A CONSUMING FIRE
He is a man who has failed in this life, and says he has no chance of success in another; but out of the fragments of his failures he has pieced together for himself a fabric of existence more satisfying than most of us make of our successes. It is a kind of triumph to look as he does, to have his manner, and to preserve his attitude toward advancing years—those dreaded years which he faces with pale but smiling lips.
If you would see my friend Hayden, commonly called by his friends the connoisseur, figure to yourself a tall gentleman of sixty-five, very erect still and graceful, gray-headed and gray-bearded, with fine gray eyes that have the storm-tossed look of clouds on a windy March day, and a bearing that somehow impresses you with an idea of the gracious and pathetic dignity of his lonely age.
I myself am a quiet young man, with but one gift—I am a finished and artistic listener. It is this talent of mine which wins for me a degree of Hayden’s esteem and a place at his table when he has a new story to tell. His connoisseurship extends to everything of human interest, and his stories are often of the best.
The last time that I had the honor of dining with him, there was present, besides the host and myself, only his close friend, that vigorous and successful man, Dr. Richard Langworthy, the eminent alienist and specialist in nervous diseases. The connoisseur evidently had something to relate, but he refused to give it to us until the pretty dinner was over. Hayden’s dinners are always pretty, and he has ideals in the matter of china, glass, and napery which it would require a woman to appreciate. It is one of his accomplishments that he manages to live like a gentleman and entertain his friends on an income which most people find quite inadequate for the purpose.
After dinner we took coffee and cigars in the library.
On the table, full in the mellow light of the great lamp (Hayden has a distaste for gas), was a bit of white plush on which two large opals were lying. One was an intensely brilliant globe of broken gleaming lights, in which the red flame burned strongest and most steadily; the other was as large, but paler. You would have said that the prisoned heart of fire within it had ceased to throb against the outer rim of ice. Langworthy, who is wise in gems, bent over them with an exclamation of delight.
“Fine stones,” he said; “where did you pick them up, Hayden?”
Hayden, standing with one hand on Langworthy’s shoulder, smiled down on the opals with a singular expression. It was as if he looked into beloved eyes for an answering smile.
“They came into my possession in a singular way, very singular. It interested me immensely, and I want to tell you about it, and ask your advice on something connected with it. I am afraid you people will hardly care for the story as much as I do. It’s—it’s a little too rococo and sublimated to please you, Langworthy. But here it is:
“When I was in the West last summer, I spent some time in a city on the Pacific slope which has more pawnbrokers’ shops and that sort of thing in full sight on the prominent streets than any other town of the same size and respectability that I have ever seen. One day, when I had been looking in the bazaars for something a little out of the regular line in Chinese curios and didn’t find it, it occurred to me that in such a cosmopolitan town there might possibly be some interesting things in the pawn-shops, so I went into one to look. It was a common, dingy place, kept by a common, dingy man with shrewd eyes and a coarse mouth. Talking to him across the counter was a man of another type. Distinction in good clothes, you know, one is never sure of. It may be only that a man’s tailor is distinguished. But distinction in indifferent garments is distinction indeed, and there before me I saw it. A young, slight, carelessly dressed man, his bearing was attractive and noteworthy beyond anything I can express. His appearance was perhaps a little too unusual, for the contrast between his soft, straw-colored hair and wine-brown eyes was such a striking one that it attracted attention from the real beauty of his face. The delicacy of a cameo is rough,” added the connoisseur, parenthetically, “compared to the delicacy of outline and feature in a face that thought, and perhaps suffering, have worn away, but this is one of the distinctive attractions of the old. You do not look for it in young faces such as this.
“On the desk between the two men lay a fine opal—this one,” said Hayden, touching the more brilliant of the two stones. “The younger man was talking eagerly, fingering the gem lightly as he spoke. I inferred that he was offering to sell or pawn it.
“The proprietor, seeing that I waited, apparently cut the young man short. He started, and caught up the stone. ‘I’ll give you—’ I heard the other say, but the young man shook his head, and departed abruptly. I found nothing that I wanted in the place, and soon passed out.
“In front of a shop-window a little farther down the street stood the other man, looking in listlessly with eyes that evidently saw nothing. As I came by he turned and looked into my face. His eyes fixed me as the Ancient Mariner’s did the Wedding Guest. It was an appealing yet commanding look, and I—I felt constrained to stop. I couldn’t help it, you know. Even at my age one is not beyond feeling the force of an imperious attraction, and when you are past sixty you ought to be thankful on your knees for any emotion that is imperative in its nature. So I stopped beside him. I said: ‘It is a fine stone you were showing that man. I have a great fondness for opals. May I ask if you were offering it for sale?’
