The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories Read online

  His excitement dropped. “The foundation stone—?”

  “When are you going to touch the electric button that sets the thing going?”

  Paul, with his hands in his sagging pockets, began to pace the library hearth-rug—I can see him now, setting his shabby red slippers between its ramified cabbages.

  “My dear fellow, there are one or two points to be considered still—one or two new suggestions I picked up over there—”

  I sat silent, and he paused before me, flushing to the roots of his thin hair. “You think I’ve had time enough—that I ought to have put the thing through before this? I suppose you’re right; I can see that even Ned Halidon thinks so; and he has always understood my difficulties better than you have.”

  This insinuation exasperated me. “Ned would have put it through years ago!” I broke out.

  Paul pulled at his straggling moustache. “You mean he has more executive capacity? More—no, it’s not that; he’s not afraid to spend money, and I am!” he suddenly exclaimed.

  He had never before alluded to this weakness to either of us, and I sat abashed, suffering from his evident distress. But he remained planted before me, his little legs wide apart, his eyes fixed on mine in an agony of voluntary self-exposure.

  “That’s my trouble, and I know it. Big sums frighten me—I can’t look them in the face. By George, I wish Ned had the carrying out of this scheme—I wish he could spend my money for me!” His face was lit by the reflection of a passing thought. “Do you know, I shouldn’t wonder if I dropped out of the running before either of you chaps, and in case I do I’ve half a mind to leave everything in trust to Halidon, and let him put the job through for me.”

  “Much better have your own fun with it,” I retorted; but he shook his head, saying with a sigh as he turned away: “It’s not fun to me—that’s the worst of it.”

  Halidon, to whom I could not help repeating our talk, was amused and touched by his friend’s thought.

  “Heaven knows what will become of the scheme, if Paul doesn’t live to carry it out. There are a lot of hungry Ambrose cousins who will make one gulp of his money, and never give a dollar to the work. Jove, it would be a fine thing to have the carrying out of such a plan—but he’ll do it yet, you’ll see he’ll do it yet!” cried Ned, his old faith in his friend flaming up again through the wet blanket of fact.

  II

  PAUL AMBROSE did not die and leave his fortune to Halidon, but the following summer he did something far more unexpected. He went abroad again, and came back married. Now our busy fancy had never seen Paul married. Even Ned recognized the vague unlikelihood of such a metamorphosis.

  “He’d stick at the parson’s fee—not to mention the best man’s scarf-pin. And I should hate,” Ned added sentimentally, “to see ‘the touch of a woman’s hand’ desecrate the sublime ugliness of the ancestral home. Think of such a house made ‘cozy’!”

  But when the news came he would own neither to surprise nor to disappointment.

  “Goodbye, poor Academy!” I exclaimed, tossing over the bridegroom’s eight-page rhapsody to Halidon, who had received its duplicate by the same post.

  “Now, why the deuce do you say that?” he growled. “I never saw such a beast as you are for imputing mean motives.”

  To defend myself from this accusation I put out my hand and recovered Paul’s letter.

  “Here: listen to this. ‘Studying art in Paris when I met her—“the vision and the faculty divine, but lacking the accomplishment,” etc…. A little ethereal profile, like one of Piero della Francesca’s angels … not rich, thank heaven, but not afraid of money, and already enamored of my project for fertilizing my sterile millions…’”

  “Well, why the deuce—?” Ned began again, as though I had convicted myself out of my friend’s mouth; and I could only grumble obscurely: “It’s all too pat.”

  He brushed aside my misgivings. “Thank heaven, she can’t paint, any how. And now that I think of it, Paul’s just the kind of chap who ought to have a dozen children.”

  “Ah, then indeed: goodbye, poor Academy!” I croaked.

  The lady was lovely, of that there could be no doubt; and if Paul now for a time forgot the Academy, his doing so was but a vindication of his sex. Halidon had only a glimpse of the returning couple before he was himself snatched up in one of the chariots of adventure that seemed perpetually waiting at his door. This time he was going to the far East in the train of a “special mission,” and his head was humming with new hopes and ardors; but he had time for a last word with me about Ambrose.

