My mortal enemy

By Willa Cather

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Title: My mortal enemy

Author: Willa Cather

Illustrator: W. A. Dwiggins


        
Release date: April 20, 2026 [eBook #78501]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 1926

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78501

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY MORTAL ENEMY ***




Transcriber’s Note: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores:
_italics_.




                                  MY
                             MORTAL ENEMY




                                  MY

                             MORTAL ENEMY


                             WILLA CATHER

                      [Illustration: (Colophon)]

                            ALFRED A. KNOPF
                               NEW YORK
                                 1926




         _First, Second and Third printing before publication_


               _Printed in the United States of America_
              _Copyright 1926_ ⠂ _Alfred A. Knopf, Inc._




                                PART I




[Illustration: (A necklace with large cut stones)]

                                  I


I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known about
her ever since I could remember anything at all. She and her runaway
marriage were the theme of the most interesting, indeed the only
interesting, stories that were told in our family, on holidays or at
family dinners. My mother and aunts still heard from Myra Driscoll,
as they called her, and Aunt Lydia occasionally went to New York to
visit her. She had been the brilliant and attractive figure among
the friends of their girlhood, and her life had been as exciting and
varied as ours was monotonous.

Though she had grown up in our town, Parthia, in southern Illinois,
Myra Henshawe never, after her elopement, came back but once. It was
in the year when I was finishing High School, and she must then have
been a woman of forty-five. She came in the early autumn, with brief
notice by telegraph. Her husband, who had a position in the New York
offices of an Eastern railroad, was coming West on business, and they
were going to stop over for two days in Parthia. He was to stay at
the Parthian, as our new hotel was called, and Mrs. Henshawe would
stay with Aunt Lydia.

I was a favourite with my Aunt Lydia. She had three big sons, but no
daughter, and she thought my mother scarcely appreciated me. She was
always, therefore, giving me what she called “advantages,” on the
side. My mother and sister were asked to dinner at Aunt Lydia’s on
the night of the Henshawes’ arrival, but she had whispered to me: “I
want you to come in early, an hour or so before the others, and get
acquainted with Myra.”

That evening I slipped quietly in at my aunt’s front door, and while
I was taking off my wraps in the hall I could see, at the far end of
the parlour, a short, plump woman in a black velvet dress, seated
upon the sofa and softly playing on Cousin Bert’s guitar. She must
have heard me, and, glancing up, she saw my reflection in a mirror;
she put down the guitar, rose, and stood to await my approach. She
stood markedly and pointedly still, with her shoulders back and her
head lifted, as if to remind me that it was my business to get to
her as quickly as possible and present myself as best I could. I was
not accustomed to formality of any sort, but by her attitude she
succeeded in conveying this idea to me.

I hastened across the room with so much bewilderment and concern in
my face that she gave a short, commiserating laugh as she held out
to me her plump, charming little hand.

“Certainly this must be Lydia’s dear Nellie, of whom I have heard so
much! And you must be fifteen now, by my mournful arithmetic--am I
right?”

What a beautiful voice, bright and gay and carelessly kind--but she
continued to hold her head up haughtily. She always did this on
meeting people--partly, I think, because she was beginning to have a
double chin and was sensitive about it. Her deep-set, flashing grey
eyes seemed to be taking me in altogether--estimating me. For all
that she was no taller than I, I felt quite overpowered by her--and
stupid, hopelessly clumsy and stupid. Her black hair was done high
on her head, _à la_ Pompadour, and there were curious, zigzag, curly
streaks of glistening white in it, which made it look like the fleece
of a Persian goat or some animal that bore silky fur. I could not
meet the playful curiosity of her eyes at all, so I fastened my gaze
upon a necklace of carved amethysts she wore inside the square-cut
neck of her dress. I suppose I stared, for she said suddenly: “Does
this necklace annoy you? I’ll take it off if it does.”

I was utterly speechless. I could feel my cheeks burning. Seeing that
she had hurt me, she was sorry, threw her arm impulsively about me,
drew me into the corner of the sofa and sat down beside me.

“Oh, we’ll get used to each other! You see, I prod you because I’m
certain that Lydia and your mother have spoiled you a little. You’ve
been overpraised to me. It’s all very well to be clever, my dear, but
you mustn’t be solemn about it--nothing is more tiresome. Now, let us
get acquainted. Tell me about the things you like best; that’s the
short cut to friendship. What do you like best in Parthia? The old
Driscoll place? I knew it!”

By the time her husband came in I had begun to think she was going
to like me. I wanted her to, but I felt I didn’t have half a chance
with her; her charming, fluent voice, her clear light enunciation
bewildered me. And I was never sure whether she was making fun of me
or of the thing we were talking about. Her sarcasm was so quick, so
fine at the point--it was like being touched by a metal so cold that
one doesn’t know whether one is burned or chilled. I was fascinated,
but very ill at ease, and I was glad when Oswald Henshawe arrived
from the hotel.

He came into the room without taking off his overcoat and went
directly up to his wife, who rose and kissed him. Again I was some
time in catching up with the situation; I wondered for a moment
whether they might have come down from Chicago on different trains;
for she was clearly glad to see him--glad not merely that he was safe
and had got round on time, but because his presence gave her lively
personal pleasure. I was not accustomed to that kind of feeling in
people long married.

Mr. Henshawe was less perplexing than his wife, and he looked more
as I had expected him to look. The prominent bones of his face
gave him a rather military air; a broad, rugged forehead, high
cheek-bones, a high nose, slightly arched. His eyes, however, were
dark and soft, curious in shape--exactly like half-moons--and he wore
a limp, drooping moustache, like an Englishman. There was something
about him that suggested personal bravery, magnanimity, and a fine,
generous way of doing things.

“I am late,” he explained, “because I had some difficulty in
dressing. I couldn’t find my things.”

His wife looked concerned for a moment, and then began to laugh
softly. “Poor Oswald! You were looking for your new dress shirts that
bulge in front. Well, you needn’t! I gave them to the janitor’s son.”

“The janitor’s son?”

“Yes. To Willy Bunch, at home. He’s probably wearing one to an
Iroquois ball to-night, and that’s the right place for it.”

Mr. Henshawe passed his hand quickly over his smooth, iron-grey hair.
“You gave away my six new shirts?”

“Be sure I did. You shan’t wear shirts that give you a bosom, not
if we go to the poorhouse. You know I can’t bear you in ill-fitting
things.”

Oswald looked at her with amusement, incredulity, and bitterness. He
turned away from us with a shrug and pulled up a chair. “Well, all I
can say is, what a windfall for Willy!”

“That’s the way to look at it,” said his wife teasingly. “And now
try to talk about something that might conceivably interest Lydia’s
niece. I promised Liddy to make a salad dressing.”

I was left alone with Mr. Henshawe. He had a pleasant way of giving
his whole attention to a young person. He “drew one out” better than
his wife had done, because he did not frighten one so much. I liked
to watch his face, with its outstanding bones and languid, friendly
eyes--that perplexing combination of something hard and something
soft. Soon my mother and uncle and my boy cousins arrived. When the
party was complete I could watch and enjoy the visitors without
having to think of what I was going to say next. The dinner was
much gayer than family parties usually are. Mrs. Henshawe seemed to
remember all the old stories and the old jokes that had been asleep
for twenty years.

“How good it is,” my mother exclaimed, “to hear Myra laugh again!”

Yes, it was good. It was sometimes terrible, too, as I was to find
out later. She had an angry laugh, for instance, that I still shiver
to remember. Any stupidity made Myra laugh--I was destined to
hear that one very often! Untoward circumstances, accidents, even
disasters, provoked her mirth. And it was always mirth, not hysteria;
there was a spark of zest and wild humour in it.




[Illustration: (An elegant, high fence)]

                                  II


The big stone house, set in its ten-acre park of trees and surrounded
by a high, wrought-iron fence, in which Myra Driscoll grew up,
was still, in my time, the finest property in Parthia. At John
Driscoll’s death it went to the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, and I
could remember it only as a convent. Myra was an orphan, and had been
taken into this house as a very little girl and brought up by her
great-uncle.

John Driscoll made his fortune employing contract labour in the
Missouri swamps. He retired from business early, returned to the town
where he had been a poor boy, and built a fine house in which he took
great pride. He lived in what was considered great splendour in those
days. He kept fast horses, and bred a trotter that made a national
record. He bought silver instruments for the town band, and paid the
salary of the bandmaster. When the band went up to serenade him on
his birthday and on holidays, he called the boys in and treated them
to his best whisky. If Myra gave a ball or a garden-party, the band
furnished the music. It was, indeed, John Driscoll’s band.

Myra, as my aunt often said, had everything: dresses and jewels,
a fine riding horse, a Steinway piano. Her uncle took her back
to Ireland with him, one summer, and had her painted by a famous
painter. When they were at home, in Parthia, his house was always
open to the young people of the town. Myra’s good looks and high
spirits gratified the old man’s pride. Her wit was of the kind that
he could understand, native and racy, and none too squeamish. She
was very fond of him, and he knew it. He was a coarse old codger,
so unlettered that he made a poor showing with a pen. It was always
told of him that when he became president of our national bank, he
burned a lot of the treasury notes sent up to his house for him to
sign, because he had “spoiled the sig-nay-ture.” But he knew a great
deal about men and their motives. In his own way he was picturesque,
and Myra appreciated it--not many girls would have done so. Indeed,
she was a good deal like him; the blood tie was very strong. There
was never a serious disagreement between them until it came to young
Henshawe.

Oswald Henshawe was the son of a German girl of good family, and an
Ulster Protestant whom Driscoll detested; there was an old grudge
of some kind between the two men. This Ulsterman was poor and
impractical, a wandering schoolmaster, who had charge for a while of
the High School in Parthia, and afterwards taught in smaller towns
about. Oswald put himself through Harvard with very little help from
his parents. He was not taken account of in our town until he came
home from college, a handsome and promising young man. He and Myra
met as if for the first time, and fell in love with each other. When
old Driscoll found that Oswald was calling on his niece, he forbade
him the house. They continued to meet at my grandfather’s, however,
under the protection of my Aunt Lydia. Driscoll so persecuted the
boy that he felt there was no chance for him in Parthia. He roused
himself and went to New York. He stayed there two years without
coming home, sending his letters to Myra through my aunt.