“He continued to look at me, inspecting me calmly, with a fastidious expression. Upon my word, I felt singularly honored when, at the end of a minute or two, he said: ‘I should like to show it to you. If you will come to my room with me, you may see that, and another;’ and he turned and led the way, I following quite humbly and gladly, though surprised at myself.
“The room, somewhat to my astonishment, proved to be a large apartment—a front room high up in one of the best hotels. There were a good many things lying about which obviously were not hotel furnishings, and the walls, the bed, and even the floor were covered with a litter of water-color sketches. Those that I could see were admirable, being chiefly impressions of delicate and fleeting atmospheric effects.
“I took the chair he offered. He stood, still looking at me, apparently not in haste to show me the opals. I looked about the room.
“‘You are an artist?’ I said.
“‘Oh, I used to be, when I was alive,’ he answered, drearily. ‘I am nothing now.’ And then turning away he fetched a little leather case, and placed the two opals on the table before me.
“‘This is the one I have always worn,’ he said, indicating the more brilliant. ‘That chillier one I gave once to the woman whom I loved. It was more vivid then. They are strange stones—strange stones.’
“He said nothing more, and I sat in perfect silence, only dreading that he should not speak again. I am not making you understand how he impressed me. In the delicate, hopeless patience of his face, in the refined, uninsistent accents of his voice, there was somehow struck a note of self-abnegation, of aloofness from the world, pathetic in any one so young.
“I am old. There is little in life that I care for. My interests are largely affected. Wine does not warm me now, and beauty seems no longer beautiful; but I thank Heaven I am not beyond the reach of a penetrating human personality. I have at least the ordinary instincts for convention in social matters, but I assure you it seemed not in the least strange to me that I should be sitting in the private apartment of a man whom I had met only half an hour before, and then in a pawnbroker’s shop, listening eagerly for his account of matters wholly personal to himself. It struck me as the most natural and charming thing in the world. It was just such chance passing intercourse as I expect to hold with wandering spirits on the green hills of paradise.
“It was some time before he spoke again.
“‘I saw her first,’ he said, looking at the paler opal, as if it was of that he spoke, ‘on the street in Florence. It was a day in April, and the air was liquid gold. She was looking at the Campanile, as if she were akin to it. It was the friendly grace of one lily looking at another. Later, I met her as one meets other people, and was presented to her. And after that the days went fast. I think she was the sweetest woman God ever made. I sometimes wonder how He came to think of her. Whatever you may have missed in life,’ he said, lifting calm eyes to mine, and smiling a little, ‘you whose aspect is so sweet, decorous, and depressing, whose griefs, if you have griefs, are the subtle sorrows of the old and unimpassioned’—I remember his phrases literally. I thought them striking and descriptive,” confessed Hayden—“‘I hope you have not missed that last touch of exaltation which I knew then. It is the most exquisite thing in life. The Fates must hate those from whose lips they keep that cup.’ He mused awhile and added, ‘There is only one real want in life, and that is comradeship—comradeship with the divine, and that we call religion; with the human, and that we call love.’
“‘Your definitions are literature,’ I ventured to suggest, ‘but they are not fact. Believe me, neither love nor religion is exactly what you call it. And there are other things almost as good in life, as surely you must know. There is art, and there is work which is work only, and yet is good.’
“‘You speak from your own experience?’ he said, simply.
“It was a home thrust. I did not, and I knew I did not. I am sixty-five years old, and I have never known just that complete satisfaction which I believe arises from the perfect performance of distasteful work. I said so. He smiled.
“‘I knew it when I set my eyes upon you, and I knew you would listen to me and my vaporing. Your sympathy with me is what you feel toward all forms of weakness, and in the last analysis it is self-sympathy. You are beautiful, not strong,’ he added, with an air of finality, ‘and I—I am like you. If I had been a strong man.... Christ!’
“I enjoyed this singular analysis of myself, but I wanted something else.
“‘You were telling me of the opals,’ I suggested.
“‘The opals, yes. Opals always made me happy, you know. While I wore one, I felt a friend was near. My father found these in Hungary, and sent them to me—two perfect jewels. He said they were the twin halves of a single stone. I believe it to be true. Their mutual relation is an odd one. One has paled as the other brightened. You see them now. When they were both mine, they were of almost equal brilliancy. This,’ touching the paler, ‘is the one I gave to her. You see the difference in them now. Hers began to pale before she had worn it a month. I do not try to explain it, not even on the ground of the old superstition. It was not her fault that they made her send it back to me. But the fact remains; her opal is fading slowly; mine is burning to a deeper red. Some day hers will be frozen quite, while mine—mine—’ his voice wavered and fell on silence, as the flame of a candle fighting against the wind flickers and goes out.