  “You’ll see—you’ll see!” he summed up hopefully as we parted; and what I was to see was, of course, the crowning pinnacle of the Academy lifting itself against the horizon of the immediate future.

  It was in the nature of things that I should, meanwhile, see less than formerly of the projector of that unrealized structure. Paul had a personal dread of society, but he wished to show his wife to the world, and I was not often a spectator on these occasions. Paul indeed, good fellow, tried to maintain the pretense of an unbroken intercourse, and to this end I was asked to dine now and then; but when I went I found guests of a new type, who, after dinner, talked of sport and stocks, while their host blinked at them silently through the smoke of his cheap cigars.

  The first innovation that struck me was a sudden improvement in the quality of the cigars. Was this Daisy’s doing? (Mrs. Ambrose was Daisy.) It was hard to tell—she produced her results so noiselessly. With her fair bent head and vague smile, she seemed to watch life flow by without, as yet, trusting anything of her own to its current. But she was watching, at any rate, and anything might come of that. Such modifications as she produced were as yet almost imperceptible to any but the trained observer. I saw that Paul wished her to be well dressed, but also that he suffered her to drive in a hired brougham, and to have her door opened by the raw-boned Celt who had bumped down the dishes on his bachelor table. The drawing-room curtains were renewed, but this change served only to accentuate the enormities of the carpet, and perhaps discouraged Mrs. Ambrose from farther experiments. At any rate, the desecrating touch that Halidon had affected to dread made no other inroads on the serried ugliness of the Ambrose interior.

  In the early summer, when Ned returned, the Ambroses had flown to Europe again—and the Academy was still on paper.

  “Well, what do you make of her?” the traveller asked, as we sat over our first dinner together.

  “Too many things—and they don’t hang together. Perhaps she’s still in the chrysalis stage.”

  “Has Paul chucked the scheme altogether?”

  “No. He sent for me and we had a talk about it just before he sailed.”

  “And what impression did you get?”

  “That he had waited to send for me till just before he sailed.”

  “Oh, there you go again!” I offered no denial, and after a pause he asked: “Did she ever talk to you about it?”

  “Yes. Once or twice—in snatches.”

  “Well—?”

  “She thinks it all too beautiful. She would like to see beauty put within the reach of everyone.”

  “And the practical side—?”

  “She says she doesn’t understand business.”

  Halidon rose with a shrug. “Very likely you frightened her with your ugly sardonic grin.”

  “It’s not my fault if my smile doesn’t add to the sum-total of beauty.”

  “Well,” he said, ignoring me, “next winter we shall see.”

  But the next winter did not bring Ambrose back. A brief line, written in November from the Italian lakes, told me that he had “a rotten cough,” and that the doctors were packing him off to Egypt. Would I see the architects for him, and explain to the trustees? (The Academy already had trustees, and all the rest of its official hierarchy.) And would they all excuse his not writing more than a word? He was really too groggy—but a little warm weather would set him up again, and he would certainly com
e home in the spring.

  He came home in the spring—in the hold of the ship, with his widow several decks above. The funeral services were attended by all the officers of the Academy, and by two of the young fellows who had won the travelling scholarships, and who shed tears of genuine grief when their benefactor was committed to the grave.

  After that there was a pause of suspense—and then the newspapers announced that the late Paul Ambrose had left his entire estate to his widow. The board of the Academy dissolved like a summer cloud, and the secretary lighted his pipe for a year with the official paper of the still-born institution.

  After a decent lapse of time I called at the house in Seventeenth Street, and found a man attaching a real-estate agent’s sign to the window and a van-load of luggage backing away from the door. The care-taker told me that Mrs. Ambrose was sailing the next morning. Not long afterward I saw the library table with the helmeted knights standing before an auctioneer’s door in University Place; and I looked with a pang at the familiar ink-stains, in which I had so often traced the geography of Paul’s visionary world.

