A book of martyrs

by Cornelia A. P. Comer

AN INSTANCE OF CHIVALRY

Applegate entered his door that night with a delightful sense of the difference between the sharp November air without and the warmth and brightness within, but as he stood in the little square hall taking off his overcoat, this comfortable feeling gave way to a heart-sick shrinking of which he was unashamed. He was a man of peace, and through the closed door of the sitting-room came the sound of voluble and angry speech. The voice was that of Mrs. Applegate.

Reluctantly he pushed open the door. It was a pretty quarrel as it stood. At one end of the little room, gay with light and color, was Julie, leaning on the mantel. She wore a crimson house-dress a trifle low at the throat, which set off vividly her rich, dark beauty. Undoubtedly she had beauty, and a singular, gypsy-like piquancy as well. It did not seem to matter that the gown was slightly shabby. She was kicking the white fur hearth-rug petulantly now and then to punctuate her remarks.

Dora, with her book in her lap, sat in a low chair by the lamp. Dora was a slender, self-possessed girl of fifteen, in whose cold, young eyes her step-mother had read from the first a concentrated and silent disapproval which was really very exasperating.

“It’s the first time that woman has set foot in this house since I’ve been the mistress of it,” Julie was saying, angrily. “Maybe she thinks I ain’t fine enough for her to call on. Lord! I’d like to tell her what I think of her. It was her business to ask for me, and it was your business to call me, whether she did or not. Maybe you think I ain’t enough of a lady to answer Mrs. Buel Parry’s questions. I’d like to have you remember I’m your father’s wife!”

Dora’s head dropped lower in an agony of vicarious shame. How, her severe young mind was asking itself, could any woman bear to give herself away to such an appalling extent? To reveal that one had thwarted social ambitions; to admit that one might not seem a lady—degradation could go no farther in the young girl’s eyes.

“What’s the matter, Dora?” asked Applegate, quietly, in the lull following Julie’s last remark.

“Mrs. Parry came to the door to ask what sort of a servant Mary Samphill had been. Mamma was in the kitchen, teaching the new girl how to mould bread, and I answered Mrs. Parry’s questions. She did not ask for any one.”

“I say it was Dora’s business to ask her in and call me. Whose servant was Mary Samphill, I’d like to know. Was she Dora’s?”

Applegate crossed the room to the open fire and stretched his chilled fingers to the flame.

“Aren’t you a little unreasonable, Julie?” he inquired, gently. “If Mrs. Parry didn’t ask for you, I don’t quite see what Dora could do but answer her questions.”

“Me unreasonable? I like that! Mrs. Buel Parry came to this house to see me, but Dora was bound I shouldn’t see her. Dora thinks”—she hesitated a moment, choking with her resentment—“she thinks I ain’t Mrs. Parry’s kind, and she was going to be considerate and keep us apart. Oh, yes! She thinks she knows what the upper crust wants. If I’m not Mrs. Parry’s sort, I’d like to know why. You thought I was your sort fast enough, John Applegate!” and Julie threw back her dark head with a gesture that was very fine in its insolence. “I guess if Mrs. Parry and Mrs. Otis and that set are company for you, they’re company for me. Of course you take Dora’s side. You always do. I can tell you one thing. When I was Frazer MacDonald’s wife I had some things I don’t have now, for all you think you’re so fine. MacDonald never would have stood by and seen me put upon. If folks wasn’t civil to his wife, he knew the reason why. I might have done better than marry you—I might——”

Julie stopped to take breath.

“Do you think I can make Mrs. Parry call on you if she doesn’t want to, Julie?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“What is the good of marrying a man who can’t do anything for you?” she demanded. “It isn’t any more than my due she should call, and you know it. She was thick enough with your first wife. And me to be treated so after all I’ve done for you and your children. I give you notice I’m going to Pullman to-morrow, and I’m going to stay till I get good and ready to come back. Maybe you’ll find out who makes this house comfortable for you, John Applegate. Maybe you will.”

And with this Julie slipped across the room—she could not be ungraceful even when she was most violent—and left it, shutting the door with emphasis.

There was deep silence between Applegate and his daughter for a little while. Why should either speak when there was really nothing to say?