All Myra’s friends were drawn into the web of her romance; half a
dozen young men understudied for Oswald so assiduously that her uncle
might have thought she was going to marry any one of them. Oswald,
meanwhile, was pegging away in New York, at a time when salaries were
small and advancement was slow. But he managed to get on, and in
two years he was in a position to marry. He wrote to John Driscoll,
telling him his resources and prospects, and asked him for his
niece’s hand. It was then that Driscoll had it out with Myra. He did
not come at her in a tantrum, as he had done before, but confronted
her with a cold, business proposition. If she married young Henshawe,
he would cut her off without a penny. He could do so, because he had
never adopted her. If she did not, she would inherit two-thirds of
his property--the remaining third was to go to the church. “And I
advise ye to think well,” he told her. “It’s better to be a stray dog
in this world than a man without money. I’ve tried both ways, and I
know. A poor man stinks, and God hates him.”

Some months after this conversation, Myra went out with a sleighing
party. They drove her to a neighbouring town where Oswald’s father
had a school, and where Oswald himself had quietly arrived the day
before. There, in the presence of his parents and of Myra’s friends,
they were married by the civil authority, and they went away on the
Chicago express, which came through at two in the morning.

When I was a little girl my Aunt Lydia used to take me for a walk
along the broad stone flagging that ran all the way around the
old Driscoll grounds. Through the high iron fence we could see
the Sisters, out for recreation, pacing two and two under the
apple-trees. My aunt would tell me again about that thrilling night
(probably the most exciting in her life), when Myra Driscoll came
down that path from the house, and out of those big iron gates, for
the last time. She had wanted to leave without taking anything but
the clothes she wore--and indeed she walked out of the house with
nothing but her muff and her _porte-monnaie_ in her hands. My prudent
aunt, however, had put her toilet articles and some linen into a
travelling-bag, and thrown it out of the back window to one of the
boys stationed under an apple-tree.

“I’ll never forget the sight of her, coming down that walk and
leaving a great fortune behind her,” said Aunt Lydia. “I had gone
out to join the others before she came--she preferred to leave the
house alone. We girls were all in the sleighs and the boys stood in
the snow holding the horses. We had begun to think she had weakened,
or maybe gone to the old man to try to move him. But we saw by the
lights behind when the front door opened and shut, and here she came,
with her head high, and that quick little bouncing step of hers. Your
Uncle Rob lifted her into the sleigh, and off we went. And that hard
old man was as good as his word. Her name wasn’t mentioned in his
will. He left it all to the Catholic Church and to institutions.”

“But they’ve been happy, anyhow?” I sometimes asked her.

“Happy? Oh, yes! As happy as most people.”

That answer was disheartening; the very point of their story was that
they should be much happier than other people.

When I was older I used to walk around the Driscoll place alone very
often, especially on spring days, after school, and watch the nuns
pacing so mildly and measuredly among the blossoming trees where
Myra used to give garden-parties and have the band to play for her.
I thought of the place as being under a spell, like the Sleeping
Beauty’s palace; it had been in a trance, or lain in its flowers
like a beautiful corpse, ever since that winter night when Love went
out of the gates and gave the dare to Fate. Since then, chanting and
devotions and discipline, and the tinkle of little bells that seemed
forever calling the Sisters in to prayers.

I knew that this was not literally true; old John Driscoll had lived
on there for many years after the flight of his niece. I myself could
remember his funeral--remember it very vividly--though I was not
more than six years old when it happened. I sat with my parents in
the front of the gallery, at the back of the church that the old man
had enlarged and enriched during the latter days of his life. The
high altar blazed with hundreds of candles, the choir was entirely
filled by the masses of flowers. The bishop was there, and a flock
of priests in gorgeous vestments. When the pall-bearers arrived,
Driscoll did not come to the church; the church went to him. The
bishop and clergy went down the nave and met that great black coffin
at the door, preceded by the cross and boys swinging cloudy censers,
followed by the choir chanting to the organ. They surrounded, they
received, they seemed to assimilate into the body of the church,
the body of old John Driscoll. They bore it up to the high altar on
a river of colour and incense and organ-tone; they claimed it and
enclosed it.

In after years, when I went to other funerals, stark and grim
enough, I thought of John Driscoll as having escaped the end of all
flesh; it was as if he had been translated, with no dark conclusion
to the pageant, no “night of the grave” about which our Protestant
preachers talked. From the freshness of roses and lilies, from the
glory of the high altar, he had gone straight to the greater glory,
through smoking censers and candles and stars.

                  *       *       *       *       *

After I went home from that first glimpse of the real Myra Henshawe,
twenty-five years older than I had always imagined her, I could not
help feeling a little disappointed. John Driscoll and his niece had
suddenly changed places in my mind, and he had got, after all, the
more romantic part. Was it not better to get out of the world with
such pomp and dramatic splendour than to linger on in it, having to
take account of shirts and railway trains, and getting a double chin
into the bargain?

The Henshawes were in Parthia three days, and when they left, it
was settled that I was to go on to New York with Aunt Lydia for the
Christmas holidays. We were to stay at the old Fifth Avenue Hotel,
which, as Myra said, was only a stone’s throw from their apartment,
“if at any time a body was to feel disposed to throw one, Liddy!”




[Illustration: (A view of a city)]

                                 III


My Aunt Lydia and I arrived at the Jersey City station on the day
before Christmas--a soft, grey December morning, with a little
snow falling. Myra Henshawe was there to meet us; very handsome,
I thought, as she came walking rapidly up the platform, her plump
figure swathed in furs,--a fur hat on her head, with a single narrow
garnet feather sticking out behind, like the pages’ caps in old
story-books. She was not alone. She was attended by a tall, elegant
young man in a blue-grey ulster. He had one arm through hers, and in
the other hand he carried a walking-stick.

“This is Ewan Gray,” said Mrs. Henshawe, after she had embraced us.
“Doubtless you have seen him play in Chicago. He is meeting an early
train, too, so we planned to salute the morn together, and left
Oswald to breakfast alone.”

The young man took our hand-luggage and walked beside me to the
ferryboat, asking polite questions about our trip. He was a
Scotchman, of an old theatrical family, a handsome fellow, with a
broad, fair-skinned face, sand-coloured hair and moustache, and fine
grey eyes, deep-set and melancholy, with black lashes. He took us
up to the deck of the ferry, and then Mrs. Henshawe told him he had
better leave us. “You must be there when Esther’s train gets in--and
remember, you are to bring her to dine with us to-morrow night. There
will be no one else.”

“Thank you, Myra.” He stood looking down at her with a grateful,
almost humble expression, holding his soft hat against his breast,
while the snow-flakes fell about his head. “And may I call in for a
few moments to-night, to show you something?”

She laughed as if his request pleased her. “Something for her, I
expect? Can’t you trust your own judgment?”

“You know I never do,” he said, as if that were an old story.

She gave him a little push. “Do put your hat on, or you’ll greet
Esther with a sneeze. Run along.”

She watched him anxiously as he walked away, and groaned: “Oh, the
deliberation of him! If I could only make him hurry once. You’ll hear
all about him later, Nellie. You’ll have to see a good deal of him,
but you won’t find it a hardship, I trust!”

The boat was pulling out, and I was straining my eyes to catch,
through the fine, reluctant snow, my first glimpse of the city we
were approaching. We passed the _Wilhelm der Grosse_ coming up the
river under tug, her sides covered with ice after a stormy crossing,
a flock of seagulls in her wake. The snow blurred everything a
little, and the buildings on the Battery all ran together--looked
like an enormous fortress with a thousand windows. From the mass, the
dull gold dome of the _World_ building emerged like a ruddy autumn
moon at twilight.

From the Twenty-third Street station we took the crosstown
car--people were economical in those days--to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
After we had unpacked and settled our things, we went across the
Square to lunch at Purcell’s, and there Mrs. Henshawe told us about
Ewan Gray. He was in love with one of her dearest friends, Esther
Sinclair, whose company was coming into New York for the holidays.
Though he was so young, he had, she said, “a rather spotty past,”
and Miss Sinclair, who was the daughter of an old New England family
and had been properly brought up, couldn’t make up her mind whether
he was stable enough to marry. “I don’t dare advise her, though I’m
so fond of him. You can see; he’s just the sort of boy that women
pick up and run off into the jungle with. But he’s never wanted to
marry before; it might be the making of him. He’s distractedly in
love--goes about like a sleep-walker. Still, I couldn’t bear it if
anything cruel happened to Esther.”

Aunt Lydia and Myra were going to do some shopping. When we went out
into Madison Square again, Mrs. Henshawe must have seen my wistful
gaze, for she stopped short and said: “How would Nellie like it if we
left her here, and picked her up as we come back? That’s our house,
over there, second floor--so you won’t be far from home. To me this
is the real heart of the city; that’s why I love living here.” She
waved to me and hurried my aunt away.

Madison Square was then at the parting of the ways; had a double
personality, half commercial, half social, with shops to the south
and residences on the north. It seemed to me so neat, after the
raggedness of our Western cities; so protected by good manners and
courtesy--like an open-air drawing-room. I could well imagine a
winter dancing party being given there, or a reception for some
distinguished European visitor.

The snow fell lightly all the afternoon, and friendly old men with
brooms kept sweeping the paths--very ready to talk to a girl from
the country, and to brush off a bench so that she could sit down.
The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and sociable, like
pleasant people. The snow lay in clinging folds on the bushes, and
outlined every twig of every tree--a line of white upon a line of
black. Madison Square Garden, new and spacious then, looked to me so
light and fanciful, and Saint Gaudens’ Diana, of which Mrs. Henshawe
had told me, stepped out freely and fearlessly into the grey air. I
lingered long by the intermittent fountain. Its rhythmical splash
was like the voice of the place. It rose and fell like something
taking deep, happy breaths; and the sound was musical, seemed to
come from the throat of spring. Not far away, on the corner, was
an old man selling English violets, each bunch wrapped in oiled
paper to protect them from the snow. Here, I felt, winter brought
no desolation; it was tamed, like a polar bear led on a leash by a
beautiful lady.

About the Square the pale blue shadows grew denser and drew closer.
The street lamps flashed out all along the Avenue, and soft lights
began to twinkle in the tall buildings while it was yet day--violet
buildings, just a little denser in substance and colour than the
violet sky. While I was gazing up at them I heard a laugh close
beside me, and Mrs. Henshawe’s arm slipped through mine.

“Why, you’re fair moon-struck, Nellie! I’ve seen the messenger boys
dodging all about you!” It was true, droves of people were going
through the Square now, and boys carrying potted plants and big
wreaths. “Don’t you like to watch them? But we can’t stay. We’re
going home to Oswald. Oh, hear the penny whistle! They always find
me out.” She stopped a thin lad with a cap and yarn comforter but no
overcoat, who was playing _The Irish Washerwoman_ on a little pipe,
and rummaged in her bag for a coin.