  Halidon, who had picked up another job in the Orient, wrote me an elegiac letter on Paul’s death, ending with—“And what about the Academy?” and for all answer I sent him a newspaper clipping recording the terms of the will, and another announcing the sale of the house and Mrs. Ambrose’s departure for Europe.

  Though Ned and I corresponded with tolerable regularity I received no direct answer to this communication till about eighteen months later, when he surprised me by a letter dated from Florence. It began: “Though she tells me you have never understood her—” and when I had reached that point I laid it down and stared out of my office window at the chimney-pots and the dirty snow on the roof.

  “Ned Halidon and Paul’s wife!” I murmured; and, incongruously enough, my next thought was: “I wish I’d bought the library table that day.”

  The letter went on with waxing eloquence: “I could not stand the money if it were not that, to her as well as to me, it represents the sacred opportunity of at last giving speech to his inarticulateness …”

  “Oh, damn it, they’re too glib!” I muttered, dashing the letter down; then, controlling my unreasoning resentment, I read on. “You remember, old man, those words of his that you repeated to me three or four years ago: ‘I’ve half a mind to leave my money in trust to Ned’? Well, it has come to me in trust—as if in mysterious fulfillment of his thought; and, oh, dear chap—” I dashed the letter down again, and plunged into my work.

  III

  “WON’T you own yourself a beast, dear boy?” Halidon asked me gently, one afternoon of the following spring.

  I had escaped for a six weeks’ holiday, and was lying outstretched beside him in a willow chair on the terrace of their villa above Florence.

  My eyes turned from the happy vale at our feet to the illuminated face beside me. A little way off, at the other end of the terrace, Mrs. Halidon was bending over a pot of carnations on the balustrade.

  “Oh, cheerfully,” I assented.

  “You see,” he continued, glowing, “living here costs us next to nothing, and it was quite her idea, our founding that fourth scholarship in memory of Paul.”

  I had already heard of the fourth scholarship, but I may have betrayed my surprise at the plural pronoun, for the blood rose under Ned’s sensitive skin, and he said with an embarrassed laugh: “Ah, she so completely makes me forget that it’s not mine too.”

  “Well, the great thing is that you both think of it chiefly as his.”

  “Oh, chiefly—altogether. I should be no more than a wretched parasite if I didn’t live first of all for that!”

  Mrs. Halidon had turned and was advancing toward us with the slow step of leisurely enjoyment. The bud of her beauty had at last unfolded: her vague enigmatical gaze had given way to the clear look of the woman whose hand is on the clue of life.

  “She’s not living for anything but her own happiness,” I mused, “and why in heaven’s name should she? But Ned—”

  “My wife,” Halidon continued, his eyes following mine, “my wife feels it too, even more strongly. You know a woman’s sensitiveness. She’s—there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for his memory—because—in other ways…. You understand,” he added, lowering his tone as she drew nearer, “that as soon as the child is born we mean to go home for good, and take up his work—Paul’s work.”

  Mrs. Halidon recovered slowly after the birth of her child: the return to America was deferred for six months, and then again for a whole year. I heard of the Halidons as established first at Biarritz, then in Rome. The second summer Ned wrote me a line from St. Moritz. He said the place agreed so well with his wife—who was still delicate—that they were “thinking of building a house there: a mere cleft in the rocks, to hide our happiness in when it becomes too exuberant”—and the rest of the letter, very properly, was filled with a rhapsody upon his little daughter. He spoke of her as Paula.

  The following year the Halidons reappeared in New York, and I heard with surprise that they had taken the Brereton house for the winter.

  “Well, why not?” I argued with myself. “After all, the money is hers: as far as I know the will didn’t even hint at a restriction. Why should I expect a pretty woman with two children” (for now there was an heir) “to spend her fortune on a visionary scheme that its originator hadn’t the heart to carry out?”

  “Yes,” cried the devil’s advocate—“but Ned?”