“Supper is on the table, father,” observed Dora, at last. “There is no use in letting it get any colder,” and still in silence they went to their meal.

Julie MacDonald, born Dessaix, was the daughter of a French market-gardener and of a Spanish woman, the danseuse of a travelling troupe, who, when the company was left stranded in an Indiana town, married this thrifty admirer. The latter part of Julie’s childhood was passed in a convent school, whence she emerged at fifteen a rabid little Protestant with manners which the Sisters had subdued slightly but had not been able to make gentle. She learned the milliner’s trade, which she practised until, at twenty-two, she married Frazer MacDonald, a gigantic, red-haired Scotch surveyor.

A few years after their marriage MacDonald went West, intending to establish himself and then send for Julie, whom he left meanwhile with her sister, the wife of a well-to-do mechanic living in Pullman. His train was wrecked somewhere in Arizona and the ruins took fire. MacDonald was reported among those victims whose bodies were too badly burned for complete identification, and though Julie refused to believe it at first, when the long days brought no tidings she knew in her heart that it was true.

She established herself at her old trade in one of the county towns of the Indiana prairie country, where she worked and prospered for three years before John Applegate asked her to marry him.

At the convent they had tried to teach her to worship God, but abstractions were not in Julie’s line. Respectability was more tangible than righteousness, and deference to the opinion of the world an idea she could grasp. The worship of appearances came to be Julie’s religion. Nothing could be more respectable than John Applegate, who was a hardware dealer and one of Belleplaine’s leading merchants, and she accepted him with an almost religious enthusiasm.

The hardware business in a rich farming country is a good one. And then, in her own very unreasonable way, Julie was fond of Applegate.

“A little mouse of a man, yes,” she said to herself, “but such a good little mouse! I’ll have my way with things. When MacDonald was alive he had his way. Now—we’ll see.”

As for Applegate, he was just an average, unheroic, common-place man, such stuff as the mass of people are made of. Having decided to remarry for the sake of his children, he committed the not-uncommon inconsistency of choosing a woman who could never be acceptable to them and who suited himself entirely only in certain rare and unreckoning moods which were as remote from the whole trend of his existence as scarlet is from slate-color. But he found this untamed daughter of the people distinctly fascinating, and, with the easy optimism of one whose eyes are blinded by beauty, assured himself that it would come out all right.

His little daughter kissed him dutifully and promised to try to be a good girl when he told her he was going to bring a new mamma home, a pretty, jolly mamma, who would be almost a play-mate for her and Teddy, but secretly she felt a prescience that this was not the kind of mamma she wanted.

A few weeks after his marriage her father found her one day shaking in a passion of childhood’s bitter, ineffectual tears. With great difficulty he succeeded in getting an explanation. It came in whispers, tremblingly.

“Papa, she—she says bad words! And this morning Teddy said one too. Oh, Papa”—the sobs broke out afresh—“how can he grow up to be nice and how am I going to get to be a lady—a lady like my own mamma—if nobody shows us how?”

Applegate dropped his head on his chest with a smothered groan. For himself he had not minded the occasional touches of profanity—to do her justice, they were rare—with which Julie emphasized her speech, for they had only seemed a part of the alien, piquantly un-English element in her which attracted him, but when Dora looked up at him with his dead wife’s eyes he could not but acknowledge the justice of her tragic horror of “bad words.”

“What have I done?” he asked himself as the child nestled closer, and then, “What shall I do?” for he found himself face to face with a future before whose problems he shrank helplessly.

One does not decide upon the merits of falcons according to the traditions of doves, and it would be quite as unjust to judge Julie Applegate from what came to be the standpoint of her husband and his children. There is no doubt that she made life hideous to them, but this result was accidental rather than intentional. There are those to whom the unbridled speech of natures without discipline is as much a matter of course as the sunshine and the rain. If to Applegate and Dora it was thunder-burst and cyclone, whose was the blame?

And if one is considering the matter of grievances, Julie certainly had hers. Most acute of all, she had expected to acquire a certain social prominence by her marriage, but was accorded only a grudging toleration by the circle to which the first Mrs. Applegate had belonged. This was the more grinding from the fact that in Belleplaine, as in all small towns of the great Middle-West, social distinctions are based upon personal quality and not upon position.

