CHAPTER V
The next afternoon Ardly burst into Nevins's studio without knocking, and paused in the centre of the floor to give dignity to his announcement.
"I have seen her," he said.
Nevins, who was stretched upon the divan, with his feet in the air and a cigarette in his mouth, rolled his eyes indolently in Ardly's direction.
"My dear fellow," he returned, "am I to presume that the pronoun 'her' refers to an individual or to a sex?"
"Don't be an ass," retorted Ardly. "I tell you I've seen Mariana."
Nevins turned upon his side and removed the cigarette from his lips.
"Where?" he responded, shortly.
"She was coming out of Thorley's. She wore an acre of violets. She has a footman in livery."
"How do you know it was she?"
"Well, I'll be damned! Don't I know Mariana?"
Nevins sat up and rested his head in his hands.
"How did she look?" he asked.
"Stunning. She has an air about her – "
"Always had."
"Oh, a new kind of air; the way a woman moves when she is all silk on the wrong side."
Nevins nodded.
"Speak to you?"
"I didn't give her a chance," returned Ardly, gloomily. "What's the use?"
The knocker rose and fell, and Mr. Paul entered, as unaltered as if he had stepped aside while the eight years slid by.
Nevins greeted him with a slight surprise, for they had drifted different ways.
"Glad to see you," he said, hospitably; "but this is an unusual honor."
"It is unusual," admitted Mr. Paul, seating himself stiffly on the edge of the divan.
"I am afraid to flatter myself with the hope that a whisper of my spreading fame has brought you," continued Nevins, nodding affably.
Mr. Paul looked up absently. "I have heard no such rumor," he replied, and regarded the floor as if impressed with facts of import.
"Perhaps it is your social charm," suggested Ardly; "or it may be that in passing along Fifty-fifth Street he felt my presence near."
Nevins frowned at him and lighted a fresh cigarette.
"I hope you are well, Mr. Paul," he remarked.
Mr. Paul looked up placidly.
"I may say," he returned, "that I am never well."
"Sorry to hear it."
There was a period of silence, which Mr. Paul broke at last in dry tones.
"I have occasion to know," he announced, "that the young woman whom we knew by the name of Mariana, to which I believe she had no legal title, has returned to the city."
Nevins jumped. "You don't say so!" he exclaimed.
"My information," returned Mr. Paul, "was obtained from the elevator boy who took her to the apartment of Miss Ramsey."
"Did she go to see Miss Ramsey?" demanded Nevins and Ardly in a breath.
Mr. Paul shook his head.
"I do not know her motive," he said, "but she has taken Miss Ramsey away. For three days we have had no news of her."
The knocker fell with a decisive sound. Nevins rose, went to the door, and opened it. Then he started back before the apparition of Mariana.
She was standing near the threshold, her hand raised as when the knocker had fallen, her head bent slightly forward.
With an impulsive gesture she held out her gloved hands, her eyes shining.
"Oh, I am so glad!" she said.
Nevins took her hands in his and held them while he looked at her. She was older and graver and changed in some vital way, as if the years or sorrow had mellowed the temperament of her youth. There was a deeper thrill to her voice, a softer light in her eyes, and a gentler curve to her mouth, and over all, in voice and eyes and mouth, there was the shadow of discontent.
She wore a coat of green velvet, with ruffles of white showing at the loosened front, where a bunch of violets was knotted, and over the brim of her hat a plume fell against the aureole of her hair.
"I am so glad," she repeated. Then she turned to Ardly with the same fervent pressure of the hands.
"It is too good to be true," she went on. "It is like dropping back into girlhood. Why, there is dear Mr. Paul!"
Mr. Paul rose and accepted the proffered hands.
"You have fattened, madam," he remarked, with a vague idea that she had in some way connected herself with a title.
Mariana's old laugh pealed out.
"Why, he is just as he used to be," she said, glancing brightly from Ardly to Nevins in pursuit of sympathy. "He hasn't changed a bit."
"The changes of eight years," returned Mr. Paul, "are not to be detected by a glance."
Mariana nodded smilingly and turned to Nevins.
"Now let me look at
you
," she said. "Come under the light. Ah! you haven't been dining at The Gotham."
"Took my last dinner there exactly six years ago next Thanksgiving Day," answered Nevins, cheerfully. "Turkey and pumpkin-pie."
She turned her eyes critically on Ardly.
"Well, he has survived his sentiment for me," she said.
Ardly protested.
"I don't keep that in the heart I wear on my sleeve," he returned. "You would need a plummet to sound the depths, I fancy."
Mariana blushed and laughed, the faint color warming the opaline pallor of her face. Then she glanced about the room.
