“What did you say to me last night?” she asked.
“What did I say? I said—you asked me—I said it would be difficult.”
“Do you think so still?”
“Always.”
“Tristrem, I will be your wife.”
A Cimmerian led out of darkness into sudden light could not marvel more at multicolored vistas than did Tristrem, at this promise. Truly they are most hopeless who have hoped the most. And Tristrem, as he paced the rooms, had told himself it was done. His hopes had scattered before him like last year’s leaves. He had groped in shadows and had been conscious only of a blind alley, with a dead wall, somewhere, near at hand. But now, abruptly, the shadows had gone, the blind alley had changed into a radiant avenue, the dead wall had parted like a curtain, and beyond was a new horizon, gold-barred and blue, and landscapes of asphodels and beckoning palms. He was as one who, overtaken by sleep on the banks of the Styx, awakes in Arcadia.
His face was so eloquent with the bewitchments through which he roamed that, for the first time that evening, Miss Raritan smiled. She raised a finger warningly.
“Now, Tristrem, if you say anything ridiculous I will take it back.”
But the warning was needless. Tristrem caught the finger, and kissed her hand with old-fashioned grace.
“Viola,” he said, at last, “I thank you. I do not know what I can do to show how I appreciate this gift of gifts. But yet, if it is anything, if it can bring any happiness to a girl to know that she fills a heart to fulfilment itself, that she dwells in thought as the substance of thought, that she animates each fibre of another’s being, that she enriches a life with living springs, and feels that it will be never otherwise, then you will be happy, for so you will always be to me.”
The speech, if pardonably incoherent, was not awkwardly made, and it was delivered with a seriousness that befitted the occasion. In a tone as serious as his own, she answered:
“I will be true to you, Tristrem.” That was all. But she looked in his face as she spoke.
They had been standing, but now they found seats near to each other. Tristrem would not release her hand, and she let it lie unrebellious in his own. And in this fashion they sat and mapped the chartless future. Had Tristrem been allowed his way the marriage would have been an immediate one. But to this, of course, Miss Raritan would not listen.
“Not before November,” she said, with becoming decision.
“Why, that is five months off!”
“And months are short, and then—”
“But, Viola, think! Five months! It is a kalpa of time. And besides,” he added, with the cogent egotism of an accepted lover, “what shall I do with myself in the meantime?”
“If you are good you may come to the Pier, and there we will talk edelweiss and myosotis, as all engaged people do.” She said this so prettily that the sarcasm, if sarcasm there were, was lost.
To this programme Tristrem was obliged to subscribe.
“Well, then, afterward we will go abroad.”
“Don’t you like this country?” the girl asked, all the stars and stripes fluttering in her voice, and in a tone which one might use in reciting, “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead?”
“I think,” he answered, apologetically, “that I do like this country. It is a great country. But New York is not a great city, at least not to my thinking. Collectively it is great, I admit, but individually not, and that is to me the precise difference between it and Paris. Collectively the French amount to little, individually it is otherwise.”
“But you told me once that Paris was tiresome.”
“I was not there with you. And should it become so when we are there together, we have the whole world to choose from. In Germany we can have the middle ages over again. In London we can get the flush of the nineteenth century. There is all of Italy, from the lakes to Naples. We can take a doge’s palace in Venice, or a Caesar’s villa on the Baia. With a dahabieh we could float down into the dawn of history. You would look well in a dahabieh, Viola.”
“As Aida?”
“Better. And that reminds me, Viola; tell me, you will give up all thought of the stage, will you not?”
“How foolish you are. Fancy Mrs. Tristrem Varick before the footlights. There are careers open to a girl that the acceptance of another’s name must close. And the stage is one of them. I should have adopted it long ago, had it not been for mother. She seems to think that a Raritan—but there, you know what mothers are. Now, of course, I shall give it up. Besides, Italian opera is out of fashion. And even if it were otherwise, have I not now a lord, a master, whom I must obey?”
Her eyes looked anything but obedience, yet her voice was melodious with caresses.
And so they sat and talked and made their plans, until it was long past the conventional hour, and Tristrem felt that he should go. He had been afloat in unnavigated seas of happiness, but still in his heart he felt the burn of a red, round wound. The lie that Weldon had told smarted still, yet with serener spirit he thought there might be some unexplained excuse.
“Tell me,” he asked, as he was about to leave, “what was it Weldon said?”
Miss
