“You have not taken him?” she began by way of reconnaissance.
That afternoon Fanny had visited ruins. There were others more personal that she was viewing then, the ruins of fair things not dead but destroyed.
“Answer me,” Mrs. Price commanded.
The girl started. But she had been far away—in that lovely land where dreams come true and then, it may be, turn into nightmares. Through the dreams hand in hand with Loftus she had been strolling. Now she must put them all away.
“Answer me,” Mrs. Price repeated.
“I am afraid so.”
Into a misty and deserted parlor of the Inn Mrs. Price pulled the girl and there let fire.
“Afraid! You ought to be! What will your father say?”
The father here projected was a gentleman who resided abroad and who seldom opened his mouth except to put something in it.
“And Fred!”
Fred was Fanny’s brother, a young chap whose opinions were of no value to anyone, himself included.
“And everybody!”
Everybody was the upper current of social life.
“And Sylvia!”
The earlier shots had not inflicted any visible damage, but this must have told.
“I shall have to write to her,” Fanny with unusual meekness replied.
“Yes, do. Do by all means. Tell her you have taken her leavings. And why? Merciful heavens, why? If you were as staid and stiff as she I could understand. But a girl like you, with your tastes, your extravagances, a girl with a national reputation for beauty, to go and accept twenty-five thousand a year is—is—sinful, that’s what it is. Your own father has that, and on it we are out at elbows. It is just about enough for you to dress on. Oh, Fanny, Fanny!”
Hysterically the old lady waved her hands. “Oh, Fanny, I have so prayed that you would make a brilliant match. I have scrimped and saved that you might, and you go and take a blond beast of a pauper. It is too cruel!”
Fanny winced. It was cruel. But the cruelty was not hers. It was Fate’s. She too had hoped for the very marriage her mother had so ardently desired. But Loftus had not cared. Occupied elsewhere he had sailed away. As well then Annandale as another.
“You see, you know,” she said in a wretched effort at smoothing things over, “he is quite a hero.”
But this was too much. Mrs. Price shook her head like a battle horse and fairly neighed.
“Because he saved your clothes? If it had been your life and you had said ‘Thank you’ it would have been ample. But your clothes! Not mine; the beast had not sense enough for that, but yours! I do hope you will give that as an excuse to Sylvia!”
X
A Victim
Sylvia had gone from Newport. She was then at Lenox. It was there the previous autumn that her interest in Annandale had begun. The interest had so deepened that she gave him her heart. Never before had she given that to anyone. Annandale had taken it and then, one night, he had so bruised it that she thought it broken. He had written that he had not meant to. His letter had been full of regrets, of protestations, of bad grammar. Such things may palliate, but they do not cure. Only time can do that.
Time is a strange emollient. In its mysterious potency it softens without our knowledge. Suddenly a whisper, a breeze that passes, shows that it has done its work. With Sylvia time was having its will. Furtively she had found herself wondering, as Annandale had wondered, how it should fare with her, and how with him, could the past be effaced and the old days renewed. But those days were gone, she decided. Though into that decision a doubt would creep, not indeed concerning the departure, but concerning her attitude and the justice of it.
Annandale had sinned. He had sinned wantonly, grievously. From an atmosphere of vice—an atmosphere from which, under pain of her displeasure, she had distinctly warned him—he had staggered to her, its pollution about him, reeking with drink, talking abundantly about nothing imaginable, and at her just remonstrance had become instantly irritable, refusing almost to leave the house.
So had his condition and the spectacle of it shocked her that, for awhile, memory of him and of it was repellent. In her own eyes she felt degraded. That men drank, she knew. But in her sphere of life they drank either moderately or else in haunts invisible to her. And it was precisely from such a haunt he had come, a shameless haunt, one that sullied her even to know of.
Yes, he had sinned, wantonly, grievously, almost unforgivably. Almost, she reflected, but perhaps not quite. In his letter of protest and regret he had told her that he remembered nothing, nothing whatever, absolutely nothing at all, save one vague, brief vision of herself. The rest, the beginning, the end, the inter-spaces were, he assured her, blank. At first she had thought that sheer nonsense. But, later, the earnest way in which it was put impressed her. Then on the heels of that communication there had followed one from Orr, endorsing what Annandale said, declaring that it was all quite possible, adding that, in certain temperaments, memory when influenced by toxics will play tricks stranger than the average mind can comfortably credit.
These letters she had not answered. Logically she could not admit the validity of the statements which they contained. But the heart has logic which logic does not know. Then, too, is there not that within us that prompts us to believe less what we should than what we wish? Sylvia’s reason, guided by her inexperience, refused at first to accept the idea that any sane man could act as Annandale had and afterward be oblivious of it. That remorse there should be was only natural,
