Cornelia A. P. Comer

“ It was as if a Dresden china shepherdess had been put upon their kitchen mantel-shelf.
Don Jessup stooped and picked a cluster of the pink wild rosebuds, whose bushes were scattered along the road outside the fence, and handed them to her with an admiring look. Why, he scarcely knew; it is [Pg 24] as involuntary and natural a thing for any one to pay passing tribute to a pretty girl as for the summer wind to kiss the clover. Serene read the momentary impulse better than he did himself, and took the buds with deepening color and a beating heart. ”

“ If they had spoken of his good fortune in being loved by Virginia, that was something a man could understand. The gods might envy Virginia’s lover, but that he, Roderick Le Garde, should be congratulated on becoming John Fenley’s son-in-law was intolerable.
He by no means pretended to scorn money, however, and he felt as strongly as did Fenley that Virginia must have it. Luxury was her natural atmosphere—any woman’s perhaps, but surely hers. Other men sacrificed other things for the women that they loved. ”

“ It is no light matter to make one’s self the arbiter of another man’s destiny; and he knew enough of Witherle to feel sure that the man’s future was in his hands. He looked down at him dubiously, his strong hands still clutching the rail tensely. For a minute he felt that he must move on without making his presence known, but even as he resolved, the clocks and whistles clamorously announced the hour.
When the men quitted their work, the man whom Lowndes’s eyes were following came up the stairs that led to the bridge. As he passed, Lowndes laid a hand lightly on his shoulder. ”

“ They were such little things this stranger had done—things so slight, so involuntary, so unconscious that they did not deserve the name of courtesies, but they were enough to open the flood-gates of an embittered heart. There was a world where all the men were deferential and all the women’s lives were wrapped about with the fine, small courtesies of life—formal, but not meaningless. ”

“ Lowndes hesitated long before he spoke. He was reflecting that Witherle’s exaltation was pathological—he was drunk with the air of the open road.
“Poor little devil!” he thought. “One might let alone a man who finds ecstasy in being a coal-heaver; but it won’t do.”
“Life is big,” he admitted, slowly; “it’s tremendous, if you like; it’s all you say—but it isn’t for you. Don’t you see it is too late? We’re all of us under bonds to keep the world’s peace and finish the contracts we undertake. ”

“ She stretched out the tired arms upon which she had been lying, looked at the patient hands which had long lost the beauty her face still kept, and lifted her eyes to the solemn sky.
“I shall die some day,” she said, passionately. “No one can take that away from me. Thank Heaven, it is not one of the privileges a woman forfeits by marrying out of her station.”
Forbes stayed three days longer; restless, wretched days whenever he thought of himself and his position; sunlit and serene whenever his facile temperament permitted him to forget them. ”

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

“ Lowndes stared at him curiously, reflecting upon the fastidiousness with which men pick and choose their offenses against righteousness, embracing one joyously and rejecting another with scorn.
“Yes; so it would. But I have offered to do the lying for you, and you are off your head, you know.”
“How?” demanded Witherle, sharply.
“Any man is off his head who can’t take life as it comes, the bad and the good, and bear up under it. Suicide is insanity. You tried to commit suicide in the cowardliest way, by getting rid of your responsibilities and saving your worthless breath. Old man, it won’t do. ”

“ And this conviction, strongest in the teeth of all that would seem most vehemently to deny it, was to her nothing less than intoxicating.
She was not one of the women to whom there still seems much left in life when love is gone. To be sure, she had the consolations of religion and a certain sweet reasonableness of temperament which prompted her to pick up the pieces after a crash, and make the most of what might be left. ”

“ Le Garde, in a terrible voice, “that the ‘commission’ you paid Rogers was blackmail, the price of his ‘news’ and his silence?”
Mrs. Le Garde shrugged her shoulders.
Roderick rose dumbly. He knew all that he need. The room whirled round him. How he made his way out of the house he did not know. Had he served seven years—for this? The fair house of his life, built up on the insubstantial foundations of a woman’s silence and her sweet looks, was tumbling about his ears. ”

“ She knew how the mind can adjust itself to any phase of experience, and had learned that what woman has undergone, woman can undergo—yes, and be strong about it. She knew how, under the impulse of necessity, the once impossible grows to be the accepted life, and the food that could not be swallowed becomes the daily bread. ”

“ And the reason that we remember now is that love and God are one, and this is the judgment. That is why we see their eyes rebuking us. It comes to us, now that we die. That is all life is for—to learn not to grieve love. ”

“ To Forbes the way seemed long. His feet grew heavy and his head bewildered. Was this really he, this man who was in flight from justice and dependent on the chance kindness of a stranger for shelter from the clutches of the law?
They reached the canyon and began to make their way slowly down and along its side. The woman led fearlessly over the twistings of a trail imperceptible to him. He followed dizzily. Suddenly she turned.
“It is just around this rock that juts out in front. Is your head steady? It falls off sheer below and the path is narrow.” ”

“ Not His life only, then, but your life and mine, which we know to the bitter-sweet depths, and whose lessons grow clearer and clearer before us, are to guide us. Life is the light of men. I sometimes think that this, and this only, is rejecting Christ—to refuse to find Him in the life He gives us.”
Serene heard no more. ”

“ All around are the great upland swells of the mountains, rising endlessly, ridge beyond ridge, like the waves of the sea. In a hollow beside the glittering track is the one sign of human existence in sight—the sun-scorched, brown railway station. ”

