After
all, what did she herself know of her husband’s reasons for not being in the
war? What right had she to set down to cowardice a course which might have been
enforced by necessity, or dictated by unimpeachable motives? Why should she not
put to him the question which she was perpetually asking herself? And not
having done so, how dared she condemn him unheard?
A
month or more passed in this torturing indecision. Corbett had returned with
fresh zest to his accustomed way of life, weaned, by his first glimpse of the
Champs Elysées, from his factitious enthusiasm for Boston. He and his wife entertained their friends
delightfully, and frequented all the “first nights” and “private views” of the
season, and Corbett continued to bring back knowing “bits” from the Hotel
Drouot, and rare books from the quays; never had he appeared more cultivated,
more decorative and enviable; people agreed that Delia Benson had been
uncommonly clever to catch him.
One afternoon he returned later than usual from the club, and,
finding his wife alone in the drawing-room, begged her for a cup of tea.
Delia reflected, in complying, that she had never seen him look better; his
fifty-two years sat upon him like a finish which made youth appear crude, and
his voice, as he recounted his afternoon’s doings, had the intimate inflections
reserved for her ear.
“By
the way,” he said presently, as he set down his tea-cup, “I had almost
forgotten that I’ve brought you a present—something I picked up in a little
shop in the Rue Bonaparte. Oh, don’t look too expectant; it’s not a chef-d’oeuvre; on the contrary, it’s
about as bad as it can be. But you’ll see presently why I bought it.”
As
he spoke he drew a small flat parcel from the breast-pocket of his impeccable
frock-coat and handed it to his wife.
Delia,
loosening the paper which wrapped it, discovered within an oval frame studded
with pearls and containing the crudely executed miniature of an unknown young
man in the uniform of a United States cavalry officer. She glanced inquiringly at
Corbett.
“Turn
it over,” he said.
She
did so, and on the back, beneath two unfamiliar initials, read the brief
inscription:
“Fell
at Chancellorsville, May 3, 1863.”
The
blood rushed to her face as she stood gazing at the words.
“You
see now why I bought it?” Corbett continued. “All the pieties of one’s youth seemed to protest against leaving it in the
clutches of a Jew pawnbroker in the Rue Bonaparte. It’s awfully bad, isn’t
it?—but some poor soul might be glad to think that it had passed again into the
possession of fellow-countrymen.” He took it back from her, bending to examine
it critically. “What a daub!” he murmured. “I wonder who he was?
Do you suppose that by taking a little trouble one might find out and restore
it to his people?”
“I
don’t know—I dare say,” she murmured, absently.
He
looked up at the sound of her voice. “What’s the matter, Delia? Don’t you feel
well?” he asked.
“Oh,
yes. I was only thinking”—she took the miniature from his hand. “It was kind of
you, Laurence, to buy this—it was like you.”
“Thanks
for the latter clause,” he returned, smiling.
Delia
stood staring at the vivid flesh-tints of the young man who had fallen at Chancellorsville.
“You
weren’t very strong at his age, were you, Laurence? Weren’t you often ill?” she
asked.
Corbett
gave her a surprised glance. “Not that I’m aware of,” he said; “I had the
measles at twelve, but since then I’ve been unromantically robust.”
“And
you—you were in America until you came abroad to be with your sister?”
“Yes—barring
a trip of a few weeks in Europe.”
Delia
looked again at the miniature; then she fixed her eyes upon her husband’s.
“Then
why weren’t you in the war?” she said.
Corbett
answered her gaze for a moment; then his lids dropped, and he shifted his
position slightly.
“Really,”
he said, with a smile, “I don’t think I know.”
They
were the very words which she had used in answering her aunt.
“You
don’t know?” she repeated, the question leaping out like an electric shock.
“What do you mean when you say that you don’t know?”
“Well—it
all happened some time ago,” he answered, still smiling, “and the truth is that
I’ve completely forgotten the excellent reasons that I doubtless had at the
time for remaining at home.”
“Reasons for remaining at home? But there were none; every
man of your age went to the war; no one stayed at home who wasn’t lame, or
blind, or deaf, or ill, or—” Her face blazed, her voice broke passionately.
Corbett
looked at her with rising amazement.
“Or—?”
he said.
“Or
a coward,” she flashed out. The miniature dropped from her hands, falling
loudly on the polished floor.
The
two confronted each other in silence; Corbett was very pale.
“I’ve
told you,” he said, at length, “that I was neither lame, deaf, blind, nor ill.
Your classification is so simple that it will be easy for you to draw your own
conclusion.”
And
very quietly, with that admirable air which always put him in the right, he
walked out of the room. Delia, left alone, bent down and picked up the
miniature; its protecting crystal had been broken by the fall. She pressed it
close to her and burst into tears.
An
hour later, of course, she went to ask her husband’s forgiveness. As a woman of
sense she could do no less; and her conduct had been so absurd that it was the
more obviously pardonable. Corbett, as he kissed her hand, assured her that he
had known it was only nervousness; and after dinner, during which he made
himself exceptionally agreeable, he proposed their ending the evening at the
Palais Royal, where a new play was being given.
Delia
had undoubtedly behaved like a fool, and was prepared to do meet penance for
her folly by submitting to the gentle sarcasm of her husband’s pardon; but when
the episode was over, and she realized that she had asked her question and
received her answer, she knew that she had passed a milestone in her existence.
Corbett was perfectly charming; it was inevitable that he should go on being
charming to the end of the chapter. It was equally inevitable that she should
go on being in love with him; but her love had undergone a modification which
the years were not to efface.
