Silence, while Marie-Aimée turned her face wholly from the light. But even while she made application of her little damp pocket-handkerchief, a stealing sense warmed her in all her woe that she had somehow made a friend of Miss Cheriton. The exemplary piece of tranquility there felt drawn to her; something communicated this unimaginable fact directly to her heart; and it melted her, as the hint of kindness always did, and inclined her now verily to make no more circumstances about it, but show her whole heart in abandoned frankness, repeating just once more the fault she was here to confess. But simultaneously with gratitude for that liking, rose in Marie-Aimée the need to repay it greatly; whence a caution to herself to proceed more than ever guardedly with the truth.
"And after we were come back," she took up again, "we naturally continued seeing a great deal of each other. I won't say we would not have done so from choice, but it was inevitable, too. Our profession threw us together, concerts, rehearsals; he used, besides, to bring every bit of new music to learn at my house, with me to play it over for him. And so on, for years; and to me, I tell it frankly, that light-hearted, unconventional comradeship of ours gave its principal charm to life. In the last year I have seen less of him, and latterly very much less. He was not singing much, he was under treatment for his throat, and often out of town by his doctor's directions. I missed him, but I am busy from morning until night, the week round, work and a thousand things. I thought nothing of it. Do old friends need to see each other constantly to be assured nothing is changed? Then I hear of his engagement to you. I am thunderstruck! For never, never, never, had I dreamed of such a possibility. You see my folly? He was not bound to me by any promise, or by what you would call a moral obligation. There never had been any question of our marrying, not even at the beginning when we first got home, not even in my own mind—" Native honesty and poor human nature would not permit but that she should add, though in a tone that made little of it—" any definite, immediate, formulated idea of it. My poor sweet mother was living then, a sufficient reason against it. And when she was no longer there, all had got into a groove, and remained as it had been. And it seemed natural. I have nothing but what I earn. He was having bothers about money. He put all his in a mine, you know. We called ourselves poor working-people. But still! There it is! That's where you discover my bird's brain. That's me! The way I am! I flatly refused to believe it, and when I saw him again, I did not even ask. But I daresay I looked as he had never seen me look. Then he himself told me of it, as one tells such a thing to an old friend. And the past stood suddenly in a new light; and I saw clearly, in a flash, that just this and nothing else was to have been expected. And I knew that it was altogether the most fortunate thing that could happen to him; and, after the first, I acquiesced.
"Only, I followed my nature in making the outcry of one who has received a wound and is bleeding dreadfully. I have no dignity, Miss Cheriton. Discretion and I have never so much as been acquainted. I go around with my heart in my face, I forget my face, you see, in thinking of what has befallen me. And I run into some sympathetic woman who is fond of me, and she cries out 'Marie-Aimée, my poor child, what is the matter with you?' and I bend feebly upon her shoulder, and tell. And then I suppose she goes off and tells too. Hence, you see, the ground of Mr. Bronson's remonstrances with me yesterday evening. And in consequence of them I am here. I didn't know what else to do, Miss Cheriton. I hope it was best. And you do see, don't you? I have made the whole thing plain? I have made it all right? You know how he is, and now you have seen how I am, the inference will be simple! And I beg both your pardons. Oh, he is right, he is quite right, to feel put out with me, but not—" she forced a little watery smile, as she rose to take her leave—"not because it has ever seemed so terribly to a great singer's discredit that, when the whole world goes after him, among them should be a silly woman who does not manage to conceal her grande passion. It only makes him like Mario and others; you must not let it trouble you, Miss Cheriton. You must think of me in a thought of the same strain you bestow upon the thousands of photographs of him that have been sold in the course of his career, and are cherished and given places of honor in young ladies' rooms; and the sentimental follies school girls have committed in the way of sending him flowers and notes. Let these tributes to him merely increase your pride of possession. He is free from all blame, all, that is what I have wished you to feel assured of, or all—" she put out her hand in farewell—"except just a little, little bit. You don't mind? A little bit he certainly was to blame, though I suppose it can be laid to the account of his modesty, in not taking it home to himself that he could not be so nice, so consistently, persistently dear and nice to a person, without her falling to stupidly adoring him."
