foremost across her brow, let it fall again to her side.

“Chris, listen to me. Last evening⁠—you had barely gone⁠—Claire rang for a messenger⁠—she often does, you know⁠—and sent some note. I thought nothing of it, and asked no questions. For a while she sat here talking about a habit she was trying to get, and a little later, it was barely ten o’clock, she said something about being tired, and went to her room. H’m. I think I must have fallen asleep. In any event, I heard a noise such as the front door makes. At first I thought you might have returned. I listened a moment, and then went out in the hall. There was no sound. I went to Claire’s room and tapped: she did not answer. I tried the door: it was locked. ‘She is asleep,’ I told myself, and listened again; but I heard nothing more, and, deciding that I had been mistaken, I came back here and tried to read. But I must have dozed off; for suddenly I awoke again with a start: I was sure I had heard that noise a second time. In a moment I was in the hall, and there, on the stairs, was Claire.”

“Claire!”

“Yes, Claire; it was then after one. She had been out at least two hours⁠—perhaps even three.”

“But where? Where had she been?”

“I asked her, and she said she had been to Miss Pickett’s.”

“But she is often there. She was there only the other night.”

“Yes, I know. She told me that Miss Pickett was having a dance, and that she thought she might as well go. The messenger, she explained, was for the cab.”

“Really, Ruth, it was unconventional, I admit, and you must tell her not to go out in that way again, but, aside from that⁠—no, really, I see no cause for anxiety.”

As his wife had spoken, a great load had been lifted from him⁠—one, however, that was immediately replaced by another. “I must attend to Bucholz at once,” he decided.

“No, perhaps not,” Ruth answered, pensively. “Only she did not seem to be in ball-dress, and⁠—”

But Gonfallon had no time to listen further. “Ruth,” he exclaimed, “I have many things to attend to. If you don’t mind, I will get Jane to give me a bite, and then I must go. Don’t sit up for me; and there,” he added, “I will see that the front door does not creak.”

She had fallen on a lounge, and, bending to her, he brushed her forehead with his lips and left the room.

IX

“Did you ever see a ventriloquist? The ventriloquist speaks, a mannequin answers. The questions are so adroit, the answers so natural, that everyone, even to the mannequin, thinks that the dialogue is real. Such, Miss Raritan, is love⁠—a duo in which one of the vocalists grimaces while the other sings for two.”

“Mr. Jones, I knew your wit was copyrighted, I did not know it was profound.”

For centrepiece that evening the dinner-table had blue lilies afloat in a silver pond. About it were a handful of people, a dozen or fourteen at most, who had assembled at the bidding of Mrs. Manhattan partly to greet Mrs. Jerold Fox, a lady who some years before had deserted New York for the allurements of Paris and the Mediterranean coast, and partly to enjoy the primeur of a bishop en herbe. Mrs. Manhattan, be it said, was just the person to do things by halves.

And there, at the hostess’s right, as Gonfallon, expressing in eye and in mien the indulgence which comes of dishes perfectly served, sat listening to the conversation that fluttered about him, attentive the while to Mrs. Manhattan, affecting even to chide her for a jest which she had invented for the evening and which consisted in bestowing on him the title of Lord which the English give to their bishops, it was apparent that he was at peace with the world.

The episcopate, indeed, was not yet his, but during the fortnight that had elapsed since the terrible journey from Bronx, many things had happened which pointed directly to him as its future possessor. Moreover, the nightmare which Bucholz induced had vanished as abruptly as it had come. An anonymous benefactor, one whom Bucholz fancied to be none other than Gonfallon, had sent him the amount in time. And that anonymous benefactor, whom, in the earliest perplexity which beset them when Gonfallon on the evening of his return from Bronx learned from Bucholz’ own lips that the money had been brought to him and Bucholz learned from Gonfallon that he knew nothing of the sender, that anonymous benefactor, at first unimaginable as Abistek, they ultimately decided must surely be Jerolomon, and, presto! in the eyes of both, the vampire changed to a dove.

Relieved of this burden, Gonfallon had returned to Bronx, departing only when the grave had closed and the last rite had been performed, but not, however, before his old parishioners, radiating in the presence of the now famous cleric who once had been their own, had insisted on his delivering one of his spiritual harangues again. Then, the dust of Bronx barely shaken from him, his mother had been taken ill, and he had been forced to journey to the prim Massachusettsian village in which she dwelt, and to linger there until through an unexpected turn in the malady his mother had been declared out of danger and he was suffered to return to his pastorate in town. Meanwhile, he had caught but infrequent glimpses of Claire; indeed, during his absence such a mass of duties had accumulated, so many parochial matters demanded his attention, that until this evening he had had barely a moment which he could call his own.

But now as he sat at his hostess’s right, interrupting the conversation that fluttered about him now with one of those pleasantries which the popular divine can permit himself, now interjecting some apposite sally⁠—sounding as he did so that resonant accent with which his famous phrase, “Religion, not politics, is the nation’s soul,” had been fired point-blank at the President⁠—he looked once again a maker of songs and of laws and every inch a prelate. With Bucholz inoffensive and the bishopric full in sight, he could well afford to be himself. It was good to smile, and his smile was contagious. There was but one thing that jarred.

On the opposite side of the table, at the farther end, between Mrs. Fox and Miss Raritan, Jones was seated, his recent mourning noticeable only in two microscopic studs of onyx, or of sapphire, the which, parenthetically, give the same effect. On the other side of Miss Raritan was Trement Yarde, and next to him was Claire. To Nicholas Manhattan, the gentlest yet the most easily bored of men⁠—and to whomsoever else would listen⁠—Mrs. Fox was relating a few of her triumphs. Her conversation, such of it at least as reached Gonfallon’s ear, was a glittering spangle of noble names. During her sojourn abroad, seemingly with no one of lesser degree than a baronet had she ever exchanged a word. Her speech was striated with foreign idioms, and occasionally she lapsed wholly into French.