"So this is the studio," she exclaimed, eagerly – "the studio we so often planned together – and there is the divan I begged for! Ah, and the dear adorable 'Antinous.' But what queer stuff for hangings!"
"If you had sent me word that you were coming," returned Nevins, apologetically, passing his hands over his hair in an endeavor to make it lie flat, "I'd have put the place to rights, and myself too."
"Oh, but I wanted to see you just as you are every day. It is so home-like – and what a delightful smell of paint! But do you always keep your boots above the canopy? They spoil the effect somehow."
"I tossed them up there to get rid of them," explained Nevins. "But tell me about yourself. You look as if you had just slid out of the lap of luxury."
"Without rumpling her gown," added Ardly.
"I was about to observe that she seemed in prosperous circumstances," remarked Mr. Paul.
"Oh, I am," responded Mariana. "Stupidly prosperous. But let me look at the paintings first, then I'll talk of myself. What is on the big easel, Mr. Nevins?"
"That's a portrait," said Nevins, drawing the curtain aside and revealing a lady in black. "I am only a photographer in oils. I am painting everybody's portrait."
"That means success, doesn't it? And success means money, and money means so many things. Yes, that's good. I like it."
Nevins smiled, enraptured.
"You were the beginning," he said. "It was the painting of you and – and the blue wrapper that did it. It gave me such a push uphill that I haven't stood still since."
The wistfulness beneath the surface in Mariana's eyes deepened suddenly. Her manner grew nervous.
"Oh yes," she said, turning away. "I remember."
Mr. Paul, who had watched her gloomily, with traces of disapprobation in his gaze, took his leave with a stilted good-bye, and Mariana threw herself upon the divan, while Ardly and Nevins seated themselves on footstools at her feet and looked into her eyes.
"I want to hear all – all," she said. "Are you happy?"
"Are you?" asked Ardly.
She shook her head impatiently. "I? Oh yes," she answered. "I have clothes, and a carriage, and even a few jewels."
She slipped the long glove from her hand, which came soft and white from its imprisonment, with the indentation of the buttons on the supple wrist. She held up her fingers, where a blaze of diamonds ran. Then she smiled.
"But I never sang with Alvary," she added.
"Where is the voice?"
"It is dead," she replied; "but it was only a skeleton when it lived. I learned that afterwards. I had the artistic temperament without the art."
Nevins and Ardly, watching the mobility of her face, saw the old half-disdainful weariness steal back.
"So you have learned that," said Nevins. "It is the greater wisdom – to learn what one has not."
"I don't idealize any longer," answered Mariana, playing with the glove in her lap. "I have lopped off an ideal every hour since I saw you."
"Sensible woman," returned Ardly. "We don't lop off our ideals – we distort them. Life is a continuous adjustment of the things that should be to the things that are."
"And middle-age shows the adjustment to be a misfit," added Nevins, his boyish face growing almost sad. "We grow tired of burnishing up the facts of life, and we leave the tarnish to mix with the triple-plate."
"Are you middle-aged?" asked Mariana.
"Not since you entered."
She smiled, pleased with the flattery. "So I am a restorer of youth. Do I look young?"
"There is a glass."
She turned towards it, catching the reflection of her face shadowed by the plume against her hair.
"Your eyes are older," said Nevins. "They look as if they had seen things, but your mouth is young. It could never hold an expression long enough for it to impress a line. Heavens! It is a mouth that would madden one to model, because of the impossibility! It is twenty mouths in one!"
"You never liked my nose," said Mariana, her eyes still on the glass. "Do you remember how you straightened it in the poster?"
"I have the poster still."
"And I have the nose."
Then she laughed. "It is so delightful to be here," she said.
Ardly and Nevins talked rapidly, running over the years one by one, giving glimpses of the changes in their lives, meeting Mariana's gay reserve with fuller confidence. They had both grown boyish and more buoyant, and as they spoke they felt like an incoming tide the warmth of Mariana's manner. She seemed more lovable to them, more generous, more utterly to be desired. Her nature had ripened amid the luxury of her life, which, instead of rendering her self-centred, as poverty had done, had left her more responsive to the needs of others. She threw herself into the records of their lives with an impulsive fervor, stopping them at intervals to question as to details, and covering the past eight years with sympathetic search-lights.
And yet beneath the superficial animation in her voice there was a restless thrill, and the eagerness with which she turned to trivial interests was but the nervous veil that hid the weariness in her heart. It was as if she plunged into the thoughts of others that she might put away the memory of herself.
"So you have become a politician?" she said to Ardly. "I am so interested!"
