The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories Page 17

  “I see no reason to at present,” said Stanwell drily. “But I won’t pretend to be ashamed when I’m not. I think there are occasions when a man is justified in doing what I’ve done.”

  She looked at him solemnly. “What occasions?”

  “Why, when he wants money, hang it!”

  She drew a deep breath. “Money—money? Has Caspar’s example been nothing to you, then?”

  “It hasn’t proved to me that I must starve while Mungold lives on truffles!”

  Again her face changed and she stirred uneasily, and then rose to her feet.

  “There is no occasion which can justify an artist’s sacrificing his convictions!” she exclaimed.

  Stanwell rose too, facing her with a mounting urgency which sent a flush to his cheek.

  “Can’t you conceive such an occasion in my case? The wish, I mean, to make things easier for Caspar—to help you in any way you might let me?”

  Her face reflected his blush, and she stood gazing at him with a wounded wonder.

  “Caspar and I—you imagine we could live on money earned in that way?”

  Stanwell made an impatient gesture. “You’ve got to live on something—or he has, even if you don’t include yourself!”

  Her blush deepened miserably, but she held her head high.

  “That’s just it—that’s what I came here to say to you.” She stood a moment gazing away from him at the lake.

  He looked at her in surprise. “You came here to say something to me?”

  “Yes. That we’ve got to live on something, Caspar and I, as you say; and since an artist cannot sacrifice his convictions, the sacrifice must—I mean—I wanted you to know that I have promised to marry Mr. Mungold.”

  “Mungold!” Stanwell cried with a sharp note of irony; but her white look checked it on his lips.

  “I know all you are going to say,” she murmured, with a kind of nobleness which moved him even through his sense of its grotesqueness. “But you must see the distinction, because you first made it clear to me. I can take money earned in good faith—I can let Caspar live on it. I can marry Mr. Mungold; because, though his pictures are bad, he does not prostitute his art.”

  She began to move away from him slowly, and he followed her in silence along the frozen path.

  When Stanwell re-entered his studio the dusk had fallen. He lit his lamp and rummaged out some writing-materials. Having found them, he wrote to Shepson to say that he could not paint Mrs. Van Orley, and did not care to accept any more orders for the present. He sealed and stamped the letter and flung it over the banisters for the janitor to post; then he dragged out his unfinished head of Kate Arran, replaced it on the easel, and sat down before it with a grim smile.

  THE BEST MAN

  I

  DUSK had fallen, and the circle of light shed by the lamp of Governor Mornway’s writing-table just rescued from the surrounding dimness his own imposing bulk, thrown back in a deep chair in the lounging attitude habitual to him at that hour.

  When the Governor of Midsylvania rested he rested completely. Five minutes earlier he had been bowed over his office desk, an Atlas with the State on his shoulders; now, his working hours over, he had the air of a man who has spent his day in desultory pleasure, and means to end it in the enjoyment of a good dinner. This freedom from care threw into relief the hovering fidgetiness of his sister, Mrs. Nimick, who, just outside the circle of lamplight, haunted the warm gloom of the hearth, from which the wood fire now and then sent up an exploring flash into her face.

  Mrs. Nimick’s presence did not usually minister to repose; but the Governor’s serenity was too deep to be easily disturbed, and he felt the calmness of a man who knows there is a mosquito in the room, but has drawn the netting close about his head. This calmness reflected itself in the accent with which he said, throwing himself back to smile up at his sister: “You know I am not going to make any appointments for a week.”

  It was the day after the great reform victory which had put John Mornway for the second time at the head of his State, a triumph compared with which even the mighty battle of his first election sank into insignificance, and he leaned back with the sense of unassailable placidity which follows upon successful effort.

  Mrs. Nimick murmured an apology. “I didn’t understand—I saw in this morning’s papers that the Attorney-General was reappointed.”

  “Oh, Fleetwood—his reappointment was involved in the campaign. He’s one of the principles I represent!”

  Mrs. Nimick smiled a little tartly. “It seems odd to some people to think of Mr. Fleetwood in connection with principles.”