The Henshawes’ apartment was the second floor of an old brownstone
house on the north side of the Square. I loved it from the moment
I entered it; such solidly built, high-ceiled rooms, with snug
fire-places and wide doors and deep windows. The long, heavy velvet
curtains and the velvet chairs were a wonderful plum-colour,
like ripe purple fruit. The curtains were lined with that rich
cream-colour that lies under the blue skin of ripe figs.

Oswald was standing by the fire, drinking a whisky and soda while he
waited for us. He put his glass down on the mantel as we opened the
door, and forgot all about it. He pushed chairs up to the hearth for
my aunt and me, and stood talking to us while his wife went to change
her dress and to have a word with the Irish maid before dinner.

“By the way, Myra,” he said, as she left us, “I’ve put a bottle of
champagne on ice; it’s Christmas eve.”

Everything in their little apartment seemed to me absolutely
individual and unique, even the dinner service; the thick grey plates
and the soup tureen painted with birds and big, bright flowers--I was
sure there were no others like them in the world.

As we were finishing dinner the maid announced Mr. Gray. Henshawe
went into the parlour to greet him, and we followed a moment later.
The young man was in evening clothes, with a few sprays of white
hyacinth in his coat. He stood by the fire, his arm on the mantel.
His clean, fair skin and melancholy eyes, his very correct clothes,
and something about the shape of his hands, made one conscious of a
cool, deliberate fastidiousness in him. In spite of his spotty past
he looked, that night, as fresh and undamaged as the flowers he wore.
Henshawe took on a slightly bantering tone with him, and seemed to
be trying to cheer him up. Mr. Gray would not sit down. After an
interval of polite conversation he said to his host: “Will you excuse
me if I take Myra away for a few moments? She has promised to do
something kind for me.”

They went into Henshawe’s little study, off the parlour, and shut the
door. We could hear a low murmur of voices. When they came back to
us Mrs. Henshawe stood beside Gray while he put on his caped cloak,
talking encouragingly. “The opals are beautiful, but I’m afraid of
them, Ewan. Oswald would laugh at me, but all the same they have a
bad history. Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck
in the world; why, for mercy’s sake, add opals? He brought two
bracelets for me to decide between them, Oswald, both lovely. However
did they let you carry off two, Ewan?”

“They know me there. I always pay my bills, Myra. I don’t know why,
but I do. I suppose it’s the Scotch in me.”

He wished us all good-night.

“Give a kiss to Esther for me,” said Mrs. Henshawe merrily at the
door. He made no reply, but bent over her hand and vanished.

“What he really wanted was to show me some verses he’s made for her,”
said Mrs. Henshawe, as she came back to the fire. “And very pretty
ones they are, for sweet-heart poetry.”

Mr. Henshawe smiled. “Maybe you obliged him with a rhyme or two, my
dear? Lydia--” he sat down by my aunt and put his hand on hers--“I’d
never feel sure that I did my own courting, if it weren’t that I was
a long way off at the time. Myra is so fond of helping young men
along. We nearly always have a love affair on hand.”

She put her hand over his lips. “Hush! I hate old women who egg on
courtships.”

When Oswald had finished his cigar we were taken out for a walk.
This was primarily for the good of her “figger,” Myra said, and
incidentally we were to look for a green bush to send to Madame
Modjeska. “She’s spending the holidays in town, and it will be dismal
at her hotel.”

At the florist’s we found, among all the little trees and potted
plants, a glistening holly-tree, full of red berries and pointed
like a spire, easily the queen of its companions. “That is naturally
hers,” said Mrs. Myra.

Her husband shrugged. “It’s naturally the most extravagant.”

Mrs. Myra threw up her head. “Don’t be petty, Oswald. It’s not a
woollen petticoat or warm mittens that Madame is needing.” She gave
careful instructions to the florist’s man, who was to take the tree
to the Savoy; he was to carry with it a box of cakes, “of my baking,”
she said proudly. He was to ask for Mrs. Hewes, the housekeeper, and
under her guidance he was to carry the tree up to Madame Modjeska’s
rooms himself. The man showed a sympathetic interest, and promised to
follow instructions. Then Mrs. Henshawe gave him a silver dollar and
wished him a Merry Christmas.

As we walked home she slipped her arm through mine, and we fell a
little behind the other two. “See the moon coming out, Nellie--behind
the tower. It wakens the guilt in me. No playing with love; and I’d
sworn a great oath never to meddle again. You send a handsome fellow
like Ewan Gray to a fine girl like Esther, and it’s Christmas eve,
and they rise above us and the white world around us, and there isn’t
anybody, not a tramp on the park benches, that wouldn’t wish them
well--and very likely hell will come of it!”




[Illustration: (A pair of cuff-links and a flower)]

                                  IV


The next morning Oswald Henshawe, in a frock-coat and top-hat, called
to take Aunt Lydia and me to church. The weather had cleared before
we went to bed, and as we stepped out of our hotel that morning, the
sun shone blindingly on the snow-covered park, the gold Diana flashed
against a green-blue sky. We were going to Grace Church, and the
morning was so beautiful that we decided to walk.

“Lydia,” said Henshawe, as he took us each by an arm, “I want you to
give me a Christmas present.”

“Why, Oswald,” she stammered.

“Oh, I have it ready! You’ve only to present it.” He took a little
flat package from his pocket and slipped it into her muff. He
drew both of us closer to him. “Listen, it’s nothing. It’s some
sleeve-buttons, given me by a young woman who means no harm, but
doesn’t know the ways of the world very well. She’s from a breezy
Western city, where a rich girl can give a present whenever she wants
to and nobody questions it. She sent these to my office yesterday. If
I send them back to her it will hurt her feelings; she would think I
had misunderstood her. She’ll get hard knocks here, of course, but I
don’t want to give her any. On the other hand--well, you know Myra;
nobody better. She would punish herself and everybody else for this
young woman’s questionable taste. So I want you to give them to me,
Lydia.”

“Oh, Oswald,” cried my aunt, “Myra is so keen! I’m not clever enough
to fool Myra. Can’t you just put them away in your office?”

“Not very well. Besides,” he gave a slightly embarrassed laugh, “I’d
like to wear them. They are very pretty.”

“Now, Oswald....”

“Oh, it’s all right, Lydia, I give you my word it is. But you know
how a little thing of that sort can upset my wife. I thought you
might give them to me when you come over to dine with us to-morrow
night. She wouldn’t be jealous of you. But if you don’t like the idea
... why, just take them home with you and give them to some nice boy
who would appreciate them.”

All through the Christmas service I could see that Aunt Lydia was
distracted and perplexed. As soon as we got back to the hotel and
were safe in our rooms she took the brown leather case from her muff
and opened it. The sleeve-buttons were topazes, winy-yellow, lightly
set in crinkly gold. I believe she was seduced by their beauty. “I
really think he ought to have them, if he wants them. Everything is
always for Myra. He never gets anything for himself. And all the
admiration is for her; why shouldn’t he have a little? He has been
devoted to a fault. It isn’t good for any woman to be humoured and
pampered as he has humoured her. And she’s often most unreasonable
with him--most unreasonable!”

The next evening, as we were walking across the Square to the
Henshawes, we glanced up and saw them standing together in one of
their deep front windows, framed by the plum-coloured curtains. They
were looking out, but did not see us. I noticed that she was really
quite a head shorter than he, and she leaned a little towards him.
When she was peaceful, she was like a dove with its wings folded.
There was something about them, as they stood in the lighted window,
that would have discouraged me from meddling, but it did not shake my
aunt.

As soon as we were in the parlour, before we had taken off our
coats, she said resolutely: “Myra, I want to give Oswald a Christmas
present. Once an old friend left with me some cuff-links he couldn’t
keep--unpleasant associations, I suppose. I thought of giving them
to one of my own boys, but I brought them for Oswald. I’d rather he
would have them than anybody.”

Aunt Lydia spoke with an ease and conviction which compelled my
admiration. She took the buttons out of her muff, without the box, of
course, and laid them in Mrs. Henshawe’s hand.

Mrs. Henshawe was delighted. “How clever of you to think of it,
Liddy, dear! Yes, they’re exactly right for him. There’s hardly any
other stone I would like, but these are exactly right. Look, Oswald,
they’re the colour of a fine Moselle.” It was Oswald himself who
seemed disturbed, and not overpleased. He grew red, was confused
in his remarks, and was genuinely reluctant when his wife insisted
upon taking the gold buttons out of his cuffs and putting in the
new ones. “I can’t get over your canniness, Liddy,” she said as she
fitted them.

“It’s not like me, is it, Myra?” retorted my aunt; “not like me at
all to choose the right sort of thing. But did it never occur to
you that anyone besides yourself might know what is appropriate for
Oswald? No, I’m sure it never did!”

Mrs. Myra took the laugh so heartily to herself that I felt it was
a shame to deceive her. So, I am sure, did Oswald. During dinner he
talked more than usual, but he was ill at ease. Afterwards, at the
opera, when the lights were down, I noticed that he was not listening
to the music, but was looking listlessly off into the gloom of the
house, with something almost sorrowful in his strange, half-moon
eyes. During an _entr’acte_ a door at the back was opened, and a
draught blew in. As he put his arm back to pull up the cloak which
had slipped down from his wife’s bare shoulders, she laughed and
said: “Oh, Oswald, I love to see your jewels flash!”

He dropped his hand quickly and frowned so darkly that I thought he
would have liked to put the topazes under his heel and grind them up.
I thought him properly served then, but often since I have wondered
at his gentle heart.




[Illustration: (Two women, one playing piano and the other with her
chin in her hands)]

                                  V


During the week between Christmas and New Year’s day I was with Mrs.
Henshawe a great deal, but we were seldom alone. It was the season
of calls and visits, and she said that meeting so many people would
certainly improve my manners and my English. She hated my careless,
slangy, Western speech. Her friends, I found, were of two kinds:
artistic people--actors, musicians, literary men--with whom she was
always at her best because she admired them; and another group whom
she called her “moneyed” friends (she seemed to like the word), and
these she cultivated, she told me, on Oswald’s account. “He is the
sort of man who does well in business only if he has the incentive of
friendships. He doesn’t properly belong in business. We never speak
of it, but I’m sure he hates it. He went into an office only because
we were young and terribly in love, and had to be married.”

