CHAPTER XIX.
“You are very thoughtful, Mr. Stoughton,” remarked Mrs. Percy-Bartlett gently, as she wheeled around on the piano-stool and looked Richard squarely in the face.
“I was weighing a sentence just uttered by John Fenton—one of those haunting phrases of his that will not take a back seat when they have once entered the mind.”
“He must be a man of peculiar power, this John Fenton,” commented Mrs. Percy-Bartlett musingly. “I have heard him quoted a good deal of late.”
“By Gertrude Van Vleck?” asked Richard, with an impulsive exhibition of bad taste.
Mrs. Percy-Bartlett frowned.
“I am astonished, Mr. Stoughton! Your question is simply shocking. But tell me,” she continued, leaning forward, and looking at him inquisitively, “do you really think that Mr. Fenton is interested in Gertrude?”
“I am astonished!” cried Richard. “Your question is simply shocking, Mrs. Percy-Bartlett.”
Their eyes met, and they laughed merrily. They were both very happy for the moment. The love-affairs of other people may form at times a very effective counter-irritant and delay a crisis that Platonic friendship is apt to carry with it when a young married woman and an ardent youth use it as a cloak to conceal their feelings.
“In some respects,” remarked Mrs. Percy-Bartlett musingly, “it would be an ideal union.”
“If there are such,” put in Richard reflectively.
“That sounds like the cynicism of your friend Mr. Fenton. I hope, Mr. Stoughton, that you are not losing your ideals.”
“On the contrary,” said Richard earnestly, “I am finding new ones.”
“May I ask where?” she murmured, a wistful look in her brown eyes.
“I have found the highest of them all in this little music-room,” he said with more earnestness in his tone than it had held before. “What ideal is so beautiful as that which forms the basis of our friendship? Is it not true that the altar on which we make the hardest sacrifice is that which becomes the most sacred in our sight? I might live a thousand years, but when memory grew weary of its heavy task, it would still turn fondly to the scene before me now, and I would see myself in fancy a youth with an ideal—an ideal that sealed his lips—and broke his heart.”
He had turned very pale, and his words seemed to him to have been forced from him by a mysterious and irresistible influence that he could neither recognize nor control.
The woman’s eyes were heavy with unshed tears. As he had gone on speaking in a low, vibrant tone, she had felt the blood rush to her face, and then recede, leaving her cheeks white and drawn. Her hands trembled as she turned and struck a few wavering, melancholy chords on the piano.
Richard had arisen, and was looking down at her, his face grown old, as if life had whispered a mighty secret into his unwilling ears, and marred the pristine glory of his youth.
Neither of them spoke for a time. Finally he said,—
“I had started to quote to you something that Fenton said. Do you care to hear it?”
His voice was almost hard with the effort he made to control its trembling.
“Yes,” she murmured, looking up at him, in her eyes a mute appeal, an unspoken prayer to his nobler self.
“‘The glory of a renunciation,’ said my friend, ‘lies in the strength of the temptation.’”
She put her cold, trembling hand into his and their eyes met.
“Please go,” she whispered. “If you care for me at all you will do as I ask.”
She withdrew her hand, and Richard turned away as if determined to do as she had requested. For a moment he saw himself in his true character,—an impressionable, impetuous man, inexperienced in the ways of the world, and easily influenced by his surroundings. He saw himself casting meaning glances at a dark-eyed girl in an unconventional restaurant. Then the remorse and self-loathing that had come over him as he knelt in prayer in the sombre shadows that haunted a church-pew returned for an instant, and he felt an irresistible desire to prove, for his own satisfaction, that the higher aspirations that had dominated him later on were not mere fleeting fancies. He turned and reseated himself in the chair at her side.
“Forgive me for what I’ve said,” he implored, his voice low and firm; “I dare not leave you now. It will drive me mad to reflect that I have been unkind to you. I have been very selfish. Let me have at least one more chance to prove that I can be your friend.”
She smiled sadly, and turning to the instrument played softly the refrain of Heine’s melancholy song.
The impotence of longing, the futility of rebellion, were emphasized in Richard’s restless mind as he recalled the words of the poem she had set to music. What availed it that the pine-tree craved the palm? The inexorable fiat of a universe controlled by laws as pitiless as they are unchangeable had decreed that only in dreams should its love find satisfaction.
She turned and looked at him again. Her face was pale, and there were shadows beneath her eyes, but in her smile was a ray of sunshine.
“Why can you not be content?” she asked gently. “Do you not find pleasure in spending an evening with me now and then?”
“You need not ask,” he murmured.
“But do you know that it would end all this if—if”—
“If?”
“If you were always as reckless as you have been to-night.”