But it was not Mrs. Fox that jarred on Gonfallon: it was Claire and Yarde. From the first, through one of those illogical processes which often hold the core of logic itself, Gonfallon had detested the young fellow; everything about him, from the part of his hair to the soles of his St. James Street shoes⁠—everything, even to the trick he had of contemplating his fingertips, was antipathetic in the extreme. Later, when Yarde had become a visitor at the rectory, haunting it as it were with his unwelcome presence, the antipathy had changed to detestation; and now that he was talking to Claire, and talking to her moreover in a voice so modulated that no one save the girl herself could hear him, Gonfallon’s detestation addled into rage. For the moment he pitied the girl, and sorrowed for her that she should have for neighbor a man she loathed. But suddenly his pity was shot with wonder, his anger with surprise. During the early part of the meal Claire had chatted amiably enough to the man seated between Mrs. Manhattan and herself, and Yarde had delivered himself up to the fascinations of Miss Raritan. But now the conversation had changed, and Yarde was devoting himself to Claire.

That the former should address the girl whom he had taken in to dinner was a thing which, however objectionable in the abstract, was in the circumstances perfectly proper. Indeed, Gonfallon told himself that although Claire in that conversation which he had overheard had snubbed the fellow right roundly, still the dinner-table of a third person must and should interrupt the continuity of a quarrel subsisting between a man and a woman whom the hostess has placed side by side. And now, in spite of that snubbing, did Yarde not address Claire, and did Claire not respond, it would be unmannerly of the one and unseemly of the other. Platitudes are easy of utterance, and the weather, however beastly, has never caused a shipwreck yet.

But as Gonfallon watched them it was clear to him that no exchange of commonplaces was taking place. When he had last seen the two together, Claire’s attitude had been that of an insulted princess, in her voice had been a threat; now disdain had vanished; where the menace had been was now a smile. On her part the transformation was greater than any regard for the proprieties demanded; while as for Yarde, in place of the sulk of a whipped spaniel there had come an air of confidence which was insolent to a degree. Through some jugglery which Gonfallon felt himself incompetent to fathom, he seemed to be engaged in filching from him a thing which after⁠—nay, with⁠—the episcopate was more precious than all things else. And at this jugglery, at this open pillage of his own chattels, conventionality compelled him to assist, inhibiting him even from so much as warning the marauder off, and demanding that he should laugh, that he should jest, that his flow of small-talk should not tarry.

“Don’t you agree with me, doctor?”

In the little drama Gonfallon played the hero’s role. Of the jealousy which had sprung into being within him, that jealousy which spends itself not in a scene but in a crime, of the revulsion of feeling, of the anger and surprise, he gave no outward sign; not an eyelid had twitched, not a muscle of his face had altered. His observations, however long in the telling, had in reality not outlasted a moment; and Mrs. Manhattan, who had been expressing her views on some subject which was doubtless of importance, never dreamed that the guest who appeared to be giving her his fullest attention had in that moment traversed the world, unconscious of her presence, deaf to her speech.

“Perfectly, my dear Mrs. Manhattan,” he answered. “I agree with you in every respect.”

From the other end of the table came the falsetto laugh which Mrs. Fox used as fanfare to sound the retreat of some noble personage from her speech. She was in great good spirits, and looked around, for admiration perhaps, at Jones. Presumably she had been informed of his calling, one which doubtless was to her incompatible with the usages of the selectest set, for over the oysters she had ignored him entirely, over the roast she had given him a glance which she was prepared on the instant to bestow on someone else. But with the sweets she was surprised into remarking that he looked enough like the secretary of the Austrian Legation to be that gentleman’s brother.

“Who did you say he was?” she asked of her host.

“I call him Alphabet,” Manhattan answered, “but his name is Chisolm-Jones.”

“Not a nephew of Madame de Cinq-Cygne?”

“Her nephew.”

The questions and answers Gonfallon garnered unconsciously. He was in the cerebral condition of a chess-player whom the remark of a bystander addressed during the absorption of the game reaches only when the move is made. Do what he might, his attention was centred on Claire; and through that attention filtered the conversation of the other guests.

Miss Raritan was talking across the table, praising Massenet and the inspiration which that composer displays. Mrs. Manhattan had turned to the man on her left. For the moment both Claire and Yarde were silent. Mrs. Fox was captivating Jones.

“And that dear countess! How is she?”

“Better than she has been for some time,” Jones answered. “She is dead.”

“I am so glad,” Mrs. Fox rejoined: it was evident that only the initial sentence had reached her. “I am so glad. There are few whom I have known⁠—among my own compatriots, of course⁠—who speak French as well as she. Do you know, it is really difficult for me now to accustom myself to my own tongue? You must have experienced the same thing yourself.”

“Often, Mrs. Fox.”

“I was sure of it. Nous autres, n’est-ce pas? Mais tout le monde parle Français maintenant. Figurez-vous qu’à Cannes, l’hiver passé, j’étais vraiment étonnée de trouver ma langue dans la bouche du Prince de Galles!”

“Son Altesse aussi sans doute,” Jones answered, with a sniff.

“What do you think of her?” asked Miss Raritan, in a whisper.

“Fox et praeterea nihil,” he replied; a jest which the young lady did not wholly grasp, but at which, as was her wont, she smiled approvingly.

“And now, do tell me,” Mrs. Fox continued⁠—“you know I have been away so long⁠—what is the last scandal?”

“The last scandal? Let me see.” And the novelist seemed to meditate. “Ah, yes. You remember Mrs. Gwathmeys, don’t you?”

“Cynthia Van Dam that was?”

“Exactly. Well, the other day her husband picked her pocket.”

“Mr. Chisolm-Jones!”

“You don’t understand. It was a pleasantry on his part. He saw a bit of paper peeping out of her bodice, and snatched it from her.”

“You said her pocket.”

