"I cannot see you to-night. Be generous, – understand me. Mr. Cedersholm leaves for Russia to-morrow, he has asked me as a last favour to let him see me. I have done him so much wrong that I cannot refuse him. Come early to-morrow morning, and we will walk in the Bois together.

"I am yours,
"Mary."

He read the letter before the footman, and the "yours, Mary" made his heart bound and his throat contract. He walked toward the Champs Elysées slowly, thinking. Cedersholm sailed to-morrow, away from France. He was sent away beaten, bruised, conquered. He must have loved her. No man could help it. Was this the beginning of Fairfax's triumph? Well, he could not help it – he was glad. Cedersholm had stolen his fire, the labour of his youth, and now he would not have been human if there had not been a thrill through him that the conqueror knows. He could spare him this farewell evening with the woman who signed herself "I am yours, Mary."

"Vade in Pace," he murmured.

Then the vision of the woman rose more poignant than anything else, and he saw her as she had stood under his hands, the tears in her eyes, and the fire and pallor of passion on her face.

What should he do now? Marry her, of course. He would be married, then, twice at thirty. He shook his broad shoulders as though instinctively he chafed under the sudden adjusting to them of a burden. He limped out into the Champs Elysées, under the rows of light where the lamps were like illumined oranges. The vehicles twinkled by like fire-flies in the mist. Before him was the Palais de l'Industrie and back of it stretched the Champ de Mars and Napoleon's tomb. The freedom of the night and the hour was sweet to him; and he dreamed as he limped slowly down the Avenue under the leafless trees. Probably wisdom would tell him that, if he married now, it would be the end of his career. Love was an inspiration, a sharp impelling power to art, but marriage, a home, another household, another hearth and family, beautiful as the picture was, seemed to him, even bright and keen as was his passion, to be captivity. And the memory of Albany came back to him, the cold winter months, the days on the engine, the blizzards against the tenement panes, household cares, small and petty, the buying of coal and food, and the constant duties which no man can shrink from and be a man, and which fret the free spirit of the creator. Moreover, the anguish of those days returned, biting his very entrails at the remembrance of his griefs, his remorse, his regrets. Molly by the study light, patient and wifely, rose before his eyes. There was his wife, and she seemed holy and stainless, set apart for that position and very perfect. He saw her lying pale and cold, beautiful as marble, with the little swathed form on her bosom, which had given and never nourished. He saw them both – his wife and child. Can a man begin over again? Can he create anew, perfectly anew, the same vision? He saw her go through the open door, holding it wide for him. So she should hold it at the last. He could give her this. He had defrauded her of so much. He could give to her to eternity a certain faithfulness.

He was exalted. He walked freely, with his head uplifted. It was a misty evening and the mists blew about him as he limped along in his student's cape, his spirit communing with his ideals and with his dead. Before, his visions took form and floated down the Avenue. Now they seemed unearthly, without any stain of human desire, without any worldly tarnish. He must be free. The latitude of his life must be unbounded by any human law, otherwise he would never attain. The flying forms were sexless and his eyes pursued them like a worshipper. They were angelic. For the moment he had emancipated himself from passion.

He reached the Place de la Concorde. It was ten o'clock. He could not go home to be questioned by Dearborn – indeed, he could not have stood a companion. He called a cab and told the man to drive him up to the Bois de Boulogne, and they rolled slowly up the Avenue down which he had just come. But in what position did he stand toward Mary Faversham? She had refused Cedersholm because she loved him and he loved her – more than he ever could love, more than he ever had loved. A cab passed him in which two forms were enlaced. The figures of two lovers blotted in the darkness. Along the alleys, under the winter trees, every now and then he saw other lovers walking arm-in-arm, even in winter warmed by the eternal fire. He touched his pocket where her note lay and his emotions stirred afresh.

He dreamed of her.