“How hard it is to obtain justice in this world,” he cried, a faint smile on his lips. “How well I know that, far from being reckless, I have exercised the greatest self-restraint. Do you know,—please don’t turn your eyes away,—do you know what temptation I have resisted to-night? Is it not true that the grandeur of a victory lies in the martial power of the enemy overthrown? I would have been a coward had I retreated when you asked me to. Is it not better for us to sit here contentedly and talk of friendship?”
She glanced at him deprecatingly.
“Do you know,” she said in a tone of sadness, “that there is sometimes a mocking note in your voice and an expression on your face that make me wonder if you ever take yourself or any one else seriously?”
She had put into words a doubt that had never before been symbolized in his mind, though often vaguely felt. He was silent for a moment, wondering if it was only his youth, or a fundamental defect in character, that had awakened in her a questioning that found so unwelcome a response in his own heart. Unfortunate is that man who finds nothing at the very depths of his own personality but an interrogation mark.
“Are you not unreasonable?” he suggested quietly, striving to obtain self-justification. “When I speak earnestly—and honestly—you ask me to leave you. When I openly ratify the terms upon which you allow me to remain, you say I jest. I almost despair of ever winning your favor.”
She smiled encouragingly.
“I like you now,” she remarked frankly. “Perhaps, after all, I am not as daring a rebel as I once told you that I was.”
Some one had entered the drawing-room; and turning toward the portière, they saw Percy-Bartlett, his pale face just a shade whiter than usual.
“Good-evening, Stoughton,” he said, coming forward and giving the young man his hand. “Harriet, we ask your indulgence. Shall we smoke here or go into the library?”
Richard’s first inclination was to take his departure at once, but he realized in time the awkwardness that would attend such a step.
“Always the slaves to habit!” cried Mrs. Percy-Bartlett, with a vivacity born of nervous reaction rather than of satisfaction at the contretemps.
“I long ago gave up the idea of defending my music-room from cigar-smoke, Mr. Stoughton. In fact, I have become fond of it. I think,” and she looked at her husband smilingly, but with a gleam of defiance in her eyes, “that I will take to cigarettes. They’re really quite good form in these days, are they not?”
“It is hard to say at present,” remarked Percy-Bartlett, puffing his cigar reflectively, “what is good form and what is not. I confess, Stoughton, that I am rather old-fashioned in my ideas.”
“For instance?” suggested Richard, not wholly at his ease.
“There are a thousand illustrations on my tongue. But of what use is resistance? The new ideas—and cigarettes are an appropriate symbol of many of them—are too strong at present in their initial force to succumb to opposition. But I have never lost faith in the power of reaction. We have gone ahead too fast. There must be a return to the old ways soon.”
Mrs. Percy-Bartlett turned restlessly to the piano, and struck a few defiant chords on the instrument. She had expressed a doubt as to her status as a rebel. Her husband had appeared at the right moment to fling those doubts to the wind.
As Richard arose to take his departure, Percy-Bartlett said to him, with more cordiality than the young man inwardly felt that he deserved from such a source,—
“Don’t let the atmosphere in which you are thrown, Stoughton, cause you to cast away your birthright. It is on men of birth and education that the safety of this country ultimately depends. You should be—and I hope you are—a conservative of the conservative. I want to get you into the Sons of the Revolution and the Society of Colonial Wars. I am an enthusiast on these things, Stoughton,—a man must have a fad, you know,—and you’re the kind of material that we can’t afford to give to the enemy. Good-night! Drop into my office some morning soon, and we’ll talk these matters over.”
Mrs. Percy-Bartlett gave her cold hand to Richard and said, with a conventional intonation that chilled him, in spite of the soft expression in her eyes,—
“And we will see you soon again, Mr. Stoughton?”
“Thanks,” he said, “and good-night.”
Percy-Bartlett had reseated himself, and was taking the final puffs from his cigar, as his wife returned and began to rearrange the sheets of music on the piano.
“Stoughton is a boy I think I might like,” remarked Percy-Bartlett, gazing at his wife steadily. “But he looks worn-out. I fear he is overdoing things.”
“Perhaps,” she answered with studied indifference. “I suppose his work is very wearing.”
“Yes; and that’s what I can’t understand about the youngster. He has money of his own. Why doesn’t he travel and study instead of tying himself to such a merciless mill-wheel as a daily newspaper?”
How magnificent is man’s blind egotism! Percy-Bartlett, a millionnaire, was devoting his whole time and nervous energy to adding to his wealth, and still he censured a youth, by no means rich, for following a line of life that insured him a living. It is so easy to demand of our neighbor that he lead an ideal existence!
“You look very pale, my dear,” remarked his wife after a long silence, with more concern in her voice than it often held in his hearing.
“I am not feeling especially well,” he returned gratefully, and throwing away his cigar, “I must give up smoking, Harriet. The doctor says it is imperative.”