“Isn’t a bodice a woman’s pocket? However, Gwathmeys seized the paper, and suddenly he cried, ‘What is this? My love, my chosen, but not mine, I send my whole heart to you in these words I write.⁠—Who is it wrote that?’ ‘Owen Meredith,’ his wife answered.”

“The shameless thing!” interjected Mrs. Fox.

“ ‘I will kill him!’ shouted Gwathmeys.” As Jones spoke he imitated the voice of an ogre in a fairytale.

“And quite right, too.”

“As you say.”

“And did he?”

But Jones’s answer was lost. Mrs. Manhattan had moved, and at that signal her guests rose from the table. When the men, after accompanying the womenfolk into the drawing room, returned for coffee and liqueurs, the novelist seemed absorbed. He took little part in the conversation, and, until his host suggested that it might be well to join the ladies, he sat now puffing at a huge cigar, now flicking the ashes on the floor.

The drawing room which they then entered, the smallest of the three which the house contained, was so cunningly furnished with everything that you would have expected most, that it was even comfortable and unsuggestive of a sheriff’s sale. At one end a screen served as a partition between two sofas. Near to one of the sofas was a mantel, near to the other a piano. Throughout the room other nooks had been arranged. It was one of the few places where a tête-à-tête can be enjoyed in a crowd.

When the men entered, Miss Raritan was at the piano. On the sofa nearest the mantel Claire had just seated herself. The other women were in a group. Gonfallon at once took up a position by the mantel, on which he leaned, his back turned to his sister-in-law; Manhattan lounged near the piano; and Trement Yarde sat himself next to Claire.

For a moment the room was resonant with that accent which is peculiar to the after-dinner speech. Then, as Miss Raritan’s fingers strayed over the keys, there was a lull. Presently the girl’s voice sounded, low as yet, for she was heating her throat; then suddenly it rose, and dilating filled the room, and, as she sang, each note was evocative of fancies, each word clear as the token on a coin.

Baise-moy, mignonne, cent fois rebaise-moy.

The refrain of her song drifted from her in a murmur of applause. When she had finished, Jones crossed the room to where Gonfallon stood, and, leaning against the mantel, for a moment he gazed at Claire, still seated with Yarde on the sofa just beyond, and plucked at his yellow beard.

With an effort Gonfallon roused himself from a revery into which he had sunk. “She sings well, does she not?” he remarked. “I wish I could induce her to join the choir.” And, as Jones answered nothing, he added, after a moment, “You are the last person I expected to meet tonight.”

“Because of my aunt? What nonsense! Though, to be sure, after the manner in which I was treated one might easily expect me to be in sackcloth. No, Mrs. Manhattan asked me before the Bronx episode occurred, and, having accepted her invitation, I saw no reason to back out. Yesterday I got together a change of linen and a metaphysical theory, and here I am. It is ghastly in the country. If it were not for my man, I give you my word, I believe I would keep myself full as a harvest-moon.”

“Your man?”

Jones had been speaking in the leisurely growl that was usual to him, in a voice in which a drawl and a snarl seemed to struggle for prominence. But now his face lit up, he straightened himself, and, with a glance at the sofa as though to assure himself of the inattention of its occupants, he plucked again at his beard and continued in a clearer key:

“Yes, the one luxury that my aunt’s munificence has permitted me. I have only had the beggar a week, but I have told him that if he behaves himself I will promote him from valet to secretary. His life has been a magic-lantern: he has visited all sorts of impossible places; he has been to Bokhara, to Quito, to Boston⁠—to Mars, for all I know. If I had had a fraction of his adventures I could busy a room-full of stenographers with the dictation of plots. He keeps me in a fever with his anecdotes; he⁠—”

“Is he an Englishman?”

“No; he is a Swiss, or a Pole⁠—both, perhaps. However, I wouldn’t rely on his veracity. He tells me he has only been in this country a few weeks, two of which he passed as servant to some young man here who sent him adrift because he couldn’t marrowbone his boots.”

“H’m.”

“Yes, so he said. He told me something odd about him, too⁠—rather typical, I thought. The substance of it, I fancy, he must have obtained through the keyhole and his master’s correspondence⁠—a supposition which may account for his dismissal. But to come to the point. It appears that the young man, after the fashion of his kind, was smitten in a certain quarter. The object of his affections, poor, parenthetically, but presumably virtuous, would have none of him. In fact, she detested him as only a girl can who has nothing better to do. It may be⁠—”

Gonfallon had ceased to listen; his thoughts had wandered to the dinner-table, and then, returning, settled on the occupants of the sofa at his back. At the earliest possible moment he determined to take Claire and go.

“It may be,” Jones continued, “that the young fellow, in the vivacity which youth will cause, had played some little trick on her which she resented. Joseph⁠—my man⁠—described her as haughty as a Wittelsbach, and of course, as such, not one to take things lightly. Be that as it may, one afternoon our hero sauntered forth, his boots radiant though unboned, a flower in his coat, and the smell of iris on his linen. It was evident to Joseph that he intended to conquer or to die. An hour or so later our hero⁠—h’m, his name was⁠—er⁠—no, Joseph told me, but I have forgotten⁠—however, our hero returned, looking blacker than Cain, abused Joseph about the first thing that came in his head, and shut himself up in his room. Joseph, as a good servant should, loitered within call. Presently, a ring at the bell, a messenger and a note. No sooner did our hero read it than his face changed from Cain’s to Abel’s. It was then eight o’clock. Ten minutes later he was in evening dress. ‘I will dine at the Club,’ he said: ‘meanwhile, do you go to Klunder’s and get all the flowers he has in his shop cover the room with them, cover the carpet, fill the vestibule if you can.’ Joseph did as he was bid. He secured a hundred dozen roses, a basket of mignonette, and yards of smilax. When his master returned, the apartment had the breath of the Fortunate Isles. I mentioned that he lived in an apartment, didn’t I?”