He had been tortured day by day, these weeks, by jealousy of Cedersholm, and this helped him on in his sentimental progress. They passed the street, which a moment before he had taken from her house, to come out upon the Champs Elysées. They rolled into the Bois, under the damp darkness and the night, and the forest odours came to him through the window of the cab. She would have to wait until he was rich and famous. As far as her fortune was concerned, if she loved him she could give it to the poor. He could tell her how to use it. She should never spend a cent of it on herself. He must be able to suffice for her and for him. Rich or poor, the woman who married him would have to take him as he was. On the lake the mists blew over the water. They lay white as spirits among the trees. Everything about the dark and silent night was beautiful to him, made beautiful by the sacred warfare in his own mind. Above all came the human eagerness to see her again, to touch her again, to tell his love, to hear her say what Dearborn's coming had prevented. And he would see her to-morrow morning. It was profanity to walk in these woods without her.

"Go back," he called to the coachman, "go back quietly to the Quais."

He hoped that he should be able to sleep and that the next day would come quickly. He became ardent and devoted as he dreamed, and all the way back his heart ached for her.

When he entered the studio and called Dearborn he received no response. There was a note from the playwright on the table – he would not be back until the next morning.

Fairfax, his hand under his pillow, crushed her letter, and the words: "I am yours, Mary," flushed his palm and his cheek.

He had been awake since dawn, fire in his blood and heart animating his brain and stimulating his creative power. In the early light he had seated himself to make a few sketches, drawing little exquisite studies of her, and the face on the paper was ideal, irritatingly so. The chin and the cheek was young and soft, too youthful for Mrs. Faversham. It suggested Bella.

When he went to see her that afternoon, for the first time he was shown upstairs. Each step was sacred to him as he mounted to the part of the house in which she lived her intimate life. The stairs were marble, covered by thick rugs; the iron balustrade had been brought from a château in the days of the Revolution. Along the wall at his side hung splendid tapestries, whose colours would have delighted him at another time. But his eyes now were blinded to material things. His soul, heart and nature were aflame, and he walked on air. When he was shown into a small room, Mrs. Faversham's own sitting-room, his agitation was so great that he seemed to walk through a mist.

She was not there. The day was fresh and the wood fire burning across the andirons called to him with a friendly voice. The objects by which she surrounded herself represented a fortune; the clock before him, which marked the hour in which he first came to see his love, had belonged to Marie Antoinette, and it beamed on the lover from its wise old clever face, – crystal water fell noiselessly, as the minutes passed, from a little golden mill over which watched two Loves like millers. There were her books on the table, bound with art and taste. There were her writing things on her desk, and a half-finished letter on the blotter. There was her "chaise-longue" with its protective pillows, its sable cover, and between the lace curtains Antony could see the trees of the park. On the footstool a Pekinese dog sat looking at him malevolently. It lifted its fluffy body daintily and raised its impertinent little face to the visitor. Then a door opened and she came in murmuring his name. Antony, seeing her through a mist of love which had not yet cleared, took her in his arms, calling her "Mary, Mary!" He felt the form and shape of her in his arms. As dream women had never given themselves to him, so she seemed to yield.

When they sat side by side on the little sofa the Pekinese dog jumped up and sat between them. She caressed it with one hand, laying the other on Antony's shoulder.

"I must tell you my life," he said, and his sight cleared as he spoke, and he saw her face transformed by its emotion, her eyes adoring and beautiful, her lips parted as if the breath of life he had given to her left her wondering still.

"Don't tell me of anything to-day."

He took the hand that lay on his shoulder and raised it. "I must tell you now."

"I ask for nothing, Antony. What does the past matter?" She bent forward and kissed him on his eyes. "I would like to think they had never looked at anything before to-day."

He smiled. "But they have looked hard at many things, Mary. They will always look deeply, and I want you to look back with me."

She sighed. "Then, forward with me." The Pekinese dog sprang into her lap. "Go on," she said docilely; "but I am so divinely happy! Why should we think of anything else?"

He brushed away the mist that threatened again to cloud his vision. He took her hand and held it firmly and, lifting up his head, began frankly to tell her of his past.