“ A circle of anxious people, whose presence made the stuffy room still stuffier, were eagerly watching her. Opening her languid eyes to these material discomforts of her situation, she closed them again. She felt very ill, and the only thing in her mind was the conviction that had overtaken her just as she fainted—“Then God is no nearer in Paulding than at home.”
As the result of closing her eyes seemed to be the deluging of her face with water until she choked, she decided to reopen them.
“Well,” said Aunt Mari, heartily, “that looks more like. How do you feel, Serene? ”

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

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

“ Humanity from any point of view is a touching spectacle; from [Pg 5] a business standpoint it is infinitely droll. Personally Lowndes was one of the wholesome natures for whom there are more certainties than uncertainties in life, and he felt for Witherle the protecting friendliness that a strong man sometimes has for one less strong. He advised him as to his investments on week-days, and listened patiently Sunday after Sunday, as the lesser man expounded the mysteries of creation and the ways of the Creator, sustained by the reflection that Witherle was better than his sermons. ”

“ I wintered in a Michigan lumber-camp—that was hell. I was a boat-hand on the Columbia last summer—that was heaven. I worked in a coal-mine two months—a scab workman, you understand. And now I’m at this. I tell you, it is fine to get rid of cudgelling your brains for ideas that aren’t there, and of pretending to teach people something you don’t know, and take to working with your hands nine hours a day and sleeping like a log all night. I hadn’t slept for months, you know. These people tell me about themselves. I’m seeing what life is like. ”

“ He had left as little trace whereby he could be followed as a meteor leaves when it rushes across the sky.
Presently, of course, interest in the event subsided; the church got a new minister; Witherle’s wife went back to her own people; the world appeared to forget. But there was a man of Witherle’s congregation named Lowndes who still meditated the unsolved problem at odd moments. He was a practical man of affairs, with the psychological instinct, and he found the question of why people do the things that they do perennially interesting. ”

“ The night passed as even nights in sick-rooms will, and at last it began to grow toward day. The nurse became suddenly conscious of deadly weariness and need of rest. She called the servant and left her in charge, with a few directions and the injunction to call her at need, and then stole down the stairs to snatch, before she rested, the breath of morning air she craved.
As she stood at the veranda’s edge in the twilight coolness and twilight hush watching the whitening sky, there came steps behind her, and turning, she came face to face with Neil Hardesty. ”

“ Nevertheless, when Serene woke in the night, not only was there vivid lightning in the sky, and the roll of distant but approaching thunder, but there was also the unfamiliar sound of rain blown sharply against the roof, and a delicious coolness in the room. ”

“ We persecute our faith in many ingenious ways, but perhaps those torture themselves most whose religion is most emotional—those who are only sure that God is with them when they feel the peace of His presence in their hearts. ”

“ Applegate crossed the room to the open fire and stretched his chilled fingers to the flame.
“Aren’t you a little unreasonable, Julie?” he inquired, gently. “If Mrs. Parry didn’t ask for you, I don’t quite see what Dora could do but answer her questions.”
“Me unreasonable? I like that! Mrs. Buel Parry came to this house to see me, but Dora was bound I shouldn’t see her. Dora thinks”—she hesitated a moment, choking with her resentment—“she thinks I ain’t Mrs. Parry’s kind, and she was going to be considerate and keep us apart. Oh, yes! She thinks she knows what the upper crust wants. ”

“ But you know Julie’s way.”
“Yes,” said Applegate, “I know Julie’s way.”
Hopson drew a breath of relief. He had at least discharged himself of his intercessory mission.
“I tell Julie she’d better put up with it and go with MacDonald. The life would be more the sort of thing she likes. But her head’s set and she won’t hear to anything Henriette or I say. You see, that’s what Julie holds by, what she thinks is respectable. And it’s about all she does hold by.” ”

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

“ He left the sentence hanging in the air, as if afraid to finish it, and neither this modesty nor the yearning tenderness of his accent was lost upon the girl.
“As you say, there is no one else.”
“But—but there might be,” suggested Rollinson, who was strongly possessed by the insane delusion of the lover that all men must needs worship his lady. “Bertha! If you are going to learn to love me, make haste to be kind. I am horribly unreasonable. I see a rival in every man you speak to, dance with, smile at. ”

“ Lowndes stared. Truly it was delightfully simple. “Why, man, you can’t chuck your responsibilities overboard like that. Your wife——”
“When I was twenty-one,” interrupted Witherle, “I was in love. The girl married somebody else. Before I met my wife she had cared for a man who married another woman. You see how it was. We were going to save the pieces together. As a business arrangement that sort of thing is all right. I haven’t a word to say against it. She is a good woman, and we got on as well as most people, only life was not ecstasy to either of us. ”

“ Was it not a poor, cheap convention of righteousness which demanded he should take such a woman back to embitter the rest of his days and warp his children’s lives? He rebelled hotly at the thought. That it was Julie’s view of the ethical requirement of her position made it all the more improbable that it was really right. Surely his duty was to his children first, and as for Julie, let her reap the reward of her own temperament. The Lord God Himself [Pg 67] could not say that this was unjust, for it is so that He deals with the souls of men. ”

“ It is a long way from poverty to wealth, but a short one from wealth to poverty.”
“Yes,” said Virginia, “I know; but I also know enough about it to be sure that I could manage the business if it became necessary. You and I are both business men, dear. Let us import a new element into the family.”
Fenley laughed proudly. “By Jove! I believe you could do it!” A little further silence; then, “So your heart is set on this, daughter?”
“Have I a heart?” asked Virginia, sedately, rising and leaning an elbow on the mantel as she held up one small, daintily slippered foot to the blaze. ”