The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories

“Well, what do you make of her?” the traveller asked, as we sat over our first dinner together.

“Too many things—and they don’t hang together. Perhaps she’s still in the chrysalis stage.”

“Has Paul chucked the scheme altogether?”

“No. He sent for me and we had a talk about it just before he sailed.”

“And what impression did you get?”

“That he had waited to send for me till just before he sailed.”

“Oh, there you go again!” I offered no denial, and after a pause he asked: “Did she ever talk to you about it?”

“Yes. Once or twice—in snatches.”

“Well—?”

“She thinks it all too beautiful. She would like to see beauty put within the reach of everyone.”

“And the practical side—?”

“She says she doesn’t understand business.”

Halidon rose with a shrug. “Very likely you frightened her with your ugly sardonic grin.”

“It’s not my fault if my smile doesn’t add to the sum-total of beauty.”

“Well,” he said, ignoring me, “next winter we shall see.”

But the next winter did not bring Ambrose back. A brief line, written in November from the Italian lakes, told me that he had “a rotten cough,” and that the doctors were packing him off to Egypt. Would I see the architects for him, and explain to the trustees? (The Academy already had trustees, and all the rest of its official hierarchy.) And would they all excuse his not writing more than a word? He was really too groggy—but a little warm weather would set him up again, and he would certainly come home in the spring.

He came home in the spring—in the hold of the ship, with his widow several decks above. The funeral services were attended by all the officers of the Academy, and by two of the young fellows who had won the travelling scholarships, and who shed tears of genuine grief when their benefactor was committed to the grave.

After that there was a pause of suspense—and then the newspapers announced that the late Paul Ambrose had left his entire estate to his widow. The board of the Academy dissolved like a summer cloud, and the secretary lighted his pipe for a year with the official paper of the still-born institution.

After a decent lapse of time I called at the house in Seventeenth Street, and found a man attaching a real- estate agent’s sign to the window and a van-load of luggage backing away from the door. The care-taker told me that Mrs. Ambrose was sailing the next morning. Not long afterward I saw the library table with the helmeted knights standing before an auctioneer’s door in University Place; and I looked with a pang at the familiar ink-stains, in which I had so often traced the geography of Paul’s visionary world.

Halidon, who had picked up another job in the Orient, wrote me an elegiac letter on Paul’s death, ending with —“And what about the Academy?” and for all answer I sent him a newspaper clipping recording the terms of the will, and another announcing the sale of the house and Mrs. Ambrose’s departure for Europe.

Though Ned and I corresponded with tolerable regularity I received no direct answer to this communication till about eighteen months later, when he surprised me by a letter dated from Florence. It began: “Though she tells me you have never understood her—” and when I had reached that point I laid it down and stared out of my office window at the chimney-pots and the dirty snow on the roof.

“Ned Halidon and Paul’s wife!” I murmured; and, incongruously enough, my next thought was: “I wish I’d bought the library table that day.”

The letter went on with waxing eloquence: “I could not stand the money if it were not that, to her as well as to me, it represents the sacred opportunity of at last giving speech to his inarticulateness …”

“Oh, damn it, they’re too glib!” I muttered, dashing the letter down; then, controlling my unreasoning resentment, I read on. “You remember, old man, those words of his that you repeated to me three or four years ago: ‘I’ve half a mind to leave my money in trust to Ned’? Well, it has come to me in trust—as if in mysterious fulfillment of his thought; and, oh, dear chap—” I dashed the letter down again, and plunged into my work.

III

“WON’T you own yourself a beast, dear boy?” Halidon asked me gently, one afternoon of the following spring.

I had escaped for a six weeks’ holiday, and was lying outstretched beside him in a willow chair on the terrace of their villa above Florence.

My eyes turned from the happy vale at our feet to the illuminated face beside me. A little way off, at the other end of the terrace, Mrs. Halidon was bending over a pot of carnations on the balustrade.

“Oh, cheerfully,” I assented.

“You see,” he continued, glowing, “living here costs us next to nothing, and it was quite her idea, our founding that fourth scholarship in memory of Paul.”

I had already heard of the fourth scholarship, but I may have betrayed my surprise at the plural pronoun, for the blood rose under Ned’s sensitive skin, and he said with an embarrassed laugh: “Ah, she so completely makes me forget that it’s not mine too.”

“Well, the great thing is that you both think of it chiefly as his.”

“Oh, chiefly—altogether. I should be no more than a wretched parasite if I didn’t live first of all for that!”

Mrs. Halidon had turned and was advancing toward us with the slow step of leisurely enjoyment. The bud of her beauty had at last unfolded: her vague enigmatical gaze had given way to the clear look of the woman whose