“I waited many minutes for him to speak again, but the silence was unbroken. At last I rose. ‘Surely you did not mean to part with either stone?’ I said.
“He looked up as if from a dream. ‘Part with them? Why should I sell my soul? I would not part with them if I were starving. I had a minute’s temptation, but that is past now.’ Then, with a change of manner, ‘You are going?’ He rose with a gesture that I felt then and still feel as a benediction. ‘Good-by. I wish for your own sake that you had not been so like my poor self that I knew you for a friend.’
“We had exchanged cards, but I did not see or hear of him again. Last week these stones came to me, sent by some one here in New York of his own name—his executor. He is dead, and left me these.
“It is here that I want your counsel. These stones do not belong to me, you know. It is true that we are like, as like as blue and violet. But there is that woman somewhere—I don’t know where; and I know no more of their story than he told me. I have not cared to be curious regarding it or him. But they loved once, and these belong to her. Do you suppose they would be a comfort or a curse to her? If—if—” the connoisseur evidently found difficulty in stating his position. “Of course I do not mean to say that I believe one of the stones waned while the other grew more brilliant. I simply say nothing of it; but I know that he believed it, and I, even I, feel a superstition about it. I do not want the light in that stone to go out; or if it should, or could, I do not want to see it. And, besides, if I were a woman, and that man had loved me so, I should wish those opals.” Here Hayden looked up and caught Langworthy’s amused, tolerant smile. He stopped, and there was almost a flush upon his cheek.
“You think I am maudlin—doting—I see,” he said. “Langworthy, I do hope the Lord will kindly let you die in the harness. You haven’t any taste for these innocent, green pastures where we old fellows must disport ourselves, if we disport at all. Now, I want to know if it would be—er—indelicate to attempt to find out who she is, and to restore the stones to her?”
Langworthy, who had preserved throughout his usual air of strict scientific attention, jumped up and began to pace the room.
“His name?” he said.
Hayden gave it.
“I know the man,” said Langworthy, almost reluctantly. “Did any one who ever saw him forget him? He was on the verge of melancholia, but what a mind he had!”
“How did you know him, Langworthy?” asked Hayden, with pathetic eagerness.
“As a patient. It’s a sad story. You won’t like it. You had better keep your fancies without the addition of any of the facts.”
“Go on,” said Hayden, briefly.
“They live here, you know. He was the only son. He unconsciously acquired the morphine habit from taking quantities of the stuff for neuralgic symptoms during a severe protracted illness. After he got better, and found what had happened to him, he came to me. I had to tell him he would die if he didn’t break it off, and would probably die if he did. ‘Oh, no matter,’ he said. ‘What disgusts me is the idea that it has taken such hold of me.’ He did break it off directly and absolutely. I never knew but one other man who did that thing. But between the pain and the shock from the sudden cessation of the drug, his mind was unbalanced for awhile. Of course the girl’s parents broke off the engagement. I knew they were travelling with him last summer. It was a trying case, and the way he accepted his own weakness touched me. At his own request he carried no money with him. It was a temptation when he wanted the drug, you see. It must have been at some such moment, when he contemplated giving up the struggle, that you met him in the pawn-shop.”
“I am glad I knew enough to respect him even there,” murmured Hayden, in his beard.
“Oh, you may respect him, and love him if you like. He died a moral hero, if a mental and physical wreck. That is as good a way as any, or ought to be, to enter another life—if there is another life.”
“And the woman?” asked the connoisseur.
“Keep the opals, Hayden; they and he are more to you than to her. She—in fact it is very soon—is to marry another man.”
“Who is—”
“A gilded cad. That’s all.”
Langworthy took out his watch and looked at it. I turned to the table. What had happened to the dreaming stones? Did a light flash across from one to the other, or did my eyes deceive me? I looked down, not trusting what I saw. One opal lay as pale, as pure, as lifeless, as a moon-stone is. The other glowed with a yet fierier spark; instead of coming from within, the color seemed to play over its surface in unrestricted flame.
“See here!” I said.
Langworthy looked, then turned his head away sharply. The distaste of the scientific man for the inexplicable and irrational was very strong within him.
But the old man bent forward, the lamp-light shining on his white hair, and with a womanish gesture caught the gleaming opal to his lips.
“A human soul!” he said. “A human soul!”