Tales of Men and Ghosts

shattered past. “You mean, then, that you didn’t write because—”

“Because I found, when I reached America, that I was a pauper; that my wife’s money was gone, and that what I could earn—I’ve so little gift that way!—was barely enough to keep Juliet clothed and educated. It was as if an iron door had been suddenly locked andbarred between us.”

Lizzie felt herself driven back, panting upon the last defenses of her incredulity. “You might at least have told me—have explained. Do you think I shouldn’t have understood?”

He did not hesitate. “You would have understood. It wasn’tthat.”

“What was it then?” she quavered.

“It’s wonderful you shouldn’t see! Simply that I couldn’t write you that. Anything else—not that!”

“And so you preferred to let me suffer?”

There was a shade of reproach in his eyes. “I suffered too,” he said.

It was his first direct appeal to her compassion, and for a moment it nearly unsettled the delicate poise of her sympathies, and sent them trembling in the direction of scorn and irony. Buteven as the impulse rose, it was stayed by another sensation. Once again, as so often in the past, she became aware of a fact which, in his absence, she always failed to reckon with—the fact of thedeep irreducible difference between his image in her mind and hisactual self, the mysterious alteration in her judgment produced by the inflections of his voice, the look of his eyes, the whole complex pressure of his personality. She had phrased it once self-reproachfully by saying to herself that she “never could rememberhim,” so completely did the sight of him supersede the counterfeit about which her fancy wove its perpetual wonders. Bright and breathing as that counterfeit was, it became a gray figment of the mind at the touch of his presence; and on this occasion the immediate result was to cause her to feel his possible unhappiness with an intensity beside which her private injury paled.

“I suffered horribly,” he repeated, “and all the more that Icouldn’t make a sign, couldn’t cry out my misery. There was onlyone escape from it all—to hold my tongue, and pray that you might hate me.”

The blood rushed to Lizzie’s forehead. “Hate you—you prayed that I might hate you?”

He rose from his seat, and moving closer, lifted her hand gently in his. “Yes; because your letters showed me that, if youdidn’t, you’d be unhappier still.”

Her hand lay motionless, with the warmth of his flowing through it, and her thoughts, too—her poor fluttering stormy thoughts—felt themselves suddenly penetrated by the same soft current of communion.

“And I meant to keep my resolve,” he went on, slowly releasing his clasp. “I meant to keep it even after the random stream of things swept me back here in your way; but when I saw you the other day, I felt that what had been possible at a distance was impossible now that we were near each other. How was it possibleto see you and want you to hate me?”

He had moved away, but not to resume his seat. He merely paused at a little distance, his hand resting on a chair-back, inthe transient attitude that precedes departure.

Lizzie’s heart contracted. He was going, then, and this washis farewell. He was going, and she could find no word to detainhim but the senseless stammer “I never hated you.”

He considered her with his faint grave smile. “It’s not necessary, at any rate, that you should do so now. Time and circumstances have made me so harmless—that’s exactly why I’ve dared to venture back. And I wanted to tell you how I rejoice inyour good fortune. It’s the only obstacle between us that I can’t bring myself to wish away.”

Lizzie sat silent, spellbound, as she listened, by the sudden evocation of Mr. Jackson Benn. He stood there again, between herself and Deering, perpendicular and reproachful, but less solid and sharply outlined than before, with a look in his small hard eyes that desperately wailed for reembodiment.

Deering was continuing his farewell speech. “You’re rich now, you’re free. You will marry.” She vaguely saw him holding out his hand.

“It’s not true that I’m engaged!” she broke out. They were the last words she had meant to utter; they were hardly related to her conscious thoughts; but she felt her whole will suddenly gathered up in the irrepressible impulse to repudiate and fling away from her forever the spectral claim of Mr. Jackson Benn.

VII

IT was the firm conviction of Andora Macy that every object in the Vincent Deerings’ charming little house at Neuilly had been expressly designed for the Deerings’ son to play with.

The house was full of pretty things, some not obviously applicable to the purpose; but Miss Macy’s casuistry was equal tothe baby’s appetite, and the baby’s mother was no match for them in the art of defending her possessions. There were moments, in fact, when Lizzie almost fell in with Andora’s summary division of her works of art into articles safe or unsafe for the baby to lick, or resisted it only to the extent of occasionally substituting some less precious or less perishable object for the particular fragility on which her son’s desire was fixed. And it was with this intention that, on a certain fair spring morning—which worethe added luster of being the baby’s second birthday—she had murmured, with her mouth in his curls, and one hand holding a bitof Chelsea above his dangerous clutch: “Wouldn’t he rather have that beautiful shiny thing over there in Aunt Andorra’s hand?”

The two friends were together in Lizzie’s little morning-room—the room she had chosen, on acquiring the house, because, when she sat there, she could hear Deering’s step as he paced up and down before his easel in the studio she had built for him. His step had been less regularly audible than she had hoped, for, after three years of wedded bliss, he had somehow failed to settle downto the great work which was to result from that privileged state; but even when she did not hear him she knew that he was there, above her head, stretched out on the old divan from Passy, and smoking endless cigarettes while he skimmed the morning papers; and the sense of his nearness had not yet lost its first keen edge of bliss.

Lizzie herself, on the day in question, was engaged in a more arduous task than the study of the morning’s news. She had neverunlearned the habit of orderly activity, and the trait she least understood in her husband’s character was his way of letting the loose ends of life hang as they would. She had been disposed at first to ascribe this to the chronic incoherence of his first menage; but now she knew that, though he basked under therule of her beneficent hand, he would never feel any active impulse to further its work. He liked to see things fall into place about him at a wave of her wand; but his enjoyment of her household magic in no way diminished his smiling irresponsibility, and it was with one of its least amiable consequences that his wife and her friend were now dealing.