  The Governor’s smile had no answering acerbity; the mention of his Attorney-General’s name had set his blood humming with the thrill of the fight, and he wondered how it was that Fleetwood had not already been in to clasp hands with him over their triumph.

  “No,” he said, good-humoredly, “two years ago Fleetwood’s name didn’t stand for principles of any sort; but I believed in him, and look what he’s done for me! I thought he was too big a man not to see in time that statesmanship is a finer thing than practical politics, and now that I’ve given him a chance to make the discovery, he’s on the way to becoming just such a statesman as the country needs.”

  “Oh, it’s a great deal easier and pleasanter to believe in people,” replied Mrs. Nimick, in a tone full of occult allusion, “and, of course, we all knew that Mr. Fleetwood would have a hearing before any one else.”

  The Governor took this imperturbably. “Well, at any rate, he isn’t going to fill all the offices in the State; there will probably be one or two to spare after he has helped himself, and when the time comes I’ll think over your man. I’ll consider him.”

  Mrs. Nimick brightened. “It would make such a difference to Jack—it might mean anything to the poor boy to have Mr. Ashford appointed!”

  The Governor held up a warning hand.

  “Oh, I know, one mustn’t say that, or at least you mustn’t listen. You’re so dreadfully afraid of nepotism. But I’m not asking for anything for Jack—I have never asked for a crust for any of us, thank Heaven! No one can point to me—” Mrs. Nimick checked herself suddenly and continued in a more impersonal tone: “But there’s no harm, surely, in my saying a word for Mr. Ashford, when I know that he’s actually under consideration, and I don’t see why the fact that Jack is in his office should prevent my speaking.”

  “On the contrary,” said the Governor, “it implies, on your part, a personal knowledge of Mr. Ashford’s qualifications which may be of great help to me in reaching a decision.”

  Mrs. Nimick never quite knew how to meet him when he took that tone, and the flickering fire made her face for a moment the picture of uncertainty; then at all hazards she launched out: “Well, I have Ella’s promise, at any rate.”

  The Governor sat upright. “Ella’s promise?”

  “To back me up. She thoroughly approves of him!”

  The Governor smiled. “You talk as if Ella had a political salon and distributed lettres de cachet! I’m glad she approves of Ashford; but if you think my wife makes my appointments for me—” He broke off with a laugh at the superfluity of such a protest.

  Mrs. Nimick reddened. “One never knows how you will take the simplest thing. What harm is there in my saying that Ella approves of Mr. Ashford? I thought you liked her to take an interest in your work.”

  “I like it immensely. But I shouldn’t care to have it take that form.”

  “What form?”

  “That of promising to use her influence to get people appointed. But you always talk of politics in the vocabulary of European courts. Thank Heaven, Ella has less imagination. She has her sympathies, of course, but she doesn’t think they can affect the distribution of offices.”

  Mrs. Nimick gathered up her furs with an air at once crestfallen and resentful. “I’m sorry—I always seem to say the wrong thing. I’m sure I came with the best intentions—it’s natural that your sister
should want to be with you at such a happy moment.”

  “Of course it is, my dear,” exclaimed the Governor genially, as he rose to grasp the hands with which she was nervously adjusting her wraps.

  Mrs. Nimick, who lived a little way out of town, and whose visits to her brother were apparently achieved at the cost of immense effort and mysterious complications, had come to congratulate him on his victory, and to sound him regarding the nomination to a coveted post of the lawyer in whose firm her eldest son was a clerk. In the urgency of the latter errand she had rather lost sight of the former, but her face softened as the Governor, keeping both her hands in his, said in the voice which always seemed to put the most generous interpretation on her motives: “I was sure you would be one of the first to give me your blessing.”

  “Oh, your success—no one feels it more than I do!” sighed Mrs. Nimick, always at home in the emotional key. “I keep in the background. I make no noise, I claim no credit, but whatever happens, no one shall ever prevent my rejoicing in my brother’s success!”