The business friends seemed to be nearly all Germans. On Sunday
we called at half-a-dozen or more big houses. I remember very
large rooms, much upholstered and furnished, walls hung with large
paintings in massive frames, and many stiff, dumpy little sofas,
in which the women sat two-and-two, while the men stood about the
refreshment tables, drinking champagne and coffee and smoking fat
black cigars. Among these people Mrs. Myra took on her loftiest and
most challenging manner. I could see that some of the women were
quite afraid of her. They were in great haste to rush refreshments to
her, and looked troubled when she refused anything. They addressed
her in German and profusely complimented her upon the way she spoke
it. We had a carriage that afternoon, and Myra was dressed in her
best--making an especial effort on Oswald’s account; but the rich and
powerful irritated her. Their solemnity was too much for her sense
of humour; there was a biting edge to her sarcasm, a curl about the
corners of her mouth that was never there when she was with people
whose personality charmed her.

I had one long, delightful afternoon alone with Mrs. Henshawe in
Central Park. We walked for miles, stopped to watch the skating,
and finally had tea at the Casino, where she told me about some of
the singers and actors I would meet at her apartment on New Year’s
eve. Her account of her friends was often more interesting to me
than the people themselves. After tea she hailed a hansom and asked
the man to drive us about the park a little, as a fine sunset was
coming on. We were jogging happily along under the elms, watching the
light change on the crusted snow, when a carriage passed from which
a handsome woman leaned out and waved to us. Mrs. Henshawe bowed
stiffly, with a condescending smile. “There, Nellie,” she exclaimed,
“that’s the last woman I’d care to have splashing past me, and me in
a hansom cab!”

I glimpsed what seemed to me insane ambition. My aunt was always
thanking God that the Henshawes got along as well as they did, and
worrying because she felt sure Oswald wasn’t saving anything. And
here Mrs. Myra was wishing for a carriage--with stables and a house
and servants, and all that went with a carriage! All the way home she
kept her scornful expression, holding her head high and sniffing the
purple air from side to side as we drove down Fifth Avenue. When we
alighted before her door she paid the driver, and gave him such a
large fee that he snatched off his hat and said twice: “Thank you,
thank you, my lady!” She dismissed him with a smile and a nod. “All
the same,” she whispered to me as she fitted her latchkey, “it’s very
nasty, being poor!”

That week Mrs. Henshawe took me to see a dear friend of hers, Anne
Aylward, the poet. She was a girl who had come to New York only a few
years before, had won the admiration of men of letters, and was now
dying of tuberculosis in her early twenties. Mrs. Henshawe had given
me a book of her poems to read, saying: “I want you to see her so
that you can remember her in after years, and I want her to see you
so that we can talk you over.”

Miss Aylward lived with her mother in a small flat overlooking the
East River, and we found her in a bathchair, lying in the sun and
watching the river boats go by. Her study was a delightful place that
morning, full of flowers and plants and baskets of fruit that had
been sent her for Christmas. But it was Myra Henshawe herself who
made that visit so memorably gay. Never had I seen her so brilliant
and strangely charming as she was in that sunlit study up under the
roofs. Their talk quite took my breath away; they said such exciting,
such fantastic things about people, books, music--anything; they
seemed to speak together a kind of highly flavoured special language.

As we were walking home she tried to tell me more about Miss Aylward,
but tenderness for her friend and bitter rebellion at her fate choked
her voice. She suffered physical anguish for that poor girl. My
aunt often said that Myra was incorrigibly extravagant; but I saw
that her chief extravagance was in caring for so many people, and
in caring for them so much. When she but mentioned the name of some
one whom she admired, one got an instant impression that the person
must be wonderful, her voice invested the name with a sort of grace.
When she liked people she always called them by name a great many
times in talking to them, and she enunciated the name, no matter
how commonplace, in a penetrating way, without hurrying over it or
slurring it; and this, accompanied by her singularly direct glance,
had a curious effect. When she addressed Aunt Lydia, for instance,
she seemed to be speaking to a person deeper down than the blurred,
taken-for-granted image of my aunt that I saw every day, and for
a moment my aunt became more individual, less matter-of-fact to
me. I had noticed this peculiar effect of Myra’s look and vocative
when I first met her, in Parthia, where her manner of addressing my
relatives had made them all seem a little more attractive to me.

One afternoon when we were at a matinée I noticed in a loge a young
man who looked very much like the photographs of a story-writer
popular at that time. I asked Mrs. Henshawe whether it could be he.
She looked in the direction I indicated, then looked quickly away
again.

“Yes, it’s he. He used to be a friend of mine. That’s a sad phrase,
isn’t it? But there was a time when he could have stood by Oswald
in a difficulty--and he didn’t. He passed it up. Wasn’t there. I’ve
never forgiven him.”

I regretted having noticed the man in the loge, for all the rest of
the afternoon I could feel the bitterness working in her. I knew that
she was suffering. The scene on the stage was obliterated for her;
the drama was in her mind. She was going over it all again; arguing,
accusing, denouncing.

As we left the theatre she sighed: “Oh, Nellie, I wish you hadn’t
seen him! It’s all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our
enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving
our friends?”--she beat on her fur collar with her two gloved
hands--“that’s where the rub comes!”

The Henshawes always gave a party on New Year’s eve. That year most
of the guests were stage people. Some of them, in order to get there
before midnight, came with traces of make-up still on their faces.
I remember old Jefferson de Angelais arrived in his last-act wig,
carrying his plumed hat--during the supper his painted eyebrows
spread and came down over his eyes like a veil. Most of them are dead
now, but it was a fine group that stood about the table to drink the
New Year in. By far the handsomest and most distinguished of that
company was a woman no longer young, but beautiful in age, Helena
Modjeska. She looked a woman of another race and another period, no
less queenly than when I had seen her in Chicago as Marie Stuart, and
as Katharine in _Henry VIII_. I remember how, when Oswald asked her
to propose a toast, she put out her long arm, lifted her glass, and
looking into the blur of the candlelight with a grave face, said: “To
my coun-n-try!”

As she was not playing, she had come early, some time before the
others, bringing with her a young Polish woman who was singing at
the Opera that winter. I had an opportunity to watch Modjeska as
she sat talking to Myra and Esther Sinclair--Miss Sinclair had once
played in her company. When the other guests began to arrive, and
Myra was called away, she sat by the fire in a high-backed chair, her
head resting lightly on her hand, her beautiful face half in shadow.
How well I remember those long, beautifully modelled hands, with
so much humanity in them. They were worldly, indeed, but fashioned
for a nobler worldliness than ours; hands to hold a sceptre, or a
chalice--or, by courtesy, a sword.

The party did not last long, but it was a whirl of high spirits.
Everybody was hungry and thirsty. There was a great deal of talk
about Sarah Bernhardt’s _Hamlet_, which had been running all week and
had aroused hot controversy; and about Jean de Reszke’s return to
the Metropolitan that night, after a long illness in London.

By two o’clock every one had gone but the two Polish ladies.
Modjeska, after she put on her long cloak, went to the window, drew
back the plum-coloured curtains, and looked out. “See, Myra,” she
said with that Slav accent she never lost, though she read English
verse so beautifully, “the Square is quite white with moonlight. And
how still all the ci-ty is, how still!” She turned to her friend;
“Emelia, I think you must sing something. Something old ... yes, from
_Norma_.” She hummed a familiar air under her breath, and looked
about for a chair. Oswald brought one. “Thank you. And we might have
less light, might we not?” He turned off the lights.

She sat by the window, half draped in her cloak, the moonlight
falling across her knees. Her friend went to the piano and commenced
the _Casta Diva_ aria, which begins so like the quivering of
moonbeams on the water. It was the first air on our old music-box
at home, but I had never heard it sung--and I have never heard it
sung so beautifully since. I remember Oswald, standing like a statue
behind Madame Modjeska’s chair, and Myra, crouching low beside the
singer, her head in both hands, while the song grew and blossomed
like a great emotion.

When it stopped, nobody said anything beyond a low good-bye. Modjeska
again drew her cloak around her, and Oswald took them down to their
carriage. Aunt Lydia and I followed, and as we crossed the Square we
saw their cab going up the Avenue. For many years I associated Mrs.
Henshawe with that music, thought of that aria as being mysteriously
related to something in her nature that one rarely saw, but nearly
always felt; a compelling, passionate, overmastering something for
which I had no name, but which was audible, visible in the air that
night, as she sat crouching in the shadow. When I wanted to recall
powerfully that hidden richness in her, I had only to close my eyes
and sing to myself: “_Casta diva, casta diva!_”




[Illustration: (A key-ring with many keys)]

                                  VI


On Saturday I was to lunch at the Henshawes’ and go alone with Oswald
to hear Bernhardt and Coquelin. As I opened the door into the entry
hall, the first thing that greeted me was Mrs. Henshawe’s angry
laugh, and a burst of rapid words that stung like cold water from a
spray.

“I tell you, I will know the truth about this key, and I will go
through any door your keys open. Is that clear?”

Oswald answered with a distinctly malicious chuckle: “My dear, you’d
have a hard time getting through that door. The key happens to open a
safety deposit box.”

Her voice rose an octave in pitch. “How dare you lie to me, Oswald?
How dare you? They told me at your bank that this wasn’t a bank key,
though it looks like one. I stopped and showed it to them--the day
you forgot your keys and telephoned me to bring them down to your
office.”

“The hell you did!”

I coughed and rapped at the door ... they took no notice of me. I
heard Oswald push back a chair. “Then it was you who took my keys out
of my pocket? I might have known it! I never forget to change them.
And you went to the bank and made me and yourself ridiculous. I can
imagine their amusement.”

“Well, you needn’t! I know how to get information without giving
any. Here is Nellie Birdseye, rapping at the gates. Come in, Nellie.
You and Oswald are going over to Martin’s for lunch. He and I are
quarrelling about a key-ring. There will be no luncheon here to-day.”

She went away, and I stood bewildered. This delightful room had
seemed to me a place where light-heartedness and charming manners
lived--housed there just as the purple curtains and the Kiva rugs and
the gay water-colours were. And now everything was in ruins. The air
was still and cold like the air in a refrigerating-room. What I felt
was fear; I was afraid to look or speak or move. Everything about me
seemed evil. When kindness has left people, even for a few moments,
we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them. When it
has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck;
we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

“It’s all right, Nellie.” Oswald recovered himself and put a hand on
my shoulder. “Myra isn’t half so furious with me as she pretends.
I’ll get my hat and we’ll be off.” He was in his smoking-jacket, and
had been sitting at his desk, writing. His inkwell was uncovered, and
on the blotter lay a half-written sheet of note paper.