Then, there was Dora. From Julie’s point of view tempers were made to lose, but Dora habitually retained hers with a dignity which, while it endeared her to her father, only exasperated his wife. Julie developed an inordinate jealousy of the girl, and the love of the father and daughter became a rod to scourge them. With the most pacific intentions in the world it was impossible to divine what would or what would not offend Julie.

On the occasion of the family quarrel recorded, Julie departed for Pullman, according to her threat, and for a few days thereafter life was delightfully peaceful. Dora exhibited all sorts of housewifely aptitudes and solicitudes, the wheels of the household machinery moved smoothly, and the domestic amenities blossomed unchecked.

Julie had been gone a week, a week of golden Indian summer weather, when one day, as Applegate was leaving the house after dinner, he was met by the telegraph boy just coming in. He stopped at the gate and tore the message open. It was from Julie’s brother-in-law, Hopson, and condensed in its irreverent ten words a stupefying amount of information. Applegate stared at it, unable to understand.

“MacDonald has come alive. Claims Julie. High old times. Come.”

He crushed the yellow paper in his hands, and turning back, sat down heavily upon the steps of the veranda, staring stupidly ahead of him. If this were true, what did it mean to him? Out of the hundred thoughts assailing him one only was clear and distinct. It meant that he was free!

He turned the telegram over in his fingers, touching it with the look of one who sees visions.

Free. His home—his pretty home—his own again, with Dora, who grew daily more like her mother, as his little housekeeper. Free from that tempestuous presence which repelled even while it attracted. Free from the endless scenes, the tiresome bickerings, the futile jealousies, the fierce reproaches and the fierce caresses, both of which wearied him equally now. He had scarcely known how all these things which he bore in silence had worn and weighed upon him, but he knew at last. The measure of the relief was the measure of the pressure also. The tears trickled weakly down his cheeks, and he buried his face in his hands as if to hide his thankfulness even from himself. The prospect overwhelmed him. No boy’s delight nor man’s joy had ever been so sweet as this. When he looked up, the pale November sunlight seemed to hold for him a promise more alluring than that of all the May-time suns that ever shone—the promise of a quiet life.

As he accustomed himself to this thought, there came others less pleasant. The preeminently distasteful features of the situation began to raise their heads and hiss at him like a coil of snakes. He shrank nervously from the gossip and the publicity. This was a hideous, repulsive thing to come into the lives of upright people who had thought to order their ways according to the laws of God and man. It was only Julie’s due to say she had intended that. But it had come and must be met. Julie was MacDonald’s wife, not his—not his. The only thing to be done was to accept the situation quietly. He knew that his own compensation was ample—no price could be too great to pay for this new joy of freedom—but he shivered a little when he thought of Julie with her incongruous devotion to the customary and the respectable. It would hurt Julie cruelly, but there was no one to blame and no help for it. And MacDonald could take her away into the far new West and make her forget this miserable interlude. He knew that for MacDonald, who was of a different fibre from himself, Julie’s charm had been sufficient and enduring. Whatever might be the explanation of his long absence, Applegate did not doubt that the charm still endured. And, in the end, even they themselves would forget this unhappy time which was just ahead of them, and its memory would cease to seem a shame and become a regret, whose bitterness the passing years would lessen tenderly.

Having thus adjusted the ultimate outcome of the situation to suit the optimism of his mood, Applegate drew out his watch and looked at it. He had just time to make the necessary arrangements and catch the afternoon train for Chicago.

He telegraphed to Hopson, and as he left the train that evening he found the man awaiting him. The two shook hands awkwardly and walked away together in silence. It was only after they had gone a block or two that Hopson said:

“Well, I’m glad you’ve got here. We’ve been having a picnic up at the house. Julie’s been having the hysterics and MacDonald—you never knew MacDonald, did you?”

Applegate listened politely. He had a curious feeling that Julie and her hysterics were already very far away and unimportant to him, but he did not wish to be so brutal as to show this.

“When did MacDonald return and where has he been?” he asked, gravely.