"I am a Southerner, born in New Orleans…"

As he talked she listened spellbound by his power of narrative. In his speech he was as charming a creator as in his art. She saw the picture of his Louisiana home; she saw the exquisite figure of his mother; she saw the beginning of his genius and his poetic, dreaming years. When he began the more realistic part of his story, talking aloud like this of himself for the first time to a woman he loved, he forgot her entirely, carried back by a strong force to the beginning of his struggles in New York. She listened, unchanged and a little terrified, as he told her of his work in the sculptor's studio, disguising the name of the man for whom he worked. She stopped him, her hand on his. So had she asked previously Cedersholm. Her voice brought him back to the present, to a feeling that for nothing in the world would he tell her yet, and he said "No, no," veiling the fact so that he could not guess, and passed over the misery of his master's treachery and his defeat. But through his narrative like a flame, charming, brilliant, vivifying, flashed the personality of Bella, though a child only, still a woman, and again Mary Faversham, with her hand on his stopped him —

"What a bewitching child," she said. "Don't speak of her with such fire. I believe you loved her! She must be a woman."

Antony stirred. He rose from the divan where he was sitting and crossed over to the fireplace and stood by the eighteenth-century clock where the crystal water fell with the passing moments. She looked at him as he stood there, powerfully built, strong, the light of his feeling and of his introspection kindling in his eyes and on his brow. It had been three o'clock when he began his story. The afternoon grew paler, the fire died down to ashes on the little hearth. He took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it and stood smoking a few moments. Then he went in his imagination to Albany and carried his hearer with him, and he began to speak of Molly. He waited for a moment before laying bare to her his intimate life. As he turned and met her eyes, he said —

"I do not know how to tell you this. You must listen as well as you can. It is life, you know, and there are many kinds."

Antony, absorbed in his speech, forgot her entirely. He told her of Molly Shannon with a tenderness that would have moved any woman. When he closed the chapter of his married life, with his last words a silence fell, and he saw that she was moved beyond what he had dreamed she would be. He went back to her, waited a moment, then sat down and put his arm around her.

"That is my past," he murmured. "Can you forget what there is in it of defeat and forget its sorrow?"

She kissed him and murmured: "I love you the better for it. It seems you have come to me through thorny ways, Antony. Perhaps I can make you forget them."

He did not tell her that she would. Even in this moment, when she was in his arms, he knew that in her there would be no such oblivion for him. The marks were too deep upon him. He felt them now. With what he had been saying, there came back to him a sense of the tremendous burden he had borne when poor, a sense of the common burden we all bear and which in the heart of the poet nothing ever entirely lifts.

"Listen," he said urgently and with a certain solemnity. "Any other man would speak to you about nothing but love. I can do it some day perhaps too easily, but not now, for this is our beginning and between us both there must be nothing to conceal." He thought she started a little, and said hastily: "I mean, nothing for our souls to hide. What I have told you is my life, but it does not end there. I adore my work. I am a worker born, I don't know how much of one, but I must give my time and my talent to it."

"I know, I know," she breathed. "Do you think I don't realize it, Antony? Do you think I don't adore you for it? Why, it is part of what makes me love you."

"That is all," he said. "I could no more emancipate myself from my work than I can from my ideals; they are part of me. I am perfectly poor."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, softly, "don't, don't speak of that."

He turned his fine eyes on her with a light in them whose courage and beauty she did not understand.

"Why not speak of it?" he asked quietly. "I am not ashamed of the fact that I have no money. Such as money is, I shall make it some day, and I shall not value it then any more than I do now. It is necessary, I begin to see, but only that. Its only importance is the importance we give to it: to keep straight with our kind; to justify our existence, and," he continued, "to help the next man."

His face took a firmer expression. More than in his recitation of his life he seemed to forget her. As he said so, his arms fell a little way away from her – she grew cold – he seemed a stranger. Only for a moment, however, for he turned, put out his arms, and drew her to him. He kissed her as he had not kissed her yet, and after a few moments said —

"Mary, I bring you my talent, and my manhood, and my courage – nothing else – and I want it to be enough for you."

She said that it was. That it was more than enough.

Fairfax sighed, his arms dropped, he smiled and looked at her, and said —

"I wonder if it is?" He glanced round the room quietly, with an arrogance of which he was unconscious. "You must give all this up, Mary."

"Must I?" She flushed and laughed. "You mean to say you want me to come to Bohemia?"