"You wouldn't be if you knew as much of it as I do," remarked Nevins. "You'd be ashamed. It makes me blush every time I see his name on a ticket. I consider it an offence against the paths of our fathers."
"Why, Mr. Ryder told me you were working for him," Mariana returned; "but he did say that he couldn't reconcile it with your common-sense. He's for the other side, you know."
"So am I!" groaned Nevins; "but what has a man's convictions to do with his vote?"
"Or with his election?" laughed Ardly. "But Nevins is an unwilling accomplice of my aspirations."
"I wouldn't call them aspirations," remonstrated Nevins.
Mariana buttoned her glove and rose. "I am going to work for you," she said, "and my influence is not to be scorned. I have not one vote, but dozens. I shall elect you."
"Don't," pleaded Nevins; "it will soil your hands!"
"Oh, I can wash them!" she laughed; "and it is worth a few smuts. I shall tell Mr. Ryder to canvass for you," she added.
Ardly shouted, "Good heavens! He is one of the best fighters the Republicans have!"
Mariana smiled inscrutably.
"But that was before I had a candidate," she answered.
They followed her to the sidewalk and tucked her carriage furs about her while the footman looked on.
"And you are coming to see me soon?" she insisted – "very soon?"
"We swear it!" they protested.
"And you will tell me all the news of the elections?"
"On our manly faith."
"That I will trust. Good-bye!"
"Good-bye!"
The carriage started, when suddenly she lowered the window and looked out, the plume in her hat waving black against the wind.
"I forgot to tell you," she said; "my name is Gore – Mrs. Cecil Gore."
With the light of audacity in his face, Nevins laid his hand upon the window.
"And where is the Honorable Cecil?" he asked.
A flash of irritation darkened Mariana's eyes. She laughed with a ring of recklessness.
"The Lord forbid that I should know!" she replied.
She motioned to the coachman, and the carriage rolled rapidly away. Nevins stood looking after it until it turned the corner. When the last wheel vanished, he spoke slowly:
"Well, I'll be blessed!" he said.
Ardly stooped and picked up a violet that lay upon the curbing.
"And so will I," he responded.
"Have a whiskey?"
"All right."
They entered the building and mounted the stairs in silence.
CHAPTER VI
The Reverend Anthony Algarcife had inspired his congregation with an almost romantic fervor.
When he had first appeared before them as assistant to Father Speares in his Bowery Mission, and a little later as server in the celebrations, they regarded him as a thoughtful-eyed young priest, whose appearance fitted into the general scheme of color in the chancel. When he read the lessons they noticed the richness of his voice, and when at last he came to the altar-step to deliver his first sermon they thrilled into the knowledge of his power.
But he turned from their adulations almost impatiently to throw himself into the mission in the slums. His eloquence had passed from the rich to the poor, and beyond an occasional sermon he became only a harmonious figure in the setting of the church. For the honors they meted out to him he had no glance, for their favors he had only indifference. He seemed as insensible to praise as to censure, and to the calls of ambition his ears were closed. He lived in the fevered haste of a man who has but one end remaining – to have life over.
But his indifference redounded to his honor. Because he shunned popularity, it fell upon him; because he put aside personal gains, he found them in the reverence of his people. His apathy was construed into humility, his compassion into loving-kindness, his endeavors to stifle memory into the fires of faith. At the end of six years his determination to remain a cipher in religion had made him the leader of his church, and the means which he had taken to annihilate self had drawn on him the wondering eyes of his world. Almost unconsciously he bowed his head to receive the yoke.
When, at the death of Father Speares, he was called to the charge, he accepted it without a struggle and without emotion. He saw in it but an opening to heavier labor and an opportunity to hasten the progress of his slow suicide.
So he took the work from the failing hands and devoted to it the fulness of his own frenzied vigor. The ritual which his predecessor loved became sacred to him, and the most trivial ceremonials grew mighty with memory of the dead. Each candle upon the altar, each silken thread in the embroidered vestments he wore, was a tribute to a sincerity which was not his.
He lent a sudden fervor to the decoration of the church and to the training of his choristers, passionately reviving lost and languishing rites of religion, and silencing the faint protests of his more conservative parishioners by an arrogant appeal to the "Ornaments Rubric" of the Prayer-book. In defiance of the possible opposition of the bishop, he transposed the "Gloria" to its old place in the Catholic Mass, hurling, like an avenging thunderbolt, at a priestly objector to the good old rule of St. Vincent, "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus."
"My dear father," his senior warden had once said to him, "I doubt if most priests put as much work into their whole lives as you do into one celebration."
"I know," replied Father Algarcife slowly. "If I have left anything undone it has been from oversight, not fear of labor."
The warden smiled.