  My first impression of Halidon was that he had thickened—thickened all through. He was heavier, physically, with the ruddiness of good living rather than of hard training; he spoke more deliberately, and had less frequent bursts of subversive enthusiasm. Well, he was a father, a householder—yes, and a capitalist now. It was fitting that his manner should show a sense of these responsibilities. As for Mrs. Halidon, it was evident that the only responsibilities she was conscious of were those of the handsome woman and the accomplished hostess. She was handsomer than ever, with her two babies at her knee—perfect mother as she was perfect wife. Poor Paul! I wonder if he ever dreamed what a flower was hidden in the folded bud?

  Not long after their arrival, I dined alone with the Halidons, and lingered on to smoke with Ned while his wife went alone to the opera. He seemed dull and out of sorts, and complained of a twinge of gout.

  “Fact is, I don’t get enough exercise—I must look about for a horse.”

  He had gone afoot for a good many years, and kept his clear skin and quick eye on that homely regimen—but I had to remind myself that, after all, we were both older; and also that the Halidons had champagne every evening.

  “How do you like these cigars? They’re some I’ve just got out from London, but I’m not quite satisfied with them myself,” he grumbled, pushing toward me the silver box and its attendant taper.

  I leaned to the flame, and our eyes met as I lit my cigar. Ned flushed and laughed uneasily. “Poor Paul! Were you thinking of those execrable weeds of his?—I wonder how I knew you were? Probably because I have been wanting to talk to you of our plan—I sent Daisy off alone so that we might have a quiet evening. Not that she isn’t interested, only the technical details bore her.”

  I hesitated. “Are there many technical details left to settle?”

  Halidon pushed his armchair back from the fire-light, and twirled his cigar between his fingers. “I didn’t suppose there were till I began to look into things a little more closely. You know I never had much of a head for business, and it was chiefly with you that Paul used to go over the figures.”

  “The figures—?”

  “There it is, you see.” He paused. “Have you any idea how much this thing is going to cost?”

  “Approximately, yes.”

  “And have you any idea how much we—how much Daisy’s fortune amounts to?”

  “None whatever,” I hastened to assert.

  He looked relieved. “Well, we simply can’t do it—and live.�
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  “Live?”

  “Paul didn’t live,” he said impatiently. “I can’t ask a woman with two children to think of—hang it, she’s under no actual obligation—” He rose and began to walk the floor. Presently he paused and halted in front of me, defensively, as Paul had once done years before. “It’s not that I’ve lost the sense of my obligation—it grows keener with the growth of my happiness; but my position’s a delicate one—”

  “Ah, my dear fellow—”

  “You do see it? I knew you would.” (Yes, he was duller!) “That’s the point. I can’t strip my wife and children to carry out a plan—a plan so nebulous that even its inventor…. The long and short of it is that the whole scheme must be re-studied, reorganized. Paul lived in a world of dreams.”

  I rose and tossed my cigar into the fire. “There were some things he never dreamed of,” I said.

  Halidon rose too, facing me uneasily. “You mean—?”

  “That you would taunt him with not having spent that money.”

  He pulled himself up with darkening brows; then the muscles of his forehead relaxed, a flush suffused it, and he held out his hand in boyish penitence.

  “I stand a good deal from you,” he said.

  He kept up his idea of going over the Academy question—threshing it out once for all, as he expressed it; but my suggestion that we should provisionally resuscitate the extinct board did not meet with his approval.

  “Not till the whole business is settled. I shouldn’t have the face—Wait till I can go to them and say: ‘We’re laying the foundation-stone on such a day.’”

  We had one or two conferences, and Ned speedily lost himself in a maze of figures. His nimble fancy was recalcitrant to mental discipline, and he excused his inattention with the plea that he had no head for business.

  “All I know is that it’s a colossal undertaking, and that short of living on bread and water—” and then we turned anew to the hard problem of retrenchment.

  At the close of the second conference we fixed a date for a third, when Ned’s business adviser was to be called in; but before the day came, I learned casually that the Halidons had gone south. Some weeks later Ned wrote me from Florida, apologizing for his remissness. They had rushed off suddenly—his wife had a cough, he explained.