"I want you to live as I can live," he said, "share what I must have … that is, I should ask you that if you married me now …"

He watched her face. It was still illuminated. Her love for him was too vital to be touched by this proposition which she did not wholly understand.

"Most men shrink," Fairfax said, "from taking the woman they love from her luxuries. I believe that I shall not be poor very long. It will be a struggle. If you marry me now, you will share it with me, otherwise …" He waited a moment.

And she repeated: "Otherwise, Antony?"

"I shall go away," he answered, "and not come back again until I am rich and great."

CHAPTER XVII

After he had left her he was dazed and incredulous. His egoism, his enthusiasm, his idea of his own self-sufficiency seemed preposterous. A man in love should entertain no idea but the thought of the woman herself. He began to chafe at poverty which he had assured her made no difference to him. Did he wish to live again terrible years of sacrifice and sordidness? If so, he could not hope a woman accustomed to luxury would choose to share his struggle. He was absurd.

"Money," Dearborn said, regarding his shabby cuffs, "opens many doors. I am inclined also to think that it shuts many doors. You remember the Kingdom of Heaven and the needle's eye; but," he continued whimsically, "I should not think of comparing Mrs. Faversham to a camel, Tony!"

"Don't be an ass," said Antony, proudly. "Mrs. Faversham and I feel alike about it. Money will play no part in our mutual future." And, as he said this, was sure neither of her nor of himself.

"Under which circumstances," said his companion, "I shall offer you another cup of coffee and tell you my secret. Going with my play to London is not the only one. I am in love. When you have drunk your coffee we'll go home. Potowski is going to play for us, and he is going to bring his wife at last."

The two friends sat that evening in a corner of a café on the Boulevard Montparnasse. There were Bohemians around them at their table, and they themselves were part of that happy, struggling world. Dearborn dropped his voice, and said softly to Fairfax —

"And I have asked my little girl to come as well to-night to hear the music."

Fairfax, instead of drinking his coffee, stared at Dearborn, and when Dearborn murmured, "Nora Scarlet is her name. Isn't it a name for a drama?" Fairfax stared still harder and repeated the girl's name under his breath, flushing, but Dearborn did not observe it.

"I want you to see her, Tony; she is sweet and good."

"Bob," said Fairfax gravely, "you mean to tell me you have been falling in love and carrying on a romance without telling me a word about it?"

Dearborn smiled. "To tell the truth, old man," he replied, "you have been so absorbed; there was not room for two romances in the studio.

"I met her in the springtime, Gentle Annie," Dearborn said whimsically, "and it was raining cats and dogs – but for me it rained just love and Nora. We were both waiting for a 'bus. Neither one of us had an umbrella. Now that you speak of it, Tony, I think we have never mended that lack in our possessions. We climbed to the impériale together, and the rain beat upon us both. We laughed, and I said to myself, a girl that can laugh like that in a shower should be put aside for a rainy day. We talked and we giggled. The rain stopped. We forgot to get down. We went to the end of the line and still we forgot to get down. The conductor collected a double fare, and afterward I took her home."

(Antony thought to himself, "Just what I did not do.")

"She is angelic, Tony, delightful, an artist's dream, a writer's inspiration, and a poor man's fairy."

Fairfax laughed.

"Don't laugh, old man," said Dearborn simply. "I have never heard you rave like this about the peerless Mary."

Fairfax said, "No. But then you talk better than I do." He shook Dearborn's hand warmly. "You know I am most awfully glad, don't you?"

"I know I am," said Dearborn, lighting a cigarette.

He settled himself with a beautiful content, asking nothing better than to go on rehearsing his love affair.

"We have been engaged a long time, Tony. It is only a question of how little two people can dare to try to get on with, you know, and I have determined to risk it."

As they went up the steps of the studio together, Fairfax said —

"She is coming to-night, Bob, you say? Does she know anything about me?"

At this Dearborn laughed aloud. "She knows a great deal about me, Tony. My dear boy, do you think we have talked much about anything but each other? Do you talk with Mrs. Faversham about me? Nora knows I live here with a chum. She doesn't even know your name."

