“Just the man for her. Nicholas was so sorry he couldn’t come. Trement, you know, is a connection of ours. I even had a hand in his bringing up.”
“I was sure of it.”
“And how impressive you did make the service! Ah! here they are.”
About the corner bride and groom had turned. The face of the latter was flushed as were he the sacrifant; the former held her head erect, and her mouth seemed at the slightest provocation prepared to bubble into laugh.
There was a gurgle, a hum, an undulant shout, and they had gone. Through the open doorway Miss Pickett threw a slipper which hit the coachman on the cheek. Tandem had obtained a handful of rice, which he scattered lavishly in the air. And as the brougham drove off, Yarde was seen, his head bent, fumbling at the nape of his neck for a furtive grain that had lodged in his collar.
For a while yet the guests lingered, companioned by Gonfallon and Ruth. Then, little by little, the handful diminished and shrunk, until husband and wife were alone.
“It will be dreary without Claire, will it not?” Ruth remarked as the ultimate loiterer passed from the house. There was no doubt about it—Dr. McMasters was not only a physician, but a sorcerer as well. The neuralgia which had fed upon her had been exorcised long since.
In the adjoining room the maid was busy with the detritus of the wedding-feast.
“Will it not?” she repeated, and, without waiting for an answer, suddenly her arm had wound about him, and for a moment her head rested on his breast. Then, conscious, seemingly, of the presence of the maid, she moved from him, and Gonfallon, turning on his heel, entered the study again.
On the floor before him the prayerbook lay, and he stooped to pick it up. It was not large—hardly bigger than a good resolution—but as prayerbooks go it was a gem. The text was illuminated, and for binding it had tortoiseshell clamped with gold. In the morning Ruth had brought it to him with the request that he would use it at the service which was to be. And now as he raised it from the floor it opened in his hand. On the flyleaf was an inscription in characters thin as hair: “To Ruth, from her loving sister. Christmas, .” And as he read it he understood why the request had been made.
Idly he turned the pages. Between the covenants of the marriage-pact a blue flower had been pressed. During the agitations of the ceremony it had been unnoticed, but now something about it seemed to evoke a memory, and he went back again to the slopes and intervales of Bronx. Idly still he turned the leaves. Before the psalm “With my whole heart thy praise I will proclaim” another flower had been placed, but this one was yellow, as though the hope of the first betokened had mellowed with fulfilment. And as he turned again, facing the collect for Ash-Wednesday he found a clipping from some Poets’ Corner, a bit of schoolgirl verse:
I wait for the story: the birds cannot sing it, Not one, as he sits on the tree, The bells cannot ring it, but long years, oh, bring it, Such as I wish it to be.
He read it twice, and very gently, almost reverently, he put the book aside. Anger seemed to take itself visibly away; he saw it leaving him, and made no effort to detain. Already hatred was departing, and in its train an illusion had unmasked. “It is not I that love you,” someone was saying; “it is Ruth.”
He had fallen in a chair, and sat, his face buried in his hands. Back again from the past one memory after another came to him unreproached: first his wooing of her, her shy willingness, the sweet profanation, the earliest reluctant kiss, then the altar-rail, the blush of girlhood abandoned, the wifely solicitude, the unalterable charm with which illness had coped in vain, the tenderness of her nature, the unwavering allegiance, the trust, the belief, the pride in him.
“It is I,” he mused, “with whom she covenanted, it is I whose praise she proclaimed. I am the story she waited.” And, raising his face from his hands, he added, “If that story were only true!”
Already the afternoon had taken itself off. And as the light decomposed and decreased, something that was like to weariness seemed to fill the room. On the ceiling an uncertain dimness gathered. Here and there a gilt nail on the woodwork detained as with a pin a fringe of the mantle of day, but in the background was a somnolence in which objects disappeared mysteriously, one by one. In the corners shadows came and crouched. Under the chairs pits had formed, and out of them crept an obscurity which effaced and devoured the floor. On the ceiling the dimness deepened, the crouching shadows elongated and lapped the walls. A rumble from the street put an accent on the gloom, and presently, by way of vespers, the voice of the housemaid chanting “Jesus loves me” climbed on a treble from the regions below.
For a little space Gonfallon moved uneasily. Then, when night had wholly come, he found his way from the study, and groped through the darkness to Ruth.
A Transient Guest
I
Since the Koenig Wilhelm, of the Dutch East India Service, left Batavia, the sky had been torpidly blue, that suffocating indigo which seems so neighborly that the traveller fancies were he a trifle taller he could touch it with the ferule of his stick. When night came, the stars would issue from their ambush and stab it through and through, but the glittering cicatrices which they made left it bluer even, more persistent than before. And now, as the ship entered the harbor, there was a cruelty about it that exulted and defied. The sun, too, seemed to