I was glad to get out into the sunlight with him. The city seemed
safe and friendly and smiling. The air in that room had been like
poison. Oswald tried to make it up to me. We walked round and round
the Square, and at Martin’s he made me drink a glass of sherry, and
pointed out the interesting people in the dining-room and told me
stories about them. But without his hat, his head against the bright
window, he looked tired and troubled. I wondered, as on the first
time I saw him, in my own town, at the contradiction in his face:
the strong bones, and the curiously shaped eyes without any fire in
them. I felt that his life had not suited him; that he possessed some
kind of courage and force which slept, which in another sort of world
might have asserted themselves brilliantly. I thought he ought to
have been a soldier or an explorer. I have since seen those half-moon
eyes in other people, and they were always inscrutable, like his;
fronted the world with courtesy and kindness, but one never got
behind them.

We went to the theatre, but I remember very little of the performance
except a dull heartache, and a conviction that I should never like
Mrs. Myra so well again. That was on Saturday. On Monday Aunt Lydia
and I were to start for home. We positively did not see the Henshawes
again. Sunday morning the maid came with some flowers and a note from
Myra, saying that her friend Anne Aylward was having a bad day and
had sent for her.

On Monday we took an early boat across the ferry, in order to
breakfast in the Jersey station before our train started. We had got
settled in our places in the Pullman, the moment of departure was
near, when we heard an amused laugh, and there was Myra Henshawe,
coming into the car in her fur hat, followed by a porter who carried
her bags.

“I didn’t plot anything so neat as this, Liddy,” she laughed, a
little out of breath, “though I knew we’d be on the same train. But
we won’t quarrel, will we? I’m only going as far as Pittsburgh. I’ve
some old friends there. Oswald and I have had a disagreement, and
I’ve left him to think it over. If he needs me, he can quite well
come after me.”

All day Mrs. Myra was jolly and agreeable, though she treated us
with light formality, as if we were new acquaintances. We lunched
together, and I noticed, sitting opposite her, that when she was in
this mood of high scorn, her mouth, which could be so tender--which
cherished the names of her friends and spoke them delicately--was
entirely different. It seemed to curl and twist about like a little
snake. Letting herself think harm of anyone she loved seemed to
change her nature, even her features.

It was dark when we got into Pittsburgh. The Pullman porter took
Myra’s luggage to the end of the car. She bade us good-bye, started
to leave us, then turned back with an icy little smile. “Oh,
Liddy dear, you needn’t have perjured yourself for those yellow
cuff-buttons. I was sure to find out, I always do. I don’t hold
it against you, but it’s disgusting in a man to lie for personal
decorations. A woman might do it, now, ... for pearls!” With a bright
nod she turned away and swept out of the car, her head high, the long
garnet feather drooping behind.

Aunt Lydia was very angry. “I’m sick of Myra’s dramatics,” she
declared. “I’ve done with them. A man never _is_ justified, but if
ever a man was....”




PART II




[Illustration: (A pile of ties and a small vial)]

                                  I


Ten years after that visit to New York I happened to be in a
sprawling overgrown West-coast city which was in the throes of rapid
development--it ran about the shore, stumbling all over itself and
finally tumbled untidily into the sea. Every hotel and boarding-house
was overcrowded, and I was very poor. Things had gone badly with my
family and with me. I had come West in the middle of the year to take
a position in a college--a college that was as experimental and
unsubstantial as everything else in the place. I found lodgings in
an apartment-hotel, wretchedly built and already falling to pieces,
although it was new. I moved in on a Sunday morning, and while I was
unpacking my trunk, I heard, through the thin walls, my neighbour
stirring about; a man, and, from the huskiness of his cough and
something measured in his movements, not a young man. The caution of
his step, the guarded consideration of his activities, let me know
that he did not wish to thrust the details of his housekeeping upon
other people any more than he could help.

Presently I detected the ugly smell of gasolene in the air, heard a
sound of silk being snapped and shaken, and then a voice humming very
low an old German air--yes, Schubert’s _Frühlingsglaube_; ta ta te-ta
| ta-ta ta-ta ta-ta | ta. In a moment I saw the ends of dark neckties
fluttering out of the window next mine.

All this made me melancholy--more than the dreariness of my own case.
I was young, and it didn’t matter so much about me; for youth there
is always the hope, the certainty, of better things. But an old man,
a gentleman, living in this shabby, comfortless place, cleaning his
neckties of a Sunday morning and humming to himself ... it depressed
me unreasonably. I was glad when his outer door shut softly and I
heard no more of him.

There was an indifferent restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel.
As I was going down to my dinner that evening, I met, at the head
of the stairs, a man coming up and carrying a large black tin tray.
His head was bent, and his eyes were lowered. As he drew aside to
let me pass, in spite of his thin white hair and stooped shoulders,
I recognised Oswald Henshawe, whom I had not seen for so many
years--not, indeed, since that afternoon when he took me to see Sarah
Bernhardt play _Hamlet_.

When I called his name he started, looked at me, and rested the tray
on the sill of the blindless window that lighted the naked stairway.

“Nellie! Nellie Birdseye! Can it be?”

His voice was quite uncertain. He seemed deeply shaken, and pulled
out a handkerchief to wipe his forehead. “But, Nellie, you have grown
up! I would not know you. What good fortune for Myra! She will hardly
believe it when I tell her. She is ill, my poor Myra. Oh, very ill!
But we must not speak of that, nor seem to know it. What it will mean
to her to see you again! Her friends always were so much to her,
you remember? Will you stop and see us as you come up? Her room is
thirty-two; rap gently, and I’ll be waiting for you. Now I must take
her dinner. Oh, I hope for her sake you are staying some time. She
has no one here.”

He took up the tray and went softly along the uncarpeted hall.
I felt little zest for the canned vegetables and hard meat the
waitress put before me. I had known that the Henshawes had come on
evil days, and were wandering about among the cities of the Pacific
coast. But Myra had stopped writing to Aunt Lydia, beyond a word of
greeting at Christmas and on her birthday. She had ceased to give
us any information about their way of life. We knew that several
years after my memorable visit in New York, the railroad to whose
president Oswald had long been private secretary, was put into the
hands of a receiver, and the retiring president went abroad to live.
Henshawe had remained with the new management, but very soon the
road was taken over by one of the great trunk lines, and the office
staff was cut in two. In the reorganization Henshawe was offered a
small position, which he indignantly refused--his wife wouldn’t let
him think of accepting it. He went to San Francisco as manager of a
commission house; the business failed, and what had happened to them
since I did not know.

I lingered long over my dismal dinner. I had not the courage to
go up-stairs. Henshawe was not more than sixty, but he looked much
older. He had the tired, tired face of one who has utterly lost hope.

Oswald had got his wife up out of bed to receive me. When I entered
she was sitting in a wheel-chair by an open window, wrapped in a
Chinese dressing-gown, with a bright shawl over her feet. She threw
out both arms to me, and as she hugged me, flashed into her old gay
laugh.

“Now wasn’t it clever of you to find us, Nellie? And we so safely
hidden--in earth, like a pair of old foxes! But it was in the cards
that we should meet again. Now I understand; a wise woman has been
coming to read my fortune for me, and the queen of hearts has been
coming up out of the pack when she had no business to; a beloved
friend coming out of the past. Well, Nellie, dear, I couldn’t
think of any old friends that weren’t better away, for one reason
or another, while we are in temporary eclipse. I gain strength
faster if I haven’t people on my mind. But you, Nellie ... that’s
different.” She put my two hands to her cheeks, making a frame
for her face. “That’s different. Somebody young, and clear-eyed,
chock-full of opinions, and without a past. But you may have a past,
already? The darkest ones come early.”

I was delighted. She was ... she was herself, Myra Henshawe! I
hadn’t expected anything so good. The electric bulbs in the room
were shrouded and muffled with coloured scarfs, and in that light
she looked much less changed than Oswald. The corners of her mouth
had relaxed a little, but they could still curl very scornfully
upon occasion; her nose was the same sniffy little nose, with its
restless, arched nostrils, and her double chin, though softer, was no
fuller. A strong cable of grey-black hair was wound on the top of her
head, which, as she once remarked, “was no head for a woman at all,
but would have graced one of the wickedest of the Roman emperors.”

Her bed was in the alcove behind her. In the shadowy dimness of the
room I recognised some of the rugs from their New York apartment,
some of the old pictures, with frames peeling and glass cracked. Here
was Myra’s little inlaid tea-table, and the desk at which Oswald had
been writing that day when I dropped in upon their quarrel. At the
windows were the dear, plum-coloured curtains, their cream lining
streaked and faded--but the sight of them rejoiced me more than I
could tell the Henshawes.

“And where did you come from, Nellie? What are you doing here, in
heaven’s name?”

While I explained myself she listened intently, holding my wrist
with one of her beautiful little hands, which were so inexplicably
mischievous in their outline, and which, I noticed, were still white
and well cared for.

“Ah, but teaching, Nellie! I don’t like that, not even for a
temporary expedient. It’s a cul-de-sac. Generous young people use
themselves all up at it; they have no sense. Only the stupid and the
phlegmatic should teach.”

“But won’t you allow me, too, a temporary eclipse?”

She laughed and squeezed my hand. “Ah, _we_ wouldn’t be hiding in
the shadow, if we were five-and-twenty! We were throwing off sparks
like a pair of shooting stars, weren’t we, Oswald? No, I can’t bear
teaching for you, Nellie. Why not journalism? You could always make
your way easily there.”

“Because I hate journalism. I know what I want to do, and I’ll work
my way out yet, if only you’ll give me time.”

“Very well, dear.” She sighed. “But I’m ambitious for you. I’ve no
patience with young people when they drift. I wish I could live their
lives for them; I’d know how! But there it is; by the time you’ve
learned the short cuts, your feet puff up so that you can’t take the
road at all. Now tell me about your mother and my Lydia.”

I had hardly begun when she lifted one finger and sniffed the air.
“Do you get it? That bitter smell of the sea? It’s apt to come
in on the night wind. I live on it. Sometimes I can still take a
drive along the shore. Go on; you say that Lydia and your mother
are at present in disputation about the possession of your late
grandfather’s portrait. Why don’t you cut it in two for them, Nellie?
I remember it perfectly, and half of it would be enough for anybody!”

While I told her any amusing gossip I could remember about my family,
she sat crippled but powerful in her brilliant wrappings. She looked
strong and broken, generous and tyrannical, a witty and rather
wicked old woman, who hated life for its defeats, and loved it for
its absurdities. I recalled her angry laugh, and how she had always
greeted shock or sorrow with that dry, exultant chuckle which seemed
to say: “Ah-ha, I have one more piece of evidence, one more, against
the hideous injustice God permits in this world!”

