The stream of events of the last five years was more rapid and intricate to the vision of her mind. The first light ripple on this stream was her clear memory of the charming, inconsequent American boy whom she had met in Vienna five years before. It had been on one of her trips, that were always solitary, since Captain Essington was too busy spending her neat little fortune in various very private and proper gambling-clubs to care how his wife amused herself.
How this boy, Fox Longacre, with his facile Gallic Americanism, had stood out among the miscellaneous lot of students of the Vienna Conservatory! She remembered his passionate enthusiasm for the music that he whimsically called his “trade,” his spasmodic application.
They had got on famously in their short, merry acquaintance.
She had felt it the greatest pity in the world that he should be an orphan, a waif, with just enough money to let him be comfortably idle, and such potentialities of power running riot.
She had regretted the end of that gay little friendship when she returned to her sad-colored London.
Between this first encounter and the next intervened her catastrophe. Something done in those private and particular gambling-houses—something that never clearly came out of them—swallowed the half of the money remaining, and directed the shot that ended Captain Essington’s life. A grim, a bitter wrench it had been! The mere memory of it brought back the ghost of the old ache. She had realized then what depths of suffering might be, in which love and bereavement bore no part. Even the relief of freedom had been overwhelmed in the shock of violent death, of disorganized existence.
How vividly it had set before her the instability of present circumstances, the danger of depending on what had been! She had been frightened to drawing into herself, away from the interests of the world around her that had meant so much to her.
In her vague retrospection it seemed to her it had been more the kindness of her friends than any effort on her own part that had not only kept, but lifted her place among them in the difficult years that followed; such a place that, when the brilliant boy of her Vienna memory turned up in London, older, less confident, more moody by three years, and desperately “out” of everything he should have been “in,” she had almost bewildered him by the number of doors she could open to him. All her social threads so casually picked up, at once had significance, were manipulated to a purpose. What a zest, what a spirit her life had had! How self-distrustful he had been! How she had, at moments, pulled him after her! It had been desperate at times to keep him up to it, but every minute had been worth living. And now that her long hope was almost realized, now that he seemed on the very verge of his success,—now—
She shifted her eyes to the two bright glints on the toes of Cissy Fitz Hugh’s patent leathers. The car was one dusky tone in the deepening twilight, and these two hypnotic points of light helped to fix her memory more clearly on the past.
Well, she had been the one woman to him. He had glorified her as a boy will. What a joy it had been, that adoring loyalty of his, even while she knew she cheated him! The memory of his old impetuosity, his insistence, his unhesitating confidence over the inevitable question that had risen between them, came back to her, a warm, pleasurable emotion. And then the sadder sequence! For it had come to her then that a woman seasoned, sophisticated, settled, who would marry a boy ten years her junior—and such a boy—would be either a knave or a fool.