At the question Gonfallon looked up. Jones seemed to be speaking less to him than to an audience behind his back. Mechanically he turned: apparently Claire and Yarde were talked out, for they sat as though listening to the novelist. Gonfallon felt for his watch and consulted it furtively: five minutes more and his cab would be at the door. “Yes, yes, of course,” he answered, absently. “Well, what then?”

“Then our hero dismissed Joseph for the night; but Joseph must have preferred to await developments. He declares that he had some brushing up to attend to, over which he fell asleep, and on awakening did not wish to make his presence known. But my own opinion is that during his master’s absence he found the note that had been brought, and that that note so piqued his curiosity that he hid in some closet in the hall. However, to make a long story short, just before midnight he heard the bell ring, and presently the sound of a girl’s voice. It was evident that she was excited. She entered the apartment like a tempest, and as she spoke her words came from her by jerks, as though wrenched by the effort of one whose patience or whose breath is gone. ‘See,’ said our hero, attempting to soothe her, ‘these roses are in welcome of you.’ ‘It is not for roses I come, but for money⁠—I am here.’ Then the door of the room which they entered was closed. For a moment there was a murmur, then an exclamation. Immediately the door reopened, and Joseph heard them pass out. This time the girl’s voice was assured. ‘Will you ever forgive me?’ she asked. ‘Will you think better of me than before?’ he answered. Seemingly⁠—”

Gonfallon, weary of Jones and of his tiresome tale, consulted his watch again. Down the room some of the guests had encircled Mrs. Fox. At the piano Miss Raritan was still seated, her exquisite face upturned to some man who was fingering a sheet of music. From behind, Gonfallon heard a rustle, Jones ceased speaking, and abruptly the room was in commotion.

Miss Raritan, rising from her seat, hurried forward, followed by Mrs. Manhattan, and in a moment by the other guests.

Gonfallon started and turned. On the sofa, Claire, her eyes closed, her head on her shoulder, her face but little less white than her frock, seemed to have sunk into a heap. “She’s fainted,” he heard Miss Raritan exclaim, and saw Mrs. Manhattan raise the girl up and beat her small hands with her own. Almost immediately the girl opened her eyes, and Gonfallon rushed to her aid. Yarde, who had stood up, glanced down at her and then over at Jones.

“There, I am right enough,” she lisped.

Again Yarde glanced at her, and then, as though assured of her well-being, he moved to where the novelist stood and looked him in the face. “You brute⁠—”

Jones caught him by the arm. “Listen to me, Trement. There, don’t struggle: she’s over it already. Besides, Gonfallon has his eye on you. Did you ever hear of Balzac? Of course not. Well, Balzac was a machine that blackened paper. One day, or rather one night, someone said to him, ‘There’s a pretty girl.’ He answered, ‘You mean a plot.’ Not a novel did he write that he had not dug from a woman’s heart. For a week I have been hunting for a climax. This evening I tried an experiment; it succeeded. I have my climax now. Call me a brute if you care to, but be good enough to understand that I am perfectly domesticated and thoroughly well trained. I always mask my heroine. There, Miss Bucholz is motioning to you.”

And with that Jones turned on his heel and adjusted his cravat. “I wonder,” he mused, “I wonder what that little imbecile would think of Vernet, who lashed himself to a masthead that he might study a storm?”

X

The drive from Mrs. Manhattan’s to the rectory was always a short one, but on this occasion it was brief indeed. The noise of the wheels brought to Gonfallon the echo of Miss Raritan’s song; and as in a constant resummons of the same refrain it beset and pursued him, forcing him whether he willed it or not into a lunatic duo with the vehicle in which he sat, a disorganized lamppost caught and detained the obsession, and he fell to wondering whether electricity was preferable to gas.

Then at once the query departed of itself. Jones was standing opposite, relating less to him than to an audience behind his back some endless story of nothing at all. And that story, to which five minutes before he had accorded only the show of interest which civility exacts, suddenly became poignant and fraught with interest.

At Mrs. Manhattan’s, in the earliest surprise at the unexpected, he had attributed Claire’s collapse to fatigue, to the heat of the room and the strain of her stays; but now, in fumbling about for the logic of Jones’s anecdote, he recalled the novelist’s significant forgetfulness of his hero’s name, the manner in which he had talked at the occupants of the sofa recurred to him, he remembered the epithet which Yarde had blurted out, and at once a panorama unrolled. He had not been the auditor of a pointless tale; he had assisted at the fabulization of a masquerade; but the clock had struck, the dominos had fallen, the masks were raised.

In a confusion of visions he saw Claire dismissing her suitor like a lackey, the interview between Bucholz and himself, interrupted by her and indubitably overheard; he divined the conflict within her, the rememoration of Yarde’s offer, the knowledge of her father’s guilt. Then one after another he comprehended the first incitement, the inward revolt, the renewed assault, the rebellion in her of all that was best, the martyrdom that ensued, the self-crucifixion, the tension of nerves, the defeat that was a victory, the agony over the wording of the note, the despatch of the message, the comedy played for Ruth, the suffocation hid with a smile, the anguish of the preparation, the dread, perhaps the hope, of detention, the horror of the unlighted stairs, the tragedy of the cab that waited there, the agony of her thoughts as she was driven away, her hysterical entrance into Yarde’s apartment, and then, to the man she loathed, her offer in payment of her father’s shame. No, it was more than noble; it was Greek.

Of her possible contempt of him, Gonfallon gave no thought. And as his fancy veered from Claire to Yarde it was with a little undercurrent of applause. Truly he had misjudged the man, not much perhaps, but still misjudgment there had been. He could have throttled him on that afternoon when he had heard him, in anger at his rejection, make that offer which he had coupled with the insulting assurance that the walls of his rooms were dumb. Yes, he could have throttled him then with delight. And yet, when Claire, in her haste to rescue her father, had in her helplessness knocked at his door, he had been better than his word: assistance had been accorded unexactingly, and so soon as rendered, immediately he had let her go. However the episode might be viewed, in this respect at least Yarde’s conduct had in it a dash of the talon rouge. No wonder Claire’s attitude had changed: it were ungracious of her had it not. But there the matter should rest. Claire should be under no further obligation to smile at this subtler Lovelace. The money he would find means of repaying. As for Jones, he could be hushed with a word.