While we were talking, the silence of the strangely balmy February
evening was rudely disturbed by the sound of doors slamming and heavy
tramping overhead. Mrs. Henshawe winced, a look of apprehension and
helplessness, a tortured expression, came over her face. She turned
sharply to her husband, who was resting peacefully in one of their
old, deep chairs, over by the muffled light. “There they are, those
animals!”

He sat up. “They have just come back from church,” he said in a
troubled voice.

“Why should I have to know when they come back from church? Why
should I have the details of their stupid, messy existence thrust
upon me all day long, and half the night?” she broke out bitterly.
Her features became tense, as from an attack of pain, and I realised
how unable she was to bear things.

“We are unfortunate in the people who live over us,” Oswald
explained. “They annoy us a great deal. These new houses are poorly
built, and every sound carries.”

“Couldn’t you ask them to walk more quietly?” I suggested.

He smiled and shook his head. “We have, but it seems to make them
worse. They are that kind of people.”

His wife broke in. “The palavery kind of Southerners; all that slushy
gush on the surface, and no sensibilities whatever--a race without
consonants and without delicacy. They tramp up there all day long
like cattle. The stalled ox would have trod softer. Their energy
isn’t worth anything, so they use it up gabbling and running about,
beating my brains into a jelly.”

She had scarcely stopped for breath when I heard a telephone ring
overhead, then shrieks of laughter, and two people ran across the
floor as if they were running a foot-race.

“You hear?” Mrs. Henshawe looked at me triumphantly. “Those two silly
old hens race each other to the telephone as if they had a sweetheart
at the other end of it. While I could still climb stairs, I hobbled
up to that woman and implored her, and she began gushing about ‘mah
sistah’ and ‘mah son,’ and what ‘rahfined’ people they were.... Oh,
that’s the cruelty of being poor; it leaves you at the mercy of such
pigs! Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some
sort of dignity.” She leaned back, exhausted, and shut her eyes.

“Come, Nellie,” said Oswald, softly. He walked down the hall to
my door with me. “I’m sorry the disturbance began while you were
there. Sometimes they go to the movies, and stay out later,” he said
mournfully. “I’ve talked to that woman and to her son, but they are
very unfeeling people.”

“But wouldn’t the management interfere in a case of sickness?”

Again he shook his head. “No, they pay a higher rent than we
do--occupy more rooms. And we are somewhat under obligation to the
management.”




[Illustration: (A tree with the sea in the distance)]

                                  II


I soon discovered the facts about the Henshawes’ present existence.
Oswald had a humble position, poorly paid, with the city traction
company. He had to be at his desk at nine o’clock every day except
Sunday. He rose at five in the morning, put on an old duck suit (it
happened to be a very smart one, with frogs and a military collar,
left over from prosperous times), went to his wife’s room and gave
her her bath, made her bed, arranged her things, and then got their
breakfast. He made the coffee on a spirit lamp, the toast on an
electric toaster. This was the only meal of the day they could have
together, and as they had it long before the ruthless Poindexters
overhead began to tramp, it was usually a cheerful occasion.

After breakfast Oswald washed the dishes. Their one luxury was a
private bath, with a large cupboard, which he called his kitchen.
Everything else done, he went back to his own room, put it in order,
and then dressed for the office. He still dressed very neatly, though
how he managed to do it with the few clothes he had, I could not
see. He was the only man staying in that shabby hotel who looked
well-groomed. As a special favour from his company he was allowed to
take two hours at noon, on account of his sick wife. He came home,
brought her her lunch from below, then hurried back to his office.

Myra made her own tea every afternoon, getting about in her
wheel-chair or with the aid of a cane. I found that one of the
kindest things I could do for her was to bring her some little
sandwiches or cakes from the Swedish bakery to vary her tinned
biscuit. She took great pains to get her tea nicely; it made her feel
less shabby to use her own silver tea things and the three glossy
English cups she had carried about with her in her trunk. I used
often to go in and join her, and we spent some of our pleasantest
hours at that time of the day, when the people overhead were usually
out. When they were in, and active, it was too painful to witness
Mrs. Henshawe’s suffering. She was acutely sensitive to sound and
light, and the Poindexters did tramp like cattle--except that their
brutal thumping hadn’t the measured dignity which the step of animals
always has. Mrs. Henshawe got great pleasure from flowers, too, and
during the late winter months my chief extravagance and my chief
pleasure was in taking them to her.

One warm Saturday afternoon, early in April, we went for a drive
along the shore. I had hired a low carriage with a kindly Negro
driver. Supported on his arm and mine, Mrs. Henshawe managed to
get downstairs. She looked much older and more ill in her black
broadcloth coat and a black taffeta hat that had once been smart. We
took with us her furs and an old steamer blanket. It was a beautiful,
soft spring day. The road, unfortunately, kept winding away from
the sea. At last we came out on a bare headland, with only one old
twisted tree upon it, and the sea beneath.

“Why, Nellie!” she exclaimed, “it’s like the cliff in _Lear_,
Gloucester’s cliff, so it is! Can’t we stay here? I believe this nice
darkey man would fix me up under the tree there and come back for us
later.”

We wrapped her in the rug, and she declared that the trunk of the old
cedar, bending away from the sea, made a comfortable back for her.
The Negro drove away, and I went for a walk up the shore because I
knew she wanted to be alone. From a distance I could see her leaning
against her tree and looking off to sea, as if she were waiting for
something. A few steamers passed below her, and the gulls dipped and
darted about the headland, the soft shine of the sun on their wings.
The afternoon light, at first wide and watery-pale, grew stronger and
yellower, and when I went back to Myra it was beating from the west
on her cliff as if thrown by a burning-glass.

She looked up at me with a soft smile--her face could still be
very lovely in a tender moment. “I’ve had such a beautiful hour,
dear; or has it been longer? Light and silence: they heal all one’s
wounds--all but one, and that is healed by dark and silence. I find I
don’t miss clever talk, the kind I always used to have about me, when
I can have silence. It’s like cold water poured over fever.”

I sat down beside her, and we watched the sun dropping lower toward
his final plunge into the Pacific. “I’d love to see this place at
dawn,” Myra said suddenly. “That is always such a forgiving time.
When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it’s as
if all our sins were pardoned; as if the sky leaned over the earth
and kissed it and gave it absolution. You know how the great sinners
always came home to die in some religious house, and the abbot or the
abbess went out and received them with a kiss?”

When we got home she was, of course, very tired. Oswald was waiting
for us, and he and the driver carried her upstairs. While we were
getting her into bed, the noise overhead broke out--tramp, tramp,
bang! Myra began to cry.

“Oh, I’ve come back to it, to be tormented again! I’ve two fatal
maladies, but it’s those coarse creatures I shall die of. Why didn’t
you leave me out there, Nellie, in the wind and night? You ought to
get me away from this, Oswald. If I were on my feet, and you laid
low, I wouldn’t let you be despised and trampled upon.”

“I’ll go up and see those people to-morrow, Mrs. Henshawe,” I
promised. “I’m sure I can do something.”

“Oh, don’t, Nellie!” she looked up at me in affright. “She’d turn a
deaf ear to you. You know the Bible says the wicked are deaf like the
adder. And, Nellie, she has the wrinkled, white throat of an adder,
that woman, and the hard eyes of one. Don’t go near her!”

(I went to see Mrs. Poindexter the next day, and she had just such a
throat and just such eyes. She smiled, and said that the sick woman
underneath was an old story, and she ought to have been sent to a
sanatorium long ago.)

“Never mind, Myra. I’ll get you away from it yet. I’ll manage,”
Oswald promised as he settled the pillows under her.

She smoothed his hair. “No, my poor Oswald, you’ll never stagger far
under the bulk of me. Oh, if youth but knew!” She closed her eyes and
pressed her hands over them. “It’s been the ruin of us both. We’ve
destroyed each other. I should have stayed with my uncle. It was
money I needed. We’ve thrown our lives away.”

“Come, Myra, don’t talk so before Nellie. You don’t mean it. Remember
the long time we were happy. That was reality, just as much as this.”

“We were never really happy. I am a greedy, selfish, worldly woman;
I wanted success and a place in the world. Now I’m old and ill and
a fright, but among my own kind I’d still have my circle; I’d have
courtesy from people of gentle manners, and not have my brains beaten
out by hoodlums. Go away, please, both of you, and leave me!” She
turned her face to the wall and covered her head.

We stepped into the hall, and the moment we closed the door we heard
the bolt slip behind us. She must have sprung up very quickly. Oswald
walked with me to my room. “It’s apt to be like this, when she has
enjoyed something and gone beyond her strength. There are times when
she can’t have anyone near her. It was worse before you came.”

I persuaded him to come into my room and sit down and drink a glass
of cordial.

“Sometimes she has locked me out for days together,” he said. “It
seems strange--a woman of such generous friendships. It’s as if she
had used up that part of herself. It’s a great strain on me when she
shuts herself up like that. I’m afraid she’ll harm herself in some
way.”

“But people don’t do things like that,” I said hopelessly.

He smiled and straightened his shoulders. “Ah, but she isn’t people!
She’s Molly Driscoll, and there was never anybody else like her. She
can’t endure, but she has enough desperate courage for a regiment.”




[Illustration: (A teapot, teacups and saucers, and an open book)]

                                 III


The next morning I saw Henshawe breakfasting in the restaurant,
against his custom, so I judged that his wife was still in retreat.
I was glad to see that he was not alone, but was talking, with
evident pleasure, to a young girl who lived with her mother at this
hotel. I had noticed her respectful admiration for Henshawe on other
occasions. She worked on a newspaper, was intelligent and, Oswald
thought, promising. We enjoyed talking with her at lunch or dinner.
She was perhaps eighteen, overgrown and awkward, with short hair and
a rather heavy face; but there was something unusual about her clear,
honest eyes that made one wonder. She was always on the watch to
catch a moment with Oswald, to get him to talk to her about music,
or German poetry, or about the actors and writers he had known. He
called her his little chum, and her admiration was undoubtedly a help
to him. It was very pretty and naïve. Perhaps that was one of the
things that kept him up to the mark in his dress and manner. Among
people he never looked apologetic or crushed. He still wore his topaz
sleeve-buttons.

On Monday, as I came home from school, I saw that the door of Mrs.
Henshawe’s room was slightly ajar. She knew my step and called to me:
“Can you come in, Nellie?”