“He got here yesterday. He says he had a shock or something in that accident—anyhow, he just couldn’t remember anything, and when he come to he didn’t know who he was, nor anything about himself, and all his papers and clothes had been burnt, so there was nothing to show anybody who he was. He could work, and he was all right most ways. Says he was that way till about six months ago, when a Frisco doctor got hold of him and did something to his head that put him right. He has papers from the doctor to show it’s true. His case attracted lots of attention out there. Of course he wrote to Julie when he came to himself, but his letters went to our old address and she never got them. So then he started East to see about it. He says he’s got into a good business and is going to do well.”

There was a long silence. Presently Hopson began again, awkwardly:

“I don’t know how you feel about it, but I think Julie’d ought to go back to him.”

Applegate’s heart began to beat in curious, irregular throbs; he could feel the pulsing of the arteries in his neck and there was a singing in his ears.

“Of course Julie agrees with you?” he said, thickly.

“Well, no; she don’t. That’s what she wanted me to talk to you about. She can’t see it but one way. She says he died, or if he didn’t it was the same thing to her, and she married you. She says nobody can have two husbands, and it’s you who are hers. I told her the law didn’t look at it that way, and she says then she must get a divorce from MacDonald and remarry you. MacDonald says if she brings suit on the ground of desertion he will fight it. He says he can prove it ain’t been no wilful desertion. But probably he could be brought round if he saw she wouldn’t go back to him anyhow. MacDonald wouldn’t be spiteful. But he was pretty fond of Julie.”

Applegate had stopped suddenly in the middle of Hopson’s speech. Now he went forward rapidly, but he made no answer. Hopson scrutinized his face a moment before he continued:

“Julie says you won’t be spiteful either. She says maybe she was a little hasty in what she said just before she came up here. But you know Julie’s way.”

“Yes,” said Applegate, “I know Julie’s way.”

Hopson drew a breath of relief. He had at least discharged himself of his intercessory mission.

“I tell Julie she’d better put up with it and go with MacDonald. The life would be more the sort of thing she likes. But her head’s set and she won’t hear to anything Henriette or I say. You see, that’s what Julie holds by, what she thinks is respectable. And it’s about all she does hold by.” He hesitated, groping blindly about in his consciousness for words to express his feeling that this passionate, reckless nature was only anchored to the better things of life by her fervent belief in the righteousness of the established social order.

“Julie thinks everything of being respectable,” he concluded, lamely.

“Is it much farther to your house?” asked Applegate, dully.

“Right here,” answered Hopson, pulling his key from his pocket.

They entered a crude little parlor whose carpet was too gaudy, and whose plush furniture was too obviously purchased at a bargain, but its air was none the less heavy with tragedy. A single gas-jet flickered in the centre of the room. On one side a great, broad-shouldered fellow sat doggedly with his elbows on his knees and his face buried in his hands. There was resistance in every line of his figure. On the sofa opposite was Julie in her crimson dress. As she lifted her face eagerly, Applegate noticed traces of tears upon it. Mrs. Hopson, who had been moving about the room aimlessly, a pale and ineffective figure between these two vivid personalities, came to a standstill and looked at Applegate breathlessly. For a moment no one spoke. Then Julie, baffled by the eyes she could not read, sprang to her feet and stretched out her hands with a vehement gesture.

“John Applegate, you’ll put me right! You will. I know you will. I can’t go back to him! How can I?” Her hungry eyes scrutinized his still, inexpressive face.

“John, you aren’t going to turn me off?” Her voice had a despairing passion in it. “You won’t refuse to marry me if I get the divorce? Good God! You can’t be such a devil. John! oh, John!”

Applegate sat down and looked at her apathetically. He was not used to being called a devil. Somehow it seemed to him the term was misapplied.

“Don’t take on so, Julie,” he said, quietly. The room seemed to whirl around him, and he added, with a palpable effort:

“I’ll think it over and try to do what is best for both of us.”

At that MacDonald lifted his sullen face from his hands for the first time and glanced across at the other man with blood-shot eyes. Then he rose slowly, his great bulk seeming to fill the room, and walking over to Applegate’s chair stood in front of it looking down at him. His scrutiny was long. Once Applegate looked up and met his eyes, but he was too tired to bear their fierce light and dropped his own lids wearily.