The cab had stopped, but it needed a movement from his companion to remind him that the journey was done. He got out, aided her to alight, and unlatched the door. As yet, neither had spoken. On entering the house Claire made directly for the stairs.

“Don’t go up yet; I want a word with you,” he muttered, and glanced at the banisters above.

“What is it?” She halted and turned. The cheeks were still pale, and the white fur of her wrap increased the pallor of her face.

He put his hat and coat aside, and, raising the curtain of the sitting-room, motioned her to enter.

For a second she hesitated and looked at him inquisitorially, the brow contracted; then, gathering a fold of her frock, she obeyed the gesture, and, entering the room, she stood, her wrap drawn about her, her head thrown back, one foot beating a measure impatiently on the floor.

Gonfallon glanced again at the banisters and let the curtain fall. “Claire,” he began, “there is but one explanation of what occurred this evening. The fault, perhaps, is partly mine. I had intended on my return from Bronx to take immediate action in regard to your father, but you forestalled me. You forestalled me, moreover, in a manner which⁠—which⁠—well, of which the least said the better. Fortunately, matters are not as bad as they might be. You have been exceedingly imprudent, and I have been remiss. As for that young man, his mere presence is sufficient to tarnish a dawn. From your own demeanor, from things which Ruth has let fall, I understand that he is as objectionable to you as he is to me. The obligation which he has placed us all under must of course be cancelled, and to that I will attend; but hereafter it is impossible for you to see him again. You agree with me, do you not?”

In and about the girl’s mobile lips a sneer hovered like a bee on a rose. Leisurely she undid her cloak. “Not in the least,” she answered.

“But you know I dislike him; you know⁠—”

“And why should you?” Her head, which had been thrown back, she now held a trifle to one side. “And why should you? Has he ever done you a kindness?” She paused a second, and added, “You dislike my father too, don’t you?”

The thrust was keen and venomous as the tooth of a rat. But on her mouth the sneer was so quickly effaced by a smile that one might have thought that in her heart a bird had suddenly burst into song.

At the change in her expression Gonfallon forgot to heed the taunt. “He is unprincipled, Claire⁠—”

“Ah! He is unprincipled, is he? And what of it? You have no principles of your own to boast of. No, Chris, you have none.”

She pointed at him. On the end of her finger were all sorts of pretty gestures, and in her face, to which some trace of color had returned, was the mimic of a child saying, Fi! “You must find a better reason than that.”

At the movement of her hand the wrap fell from her. She was bare of neck and of arm. Her frock was after that English model which gives some freedom to the limbs yet keeps the waist well girt. It was colorless yet scintillant, and in it, with the white of the fur at her feet, it needed little imagination to fancy her a statue of Injustice vacating its niche.

The slender finger still extended seemed to pierce him like a gibe. “You must find a better reason than that,” she repeated; “you must, indeed.” Her smile had bubbled into a ripple, her eyes laughed, and she flushed.

Gonfallon’s breath came faster. He had been staring at her. “It is because I love you, Claire,” he whispered. And in a moment he caught her to him and pressed her lips of silk to his. At their emollient touch his anger evaporated as utterly as had it never been. “Sweetheart,” he murmured, “it is because you are more than all the world to me.”

He gazed into her deep eyes’ depth. Instead of an answering gleam, there was in them an apathy, stagnant and unmoved. “Sweetheart,” he repeated, and as he did so the eyes into which he gazed dilated as at some sudden dread. From behind him came a smothered cry. His arms fell again to his side, and he wheeled about. In the doorway Ruth stood, her face barred by a shadow. Claire stooped for her cloak, and Gonfallon bit his lip.

Ruth advanced to where they stood. Her face now they could see had on it the stamp of unvanquishable pain, seared in, immutable and already cold. She glanced from one to the other.

“Claire,” she said, and as she spoke her words fell from her very swiftly, unseparated by intervals, as though in speech relief might be⁠—“Claire, our mother died when you were born. The first thought I ever had was of your good. The earliest effort I ever made I made for you. I tried to be not a sister alone, I tried to replace the mother you had lost. I have failed.”

Claire made as though to speak, but already Ruth had turned to Gonfallon.

“Christopher, the first dream of my girlhood belonged to you. The only thoughts I did not give to Claire were those I gave to you. You took so many, Christopher! I gave you my whole heart; I thought you gave me yours. I was wrong.”

“Wrong?” cried Claire; “you are stark, staring mad, that is what is the matter with you, Mrs. Gonfallon.”

“I am sure,” Gonfallon hazarded, “I don’t see⁠—”

“I did,” said his wife. The monosyllables fell like a sentence.

“Well, Ruth,” Claire broke in, “if you object to Chris kissing me on an occasion like this⁠—”

“Like this? What occasion can it be?”

“Why, Chris was congratulating me on my engagement. Don’t you think you are absurd?”

A light as from some new dawn seemed to break in Ruth’s eyes. She turned to Claire again.

“I am engaged to Trement Yarde,” the girl added.

Gonfallon felt the blood mount to his temples. “It is a lie,” he told himself. “Or if by chance she is telling the truth, then⁠—”

“He asked me again tonight,” Claire continued. “It was the fourth time; I was afraid he might not ask again⁠—”

“Is this true, Christopher?” Ruth’s voice was almost joyous.

“It is true,” he answered, and ground his nails into his flesh.

“But you don’t love him!” And already Ruth’s arm had wound itself about her sister’s waist.

Claire nodded eagerly. “Oh, but I do, though⁠—lots and lots⁠—corner lots.”

“Claire, dear,” expostulated Ruth, “you said you hated him.”

“H’m, perhaps. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

Ruth turned again from her sister to her husband. “Chris, Claire has forgiven me: will not you?”