She was staying in bed that afternoon, but she had on her best
dressing-gown, and she was manicuring her neat little hands--a good
sign, I thought.

“Could you stop and have tea with me, and talk? I’ll be good to-day,
I promise you. I wakened up in the night crying, and it did me
good. You see, I was crying about things I never feel now; I’d been
dreaming I was young, and the sorrows of youth had set me crying!”
She took my hand as I sat down beside her. “Do you know that poem of
Heine’s, about how he found in his eye a tear that was not of the
present, an old one, left over from the kind he used to weep? A tear
that belonged to a long dead time of his life and was an anachronism.
He couldn’t account for it, yet there it was, and he addresses it
so prettily: ‘Thou old, lonesome tear!’ Would you read it for me?
There’s my little Heine, on the shelf over the sofa. You can easily
find the verse, _Du alte, einsame Thräne_!”

I ran through the volume, reading a poem here and there where a leaf
had been turned down, or where I saw a line I knew well. It was a fat
old book, with yellow pages, bound in tooled leather, and on the
fly-leaf, in faint violet ink, was an inscription, “To Myra Driscoll
from Oswald,” dated 1876.

My friend lay still, with her eyes closed, and occasionally one of
those anachronistic tears gathered on her lashes and fell on the
pillow, making a little grey spot. Often she took the verse out of my
mouth and finished it herself.

“Look for a little short one, about the flower that grows on the
suicide’s grave, _die Armesünderblum’_, the poor-sinner’s-flower. Oh,
that’s the flower for me, Nellie; _die Arme--sünder--blum’_!” She
drew the word out until it was a poem in itself.

“Come, dear,” she said presently, when I put down the book, “you
don’t really like this new verse that’s going round, ugly lines about
ugly people and common feelings--you don’t really?”

When I reminded her that she liked Walt Whitman, she chuckled slyly.
“Does that save me? Can I get into your new Parnassus on that dirty
old man? I suppose I ought to be glad of any sort of ticket at
my age! I like naughty rhymes, when they don’t try to be pompous.
I like the kind bad boys write on fences. My uncle had a rare
collection of such rhymes in his head that he’d picked off fences and
out-buildings. I wish I’d taken them down; I might become a poet of
note! My uncle was a very unusual man. Did they ever tell you much
about him at home? Yes, he had violent prejudices; but that’s rather
good to remember in these days when so few people have any real
passions, either of love or hate. He would help a friend, no matter
what it cost him, and over and over again he risked ruining himself
to crush an enemy. But he never did ruin himself. Men who hate like
that usually have the fist-power to back it up, you’ll notice. He
gave me fair warning, and then he kept his word. I knew he would; we
were enough alike for that. He left his money wisely; part of it went
to establish a home for aged and destitute women in Chicago, where it
was needed.”

While we were talking about this institution and some of the refugees
it sheltered, Myra said suddenly: “I wonder if you know about a
clause concerning me in that foundation? It states that at any time
the founder’s niece, Myra Driscoll Henshawe, is to be received into
the institution, kept without charge, and paid an allowance of ten
dollars a week for pocket money until the time of her death. How like
the old Satan that was! Be sure when he dictated that provision to
his lawyer, he thought to himself: ‘She’d roll herself into the river
first, the brach!’ And then he probably thought better of me, and
maybe died with some decent feeling for me in his heart. We were very
proud of each other, and if he’d lived till now, I’d go back to him
and ask his pardon; because I know what it is to be old and lonely
and disappointed. Yes, and because as we grow old we become more and
more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery
strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood
when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is
inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.”

It had grown quite dusk while we talked. When I rose and turned on
one of the shrouded lights, Mrs. Henshawe looked up at me and smiled
drolly. “We’ve had a fine afternoon, and Biddy forgetting her ails.
How the great poets do shine on, Nellie! Into all the dark corners of
the world. They have no night.”

They shone for her, certainly. Miss Stirling, “a nice young person
from the library,” as Myra called her, ran in occasionally with new
books, but Myra’s eyes tired quickly, and she used to shut a new book
and lie back and repeat the old ones she knew by heart, the long
declamations from _Richard II_ or _King John_. As I passed her door I
would hear her murmuring at the very bottom of her rich Irish voice:

          _Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lan-cas-ter...._




[Illustration: (A closed door)]

                                  IV


One afternoon when I got home from school I found a note from Mrs.
Henshawe under my door, and went to her at once. She greeted me and
kissed me with unusual gravity.

“Nellie, dear, will you do a very special favour for me to-morrow?
It is the fifteenth of April, the anniversary of Madame Modjeska’s
death.” She gave me a key and asked me to open an old trunk in the
corner. “Lift the tray, and in the bottom, at one end, you will find
an old pair of long kid gloves, tied up like sacks. Please give them
to me.”

I burrowed down under old evening wraps and dinner dresses and came
upon the gloves, yellow with age and tied at both ends with corset
lacings; they contained something heavy that jingled. Myra was
watching my face and chuckled. “Is she thinking they are my wedding
gloves, piously preserved? No, my dear; I went before a justice of
the peace, and married without gloves, so to speak!” Untying the
string, she shook out a little rain of ten- and twenty-dollar gold
pieces.

“All old Irish women hide away a bit of money.” She took up a coin
and gave it to me. “Will you go to St. Joseph’s Church and inquire
for Father Fay; tell him you are from me, and ask him to celebrate
a mass to-morrow for the repose of the soul of Helena Modjeska,
Countess Bozenta-Chlapowska. He will remember; last year I hobbled
there myself. You are surprised, Nellie? Yes, I broke with the
Church when I broke with everything else and ran away with a German
free-thinker; but I believe in holy words and holy rites all the
same. It is a solace to me to know that to-morrow a mass will be
said here in heathendom for the spirit of that noble artist, that
beautiful and gracious woman.”

When I put the gold back into the trunk and started making the
tea, she said: “Oswald, of course, doesn’t know the extent of my
resources. We’ve often needed a hundred dollars or two so bitter
bad; he wouldn’t understand. But that is money I keep for unearthly
purposes; the needs of this world don’t touch it.”

As I was leaving she called me back: “Oh, Nellie, can’t we go to
Gloucester’s cliff on Saturday, if it’s fine? I do long to!”

We went again, and again. Nothing else seemed to give her so much
pleasure. But the third time I stopped for her, she declared she was
not equal to it. I found her sitting in her chair, trying to write
to an old friend, an Irish actress I had met at her apartment, in
New York, one of the guests at that New Year’s eve party. Her son, a
young actor, had shot himself in Chicago because of some sordid love
affair. I had seen an account of it in the morning paper.

“It touches me very nearly,” Mrs. Henshawe told me. “Why, I used to
keep Billy with me for weeks together when his mother was off on
tour. He was the most truthful, noble-hearted little fellow. I had so
hoped he would be happy. You remember his mother?”

I remembered her very well--large and jovial and hearty she was. Myra
began telling me about her, and the son, whom she had not seen since
he was sixteen.

“To throw his youth away like that, and shoot himself at
twenty-three! People are always talking about the joys of youth--but,
oh, how youth can suffer! I’ve not forgotten; those hot southern
Illinois nights, when Oswald was in New York, and I had no word from
him except through Liddy, and I used to lie on the floor all night
and listen to the express trains go by. I’ve not forgotten.”

“Then I wonder why you are sometimes so hard on him now,” I murmured.

Mrs. Henshawe did not reply to me at once. The corners of her mouth
trembled, then drew tight, and she sat with her eyes closed as if she
were gathering herself for something.

At last she sighed, and looked at me wistfully. “It’s a great pity,
isn’t it, Nellie, to reach out a grudging hand and try to spoil the
past for any one? Yes, it’s a great cruelty. But I can’t help it.
He’s a sentimentalist, always was; he can look back on the best of
those days when we were young and loved each other, and make himself
believe it was all like that. It wasn’t. I was always a grasping,
worldly woman; I was never satisfied. All the same, in age, when the
flowers are so few, it’s a great unkindness to destroy any that are
left in a man’s heart.” The tears rolled down her cheeks, she leaned
back, looking up at the ceiling. She had stopped speaking because
her voice broke. Presently she began again resolutely. “But I’m made
so. People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We
were.... A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see
what they have done to each other. Perhaps I can’t forgive him for
the harm I did him. Perhaps that’s it. When there are children, that
feeling goes through natural changes. But when it remains so personal
... something gives way in one. In age we lose everything; even the
power to love.”

“He hasn’t,” I suggested.

“He has asked you to speak for him, my dear? Then we have destroyed
each other indeed!”

“Certainly he hasn’t, Mrs. Myra! But you are hard on him, you know,
and when there are so many hard things, it seems a pity.”

“Yes, it’s a great pity.” She drew herself up in her chair. “And I’d
rather you didn’t come any more for the time being, Nellie. I’ve been
thinking the tea made me nervous.” She was smiling, but her mouth
curled like a little snake, as I had seen it do long ago. “Will you
be pleased to take your things and go, Mrs. Casey?” She said it with
a laugh, but a very meaning one.

As I rose I watched for some sign of relenting, and I said humbly
enough: “Forgive me, if I’ve said anything I shouldn’t. You know I
love you very dearly.”

She mockingly bowed her tyrant’s head. “It’s owing to me infirmities,
dear Mrs. Casey, that I’ll not be able to go as far as me door wid
ye.”




[Illustration: (Two lit candles in tall candlesticks)]

                                  V


For days after that episode I did not see Mrs. Henshawe at all. I
saw Oswald at dinner in the restaurant every night, and he reported
her condition to me as if nothing had happened. The short-haired
newspaper girl often came to our table, and the three of us
talked together. I could see that he got great refreshment from
her. Her questions woke pleasant trains of recollection, and her
straightforward affection was dear to him. Once Myra, in telling
me that it was a pleasure to him to have me come into their lives
again thus, had remarked: “He was always a man to feel women, you
know, in every way.” It was true. That crude little girl made all
the difference in the world to him. He was generous enough to become
quite light-hearted in directing her inexperience and her groping
hunger for life. He even read her poor little “specials” and showed
her what was worst in them and what was good. She took correction
well, he told me.

Early in June Mrs. Henshawe began to grow worse. Her doctors told us
a malignant growth in her body had taken hold of a vital organ, and
that she would hardly live through the month. She suffered intense
pain from pressure on the nerves in her back, and they gave her
opiates freely. At first we had two nurses, but Myra hated the night
nurse so intensely that we dismissed her, and, as my school was
closed for the summer, I took turns with Oswald in watching over
her at night. She needed little attention except renewed doses of
codeine. She slept deeply for a few hours, and the rest of the night
lay awake, murmuring to herself long passages from her old poets.