"Your life is a proof of your industry as well as your faith," he responded. "Only a man who loves his religion better than his life would risk himself daily. It is your great hold upon your people. They believe in you."
"Yes, yes," said the other.
"But I have wanted to warn you," continued the warden. "It cannot last. Give yourself rest."
Father Algarcife shook his head.
"I rest only when I am working," he answered, and he added, a little wistfully, "The parish bears witness that I have done my best by the charge."
The warden, touched by the wistfulness, lowered his eyes. "That you have done any man's best," he returned.
"Thank you," said Father Algarcife. Then he passed into the sacristy to listen to the confession of a parishioner.
It was a tedious complaint, and he followed it abstractedly – winding through the sick imaginings of a nervous woman and administering well-worn advice in his rich voice, which lent a charm to the truisms. When it was over, he advised physical exercise, and, closing the door, seated himself to await the next comer.
It was Miss Vernish, and as she entered, with her impatient limp, the bitterness of her mouth relaxed. She was supervising the embroidering of the vestments to be worn at Easter, and in a spirit of devotion she had sacrificed her diamonds to their ornamentation. Her eyes grew bright as she talked, and a religious warmth softened her manner.
"It has made me so happy," she said, "to feel that I can give something beautiful to the service. It is the sincerest pleasure I have known for years."
She left, and her place was taken by a young divinity student who had been drawn from law to theology by the eloquence of Father Algarcife. He had come to obtain the priest's advice upon a matter of principle, and departed with a quickening of his religious tendencies.
Then came several women, entering with a great deal of rustling and no evident object in view. Then a vestryman to talk over a point in business; then the wife of a well-known politician, to ask if she should consent to her husband's accepting a foreign appointment; then a man who wished to be confirmed in his church; and, after all, Mrs. Ryder, large and warm and white, to say that since the last communion she had felt herself stronger to contend with disappointment.
When it was over and he came out into the evening light, he drew himself together with a quick movement, as if he had knelt in a strained position for hours. Vaguely he wondered how his nerves had sustained it, and he smiled half bitterly as he admitted that eight years ago he would have succumbed.
"It is because my nerves are dead," he said; "as dead as my emotions."
He knew that since the pressure of feeling had been lifted the things which would have overwhelmed him in the past had lost the power to thrill his supine sensations, that from a mere jangled structure of nerve wires he had become a physical being – a creature who ate and drank and slept, but did not feel.
He went about his daily life as methodically as if it were mapped out for him by a larger hand. His very sermons came to him with no effort of will or of memory, but as thoughts long thought out and forgotten sometimes obtrude themselves upon the mind that has passed into other channels. They were but twisted and matured phrases germinating since his college days. The old fatal facility for words remained with him, though the words had ceased to be symbols of honest thought. He could still speak, it was only the ability to think that the fever had drained – it was only the power to plod with mental patience in the pursuit of a single fact. Otherwise he was unchanged. But as every sensation is succeeded by a partial incapacity, so the strain of years had been followed by years of stagnation.
He went home to dinner with a physical zest.
"I believe I have one sentiment remaining," he said, "the last a man loses – the sentiment for food."
The next evening, which chanced to be that of Election Day, Dr. Salvers came to dine with him, and when dinner was over they went out to ascertain the returns. Salvers had entered the fight with an enthusiastic support of what he called "good government," and the other watched it with the interest of a man who looks on.
"Shall we cross to Broadway?" he asked; "the people are more interesting, after all, than the politicians."
"The politicians," responded Salvers, "are only interesting viewed through the eyes of the people. No, let's keep to the avenue for a while. I prefer scenting the battle from afar."
The sounds grew louder as they walked on, becoming, as they neared Madison Square, a tumultuous medley issuing from tin horns and human throats. Over the ever-moving throngs in the square a shower of sky-rockets shot upward at the overhanging clouds and descended in a rain of orange sparks. The streets were filled with a stream of crushed humanity, which struggled and pushed and panted, presenting to a distant view the effect of a writhing mass of dark-bodied insects. From the tower of the Garden a slender search-light pointed southward, a pale, still finger remaining motionless, while the crowd clamored below and the fireworks exploded in the blackness above.
Occasionally, as the white light fell on the moving throng, it exaggerated in distinctness a face here and there, which assumed the look of a grotesque mask, illuminated by an instantaneous flash and fading quickly into the half-light of surrounding shadows. Then another took its place, and the illumination played variations upon the changing features.
Suddenly a shrill cheer went up from the streets.
"That means Vaden," said Salvers. "Let's move on."
They left the square, making their way up Broadway. At the first corner a man offered them papier-maché tigers, at the second roosters, at the third chrysanthemums.
