“Good-bye, good-bye,” he answered, fervently, moved all at once by a feeling he would have had some difficulty in naming. “I may surprise you by turning up there one of these days.”
Then her hand was withdrawn, and she disappeared in a hackney-carriage. He went back to the task of getting his luggage examined, with a sense of having been abandoned by his last friend.
“What fortitude it must require to live here,” was the reflection that made him shake his head, as he drove over the rough paving-stones, through the dirty, ignoble streets, to his hotel. It struck him as more depressing still, when he emerged from the sordid tangle of the lower town into the smug rectangularity of the upper. He was sure that Pauline would be glad enough to exchange it all for the airy perspectives, the cleanliness, the gay colours, the variety of Paris. Of course he would have to give up his bachelor chambers overlooking the Luxembourg. He would rent, or buy, or even build, a proper house for her, in the quarter of the Etoile, or near the Parc Monceau.
He turned over the pages of the Directory that the hotel-clerk condescendingly pointed out to him, and found that Mr. Morrow’s address had been twenty-something in a street that had no name, but only a number and a point of the compass to serve for one; and that seemed to him in thorough keeping with the unimaginative, business-like character of the deceased cotton-broker. Pauline, in her widowhood, would very likely have moved away. It was too late to make a call to-day, being nearly dinner-time (he had forgotten that in New York it is not forbidden to call after dinner), but he would write her a little note, informing her of his arrival, and proposing to come to-morrow in the forenoon. On the corner of the envelope he would put “Please forward,” to anticipate the event of her having moved. Then he could leave it to destiny and the post-office authorities to do the rest.
III
THE Fifth Avenue reached out in an endless straight line before him, the prose of its architecture being obscured by the gathering twilight, and punctuated monotonously by the street-lamps. Attached to one of these he found a letter-box presently, and into it he dropped the note that he had written. “Does Mrs. Merrow—Pauline Lake that was—remember Henry Aigrefield? And if so, may he call upon her to-morrow at eleven?” That was how, after destroying a dozen sheets of paper, he had at last contrived to phrase his message.
He walked slowly up the long Avenue, cut at right angles, and at fixed intervals of two hundred feet, by streets that looked enough like one another to suggest the notion that they had all been cast in the same dreary mould, and furnished to the municipality ready-made; past the innumerable coffee-coloured houses, with their damnable iteration of rigid little doorsteps; and he wondered at the purblind complacency of a people who could honestly regard this as among the finest thoroughfares of the world. The region he was traversing reminded him of certain melancholy acres in the south of London, where the city-clerk has his humble, cheerless home: it was such a neighbourhood grown rich and pretentious, but in nowise mellowed or beautified.
Would she live in one of these insignificant boxes of brown stone? “26, E. 51,” the address he had read in the Directory, sounded sufficiently unpromising. It had been Mr. Merrow’s house, and Mr. Morrow had been a practical New Yorker. But the interior? He pictured the interior as entirely lovely and delightful, for, in the nature of things, the interior would owe its character to Mr. Merrow’s wife. A good distemper on the walls, something light in key, yet warm—brick-dust, or a pearly, rosy gray; simple, graceful chairs and tables; a few good pictures, numberless good books in good bindings: over all the soft glow of candlelight; and in the midst of all, giving unity and meaning to it all, a lady, a tall slender lady, in a black gown, with a pale serious face, dark eyes full of sleeping fire, and above her white brow a rich shadow of brown hair. She was reading, her head bent a little, her feet resting on a small tabouret of some dull red stuff that lent depth to the bottom of the picture, while the candlelight playing upon her hair, upon her cheek and throat, upon the ivory page of her book and the hand that held it, made the upper and middle portions radiant. After twenty years how little changed she was! Her face had lost nothing of its girlish delicacy, its maiden innocence, it had only gained a quality of firmness, of seriousness and strength. He found a woman where he had left a child, but the woman was only the child ripened and ennobled. As the door opened to admit him, she raised her eyes, puzzled for a moment, not seeing who he was; but then, suddenly, she stood up and moved towards him, calling his name, very low, very low, so that it fell upon his ears like a note of music. And his heart pounded suffocatingly, and he trembled deliciously in all his limbs.
Why, he began to ask himself now, why, after all, should he put off till to-morrow the realisation of this great joy? If it was unconventional to pay a call in the evening, she, who had never been a stickler for the conventionalities, would forgive it to the ardour and the impatience of his passion, He had waited for her twenty years; that was long enough, without adding to it another interminable period of twelve hours. Anyhow, there could be no harm in his ringing the bell of No. 26, E. 51, and inquiring whether she still lived there, and, if not, whither she had gone. Thereby a further saving of precious hours might be effected; and—and he would do it.
The house, indeed, appeared in no particular different to the multitude that he had left behind him; but he could have embraced the Irish maid-servant who opened the door for him, because to both of his questions she answered yes. Yes, Mrs. Merrow lived here; and yes, she was at home. Would he walk into the parlour, please, and what name should she say? Lest the name should get perverted in its transmission, he equipped her with his card. Then he sat down in the “parlour” to await his fate.