As Dearborn threw open the door they could hear Potowski playing softly the old French ballad, "J'ai perdu ma tourterelle."

A woman sat by Potowski in a big chair, and the lamp on the piano shone yellow upon her. When the two men entered the studio she rose, and Potowski, still playing, said —

"Let me present, at last, my better half. Mes amis, la Comtesse Potowski."

Dearborn greeted her enthusiastically, and Tony stood petrified. The comtesse, more mistress of the moment than Tony was, put out one hand and smiled, but she had turned very pale.

It was his Aunt Caroline…

"Mr. Rainsford," she lifted her brows, "I think I have seen you before."

Tony bowed over her hand and Potowski, still smiling and nodding, cried —

"These are great men and geniuses, ma chérie. You have here two great artists together. They both have wings on their shoulders. Before they fly away from us and are lost on Olympus, be charming to them. Carolina, ma chérie, they shall hear you sing."

Robert Dearborn put his hand on Potowski's shoulder and said —

"We love your husband, madame. He has been such a bully friend to us, such a wonderful friend."

"Poof, my dear Bobbie," murmured Potowski.

("J'ai perdu ma tourterelle.")

Fairfax asked, looking directly at her, "Will you really sing for us, Madame Potowski? Can you sing some old English ballad? We have not heard a word of English for many a long day."

Potowski wandered softly into a familiar tune. He smiled over his shoulder at his wife, and, standing by the piano, Caroline Carew – Carolina Potowski – put her hands over her husband's on the keys and indicated an accompaniment, humming.

"If you can, dear, I will sing Mr. Rainsford this."

Tony took his place on the divan.

Then Madame Potowski sang:

"Flow gently, sweet Afton."

In New York Tony had said, as he sat in the big Puritan parlour, that her voice was divine. No one who has ever heard Carolina Potowski sing "Flow gently, sweet Afton" can ever forget it. Tony covered his face with his hands and said to himself, being an artist as well, "No matter what she has done, it was worth it to produce such art as that."

"Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes

Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise,
My Mary is asleep by your turbulent stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream."

Little Gardiner once more leaned against his arm; restless little Bella in red, her hair down her back, slipped out of the room to read in peace, and he sat there, a homeless stranger in a Northern city without a cent of money in his pocket, and the desires of life and art shining in his soul.

"Flow gently, sweet Afton."

He indistinctly heard Dearborn open the door. A woman slipped in and went over and sat down by her lover. The two sat together holding hands, and "Sweet Afton" flowed on, and nobody's dream was disturbed. Little Gardiner slept his peaceful sleep in his child's grave; his mother slept her sleep in a Southern cemetery; the Angel of Resurrection raised his spotless wings over the city of the silent dead, and Antony's heart swelled in his breast.

When the Comtesse Potowski stopped singing no one said a word. Her husband played a few bars of Werther and she sang the "Love Letters." Then, before she ceased, Antony was conscious that Nora Scarlet had recognized him. Before any embarrassment could be between them, he went over to her and took her hand, saying warmly —

"I am so glad, Miss Scarlet. Dearborn has told me of his good fortune. He is the best fellow in the world, and I know how lucky he is," and Nora Scarlet murmured something, with her eyes turned away from him.

Tony turned to Madame Potowski and said ardently, "You must let me come to see you to-morrow. I want to thank you for this wonderful treat."

And when Potowski and his Aunt Caroline had gone, and when Dearborn had taken Nora Scarlet home, Antony stood in the studio, which still vibrated with the tones of the lovely voice. He had lived once again a part of his old life. This was his mother's sister, and she had made havoc of her home. He thought of little Bella's visit to him in Albany.

"Mother has done something perfectly terrible, Cousin Antony – something a daughter is not supposed to know."

Well, the something perfectly terrible was, she had set herself free from a man she did not love; that she was making Potowski happy; that she had found her sphere and soared into it.

Fairfax tried in vain to think of himself now and Mary Faversham, but he could not. The past rushed on him with its palpitating wings. He groaned and stretched out his arms into the shadows of the room.

"There is something that chains me, holds me prisoner. I am wedded to something – is it death and a tomb?"