She stopped, and stood, vaguely shaking her head, prolonging her faint, watery, bitter-sweet smile; and would have withdrawn her hand, but Miss Cheriton retained it, by a firmer pressure, in the warm, kind clasp of hers. Marie-Aimée lifted her eyes, touched and full of thanks, to the fine calm eyes above her; and in their unclouded light read Anthony Bronson's unqualified exoneration, and that she herself had been impartially examined, and now stood classed, past appeal, among those soft, sweet, idiotic women who will fall into unwarranted love with any man of whom they see much, and are by their own passion made incapable of discerning the fact that he is not in love with them. The glance was full of honest sympathy for a sorrow so real; but it was not untinged with as much contempt as would be implied in the prayer, "I thank thee, my God, I am not as these women are!" Under which Marie-Aimée humbly bowed her head and waited but for the release of her hand to go. But Miss Cheriton, whom stiffness or delicacy kept from saying a word in reference to what she had heard, yet found herself utterly unwilling that her visitor should leave so uncheered. Still holding her hand, she told her, in a voice full of the suggestion of sincerity, the deep pleasure she had always had in hearing her; she amplified, tactfully, understandingly, upon all she had discovered of exquisite in her playing.
Marie-Aimée's face lightened a little; she had never become callous to praise. Miss Cheriton spoke of friends they had in common, from whom she had heard so much of her, of a sort that had long made it one of her most eager wishes to know her. Whereupon Marie-Aimée, as ever responsive, gave herself into Miss Cheriton's hands, to be known. And the two were shortly making acquaintance as they might have done had they been presented to each other at the house of those mutual friends. One could not have dreamed, to hear them, what had gone before. They talked of music mostly, and musicians, wholly forgetful of time. To illustrate some point, Marie-Aimée went to the piano and played a bar or two; after which, as she would have risen, Miss Cheriton entreated against it; and when Marie-Aimée, who never resisted, asked what she should play, suggested a composition of Miss Nevers' own, which the latter had imagined so obscure, she said, as to be almost her only secret. And she found, to her astonishment, that Miss Cheriton, whether moved by genuine musical congeniality, or a vulgarer curiosity, had procured everything ever published of Marie-Aimée's. Afterwards, Miss Cheriton took the place at the piano of Marie-Aimée urgent. Then Marie-Aimée begged leave, and supplanted her, to show how a different sequence of chords would be better; and the woman of talent and the woman of cultivation spent a long hour, delightful to both; in the course of which Miss Cheriton found the quaint enthusiasm for Marie-Aimée felt by her innumerable friends accounted for; and Marie-Aimée came to disdain, as paltry praise, the definition "very fine girl" which one was accustomed to hear joined to the name of Kate Cheriton.
Smiting her brow, aghast, at the recollection of an appointment missed, Marie-Aimée jumped to her feet. By running she might still be in time to apologize. They shook hands again, warmly; and Marie-Aimée said, all her heart in her voice, "I hope you will be very happy."
In the street, Marie-Aimée, as she hurried along, could think of nothing but Miss Cheriton. She would send her as a wedding-gift the French great-grandmother's rococo cross, the choicest bit of jewelry she owned.
Her heart might have been so much dusty, worm-eaten wood; remarking its astonishing lightness and insensibility, she reverted in thought, almost flippantly, to the horrors besetting her when she left home that morning. Surely, if it were possible that with Tony's marriage brought as close as a visit to his intended brought it, she should feel as she felt, she might still hope to put on a good face about it to the world.
In this mood she went about a good part of that day; and talked to some with so much of a return to her old spirit that they disguised their surprise by a greater cheerfulness than really their mystification allowed them to feel. Meeting an old aquaintance who put on the face of a sympathizer to say, "My dear, I did feel for you when I heard of his engagement, you know whose I mean," she looked as if not sure she understood; and the old aquaintance, after a searching look at her, dropped her mournfulness, to proceed, "It seems to be a fine thing for Bronson, this marriage. I hear that Miss Cheriton will be a millionaire. People exaggerate, you think? But she has bought a superb place out of town?"
By the late afternoon, that curious, unseasonable, baseless good cheer was wearing off, like the effects of wine, and the world, through its fading fumes, was returning to look like the world of yesterday. Weariness was overtaking her; but her heart had not recommenced its clamorous aching; it was only a little sick, when she went into a music-store for a score she needed. She was looking this over, with her eyes rather than her mind, when her attention became fixed in memory upon that expression of Miss Cheriton's face from which she had judged her mission successful—Tony cleared. Suddenly, as in the middle of the night she had sometimes known that in a letter sent off there was a word misspelled, she felt that triumph of confidence in Miss Cheriton's eyes not to have been the work of her own explanations. She herself had been fully explained to Miss Cheriton before ever she set foot in her house. How could it have been otherwise?