Myra kept beside her now an ebony crucifix with an ivory Christ. It
used to hang on the wall, and I had supposed she carried it about
because some friend had given it to her. I felt now that she had it
by her for a different reason. Once when I picked it up from her bed
to straighten her sheet, she put out her hand quickly and said: “Give
it to me. It means nothing to people who haven’t suffered.”

She talked very little after this last stage of her illness began;
she no longer complained or lamented, but toward Oswald her manner
became strange and dark. She had certain illusions; the noise
overhead she now attributed entirely to her husband. “Ah, there’s
he’s beginning it again,” she would say. “He’ll wear me down in the
end. Oh, let me be buried in the king’s highway!”

When Oswald lifted her, or did anything for her now, she was careful
to thank him in a guarded, sometimes a cringing tone. “It’s bitter
enough that I should have to take service from you--you whom I have
loved so well,” I heard her say to him.

When she asked us to use candles for light during our watches, and to
have no more of the electric light she hated, she said accusingly, at
him rather than to him: “At least let me die by candlelight; that is
not too much to ask.”

Father Fay came to see her almost daily now. His visits were long,
and she looked forward to them. I was, of course, not in her room
when he was there, but if he met me in the corridor he stopped to
speak to me, and once he walked down the street with me talking of
her. He was a young man, with a fresh face and pleasant eyes, and
he was deeply interested in Myra. “She’s a most unusual woman, Mrs.
Henshawe,” he said when he was walking down the street beside me.
Then he added, smiling quite boyishly: “I wonder whether some of the
saints of the early Church weren’t a good deal like her. She’s not at
all modern in her make-up, is she?”

During those days and nights when she talked so little, one felt
that Myra’s mind was busy all the while--that it was even abnormally
active, and occasionally one got a clue to what occupied it. One
night when I was giving her her codeine she asked me a question.

“Why is it, do you suppose, Nellie, that candles are in themselves
religious? Not when they are covered by shades, of course--I mean the
flame of a candle. Is it because the Church began in the catacombs,
perhaps?”

At another time, when she had been lying like a marble figure for a
long while, she said in a gentle, reasonable voice:

“Ah, Father Fay, that isn’t the reason! Religion is different from
everything else; _because in religion seeking is finding_.”

She accented the word “seeking” very strongly, very deeply. She
seemed to say that in other searchings it might be the object of the
quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental
that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it
was the seeking itself that rewarded.

One of those nights of watching stands out in my memory as embracing
them all, as being the burden and telling the tale of them all. Myra
had had a very bad day, so both Oswald and I were sitting up with
her. After midnight she was quiet. The candles were burning as usual,
one in her alcove. From my chair by the open window I could see her
bed. She had been motionless for more than an hour, lying on her
back, her eyes closed. I thought she was asleep. The city outside was
as still as the room in which we sat. The sick woman began to talk to
herself, scarcely above a whisper, but with perfect distinctness; a
voice that was hardly more than a soft, passionate breath. I seemed
to hear a soul talking.

“I could bear to suffer ... so many have suffered. But why must it be
like this? I have not deserved it. I have been true in friendship;
I have faithfully nursed others in sickness.... Why must I die like
this, alone with my mortal enemy?”

Oswald was sitting on the sofa, his face shaded by his hand. I looked
at him in affright, but he did not move or shudder. I felt my hands
grow cold and my forehead grow moist with dread. I had never heard a
human voice utter such a terrible judgment upon all one hopes for.
As I sat on through the night, after Oswald had gone to catch a few
hours of sleep, I grew calmer; I began to understand a little what
she meant, to sense how it was with her. Violent natures like hers
sometimes turn against themselves ... against themselves and all
their idolatries.




[Illustration: (A leaning tree on a hill overlooking the sea)]

                                  VI


On the following day Mrs. Henshawe asked to be given the Sacrament.
After she had taken it she seemed easier in mind and body. In the
afternoon she told Henshawe to go to his office and begged me to
leave her and let her sleep. The nurse we had sent away that day at
her urgent request. She wanted to be cared for by one of the nursing
Sisters from the convent from now on, and Father Fay was to bring one
to-morrow.

I went to my room, meaning to go back to her in an hour, but once
on my bed I slept without waking. It was dark when I heard Henshawe
knocking on my door and calling to me. As I opened it, he said in a
despairing tone: “She’s gone, Nellie, she’s gone!”

I thought he meant she had died. I hurried after him down the
corridor and into her room. It was empty. He pointed to her empty
bed. “Don’t you see? She has gone, God knows where!”

“But how could she? A woman so ill? She must be somewhere in the
building.”

“I’ve been all over the house. You don’t know her, Nellie. She can do
anything she wills. Look at this.”

On the desk lay a sheet of note paper scribbled in lead pencil:
“_Dear Oswald: My hour has come. Don’t follow me. I wish to be alone.
Nellie knows where there is money for masses._” That was all. There
was no signature.

We hurried to the police station. The chief sent a messenger out to
the men on the beat to warn them to be on the watch for a distraught
woman who had wandered out in delirium. Then we went to Father Fay.
“The Church has been on her mind for a long while,” said Henshawe.
“It is one of her delusions that I separated her from the Church. I
never meant to.”

The young priest knew nothing. He was distressed, and offered to help
us in our search, but we thought he had better stay at home on the
chance that she might come to him.

When we got back to the hotel it was after eleven o’clock. Oswald
said he could not stay indoors; I must be there within call, but he
would go back to help the police.

After he left I began to search Mrs. Henshawe’s room. She had worn
her heavy coat and her furs, though the night was warm. When I found
that the pair of Austrian blankets was missing, I felt I knew where
she had gone. Should I try to get Oswald at the police station? I
sat down to think it over. It seemed to me that she ought to be
allowed to meet the inevitable end in the way she chose. A yearning
strong enough to lift that ailing body and drag it out into the world
again should have its way.

At five o’clock in the morning Henshawe came back with an officer and
a Negro cabman. The driver had come to the station and reported that
at six last night a lady, with her arms full of wraps, had signalled
him at the side door of the hotel, and told him to drive her to the
boat landing. When they were nearing the landing, she said she did
not mean to stop there, but wanted to go farther up the shore, giving
him clear directions. They reached the cliff she had indicated. He
helped her out of the cab, put her rugs under the tree for her, and
she gave him a ten-dollar gold piece and dismissed him. He protested
that the fare was too much, and that he was afraid of getting into
trouble if he left her there. But she told him a friend was going to
meet her, and that it would be all right. The lady had, he said, a
very kind, coaxing way with her. When he went to the stable to put up
his horse, he heard that the police were looking for a woman who was
out of her head, and he was frightened. He went home and talked it
over with his wife, who sent him to report at head-quarters.

The cabman drove us out to the headland, and the officer insisted
upon going along. We found her wrapped in her blankets, leaning
against the cedar trunk, facing the sea. Her head had fallen forward;
the ebony crucifix was in her hands. She must have died peacefully
and painlessly. There was every reason to believe she had lived to
see the dawn. While we watched beside her, waiting for the undertaker
and Father Fay to come, I told Oswald what she had said to me about
longing to behold the morning break over the sea, and it comforted
him.




[Illustration: (An open letter with an envelope beside it)]

                                 VII


Although she had returned so ardently to the faith of her childhood,
Myra Henshawe never changed the clause in her will, which requested
that her body should be cremated, and her ashes buried “in some
lonely and unfrequented place in the mountains, or in the sea.”

After it was all over, and her ashes sealed up in a little steel box,
Henshawe called me into her room one morning, where he was packing
her things, and told me he was going to Alaska.

“Oh, not to seek my fortune,” he said, smiling. “That is for young
men. But the steamship company have a place for me in their office
there. I have always wanted to go, and now there is nothing to
hold me. This poor little box goes with me; I shall scatter her
ashes somewhere in those vast waters. And this I want you to keep
for remembrance.” He dropped into my hands the necklace of carved
amethysts she had worn on the night I first saw her.

“And, Nellie----” He paused before me with his arms folded, standing
exactly as he stood behind Modjeska’s chair in the moonlight on
that New Year’s night; standing like a statue, or a sentinel, I had
said then, not knowing what it was I felt in his attitude; but now
I knew it meant indestructible constancy ... almost indestructible
youth. “Nellie,” he said, “I don’t want you to remember her as she
was here. Remember her as she was when you were with us on Madison
Square, when she was herself, and we were happy. Yes, happier than
it falls to the lot of most mortals to be. After she was stricken,
her recollection of those things darkened. Life was hard for her, but
it was glorious, too; she had such beautiful friendships. Of course,
she was absolutely unreasonable when she was jealous. Her suspicions
were sometimes--almost fantastic.” He smiled and brushed his forehead
with the tips of his fingers, as if the memory of her jealousy was
pleasant still, and perplexing still. “But that was just Molly
Driscoll! I’d rather have been clawed by her, as she used to say,
than petted by any other woman I’ve ever known. These last years it’s
seemed to me that I was nursing the mother of the girl who ran away
with me. Nothing ever took that girl from me. She was a wild, lovely
creature, Nellie. I wish you could have seen her then.”

                  *       *       *       *       *

Several years after I said good-bye to him, Oswald Henshawe died in
Alaska. I have still the string of amethysts, but they are unlucky.
If I take them out of their box and wear them, I feel all evening
a chill over my heart. Sometimes, when I have watched the bright
beginning of a love story, when I have seen a common feeling exalted
into beauty by imagination, generosity, and the flaming courage of
youth, I have heard again that strange complaint breathed by a dying
woman into the stillness of night, like a confession of the soul:
“Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy!”

[Illustration: (Page number illustration)]




_This book is set in a type called Scotch. There is a divergence of
opinion regarding the origin of this face, some authorities holding
that it was first cut by Alexander Wilson & Son of Glasgow in 1833.
Whatever its origin, it is certain that the type was widely used in
Scotland where it was called Modern Roman, and since its introduction
into America has been known as Scotch._

  _The format, decorations and illustrations were made by W. A.
  Dwiggins and the book manufactured under the supervision of the
  Pynson Printers of New York. The press work and binding were done
  by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass., and the paper made by the
  H. C. Chalfant Mill._




                         Transcriber’s Notes


Except for obvious punctuation errors, which have been silently
corrected, original spelling and punctuation has been retained,
including inconsistent or archaic usage.

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

The page numbers in the original publication were embedded in the
same decorative illustration throughout; this illustration has been
included only once at the end of this Ebook.






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