"Look at this," said Salvers, drawing aside. "Odd for women, isn't it? Half these girls don't know what they are shrieking about."
In the throng jostling past them there were a dozen school-girls, wearing yellow chrysanthemums in their button-holes and carrying small flags in their hands. The light from the windows fell upon their pretty faces, rosy from excitement. Behind them a gang of college students blew deafening blasts on tin trumpets, and on the other side a newsboy was yelling —
"
Eve-ning Wor-ld!
Vaden elected! – Va-den – !"
His voice was drowned in the rising cheers of men politically mad.
"I'll go to the club," said Salvers, presently; "this is too deuced democratic. Will you come?"
Father Algarcife shook his head.
"Not now," he replied. "I'll keep on to Herald Square, then I'll turn in. The fight is over."
And he passed on.
Upon a white sheet stretched along the side of the
Herald
building a stereopticon portrait of a candidate appeared, followed by a second, and then by the figures of the latest returns from the election boroughs. Here the crowd had stagnated, and he found difficulty in forcing his way. Then, as the mass swayed back, a woman fainted at his side and was carried into the nearest drug-store.
In the endeavor to reach Fifth Avenue he stepped into the centre of the street, where a cable car, a carriage, and a couple of hansom cabs were blocked. As he left the sidewalk the crowd divided, and the carriage started, while a horse attached to a cab shied suddenly. A woman stumbled beneath the carriage and he drew her away. As he did so the wheel of the cab struck him, stunning him for the moment.
"Look out, man!" called Nevins, who was seated beside the coachman upon the carriage-box; "that was an escape. Are you hurt? Here, hold on!"
At the same moment the door opened and a hand reached out.
"Come inside," said a woman's voice.
He shook his head, dizzy from the shock. Red lights flashed before his eyes, and he staggered.
Then the crowd pressed together, some one pushed him into the carriage, and the door closed.
"To Father Algarcife's house," said the voice. A moment more and the horses started. Consciousness escaped him, and he lay against the cushions with closed eyes. When he came to himself, it was to hear the breathing of the woman beside him – a faint insistence of sound that seemed a vital element in the surrounding atmosphere. For an instant it lulled him, and then, as reason returned, the sound brought in its train the pale survivals of old associations. Half stunned as he was, it was by feeling rather than conception that he became aware that the woman was Mariana. He was conscious of neither surprise nor emotion. There was merely a troublous sense of broken repose and a slight bitterness always connected with the thought of her – a bitterness that was but an after-taste of his portion of gall and wormwood.
He turned his head upon the cushions and looked at her as she sat beside him. She had not spoken, and she sat quite motionless, her fitful breathing alone betraying the animation of flesh. Her head was in the shadow, but a single ray of light fell across her lap, showing her folded hands in their long gloves. He smelled the fragrance of the violets she wore, but the darkness hid them.
Surging beneath that rising bitterness, the depths of his memory stirred in its sleep. He remembered the day that he had stood at the window of that Fourth Street tenement, watching the black-robed figure enter the carriage below. He saw the door close, the wheels turn, and the last upward glance she gave. Then he saw the long street flecked with sunshine stretching onward into the aridity of endless to-morrows.
Strange that he remembered it after these eight years. The woman beside him stirred, and he recalled in that same slow bitterness the last kiss he had put upon her mouth. Bah! It meant nothing.
But his apathy was rended by a sudden fury – an instinct of hate – of cruelty insatiable. An impulse to turn and strike her through the darkness – to strike her until he had appeased his thirst for blood.
The impulse passed as quickly as it came, fleeing like a phantom of delirium, and in its place the old unutterable bitterness welled back. His apathy reclosed upon him.
The carriage turned a corner, and a blaze of light fell upon the shadow of the seat. It swept the white profile and dark figure of Mariana, and he saw the wistfulness in her eyes and the maddening tremor of her mouth. But it did not move him. He was done with such things forever.
All at once she turned towards him.
"You are not hurt?"
"It was nothing."
She flinched at the sound of his voice, and the dusk of the cross-street shrouded them again. The hands in her lap fluttered nervously, running along the folds of her dress.
Suddenly the carriage stopped, and Nevins jumped down from the box and swung the door open.
"Are you all right?" he asked, and his voice was unsteady.
"All right," responded Father Algarcife, cheerfully. He stepped upon the sidewalk, staggered slightly, and caught Nevins's arm. Then he turned to the woman within the carriage. "I thank you," he said.
He entered the rectory, and Nevins came back and got inside the carriage.
"Will you go home?" he asked, with attempted lightness. "The returns from the Assembly districts won't be in till morning, but Ardly is sure."
M