  Mrs. Nimick’s felicitations were always couched in the conditional, with a side-glance at dark contingencies, and the Governor, smiling at the familiar construction, returned cheerfully: “I don’t see why any one should want to deprive you of that privilege.”

  “They couldn’t—they couldn’t—” Mrs. Nimick heroically affirmed.

  “Well, I’m in the saddle for another two years at any rate, so you had better put in all the rejoicing you can.”

  “Whatever happens—whatever happens!” cried Mrs. Nimick, melting on his bosom.

  “The only thing likely to happen at present is that you will miss your train if I let you go on saying nice things to me much longer.”

  Mrs. Nimick at this dried her eyes, renewed her clutch on her draperies, and stood glancing sentimentally about the room while her brother rang for the carriage.

  “I take away a lovely picture of you,” she murmured. “It’s wonderful what you’ve made of this hideous house.”

  “Ah, not I, but Ella—there she does reign undisputed,” he acknowledged, following her glance about the library, which wore an air of permanent habitation, of slowly formed intimacy with its inmates, in marked contrast to the gaudy impersonality of the usual executive apartment.

  “Oh, she’s wonderful, quite wonderful. I see she has got those imported damask curtains she was looking at the other day at Fielding’s. When I am asked how she does it all, I always say it’s beyond me!” Mrs. Nimick murmured.

  “It’s an art like another,” smiled the Governor. “Ella has been used to living in tents and she has the knack of giving them a wonderful look of permanence.”

  “She certainly makes the most extraordinary bargains—all the knack in the world won’t take the place of such curtains and carpets.”

  “Are they good? I’m glad to hear it. But all the good curtains and carpets won’t make a house comfortable to live in. There’s where the knack comes in, you see.”

  He recalled with a shudder the lean Congressional years—the years before his marriage—when Mrs. Nimick had lived with him in Washington, and the daily struggle in the House had been combined with domestic conflicts almost equally recurrent. The offer of a foreign mission, though disconnecting him from active politics, had the advantage of freeing him from his sister’s tutelage, and in Europe, where he remained for two years, he had met the lady who was to become his wife. Mrs. Renfield was the widow of one of the diplomatists who languish in perpetual first secretaryship at our various embassies. Her life had given her ease without triviality, and a sense of the importance of politics seldom found in ladies of her nationality. She regarded a public life as the noblest and most engrossing of careers, and combined with great social versatility an equal gift for reading blue-books and studying debates. So sincere was the latter taste that she passed without regret from the amenities of a European life well stocked with picturesque intimacies to the rawness of the Midsylvanian capital. She helped Mornway in his fight for the Governorship as a man likes to be helped by a woman—by her tact, her good looks, her memory for faces, her knack of saying the right thing to the right person, and her capacity for obscure hard work in the background of his public activity. But, above all, she helped him by making his private life smooth and harmonious. For a man careless of personal ease, Mornway was singularly alive to the domestic amenities. Attentive service, well-ordered dinners, brightly burning fires, and a scent of flowers in the house—these material details, which had come to seem the extension of his wife’s personality, the inevitable result of her nearness, were as agreeable to him after five years of marriage as in the first surprise of his introduction to them. Mrs. Nimick had kept house jerkily and vociferously; Ella performed the same task silently and imperceptibly, and the results were all in favor of the latter method. Though neither the Governor nor his wife had large means, the household, under Mrs. Mornway’s guidance, took on an air of sober luxury as agreeable to her husband as it was exasperating to her sister-in-law. The domestic machinery ran without a jar. There were no upheavals, no debts, no squalid cookless hiatuses between intervals of showy hospitality; the household moved along on lines of quiet elegance and comfort, behind which only the eye of the housekeeping sex could have detected a gradually increasing scale of expense.

  Such an eye was now projected on the Governor’s surroundings, and its explorations were summed up in the tone in which Mrs. Nimick repeated from the threshold: “I always say I don’t see how she does it!”