Formerly
he had been to her like an unexplored country, full of bewitching surprises and
recurrent revelations of wonder and beauty; now she had measured and mapped
him, and knew beforehand the direction of every path she trod. His answer to
her question had given her the clue to the labyrinth;
knowing what he had once done, it seemed quite simple to forecast his future
conduct. For that long-past action was still a part of his actual being; he had
not outlived or disowned it; he had not even seen that it needed defending.
Her
ideal of him was shivered like the crystal above the miniature of the warrior
of Chancellorsville. She had the crystal replaced by a piece of
clear glass which (as the jeweller pointed out to her) cost much less and
looked equally well; and for the passionate worship which she had paid her
husband she substituted a tolerant affection which possessed precisely the same
advantages.
(Scribner’s 18, October 1895)
Oh,
it’s the same old story,” said Birkton, impatiently. “They’ve all come home to
roost, as usual.”
He
glanced at a heap of type-written pages which lay on the shabby desk at his
elbow; then, pushing back his chair, he began to stride up and down the length
of the little bedroom in which he and Helfenridge sat.
“What
magazines have you tried?”
“All the good ones—every one. Nobody wants poetry nowadays.
One of the editors told me the other day that it ‘was going out.’“
Helfenridge
picked up the sheet which lay nearest him and began to read, half to himself, half aloud, with a warmth of undertoned emphasis
which made the lines glow.
Neither
of the men was far beyond twenty-five. Birkton, the younger of the two, had the
musing, irresolute profile of the dreamer of dreams; while his friend, stouter,
squarer, of more clayey make, was nevertheless too much like him to prove a
useful counterpoise.
“I
always liked ‘The Old Odysseus,’” Helfenridge murmured. “There’s something
tremendously suggestive in that fancy of yours, that tradition has
misrepresented the real feelings of all the great heroes and heroines; or
rather, has only handed down to us the official statement of their sentiments,
as an epitaph records the obligatory virtues which the defunct ought to have
had, if he hadn’t. That theory, now, that Odysseus never really forgot Circe;
and that Esther was in love with Haman, and decoyed him to the banquet with
Ahasuerus just for the sake of once having him near her and hearing him speak;
and that Dante, perhaps, if he could have been brought to book, would have had
to confess for caring a great deal more for the pietosa donna of the window
than for the mummified memory of a long-dead Beatrice—well, you know, it tallies
wonderfully with the inconsequences and surprises that one is always
discovering under the superficial fitnesses of life.”
“Ah,”
said Birkton, “I meant to get a cycle of poems out of that idea—but what’s the
use, when I can’t even get the first one into print?”
“You’ve
tried sending ‘The Old Odysseus’?”
Birkton
nodded.
“To ‘Scribner’s’ and ‘The Century’?”
“And all the rest.”
“Queer!”
protested Helfenridge. “If I were an editor—now this, for instance, is so fine:
“‘Circe,
Circe, the sharp anguish of that last long speechless night
With
the flame of tears unfallen scorches still mine aching sight;
Still
I feel the thunderous blackness of the hot sky overhead,
While
we two with close-locked fingers through thy pillared porches strayed,
And
athwart the sullen darkness, from the shadow-muffled shore,
Heard
aghast the savage summons of the sea’s incoming roar,
Shouting
like a voice from Ilium, wailing like a voice from home,
Shrieking
through the pillared porches, Up,
Odysseus,
wake and come!’
“Devil
take it, why isn’t there an audience for that sort of thing? And this line too—
“‘Where
Persephone remembers the Trinacrian buds and bees
—what
a light, allegretto movement it has, following on all that gloom and horror! Ah—and
here’s that delicious little nocturne from ‘The New and the Old.’
“‘Before
the yellow dawn is up,
With pomp of shield and shaft,
Drink we of
night’s fast ebbing cup
One last delicious
draught.
‘The
shadowy wine of night is sweet,
With subtle, slumberous fumes
Pressed by the Hours’ melodious feet
From bloodless
elder-blooms.’
“There—isn’t
that just like a little bacchanalian scene on a Greek gem?”
“Oh,
don’t go on,” said Birkton sharply, “I’m sick of them.”
“Don’t
say that,” Helfenridge rebuked him. “It’s like disowning one’s own children.
But if they say that mythology and classicism and plastik are played out—if
they want Manet in place of David, or Cazin instead of Claude—why don’t they
like ‘Boulterby Ridge,’ with its grim mystery intensified by a setting of such
modern realism? What lines there are in that!
“‘It
was dark on Boulterby Ridge, with an ultimate darkness like death,
And the weak wind flagged and gasped
like a sick man straining for breath,
And one star’s ineffectual flicker
shot pale through a gap in the gloom,
As faint as the
taper that struggles with night in the sick man’s room.’
“There’s
something about that beginning that makes me feel quietly cold from head to
foot. And how charming the description of the girl is:
“‘She
walked with a springing step, as if to some inner tune,
And her cheeks had the lucent pink of
maple-wings in June.’
“There’s
Millet and nature for you! And then when he meets her ghost on Boulterby Ridge—
“‘White
in the palpable black as a lily moored on a moat’—
what a contrast, eh? And the deadly hopeless chill of the
last line, too—
“‘For the grave is deeper than grief, and longer than life is
death.’
“By
Jove, I don’t see how that could be improved!”
“Neither
do I,” said Birkton, bitterly, “more’s the pity.”
“And
what comes next? Ah, that strange sonnet on the Cinque Cento.
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