Gonfallon answered nothing. He tried to give his face some suitable expression, and evidently he succeeded, for Ruth, with the dawn still in her eyes, led her sister away.

When they had gone, Gonfallon dropped on a chair and mopped his forehead. “Hatred, indeed!” he muttered. “It is I that hate.” It was monstrous, he told himself, that she should treat him as she had. From a delight she had changed into a reproach. The desire which she had inspired, and against which he had struggled with all the feebleness of his strength, the hope unformulated yet sentient which she had evoked and against whose luminousness he had hid his eyes, these things had passed, the one into a mockery, the other into a taunt. The innocence which she exhaled, the guilelessness which she displayed, that savor and fragrance of youth which in alluring him despite himself had made him forget his office and his vows, was an acquired, a premeditated trick. Everything about her, even to the serpentine movement of her neck, was the understudy of a lie. And it was such an one as she that had the power to stir his pulse and leave him for hours after to dally with the protocols and uselessness of regret! It was she who had brought him visions of larger life, of new horizons and fresher creeds; it was she with whom he had seen himself straying beyond the conventional, far out of reach of the matter-of-fact to that ultimate meadow where the flowers distil the reason of love! And this was she! Full surely then he had been bereft.

He raised his hand to his head and let his head fall back. He was tired, outwearied by the emotions of the night, and for a little while he toyed absently with a handkerchief, rumpling it into a ball and moulding it with forefinger and with thumb. “I am no longer a lover,” he mused, “I am a judge.” His eyelids drooped, he sank yet farther in the chair, and sighed. “Of heart,” he continued, “she has none. Beneath her stays is some flesh on a stone.”

A little longer he rested, then, slowly, with the hesitant air of one perplexed, he rose from his seat, the handkerchief still rumpled in his hold. “She is an adder!” he exclaimed, and, throwing the bit of cambric from him, he repeated, in yet louder tone, “An adder⁠—that I will fang.”

The next moment, without conscious effort on his part, he found himself at her door. Should he knock? he wondered. But no; the time for ceremony was gone. With a wrench at the knob and a blow at the panel he entered in. Claire was before the mirror. She had removed her frock, but her arms and neck were no longer bare: she had some loose wrapper on, and in it all trace of the mannishness which she affected disappeared. At the sudden noise she started and turned. Gonfallon was livid. As she stared at him he gazed at her, and in that gaze he put something that was like a knee pressed on a breast.

“Wanton!” he hissed.

The girl’s hands fluttered like falling leaves. “Christopher,” she cried, “what are you doing here?”

“Wait; you shall see.”

He made towards her, and as he approached the girl drew back.

“Christopher,” she moaned, “you frighten me.”

“Is it my face that frightens? Could you see my heart!”

And still the girl retreated. Her back now was against the wall, her eyes agonized with fear. With a bound he was upon her, and, catching her wrist in his hand, he threw her on the floor. Vainly she struggled; the grip on her wrist was a vice.

“What are you going to do?” she gasped.

And Gonfallon, still holding her down, turned his head towards the table and across the room as though seeking for something of which he had immediate need.

“I do not know,” he answered; “but say your prayers.”

“Help!” she cried, her voice soaring to its uttermost tension. “Help!”

And as Gonfallon placed his hand over her mouth to hush the cry, the crouching form faded from before him. He felt an undefinable sensation of discomfort. In his ears was the roar of water displaced. With an effort he looked about him. He was still in the chair in which he had dropped asleep, and through rifts of returning consciousness he heard a loving voice: “Chris, are you not coming up? See, it is after one.”

It was Ruth, bending over him, entreating him to rise.

XI

Already a handful of guests had filled the sitting-room. In the study, across the hall, Gonfallon, robed in full canonicals, stood motionless and alone. Once only at the champing of bits and the noise of hoofs he had turned to the window. It was Miss Pickett, garmented in that terra-cotta which affects the eye as a pistol-shot affects the ear. He had heard her rustle past the door and her laugh mingle with Mrs. Manhattan’s. Then a brougham had stopped, and Tandem, in a cutaway coat, a flower in his buttonhole, had alighted and loitered an instant until Yarde had alighted too. For the moment, Gonfallon, at the possibility of their entering the room where he stood, had knit his brow; but Tandem, in his quality of best man, had convoyed the groom to some other refuge. From above came the sound of hurrying feet. The rectory was articulate, its quiet stirred with vocables. In the room overhead he pictured Claire standing before the glass, her head held sidewise, eying the last touches to her gown. Beyond, somewhere, through the walls he saw Yarde contemplating his fingertips, and to the prayerbook which he held Gonfallon gave a tighter clasp.

Since the dinner and its epilogue Gonfallon had barely seen his sister-in-law. The day after she had gone with the Picketts to Washington, and before returning to New York had managed to pass a full month with Yarde’s relatives in the South. Since then her hours had been given to the trousseau. Today she was to be married, and at the ceremony, at her mating to that man, instead of forbidding the banns he was to officiate. It was through him the Church was to sanction a thing against which every fibre of his being rebelled. In an effort to gain some mastery over the expression of his face, he turned again to the street.

There had been a flurry of snow an hour before, but now in the sunlight high noon rang everywhere. On the pavement was an eager glitter like that of broken glass, and at the corner the spires of Gethsemane pointed to a gulf of blue.

“And not a reason for refusing,” he muttered⁠—“not one.” During the preceding weeks he had told himself that this thing should never be. The touch of her lips had sealed her to him. He had felt the willingness, the courage even, to abandon the rochet already in his grasp, his high estate, his reputation, his cloth, Ruth, everything, even to honor, and carry the girl to some one of those lovely lands to which we never go, but which beckon to us, ceaselessly, from afar. In conflicts with himself conscience vanquished had been impotent to coerce. His ordinary duties he had performed with the perfunctoriness of a somnambulist. In his eyes but one light shone, and that light was Claire. And in that light all else slipped by, and he had relied now on the girl herself, now on a whim of chance, and again on some effort of his own, on something, he knew not what, but still on something that should happen in the nick of time and sunder this hateful pact.