  The tone did not escape the Governor, but it disturbed him no more than the buzz of a baffled insect. Poor Grace! It was not his fault if her husband was given to chimerical investments, if her sons were “unsatisfactory,” and her cooks would not stay with her; but it was natural that these facts should throw into irritating contrast the ease and harmony of his own domestic life. It made him all the sorrier for his sister to know that her envy did not penetrate to the essence of his happiness, but lingered on those external signs of well-being which counted for so little in the sum total of his advantages. Poor Mrs. Nimick’s life seemed doubly thin and mean when one remembered that, beneath its shabby surface, there were no compensating riches of the spirit.

  II

  IT was the custodian of his own hidden treasure who at this moment broke in upon his musings. Mrs. Mornway, fresh from her afternoon walk, entered the room with that air of ease and lightness which seemed to diffuse a social warmth about her; fine, slender, pliant, so polished and modeled by an intelligent experience of life that youth seemed clumsy in her presence. She looked down at her husband and shook her head.

  “You promised to keep the afternoon to yourself, and I hear Grace has been here.”

  “Poor Grace—she didn’t stay long, and I should have been a brute not to see her.”

  He leaned back, filling his gaze to the brim with her charming image, which obliterated at a stroke the fretful ghost of Mrs. Nimick.

  “She came to congratulate you, I suppose?”

  “Yes, and to ask me to do something for Ashford.”

  “Ah—on account of Jack. What does she want for him?”

  The Governor laughed. “She said you were in her confidence—that you were backing her up. She seemed to think your support would ensure her success.”

  Mrs. Mornway smiled; her smile, always full of delicate implications, seemed to caress her husband while it gently mocked his sister.

  “Poor Grace! I suppose you undeceived her.”

  “As to your influence? I told her it was paramount where it ought to be.”

  “And where is that?”

  “In the choice of carpets and curtains. It seems ours are almost too good.”

  “Thanks for the compliment! Too good for what?”

  “Our station in life, I suppose. At least they seemed to bother Grace.”

  “Poor Grace! I’ve always bothered her.” She paused, removing her gloves reflectively and laying her long fine hands on hi
s shoulders as she stood behind him. “Then you don’t believe in Ashford?” Feeling his slight start, she drew away her hands and raised them to detach her veil.

  “What makes you think I don’t believe in Ashford?” he asked.

  “I asked out of curiosity. I wondered whether you had decided anything.”

  “No, and I don’t mean to for a week. I’m dead beat, and I want to bring a fresh mind to the question. There is hardly one appointment I’m sure of except, of course, Fleetwood’s.”

  She turned away from him, smoothing her hair in the mirror above the mantelpiece. “You’re sure of that?” she asked after a moment.

  “Of George Fleetwood? And poor Grace thinks you are deep in my counsels! I am as sure of reappointing Fleetwood as I am that I have just been reelected myself. I’ve never made any secret of the fact that if they wanted me back they must have him, too.”

  “You are tremendously generous!” she murmured.

  “Generous? What a strange word to use! Fleetwood is my trump card—the one man I can count on to carry out my ideas through thick and thin.”

  She mused on this, smiling a little. “That’s why I call you generous—when I remember how you disliked him two years ago!”

  “What of that? I was prejudiced against him, I own; or rather, I had a just distrust of a man with such a past. But how splendidly he’s wiped it out! What a record he has written on the new leaf he promised to turn over if I gave him the chance! Do you know,” the Governor interrupted himself with a pleasantly reminiscent laugh, “I was rather annoyed with Grace when she hinted that you had promised to back up Ashford—I told her you didn’t aspire to distribute patronage. But she might have reminded me—if she’d known—that it was you who persuaded me to give Fleetwood that chance.”

  Mrs. Mornway turned with a slight heightening of color. “Grace—how could she possibly have known?”

  “She couldn’t, of course, unless she’d read my weakness in my face. But why do you look so startled at my little joke?”

  “It’s only that I so dislike Grace’s ineradicable idea that I am a wire-puller. Why should she imagine I would help her about Ashford?”