MacDonald turned from him contemptuously and faced his wife, who averted her head.

“Look at me, Julie!” he cried, appealingly. “I am better worth it than he is. Good Lord! I don’t see what you see in him. He’s so tame! Let him go about his business. He’s nobody. He don’t want you. Come along with me and we’ll lead a life! You shall cut a dash out there. I can make money hand over fist. It’s the place for you. Come on!”

For a moment Julie’s eyes glittered. The words allured her, but her old gods prevailed. She threw out her arms as if to ward off his proposal.

“No, no,” she said, shrilly. “I cannot make it seem right. You were dead to me, and I married him. One does not go back to the dead. If I am your wife, what am I to him? It puts me in the wrong these two years. I cannot have it so, I tell you. I cannot have it so!”

Applegate felt faint and sick. Rising, he groped for the door. “I must have air,” he said to Hopson, confusedly. “I will come back in a minute.”

Once outside, the cool November night refreshed him. He dropped down upon the doorstep and threw back his head, drinking in long breaths as he looked up at the mocking stars.

When he found at last the courage to ask himself what he was going to do, the answer was not ready. The decision lay entirely in his hands. He might still be free if he said the word; and as he thought of this he trembled. He had always tried to be what his neighbors called a straight man, and he wanted to be straight in this also. But where, in such a hideous tangle, was the real morality to be found? Surely not in acceding to Julie’s demands! What claim had she upon the home whose simple traditions of peace and happiness she had trampled rudely under foot? Was it not a poor, cheap convention of righteousness which demanded he should take such a woman back to embitter the rest of his days and warp his children’s lives? He rebelled hotly at the thought. That it was Julie’s view of the ethical requirement of her position made it all the more improbable that it was really right. Surely his duty was to his children first, and as for Julie, let her reap the reward of her own temperament. The Lord God Himself could not say that this was unjust, for it is so that He deals with the souls of men.

It seemed to him that he had decided, but as he rose and turned to the door a new thought stabbed him so sharply that he dropped his lifted hand with a groan.

Where had been that sense of duty to his children, just now so imperative, in the days when he had yielded to Julie’s charm against his better judgment? Had duty ever prevailed against inclination with him? Was it prevailing now?

High over all the turmoil and desperation of his thoughts shone out a fresh perception that mocked him as the winter stars had mocked. For that hour at least, the crucial one of his decision, he felt assured that in the relation of man and woman to each other lies the supreme ethical test of each, and in that relation there is no room for selfishness. It might be, indeed, that he owed Julie nothing, but might it not also be that the consideration he owed all womankind could only be paid through this woman he had called his wife? This was an ideal with which he had never had to reckon.

He turned and sat him down again to fight the fight with a chill suspicion in his heart of what the end would be.

Being a plain man he had only plain words in which to phrase his decision when at last he came to it.

“I chose her and I’ll bear the consequences of my choice,” he said, “but I’ll bear them by myself. His aunt will be glad to take Teddy, and Dora is old enough to go away to school.” Then he opened the door.

Hopson and his wife had left the little parlor. Julie on the sofa had fallen into the deep sleep of exhaustion. MacDonald still sat there, with his head in his hands, and to him Applegate turned. At the sound of his step the man lifted his massive head and shook it impatiently.

“Well?” he demanded.

“The fact is, Mr. MacDonald, Julie and I don’t get along very well together, but I don’t know as that is any reason why I should force her to do anything that don’t seem right to her. She thinks it would be more”—he hesitated for a word—“more nearly right to get a divorce from you and remarry me. As I see it now, it’s for her to say what she wants, and for you and me to do it.”

MacDonald looked at him piercingly.

“You know you’d be glad of the chance to get rid of her!” he exclaimed, excitedly. “In Heaven’s name, then, why don’t you make her come to me? You know I suit her best. You know she’s my sort, not yours. She’s as uncomfortable with you as you with her, and she’d soon get over the feeling she has against me. Man! There’s no use in it! Why can’t you give my own to me?”

“I can’t say I don’t agree with you,” said Applegate, and the words seem to ooze painfully from his white lips, “but she thinks she’d rather not, and—it’s for her to say.”