In more rational moments he had reflected that, distasteful as the engagement was, it was rendered doubly so by the fact that the other contracting party was one whom of all others in the world he loathed the most; and into that loathing, as though to mock him, there would creep at times the knowledge⁠—banished again and again, but ever returning⁠—that between him and Yarde a girl such as Claire would not hesitate for a second’s space. What chance have forty years, however well carried they may be, against the fragrance and seductions of youth?

And as Gonfallon had thought of this, he would have, had he dared, clapped there and then on that fragrance some one of those masks which disfigure and distort. He would have corroded and blasted. And instead of that he was called upon to stand, the sacerdos, and consecrate his nuptials with Claire. Instead of maiming he was to marry, instead of cursing he was to bless. Could this cup pass from him! But he had no excuse⁠—not one. It was for him to deliver the girl he loved into the arms of the man he loathed. And as he gazed down at the eager glitter of the street there came to his face an expression which Goya would have given to a gibbeted fiend. Was it not a woman that changed into Satan the angel that was Lucifer?

“Doctor, the bride is coming down.”

It was Tandem hailing him from the doorway. Gonfallon drew one long breath and turned; and as he turned he thrust his hate back in him as a soldier sheathes his sword.

“I am ready,” he answered; and to himself he added, “Calvary was easy of ascent.”

Tandem had already gone. Gonfallon drew the portiere aside, and, crossing the hall, his head bent, the prayerbook in his hand, he entered the sitting-room beyond. At his entrance the voices subsided and ceased. The guests parted into twin rows, and between them Gonfallon advanced to a mirror, before which two cushions had been placed. There he turned and stood, his head still lowered, waiting the coming of the bride.

Presently, in the lull, Yarde entered, led by Tandem, and, bowing to Gonfallon⁠—a salute which, parenthetically, was not returned⁠—he took up a position on the right. From beneath his lowered eyelids Gonfallon saw him fumble at a pocket. “He is feeling for the ring,” he reflected, and straightened himself just a little. Then came a rustle, a murmur, and Claire entered, leaning on her father’s arm. Gonfallon raised his eyes, Yarde stepped forward to greet, Bucholz in a worthy parental manner dropped his daughter’s arm, and the two young people stood before him who was to make them one.

“ ‘Dearly beloved,’ ” began Gonfallon, in that voice which those present knew so well⁠—“ ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God.’ ”

And as he repeated from memory the subsequent phrases of the opening formula, he looked down at the bride. In her cheeks that hue of the white rose which has the sulphur heart was untouched by the faintest flush. The porcelain blue of her eyes was untroubled, and her mouth still looked inviolate and unaware of love. From the tangles of her curls came the breath of brooks. She was in street-dress, but unbonneted and ungloved.

“ ‘I require and charge you both, as you will answer at the dreadful day of judgment⁠—’ ”

His eyes were still on hers, but as he delivered the warning which is customary he lowered his own beneath the directness of her gaze.

“Trement,” he continued, “wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live⁠—”

“I will,” the young man interjected, and flushed at his precipitance.

“Together after God’s ordinance in the holy state of matrimony? Wilt thou love her⁠—” And as the questions fell from him, Gonfallon, outwardly impassible, clutched tighter at the book he held. For a second his voice wavered, and, turning to the bride⁠—

“Claire,” he continued, “wilt thou take this man?”

Again his eyes were on her, and so convulsed were they that to a weaker than she, dismay would have come. He paused, and Claire, as though her thoughts had preceded and interpreted his own, in a voice quasily defiant, her head held like a challenge, her eyes a trifle contracted, and fixed maliciously on his own, made the conventional response.

“Who giveth this woman⁠—”

In speaking he caught an expression in Yarde’s face, a look of smothered mirth as though the mute dialogue had been intercepted and enjoyed. Willingly would he have hurled the prayerbook at his teeth and with his two hands about his throat crushed out his hated life. He bit his lip until it bled, and with an effort dominated himself again.

Bucholz had stepped forward, and, after making a gesture, moved back. He seemed so pompous, so spruce, and yet so unnecessary, that Gonfallon, detecting another quiver in Yarde’s expression, understood his mirth, and in his semi-hysterical condition felt his own lips twitch with a smile.

The troth then plighted, bride and groom kneeled on the cushions at his feet, and, the prayer delivered, rose up again.

“Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. For inasmuch⁠—” he continued, and, mumbling the archaic phrases that follow, he added, with a gasp, “Amen.”

The next moment Claire was in her sister’s arms and Tandem was shaking Yarde energetically by the hand. The twin ranks of the company fused into a solid square that bore down on bride and groom. Gonfallon watched his opportunity, and escaped to the study beyond.

Thus far he had held himself well. Not one of those present had divined the rebellion that was in him. But now the farce was done, and, tearing the canonicals from him, he rumpled and tossed them in a heap on the floor. The prayerbook which he had held fell from him, and he sank on a chair. Into his mouth had come a sour taste. He raised his handkerchief to his lips, and, looking at it, saw that it was flecked with red. He passed his hand across his eyes; they were dry and hot; and, suddenly, remembering Bucholz, he chuckled and tried to laugh.

The hubbub of sixty people talking at once came to him from across the hall. For a fraction of an hour he listened unhearingly. But presently something stirred him from his mental swoon. He had heard Claire’s voice, he was sure. He started and moved to the door: yes, it was she. He drew the portiere ever so little and peered into the hall. Before him the bride stood exchanging a farewell with Miss Pickett. Then the two separated, Miss Pickett turning to the sitting-room and Claire to the stairs. For a moment he waited; then, seeing that he could leave the study unobserved, he hurried out into the hall. Already the girl had reached the floor above, but he called to her, and she stopped.

“What is it?” she asked, and looked down at him from over the rail. Without a word he mounted to where she stood. “Claire,” he whispered, and strove to take her hand, “tell me, you do love me, do you not?”

And the girl, drawing from him, answered almost sadly, with a gesture that was pathetic in the sorrow it conveyed, “Love you, Gonfallon? It is not I that love you; it is Ruth.”

A door closed, and she was gone.

Gonfallon steadied himself and gazed blankly enough at the door which had shut in his face. “And it was for this I toiled,” he mused. For the moment everything seemed to disappear; then, mindful as he always was of Form, and arguing with himself as to what he was doing there, he got into his study again, and roamed about it, likening his restlessness to that of a gyrfalcon in a cage; striving not only to forget, but to cease to think as well.

Beyond, the hubbub still continued. A luncheon was in progress, and he knew that his absence would be remarked. Yet still he could make no effort to leave the room. From time to time he passed his hand across his face and let it fall again to his side. And presently the voices approached: it was evident that the guests were assembling in the hall. From the window he could see a trim brougham, bottle-green, the straw-colored wheels picked out with black, and by it a miniature groom, in his lapel a bunch of white flowers, while at the ear of the horse nearest the rectory Gonfallon noticed that a similar bunch had been placed.

“Chris, where are you?”

It was Ruth calling to him, as Tandem had done, from the uplifted fringe of the curtain.

“Chris! They are coming. Hurry!”

Again he moved out into the hall, bowing this time right and left to the guests that had assembled there. Mrs. Manhattan was prompt at nabbing, and she had him at once.

“How sweet Claire looked!” she murmured.

“Very,” Gonfallon answered, and smilingly caressed his chin.

“Such a good match, too,” she added, “you ought to be tickled to death.”

“Yes, yes, he is a splendid young fellow.”

“Just the man for her. Nicholas was so sorry he couldn’t come. Trement, you know, is a connection of ours. I even had a hand in his bringing up.”

“I was sure of it.”

“And how impressive you did make the service! Ah! here they are.”

About the corner bride and groom had turned. The face of the latter was flushed as were he the sacrifant; the former held her head erect, and her mouth seemed at the slightest provocation prepared to bubble into laugh.

There was a gurgle, a hum, an undulant shout, and they had gone. Through the open doorway Miss Pickett threw a slipper which hit the coachman on the cheek. Tandem had obtained a handful of rice, which he scattered lavishly in the air. And as the brougham drove off, Yarde was seen, his head bent, fumbling at the nape of his neck for a furtive grain that had lodged in his collar.

For a while yet the guests lingered, companioned by Gonfallon and Ruth. Then, little by little, the handful diminished and shrunk, until husband and wife were alone.

“It will be dreary without Claire, will it not?” Ruth remarked as the ultimate loiterer passed from the house. There was no doubt about it⁠—Dr. McMasters was not only a physician, but a sorcerer as well. The neuralgia which had fed upon her had been exorcised long since.

In the adjoining room the maid was busy with the detritus of the wedding-feast.

“Will it not?” she repeated, and, without waiting for an answer, suddenly her arm had wound about him, and for a moment her head rested on his breast. Then, conscious, seemingly, of the presence of the maid, she moved from him, and Gonfallon, turning on his heel, entered the study again.

On the floor before him the prayerbook lay, and he stooped to pick it up. It was not large⁠—hardly bigger than a good resolution⁠—but as prayerbooks go it was a gem. The text was illuminated, and for binding it had tortoiseshell clamped with gold. In the morning Ruth had brought it to him with the request that he would use it at the service which was to be. And now as he raised it from the floor it opened in his hand. On the flyleaf was an inscription in characters thin as hair: “To Ruth, from her loving sister. Christmas, 1879.” And as he read it he understood why the request had been made.

Idly he turned the pages. Between the covenants of the marriage-pact a blue flower had been pressed. During the agitations of the ceremony it had been unnoticed, but now something about it seemed to evoke a memory, and he went back again to the slopes and intervales of Bronx. Idly still he turned the leaves. Before the psalm “With my whole heart thy praise I will proclaim” another flower had been placed, but this one was yellow, as though the hope of the first betokened had mellowed with fulfilment. And as he turned again, facing the collect for Ash-Wednesday he found a clipping from some Poets’ Corner, a bit of schoolgirl verse:

I wait for the story: the birds cannot sing it,
Not one, as he sits on the tree,
The bells cannot ring it, but long years, oh, bring it,
Such as I wish it to be.

He read it twice, and very gently, almost reverently, he put the book aside. Anger seemed to take itself visibly away; he saw it leaving him, and made no effort to detain. Already hatred was departing, and in its train an illusion had unmasked. “It is not I that love you,” someone was saying; “it is Ruth.”

He had fallen in a chair, and sat, his face buried in his hands. Back again from the past one memory after another came to him unreproached: first his wooing of her, her shy willingness, the sweet profanation, the earliest reluctant kiss, then the altar-rail, the blush of girlhood abandoned, the wifely solicitude, the unalterable charm with which illness had coped in vain, the tenderness of her nature, the unwavering allegiance, the trust, the belief, the pride in him.

“It is I,” he mused, “with whom she covenanted, it is I whose praise she proclaimed. I am the story she waited.” And, raising his face from his hands, he added, “If that story were only true!”

Already the afternoon had taken itself off. And as the light decomposed and decreased, something that was like to weariness seemed to fill the room. On the ceiling an uncertain dimness gathered. Here and there a gilt nail on the woodwork detained as with a pin a fringe of the mantle of day, but in the background was a somnolence in which objects disappeared mysteriously, one by one. In the corners shadows came and crouched. Under the chairs pits had formed, and out of them crept an obscurity which effaced and devoured the floor. On the ceiling the dimness deepened, the crouching shadows elongated and lapped the walls. A rumble from the street put an accent on the gloom, and presently, by way of vespers, the voice of the housemaid chanting “Jesus loves me” climbed on a treble from the regions below.

For a little space Gonfallon moved uneasily. Then, when night had wholly come, he found his way from the study, and groped through the darkness to Ruth.